The Color of Light (22 page)

Sawyer grinned. “It does seem that way sometimes…but this fellow, he’s blown the lid off of figure painting. There’s nothing like him out there. Are you familiar with his work?” He was addressing Rafe.

“Not really.”

“Well, after this, he’s going to be a household name. Fantastic stuff. Huge, fleshy, bodies. No pretensions, no sugar coating. Incredibly textural. Comes right off the canvas at you.”

“I’ll have to look him up.”

The boyish enthusiasm faded. His face grew opaque, inscrutable. Rafe followed his gaze to a painting across the way. A woman with short dark hair gazed moodily into a fishbowl, resting her chin on her arms, crossed on the table in front of her. The colors were uncharacteristically muted for Matisse, a palette of subdued blues and greens, the drawing more finished than typical for him.

“There was this girl,” Sawyer said. He smiled at Rafe. “Your father and I actually came to blows over her. In La Coupole, no less.” He shook his head. “I haven’t thought about that in years.”

“What was her name?” said Rafe.

“Sofia,” he answered without hesitation. “Sofia…something Polish, I forget now. She was at the Academie Julian with us for a little while, right
before the war. Your father had a real thing for her. Always following her around. Completely doomed, of course.”

“I never heard this story,” Rafe said, coming closer. “What was doomed about it?”

“Oh…she wasn’t interested in him. Didn’t stop him from trying, though. He was completely obsessed.”

“Really,” he said. “What happened to her, anyway?”

“Lost in the war.” Sawyer looked reflective. He was silent for a little while, staring at the painting of the girl, rubbing his chin. “I should have done more,” he mused. “We all should have done more.” He raised his wiry eyebrows ruefully. “Anyway. Enough ancient history. How’s your little
atelier
coming along?”

A slim young man in a blue blazer slipped up to him, whispered in his ear. The older man had to bend over to hear the message. He listened, nodding, then straightened back up and made his apologies. “They find me everywhere. There’s a problem with a painting we’re borrowing from Japan.” He moved stiffly off, leaving him alone with Lucian.

Rafe made as if he were continuing on his way, then turned back as if he had suddenly remembered something. “I’m just coming from your assistant’s studio,” he remarked. “Thought she could use a bit of company, all alone up there on the fourth floor.”

From beneath half-lowered eyelids, Rafe watched Lucian’s face grow purple. He dropped his voice now, made it sultry, insinuating. “She asked me to pose for her. Spur of the moment, you know how that goes. I happened to be there, the lighting was just right. Very talented girl. Beautiful, too.”

April was back with a bottle of seltzer, pouring it onto a napkin and holding it to the juice stain. “Really?” Lucian said, feigning carelessness, but he raked his fingers through his stylishly spiky brown hair, belligerently shifted his stance, betraying messy emotions. “She’s got a new boyfriend now, I understand. Some boy from her class.”

He was lying. Why? Tessa was as loyal to him as ever. Ah, yes. Jealous girlfriend. He jumped on it. “No, I don’t think so. I’m on a committee with her studio mate. I would have heard. No, no boyfriend.”

Lucian’s handsome face colored, his expression darkening to resemble a sullen little boy. They were interrupted by a comely waitress, who
lowered her tray of hors d’ouevres for their inspection, fat orange beads of salmon caviar rolled into tiny blini. Rafe took one, smiling at her, making her weak in the knees.

He turned his attention to April, letting his eyes roam over her body, blatantly evaluating her. She was attractive, a dark-eyed, pale-skinned woman of forty-one or forty-two, self-assured, with a glib sense of entitlement that comes from success early in life. She wore a sheen of glossy sophistication on her trim shoulders, a forward-facing confidence, along with a worldly sexuality that was not part of Tessa’s makeup. He knew the type. He’d slept with a hundred women just like her in every era since the 1940s.

Looking her straight in the eye, he placed the blini on his tongue, swallowed it down in one rapacious bite. “I don’t believe we’ve met,” he said, extending his hand. “Raphael Sinclair.”

She must not have heard the rumors, or perhaps she was just trying to prove something, because she looked right back at him. He saw a hunger for recognition, a hard-edged ambition. Fear, too; fear of aging past desirability, of growing old alone. Fear of missing her time, of bungling the fifteen minutes when she was the next big thing, the exact moment that she must seize her opportunity or forever be relegated to the art-history ranks of almost-was, might-have-beens. He dialed up the volume of his preternatural allure, letting a dirty smile sneak across his lips.

She was responding; he could see her wanting him, in the way she played with her hair, the way her body relaxed and realigned itself in an unconscious responsive rhythm. He applied just enough pressure to her hand to make her sigh.

Lucian’s face was a study in bottled British rage. Rafe could feel his fangs begin to lower, his eyes shifting to a predatory icy clarity.

“There you are,” said Anastasia. She stepped up to Lucian, kissing him, then April, on both cheeks. “What happened to your shirt? Love your blouse, my darling. Vera Wang?” She slid her hand through Rafe’s arm, leaned her sleek head on his shoulder.

“Sorry about the shirt, old man,” he said to Lucian. “I mean it, though. Send me the bill.”

Arm in arm, they turned as a unit, drifting towards an eight-foot canvas of primitive scarlet figures scattered around a bright blue and green
background. Guiltily, Rafe glanced at the entrance to the exhibition where he had spotted Giselle earlier, but it was too late; she was gone.

“Why are you tormenting poor Lucian?” said Anastasia. She picked a glass of red wine off of a passing tray, smiling at the waiter. “He’s going to start drinking again if you keep this up. Then your little art student will never leave him.”

“Come on. Admit it. He can barely draw.”

He meant Matisse. They were standing in front of
Carmelina,
a studio painting of a heavy-featured woman seated on a red-draped table, unpretty, unposed, rendered in shades of orange and brown.

“How charming,” she said. “It makes you sound provincial
and
academic. Is it possible that you, an artist, are not transported by the ecstasy of the colors? What was the point of mindlessly rendering boring details in those years after the invention of the camera? He was a revolutionary, a sophisticated primitive, a
fauve.
”

“There’s nothing mindless about what we do,” Rafe disagreed, his temper rising.

She gestured around the room. “None of these speak to you? How about the goldfish? You wouldn’t believe what John had to promise the Pushkin to borrow that one.”

He dismissed it with a shrug. “Makes a lovely poster for a Barnard dorm room.”

“And the
Blue Nude?
What about that one?” she demanded, pointing to a reclining female figure.

“The worst student at my school can do better than that on a bad day. And that one. Poor Madame Matisse, with that green stripe down her face. Who deserves to be remembered like that?
The Piano Lesson?
God-awful, those mingy grays, that unfinished thingy floating around the background.”

She was bemused. “You sound like a doting daddy when you talk about your students,” she said.

They drifted forward. Rafe smiled at women who smiled at him, ladies he had already slept with, the ones he had not slept with yet. Ram swooped down on them to peck hello on Anastasia’s cheeks and to announce that the February issue had shipped. The art director of
Anastasia
was dressed for cocktails in another era, in an aqua dinner jacket with wide padded
shoulders and huge lapels that swashed downward and pinched at the waist. His hair was close-cropped to the point of stubble, skinny sideburns jutting to a cruel point halfway across his cheek. The lyrics to
Relax
by Frankie Goes To Hollywood were block-printed in red and black on a white gavotte, tied just so around his neck.

“R-r-raphael,”
said Ram, rolling the name off of his tongue with an exaggerated Spanish inflection,
“Love
your apartment. The pie safe next to your kitchen? Fabulous. Has Anastasia figured out yet that you’re just a great big homo?”

Rafe turned to Anastasia, raised his eyebrows. She gave him a small, dismissive shrug. “I left my pocketbook at your place. I sent him to retrieve it.”

“He was in my house? By himself?”

Her eyes were scanning the crowd. “I really like that pocketbook.”

Rafe watched Anastasia in profile, the edges of her brunette bob just brushing the edge of her jawline, eyes hidden as always behind enormous dark glasses. Wherever she went, she was deluged with enthusiastic endorsements of improbable hole-in-the-wall boutiques just visited in Brooklyn, marvelous new hair salons on the wrong side of Soho, fitness trends observed in Los Angeles. There were those, too, that kept their distance; they hovered just beyond the edge of his vision, staring, whispering to each other the rumors they had heard. She didn’t care. She had never cared. She was famously intimidating, and proud of it; she rather liked frightening away the ones who lacked the courage to step into her orbit.

She came to a dead stop in front of a large red painting, so suddenly that he bumped into her bare shoulder. A woman dressed in black, blond hair caught up over her head in an old-fashioned bun, leaned over a red table in the middle of a red room, setting a silver tureen filled with fruit and flowers on a red tablecloth. A pattern of blue flowers and vines swarmed up the tablecloth and onto the walls.

“This one,” said Anastasia. “It reminds me of…” She snatched off her dark glasses to better view the painting. The fires in her eyes danced, reflecting the red lacquered background. She gazed at it for a long moment before fitting the glasses back onto her polished porcelain face. “My mother had a tablecloth like that,” she said in a faraway voice, but Rafe didn’t hear
her. He was back in 1943, Sofia was lighting the Shabbos candles, and it felt like home.

When she spoke again, her voice was brisk, practical. “Listen. I’m going to say hello to Alex Liberman and the rest of the Condé Nast Mafia, and then I am leaving with…” she scanned the crowd. “…that one.” She indicated a tall, slender young man with hollow cheeks and curly black hair, slouching attractively in a simple but very good black sweater and black jeans. Ralph Lauren, with a twist of Tribeca. “Up and coming designer. I’m trying to get him a place in the House of Lanvin.”

“Pretty,” Rafe admitted. “Isn’t he gay?”

“That is very politically incorrect of you,” she instructed him sternly. “I would say he is omnisexual. Anyway, he is adorable. So handsome. So sweet. So talented.”

“You sound happy. Congratulations.”

“He is thinking about becoming one of us.”

His voice betrayed an edge of alarm. “Anastasia. Don’t do it.”

“Why not?”

“Look,” he said. “What you do behind that door with your interns, your assistants, your little pet projects, it’s your business. But whatever you want to call it, whatever you think you’re doing, the reality of the matter is, you’re damning him. Forget God, forget hell, forget right or wrong. That hunger, a hunger that rages night and day, a hunger you can never slake or satisfy, forever. How can you wish that upon someone you say you care for?”

“My dear Raphael. So provincial. You need to get out there and hunt.” She glared at him. “Calling in girls from that agency, like ordering Chinese food. You are getting to be like one of those fat politicians who pays to shoot tame animals at a game farm.” She dismissed his protests with an impatient gesture. “What about the rest of it, my darling? The extraordinary gifts? The events you have witnessed. The sights you have seen. The personalities we have known.” Her voice dropped a notch, became intimate. “Remember Sighisoara, my darling? The rocks sticking up out of the mountains like teeth. The vermillion of the clouds at dawn.”

“The peasants and their pitchforks,” he said.

“The stars over the ruins of Constantin’s castle,” she countered. “The sharpened senses. The sharpened wits. The textures. The flavors. Would
you trade those away so quickly?” She tilted her head, arched her eyebrows. “Wouldn’t you wish immortality on someone you cared for? Your little girlfriend, for instance. Sofia. Come on. Tell me you never thought of it.”

A jolt of pain. To disguise it, he turned from her, gazed into the crowd. Of course he’d thought of it. He had dismissed it almost immediately. Everything he loved about her would have been changed.

She took his arm. “Come with us,” she purred, seducing him. “I promise I will make it worth your while.”

“Thanks,” he said. “I still have to work the room. Can’t go home until I’ve coaxed a new heating system out of someone.”

“Again with your art school,” she said. “So mercenary.” She gave him a French peck on the cheek and headed into the crowd.

A young woman in a white halter dress was standing by herself near the entrance to the room, gazing up at
La Danse,
pretending she hadn’t been staring at him. She had upturned almond shaped eyes in an oval face, a ripple of shining chestnut-colored hair, smooth brown shoulders. There was a drop of something exotic in her genetic pool, though he couldn’t tell what it was. She glanced at him as he approached.

“I thought this was in the Barnes Foundation,” she said. She had a Texas twang in her voice.

“It is,” he replied. “Matisse did several of these. This one belongs to the Hermitage, in St. Petersburg. Actually, I think this one is nicer than the one at the Barnes.”

She smiled at him, flashing perfect white teeth that matched the string of pearls around her neck. Two girls with straight blond hair drifted close behind him, giggling meaningfully. Friends of hers.

“I love your purse,” one of them said. “Who made it?”

She angled it up, the better for them to admire the plain black nylon in the shape of an envelope. “Kate Spade,” she said. “Isn’t it cute?”