Body of Truth Read Free Page B

the greenhouses—where the bromeliads, at least, were safe—swelled as it froze in the plummeting temperatures, bursting the bark in long, serrated wounds that exposed the tender core of the trees. The towering and lacy-leafed flamboyanas at the far end of the terrace near the sun-room, two trees that Haydon had grown from seeds he had brought back from the Yucatán more than fifteen years before, had met the same fate, as had the lank jacarandas, visible now just outside the French doors, below the terrace stairs. The storm had filled the terra-cotta pots of bougainvillea with tiny white kernels of sleet that had lain with the woody stalks of the old vines in a cold and destructive embrace and had left the wild trumpet vines along the high rock walls stunned and dying without their blossoms. Near the bathhouse, the skeletons of the ebony and persimmon trees stood brittle and glazed in pale ice. Though only spring could confirm the lasting effect of the damage, the ever-varied, evergreenness of the subtropical plants, which served as the rich foil for their own gaudy efflorescence, was already reduced to the umber and bister sameness of winter.
    The snow itself had not remained long—two days, a trace of it on the third day, a ragged, dusty blue line of it next to the footing of the stone wall that surrounded the garden and the lawn—but Haydon was plunged into an unshakable gloom by the sudden plunder. To get his mind off the dreary setting, which was made even more somber on this January afternoon by the damp, lowering sky, he had taken out his dictionaries and his two collections of Leopardi, a questionable choice since the Italian poet-scholar himself had a cold eye and was given to sober moods that colored all his writings.
    Haydon had turned to this kind of diversion before, and although he wasn’t very good at it, he stuck with it, battling verb forms, wrestling with the baffling rules of grammar and grappling with a system of sentence structure that seemed to fold back over itself. The lines accumulated, the stanzas multiplied, and the paragraphs became pages as he unlaced the finely woven garment of Leopardi’s eloquent language and listened to the clear, contrapuntal voices of Palestrina’s Messa per i defunti .
    This was what he had been doing when Germaine Muller had called, and this was what he had come back to when he had left her sitting alone in her car on the foggy lane in the woods of the Rice campus. But it wasn’t any good now. He couldn’t concentrate, couldn’t even complete a sentence without his thoughts wandering back to the sad image of an alienated woman refusing consolation as she slumped against his car door, and to the unexpected news that Fossler had found and talked to Lena Muller.
    “How are you doing over there?”
    Haydon started. The library was quiet; Palestrina’s Lacrimosa had ended, and he hadn’t even been aware of it. He turned around and looked at her. Nina was sitting behind him on a small leather sofa, her feet shoved up under one of the cushions as she rested her back against the padded arm. Wearing a black vee-neck sweater of ribbed cotton with the sleeves pushed up to the elbows and a pair of black pleated pants, she had been reading an article in Progressive Architecture . Her reading glasses had slipped slightly down on her nose, and she was looking at him over the rims, just over the tops of them so that it seemed as if her pupils were hidden exactly behind the thin border of the tortoiseshell frames. The magazine was propped against her raised thighs, and she was holding it open with one hand while the other hand had gathered up her long chestnut hair, holding it up off the nape of her neck.
    “Not bad,” he said. He looked at her, olive skin and dark eyes and common sense. He relished moments like this when, by some oddity of perception, he unexpectedly saw her anew, as if for the first time again. Everything about her was fresh and surprising, her dusky