The Color of Light (76 page)

Rafe wasn’t listening. He was watching Leo Lubitsch converse animatedly with Tessa Moss, part of a circle of people that included Ram, Portia, Giselle, and Sawyer Ballard.

And as he looked upon them, his contemporaries, aged and wrinkled, spotted and stooped and shuffling and gray, he thought back to a time when they were all young and wealthy and ambitious and talented together, sitting around a table at a bistro in Paris, each of them half in-love with the same mysterious dark-haired girl, completely unprepared for the monumental changes history was assembling to wreak upon them. It seemed like only yesterday. It seemed like a hundred years ago.

Portia leaned over to say something to Tessa, resting a hand on her shoulder. Whatever she said made Tessa laugh. And as he looked upon the easy friendship between the granddaughter of Sofia Wizotsky, and the granddaughter of Sawyer Ballard, he realized that time had its own way of meting out punishment, making restitution, healing old wounds.

“I don’t know if you heard,” said Anastasia. “Margaux died two weeks ago.”

He turned to her. “I’m sorry. I know how close you two were.”

She sighed moodily. “There is more. Leo is retiring. I have met his replacement, some hot new boy from L.A. I am being kicked upstairs.”

“How can that be? You’ve been the editor of
Anastasia
since…what was it, 1975?”

“1976,” she said. “It was the Bicentennial.” She smiled, remembering. “My first issue, I had to marry patriotism with fashion and sex. The lingerie shoot almost got me lynched.”

“What does it mean, you’re being kicked upstairs?”

“They’ve given me a fancy title, Vice President in charge of New Media, they’ll find me an office somewhere, but I am being quietly, politely, fired. The new boy wants to bring in his own people, shake everything up.”

“What will you do?”

“I will do as I have always done, my dear Raphael. Move on. Perhaps I’ll go to Eastern Europe. Prague seems to be very exciting right now.”

Rafe went to work, circling the Cast Hall. He shook hands with magazine editors and critics and curators and gallery owners, and charmed an old school chum of Giselle’s who had married an Italian Count. Several board members told him this was the best graduate show they had ever hung. He spotted April Huffman in a corner of the room, looking haunted. Word had it that Lucian Swain was already cheating on her.

All night long, he watched as people approached Tessa. Wylie Slaughter and his friends bent her ear for a while. Rafe recognized a magazine editor, a collector or two, someone from a gallery in Soho, someone from a gallery in Williamsburg. One woman in particular seemed very excited, she kept gesturing at the paintings as she talked. He saw her hand Tessa a business card.

In the middle of a sentence, he would feel her eyes on him, and he would glance furtively at her and smile. Immersed in explaining her paintings to yet another curator, she would feel the hairs prickle up on the back of her neck, and just for a moment, her eyes would search him out across the room.

Finally, at seven-thirty, Giselle took the microphone, and an excited burst of murmuring filled the hall. “That’s right guys,” she said, nodding her sleek blond head, “It’s time to announce the winner of the Prix de Paris.”

“You are all talented,” she continued, looking fondly at the graduates. “If I could afford it, I’d send you all to Paris. But there can be only one winner.”

Rafe smiled politely, waiting with the rest of them. Deep in his heart, he prayed;
Not Tessa. Not Tessa. Not Tessa. Not Tessa.

“This year’s winner surprised us all. Not for lack of talent
—
she always had that
—
but for the many obstacles she had to overcome to complete her project.”

Giselle continued, her voice throaty and strong. “Halfway through the year, our winner lost her job, her scholarship and her adviser. Not once, but twice, it looked as though she wouldn’t be able to finish at all. And when she did complete her thesis project, not only was it a showstopper, a shining example of everything we teach at this school, but it made us look at something we thought we already knew, in a completely different way.”

“The winner of this year’s Prix de Paris is…Tessa Moss!”

Just for a moment, Tessa was overwhelmed. Blinking back tears, she wished that her family had come, she would have liked them to witness this, to share in this part of her life.

A few feet away, Rafe smiled at her, his beautiful face filled with light, so proud. Portia threw her long arms around her in a hug. Clayton grabbed her, bouncing her up and down and whooping with joy.

Suddenly, she understood. Portia was family to her now, and so was Ben. Clayton was family, and so was Graham. Gracie was, and Ram, and Gaby, and Harker, and Leo, and Anastasia, and even David, wherever he was. Rafe, of course. It went without saying.

It was all very clear to her now. She could not change the family she came from, but she could create a new one. A family that accepted her for who she was, not what they thought she should be. So in a sense, her family was there, after all.

She stepped forward to accept her prize.

The graduates posed together for a group photo under the
Pietà.
The camera flashed. The class of ‘93 hugged each other and promised to stay in touch.

By all standards, the show had been a smashing success. A collector had bought Clayton’s centaur on the spot. Harker was going to have a one-man show in a new gallery opening on the Lower East Side. Ben’s
Gates of Hell
had so awed one of the board members that he had offered then
and there to become his patron. A well-known restaurateur commissioned Gracie to paint a mural for the hip new place he was opening in Tribeca. A handsome young curator from the Jewish Museum had given Tessa his card and asked if she would be part of an upcoming exhibition showcasing art of the Holocaust.

The party began to thin out. People had made reservations weeks in advance for New York’s best-known restaurants; the graduates and their guests began to drift away, to dinner, to Broadway shows, to see the sights.

“Come with us,” said Portia earnestly. Auden nodded his agreement. Portia leaned over, put her hands together in prayer, hissed.
“Please.”

Sawyer Ballard’s spare frame towered over them. “Yes, do come!” he exhorted enthusiastically. Portia had introduced Tessa to her grandfather as Sofia Wizotsky’s long lost granddaughter. He looked a little dazed. She tried to visualize him as a young man, flirting with her grandmother.

“Another time,” she said.

The Ballards moved off, tall and languid and graceful, like a herd of gazelles through long grass.

As the evening drew to a close, and the crowds ebbed away, Rafe and Tessa began to make their way towards each other. They met in the middle of the room, near Clayton’s centaur.

“Hello, Tessa.”

“Hello, Mr. Sinclair.”

They smiled at each other. And then he took her hand.

They sauntered at a leisurely pace through the Cast Hall. First-year work-study students moved efficiently around them, ferreting out glass plates and empty wine glasses stashed in corners and behind sculptures. When they reached the stairs, Rafe held the door open for her. Tessa took one last look around the room, inhaling deeply of the turpentine-scented air. Together, they stepped out onto Lafayette Street.

At the corner of Gramercy Square, the plane trees had leafed out, shading the south side of the house. Morning glories and moonflowers twined green stems around the lamppost. The wisteria vines that grew in gnarled clusters over the mullioned windows were in full bloom, long trusses of lavender blossoms cascading down the chiseled face of the old brownstone mansion.

At the top of the steps, Rafe leaned over and lifted Tessa off of her feet. He carried her past the drawing of the mother and child, past the sculpture of the welcoming angel. Up the carved Gothic stairs, through the Great Room, up a second stairway to the loft. He paused before stepping over the threshold to his room.

The first thing she noticed was the bed. It was covered in rose petals.

Pillar candles of many different heights and widths cast their shimmering light from every surface and corner. Smoke from a filigreed incense burner curled lazily skyward, perfuming the air with jasmine and vanilla. An opened bottle of champagne waited on the dresser alongside two crystal flutes, the slender bowls engraved with wings.

With the greatest of care, he laid her down and gazed at her, at her miraculous hair spilling out over his pillow, at the filmy black dress that settled over his bedspread, at the seraphic smile playing across her lips.

“They reminded me of you,” he said. “They were just exactly the color of your skin.”

Handfuls of creamy rose petals fell through her fingers. “Turn around,” she murmured.

He went to the window, pushed open the fringed velvet drapes. Unlatching the French doors, he stepped out onto the terrace.

Outside, a full moon was visible over the park, shrouded in a gauzy haze. Gramercy Park was particularly beautiful tonight, the overgrown trees casting intricate patterns of light and shadow on the sidewalk, the fanlights above the doors beckoning to passersby with a friendly yellow glow. The gaslight lamps raised the specter of the nineteenth century with a ghostly luminescence, the wrought iron galleries brought to mind old black-and-white photos of Paris. Under the dogwood trees, the azaleas in the park blazed with cerise, with salmon, with violet, with pink. The raked gravel paths glistened an unearthly white.

When he turned around again, she was laying naked on the bed. Moonlight slanted in long parallelograms across her bare skin. He ran trembling fingers over her rounded bottom, finding the sweet dimples at the base of her back. He skimmed the flat of his hand along the muscles that rose alongside her spine, the level plane between her shoulders.

He stripped off his clothes; they lay discarded at the foot of the bed in a crumpled heap. He leaned over to kiss the pink lips. Tessa’s eyes were wide and full of wonder. She had never seen him completely naked. He was as beautifully made as one of the Michelangelo sculptures in the Cast Hall.

The contours of her body emerged from the rose petals like Cabanel’s
Venus
from the sea. Her fingers furrowed through his hair, she pulled his face to hers. She knew him now, had tasted what he was capable of, and still, she drew him closer.

He took his time, wanting to prolong the moment; to take hold of the firm curve of a hip, to rest his cheek upon the mound of her belly. To dwell upon the swell of her breasts, the lick of golden orange hair between her thighs.

His hands went around her waist, his fingers sinking into the flesh as he pulled her against him. His eyes fluoresced an extraordinary blue.

“I love you,” he told her. In the perfect stillness of the room, his voice was a rapturous melody that only she would ever hear. “I love you now. I will love you always. I love you more than I can ever love anyone, ever again.”

She didn’t say anything. She looked up into his eyes, and he found his answer there. His own reflection. Faith and trust. The only peace he’d ever known.

He braced himself over her. The commingled scents of sandalwood and blackberries rose from their heated bodies. The lovers gazed into one another’s eyes. With a single fluid movement, he was inside of her, making them one.

A gasp, a stifled cry, a rattling intake of breath.

“Oh, God,” he whispered in awe. “I’ve come home. Finally, I’m home.”

He was in Highgate again. It was the middle of winter, snow dusted the wings of the angels watching over the dead. Looking down, he noted that he was dressed entirely in white. London in January; he shivered, and not because of the cold.

Once again, the branches of trees reached out like bony fingers to pluck at him, his shirt, his pants, his hair. Rafe realized that he was barefoot, he was leaving bloody tracks in the snow.

Up ahead, the shadowy child ran lightly over the frost-whitened path, disappearing just where it curved into a lane of mausoleums. Now he slowed, afraid that his confederates with the jagged teeth and cadaverous breath were waiting there, just out of sight.

“Come back!” he called. A cemetery at night was no place for a child.

He could see him now, skipping far ahead, balancing on the bricks that edged the sides of the path. Reluctantly, he followed, glancing fearfully at the monuments. He expected the arrival of the child’s shadowy compatriots at any moment.

Rafe found him sitting on a bench in an Egyptian-style tomb, swinging his legs back and forth. He approached slowly, afraid he would start running again.

“Are you alone?” he said cautiously. “You don’t have to be afraid of me. I want to help you. What’s your name?”

The boy looked up at him. A pretty child, dressed in short pants, a cap, old-fashioned clothing. In the moonlight, it was impossible to tell what color his eyes were. Something about him seemed familiar.

Tired of the chase, Rafe sat down beside him. The little boy smiled. When he smiled, his eyes weren’t so sad. Where was his mother, anyway? Such a sweet child. Who would leave a child like this, on a night like this, in a place like this?

The boy reached out and took his hand. Rafe shivered. The little fingers were as cold as bone, as cold as a headstone in January.

“You’re nice,” he said.

“No I’m not,” he said. “I’m a very bad man.”

“No,” said the little boy. He smiled a crooked smile, much too old for his years. “You’re not. I would know.”

“What do you want from me?” he said.

“I have to tell you something.”

The chilly little hand was pulling him now, pulling him down so that he could put his lips close to his ear. Fear beat its wings in his heart. Suddenly, he didn’t want to know what the shadow child had to say.

The boy cupped his hand over his mouth so that only Rafe could hear. “She forgives you,” he whispered in his ear. “She forgave you a long time ago. She wishes you could forgive yourself.”

The boy jumped down from the bench and continued on his way down the path. Rafe began to follow. The little boy stopped and shook his head. “No,” he said. “It’s not time yet.”