The Color of Light (18 page)

Rafe stifled a yawn, rolled over, squinted at the clock. “What time is it?”

“Three o’clock in the afternoon. I have a meeting in a few minutes, but I just had to know.”

“Know what?” He jogged the hump in the bed next to him. “Wakey wakey,” he whispered to Janina, covering the phone with his other hand.

“What happened after you left, of course.”

“Nothing.” He swung his legs out of bed and onto the kilim rug next to his bed. Janina yawned and stretched, pointing her toes like a ballet dancer. “We went up to her studio and talked. She was in a bad way after that Lucian Swain thing. Art students are like hothouse flowers. I gave her the benefit of my experience and then I made sure she got home safely.” Janina rolled over and nipped playfully at his back, baring her teeth, making little growling noises.

“I’ve had the benefit of your experience, my darling. Talking had nothing to do with it.”

“Not with this one.” He pushed Janina away.

“Really! Not even a taste? A lick?”

“No.” he said shortly.

“Raphael, Raphael.” He could visualize her red lips, turned down with disappointment. “So bourgeois, with all your fine, delicate feelings. No one is going to believe your noble story. I’m going to have to make something up.”

“She’s one of my students, Anastasia. If there’s even a whiff of hanky panky, I’ll be thrown off the board of my own school. I’ve got to be as pure as the driven snow.” Naked, he went to the dresser, found his wallet and fished out a hundred dollar bill. He waved it at Janina, silently gesturing to her to go. She looked offended.

“Watching you dance with her…I thought you were going to bite her at any moment. Every time you drove her backwards around the floor, when you did that
quebrada
…the suspense! The anticipation! I really thought you were going to do it, and just make it look like it was part of the dance. That deep dip at the end, right down to the floor…the way you were looking at her neck with such hunger…” she was almost whispering. “It felt like the old days. Back in Europe.”

Rafe was taken aback. Was he that transparent? “I’ve got to go.”

“Are you alone?”

“No.” He pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes. He’d gotten to sleep at daybreak. “Isn’t it Saturday? Why are you at work?”

“You are the only person in New York City who doesn’t know it’s Fashion Week. Things are crazy. I am zigzagging from party to party, from one runway to the next. That Giselle woman, she was looking for you all night. You are going to have to do some fancy footwork to dance yourself out of this one. Luckily, there is that party at the Guggenheim tonight. Perhaps you can make it up to her.”

Rafe massaged the back of his neck and rolled his head. He had forgotten about that. “How do you stay up all day? Why aren’t you tired?”

She laughed. “You forget, I’m much older than you. I barely need any sleep at all. Listen. I have some information for you. I received a tearful phone call from Lucian Swain. He is beside himself. He wants his little assistant to stay right where she is. He’s terrified that she’s going to go off with you.”

“Good,” he said, scrounging through his drawers for a cigarette. Funny. He hadn’t smoked in years. “Then it worked.”

“It gets better, my darling. You won’t believe it. Lucian says our girl is a virgin. She’s religious or something. I know, I know, it is impossible. A virgin in New York! A virgin with Lucian Swain! He says that she is kind, faithful, trusting, loyal. The kind of girl you marry.” She sniffed contemptuously, as if it were in bad taste. “I can’t wait to see what happens next.”

Janina wasn’t leaving. She threw back the covers to show off her underwear-model’s body, still in the black rubberized bustier from last night.

“So, did you ask her? You had the perfect opportunity.”

“Ask her what?” He found a cigarette, lit it, inhaled deeply.

“Whether she knows what happened to your little friend from school.”

Janina wanted the cigarette. He passed it to her. “No. I still can’t bring myself to do it. I don’t know whether I want the answer to be yes or no.”

There was commotion at the other end of the line. Her tone of voice changed; he heard her issuing icy commands to someone in her office. Then she was back, warm throaty words pouring into his ear. “I have to go, my darling. I will see you later.
Au revoir.”

He hung up the phone, took the cigarette back from Janina, who had rolled over on her stomach and was waving her legs around in the air like a school girl.

“You are in love with one of your students, eh? Someone you should not touch?” she said. “What are you, a teacher?”

“Yes,” he said. “No. I’m not a teacher. The student. I don’t know. I can’t stop thinking about her.”

“Does she like you?”

“She’s with somebody else. Someone who’s not good for her.”

Janina burst out laughing. He looked over at her, his eyebrows raised.

“I’m sorry,” she apologized, not looking sorry at all. “I don’t mean to laugh at you, but it’s funny to hear someone like you say that.”

Rafe sat back down on the edge of the bed and sighed. “You know what I am.”

She took the cigarette, rolled over on her back, clenched it between her teeth. “Yes.”

“A long time ago, before I was this way, there was this woman. We were in school together in Paris, right before the war. I’m pretty sure she…I’m pretty sure she died. But all these years, there’s always been this
lingering shadow of a doubt. Ridiculous, really.” He took the cigarette from her. “It’s impossible, I know. There were no survivors from her family. Still, I can’t stop myself from feeling they must be connected. I could ask her. Then I’d know for sure. Though…” he inhaled, drawing warming smoke into his lungs. His eyes narrowed ruminatively behind the glowing tip of the cigarette. “There are parts of the story that are best not held up to the light of day.”

Janina nodded. “That was a bad time. My grandmother says that one day, the Nazis came and rounded up all the intelligentsia. The teachers, the doctors, the town officials, the professors. They took them to the forest and shot them.”

“Where are you from?”

“Ukraine,” she replied. “But my grandmother was from Lublin, in Poland. Right outside of town, there was a concentration camp. Maybe you heard of it, Majdanek. My grandmother says she used to go up to the fence when guards weren’t looking and give the prisoners food.”

“Really,” he said, thinking of the impenetrable double walls of electrified barbed wire, the guard towers. “She must have been a very brave woman.”

“Yes,” Janina agreed. “She was very surprised when the Russians liberated the camp. She says the people in the town had no idea what was going on in there.”

He remembered the unmistakable stench that had permeated clothing, hair, everything it touched, the greasy ash that had to be washed off the car windows every morning. “Of course not.”

She came to sit next to him, rolling on her stockings, her knee not quite accidentally touching his. He slid his hand up her thigh. “Very nice,” he said, stubbing out the cigarette.

“Do the Jews still use the blood of Christian children for their holidays?” she asked him as she pulled her hair back into a ponytail.

“What?” he said, staring at her in disbelief. “Good God, no. Where did you hear that?”

“From my grandmother,” she said, surprised at his reaction. “Everyone knows.”

“It’s not true,” he said, his face hardening. “It was never true. It’s a stupid peasant superstition.” He removed his hand from her thigh.

“Oh, look,” she said, genuinely contrite, pulling a sad face. “I have upset you with my silly questions. Let me make it up to you.” From an array of small colored bottles on the nightstand, she chose three, one blue, one brown, one chartreuse. Her long fingers made smooth, lazy circles over his body, starting with his chest, expanding to his back and shoulders. Despite himself, he found himself yielding, letting her skilled hands assuage his anger.

“Mmm,” he said. “What are you using?”

“Sweet orange, ginger and ylang ylang for stimulation,” she said, following the convex curve of his lower back. “Eucalyptus and rose for relaxation,” she slid to her knees on the floor in front of him. “Jasmine and vanilla for sensuality.”

She touched her scarlet lips to his throat, his chest, his flat belly, working her way down. “What’s this?” she asked, touching the inch-long scar near the center of his chest.

“Old war wound,” he said, gently removing her hand.

As she went to work, he leaned back on the bed, visualizing Tessa as she had looked at the Naked Masquerade last night. Lightly, he rested his hand on his chest, picturing a tumbled mass of red-gold curls a man could get lost in. It was Tessa’s hands massaging scented lotions over his body, Tessa’s skin the color of a peeled twig under the laces of her black camisole, Tessa calling out his name as she arched her back beneath him.

And then Janina did something with her mouth that drove all such visions from his head, and he closed his eyes and fell into a deep but uneasy sleep, where he dreamed that Tessa hid under the floorboards in Sofia’s kitchen as he forced the door shut to keep out the Nazis, while Janina offered them lotions from outside the kitchen window.

14

T
he clocks had been turned back to daylight savings time the previous Saturday night. White Street was dark and deserted, with deep, shadowed doorways that made Tessa stay a safe distance away from the buildings.

Perspective 101 wasn’t going well. One-point perspective was a revelation, the way it made furniture and buildings recede believably into an imaginary vanishing point; but today Whit had introduced Brunelleschi’s system of transferring a plotted floor plan to elevations and two point perspective by a confusing system of rays and vators, and the math, never Tessa’s favorite subject, was becoming more complex. Whit had been annoyed by her request to go through the calculations again. Everyone else seemed to get it the first time around.

Tessa ascended the three flights of stairs up to Lucian’s loft as if she were going to her execution, sending a little prayer up into the stratosphere;
Please, Lord, let them be at a meeting or something. Anywhere but here.

She pushed open the heavy door. It was blessedly silent. Relieved, she dumped her knapsack on the table and went into the studio.

“Hullo, Tess,” said Lucian.

He was alone, hunched over the drawing table. His pencil made a scritch-scratching sound as he sketched away, magnified by the echoey silence in the studio. Tessa went to her customary place, a tatty mustard-colored hydraulic chair clawed to shreds by his cat, at a long work table covered with piles of photos and magazine clippings.

“What’s all this?” asked Tessa, rolling up her sleeves.

“Wizard of Oz, Behind the Green Door.
There’s an envelope of snaps in there somewhere as well. I rented
The Devil and Miss Jones
and took some
pictures. Very educational. Say, have you seen my August
Vanity Fair?
You know, the one with Demi Moore preggers on the cover. April keeps rearranging my stuff and I can’t find a bloody thing.”

“I think I know where it is,” she said. “How about if I sort these out?”

“That would be great.” he said absently.

Half an hour later, he stretched, yawned, left the studio. She heard him on the phone in his bedroom, making one call, then another. He returned to his drawing table, picked up his pencil again. “Ordered us some din din from that veggie Chinese place. Got you the oysters. Closest to real oysters you’ll ever get, eh?”

He was wearing a sweater in a faded denim color that went perfectly with his eyes, making him look rather dashing. It occurred to her that he was being unusually solicitous.

“Meeting tonight?”

“No.” he said. “Come over here. Take a butcher’s at this.”

Tessa went around to the other side of the drawing table and stood next to him. The top of her head was even with the line of his shoulder. She breathed in his scent. He smelled of wood and lime.

“It’s from
Behind the Green Door,”
he said. “What do you think?”

She could see the silhouette of a woman’s head and something like psychedelic fireworks shooting off all around it. It took her a moment to figure out what she was looking at. She swallowed hard and looked away.

“Um…interesting.” she said gamely. She was desperate not to come off as provincial. April wasn’t provincial. “What images are you thinking of putting on it?”

“I don’t know,” he admitted. “April wants me to do this porn thing. I want to paint
The Wizard of Oz.”
He sighed.

Tessa went back to her piles, Lucian returned to his drawing. For a while, the only sound was the scratching of the pencil and the rustle of paper. The radio was tuned to NPR, providing a hum of background noise. Tessa could hear the dry whisper of Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon program.

“Hell of a party,” he said casually, breaking the silence. “You had a lovely time with Raphael Sinclair, eh?”

Surprised, she turned to face him. Emotions struggled for dominance across his guarded features; fear, worry, envy, resentment, all overshadowed by a childlike fear of being left alone. Lucian was jealous.

“He asked me to dance,” she said.

“You were the most beautiful thing in the room,” he said.

Tessa watched him draw. She loved watching his hand move over the paper. Huge paintings of
The Godfather
or
Easy Rider
or funny faces he made when he was doodling, it was all the same to her. She still couldn’t believe that the paintings she saw hanging in galleries and reprinted in books came from his fingers.

“How long have you known him?” There was a bitter edge to his voice. “Do you like him?”

She kept her eyes on her work, sorting Judy Garland from Marilyn Chambers, pulling pictures she thought might make an interesting painting and putting them in a separate file. “Ooh, this is a good one. She’s clicking her heels together.”

“I saw the way he was looking at you. There are things you don’t know.”

“Oh, really. Like what?” Lucian looked troubled, as if he were wondering whether he should take his chances and tell her a secret he was sworn to keep. “You’re not going to tell me he’s a vampire, are you? Because I’ve already heard that one.”