True Colors (19 page)

He hadn’t confided in Stan about girlfriend
woes, because he hadn’t had many girlfriends as an undergraduate.
MIT’s computer science department hadn’t been overflowing with
female students when he’d been there. He’d dated a Wellesley
student for a while, and he’d been quite infatuated with a Smith
girl who’d decided, after a few months, that her two-hour drives to
Cambridge to visit him were wearing her out. But while he’d been
passionate about his research, he’d never actually been in love
with a woman. Not until Vanessa.

He wasn’t in love with Emma, either. The very
idea was preposterous.

“Here’s the thing,” he said, unsure of what he
was going to say until the words flowed past his lips and into the
air. “There’s a jukebox in Brogan’s Point.”

“A jukebox.” Stan accepted Max’s statement with
a curious nod. “I haven’t seen one of those in ages.”

“This one looks like an antique, something
you’d see in a black-and-white movie from decades ago. It plays old
songs.” Max shook his head, aware of how strange he must sound to
Stan. “I think it put a spell on me.”

Stan erupted in laughter. “Like Voodoo? Come
on, Max. You’re a rational guy.”

“Some things defy rationality.” Max shrugged.
“The jukebox played this song, and the next thing I knew, this
woman and I… Well. It’s stupid. I don’t want to go into
it.”

“What song?” Stan grinned mischievously. “Maybe
it’ll work on my wife.”

“No. Really. It’s silly.”

“What was that really hot disco song? ‘Love to
Love You, Baby.’ Oh, man.” Stan’s smile softened, growing
nostalgic. “Very erotic. Or ‘When a Man Loves a Woman.’ The
original version. Percy Sledge.”

“‘
True Colors,’” Max told
him.

“What? Wasn’t that song used in a commercial? I
sort of remember—cameras, or film, something like that.”

“It must have been a long time ago,” Max said.
“Do cameras still use film?”

“So, tell me about this spell.”

“I’m embarrassed,” Max admitted. “I’m a
scientist. I believe in facts, data. Things I can see.”

“And yet,” Stan
argued, “music
can
put a spell on people. I don’t know about a camera commercial,
but some music…a Bach fugue, for instance. It’s mathematical, but
also emotional. Or Debussy. You listen to
Clair de Lune
and you can actually
see the reflection of a full moon in a pond. Or Percy Sledge
singing, ‘When a Man Loves a Woman.’ My wife used to throw herself
at me when she heard that song. I ought to dig out the CD and see
if it still has that effect on her.” He paused to butter a hunk of
bread and take a bite. “‘True Colors.’ Okay. What did this spell
make you do with the woman?”

Fall for
her.
Fall and fall and fall, like Alice
tumbling down the rabbit hole
. A whimsical
fantasy story to go with the whimsical fantasy that hearing a
pretty pop tune in the presence of Emma Glendon could turn his soul
inside out and upside down.

“She’s an artist,” he said. “A painter. We have
nothing in common.”

Stan dismissed this with a snort.

“I offered to help her out a little,
financially. She was insulted. She acted as if she thought I was
trying to buy her.”

“She sounds like she’s got integrity. See? You
and she have that much in common.”

“I have no integrity,” Max muttered. He’d
treated her like a recalcitrant tenant, and then like a hot mama.
He’d had sex with her for no better reason than that he’d wanted to
and she’d made herself available. He’d refused to tell her the
truth about himself.

“Don’t get all Russian on me,” Stan chided. “I
know pessimism and depression are part of your ethnic make-up, but
you’ve been in the U.S. since you were old enough to stop sucking
your thumb. Russian gloom doesn’t suit you.”

Max sighed. “Maybe she’s just too good for
me.”

“That I can
believe,” Stan teased, then turned as the waitress approached with
their entrees. “Ah, steak. If that doesn’t dispel your mood,
Mahk-SEEM
, then I’m
shipping you back to St. Petersburg.”

The steak, along with a second beer, did cheer
Max a bit. Or maybe it was simply Stan’s jovial personality. When
they parted ways at the Kendall Square T stop, Stan to head for
home, Max contemplated returning to Brogan’s Point. By now, the
Hyatt ought to be used to his making reservations and then not
keeping them.

But as he strolled to the hotel overlooking the
Charles River, he thought better of returning to Brogan’s Point
tonight. Stan had nearly convinced him that there was nothing crazy
about being bewitched by a song—even a song used as the soundtrack
for a TV commercial about photographic film—and that a healthy,
red-blooded man couldn’t be blamed for jumping the bones of a
gorgeous, red-haired painter.

Not jumping her bones. Making love to
her.

That was the catch, the thing that brought his
spirits back down. He and Emma had made love. Kissing her, filling
her, coming inside her—it had meant something.

He should have told her the truth about
himself. Instead, he’d more or less thrown money at her.

He couldn’t go back to Brogan’s Point, not
until he was ready to come clean with her. Maybe she would love him
because he was rich and she would appreciate access to his money.
Maybe she would hate him because he could buy and sell her a
million times over.

Lose-lose.

It would probably be best just to fly back to
San Francisco, forget about the house, forget about Emma. Forget
about a shimmering song that claimed to be about seeing the truth
but had in fact lured him down a blind alley.

Emma didn’t need to look at the photos she’d
taken of Max, let alone print them and pin them to a board beside
her easel for reference. His image was imbedded on the insides of
her eyelids, emblazoned on her soul. She could see his vivid blue
eyes, fringed with dark lashes. She could see the angle of his
chin, the slight hollows beneath his cheekbones, the sharp line of
his nose, the dark, silky waves of his hair, which always seemed
just a bit windblown. She could see his strong shoulders, his
leanly muscled chest. She could feel the heat of his skin against
her palms as she touched him…

She gave her head a resolute shake. The
temperature of his skin had nothing to do with her painting of
him.

She’d never before painted a portrait from
memory. But Max… She had him memorized.

“I don’t see his true colors,” she said aloud,
her voice barely a whisper in the quiet house. Monica had headed
off to spend the night with Jimmy. She might not want to do his
laundry or clean up after him, but as she’d told Emma, he was good
in bed.

Monica’s departure had suited Emma fine.
Tonight she was restless, revved up, and she didn’t want to explain
her midnight spasm of creativity to her friend. She just wanted to
paint and paint and paint. Being alone in the house meant not
having to justify herself.

“I don’t see his true colors,” she said again,
her voice hovering like a tendril of smoke in the airy loft. “But
I’ve got his dream nailed down.”

Adrenaline pumped through her veins. She’d
thought about brewing a pot of coffee, but she didn’t need caffeine
to keep her awake. Instead, she’d brought the open bottle of
Chardonnay and her wine glass upstairs to the loft, and she
fortified herself with occasional sips of the cold, crisp
beverage.

Wasn’t wine
supposed to make you drowsy? If so, this wine had failed in its
mission. Emma simmered with energy, hummed with it, trembled with
it. Her nerves were strung tight, sensitive to the spread of light
on her canvas, the play of colors as she dabbed nurdles of paint
onto one of the old ceramic dishes she used as a palette and
blended the nurdles to get the precise degree of darkness for his
hair, the right mix of pink and tawny brown for his complexion. His
eyes… Damn, it was hard to recreate that crystalline blue. A dab of
cerulean, a dab of cobalt, a generous blob of zinc white, a hint of
silver. She mixed the paint studied it, mixed it some more, and
added a little more cobalt and a little more zinc white.
There.
The true color of
Max Tarloff’s eyes.

How could she see him so clearly? How could it
feel as if he were in the loft with her, posing for her, watching
her, wanting her as much as she wanted him?

What if she’d completely misunderstood him?
Judged him unfairly? He’d offered to let her stay on this house
because he’d wanted to help her. Had that been such a bad
thing?

It had forced her to acknowledge the inequality
between them. It had reminded her that he was her landlord and that
her housing situation depended solely on his whims. It had made her
feel dependent on him, indebted to him. Maybe he hadn’t meant to
emphasize the difference in their status—she the impoverished
renter, he the generous landlord—but that was how she’d felt. If he
hadn’t realized she would take his gesture that way, well, he
hadn’t seen her true colors, either.

Dumb-ass song.

She continued painting, her brush strokes
precise and controlled, and Max slowly revealed himself on the
canvas. When it came to painting, at least, she knew his true
colors. The face and upper torso taking shape on her easel
resembled not the man who had sat awkwardly on a stool while she’d
snapped photos of him, and who’d been so reluctant to discuss his
dreams, but rather the man she’d kissed, the man she’d caressed,
the man against whose warm skin she’d traced teasing patterns with
her fingertips.

As for his dream, the one dream he’d shared
with her… She might be completely wrong about it. He might have
just told her to distract her, to prevent her from digging deeper
into his psyche. He’d put so much effort into concealing his true
colors. But she had the one dream he’d confessed to, and as the
painting materialized beneath the bristles of her brushes, that one
dream seemed right. In fact, it made her wonder whether he’d
offered to let her stay in the house not because he’d had sex with
her but because he wasn’t yet ready to let go of his
dream.

What would she do with the painting, once it
was done? She couldn’t sell it to him. She doubted she could keep
it. Yet there it was, the swirls of his hair defined by glints of
light, his face in semi-profile, his eyes gazing off to the left,
toward the view he dreamed of. Something in her rendering of him
made him appeared both wistful and satisfied, anchored in this
place even though he didn’t live here. Was he from Russia?
Brooklyn? San Francisco? No matter. In Emma’s portrait, he looked
like someone who had been searching for a home and had found it at
last.

He’d probably
hate the painting. She supposed she could keep it for herself, a
memento of a man she’d given her heart to, even though he’d kept
his heart locked away from her, refusing to let her artist’s
eyes
really
see
him.

Stupid, stupid song. She hated it. She hated
that it had bewitched her and made her fall in love with a man who
had deliberately kept his true colors hidden from her.

Yet she found herself humming it as she
worked.

***

No one answered when he rang the
bell.

He checked his watch again. Nine-fifteen. Not
terribly early, even for a Saturday morning. He rang the bell
again, then shielded his eyes with his hand and peeked through the
glass sidelight into the entry hall. No sign of life.

Emma and Monica couldn’t have moved out yet.
Emma didn’t even have a place to move to. Certainly she couldn’t
camp out in that stuffy little room at the community center. That
was a public building—offices, a swimming pool, a gym, a hub of
Brogan’s Point activity. Not a homeless shelter. And her situation
there hadn’t been finalized yet.

She’d joked about living in a tent—although,
given her back-to-the-earth childhood, maybe she hadn’t been
joking. He couldn’t believe she would have evacuated the house that
quickly, though.

However, she could have gone out that morning,
or last night. She could have returned to the Faulk Street Tavern,
heard some other song spilling from the jukebox—“When a Man Loves a
Woman,” perhaps; hadn’t Stan said that song had an aphrodisiac
effect on his wife?—and gazed into some other man’s eyes. She could
have gone home with that other man, gone to bed with him. Moved on,
even if she hadn’t yet moved out.

Max rang the bell one last time, then pulled
his key from the pocket of his jeans. It was his house, after all.
He was allowed to enter it.

Silence greeted him as he closed the door
behind him. “Hello?” he called out, not wanting to startle Emma if,
God forbid, she’d brought that other man back here for the night.
Bracing himself for that possibility, he ventured down the hall
toward the great room, moving cautiously, doing his best to clomp
his feet so she’d hear his approach. The plush white carpet
absorbed his footsteps, though. And if she and the other man Max
had conjured in his imagination had spent the night together,
they’d probably be sound asleep now.