The Color Of Night (6 page)

The conversation never flagged, and the two women quickly established an easygoing rapport. They could easily have lingered at the table for the rest of the afternoon, but soon the telephone began to ring, and Meret excused herself. Strand and Mara put away the food, cleaned up the dishes, and then left for the museum.

The Menil’s surrealist holdings were famous, and Strand had seen exhibitions from them as often as they had been presented over the four years he had been in Houston. The surrealists were always popular, and he was not surprised to find a crowd at the museum. Which suited him perfectly. He had come not to see the exhibit, but to see Mara Song.

When they entered the museum Strand stayed with Mara for the first fifteen or twenty minutes and then gradually moved to drawings on an adjacent wall, then to those on the other side of the room, periodically separating himself from her by allowing the ebb and flow of the crowd to come between them. At first she sometimes would glance around to find him, but eventually she became entirely absorbed in the drawings and forgot about him altogether. Carrying her bag over one shoulder and holding her sunglasses in her hand, Mara moved slowly from image to image, concentrating on each drawing as if she were trying to peer into the very fiber of the paper itself. She ignored the unavoidable jostling of the crowd, having eyes only for the individual pieces of art before her, often remaining so long in front of an image that she reminded Strand of one of those photographs in which the central image was the only thing in focus, while the crowds surrounding the subject appeared as a blurry swirl of movement.

He watched her from every angle as they moved through the exhibition rooms, sometimes observing her from only a few feet away, sometimes through a doorway, sometimes glimpsing her through the movement of heads and bodies and limbs of the crowd. What he saw was a woman who was captivated by a form of art that, compared to other media, was an unobtrusive world apart. To genuinely appreciate drawings, one had to be attracted to their inherent subtlety, to their modesty and intimacy. Most collectors of drawings believed that in some elemental way a drawing was a direct link to the mind of the artist in a manner that other forms of expression could not be. When one peered closely enough at the accumulated lines of a drawn image, or even at a few solitary strokes, one could almost believe that one saw the intent of the artist, and sometimes his discipline and sometimes his abandon, in a way that was bracing in its immediacy.

In a world defined by an insatiable hunger to gorge its senses with explosions of color and fulmination of sound and unrelenting activity, looking intently at a drawing on a piece of paper was an almost ascetic act. Strand found it, in her, beguiling.

When there was only a single room of drawings left to see, he drifted back to her and they finished the exhibit together.

Outside the threat of rain had passed and the sun was bearing down through the heavy air. The humidity was so high that their sunglasses fogged over immediately when they put them on. Mara laughed about this and said she found the city’s semitropical atmosphere a challenge to feminine grace. On the other hand, she added, wiping off her sunglasses on the hem of her dress, she thought there was something sexy about the heat.

They returned to Strand’s house and sat for a few minutes in the air-conditioned library, sipping iced tea.

“Well, that was fun,” Mara said. “It was, uh, it was comfortable being with you.” Then, frowning, watching him closely, “I hope that doesn’t sound… odd to you.”

“No, not at all.” He smiled. “I know what you mean.”

Mara daubed at the sweat on her glass with her napkin, thinking.

“You don’t know,” she said tentatively, “how much I appreciate your asking me to have lunch here, with you and Meret. It’s the first normal thing I’ve done in… ages.”

“Normal?”

Her eyes roamed the bookshelves. “Well, maybe normal isn’t the right word, but, I don’t know… comfortable, normal…” She took a deep breath. “It felt… tranquil.”

She looked up cautiously to see how that might strike him.

He nodded.

“I’m just trying to say that it felt good to be included in something like that.” She shook her head. “With this really absurd divorce grinding on, sometimes I feel an absence of context, as though I’m just not quite meshing with… anything.” She stopped. “This is muddy water to you, isn’t it? I’m not making myself very clear.”

Strand nodded. “I’ve enjoyed today, too. It’s been a good thing, for both of us.”

She looked at her watch. “Well, the morning appointment has turned into most of the day.” She stood. “It’s been wonderful. Thank you very much, Harry Strand.”

The time of day that Harry Strand hated finally arrived. It used to be his favorite, the hour just before dusk when the sun was poised only a few degrees above the horizon and the sharp light of the southern spring relented to the inevitable demise of another day. In the garden of the courtyard, protected by the stone walls of the old house, shade had already enveloped the fountain and the palms, and the blue hues of evening were alchemizing the tropical greens of Romy’s garden into deepening shadows.

Romy’s garden. Romy’s time of day. Sometimes Strand still kept their ritual, sitting in the quiet with a glass of ice-chilled Scotch. But it wasn’t any good anymore. The companionship was gone, the exchanges of small concerns and expressions of small delights. The Scotch remained. More of it now than before, of course. It didn’t replace what he had had, but for a little while every day it dulled the regret of having lost it.

Tonight, instead of taking his drink into the courtyard, Strand took it into the library, put on a CD of
Lucia di Lammermoor
, and took down all of his books on the five artists who had created Mara Song’s drawings. He put all the books on the library table, pulled his chair close, took a sip of Scotch, and began searching through the books.

After nearly an hour, Strand went into the kitchen to pour another drink. He returned to the library, turned off all the lights except a small one, and kicked off his shoes, propping his feet on the seat of another chair.
Lucia di Lammermoor
was well into its tragic story as he let his eyes settle on the drawing illuminated by the dim light on the wall at the end of the library table. There, in a space especially created in the center of the bookshelves, was his own Maillol drawing, a conté study of a nude the artist had done in preparation for executing the lithographic illustrations for the French-language edition of Lucian of Samosota’s
The Dialogues of the Courtesans.

The image was of a woman who, in the process of walking away from the viewer, turns in midstride and looks back. It was the first drawing that Strand and Romy had bought together, shortly after she’d come to live with him while he was in Vienna. He had discovered it in the home of an old Austrian banker whose family had retained Strand to appraise his art collection prior to selling his estate. It was a lovely thing, and when he’d shown it to Romy she had reacted to it passionately. She had become intrigued by the tenuous message implied in the turn of the woman’s hips, by the curiosity conveyed in the twist of her neck and her tilted shoulders, her head, bent slightly and turned to cast a sidelong glance at the viewer.

The number of hours Strand had sat here looking at this drawing during the last year was well into the hundreds. Or so it seemed. Though the house was full of art that they had collected during their years together, this single drawing held more of Romy’s soul than any of them; when he was in its presence, he was in Romy’s presence.

It was at this moment that Strand suddenly thought of Mara Song. She was the first woman since Romy who had worked her way unbidden into his thoughts. He was just superstitious enough to find that of significance, though he had no idea what significance to attach to it. Maybe it simply meant that it had been long enough, and Mara’s appearance at this point in his life was nothing more than a gift of time and circumstance.

Within a few days of receiving Mara’s drawings, Strand finished his appraisal of her images and asked her to come over to review it. She came in the middle of the afternoon, and they talked about his conclusions and how he would approach the sale. Mara was still there when Meret left at five o’clock. They had drinks. They talked. Strand suggested they go to Chiara’s for dinner.

A few days after that Mara called him to say she had received legal papers from Italy that represented yet another hurdle in her complex divorce proceedings. Would he like to celebrate—quietly? She had learned of a Thai restaurant that might be good. They ended the evening talking over drinks in the garden of Strand’s house.

Gradually, with neither of them bringing attention to it, the subject of the sale of the drawings fell away. Mara returned the drawings to the bank vault. Strand didn’t mention it because the sale of the drawings was a conclusion and introduced a connection to the end of something. He didn’t ask Mara why she had dropped the subject.

The next few weeks passed quickly. Strand and Mara saw a lot of each other, each of them growing increasingly at ease with calling the other to suggest dinner at a favorite restaurant or a movie or just to get together at either of their homes for a meal, which often ran late.

Mara came frequently enough to Strand’s at the end of the day that she and Meret soon became good friends. Often when Mara was coming over for the evening she would show up a little early, before Meret left for the day, and the two of them would have an early glass of wine and visit while Strand finished whatever he was doing in his office.

Sometimes on weekends when Meret wasn’t working, Mara would come over and spend the day, browsing in Harry’s library or playing CDs from his collection while he worked at his desk. She would bring her sketchbooks and curl up in a chair somewhere and work quietly. They would have drinks in the garden and talk, a pastime of which neither of them seemed to tire, every conversation bringing to each of them an accumulative knowledge of the other that continued to stabilize their friendship.

And it remained a friendship, a close friendship, but nothing more than that. Mara always went home in the evenings, or Strand did when he was at her place. Increasingly, though, Strand’s house became the place where they were most comfortable.

Strand thought a lot about what would happen if the relationship turned more intimate. In a way he yearned for it, but in another way he very much wanted to keep it just the way it was. He tried to make peace with his ambivalence, but in the end he couldn’t bring himself to remove the boundary line that protected him from a level of complication that he still wanted to avoid.

For her part, Mara seemed at ease with this, and their friendship settled into a routine in which they desired and sought nothing more than simply to be in each other’s company. But it quickly moved beyond that to the point where they very much desired each other’s presence, and the alacrity with which this happened surprised both of them.

May and June passed from the calendar in this manner, and the first anniversary of Romy’s death slipped quietly past in a single summer night, its hurt and heartache softened, at least to the point of being bearable, by Mara’s reassuring presence. July was almost gone when Strand told Mara that he was going to have to start traveling.

“Really? For how long?” She was curled up in an armchair in his office, near the windows and his desk, sketching by the oblique light that came in from the courtyard. She had gathered her hair in a loose pile on her head to keep it out of her face while she sketched, securing it in place with a couple of pencils. She was barefoot, and she was eating a frozen lime bar, a napkin in her lap.

“A few weeks.” Strand put down his pen and pushed away from his desk. He had kicked off his shoes under the desk and propped his feet on an ottoman.

“Where are you going?”

“San Francisco, then Rome. I’ve got a collection of Eakins portrait studies that I’ve been putting together for a client in San Francisco, and a man in Rome has got a little bunch of Fuseli drawings that I’d be a fool to pass up.”

Mara finished her lime bar and wiped her mouth with the napkin and then carefully wrapped the stick in the napkin.

“You’ve been working on these a long time?”

“Most of the year.”

“Sounds like fun,” she said, but she wasn’t successful at hiding her disappointment at the prospect of his leaving. Strand was a little surprised, and gratified, at her reaction. “When are you leaving?”

“In a couple of days.”

“Oh, that soon?”

She was pursing her lips slightly, her eyes diverted to her pencil as she doodled distractedly in the bottom corner of her sketchpad.

“I was wondering,” he said, “when I get back from San Francisco if you’d like to go on to Rome with me.”

Her pencil stopped. She didn’t look up. She said, “Oh… well…”

He could see her mind working in her face, something he was beginning to appreciate about her. It was an unusually transparent behavior, a lack of calculation that he found refreshing. His entire professional life had been spent dealing with people under control. Spontaneity, apparent spontaneity, was rare.

“In a few days?” she asked, still not looking up.

“Right.”

She nodded slightly, as if having confirmed something to herself, and then she looked up at him.

“I want to say something, Harry.” Her face reflected just a hint of acknowledgment that she thought she was stepping into risky water. “I’m forty-two. I don’t want to pretend that I’m in my twenties, and that I’m engaged in some sort of game here. One, I don’t have the patience for it anymore. Two, I don’t have the time for it anymore. I’ve wasted too much of it already. I must have thrown away five years in the last twelve months. Three, I want you to know, without having to be coy about it, that I like you very much, and, frankly, I don’t want you to wander away before we get to know each other better. Really get to know each other.”