Grave Doubts Read Online Free

Morgan.”
    “David.”
    “Rachel.”
    “And I’m still Miranda. So what do you think, Rachel? What’s happening here?”
    “I really have no idea.”
    “Yes you do.”
    “Do I? Well, I doubt it’s her father who did it. I think they’ve been set up as a sentimental paradox.”
    “A paradox?” said Morgan.
    “Intimate lovers; but headless, their identities erased.”
    “Subversive,” said Miranda.
    “Do either of you know ‘The Kiss’ by Auguste Rodin?”
    “Yes,” said Miranda.
    She summoned to mind the enduring embrace of bronze lovers. One of the most famous portrayals of romantic passion ever conceived, bigger than life, highly erotic, the caught moment of absolute love.
    “Yeah,” said Morgan. “The plasters were at the ROM exhibition last year.”
    “Did you read the fine print?” Rachel Naismith asked. “Beside the display?”
    They felt a little truant; both looked inquisitive.
    “The story behind ‘The Kiss’ is intriguing,” she continued. “Once you know it, the sculpture changes. It literally turns from dream into nightmare, a diabolical vision of sensual entropy —”
    “Sensual entropy! I like that,” Morgan exclaimed.
    “Translation, please,” said Miranda, not in the least embarrassed for not knowing what the officer meant. “You honoured in art history, I take it.”
    “Yeah, art and art history.”
    Morgan took it on himself to explain Rachel Naismith’s esoteric phrase, perhaps to prove he understood. He seemed oblivious to the possibility of appearing pedantic.
    “Entropy is a measure of inefficiency, say in an organism or engine where heat is wasted rather than being transformed into energy. A perfect trope for suspended passion.”
    Rachel smiled, indicating she liked Morgan, pedantry and all.
    “That’s more or less where I was going,” she said. “Rodin apparently had Dante in mind when he sculpted ‘The Kiss.’ There’s a passage in The Divine Comedy about lovers locked in a perpetual clinch, having been dispatched in flagrante delicto by the woman’s husband, who was the man’s brother. They fetch up in Hell, an inferno of their own making. Sentimental inversion: they are doomed to hold the posture of their passion forever.”
    “That’s what ‘The Kiss’ is about?” exclaimed Miranda.
    “That’s what Rodin apparently had in mind. It was supposed to be part of a tableau of Heaven and Hell; it was his unfinished masterpiece.”
    “Beauty becomes horror,” Morgan mused in quiet astonishment. “And horror becomes beauty.”
    “Becomes, both ways,” Miranda offered.
    He looked at her quizzically.
    “Beauty becomes, transforms horror; beauty becomes, complements horror. Change, no change.”
    Miranda sometimes spoke in a kind of syntactical shorthand. He nodded approval. She turned to Officer Naismith, who seemed to be playing with the verbal permutations in her head.
    “You’re right,” Rachel Naismith continued. She wasn’t sure who was right about what. She lapsed into silence, apparently not wanting to sound like a gallery brochure or an academic treatise.
    Miranda gazed at the ghastly sensuality of the corpses intertwined at their feet, who now seemed part of something infinitely more sinister. Rachel’s comparison was anachronistic, of course. These lovers had been here long before Rodin translated Dante’s words into sculpture. But they certainly embodied an unholy paradox. Beneath the sad drape of their clothing, the absolute stillness of articulated limbs conveyed a haunting absence of life. But, as Rachel had suggested, without heads, they were not individuals. The true horror, Miranda realized, lay in the extinction of their personalities.
    Morgan had seen one of the original marble versions of Rodin’s sculpture in the Tate Gallery when he lived in London after graduating from university. The plaster at the Royal Ontario Museum seemed more real, though, perhaps because it was shaped by the hands of the master, and the stone