True Colors

by Judith Arnold

  ***

  No one answered when he rang the bell.

  He checked his watch again. Nine-fifteen. Not terribly early, even for a Saturday morning. He rang the bell again, then shielded his eyes with his hand and peeked through the glass sidelight into the entry hall. No sign of life.

  Emma and Monica couldn’t have moved out yet. Emma didn’t even have a place to move to. Certainly she couldn’t camp out in that stuffy little room at the community center. That was a public building—offices, a swimming pool, a gym, a hub of Brogan’s Point activity. Not a homeless shelter. And her situation there hadn’t been finalized yet.

  She’d joked about living in a tent—although, given her back-to-the-earth childhood, maybe she hadn’t been joking. He couldn’t believe she would have evacuated the house that quickly, though.

  However, she could have gone out that morning, or last night. She could have returned to the Faulk Street Tavern, heard some other song spilling from the jukebox—“When a Man Loves a Woman,” perhaps; hadn’t Stan said that song had an aphrodisiac effect on his wife?—and gazed into some other man’s eyes. She could have gone home with that other man, gone to bed with him. Moved on, even if she hadn’t yet moved out.

  Max rang the bell one last time, then pulled his key from the pocket of his jeans. It was his house, after all. He was allowed to enter it.

  Silence greeted him as he closed the door behind him. “Hello?” he called out, not wanting to startle Emma if, God forbid, she’d brought that other man back here for the night. Bracing himself for that possibility, he ventured down the hall toward the great room, moving cautiously, doing his best to clomp his feet so she’d hear his approach. The plush white carpet absorbed his footsteps, though. And if she and the other man Max had conjured in his imagination had spent the night together, they’d probably be sound asleep now.

  Why had Vanessa chosen to floor the house in white carpet? It was pretty, but so impractical. Had she planned to make visitors remove their shoes at the front door, and pad around in their bare feet? Would she have provided slippers for her guests?

  He didn’t exactly mind the white carpet, but it would have to go. He knew nothing about interior decorating, and even less about color. Would brown carpeting be boring? Would green make the house look like a golf course? Would red be too garish? Once he had the place recarpeted, should he ask the installers to save a scrap of the carpet from the stairs to the loft as a souvenir of the hottest sex he’d ever experienced?

  In the kitchen, he found an empty wine glass on the counter by the sink. It looked clean, but when he lifted it to his nose, he could smell a residue of wine in it. A bowl containing a banana, a couple of apples, and a twig of green grapes sat on the center island. Surely if Emma and Monica had moved out, they wouldn’t have left their fruit behind. Or a dirty glass. The last time he’d been in this kitchen, when Emma had made him a delicious omelet for breakfast, he’d been impressed with how tidy the place was.

  Of course she and Monica hadn’t moved out. They had another month and a half on their lease. Monica was probably with her boyfriend, and Emma was with…

  He didn’t want to think about it.

  He felt a little like a trespasser as he moved through the airy, sunlit rooms on the first floor. You own this house, he reminded himself. It’s yours. Yet it felt like Emma’s more than his. More, even, than Vanessa’s. Emma had lived there for only a few months, but in those few months she’d made the place her own.

  He circled back to the great room and started up the stairs to the loft. At the top, he froze.

  Emma lay sprawled out on the floor, her hair a tangle of fiery red around her face, her baggy cotton sweater and jeans spattered with paint, her feet clad in her familiar, paint-stained canvas sneakers. A smear of paint marked her chin like a blue scab. Her chest rose and fell in a steady rhythm. She was sleeping.

  Beside her, on an easel, was a painting of Max, staring out at a panoramic view of the ocean. In the painting, he might be seated on that ghastly, uncomfortable stool, which stood exactly where it had been when he’d posed on it just twenty-four hours ago. He might be gazing through the wall of glass at the Atlantic Ocean at the bottom of the long, panoramic hill on which his house stood.

  His house. Emma’s home.

  He scrutinized the loft. The table at the center of the room held tubes of paint, a jar filled with several paintbrushes in various sizes, and a plate smudged with blends of paint—some blue, some yellow merging into a rich, dark green, the color of the sea in the painting. Dollops of black and brown swirled together like veins in marble, just as his hair in the painting was black with veins of brown. Two intense blues lightened with pale paint to create the color of his eyes.

  The table also contained another empty wine glass, and an empty green wine bottle. The glass in the kitchen assured Max that Emma hadn’t drunk the entire bottle herself. Someone—Monica, he hoped—had drunk at least a glass of it. And Emma didn’t look drunk. Her breathing was relaxed and steady, her complexion a healthy peach hue.

  Besides, if she’d gotten drunk, she couldn’t possibly have produced such an amazing painting. Max knew all the myths about tortured artists drinking or ingesting or shooting up assorted intoxicants and then, under the influence, allegedly creating masterpieces. He didn’t believe those myths. Great artists might be substance abusers, but the artwork they accomplished while drunk or stoned was never as beautiful or moving as what they might accomplish while sober.

  Max was a scientist. He indulged in alcoholic beverages when the occasion called for them. And he’d never come up with as good a solution to a programming challenge after drinking a few beers or a vodka as he’d come up with after consuming a mug of strong black coffee or a glass of steaming Russian tea.

  Emma wasn’t drunk. Just asleep. Since this painting hadn’t existed yesterday, she must have painted it overnight. No wonder she was exhausted.

  She couldn’t possibly be comfortable, sleeping on the rumpled, stained drop cloths spread across the floor of the loft. To pick her up and carry her to her bedroom would be awfully presumptuous. But to leave her on the floor seemed heartless.

  Before he could decide what to do with her, she stirred. A soft sound—half a purr and half a sigh—slipped past her parted lips. They looked rosier than he’d remembered, in contrast with her smooth, pale skin and that blot of blue paint staining her chin. Then her eyes fluttered open. She peered up at him, looking sweetly befuddled. At least his presence didn’t alarm her. Finding him in her loft didn’t cause her to scream or recoil in horror.

  “Max?” Her voice was thick with drowsiness.

  “You didn’t answer the doorbell, so I let myself in. I’m sorry.”

  “No, that’s all right.” She rubbed her eyes with one hand and pushed herself up to sit. “It’s your house.”

  He almost retorted that it was hers more than his, but he wasn’t sure if that was true. He also wasn’t sure if his apology was for having entered the house or for having said the wrong thing yesterday—or for having failed to say the right thing.

  “I thought you’d gone back to California. Monica said you checked out of the Ocean Bluff Inn.”

  “I just went down to Boston,” he said. “Actually, Cambridge. I wanted to see an old professor of mine.”

  “Oh, you’re a Harvard man?”

  “M.I.T.”

  She shoved a heavy tangle of hair back from her face and sighed again.

  “Either way, I guess you’re a genius, right?” She remained seated on the floor, apparently not quite fully conscious. She yawned, rubbed her eyes, rolled her shoulders, yawned again.

  He needed to move down to her level, rather than towering above her. He considered sitting on the stool—no, too uncomfortable. Or on the stairs—no, too erotic a memory attached to that place. Instead, he dropped onto the floor facing her, but not too close, not crowding her. He crossed his legs, rested his elbows on his knees, folded his hands, and watched her.
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br />   “To be able to paint something like that—” he gestured toward the painting “—is genius. It’s amazing.”

  “It still needs work,” she said. “I’ve got to extend the seascape and the sky. The ocean needs more turbulence, I think. And I didn’t get your sweater right. I have to do some more shading, give it some more dimension. It’s funny—I had no trouble picturing your face, but your sweater caused me problems.”

  He shot the painting another awed look. “You did all that last night?”

  “Last night into this morning, until I finally had to take a nap.” She yawned yet again, reminding him of a cat. A beautiful, sexy cat stirring awake after dozing in a patch of sunlight.

  “It’s extraordinary.” He peered up at the painting from his position on the floor. “Different from the painting you did of the little princess girl.”

  “That painting was much more representational,” she agreed. “This one is more impressionistic. Rougher lines, less blending of color. I don’t know. If I’d done it during the day, when I was fully rested, and I’d relied on the photos I took of you… But I didn’t want to. I wanted to feel the painting, not copy the photos.”

  “Well.” He continued to study it, then shook his head, trying to wrap his head around the idea that she’d created the painting without photos, without him posing for her. By feel. “It’s amazing,” he repeated, wishing he had the vocabulary to capture the painting’s effect on him. Did she feel the wistfulness with which she’d imbued the painting? Did she feel the loneliness he saw in the her rendering of his eyes, the stubbornness in her rendering of his mouth? Did she feel how troubled he was, how desperate to make things right and how worried that his attempt would only make things worse?

  “Feel free to name a price,” she said, then gave a half-hearted laugh that made him wonder if she seriously wanted to sell the painting to him. “We never discussed what I charge for my work, let alone signed a contract. But I sure as hell could use the money.”

  Okay. She’d raised the issue, however unwittingly, before he’d had to. He drew in a breath and said, “We have to talk.”

  “If it’s about the house—”

  “It’s about the house and a lot more,” he said. Her eyebrows lifted slightly. She looked intrigued.

  He didn’t want to intrigue her. He wanted to make her understand who he was, and to love him not because of it but in spite of it.

  He wanted her to love him.

  So much was at stake. But if he wasn’t honest with her, nothing else would matter. He took a deep breath for courage and said, “I’m very rich.”

  Emma snorted. “Compared to me, everyone is very rich. Even Monica.”

  “No, Emma. I’m talking rich. Top one-percent rich. Top one-tenth-of-one-percent rich.”

  She angled her head slightly, as if appraising him in this new light. “Well, I assumed you weren’t poor. This house isn’t exactly a shack, and you were renting it to us for peanuts. I figured either you were stupid or you were nuts. Or you were so rich, you didn’t need to charge us a high enough rent to cover your mortgage and taxes on the place.”

  “There is no mortgage. I paid cash for it.” Did he sound arrogant? Snotty? “Emma…I’m one of those gazillionaires you read about in the business pages—assuming you read the business pages, which you probably don’t,” he added when he saw the faint smirk curving her lips. “I’m a computer scientist. A software engineer. I developed an encryption program that protects credit card transactions, among other things. I got some venture capital funding, hired a small staff, and developed the software until it was ready to market. A major player in the industry offered me a ton of money for the company. So I sold it.”

  “And now you have a ton of money,” Emma concluded.

  “Yes and no.” He considered his words and reminded himself to be honest. “Yes. I have a ton of money. But a smaller ton of money than I might have had. I’ve got a seat on the board of directors of the company that bought mine, which pays a ridiculous amount to each of us whenever the board meets. I’ve made some smart investments in other start-ups. But even without that income… After the sale, I distributed shares of the profit to my staff and investors. But I had an obscene amount of money. More than I knew what to do with. More than was right, frankly.”

  “Right?” She looked intrigued again. “Is there a right amount?”

  “No one should have as much money as I did, not when there are so many people in the world who have so much less. I set up a foundation—the New World Foundation—and put most of my money into that. It funds educational programs, both here and abroad. One of our focuses is education for immigrants, helping them to assimilate and get up to speed. I was lucky I was young when I came to America—I learned English quickly and started school with my peers. My parents spoke some English, which helped. But we have so many immigrants in this country who have so much to contribute, and they come here unprepared for our schools, or with language issues. New World funds a lot of educational programs devoted to helping them.”

  “That’s nice,” Emma said. She looked mildly perplexed, as if unsure why he was telling her all this.

  So far, he’d told her only the good parts. He pushed onward. “When I sold my company, there was a party to celebrate the acquisition. I met a woman at the party. Vanessa.”

  He’d half expected Emma to react in some way. Most women didn’t like to hear about other women, at least not in the context of romantic entanglements. But Emma didn’t seem the least bit jealous or annoyed. She sat unflinching, her eyes now fully in focus, her expression curious. “Your fiancée?” she asked.

  “My ex. Yes.” He ruminated for a moment. “She was…how can I put this? I was a computer geek from M.I.T. She was the sort of woman you expect to see on the cover of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue. There was more to her than her beauty, of course. She was intelligent. She was fun. We started seeing each other. We got engaged.”

  Emma said nothing. She simply watched him, waiting.

  “And then, we broke up.” Not true, and he corrected himself. “Vanessa left me. But not before I’d bought her this house.”

  Emma’s brow dipped in a frown. “You’re still not over her, are you.”

  “I’m very much over her,” Max assured her. “But I bought this house only because she wanted it.” He fidgeted for a moment with his watchband, stalling. He hated to admit what an idiot he’d been. But he had to be honest with Emma, and being honest required him to acknowledge his foolishness. “She’d grown up in New England, and she said she’d always wanted an ocean-view house. We looked at a few places in Maine, but the winter weather is so brutal there. Then we found this house. She said she wanted it, so I bought it. I told her to decorate it any way she wanted. It was hers.”

  “So she’s responsible for all the white,” Emma said. “The walls, the carpet—it’s kind of sterile, if you ask me.”

  “Not my true colors,” he joked, his gaze flicking toward the painting on the easel. The colors Emma had used to depict him and the ocean were so rich, so lush, so vibrant. He should have figured she wouldn’t be a huge fan of Vanessa’s austere decorating choices.

  “Meanwhile, I set up my foundation. I funneled more than half my wealth into it. Vanessa was appalled.”

  “You should have consulted her,” Emma said, surprising him by taking Vanessa’s side. “A big financial decision like that? The couple ought to make it together.”

  “She didn’t want to make financial decisions,” he explained. “That wasn’t why she was upset. She was upset because my personal worth had been cut by close to two-thirds.”

  “But…you said you still have a lot of money.”

  “I do. But I had a lot less than I had when she’d accepted my proposal. She wanted to marry a billionaire. A mere millionaire wasn’t good enough for her.”

  Emma scowled. “It’s not like you blew the money on something stupid. I mean, a foundation—that’s pretty noble.”


  He made a face. “I didn’t do it to be noble. I did it because it seemed like the right thing to do. I wanted to see the money put to good use, helping people the way my family could have been helped when we first arrived in America. And helping kids in poorly funded school districts. Helping kids become more math- and science-literate. Helping kids in developing countries, where the need is so great. The foundation was a way to spread my wealth around and let it accomplish some good in the world. I couldn’t have spent all that money if I lived to be a thousand years old.” He sighed. “Apparently, Vanessa could have spent all that money. She was furious with me for not granting her the opportunity.”

  Emma absorbed this. “So she broke up with you, and you were stuck with this house.”

  “I never really considered it my house. I didn’t even want to think about it. I was grieving. And feeling like a schmuck. I thought she’d loved me. Me, an egghead from M.I.T.”

  “A very sexy egghead,” Emma said, tickling a faint smile out of him.

  “I found Andrea Simonetti running a real estate office in town and asked her to rent the house. I didn’t want it sitting empty, but I couldn’t sell it until I’d looked at it one more time. And for a year, I couldn’t bring myself to look at it, because seeing it and remembering how stupid I’d been to buy it for Vanessa would make me bitter. But this spring, I finally decided I was ready to sell it. I never gave any thought to the tenants. Until I met you.”

  “And discovered I was running an illegal art school on the premises.”

  “I was angry about that.”

  “I know.” She smiled.

  She wasn’t responding the way he’d expected. She seemed rather placid about everything he’d told her. She’d known about Vanessa—he’d told her that before—but she hadn’t known about his wealth. Perhaps she just didn’t care about him enough to be angry that he’d concealed the truth about himself for so long. Or perhaps she was an extremely clever actress, behaving blasé so she could get her hands on his money, the way Vanessa had wanted to.

  He simply couldn’t believe that of Emma, though. The one time he’d tried to give her something—the continued use of this house—she had rejected the offer, and she’d rejected him.

  “I would never try to buy you,” he said. “I hope you know that.”

  She averted her eyes and toyed with one of her shoelaces, twisting it around her finger and then releasing it. “I never thought you were trying to buy me,” she said slowly. “But yes, I’m poor. I’m your stereotypical starving artist. I’m okay with that. I didn’t become a painter to get rich. I became a painter because painting is what I do. It’s how I process the world.”

  He could more or less understand that. He processed the world through mathematics, through logic, through computer code. Different medium, but essentially the same idea.

  “I don’t mind being poor. I grew up poor. I’m used to not having much. It’s no big deal to me. As long as I have a roof over my head, some food in the fridge, an occasional glass of wine, and my art supplies, I’m fine. I don’t need more than that.”

  “That sounds more noble than my foundation,” he joked.

  Her eyes flashed with emotion. She didn’t smile. “I don’t mind being poor, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to be someone’s charity. That’s how you made me feel, Max. Just when I’d figured out a way to make everything work—a place to teach my art, a way to earn a little extra income—you stepped in and acted as if I couldn’t make everything work. You offered to fix everything for me. I didn’t know how rich you were. I didn’t know that my staying on in this house wouldn’t make any difference to you, money-wise. What I knew was that we’d slept together, and then you offered me the house because you owed me. You made me feel like a whore.”

  His heart broke a little. “God, Emma. I never meant that.” He wanted to reach for her, gather her to himself, hug her until he could convince her that he’d had only the best of intentions. He’d wanted her to have everything she wanted: a roof over her head, food to eat, wine to drink, a place to create her art. That was all.

  She wanted so little. He had so much.

  “I thought you’d be angry with me for not telling you who I was. I feel I’ve been dishonest with you. But I’ve learned to be very discreet about my wealth.”

  “You were afraid that if I knew how rich you were, I’d turn out to be another Vanessa, huh.”

  He shrugged.

  “In case you haven’t noticed, I do not look like a Sports Illustrated swimsuit model.”

  “I’d have to see you in a swimsuit to know for sure,” he said.

  There. A hint of a smile.

  “I don’t want your money, Max.”

  “What do you want?” he asked. “If you were going to paint your own dream portrait, what would you paint?”

  Her smile widened. She gazed past him, through the glass wall at the morning beyond, the wide blue sky and the wide green ocean below it. “Paint,” she said. “I’d paint paint, and canvases. I’d paint time. I don’t know how to paint that, but that’s what I want. More time. I’d paint a bottle of wine, or maybe champagne.” She turned back to him. “I’d paint an ocean view, just like yours.”

  “I didn’t realize the ocean view was my dream until you got me to acknowledge it,” he admitted.

  “It’s a good dream. There’s something elemental about the ocean. It’s where we all came from. Where we started.”

  “All things being equal,” he said, “would you let me make that dream come true for you? Would you let me give you an ocean view?”

  “If you’re talking about this house—”

  “I’m talking about you, Emma. I’m talking about us. You took this house and made it a place of creativity, of beauty. But it needs more. It needs color.”

  She eyed him quizzically. “You want me to redecorate the house?”

  He couldn’t abide the distance between them any longer. He reached out, snagged her hand, and drew her to him. Once he had his arms closed around her, he felt totally at peace, the same way he felt when he gazed out at the ocean. “Just by living here, you made this house yours,” he said. “It’s your home.”

  “What about Monica? She lives here, too.”

  “She lives here,” he agreed, “but you inhabit the place. You make it a place of learning, of sharing, of creating. If you want to pay me rent, pay me rent. I don’t care. I just want you to stay here. No,” he contradicted himself. “I want us to stay here. I want this to be our place.”

  “Our little love nest?” she asked skeptically, even as she snuggled closer to him.

  “Our home. You can make it into a home.”

  “You live in San Francisco.”

  “My foundation is there. I can fly back and forth. I don’t have to be there every day. I’ve got a phone. I’ve got a computer. I’ve got enough money to buy a private jet if I need one.” He brushed his lips against her brow. “I’m not giving you anything, Emma. I’m asking you to give something to me.”

  “What can I give you? Other than the painting?”

  “Love. Trust.” He used his thumbs on her chin to tip her face up, and he pressed a kiss to her mouth. “Color. Fill my world with color, Emma.”

  They kissed again, slower, deeper, a kiss that shimmered with light and shadow and shape, a prismic array of colors. A kiss that convinced Max that Emma was the source of all things beautiful in his world, that with her talent and creativity she could turn anything he might imagine into a reality. A kiss that assured him that he could share her vision, that if he saw the world through her paintings—through her eyes—their love would shine like a rainbow.

  A kiss that proved his dream didn’t exist merely on canvas. It existed here, in this room overlooking the ocean. It existed in this kiss.