The Color of Light (28 page)

Tessa reached school with scarcely enough time to pick up the lights and heaters. The lobby was wallpapered with an impromptu tapestry of new flyers, in magenta, cyan and yellow, doubtlessly advertising a band someone’s boyfriend played for. She rode up the creaky old elevator, mentally urging it to hurry, too worried about being late to read the colorful photocopies lining the walls. She stopped in the office to pick up equipment. Burdened with the lights and heaters, she hurried down the hallway, the flyers on the display cases dancing in the breeze from her passing. A flurry of xeroxes covered the wall near the elevator banks. Flyers were
taped to the white marble buttocks of the statues in the hallway. Flyers covered the window in the door to the classroom, one in every color.

Her hand on the knob, Tessa finally glanced at one of the photocopies. Her jaw dropped slowly open as she realized what she was looking at: April Huffman’s naked body, splayed over hundreds of printed flyers, fluttering from every surface in the building.

I have a show opening at O.K. Solomon in a week,
boasted the words above the grainy picture.
Do you?

Frantically, she spun around, her hand clapped to her mouth as the enormity of the event registered. April’s cooch winked out at her from flyers in lavender, in periwinkle, in pink, in chartreuse, in neon orange and canary yellow. Flyers papered every surface; every window, every cabinet, every display case, every column, every door, every wall. Tessa ran to the stairs, slammed open the steel door; flyers were taped neatly up and down the stairwells as far as the eye could see.

Slowly, she walked back to the classroom, picked up the heaters, and opened the door.

Bedlam. Everyone was talking at once. Tessa’s heart was pounding, her mouth dry. She dropped the heaters near the stage, threw her bag on a table.

“David saw the whole thing,” Portia insisted. “Let him tell it.”

At eight forty-five, April had gotten off the elevator and started down the hall towards the classroom, her high heels clacking loudly on the wooden floor. David, who had arrived early to mix his palette, happened to be in the lounge at the exact moment that her eyes flicked up at the solid wall of colorful copies, rustling in the rush of air from the descending elevator.

At first she’d peered closely, frowning. Fumbling in her bag for her glasses, she slipped them on and brought her face within an inch of a flyer printed on fluorescent pink paper. David said he’d heard a choked-off exclamation, then saw her rear back, almost falling off her heels, after which she’d gone tearing off towards the office. Watching through the glass, he saw her tell the secretary, her hands jerking hysterically through the air, and then she steamed back out and stomped off down the hall, tearing copies off the wall as she went along.

Back inside the classroom, she seemed to pull herself together. The model was already on the stand, reading the paper. She addressed his back, asking him to disrobe so that she could pose him. He turned around and flung off his robe, wearing nothing but a wide, friendly grin.

“That was when she screamed at the top of her lungs and left the room.” David explained.

“Clayton was really thorough,” said Ben. “He registered with the modeling office and everything.”

“Oh Lord,” breathed Tessa, feeling triumphant, feeling ill. “Was he naked?”

“Boy howdy,” said Harker.

“Like a Greek god,” added Graham.

“Where is he now?”

“Levon’s office,” said Ben.

“You should have been here,” said Graham, taking off his earphones. “It was epic in both scope and vision.”

“What should we do now?” said Gracie.

They turned to her expectantly, waiting for an answer. With no teacher, the monitor was in charge of leading the class. “I think we should draw,” said Tessa. “We’ll all take turns modeling.”

“Me first,” Gracie volunteered. She pulled her short, pleated plaid jumper up over her head, unconcerned with appearing before them in a short white belly shirt and black leggings. Part of a tattoo peeked out of the waistband just above her round bottom, an angel’s wing. She lay down on the model stand, crossing her arms behind her head and opening her knees in a conscious imitation of April’s photograph.

The room fell silent. Tessa thought she could hear the sound of the men breathing as they evaluated her voluptuous body. One by one, they dipped their brushes in their turpentine and began to paint.

April never returned to class, but Whit showed up with his clipboard, his square, heavy body stiff with suppressed rage. In clipped, furious tones, he accused them of harassment, spitting out in no uncertain terms that they were all responsible for her departure, and they had damn well better find a way to apologize, fast. They could start by taking down the flyers. As
they filed out of the room, he bent a ferocious glare on Tessa. She stared back at him, ashamed but unrepentant.

She was alone in the classroom, taking down the lights, when Levon stuck his head in the doorway. She stumped across the wooden floor, feeling like she was on the way to her own execution.

“Tessa,” he said in a low voice, once she had joined him out in the hallway. “Clayton swears up and down that this was completely his idea, that you had nothing to do with it. Is that true?”

Half-heartedly, she nodded her head up and down. A flyer they had missed accused her from the side of the display case.

His voice dropped another notch. “April says this photograph came from Lucian Swain’s studio, that it had to have come from you.”

She couldn’t look at his kind face. She stared wordlessly at the toes of her boots, white with plaster dust.

“Clayton claims he found this picture in a girlie magazine.”

She didn’t answer, didn’t move. She could have been laughing or crying; her hair was a curtain shielding her from his scrutiny.

“Come to my office,” he said.

She trailed after him. Levon’s was the third door down the corridor, on the left. He closed the door behind her, indicated the seat in front of his desk. Raphael Sinclair was there, too, leaning against the cabinets, looking out the window at a dull gray sky scudded over with low-hanging pewter-colored clouds. Now she was embarrassed, a high, scarlet flush flaming across her face.

“Clayton is in a lot of trouble.” said Levon, lowering himself into the seat behind his desk. He was as serious as she had ever seen him. “He’s been suspended. April just left. She wants me to call the police.”

Her heart squeezed itself down into a tight ball inside her chest. She was incredibly guilty. There was nothing she could say. Certain that she was going to be expelled, a tear slipped down her cheek. It all seemed terribly unfair.

Levon leaned forward on his desk. “I know what’s been going on,” he said gently. “For what it’s worth, I think April deserves it. Matter of fact, I think it was brilliant. But…” and here he sighed, “We are talking publicity disaster here. Look. I know you care about this school, and that’s why I’m
talking to you. I’m going to let you in on a little secret. The Academy is running out of money. There are grants out there that will only look in our direction if April teaches here. Whit wants her to be happy, no matter how bad an instructor she is. So, he’s out for blood.”

Tessa blanched as white as a sheet of Arches watercolor paper.

“However,” he continued matter-of-factly, “She can’t do anything to you without exposing her own bad behavior. So you’re in the clear.”

A great rush of relief flooded her body, leaving her weak. She stumbled to her feet, found her way to the door.

“On the other hand, Clayton’s daddy is getting on a plane right about now, coming to take him home.”

Tessa stopped, her hand on the doorknob. “What?” she said slowly. “Isn’t Clayton, like, thirty?”

“Well. Twenty-nine,” he said. Then, mildly. “I don’t know if he’s ever told you. He spent several months in a psychiatric institution.”

She stared at him, stupefied. “His father had him committed.” he went on calmly. “Apparently, he’s got some trouble with authority figures. Also, he exhibits a certain amount of dangerously reckless judgment. As you can see.”

Tessa stood rooted to the spot. She felt as if someone had told her the past three months had been a dream.

“Okay. Your hand has been officially slapped. You can go.”

She was dismissed. Rafe was looking at her now. He gave her a small, reassuring smile.

Chastened, she shouldered her bag, slipped out the door. As it clicked closed behind her, she heard Levon call out, “Hey! You have a good Shabbos, now.”

The phone started ringing at nine. Deep in sleep, he had ignored it the first three times. The fourth time, he struggled up out of the depths of a dream, slammed his hand on the receiver and put it to his ear.

“You’d better get down here,” Levon had said in a level voice.

Though he’d gotten to bed only a few hours earlier, Rafe had risen and come straightaway. As he entered the building, he noticed a flourish of colorful flyers lining the lobby, the walls of the elevator, fluttering all down the corridor to Levon’s office.

“Terrible, just terrible,” he had murmured, hiding a smile as he listened to the charges.

The celebrated Ms. Huffman was pacing furiously back and forth across Levon’s office, her voice shrill, demanding a full police investigation. Nothing less than having Clayton arrested would satisfy her. And she knew exactly who that photograph had come from.

“What can we do to make it up to you?” Levon had said soothingly, spreading his hands wide, palms facing up in apology. “We value the balance you bring to our program. How can we make you feel comfortable again?”

April had stopped pacing and stared at him, her eyes hard and glittering. She knew what she wanted; Tessa shamed, humiliated and expelled. Something about her reminded Rafe of a mean dog guarding a bone. With her greedy red mouth, her smooth auburn hair, her lithe, toned body and her emotional volatility, Rafe could well understand how Lucian would want to bang her. But there was something ugly walled up in there, a venomous streak a mile wide. He couldn’t believe he had chosen her over Tessa.

Levon was sympathetic, penitent, regretful, conciliatory, inferring that it might be difficult to make a charge of indecent exposure stick in an art school where full frontal nudity was an everyday affair. He apologized profusely and sincerely for the students’ behavior, reminding her that they were, after all, students, not criminals.

In the end, April had to be content with Clayton’s immediate suspension. Slinging her oversized bag over her shoulder, she grabbed her black leather jacket and stalked out of the office, muttering that she had some calls to make. And with that, the disaster was over.

“Whatever they’re paying you here,” Rafe said to Levon, “it’s not enough.”

“If anything like that happens again,” Turner said flatly, “they’re out. No questions asked.”

“C’mon, Whit,” said Levon. “She was asking for it.”

Rafe dropped into the chair in front of Levon’s desk. “What happened, Whit?” he asked, honestly curious, dusting off a knife-pleated pants leg so blue it was almost black. “Remember when you first started here? There
were seven students in that first class. You were working out of that hole on Rivington, heroin addicts shooting up in the entryway. You were beside yourself when I found you. A classical art school teaching Renaissance technique! You couldn’t wait to get started. You called it
historic.
Now that we’re attracting better students, getting some positive notice, you can’t wait to take an axe to it. Why?” He leaned forward, his eyes taking on an unnatural blue-white glow. “Is it the money? Is it the prestige? Or are you just tired of waiting for fame and fortune?”

“What do you mean, when
I
first started here?” Whit snapped. “You wrote the checks, all right. But I pulled together the first teachers, the staff, the catalogue, the freaking
office machines.
This is my school as much as it is yours. Bernard is in touch with people he knows in the NEA, the Krasner Foundation,” he held up his hands, ticking them off on his fingers. “
—
the Kellogg Institute, the Warhol Center, the Forbes Foundation—all eager to support us if we just add a few big names to the faculty roster. So they can’t draw! So what? They have great connections. They need assistants. At the very least, they can teach the students how to
sound
like successful artists.”

“The students don’t want to be postmodernists, Whit,” said Levon in a reasonable voice. “They came here because they want to be Rembrandt.”

“Don’t you get it?” Whit’s face was red, the veins standing out in his neck. “We could be really big.
And you are holding us back.”

“Whit.” Rafe’s voice was cajoling; strong, soft, inviting, an irresistible melody. “We are a small boutique art school, dedicated to the giving over of classical technique. After two very short years here, our graduates scatter to the ends of the earth. In time, they will pass on what they learn from us to their own students. Every course counts.”

“Save the sales pitch for the debutantes,” Whit snarled. “I’ve already heard it.”

Rafe had never seen him angry before; his chin was trembling in outrage. For the first time, he noticed a gold cross hung on a filigreed chain around the Chairman of the Painting Department’s neck. He was certain he hadn’t seen it before. He leaned in for a closer look.

“Never knew you were Romanian Orthodox, Whit,” he said quietly.

The two men confronted each other across Levon’s desk. Turner’s face was livid, a meaty purple. By contrast, the founder’s expression was calm, clear-eyed, almost tranquil.

There was a soft knock. Bernard Blesser put his head around the door, looking for Whit. Upon seeing Rafe, he swallowed, blanched, almost backed out.

“Hello, Bernard,” said Levon. “No, it’s all right, we’re finished here.” Whit glared at Rafe one last time, wheeled and stomped out of the office.

The two men sat in silence for a moment.

“Well, we got it under control,” said Levon. “That’s the important thing.”

“Yes, yes, of course.” Rafe agreed.