The Color of Light (19 page)

“Have you ever looked in his eyes, Tess?” His voice was suddenly harsh. “They’re flat. Like there’s no life behind them. Hey, this is New York City. People have a right to be any bloody thing they want to be. But I’ve got a bad feeling about that one. You know he’s Anastasia deCroix’s sweetheart, don’t you? Well, Anastasia’s a mate of mine. Let’s just say he makes me look like a choirboy.”

The moment passed. He got hold of himself, passed a hand through his spiky hair. “Sorry for barking at you,” he went on in a husky voice. “Bit of a rough weekend. I’ve been trying to wrap my head around the idea that you’re going to leave me one of these days.”

She raised her eyes from the pile of pictures. He looked stricken. Coming up behind him where he sat sketching in his chair, she slid her arms around his chest. “I don’t want to leave you, Lucian,” she said into his shoulder. He put the pencil down, laid his hand over hers.

“No one knows me like you do, Tess,” he said with feeling. “Don’t know what I’d do without you.” His pencil went scritch scritch scritch. “You know, April was after me all weekend to fire you. She thinks it would be for your own good, time for you to move on. I said no, of course. ‘Tessa is not negotiable,’ I said. I might have to cut her loose. She’s driving me mad.”

The buzzer rang. The food had arrived. Tessa took money out of Lucian’s wallet, ran down the three long flights of stairs, paid the delivery boy, came back up with the bags. She opened the bright red containers and set them on the table while Lucian disappeared into the stainless steel galley kitchen, returning with a bottle of wine and two stemmed glasses. Tessa couldn’t remember the last time they’d had dinner together. It was just like the old days.

“Non-alcoholic. Not half bad. Try it,” he said. Deftly, he poured for her, then for himself. They clinked glasses. “To the greatest assistant in the world,” he toasted her.

She took one sip, staved off a grimace. It was horrible. “It’s good!” she managed brightly. “Nice woody floral overtones. With an earthy aftertaste, something about green peppers.”

“Liar,” he said, grinning boyishly at her. “Note to self. Wine a big failure, Tess a poor liar. All right, try this, then. I discovered it last week. If you take a bit of the bean threads together with the Szechuan wheat gluten, and you add just a bit of so-called eel…” He stirred them together and pinched it up with his chopsticks. “Open up, that’s a good girl.”

Obediently, she opened her mouth. He deposited it on her tongue. She chewed, swallowed, considered, while he waited expectantly.

“You’re right,” she agreed. “They are better together. If this art thing doesn’t work out for you, you can always go to work for a vegetarian Chinese restaurant.”

“I might have to, if my spring show doesn’t sell,” he said grimly.

“What spring show?”

“Didn’t I tell you? Mary Boone called. They want to take me on.” He gave her a wintry smile.

She dashed around the table to give him a hug. “It’ll sell,” she promised. “Your paintings always sell.”

He sighed, gazed moodily off into the distance. With a single practiced gesture he lit a cigarette, cupping it in his hand till it glowed red, then leaned back in his chair to blow a stream of smoke off to the side, showing off the picture-perfect profile that almost got him a movie deal a couple of years back.

“Tell me about the time you met the Rolling Stones,” she said, propping her elbow on the table and resting her face in the palm of her hand.

“Oh, not that one again. You’ve heard it a hundred times.” he said.

“I love the way you tell it. Please, Lucian.” she begged.

So he told the story about the time Mick Jagger asked him to do an album cover. He did all the voices with Cockney accents, did the funny thing with his hands, the silly faces, the goofy walk, the UK slang that made her laugh. Then he told her the one about the time Steve Martin flew him out to spend the weekend after he bought one of his pieces, the one about the portrait he did for Dennis Hopper and the one about Annie Lebovitz shooting him for a spread in
Vanity Fair.

“I remember the first time you came to see me,” he said, leaning forward and flicking the ash off his cigarette. His words rolled over her like a tropical swell, washing her back to the coast of his island. “You were wearing that macramé shirt.”

“You remember what I had on?”

“Of course I remember, you silly girl. I asked you to the Brewery, bought you a pint.”

She smiled. “I let you win at darts, just because I wanted the job.”

“Let me win? Hardly.” He dragged on his cigarette. “I laid it on thick. Regaled you with sad tales of me Gran raising me all alone in Portsmouth, my sordid youth in Swinging London. By the time I got to the one about my knee being blown up in that IRA bus bombing, I had you. Then, when I asked you to stay you made up some ridiculous story about having to check your answering machine.

“I told you a space had opened up…it opened up because I fired some poor bastard the next day. I knew I had to have you in here. Never told you that, did I.” He exhaled a stream of smoke into the air directly overhead. And then he leaned forward and took her hand, looking at her with the same expression as the night he told her that he wanted to marry her.

After they had cleared the plates away and Tessa had done the dishes, Lucian stretched and said, “You know, I don’t feel like working any more tonight.”

“All right,” she said, getting up, looking around for her bag. She still had to analyze a painting for History of Composition the next morning.

“You don’t have to go, you know.” He was standing at the door with his hands in his pockets, looking beautiful and vulnerable, a dangerous combination. “We can watch a movie. I’ve got
Stairway to Heaven.
Michael Powell, you know. Greatest movie ever made. Or perhaps you feel like letting me trounce you at a game of Trivial Pursuit.”

Tessa looked at her watch. It was already nine o’clock. “I really should
—
”

“Don’t leave me, Tess,” he said in a low, choking voice, looking down at the floor. “Please. I’m not ready for that yet.”

And then his arms went around her, and he pulled her to himself as if he wanted to climb inside her, and she kissed his injured-looking eyes and the place where his hair came down over his craggy forehead and held him tight.

Come on, Lucian. Lift me up now and carry me to your big bed behind the wall over there, teach me how to make love to you. Only say you want me, and I’ll be your slave forever.

But he released her, slipped his hands back into his pockets. “Go on, then. I suppose you’ve made plans with all your new school chums. Don’t mind about poor old Lucian.”

She lingered, feeling guilty. It was cold out. “Maybe I’ll just stay a little longer.”

“Great!” he said enthusiastically, perking right up. “Why don’t you get that packet of snaps from the studio? The ones of
The Devil and Miss Jones.
I haven’t gone through them yet. Maybe something will inspire me.” He pulled a face. Clearly, this was some kind of an assignment from April.

The envelope from the one-hour-photo place on Canal Street lay by itself on the table. Tessa opened the package and flipped through it. Many pictures of an ordinary-looking woman in her thirties with laughably bad Seventies hair and unaugmented breasts. In some shots she was reclining naked on a bed eating fruit. In others, she was sandwiched between two
men. In the last few she was sharing what appeared to be a large tuna wrap with a similarly nude woman. Photographed from Lucian’s television screen, the image was grainy and blurry. Tessa squinted at it, then gasped. It was not a tuna wrap.

She returned the pictures to the envelope. As she did, one slipped out, swooshed down to the floor face down. She stooped to pick it up.

Just another naked lady, lolling across an Indian print bedspread. Tessa frowned. Though the picture was dark and yellowy, there was something familiar about the setting; she recognized the blue glass Art Deco airplane lamp on the nightstand, the framed Cassandre poster behind the bed. April, sprawled languorously across Lucian’s big double bed, knees open wide, looking directly into the camera.

Tessa’s heart kicked into high gear. A cold sweat broke out across her forehead. With a sense of shame, she took the photograph and shoved it deep into her knapsack.

“There you are,” Lucian said, poking his head into the studio. “Well, what do you think?”

“I think I have to go,” she said hurriedly. She threw her bag over her shoulder and scooped up her coat, running for the door.

“What?” Lucian said, bewildered. “What happened? I thought we were going to
—
”

But she was already down the stairs and striding down Church Street. She broke into a run, not stopping until she had crossed Canal, where it turned into Sixth Avenue. And then, under the cold light of the moon, she put her face into her hands and waited to break into sobs.

Nothing happened. Tessa straightened up, panting, her breath rising in clouds of frozen vapor in the frigid air.
Why aren’t I crying?
In the past two months she had wept over Lucian on every subway line in the city.

Puzzled, she hugged her coat tighter around herself. A platoon of taxis shot by, all taken. She pulled the lapels close around her neck and let the wind chase her up Avenue of the Americas towards home.

15

T
he weeks between Halloween and Thanksgiving went by quickly, as they always do. The witches, skeletons and spider webs in store windows disappeared, to be replaced with turkeys and pilgrims and horns of plenty.

The next time April’s Friday painting class met, Turner showed up and gave them a stern talking to on the subject of how important it was to make the brand-name artist welcome at the school. When Graham tried to tell him about her questionable teaching methods, Whit got a faraway look in his eyes and walked out without another word.

April continued to act like a feral cat staking out territory. Whenever she came around to Tessa’s easel, she regaled her with tales of double dates they went on with other famous artists, the weekend at the Cape they finally rescheduled, a house they were looking at together in Sag Harbor. She began sending her on time-consuming errands: she wanted coffee, but only from faraway Dean and Deluca’s. She sent her to the office to make handouts advertising her upcoming gallery opening, or to break a hundred dollar bill into singles in a neighborhood without a single bank. After three weeks of April’s special attention, Tessa was willing to look for alternatives. Geoff Andersen’s monitor was willing to trade positions with her, but when she went to Whit to finalize the transfer, he told her that he wouldn’t allow it this far along in the semester.

For his part, Clayton continued to torment April Huffman at every opportunity. One week he filled his canvas with the silhouette of Graham’s back, insisting it was all he could see from where he was standing. The next week, when the pose was particularly explicit, he painted April’s head onto the nude on his canvas. And on the day she came in with her hair dyed red,
Clayton, leafing idly through the paper, expressed his doubts to David that the carpet in the ad he was looking at matched the drapes.

Fortunately, the school was able to recoup the money lost the evening of the Halloween party. Rafe attended the Guggenheim benefit on Anastasia’s glamorous arm, easily seducing the majority of Giselle’s friends and relations into taking out their checkbooks. By the end of the evening she said she had forgiven him, but he could tell she was still miffed, and rightfully so.

On Monday, visiting Blesser’s office for a scheduled meeting, he found Whit sitting on the corner of the chief financial officer’s desk, his arms folded, the smile on his face making him look vaguely demonic. Though he didn’t say anything, he gloated as if he were in possession of a wonderful secret.

Levon was there too, glaring at him. After the financials were done with, he casually asked him into his office, where he spent the next half-hour enduring a well-earned tongue-lashing on the subject of his steamy little tango with a student and his inexcusable disappearing act on the most important fundraising night of the year, at a time when the school’s existence itself was in danger.

Tessa really did try to meet with her adviser to discuss her end-of-year thesis project, but Josephine broke every appointment she made. It seemed like a child was always sick, or that her newest babysitter had just called to say she was going back to Honduras.

On the first Monday following the Halloween Party, she found a gift left on the work table in her studio; a tube of genuine Old Holland Cerulean blue, made by the same venerated supplier Van Gogh had bought his paint from. It was accompanied by a note, written in a beautiful cursive hand on a sheet of heavy, cream-colored paper.
Make something that matters,
it read. Under it, an R twined through an S.

She turned it over and over again in her hands. That one tube cost fifty dollars, her paint budget for the entire semester. She weighed it, thinking of Raphael Sinclair’s eyes when he asked her to dance, remembering the cool pressure of his fingers between her shoulder blades, the roller-coaster thrill-ride sensation of being swept backwards around the room.

In class or alone in her studio, she would feel a dizzying surge of unexplained heat, and she would glance up to see his coattails billowing past as
he swept through the hallway. Once, in sculpture class, she looked up from her turntable just in time to catch his eye as he strode towards the office, and he smiled hello, turning her insides to jelly. Thinking back on the night of the Naked Masquerade, a secret smile would creep across her features as she bent back to her work.

As she doodled in the margins of her notebook during an art history lecture, she was struck forcefully by a clear vision. Men, women and children, dressed in World War II era clothing, carrying suitcases, books, violins, sucked into a whirlwind, carried upward, where they dissolved into gray smoke. Hastily, she had scribbled it down, then stared at it in surprise. She hadn’t had an original idea since she had been consumed by the Lucian/April morass.