The Color of Light

by Helen Maryles Shankman

  She’d shaken her head, at a loss for words. There had been a moment of silence that stretched on and on, a bit too long for comfort. Perhaps it was too unimaginably foreign for them, the children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren of Americans, longtime citizens of nice, safe, US of A.

  “Atwood wasn’t my family’s original name either,” David offered. “It was Blumenfrucht.”

  Portia and Gracie tried to pronounce it, tripping on the guttural ch sound. Graham had gotten closer than the others, though it still sounded like he had something caught in his throat. “It’s beautiful,” he insisted, laughing.

  “It’s a very pretty name.” David said, with great dignity. “It means fruit blossom, in German.” Which only made them laugh harder.

  She remembered that David was still looking at her, hoping she would join them later. Throwing her backpack over her shoulder, she shifted the dead weight of her sculpture to her other arm. “Sorry, guys,” she apologized. “Can’t make it. Got to get to my studio. Lots of work to do before the night is out. Lucian doesn’t want to go to April’s opening. He scheduled his flight at the same time as her stupid show, just out of spite. You’ll just have to manage without me.”

  The last student, a sculptor, left at 11:45. She heard his footsteps echo down the aisle, and the boom of the steel door as it closed behind him.

  Tessa was on her knees on the floor of her studio, sheets of 18” x 24” paper spread out all around her. She held her weary head in her hands, exhausted, out of ideas.

  Perspective hated her. Perspective wanted her to fail, wanted to break her, bite her in the ass, wanted to bring her down.

  The long and short of it was, her plan was not working. The buildings looked all right, simple rectangles grouped around a fountain in a plaza, but the obelisk was slanted in a funny way. The cone she had plotted at the top of a tower was tilting over, undeniably wrong. Something had to be missing; the flat, graphed, two-dimensional plan, transferred by a series of lines and angles called vators into a fully three-dimensional drawing, was off somewhere.

  Tessa dug her hands into her hair and squeezed as if it would extract the formula that would save her drawing. Desperate for a distraction, she turned the tape over in her boom box, pressed down the forward key.

  Dies irae! Dies illa! Solvet saeclum in favilla…teste David cum Sybilla….

  The choir shrieked out its warning, the music thundered up the empty aisle and across the deserted floor. Raphael Sinclair stood framed in the doorway.

  Something like, fear, or excitement, took hold deep in the pit of her belly. For the first time, she wasn’t startled, though her heart still knocked a tattoo against her chest, boom boom boom boom boom boom, he could almost feel it in the close air of the studio.

  He stared at her, not smiling. She couldn’t read his expression, and a feeling of shame crept over her as she began to wonder if he was there to tell her how disappointed he was with her for the April Huffman fiasco, how much damage she had done to his school. Perhaps he had waited till everyone else had left to save her the embarrassment.

  “Look, I’m sorry,” she said hurriedly. “I’m sorry about the April Huffman thing. I never meant to harm anyone. I would never do anything to hurt the school. I don’t know what came over me. Please don’t ask me to leave. I belong here.”

  It was his turn to be startled. “You’re sorry?” he said in amazement. “I’m the one who’s sorry, Tessa. That you felt you must…that you were driven to…” His lovely, lulling voice was colored with regret. “You were placed in an impossible position. I’m sorry we didn’t protect you.”

  “It’s not your fault,” she said. “How could you have known?”

  He saw that she was trying to comfort him, and he was touched. “I should have known,” he said, looking directly at her with those extraordinary eyes, bright, like beams of light.

  “I’ve missed you,” he said, surprising both of them.

  It was cold. At night the thermostat was turned down to save money, and it was particularly chilly in the studios, where the wind easily found the gaps in the old window frames. He noticed that Tessa had taken to wearing gloves with the fingers cut off to keep warm as she worked.

  “I haven’t seen you in a while,” she said.

  If anything, her studio was even more inviting at night, the light from a rusted vintage 1930s torchiere suffusing it with an orange hue, like an old photograph, or a memory. A flurry of new postcards were tacked up on her wall. A single house silhouetted against the sky, blue with lengthening evening shadows, crouched before a railroad track. Preternatural black-and-white photographs of children with angels’ wings. Nighthawks, by Edward Hopper. A long time ago, he had wanted to paint just like Hopper, scenes filled with raw light and his own loneliness.

  She watched him, privately enjoying the way his body bowed and flexed as he reached out to straighten a postcard, swooped down to peer behind a portfolio.

  “You’re working late,” he said.

  “Perspective assignment,” she said grimly. “Not my best subject.”

  “Let’s have a look,” he said. “I used to be pretty good at Perspective.” Unbelievably, he crouched down in his spotless trench coat, sweeping the gritty floor with his coattails. After a moment, she squatted down, joining him.

  “Oh, yes. That tower’s not right, is it.” He frowned, concentrating, scanning the drawings. His eyes moved from one paper to the next, following the lines on the graph to their terminus. One finger slid slowly down a ray, then stopped.

  “There. That one.”

  She squinted at it, trying to see what he meant. Then she saw it; she had made a tick mark one-sixteenth of an inch too low. She went for a yellow pencil, carefully erased the tower, moved the tick mark, redrew the tower. It was definitively better.

  “Thanks,” she said with obvious relief. “Now I can start on my self-portrait for Ted. And my sketches for Josephine.”

  He looked at her in disbelief. “Do you have any idea what time it is?” He tapped the face of his expensive-looking watch. Both hands pointed to midnight. “Go home.”

  “I’m meeting with her tomorrow,” she said wanly, rubbing her eyes. “I have to be ready.”

  “How is that going?” He stood back up, brushing off his coat.

  “She threw out two of my sketches. She wants me to lose the mother and child, too, but I told her I would make it work.”

  His face registered surprise. The sketch was tacked up on the wall in front of him, the suitcase reading Wizotsky like a reprimand from the grave. A pencil drawing was tacked up beside it, an old woman in a babushka surrounded by a hundred burning memorial candles. “I haven’t seen this one,” he said.

  “It’s my grandmother,” she said. “Every holiday she lights these memorial candles. One for every member of her family that was lost. It drives Zaydie crazy,” she added, smiling. “He tells her she should just light one, she’s going to burn the whole house down.”

  So warm, so intimate, the crimson couch, the orange light, the Persian rug, the girl. There was a new addition, a fretted hexagonal coffee table painted Venetian red, somebody’s souvenir of a long-ago college trip to Morocco. A small wooden crate of clementines sat on the table’s patterned surface, filling the room with its fragrance. He never wanted to leave.

  His eyes fell on her sculpture. With its round bottom and nipped-in waist, the little clay figure reminded him of her. He touched it, ran his fingers over its curves. Tessa thought she could feel the warmth of his hand.

  “How was your Thanksgiving?” he said. “Home to the heartland, wasn’t it?”

  She made a smile that was more of a grimace. “Best not mentioned.”

  “Why is that?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. Then, a confessional rush of words. “That’s a lie. I do know. My grandfather had a heart attack at Thanksgiving dinner.”

  “How awful,” he said, drawing closer.

  “I showed him my sketches. I thou
ght he would be proud of me.” Her voice was couched in remorse. “I should have known better.”

  “I’m sure he’s very proud of you,” Rafe said gently.

  She sighed. Like a flash of light illuminating something hidden in a drawer, or under a bed, he understood that he was mistaken, she was entirely correct, her family wasn’t proud of her at all.

  “My grandfather thinks art is a waste of time,” she said. Then, with a maturity that was poignant in someone so young, she explained, “I’m not exactly what my family had in mind.”

  “I wasn’t exactly what my parents had in mind, either,” he said.

  He wanted to reach out, touch the tangle of curls on her shoulder, but of course he couldn’t. She was tying on her black waiter’s apron now, taking the brown-paper wrapping off of a creamy white sheet of Bristol board. He roamed through the small space, dodging stacks of canvases, inspecting her most recent work.

  It was clear that Tessa’s talent had grown over the course of the semester. Her drawing had become more fluid, assured, her compositions more sophisticated. Her paintings, even ordinary studio poses, filled him with yearning, he could not explain why. Seeing her progress thrilled him. The program he had created was working; she had already surpassed some of her teachers.

  She was dragging an old oak office chair before a small mirror. She clipped the paper to her drawing board, and balanced it on her lap.

  “Is it true?” she asked, concentrating on her image in the mirror. “That we’re running out of money?”

  “Yes.” he said, uneasily eyeing the mirror.

  “Is there anything we can do? I mean, the students.”

  He sighed, lifted his hat, raked his fingers through his hair. When he raised his arm she caught a glimpse of the lining of his suit, a brilliant crimson. “Whit’s right,” he admitted. “We really do need to attract support from big foundations. But they all want us to have famous names on our faculty roster. And there aren’t many art stars with classical backgrounds. Lucian Swain, for instance. Where did he go to art school?”

  She frowned, trying to remember. “Some local college near Portsmouth, I think. They taught commercial art. How to draw soup cans, fashion illustration. Then he went to Slade.”

  “Slade,” he pronounced it as if it were an obscenity. “You’re already better than he is. What can he possibly teach you?”

  It wasn’t the shape of his eyes, she thought, or their size, or the shifting color behind the fringe of dark lashes. He looked like he could see right through her, into the darkest corners, her squirmiest secrets, and whatever those might be, he accepted it, took her side, understood completely.

  “Um. Well, he taught me a lot of things.”

  “Really.” He was circling the small room, his back to her. “Like what?”

  He smelled of sandalwood. It wafted through the studio as he moved, a sweet counterpoint to the odor of turpentine. Concentrate. “Like how to talk to someone at a gallery,” she replied, with some difficulty. “How to present my work. How to come off like a professional.” How to make tea the British way, steeping the leaves in a brown ceramic pot. That Kona coffee beans from Balducci’s are the best and need to be ground just so. How to twirl a whisk in the Cadbury’s drinking chocolate so that it gets all foamy at the top, just the way he likes it. How to hold hands with someone who’s dying. How to pretend that everything is fine when the whole world is falling down around my head.

  He turned, smiled at her. “Those are useful things to know. Maybe I’ve been wrong about these post-modernist blokes.”

  He had purposely stayed away from her since Thanksgiving. It was just too risky. Being near her made him throb with all kinds of hunger, made him want to throw her on the tufted couch and pull off her clothes. He filled his nights with balls and benefits, and the women who attended them.

  He caught a glimpse of her outside CBGB’s late Saturday night, where he had come after one thing or another at the Museum of Contemporary Art. He melted into a doorway before she could get a good look, but she saw him, he knew it; she stared his way for a long moment before turning back to her friends. He’d drawn deeper into the shadows until she moved on, his hand over the mouth of a pink-haired girl who was dozing off to a drug-enhanced sleep on his shoulder, just to be safe.

  With the night growing colder, and a sharp wind biting through the flaps of his overcoat, he had tried to puzzle it out. Over the decades, he’d known hundreds of women. Women more beautiful than Tessa, more educated, more experienced, more accomplished, more exotic. And yet she was all he could think of, all he could see when he closed his eyes. Making mindless small talk at endless cocktail parties, he smiled down at poised and polished faces and wondered if she was working late in her studio. He couldn’t explain it; something about the girl felt like home.

  She was frowning at her own face in the mirror, her head tipped to one side. He glanced at her drawing. On paper, she was unsmiling, her expression apprehensive, doubtful.

  “You’re prettier than that,” he said.

  She smiled politely. He could tell she thought that he was trying to be nice. She turned the charcoal stick lengthways to lay in a shadow for the side of her face.

  “We saw you in the Post,” she said. “There were pictures of you on Page Six. The opening of the Matisse Exhibition. You were with a girl in a white dress.”

  “Oh, yes. Oleander Haier.”

  “She’s beautiful.” Meaning. Is she your girlfriend?

  “She’s a big donor.”

  She erased a smudge. “Oh, I see,” she said.

  “Tessa,” he said.

  She turned, looked up at him. He leaned down and kissed her pink lips, her raspberry mouth, his hand resting lightly on the side of her face, and it was just as he knew it would be, a blurry rush of warmth and light. The part of him that had once been an ordinary man, with ordinary hopes of coming home at night to a pretty girl who looked at him as if he could change the world stirred, came roaring back to life.

  He pulled away, retreated to a safe distance. She was staring at him, her mouth slightly ajar.

  “I’m sorry,” he said quickly. “I shouldn’t have done that.”

  “I,” she said shakily, then lapsed into mortified silence. Not because he had kissed her, but because she had liked it, she wanted it to go on and on, she wanted to take his face in her hands and kiss him back.

  “I’m—it’s just that…”

  “I know,” he put his hands up, stopped her. “I know. I’m sorry. It won’t happen again.”

  “No, you don’t know,” she said helplessly, her eyes wide and stunned. “I wanted you to. I liked it. I liked it a lot. Too much. It’s just that I…Lucian…”

  He nodded vigorously. So good, so devoted, so loyal. If only Lucian Swain deserved it. “I understand. Really. You don’t have to explain yourself. I don’t know what came over me.”

  “I should go home,” she said.

  “Yes, of course,” he said automatically. “Let me put you in a cab.”

  He held her coat for her, a ratty, tatty heathered thing that smelled like a goat and looked like she had gotten it off a dead man. As she raised her hair up over the collar, there was a flash of white neck, a whiff of her blackberry scent, and he closed his eyes, shuddering with the wanting of her.

  She reached up, turned off the reflector lamps. “Oh, Mr. Sinclair. I meant to tell you. I asked my grandmother whether she ever knew a Sofia Wizotsky.”

  “What did she say?”

  “That was when my grandfather had his heart attack.”

  “God. I’m sorry to have had any part in that.”

  She shouldered her backpack. “Turns out my grandfather is not Abe Moss, after all. He changed his name during the war to escape being drafted into the Russian army. His real name is Wizotsky.”

  Rafe stood rooted to the spot. “I’m sorry,” he said, very slowly, and very deliberately. “Could you repeat that, please?”

  “My grandfather’s la
st name is Wizotsky,” she said, staring at him.

  “That can’t be,” he protested. “It can’t be. They all died in the war. I checked the lists for years. There were no survivors.” Suddenly, he needed a smoke. Panicking, he patted himself down, ransacking his pockets until he found a stale cigarette jammed in a lining. Clenching it between his lips, he put an arm out to steady himself.

  “Let me get you a chair,” she said quickly, turning to grab her shabby office chair.

  With the lights off, the floor-to-ceiling windows became mirrors, reflecting the objects in the room in their black depths like some evil alternate reality. She frowned at the reflection in the window. Something wasn’t right. True, the hour was late, the lighting was poor, and she was very tired. She closed her eyes, then looked again. Trick of the light, she told herself. I’m in the wrong spot. It’s the angle.

  She could see herself as clearly as if she were looking into a mirror, shadows under her eyes, hair frizzed out to there. She could make out Gracie’s drawings, the lamps, the couch, the new table. But Raphael Sinclair, standing right behind her—well, he just wasn’t there.

  The truth came to her all at once. As she backed away from him, she knocked her shin against the chair. It rotated in lazy circles behind her.

  “What are you?” she whispered.

  Rafe snapped back to the present. Tessa’s eyes were darting from his face to the window, then back again, and with a sickening swiftness, he understood. The windows. I forgot about the bleeding windows. With a dizzying sensation of overwhelming inevitability, he understood that the game was up, the part of the story where he was a harmless visiting benefactor was over, and the next chapter already begun.

  “I think you know exactly what I am,” he said, crushing the cigarette beneath his shoe. “Come on, Tessa. You must have heard the rumors.”

  He walked slowly towards her, feeling the rising tide of her fear as she backed away. “Is that what this has been about all along? You just want to…” She blanched a deathly white.

  He stopped a safe distance away. “To drink your blood? No. I’m not going to hurt you. I’m a wealthy man. This is New York. I can buy anything I need.”