The Color of Light (30 page)

“What do you reckon she’s done this time?” said Harker. “I mean, how many impressionist blow job paintings can you sell?”

“Maybe she’s tried a new medium this time,” said David.

“Decoupage,” suggested Graham. “Or maybe she’s doing portraits now. You know. From the waist down.”

There was a commotion in the back of the room. Clayton had materialized in front of the sculptors’ studio, where he was grabbing a thrashing Gracie around the waist and throwing himself backwards onto the floor. His big body broke her fall. “Come on, show me some love!” he was bellowing.

“What about you, Tessa?” David prodded her. “Are you going?”

Tessa made a sad face. “Gee, I have to work Thursday night. So sorry.”

“Come on, Tessa,” he coaxed. “One hour, one lousy hour. Free white wine. It’s bound to be terrible. Aren’t you even a little bit curious?”

In final days before winter break, Tessa had already handed in her History of Composition report, using up a dozen sheets of tracing paper to analyze the horizontal, vertical and diagonal movements in Hopper’s
Nighthawks.
She wasn’t through with Whit’s Perspective assignment yet, it was taking longer than she had expected. Tomorrow was the due date, no exceptions, so she would be working late into the night.

By now, they were supposed to be well along in their thesis projects. Ben was steadily working on a huge slab of gray clay, to which he continually fastened small, writhing forms. When Tessa peered closer, she could see the figures were all trapped, desperately struggling to escape. She’d looked to him for explanation.

“It’s my
Gates of Hell,”
he said, referring to Rodin’s famous doors. “We’re all trying to get away from something.”

Portia had decided on a series of paintings with the theme of childhood. Her sketches had a delicately unbalanced Diane Arbus quality to them, as if the children who populated them were negotiating through an unsafe world. Harker was making portraits of people he knew in the East Village; a waitress at Veselka, a Halal butcher, a club kid who said she was a vampire.

Graham was doing biblical art. “Aren’t they a little, um,
too
classical?” Tessa asked cautiously, looking at the sketches on his wall. “I mean, we’re supposed to be fighting this image of being stuck in the past.”

Leafing through a Rembrandt book, he shrugged, bored with the argument. “What do I care what people think? If I want to paint Saint
Sebastian, the sexiest saint, or Sergius and Bacchus, martyred for the love that dares not speak its name, I will. Why do I have to get the art establishment’s Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval first?”

The only student who seemed completely up in the air was Clayton. Upon returning from his two-week suspension, he’d mocked up a table full of clay figurines, all genders and subject matters. There was a Minotaur, holding its huge horned head as if it had a headache. To this he had added a pair of wrestlers, a rearing horse, two women embracing, a bust of his own head.

There was also a ghostly winged figure spreading its arms in welcome, a skeletal face hidden by a cloak, ragged drapery suspended behind it like it was whipped by the wind. When she asked him what it meant, he wrapped his arms around her waist and flew backwards into the air. Tessa experienced a momentary feeling of weightlessness before bouncing onto Clayton’s hard abdomen. She’d struggled to her feet, feeling confused and a little embarrassed while the first-year students who were gathered around brayed with laughter and he grinned like a devil, or a fool.

Late one night, as they lay sprawled across the beat-up couches in the lounge area near the windows, finished with their work but too exhausted to go home, she finally related the convoluted history of her family name.

“Holy cow,” Ben said. “So technically, you’re Tessa Wizotsky.”

She’d shaken her head, at a loss for words. There had been a moment of silence that stretched on and on, a bit too long for comfort. Perhaps it was too unimaginably foreign for them, the children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren of Americans, longtime citizens of nice, safe, US of A.

“Atwood wasn’t my family’s original name either,” David offered. “It was Blumenfrucht.”

Portia and Gracie tried to pronounce it, tripping on the guttural
ch
sound. Graham had gotten closer than the others, though it still sounded like he had something caught in his throat. “It’s
beautiful,”
he insisted, laughing.

“It’s a very pretty name.” David said, with great dignity. “It means fruit blossom, in German.” Which only made them laugh harder.

She remembered that David was still looking at her, hoping she would join them later. Throwing her backpack over her shoulder, she shifted the
dead weight of her sculpture to her other arm. “Sorry, guys,” she apologized. “Can’t make it. Got to get to my studio. Lots of work to do before the night is out. Lucian doesn’t want to go to April’s opening. He scheduled his flight at the same time as her stupid show, just out of spite. You’ll just have to manage without me.”

The last student, a sculptor, left at 11:45. She heard his footsteps echo down the aisle, and the boom of the steel door as it closed behind him.

Tessa was on her knees on the floor of her studio, sheets of 18” x 24” paper spread out all around her. She held her weary head in her hands, exhausted, out of ideas.

Perspective hated her. Perspective wanted her to fail, wanted to break her, bite her in the ass, wanted to bring her down.

The long and short of it was, her plan was not working. The buildings looked all right, simple rectangles grouped around a fountain in a plaza, but the obelisk was slanted in a funny way. The cone she had plotted at the top of a tower was tilting over, undeniably wrong. Something had to be missing; the flat, graphed, two-dimensional plan, transferred by a series of lines and angles called vators into a fully three-dimensional drawing, was off somewhere.

Tessa dug her hands into her hair and squeezed as if it would extract the formula that would save her drawing. Desperate for a distraction, she turned the tape over in her boom box, pressed down the forward key.

Dies irae! Dies illa! Solvet saeclum in favilla…teste David cum Sybilla….

The choir shrieked out its warning, the music thundered up the empty aisle and across the deserted floor. Raphael Sinclair stood framed in the doorway.

Something like, fear, or excitement, took hold deep in the pit of her belly. For the first time, she wasn’t startled, though her heart still knocked a tattoo against her chest,
boom boom boom boom boom boom,
he could almost feel it in the close air of the studio.

He stared at her, not smiling. She couldn’t read his expression, and a feeling of shame crept over her as she began to wonder if he was there to tell her how disappointed he was with her for the April Huffman fiasco, how much damage she had done to his school. Perhaps he had waited till everyone else had left to save her the embarrassment.

“Look, I’m sorry,” she said hurriedly. “I’m sorry about the April Huffman thing. I never meant to harm anyone. I would never do anything to hurt the school. I don’t know what came over me. Please don’t ask me to leave. I belong here.”

It was his turn to be startled. “You’re sorry?” he said in amazement. “I’m the one who’s sorry, Tessa. That you felt you must…that you were driven to…” His lovely, lulling voice was colored with regret. “You were placed in an impossible position. I’m sorry we didn’t protect you.”

“It’s not your fault,” she said. “How could you have known?”

He saw that she was trying to comfort him, and he was touched. “I should have known,” he said, looking directly at her with those extraordinary eyes, bright, like beams of light.

“I’ve missed you,” he said, surprising both of them.

It was cold. At night the thermostat was turned down to save money, and it was particularly chilly in the studios, where the wind easily found the gaps in the old window frames. He noticed that Tessa had taken to wearing gloves with the fingers cut off to keep warm as she worked.

“I haven’t seen you in a while,” she said.

If anything, her studio was even more inviting at night, the light from a rusted vintage 1930s torchiere suffusing it with an orange hue, like an old photograph, or a memory. A flurry of new postcards were tacked up on her wall. A single house silhouetted against the sky, blue with lengthening evening shadows, crouched before a railroad track. Preternatural black-and-white photographs of children with angels’ wings.
Nighthawks,
by Edward Hopper. A long time ago, he had wanted to paint just like Hopper, scenes filled with raw light and his own loneliness.

She watched him, privately enjoying the way his body bowed and flexed as he reached out to straighten a postcard, swooped down to peer behind a portfolio.

“You’re working late,” he said.

“Perspective assignment,” she said grimly. “Not my best subject.”

“Let’s have a look,” he said. “I used to be pretty good at Perspective.” Unbelievably, he crouched down in his spotless trench coat, sweeping the gritty floor with his coattails. After a moment, she squatted down, joining him.

“Oh, yes. That tower’s not right, is it.” He frowned, concentrating, scanning the drawings. His eyes moved from one paper to the next, following the lines on the graph to their terminus. One finger slid slowly down a ray, then stopped.

“There. That one.”

She squinted at it, trying to see what he meant. Then she saw it; she had made a tick mark one-sixteenth of an inch too low. She went for a yellow pencil, carefully erased the tower, moved the tick mark, redrew the tower. It was definitively better.

“Thanks,” she said with obvious relief. “Now I can start on my self-portrait for Ted. And my sketches for Josephine.”

He looked at her in disbelief. “Do you have any idea what time it is?” He tapped the face of his expensive-looking watch. Both hands pointed to midnight. “Go home.”

“I’m meeting with her tomorrow,” she said wanly, rubbing her eyes. “I have to be ready.”

“How is that going?” He stood back up, brushing off his coat.

“She threw out two of my sketches. She wants me to lose the mother and child, too, but I told her I would make it work.”

His face registered surprise. The sketch was tacked up on the wall in front of him, the suitcase reading
Wizotsky
like a reprimand from the grave. A pencil drawing was tacked up beside it, an old woman in a babushka surrounded by a hundred burning memorial candles. “I haven’t seen this one,” he said.

“It’s my grandmother,” she said. “Every holiday she lights these memorial candles. One for every member of her family that was lost. It drives Zaydie crazy,” she added, smiling. “He tells her she should just light one, she’s going to burn the whole house down.”

So warm, so intimate, the crimson couch, the orange light, the Persian rug, the girl. There was a new addition, a fretted hexagonal coffee table painted Venetian red, somebody’s souvenir of a long-ago college trip to Morocco. A small wooden crate of clementines sat on the table’s patterned surface, filling the room with its fragrance. He never wanted to leave.

His eyes fell on her sculpture. With its round bottom and nipped-in waist, the little clay figure reminded him of her. He touched it, ran his fingers over its curves. Tessa thought she could feel the warmth of his hand.

“How was your Thanksgiving?” he said. “Home to the heartland, wasn’t it?”

She made a smile that was more of a grimace. “Best not mentioned.”

“Why is that?”

“I don’t know,” she said. Then, a confessional rush of words. “That’s a lie. I do know. My grandfather had a heart attack at Thanksgiving dinner.”

“How awful,” he said, drawing closer.

“I showed him my sketches. I thought he would be proud of me.” Her voice was couched in remorse. “I should have known better.”

“I’m sure he’s very proud of you,” Rafe said gently.

She sighed. Like a flash of light illuminating something hidden in a drawer, or under a bed, he understood that he was mistaken, she was entirely correct, her family wasn’t proud of her at all.

“My grandfather thinks art is a waste of time,” she said. Then, with a maturity that was poignant in someone so young, she explained, “I’m not exactly what my family had in mind.”

“I wasn’t exactly what my parents had in mind, either,” he said.

He wanted to reach out, touch the tangle of curls on her shoulder, but of course he couldn’t. She was tying on her black waiter’s apron now, taking the brown-paper wrapping off of a creamy white sheet of Bristol board. He roamed through the small space, dodging stacks of canvases, inspecting her most recent work.

It was clear that Tessa’s talent had grown over the course of the semester. Her drawing had become more fluid, assured, her compositions more sophisticated. Her paintings, even ordinary studio poses, filled him with yearning, he could not explain why. Seeing her progress thrilled him. The program he had created was working; she had already surpassed some of her teachers.

She was dragging an old oak office chair before a small mirror. She clipped the paper to her drawing board, and balanced it on her lap.

“Is it true?” she asked, concentrating on her image in the mirror. “That we’re running out of money?”

“Yes.” he said, uneasily eyeing the mirror.

“Is there anything we can do? I mean, the students.”

He sighed, lifted his hat, raked his fingers through his hair. When he raised his arm she caught a glimpse of the lining of his suit, a brilliant
crimson. “Whit’s right,” he admitted. “We really do need to attract support from big foundations. But they all want us to have famous names on our faculty roster. And there aren’t many art stars with classical backgrounds. Lucian Swain, for instance. Where did he go to art school?”

She frowned, trying to remember. “Some local college near Portsmouth, I think. They taught commercial art. How to draw soup cans, fashion illustration. Then he went to Slade.”

“Slade,” he pronounced it as if it were an obscenity. “You’re already better than he is. What can he possibly teach you?”