Falling Idols Read online

  Kate nodded, more to pacify than agree, then registered with a shock what she’d missed until now. Surely she’d have seen it as a child, but the recollection wasn’t there. Today, for all intents and purposes, was the first time.

  It stood upon the wide platform above the doors, a lifesize effigy whose heavy-lidded eyes stared the length of the nave, toward the rose window where he would greet each rising sun. In shadows now, his mystery was heightened tenfold, hunching with muscled body and sinewed limbs, balanced on wide-stanced cloven feet. His magnificent head was ever-so-slightly inclined downward, as though deigning to acknowledge whoever paused to stare. Alain, she knew, would kill for his cheekbones, while shunning the wild serpentine beard. And he’d have no use at all for the goat horns, sprouting robustly from either side of the forehead, curving back and to each side. A long tongue wagged from between parted lips with a grin of lascivious delight.

  Here was the face that had given medieval churchmen all the devil they’d ever needed.

  “Pan, right?” she said.

  “Or Cernunnos. Call him what you will.”

  “I can’t believe I didn’t notice him before now.”

  “You’d be amazed how many don’t, until they leave,” Crenshaw said. “One could be excused for thinking he enjoys it that way.”

  *

  She was a betting woman all right, but knew no one here well enough to make the bet in the first place. It was nothing to be proud of, anyway: She was giving the relationship another week at most, after which Alain would find an excuse to go home early.

  It’d been entirely physical anyway, had just run its course sooner than expected. With his mussed raven hair and caramel skin and long-lashed eyes, he’d never been less than beautiful, always a willing model for her artier, more indulgent shots. Most were admittedly Mapplethorpe-influenced, somewhere between deifying and fetishizing. She’d strip him down and zoom in for the kill, the shadowy, side-lit curves of his arm or ass like a blown-glass vase, then devour everything the camera had left. By now, it didn’t amount to much.

  After early enthusiasm, Alain now hated England, she deduced, because nobody recognized him. Maybe two dozen ads and dialogue-free parts in three music videos meant he didn’t have to walk far back home before inspiring double-takes, but fame apparently ended in U.S. territorial waters and it was eating him alive.

  He sulked. He was depressed by British television — not enough channels and he claimed he couldn’t find anything but snooker tournaments and sheepdog trials. He logged epic phone time calling home to reassure himself that his world still existed. She’d thrust the keys to the rental car at him — “Take it, go, go find something you are interested in” — but he wouldn’t hear of it. Steering from the right on the wrong side of the road? It was no way to drive, not on these twisty, narrow lanes.

  Meanwhile, Kate settled day by day into this green and misty autumn sojourn, realizing, Alain’s kvetching aside, she’d not been this content in … she couldn’t remember.

  Nigel Crenshaw entrusted her with a spare key to the church so she could come early or stay late if she pleased. He loaned her books about the region, which she eagerly perused at the bed-and-breakfast in Craven Arms and in the area pubs. Little, if anything, was said about Geoffrey Blackburn, but they did help her lift him farther out of the vacuum of dry intellect and make him into a fuller person, in the context of a real time and place.

  With every day, the more her camera captured of his labors, the more Kate wondered about him: What had driven him to such excellence instead of settling for being a merely competent artisan; why he’d so thoroughly committed himself to rendering the grotesque instead of threatless, tranquil beauty.

  She thought she understood after a few days, understood as one can only after admitting to infatuation with someone not only never met, but who never could be.

  Perhaps, despite the institution behind his commissions, he had seen enough of the world to harbor no illusions of any divine goodness, and spent a lifetime chipping its cruelty into something more manageable. Or making intimate friends of its harsher faces. Or telling everyone else what he knew in metaphors they would understand.

  She could identify. So maybe Geoffrey Blackburn wasn’t so much ancestor as mirror.

  Despite everything it had brought her, she often felt that winning the Pulitzer for that hateful photo had been the worst thing that could’ve happened to her, at least at such a young age. Not that recognition itself was harmful; more that she’d been left with the inevitable what-next syndrome. The odds against her ever again being in such a right time and place were astronomical.

  And she doubted she would have the stomach to again witness anything comparable. Even the first time, she’d shot the picture like a pro, but later cried for a day and a half.

  She’d shot news only for another thirteen months.

  Commercial photography paid better, after all, and nobody died in front of the lens. Only their careers, if they’d had the audacity to age badly, or even at all.

  *

  At least once per day, while working outside the church, she caught him watching from varying distances and differing vantages: the man Crenshaw seemed to believe he’d run off.

  Some days he stood in the meadows, others near the treeline. Never any threat, hardly a movement at all out of him, he’d stand with his hands in his pockets while autumn’s bluster flapped his coat about his knees; stand there like a displaced and rough-hewn Heathcliff.

  At first she ignored him, turning away nearly as soon as she saw him. He’d be gone the next time she checked. Day by day she grew bolder, returning his gaze unfazed, and finally snapping his picture, then crossing arms over chest, determined to outstare him. He threw his head back with a hearty laugh, then walked into the trees until trunks and leaves swallowed him up.

  She inquired about him of the locals — as long as there were pubs, there was no shortage of opinions on anything — finding that no one knew much about him, only that if he made his home nearby, none could tell you how to get there.

  “Jack” was the best anyone could do for a name — this from a man who swore his good friend’s cousin had been drunk with the fellow. Popular opinion pegged him as a full-time wanderer — maybe a refugee from one of those rolling communes that motored up and down Britain — most certainly on the dole, and that the area around the Church of St. Johnny B was the crossroads of his travels.

  “Fixate on an area, some of ‘em, they do,” she was told amid the warm, rugged timbers of the Rose & Thistle. It boasted more Jack-sightings than anywhere else, until the next pub. “Get it in their heads it’s a holy place, from back before God had whiskers, and next thing you know, you’re up to your bollocks in Druids.”

  “Bollocks is right,” countered another. “You wouldn’t know a Druid if he hoisted his robe and showed you his own two.”

  She joined in the beery laughter, but still, this could’ve been close to the truth. Many of these medieval churches had been built on the ruins of far more ancient sites. Some contended it symbolized a triumph over pre-Christian beliefs, others that it was a way of coaxing stubborn pagans toward conversion.

  If this was Jack’s interest in the place, she approved, even found something endearing about it, the romanticism of clinging to what time had rendered obsolete before you ever had a chance to call it yours. Longing to reclaim it despite the world’s derision.

  Kate thought of Jack from that first day inside the church, however brief the encounter. Recalling his smell, of all things, a not-unpleasant musk of maleness and the outdoors, as though he’d slept beneath a blanket of decaying leaves, on a pillow of moss.

  Alain’s liberal dousing with cologne seemed more ridiculous every day, and the nights when they made what passed for love, in a kind of energized mutual loathing, she wondered how he would react if she came to bed with that green and woody scent on her. If he would recoil in disgust, accuse her of going native. If his rejection would be her own rit
e of passage, an emancipation to proclaim: I’m sick of you, sick of your kind altogether, finally, ready for real human beings again, real passions instead of plastic.

  The next day there was no good reason to devote time to more exterior shots, but she did it anyway, working until he was simply there, Jack on the crest of a green-domed rise. She took a chance.

  “I’ll bet you know things about this church,” she called to him, “that even Crenshaw doesn’t.”

  “Not much challenge in that,” he called back. “But don’t get me started on what you won’t want me to finish.”

  She waved him forward, and he came, in nearly every way the antithesis of Alain. Quick to smile, with the crinkles to prove it, and probably just as quick to show anger. If he gave one thought to his appearance you’d never know it. And that wafting scent, as earthy as Alain’s was bottled.

  “So let’s have one of them,” she said. “Crenshaw’s blind spots.”

  Jack stroked and scratched at his days of beard. Threads of gray she hadn’t noticed before were obvious now, in the sun.

  “Didn’t happen to tell you anything about the money running out, did he? During construction? And how they remedied that?”

  “Not a word.”

  “I didn’t think he knew of that one. Well, then. It was the early 1350s when the coffers scraped empty, and they had to close down. Stonemasons, carpenters, mortar makers … nothing to pay them with. How you going to raise the rest, if you’ve half a church?”

  “I don’t know. Fleece the flock?”

  “Good start, but you’ll need more than what you can tap them for. So, for the next two years, they displayed their relic. It’s to be St. John the Baptist’s, right? If you remember your church schooling, maybe you’ll remember the way he ended up.”

  “His head on a platter, right,” she said. “For Salome.”

  “The very same.” Jack grinned. “Got themselves a stray head, then, put it in a box, called it John’s own noggin, and charged by the peek. Did a fine pilgrimage business with it, too. Enough to finish what you see here.”

  “How do you know this and Crenshaw doesn’t?”

  “Well, now, that you’d have to ask him.” Jack shook his great shaggy head. “Not to be too hard on the old boy. It’s good that he cares as much as he does about the place. Just that he’s too much of a Presbyterian to really understand it.”

  “No such obstacles with me,” she said. “Agnostic, reformed.”

  “Oh, better than that. This place was in your blood from the start.”

  “I didn’t realize you knew. About my ancestry.”

  “Got ears, haven’t I? They work just fine.” When he smiled, his weathered face became a splendid interplay of crease and hair and twinkle. Such pictures he would take, in his natural element; for her, an antidote, maybe, to the vapidity that came out of her studio, every blemish erased by microchip.

  It occurred to her Jack could’ve wrought a thousand delusions about this place and believed every one of them. Sometimes the mad did speak with the most conviction. He could’ve left a dozen bodies buried along his wanderings, for that matter.

  “They worshipped heads, you know, back when,” he said, with a nod toward the church, as if reading her mind and deciding to play with any misapprehension rather than assuage it. “The Celts. The reverence outlasted the actual headhunting itself. Still, you have to know that before you can ever understand this place.”

  It made sense. This region, she’d already learned, had seen a tenacious holding to Celtic tradition from the murkiest antiquity, surviving well past Saxon times. That much was clear enough from the edifice itself. The gods of old religions become the devils of the ones that follow, and the Christian hell was full of them, but here in this particular stone they straddled two worlds in uneasy collusion.

  “Then the dedication to John the Baptist,” she said, “wasn’t just coincidence.”

  “Now you follow. What you had here were people who found this headless saint a lot more interesting than the main character. You should count the heads carved here. Inside, out. Forget anything with a body, just heads. Come up short of a hundred, I say you’re not trying very hard.”

  Kate looked above, found two within a few paces of where she stood. One was clutched in the hands of a giant who was stuffing it into his maw.

  “Geoffrey, they hardly knew ye,” she said, and wasn’t it the truth. Inside, in less obvious nooks and crannies, she’d found the editorial imprints of a man clearly antagonistic to Rome. One bas-relief depicted a fox in bishop’s robes preaching to a flock of geese. Another, a bloated pig in a papal miter guarding a horde of coins.

  “That two-year down spell they had?” Jack said. “Didn’t apply to him. Geoffrey Blackburn never stopped work.”

  “Meaning they paid him on the sly, or…?”

  Jack shook his head. “Meaning he thought it more important this place be finished before he died. Never went hungry or cold, him nor his family, though. Always some dressed venison or fowl showing up at the door, baskets of vegetables. Wood pile never ran low.” A broad grin. “There’s instant karma for you.”

  She looked into his eyes, green and merry, for any hint he’d been pulling her leg for minutes and was about to slap his thigh and howl. But no.

  “What is your story, Jack?” she asked.

  “Mine?” He looked taken aback. “Now, how can I tell you that? It’s got no ending yet.”

  She took him by the arm, steering him toward the west end. “Come on. We’re going inside. To count heads. My treat. They can’t throw you out then, can they?”

  “You’re missing the point of all the fun.”

  “Like hell,” she said. “Wait’ll you see Crenshaw’s face when he sees you have every right to be there.”

  *

  When he did it, Alain took the easy way out, the time-honored tactic of cads and cowards: told her in a public place so she’d be less likely to cause a scene.

  Showed how much he’d been paying attention. Opinion on them at the Rose & Thistle was neatly divided. She was liked, he wasn’t. It wouldn’t be difficult to make his strategy backfire. Making two ways the joke was on him.

  “I didn’t think you’d last this long,” she said. “I had a bet with myself you’d crack by day before yesterday.”

  Alain masked every emotion well but surprise. She knew he was thinking it wasn’t supposed to be this way, she was supposed to be devastated. To plead. How could any woman in her right mind not? Especially her — older by nearly a decade, and getting no younger.

  The truth? His youth and beauty really had been good for her ego. What she hadn’t expected was how elevating it felt to discover she could wave goodbye to all that as easily as she could a pigeon who’d eaten popcorn at her feet. Now that he’d seen that departure alone wasn’t going to ruin her, he progressed to petty jealousy.

  “I thought I’d hang in London for a couple days first.” All nonchalance, holding up his cell phone. “Guess who’s in for a shoot. Andi Wexler. I called my agent earlier and got her number, so she’s … expecting me.”

  Kate nodded. “When you kiss her, make sure it’s before she disappears to poke a finger down her throat. Otherwise, she might not’ve rinsed well. You knew about the bulemia, didn’t you? No? Forget it, then. Just try not to think about it.”

  Low, but the only kind of parry he would understand.

  She could’ve told him of the past few nights: Sixteen hours ago, in bed? In my mind it wasn’t even you. I replaced you with a stranger whose last name I don’t know and it was better that way, and it was just as better the night before when I dreamed of him, when I pulled him deeper into me than I ever did you on your best day. I did it because he smells of an earth you don’t even like to touch. I did it because he’s real. More real in a dream than you are in the flesh. Could’ve told him, but didn’t, because Alain’s comprehension stretched only so far.

  As easily as that, they were done. He got a few steps
away, then turned as if he wanted to say more but had no idea how it was done. As emotions went, he handled bewilderment well, too.

  Amid stone and timber, fire and ale, she wished for misery but felt only relief. Misery would be proof of something, that she’d risked and cared enough to want to die for a day or two. That she’d been alive. That for the next few hours she was entitled to drink with strangers until she was stupid, and listen to their advice, their comforts, cry if she wanted.

  Instead, she couldn’t even imagine tearing up his pictures after she got home because they were technically flawless. Good god, had it always been this hollow? Sometimes she thought herself cut from denser stuff than Geoffrey Blackburn had ever worked on.

  She ordered a shot of Welsh single-malt anyway, and they all laughed when she told them that his name wasn’t even Alain, but Albert. He’d been held in low regard ever since loudly observing that most of the local faces seemed modeled on the potato.

  She drank for an hour, then another. The fire had warmed her body, the whiskey her belly, the company her soul, and she allowed how much better this trip would’ve been if she could’ve shared it with someone who appreciated such modest provincialities.

  She was achieving her latest annual drunken epiphany that it was time to change her life, when a regular came in shrugging the October chill off himself and telling of the wreck he’d passed a few miles down the road. Police already on the scene, but what a mess, some idiot driving too fast for the curves, looked like, slamming head-on into a stone fence and through the windscreen he went, straight at the curled-up edge of the smashed bonnet.

  That son of a bitch, was the first thing she thought. Doesn’t drive one mile since we came here and now he takes the car? Thinks he’ll drive it to London?

  For the rest of the night, the mood in the Rose & Thistle was glum. She remained by the fireside, listening to talk and awkward condolences, clutching her thick pullover sweater tightly about her, and fearing if she left the fire she’d freeze.