The Bohemian Murders (5 page)

“Where is the ocean?” I asked, as to my surprise he nosed the Maxwell into a bush of marguerites and stopped the motor. “I thought we were going to picnic on this beach of pure white sand that you’ve told me so much about.”

“We are,” he replied, “but everyone is gathering here at Peterson’s first. We’ll all go down to the beach together. We do this most every night, to watch the sunset. It’s beautiful. A peak experience.”

I smiled at his enthusiasm but felt bitterly disappointed: I’d thought that Michael and I would be picnicking alone. In my fantasies, our first time together on the white sands of Carmel would be the occasion of his telling me, at last, that he loved me. He would thank me for giving up San Francisco in order to be near him. And I would say something like “Oh, it’s nothing, because I love you too.”

Oscar Peterson’s place reminded me of a summer camp I used to go to when I was a child: It smelled all woodsy and appeared barely fit for human habitation. A scrawled sign had been tacked on a tree trunk near the graveled turnaround that served for a drive:
PETERSON’S PLACE
. Not a very novel name considering, if I remembered correctly from the various stories of Carmel Michael had told me, that Oscar was a poet.

“Here’s Oscar now,” Michael said, taking my elbow. I drew in a deep breath, raised my chin, and assumed a smile.

The man who approached us was tall and thin and pale, with sparse graying hair that hung limply to his shoulders. He wore round glasses with silver frames and thick lenses that magnified his gray eyes. His clothes looked as if they might once have belonged to somebody else, or alternatively, as if he might once have
been
somebody else: shirt and trousers both so much too big that they hung in folds, gathered in at the waist by a knotted red scarf for a belt. His trousers were chopped off just below the knee, exposing a pair of fish-belly-white shins,
and he wore sandals on his long-toed bony feet. In sum, his appearance was rather off-putting, or so I thought until Michael completed his introduction.

“Fremont, I am charmed,” Oscar said, with a smile so radiant it instantly eclipsed all his oddity.

“Likewise, Oscar,” I said, meaning it.

“We’re all back here amongst the trees.” He waved vaguely and started off. Michael and I followed, and soon I was knee-deep, so to speak, in Carmelites.

One fellow, an artist with an Arabic-sounding name I didn’t quite catch, wore flowing robes of black and white, complete with a burnoose. His companion was a woman who looked older than he—if one could judge his age by his face, since every other part of him was covered. She also looked less exotic, wearing a fashionable auto-travel costume of duster and veiled hat, in a delicate but dull shade of pink called ashes-of-roses. Her name was Irma Fox and her face resembled one, with her small mouth and sharp nose and beady eyes all squinched together in the center of it.

Just: beyond Irma three fellows sat in a row on a redwood bench. They were all in their shirtsleeves, with collars removed and varicolored vests hanging open. They introduced themselves as Tom, Dick, and Harry and I wondered if they were joshing me. I was just about to ask, when
she
appeared. All bedecked in flowers, she floated up out of nowhere to hang on Michael’s arm.

“
Dahr
-ling,” she said in a voice dripping honey, “you
must
introduce me to my
rival.
”

Before that, I hadn’t even known I had a rival. Another josher, like Tom, Dick, and Harry—that was what I thought at first.

Michael chuckled and said smoothly, “Artemisia Vaughn, may I present Caroline Fremont Jones, who prefers to be called Fremont.”

“How-do-you-do,” I said by rote.

She said, “Charmed. I prefer to be called Artemisia, though there are some cretins around here who insist on calling me Art. One doesn’t want to be
called
Art, one
creates
art.”

“Artemisia is an artist,” Michael said, smiling down at her, “in more than one medium. She paints and writes, and does amateur theatrics.”

I said, “How impressive.” It was hard not to stare at this artistic paragon. She looked as if she might be somewhere between Michael and myself in age—that is to say, in her thirties. Her face was arresting but not beautiful, dominated by a long nose with a bit of a hook at the tip. Large, dark brown eyes were her best feature, balancing a wide mouth. She had braided into her long brown hair some of the daisies that bloom so profusely here, and she wore a Grecian-style gown that showed off a pair of pointed and obviously unbound breasts.

“I paint nocturnes,” said Artemisia, “and I write stories out of my dreams. I am only interested, you see, in things of the night.”

“Then one would presume,” I said brightly, “that is why you are named for Artemis, goddess of the moon.”

“Of course!” She laughed, sounding a good deal like a shower of golden coins, and laid her head with the greatest of ease against Michael’s shoulder.

“And of the hunt,” I added.

“How clever your friend is, Misha,” she purred. “But of course you told me she was, didn’t you?”

“Fremont is indeed clever. Too much so, sometimes.”

“You are too kind, both of you,” I said; I was thinking, What was that she called him? A pet name? This was becoming a tad unbearable.

“Don’t be silly!” She tweaked Michael’s nose. The easy way she touched him quite astonished me. He smiled down at her, not minding her familiarity in the least.

“One can never be too clever,” she asserted. “Isn’t that right, Fremont?” Lifting her head from Michael’s shoulder she winked at me and, without waiting for a reply, twirled off, the folds of her Grecian gown rippling around her.

That was my first encounter with Artemisia Vaughn, the Other Woman. It left me so stunned that I met the rest of the Carmelites in a kind of daze. In order to
remember people, I had to pair their names with their clothing. This was easier than it might have been, because this picnic was the nearest thing to a costume party I’d seen since Halloween.

Brunhilde, a sturdy blonde of Germanic appearance, was Mimi Peterson. Although she did not wear a horned helmet, she had hair as yellow as corn, knotted carelessly on top of her head and spilling down her cheeks and nape in a most attractive way.

There was La Señorita—an extremely thin brunette in ruffles whose name I promptly forgot; the Medium Brown Man, named Arthur Something—a quiet, brown-suited fellow who was medium everything: height, weight, age, length of nose, size of ears, etc., etc., etc.; and Diogenes—an older man, white-haired and round-bellied, in a shapeless drab robe, carrying a lantern—a professor by the name of Stork or Storch. Finally there was Phoebe, who looked like one of those little gray-brown birds but also like a softly rounded Jane Eyre, in a chocolate dress with a white collar, center-parted light brown hair, and hazel eyes. Her last name, which equally suited her, was Broom.

My reverie was suddenly and rudely interrupted with a snort and a jolt—Hettie’s bay mare had achieved the crest of Carmel Hill and was attacking the downslope with rather too much enthusiasm. “Easy, Bessie, easy!” I yelled, pulling back on the reins to slow her down. Since the fog had cleared I was able to see the magnificent blue curve of Monterey Bay over the tops of the trees as we began our descent. But in my mind I remained in another place, by the edge of another bay: Carmel Bay, on that first and fateful December day.

All the colorful Carmelites, plus me, had finished eating a potluck picnic supper on the sand—which was as white as Michael had said it was. The sun was a fiery red ball sinking toward the Pacific when Artemisia came running over to the blanket where Michael and I sat, and grabbed us both by the hand.

“You must come, both of you!” she exclaimed. “I am constructing a living tableau to the dying day!”

Michael allowed her to pull him to his feet but I resisted, saying, “No, thank you. I much prefer to be part of the audience.”

She pouted and Michael’s mouth curved in a sensual hint of a smile. “Are you sure, Fremont? Artemisia’s tableaux are quite the thing.”

Not quite my thing, I thought, but I forced yet another smile and waved them on. Then I watched with a strange combination of envy and sadness as Artemisia assembled her little group of men and women and laid her hands on them, moving arms and legs and tilting heads into various poses, as if they were living statues. The setting sun stained their bodies red-gold.

“She’s good at that,” a voice behind me said quietly.

I looked around, startled because I’d thought myself more or less alone; the nearest picnic blanket was perhaps ten feet away, and both its inhabitants were in the tableau. “Phoebe,” I said, recognizing her. “I agree; Artemisia seems endlessly talented.”

Phoebe sat down next to me, tucking her feet beneath her skirts. She wore brown high-button shoes, an odd choice considering the sand. She said, “You didn’t take my meaning. I meant she is good at manipulating people.”

“Ah,” I said, in the way that Michael does when he either does not know what to say, or does not wish to give anything away. I waited, but Phoebe did not elaborate.

In silence we watched a scene so lovely it made me ache. The declining sun gilded the wave crests, while elsewhere the sea was dark as wine; a family of seagulls wheeled on the wind and dipped into a streak of sunset that dyed them pink as flamingoes. Except for that single shaft of sun, the air was thick with purple twilight.

Artemisia, not quite satisfied with her arrangement, placed her hand on Michael’s inner thigh and rotated his leg outward. A sliver of ice slit my heart. She stroked his throat, forcing his head back; she took her own long white scarf and draped it around his neck so that the tails of it streamed in the wind. His arms were flung back as
she had placed them, after the manner of the Winged Victory of Samothrace. The others held positions slightly less dramatic—Artemisia had made Michael the hero of this scene.

At last she was satisfied and stepped back. The living statues held their poses while the sun, grown gigantic in its declension, released a final scarlet flash that turned them all to blood-red gods.

And Phoebe said, “I didn’t realize Misha was so handsome.”

“Misha?” I whispered, so as not to spoil the dramatic moment.

“Misha. Your friend.”

At that moment Diogenes lumbered to his feet and began to sing, or rather to chant, a wordless melody in a minor key that was quite affecting—even to me with my divided mind. Artemisia clapped her hands once, and the tableau shifted smoothly to another pose. A collective sigh rose from all the observers, myself included. The living tableau to the dying day was both beautiful and eerie; it gave me goose bumps.

Phoebe’s voice broke the spell. “I wonder if Misha would pose for me in the nude,” she mused.

I recalled that she was a sculptor, and was grateful the last rays of sunset would camouflage my cheeks, for they flamed at the thought of Michael posing in the nude. But I did not make any objection; a few hours in their company had taught me that these unusual people were true bohemians, artists and intellectuals, the most
avant
of the avant-garde—even if a few of them did seem to me slightly insane. So I only asked, “Why do you call him Misha, Phoebe?”

“Because,” she replied, “it’s the Russian nickname for Michael, and he’s Russian. You didn’t know?”

“I thought he was an American.”

“Well, maybe he’s both. All I know is, when he first came looking around Carmel, not long after the earthquake, he was Michael Archer. Then when he bought the land, the title was drawn up for Mikhail Arkady Kossoff, which he said was his legal name, the one he was born
with. He was born in Fort Ross—which used to belong to the Russians before California became a state.” Phoebe shrugged. “We didn’t think much of it—all artists know lots of people who have changed their names. Anyhow, it was Artemisia who first called him Misha. He liked it, and it stuck, and now as far as I know, Michael Archer is no more.”

“How very interesting,” I said. I stared across the sand where the tableau was breaking up and the living statues were embracing one another, saying their good nights amid arpeggios of laughter. The central figure in this sharing of affection was Artemisia, the white of her Grecian gown glowing as if it fed on the little remaining light, and even as I tried to swallow my jealousy, Michael—whom she had first called Misha—leaned over her, removing her scarf from about his neck and wrapping it around hers.

I had looked away then, because I’d been afraid he would kiss her, and I hadn’t wanted to see. Phoebe had continued to talk but I hadn’t heard a word she said; my ears were roaring and my mouth had gone drier than the sand on which I sat. At that exact moment it had all come together for me: I would be miserable living in a cottage in Carmel, where I would have to deal with this sort of thing every day; there would be no I-love-you’s for Michael and me on the white sand or anywhere else; I had come within inches of making a complete fool of myself. In other words, I’d made a great mistake.

I hadn’t cried then; somehow I’d gotten through that night and the rest of the days and nights that followed. I don’t cry easily. But now, with the wind in my face as Hettie’s mare flew downhill toward Monterey, I felt tears drying on my cheeks.

An earthquake is a great learning experience. I suppose the same is true of any disaster that shakes you up and turns your life upside down; when you start putting yourself back together again, you find that nothing looks quite the same as it did before. And if you have lost a great deal, as most of us did in the quake and fire, you
will quickly learn what means the most to you by the ferocity with which you long to have it back.

Love and friendship aside (for at the moment I am understandably confused on that score), what I missed most after the earthquake, with a longing that was almost physical, was the daily routine of going to my office and having a job to do that earned me a living wage. I learned that any work, paid or not, is better than none; and that forming one’s own routine and sticking to it can be the equivalent of a port in a storm. Therefore I lost no time, once I’d decided to stay in Pacific Grove, finding an office and setting up my daily routine. Though it did have to be modified when I agreed to become temporary keeper of the light.