NINE

Studio Session

The address that the gallery assistant had left on her answering machine brought Allegra to a warehouse near market Street. She took a creaky factory elevator to a loft on the top floor.

Last night she had spent the remainder of the party re-miniscing about high school with her old friends, many of whom were starting their lives in the world: newly minted investment bankers and law students, a scattering of television PA’s and cub reporters, along with fashion assistants and the self-described ladies and gentlemen of leisure who had come into their inheritances and were whiling away their days on the social circuit—their lives a succession of parties and benefits and festivals; a jet-setting crowd who frequented Wimble-don, Art Basel, and the Venice Film Festival. Her friends had cooed over her new haircut and wanted to know why she had disappeared from their lives without an explanation. People like Allegra were not supposed to do such disagreeable things.

Their kind kept in touch out of habit, forever recounting the glory days when one had been a scrapper at St. Paul’s or Endicott. She had apologized profusely and promised to have them all over, in New York, once they were finished with the renovations on the town house on Fifth Avenue, where she and Charles were supposed to live after they were bonded.

The elevator opened right into Ben’s studio. “Hello?”

“In here!” Ben called. She walked out to find him standing in front of a large painting, wiping his hands on a wet rag.

“You’re here,” he said, as if he didn’t quite believe it. He put the rag away and wiped his hands on his jeans. He was nervous, she was surprised to discover. He had none of the breezy nonchalance he’d displayed the night before.

“You invited me.”

“I wasn’t sure you would come,” he admitted.

“Well, I’m here now.” She gave him a tentative smile. She didn’t know why he was acting so strange. Had she misread him? He had invited her to see the studio, and she had thought it was a sincere invitation—not one of those casual, polite things that people say to each other at dinner parties.

Was this yet another mistake? She had woken up this morning excited at the prospect of seeing him again, and hoping that he would be alone. They stood facing each other for so long that Allegra finally felt he was being rude. “Well, are you going to show me your work?”

Ben blushed. “Sorry, seem to have forgotten my manners.

Please, by all means.”

Allegra walked around the room. The studio was a large white loft with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the bay.

There were paint cans and paintbrushes everywhere, and plastic on the floor. The oily smell of gesso filled the air.

“Sorry it’s a bit messy,” he said.

She nodded, not quite sure what to say. The loft was filled with an assortment of canvases in all sizes, a few stretched eight feet high and ten feet across. There were smaller paintings propped on easels or tacked on the walls. Some were framed and encased in plastic. As Allegra looked around, she noticed a theme in all of his work. Every painting—from the mural that showed a girl lying dreamily in bed, like a modern odalisque, to the small ones, which were like the one she had purchased—each and every painting in the studio was a portrait of her.

She walked through the space, studying the paintings and drawings in complete silence and utter shock. Ben followed her wordlessly, waiting to hear her reaction. For now, she didn’t have one. She was merely processing the information he was giving her. The paintings held the breadth of their short love story: Allegra on the bed, in her white camisole; Allegra in the woods, the night of her initiation into the Peithologians,

“a secret society of poets and adventurers,” which meant they got drunk in the forest after curfew; Allegra holding up a Latin textbook, laughing at how terrible she was at the language; Allegra nude, her back turned to the viewer. There was a small dark painting, all black except for the bright blond hair and ivory fangs. Allegra the vampire princess.

She understood now. The carefree artist and jocular heir-about-town from the night before was all an act. The familiar’s kiss had marked him, had changed him, and in order to deal with her abandonment, he had created a shrine to her. This obsessive recollection of every moment of their relationship was his way of keeping her close to him. He painted her over and over so that he would never forget her. It was all there—his love and need for her. This was his true heart, open and exposed and bleeding.

Now she understood what his mother had tried to tell her when she had said, “You’re the girl in the paintings.” Decca Chase was worried about her boy, and had thought that maybe if she brought Allegra to him, he would find a way to be with her or get over her. Smart woman.

Ben shuffled his feet, his face slowly turning a brilliant shade of crimson. He gulped. “Well, what do you think?”

“I’m so sorry for leaving you,” Allegra said slowly, not quite able to meet his eyes. “I’m so sorry I disappeared that night. You don’t understand—I’m not free…. I don’t have a choice about whom I can love. You have to forget about me….

It’s better for everyone. For you.”

Ben frowned. “No… no… you don’t understand.”

But Allegra was back in the elevator, and this time she would not return. She had made a mistake in seeking him out, in putting her entire future at risk, and she would not make it again.

Sometimes it was better to keep Pandora’s box closed.