The Color of Light

by Helen Maryles Shankman

  “You just missed your little art student,” she said, her eyes sparkling behind her sunglasses.

  “Tessa was here?” he repeated, puzzled. In the circle of black-clad well-wishers, he saw Whit, sweating profusely, clearly overjoyed to be in such elevated company. Next to him stood Lucian Swain, holding a glass of tomato juice and looking a little tipsy.

  “…the inspiration for this whole show,” April was saying to Jeff Koons. She turned from her conversation to take Lucian’s hand. His face split with a bashful grin. Only then did Rafe focus on the enormous painting behind them. He stepped back from the ten-foot canvas, the better to survey the giant, pixilated image.

  At the other end of the gallery, Portia’s gaze happened to fall on him at the moment he stood back from the canvas. She saw his shoulders jerk slightly, saw him raise his hand to his mouth. Inexplicably, she shivered.

  “Isn’t it delicious, my darling?” Anastasia’s warm voice poured over him, inviting him to share in the cosmic comedy of the situation. “Come, join us. You know everybody.”

  Rafe wheeled around, went stalking back through the gallery.

  “I think we should split up and look for her,” Levon was saying. “Where do you think she would go?”

  “I’ll try her studio,” offered Ben.

  “David and I will take her apartment,” said Portia.

  “Come on, guys, think. Where else?” said Levon impatiently. “Is there somewhere she likes to go, a coffee shop, a favorite park bench?”

  The students looked helplessly at each other, then back to Levon. “Well, there’s Lucian’s place,” Graham said dryly.

  “All right, let’s go,” Levon said. “Call me when you find her.”

  The students raced out the door and split up, the two groups going in different directions.

  “You don’t think she’d do anything stupid, do you?” he said when they were gone.

  Rafe shook his head slowly. “Artists,” he said. “We live and die by our passions.”

  Levon watched him toying with his hat, absently running his fingers over the wide gray brim. Suddenly, he came to some kind of decision; he set the fedora back on his head, tilting it down with a snap.

  “I’ve seen enough.” he said curtly. “Call me at home when you hear something.”

  “Where are you going?” Levon said. There was a yellow light, proceed-with-caution tone to his voice.

  “To find her,” he said.

  Rafe pushed through the frosted double doors, planted both feet on the pavement. He closed his eyes and inhaled, tasting the air on his tongue.

  The temperature had grown milder as the sun went down, one of those balmy December evenings that makes New Yorkers think of spring. Windows were open. The clinking of glasses and plates, the convivial roar of people gathered in bars and restaurants spilled out onto the sidewalks. Smells unfurled across the cool night air. He detected the twin spices of ginger and garlic wafting from a restaurant a few doors down, and the odor of a condom warmed inside someone’s leather wallet. The sour smell of the subway blowing up from the grates. A cacophony of expensive fragrances whenever anyone entered or exited the gallery.

  A faint trace of blackberries lingered on the pavement near the glass doors. Rafe set off at a trot across the street, continuing on West Broadway to where it met Prince, then turned the corner. She was headed west.

  Rafe followed the scent to Sixth Avenue. She had traveled briefly on the Avenue of Americas, then made a left at Bleecker. She stayed on the south side of the street for a few blocks, hurrying past Carmine and Mulberry, the cafés, the bakeries, the t-shirt and poster shops, and then he lost her. He felt a stab of panic as he stood there, catching up with her scent again a few steps further, in front of a hip home goods place with the unpronounceable name of Mxplyzk.

  Where Bleecker met up with Christopher Street, he stopped, lifted his head, tested the air. It was busy this time of evening, dozens of gay and straight couples ambling up and down the quaint Village street, last minute Christmas shopping, dining with friends, ogling the leather fetish clothing in the windows. Now he quickened his pace, spurred on by fear. Tessa was heading directly for the river.

  The West Side Highway is the farthest west you can go on the island of Manhattan, a lonely strip of gravel and cracked pavement abutting the mighty Hudson River. At this point in New York history, it was home to hookers, strip clubs, parking lots and pornographic video stores.

  Just across the highway was an abandoned pier, thrusting out into the river, sixty feet of cracked concrete and twisted iron rebar. A chain with a heavy padlock hung from one side of the entrance to the other, a halfhearted attempt at keeping trespassers away.

  A transvestite prostitute and his client scattered at Rafe’s approach. Two men strolled past, shoulder to shoulder, hands thrust deep in each other’s back pockets.

  At the end of the pier, he could see a small figure leaning over the cable that served as a flimsy railing, looking down at the black water. Rafe stepped over the chain, slowly approached the apparition, stopping when he was about twenty feet away.

  “Hello, Tessa,” he said.

  She turned towards him. In the dark, he couldn’t clearly see her features. The river gurgled and sucked at the pilings.

  “Are you all right?” he asked, taking a step closer.

  “We used to come here sometimes after meetings,” she said. “We’d hold hands and talk about how it would be when he got better.”

  She turned her head away from him, looking down the river to the Wall Street skyline, at the World Trade Center lit up like towering twin Christmas trees. “Did you go to April’s show?”

  He took a few cautious steps closer. “Yes.”

  There was a tear sliding down her face. “I think I already knew,” she said. “I think I’ve always known.” Savagely, she wiped it away with the back of her wrist. Her voice filled like a sail, billowing with despair, and as lovers have done since the beginning of the world, she cried out at the starry night, “Why? What for? What did I do wrong?”

  “Oh, Tessa,” he said, in a voice that rose and fell like the river. “When things went bad, he clung to you like a lifeboat. When things went back to normal, he became the same thoughtless, narcissistic, self-serving egotistical bastard he’s always been. It’s not your fault, Tessa. You didn’t do anything wrong.”

  She sighed, a wet, ragged little sound. There was nothing he could say, other than the obvious.

  “You are everything that is clean and good and right with this world. And if it was me, if you had saved my life—if you were mine, I would never let you go.”

  They were both quiet for a while, listening to sound of the water lapping against the pier. He had just told her that he loved her.

  “I’ve been lying to myself for a long time,” she said.

  She wriggled out of her coat, letting it slip from her shoulders. It fell in a pile around her feet. The water bucked and shimmered, the moon broken to pieces on its dark and shining surface. Fearing that she was about to leap, he took another step closer, readying himself to grab her if that was what he had to do.

  And then she was breaking down, like the little girl that she still was, and he could see her cheeks glistened with tears. He opened his arms wide to receive her, and she ran to him, slipping her arms inside his coat and pressing her face against his shirt. Something was dying inside of her, a dream, in a slow, thrashing struggle, a butterfly impaled on a pin.

  He held her, stroked her hair, whispered her name. Her face was warm against his chest. He could barely contain his joy at her touch. And then she put her hands around his face and pulled him down to her, kissing him with a combination of ferocity, inexperience and passion that was a revelation, made him weak with need, made him want to tear her clothes off and take her right then and there on the cracked pavement and broken beer bottles littering the pier. He hooked his finger in the bandanna around her hair, pulled it out, all the while knowing he shouldn’t,
he mustn’t, it was the worst idea in the world, it was madness, it was an irreversible mistake. The mass of curls sprang loose, fell around her face, down her back. Slowly, he kissed her eyes, then her lips, opening her mouth with his tongue, and as he did, the inside of his head filled with radiant light.

  “I won’t do anything unless you want me to,” he whispered to her.

  He needn’t have been so cautious, they were alone at the end of a condemned pier in the middle of the Hudson River, but somehow he felt himself to be under the watchful eyes of God, and he wanted to get it right.

  “I want you to touch me,” she whispered back, her voice shaking.

  She was wearing the macramé shirt she had worn the night of the party in his townhouse, and he slid his hands over it, rubbing his fingertips over the cotton fabric covering her breasts. She made a sound, a sharp intake of breath. He slipped his hands underneath, his fingers moving over the silky material of her underthings, feeling her nipples stiffen and rise to his touch. He pulled her shirt over her head, let it drop from his fingers, stood back to look.

  She was all light and shadow in the moonlight, like a marble statue shaped by the hand of Rodin. Her breasts were small but full, with upturned pink nipples exactly the size and shape of a silver dollar. He moved his hands down the long valley of her spine, feeling the prickle of goosebumps in the chilly air, taking pleasure in the tensile fluidity of her skin. She took a shuddery breath, undulating under his touch. Standing on tiptoe, she put her arms around his neck.

  Bending down, he cupped one of her breasts, marveling at the way it fit perfectly in his hand. He tickled the pearly tip with his tongue, then drew it between his lips.

  With a surprised gasp, she sucked in her breath, bit down on her lip, cried out. Her legs buckled beneath her, and she collapsed. She would have fallen if he hadn’t caught her.

  She cried out; her legs buckled beneath her, and she collapsed. She would have fallen if he hadn’t caught her, held her up.

  “Are you all right?” he said quickly. “Did I hurt you?”

  “What,” she said when she could talk. “What was that?”

  He smoothed the hair away from her face. “What was what?”

  She was breathing hard. Her eyes were half-closed, dreaming. “I was teetering on the edge of this cliff, this…precipice. And I had a choice. I could back away, or I could go over the top.”

  “Did you just…come?” he asked her, incredulous.

  “Is that what that was?” She looked at him drowsily, unfocused. She was holding onto him for support. “Wow.”

  “Didn’t Lucian ever…didn’t he ever, ah, do anything nice for you?” he said, phrasing it as delicately as he knew how.

  She didn’t answer. He put the folds of his coat around her like wings. When he kissed her again, her soft pink mouth opened for him at the touch of his tongue. He was lost in the innocence of it, after all the women he had known, the games he had played, the strange places he had been, it was as if he were being made new again, starting all over from the beginning.

  He could feel her body tremble, with desire, or the cold, maybe both. “Are you cold?” he asked her. Tightening his arms around her, he rested his cheek on her shining hair.

  Wrapped in his coat, they watched the lights play on the water. An old lightship was moored nearby, the words Frying Pan painted by hand on her rusty hull. The crests of small waves gleamed silver as they rose up against it on their way downstream. Over and over again, the moon dashed itself against the pier, shattering to pieces, then gathered itself together for another try.

  He wanted to stay there forever, her warm smooth body pressed against his shirt. Maybe if he remained perfectly still, she would let him. But she stirred, restless. He knew how that song went. She had to keep moving, stay ahead of the pain.

  Regretfully, he let her go, stooped down for her shirt. She turned away from him to dress, a charming nod to modesty. He watched the muscles of her back ripple and stretch as she pulled it over her head, shrugged it on, held her ratty coat for her as she slipped into the sleeves. She hoisted her backpack over her shoulder. Fully dressed, she was his art student again.

  “Look, would you like to go somewhere, get something to eat?” he asked her.

  But she wasn’t hungry, she didn’t think she’d ever be hungry again. She shook her head, the tendrils trembling.

  “Shall we walk, then?”

  Yes, she would like to walk. Side by side, they picked their way across the old pier, through the cigarette butts, used condoms and broken glass. As they approached the West Side Highway, she reached for his hand. His fingers closed around hers.

  Through the narrow, winding streets of Greenwich Village they walked, past handsome brownstones ornamented with great swags of evergreen and red velvet ribbon, past small glowing storefronts displaying candles and creams and soaps and books and greeting cards and all manner of cheerful gifty things. Turning on Greenwich, they passed a restaurant called Tea and Sympathy, where a homesick Brit could order shepherd’s pie, bangers and mash, Lucozade, treacle pudding. Further on was a shop that repaired and blocked men’s hats, the last one in the city. A watchmaker occupied a tiny storefront nearby, the window filled with antique silver pocketwatches. The traces of ghostly advertisements painted onto the sides of buildings along Sixth Avenue exhorted them to buy from extinct neighborhood businesses: a carriage maker, corsets, men’s opera hats and gloves.

  They walked slowly, dawdling, suddenly shy with their new knowledge of each other. All the way from Christopher Street to Sixteenth Street they went, then halfway across the diameter of Manhattan Island to Sixth Avenue. All the while, Rafe thought of how some things don’t change all that much in fifty years, and how good her hand felt in his, how right and just, and how remarkable it was after all this time to be back at the beginning, deliriously happy to be holding hands with the girl of his dreams.

  They were waiting for the light to change at the corner of Sixteenth and Sixth when he realized that someone might see them, and he used the lame excuse of having to look at his watch to reluctantly let go of her hand. By the dim yellow light of the streetlamp, it was two-thirty a.m.

  “I need a new job,” she said suddenly. “I can’t go back there.”

  “I know someone who might be able to help,” he said.

  They came to a stop under her awning. He glanced across the street, to the church, where homeless men slept in huddled piles on the limestone steps.

  “Do they ever bother you?”

  “No,” she said. She shivered. “Poor creatures. By morning, they’re gone.”

  In the light, he could see that her mascara had run, making dark circles under her eyes. He smiled. She looked like she was dressed up as a vampire for Halloween. Her eyes weren’t precisely brown, he realized. There was a ring of green around the pupil, easy to miss if you weren’t paying close attention. An image floated in the lovely, liquid depths of her iris, the reflection of a man in an overcoat with the collar turned up, wearing a fedora, silhouetted against the stained glass rose window of the church across the street.

  “Oh God,” he whispered. “I can see myself in your eyes.”

  She stared at him. And then they were surrounded, circled by a cloud of her friends, pouring out of the lobby of her building, all talking at once.

  Luscious Graciela hugged her from top to bottom. Sawyer Ballard’s granddaughter put her long arms around her shoulders and squeezed. Clayton lifted her up off of her feet in a bear hug. The good-looking young man who was always in her studio gazed at her in a particular way that was not the way friends ordinarily look at other friends.

  Rafe took a step out of their circle, then another. Tessa belonged to them now, and he was again relegated to the position of mysterious and untouchable founder of the school.

  “You found her!” exclaimed Portia, grinning. She resembled her grandfather, tall, lean, patrician, blond. “On an abandoned pier? Wow! How did you know?”

  “J
ust luck, really.” he said.

  Now they fell silent, looking at him curiously. He put his gloves back on, just to give himself something to do. He wanted to go inside with her, undress her, draw her a warm bath, get into bed with her, make love to her until she fell asleep, but clearly, that was not going to happen tonight.

  And then they turned back to her, in the center of their circle, asking a hundred different questions at once, deriding April’s motives, her exhibitionism, her composition, her color, her technique, and while they were at it, Lucian Swain’s entire oeuvre of work as well.

  He cast one last look at Tessa, sheltered by the protective shield of her friends. Though her eyes were still achingly sad, something in her demeanor was clearly changed.

  He extended his arm, grasped her shoulder. “I’ve got to be going,” he said.

  “Oh,” she said, and for a minute she looked lost again. Then she remembered herself, managed a wan smile.

  He backed away, keeping her in his sights for just a moment longer. Then he turned and crossed the street, disappearing into the long shadows that fell around St. Xavier.

  24

  You’re going down, son,” said Harker, crouched over a blue plastic top, his cheek parallel with the floor.

  “I’m going to hit you so hard, they’ll only find little bitty pieces of you over the state line,” Ben replied.

  The tension in the room was palpable. The two men were kneeling on the polished oak floor in the formal dining room of the Ballard’s cottage, each of them wielding a colored plastic dreidel with Hebrew letters embossed on the sides.

  “Gentleman. Battle stations, please. Man your dreidels,” droned Graham. “On my mark. One. Two. Three.”

  The tops spun in tight circles, knocking lightly together, as if testing each other’s mettle. Then, so quickly that nobody saw exactly how it happened, Harker’s blue dreidel whacked Ben’s red dreidel out of the ring. It spun out, skittering over the floor and across a Persian carpet before coming to rest under a Chippendale chair. In triumph, Harker threw his arms in the air, yodeled out a victory yell.