The Color of Light (16 page)

She fell silent, absorbed in her own thoughts. Abruptly, she turned to him. “How did you know about me? Who told you? Does everybody know?” She put a hand to her head. “This is so embarrassing. I feel like an idiot.”

“Lucian and I have a mutual friend,” he said hastily. “Anastasia deCroix.” He paused, then said mildly, “No one thinks you’re an idiot.”

“I’m okay, you know. You can get back to the party now. They must be looking for you.”

“I’m sure they can do without me for a little while longer.”

She looked wistfully at one of Graham’s pen and ink drawings, a sketch of a model’s back. The anatomy was flawless; not one extraneous mark, not one line out of place. “Fame,” she mused, returning to his question. “I’ve been around fame. It leads to strangers showing up at your door with your name painted on their breasts.”

It made her absurdly happy to see him stop and laugh, she couldn’t have said why. “It’s not like I want to labor for years in obscurity,” she added. “I’m not a martyr. I want people to see my work. I’d like if it made them feel something, or if it made someone think a new thought, or see things in a different way.”

This had the heavy ring of truth. “That’s it,” she said as they meandered into the aisle. “I want something I make to make a difference to somebody.” She rolled her eyes. “I sound so pretentious.”

“I don’t think you’re pretentious,” he said.

They drifted from studio to studio. Tessa stole a glance at the man beside her, felt herself responding to the grace with which he moved, the way his clothes fit his lean, muscular body. She felt like she was under a spell, a thrill of enchantment, as if she had discovered a room in her apartment that hadn’t been there before.

In the sculptors’ studio, they were confronted by a doleful, empty-eyed female figure. Small, contorted human bodies writhed from the contours of her skirt.

“Ben,” she said. “I think it’s for a competition. A slavery monument somewhere.”

He studied the plaster cast. “Right. He came to us from some dreary technical school in Indiana.”

They moved on to David and Portia’s studio. David’s wall was neatly hung with figure studies, flawlessly executed in paint, charcoal, pen and ink.

“He’s good,” Rafe commented.

“Yes.” she said in a way that made him glance at her, “Really good.”

Portia’s side was stacked with her studio paintings of nude models. They had a lyrical, haunting quality to them, owing to the delicacy of her line and the way she handled her paint.

“Lovely,” he said, inspecting them closely. “Filled with light.”

“Why did you do it?” she said curiously. “Pull me out onto the floor, dance with me. Why?”

Yes. Why? His heart was a riot of confusion. He had no business being alone with her, no business making a scene, no business skipping out on the party when hundreds of wealthy lovelies were downstairs, waiting for his attentions, begging to be convinced that the Academy was exactly the right institution at which to throw their money. This could bring nothing but disaster, after all the years he had spent sculpting his persona as a society fixture and cultivating the reputation of his school.

He prowled restlessly through the room to the empty student lounge at the front of the building. She was following him; he could hear her stiff skirts swishing somewhere in the dark behind him.

The windows facing the street had been crisscrossed with huge masking tape X’s, and they threw eerie rippling patterns on the studio walls. He rested his palms on the cool glass. “You called to me.” he finally answered. “I can’t explain it.” And then suddenly, with a rush of feeling, “I’ve felt connected to you since the moment I first laid eyes on you. Don’t you know? Can’t you feel it?”

Tessa was astonished. It was as if a character in a movie she was watching had walked off the screen, found her in the theater, and delivered the lines from the big love scene.

He looked up at the ceiling, where workmen had already begun installing the new ventilation system. “But I’m a thousand lifetimes older than you. And I’m on the board. I’d be kicked right out if anyone suspected anything. And then we all lose.”

The wind started up again. It whistled mournfully through chinks in the buildings armor, sent plastic grocery bags tumbling end over end and paper cups skidding down the sidewalk on the street below.

“Listen,” he went on, in a tense, low voice. “I know you’re in love with Lucian Swain. And, for what it’s worth, I think he loves you, too. Not as
much as he loves his dick, of course. But…he is what he is. And he’s not fit to touch the hem of your skirt.” The neon sign on the Astor Place Theatre advertising Blue Man Group flashed on and off, staining his face blue and yellow by turn. The blue light heightened the angles of his handsome face, made him look almost dangerous. A muscle in his jaw flexed; and then he added, “And neither am I.”

Tessa studied her image in the dark window.

Oh, dear God, she can see that I have no reflection.

He heard the rustle of her petticoats, felt the warm aura of her presence tickling the hairs on the back of his neck. She was standing beside him, looking out over the rooftops of Greenwich Village through windows dotted with raindrops.

“Thank you,” she said softly. “Thank you for all of it. The dance, the school…the things you said. Everything.” Her breath made a foggy patch on the glass. She traced a heart with an arrow through it. “You know, this is my turf,” she said forlornly. “What’s he doing here, anyway?” She expelled a deep, shaky sigh. “I always imagine this block is mine,” she explained apologetically. “I feel safe here. Silly, huh?”

He registered a surprising flutter of pleasure. “No,” he said. “Not silly at all.”

Take her. Take her now. No one else is around. She wants it. She’s waiting for you.

“Look,” he said, against his better judgment. “Would you like to go out for a drink?”

She shook her head no. “I’m sorry. I have to get home. It’s Friday night.”

“Friday night?” he repeated, not understanding.

Shy, embarrassed. “It’s a long story. I’m usually home on Friday nights… my Sabbath…I didn’t want to miss the Halloween Party.”

Sofia’s hands describing circles in the air as she lit the Shabbos candles. Isaiah covering his eyes with his baby fists, imitating her.

“Do you mean…Shabbos?” he said, the syllables rusty on his tongue.

Tessa’s mouth dropped open. “How do you know that word?” she asked slowly.

I want to tell her.

Don’t be an idiot.

There was a burst of noise over in the sculptors’ studio; a bump, a crash, a whispered oath, shh-shhing. Drunken party guests looking for a place to consummate their excitement, knocking over someone’s hard work.

The spell was broken. “I’d better go.”

“Stay,” he said. She shook her head no. He could feel her withdrawing, backing away from the intimacy of the moment. “Let me walk with you, then.”

A ghostly figure in a red dress materialized from the gloom. “Mr. Sinclair? Is that you?”

It was Allison, accompanied by one of the first-year students, a boy from Germany. Exasperated, he turned to her. “Yes?”

“Giselle is looking for you. She thought she saw you come up here.”

Damn.
“I’ll be right down. He turned back to Tessa. “Will you wait for me?”

“I can’t.” She was receding from him, irretrievably called back to her life, the world of light, the land of the living.

Allison, from the shadows. “Mr. Sinclair?”

“Tell Giselle I’ll be there in a minute,” he commanded her. “Now, go.” He could hear her muffled giggles as she fled through the studio floor with her new friend, the staccato clatter of their tread echoing down the stairs.

“Tessa?” he said, his voice soft and low, trying to win her back again.

Her eyes, her eyes. They looked at you the way you had always wanted someone to look at you. They believed every tale you ever told and took your side. They roused him, made him restless, made him want to protect her, pursue her, hunt her down, keep her safe.

“Yes,” she said quietly. “I feel it too.”

And then she was backing away, letting herself be swallowed up by the darkness. He heard the steel door slam; the sound of her footsteps running down the stairs was drowned out by the noise of Harker’s band playing
Rock Lobster.

A fiery ball mounted in his chest, rising to his brain. Her bare flesh under his hands, under his control as he forced her backwards around the dance floor. The swell of her breasts over the lace as she arced back in a dip. Her long white neck. His head throbbed. He pressed his fists against his temples.

Go. The party. Remember? Giselle. Biggest fundraiser of the year.

Halloween. A million people dressed as someone else on the streets of Greenwich Village tonight looking for a good time. Some looking for that special someone. Others looking for trouble. Odds were good that some would find both.

Tessa, by herself, on a night like this, in the path of someone like me.

Now he hurried, racing down the stairs to the service entrance at the back of the building.

In the middle of Lafayette Street, he stood still. He closed his eyes, inhaled, concentrating. Due to the storm, tonight New York was a confusing jumble of unfamiliar odors, full of questionable smells blown in from faraway places. The stench of wet garbage; the burnt-rubber stink of asphalt; the overpowering odor of the homeless blowing up from the subway vents. The omnipresent scent of dry cleaning chemicals; the sharp reek of sweat and vinyl raincoats; the smoky musk of burning wood; cooking smells from the Korean deli; the unmistakable cold tang of winter.

There it was, a whiff of summer, the scent of blackberries trailing off in the direction of Astor Place. He headed north on Lafayette, then west on Eighth Street, circumnavigating a bevy of NYU students, their hair spray-painted purple, blue, ruby, emerald.

Despite the storm of the century, the streets of the village were packed. He lost her scent as he passed through a platoon of transvestite Marilyn Monroes, catching it again at Fifth Avenue. The crowds leaving the parade route along Sixth Avenue made way for him, a striking but slightly sinister man in a tuxedo stalking down Fifth Avenue, focused on a single object somewhere ahead of him.

Crowds were flowing down all the major avenues, converging on Union Square, the end of the parade route. A man strode past him wearing nothing but blue body glitter, a codpiece and a pair of white feathered wings. A couple of Chers, a couple of Lizas, several different versions of Dorothy Garland from various eras. A pair of hippies. Leather-legged punk rockers sporting hair shaved and shaped into neon-green mohawks. A couple outfitted as condoms. Scattered rubbery George Bush masks. One diehard Nixon.

There she was, crossing Ninth Street, heading uptown. He would have recognized her anywhere, her hair hanging almost to her waist, the curls jouncing with each step.

There were girls dressed as cats, girls dressed as witches, girls dressed as Elvira, girls dressed as Playboy bunnies, girls dressed as hookers. Posses of young men in flannel shirts and jeans, redolent of Corona and Sam Adams, come down from the East Side, or Columbia, or the boros, or Jersey, for one wild night in New York City. A unicorn, resplendent in a sparkling transparent body stocking, shimmery lavender tail and an iridescent horn glued to his forehead. A hooded Grim Reaper, ten feet tall, sweeping by on stilts, tapping on an oversized watch as he passed.

Expertly, Tessa navigated her way through the lanes of foot traffic moving along the sidewalks with a native’s feel for the natural rhythm of the street. Rafe watched young men glance covetously over their shoulders for a second look at her luminous face, one slamming with an audible
oof
into the person walking just ahead of him.

At Sixteenth Street, in front of Armani Express, she turned left, a single diminutive figure fighting the hordes surging east. A skeleton the size of a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade balloon hovered over the throng, in the wake of a samba band trying to find its way to Union Square. The giant skull bobbled left and right with a wicked grin, and the staring empty eye sockets seemed to be searching for someone in the crowd. Tessa hugged the buildings, squeezing past a stoop with an Anarchy symbol spray-painted on it, just avoiding the reach of its skeletal fingers.

Near the end of the block she reached in her pocket for a key, pulled open the glass fronted door of a building and entered. Rafe sprinted forward, getting there just in time to see her pass the elevator, turn right, and disappear from view.

There was a row of wide, high, street-level windows, and he peered into them through a chink in the dirty venetian blinds. Here, between the slats, he could plainly see a long narrow room with a door at the end of it. Ubiquitous New York City exposed brick walls. A staircase, a sagging corduroy couch, a wooden table, a lamp, a TV, a coffee table. Tessa, throwing her coat down on the couch.

“Hey!” a sharp male voice behind reprimanded him. “We don’t do that here.”

Rafe turned his head. A clean-cut young man in a suit and trench coat, Wall Street type, or a lawyer, doing the right thing. At any other time, he would have applauded his civic responsibility, but now he fixed him with a hard, baleful glare. The young man sucked in his breath, jerked away like he’d been stung, then hurried off down the street, fearfully glancing back to see if he was being followed.

By the time he turned back, Tessa was gone. He straightened up, noted the location. 43 West 16th Street, her awning said, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues.

He had left the party without his coat, and now he felt the chill biting into him. A bitter cold front was riding in on the tail of the storm. There was a phone booth in front of the Korean deli on the opposite corner. He trotted across the street, pulled a business card from his wallet, dropped a quarter into the slot with shaky hands. Fumbled the number. Cursed himself. Found another quarter, dialed again.

“Drohobych Import Export,” answered a bored Russian operator.