The Color of Light (2 page)

The conversation that had started up after the meeting died back down. Levon continued in his affable voice.

“They come from the far corners of the earth to be here, at this school. There’s a student here from frigging
Norway
this year. Every day I get these calls. ‘Are you really a classical art school? Can you really teach me how to paint like Rembrandt?’

“Okay, maybe the guy is eccentric, but hey, he’s British. Raphael Sinclair sought out each person in this room to create this place. He knew our backgrounds, and experience, and our work. He went to Russia to recruit Mischa when it was still the Soviet Union. He went to Paris to persuade Ted. He found Inga in East Germany, and Geoff in Glasgow and Langley in Pasadena. Tony, I don’t know where the hell he found you.” Scattered titters.

“There are a hundred schools that teach kids how to use video cameras and make art out of stuff they find in dumpsters. But there’s only one Academy.”

The instructors looked at one another and then down at their plates. Levon looked at his watch, rose to his feet. “I’ve got to go. I’ve got a kid coming in from Wisconsin for an interview. Good meeting, Whit.” And he set off through the Cast Hall, leaving them to the coffee and petits fours.

In the stairwell, Rafe leaned against the steel door, counted to ten, took deep cleansing breaths in an attempt to control his blinding fury.

Originally, he had planned to be there for the length of the meeting. He chose to remove himself when tearing Turner’s head off began to seem like a workable solution. Also, there was the matter of the sun streaming into the room.

He leaned over, put his hands on his knees, trying to bring his rage down to something more human and manageable. There was a pay phone in the hallway on the third floor landing. One side of a disembodied conversation floated down the stairs.

“I’m not working tonight. I’ll be over later.” It was a girl. A pause as whoever was on the other end of the phone replied. “Oh.” A world of pain in that two-letter word. “Where were you last night? I thought your meetings were on Sundays.” Another pause. The voice was becoming sadder. “Some of the guys? Okay. Well…maybe tomorrow.” The click of the pay phone being hung back up. A moment of silence, followed by the awful, clanging cacophony of the phone being smashed furiously against the box, magnified a hundred times by the cinderblock and steel in the enclosed space. Finally, the sound of stifled weeping echoed through the stairway, and a steel door opened and closed.

Ah, art students. Come for the talent, stay for the tears.

He straightened up, rolled his shoulders. The rage was subsiding. Halfway down the stairs, he thought he’d see if the cannoli would come out with him for a drink. He straightened his tie and headed back up to the fourth floor.

The staircase he’d taken opened into the sculptors’ studio. Though it was only the beginning of the school year, everything was already covered
with a fine white coating of plaster dust. Armatures and clay figures jostled each other for space on bookshelves and windowsills. Some of the students had begun working on ideas for their thesis projects, ghostly contorted figures rising up from clay-spattered turntables, covered in damp rags to keep them from drying out.

The floor seemed abandoned. And then, from the direction of the girl’s studio, Mozart’s
Requiem
began to play.

Softly, softly, he began to walk towards the music.

It was coming from behind the curtain that draped the cannoli’s doorway. He stopped, stood perfectly still, closed his eyes, breathed in the scent.

He could catch the thinnest glimpse of a girl in the sliver of air between the curtain and the partition. She was small, dressed in art school standard-issue basic black, with an ass like an upside-down heart. But her hair. Oh, her hair. It cascaded in a fall of loose curls down her back, not red, not blonde, not brown, and yet all of them mixed together, trailing off at her waist. With a pang, he imagined the colors he would have used to paint it, in the years when he could still paint; golden ochre, terra rossa, raw sienna.

She was bending over, setting down two space heaters and a reflector lamp. When she straightened up, her gaze wandered to the sketch of the mother and child he had seen earlier. She stood there, perfectly still, absorbed in her thoughts. Then he realized that she was looking past the sketch, at a drawing tacked up beside it, done in sanguine and charcoal.

A naked woman sat at the edge of a rumpled bed, yearning with her whole body toward a man leaning against the wall next to an open door. The man was dressed in a tuxedo, ready to go out. His face was expressionless, lost in shadow.

The girl in the room seemed to sense Rafe’s presence. She turned her head toward the doorway, just enough for him to see fear wash over her like a tide.

A strange sensation of vertigo came over him. He rested his hand on the wall as if he could touch what was behind it. And then he moved on, quicker now, almost running, until he reached the door at the other end of the hall.

The girl blinked, wondering what had come over her. It had been something more than being female and alone on a deserted floor. Something ancient. Primeval.

At that moment, a door clanged open. Heavy footsteps treaded through the back where the sculptors’ studio was. She heard scraping noises. Something thrown heavily onto the floor. The sound of chairs being moved.

“Damn! Missed the blackboard!” someone exploded. The Simpsons theme music blasted through the vast hall. The girl let out her breath; she hadn’t realized she was holding it in. Just the sculptors gathering around the TV for their nightly ritual. She smiled in relief, feeling silly. It had only been someone late for an evening class. And yet…

She shrugged the feeling off, went back to staring at her drawing.

Midtown, a nondescript limestone and brick building like a hundred other buildings on Forty-fourth and Madison.

He passed the information desk, the newsstand, went straight into a waiting elevator. Three other people were in the car; one woman in a serious black suit and a short blunt haircut, a man wearing a red paisley shirt with ruffled sleeves and pinstriped polyester bellbottoms, and one tall, frighteningly thin young girl with a blank, pretty face.

They all got off at twenty-two. The reception area was papered with gold leaf. A sign in three-foot-high block letters announced, ANASTASIA. The man in bellbottoms nodded politely at Rafe as he breezed past, the woman in black hurried down a staircase to another floor. He waited with the model until the receptionist whispered, “She can see you now.”

Rafe walked down the corridor past empty desks and offices. Most of the editors and assistants had already left for the night. Computers winked quietly into the dusk. At the end of the passageway, a severe little Englishwoman peered disapprovingly over her glasses at him and said, “Go on in, then.”

A small plaque on the door read,
Anastasia deCroix, Editor in Chief.
He knocked twice, let himself in. A tiger-skin rug covered the floor. Orchids in pots were scattered tastefully around the surfaces and corners. At the center of the room was a round table and five chairs with sleekly twisted,
brushed aluminum legs, upholstered in a silky, lipstick-red fabric. At the opposite end of the office was a desk with a Tizio lamp and a computer. A leopard-spotted daybed lounged discreetly in the shadows.

Though it was a corner office, with floor to ceiling windows on two sides, the shades were always drawn. Anastasia deCroix’s aversion to sun was well documented. The door opened, and Anastasia herself stalked through it, talking to someone unseen.

“I don’t care what she told Italian
Vogue,”
she snapped in French-accented English. “If she can’t be at the lingerie shoot on Friday, she won’t be on the cover next month. Tell
that
to Elite Models. Hello, my darling,” she said as she strode past him to the table, laid out with grainy gray photographs of pretty people apparently having sex.

Rafe picked up a picture, scrutinized it. “What’s this for?” A headless female torso bent over backwards, nipples erect.

“The December orgasm story. We have one every month. You like this one?” She plucked it from his fingers, surveyed it thoughtfully. “Anthea!” she called sharply. The severe woman poked her head around the door. “Take this to the art department right away, please. Tell Ram, ‘Orgasm.’ Now, what is it, my darling? You have five minutes before I have to rush off. My car is already waiting downstairs. Tell me while I change.” She picked up a garment bag and shut herself behind a door marked
Private.

“Why? Where are you off to?” A photograph on the table caught his eye. Though the couple in the picture was joined at the hips, their silvery bodies were arcing away from each other and their eyes were closed in passion. “Were they really making love?”

“A child could see they are pretending. Look. They are not even sweating. Jean-Paul is throwing a party for his new fragrance at the Puck Building.”

The door opened. She stepped out in a tight burgundy dress with a plunging neckline shaped like an inverted heart. She leaned over to pull on black stilettos, revealing a generous sweep of cleavage, then straightened back up, flipping back her short dark hair. “How do I look?”

Nobody knew how old Anastasia deCroix really was, or where she had come from. The columnists put her age at anywhere from thirty-five to fifty-five. As editor-in-chief of the eponymous
Anastasia,
the most
influential women’s magazine in the United States, she was both revered and feared in the fashion industry. It was said that one day, Leo Lubitsch had flown her in from Buenos Aires and given her an office. The next day,
Anastasia’s
sales numbers had overtaken
Vogue, InStyle, Elle,
and
Marie Claire.

“Terrible,” he said. “Like an old skank.”

She smiled at him. Her lips were stained dragon red, in a discontinued Chanel color that they still made just for her. “So, what is it today? Is that horrible little man still trying to take your school away from you? Is the entire faculty still sleeping with the students?” She selected a round brush from a chromed caddy, began fluffing her hair.

“Funny you should ask.” He related the story of going to the girl’s studio, the drawing on the wall.

“Wizotsky? Like your little girlfriend from school?” The irises of her eyes gleamed ruby red, not quite human. Her pupils narrowed and dilated voraciously, the real reason she wore her signature dark glasses night and day. “Are you sure?”

“Same spelling, anyway.”

“Come, we’ll talk in the elevator.” She put the glasses back on, took her bag, a jeweled box that was made to look like a wrapped present, raced ahead of him down the corridor.

“Have you met her, this girl?”

“God, no. I can’t even bring myself to say hello.”

“Hm.” She swished on face powder, put the compact back in her bag. They were zipping down in the elevator now. “Perhaps it’s a different Wizotsky,” she suggested in a soothing voice. “It was such a long time ago.”

They were walking through the lobby now. Rafe had to lengthen his stride to keep up with her. She smiled at the old German couple who ran the magazine stand, hurried through the revolving door. “Why don’t you accompany me, my darling? Maybe we’ll meet someone…nice.” Her lips stretched in a rapacious smile as she slid into the limo. “Join us. We could have dinner together.” She patted the seat next to her. “Come. Leo will be happy to see you.”

He got in. The car slid away from the curb, headed downtown. “How is Leo? Not dead yet?”

“No, my darling. But he is getting old. He shakes now. And Margaux…” she sighed. “Poor Margaux. She was always so chic. Remember, during the war, in Paris? They were adorable. She was always wearing some little hat that she had just made, and he was charming and dapper, every inch the Russian aristocrat, so courtly and ruthless. They were more
—
how can I put it
—
like us, than anyone I have ever met.”

For a moment, he was silent, remembering. “Funny that he never asked to be changed.”

She responded with a Gallic shrug. “I offered it to him once. When Brodov died, after suffering a long illness. You know, they had this big rivalry going on when they first came to America, Leo with
Femme,
Brodov with
Bella.
It was in the papers all the time how they were stealing each other’s ideas, photographers, models. Wives. Anyway, he said he didn’t want to outlive his times. Can you imagine?” A short, sharp laugh.

They were shooting down Fifth Avenue at Twenty-fourth street, past old Madison Square. The Flatiron building reared up before them. A derelict was standing in front of the Civil War monument holding up a sign that read,
Lost job, please help.

“I like his jacket,” she said, tapping on the glass. “Look at those buttons.”

They rode in silence for a while. Below Twenty-third, the look on the street changed. Thin couples headed for the trendy new restaurants grouped around Union Square. Pale, tattooed girls with long dark hair streaked magenta, or electric blue, lugging huge portfolios. Flocks of the young and the hip, dressed all in black, flowing steadily towards the Village, Soho, Tribeca.

“Perhaps she has a friend you could ask,” she suggested. “She must be friendly with the other girl in her studio, what did you call her? The cannoli.”

“I don’t think so.” he replied, remembering the astonishing accuracy of Graciela’s anatomical drawing. “Their interests seem to be very different.”

“They are girls.” Anastasia said emphatically. “If they are sharing a studio, they will become intimates. You will see. Befriend the cannoli, and you will learn all the scary depressing one’s secrets.”

He was looking out the window. A boy and a girl were strolling down Fifth Avenue looking in shop windows, her arm circled around his hips, his
thumb hooked into a belt loop on her jeans. They stopped in front of an antique toy store on Sixteenth Street to kiss. He turned away.

“The flames in her eyes,” he whispered. “It made me feel…”