The Color of Light (72 page)

“Sorry I’m late,” he said breezily.

Turner’s jaw dropped open. He turned to stare at Blesser, who looked as though he’d seen a ghost. It took him a moment to find his voice. “You’re not on the board anymore,” he said, scrambling to recover his confidence. “You don’t have a vote.”

“But I am still the founder of this school,” he replied with a friendly smile, staring directly into Whit’s eyes. “And though you are entirely correct, I cannot vote, I believe I am still permitted to speak. May I?”

Whit dropped his gaze.

All eyes were on Rafe as he glided around the room, stopping in front of the replica of the
Pietà.
He took off his hat and smoothed his hair, smiled gorgeously. There was a sudden crossing and uncrossing of many legs.

Uh oh,
thought Whit. His heart sank.

Rafe’s eyes roamed the crowd, searching for allies, smiling at old friends. Imported fabrics stretched and rustled as the thirty members of the board sat forward. Unexpectedly, a picture of Tessa rose before his eyes, her eyes closed, her face hidden behind an oxygen mask, and his courage faltered.

How would he even begin? What could he possibly say to undo the damage he had wrought?

For some reason, he thought of the New Students Party. It felt like a hundred years ago. Fights had broken out after Whit had announced that April would be the new painting teacher. Tessa, wearing that cream-colored macramé shirt, the coffee-colored glass bead like a sucking candy
on a tether around her neck. Tessa, her fingers running over the watery green sculpture in the alcove. Tessa, on her knees before him.

“Many months ago,” he began. “A student asked me a question. ‘What’s a board member?’ she said.”

They tittered. He smiled as if it were a joke. “I explained how we were responsible for keeping the lights on, for keeping the boiler lit. If it means we have to throw fabulous parties and invite lots of friends and celebrities to get it done, well then, so be it.”

He was warmed by a wave of laughter. He had them.

“Veronique,” he said to a woman in a pink and black Chanel suit who had created her own cosmetics line. “Remember when we met? Always the same tired gallery openings, the endless excruciating merry-go-round of oddly-shaped canvases and impenetrable videos.” She nodded her coiffed helmet of brown hair.

“Holland.” He turned to the right, addressing a man in his fifties who had made a fortune in designer jeans. “Collages made from trash. Rooms filled with mud. Manifestos on the walls to tell us what to feel.” Holland rolled his eyes.

He began to pace, weaving in and out of the masterpieces along the walls of the Cast Hall. His voice was as smooth as the caress of his fingers along the polished surfaces. At Rodin’s
Kiss,
he reached out to pass his hand along the female figure’s thigh. The women in the room sighed.

“Five years ago, the people in this room came together to see that the secrets of the Old Masters live on. Thanks to you and your efforts, they do live on. In our students. Through the prism of their training, our artists can turn an ordinary model posing in an ordinary classroom into a painting that sears the soul, or a figure that might have been sculpted by God. Thanks to you, these techniques, these recipes, these skills, are being passed from our teachers, to our students, to their students. That is how a revolution begins.”

He stopped to face them. “But perhaps you’re thinking this. Sure, Rafe is charming. Fun at a party. Knows all the pretty girls. But recently, he’s not the same fellow. He’s erratic. Undependable. Distracted.” He waited a beat. “Gotten involved with a student.” Another beat. “You’ve all seen the pictures.”

There was a murmured undertone of agreement from one quadrant of the room, but he faced it down, his eyes calm and clear.

“On a personal level,” he continued, “This has been a difficult year for me. I’d like to apologize. First, for any damage I may have inflicted on my beloved school. And second, for any pain I may have caused the people I work with. People whose opinions I treasure. People I care about deeply.” He glanced at Giselle. At Levon, who rewarded him with a warm grin.

“I am not asking to be reinstated to the board. What I did was wrong, and I accept the consequences of my actions. All I ask is for your vote. That you choose to keep this school in peak running condition for the next da Vinci, the next Rembrandt, the next Raphael, the next Michelangelo.

“Because he is already out there, my friends, sitting in a dreary, underfunded public school in some dusty little town where they just cut the art program, doodling in his textbooks instead of listening to the teacher, waiting for that blessed day that he moves to New York and finds a place where they will understand him and nurture his God-given talent.”

His voice was like a beautiful song you strained to remember, because once, a long time ago, it was playing on the radio the first time you were falling in love.

“It is we who are responsible for the soul of the school,” he said, coming to a passionate crescendo. “What is a board member? It is this, ladies and gentlemen.
You
are the beating heart of the American Academy of Classical Art.”

For a moment, the room was still. He had failed to move them, he thought in despair. Acknowledging defeat, he bowed his head, took a step back.

Someone began to clap. The thirty members of the board burst into thunderous applause. Giselle leapt to her feet, followed by the heir to the cough drop fortune, the baby powder magnate, and then the rest of the people in the room. The sound was deafening, echoing through the vastness of the Cast Hall, bouncing off the vaulted ceiling, reverberating wildly off the mute statues and down the eggplant-colored halls. The students gathered outside behind the steel doors heard it, and began to applaud too,
hooting and whistling and stomping their feet. Profoundly moved, Rafe spread his arms wide, the sides of his voluminous coat opening like wings, as if by doing so, he could embrace them all. And smiled.

In the end, it was close. With the faculty and board members all counted, it was nineteen to twenty-one. The Classicists nearly won.

Rafe had guessed correctly. He had been too unstable, too unpredictable, and the improvements that could be made with the promised grant money, too irresistible. Whit gloated with triumph. It had all been for nothing.

He slipped out the back door, avoiding her friends. In the stairway, he dropped a quarter in the new payphone, called the emergency number on the card. The operator knew nothing about Tessa, nothing about a van or men in blue jumpsuits.

He hung up, dialed his answering service. A young man with a Southern accent told him a man named Ram had left a message; Tessa was in surgery, he would try again later.

He hurried home through a cold drizzle, just in time for Ram’s next call.

She nearly died on the table, he told him. By the time she got to the hospital, she’d lost close to a third of her blood. Feeling faint, Rafe leaned his forehead against the cold surface of the wall. The surgeons recovered two pieces of the silver bullet that perforated her small intestine. The third lay close to her spine, in a nook so risky to penetrate that it was considered safer just to leave it in place.

She was at St. Vincent’s, in the Village. Rafe slammed down the phone, headed back out into the drizzle, realized he had forgotten his wallet, went back home, went back out in the rain, remembered all over again that it was impossible to catch a taxi in this weather. When he finally reached the hospital, rain dripping off of the brim of his hat, he was told that only immediate family members were being allowed in to see her.

“But I
am
immediate family,” he said, without hesitation. The guard looked him up and down, exhibiting a certain amount of disbelief. “I’m her…” and there he stopped. Yes, what was he? Lover. Patron. Muse. “I’m her boyfriend,” he said, wincing at the inadequacy of the word.

The guard shook his head. Not good enough. Rafe slammed his fists on the desk in rage, splintering the surface of the wood. A police officer started towards him. He put up his hands, palms facing out, backing away.
See, I’m not crazy.
He would have to find another way.

He never did get to see her. In the end, her family chose to have her flown back to Chicago. They had warned her that New York was a jungle. They wanted her in a hospital nearby, one where they knew the doctors.

At home, he found the blanket in which he had wrapped her, strewn across the tiles of the entryway. He gathered it up and held it to his face. It still smelled of her.

Rain streaked the windowpanes of his enormous, empty house like tears. Raphael Sinclair climbed the stairs to his room, tiredly stripping off his coat, his hat, his tie, his impeccably tailored Savile Row suit. He left each item where it fell, a trail of wrinkled bespoke clothing stretching behind him, as far as the front door.

He crawled into bed, between cold sheets.
Come and get me,
he thought tiredly, addressing the shadowy dream child and his teammates.

Under the covers, he wondered briefly if he had locked the doors. He was surprised to find that he didn’t care anymore.

16

T
wo weeks later, Levon Penfield climbed heavily up the steps to the townhouse at the edge of Gramercy Park and rang the doorbell.

It was the evening of a perfect day, the skies a deep cobalt blue overhead. As he waited, he admired Spring’s first pleasures in the gated park; white and purple swaths of crocuses undulated along the raked gravel paths. Above them, jonquils nodded their stately heads. Forsythia burst into sunny drifts of yellow.

Music played from somewhere inside the house. Levon thought he recognized the tune, something by Roy Orbison. The voice sobbed and sighed, rising to a crescendo of sheer, unadulterated woe. When the song ended, there was a moment of silence, and then it started over again.

He rang one more time, but the house showed no sign of life. Just as he turned to shuffle back down the stairs, he heard a bolt turn, and the door opened a crack to display Rafe’s unshaven face.

Levon followed him through the entry hall. The place was a mess; the walls were being re-plastered, in a burnt orange color you saw sometimes on old houses in Rome.

But the real transformation was in his appearance. The sartorially splendid Raphael Sinclair was turned out today in a robe, pajamas, and a pair of slippers, and by the looks of it, had been wearing them since the last time Levon had seen him two weeks ago. He had lost weight; his cheekbones angled sharply out of his handsome face. His hair stood up in tufts around his head, as if it hadn’t seen a comb, or possibly, shampoo, for a similar length of time.

Upstairs, Levon eased himself onto a sage-colored velvet couch, looking around. He frowned. “Something’s different. You got rid of the carpet.”

Rafe rubbed his eyes. They were bloodshot, rimmed with red. “Yes. I was tired of it.”

“You know, you look like hell.”

“Thank you.”

His robe was open, he wasn’t wearing a shirt. Levon took note of the star-shaped scar over his heart, the gold ring on a chain around his neck.

“You might want to think about changing your clothes, shaving, maybe taking a shower once in a while.”

“Why? I have nothing to do, nowhere to go.” He turned his head towards the window. He looked as if he hadn’t slept in weeks. His skin was pasty, there were shadows under his eyes. Suddenly, he leaned forward. “Have you had any news of Tessa?” he asked urgently, the strange eyes boring desperately into him. “I can’t seem to get through.”

Levon shook his head. “Her family doesn’t want to have anything to do with us. Apparently, they didn’t want her to go to art school in the first place. They’re saying they’re not going to let her finish the year.”

With that, the air seemed to go out of him. He sank back into the couch.

“But Clayton managed to speak to her. He pretended he was from the records department at St. Vincent’s.”

Life entered his face again. “What did she say?”

“She’s back on her feet. She misses us. Her family is driving her crazy. She’s worried about her thesis project. She wishes she was here.”

Rafe expelled a great sigh, caved over, buried his face in his hands. Levon stared at him curiously.

“So it’s true, all those things they said about you. You really are a vampire.”

“Yes. Who told you?”

“Everybody.”

The unkempt head nodded understanding.

“So, you actually drink blood.”

The melodious voice was muffled. “Yes.”

“And you really are immortal.”

He nodded again.

“Wow.”

“It’s not all it’s cracked up to be,” he replied. There was a wineglass on the Mission coffee table, filled with some viscous liquid. Levon looked at it now. The color was somewhere between a deep alizarin crimson and a brownish umber.

“Is that…”

“Blood? Yes.” He gestured sardonically towards the glass. “May I offer you a drink? It’s not so bad if you add a bit of sea salt and a splash of grenadine.”

“So, you don’t have to feed off of a live human being? You can buy it?”

“Apparently.” He grimaced. “Comes in a bag. Falls off a truck in Staten Island or something. Cheers.”

Levon nodded, then picked a piece of imaginary lint off of his jacket. “Rafe,” he said. “This is not strictly a social call.” He took his cap off, rubbed his shining head. “How do I say this.” He placed the cap back on his head. “Bernard Blesser never wrote any letters to grants or foundations. He never made a single call to an institution on our behalf. He was never in touch with any of the places he talked about.”

Rafe slowly raised his head.

Levon rested his hands on his cane. “And the reason I know is because the bank called. Our checks are bouncing all over town. Blesser’s gone. With all our money.” He paused, then added, “With all
your
money, I should say.”

Rafe stared at him, remembering. “He came up to me after the last meeting, said the ventilation system cost double what they quoted us, we couldn’t make payroll.” The color of his eyes was swirling and shifting like fog. “I gave him my banker’s number. My passwords.”