The Reluctant Model

Sunday, 8:15 PM. The townhouse in Fort Greene.

"Hold still," said Camille.

"I am holding still."

"You're breathing."

"I'm required to breathe."

"Not that loudly."

The second-floor sitting room at the back of the house had a south window, a green velvet armchair, and a small table of pale ash that had once stood in a studio in Tribeca. Camille had carried it over herself, on the subway, in a rented van, with Cole and Ostrander grumbling cheerfully on either end. Now it stood under the lamp, with a towel spread across it, and on the towel lay a neat row of tools: a nail file, a buffer, a bottle of cuticle oil, a rack of brushes, and a lamp the shape of a small white whale.

On the other side of the table sat the chairman of Kastellan Holdings.

He had taken off his jacket. He had rolled up his sleeves. He sat bolt upright in a straight-backed chair with both hands laid flat on the towel, palms down, like a man awaiting the results of a polygraph. His expression was one of profound and carefully concealed alarm.

"It's a manicure," said Camille. "Not an interrogation."

"I've been interrogated. It was less stressful."

"You've been shot. This is less stressful."

"That," said Julian, "is a matter of opinion."

She laughed and bent her head over his left hand.

…

It had started as a joke.

The half-penalty, she had said, that Thursday, and he had said what's the rest, and she'd said, after a moment's thought, with an air of enormous innocence, that the wedding was in five weeks. That a bride was supposed to do her own nails, according to a certain tradition, but that she did not trust her own hands on the morning of the day, and that the bridal party would need a full set of French tips, and that she needed practice with a variety of nail beds.

You have eleven nieces, Julian had said.

They're fourteen. They'll squirm.

Cole's mother.

In Ohio.

Dara.

Won't let me near her. She says I'd hide something in the cuticle.

And so, with a sigh and a long face, as of a man acquiescing to a firing squad, Julian Kastellan had said: Fine.

Camille now studied his left hand under the lamp.

It was a large, square, capable hand, tanned across the back, scarred across the knuckles, with the faint white tracery of old burns on the thumb. She had known it for eight months. She had seen it strike a bouncer's shoulder and cradle a gun, and knot a tie, and write a check, and clench itself on a steering wheel until the leather split. She had seen it shake in a hospital room, and open in front of a fireplace, and hover an inch from her cheek in the back of a speeding car.

She had never looked at it this way.

These, she thought, turning it gently, are beautiful hands.

Not pretty. Pretty was for the women of the Metropolitan Club. These were hands that had done things: broad palm, long fingers, strong blunt nails with a small ridge across the left forefinger where a ceramic blade had once nicked the bone. The cuticles were a disaster. He had, she realized, been biting them.

"You bite your cuticles," she said.

"I don't."

"You do. On the left index. Right here." She pressed a thumb lightly to the spot. "When you're reading a contract."

"I've never—"

"I watch you, Julian." Her voice was soft. "Hands are what I do."

He was quiet for a moment.

"I didn't know that was visible," he said.

"Everything's visible. If you know how to look."

She picked up the file.

…

The first twenty minutes were quiet.

She worked in the old, absorbing silence of her craft, with her head bent and her tongue caught lightly between her teeth, the way it always was when she concentrated. She shaped each nail with a few quick, sure strokes. She pushed back the cuticles with a little orangewood stick. She buffed, and oiled, and wiped, and the room filled with the smell of lavender and acetone, and the hush of the house settled around them like a blanket.

Julian watched.

He had meant to resist. He had meant to maintain, for the duration, a certain dignified detachment, the cool amused tolerance of a man doing his bride a kindness. But something had happened, somewhere around the third nail. His shoulders had come down. His breathing had slowed. The tight line of his mouth had unwound. He sat with his hand in hers, loose and warm and utterly still, and watched the top of her dark head bent in the lamplight, and felt a peace so profound that for a long moment he could not think what to call it.

It was the thing he had been looking for in the dark of the Kastellan penthouse, at three in the morning, for thirty-four years.

This, he thought. This is what it is. To be touched by someone who isn't afraid of you.

"You're very good at this," he said, quietly.

"I know."

"No, I mean... I've seen a great many people who are good at what they do. Surgeons. Assassins. Chess masters." He turned his hand a little in hers. "I've never seen anyone who's so entirely at home in what she does."

She looked up.

"It's the only place I ever was," Camille said.

"And now?"

"Now there are two." She smiled and went back to the nail. "It's a nice thing, to have a second."

He swallowed. His hand tightened a fraction in hers, then relaxed.

"May I say something possessive?" he asked.

"Is it going to be a violation of item two?"

"It is not about anyone else."

"Go on."

"I do not like," said Julian, "the idea of any other man's hand being where mine is."

She glanced up under her lashes.

"At my studio?"

"At any table. In any room." His voice was low, not unkind. "I know it isn't reasonable. I know it's a thing I have to keep in a box, like the files. But when I think of you holding someone's hand like this. Concentrating. That little line between your eyes. Touching his fingers one by one..." He drew a breath. "It does something to me. I don't care for it."

"It's a job, Julian."

"I know."

"Women. Mostly. And Mr. Kowalski, who is eighty and has a prosthetic hand."

"I like Mr. Kowalski."

"You've never met Mr. Kowalski."

"I read his file." He looked, very briefly, abashed. "He's a retired plumber. He collects model trains. He seems to be a decent man."

She put her hand over her face.

"You read his file."

"A very short file."

"Item two!"

"I'm confessing. I'm confessing now. It counts."

"It does not count!"

"A half-credit," said Julian hopefully.

She was laughing too hard to answer. She put her forehead down on the edge of the table, among the bottles, and shook with it, and when she lifted her head again he was looking at her with a gleam in his eye, and a faint, a very faint, pink in his cheekbones.

"There," she said, wiping her eyes. "That's what I thought. Is that all of the possessiveness?"

"Not remotely."

"Tell me."

He hesitated.

"I want," Julian said, in a low voice, "to be the only one who gets to look at you when you're like this. At work. With the lamp on your hair. I used to stand in the door of the studio in Tribeca, and I thought, this is the single most beautiful thing I've ever seen, and I thought, no one else gets to see it." His eyes held hers. "That's not control. I know the difference now. It's only a thing I feel. A great, selfish, unreasonable joy."

She sat very still.

Her heart was beating in her throat.

"That's allowed," she said, softly.

"Is it?"

"Item twelve."

"There is no item twelve."

"There is now." She put down the brush. "You're allowed to feel it, as much as you like. You're allowed to say it, out loud, at the dinner table, in front of my father. You are just not allowed to act on it." She tilted her head. "Unless I ask."

"And if you ask?"

"Then you act like crazy."

His breath came out in a rough, short, startled laugh.

He lifted his free hand, slowly, and laid it against her cheek. His thumb brushed the corner of her mouth. She turned her face into his palm and kissed it, and for a long, quiet moment neither of them moved, the lamp humming, the whale-shaped dryer glowing blue, a half-finished manicure drying on the table between them.

"Camille," he murmured.

"Mm."

"The polish."

"What about it?"

"You're going to smudge it."

"I'm not the one who's moving."

"I'm not moving. I'm a statue."

"You're a terrible statue."

"I'm aware."

…

At nine-forty, she turned off the lamp.

"Done?" he said.

"Done. Hold them up."

He lifted both hands into the light.

She had not asked what he wanted. She had simply known. Ten nails, short and clean and square, buffed to a soft satin shine. On eight of them, a clear coat, almost invisible, except for the way it caught the lamplight and held it, like a pool of still water. On the thumbs, a faint nude, the color of skin. And on his left ring finger, the one that would, in five weeks, hold a band of dark gold, she had painted something small.

A tiny black pawn.

Hand-drawn, in matte lacquer, no bigger than a grain of rice. A round head, a neat collar, a broad base. It sat on the center of the nail like a signature.

Julian stared at it.

He did not speak for a long time. He turned his hand, slowly, one way and then the other, and the little pawn winked in the lamplight, black and glossy and perfect.

"It's me," he said.

"It's you."

"That's what I was. At the beginning."

"No." She shook her head. "That's what I was. At the beginning. You just thought you were the player." She took his hand in both of hers. "This is what we both were. I'm giving it back to you."

"Why?"

"Because it's the one piece on the board that gets to the other side."

He looked at her.

"It crosses all sixty-four squares," said Camille. "One at a time. Without being noticed. Until it reaches the last row." She traced the tiny shape with the tip of her finger. "And then it can be anything it wants."

He closed his eyes.

"A queen," he whispered.

"If it likes."

"Or a knight."

"Or a bishop. Or a rook." She smiled. "Or a person, who decides to stay a pawn, because it's the only thing in the world she wants to be."

He opened his eyes.

They were very bright.

"I do not deserve you," said Julian.

"No."

"That was meant to be reassuring."

"I'm a nail technician, Julian. I don't do reassuring. I do the truth." She leaned over the table and kissed him, once, firmly, on the mouth. "You don't deserve me. Nobody deserves anybody. We just choose. It's the only thing that counts."

A silence.

"You are," Julian said, with a sigh of deep and utter defeat, "extremely annoying."

"I know."

"Intolerable."

"Yes."

"I'm going to marry you in five weeks."

"I'm counting on it."

He lifted his hand again, and looked at the pawn, and his mouth began, against every attempt at discipline, to curl.

"I'm not washing my hands for a week," he said.

"You'll have to. You're a banker."

"I'll wear gloves."

"You'll look like a mob boss."

"I'll look like a man with a secret."

"Julian."

"Yes."

"The polish needs to cure." She picked up the little lamp. "Another ninety seconds. Put them under."

He put them under.

He sat there, with his big scarred hands spread beneath the blue light, perfectly still, as obedient as a child, and across the table she watched him with her chin on her fist and a smile she could not hold back. A sudden gust of wind rattled the window. Down in the garden, in the dark, the magnolia sighed and dropped a petal on the stone.

And in the little warm room, among the bottles and the brushes and the smell of lavender, the most dangerous man in New York held his hands out to a nail technician, and let her tell him what to do.

He had never in his life felt so entirely in control.