True Colors

by Judith Arnold

  ***

  Friday.

  That gave him a full day to recover from bizarre spell he was under. One entire day to take care of business, drive down to Cambridge, visit with his mentor from MIT, and remember who he was: Max Tarloff. Computer geek. Rich guy. San Francisco resident. Property owner eager to sell the ocean-view house he’d bought on Boston’s north shore two years ago, when his brain had been outvoted by his heart.

  Surely that wasn’t what was happening now. His heart had nothing to do with Emma Glendon and her fanciful painting. He was just…bewitched. Or bored. Or something.

  He hadn’t felt so muddled when he’d first met her. He’d considered her attractive, certainly, but he encountered plenty of attractive women. He’d also considered her a problem, which she was. He’d been annoyed with her. Angry. Exasperated.

  What had happened to change his perspective?

  It couldn’t have been merely that he’d viewed the painting she’d been working on, fascinating though it was. He’d had no idea what her paintings were like when he’d offered to help her find some studio space elsewhere in town. That offer had been utterly irrational. His consenting to let her paint him was equally irrational. Both decisions only dragged him further from his goal of selling the house and getting on with his life.

  True Colors.

  The possibility that the song was what had turned him around, paralyzed certain thought centers in his brain, and made him lose track of his plans and goals, was as crazy as everything else. Yet what else could have caused his mental meltdown?

  He consoled himself with the thought that Emma seemed to have been transformed, as well. At their first meeting, she’d distrusted him. She’d resented him. She’d contemplated calling the police on him. And now…

  She wanted to paint him.

  And he wanted to kiss her.

  Don’t think about that, he cautioned himself. Think about the painting.

  When had he ever been interested in fine art, of all things? His parents had coerced him into those violin lessons, but he’d hated them. His passion had been for stickball, the beach, hip-hop, computers, and eventually girls. By the time he was twelve, he’d mastered C++ and Java programming. He and his Linux operating system had made sweet music together, far sweeter than any sound he’d ever coaxed out of his violin. In high school, he and Laurie Peretzky in high school had made much sweeter music. In college, he and Jenna Parsons. And for a couple of glorious years, he and Vanessa.

  Much sweeter music than that cloying “True Colors.”

  The drive from Brogan’s Point to Cambridge took less than an hour, which meant he could easily return to the Ocean Bluff Inn tonight if he chose. He still had a room waiting for him at the Hyatt Regency in town, however. He’d left his clothes and toiletries at the inn, but he could purchase a few necessities in the city if he decided to stay there. For some reason, he thought it might be best to keep his distance from Brogan’s Point for a while—or, more specifically, to keep his distance from Emma, at least until his brain resumed its normal functioning.

  He was able to park in one of MIT’s visitor lots. Pocketing the claim ticket the lot attendant handed him, he strolled the familiar streets of the campus, basking in the gentle nostalgia characteristic of a returning alumnus. MIT wasn’t a beautiful campus. It lacked the ivy-covered colonial buildings of Harvard, just a mile up Mass Avenue. The buildings here were designed for science and engineering, and they looked it—gray and utilitarian, labeled with numbers rather than names. Even Building 10, with its symmetrical pillars and the Great Dome rounding its roof, looked austere in an ancient Greco-Roman sort of way.

  He checked his watch. Ten-thirty. Too early to call Janet; it was only seven-thirty on the west coast. Besides, he’d spoken to her last night and didn’t have to check in with her today. According to her, the foundation was operating quite smoothly in his absence. A few financial reports had come in, but nothing he needed to review immediately. She would scan them and email them to him if he wished, but really, nothing at the office demanded his urgent attention, and she hoped he was enjoying his trip back east.

  He might be the chairman of the New World Foundation, but Janet could run the place well enough without him. Possibly even better, since he wasn’t in her way, meddling, questioning, analyzing.

  He strolled through campus to the Strata Center, assuming he would find Stan Weisner in that building—one of the few oddly shaped structures on campus, but certainly nothing reminiscent of picture-postcard ivy-covered college campuses. The Strata Center housed much of the computer science department. When Max had been Stan Weisner’s student, he’d called Stan Professor Weisner, but in the past ten years, they’d become first-name-basis friends. He and Stan bounced ideas off each other. Stan had been an early investor in Max’s start-up when it had been little more than the manifestation of Max’s honors thesis, and as a result, Stan was now significantly wealthier than he’d been back in the days when Max had called him Professor Weisner.

  A schedule on Stan’s office door indicated that he was currently teaching a class. Max noted the classroom number and strode down the hall. As an undergraduate, he had loved Stan’s lectures. No harm in catching the final few minutes of his mentor in action before they settled somewhere to drink coffee and talk shop.

  The classroom was full—and why wouldn’t it be, since it was a computer science class at one of the world’s preeminent science and technology universities? Max discreetly slipped into the room through a door at the rear and lowered his lanky body into the only empty seat he saw. At the other end of the room, Stan, his round pink face framed above with wild silver curls and below with a matching silver beard, chattered enthusiastically while scribbling code onto a whiteboard in his indecipherable scrawl. His students leaned forward, some squinting at the squiggly figures on the whiteboard, some tapping the keyboards of their laptops and tablets, some merely shaking their heads in confusion.

  If anything, Stan’s hair and beard looked shrubbier than ever, almost as if his face were at the center of a flower. Max wondered if Emma would want to paint Stan. Surely his radiant face, surrounded by all those chaotic curls, was more worthy of her talents than Max’s was.

  His smile faded. He’d traveled to Cambridge, at least in part, because he didn’t want to think about Emma. But there she was, lodged in his brain. Like a rainbow.

  No. Not like a rainbow. Not like that stupid song.

  Stan finished jotting something on the whiteboard and spun around, words spewing from his mouth and his hands flapping like a chicken’s wings. In mid-sentence, he spotted Max and let out a hoot. “Maxim!” he hollered, pronouncing Max’s name as the way Russian parents did: Mahk-SEEM.

  Every student in the room swiveled around to stare at Max. He sank as low as he could in the chair, but that did nothing to discourage their gawking.

  Even if it had, Stan wasn’t about to let him remain anonymous. “Max, come on up here!” the professor bellowed, gesturing with a wide sweep of his arm. “Do you know who this is?” he addressed his students, who continued to stare at Max until, with reluctance, he hauled himself out of the chair and trudged to the front of the room. “This is Max Tarloff,” Stan continued. “One of the most brilliant CS majors ever to walk the halls of this esteemed institution. Probably the most brilliant student I ever had who didn’t go on for a Ph.D.”

  Max rolled his eyes. He remembered Stan’s efforts to persuade him to apply to graduate school, and his own unwillingness to be persuaded. He’d had a business plan embedded in his honors thesis, and he’d wanted to pursue it. That had turned out to be the right choice for him.

  “Okay, so you haven’t heard of Max Tarloff,” Stan said, obviously noticing the blank stares of his students. “Maybe you’ve heard of NWES? New World Encryption Strategies?”

  The students stopped looking confused. “That’s you?” a young man in the front row asked.

  Someone further back in the room murmured, “Holy shit!”<
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  “That’s Max,” Stan boasted.

  Max rolled his eyes again. He wished he was still seated in that chair in the back row. Or maybe hiding under the chair. He didn’t like the spotlight, and he definitely didn’t like being viewed as a ridiculously successful titan of the computer industry, even if that was what he was.

  “While he was an undergraduate, Max developed a system for encrypting information from credit cards and other scanned material to protect it from hackers and pirates. Brilliant stuff, boys and girls.”

  “I had a good professor,” Max said, trying to deflect some of the attention to Stan.

  “You bet he did,” Stan said, happy to toot his own horn as well as Max’s. “He graduated from MIT, moved to San Francisco, raised some capital and started a company. Some of you may have heard about its acquisition by Google three years ago.”

  Awe shimmered in the gazes of the students as they regarded Max. Uncomfortable as the object of such reverence, he shifted his weight from one foot to the other and focused his gaze on the ceiling tiles. He would have preferred that the universe hadn’t heard about the acquisition, but the sum Google had paid Max for his company had been staggering—just over a billion dollars. Google would have paid even more, but Max had insisted on retaining some patents and licensing agreements, guaranteeing him a steady income from his innovations.

  As if he needed a steady income. Even after distributing much of the windfall to his investors and employees, he’d been absurdly wealthy. He’d bought his parents a house and convinced his mother to retire from her job as a cafeteria lady at P.S. 209; his father had insisted on continuing to drive his cab, but he’d reduced his hours and volunteered for fewer night shifts. Max had invested some of his money in new start-ups, a few of which were prospering and earning him more income. He’d donated generously to MIT’s scholarship fund. And he’d set up the foundation—the best thing he’d ever done, even if it had cost him Vanessa. Maybe because it had cost him Vanessa.

  Hands shot into the air throughout the classroom. Stan’s students had questions for Max. Dozens of questions.

  “Why did you call your company New World?”

  “Because technology is a new world,” Max said. “Also, because my family immigrated from the Old World to America, which we considered the New World.”

  “What advice do you have for people like us who want to develop new apps?”

  “Forget the apps,” Max answered. “How many apps do we need on our phones to find the nearest seafood restaurant? How many apps do we need to play time-wasting games?”

  “But that’s where the money is,” someone called out.

  “It’s not going to change the world,” Max argued. “Do something useful. Develop software that will help doctors pinpoint the kind of tumor a cancer patient has. Develop software that will make automobiles safer. Develop software that will protect consumers who scan their credit cards, so no one can steal their data and empty their bank accounts.”

  “You’ve already taken care of that,” Stan reminded Max.

  “How rich are you?” a girl near the back of the room asked, a question that prompted a good deal of laughter.

  “You want me to flunk her?” Stan joked.

  “No, I’ll answer her,” Max said solemnly. “I kept enough money to live comfortably and used the rest to establish the New World Foundation. We fund educational programs. Scholarship money for college kids, and also programs at younger levels. Pre-K programs in poor communities. Tutoring programs. Classes for immigrants who need language help. We’ve teamed up with several organizations that fund educational programs in Africa.”

  Some of the students looked marginally less impressed with him. Evidently, they thought he ought to be spending his wealth on private jets and ocean-worthy yachts. Or maybe on modern, glass-walled houses with stunning water views.

  Other students looked more impressed. But Max hadn’t set up his foundation in order to impress anyone. To him, it had simply been a matter of his having greater wealth than he could make use of. He could live the rest of his life without ever wanting for anything. Beyond that, why sit on his money when he could instead use it for something worthwhile?

  Besides, money sometimes attracted the wrong people—people who wanted that money. People who pretended to like you because you could do things for them. People whose values skewed in directions Max didn’t exactly admire.

  People who wanted to use you. People who could hurt you.

  Fortunately, the students’ questions veered from a tabloid-worthy interest in his wealth to the technology he’d developed. His scribbles joined Stan’s on the whiteboard, and he reveled in the sheer joy of just doing science, exploring, experimenting, thinking hard. Of all the ups and downs in his life, the years he’d spent at MIT, surrounded by computer geeks like himself, had been among the best.

  He needed this kind of exchange, this kind of mental exercise. Running the foundation was interesting enough, and spiritually rewarding. Monitoring his investments had its own satisfactions. Meeting with colleagues on the boards to which he’d been named was pleasant. Consulting with government officials searching for new encryption strategies allowed him to demonstrate his gratitude toward the country that had taken his family in. Interrogating fresh-faced young techies about the projects they wanted him to invest in stimulated him, even though he often found that their science instincts weren’t as strong as their hunger for the kind of wealth he’d achieved.

  But talking with like-minded souls about pure research… That was joy.

  He wondered if Emma felt a similar bliss when she discussed art with other artists, if she experienced the same rush of giddy satisfaction when one of her students drew a line just so or captured just the right hue in a painting.

  And he wondered why, when he was in his milieu, in the heart of MIT’s computer science building, he still couldn’t stop thinking about Emma.