The Color of Light

by Helen Maryles Shankman

  She drew a ragged breath, not believing him.

  “Come on, Tessa. If I was going to harm you, it would have already happened by now. God knows, I’ve had plenty of opportunity.”

  She mulled that over. Curiously, now. “So…you’re really a vampire?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “And you have to drink blood to live.”

  “Yes.”

  “Aren’t you afraid I’m going to give away your secret?”

  “No,” he said. “Not really.”

  “Why not? Aren’t you afraid of what people would say? Of what people would do?”

  “This is New York City. Here, you can be anyone you want to be.”

  She thought about that for a while. “Does anyone else know?”

  “A few people.”

  “Is Levon one of them?”

  “No.”

  “Whit?”

  “I don’t think so. Though he has his suspicions.”

  She scoured her memory for all the vampire lore she had ever heard. “Are you really afraid of the cross?”

  “No, not particularly.”

  “What about garlic?”

  “A mild deterrent.”

  “Holy water?”

  He rolled his eyes.

  A thought occurred to her. “Are you really immortal?”

  “Yes. Well, to a point. I can still die. Stake through the heart, sunlight and all that.”

  “I don’t like sunlight either,” she confessed. “If I’m in the sun for more than thirty seconds, I burn.”

  He smiled. The color was returning to her face. She was already accepting it.

  “Do you have to sleep in a coffin filled with dirt from your homeland?”

  “I sleep on a very nice, very thick, extra-soft pillow-top Stearns and Foster mattress, thank you very much.”

  “Do you have demon brides and evil minions? Clayton wanted to know.”

  “No. At least, none that I know of.”

  “Have you ever hurt anyone?”

  He hesitated, nodded.

  “Killed anyone?”

  He nodded again, slower this time. That shook her. She went white again.

  “But I don’t do that anymore,” he added hastily. “I have to drink blood. I don’t have to be a killer.”

  “Oh,” she said.

  Her eyes were wide and terrified. Terrified of him. It made him ache to see it. He wished things could be back the way they were five minutes ago, when he was the mysterious and very sexy founder of the school paying her a private late night visit instead of a vicious killer promising not to hurt her. The thrall. He would use the thrall.

  “Look at me, Tessa,” he said softly. “Look in my eyes.” Forget everything you’ve seen, everything you’ve heard.

  But she was watching him closely, her eyebrows knitting together, flying apart, alive with questions, afraid of the answers. With a sigh, he gave up. It went that way once in a while; some people were just immune to it.

  Well, he thought grimly. In for a penny, in for a pound. No way out but through.

  “You must have more questions,” he said. “Go on.”

  “Is it true that you don’t have a heartbeat?”

  He reached for her hand. She didn’t try to pull away. He peeled off the glove, slipped her fingers under his jacket, laid her hand over his heart and held it there. Her eyes clouded with horrified wonder, then, affectingly, tears.

  “How did you… when did you become a…”

  He fixed his gaze on her, so full of unrelenting sorrow, that despite her worst fears, her heart fluttered, just a little.

  “I was in art school in Paris,” he said. “There was this marvelous girl. She was kind and gifted and beautiful, from a town on the far eastern border of Poland, where her family had a tea importing company. On the night she married another man, I went out to drown my sorrows. I picked up the wrong girl. She left me dead on the cobblestones outside a bloody bucket called The Lamb and Jackal in the center of London. The date was August 23, 1939.”

  “Which one was she?” she asked. “Sofia, I mean. The marvelous girl or the vampire?”

  “The marvelous girl,” he said.

  “What happened to her?” she said. “To Sofia.”

  Somehow, he had not been prepared for this. He turned his head away; she saw him swallow hard, saw a muscle in his jaw jump. “She died, I think. In Auschwitz. In the winter of 1943.”

  “Oh my God,” she whispered.

  “You remind me of her,” he said to her reflection in the window. “Every day. Since the first time I saw you.”

  Across the street, the lights at the Astor Theatre advertising Blue Man Group flickered and went out. Four storeys below, the metal shutters clanked and rattled as the Korean deli closed down for the night. Goth girls in high heels laughed together as they clacked past the school and on down Lafayette Street towards the clubs. On the fourth floor of the American Academy of Classical Art, it was quiet enough to hear the ticking of a clock on the wall in the sculptors’ studio, quiet enough to hear the creaks of the old factory building settling further into the bedrock underlying Manhattan.

  She picked up her drawing board and tucked it under her arm, bringing him with a wrench back to the present. He glanced at his watch. One o’clock. “Let me put you in a taxi,” he said.

  He followed behind her to the end of the floor, her bright curls bouncing with every step. In the elevator, he was careful not to crowd her. When they reached the ground floor, she scurried though the lobby and out to the street, hungry for the safety of public spaces. The whorls of her hair whipped and churned as if they were in torment, making her look like an anguished Medusa.

  He could see that her tatty coat was no defense against the sharp wind, and it made him want to put his arms around her. Instead, he stepped out into the street, put out his hand. A taxi crossed three lanes, screeched to a stop beside them.

  He turned to her. He had not stopped to close his coat, and it flapped and billowed in the icy wind. His arms opened wide, in unconscious imitation of the marble angel that stood at the foot of the double staircase in his townhouse. “Tessa,” he said. “It doesn’t define me. It’s not who I am.”

  She nodded, her face half-hidden in her scarf.

  He opened the cab door for her. She slid onto the leather seat. He knocked on the driver’s window, handed him some bills, told him where to go. Then he closed the door and stepped back onto the curb.

  She rolled down her window. “Say,” she said abruptly. “Are you going to the April Huffman opening on Thursday night?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Why?”

  “Bite her for me, will you?” she said.

  He stared at her in surprise as the taxi pulled away into traffic, then began to laugh. He watched until it rounded Astor Square, where it shot up Fourth Street and out of sight.

  23

  Josephine never showed up for their meeting the next day. Perhaps it was a misunderstanding, perhaps it was a babysitting conflict. At any rate, four o’clock came and went with no word from her advisor. At five o’clock, Tessa packed up her gear and headed downtown.

  She was driving Lucian to JFK for a seven-thirty flight. Then she was supposed to return his old green Citroen to the parking garage for the week, after which time she would take it to the airport to pick him up.

  Tessa reached his loft at 5:15 p.m. At the top of the stairs, she knocked, then pushed the door open. She dropped her knapsack on a chair. His bags were packed and waiting on the refectory table, alongside an empty bottle of non-alcoholic wine and a couple of smudgy glasses, a stack of bills, a list of AA meetings in London, today’s Times.

  She called his name. But the apartment was empty; he must be taking in a last AA meeting before his trip, she decided. There would be massive drinking, on a UK level, all week long at Stephen’s place in the country, there always was, and he had told her he was worried about slipping.

  She went into the studio.
A pile of photographs on her table needed to be filed away, and she took care it, putting them neatly in color coded folders with stickers marked Men Walking, Women Seated, Bill Clinton, Judy Garland, and two hundred other categories he might need on any given day. She slipped the folders in alphabetical order onto the shelves, where they would reside until they were needed again.

  From the studio, she went to the kitchen, where there were dishes and a frying pan left in the sink. She washed them, left them to dry on a dishtowel, then sat down on the le Corbusier couch to wait.

  At six-thirty, he still had not returned. She looked at the clock, did the calculations. If there was no traffic, she would get him there at the very earliest, seven, half an hour before his flight, still worth a run for the gate. But there would be traffic; it was high rush hour, on the busiest travel day of the year. The Van Wyck would be crawling, at best. They should have left an hour ago. He had already missed his flight.

  Perhaps there was a note. She looked under the bags, under the table. In the studio, she searched her desk and his drawing table, finding nothing more significant than some doodles on a lined yellow pad.

  By seven o’clock, she understood that his plans had changed. Something must have come up. As a last resort, she thought to check her answering machine. But there was only a message from Portia, telling her they were meeting at April’s gallery on West Broadway at seven.

  There was nothing else to do. Before she locked up, she wrote Lucian a note; she wanted him to know she had been there, she had left, and that he could find her at home. I love you, she signed it. Tessa. She anchored it under his bag, took one last look around, and closed the door behind her.

  It had warmed up since the day before. The sky was clear and glittered with stars, the air crisp and full of possibilities. She could smell wood smoke and the agreeable odor of grilling steak coming from just up ahead. Her stomach growled; she hadn’t eaten since noon. She sprinted across the rush hour traffic snarling the length of Canal Street, passed the cherry red facade of Pearl Paint, and turned up Greene Street.

  The sidewalks of Soho were clogged with pink-cheeked shoppers, all in a hurry to be somewhere else. Passersby smiled holiday greetings as they scurried past one another with their shopping bags. The storefronts had an enticing yellow warmth to them in the holiday dusk, their windows overflowing with beautiful things that nobody needed.

  Automatically, she turned left at Spring Street, then right at West Broadway. Her legs carried her forward, having formulated a plan her mind had not yet agreed upon. OK Solomon lay straight ahead, before the intersection with Prince Street.

  She would meet Portia and David at April’s opening after all. Perhaps there would be hors d’ouevres, at the very least, free white wine. She could use a laugh. She looked at her watch. It was already 7:30. She picked up the pace, hoping she hadn’t missed them.

  There was a crowd gathered on the wide pavement outside the gallery, five deep. A few steps closer, she saw why.

  The gallery’s windows displayed a tableau of six men and women. A model stood with his arms at his sides, his weight supported by his right leg, in a classic contrapasto position. A light-haired Adonis reclined on a sculptor’s stand, revolving in slow circles. An auburn-haired beauty straddled the back of an Eames chair, the vee between her thighs both masked and echoed by the curvilinear design. Three women stood with their arms twined around each other, like Graces.

  They were, of course, completely naked. Even Tessa, used to looking at bare flesh for as long as six hours a day, was taken aback. Seeing them displayed in the windows as if they were merchandise made it deliberately sexual. Maybe it was the way they were staring confrontationally back at the viewers on the sidewalk, heavy-lidded with postmodernist irony.

  New Works by April Huffman, said the white letters printed in Futura on the window. Tessa walked up the two steps, and went in through the frosted glass door.

  She stopped just inside. To the right was a table of plastic tumblers, filled halfway with white wine. To the left was another table bearing Camembert and crackers. Hung at even distances around the walls were a dozen paintings in April’s signature style.

  April with her legs twined around the head of a dark-haired male figure. April on her knees, her eyes closed and her mouth open. A close up of April with her head in an anonymous male lap. April tongue-kissing a German Shepherd. An interesting composition that appeared to be the view of an erect penis as seen from between April’s legs.

  Tessa circled around a statuette displayed on a pedestal in the center of the room. A naked ceramic April on all fours, being serviced from behind. Apparently, she had taken up sculpting. Harvey would have given her a C.

  In another corner, a screening area played the documentary film she made on Dissection Day over and over again in a continuous loop. April looking faintly demonic, waving a scalpel around and slicing into a helpless cadaver. Behind her, Graham could be seen ducking out of the way.

  Tessa moved between throngs of people who all seemed to know one another, massed in circles large and small, all dressed in varying shades and textures of black and nearly black. The conversational level was just below the level of a roar.

  “This is new for her. Look at her surfaces!” she heard someone exclaim. “Her study of anatomy has really moved her work forward,” someone answered. “The way she uses color!” said a skeletal man with a shaved head and a Teutonic accent. “Her audacity!” said a petite, dark-haired woman who seemed to know.

  Finally, bathed in the spotlight being cast by a video camera, Tessa saw the artist herself. She was framed by an enormous painting that took up the entire back wall of the gallery, dressed in a mannish white shirt and fitted black pants, all sleek hair and red lipstick. She had dyed her hair brown again, Tessa noticed, and she was talking animatedly into a mike being held by a television reporter.

  Behind her, standing a little way out of the spotlight, was Lucian, his arms folded, looking proud and happy.

  Now Tessa looked at the painting. It was very large, perhaps ten feet wide and six feet tall. As she focused on it, the background grew familiar; she knew that Indian print bedspread, she knew the blue glow of that particular 1930s airplane lamp. With a great heaviness, a feeling of gravity that threatened to pull her down to the floor, she slowly, reluctantly, let her eyes drift to the figures.

  April Huffman’s pale-skinned back, her straight dark hair, her bony knees, her small flat ass, her legs straddling her partner’s sides as she mounted him, the famous painter Lucian Swain.

  The interview must have ended, because the cameraman turned off his spotlight and moved away. April turned to Lucian, who smiled brightly and folded her into an ecstatic embrace.

  There was a tightness in Tessa’s chest. The babbling noise in the room grew louder, the voices garishly high-pitched. Darkness swelled around her, beating the air like a murder of crows taking to the sky. The voices inside the gallery rose to the level of a shriek.

  It was intolerably hot inside the crowded space; when did it get so hot? She could feel her face burning. She turned and tried to make her way to the door, but there were too many people. The exit seemed very far away.

  “Hey there, girlfriend!” exclaimed Portia, pushing the door open.

  “You’re here!” said David with a surprised smile. “Is it as bad as we thought?”

  She groped past them into the night. Outside, with the breeze fanning her skin, she stopped for a moment, blowing out gusts of white vapor. Seeing her, a passerby might have thought she was uncertain about in which direction she should be heading.

  And then tears began streaking down her face. She swiped at them with the back of her hand and started moving, stepping heedlessly into traffic, weaving through the cars coming down West Broadway. At Prince Street, she broke into a run, disappearing into the yellow night.

  In a taxi coming down West Broadway, Raphael Sinclair felt a massive jolt in the atmosphere, followed by a sudden vertigo. He reached
for the side of the car to steady himself.

  “You all right?” said Levon, concerned.

  “Yes, I’m fine. Headache,” he forced a smile, rubbing his fingertips in a slow circle on his temple.

  Levon struggled with his cane as Rafe paid the driver. “Knee’s really bothering me tonight,” he puffed as Rafe gave him a hand.

  “You really should see a doctor.”

  “You and Hallie,” he groused. And then they were gaping at the nude models in the window, along with the rest of the crowd on the sidewalk.

  “Shall we?” said Rafe. He pushed open the door. “Allow me.”

  “Holy cow,” said Levon.

  Rafe arched his eyebrows, wordlessly taking in the texture and variety of April’s carnal experiences.

  Levon paused before one of the sculptures. “Damn,” he said. “Wish I’d known her when I was younger.”

  “It’s not too late,” said Rafe. “I hear she’s available.”

  Sawyer Ballard’s granddaughter and the young man who was always hanging around Tessa’s studio were standing at the front of the gallery, clearly agitated. Other graduate students from her year were threading towards them through the crowd.

  “Excuse me, Mr. Sinclair,” Portia said, then turned away from him, urgently addressing Levon.

  Anastasia was at the back of the room. Waving, she called to him, her cheeks colored with excitement. She was chattering away with the artist, who looked strangely diminished with her clothes on. Rafe gazed impersonally at the art on the walls. The paintings really were shocking. Her lack of basic anatomy was appalling.

  He glided through the throng of black-clad guests, his overcoat floating behind him like a shroud. Crowds parted in his path. Women in short cocktail dresses put their hands to their throats and turned to find what made them feel simultaneously so frightened and so aroused.

  Anastasia stepped away from a circle of people to greet him. She was wearing a voluminous golden orange silk faille evening coat with enormous balloon sleeves, the hem dragging along the floor behind her. Her ebony hair was as smooth as satin, cut into a severe bob that ended at her jaw. Balancing a glass of red wine in one hand, she stooped to kiss him on both cheeks, taller than he was tonight in patent leather stilettos.