True Colors (18 page)

“Max and I…” Just
saying those words ignited a pain in her chest, round and hard.
There was no
Max and I
. Emma had thought there could be, but there
wasn’t.

“Our landlord?” Monica asked.

Emma nodded dolefully. “I’m an idiot. I
know.”

“You’re not an idiot. What
happened?”

“I thought…” She heaved a sigh. “I thought
something was going on between us.”

“Something romantic?”

Emma nodded.

“You slept with him?”

Another nod. Emma wasn’t sure she wanted to
reveal, even to her best friend, what an impulsive, reckless, poor
judge of character she was. “And he turned it into a tit-for-tat
thing. He made me feel…” She sipped some wine. Icy and dry, it
soothed her throat, and her soul. “I mean, I thought I was falling
in love with him. I felt so close to him. Like we understood each
other. Like we knew each other on a really deep level. And he…” She
swallowed the quiver in her voice. “He told me I could stay here in
this house.”

Monica scrutinized her across the center
island. Evidently, Emma wouldn’t have to explain further. Monica
got what Emma was implying. “In other words, he’d let you live here
like a kept woman?”

“I don’t think he meant it quite that way, but
that was how his offer felt to me. Maybe I’m too sensitive, I don’t
know…” She drifted off, once again sinking into a bitter
self-evaluation. Impulsive Reckless. Poor judge of
character.

“So—wait a minute. He was willing to continue
to rent the house to us?”

“He said he wouldn’t sell it. I could live
here.”

“Because you slept with him?”

One more sad, pitiful nod.

“Emma.” Monica sounded not judgmental but
confused. “I know he’s a good-looking guy. Very good-looking.
But…shit, Emma. Why on earth would you have sex with the
landlord?”

Emma stifled her sigh by sipping some wine. “It
was just—like this spontaneous thing. Magic.”

“Did he break your heart?” Monica’s voice
bristled with righteous anger.

“No,” Emma assured her, although for some
reason she wasn’t quite convinced of that. How could Max have
broken her heart? They hardly knew each other. Surely what she’d
felt for him couldn’t be love.

Yet the pain
increased inside her, swelling like a tender bruise in the center
of her soul.
Something
was broken, that much was certain.

“So it was just one of those things,” Monica
summarized. “And then he botched the aftermath.”

“Maybe we both botched it,” Emma conceded.
“Maybe he didn’t mean his offer the way I took it. Maybe I
overreacted. I don’t know.” She felt her tears returning, and in
the stark white light of the kitchen, she couldn’t pass them off as
perspiration.

“Then there’s a chance we can fix this,” Monica
said briskly, setting down her glass and digging in her hip pocket.
She pulled out her cell phone and started tapping the
buttons.

“Don’t call him!”

“I’m not calling him,” Monica said. “I’m
calling Andrea Simonetti to see if Max listed the house for sale.
If you’re right about him, he might do something out of spite. If
you’re wrong about him, it’s possible he was serious about letting
you stay on in the house. And honestly, if he does, I want to stay
here, too. That efficiency apartment at the inn is so tiny—and much
too close to my parents. It would be practically like moving back
in with them. Ugh.” She shuddered.

“What about living with Jimmy?”

Another shudder. “The more I thought about
that, the less I liked the idea. You know him—if I moved in, he’d
say, ‘Oh, you’re running a load of laundry? You can wash these
clothes of mine while you’re at it.’ I don’t want to do his
laundry. I don’t want to clean up his messes. He’s a great guy,
he’s fun, he makes me laugh, he’s good in bed, but I don’t want to
have to pull his hair out of the shower drain.” As she spoke, she
tapped her phone, then held it to her ear and listened. After a
minute, she said, “Hey, Andrea. It’s Monica Reinhart. I’m glad I
caught you…” After a couple of minutes of chit-chat, she said
goodbye and disconnected the call. “He hasn’t listed the house,”
she informed Emma with a smile. “Andrea hasn’t heard from him in a
couple of days.”

“I don’t know if I can live here,” Emma said
dolefully. “Not after…”

“Not after you and he had one of those things?
That’s no reason to give up on the house. We both want to continue
living here. Before he showed up on our front doorstep, we were
figuring on renewing our lease, right? You can work this out with
him. Don’t be a wimp.” She tapped her phone again, her thumbs
flying over the screen. She stared at it, squinted, enlarged it,
scrolled. Her smile faded. “Damn.”

“What?”

“I just accessed the inn’s registration files.
He’s checked out.”

“He has?”

“Fifteen minutes ago.”

“So…he’s gone, but he didn’t put the house up
for sale.” Emma wasn’t sure what that meant. She wasn’t sure of
anything, except that at the rate she was sipping her wine, she was
going to need a refill soon.

“Our lease doesn’t expire until the end of
June. He’s still got a few weeks to kick us out. He might go back
to California and have Andrea take care of everything for
him.”

A few more tears leaked out of Emma’s eyes. She
didn’t want Max in California. She wanted him here. She wanted him
to come to the house and tell her he hadn’t meant his offer the way
it had come out. She wanted him to say he was thrilled that she’d
found a new work space, and he hoped she’d find an affordable new
place to live, and he couldn’t wait to see her Dream Portrait of
him. She wanted him to take her in his arms and kiss her, and
murmur that one of the things he loved about her was her
independence, her self-sufficiency, her ability to survive even
though she was an artist living in a society that didn’t value
artists terribly highly.

But now he was gone. Back to his job, directing
a foundation? Back to his view of San Francisco Bay? Back to a life
that had never really had a place for her in it?

San Francisco Bay. The Atlantic
Ocean.

Suddenly she knew the dream she would paint in
his portrait. Because damn it, he might have vanished, but she was
going to paint his Dream Portrait, anyway.

***

Stan Weisner seemed delighted to see Max
hovering in the open doorway to his office. “Finally, you’re going
to take me out to dinner,” Max’s old professor said, his mane of
curls shimmering like polished silver springs in the glare of the
fluorescent fixture in the ceiling—a fixture that reminded Max of
the equally harsh lighting in that room Emma was so thrilled about
turning into a studio.

Max had found
Stan at his desk, finishing up some work before he left campus for
the evening. After apologizing for having passed on dinner the
other night, Max had insisted on taking Stan out tonight. Stan had
phoned his wife to inform her of his dinner plans, and he was
beaming when he hung up the phone. “She’s thrilled,” he said. “If I
went home for dinner, she’d have to prepare a real meal. Instead,
she’ll just open a can of something and read a book while she eats.
Should I let
El Presidente
know you’re back in town? We could stop at his
house for a drink if you’d like.”

Max didn’t want to socialize with the
university’s president. He didn’t want to be fawned over and
thanked for his generosity. What he really wanted to do was hole up
in his room at the Hyatt Regency, just a few blocks up Memorial
Drive from the campus, and lose himself in a bottle of vodka.
Russian psychotherapy, his father used to call it.

But he owed Stan
a better visit than the one they’d had a few days ago, when Max had
wound up taking over Stan’s comp-sci class and then had raced back
to Brogan’s Point to see Emma. And he owed himself the opportunity
to think about something—
someone
—other than
her.

She’d been right to blow up at him, even if
she’d blown up at him for the wrong reason. She didn’t know the
right reason. She didn’t know that he hadn’t come clean with her,
that he hadn’t told her who he truly was, that he hadn’t revealed
to her how insignificant the house and her meager rental payments
were to him. He hadn’t trusted her enough to tell her. He owned
that mistake.

She’d made it clear, when she’d stormed out of
the Faulk Street Tavern, that she was in no mood to repair their
barely begun, terribly fragile relationship. Perhaps he should have
chased after her, imposed himself on her, forced her to listen…to
what? His confession about having more money than any human being
could ever possibly spend in a lifetime? His explanation that he’d
shifted most of that money to his foundation—and still had more
than he needed to live in luxury for the next hundred years? His
revelation that the last woman he’d loved had left him when he told
her he’d used most of his fortune to set up a foundation instead of
spending it on her?

Emma didn’t lust
after his money. She didn’t even
know
about his money. He’d learned
not to discuss his wealth, certainly not with anyone he knew as
little as he knew Emma.

Yet when he looked at her, when he touched her,
when he kissed her…he felt a deeper knowing. Like that enchanting
song, he felt that he saw her true colors. Those true colors
implied that Emma was the sort of person who would like him not
more but less, once she knew how rich he was.

That didn’t compute. People loved money. They
loved wealth, and luxury, and not having to scrimp and scrape to
get by. They loved not having to worry about finding an affordable
place to live and work. Why should Max believe Emma was
different?

It was the song he didn’t trust—not Emma but
the song, which had given him the absurd belief that he could see
something in Emma that probably wasn’t there.

If he didn’t trust her, he didn’t trust himself
even more. He’d misread Vanessa so utterly, why should he assume
he’d suddenly developed the ability to comprehend women’s minds and
souls?

He and Stan strolled up Mass Avenue, chatting
about Stan’s students, his final stretch of classes before the exam
period began, his usual gripes concerning the challenges of
securing grants to fund his research. They paused at each
restaurant they encountered, scrutinizing the posted menus and
peering inside. Eateries Max remembered from his student days, when
he’d had no money to dine out, looked less tempting today than they
had when they’d been beyond his reach. Now, no restaurant in the
entire country was beyond his reach.

Eventually, he and Stan found a menu that
appealed to them. Fortunately, the restaurant was able to seat them
without a reservation.

“Enough about me,” Stan declared, once the
beers they’d ordered had been delivered to their table. “What’s
going on with you? Still enjoying being the richest man on the
planet?”

“No,” Max said,
not having to think. He wasn’t the richest man on the planet, not
by a long shot. And since he’d divested himself of so much of his
wealth when he’d established the foundation, he technically wasn’t
as rich as most people assumed he was. But he
was
rich. And at the moment, he
didn’t enjoy it.

Stan chuckled. “Fund my research,” he joked.
“Let me lighten your load.”

“Submit something to Janet,” Max suggested. “As
a rule, we don’t fund university research, but for you I could make
an exception.”

“Nah, that’s all right.” Stan waved his hand as
if erasing Max’s words from the air between them. “I’ll get my
funding on my own. We don’t want people accusing you of playing
favorites with your foundation. And here we are, talking about me
instead of you again.” Stan drank some more beer and leaned back in
his chair. “Tell me why a guy who should be on top of the world
looks like he’s on his way home from a funeral.”

Max managed a chuckle. “Do I look that
bad?”

“On a ten-point glum scale, I’d score you at
least a nine. I thought this was supposed to be an easy trip for
you. Divest yourself of some real estate, visit your old stomping
grounds, let MIT throw rose petals at your feet, and humor your old
honors advisor.” He leaned forward, suddenly frowning. “You didn’t
come back east for a funeral, did you?”

“No. No, I’m fine.” The waitress returned to
their table, and Max gave the menu a perfunctory glance before
ordering a steak. He had no appetite, but he had to eat.

Once the waitress had gathered their menus and
departed, Stan studied Max more closely in the muted lighting of
the restaurant. “So, what’s the problem? Anything I can help you
with?”

“I doubt it,” Max
said, realizing as soon as he’d spoken that his words implied
there
was
a
problem. Not a major disclosure; Stan had already figured out as
much.

A weighted silence stretched between them,
lasting until the waitress returned with their salads. Max knew he
had to say something. Stan was his friend. During the four years
Max had been at MIT, Stan had been practically a father figure. Max
had confided in him about his money woes—back then, he’d been
juggling a scholarship, a loan and two jobs, both tutoring fellow
students and washing dishes in one of the campus refectories. When
one of his roommates started self-medicating his depression with
copious amounts of pot and booze, Max had asked Stan for guidance.
When Max’s mother had been diagnosed with early-stage breast
cancer, Stan had offered him reassurances, steered him to useful
medical websites, and given him enough money to buy a bus ticket to
New York so he could see her after her surgery.