The Color of Light

by Helen Maryles Shankman

“He was in my house? By himself?”

  Her eyes were scanning the crowd. “I really like that pocketbook.”

  Rafe watched Anastasia in profile, the edges of her brunette bob just brushing the edge of her jawline, eyes hidden as always behind enormous dark glasses. Wherever she went, she was deluged with enthusiastic endorsements of improbable hole-in-the-wall boutiques just visited in Brooklyn, marvelous new hair salons on the wrong side of Soho, fitness trends observed in Los Angeles. There were those, too, that kept their distance; they hovered just beyond the edge of his vision, staring, whispering to each other the rumors they had heard. She didn’t care. She had never cared. She was famously intimidating, and proud of it; she rather liked frightening away the ones who lacked the courage to step into her orbit.

  She came to a dead stop in front of a large red painting, so suddenly that he bumped into her bare shoulder. A woman dressed in black, blond hair caught up over her head in an old-fashioned bun, leaned over a red table in the middle of a red room, setting a silver tureen filled with fruit and flowers on a red tablecloth. A pattern of blue flowers and vines swarmed up the tablecloth and onto the walls.

  “This one,” said Anastasia. “It reminds me of…” She snatched off her dark glasses to better view the painting. The fires in her eyes danced, reflecting the red lacquered background. She gazed at it for a long moment before fitting the glasses back onto her polished porcelain face. “My mother had a tablecloth like that,” she said in a faraway voice, but Rafe didn’t hear her. He was back in 1943, Sofia was lighting the Shabbos candles, and it felt like home.

  When she spoke again, her voice was brisk, practical. “Listen. I’m going to say hello to Alex Liberman and the rest of the Condé Nast Mafia, and then I am leaving with…” she scanned the crowd. “…that one.” She indicated a tall, slender young man with hollow cheeks and curly black hair, slouching attractively in a simple but very good black sweater and black jeans. Ralph Lauren, with a twist of Tribeca. “Up and coming designer. I’m trying to get him a place in the House of Lanvin.”

  “Pretty,” Rafe admitted. “Isn’t he gay?”

  “That is very politically incorrect of you,” she instructed him sternly. “I would say he is omnisexual. Anyway, he is adorable. So handsome. So sweet. So talented.”

  “You sound happy. Congratulations.”

  “He is thinking about becoming one of us.”

  His voice betrayed an edge of alarm. “Anastasia. Don’t do it.”

  “Why not?”

  “Look,” he said. “What you do behind that door with your interns, your assistants, your little pet projects, it’s your business. But whatever you want to call it, whatever you think you’re doing, the reality of the matter is, you’re damning him. Forget God, forget hell, forget right or wrong. That hunger, a hunger that rages night and day, a hunger you can never slake or satisfy, forever. How can you wish that upon someone you say you care for?”

  “My dear Raphael. So provincial. You need to get out there and hunt.” She glared at him. “Calling in girls from that agency, like ordering Chinese food. You are getting to be like one of those fat politicians who pays to shoot tame animals at a game farm.” She dismissed his protests with an impatient gesture. “What about the rest of it, my darling? The extraordinary gifts? The events you have witnessed. The sights you have seen. The personalities we have known.” Her voice dropped a notch, became intimate. “Remember Sighisoara, my darling? The rocks sticking up out of the mountains like teeth. The vermillion of the clouds at dawn.”

  “The peasants and their pitchforks,” he said.

  “The stars over the ruins of Constantin’s castle,” she countered. “The sharpened senses. The sharpened wits. The textures. The flavors. Would you trade those away so quickly?” She tilted her head, arched her eyebrows. “Wouldn’t you wish immortality on someone you cared for? Your little girlfriend, for instance. Sofia. Come on. Tell me you never thought of it.”

  A jolt of pain. To disguise it, he turned from her, gazed into the crowd. Of course he’d thought of it. He had dismissed it almost immediately. Everything he loved about her would have been changed.

  She took his arm. “Come with us,” she purred, seducing him. “I promise I will make it worth your while.”

  “Thanks,” he said. “I still have to work the room. Can’t go home until I’ve coaxed a new heating system out of someone.”

  “Again with your art school,” she said. “So mercenary.” She gave him a French peck on the cheek and headed into the crowd.

  A young woman in a white halter dress was standing by herself near the entrance to the room, gazing up at La Danse, pretending she hadn’t been staring at him. She had upturned almond shaped eyes in an oval face, a ripple of shining chestnut-colored hair, smooth brown shoulders. There was a drop of something exotic in her genetic pool, though he couldn’t tell what it was. She glanced at him as he approached.

  “I thought this was in the Barnes Foundation,” she said. She had a Texas twang in her voice.

  “It is,” he replied. “Matisse did several of these. This one belongs to the Hermitage, in St. Petersburg. Actually, I think this one is nicer than the one at the Barnes.”

  She smiled at him, flashing perfect white teeth that matched the string of pearls around her neck. Two girls with straight blond hair drifted close behind him, giggling meaningfully. Friends of hers.

  “I love your purse,” one of them said. “Who made it?”

  She angled it up, the better for them to admire the plain black nylon in the shape of an envelope. “Kate Spade,” she said. “Isn’t it cute?”

  “Where did you get it? I’ve got to have one.” They glanced at him, then back at her, telegraphing their approval, made plans to meet on Sunday for brunch, then drifted in the direction of the entrance to the exhibition.

  “My parents have one like this, but smaller,” she said. She was referring to La Danse. “I think it’s a study.” She turned to him. “I know who you are.” She was still smiling, coquettishly now. “You’re Raphael Sinclair. I went to that Naked Masquerade Ball at your school on Halloween. Are you really a vampire?”

  He came closer, his eyes gleaming. “And if I was? Would it make a difference?”

  She flicked a stream of ebony hair behind her shoulder with a coy flip of her hand. “That depends,” she said. “Are you going to make me do your evil bidding?”

  “Very likely,” he said.

  “Can we go somewhere for a drink?” she said. Modern girls. They didn’t wait for invitations.

  “I know a place,” he said.

  They went to a clubby, crowded singles bar called Dorrian’s on Eighty Fourth and Second. The room was long and narrow, the lighting low and warm, the music loud and pulsating. Pretty girls clustered at the bar and tossed their heads back when they laughed, glancing sideways to see if anyone was watching them. Young men with moussed hair and pressed jeans, smelling of cologne and breath mints, clung to their friends and drank beer for courage.

  Rafe found them a table at the back. She ordered a Cosmopolitan. “So you’re a vampire,” she said.

  “Suppose I am,” he said. His eyes locked on hers, and her face went a little blurry for a second.

  She shook her head and laughed. “My mom used to watch Dark Shadows,” she said. She leaned forward across the table, giving him a peek down the front of her dress. “Honestly, I think my stepmother is a vampire. She sleeps all day and parties all night. Sucks men dry and then moves on. Come to think of it, I never see her eat anything, either.”

  “That’s a fallacy,” he admitted. “We can. We just don’t.”

  “What about the garlic?”

  “Its power is limited.”

  She had finished her first drink. She leaned her elbow on the table, stirred her ice. “And the holy water? The sign of the cross?”

  He shrugged.

  “Sunlight?”

  “Well, now. That packs a wallop.” he said, gesturing to the barman for an
other margarita.

  “Really?” She touched the pointed tip of her tongue to the grains of salt mounted around the rim of the glass. “Would you really, like, burst into flames?” Without waiting for an answer, she kicked her Manolo Blahniks off, ran her toes up inside his pants leg. Under the table, he slid his hand under her dress and ran it along her firm tanned thigh, wiggling his fingers under the elastic of her panties. She gasped, then closed her eyes and straightened up very suddenly, her mouth open, quivering. He whispered something in her ear that made her arch her back. She leapt up from the table and headed for the door. He followed her out through a gauntlet of girls in halter tops staring at them with naked envy.

  In the taxi, he slipped his hand under her dress and continued his ministrations, watching her, the expressions flitting across her face. They got out somewhere in the Seventies, at a nondescript postwar doorman building between Park and Madison. Rafe followed her into a cool, understated lobby, and when the elevator doors closed behind them, he pressed her against the Brazilian rosewood paneled interior, opening her mouth with his tongue.

  The elevator went up, up, up, stopped somewhere near the top floor. She pulled herself away from him long enough to wobble out, turn the key in the lock, open the door. High above the Upper East Side, New York City sparkled with a hundred million lights, filling a wall of windows at the far side of her apartment.

  She entered, her stiletto heels clicking on the marble floor, set her purse down on a table. She turned around to look for him. Seeing him waiting at the door, she laughed. “Oh, I forgot. Vampire.” She put her arm out, bowing in a theatrical gesture of welcome. “Please come in.”

  Mesmerized by the view, he moved to the windows. By night, the buildings fell away, replaced by a dream landscape, starry constellations in the shapes of skyscrapers. The headlamps from the cars surging along Park and Madison Avenues turned the streets into rivers of gold and red. Further south, he could see the outlines of the Williamsburg and Brooklyn Bridges twinkling in the distance like spiderwebs spun from Christmas bulbs, their scallops of cable like strings of pearls. Just beyond the glow of Manhattan occurred an abrupt absence of color and light, a long and winding tributary of deep and utter blackness that was the East River, and beyond it, the faint, glimmering lights of Brooklyn.

  “Nice,” he said.

  “I know,” she said. “Some view, huh.” She was looking at him.

  He turned from the view of the city lights to the girl. “What’s your name?” he said, walking slowly towards her.

  She lunged at him, suckering her mouth to his. He peeled off his coat and jacket, propelled backwards through a doorway into another room and onto a bed. He pushed her skirt up to her waist with both hands, pulled down a black thong, and then her hands were on his head, pushing him downward, and he lowered himself between her thighs.

  Later, after she had moaned out her approval again and again, he made his way up to her pleasured face. He kissed her, and she smiled at him, propping her head up on her elbow.

  “You sure know what a girl likes,” she said.

  “I’m gifted that way,” he said.

  She was fumbling around in a side table drawer. A moment later, she was offering him a round pink pill. A heart with an arrow through it was stamped into its surface.

  “Ecstasy,” she said.

  He politely declined, explaining that drugs had no effect on him. Her face clouded over. He took one to make her happy. She downed hers without water, and then she climbed on top of him, settling to the right, to the left, as if she were testing out a saddle. She smoothed her hands over his chest and down his abdominal muscles, dusted with a shadow of curling hair.

  “Wow,” she said. “You’re really ripped. Where do you work out?” She slid down his body to the end of the bed, her shining hair a puddle of silk slipping across his flesh. The things she did with her hands and mouth banished all tangible thought from his mind, and he grasped the sheets and wound them into ropes, forgetting for a little while the events of the day. He could feel his muscles tightening, the storm gathering in his belly, in his quadriceps, mounting, and then the dizzying, explosive unleashing of pressure. Then came the long spiral down into sleep.

  When his eyes fluttered open again, it was still dark. She was on her side, watching him. It took him a moment to remember who she was, how he got there.

  “I want it,” she said, tracing a pattern on his chest with one finger. “I want you to bite me.”

  “Oh,” he said, sliding one hand over her hip and down her thigh. The shadowy, indefinite color of his irises began to change, growing lighter, lighter still, until they were the blue-white of pond ice. His voice rolled over her, voluptuous, impassioned, dark. “Daddy’s little girl wants to know how it feels to be sucked by a big bad vampire? Is that it? Is that what you want?”

  She smiled flirtily at him, smoothed her hair back behind her ear, turning her head just a little, exposing her neck. “Will it hurt?”

  “Oh, yes.” He nuzzled the unprotected skin of her throat. His jaw muscles began to swell, his fangs descending. He worked his way down her body, tonguing the base of her throat, moving his lips across her flat brown nipples, flicking his tongue into the dip of her navel. He rolled her over and kissed the cleft of her ass, and moving down, kissed her belly above the dark thatch of her symphysis pubis. He wrapped his arms around her waist and pulled her to him.

  “Tell me you want it,” he said roughly. “Tell me you want me to suck your blood.”

  “I want it,” she groaned. “I want you to suck me.”

  He folded one of her legs into an inverted vee, skimming his fingers delicately along the smooth skin of her calves, brushed his lips against the soft skin of her inner thigh. She trembled with fear and anticipation. He hesitated for a moment longer, just barely dimpling her flesh with his teeth, waiting, waiting, heightening her apprehension, her arousal. Without warning, he bit down. Blood welled up, spilled into his mouth. She flinched, kneading handfuls of Frette sheets, then arced up in narcotized frenzy as he sucked hard and deep from the blue artery inside her thigh.

  Her name was Oleander Haier. This he learned when Bernard Blesser read him the name she signed on the check that arrived in the mail the following week. Also, that she was the daughter of a rubber tire baron, newly arrived in New York, ostensibly to go to NYU business school.

  At five in the morning he arose from her bed, regarding her sleeping body for a moment before dressing hurriedly and taking the elevator down to the main floor.

  The lobby was empty, the doorman missing, probably asleep in a back room somewhere. The streets were deserted, with the curious silence the city develops on holiday mornings. He found a taxi at once, sank back into the seat and closed his eyes as it hummed down the empty streets to Gramercy Park.

  At the intersection of Thirty-fourth Street, Broadway, and the Avenue of the Americas, the car rumbled over steel plates, past ghostly teams of high-school marching bands from Wisconsin and girls from Oklahoma in short cheerleader dresses and cowboy boots stamping their feet in the frigid hours before dawn, already in position, waiting for the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade to begin. Underneath Sixth Avenue, Tessa Moss stepped aboard the subway train that would whisk her to Kennedy Airport.

  17

  Is that the nicest thing you have to wear?” her mother hissed. “It’s a shmatta. You look like a gypsy. Go upstairs and change.” Shaking her head, she continued past her to the kitchen.

  Tessa, caught midway down the stairs, glanced down at the chocolate-colored cotton and velvet dress she had bought at a flea market in Soho, embroidered all over with Klimt-like swirls and patterns. She thought it was beautiful. The doorbell rang. Too late to change now. She went to get the door of her parents’ house, a 1960s derivation of a Prairie style bi-level. It was her uncle Bernie and his wife Barbara, her married cousins Cilla and Alex and their children. The kids ducked under her arm and raced to the den to turn on the television.

&nbs
p; “What an interesting dress!” Auntie Barbara exclaimed. She was holding a Pyrex casserole covered in tin foil, containing, Tessa knew, her famous zucchini kugel. “Where did you find such an interesting dress?”

  “Hey! How’s art school?” said Uncle Bernie. “Do you really draw nudes?”

  She gave him a sheepish smile. “Yes. We really do. So often you don’t even notice they’re naked.”

  He laughed. “Maybe I’ll audit your class. You know, I could have gone to art school. You’ve seen my portrait of JFK, right?”

  Tessa nodded. “I sure did. It’s good.” And in truth, it was pretty good. But Uncle Bernie had also been interested in baseball cards and tropical fish, followed by slot car racing and his stereo system, and in the end, he had gone to work in the family import-export business.

  “You should settle down,” he suggested. Then, lowering his voice, he said, “You’re not getting any younger, you know. Zaydie’s worried about you.”

  “Don’t mind him,” said Auntie Barbara, rolling her eyes. “He just wants to see you settled, like everybody else.”

  “Pa!” Uncle Bernie veered off into the living room to greet her grandfather, already ensconced on the sofa. Her aunt went to the kitchen to put her casserole in the oven. Tessa closed the door, her face burning. The doorbell rang again, and it was Uncle Allen and Aunt Eva with cousin Goldie and her husband Josh. Their kids scooted around her to join the other children in front of the TV.

  “You need a haircut,” Uncle Allen growled. “Wearing your hair that way makes a statement.”

  Auntie Eva shook her head, nonplussed. “Don’t listen to him,” she whispered as he went to join his father on the couch. “He’s grouchy today. He wanted the dinner to be at our house. Maybe if you put it in a ponytail. You must be hot with it around your face all the time.”

  “No, I like it this way,” she said. “It’s all right. Really.”

  But Auntie Eva was determined. She dug around the bottom of her purse, found a rubber band, bundled Tessa’s tresses into a ponytail. “See?” she said, steering her to the mirrored door of the bathroom. “Doesn’t that feel much better?”