True Colors (6 page)

Scowling, Monica turned to Emma. “What the
hell just happened?”

Good question.
“I—he left,” she stammered. “And stuck us with the
bill for the drinks.”

“I invited him here,” Monica assured Emma.
“He knew I was treating. Is he serious? Is he going to find you
studio space?”

“I don’t see how he can. It’s not like he
knows this town.” The last traces of mist floated out of Emma’s
brain and reality settled onto her, cold and heavy. “Any studio
space he finds is going to be too expensive for me, anyway. And I’m
still going to wind up homeless—unless he finds a studio that has a
bed in it.”

“We’ve got a couple of months,” Monica
reminded her.

“He could kick us out tomorrow,” Emma shot
back. “We’re in breach of the lease, aren’t we?”

Monica gazed toward the door through which
he’d vanished, then swiveled back to Emma. “I don’t think he’s
going to,” she said. “If he’s going to help you find studio space,
he’s not going to kick us out. He’s a good guy.”

Emma wouldn’t go that far. She wasn’t sure
what kind of guy he was.

All she knew was that the song had walloped
him the way it had walloped her. And he’d been as shaken by it as
she was.

***

Gus watched the tall, dark-haired man bolt
out of the tavern. She didn’t know who he was, but she knew what
had happened to him. Not in the particulars, but she was well aware
of the peculiar power of the jukebox over some people.

He’d been nailed by it. He and Monica’s
red-haired friend.

Gus didn’t know the redhead. She was a
newcomer to Brogan’s Point, and she rarely came into the tavern.
But Gus knew Monica Reinhart. Hell, she’d known Monica when the kid
was just a bump in her mother’s abdomen. Like Gus, the Reinharts
were in the hospitality business. The Reinharts’ brand of
hospitality was a bit more upscale than hers, but their inn and her
bar were both landmarks in town. Gus knew that the Reinharts often
recommended the Faulk Street Tavern to the Ocean Bluff Inn’s
guests, even though they had a cocktail lounge at the inn. And Gus
was always happy to send travelers up the road to the inn if they
needed a place to stay.

She’d watched Monica grow from a scrappy kid
into a hard-working teenager, into an even harder-working adult.
She’d sometimes found herself wishing Monica had been just a couple
of years older, or her own sons a couple of years younger. Gus’s
younger son and Monica would have made a great pair. Now that they
were all old enough that the age difference didn’t matter, her boys
no longer lived in town. And Monica was still dating Jimmy
Creighton, who’d been a good-looking twit as a teenager and hadn’t
evolved much since then.

Sometimes Gus wished a tune from the jukebox
would seize Monica and spin her around, give her a different
perspective on life and love. But this evening, it seemed as if
Monica’s friend had been the one spun around.

Monica’s friend and that lanky stranger. Just
recalling how quickly he’d fled from the bar caused Gus to
smile.

Manny Lopez, Gus’s assistant, lumbered the
length of the bar, hauling a case of vodka from the storeroom
downstairs. Gus was strong, but Manny had been a linebacker in high
school, and he was still built like one, big and solid, with
muscles as tough as the rubber in the radial tires on Gus’s
four-by-four. He carried the case of liquor as if it were no
heavier than a box of tissues. “Gonna be light tonight,” he said,
commenting on the sparse crowd.

“It’s early yet,” she assured him as he set
the carton down and began unloading the bottles. “Jimmy Creighton
and his friends’ll drink enough to keep us in the black.”

Manny laughed. Gus smiled, but she wasn’t
actually joking. Monica could do so much better. All she needed was
a little nudge. Or maybe for Will to swing back into town and
decide he liked Brogan’s Point, after all. Gus’s older son had a
wife, a baby and a mortgage down in Quincy. He wasn’t going
anywhere. But Will still rented, and that Boston rent he was paying
devoured a huge portion of his paycheck. He could come back to
Brogan’s Point, find work here, settle down, notice that Monica had
blossomed into a lovely lady.

Gus’s smile widened. Her sons were every bit
as stubborn and headstrong as she was. She’d never fulfilled her
mother’s dreams, choosing basketball over ballet, marrying a bar
owner and joining him in the business, taking it over after cancer
had claimed him, and currently enjoying a nice, comfortable,
out-of-wedlock affair with Ed Nolan, one of Brogan’s Point’s
finest. Gus’s mother frequently made comments about Ed’s not buying
the cow when he could get the milk for free. Gus ignored her.

She glanced over at the booth where Monica
and her friend were seated. With the man gone, Monica had switched
benches so she faced Emma. They bowed their heads together over the
table, conferring intensely. Gus couldn’t see Monica’s face, but
she could see the redhead’s.

Pretty girl. Crazy hair.

And a dazed expression.

The jukebox had gotten to her, for sure.

That song. He didn’t even like it. Too
schmaltzy. Too whiny. Why the hell couldn’t he get it out of his
mind?

He liked hip-hop, raw and
thumping. Maybe his taste in music—or lack of taste, his parents
insisted—had been a reaction to the violin lessons he’d been forced
to take as a child. Every week he’d had to trudge down Brighton
7
^th
Street to Mr. Chomsky’s apartment, where he’d spend an hour
sawing away on his cheap, battered fiddle while Mr. Chomsky would
mutter, “So much talent going to waste because you don’t practice
enough! Apply yourself!” Max had wanted to apply himself to the
stickball games going on in the street or to the stretch of beach
beckoning him from the southern end of Brighton
7
^th,
,
not to mastering vibratos and bow positions.

But his parents were old country, old school,
old everything. They might have emigrated from Russia and embraced
their newly minted American citizenship, but the only music they
considered worthwhile was what Tchaikovsky, Prokofiev, Mussorgsky,
Stravinksy and Shostakovich had written. They’d hated that their
only child listened to that “loud, trashy stuff—I can’t even call
it music,” his father would rail. “Not in my house. I won’t allow
it.”

Other teenagers might have been sneaking
smokes and booze beneath the elevated tracks of the B train running
through the neighborhood. Max had been sneaking Ludacris, Ja Rule
and Eminem.

He sure as hell hadn’t been developing a
taste for pop ballads like “True Colors.” Yet that song had flowed
from that antique-looking jukebox straight into his skull and
settled in for a nice, long stay.

His accommodations at the
Ocean Bluff Inn were spacious and pretty, the walls a muted beige,
the bed decadently comfortable, king-sized and piled high with
pillows. The room was silent; the windows faced away from the
ocean, so he didn’t hear the waves breaking against the sand, and
the hotel was clearly not filled to capacity, so no voices seeped
under his door from the hall. But he couldn’t sleep, not with that
freaking song playing over and over in his head.
Beautiful, like a rainbow…
So sweet. So cloying.

It wasn’t just the song that had taken up
residence like a squatter in his gray matter. It was the actual
squatter occupying his house: Emma Glendon. Emma with her
extravagant hair and her astute eyes. Red hair, hazel eyes. Were
those her true colors, or did she make use of Lady Clairol and wear
tinted contacts?

Why should he care?

Damn it, he
did
care—enough to
volunteer to help her find studio space. As if he could possibly be
of any assistance in that. He knew nothing about Brogan’s Point.
He’d bought a house here only because Vanessa had been from the
area—the North Shore, she’d called it—and wanted an East Coast
base. They’d been engaged to be married. He’d wanted her happy.
She’d picked out the house, and he’d said, “Sure.”

He’d been a fool then. And here he was, being
a fool again, helping that red-headed creature to find a new base
of operations once he’d evicted her.

One big difference between her and Vanessa,
of course, was that she hadn’t asked him for his help. She’d seemed
started by his offer, as startled as he himself was when he’d made
it. He’d been under a spell when he’d spoken, bewitched.

He was a man of his word, however. His
parents may have failed to instill in him their passion for
Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff, but they’d taught him to honor his
commitments, to follow through on his promises.

So he’d find Emma a place to set up her
easel. At least he’d try.

And then he’d remove her from his house, put
the damned place up for sale, and get on with his life.

***

“Tell me again about the magic,” Emma asked
Monica.

Early morning sunlight filtered through the
trees and streamed into the kitchen through a wall of glass. The
kitchen didn’t offer a view of the ocean as the loft where Emma
worked did, but it overlooked the forest of towering pines that
bordered the house’s rear yard. Emma recalled the views from
Claudio’s apartment: through the bedroom window a dark, narrow
alley, and through the front windows the brick and brownstone
buildings across the street. If you stood deep in the corner of the
main room and peered westward through the window furthest from that
corner, you could glimpse the drab steel cables of the Manhattan
Bridge. Not the whole bridge itself, just a few of the cables.

Moving to Brogan’s Point had taken some
getting used to, but the views from her current home were vastly
superior. Unfortunately, her enjoyment of the view wasn’t going to
last. God knew what views her next home would have. The pavement
beneath her cardboard box? Maybe a flap, with “This Side Up” and an
arrow printed on it?

She and Monica sat side by side on stools,
their coffee steaming in mugs on the granite island occupying the
center of the room. Monica was working her way through a bowl of
oatmeal, but Emma had no appetite. Just sipping her coffee was a
struggle.

“What magic?” Monica asked.

They were both dressed for work, Monica in
crisp slacks and a tailored blouse, Emma in her paint-spattered
overalls. She didn’t have any students today, and she intended to
make as much progress as possible with her Dream Portrait of Ava
Lowery. She didn’t hold out much hope that Max would find her a
studio any time soon, if ever, and she needed to get Ava’s portrait
done and a nice, fat check from Ava’s parents in her pocket before
she ventured out to find a studio on her own.

“That magic jukebox at the Faulk Street
Tavern. What’s the story with that?”

Monica scooped a dab of oatmeal onto her
spoon and consumed it slowly, licking her spoon as if it were a
lollipop. “According to legend,” she said, her voice taking on the
stentorian quality of a documentary film narrator, “sometimes the
jukebox will play a song that speaks to only one or two individuals
in the bar. No one else will especially react to it, but the people
it’s aimed at will be changed by it.”

“Changed in what way?”

Monica shrugged. “Changed in a way they need
to be changed.”

As explanations went, that was pathetically
vague. “So someone could hear a song and realize she needs a
haircut?”

“I think the change is more profound,” Monica
said. “It’s just a myth, though. Don’t you dare cut your hair.”

“I wasn’t planning to,” Emma said, then hid
behind her mug, taking a long, scalding slurp of coffee. She didn’t
want Monica to think she’d been changed profoundly by that song
yesterday. She wasn’t even sure she’d been changed at all. Max,
yes, but not her.

Then again, the insomnia she’d endured last
night was a change for her. Usually, when she couldn’t sleep, it
was because she was so energized by a project. She’d been known to
stay up half the night working on a canvas, fueled by adrenaline
and goaded by her muse. But the previous night’s sleeplessness had
nothing to do with her art. It had to do with Max Tarloff. She’d
lain awake, restless and edgy, picturing the mesmerizing glow in
his striking blue eyes as the song had wrapped itself around him
and Emma. She’d visualized the delectable shape of his mouth. She’d
imagined that mouth on hers, imagined it grazing down her body…

A wave of heat washed through her. She
shifted her legs on the stool and took another drink of coffee,
praying that Monica wouldn’t notice how ridiculously turned on she
was. By thoughts of their landlord, of all people! By thoughts of
the man who would be kicking them out of the house the instant
their lease was up, if not sooner.

“So the song from the jukebox changes the
person who paid for it, right?” Whatever bizarre effect “True
Colors” had had on her and Max, neither of them had put money into
the machine and punched the numbered buttons for that song. Surely
its magic had been intended for someone else. They were just
collateral damage.

Monica shook her head. “No one can choose
what song will come out of the jukebox,” she said. “No one even
knows what songs are inside the jukebox, except that they’re all
old. According to Gus, they’re all songs that were hits while you
could still get records on vinyl. The jukebox can’t handle CD’s or
MP3’s.”

“And you can’t choose which song it will
play?” Now it was Emma’s turn to shake her head. “People put in
money and then they simply have to accept whatever song comes
out?”

“Yep.”

“That doesn’t seem fair.”

“Well, no one is forced to put money into the
machine. And it’s only a quarter for three songs. The price hasn’t
changed in decades. For twenty-five cents, people are willing to
take a chance. It’s kind of fun. You put in a quarter and then the
jukebox surprises you.”