The Color of Light (35 page)

“Nice night,” said David.

“It is,” agreed Portia, folding her long body into a chair. “It’s always warmer here by the water. Sometimes you can see sea lions sunning themselves out on the rocks.”

Ringo struggled into her lap, turned a few circles before settling down with his head on her knee. She leaned back and closed her eyes. She looked serene, at peace. Portia belonged here, Tessa realized, as much a part of the house and the town as the rocks jutting up out of the harbor, in a way she herself had never belonged anywhere, until she had come to New York.

Clayton had had three flutes of champagne, and was waving his glass at Graham for a refill. “All right. Listen up, y’all. I’ve got one for you. Does art have a purpose? Discuss.”

“Who says art has to have a purpose?” countered David.

“Everything has a purpose,” said Graham.

“How about evil?” said Ben. “Does evil have a purpose?”

“Sure it does,” said Graham dourly, buried deep in his coat. “It keeps us home at night; it keeps us from wandering, keeps us in line, makes us appreciate what we have. It serves as a dark mirror for us all to look inside and say, ‘At least I don’t do
that.’”

“Whoa there, son,” said Harker, rolling a cigarette. “Before you go all Psyche 101 on our asses. There’s enough hardcore evil to go around. Hitler
was evil. Stalin was evil. This guy Saddam Hussein is evil. I don’t know what purpose they serve.”

“It’s not just the big bad,” said David. “Hannah Arendt wrote about ‘the banality of evil.’ You know, Eichmann didn’t hate anyone. He just followed orders, handed in the paperwork, made sure the trains ran on time.”

“Hey,” said Clayton. “I just wanted to talk about art. If we’re going to be discussing the banality of evil, I’m gonna need another beer.” Unsteadily, he got to his feet, went back into the house.

Tessa was lulled by the rhythm of the runners rocking on the slatted floor of the veranda. Beyond the end of the porch, the fog rolled itself slowly into indefinable shapes, clearing briefly to reveal the lighthouse and the piers of the Jamestown Bridge before closing up ranks again. The only sound was the mournful lowing of the foghorn.

“Do you think it’s possible for someone to change?” she said suddenly. “Someone who’s done…
really
bad things.”

“Hitler, Stalin, those guys were psychopaths,” said David. “I think that kind of evil is hardwired.”

“People change,” said Harker. “I was a different guy in high school. Skipped class, stole stuff, smoked a lot of weed, blew off anyone who tried to help me. That was before I got into music.”

“Is that when you got all those tattoos?” Portia asked. Thorny vines climbed up Harker’s arms, from his wrists up to his shoulders. Skulls and roses bloomed in the thicket of canes and leaves.

“Nah. That was later.” His guitar lay across his lap, and he picked it up now, strumming out the opening chords for
God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen.

“Hey,” Portia said. “If you could ask God one question. What would it be?”

“I’d have to think about that,” said Harker. “Wait. I got it. I want to know about the Resurrection. Like, do you have to come back in the body you died in? I mean, what if you were old and sick?”

“Maybe you get a choice,” suggested Katie.

Harker shivered. “I’d hate to come back as me back then. All that cow-tipping and setting stuff on fire. And I’d have to learn to play guitar all over again.”

“I would want to know if my father is proud of me.” said Ben. “He died when I was eleven.”

“I’m sorry,” said Portia wistfully.

He shrugged his big shoulders. “He worked on the first nuclear submarines, before anybody knew asbestos was bad for you. What about you, Portia?” he said, turning the conversation away from himself. “What would your question be?”

Portia stroked the dog’s silky head. “I would ask why there has to be so much suffering in the world.”

“How about you, Graham?” said Harker, his hands busy with the guitar.

“Well,” Graham drawled. “If I believed in God, which I don’t, I would ask Him this. When animals die, do they go to Heaven? Also, after the Resurrection, will the pets come back too? I had this shepherd mix named Blue.”

“You’re not taking this very seriously.” Portia said, smiling.

“I’m with Graham,” David admitted. “I’m kind of an agnostic. You know. Prove it to me. But if He really exists, I’d ask Him how long I’ve got.”

“Really?” asked Tessa curiously. “I don’t think I want to know.”

“Also, how I go. That way, I can plan for it.”

There was a heavy tread on the floorboards of the veranda. Clayton was back. “What’d I miss?” he huffed, opening a Sam Adams.

“Oh, you know. If you could ask God one question.”

“That’s easy,” he answered immediately. “If time travel exists, and if there are travelers among us now.”

Ben said, “Come on, Clayton. You must have a question.”

He put the beer to his lips, then wiped his mouth. “All right. I guess I’d want to know what I should do for my thesis project.”

There was a lull in the conversation, smoothed over by the water lapping against the shore. The foghorn groaned again. A buoy clanged from somewhere out in the harbor.

“I know I already said the thing about the pets,” said Graham pensively. “But I guess if I could, I’d ask if there was someone out there for me. I’m always falling for straight guys, hoping they’ll have this epiphany that they’ve really been gay all along. Did I really just say that out loud,” he mumbled, covering his eyes. “I must be completely hammered.”

Tessa turned to look at Graham, slumped down in his rocking chair, his sallow face floating like a ghost over the upturned collar of his raincoat. She leaned over and touched his hand. “There’s someone out there for you, Graham,” she said earnestly. “There’s someone out there for all of us.”

“Even Clayton,” said Ben.

“I really love you guys,” Clayton blubbered sloppily. Then he put on a wolfish grin, treating them to his best Elvis sneer. “Seriously, though. I’m really glad to know y’all. I didn’t know a soul when I moved to New York. You’re like family to me. Only, you know, without any of the hurting.”

“I didn’t know anybody either,” said Ben. “I’m glad I met you, too.”

“Us, too.” said Harker. “All right, that’s not strictly true. I already knew a lot of people here, and Katie’s got some cousins. But still. You guys are all right.”

“That goes for me, too,” David agreed. But he was looking at Tessa.

Tessa leaned back in her chair, stared down into her glass. “I couldn’t have gotten through this year without all of you,” she murmured.

“I think we’re all incredibly blessed to have found one other,” Portia said softly.

“Say,” Harker said. “Getting back to Clayton’s question. Does art have a purpose?”

“Sure,” said David. “It elevates whoever is looking at it.”

“To enlighten,” said Portia. “To inspire.”

“To educate,” said Ben.

“To the class of ‘93,” said Graham, solemnly raising his glass. “May we be blessed with the ability to create works of art that elevate, that enlighten, that educate, that inspire.” The students rose to their feet and clinked glasses.

“To art that matters.”

“Those are good answers,” said Harker, taking out his sketchbook, another cigarette jiggling up and down in the corner of his mouth. “I’m going to write them down.”

Which was followed by the marathon dreidel battle. It began genteelly enough. An hour later, when Portia and Tessa quit, the boys were still at it, hurling terrible invective at each other, imprecating each other’s integrity, manhood, the sorry state of their mothers’ virtue.

Tessa and Portia cleared the table, brought the dishes to the kitchen. Irma washed up in the old apron-front sink. Tessa carefully wiped the china dry with soft dishcloths while Portia counted the silver and returned it to the vault. By the time they were finished, it was ten-thirty. Tessa needed to keep busy. Left on her own, her mind kept returning to scenes from the night before. Portia must have sensed it; when the last dish was put away, she turned to her friend and said, “You know, it’s still early. Come on. I’ll show you the grounds.”

The floor in the grand hallway was checkered with black and white marble, just like in glossy magazine spreads of fancy homes in
Architectural Digest.
Just inside the foyer stood a bust on a fluted marble pedestal. Tessa thought it looked vaguely like Portia. She was searching for an identifying plaque when she remembered that she was in a private home.

“It’s by Rodin,” Portia said, hiding a smile. She knew what Tessa had been doing. “He made it when my great-grandmother was studying in Paris. I found it in a cupboard in the attic. When I asked my mom why it wasn’t on display, she said, ‘It never really looked like her.’ After I was done genuflecting in front of it, I said, ‘Mom.
Rodin.’”

“She kind of looks like you,” said Tessa.

Portia tilted her head. “Really? You think so?”

Tessa took in the long lovely face, the calm eyes, the strong chin, the hair piled up in a bun on top of her head. By coincidence, Portia was wearing her hair in a bun tonight. The resemblance was uncanny.

“What was her name?”

“Rose. Rose Sawyer Ballard. I never met her, she died before I was born. From what I can gather, she was a remarkable woman. It was a real scandal when she went to art school. People would cross to the other side of the street to avoid her. Well-bred girls just didn’t do that back then, draw naked men.”

They left Ringo in the house; he whined pitifully, dancing on impatient white paws, but Portia wanted to avoid a repeat encounter with a family of skunks that wandered the grounds at night. They descended the wide stone steps, crossed the circular Belgian block driveway. Tessa followed Portia down a flagstone walk that vanished into a shifting wall of fog. As visibility diminished, Tessa grew uneasy; she hesitated, looking back at the house, its squared-off edges already lost in the fog.

“I love it when it’s like this,” she heard Portia say from somewhere up ahead. “It’s like being in a ghost story.”

Well. If Portia wasn’t going to be afraid, she wasn’t either. They followed the walkway as far as it went. At its end, they turned onto a path that meandered to the left, gravel crunching under their feet.

Ahead of them was the Monet bridge spanning a goldfish pond in the Japanese style. Ghostly images of trees materialized around them, one, then another, veiled in mist. A structure loomed up at them, twenty feet ahead; Portia stopped.

“Want to see the playhouse?”

“Sure.”

They crossed the little bridge, the fog muffling the sound of their footsteps. “My grandmother had these Italian craftsmen make replicas of furniture from the big house,” Portia explained. “Little armchairs, little Persian rugs. I used to love being out here away from the grownups. My brother and I played house all the time. I haven’t been inside in years.”

She tried the knob. It wouldn’t yield. She frowned, put her hands on her hips. “When did they start locking it?”

The little house must have been handsome once, but now it looked as if it had fallen upon hard times. Located under the trees, its stucco was turning green with moss. The hipped roof was sticky with sap, under a blanket of pine needles. Frustrated, Portia tried to sweep them off with her coat sleeve, quickly giving up. She looked glum.

“That’s all right,” said Tessa, comfortingly. “We’ll come back another time.”

“I really should come out here sometime and clean this up,” she said. Her face brightened. “Wait a minute,” she said. She pulled out the keyring she had used to open the china cupboards, sorted through the various blackened skeleton keys, trying them in the lock one by one until finally, with a satisfying click, Portia exclaimed, “Open Sesame!” and pushed open the door.

It was empty. A lone folding chair was left in the middle of the room. Portia was crestfallen. “Oh,” she said wistfully. “He must have given the furniture away.” She dropped down into the chair. It gave out a puff of dust. A frightened vole trundled away along the baseboard. “My grandfather is always doing that, giving stuff to museums. They love him.”

“I’m sorry,” Tessa said, wanting to comfort her friend. Even in the dark, she could make out the dovetailed joints, the carved moldings around the window, and she turned around in a circle, awestruck by the exacting nineteenth-century craftsmanship. “It’s still amazing. How often do you see coffered ceilings in a child’s playhouse?”

Portia didn’t answer. Her face was occluded, far away.

“It’s not going to be in the family much longer. None of us will be able to afford it. My grandfather is talking about selling it. The Yacht Club is interested.”

Tessa hugged her arms around herself for warmth. The yellow windbreaker she had borrowed from the front closet on her way out the door was made for summer squalls, not a night in December, even a mild one.

“When I was fifteen,” Portia said absently, staring out of the child-sized mullioned windows. “My cousin Caroline got married out on the lawn.”

“That must have been fun.”

“Mm,” Portia agreed. “My grandfather put up a big white tent, right over there, in front of the house. I was a bridesmaid. I had never been in a wedding before. I had a new dress that Caroline had picked out, and someone was coming to do all the girls’ hair and makeup.

“Caroline was much older than I was, and I thought, so sophisticated. She worked as an editor at a magazine in New York. She was so pretty, and so confident. She had this throaty laugh. I adored her.

“There was this big luncheon, a kind of meet-the-families thing, planned for the day before the wedding. It was the end of May. The sky was blue, it was a cool, brisk morning. There were whitecaps on the water, and you could hear the sound of the banners and flags snapping on the ends of their poles. I was in the art studio, trying to capture it all on paper, when Caroline’s fiancée poked his head around the door.

“Drew Foster. I had this mad crush on him. He was tall and smart and funny, with these really broad shoulders
—
he played football in high school
—
and a smile that made me feel all jumpy and nervous and excited inside. He had just graduated from Harvard, and he was starting law school in the fall. He asked if it was all right if he came in. I said, sure. I was so flattered. The day before his wedding, and he wanted to spend time with
me! Anyway. He came in, closed the door. He came up behind me to see what I was doing. ‘Wow,’ he said. ‘You’re really good.’