The Color of Light

by Helen Maryles Shankman

  The following morning, she would be flying home for Thanksgiving. There was a big celebratory dinner with all the cousins planned in honor of her grandfather’s eightieth birthday. Tessa didn’t look forward to going home. Her mother would be in the kitchen the entire time with her grandmother and aunts, her father would be waving his arms and jumping through hoops in a futile effort to get her grandfather’s attention. As usual, Zaydie would all but ignore him, bestowing the lion’s share of his consideration on his two other sons and their children. No one would ask Tessa anything about her opinions, her friends, her life, her work. All they ever wanted to know was if she was any closer to getting married. It was the same at every family get-together. It was as predictable as an after-school special. She consoled herself with the knowledge that it would, at least, be brief.

  The building was uncharacteristically quiet. Wednesday night before Thanksgiving was the busiest travel night of the year.

  Outside the wall of windows, the sun was setting in bands of purple and red over the water tanks and rooftops of the West Village. As Tessa made her way through the lounge area and down the aisle, her footsteps sounded unnaturally loud on the wooden floor. She was completely alone. Even the sculptors’ grotto was empty.

  As the day drew to a close, the old building was full of strange noises; yawing creaks, thumps, the skittering of small things running past. The hairs prickled up on the back of her neck. She flung aside the curtain to her studio and stepped inside, coming face to face with Raphael Sinclair.

  Choking back an exclamation, she reared back, knocking over a turntable Gracie had borrowed from the sculptors’ studio to support her écorché. He dived forward, righting it before any damage could be done.

  “Sorry,” he smiled his wry smile. “That happens a lot.”

  “Hi, Mr. Sinclair,” she said.

  “Hello, Tessa.” he said.

  In his overcoat and fedora, he looked like a character in a 1940s film noir, someone gliding through Rick’s in Casablanca. She was taken again by his extraordinary beauty, the strange-colored eyes ringed by a halo of dark lashes, the sensual mouth, those luxuriant lips. A mouth you wanted to kiss for a very long time. Tessa shook it off. Founder of the school, for God’s sake. She lowered her eyes, took her coat off, hung it on her easel.

  They had not spoken since Halloween, though she had been very much on his mind. She looked fetching, as always, even in that horrible shaggy coat she wore over her customary black leggings and shirt. Today she was adorably disheveled, her cheeks pink, her curls in disarray, as if she had just gotten out of bed.

  “I like to come up here and look around sometimes,” he said.

  She plopped her knapsack down on the floor. On cue, the sketchbook slipped out onto the floor. Hurriedly, she picked it up, lovingly brushing crumbs of dried clay from the velvety calfskin cover. “Thank you for the Cerulean blue,” she said. “And the sketchbook. You really didn’t have to do that.”

  “You needed a sketchbook,” he said.

  She picked up a spice-colored Indian scarf shot through with silver, twisted it into a rope and threaded it behind her neck. Surreptitiously, he watched her breasts lift and fall as she tied back her heavy hair, revealing her smooth white forehead, those sharply angled eyebrows that made him ache, a squarely determined jaw line he had not noticed before. There was a small mirror in the corner. She furtively peeked in it now to check her look.

  “How have you been?” he said.

  “Fine. Busy. And you?”

  “Good, good. Also busy.”

  She fiddled with the radio, looking for a song. A melancholy voice wailed that it was losing its religion.

  “Say, wasn’t this Dissection Day?” he asked, as if he hadn’t made a special trip up to her studio just to see how she was handling it. “How did it go?”

  She hesitated in tying her apron, just for a tick, then finished with a flourish. “It was fine.”

  “Oh,” he said. “Did you find it helpful?”

  Her face clouded. “It was terrible,” she confessed.

  “Really.” he said, moving closer. “Why?”

  She reached for her hair, stretching a single curly lock around her finger. “The cadavers. They were so…” she was frowning at something on her wall, but her eyes were very far away. “…dead.”

  “Yes. Well. If you’re going to dissect them, they’re better off that way, really.”

  She flashed him a resentful look, making him feel sorry he had been flip. “Have you ever lost anyone you loved?” he asked gently, trying to make up for it.

  “No,” she said. “Well…my grandparents.” His heart fluttered. “But I was just a little girl, I barely remember them. That’s not it.”

  “I think they’re alcoholics, mostly,” he said. “Donated their bodies to science. It’s a nice way to make up for a wasted life. There’s a symmetry to it, don’t you think?”

  “She was wearing pink nail polish,” she said. He looked at her blankly. “The cadaver, I mean.” She crossed her arms, hugging herself. “Where was her family? Where were her children? Didn’t anybody care about her? Why were they allowing her to be cut up into little pieces by art students?”

  Rafe took off his gloves, drawing closer. “Don’t feel too sorry for them. If they could feel anything at all, I’m sure they would feel glad that they’re finally able to contribute something useful to society. The medical students learn healing from studying their diseased bodies, and then you art students take what you need to make your figures come to life. It’s a kind of alchemy.”

  “What happens when you die?” she burst out, bewildered. “Where does life go when it leaves? Is that all that’s left after all our rushing around and bill-paying and clothes-shopping and apartment-hunting and staying on the straight and narrow is done with? Is that all there is?”

  Now he understood. She had come face to face with mortality. “Everybody dies, Tessa,” he said, in a voice that was a sad but lovely song. “You have many years to live and many lives to touch. She had nothing but her body to leave to the world. You, on the other hand, will leave a body of beautiful work. Don’t be sad, Tessa. She’s not you.”

  She sighed. He wanted to put his arms around her and lay his cheek on top of her shining head, rest upon that river of tawny hair. But of course he couldn’t; she was as forbidden to him as those special tubes of paint they kept locked up in the case at Pearl Paint. He moved away from her, away from temptation. There were new sketches tacked up around her space, new postcards, notes to herself. Several small canvases, stacked with their backs facing out, stored in a dark corner.

  “Why are they in the corner? Have they been naughty?”

  She smiled at that. “Those are from April Huffman’s painting class.”

  He turned to stare at her. “You’re in her class? That must be awkward.”

  Tessa sighed again. So many unexpressed emotions in a single sound.

  “Why don’t you transfer to another section?”

  “I need the work study hours. That’s the only monitor position available.”

  “Why don’t you switch with another monitor?”

  “Whit won’t let me.”

  “Whit won’t…what?” he said incredulously. His eyes narrowed, glittering. His nostrils flared. A muscle in his jaw flexed and hardened. She couldn’t have explained why, but at that moment, he looked fully capable of killing someone. For the first time, Tessa found his presence intimidating. She took an involuntary step backwards, towards the door.

  With obvious difficulty, he suppressed his rage. “Sorry,” he said. He gestured at the paintings. “May I?”

  There were three of them, sloppy, amateurish affairs. The models were baldly posed and badly lit. In their blatant sexuality, they were neither erotic, nor sensual. In the unflattering light, the models looked as if they were being shot for a low-budget porn video.

  He moved away from her, over to Gracie’s side of the room. The giant self-portrait of the
artist astride her boyfriend was gone, presently occupying the wall above the bed in their apartment in Little Italy. There were new drawings taking its place; a tapestry of fat babies evolving into three sensual young women, who evolved further into a withered crone. A studio painting of a seated male nude with six-pack abs. A life-size charcoal drawing of a belly dancer.

  “What’s old Lucian up to these days, anyway?” he said casually.

  Unconsciously, her shoulders bent into a curve, as if she were protecting herself. “Oh. He’s all right. Mary Boone took him on. He’s set for a show in the spring. April’s trying to get him to paint a scene from a porno flick. She says it will get him to loosen up.”

  “I think Lucian’s always been pretty loose,” he said dryly.

  He turned from her to study her wall. She had been busy. There was a flurry of new compositions, hastily scribbled on the backs of envelopes, a phone bill, a class handout. A swirling mass of bodies spiraled upwards into a whirlwind. A landscape with a train, arms waving out of airholes in the sides. Three small figures on a train platform, overshadowed by a wall of flame.

  Tessa studied him from the corner of her eye. He was wearing an overcoat the color of bittersweet chocolate. It swooped and swirled around him with a careless elegance as he moved through her space, reaching out a hand to caress one of Gracie’s sculptures, straightening a crooked postcard pinned to a wall, bending to prop up a canvas slipping forward onto the floor. She was torn between enjoying the beauty of his movements and wanting to warn him that he was going to get oil paint all over his nice coat.

  “So, why are you still here?” he said, turning to her. “Why haven’t you taken off for parts unknown like everyone else?”

  “Couldn’t get a flight until tomorrow.”

  Another half-truth. “Your family must be very proud of you,” he said, probing.

  They’d be prouder if I was popping out grandchildren. “Yes, they must be,” she said.

  There was a couch, a tufted and fringed kidney-shaped red velvet affair that would not have been out of place in a Storyville bordello. Gracie had discovered it at the curb across the street and managed to persuade Clayton and Ben to shlep it upstairs for her. Rafe dropped into it, removing his hat and crossing his long legs with the leisurely grace of a cat. “My father wanted me to go into finance,” he offered. “He said art was no business for a grown man.”

  “You went to art school?” She was taking out her sketchbook, opening it, smoothing the pages.

  “Yes. In Paris. At the École des Beaux-Arts.”

  “Paris! That must have been amazing.” She was doodling with a yellow number two pencil. Eyes, hands, shoes. Warm-up exercises.

  “Yes, well…we drew from plaster casts for a whole year before they let us get near a live model. That was a bit excessive. But that’s what I’ve been trying to do; I want to recreate the classical training I received, here at the Academy.”

  “So what happened?” she said curiously. “Why don’t you paint anymore?”

  He turned his head towards the window. The last red rays of sunset filtered in through the curtains, outlining his profile in gold. The details of the left side of his body were lost in velvety chiaroscuro darkness.

  She sucked in her breath with the drama of it. “Don’t move,” she said.

  The face she turned to him now was strong, calculating, confident, as if someone else had stepped into her body. She was looking at him with an artist’s eye, evaluating the pattern of light and shadow falling across his face, his clothing, his hands. Her eyes narrowed, eliminating, he knew, extraneous detail, flicking impartially from his face to the paper.

  With a few lines, she described the stresses and folds of his suit, the way one leg balanced lightly across his knee, the sensitivity of his fingers and hands. With the lightest of touches, she rendered the line of his nose, the bow of his lips, the angle of his cheekbones. A tremor ran through his body. It was like she was touching him.

  She cocked her head, critically viewing her drawing. “Uch. It’s all wrong.”

  “May I see it?”

  “No. It’s terrible.”

  She closed the sketchbook and tossed it with feigned casualness onto a red Chinese altar table she had bagged from a dumpster on Greene Street. Rafe smiled pleasantly at her. At the same time, they both lunged for the sketchbook.

  She was too slow; he had it in his grasp. Though he had seen himself in photographs, the immediacy of the drawing was undeniable. She had captured him emerging from the shadows of the couch, the vee of his white shirt a bright patch in the dark drawing, gazing like a visionary into the distance. The image was a tone poem, tender, beautiful, a romanticized vision of himself, suggestive too of reserves of power and strength.

  Another drawing came to mind, a drawing pressed flat in a sketchbook more than half a century ago. Ah, Tessa. If you knew the things I’ve done.

  Abruptly, he got to his feet and paced around the space as if it were too small.

  “That sketch,” he said, his back turned to her. “The one of the mother and child.”

  “Yes.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “They’re getting off the train at Auschwitz,” she said. “I’m doing a series of paintings on the Holocaust.”

  “Oh,” he said. His back was turned to her. “How did you happen to choose the Holocaust?”

  “My grandparents are survivors.”

  “I see. From where?”

  “Poland.”

  “Where in Poland?”

  This struck her as an odd question, and she looked at him questioningly as she answered, “Wlodawa.”

  She pronounced it just as Sofia had, Vluh-duh-vuh. He crossed his arms to keep them from shaking. Keeping his voice deliberately casual, he said, “Where did you come by the name on the suitcase?”

  “Wizotsky?” She pronounced it with the W sounding like a V. “It’s my grandmother’s maiden name.”

  “Does she talk about it much? The war, I mean.”

  She shook her head regretfully. “Not at all. Whatever happened must have been terrible. She lost everybody.”

  He gave her back the sketchbook. Tessa closed it with a snap and tucked it into her knapsack. His questions seemed weirdly out of place, inconsistent with his wealthy playboy image.

  “I’m sure it was dreadful. What do you know of her story?”

  “Only that she came from this huge, wealthy family, and then the Germans came and took them all away. Really. That’s everything.”

  “Does she.” His voice failed him. He tried again. “Does she talk about her life before the war?”

  Something stirred in her memory. “There was a family business. A tea company.”

  “Wizotsky,” he said. “The Tzar of Teas.”

  She looked at him with a dawning sense of unease.

  “Tessa.” he said, drawing closer. His voice dropped to a whisper. “Is your grandmother’s name…Sofia?”

  “No,” she said. “It’s Freyda.”

  He had been so completely certain of her answer, that for a moment afterwards he actually thought he had heard her say yes.

  “Freyda?” he repeated stupidly. “Are you sure?”

  “Yes.” She was looking at him curiously.

  “But I was so sure,” he protested weakly.

  His eyes had turned opaque, remote. He had been holding on to something, some kind of a hope, and with that one word, that name, she had utterly dashed it. “I’m sorry if that’s not what you wanted to hear,” she said apologetically.

  He reached out and took her hand, as natural as breathing. “Truthfully, I’m not sure what I wanted to hear,” he said.

  Tessa’s hand was honest and square, the nails filed short and neat for working purposes. The blue veins in her wrist were like rivers on a map of the world, her skin the color of parchment. Hands made for creation. But not Sofia’s hands.

  On impulse, he kissed her upturned pink palm. The heat from his touch seared u
p through her arm, burned like a lit fuse throughout her body, settling in the pit of her belly.

  Somewhere behind them, the steel door slammed, admitting a burst of conversation. Several sets of resounding footsteps echoed past them, stumping to the sculptors’ studio.

  He released her, stepping away to a discreet distance. “I should be going,” he said, smoothing the brim of his hat. “Big reception at the MoMA tonight. Opening of the Matisse retrospective. Lots of wealthy women there who need to be persuaded to give freely.”

  “Say hello to Lucian,” she said. “That’s where he’s going, too.”

  He pulled on his kid leather gloves, flexing his fingers. “I will.”

  Still, he lingered, unwilling to leave the warmth of her studio. Yellow light from a 1950s vintage lamp spilled over the cracked leather cushions of a pair of Danish modern chairs reclaimed from a curb on Tenth Street, across a threadbare Persian rug, illuminating the accidental collages that unfurled across the walls like vines.

  The velvety plush of the couch beckoned to him. He surveyed the room with obvious regret. “I’ve never liked Matisse,” he confessed. “Oh, it feels so good to say that.”

  “I don’t like him either. Makes a nice thank-you card, though.”

  That earned her a smile. “Come back soon, Tessa Moss,” he said, his voice a caress, lean and as limber as a whippet. And then he was gone, the curtain swishing closed behind him.

  It came out of nowhere, the image that rose up before her mind’s eye. A crooked old woman in a babushka bowed over a table swaying under the weight of a hundred flickering yahrzeit candles. She dug out her sketchbook, hurriedly scribbled it down.

  There. She had five sketches to show Josephine on Monday. Now she could go home. She untied her apron and slipped it over the easel, shrugged into her coat. She turned around one last time, reluctant to leave the inviting space, the art-covered walls. With her hand on the switch, she hung back, hesitated. But she had to be up at four to make it to the airport on time, and she still had to pack.