The Color of Light (21 page)

“Yes.”

“Tell me about it.”

“They’re getting off the train at Auschwitz,” she said. “I’m doing a series of paintings on the Holocaust.”

“Oh,” he said. His back was turned to her. “How did you happen to choose the Holocaust?”

“My grandparents are survivors.”

“I see. From where?”

“Poland.”

“Where in Poland?”

This struck her as an odd question, and she looked at him questioningly as she answered, “Wlodawa.”

She pronounced it just as Sofia had,
Vluh-duh-vuh.
He crossed his arms to keep them from shaking. Keeping his voice deliberately casual, he said, “Where did you come by the name on the suitcase?”

“Wizotsky?” She pronounced it with the W sounding like a V. “It’s my grandmother’s maiden name.”

“Does she talk about it much? The war, I mean.”

She shook her head regretfully. “Not at all. Whatever happened must have been terrible. She lost everybody.”

He gave her back the sketchbook. Tessa closed it with a snap and tucked it into her knapsack. His questions seemed weirdly out of place, inconsistent with his wealthy playboy image.

“I’m sure it was dreadful. What do you know of her story?”

“Only that she came from this huge, wealthy family, and then the Germans came and took them all away. Really. That’s everything.”

“Does she.” His voice failed him. He tried again. “Does she talk about her life before the war?”

Something stirred in her memory. “There was a family business. A tea company.”

“Wizotsky,” he said. “The Tzar of Teas.”

She looked at him with a dawning sense of unease.

“Tessa.” he said, drawing closer. His voice dropped to a whisper. “Is your grandmother’s name…Sofia?”

“No,” she said. “It’s Freyda.”

He had been so completely certain of her answer, that for a moment afterwards he actually thought he had heard her say yes.

“Freyda?” he repeated stupidly. “Are you sure?”

“Yes.” She was looking at him curiously.

“But I was so sure,” he protested weakly.

His eyes had turned opaque, remote. He had been holding on to something, some kind of a hope, and with that one word, that name, she had utterly dashed it. “I’m sorry if that’s not what you wanted to hear,” she said apologetically.

He reached out and took her hand, as natural as breathing. “Truthfully, I’m not sure what I wanted to hear,” he said.

Tessa’s hand was honest and square, the nails filed short and neat for working purposes. The blue veins in her wrist were like rivers on a map of the world, her skin the color of parchment. Hands made for creation. But not Sofia’s hands.

On impulse, he kissed her upturned pink palm. The heat from his touch seared up through her arm, burned like a lit fuse throughout her body, settling in the pit of her belly.

Somewhere behind them, the steel door slammed, admitting a burst of conversation. Several sets of resounding footsteps echoed past them, stumping to the sculptors’ studio.

He released her, stepping away to a discreet distance. “I should be going,” he said, smoothing the brim of his hat. “Big reception at the MoMA tonight. Opening of the Matisse retrospective. Lots of wealthy women there who need to be persuaded to give freely.”

“Say hello to Lucian,” she said. “That’s where he’s going, too.”

He pulled on his kid leather gloves, flexing his fingers. “I will.”

Still, he lingered, unwilling to leave the warmth of her studio. Yellow light from a 1950s vintage lamp spilled over the cracked leather cushions of a pair of Danish modern chairs reclaimed from a curb on Tenth Street, across a threadbare Persian rug, illuminating the accidental collages that unfurled across the walls like vines.

The velvety plush of the couch beckoned to him. He surveyed the room with obvious regret. “I’ve never liked Matisse,” he confessed. “Oh, it feels so good to say that.”

“I don’t like him either. Makes a nice thank-you card, though.”

That earned her a smile. “Come back soon, Tessa Moss,” he said, his voice a caress, lean and as limber as a whippet. And then he was gone, the curtain swishing closed behind him.

It came out of nowhere, the image that rose up before her mind’s eye. A crooked old woman in a babushka bowed over a table swaying under the weight of a hundred flickering
yahrzeit
candles. She dug out her sketchbook, hurriedly scribbled it down.

There. She had five sketches to show Josephine on Monday. Now she could go home. She untied her apron and slipped it over the easel, shrugged into her coat. She turned around one last time, reluctant to leave the inviting space, the art-covered walls. With her hand on the switch, she hung back, hesitated. But she had to be up at four to make it to the airport on time, and she still had to pack.

“Goodbye, art,” she murmured as she turned out the light. “See you on Monday.”

16

I
’m sorry, my darling,” said Anastasia. “You really thought it was her, didn’t you.”

He barely nodded. His eyes were dark, grieving.

“Raphael,” she said gently. “Why are you doing this to yourself? Sofia died a long time ago.”

“Fifty years ago this winter. But I never actually saw her…” and here he stopped.

“You never saw her body.” She finished the sentence for him.

He nodded.

“Let it go, Raphael,” she advised. “Let her rest in peace.” Emotions juddered off of him in waves, delectable, invigorating. Behind her dark glasses, her eyes glowed red, drinking it in. “She must be some kind of a cousin. It’s still something.”

He didn’t answer, swished the ice in his drink in slow circles while his eyes roamed over the crowd. They were at the Museum of Modern Art, standing at the epicenter of a slowly revolving organism of celebrated New Yorkers, the apex of the worlds of art, fashion, and society. Anna Wintour wandered through a roomful of frolicking blue swimmers with Muccia Prada. Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon were deep in conversation with Annie Lebovitz and Susan Sontag. Lucian Swain was laughing in a loose confederacy that included David Salle, Julian Schnabel and a dark-haired woman he didn’t recognize.

Slim waiters in black and white whisked around clusters of chattering celebrities and socialites, bearing silver trays of Moroccan mezze and Spanish tapas. The dresses of the women were outshone by the paintings
the way the sun outshines the stars, blazing with crayon-bright color, laid out side by side on new-painted walls around the third floor of the museum.

He had been sure, so sure that he had built up a whole scenario of how it would go, with Tessa replying yes, anticipating the conflicting sensations of pleasure and pain that would wash over and around him, the questions that would follow. How did she do it? How had Sofia survived where so many others had not? Other, more selfish questions; did she ever think of him? And if she did, was it with love or hate that he lived on in her memory? Tessa would have questions of her own, questions he would be forced to answer.

Tessa.
That would change, too, the proprietary way he would feel towards her, not just his student now, but his responsibility. What if she came to hate him? What if she heard his story and felt only terror, or revulsion, as any decent person would? Rafe smoothed his hair back, unconscious of the nervous gesture. He didn’t think he could bear that; he liked being welcome in her studio, liked being on the periphery of her world. In the end, of course, it hadn’t mattered. She had never heard of Sofia. Wizotsky was just a name on a distant branch of a family tree. There was no connection after all. Perhaps this was why he had avoided asking her for three months. He meant nothing to her. And Sofia was dead all over again.

Rest in peace? Please, God, no. Haunt me, Sofia. You said you’d haunt me.

“Sinclair,” came a cordial voice with a slight European accent at his elbow.

“Leo,” he replied without enthusiasm to the elderly, silver-haired man beside him. This June it would be fifty-one years that Leo Lubitsch had been editorial director of
Anastasia
and the eight other magazines that made up the roster at Agha Publishing, since the day he had arrived from Paris at the height of World War II to oversee the creation of
Femme.
At eighty-two, he was still dashing, even a bit rakish. Rafe remembered when Leo was the talk of all of chic Paris, when he dressed to compete with the Prince of Wales. These days he was always seen in an inconspicuous gray glen-plaid suit, notable only if you appreciated the finer details of tailoring and a Savile Row provenance. Leo said he didn’t like to outshine the art.

“How are you?” he continued in that smooth, continental voice. “Still heading up that quaint little school?”

“You should come by. I’ll have one of the students give you a tour. I’ll find you a pretty one.”

Leo gave a polite smile. “Yes, yes, of course.”

“Leo.” Anastasia darted forward, kissed him on both cheeks.

“Anastasia.” He smiled with delight. She was wearing a flouncy black silk taffeta affair, with a low round décolletage, a cinched waist and big, brightly colored polka dots.
“Merveilleux, mon cherie. Qui ce fait cette chemise?”

“Lacroix,” she replied. “Isn’t it fabulous?”

He chuckled.
“Tu est XXX,”
he said, and they both laughed.

“How’s Margaux?” Rafe said bitterly. “Do give her my best.”

Leo looked resigned, suddenly old. Anastasia gave him a stern look, then turned back to Leo. “We have a mystery,” she said lightly, changing the subject. “Raphael has a
jeune fille
enrolled at his
petite academie
who may be somehow related to an old girlfriend.”

Leo’s mournful expression changed. “You can’t mean…Sofia?”

“Yes! He says the eyes are just the same.”

“But that’s impossible,” said Leo. “Didn’t she…”

“Yes.” said Rafe shortly. “That’s why it’s impossible. Anyway, the names are different…a distant cousin at best…” he could feel himself backing away from the conversation. It was too private a matter to be airing with Leo Lubitsch at a gala reception for a blockbuster Matisse show.

Leo was looking at him in surprise, completely nonplussed. For a moment, he looked younger, more like the dapper young artist he used to be in 1939, the only son of a Soviet functionary and an actress; and then his face collapsed, realigned itself in wrinkles, the Morse code of old age.

“Sofia Wizotsky,” he said, shaking his gray head. His eyes were moist, his thin moustache quivering. “Such a lovely girl. Caught on the cusp between innocence and revelation. What a loss. You didn’t know her, did you, my dear.”

“Not really,” replied Anastasia, scanning the crowd.

Leo sighed, gazed with an old man’s melancholy at the painting before him.
“La Danse,”
he said meditatively. “From the Hermitage. Before the Revolution, it belonged to my uncle.” He took a pair of glasses out of his
breast pocket, took his time unfolding them. Anastasia was right. His hands shook, a barely perceptible but continual tremor. It took a moment for him to get them on correctly. The process of aging was full of small, unexpected everyday indignities.

Out of the corner of his eye, Rafe saw Giselle at the other end of the gallery, drifting past the deep russet of
The Red Studio
with a tall, skinny, severely fashionable older woman he had bedded back in the early 1950s, when she was still a debutante. Her husband, a pioneering television executive at CBS, had died a year ago, leaving her with bags of money. She had just donated the contents of her closet, a veritable timeline of twentieth-century couture fashion, to the Costume Institute at the Met. Perhaps, with just a bit of encouragement, she could be induced to open up her Judith Lieber handbag and endow a scholarship.

“Excuse me,” he said to Leo and Anastasia, and he cut into the crowd.

The circles had shifted. Alexander Liberman and S.I. Newhouse had joined Anna Wintour and Tina Brown. Catching his eye, Tina smiled at him like the schoolgirl she had been when he first met her, working as a lackey at the
Tatler.
Nearby, in front of
Bathers in a River,
Sawyer Ballard, six foot four in his Gucci loafers, was going on about some show scheduled for the end of the year. Rafe felt his hands tighten into fists.
Steady now.
He was with Lucian Swain and the dark-haired woman from before. It struck him that this must be April Huffman.

“Every artist should take Dissection,” she was saying brightly. “I brought along a film crew, part of a documentary I’m making. It’s going to be running on public television around the time of my gallery show.”

The sensible thing would be to give them wide berth. But some other force was at work inside him tonight, and as he glided past them on his way to Giselle, he brushed lightly against the other man’s elbow, jostling him. Lucian leaped back, cursing. Rafe was gratified to see tomato juice dripping down his nice white shirtfront.

“Bugger!” he rasped, his shaggy eyebrows lowering into a knot.

“So clumsy of me,” said Rafe apologetically. “Please. Send me the bill. May I get you another drink? What was it, a Shirley Temple?”

Lucian was dabbing at the stain on his shirt. “I’ll get seltzer,” April said, glaring at him, and disappeared into the crowd.

Sawyer unfolded his long arms to enthusiastically pump his hand up and down. “Sinclair! God, you look more like your old man every time I see you. It’s uncanny.”

Rafe smiled politely.
Sawyer, you bastard.
He knew him from his art student days in Paris. He hadn’t liked him much then, either. His hair had stopped thinning, but in the intervening years, had turned from dirty blond to iron gray. Rafe still pictured him in the same little round wire-rimmed glasses, though contact lenses had replaced them years earlier. The first time he ran into him in New York, it was the 1960s. It was simpler to tell him that he was his own son, from the wrong side of the sheets, than to tell him the truth.

“Your father hated Matisse. Said he couldn’t draw. Can you imagine?” He was shaking his patrician head, laughing.

“Freud, eh?” said Lucian. “I thought you only showed dead artists at the Met.”