The Color of Light (26 page)

“Who’s SD?”

“Sara,” said David. “We work on the same painting sometimes. Our styles are similar.”

“Wow,” Harker said, looking up from his guitar. “That’s pretty intimate, isn’t it?”

David had leveled his gaze at Tessa. It was clear to her that this was not the direction he wanted this conversation to go. And just then, Portia had come in through the curtain.

But the big story upon her return from Chicago involved Lucian. Half a dozen calls awaited her on the answering machine, all saying the same thing; he had broken up with April, he was in a bad way, would she meet him for dinner. Still in her coat, she had stabbed his number into the phone before the second message spooled to an end.

He’d greeted her at the door looking strained, distant, a little sad. “You’re the only one who really understands me, Tessa,” he said as he took her hand, slid it over his belly and down the front of his jeans.

“I love you,” she whispered afterwards in his bed, laying her head on his chest. He grunted, already falling asleep.

Tessa sat up beside him for a long while, staring at the famous artist cradled in the crumpled sheets, his skin colored blue and gold in the lamplight, reflexively taking note of the shadows and highlights as they chased each other across his sleeping figure. For the first time, she noticed the lines around his eyes, the flesh just beginning to sag under his jaw. And though he was fit, working out at a gym downtown twice a week, his was still the body of a middle-aged man.

Raphael Sinclair’s lean physique, prowling through her studio, stretched out on her couch, flickered before her mind’s eye. Feeling disloyal, she had pushed the thought away. She loved Lucian, none of that mattered. Still, something had been left unsaid in the dark; something was not wrong, and yet not right.

“How about you?” the waitress was saying.

Tessa stared at her blankly. “I’m sorry. I was thinking about something else.”

“Do you need another minute?”

Tessa shook her head no, she was ready, she got the same thing every time anyway, the bean and cheese burrito. The beer had softened the edges
of everything, making the room feel warmer. David, on her right, leaned over to reach for a napkin, brushing against her shoulder, and it left a pleasant tingle.

“Whit says we have to go to the Matisse show,” said Graham morosely. “He wants me to see
Carmelina
up close and personal.”

“You don’t like Matisse?” said Harker.

“Most overrated artist on the planet.”

“I went last Saturday,” said David.
“Carmelina’s
not so bad in person. But the crowds! I haven’t seen anything like it since the Van Gogh exhibitions in the Eighties.”

“I thought it was only open to members over the weekend,” said Graham.

“My mom’s a docent.”

“Well, la-di-dah,” replied Graham without conviction, paging through a
New York Post
that lay open on the table.

“How was your Thanksgiving?” Portia asked him.

Graham grimaced. “Oh, the usual. I pretended to be straight. They pretended to believe me.”

“Your family’s been here so long they were probably at the first Thanksgiving.” David said to Portia. “Do you do anything different than the rest of us mortals?”

“We have a big family get together with the cousins at my grandfather’s house, just like anyone else.”

“Sounds like fun.”

Her lips were compressed into a thin line. “Well, it’s not. My grandfather makes a big deal about inspecting my work. He leafs slowly through my portfolio, drawing by drawing. Big sighs at each page. Then he tells the whole table how artists were so much more talented when he was in art school. My grandmother favors my cousin India and her brothers more than me and my brothers. India reminds me yet again that her family has a bigger house, faster cars, better connections and more money. One of the younger cousins breaks a cherished antique handed down from my great-grandmother. My uncle drinks too much. We pretend it is fine. I’m sure the same stuff happens in your family.”

“My parents are divorced,” David said. “My grandparents are dead.”

“Lucky.” Portia muttered.

“So, who’s going to be our next president?” Harker said, changing the subject, stretching his legs out under the table.

“Oh, please Lord, anybody but Bush.” said Graham. “Not a day goes by that I don’t worry that someone’s going to shoot him and make that moron Quayle our President.”

“I like Clinton,” Clayton said. “My daddy says he’s the smartest man he’s ever met. Also, it would be nice to have a fellow without an accent in the White House.”

“How can you read that crap?” asked David, indicating the
Post.

Graham fixed him with a disapproving glare. “Excuse me, but this newspaper has been the source of some of the finest writing in the history of journalism. I am speaking, of course, of the greatest headline of all time,
Headless Body found in Topless Bar.
Also, I need to know what Princess Di is up to at all times.”

“Say, Tessa,” said David, working on his second Corona. “How’s it going with old Lucian?”

She knew she shouldn’t say anything, but the beer coursing through her system did all the talking. “He broke up with April.” she said, and a smile, shy at first, then dazzling, broke across her face.

“Must’ve been after this picture was taken, then,” said Graham, tapping on the newspaper. Tessa leaned forward. Lucian and April, shoulder to shoulder, smiling brightly for the Page Six photographer. She shrugged, though her confidence stumbled a little. She remembered the photograph of April, still in her knapsack, and felt guilty.

“And looky here, if it isn’t the founder of our school.” Graham turned the tabloid around and pushed it into the middle of the table. Raphael Sinclair, caught in the harsh light of a photographer’s flash, wearing a dinner jacket, was cozied up next to a dark-skinned girl in a white halter dress. They were both smiling.

Harker read the caption out loud. “Photographed at the opening of the new Matisse Exhibition at the Met, Raphael Sinclair and a friend.”

She was surprised by the sharp pang of emotion. Immediately, she reprimanded herself. Of course he was at a party with a beautiful girl. He could have anyone he chose. Despite the week’s commotion, she
had still had the presence of mind to notice that he hadn’t stopped by her studio.

“Hey, Tessa. What did the great Lucian Swain give you for your birthday?” said Gracie, with a wink.

“Yeah, girlfriend!” Portia laughed. “Anything you can show us?”

She smiled tentatively. Lucian had forgotten her birthday. “No, nothing I can show you.”

Amidst the hooting, Clayton looked concerned. “Tessa, please,” he said. “Whatever’s going on between you and Lucian Swain, just don’t get Mr. Sinclair angry. You know. Vampire and all.”

Tapping Page Six, she said, “I don’t think we need to worry about that.”

The food came. To her vast relief, the subject of conversation turned to other things; plans for the holidays, meetings with advisers, galleries they had visited, breakthroughs in their work. In the storm of events that had followed her catastrophic visit to Chicago, she had forgotten the peculiar conversation in her studio last Wednesday night. She leaned forward and opened her mouth to tell them, but as the words formed on her lips she thought the better of it. She was beginning to feel sleepy. It was very warm in the room. And then the waiter was wading through the tables, carrying a jiggling flan with a candle in it and singing
Happy Birthday,
and the whole restaurant joined in. Somehow, David ended up walking her home on his way to the subway, and in the warm amber glow of the beer, his eyes met hers, and his hands lit on her shoulders as he pulled her towards him for a kiss.

19

T
essa was late to class the next day. For the first time in her life, she had a hangover; that morning, as she got out of bed, she staggered, gripping the side of her dresser for support. She had to sit back down until her room stopped revolving.

As she walked the three-quarters of a mile from her apartment to school, gusts of December wind threatened to loft her canvas into the wind like a kite at every street corner. Her head pounded with every jarring step. Maybe someone in the office would have Advil. Guiltily, she remembered kissing David last night under the awning of her building. What had she been thinking?

She hurried down the hall towards the classroom, burdened with the lamps and heaters. Her heart gave a little twitch when she remembered whose class she was headed for. She dreaded confronting April after the events of this week.

A first-year student stared at her as she passed, a tall, gangly printmaker with blond dreadlocks. Self-consciously, she raised her hand to her head, wondering if something had blown into her hair on the way over.

A group of sculptors lounging on the couches near the office followed her with their eyes as she hustled past them towards the classroom. A pair of first-year painters who had been chattering near the display case fell silent at her approach. Puzzled, she checked her reflection in a glass case before she swung into the classroom. Nothing out of the ordinary. Just the usual unruly hair. Maybe her eyes were a little puffy .

The room was dark. No one had thought to open the shades. The class skeleton, swaying gently on his stand in a dusty corner, had a cigar stub
clenched jauntily between his teeth. Today he was also wearing a sporty-looking driving cap, a mordant caricature of Levon.

The model was leaning against the stool on the low stage, reading a newspaper, still dressed in his robe. She dropped her bag on a painting stand next to Graham. It was the spot nearest to the door, belonging to the easel with the worst view. She was the last one to arrive. The rest of the class was already there, bent over their palettes.

A few minutes went by before she realized that it was unnaturally silent, devoid of the usual back and forth of classroom chatter. Something big had blown through before she arrived. Her pulse quickening, she wondered if it was possible that someone had seen her kissing David. He was on the other side of the room, making a point of not looking at her, carefully mixing his paints. Even Ben was studiously avoiding her glance, taking a great interest in arranging his tubes of paint. Harker had his earphones on, deep in his music. But Clayton lifted his head to meet her gaze, and there was an unfamiliar look on his face, something like desire, and hunger, and a kind of surrealistic awe.

Graham leaned over to her and whispered, “You’ve been outed.”

Clayton put down his palette knife and came to hover near her, his hands jammed in the pockets of his jeans. For the first time since she had known him, he seemed tongue-tied, searching for the right words.

“Tessa,” he said in his soft Southern accent. “When the time comes, I hope you’ll consider me. I respect you so much, as an artist, and as a woman. It would be an honor.”

“Shut up, Clayton,” said Ben.

Tessa swung around, looked to Graham in confusion.

“April’s been here already,” he said, his lip curled. “And, boy howdy, is she pissed. She filled us in about her painful but necessary breakup with her precious Lucian Swain. Incidentally, it seems that all the rumors about his legendary equipage are true.”

He cleared his throat before he went on. “More of interest to you,” he continued mildly, “she mentioned, shall we say, the state of your maidenhood. I believe her exact words were, ‘Tessa’s a
virgin!
Can you believe it? What is
up
with that, anyway?’”

“People were staring at me in the hallway,” she whispered.

“Well. The door was open. And she was pretty loud. Whatever medication she’s on, they need to jigger the dose.”

Tessa was dumb with shock. She knew what every man in the room was thinking, imagining, picturing, even if they had never thought of her in that way before.

“Her last words as she left the classroom were, ‘Now they can finally have each other.’”

Tessa reached inside her knapsack and pulled out the photograph of April spread-eagled on Lucian’s bed. Without a word, she walked over to Clayton and handed it to him. Then she left the classroom, her head ducked down inside the collar of her coat, not looking up until she was safely inside her apartment.

It was late on Friday afternoon. The sun had made a great show of setting among stacks of fluffy purple evening clouds. Levon was just putting away his files when there was a soft knock at his door. “Come on in,” he called, slipping the last one into a cabinet behind his desk.

When he turned back around, Raphael Sinclair was in his office, watching him. At six foot two and two hundred and fifty pounds, Levon Penfield didn’t startle easily, but he took an involuntary step back into a cardboard box full of office supplies.

“Man!” he said, shaking his head and grinning. “Gets me every time. Where’ve you been? I haven’t seen you since Monday’s meeting.”

“Prague,” he replied, removing his fedora and picking a speck of city soot from the crown. “Flew over to talk to an artist out there. Got back at five o’clock this morning.”

“Phew. You must be tired. Was it worth it?”

“Regretfully, no.”

“I hear Prague is beautiful,” said Levon. “All that Art Nouveau and crazy Gothic architecture.”

“It is,” he agreed. “It’s changed a lot. Lots of cafés, tourists, students. You should go sometime.”

“Sounds like you’ve been there before. Were you there when it was still under communism?”

“Something like that.”

He’d been to Prague, yes, but it was to chase down a lead, not an art teacher. For years after the war ended, he’d checked the Red Cross lists, looking for a Sofia Wizotsky, a Sofia Weiss. He’d even been vain enough to seek a Sofia Sinclair. A private detective he paid to look for just this sort of thing found one in Prague. She was even an artist this time. He’d spent the better part of the past weekend lurking outside a wildly ornate apartment building on Parizska Street in the old Jewish Quarter, wondering what he would say when he saw her. Unfortunately
—
or fortunately, depending on which way he chose to look at it—Sofia Sinclair turned out to be an expatriate art student from the UK, with a spiky blond updo and an East End accent.