The Color of Light (39 page)

She must have nodded off, because the next thing she remembered was his amused face close to hers, trying to wake her without startling her into falling off the stool. In that brief lapse of time, she had had a short, vivid dream. A family, sitting around a table, holding hands, their eyes closed. A spotlight shone down on them from above. In the background, shadows. She had reached for her sketchbook, scribbled it down.

Slaughter studied it now, tapped it with his finger. “Yeah. What’s
that
about?” He plowed back his hair, tapped on her sketchbook. “Definitely this one.”

“Really?” She was surprised.

“Really.” He stepped back from the canvas. He glanced at her, then looked again, more closely this time. Here it comes, she thought. “Say,” he said. “Aren’t you Lucian Swain’s assistant?”

Suddenly it was hard to breathe. “I was,” she managed to say. “Not anymore.”

He leaned over, peered closely at the sanguine and charcoal drawing of the naked girl turned towards the man in the shadows on the wall behind her. “He’s seeing April Huffman now, I hear.”

She sighed. He raised his eyebrows,
Oh, I get it.

His arms crossed, he made a circuit of the room, taking in the postcards and sketches on the wall. He paused before a particularly fine studio nude, a woman seated on a chair, simple, well lit and sensitively rendered.

“Wow,” he said. “You guys are really good. I should sit in on some classes. Could you do this before you came here?”

She dropped her brush into turpentine. “Before I came here,” she said. “I could draw. What I’ve learned here, made me an artist.”

He stopped in front of her écorché, studied the muscles. “Wish they’d had a place like this when I was going to school. Course, it was the Sixties. We didn’t even have a drawing teacher. Mostly, we got stoned and slept around with other students.”

He stopped one last time to study the sketches for her thesis project, tacked in a little block of four on her wall. When he reached the curtain that served as the door, he said, “You know, you’re very talented. I’d take you on myself, but I already have an assistant. I could ask around.”

“Thanks, I’d appreciate that,” she said.

It was Monday, midway into the Intersession project. Two weeks before winter semester would start. Two weeks since she had realized she was in love with Raphael Sinclair. Tessa knew she was getting in too deep, too soon. Portia, had she been around, would have told her she had jumped from the frying pan into the fire. She didn’t care. She felt utterly complete, as if a missing piece of herself had been restored to her, in a way that was very messy and complicated and regrettable and made no sense at all if you held it up to the light for too long.

Now they had to be discreet. With the holiday season over, he had returned to work, which for him meant meetings at school, the board, various committees. Tessa became adept at coming up with reasons to wander down the hallway that led to the offices of the Deans, developing a sudden interest in the work in the nearby display cases, a ruse that had paid off yesterday, when Rafe emerged from Giselle’s office, a too-skinny first-year student named Allison clinging to his side. As she bubbled animatedly away about an upcoming committee meeting, he had breezed smartly past Tessa, smiling politely while managing to brush his fingertips against her hand. The hairs had stood up at the back of her neck, and an electric current hummed up and down the entire length of her body for the rest of the day.

What she really needed was to find a job, and she made a lackluster stab at it, dutifully calling a few listings she saw in the back of the
Times,
mentioning casually to Giselle that she could use some assistant work. Truthfully, she wasn’t trying very hard. A job would have meant being less available for Rafe, and if she didn’t mind living on macaroni, and met the minimum payments on all of her bills, she could stretch out her money, just a little bit longer.

“Tell me something about yourself,” she said.

“All right,” he said agreeably.

“Where are you from?”

It was midnight. They were sitting across from each other at a small table in Florent, a funky little all-night bistro in the Meatpacking District, a seedy, nineteenth-century neighborhood of low buildings and cobblestoned streets on the far west side of Manhattan that even smelled dangerous. At some point she noticed that all the other customers seemed to be club kids or transvestites.

He ordered the
mousse au chocolat,
just so that he could watch her lick it off the tip of a spoon. “How is it?”

“Incredible.”

“Tell me.”

She closed her eyes. “The texture. It’s light and fluffy.” Another taste of what was on the spoon. “Dense and silky. All at the same time.” She thought some more. “Bittersweet chocolate. Not too sweet. And the aroma…I wish you could taste it.”

He leaned forward, licked a trace of mousse from her upper lip. “Lovely,” he murmured. He slid his fingers across the table until they touched hers. “Cambridge,” he said. “Originally. Then I spent some years in a boarding school in East Anglia. Moved to London in my teens.”

“Where is East Anglia?”

“Northeast of London. Very rural.”

“It sounds pretty.”

“Yes, it does.”

She smiled. “I wish we could have been in art school together. That would have been fun.”

“Oh, yes.”

“Do you think you would have been attracted to me?”

“I would have to be dead not to find you attractive.” He frowned. “Technically, I
am
dead.”

“I think I would have opened with, ‘Wow, you have beautiful eyes. Would you pose for me sometime?’”

His smile deepened. “I would have said yes.”

“I’d start off very professional. Do a few quick sketches. And then I’d ask you to take your shirt off.”

Now he laughed. “I would have said yes to that as well.”

“I’d have the studio next to yours. I’d keep coming over, asking for your opinion.”

“There would have been a lot of late nights.” He reached under the table, rested his hands on her legs, just above her knees. “One day, we would be riding the elevator to the fourth floor. As the other students stepped out, and the doors closed, I’d press you up against the wall and have my wicked way with you.”

She laughed with delight. They were quiet for a moment, happy together. She sought out his eyes. He found he could not meet her gaze for long; he glanced away. She reached out, took his face in her hands. “Hey. I was looking at those.”

He tried, stared down into her lovely brown eyes for a moment. Flecks of green. Faith and trust. A man in a fedora.

She took out her sketchbook, began to draw. He tried to peek, but she covered it with her hand. Finally, she tore out the page, folded it in three. Pushed it across the table.

“Your turn,” she said.

He stared at it as if it were a dead thing. Picked up the pencil, put it to the paper, then put it back down again.

“I can’t,” he said.

She was surprised. “What do you mean? I thought you were an artist. You said you went to art school.”

“I can’t draw,” he said abruptly. “I lost the ability, the talent, whatever you want to call it, when I, ah, when I.” He fell silent.

“Oh, God.” she said awkwardly. “I’m so sorry.”

Beautiful Tessa Moss, a remnant of Sofia’s blood running through her veins, her extraordinary eyes sad on his account. Under the table, he took her hands, laced his fingers through hers. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s walk.”

The school building was darkened, empty. She turned on the reflector light in her studio as Rafe stopped short, staring at the painting on her easel. She whisked it away, replacing it with what looked vaguely like a family saying grace. “Wylie likes this one.”

Good.
The image of Tessa, hiding under a bed, Nazi bootheels inches from her head, had shaken him.

“So, how is it going with the great Wylie Slaughter?”

“You know, for a postmodernist, he’s not such a bad guy. He really likes what we’re doing here.”

“Hm. What else did he say?”

“He said I’m very talented.”

“Did he now.” He sat down on the frivolous red velvet couch, patted the tufted cushion next to him, beckoned with one finger. She sat, instead, across his lap, leaned her head on his shoulder, closed her eyes. He enclosed her in the circle of his arms.

“Tired,” she said.

“You should get to bed earlier.”

“I should.”

Leaning his cheek on her hair, he let his gaze play over the maze of images on her wall. Her studio stirred up memories of his own student days. When he was with her, they were pleasant, not painful.

“Have you done anything more on your thesis project?”

“Who wants to know,” she said, her eyes still closed. “Raphael Sinclair, the founder of the school? Or Raphael Sinclair who comes knocking on my window every night?”

“The first one.”

“Then, the answer is, you bet.” She yawned.

“Really. Tessa. What about canvases? Have you started building your canvases?”

“I still haven’t gotten Josephine’s final OK on my sketches. She never showed up for our last meeting.”

“What?”

She felt guilty, now, for getting Josephine in trouble. Her eyes fluttered open. “She has two kids. She’s busy. Sometimes her babysitter doesn’t show up. Or the kids get sick. Or the subway gets stuck.”

“Look,” he said. “I’m taking over as your adviser now. Three paintings.” He ticked them off on his fingers. “The grandmother lighting the candles. The whirlwind of bodies. The mother and child.” On the last one, his voice may have faltered slightly. “All right?”

“All right.”

The fingers of one small white hand came to rest in his lap, making it hard to concentrate. He settled back into the couch, closed his eyes. Suddenly, his eyes flew open, he caught her wrist.

“Tessa. You don’t have to…I don’t want you to…”

She bent a beatific gaze on him. Smiled lasciviously.

His lower lip caught between his teeth.

She reached up and turned out the light.

Afterwards, she stood up, stretched. It was cold in the studio. She wrapped herself in a length of cloth she kept for draping models and eased away from him, over to her easel, turned the reflector light back on.

Drawn in by the world she had created, she picked up a scarf and absentmindedly tied back her hair. Her eyes narrowed; in a kind of trance, she picked up a bristle brush, daubed it in a pile of burnt umber left on her palette. Unnoticed, the drape slipped to the floor, as she began to fill in the background.

Drowsily, Rafe opened his eyes, looked at his watch. Five a.m. Outside her window, the sky was still a deep, wintery blue. Fluffy flakes of new snow were falling, gathering on the windowsill. He had dozed off; soon he would have to dress, brave the snow, get home before daylight. Tessa was standing in front of her canvas, wearing only a skimpy camisole and jeans. He came to stand behind her, watched her paint, inhaled the turpentine as if it were air. His hands lit on her hips. She paused for a moment, went back to work.

“How did you find out you couldn’t draw anymore?”

“I was on the
terrasse
of a restaurant in Antibes, the south of France…I asked the waiter for a pencil. I was going to draw the couple at the next table, the sea…the woman I was with. The pencil came. I held it between my fingers, just as I always had, every day since I was five. I knew exactly where to start, what to do.”

He brought his hands close to his face to scrutinize them in the low light, turning them over to look at the palms, the slender fingers, as if the answer were still to be found there.
“Phhht.
Gone. Whatever small talent I had died with the man I used to be.”

Tessa took his right hand, kissed it. Holding his hand in hers, she chose a brush. “Closer,” she murmured, turning to her easel.

He moved behind her. She raised the brush to the canvas, then, their fingers grasping it together.

Together, they drew the sable tip across the surface, as delicately as a skater gliding across a pond. Their hands swooped and soared. They moved across vast open expanses of snowy canvas, the hairs of the brush leaving marks in the thick paint. He could feel the liquid viscosity of the varnish under his fingertips, and thrilled to the smooth sensation of the brush glissading over the paint. Holding her hand, he made gestures small and large, edges soft and sharp. He felt the bones and tendons in her fingers jump and dance as they lingered tenderly over the features of a boy’s face, scumbled light falling over the mother’s hair, glazed a shadow over the father’s eyes.

A mixture of smells and textures, freedom and discipline, just as he remembered it. He yanked her around to face him. He kissed her, ferociously, rapaciously. The brush dropped to the floor.

She tore at his shirt, pulling it free of his trousers and up over his head. He slipped down the straps of her camisole, then kissed her breasts. She pushed him down on the couch. He reached for one bare arm, pulled her between his knees.

“Tell me what you want,” he whispered.

“I want you,” she whispered back. “In my studio. Just like this. For always.”

She knelt on the floor between his legs, touched her tongue to the arrow of hair that ran down his abdomen and disappeared under the waistband of his trousers. He felt his muscles twitch, aroused.

“How many girls have drawn you, over the years?” she said.

“Just two.”

She rose up through his knees to kiss the ridges of his stomach muscles, the finger-like projections of his serratus, the smooth rise and fall of his pectorals. He lay back on the couch, dug his fingernails into the tufted cushions. Warmed by the pressure of her breasts against his skin, he caught her face between his hands, kissed her. She bent her head to the tender and vulnerable hollow formed by the clavicles and the tendons at the base of his throat.

“What is this?” There was a small, raised welt of white flesh to the left of his sternum, over his heart, about an inch in length. She touched it with a finger.

“Don’t,” he said, capturing her hand in his.