True Colors (9 page)

She wanted to paint him.

And he wanted to kiss her.

Don’t think about
that,
he cautioned himself.
Think about the painting.

When had he ever been interested in fine art,
of all things? His parents had coerced him into those violin
lessons, but he’d hated them. His passion had been for stickball,
the beach, hip-hop, computers, and eventually girls. By the time he
was twelve, he’d mastered C++ and Java programming. He and his
Linux operating system had made sweet music together, far sweeter
than any sound he’d ever coaxed out of his violin. In high school,
he and Laurie Peretzky in high school had made much sweeter music.
In college, he and Jenna Parsons. And for a couple of glorious
years, he and Vanessa.

Much sweeter music than that cloying “True
Colors.”

The drive from Brogan’s Point to Cambridge
took less than an hour, which meant he could easily return to the
Ocean Bluff Inn tonight if he chose. He still had a room waiting
for him at the Hyatt Regency in town, however. He’d left his
clothes and toiletries at the inn, but he could purchase a few
necessities in the city if he decided to stay there. For some
reason, he thought it might be best to keep his distance from
Brogan’s Point for a while—or, more specifically, to keep his
distance from Emma, at least until his brain resumed its normal
functioning.

He was able to park in one of MIT’s visitor
lots. Pocketing the claim ticket the lot attendant handed him, he
strolled the familiar streets of the campus, basking in the gentle
nostalgia characteristic of a returning alumnus. MIT wasn’t a
beautiful campus. It lacked the ivy-covered colonial buildings of
Harvard, just a mile up Mass Avenue. The buildings here were
designed for science and engineering, and they looked it—gray and
utilitarian, labeled with numbers rather than names. Even Building
10, with its symmetrical pillars and the Great Dome rounding its
roof, looked austere in an ancient Greco-Roman sort of way.

He checked his watch. Ten-thirty. Too early
to call Janet; it was only seven-thirty on the west coast. Besides,
he’d spoken to her last night and didn’t have to check in with her
today. According to her, the foundation was operating quite
smoothly in his absence. A few financial reports had come in, but
nothing he needed to review immediately. She would scan them and
email them to him if he wished, but really, nothing at the office
demanded his urgent attention, and she hoped he was enjoying his
trip back east.

He might be the chairman of the New World
Foundation, but Janet could run the place well enough without him.
Possibly even better, since he wasn’t in her way, meddling,
questioning, analyzing.

He strolled through campus to the Strata
Center, assuming he would find Stan Weisner in that building—one of
the few oddly shaped structures on campus, but certainly nothing
reminiscent of picture-postcard ivy-covered college campuses. The
Strata Center housed much of the computer science department. When
Max had been Stan Weisner’s student, he’d called Stan Professor
Weisner, but in the past ten years, they’d become first-name-basis
friends. He and Stan bounced ideas off each other. Stan had been an
early investor in Max’s start-up when it had been little more than
the manifestation of Max’s honors thesis, and as a result, Stan was
now significantly wealthier than he’d been back in the days when
Max had called him Professor Weisner.

A schedule on Stan’s office door indicated
that he was currently teaching a class. Max noted the classroom
number and strode down the hall. As an undergraduate, he had loved
Stan’s lectures. No harm in catching the final few minutes of his
mentor in action before they settled somewhere to drink coffee and
talk shop.

The classroom was full—and why wouldn’t it
be, since it was a computer science class at one of the world’s
preeminent science and technology universities? Max discreetly
slipped into the room through a door at the rear and lowered his
lanky body into the only empty seat he saw. At the other end of the
room, Stan, his round pink face framed above with wild silver curls
and below with a matching silver beard, chattered enthusiastically
while scribbling code onto a whiteboard in his indecipherable
scrawl. His students leaned forward, some squinting at the squiggly
figures on the whiteboard, some tapping the keyboards of their
laptops and tablets, some merely shaking their heads in
confusion.

If anything, Stan’s hair and beard looked
shrubbier than ever, almost as if his face were at the center of a
flower. Max wondered if Emma would want to paint Stan. Surely his
radiant face, surrounded by all those chaotic curls, was more
worthy of her talents than Max’s was.

His smile faded. He’d
traveled to Cambridge, at least in part, because he didn’t want to
think about Emma. But there she was, lodged in his brain.
Like a rainbow.

No. Not like a rainbow. Not like that stupid
song.

Stan finished jotting
something on the whiteboard and spun around, words spewing from his
mouth and his hands flapping like a chicken’s wings. In
mid-sentence, he spotted Max and let out a hoot. “Maxim!” he
hollered, pronouncing Max’s name as the way Russian parents
did:
Mahk-SEEM.

Every student in the room swiveled around to
stare at Max. He sank as low as he could in the chair, but that did
nothing to discourage their gawking.

Even if it had, Stan wasn’t about to let him
remain anonymous. “Max, come on up here!” the professor bellowed,
gesturing with a wide sweep of his arm. “Do you know who this is?”
he addressed his students, who continued to stare at Max until,
with reluctance, he hauled himself out of the chair and trudged to
the front of the room. “This is Max Tarloff,” Stan continued. “One
of the most brilliant CS majors ever to walk the halls of this
esteemed institution. Probably the most brilliant student I ever
had who didn’t go on for a Ph.D.”

Max rolled his eyes. He remembered Stan’s
efforts to persuade him to apply to graduate school, and his own
unwillingness to be persuaded. He’d had a business plan embedded in
his honors thesis, and he’d wanted to pursue it. That had turned
out to be the right choice for him.

“Okay, so you haven’t heard of Max Tarloff,”
Stan said, obviously noticing the blank stares of his students.
“Maybe you’ve heard of NWES? New World Encryption Strategies?”

The students stopped looking confused.
“That’s you?” a young man in the front row asked.

Someone further back in the room murmured,
“Holy shit!”

“That’s Max,” Stan boasted.

Max rolled his eyes again. He wished he was
still seated in that chair in the back row. Or maybe hiding under
the chair. He didn’t like the spotlight, and he definitely didn’t
like being viewed as a ridiculously successful titan of the
computer industry, even if that was what he was.

“While he was an undergraduate, Max developed
a system for encrypting information from credit cards and other
scanned material to protect it from hackers and pirates. Brilliant
stuff, boys and girls.”

“I had a good professor,” Max said, trying to
deflect some of the attention to Stan.

“You bet he did,” Stan said, happy to toot
his own horn as well as Max’s. “He graduated from MIT, moved to San
Francisco, raised some capital and started a company. Some of you
may have heard about its acquisition by Google three years
ago.”

Awe shimmered in the gazes of the students as
they regarded Max. Uncomfortable as the object of such reverence,
he shifted his weight from one foot to the other and focused his
gaze on the ceiling tiles. He would have preferred that the
universe hadn’t heard about the acquisition, but the sum Google had
paid Max for his company had been staggering—just over a billion
dollars. Google would have paid even more, but Max had insisted on
retaining some patents and licensing agreements, guaranteeing him a
steady income from his innovations.

As if he needed a steady
income. Even after distributing much of the windfall to his
investors and employees, he’d been absurdly wealthy. He’d bought
his parents a house and convinced his mother to retire from her job
as a cafeteria lady at P.S. 209; his father had insisted on
continuing to drive his cab, but he’d reduced his hours and
volunteered for fewer night shifts. Max had invested some of his
money in new start-ups, a few of which were prospering and earning
him more income. He’d donated generously to MIT’s scholarship fund.
And he’d set up the foundation—the best thing he’d ever done, even
if it had cost him Vanessa. Maybe
because
it had cost him
Vanessa.

Hands shot into the air throughout the
classroom. Stan’s students had questions for Max. Dozens of
questions.

“Why did you call your company New
World?”

“Because technology is a new world,” Max
said. “Also, because my family immigrated from the Old World to
America, which we considered the New World.”

“What advice do you have for people like us
who want to develop new apps?”

“Forget the apps,” Max answered. “How many
apps do we need on our phones to find the nearest seafood
restaurant? How many apps do we need to play time-wasting
games?”

“But that’s where the money is,” someone
called out.

“It’s not going to change the world,” Max
argued. “Do something useful. Develop software that will help
doctors pinpoint the kind of tumor a cancer patient has. Develop
software that will make automobiles safer. Develop software that
will protect consumers who scan their credit cards, so no one can
steal their data and empty their bank accounts.”

“You’ve already taken care of that,” Stan
reminded Max.

“How rich are you?” a girl near the back of
the room asked, a question that prompted a good deal of
laughter.

“You want me to flunk her?” Stan joked.

“No, I’ll answer her,” Max said solemnly. “I
kept enough money to live comfortably and used the rest to
establish the New World Foundation. We fund educational programs.
Scholarship money for college kids, and also programs at younger
levels. Pre-K programs in poor communities. Tutoring programs.
Classes for immigrants who need language help. We’ve teamed up with
several organizations that fund educational programs in
Africa.”

Some of the students looked marginally less
impressed with him. Evidently, they thought he ought to be spending
his wealth on private jets and ocean-worthy yachts. Or maybe on
modern, glass-walled houses with stunning water views.

Other students looked more impressed. But Max
hadn’t set up his foundation in order to impress anyone. To him, it
had simply been a matter of his having greater wealth than he could
make use of. He could live the rest of his life without ever
wanting for anything. Beyond that, why sit on his money when he
could instead use it for something worthwhile?

Besides, money sometimes attracted the wrong
people—people who wanted that money. People who pretended to like
you because you could do things for them. People whose values
skewed in directions Max didn’t exactly admire.

People who wanted to use you. People who
could hurt you.

Fortunately, the students’ questions veered
from a tabloid-worthy interest in his wealth to the technology he’d
developed. His scribbles joined Stan’s on the whiteboard, and he
reveled in the sheer joy of just doing science, exploring,
experimenting, thinking hard. Of all the ups and downs in his life,
the years he’d spent at MIT, surrounded by computer geeks like
himself, had been among the best.

He needed this kind of exchange, this kind of
mental exercise. Running the foundation was interesting enough, and
spiritually rewarding. Monitoring his investments had its own
satisfactions. Meeting with colleagues on the boards to which he’d
been named was pleasant. Consulting with government officials
searching for new encryption strategies allowed him to demonstrate
his gratitude toward the country that had taken his family in.
Interrogating fresh-faced young techies about the projects they
wanted him to invest in stimulated him, even though he often found
that their science instincts weren’t as strong as their hunger for
the kind of wealth he’d achieved.

But talking with like-minded souls about pure
research… That was joy.

He wondered if Emma felt a similar bliss when
she discussed art with other artists, if she experienced the same
rush of giddy satisfaction when one of her students drew a line
just so or captured just the right hue in a painting.

And he wondered why, when he was in his
milieu, in the heart of MIT’s computer science building, he still
couldn’t stop thinking about Emma.

Emma had misgivings about meeting Monica at
the Faulk Street Tavern Thursday evening. But she had to hike down
the hill, anyway, and Monica had sounded excited when she’d phoned
Emma an hour ago. “I’ve got an idea,” she’d said.

Great. Emma needed an idea. Or two. Or
three.

She needed a lot more than ideas. She needed
money, and she needed her head examined, not necessarily in that
order.

The day had started out well enough. Last
night she’d declared Ava Lowery’s Dream Portrait finished. If she
held onto it any longer, she’d wind up tweaking this and that,
making the emerald lawn surrounding the castle a slightly deeper
hue, adding a bit more sparkle to Ava’s crown, or maybe to Ava’s
eyes. As an artist, she knew that no creative work was ever really
done; there was always one more thing you could improve on. At some
point, you simply had to be brave and say, “Enough.”

Because Ava’s painting was her first paid
project in Brogan’s Point, Emma had included framing in her price.
She was hoping Ava’s Dream Portrait would be her calling card. If
Ava’s parents liked it enough, they would show it to their friends
and recommend Emma. A frame would make the portrait look just a bit
better, like wrapping an elegant satin ribbon around a gift-wrapped
box and tying it into a gorgeous pompom-shaped bow. A frame made
the painting look complete.