The Color of Light
HELEN MARYLES SHANKMAN
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Text copyright © 2013 Helen Maryles Shankman
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
To every English teacher I ever had.
To anyone who ever told me a story.
To all my vampires, alive and dead.
But most of all,
To Jon.
When I’m asleep, dreaming and drowsed and warm,
They come, the homeless ones, the noiseless dead.
While the dim and charging breakers of the storm
Rumble and drone and bellow overhead,
Out of the gloom they gather about my bed.
They whisper to my heart; their thoughts are mine.
—Siegfried Sassoon
Prologue
New York City, 1992.
It was late, but the blond girl he had seen panhandling earlier in the afternoon was still there, sharing a cigarette with another junkie in the doorway of a store for rent at the corner of Broadway and 8th Street.
“One hundred dollars.” he said to her.
“Okay,” she said, and handed the cigarette to her companion. The boy, skeletally thin beneath his dirty Rush t-shirt, leaned over and whispered something to her. Clearly, he didn’t like the looks of him. He could hear her murmur something back, and then the boy looked at him with cold, hard eyes, took another drag of the cigarette, and headed off in the direction of St. Mark’s Place.
She got to her feet, dusting off her pants. “What do you want me to do?”
She was young, so young that her cheeks still looked downy and round, like a child’s. Her hair was shiny, bouncy, with a good cut. She was probably a recent runaway; she seemed unsure of herself, almost innocent.
He came closer to her, and now she could see him better in the yellow glow of the streetlight. He had a long, aristocratic face, high sculptured cheekbones like you’d see on a statue, full sensual lips.
Beautiful eyes. She couldn’t stop looking at his eyes.
“Why don’t we get you fixed up first?” And a voice like a priest.
“Wow,” she said, a little girl getting a new toy. “Thanks, mister.”
He followed her to a club on the Bowery, where he paid the guy who worked the door for a tiny glassine envelope. She led him around the corner onto a narrow, dimly lit street, to a dark doorway, away from the crowd and the noise and the bright lights of the club. She opened the envelope with shaking hands and hungrily sniffed its powdery contents up her pert little nose.
With a deep sigh, she leaned against the rusting, steel-gated door. It squealed in protest. An ocean of peaceful easy feeling washed over her. “Okay, mister,” she murmured. “Let’s go.”
He drew near her, put gentle hands on her body, turned her to face the wall. She twisted her fingers in the gate to keep herself from falling down. As he came up behind her, swept the hair from her neck, touched his lips to her shoulder, she took in a cacophony of smells. Vanilla. Something green, like distant fields. Musk. Sandalwood.
The last thing she would remember as she coasted down into a druggy trance was the prick of his teeth as they pressed into her throat.
Part One
1
We’re late,” said Raphael Sinclair, as he ran up the long flight of stairs to the Cast Hall. “That idiot Turner will already have them all riled up.”
“I had a little trouble getting here,” the man beside him said mildly. “A car caught fire on the West Side Highway. It’s backed up all the way to the bridge.” Levon Penfield, the Dean of Admissions, glanced over at his companion, amused. “Sometimes even I believe what they say about you. What are you doing in a hat and overcoat? It’s 83 degrees out there.”
Rafe didn’t answer. They reached the second floor landing. He held open the fire door for his companion.
But Levon wasn’t there. “I have to check on my transfer students,” he called down as he continued up the stairs, two at a time. Rafe cursed, slammed the door shut and followed the echo of his footsteps up to the fourth floor.
“Good God,” he said as the door closed behind him.
As part of the school’s expansion plan, a huge lofty space with whitewashed walls thirty feet high had been converted to studios. Windows soared from floor to ceiling. Ten large rooms took up either side of the floor, made from moveable white walls and white drapes, with a wide aisle down the middle. Dozens of fluorescent lamps tricked out with reflectors and full-spectrum bulbs filled the room with light the color of the sun. Rafe closed his eyes and inhaled deeply, the scent of turpentine and linseed oil intoxicating him.
Hearing Levon’s deep voice, he moved slowly down the aisle, peering into each studio. Picture postcards of paintings by Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael, Rubens, Rembrandt, Titian, Botticelli, Velasquez and Vermeer, were tacked up on the homosote walls alongside life drawings, grocery lists, phone numbers and thumbnail sketches. Canvases were stacked in corners, easels held today’s wet work.
He found Levon in the second studio on the right, talking with a delectable pastry of a girl standing at the top of a ladder. She was wearing a very short plaid skirt that made her look like a naughty Catholic schoolgirl. She reminded him of a cannoli, a voluptuous vanilla cream filling stuffed into a soft golden crust.
Levon spun around to introduce him, his eyes shining, as if he were the host at a wonderful party. “There you are, Rafe! This is Graciela. She’s new here this year. Look how beautifully she draws!”
Rafe crossed over to the piece she was working on. She did, indeed, draw beautifully. It was a life-sized charcoal drawing of herself naked, making love to a good looking, well-endowed young fellow. “It’s my boyfriend,” she said giggling, tossing her bronze-colored hair. “It’s for his birthday.”
“You’re very talented,” he agreed, then turned to look at the other things on the wall.
“Do you work from photographs or from life?” he heard Levon ask.
“I did his thing from memory,” he heard her reply, but Rafe was no longer listening. She really did draw beautifully. Each mark on her figures was precisely placed, with a satisfying variation of thick and thin lines, describing the way a leg turned, or the expression in a face.
Curious to see what she used for inspiration, he noticed a postcard of his favorite Madonna and Child on the opposite wall. Next to it was a small pencil sketch. Something about it drew him closer.
With a nod to the Renaissance painter Raphael, it was a mother holding a child. Every shadow was delicately rendered, creating form, revealing features, or hiding them in shadow. They were dressed in clothing from the 1930s, the mother covering the little boy’s eyes with her hand.
Now he was so close he was almost touching it.
Her face was a mask of horror. Flames leaped in her eyes. At her feet was a suitcase with a name printed on it.
Wizotsky.
Rafe heeled around and stared deliberately into Graciela’s amber eyes. “What made you do this drawing?” he said, pointing at the tiny sketch on the wall. His voice was light and gentle, but there was an underlying current of something else.
It took her a moment to answer, transfixed by his gaze. When she saw which one he meant, she broke into peals of laughter. “Oh, that one!”
He smiled politely, not understanding.
“That’s not mine. I ju
st share a studio with her. Isn’t it scary and depressing?”
He stared at the drawing for another moment, then dropped his gaze. “Yes. Of course. Scary and depressing. Well—good luck, then.”
He ducked under the curtain draped over the doorway and disappeared. Levon followed close behind.
Their footsteps echoed off the shadowy purple walls as they swept past statues of Greek wrestlers, the Dying Gaul, the head of Michelangelo’s David. A Roman beauty in carved drapery gazed at them with empty eyes. A Rodin hand implored them from a block of raw marble.
Two rows of folding chairs were set up at the end of the Cast Hall. A table was arranged with little petits fours and a coffee urn. Board members and instructors turned around to smile hello.
“Glad you could join us, Levon, Rafe.” Whit Turner was standing at the front holding a clipboard, not looking glad at all. “We’re just talking about the focus of the school this year. We thought we’d get a jump on it this time, steer it in the right direction from the beginning.”
Levon took a seat, glanced over to Harvey Glaser, the sculpting teacher. Harvey shook his head. Not good.
“We’re talking about bringing on board some artists who belong to the postmodern discipline, but who bring the human figure into their work. Some of us think that would put the school on a more contemporary track, make the art world take us a little more seriously.”
“It seems like a good idea,” agreed Blesser, the school’s chief financial officer. “Might get us more endowments, if they see us as a serious art school.”
There was a silence, a collective intake of breath.
“A serious art school?”
“Don’t, Rafe,” muttered Levon. “He’s trying to provoke you.”
“So… you don’t think what we do here is serious.”
Turner sighed, waited.
“No other school in the entire world is teaching these skills. Parsons, Pratt, even the École des Beaux-Arts—they’ve all abandoned it.” His voice flowed over them like a caress, a siren’s song. “How to draw like Raphael. How to paint like da Vinci. How to sculpt like Michelangelo. How to create works of art that one may appreciate without reading a handout that explains what you’re looking at, and what you should be feeling.
“The methods of the old masters are being lost in the mists of time. And you don’t think that’s serious?”
Rafe leaned against the table with the little cakes on it with his arms crossed, his strange eyes burning into Whit Turner, filling him with dread. I swear, Turner would tell his friends, his voice cracking a little. There’s something that’s just not right about that guy, something that makes your blood freeze when he looks your way. And if you disagree with him…well, you lock your windows at night.
But today Turner stood his ground, turned his blocky body and his square head to face his adversary down. “Of course I think it’s serious. But I also know what they call us out in the art world. Remedial art school. Art School 101. Art School for Dummies.”
He paused, looking from one face to the next as he let it sink in. “They say we’re obsessed with skills that passed into redundancy around the time of the invention of the camera. And if we want to attract serious patrons, and serious money, we have to look like a serious art school. And that means we need some big name artists teaching here, even if they don’t know how to draw.”
Late afternoon sun slanted in through the windows, the kind of light that only comes in early autumn, falling in golden bars across the two men.
“No. Never.” Rafe said quietly. “Please excuse me.” He strode away, his coat billowing out behind him, and vanished through a back exit.
There was an audible feeling of relief, even from his supporters.
“Anybody else smell smoke?” muttered Blesser.
“I’ve been working here for four years, and I didn’t know there was an exit back there. Did you?” said the chairman of the drawing department, nervously patting her forehead with a paper napkin.
“Can’t we just discuss fundraising for once, you know, parties, like other boards?” the Dean of Student Affairs said plaintively.
“Hey, I know he founded the school, and I’m on his side, but every time he catches my eye, I want to run home and hide under my bed,” said the anatomy instructor, who had once worked as a butcher.
Cautiously, Turner looked all around the room, peered as far down the darkened Cast Hall as he could. When he had satisfied himself that the school’s founder was not lurking anywhere in the shadows, he wiped the perspiration from his brow and continued.
“You all know my work. I’m a classical painter. I do guys in Renaissance drapery on marble staircases in two-point perspective. However…” Turner went on, confidentially lowering his voice, “this is about our careers, too. Do you want to be known as a teacher from that funny little art school that lives in the past? Or do you want to be a professor at a boutique art school to rival Yale, Parsons, Rhode Island School of Design, the Chicago Art Institute?”
There was an uncomfortable silence.
“I’ll make some inquiries,” he said and made some notes on his clipboard, signifying that the meeting was over. Chairs scraped on wood floors. People drifted to the table with the coffee.
“You know,” Levon said. Inwardly, Whit groaned. “Have you asked the students what they think?”
The conversation that had started up after the meeting died back down. Levon continued in his affable voice.
“They come from the far corners of the earth to be here, at this school. There’s a student here from frigging Norway this year. Every day I get these calls. ‘Are you really a classical art school? Can you really teach me how to paint like Rembrandt?’
“Okay, maybe the guy is eccentric, but hey, he’s British. Raphael Sinclair sought out each person in this room to create this place. He knew our backgrounds, and experience, and our work. He went to Russia to recruit Mischa when it was still the Soviet Union. He went to Paris to persuade Ted. He found Inga in East Germany, and Geoff in Glasgow and Langley in Pasadena. Tony, I don’t know where the hell he found you.” Scattered titters.
“There are a hundred schools that teach kids how to use video cameras and make art out of stuff they find in dumpsters. But there’s only one Academy.”
The instructors looked at one another and then down at their plates. Levon looked at his watch, rose to his feet. “I’ve got to go. I’ve got a kid coming in from Wisconsin for an interview. Good meeting, Whit.” And he set off through the Cast Hall, leaving them to the coffee and petits fours.
In the stairwell, Rafe leaned against the steel door, counted to ten, took deep cleansing breaths in an attempt to control his blinding fury.
Originally, he had planned to be there for the length of the meeting. He chose to remove himself when tearing Turner’s head off began to seem like a workable solution. Also, there was the matter of the sun streaming into the room.
He leaned over, put his hands on his knees, trying to bring his rage down to something more human and manageable. There was a pay phone in the hallway on the third floor landing. One side of a disembodied conversation floated down the stairs.
“I’m not working tonight. I’ll be over later.” It was a girl. A pause as whoever was on the other end of the phone replied. “Oh.” A world of pain in that two-letter word. “Where were you last night? I thought your meetings were on Sundays.” Another pause. The voice was becoming sadder. “Some of the guys? Okay. Well…maybe tomorrow.” The click of the pay phone being hung back up. A moment of silence, followed by the awful, clanging cacophony of the phone being smashed furiously against the box, magnified a hundred times by the cinderblock and steel in the enclosed space. Finally, the sound of stifled weeping echoed through the stairway, and a steel door opened and closed.
Ah, art students. Come for the talent, stay for the tears.
He straightened up, rolled his shoulders. The rage was subsiding. Halfway down the stairs, he thought he’d se
e if the cannoli would come out with him for a drink. He straightened his tie and headed back up to the fourth floor.
The staircase he’d taken opened into the sculptors’ studio. Though it was only the beginning of the school year, everything was already covered with a fine white coating of plaster dust. Armatures and clay figures jostled each other for space on bookshelves and windowsills. Some of the students had begun working on ideas for their thesis projects, ghostly contorted figures rising up from clay-spattered turntables, covered in damp rags to keep them from drying out.
The floor seemed abandoned. And then, from the direction of the girl’s studio, Mozart’s Requiem began to play.
Softly, softly, he began to walk towards the music.
It was coming from behind the curtain that draped the cannoli’s doorway. He stopped, stood perfectly still, closed his eyes, breathed in the scent.
He could catch the thinnest glimpse of a girl in the sliver of air between the curtain and the partition. She was small, dressed in art school standard-issue basic black, with an ass like an upside-down heart. But her hair. Oh, her hair. It cascaded in a fall of loose curls down her back, not red, not blonde, not brown, and yet all of them mixed together, trailing off at her waist. With a pang, he imagined the colors he would have used to paint it, in the years when he could still paint; golden ochre, terra rossa, raw sienna.
She was bending over, setting down two space heaters and a reflector lamp. When she straightened up, her gaze wandered to the sketch of the mother and child he had seen earlier. She stood there, perfectly still, absorbed in her thoughts. Then he realized that she was looking past the sketch, at a drawing tacked up beside it, done in sanguine and charcoal.
A naked woman sat at the edge of a rumpled bed, yearning with her whole body toward a man leaning against the wall next to an open door. The man was dressed in a tuxedo, ready to go out. His face was expressionless, lost in shadow.
The Color of Light Page 1
