The Color of Light

by Helen Maryles Shankman

  “Goodbye, art,” she murmured as she turned out the light. “See you on Monday.”

  16

  I’m sorry, my darling,” said Anastasia. “You really thought it was her, didn’t you.”

  He barely nodded. His eyes were dark, grieving.

  “Raphael,” she said gently. “Why are you doing this to yourself? Sofia died a long time ago.”

  “Fifty years ago this winter. But I never actually saw her…” and here he stopped.

  “You never saw her body.” She finished the sentence for him.

  He nodded.

  “Let it go, Raphael,” she advised. “Let her rest in peace.” Emotions juddered off of him in waves, delectable, invigorating. Behind her dark glasses, her eyes glowed red, drinking it in. “She must be some kind of a cousin. It’s still something.”

  He didn’t answer, swished the ice in his drink in slow circles while his eyes roamed over the crowd. They were at the Museum of Modern Art, standing at the epicenter of a slowly revolving organism of celebrated New Yorkers, the apex of the worlds of art, fashion, and society. Anna Wintour wandered through a roomful of frolicking blue swimmers with Muccia Prada. Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon were deep in conversation with Annie Lebovitz and Susan Sontag. Lucian Swain was laughing in a loose confederacy that included David Salle, Julian Schnabel and a dark-haired woman he didn’t recognize.

  Slim waiters in black and white whisked around clusters of chattering celebrities and socialites, bearing silver trays of Moroccan mezze and Spanish tapas. The dresses of the women were outshone by the paintings the way the sun outshines the stars, blazing with crayon-bright color, laid out side by side on new-painted walls around the third floor of the museum.

  He had been sure, so sure that he had built up a whole scenario of how it would go, with Tessa replying yes, anticipating the conflicting sensations of pleasure and pain that would wash over and around him, the questions that would follow. How did she do it? How had Sofia survived where so many others had not? Other, more selfish questions; did she ever think of him? And if she did, was it with love or hate that he lived on in her memory? Tessa would have questions of her own, questions he would be forced to answer.

  Tessa. That would change, too, the proprietary way he would feel towards her, not just his student now, but his responsibility. What if she came to hate him? What if she heard his story and felt only terror, or revulsion, as any decent person would? Rafe smoothed his hair back, unconscious of the nervous gesture. He didn’t think he could bear that; he liked being welcome in her studio, liked being on the periphery of her world. In the end, of course, it hadn’t mattered. She had never heard of Sofia. Wizotsky was just a name on a distant branch of a family tree. There was no connection after all. Perhaps this was why he had avoided asking her for three months. He meant nothing to her. And Sofia was dead all over again.

  Rest in peace? Please, God, no. Haunt me, Sofia. You said you’d haunt me.

  “Sinclair,” came a cordial voice with a slight European accent at his elbow.

  “Leo,” he replied without enthusiasm to the elderly, silver-haired man beside him. This June it would be fifty-one years that Leo Lubitsch had been editorial director of Anastasia and the eight other magazines that made up the roster at Agha Publishing, since the day he had arrived from Paris at the height of World War II to oversee the creation of Femme. At eighty-two, he was still dashing, even a bit rakish. Rafe remembered when Leo was the talk of all of chic Paris, when he dressed to compete with the Prince of Wales. These days he was always seen in an inconspicuous gray glen-plaid suit, notable only if you appreciated the finer details of tailoring and a Savile Row provenance. Leo said he didn’t like to outshine the art.

  “How are you?” he continued in that smooth, continental voice. “Still heading up that quaint little school?”

  “You should come by. I’ll have one of the students give you a tour. I’ll find you a pretty one.”

  Leo gave a polite smile. “Yes, yes, of course.”

  “Leo.” Anastasia darted forward, kissed him on both cheeks.

  “Anastasia.” He smiled with delight. She was wearing a flouncy black silk taffeta affair, with a low round décolletage, a cinched waist and big, brightly colored polka dots. “Merveilleux, mon cherie. Qui ce fait cette chemise?”

  “Lacroix,” she replied. “Isn’t it fabulous?”

  He chuckled. “Tu est XXX,” he said, and they both laughed.

  “How’s Margaux?” Rafe said bitterly. “Do give her my best.”

  Leo looked resigned, suddenly old. Anastasia gave him a stern look, then turned back to Leo. “We have a mystery,” she said lightly, changing the subject. “Raphael has a jeune fille enrolled at his petite academie who may be somehow related to an old girlfriend.”

  Leo’s mournful expression changed. “You can’t mean…Sofia?”

  “Yes! He says the eyes are just the same.”

  “But that’s impossible,” said Leo. “Didn’t she…”

  “Yes.” said Rafe shortly. “That’s why it’s impossible. Anyway, the names are different…a distant cousin at best…” he could feel himself backing away from the conversation. It was too private a matter to be airing with Leo Lubitsch at a gala reception for a blockbuster Matisse show.

  Leo was looking at him in surprise, completely nonplussed. For a moment, he looked younger, more like the dapper young artist he used to be in 1939, the only son of a Soviet functionary and an actress; and then his face collapsed, realigned itself in wrinkles, the Morse code of old age.

  “Sofia Wizotsky,” he said, shaking his gray head. His eyes were moist, his thin moustache quivering. “Such a lovely girl. Caught on the cusp between innocence and revelation. What a loss. You didn’t know her, did you, my dear.”

  “Not really,” replied Anastasia, scanning the crowd.

  Leo sighed, gazed with an old man’s melancholy at the painting before him. “La Danse,” he said meditatively. “From the Hermitage. Before the Revolution, it belonged to my uncle.” He took a pair of glasses out of his breast pocket, took his time unfolding them. Anastasia was right. His hands shook, a barely perceptible but continual tremor. It took a moment for him to get them on correctly. The process of aging was full of small, unexpected everyday indignities.

  Out of the corner of his eye, Rafe saw Giselle at the other end of the gallery, drifting past the deep russet of The Red Studio with a tall, skinny, severely fashionable older woman he had bedded back in the early 1950s, when she was still a debutante. Her husband, a pioneering television executive at CBS, had died a year ago, leaving her with bags of money. She had just donated the contents of her closet, a veritable timeline of twentieth-century couture fashion, to the Costume Institute at the Met. Perhaps, with just a bit of encouragement, she could be induced to open up her Judith Lieber handbag and endow a scholarship.

  “Excuse me,” he said to Leo and Anastasia, and he cut into the crowd.

  The circles had shifted. Alexander Liberman and S.I. Newhouse had joined Anna Wintour and Tina Brown. Catching his eye, Tina smiled at him like the schoolgirl she had been when he first met her, working as a lackey at the Tatler. Nearby, in front of Bathers in a River, Sawyer Ballard, six foot four in his Gucci loafers, was going on about some show scheduled for the end of the year. Rafe felt his hands tighten into fists. Steady now. He was with Lucian Swain and the dark-haired woman from before. It struck him that this must be April Huffman.

  “Every artist should take Dissection,” she was saying brightly. “I brought along a film crew, part of a documentary I’m making. It’s going to be running on public television around the time of my gallery show.”

  The sensible thing would be to give them wide berth. But some other force was at work inside him tonight, and as he glided past them on his way to Giselle, he brushed lightly against the other man’s elbow, jostling him. Lucian leaped back, cursing. Rafe was gratified to see tomato juice dripping down his nice white shirtfront.

  �
�Bugger!” he rasped, his shaggy eyebrows lowering into a knot.

  “So clumsy of me,” said Rafe apologetically. “Please. Send me the bill. May I get you another drink? What was it, a Shirley Temple?”

  Lucian was dabbing at the stain on his shirt. “I’ll get seltzer,” April said, glaring at him, and disappeared into the crowd.

  Sawyer unfolded his long arms to enthusiastically pump his hand up and down. “Sinclair! God, you look more like your old man every time I see you. It’s uncanny.”

  Rafe smiled politely. Sawyer, you bastard. He knew him from his art student days in Paris. He hadn’t liked him much then, either. His hair had stopped thinning, but in the intervening years, had turned from dirty blond to iron gray. Rafe still pictured him in the same little round wire-rimmed glasses, though contact lenses had replaced them years earlier. The first time he ran into him in New York, it was the 1960s. It was simpler to tell him that he was his own son, from the wrong side of the sheets, than to tell him the truth.

  “Your father hated Matisse. Said he couldn’t draw. Can you imagine?” He was shaking his patrician head, laughing.

  “Freud, eh?” said Lucian. “I thought you only showed dead artists at the Met.”

  Sawyer grinned. “It does seem that way sometimes…but this fellow, he’s blown the lid off of figure painting. There’s nothing like him out there. Are you familiar with his work?” He was addressing Rafe.

  “Not really.”

  “Well, after this, he’s going to be a household name. Fantastic stuff. Huge, fleshy, bodies. No pretensions, no sugar coating. Incredibly textural. Comes right off the canvas at you.”

  “I’ll have to look him up.”

  The boyish enthusiasm faded. His face grew opaque, inscrutable. Rafe followed his gaze to a painting across the way. A woman with short dark hair gazed moodily into a fishbowl, resting her chin on her arms, crossed on the table in front of her. The colors were uncharacteristically muted for Matisse, a palette of subdued blues and greens, the drawing more finished than typical for him.

  “There was this girl,” Sawyer said. He smiled at Rafe. “Your father and I actually came to blows over her. In La Coupole, no less.” He shook his head. “I haven’t thought about that in years.”

  “What was her name?” said Rafe.

  “Sofia,” he answered without hesitation. “Sofia…something Polish, I forget now. She was at the Academie Julian with us for a little while, right before the war. Your father had a real thing for her. Always following her around. Completely doomed, of course.”

  “I never heard this story,” Rafe said, coming closer. “What was doomed about it?”

  “Oh…she wasn’t interested in him. Didn’t stop him from trying, though. He was completely obsessed.”

  “Really,” he said. “What happened to her, anyway?”

  “Lost in the war.” Sawyer looked reflective. He was silent for a little while, staring at the painting of the girl, rubbing his chin. “I should have done more,” he mused. “We all should have done more.” He raised his wiry eyebrows ruefully. “Anyway. Enough ancient history. How’s your little atelier coming along?”

  A slim young man in a blue blazer slipped up to him, whispered in his ear. The older man had to bend over to hear the message. He listened, nodding, then straightened back up and made his apologies. “They find me everywhere. There’s a problem with a painting we’re borrowing from Japan.” He moved stiffly off, leaving him alone with Lucian.

  Rafe made as if he were continuing on his way, then turned back as if he had suddenly remembered something. “I’m just coming from your assistant’s studio,” he remarked. “Thought she could use a bit of company, all alone up there on the fourth floor.”

  From beneath half-lowered eyelids, Rafe watched Lucian’s face grow purple. He dropped his voice now, made it sultry, insinuating. “She asked me to pose for her. Spur of the moment, you know how that goes. I happened to be there, the lighting was just right. Very talented girl. Beautiful, too.”

  April was back with a bottle of seltzer, pouring it onto a napkin and holding it to the juice stain. “Really?” Lucian said, feigning carelessness, but he raked his fingers through his stylishly spiky brown hair, belligerently shifted his stance, betraying messy emotions. “She’s got a new boyfriend now, I understand. Some boy from her class.”

  He was lying. Why? Tessa was as loyal to him as ever. Ah, yes. Jealous girlfriend. He jumped on it. “No, I don’t think so. I’m on a committee with her studio mate. I would have heard. No, no boyfriend.”

  Lucian’s handsome face colored, his expression darkening to resemble a sullen little boy. They were interrupted by a comely waitress, who lowered her tray of hors d’ouevres for their inspection, fat orange beads of salmon caviar rolled into tiny blini. Rafe took one, smiling at her, making her weak in the knees.

  He turned his attention to April, letting his eyes roam over her body, blatantly evaluating her. She was attractive, a dark-eyed, pale-skinned woman of forty-one or forty-two, self-assured, with a glib sense of entitlement that comes from success early in life. She wore a sheen of glossy sophistication on her trim shoulders, a forward-facing confidence, along with a worldly sexuality that was not part of Tessa’s makeup. He knew the type. He’d slept with a hundred women just like her in every era since the 1940s.

  Looking her straight in the eye, he placed the blini on his tongue, swallowed it down in one rapacious bite. “I don’t believe we’ve met,” he said, extending his hand. “Raphael Sinclair.”

  She must not have heard the rumors, or perhaps she was just trying to prove something, because she looked right back at him. He saw a hunger for recognition, a hard-edged ambition. Fear, too; fear of aging past desirability, of growing old alone. Fear of missing her time, of bungling the fifteen minutes when she was the next big thing, the exact moment that she must seize her opportunity or forever be relegated to the art-history ranks of almost-was, might-have-beens. He dialed up the volume of his preternatural allure, letting a dirty smile sneak across his lips.

  She was responding; he could see her wanting him, in the way she played with her hair, the way her body relaxed and realigned itself in an unconscious responsive rhythm. He applied just enough pressure to her hand to make her sigh.

  Lucian’s face was a study in bottled British rage. Rafe could feel his fangs begin to lower, his eyes shifting to a predatory icy clarity.

  “There you are,” said Anastasia. She stepped up to Lucian, kissing him, then April, on both cheeks. “What happened to your shirt? Love your blouse, my darling. Vera Wang?” She slid her hand through Rafe’s arm, leaned her sleek head on his shoulder.

  “Sorry about the shirt, old man,” he said to Lucian. “I mean it, though. Send me the bill.”

  Arm in arm, they turned as a unit, drifting towards an eight-foot canvas of primitive scarlet figures scattered around a bright blue and green background. Guiltily, Rafe glanced at the entrance to the exhibition where he had spotted Giselle earlier, but it was too late; she was gone.

  “Why are you tormenting poor Lucian?” said Anastasia. She picked a glass of red wine off of a passing tray, smiling at the waiter. “He’s going to start drinking again if you keep this up. Then your little art student will never leave him.”

  “Come on. Admit it. He can barely draw.”

  He meant Matisse. They were standing in front of Carmelina, a studio painting of a heavy-featured woman seated on a red-draped table, unpretty, unposed, rendered in shades of orange and brown.

  “How charming,” she said. “It makes you sound provincial and academic. Is it possible that you, an artist, are not transported by the ecstasy of the colors? What was the point of mindlessly rendering boring details in those years after the invention of the camera? He was a revolutionary, a sophisticated primitive, a fauve.”

  “There’s nothing mindless about what we do,” Rafe disagreed, his temper rising.

  She gestured around the room. “None of these speak to you? How about
the goldfish? You wouldn’t believe what John had to promise the Pushkin to borrow that one.”

  He dismissed it with a shrug. “Makes a lovely poster for a Barnard dorm room.”

  “And the Blue Nude? What about that one?” she demanded, pointing to a reclining female figure.

  “The worst student at my school can do better than that on a bad day. And that one. Poor Madame Matisse, with that green stripe down her face. Who deserves to be remembered like that? The Piano Lesson? God-awful, those mingy grays, that unfinished thingy floating around the background.”

  She was bemused. “You sound like a doting daddy when you talk about your students,” she said.

  They drifted forward. Rafe smiled at women who smiled at him, ladies he had already slept with, the ones he had not slept with yet. Ram swooped down on them to peck hello on Anastasia’s cheeks and to announce that the February issue had shipped. The art director of Anastasia was dressed for cocktails in another era, in an aqua dinner jacket with wide padded shoulders and huge lapels that swashed downward and pinched at the waist. His hair was close-cropped to the point of stubble, skinny sideburns jutting to a cruel point halfway across his cheek. The lyrics to Relax by Frankie Goes To Hollywood were block-printed in red and black on a white gavotte, tied just so around his neck.

  “R-r-raphael,” said Ram, rolling the name off of his tongue with an exaggerated Spanish inflection, “Love your apartment. The pie safe next to your kitchen? Fabulous. Has Anastasia figured out yet that you’re just a great big homo?”

  Rafe turned to Anastasia, raised his eyebrows. She gave him a small, dismissive shrug. “I left my pocketbook at your place. I sent him to retrieve it.”