The Color of Light

by Helen Maryles Shankman

  The girl in the room seemed to sense Rafe’s presence. She turned her head toward the doorway, just enough for him to see fear wash over her like a tide.

  A strange sensation of vertigo came over him. He rested his hand on the wall as if he could touch what was behind it. And then he moved on, quicker now, almost running, until he reached the door at the other end of the hall.

  The girl blinked, wondering what had come over her. It had been something more than being female and alone on a deserted floor. Something ancient. Primeval.

  At that moment, a door clanged open. Heavy footsteps treaded through the back where the sculptors’ studio was. She heard scraping noises. Something thrown heavily onto the floor. The sound of chairs being moved.

  “Damn! Missed the blackboard!” someone exploded. The Simpsons theme music blasted through the vast hall. The girl let out her breath; she hadn’t realized she was holding it in. Just the sculptors gathering around the TV for their nightly ritual. She smiled in relief, feeling silly. It had only been someone late for an evening class. And yet…

  She shrugged the feeling off, went back to staring at her drawing.

  Midtown, a nondescript limestone and brick building like a hundred other buildings on Forty-fourth and Madison.

  He passed the information desk, the newsstand, went straight into a waiting elevator. Three other people were in the car; one woman in a serious black suit and a short blunt haircut, a man wearing a red paisley shirt with ruffled sleeves and pinstriped polyester bellbottoms, and one tall, frighteningly thin young girl with a blank, pretty face.

  They all got off at twenty-two. The reception area was papered with gold leaf. A sign in three-foot-high block letters announced, ANASTASIA. The man in bellbottoms nodded politely at Rafe as he breezed past, the woman in black hurried down a staircase to another floor. He waited with the model until the receptionist whispered, “She can see you now.”

  Rafe walked down the corridor past empty desks and offices. Most of the editors and assistants had already left for the night. Computers winked quietly into the dusk. At the end of the passageway, a severe little Englishwoman peered disapprovingly over her glasses at him and said, “Go on in, then.”

  A small plaque on the door read, Anastasia deCroix, Editor in Chief. He knocked twice, let himself in. A tiger-skin rug covered the floor. Orchids in pots were scattered tastefully around the surfaces and corners. At the center of the room was a round table and five chairs with sleekly twisted, brushed aluminum legs, upholstered in a silky, lipstick-red fabric. At the opposite end of the office was a desk with a Tizio lamp and a computer. A leopard-spotted daybed lounged discreetly in the shadows.

  Though it was a corner office, with floor to ceiling windows on two sides, the shades were always drawn. Anastasia deCroix’s aversion to sun was well documented. The door opened, and Anastasia herself stalked through it, talking to someone unseen.

  “I don’t care what she told Italian Vogue,” she snapped in French-accented English. “If she can’t be at the lingerie shoot on Friday, she won’t be on the cover next month. Tell that to Elite Models. Hello, my darling,” she said as she strode past him to the table, laid out with grainy gray photographs of pretty people apparently having sex.

  Rafe picked up a picture, scrutinized it. “What’s this for?” A headless female torso bent over backwards, nipples erect.

  “The December orgasm story. We have one every month. You like this one?” She plucked it from his fingers, surveyed it thoughtfully. “Anthea!” she called sharply. The severe woman poked her head around the door. “Take this to the art department right away, please. Tell Ram, ‘Orgasm.’ Now, what is it, my darling? You have five minutes before I have to rush off. My car is already waiting downstairs. Tell me while I change.” She picked up a garment bag and shut herself behind a door marked Private.

  “Why? Where are you off to?” A photograph on the table caught his eye. Though the couple in the picture was joined at the hips, their silvery bodies were arcing away from each other and their eyes were closed in passion. “Were they really making love?”

  “A child could see they are pretending. Look. They are not even sweating. Jean-Paul is throwing a party for his new fragrance at the Puck Building.”

  The door opened. She stepped out in a tight burgundy dress with a plunging neckline shaped like an inverted heart. She leaned over to pull on black stilettos, revealing a generous sweep of cleavage, then straightened back up, flipping back her short dark hair. “How do I look?”

  Nobody knew how old Anastasia deCroix really was, or where she had come from. The columnists put her age at anywhere from thirty-five to fifty-five. As editor-in-chief of the eponymous Anastasia, the most influential women’s magazine in the United States, she was both revered and feared in the fashion industry. It was said that one day, Leo Lubitsch had flown her in from Buenos Aires and given her an office. The next day, Anastasia’s sales numbers had overtaken Vogue, InStyle, Elle, and Marie Claire.

  “Terrible,” he said. “Like an old skank.”

  She smiled at him. Her lips were stained dragon red, in a discontinued Chanel color that they still made just for her. “So, what is it today? Is that horrible little man still trying to take your school away from you? Is the entire faculty still sleeping with the students?” She selected a round brush from a chromed caddy, began fluffing her hair.

  “Funny you should ask.” He related the story of going to the girl’s studio, the drawing on the wall.

  “Wizotsky? Like your little girlfriend from school?” The irises of her eyes gleamed ruby red, not quite human. Her pupils narrowed and dilated voraciously, the real reason she wore her signature dark glasses night and day. “Are you sure?”

  “Same spelling, anyway.”

  “Come, we’ll talk in the elevator.” She put the glasses back on, took her bag, a jeweled box that was made to look like a wrapped present, raced ahead of him down the corridor.

  “Have you met her, this girl?”

  “God, no. I can’t even bring myself to say hello.”

  “Hm.” She swished on face powder, put the compact back in her bag. They were zipping down in the elevator now. “Perhaps it’s a different Wizotsky,” she suggested in a soothing voice. “It was such a long time ago.”

  They were walking through the lobby now. Rafe had to lengthen his stride to keep up with her. She smiled at the old German couple who ran the magazine stand, hurried through the revolving door. “Why don’t you accompany me, my darling? Maybe we’ll meet someone…nice.” Her lips stretched in a rapacious smile as she slid into the limo. “Join us. We could have dinner together.” She patted the seat next to her. “Come. Leo will be happy to see you.”

  He got in. The car slid away from the curb, headed downtown. “How is Leo? Not dead yet?”

  “No, my darling. But he is getting old. He shakes now. And Margaux…” she sighed. “Poor Margaux. She was always so chic. Remember, during the war, in Paris? They were adorable. She was always wearing some little hat that she had just made, and he was charming and dapper, every inch the Russian aristocrat, so courtly and ruthless. They were more—how can I put it—like us, than anyone I have ever met.”

  For a moment, he was silent, remembering. “Funny that he never asked to be changed.”

  She responded with a Gallic shrug. “I offered it to him once. When Brodov died, after suffering a long illness. You know, they had this big rivalry going on when they first came to America, Leo with Femme, Brodov with Bella. It was in the papers all the time how they were stealing each other’s ideas, photographers, models. Wives. Anyway, he said he didn’t want to outlive his times. Can you imagine?” A short, sharp laugh.

  They were shooting down Fifth Avenue at Twenty-fourth street, past old Madison Square. The Flatiron building reared up before them. A derelict was standing in front of the Civil War monument holding up a sign that read, Lost job, please help.

  “I like his jacket,” she said, tapping on the glass. �
��Look at those buttons.”

  They rode in silence for a while. Below Twenty-third, the look on the street changed. Thin couples headed for the trendy new restaurants grouped around Union Square. Pale, tattooed girls with long dark hair streaked magenta, or electric blue, lugging huge portfolios. Flocks of the young and the hip, dressed all in black, flowing steadily towards the Village, Soho, Tribeca.

  “Perhaps she has a friend you could ask,” she suggested. “She must be friendly with the other girl in her studio, what did you call her? The cannoli.”

  “I don’t think so.” he replied, remembering the astonishing accuracy of Graciela’s anatomical drawing. “Their interests seem to be very different.”

  “They are girls.” Anastasia said emphatically. “If they are sharing a studio, they will become intimates. You will see. Befriend the cannoli, and you will learn all the scary depressing one’s secrets.”

  He was looking out the window. A boy and a girl were strolling down Fifth Avenue looking in shop windows, her arm circled around his hips, his thumb hooked into a belt loop on her jeans. They stopped in front of an antique toy store on Sixteenth Street to kiss. He turned away.

  “The flames in her eyes,” he whispered. “It made me feel…”

  She touched his arm. “My poor Raphael. You suffer so beautifully.” Taking his face in her long, pale, manicured hands, she kissed him avariciously on the mouth, undulating her voluptuous body against his chest. It took him a moment to respond, but he did, reluctantly.

  “Come.” Anastasia’s warm words poured over him. “Let us go to this opening, and we will drink horrid white wine, and we will make polite, boring conversation, and then we will sneak out and grab something for dinner and forget all about these…feelings.”

  The arch at Washington Square Park loomed suddenly before them, lighted for the evening, abruptly invoking Paris. They were at Eighth Street now. There was still an orange glow behind the buildings on Sixth Avenue, but over his head, and to the east, stretched night. “Let me off here,” he said, and got out.

  The window hummed down. ”Leo will be so disappointed,” she said, and slipped her dark glasses back on. The limo pulled away from the curb, leaving him alone under the arch.

  Washington Square was almost deserted at night. Lights were coming on in the windows of the brownstones and apartment buildings surrounding the park, making it seem colder and darker by contrast. A couple of brave souls, ex-cons, or refugees of Soviet Russia, afraid of nothing, were still playing chess at the concrete tables in the southwest corner. A boy and a girl, NYU students, made slow circles on the swings in the playground.

  “If you perform an altruistic act that benefits you as well,” the girl was saying urgently, “is it still altruism?”

  He thrust his hands in his pockets, turned under the coffered arch, followed the walkway to the dry fountain at the heart of the park.

  Legend had it that there was an old hanging tree somewhere on the grounds. Bodies of the victims of the Great 1849 cholera epidemic lay buried under its grass. The strumming of a faraway guitar wafted by on a breeze, as did a smoky, herbaceous whiff of marijuana. Shadowy figures moved in the golden windows of the brownstones and apartments and NYU dorm rooms all around him, preparing dinner, dressing to go out, or to study, or go to work. To fight, or to make love, or perhaps only to buy groceries.

  “Sess, sess,” muttered a dealer lingering near the fountain. Autumn’s first fallen leaves swirled around Rafe’s Italian leather loafers as he passed. He slowed to watch a lone artist packing up his gear, folding up the workings of a French easel as complicated as an origami swan.

  He’d been this way for more than half a century now. Though technically, at eighty-three he was a year older than Leo, he had stopped aging at thirty, the year he drew his last breath on the cold paving stones of a narrow London alley.

  For fifty-three years he’d been apart from the world, a world whose pursuits and desires pushed on all around him. He would never know the breathless excitement of courtship and marriage, the milestones of a career, fatherhood, a child’s tottering first steps, birthday parties with piñatas and clowns, gray hairs, grandchildren, retirement, the headlong rush towards mortality.

  For him, there had been other, darker milestones. His own death. The unlucky soul who had served as his first meal. Europe in the 1940s, awash with blood. Sofia.

  Sofia Wizotsky, with her black curling hair and her black fiery eyes. Translucent skin the color of skim milk. Red red lips turned up to kiss him, to beat back the darkness in the cattle car. Isaiah’s soft round cheek pressed to his face, so light in his arms.

  He stopped, brought his hand to his cheek as if he could still feel it there. A torrent of grief welled up inside him, roiled into his throat, burst out in an anguished cry under the yellow moon.

  “Sess?” the dealer repeated dubiously.

  With a roar of rage, Rafe bounded over a bench, buried his fangs in his throat. The dealer got off one strangulated bellow before being struck to the ground.

  He was a big man, and strong, but still Rafe held him down with ease, ferociously took what he wanted. When he’d finished, he staggered to his feet, wiping his mouth. The magnitude of what he’d done hit him with full force. Washington Square Park, for God’s sake. Why not Times Square? It would be on the cover of the New York Post by morning, though the Times would probably bury it in the Metro Section.

  Behind him, the dealer began shaking uncontrollably, going into shock. If he didn’t receive emergency medical attention, he would die.

  Rafe dragged him to a grassy area under a tree, stripped off his overcoat, laid it over the shuddering body. And then he fled into the warm night, cursing himself for letting his passions overtake his reason, stopping only long enough to put in a quick 911 call at a pay phone on Fourth Avenue.

  2

  No, that’s not right,” said Turner from behind.

  He put his hand out for the brush. Tessa stepped away from her easel. It was late afternoon in fall, the last class of the day, and the room was already dark. The only light came from the lamp focused on the model.

  “You got into the details too quickly. Remember; get the big shapes right first; big lights, big darks.” His hand moved quickly and surely, wiping out the details she had spent all afternoon creating. Using her brush, he glazed over the dark areas, eliding them with the shadow under the model.

  The effect was magical. A man’s torso emerged from the shadows on the canvas. The instructor handed back her brush and moved on to the next student. Tessa saw Portia’s body go rigid; she hated when teachers worked on her paintings.

  “You’ve got the big lights and darks down,” he was saying to her, “but you’re going to have to put in details some day.” He put his hand out for the brush.

  Tessa smiled to herself, wiped her brush clean on a rag. She wasn’t going to be doing anything more on her painting today, she might as well start cleaning up. She was supposed to meet Lucian at his loft at seven. If she hurried, she would still have time to wash the turpentine aroma out of her hair.

  This was her favorite time of day. Something about the painting studio at dusk put a damper on conversation, invoked a reverential silence. The dark gathering in the corners made the room feel like a cave, as if they were primitives painting in Lascaux, perhaps an austere order of monks creating art for cathedrals.

  From somewhere in the dark, Turner said, “All right, that’s it. Everybody bring your paintings to the front. Would someone hit the lights?”

  They blinked like raccoons caught in car headlamps. The model stepped down from the stand, pulled on his robe, went off into a corner to change.

  Turner strolled slowly past their canvases, considering each one. He stopped in front of a figure made from dirty oranges, taffy browns, olive greens, subdued purples.

  “Wow,” he said. “DJ, right? Look at the way he planted the feet on the floor plane. Feel the weight of that. And look at the way he painted the light, fr
om the top of the head, all the way down to the shadow on the model stand. It’s just right, in color, tone, hue and value. Nice work, DJ, can I borrow it? I want to put it in the display case. Okay, everybody, see you on Friday.”

  Now came the clatter of palettes being scraped down, easels being pushed apart to make room to pass, the rattle of brushes being dumped in the sink for washing, the sound of water running through antiquated pipes.

  “We should just work on the same canvas,” Portia said in a low voice as she stirred her brushes in turpentine. “I’ll do the big lights and the big darks, and you can come in for the details.”

  “He still wouldn’t like it,” said Tessa as she retrieved the damask fabric swathing the stage. “We’re not boys.”

  “Hey. He doesn’t like my work either, and I’m a boy,” said David, on the other side of Portia.

  “Yes, well, he feels threatened by you.” Portia said kindly. “You’re better at color than he’ll ever be. He finds that intimidating.”

  “He never says anything nice about my paintings, either,” offered Ben, behind Tessa. “I think maybe it’s a racial thing.” His umber skin glistened under the fluorescent lights.

  “I think maybe it’s a sculptor thing. No one expects you to be able to hold a brush.”

  “He likes my paintings,” said Gracie breezily. “Look. I really nailed the color of the penis this time.”

  DJ, sitting in front of them doodling a head, giggled. “You said ‘nailed.’” Gracie picked up her art case and her canvas and went to sit next to him.

  “Doesn’t she have a boyfriend?” said David. “You should know. You’re her roommate.”

  “I am not her roommate,” said Tessa pointedly. “We share a space. And yes, she does. His name is Nick. Nicky. Nicky-boy. Nick-arino. He’s from Queens, he does car detailing, drives a ‘67 Dodge Camaro. He’s currently appearing naked on the wall of my studio, if you want to know more.”