Tessa turned to look at Graham, slumped down in his rocking chair, his sallow face floating like a ghost over the upturned collar of his raincoat. She leaned over and touched his hand. “There’s someone out there for you, Graham,” she said earnestly. “There’s someone out there for all of us.”
“Even Clayton,” said Ben.
“I really love you guys,” Clayton blubbered sloppily. Then he put on a wolfish grin, treating them to his best Elvis sneer. “Seriously, though. I’m really glad to know y’all. I didn’t know a soul when I moved to New York. You’re like family to me. Only, you know, without any of the hurting.”
“I didn’t know anybody either,” said Ben. “I’m glad I met you, too.”
“Us, too.” said Harker. “All right, that’s not strictly true. I already knew a lot of people here, and Katie’s got some cousins. But still. You guys are all right.”
“That goes for me, too,” David agreed. But he was looking at Tessa.
Tessa leaned back in her chair, stared down into her glass. “I couldn’t have gotten through this year without all of you,” she murmured.
“I think we’re all incredibly blessed to have found one other,” Portia said softly.
“Say,” Harker said. “Getting back to Clayton’s question. Does art have a purpose?”
“Sure,” said David. “It elevates whoever is looking at it.”
“To enlighten,” said Portia. “To inspire.”
“To educate,” said Ben.
“To the class of ‘93,” said Graham, solemnly raising his glass. “May we be blessed with the ability to create works of art that elevate, that enlighten, that educate, that inspire.” The students rose to their feet and clinked glasses.
“To art that matters.”
“Those are good answers,” said Harker, taking out his sketchbook, another cigarette jiggling up and down in the corner of his mouth. “I’m going to write them down.”
Which was followed by the marathon dreidel battle. It began genteelly enough. An hour later, when Portia and Tessa quit, the boys were still at it, hurling terrible invective at each other, imprecating each other’s integrity, manhood, the sorry state of their mothers’ virtue.
Tessa and Portia cleared the table, brought the dishes to the kitchen. Irma washed up in the old apron-front sink. Tessa carefully wiped the china dry with soft dishcloths while Portia counted the silver and returned it to the vault. By the time they were finished, it was ten-thirty. Tessa needed to keep busy. Left on her own, her mind kept returning to scenes from the night before. Portia must have sensed it; when the last dish was put away, she turned to her friend and said, “You know, it’s still early. Come on. I’ll show you the grounds.”
The floor in the grand hallway was checkered with black and white marble, just like in glossy magazine spreads of fancy homes in Architectural Digest. Just inside the foyer stood a bust on a fluted marble pedestal. Tessa thought it looked vaguely like Portia. She was searching for an identifying plaque when she remembered that she was in a private home.
“It’s by Rodin,” Portia said, hiding a smile. She knew what Tessa had been doing. “He made it when my great-grandmother was studying in Paris. I found it in a cupboard in the attic. When I asked my mom why it wasn’t on display, she said, ‘It never really looked like her.’ After I was done genuflecting in front of it, I said, ‘Mom. Rodin.’”
“She kind of looks like you,” said Tessa.
Portia tilted her head. “Really? You think so?”
Tessa took in the long lovely face, the calm eyes, the strong chin, the hair piled up in a bun on top of her head. By coincidence, Portia was wearing her hair in a bun tonight. The resemblance was uncanny.
“What was her name?”
“Rose. Rose Sawyer Ballard. I never met her, she died before I was born. From what I can gather, she was a remarkable woman. It was a real scandal when she went to art school. People would cross to the other side of the street to avoid her. Well-bred girls just didn’t do that back then, draw naked men.”
They left Ringo in the house; he whined pitifully, dancing on impatient white paws, but Portia wanted to avoid a repeat encounter with a family of skunks that wandered the grounds at night. They descended the wide stone steps, crossed the circular Belgian block driveway. Tessa followed Portia down a flagstone walk that vanished into a shifting wall of fog. As visibility diminished, Tessa grew uneasy; she hesitated, looking back at the house, its squared-off edges already lost in the fog.
“I love it when it’s like this,” she heard Portia say from somewhere up ahead. “It’s like being in a ghost story.”
Well. If Portia wasn’t going to be afraid, she wasn’t either. They followed the walkway as far as it went. At its end, they turned onto a path that meandered to the left, gravel crunching under their feet.
Ahead of them was the Monet bridge spanning a goldfish pond in the Japanese style. Ghostly images of trees materialized around them, one, then another, veiled in mist. A structure loomed up at them, twenty feet ahead; Portia stopped.
“Want to see the playhouse?”
“Sure.”
They crossed the little bridge, the fog muffling the sound of their footsteps. “My grandmother had these Italian craftsmen make replicas of furniture from the big house,” Portia explained. “Little armchairs, little Persian rugs. I used to love being out here away from the grownups. My brother and I played house all the time. I haven’t been inside in years.”
She tried the knob. It wouldn’t yield. She frowned, put her hands on her hips. “When did they start locking it?”
The little house must have been handsome once, but now it looked as if it had fallen upon hard times. Located under the trees, its stucco was turning green with moss. The hipped roof was sticky with sap, under a blanket of pine needles. Frustrated, Portia tried to sweep them off with her coat sleeve, quickly giving up. She looked glum.
“That’s all right,” said Tessa, comfortingly. “We’ll come back another time.”
“I really should come out here sometime and clean this up,” she said. Her face brightened. “Wait a minute,” she said. She pulled out the keyring she had used to open the china cupboards, sorted through the various blackened skeleton keys, trying them in the lock one by one until finally, with a satisfying click, Portia exclaimed, “Open Sesame!” and pushed open the door.
It was empty. A lone folding chair was left in the middle of the room. Portia was crestfallen. “Oh,” she said wistfully. “He must have given the furniture away.” She dropped down into the chair. It gave out a puff of dust. A frightened vole trundled away along the baseboard. “My grandfather is always doing that, giving stuff to museums. They love him.”
“I’m sorry,” Tessa said, wanting to comfort her friend. Even in the dark, she could make out the dovetailed joints, the carved moldings around the window, and she turned around in a circle, awestruck by the exacting nineteenth-century craftsmanship. “It’s still amazing. How often do you see coffered ceilings in a child’s playhouse?”
Portia didn’t answer. Her face was occluded, far away.
“It’s not going to be in the family much longer. None of us will be able to afford it. My grandfather is talking about selling it. The Yacht Club is interested.”
Tessa hugged her arms around herself for warmth. The yellow windbreaker she had borrowed from the front closet on her way out the door was made for summer squalls, not a night in December, even a mild one.
“When I was fifteen,” Portia said absently, staring out of the child-sized mullioned windows. “My cousin Caroline got married out on the lawn.”
“That must have been fun.”
“Mm,” Portia agreed. “My grandfather put up a big white tent, right over there, in front of the house. I was a bridesmaid. I had never been in a wedding before. I had a new dress that Caroline had picked out, and someone was coming to do all the girls’ hair and makeup.
“Caroline was much older than I was, and I thought, s
o sophisticated. She worked as an editor at a magazine in New York. She was so pretty, and so confident. She had this throaty laugh. I adored her.
“There was this big luncheon, a kind of meet-the-families thing, planned for the day before the wedding. It was the end of May. The sky was blue, it was a cool, brisk morning. There were whitecaps on the water, and you could hear the sound of the banners and flags snapping on the ends of their poles. I was in the art studio, trying to capture it all on paper, when Caroline’s fiancée poked his head around the door.
“Drew Foster. I had this mad crush on him. He was tall and smart and funny, with these really broad shoulders—he played football in high school—and a smile that made me feel all jumpy and nervous and excited inside. He had just graduated from Harvard, and he was starting law school in the fall. He asked if it was all right if he came in. I said, sure. I was so flattered. The day before his wedding, and he wanted to spend time with me! Anyway. He came in, closed the door. He came up behind me to see what I was doing. ‘Wow,’ he said. ‘You’re really good.’
“My heart was beating about a hundred miles a minute. ‘You’re so talented,’ he said. Then, ‘Of all Caroline’s cousins, I think you’re the prettiest.’
“I loved him for that. Even then, I was a head taller than all my classmates. I didn’t feel pretty. I felt awkward and clumsy and shy. He came closer. Too close. I could feel his breath on my hair. And then he kissed me.
“I was shocked. ‘But you’re marrying Caroline tomorrow,’ I said.
“He gave me one of those winning smiles, you know, the kind that makes you feel all oogly, like your insides are made out of chewing gum, and he said, ‘Come on, Portia. We’re practically family.’
“So I let him kiss me. And then he was opening his mouth, and touching me, and I was saying no, no, no, and pushing him away, and he was holding me too hard and forcing me down onto the floor, and…” Portia stopped. Her long face was furrowed with an old grief. She shivered. “Let’s get out of here.”
They left the playhouse behind, ducking through the child-sized door. There were more trees now, trunks appearing out of the mist, the scent of crushed pine needles pleasantly reminiscent of turpentine. They had to watch where they were going; here under the trees, knotty roots heaved themselves up out of the earth. The ground under their feet grew soft, spongy, emitting a faint marshy odor of decay. The fog thinned for a moment, letting in moonlight, revealing a small clearing in the woods.
“Where are we?” said Tessa.
“The pet cemetery,” said Portia. Tessa ran her fingers along a bench. Kermit, a St. Bernard. He Was A Good Dog 1913 was engraved in spidery capital letters on one of the weathered gray slats.
“Look. This is where I buried my cat.” At Portia’s feet was a lichen-covered stone with the name Alice inscribed in it, and the year 1979. “There’s a horse under here somewhere, too.”
“What happened?” said Tessa cautiously. “Drew. Did they call off the wedding?”
She looked down at the ground, studying the pitted, mossy stones. “No. Nothing like that.” She shoved her hands deep in her pockets. The breeze stirred the tails of her coat. “Drew said that if I told anybody, he would swear that I was a liar, that I came on to him, that I made it all up because he turned me down. I believed him. I was fifteen, you know? Years later, I understood. He picked me because I was young, and shy, and vulnerable.
“I told my mother that I couldn’t go to the wedding, I was sick. My aunt was furious. My grandfather came stomping up to my room to give me a piece of his mind. Act like a Ballard, damn it. Couldn’t I just grit my teeth, walk down the aisle and puke later? I stayed in bed with the lights off for three days.”
“Did you ever tell anybody?”
“When I was eighteen, I told my mother. She was horrified. It couldn’t be possible. He was from such a nice family. Was I sure I hadn’t imagined it. Maybe he was just horsing around. Then she got angry. What had I done to make him think I wanted it? Of course, by then, it didn’t matter. Everyone knew he was cheating on Caroline.
“No one ever said anything. It just got swept under the carpet with all the other bits and pieces of stuff that was never discussed in my family. My grandfather leaving my grandmother. My mother, firing every nanny who ever got close to me. My parents, sending us off to boarding school so that we wouldn’t interfere with their party plans. Portia’s feelings.” Her shoulders trembled with unexpressed rage. “So untidy.”
She squatted down, moodily picked a piece of moss off of the cat’s headstone. “Anyway. I didn’t pick up a paintbrush for the next eight years. Until I met Auden.” At the mention of his name, the soft, serene expression returned to her face.
Tessa shifted from one foot to the other. “Portia,” she began. What could she possibly say that wouldn’t sound trivial or banal?
Portia turned a smile to her, gracious as always. “You don’t have to say anything,” she said, getting to her feet, brushing pine needles from the tails of her coat. “I shouldn’t have burdened you with all of this.”
“The terrible things that happen to us,” Tessa said slowly. “What we do with them…I think that’s what makes us artists. Your paintings are filled with grace. With light. With air. With forgiveness. I don’t know how you do it. But somehow, you transform your pain into a world, a universe of beauty.”
It was a moment before she spoke again. “Thank you, Tessa,” she said. “Thank you for that.”
They sat in silence for a moment. Mowgli, a mischievous Spider Monkey, 1927, Tessa read. Eloise, a beloved Pekinese, 1952.
“You know, you haven’t mentioned Lucian once.”
“Mm.” She didn’t want to talk about Lucian anymore. She wanted to forget about him forever.
“What happened Thursday night?”
“I was supposed to drive him to the airport. He wasn’t there. I waited. He didn’t show. I was walking home. Somehow, I ended up at April’s gallery. I saw the painting. I saw him kiss her. I left.”
Portia was kicking the moss off of a small gravestone so pitted with age that the writing on it was illegible. “How did Mr. Sinclair find you?”
“Oh. That.” She wondered, too. Was it a vampire thing? “I don’t know,” she admitted. “I may have mentioned to him that I used to go there with Lucian.”
Portia nodded. “I like the way he appreciates you,” she said. “And for all the right reasons. You’re smart. You’re talented. You’re beautiful. Of course he’s attracted to you. And him, well…I get it. That face, that body. That voice. But Tessa…remember what he is.”
Tessa felt a small tremor go through her body. What did Portia know?
“He’s the founder of the school, yes. But he’s also, well…he has kind of a reputation.” She sighed. “Look. I have a confession to make. I told you that story for a reason. Remember, the day after the Halloween Party, I tried to tell you. I have a sensitivity for these things. When I looked in his eyes, when he shook my hand, I felt…” She looked meaningfully at her friend, took a deep breath. “I don’t think this is going to end well.”
A pair of headlights came searching through the fog, turning in through the gate and into the driveway, stopping in front of the house.
“Who’s that?” Portia frowned. “There’s a bed and breakfast up the road. Sometimes tourists pull in here by mistake.” She glanced apologetically at Tessa. “I’ll be right back.” She marched off through the woods towards the house.
The night was getting colder; Tessa could see her breath. She wrapped her arms around herself, rubbing them for warmth. The layers of fog separated just enough for her to have a sightline to the house. A man was getting out of the back of a taxi, paying the driver. Tessa heard the little dog yapping, saw Portia slow, then break into a run. As she reached the car, she launched herself into the passenger’s arms. He caught her, swinging her around in a joyful circle. Auden. He must have come up early to surprise her.
“Tessa! It’s Auden!” Portia�
�s voice confirmed it, sounding very far away through the fog. “We’re coming back for you!”
“That’s all right,” she hollered back, not wanting to intrude on their moment. They hadn’t seen each other since Thanksgiving, she knew. “I’m okay. Go on ahead.”
Portia waved, turned back to Auden. Tessa watched the lovers mount the wide stone steps, their arms around each other’s waists. The fog drew around them like a curtain.
Tessa shivered, her bravado fled. The sad little graveyard would have been spooky enough at any time, but at midnight, thick with winding sheets of mist, it was monster-movie scary. She could hardly see her hand in front of her face. She moved forward, towards the house, she hoped. After her third step, she snagged her shoe on an unseen obstacle, nearly falling flat on her ass on the boggy ground. She looked to see what had tripped her up. Tessa, A Persian Cat Died 1945. Wonderful, she thought.
She heard twigs snap and crackle, something moving towards her. Now she felt real fear. The hairs stood up at the back of her neck, the flesh of her arms prickled into goosebumps. She strained for a sound, any sound, in the dead quiet of the fog. At last, she heard an angry whir, a scuffle, taking place in the bushes nearby. Moments later a red fox trotted across the clearing, a few feet in front of her.
Tessa froze, holding her breath; she had never been this close to a wild animal before. The fox was carrying something in its jaws, the outstretched feathers of a wing stretched stiffly between its teeth. It stopped and glanced at her before trotting off, the white tip of his brushy tail disappearing into the fog.
She exhaled, pulled her arms a little tighter around herself. Finally, she allowed herself to think back on the events of last night.
Had she really been that stupid? Was she, nice, law-abiding Tessa Moss capable of doing something as dangerous as walking out onto a dark, deserted pier at midnight, then throwing herself at a stranger who was, by his own admission, a vampire?
The clouds seethed and parted, revealing the silhouette of a man in a hat and overcoat standing between the trees. Just as quickly, the image was gone, the fog churning in the space under the boughs.
The Color of Light Page 28