True Colors

by Judith Arnold

  Chapter Seven

   

  Andrea Simonetti seemed perturbed. “Monica had a friend visiting her,” she told Max. “There’s nothing in her lease banning visitors.”

  “This is a bit more permanent than a visit,” Max told the broker. The real estate company where she worked was located inside a building that looked like an actual house, with shingles and shutters and a cute brick chimney, although the house sat on Main Street and was abutted by a driveway that led to an asphalt parking lot in back. Andrea’s office was the size of a small bedroom, but instead of a bed, it contained a broad desk with a computer humming on it, and the walls were adorned with a few framed certificates attesting to Andrea’s professional status and several dozen glossy photographs of houses for sale.

  “In other words, the friend is living in your house,” Andrea surmised.

  Max nodded. “Not just living there. She’s running a business out of the house.”

  “A business?” Andrea’s impeccably tweezed eyebrows arched so high, Max was afraid they’d collide with her hairline.

  He laughed. “Not that kind of business. She teaches art. And that’s the thing. I can’t have her running a school in the house, with little kids doing finger-painting and trashing the place.”

  “Is the place trashed?” Andrea’s eyebrows soared again.

  “Not that I could see.”

  “We need to do a walk-through,” Andrea said, jotting a note on the small pad on her desk. “Monica is liable for any damage to the place. We’ve got the security deposit, but—”

  “The thing is, this second tenant…” What could he tell Andrea about the second tenant? That her hair was the color of fire and her lips made him think of plums, sweet and tart and juicy? That beneath her baggy apparel he could detect the sort of enticing curves most women went on drastic diets to eliminate and most men dreamed of? That a stupid song had scrambled his usually orderly mind and he was no longer quite sure of who he was?

  No. He couldn’t say any of that. Just thinking it gave him a headache.

  “She needs to work,” he said. “I want to help her find someplace else to hold her classes.”

  “I don’t see how that’s your responsibility,” Andrea said, her tone indignant. “I’m so sorry. I should have checked to make sure Monica was honoring the terms of the lease. I’ve known the Reinharts for years. Monica is a good girl. I assumed she would entertain friends in the house—and I assumed she would do so in a civilized manner. No blow-outs, no keggers, no inviting half the world over via Twitter.”

  “Forget parties. Forget trashing the place.” Max tried to steer Andrea back to the issue that concerned him. “You know the available properties around here. Is there any reasonably priced space where Emma could hold her classes?”

  Andrea shrugged. “I’d have to research it.”

  “Please do.” Max rose from his chair.

  Andrea peered up at him. Her lipstick was as impeccable as her eyebrows, the dark pink applied with precision. Max had never understood the allure of lipstick. If you wanted to kiss a woman, you didn’t want to kiss some cosmetic product. And if you didn’t want to kiss her, lipstick wasn’t going to change that.

  “What about listing the house?” Andrea asked. “Do you want to go ahead with that?”

  “I plan to sell it,” he assured her. “But don’t list it yet. They have two more months on the lease.”

  “Selling a house takes time. Especially an unusual house like yours. It’s fabulous, but it’s not exactly your standard-issue Boston area home. I know we’ll get a good price for it, but it might take longer to find a buyer who loves it as much as you did when you bought it.”

  Max wasn’t sure he’d ever loved it. Vanessa had. He’d bought it for her.

  But that was none of Andrea’s business. “If you want to get started on some preliminary work—have it appraised, photograph it, make sure everything is in order—that would be fine. But don’t list it yet. I’ll let you know when I’m ready to take the next step.”

  Leaving Andrea’s office, passing two younger brokers at their desks in the front room and stepping outside into the sunny afternoon, Max tried to puzzle out why he was suddenly less than eager to sell the house. Every remotely possible explanation led back to that stupid song. Like a rainbow? What the hell did rainbows have to do with anything?

  He strolled down the driveway to the lot in the rear, where he’d parked his rental car, and climbed in. Had he been at Logan Airport only yesterday, signing the paperwork in that area of the terminal where all the rental car desks were clustered? Had it been a mere twenty-four hours ago when he’d phoned the Hyatt Regency in Cambridge on his way out to the rental car lot and told them he’d be checking into his room that evening, after a quick trip north to Brogan’s Point?

  Why was he still here? Why had he spent a night in the Ocean Bluff Inn instead of the Hyatt? Why hadn’t he told Andrea to go ahead and list his house for sale?

  Why did he want to help Emma find studio space? Yesterday, when he’d seen her huddling inside the front door of his house with those two little girls, her thumb poised on her cell phone so she could dial 911, he’d had no interest in helping her. Quite the opposite—he’d been startled and then enraged to discover her living in the house. He’d wanted her gone.

  Now… Now he didn’t know what he wanted.

  Because of that ridiculous song? Or because of Emma’s stubborn chin and her defiant attitude, her lush lips and her amazing hair?

  He pulled out of the driveway and cruised slowly down Main Street and then Atlantic Avenue, searching for studio space. As if he knew what such a thing would look like. The businesses lining the street had signs and displays in their windows: hardware store, boutique, gift shop, consignment shop, knitting shop, diner. Nearly all the stores were occupied, and none of them seemed like a suitable venue for an artist to hold classes and paint.

  What did Max know about artists, anyway?

  He wondered what Emma had done to create a studio in his house. Had she just taken a room and filled it with art supplies? Was the room full of half-finished canvases? Did it reek of turpentine?

  Without consciously thinking about it, he steered out of town and up the twisting back road that climbed the hill to his house. Other houses stood along the road, nestled among the pine trees. Some were set back from the street by long driveways, and others loomed close to the roadway. His house sat at the top of the hill on a two-acre plot. An architect had designed the house for himself twenty-five years ago, and sold it only because he’d reached the age when New England winters were more than his arthritic joints could tolerate. Max was only the second person to own the house—and he’d never even hung his jacket in one of its closets. That was actually rather pathetic. An architect’s dream come to life, and Max owned it, and he’d spent not one single night under its roof.

  He reached his driveway and let the car roll to a stop. The scent of the ocean, so prominent down the hill, along Main Street and Atlantic Avenue, was overtaken here by the fragrance of the surrounding pine forest. Although he couldn’t smell the ocean, he could see it. The architect had cleared enough trees to provide a spectacular vista from southeastern-facing side of the house.

  Max turned from the ocean view and regarded the house thoughtfully. He could see why Vanessa had fallen in love with it. Too bad she’d never really gotten to enjoy the place. She’d furnished it, decorated it, discussed her plans with him. And then everything had fallen apart.

  At one time, that thought would have filled him with bitterness. Standing on the front walk right now, making his way to the porch, pressing the doorbell… The song he’d heard in the bar last night drifted through his head, and to his amazement, he felt no bitterness at all.

  As she had yesterday, Emma peeked through the sidelight. Unlike yesterday, however, today she felt safe in opening it when she saw Max on the other side of the glass. Even though he had a key and could have let himself in, he rema
ined standing on the front porch as she opened the door, gazed up at him, and said, “Hi.”

  As if she’d expected him.

  “May I come in?”

  “Sure.” She stepped back and he entered the house.

  He wanted to focus on the house itself, to view it the way Vanessa had the first time Andrea had shown them the place. He wanted to see it not as a burden to be shed but as a home, a place where Emma and Monica lived.

  White carpeting, was his first thought. Not very practical.

  Emma smiled hesitantly. “I’m working right now, so…”

  “I didn’t mean to interrupt you,” he urged her. “I just wanted…” To see you, he almost blurted out. “To see your work space. You need a new studio. What is that going to entail?”

  She turned and strolled ahead of him down the hall. His gaze journeyed from the tumbling waves of her hair down her compact body, clad today in baggy denim overalls. Her hips shimmied gently with each step. Her feet were small, her sneakers spattered with paint. Fortunately, all the sneakers left on that impractical white carpet were tread marks. The paint must have dried long ago.

  As they entered the great room and neared what Andrea had called a floating staircase—one that rose from the center of the room, not bordered by walls—he heard what sounded like a low chuckle coming from Emma. “What?” he asked.

  “Did anyone ever tell you you talk funny?” she asked, then hurriedly added, “I don’t mean that as an insult. It’s just—I mean, what is that going to entail? No one says entail in casual speech.”

  Max hesitated, his foot on the first riser as she proceeded up the stairs. “They don’t?”

  “No one I know does.”

  “You know me.” He followed her up the stairs to the loft. Few people noticed that he spoke—well, funny wasn’t the word he’d use to describe his speech. He loved language and all the words it provided for him. He used them whenever he needed them. Entail was a perfectly good word. “English isn’t my first language,” he told her. He wasn’t sure why he’d revealed that about himself. But then, he wasn’t sure why he’d driven up the hill to the house in the first place. He wasn’t sure why he was doing a lot of things.

  Emma had already reached the loft. She spun around and stared at him. “Really? I never would have guessed. You speak beautifully. You just use unusual words sometimes. What’s your first language?”

  He didn’t answer right away. He was too distracted by the sight of the loft, which she’d converted into a splendid work space. The floor was covered with thick, stained drop cloths. Canvases stood stacked against a wall, draped in plastic wrap to prevent them from marring the wall itself. Sturdy shelving along another wall held supplies. A large table stood at the center of the loft, old and scarred and covered with paints, brushes, and a jar of murky solvent. Three easels stood near the table, the center one holding a rectangular canvas, maybe two feet by three feet, that featured a painting of an adorable little girl, her eyes bright, her cheeks a soft, tawny peach hue, her rippling blond hair topped by a bejeweled crown. Behind her face, a half-painted castle loomed, and what appeared to be a unicorn stood on the stretch of green lawn beside the castle. The easels flanking the painting held photographs and sketches of the girl, the castle, and the mythical horned creature.

  Max was mystified. “A unicorn?”

  “It’s what I call a Dream Portrait,” Emma explained. “I paint the person and surround her with her dreams. Ava Lowery dreams of being a princess. What’s your first language?”

  “Russian,” Max said, his gaze riveted to the painting. He picked a path carefully over the drop cloths for a closer look at the canvas on the easel. The afternoon’s natural light flooded through the glass wall of the great room, bathing the painting in a warm, golden glow.

  “Russian?” Emma said. “Really?”

  “I was a toddler when my family came to America,” he told her. “A year and a half old. For the first few years we were in the United States, my parents spoke only Russian, so that was what I learned first. I picked up English pretty quickly, though.”

  “Wow. Russia! Why’d they come here?”

  He shrugged. “A better life. More freedom.”

  “So where did you grow up? Where did you learn English?”

  He finally tore his gaze from the painting to look at Emma. Her face glowed even more beautifully than that of the little girl on the canvas. He didn’t think his life story was particularly interesting, but her eager curiosity touched him. “Brighton Beach. It’s a neighborhood in Brooklyn where many Russian immigrants live. Little Odessa, it’s called.”

  “Sure, I’ve heard of Little Odessa. Before I moved here, I was living in Dumbo.” He frowned, picturing the cartoon elephant with the big ears. “Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass,” she explained. “It’s on the western edge of Brooklyn. Lots of artists live there. Lots of lofts converted into studios. It’s getting gentrified, so the artists will probably be forced out soon by high rents.”

  He’d known his way around Brooklyn pretty well while growing up, but he had never heard of that neighborhood. “Dumbo,” he said, then shook his head. “I gather Brooklyn has become somewhat more upscale since I left.”

  “You live in California now, right?”

  “San Francisco.” He ambled around the loft, careful not to trip over the wrinkles and bumps in the cloth covering the floor. The view of the ocean through the glass wall was spectacular. “I like living near the ocean.”

  “This house qualifies,” Emma said, glancing toward the glass wall for a moment and then gravitating back to the easel. “You should keep it.”

  “It’s a little far from San Francisco. I would have a difficult commute to work.”

  “Big deal. The U.S. has two oceans. You might as well have homes near both of them.”

  The idea was tempting. But this had been Vanessa’s house, not his, not theirs. She was gone, and he wanted her house gone, too. Perhaps that sentiment was irrational, but he was rational ninety-nine percent of the time. He could allow himself one tiny percent of irrationality.

  “I guess that would be pretty expensive,” Emma conceded. “Two houses. Sheesh. I can’t imagine owning even one house. But if I were you, I’d dump the San Francisco place and keep this one.” She studied her painting thoughtfully, then lifted a paintbrush and dabbed a touch of shading to the castle’s main turret.

  “As I said, I work in San Francisco,” he said, not adding that he could work on the east coast as easily as the west. Computers, phones and airplanes could keep him connected. And overseeing his foundation and his investments wasn’t exactly the most demanding job in the world. He had Janet running the office in San Francisco. She was alarmingly competent. And he was a call or a text away if she needed to contact him.

  He could work here as easily as there. He could convert the magnificent loft into an office and manage the foundation while gazing out at the ocean. His office in San Francisco was on Market Street, which he supposed offered a pretty enough view for an urban vista. But it wasn’t as stunning as the view through the glass walls of his house.

  Vanessa’s house, he reminded himself.

  Emma took a step back from her easel and scrutinized her painting. She had the easel positioned facing the wall of glass so the daylight streaming through the panes would illuminate it. He studied her profile. Her nose had a slight bump in it, not visible when viewed straight on. Her chin was surprisingly strong. Or maybe not so surprisingly, he thought. She was clearly a tough woman, determined and stubborn. Did the shape of a woman’s chin correlate to her personality?

  She startled him by turning suddenly, so she was facing him. “I’d like to paint you,” she said.

  Her words surprised him even more than her abrupt movement. His own words surprised him even more. “I’d like to kiss you.”