The Color of Light (75 page)

Eat. Sleep. Drink coffee. Mix colors. Paint. Sleep. Do it again.

Slowly, her visions came to life; in a darkened room, the babushka-ed grandmother’s face glowed in the amber light of a hundred
yahrtzeit
candles.

“Great,” Levon told her. “Now finish the other one.”

The twisted vortex of human beings climbing towards the sky took on dimension, the faces, expression. At the bottom of the canvas, where the whirlwind sprang from a still green savannah, the figures were in full color, dressed in fashions from the 1930s; overcoats, suits, hats, round glasses. By the time the eye of the viewer reached the top of the canvas, the figures had lost everything, evolving into gray ghosts. The arms of a child dissolved into smoke; a woman’s long, drifting hair melted into a passing cloud.

The night before the exhibition, Tessa laid the last stroke of paint on the last figure on the last canvas. She lowered her brush and stepped back.

She should have been happy.

It was a warm evening in Manhattan at the end of May, the kind that promises that summer will break out at any moment. Orange streaks could still be seen in the western skies over the chimneys and water towers.

She went to the window, felt the soft breeze on her face. She closed her eyes. Rafe would be waking up right about now. She imagined him getting up out of bed, raking his fingers through his tousled hair, the breathtaking beauty of his body as he glided across his room to the shower.

Across the street, people were gathering for the eight o’clock performance of Blue Man Group. Someone was practicing the violin with the windows open. An opera singer was warming up in the acting school that occupied the top floors of the building. She could hear the excited chatter of NYU students, or perhaps they were from Cooper Union, walking by on the sidewalk below. She smelled lilacs, and remembered that they were in bloom this time of year. Perhaps there was one flowering in one of the impromptu gardens that peppered the roofs of the nearby buildings.

With a sigh, she turned back to her studio. The mother and child painting peered reproachfully at her from the wall. She frowned at it. Though it had been completed weeks ago, she had never been satisfied. Something was still missing.

Tessa crossed her arms, leaned against the radiator. She thought about the girl she had been when she had started classes last September, unformed,
naive. She had been a blank canvas then, unaware of her own singularity, hunting for an identity among other people’s lives.

Her thoughts traveled further back now, into the past; she thought of a girl who’d gone to art school in the long ago winter of 1939, a girl just like her, blazing with talent, burning with a passion she did not dare reveal.

She thought about Yechezkel and his first wife, Sara Tessa. About their children, and the millions more just like them. She thought about her father, growing up under his uncle’s watchful, unloving eye. She thought about her family, fifty years later still shackled to the catastrophic damage Hitler had wreaked upon the human psyche. She thought about Isaiah, sentenced to death for the unpardonable crime of being a Jewish child on the continent of Europe in 1943. About Sofia, whose last independent act as a human being was to be a choice between the unspeakable and the unthinkable. She thought about Rafe, who’d witnessed it all.

Taking a clementine from the little wooden crate on the octagonal Moroccan table, she stood before her wall, as she had a thousand times before, looking to the postcards of famous artworks for inspiration. As she peeled the clementine, her gaze roamed across the playing field of art history. Hopper’s
Nighthawks,
the loneliest painting in the world. The rich reds, blues and browns in Titian’s palette. The fierce bravado in Velasquez’s brushwork. The tenderness in a Raphael Madonna. The densely muscled back of a Sibyl in the Sistine Chapel ceiling. The pink-cheeked innocence of a Bouguereau angel.

Finally, her eye fell on the photograph Leo had given her, the one titled
Saint Valentine’s Day, Paris, 1939.

Studying it again, Tessa felt excitement bloom inside of her. She looked at her watch. It was eight o’clock. Perhaps…if she worked all night.

Lifting the heavy canvas back onto the easel, she began to paint.

At three in the morning, she was finished. Which was good, because the porters were coming at eight to move the paintings to the Cast Hall for the show.

It was too late to go home. She collapsed onto Gracie’s couch, falling promptly and deeply asleep.

When she awoke, it was already morning. Sunlight streamed in through the window. Her side ached. For a moment, she was confused, and then she remembered the night before, and swung her feet onto the floor.

Something was going on. There was a babel of noise from one of the other studios, growing louder as she sat there. She boosted herself up, feeling a little wobbly, then pushed aside the curtain that opened onto the aisle.

A crowd of people was gathering around Portia and David’s doorway. Two first-year students ran by, nearly knocking her over. “Can you believe it?” One of them said to the other. “I never thought it would be
—
” and then they were past her; she didn’t catch the name. With growing unease, Tessa pushed her way through the throng of students.

The sight that greeted her was so strange she thought she might be dreaming it. Sunlight filtered in over Portia’s neat wall of postcards and sketches. There were art books and sketchbooks, a teapot with a matching teacup, a box of Celestial Seasonings herbal tea. Her crock of brushes, her can of turpentine. The usual stack of paintings against the radiator.

David’s side of the studiºo was empty, stripped down to the bare walls. Everything was gone. Even the floor had been swept clean.

The only thing left behind was his easel. The crossbeam supported a large canvas, newly coated with a thick layer of white paint. His thesis painting.

Ben and Clayton were huddled together with Portia. They glanced up at her as she came in, as stricken as if they had discovered his body.

“What?” she said, bewildered, fumbling for words. “When?”

Portia was shaking her head. “It must have happened some time during the night. I came in this morning and found it like this.”

“I was up painting until three. I didn’t hear anything.”

“Us too,” said Ben, nodding towards Clayton. “I crashed at around three-thirty.”

“The last time I saw him was around two o’clock, heading down to the deli for a cup of coffee,” offered Clayton. He was in a daze, from the shock, or from the exhaustion, Tessa didn’t know which. “He was going on about how he couldn’t get the transition of light right on the watering can. It looked fine to me.”

“Did he tell anybody?” said Tessa, bewildered. The sculptors glanced at each other, shook their heads. “Leave a note?”

Portia looked haunted. “No.”

Clayton was still shaking his head. “He seemed so…
normal.”
he said, summing it up for all of them.

Suddenly the porters were there. Slowly, reluctantly, the artists parted from one another, returning to their studios to oversee the safe transit of their thesis paintings, most of them still wet, down the freight elevator to the first floor.

19

T
he Graduation Exhibition took place, as did all other events of importance at the Academy, in the Cast Hall. It had been painted white for the occasion, the wooden floors sanded and polished to a high gloss. Special full-spectrum lamps were installed overhead, positioned so that they would cast light, but not glare, onto the varnished paintings. The skeleton from the anatomy room had been wheeled in, a diploma clutched in the bony metacarpals of its right hand, dressed formally for today’s occasion in a cape, gown and mortarboard.

No decorators had been called in, no fancy hors d’ouevres from Glorious Food, no candles or smoke or waiters or special effects. There was a discreetly skirted table bearing glasses of white wine, some platters with cheese and fruit, a tasteful floral arrangement. Tonight was about the art.

Rafe ran his hand through his hair, checked his clothing yet again for lint, for invisible traces of plaster dust. He was nervous. Had he still been in possession of a heartbeat, it would have been racing.

The Exhibition was what the Academy held instead of a traditional graduation ceremony. Engraved invitations had gone out weeks ago to family members, to galleries, collectors, curators and the press, as well as to the board members and the faculty. At the end of the evening, Giselle would announce the winner of the Academy’s prestigious Prix de Paris, awarding a single lucky student an all-expenses-paid year of study in Paris. And then the second-year students formally became Masters of Fine Arts.

Portia’s family was coming, and so was Ben’s. Harker’s family was driving up from Texas. Clayton’s father was flying in from Mississippi. Graham’s parents were making the trip in from the Midwest. If there were a prize to
win for traveling the shortest distance, Gracie’s parents would win; they just had to traverse the few blocks from Mulberry Street to Lafayette.

Tessa would be on her own. She had already graduated once, her parents had seen it, they were not flying out to New York to see an art show. Besides, they were invited to a bar mitzvah on Shabbos, and Cilla had delivered a baby boy, his
bris
falling, by coincidence, on the same day as the show. His name was Isaiah.

Rafe glided into the Cast Hall. Allison was poised near the door, handing out programs. She looked healthier; perhaps she had put on a little weight.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Sinclair,” she said hurriedly, before he could speak. “I was failing two classes. Mr. Turner told me he’d change my grades if I just…” she looked down at the floor, then determinedly met his eye. “It was all true, though. Everything I said. I wanted to die.” She looked helpless again, remembering. “That night was kind of a bottom for me. I got help the next day.”

“It was a bad time for me, too, Allison,” he said.

“Thanks for not taking advantage of me,” she said, and handed him a program.

He smiled at her and went in.

He was late; the Cast Hall was already packed with graduates and their families. He himself had not yet seen the show; Giselle and a team of board members had overseen the hanging of the paintings, holding long heated discussions about which paintings should go next to which, and where. Temporary walls had been constructed so that each artwork could be viewed separately, without being crowded together or hung atop one another. He set off through the aisles searching for Tessa.

A critic from
ArtForum
was staring at him. So was someone from the Marlborough gallery. Rafe was used to being looked at, it was nothing new for him, he was looking particularly sharp tonight, and he knew it. After tonight, Tessa was no longer a student at the American Academy of Classical Art.

A critic he knew vaguely from the
Times
regarded him with interest. Wylie Slaughter and his group of supercool artist friends glanced at him and whispered furiously.

Self-consciously, he checked his suit, smoothed his hair. Nothing seemed to be out of place. He shrugged it off.

Rounding a corner, he saw a large crowd gathered at the far wall. A student he didn’t know noticed him, then whispered to his friend. The friend elbowed a third boy, who turned around, too. Two first-year students glanced at him, then returned to staring at whatever was on the wall.

Rafe shouldered his way to the front of the throng, and found himself face-to-face with Tessa’s painting of the mother and child, the one that had affected him so deeply when it was just a pencil sketch, that long ago day in September.

Only now, it was Sofia.

Once again, the look of horror dawned across the face shaped like a heart, a wall of flames leapt in her wild and tragic eyes. Once again, she held tight to a sweet and pink-cheeked little boy, her fingers covering his eyes.

A grieving young man wrapped his arms protectively around them, his head turned away, as if he couldn’t bear to watch. Great black feathered wings rose from his shoulders. Raphael Sinclair, the Angel of Healing. He clapped his hand over his eyes, shutting out the sight.

Someone took his hand. “I’m sorry,” he heard Tessa whisper beside him. “Is it all right? I didn’t know how to tell you. I’m so sorry.”

Tessa’s painting was only the beginning. The gallery was filled with tributes to the embattled founder of the school. Graham had painted him as St. Sebastian, looking to the heavens, his body pierced with arrows. Harker had included him in his portrait gallery of downtown denizens, his collar pulled up, the brim of his hat pulled low over his eyes. In her tower of edenic female nudes, Gracie had found room for just one perfect man. Portia had painted two children holding hands in a green and threatening landscape, children who looked suspiciously like Rafe and Tessa. Ben had sculpted him struggling to free himself from the Devil’s grip, alongside small tortured figures of Harker, Portia, Gracie, Clayton, and, of course, himself.

But the biggest surprise was the centaur. Displayed on a pedestal in the middle of the Cast Hall, grafted onto the body of a horse, was the muscular torso of Raphael Sinclair.

“There was this eureka moment,” Clayton was explaining in his juiciest Southern twang to a plump journalist who was scribbling away in a notebook and nodding vigorously. “Artists. Half human, half something untamed that the rest of the world doesn’t understand.”

“Historic,” the journalist was muttering ecstatically. “This is his-
tor
-ic.”

Anastasia materialized from the crowd to take his arm, “Well, my dear,” she said. “You have succeeded. Your students are quite gifted. Really, I am impressed.”

He turned to her and smiled. “They are, aren’t they.”

She was dressed in a little blue cocktail dress with insets of lace and studs, tiny pleats set all around the skirt. Between her breasts hung a large bejeweled cross, perhaps four inches in length, made from black metal and burgundy stones. “Made by one of your children,” she said, holding it in her palm. “That Allison girl. We are featuring it in the September issue. My last.”