The Color of Light (44 page)

She became obsessed with the human body. Furtively, she studied her brother when he dressed, the housekeeper as she bent over the beds, the children playing by the pump in the village. When her friends took off their clothes to go swimming, she observed the details of their anatomy and recorded it on paper, which she naively stashed in her writing desk.

One day, when she came home from school, she found her mother waiting for her, holding an armful of her drawings.
Nakedda nekayvas,
she spat out as she shook them in her face. Sick in the head! Something must be wrong with you to make you want to draw these things!

Her mother threw the drawings into the kitchen fire. The flames licked the pictures of her family and friends, then consumed them.

She took away Sofia’s pencils, told her if she ever caught her drawing again, she would put her fingers in the fire. When she looked to her father for help, he avoided her gaze. Then he took off his belt.

Poor Sofia. They never looked at her the same way again, not really. The belt was applied regularly and with conviction if she so much as doodled on the corner of a newspaper. They made her pray three times a
day to be released from the demons that must have possessed her to make those pictures.

Though they tried to keep it hush hush, somehow it got around that the Wizotsky girl was sex-crazed.
Nakkeda nekayvas!
Maybe it was the help, maybe it was Yechezkel, but everyone in town heard the story. When she went to synagogue the following Shabbos, people turned around to stare. When she walked through town, people whispered, and women hid their children behind their skirts. It was a
shonda,
the kind of scandal that ruins a family’s reputation.

The
shonda
reflected badly on all of them, but her parents’ fortune eased the pain, and her brother was married off anyway. Grandchildren followed shortly thereafter. One year went by, then another, but there were no takers for the Wizotskys’ damaged flower. Though Sofia was accomplished, intelligent and beautiful, nobody in the Orthodox world wanted to have the girl who drew
nakkeda nekayvas
for their daughter-in-law. The story of the
shonda
floated through the Polish Jewish world like feathers from an opened pillow.

This suited Sofia just fine. She didn’t want to marry those boys in black coats and black hats anyway.

At twenty-two, she was practically an old maid. Her parents worried for their unmarried daughter, with war threatening and no husband to protect her, so in the winter of 1939, they packed her off to Paris. She would be safe there while their search continued, someone perhaps more
modernishe,
or with lower standards. They had a friend with a house in the Pletzel, the old Jewish neighborhood in the Marais. There was a flat on the top floor Sofia could rent while the landlord’s wife kept a sharp eye on her.

Her father was busy directing the movers when he came across a drawing, hidden behind her bed. Angrily, he yanked it out, ready to be outraged. But it was an innocuous landscape, massive gray storm clouds rolling over a patchwork of plowed fields. He stared at it for a long time. Perhaps he was thinking of his dead sister. Finally, he sighed and murmured, “So beautiful. So talented. What will become of you, my
shayna maidel?”

They sent Jewish suitors for her consideration; a widower in his fifties, bald, bearded and fat. The one with the crippling limp, one leg a full foot
shorter than the other. A hunchback with a profound speech impediment. The one who was terribly scarred.

She rejected them all. For the first time since she was twelve, Sofia was truly happy. She was on her own in a city that was, in itself, a work of art. Men and women strolled casually down the boulevards with portable easels under their arms, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. The Louvre, filled with the world’s masterpieces, was open every day. She would get so close to the paintings that she made the guards nervous. She took the money her mother gave her to buy pretty dresses and spent it all on art classes.

There were caveats. She had to be back in her room by nine o’clock every night. She was allowed no visitors, male or female. If her landlady thought her dress was immodest or too alluring, she would send her back upstairs to change. She was supposed to take all her meals with the family she lived with, but she flouted that particular rule, posing as a vegetarian at the cafés and restaurants she frequented with her artist friends.

Every day, she prayed to God that her parents would never find that suitable match for her, the man who would take her away from the life she loved. Each time she opened a letter from home, her hands shook and her heart pounded with fear as she raced through her mother’s longhand, searching for the words that told her she was still free.

Sofia had run out of words. We sat in silence. A table of people near us exploded into uproarious laughter. The sounds of cutlery scraping plates and the babble of conversation went on all around us.

I wanted to take her in my arms and hold her and stroke her hair and kiss her eyes until there was no sorrow left in them. I wanted to take her back to my flat and make sweaty, reckless pornographic love to her till she was washed clean of everything sad that had ever happened to her.

She made me swear not to tell anyone a single detail. Bewildered, I asked her why.

“I just want to be Sofia,” she murmured as she lit a cigarette. Her face became blurry, lost in a haze of blue smoke. “Just Sofia Wizotsky, for a little while longer.”

She tapped my sketchbook. “Forget everything I told you. Let’s play.”

I tore out a page and passed it to her. She borrowed my pencil, looked at me sharply, bent to her task.

I told her a few tasty bits of my own history; my parents’ abandonment, my bleak childhood, how Art had carried me in her hands, saved me from it all. And while I talked on, her black eyes filled with emotion, her eyebrows acting as punctuation marks; swooping fiercely up and down, asking questions, expressing sorrow, outrage or pity.

I never told anyone the things I told her. The act of shaping it into words for her caused me physical anguish, as if it were happening all over again. At the end of it, I was bent over the table, exhausted, spent.

Her small white hand glided over mine, alighting as gently as a butterfly. “We are just the same,” she said softly.

My fingers curled around hers.

In the course of a single evening, I had fallen truly, madly, deeply in love, and found that the woman of my dreams could never be mine. I knew now, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that I could never walk her home, that she would never invite me in, that we could never be seen kissing on Paris street corners. I should have been distraught. Instead, I felt that something important had passed between us, something had changed.

Slowly, regretfully, she slipped her hand out of mine.

“Here. You open it.” She pushed the drawing across the marble topped table.

“Ladies first.” I pushed it back.

She unfolded it. Her face broke into a dazzling smile, and then she giggled, clapping her hand over her mouth, as if she were afraid to be caught being happy. She turned it around to show me.

Sofia had drawn my head, a perfect miniature likeness. Beneath it, I had drawn a longshoreman’s torso, with huge muscles and washboard abs, feathery white wings. At the bottom, she had drawn a clawfoot bathtub full of bubbles. I burst out laughing.

Now she noticed the time. “Oh! I’ll be late!” She gestured for the waiter. “Good night, English. See you tomorrow.” She pulled her collar up around her face and went out into the night.

Waiting for my change, I smoothed out the drawing, pressed it flat. In her hands, I was smoldering, sensuous, sexualized. I ran my fingertips over
her lines, feeling the grooves in the paper. Was that really how she saw me, or did she just draw me the way she drew everything else?

That night, I started on a painting of Sofia as I found her that evening, alone at a table by the wall in La Coupole, letter in hand, the plum in the glass, the thousand-mile stare. The next day, after class, I would ask her to pose for me in my studio in the green dress she had worn the first time I laid eyes on her. And after a moment of hesitation, she would say yes.

Our innocent little trysts went on for another six blissful weeks.

By March, the background of my painting was already roughed in. I had been to La Coupole so often I could paint it in my sleep. Sofia’s skin was the color of skim milk, almost blue-white. I was using zinc white for its transparent bluish properties, mixing it with lead white for creaminess. Her lips were a holy matrimony of cadmium red scarlet and alizarin crimson. On breaks, we gazed dreamily into each other’s eyes over cigarettes while I told her how well it was going and pondered what it might be like to kiss her cushiony lips.

Under the discreet cover of a crowd, we were always together. Strolling together through the barren Tuileries, lagging behind a group of classmates on their way to the Louvre, she told me a song she heard on the radio had made her weep; I told her a new Balthus painting I had glimpsed in a gallery made me wretched with jealousy. She whispered guiltily that she disliked Picasso; I assured her he was overrated. She cried her eyes out during
Wuthering Heights;
I laughed at her. She told me she was tired of the dreary Parisian winter; I told her I had already used up three tubes of Payne’s grey and it was only February. She griped that the master kept telling her that she was rushing, she should get the big relationships in the painting down first; I told her that since she had started, the master hardly noticed anyone but her.

On March 16th, Hitler rolled over Czechoslovakia, and we finally knew that war was imminent.

That night, we met at La Coupole, as we often did, under cover of acquaintances from school and the expatriate artist community. I arrived before Sofia. At the table were Leo and Margaux. Salvador Dali with his beloved Gala. One of the lesser Surrealists. Colby. Erlichmann and his girlfriend Beata. Sawyer Ballard.

I took out my sketchbook and pencil, waited for something to catch my eye, but the truth is I was watching the door, my heart already pounding, living for the moment she would walk through it and smile just for me, illuminating the room like the sun.

Sawyer got up, came around the table to me, leaned over to shake hands. Despite the fact that Sofia politely declined his advances, he’d kept right on trying, some kind of belligerent American can-do, go-getter attitude at work there, as if he thought she ought to say yes out of gratitude.

“What do you say, Sinclair?”

“Evening, Sawyer. How’s that landscape coming along?”

“Oh, you know. Nothing I haven’t done already ten times over. I’m thinking of going back to Boston. There are too many uniforms in this place. Things are about to get hairy, and if war comes, I want to be back home.” Absently, I nodded agreement, only half listening.

Just then, Sofia came through the door. She slowed, scanning the vast crowded eating hall. She looked stricken.

“Looks like she picked you,” Sawyer said enviously. I had already forgotten him. “You win.”

“What do you mean?” Not taking my eyes off of her, I tried to look as if I didn’t know what he was talking about.

“Oh, come on. She chose you. Must be that ripping accent you Brits have,” he groused. “Completely unfair advantage. Well, congratulations. I hear those Jew girls are wildcats in the sack. I guess I don’t have to tell
you
that.”

Before I had time to think, I struck him full on the mouth. He staggered and went down, knocking over chairs, falling against a table full of Hungarians.

I threw myself onto him, punched his smug face two more times before someone pulled me up from behind, pinned my arms back.

“Sinclair!” Angrily. It was Colby. “What the hell are you doing?”

Sawyer propped himself up on his elbow, put his hand to his mouth. He rolled over, spat out blood.

We were instantly surrounded by a swarm of curious onlookers. This was La Coupole, after all, where a fistfight over a woman was part of the floor show along with celebrity spotting. I was unreasonably happy to see
Sawyer bleeding like a pig. Someone retrieved his glasses from a bowl of bouillabaisse and passed them to him. Colby gave him some clean napkins. He wiped his mouth, grimacing at the sight of his own blood. Rejecting offers of help, he got to his feet. He put his glasses back on, carefully winding the gold wires around his ears. The fight was obviously over. Disappointed restaurant patrons went reluctantly back to their own altercations.

“So it’s that way,” he said, dipping a napkin in soda water and brushing at the bloodstains on his white shirt. “You’re in love with her. You’re crazy, Sinclair. What are you going to do, bring her home to meet your mother?
Marry
her?”

Suddenly, I realized Sofia was there, aghast at the sight of us both spattered with blood.

“What is this about?”

I looked at her, then away, ashamed, not knowing what to say.

“This is about me?” she said, her face pale.

“Hey, Sinclair,” said Sawyer. I turned to him, and he socked me on the jaw, sent me sprawling over a table and onto the floor.

I lay there for a minute, the taste of blood filling my mouth. Sofia was on her knees beside me, cupping my face in her small white hands. A
garçon
came over, gesticulating furiously, jabbering in French to the tune of
you must leave now.

“Raphael, Raphael, my angel of healing,” she whispered, “What have I done to you?”

“You’re going to have a hell of a mark.” Colby frowned at me, folded some ice into a napkin, squatted down and held it on my jaw. I winced and pushed him away.

“What’s gotten into you, Sinclair? Sawyer’s a prick. You know that. You’ve known it for five years.”

Slowly, I pulled myself up off the floor, rubbing my jaw. I needed to talk to her, tell her to forget everything she had heard. I needed to tell her that Sawyer was wrong, that he didn’t know anything about it, that she was too damn good for my so-called family. But she had disappeared during the confusion in the noisy restaurant.