The Color of Light (45 page)

My sketchbook had fallen to the floor when Sawyer hit me. Looking around, I spotted it under our table, between Erlichmann and Beata. I
apologized for disturbing their evening. He waved it off. “Love is a messy undertaking,” he advised me in his morose German accent. “Enter at your own risk.”

I bent to retrieve it from between the legs of Beata’s chair. “Don’t go to her,” she instructed me in a low voice. Her gray eyes were serious and sad. “There is something you don’t know.”

I clenched my jaw. It hurt. “I know I love her,” I replied. I pulled my collar up and went out into the misty night.

I had only one thought. She was going to cut me out of her life without another word. I looked up and down the street, but it was empty of passersby. Taxis stopped in front of the restaurants and bars and cafés, spilled out their loads of laughing passengers, zoomed off again to pick up their next fares. I hailed one, instructed the driver to take me to the Fourth Arrondissement, Rue des Rosiers, and there’s an extra franc for you if you step on it.

When he squealed to a stop, I threw the driver his money and got out. The street was deserted. The rain was making a tremendous racket, beating a tattoo on the roofs and garbage cans and gurgling down the drainpipes. I looked up, wondering which window might be hers, but water ran down my face and into my eyes, making it impossible to see more than five feet ahead. Too late, I remembered her rules.
No visitors, male or female.
Without a plan, I splashed across the flooded gutters to her door.

And there she was, hatless, completely drenched. She was standing before the gate to the courtyard, key in hand, as if she were about to open it when she had become absorbed in thinking about something else.

I wanted to put my arms around her, protect her forever from idiots like Sawyer. Instead, I came up behind her, hands safely in my pockets.

“I’m sorry, Sofia.” I repeated helplessly. “I’m sorry.”

She acknowledged me, imperceptibly nodding her head, as if she had decided something.

“Let’s go,” she said abruptly. “Let’s get away from here.”

I waved my arms, flagging down the taxi I had just left. Once inside, I directed the driver to take us to nearby Place de Bastille. Here were the kind of places where the lowest rungs of society came to dance, to argue, to fight, to drink, where sailors and day-laborers came to negotiate a price
for services rendered in small rooms nearby. Places where nobody would recognize Sofia or me.

We took a small, scarred table in the back of an odiferous joint on the Rue de Lappe, smelling suggestively of urine, beer and sweat. She shrugged off her coat, left it dripping on the back of a chair. I looked across the table at her, glowing in the poor light of the squalid bar. Bits of blue-black hair clung to the sides of her face.

“Have you got a cigarette?”

I did. She placed it between her lips and leaned forward for a light, our faces almost touching, so close that I could feel warmth emanating from her skin. She leaned back in her seat, held her cigarette aloft. Gray smoke rose in a lazy line towards the ceiling.

“Tell me, English,” she said. Her voice was low, melancholy, thrilling. “Tell me what you are going to do when you are finished with your studies.”

Here, I was on solid ground. I told her I was going to stay in Paris forever, painting lonely landscapes and alienated apartment dwellers. There was a gallery showing some interest in my work, and I hoped they would take me on. I told her I wanted to buy a little place in Provence, something charming, surrounded by picturesque Van Gogh fields full of picturesque Monet haystacks. I told her she should visit England someday, that I could take her to see the sights, maybe the places where I grew up.

She listened to me drone on and on, resting her chin in her hand, looking at me through drowsy half-closed eyes. I think she just wanted to hear the sound of my voice rising and falling, telling stories, weaving dreams. They must have been her dreams, too.

The music changed to jazz. “I want to dance,” she said suddenly. “Let’s dance.”

I rose to my feet and followed her obediently onto the small, close dance floor. She turned to face me. I stood as awkwardly as a schoolboy, my arms dangling at my sides.

“Go on,” she said. “I want you to.”

I slid my hand around her tiny waist. She curved her hand over my shoulder, placed her other hand lightly in mine.

I had been with women before, dozens of women, oceans of women, straddling, you might say, the entire spectrum of the social strata. Models,
actresses, society girls, hat check girls. American art students with more money than talent. Once, a sword swallower from a troupe that was performing at the Place du Tertre, and her sister the fire-eater. I didn’t care what color they were or what language they spoke or how much money their daddies made. All I ever asked for was a good time.

This burned.

Burned with an incandescence that consumed, lit me up from within like a house on fire. With every lunge forward, with every step back, with every brush of her body against mine, the flames leapt higher. I burned for her.

The dance floor became packed with unwashed bodies touching us as they swayed in time to the music, the air thick with smoke. The band grew louder and more insistent, the saxophone lamenting over the piano and the violin. From time to time, there were bursts of raucous laughter, or shouted indignation, threats of violence. The tobacco-stained walls beaded over with droplets of humidity. Nine o’clock came and went. When I pointed out the hour, Sofia acknowledged me with a nod, bowed her lovely head, and delicately rested her cheek on my chest. I hardly dared to move. I feared that any sudden movement would frighten her away.

This was it, then. This was love, blinding, selfish, unassailable, deathless love. Yes, I did want to marry her, bring her home to meet my mother, then take her away and spend the rest of my life erasing the memories of everything that had come before. This was the last woman I ever wanted to make love to, the only face I ever wanted to see in the morning when I opened my eyes to the new day.

At two in the morning, damp from the exertion and the humidity, we found our table, collapsed into our seats. Sofia fanned herself. I ordered drinks.

“Sofia,” I said. She turned to me expectantly.

“I love you. I love you more than anything in this world or the next. I love the kindness in your voice, the passion in your eyes. I want to be the only man to ever see you naked, the only man to ever lay his hands on your porcelain skin. I want to make love to you every night before we fall asleep, then wake up in the morning and do it again. I don’t know if I believe in God, but I believe in the salvation of your love. Marry me.”

But I never said it, never said any of it. I don’t know why. I couldn’t get the words out, as much as I yearned to say them. Maybe my parents’ marriage put me off the whole institution. Maybe it was the hand of God. Or maybe Sawyer’s words got to me, after all.

She waited for a moment, then tilted her head, reading me, taking it in. Then she smiled a sad little smile, the corners of her mouth turned down instead of up, her black eyes telegraphing the tragedy still to come, if only I had been paying attention.

“Let’s play,” I said, and I tore out a page out of my sketchbook, hurriedly drew a picture, folded it over, slid it across the table.

She scanned the room, searching for inspiration. Her hair was longer than was fashionable, and the rain had turned it curly; it hung in tight ringlets around her head. I watched her as she drew. I loved looking at her hand grasping the pencil, her small tapered fingers like some kind of Italian cookie rolled in powdered sugar.

She squinted at her drawing, folded it and passed it back to me.

My turn. I hesitated, staring at the blank paper. I scribbled something down, slid it across the table to her.

“Go on,” I said. “Open it.”

She lifted the top flap, unfolded the bottom. When she saw what was inside, she sat back in shock, then clapped her hand over her mouth as if she were afraid something would fly out, something she could never take back.

Sofia had made a mermaid in the centerfold, a beautiful female torso with a long, shimmering tail. Bubbles rose to an imaginary surface. A shark glided in the distance behind her.

But at the top, looking like it belonged to another picture, was a couple embracing. The woman had dark curling hair, a small pointed nose, her rosebud mouth pressed to her lover’s lips in an eternal kiss. The man lay across her body, concealing it, his arms clasped around her slight shoulders. His hair was clipped close in the back, coming to a peak as it fell over his forehead.

Under the mermaid, abandoning the game, I had scrawled the words
I love you.

She took a good, long time looking at it, smoothing out the creases in the paper, tracing her fingers along the lines I had made. An artist’s caress.

“Raphael,” she finally murmured. “One more dance.”

The band was playing a scratchy tango,
Una Por Cabeza,
passionate even for a tango, and this time there was no hesitation when I put my arm around her waist and she settled her hand upon my shoulder.

For just a little longer Sofia upheld the imaginary space between us, like a student at a proper dance academy; but in the final wistful minutes of the night before daylight begins to send feelers out into the darkness, the entire length of her body dissolved into mine, and the lilac perfume of her scent filled my senses when I rested my cheek against her hair, and her pale face was luminous in the smoky haze when she turned it up to mine.

Her hand moved to the back of my neck. I shuddered at her touch. Now, on the edge of the precipice I hesitated, knowing with certainty that after this, nothing could be the same. For just one more moment I held back, measuring the full weight of its meaning, for her, for me, for ever, after this night.

But when I felt her soft red mouth on my eyes, felt her soft white hands on my face, a chasm opened under me; all rational thought fell down and down into its shadowy depths. I closed my eyes and gave myself over to her completely.

When they threw us out of the place at closing time, it was three or four in the morning. We emerged from the fetid air of the bar to find it had stopped raining. There was a thin rime of ice on the cobblestones and the sky had cleared to a brilliant Prussian blue, littered with an anorexic sliver of a moon and cold white stars.

Sofia had had two pastis, just enough to affect her ability to walk a straight line. Lightly, she rested her hand on my shoulder as I maneuvered her into a taxi, slid in next to her.

Now I remembered the expression on her face as she searched for me in La Coupole earlier this evening, a hundred years ago.

“Sofia,” I said, just loud enough so her eyes would flicker open. “Last night. You looked like the world was coming to an end. Is everything all right?”

A deep, heartfelt sigh. “It doesn’t matter anymore,” she muttered, her eyelids fluttering down like shutters. She yawned charmingly, covering her mouth with her gloved hand. “Tell me, English,” she murmured. “I didn’t
see the paper this morning. Tell me something funny that the monitor said today.” And she closed her eyes and leaned her dark head against my shoulder.

Now I wished I had taken her someplace farther away; we were in front of Sofia’s apartment in a matter of minutes. I touched her arm. She stirred, cried out anxiously in a foreign language. A brief bad dream.

“Look,” I said gently. “We’re here.” She sat up rubbing her eyes, adorably disheveled, stared dully out the window at the chipped plaster and rusted wrought iron balcony of her building. I put my hand on the door handle, meaning to go round the car to open the door for her.

“No,” she said, laying her hand on mine. “Better you stay here.” We sat in the back seat with the car running for a little while longer, hip to hip through the layers of clothing, touching but not touching, until the windows of the taxi fogged over with our breath and the heat rising from our bodies.

Obediently, I let her slide out of the taxi, watched her walk on unsteady legs to the door and take her key from her bag. She put it in the lock, turned it till it clicked. The metal gate swung open. For one more moment she was in my sight, framed by the darkness of the courtyard beyond. And then she was gone.

It came from nowhere, a torrent of sickening, gut-wrenching panic. Flinging myself out the car door, I caught the gate before it could clang closed, then seized her, pulling her into my embrace, as if by doing so, I could lock her up inside of me.

I can still feel the heavy silk of her dress sliding through my fingers, her body yielding, melting into mine, the sweet, sweaty, intimate smell of her skin, the salty taste of her mouth. And when she crept her arms around my neck and shyly gave me what I knew to be the first kisses she had ever given any man, shining visions of a new life opened up before my eyes; and in my heart, I was wedded for eternity to her unforeseeable fate.

I couldn’t sleep anymore than night; I told the taxi driver to take me to my studio, then gave him all the money I had in my pockets.

I felt burdened by new responsibilities and light-headed with happiness. By the leaden light of dawn, I finished my painting of Sofia. Every
stroke of the brush was a caress; every daub of cadmium red on her lips a kiss.

By seven-thirty it was done, and I meant to go out and have coffee at the café round the corner before class. Instead, I promptly collapsed onto my couch and slept till noon.

When I awoke, the sun had slipped past the midpoint in the sky. It was a hard, bright afternoon, one of those late-winter days that you can actually smell spring. I had missed my morning classes hours ago.

For the remainder of the day I roamed the streets of Paris, plotting out our lives together. We would keep separate apartments to satisfy her family. But every morning would find us at the same café. From there, we would go to class, spend the early part of the day working, then break for lunch. There, we would stare hungrily into each other’s eyes as we nibbled on our midday meal. Then we’d tear ourselves away from one another, go to our respective studios and paint until dark. As evening fell, we would meet at one of the restaurants in the Fifth for dinner, and from there we would go to the theater, or a concert, or stroll the boulevards, it didn’t matter so long as she was by my side, her arm safely tucked under mine.