The party began to thin out. People had made reservations weeks in advance for New York’s best-known restaurants; the graduates and their guests began to drift away, to dinner, to Broadway shows, to see the sights.
“Come with us,” said Portia earnestly. Auden nodded his agreement. Portia leaned over, put her hands together in prayer, hissed. “Please.”
Sawyer Ballard’s spare frame towered over them. “Yes, do come!” he exhorted enthusiastically. Portia had introduced Tessa to her grandfather as Sofia Wizotsky’s long lost granddaughter. He looked a little dazed. She tried to visualize him as a young man, flirting with her grandmother.
“Another time,” she said.
The Ballards moved off, tall and languid and graceful, like a herd of gazelles through long grass.
As the evening drew to a close, and the crowds ebbed away, Rafe and Tessa began to make their way towards each other. They met in the middle of the room, near Clayton’s centaur.
“Hello, Tessa.”
“Hello, Mr. Sinclair.”
They smiled at each other. And then he took her hand.
They sauntered at a leisurely pace through the Cast Hall. First-year work-study students moved efficiently around them, ferreting out glass plates and empty wine glasses stashed in corners and behind sculptures. When they reached the stairs, Rafe held the door open for her. Tessa took one last look around the room, inhaling deeply of the turpentine-scented air. Together, they stepped out onto Lafayette Street.
At the corner of Gramercy Square, the plane trees had leafed out, shading the south side of the house. Morning glories and moonflowers twined green stems around the lamppost. The wisteria vines that grew in gnarled clusters over the mullioned windows were in full bloom, long trusses of lavender blossoms cascading down the chiseled face of the old brownstone mansion.
At the top of the steps, Rafe leaned over and lifted Tessa off of her feet. He carried her past the drawing of the mother and child, past the sculpture of the welcoming angel. Up the carved Gothic stairs, through the Great Room, up a second stairway to the loft. He paused before stepping over the threshold to his room.
The first thing she noticed was the bed. It was covered in rose petals.
Pillar candles of many different heights and widths cast their shimmering light from every surface and corner. Smoke from a filigreed incense burner curled lazily skyward, perfuming the air with jasmine and vanilla. An opened bottle of champagne waited on the dresser alongside two crystal flutes, the slender bowls engraved with wings.
With the greatest of care, he laid her down and gazed at her, at her miraculous hair spilling out over his pillow, at the filmy black dress that settled over his bedspread, at the seraphic smile playing across her lips.
“They reminded me of you,” he said. “They were just exactly the color of your skin.”
Handfuls of creamy rose petals fell through her fingers. “Turn around,” she murmured.
He went to the window, pushed open the fringed velvet drapes. Unlatching the French doors, he stepped out onto the terrace.
Outside, a full moon was visible over the park, shrouded in a gauzy haze. Gramercy Park was particularly beautiful tonight, the overgrown trees casting intricate patterns of light and shadow on the sidewalk, the fanlights above the doors beckoning to passersby with a friendly yellow glow. The gaslight lamps raised the specter of the nineteenth century with a ghostly luminescence, the wrought iron galleries brought to mind old black-and-white photos of Paris. Under the dogwood trees, the azaleas in the park blazed with cerise, with salmon, with violet, with pink. The raked gravel paths glistened an unearthly white.
When he turned around again, she was laying naked on the bed. Moonlight slanted in long parallelograms across her bare skin. He ran trembling fingers over her rounded bottom, finding the sweet dimples at the base of her back. He skimmed the flat of his hand along the muscles that rose alongside her spine, the level plane between her shoulders.
He stripped off his clothes; they lay discarded at the foot of the bed in a crumpled heap. He leaned over to kiss the pink lips. Tessa’s eyes were wide and full of wonder. She had never seen him completely naked. He was as beautifully made as one of the Michelangelo sculptures in the Cast Hall.
The contours of her body emerged from the rose petals like Cabanel’s Venus from the sea. Her fingers furrowed through his hair, she pulled his face to hers. She knew him now, had tasted what he was capable of, and still, she drew him closer.
He took his time, wanting to prolong the moment; to take hold of the firm curve of a hip, to rest his cheek upon the mound of her belly. To dwell upon the swell of her breasts, the lick of golden orange hair between her thighs.
His hands went around her waist, his fingers sinking into the flesh as he pulled her against him. His eyes fluoresced an extraordinary blue.
“I love you,” he told her. In the perfect stillness of the room, his voice was a rapturous melody that only she would ever hear. “I love you now. I will love you always. I love you more than I can ever love anyone, ever again.”
She didn’t say anything. She looked up into his eyes, and he found his answer there. His own reflection. Faith and trust. The only peace he’d ever known.
He braced himself over her. The commingled scents of sandalwood and blackberries rose from their heated bodies. The lovers gazed into one another’s eyes. With a single fluid movement, he was inside of her, making them one.
A gasp, a stifled cry, a rattling intake of breath.
“Oh, God,” he whispered in awe. “I’ve come home. Finally, I’m home.”
He was in Highgate again. It was the middle of winter, snow dusted the wings of the angels watching over the dead. Looking down, he noted that he was dressed entirely in white. London in January; he shivered, and not because of the cold.
Once again, the branches of trees reached out like bony fingers to pluck at him, his shirt, his pants, his hair. Rafe realized that he was barefoot, he was leaving bloody tracks in the snow.
Up ahead, the shadowy child ran lightly over the frost-whitened path, disappearing just where it curved into a lane of mausoleums. Now he slowed, afraid that his confederates with the jagged teeth and cadaverous breath were waiting there, just out of sight.
“Come back!” he called. A cemetery at night was no place for a child.
He could see him now, skipping far ahead, balancing on the bricks that edged the sides of the path. Reluctantly, he followed, glancing fearfully at the monuments. He expected the arrival of the child’s shadowy compatriots at any moment.
Rafe found him sitting on a bench in an Egyptian-style tomb, swinging his legs back and forth. He approached slowly, afraid he would start running again.
“Are you alone?” he said cautiously. “You don’t have to be afraid of me. I want to help you. What’s your name?”
The boy looked up at him. A pretty child, dressed in short pants, a cap, old-fashioned clothing. In the moonlight, it was impossible to tell what color his eyes were. Something about him seemed familiar.
Tired of the chase, Rafe sat down beside him. The little boy smiled. When he smiled, his eyes weren’t so sad. Where was his mother, anyway? Such a sweet child. Who would leave a child like this, on a night like this, in a place like this?
The boy reached out and took his hand. Rafe shivered. The little fingers were as cold as bone, as cold as a headstone in January.
“You’re nice,” he said.
“No I’m not,” he said. “I’m a very bad man.”
“No,” said the little boy. He smiled a crooked smile, much too old for his years. “You’re not. I would know.”
“What do you want from me?” he said.
“I have to tell you something.”
The chilly little hand was pulling him now, pulling him down so that he could put his lips close to his ear. Fear beat its wings in his heart. Suddenly, he didn’t want to know what the shadow child had to say.
The boy cupped his hand over his mout
h so that only Rafe could hear. “She forgives you,” he whispered in his ear. “She forgave you a long time ago. She wishes you could forgive yourself.”
The boy jumped down from the bench and continued on his way down the path. Rafe began to follow. The little boy stopped and shook his head. “No,” he said. “It’s not time yet.”
Then, as if someone was calling him, he cocked his head, listening to a voice beyond Rafe’s hearing. “I have to go now,” he said. And then he turned around and went tripping off down the lane. His outline shimmered, then disappeared into the thin cold air, leaving Rafe alone in the snowy graveyard.
She found him in the garden. She stepped out the French doors, looking up at the sky. It was a deep Prussian blue; she could see Venus twinkling overhead. He was dressed in gray trousers and a soft black crew-neck sweater. It was as casual as she had ever seen him. His hands were in his pockets; he was staring absently up at the stars. This late in spring, the Japanese cherry was already weeping its petals to the ground. Moonflowers turned their pale, open faces to the night sky, weaving themselves through a white clematis vine that trailed up and around an arched wooden arbor. A fountain of white roses clambered enthusiastically up the wall of the next building. Hanging pots of night-blooming jasmine perfumed the air. He turned at the sound of her padding down the steps.
“Your ring,” she said. “I noticed you weren’t wearing it anymore.”
“Yes,” he said. “I’ve put it somewhere safe.” Before the Graduate Exhibition, he had lifted it off from around his neck, held it in the palm of his hand. He had bent his head and kissed it goodbye before shutting it carefully away in a velvet box in a drawer in his bedroom.
Her hair was wet, falling to her waist. She smelled of the lily-of-the-valley shower gel that was in his bathroom. He pulled her up onto her toes, pressed his lips to hers. Pushed the robe down around her shoulders and nibbled kisses down her throat.
There was something she wasn’t telling him, an unspoken air of regret. He pulled away, looked gravely into her eyes.
“What is it, sweet girl?” He was hesitant with her, awkward, almost shy. “Did you…was it…was I all right?”
She put her arms around him, whispered into his chest. “It’s just that… well, I can never save you again.”
He pushed aside her hair, cupped her face in his hands. “You’re wrong about that,” he told her earnestly. “You do save me. Every day.”
He went down on his knees before her, bowed his head to kiss her belly, the muscles of her abdomen reminding him of the body of a violin. A memory teased at the edge of his consciousness. Something about Clayton’s centaur. It had been a little too accurate.
“Tessa,” he frowned. “Did Clayton see me naked?”
“Um. He might have.”
He grimaced. “Anyone else I should know about?”
She lifted her shoulders, dropped them. “Ah—maybe Ben.”
He sighed.
“It really helped him with his sculpture,” she enthused. “Did you see?”
Art students. The robe spilled to the ground with a silky splash. He made love to her amidst the clouds of white flox creeping across the earth at their feet.
She dabbed a jot of raspberry jam onto her croissant, poured them both a cup of coffee. He preferred his black; she took both cream and sugar.
“When we’re in Paris,” she said dreamily. “It will be like this every day.” She was sleepy and radiant, her hair tumbled in tawny ringlets around her face.
His heart filled with love for her. Inside, he was already grieving. He couldn’t go back to Paris. Sorrow was etched on every building and streetlamp in the City of Light. Turning a corner in le Marais, in St. Germain, in Montparnasse, in Montmartre, each vista would bring renewed feelings of tragedy and loss.
He busied himself with stirring cream and sugar into her second cup of coffee. “It’s going to be brilliant,” he said courageously, trying to work up some enthusiasm. “I want you to do everything I did…take classes, sit in cafés, paint in the Louvre. You won’t want to come back.” His smile was a ruse to conceal his grief. “You can even stay in my old rooms. I think I’m still paying rent on them. Then again, you might prefer the Marais. It’s gotten very hip.”
The first cloud of doubt crossed her face. “You’re not coming with me, are you.”
Slowly, he shook his head no.
“You can take a year off, the school is in the black now,” she said quickly. “You can fly back whenever they need you.”
He dropped his gaze. “I can’t go back to Paris, Tessa. Too many memories.”
“We’ll make new ones.” She reached across the table, took his hand. He rubbed his thumb over hers. From the look on his face, the lengthening silence between them, she knew he meant it.
She looked down at the table, heaved a sigh. “Then I won’t go, either.” she said decisively.
He looked up at her in alarm. “What do you mean? This is a once-in-a-lifetime experience, Tessa. You must go.”
She shook her head resolutely. “I’m not leaving you. If you’re not going, I’m not going.”
He sighed, covered her hand with his, wished he had a cigarette. “Tessa,” he said quietly. “I want you to have the life that was stolen from us. From Sofia and me. I owe it to her.”
“I have that life,” she said. “With you.”
“I nearly killed you, Tessa. That’s the life you have with me.”
He couldn’t meet her startled gaze. “I never told you. The night you saved me…The night you did that brave and foolish thing…”
“Anyone would have done it.”
“No. No one but you.” He squeezed her hand. “You were in shock. Dying. The ambulance wasn’t coming. I almost…” He looked away for a minute, remembering her unconscious in his arms, her life bleeding away into the oriental carpet. “I almost made you…one of us.” He sounded tired, even to himself. “I’d already made the slash across my chest. If you had swallowed even a drop of my blood, that would have been enough. Ram stopped me.”
She leaned both elbows on the table, took her head in her hands.
“I would do anything to keep you here with me. Anything. Understand? Even that.”
He’d crossed some kind of a border, he knew. But he had to shock her to her senses; she had to be made to understand. She was a sweet and lovely girl, and he was a Beast. Her purpose was to live in the light. His was to punish the wayward, the ones that ask questions, the ones who stray. They could have no future together.
She got to her feet. This is it, he thought dully. I’ve really done it this time. This is goodbye. He tried to steel himself, found that he couldn’t. He had used up all his defenses.
She sank to her knees in front of him, unbuttoned his shirt. The air was perfumed with the scent of sandalwood. She stared at the star-shaped scar she had made over his heart, then kissed it. He made some kind of a sound, bowed his head.
She reached into the shirt to put her arms around him, laid her head on his chest. “I love you, Raphael Sinclair,” she whispered. “And I am not going to Paris.”
So he lied to her. He told her he would join her in September. Now she was excited; there were flights to arrange, boxes to pack.
She’d spent the entire day moving her studio equipment back to her apartment while he slept on, insisting that she could do it all by herself. Now she was asleep in his bed, exhausted. Barefoot, he went downstairs. Alone among his trophies and his possessions, dressed only in a pair of striped pajama pants, he stood before Sofia’s drawing and tried to think.
He would not repeat the agonies of this past winter, when he laid waste to his carefully cultivated reputation and almost destroyed the school. It was the only legacy he had to leave this world. He would die first.
Rafe put a disc into his new CD player, recommended by the lethargic heroin addict with a pierced lower lip working the counter at Tower Records. Lotte Lenya’s throaty vibrato hissed out of the speakers.
He had caused so much pain to so many people over the span of his long life. This time, before the demons took over, while he would still be remembered as the founder of the American Academy of Classical Art, and not for whatever atrocities he might commit after madness robbed him of his higher faculties, his thoughts turned toward taking his own life.
Better to die now, while his mind was clear and his conscience at peace. While he was still a man, and not a monster. Tessa would be taken care of, he had seen to that; she would get the house, the art, whatever he had recovered from Blesser before he paid so dearly for his crimes. She would never have to think about money again.
He had worried that she would find another lover. But that had never been the real issue. She loved him completely, he knew that now, she would never leave him. But to keep her for himself meant to steal her away from the light, forcing her to exchange it for an eternity of darkness. With him there would be no family, no car pools, no cheerful holiday feasts with aunts, uncles and cousins. No soccer practice. No shambling house in the suburbs. No children. And always, always, the lurking possibility that she might come to harm at his hands. Taking himself out of the equation seemed like the logical solution to all of his problems.
She would be devastated, there was no way around it. Simple logic dictated that he wait until she was far away in Paris, settled in, entrenched in her new life. But he would be lost by then, cutting a bloody swath through the boroughs of New York City. If he did it now, while her friends were still close enough to lend support, while Levon was still here to see her through, while that damned David was still in love with her, she could mourn him over the summer and then fly off to Paris to get on with the life he had planned for her.
He went to the window, pushed aside the fringed velvet curtain. It was still dark out. He cranked open the casement window, inhaling the crisp night air, scoured clean by a passing shower. New York City was very dear to him, now that he was leaving her. He could hear the lonesome tinkle of wind chimes drifting in from a neighbor’s deck, the sibilant whoosh–ssssss of a bus braking at Third Avenue. He could smell the vinegary odor of mulch rising up from the park below, of new life breaking through the clods of damp earth to the surface. The acrid scratch of a lit match, the sweet perfume of tobacco. The smell of lilacs floating up to him from someone else’s garden.
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