Color Blind (19 page)

D
id she actually feel happy? Was that possible? Kate had been certain she would never feel that particular emotion again. And yet, watching the moving men stack Nola’s two canvas suitcases and cardboard cartons in the large guest room, the one just beside the room Kate and Richard had originally planned as a nursery—bassinette, crib, and changing table already installed—was giving her a kind of pleasure she had been resigned to let go.

Kate smiled warmly at Nola, hoping to hang on to the feeling, though the words in those damn paintings kept flashing, and she could not stop thinking about Leonardo Martini’s convenient suicide, or those obsessively scribbled borders, and the art of the insane. “Do you like the bed where it is?” she asked, working hard to stay in the moment.

Nola had decided to move in after she’d tumbled off a step stool in her cramped apartment, and Kate had hired the moving men, gotten Nola’s studio apartment listed with Columbia housing, and purchased the baby furniture within hours, before Nola could change her mind. Now she nervously shifted the bassinette a foot to the left, the changing table to the right.

“Kate. Relax. Please. You’re making me nervous.”

Relax.
Was that possible? She didn’t think so. “You hungry?”

“Starved.”

“Good.” Kate led the way down the hall, ignoring the gruesome crime scene pictures flashing in her brain, trying, for Nola’s sake, to act as if she was okay. In the pantry, she pushed canned goods aside. “I know Lucille stashed some Mallomars in here. I was thinking we’d stay in tonight and I’d cook.”

“
You?
You must mean order-in-cook, right?”

Kate laughed, somewhat forced. “Believe it or not, I can cook.” She poured Nola a glass of milk, then slid the Mallomars onto the long oak counter, watched, delighted, as Nola tore into them. Maybe it
was
possible to forget—for a while. She leaned onto the counter. God, she was tired; tired of the energy it took to distance herself so that she could work the case; tired of fueling the rage that she needed to keep going.

“You sure you’re okay? You don’t seem it,” said Nola.

Kate peered at the young woman. “Are you a witch, or what?”

“I’d choose perceptive.” She returned Kate’s stare. “So?”

“So…I’m coping.” Isn’t that what she had always done? Her mother’s suicide, father’s cancer, Elena’s death, runaways, homicides. “If you’d asked me a few days ago, I’d have said no, I was
not
okay—that I couldn’t even imagine going on with my life, but…This is what one does, right? Just…go on.” Kate turned away, wiped invisible cookie crumbs from her fingers into the sink, tears collecting in her eyes, though she tried to ignore them. “I guess I’ve gotten pretty good at burying my emotions…at denial.” An image of that dark alley flickered in the back recesses of her mind.

“Nothing wrong with that. I think I dreamed away the bad parts of my life.” Nola thought about her brother Niles dying, then her mother. “Sometimes the truth is just too hard.”

“Yes.” Kate rested her hand over Nola’s. She suddenly had the feeling that something was about to go wrong. But why now, at this particular moment—the first time in over a week that she’d felt anything but miserable? She tried to shake it off, but Nola caught it.

“What?”

“Nothing. It’s just…everything, I guess.” For the briefest moment there was another face in her mind, that of her former protégée—a young woman not unlike Nola, whom Kate had been unable to protect.

She slid her arm around Nola’s shoulder. “I’m glad you’re here,” she said, and she was. So why wouldn’t that nagging, awful feeling leave her alone?

“Me too,” said Nola. “Come on. Let’s watch your show.”

T
he black shades are drawn, the tiny screen shimmering into the dark room. He’s a bit disappointed at first—the show isn’t nearly so good as cartoons or that Xena show he watched yesterday, but he sure does like her, the art
her-story-n,
Kate.

He has that feeling again, just for a moment, that he actually knows her. Is it because of the way she smiles at him, or gives him a serious look as if she were aware of him watching?

He squints at the TV screen, believes he is right, that they do know each other, are somehow psychically or even physically connected, maybe from a former life. But no matter—it will come to him. Sometimes he has trouble remembering things, thinks it is because of what they did to him.

The taste of rubber in his mouth. He shudders, looks back at the TV, at the art
her-story-n
. Soon he hopes they will be good friends. She might even become his new best friend, though he wouldn’t want Tony to know that, or Brenda or Brandon, or Donna, especially, who can get really jealous. He would never want to hurt their feelings because that’s the kind of friend he is.

So far he wouldn’t want to be friends with any of the artists on the show, though she seems to like them, the way she listens as though she cares. It makes him think she is a very good person.

He’s even taking a few notes, like when she showed that big painting with all the wooden crosses and plastic dolls attached to it and said that the artist, WLK Hand, was one of the great young artists of his generation, and though he didn’t understand why, he’d like to know why
she
thinks that, and so he’s written down the date of WLK Hand’s exhibition and the name of the gallery, Vincent Petrycoff, and thinks that maybe he’ll go and see for himself.

The artists she interviews say things like—“chromatic,” and “complementary and tertiary colors,” and “warm versus cool”—in very serious voices, and it reminds him of the times when he would sneak into the Art Students League and listen to the teachers, or some of the art books he has managed to read.

A painting flashes on the screen—a big painting comprised of horizontal bands with words stenciled into and onto the painted surface—
yellow
and
blue
and
red
—and the art
her-story-n
says, “Notice how the artist Jasper Johns
illustrates
color with words,” and he jerks to attention.

My God, she knows him!

“Tony,” he shouts. “Come here! Listen to this! She
knows
him!
Jasper Johns!
”

He thinks back, remembers that day, the moment, in the bookstore, when he turned the page, not expecting anything, and there they were, those paintings! He’d chosen the book purely for the artist’s name, which interested him, but then seeing those paintings with the words, so like his own paintings, how amazing was that?

Now he lifts the book on the top of the stack beside his paint table—a place of honor, where he keeps it because he so often refers to it. It gives him faith and confidence that there is someone who thinks like he does. He flips pages until he finds the particular painting that was just on the screen,
By the Sea
,1961. He never could figure out why the artist called it that, because no matter how hard he looks, he cannot see even a hint of the sea. It must be some kind of joke. But the words are clear—
red, yellow, blue
—and then, in the lowest quadrant, it’s like the artist has merged all the words on top of one another so they are impossible to read and yet he can read them all at once. He figures that the artist, his blood brother, his idol, must have gotten confused or angry and painted all the words over and over one another like that, and it makes his heart ache with love for him, and he wishes he could tell him that it’s okay, that he understands his frustration.

He hurries back to the couch, to the television show, and to Kate, who is saying “Thank you and good night,” and feels depressed that it is over so soon, and that there is nothing more about his soul mate, and then something even more amazing happens, but it is so fast that he isn’t sure it actually occurred.

Can it be?
He squints at the screen.
Did I really see it?

And then it happens again.

Her hair, chestnut.

Oh my God!

Just a flicker that burns bright and dies in an instant, but he sees it for sure this time—her hair, in color. He did not imagine it.

He leans forward, nerve endings tingling, and rubs his eyes, which are so tired from staying up all night and working all day on his paintings and then watching too much TV. Are they playing tricks on him?

“Join me next week,” says Kate. “When my guest will be…”But her hair’s gone black again and now there is some older guy, barefoot, sitting in a really big studio surrounded by huge gray paintings, and the guy is talking to her, the art
her-story-n,
saying something about how color is “everything,” and he wishes he could reach into the TV set and grab the guy around the throat and squeeze until—

There it is again! My God!
Her hair
is
chestnut, and her eyes are blue!

He stares at the screen, but the moment has faded.

He falls back against the beat-up cushions of his beat-up couch, breathing hard.
What’s going on?

How can he possibly wait until her next show? He thinks about what just happened—her chestnut hair and blue eyes, then shuts off the TV and sits surrounded by the semidarkness that envelops him like the embraces he has always wanted and never received, and concentrates on her, the art
her-story-n
—and her beautiful, miraculous chestnut hair and blue blue eyes.

He snatches up a handful of crayons, thinks that maybe he will see them as he used to, but no, nothing.

A memory: His first box of crayons. It was from their wrappers that he first began to understand the concept of words—
red, yellow, blue, green
—and from Holly, the fifteen-year-old girl who lived with them for a while, who would sit with him sometimes, sniffing Duco Cement glue and reading the names off the crayon labels, particularly the exotic-sounding ones she liked the best—
wild watermelon, hot chartreuse,
and
hot magenta
—and wait until he repeated them, then clap her hands and tell him how smart he was when he was right.

He smiles until he remembers finding Holly on their bathroom floor with a needle in her arm and foam bubbling out of her mouth.

But he doesn’t want to think about the past. He wants to focus on the present. And the future.

He thinks about last night. Up in the Bronx. When he was selecting the next one. What patience he had, watching her all night, getting in and out of cars, then following her in the very early morning hours, when it wasn’t quite light. He could have taken her then, but that wasn’t the plan. He’ll be back. With the boy’s painting. That’s the plan.

He glances up, his eyes perfectly adjusted to the dim light, focusing on the painting he made at the dark-haired boy’s apartment. How vibrant it had been, bright painful scarlet and sad dark plum; how much it had resembled the Soutines and Francis Bacon and de Kooning paintings—like innards and guts themselves—though they don’t look it anymore. Maybe next time, when he watches her show, it will happen again—the miracle—and he’ll look at all his wonderful reproductions and see them as they were; as they are.

He reaches out and runs his fingers over the black TV screen, picking up electric static and pictures her, the art
her-story-n,
then coils his body into a fetal position, sticks his thumb into his mouth, and like a baby with a bottle begins to make soft sucking noises.

K
ate was quoting the color theorist Johannes Itten when a Jasper Johns painting she had used to illustrate a point flashed onto the screen. She’d almost forgotten. Now it brought back the image of those two Bronx paintings. But a moment later Josef Albers’s
Homage to the Square
painting of concentric green squares replaced it.

“Hey, that’s one of the paintings I chose for you,” said Nola. “I even found Albers’s notes on the green pigments he used and mixed. Let’s see…viridian, phthalocyanine green, and I think Hooker’s green—no question my favorite paint name, ever.”

Kate looked at Nola. “What did you just say about Albers?”

“You mean about the way he mixed the various greens?”

“No, the color names?”

“You mean viridian, phthalocyanine, and Hooker’s green?”

“Yes.” What was it she was trying to get at?
Phthalocyanine green. Viridian.
The serious, technical names manufacturers gave to oil paints. That was it. They didn’t give their pigments names like wild watermelon or raspberry. “Wild watermelon,” said Kate aloud.

“Excuse me?”

“Wild watermelon. I was just wondering where I’d find a color with that name. Maybe on one of those little swatches that interior decorators use?”

“Crayolas,” said Nola.

“Crayolas? Like crayons, you mean?”

“Yeah. I pretty much know most of those names by heart.” Nola closed her eyes. “Sky blue, goldenrod, mulberry.”

“And wild watermelon?”

“I think that was in the box of seventy-two colors—along with hot magenta, blizzard blue, and razzmatazz.” Nola shook her head. “No, actually I think razzmatazz came out a little later, in the box of eighty colors.”

Razzmatazz.
The word flickered in Kate’s memory. “What’s razzmatazz?”

“Kind of a red-violet, sort of what Alizarin crimson is to oil paint.”

Crayon names.
What on earth did that mean? Were they dealing with a kid?

Kate stared at the TV screen, her face reduced to color pixels, mouth moving. Lost in thought, she had stopped listening to what she was saying.