A Spectral Hue Read online

  “No,” he replied. “Though my folks wanted me to go. They were both graduates—dentistry and pharmacology. But I got bitten by the art bug, much to their disappointment. I go to an art college in Rhode Island.”

  “So what are you—a painter? A sculptor?”

  Xavier sighed. He hated explaining this part. It was embarrassing, and confusing. “I started out as a painter. Mostly abstract.” He saw Iris’s eyes glaze over. “But I became interested in writing about art, rather than making it.”

  “Huh,”she said.

  ***

  The second floor had a single runner rug of seafoam green. He glimpsed what he assumed was the master bedroom. The bed was at least queen-sized and had stacks of odd things piled on top of the quilt. He saw a tower of card decks. A couple of bulging quilt-bags were strewn amongst what looked like old coins, and twigs. Iris led him further down the hall, to a room with a door that had peeling paint. Aqua skin, yellow sinew. Xavier felt certain that the room was going to be a dump. Not surprising, since Shimmer wasn’t exactly a destination spot.

  He was pleasantly surprised by what he saw behind the door. The walls of the room were the color of the sea, a soft greenish blue, while the tufted wool carpet was darker blue in tone, with random loops of yellow and black. The platform bed was dressed in bright white linens, super fluffy pillows and a duvet that just begged to be leapt into. Best of all, the window faced the surrounding marsh. More clouds had broken up, and pools of water sparkled here and there.

  “You have a charging station!” said Xavier.

  “I’m not uncivilized,” said Iris, “even if this is the edge of the world.”

  ***

  Xavier unpacked his large suitcase, putting away the sweaters and hoodies he expected to wear during his stay. The air was crisp, cool and damp. He expected days of cloudy, rainy weather. After he put his clothes away, he pulled out his laptop and a couple of library books that were flagged with Post-It notes. He had no real plan, besides visiting the ruins of the house Hazel Whitby, and later, Shadrach Grayson lived in and researching the archives of the local museum. The bulk of Whitby’s and Grayson’s work was spread out in private collections.

  He felt a nerdy glee at the prospect of being close to the physical objects. According to the map function on his smartphone, the Whitby-Grayson Museum was a scant 1/4 mile away. Walking distance. Unfortunately, it had limited hours when it was open to the public. He would have to wait until tomorrow.

  The sea-blue room was mostly bare. There was a chest of drawers with a faux antique lamp on the top, a standing cabinet that served as a kind of nightstand, and a large oval full-length mirror. There was a single picture that hung over the bed, a framed blur of pinkish-purple that looked like it was made out of tissue paper.

  Xavier walked up to get a better look at the picture. Against a white linen background—perhaps a repurposed handkerchief—a treelike shape was glued together in translucent layers. Beneath the pink opaque shape, and beneath the handkerchief, there was a photograph of something. He turned on the flashlight function of his smartphone, illuminating the picture.

  The palimpsest photograph was a picture of the marsh-bell orchid. Iris had said that Hazel Whitby’s quilts made her nauseous. She wasn’t the only one who thought that. The quilts were riotous things, swirls of clashing colors, and all them referenced, in some shape or form, the marshlands and the orchid.

  His advisor, Dr. Paul Giordano, wasn’t particularly enamored of Whitby’s work. This wasn’t surprising. Giordano specialized in the Pop Art and Fluxus movements. He considered Whitby’s quilts closer to craft than actual art.

  He’d told Xavier, “I know you think she’s some sort of visionary artist. I just don’t see it. It looks like a mess, to me. Her shapes are uneven, her aesthetic nonexistent. It reminds me of Art Brut—art done by mentally deficient people. Besides, I think it’s kind of ugly.”

  His other committee member, the artist Gilda Devine, had been in the meeting as well. She was tart-tongued on the best of days. “Oh, Paul,” she’d said, “I would think you would like ugly art. Isn’t that the point of the Fluxus movement?”

  Xavier had tried to keep a straight face. It was like watching a play, seeing these two people fight. Paul Giordano was a thin white man with a shaved head, circular John Lennon glasses and always wore paisley shirts. Gilda Devine was an African-American woman, large and muscular, positively Amazonian. She wore loud, batiked wraps and ballet slippers, and her hair was intricately braided.

  “Maybe ‘ugly’ was too harsh a word, Gilda,” said Dr. Giordano. “But I find her work, and the work of Shadrach Grayson, for that matter, to be too busy, too frantic. Other than being purple, I don’t really see that there’s much of a thesis there.”

  Dr. Devine said, “Don’t listen to him, Xavier, honey. Both Whitby and Grayson were likely illiterate and had limited exposure to ‘fine art.’ They didn’t have artistic mission statements. You won’t find a thematic continuity that satisfies the Academy.” Here, she gave Dr. Giordano one of her laser-sharp glares. “But you will find something. I, for one, am excited to see what you come up with!”

  ***

  Dr. Giordano and Dr. Devine were the diametrically opposed influences of his academic studies. Yin and yang, anima/animus. When he went to Sequoia Arts and Crafts, he’d fully intended to be a painter. His father, Amos Wentworth, wasn’t terribly supportive of this decision. Dad was a professor of pharmacology at Howard and made it his life’s passion to drive more African-Americans into the STEM fields. His father had no problem with his son painting; it was just not a financially stable career choice. Couldn’t he paint on the side?

  Berniece Ivy-Wentworth, his mother, encouraged him. She was also a professor at Howard, in the dentistry school. Her younger brother Gideon had been a dancer before he’d died of AIDS in the days before effective drug treatments, and believed that Xavier’s artistic nature was a genetic gift. Mom, however, objected to his going to a tiny arts college somewhere in Rhode Island. Howard had a decent studio arts program, and besides, it was free, due to both his folks being assistant professors. It’s cold up there, she told him, and only 2.5% African-American.

  He sold the both of them on Sequoia Arts and Crafts by telling them that Gilda Devine taught studio arts there. Devine had been recently featured in a New York Times article, and at least his mother was impressed.

  The move to a tiny town in the middle of a wintry wasteland was difficult for Xavier. The mostly white student population treated him with kid gloves, as if he were a rare hothouse flower. Sometimes, he felt that they only befriended him to prove how ‘woke’ they were. Dr. Devine, thankfully, took him under her wing.

  Not that she was necessarily comforting. She brutally eviscerated his paintings, along with everyone else’s. “Naive,” “nihilistic,” “derivative,” “unremarkable” were words hurled at him with some frequency.

  She was the one who encouraged him to take more theoretical course work. “Everyone wants to be the next Kara Walker or Jacob Lawrence.”

  Dr. Giordano joined Sequoia’s faculty in Xavier’s second year. His art history survey course was multi-disciplinary, multi-vectored and multi-media. He’d use a Bluetooth set and walk up and down classroom rows, wielding his projector remote like a wand. His lectures were full of word play and pop culture references. He managed to link disparate ideas together—queer theory and quantum physics, for example. Or Bjőrk and Francis Bacon. It would make sense, at least at the moment.

  Devine and Giordano were frenemies.

  Gilda thought that Paul was cocky, more flash than substance. She referred to him as “that little white gay boy,” (with affection, of course). Paul had published a couple of art history books that focused on the graphics used by queer activists. His writing style was dense, swirling and confusing, mixing literary criticism, economic theory and historical data. Xavier had to reread several paragraphs multiple times before he could glean any meaning from them. “That l
ittle white gay boy tries way too hard,” Dr. Devine once confided to Xavier. (He had just nodded noncommittally; but personally thought Giordano’s chapter on sans serif fonts as ‘anti-heteronormative’ was a little too close to poetry than solid scholarship.)

  Paul thought that Gilda was too old-school, and that she rested on her laurels. She had made a name for herself in the late seventies with her large abstract palimpsest-style of paintings that captured her crippling migraines. The oil paint was built up thickly, in lumps and bumps, in ugly, bruised colors. Rotten orange, muddy brown, putrid yellow. Some of her paintings had pieces of hair or bits of eggshell embedded in them. All of her work had hidden figures, beneath and behind the thick, scraped coatings of paint. It was violent, unsettling work. Paul, on Gilda’s work: “Her retrospective was called ‘A Black Girl’s Pain.’ Really? Why not ‘For Colored Girls With Bad Headaches.’”

  Both of them weren’t in love with Hazel Whitby’s quilts, or Shadrach Grayson’s seascapes. Giordano had initially shot down the project as “bourgeois mysticism,” while Devine thought that there just wasn’t enough of a case to be made for the Shimmer Artists.

  “It’s an art movement made up of Magical Negroes,” she’d said to him in one meeting.

  (Even now, that barb stung.)

  But as he stared at the lone piece of art in his rented room, he couldn’t help but feel that it was a sign.

  ***

  Xavier remembered the first time he saw a Hazel Whitby quilt.

  He’d been dragged to one of his parents’ friends’ parties, somewhere in the nearby Virginia suburbs full of McMansions hidden in tree-filled hills. Not ten minutes out of the city, and he saw groundhogs, rabbits, and a doe with a fawn in the falling dusk. He was twelve, and had been told that there would be lots of other kids at the party.

  “Maybe you’ll make some friends,” his mother said. “You never know!”

  He never made friends at these parties. Mostly, he and the other kids watched as the adults slowly got tipsy and spoke about sports and politics (both national and inter-office). Sometimes, there would be a recreation room with a pool table or foosball table, but he was clumsy when it came to that. There were times when the other kids were all girls, or they were all younger than he was. Or they all went to the same school.

  He grunted a response to Mom as they pulled up inside a housing development full of identical-looking houses: all-brick three-story houses with flagstone paths, large front yards, and garages. Tealights lined the winding front path. He knew that he’d be bored within minutes of entering the house. He hoped that they had good food, at least. Mom was dressed up, in a blue pantsuit with a shimmery see-through chiffon blouse and black sling backs. She smelled of lilac perfume and bergamot hair pomade. Dad was in a suit jacket, lime-green, khakis but no tie. He reeked of Aqua Velva. Within the hour, they’d be smelling of whiskey sours or gin and tonics.

  Once they were in the house, Xavier ran the gauntlet of greetings, how-you’ve-growns, head-tousles and kisses by various women he only vaguely knew. The grown-ups were in a marble-tiled living room, with a full bar and bossa nova blaring from speakers. The kids were sequestered in the basement. This time, the “kids” were all older and furthermore went to various private schools in Virginia. He was the only one from the city itself. There were maybe five of them, and all of their discussion revolved around people they knew. Xavier knew that this would happen. That was why he hated going to parties. At twelve, he could take care of himself.

  He drifted away from them, to explore the house. He had to make his own fun somehow. I could always tell them that I was looking for the bathroom, he thought, in case anyone asked why he’d escaped the kids’ cage. He heard the dull murmur of tipsy adults in the living room when he emerged into the empty kitchen. There was a door out to the main party. Someone was playing a piano. Xavier carefully opened the door. No one was in the hallway that divided the living room from the kitchen. The first floor was colonized by groups of grown-ups, so he dashed up to the second floor.

  The master bedroom at the end of the carpeted hall was closed. A guest bedroom, slightly to the left of the stairway, however, was invitingly open. He slipped inside, and partially closed the door so that any patrolling adults wouldn’t immediately see him. He clicked on a table lamp, done in the Tiffany style. It was a mushroom cloud of stained glass, with bright purple grapes against a periwinkle background. The lamp’s light was feeble against the summer darkness. The room itself was plain, aside from the ornate lamp. The twin bed had a cream-colored duvet and mounds of decorative pillows, like a hotel room. The walls were painted the same beige color as the rest of the house. There was a small bookcase filled with hardcover editions of books by Sidney Sheldon and Danielle Steel. The room reminded Xavier of vanilla ice cream. Not the kind with black pepper-like specks. The kind that was just kind of there, the kind that was sweet and cold and nothing more. Xavier was about to turn off the lamp and explore other rooms when something caught his eye.

  At first, he thought it was a poster of a particularly ugly abstract painting. The colors clashed, and the shapes were crudely drawn. But, it wasn’t a print. There was too much texture there, lumps and bumps, like an old pillow. Threads hung down, undone. Xavier went up to the wall hanging. It wasn’t a painting at all. It was some kind of quilt that had been mounted and sealed behind glass. In the weak light, he couldn’t make out what he was supposed to be seeing. He switched on the overhead light. He didn’t intend to stay long in the guest room. But turning on the light brought the quilt to life.

  Purples and blues, greens and browns all surged together in a kaleidoscopic fashion. Dots of purple-pink scattered across the piece. Stitches divided chunks of green and blue.

  Xavier stepped closer to the quilt, beguiled. He found that if he stared at it long enough, it began to move. At first, he thought it was just spots before his eyes, due to the sudden flood of light. But the purple-pink flecks moved, zooming back in and out of the tapestry. And, in moving, they revealed more about the tapestry’s intention. The blue fabric, which shimmered like satin, was supposed to be water. And the daubs of green were grass. Little islands in a mostly still waterscape. At the top of the tapestry, there were brownish green smudges, the suggestion of trees. What were the specks of magenta meant to be, then? He watched as they luminously hovered about in the grassy clumps and over the water. Somehow, he knew that it was salt water. He could even smell the brine, as if the quilt had been dipped in there.

  “There you are!” He heard his mother’s voice. It was jarring enough to stop the dance of the pink-purple specks. “He’s in here, Amos.”

  It took effort to pull his eyes away from that woven marsh. When he did, he found himself in the guest room, with his parents staring at him from the doorway. For the briefest of moments, the purple-pink sparks were superimposed against the room, as if the tapestry were projecting images. Xavier blinked them away.

  “Have you been here all this time?” Dad asked him. “We were looking for you downstairs.”

  “We thought you’d wandered off,” his mother added.

  Were they worried? His mother’s voice had a frantic edge to it, and Dad sounded annoyed.

  “You know better than to go creeping off in people’s houses,” said Dad.

  “I’m just glad he’s safe. Come on, honey, it’s time to go.” Mom made some ushering movements with her hands. Time to go. How long had he been in the room? He thought that approximately fifteen minutes had passed since they’d arrived at the Bairds. A half-hour at the most. Had something bad happened? Was that why they were rushing out?

  “Look at the tapestry, Mom. Dad,” he said. “Isn’t it cool?”

  He heard a female voice behind his parents. “It’s an original Hazel Whitby piece.”

  “It’s a what?” his mother muttered.

  Mrs. “Edyie” Baird swanned into the room, shoving his parents aside. She was dressed in a white pantsuit. A golden-faced sun medallion dangled be
tween her décotellage, and she wore a large turban, hiding all of her hair. Mrs. Baird always wore turbans. When he was younger, he’d told his mother that she looked like a genie. His father wondered if there was even any hair beneath her never-ending supply of hats. (“She might be as bald as that Sea Hag on Popeye,” his dad once said.)

  “Hazel Whitby,” said Mrs. Baird. “She was a former slave who lived on the Eastern Shore. She made hundreds of quilts. Even inspired other black artists. I believe they started a mini-movement.”

  Dad said, “Huh.” Which meant that he thought that quilt wasn’t much to look at. Mom had that glassy-eyed look that indicated that she wasn’t really interested.

  Mrs. Baird continued: “They are very collectible. Some of them are even in art galleries.”

  “You don’t say,” Mom replied. She examined the tapestry, her face scowling up in concentration.

  “I had it appraised. I got it for two-fifty. It’s worth two thousand.”

  “It is certainly colorful.”

  “The purple spots move,” Xavier said.

  “The colors do clash,” Dad said. “But, it’s getting late. We’re the last ones here, and I’m sure that Edyie and Aaron would like to rest after giving such a grand party.”

  Mrs. Baird insisted that it was no trouble at all. On the ride back home, he almost fell asleep to his parent’s gossipy banter. How So-and-So got drunk, and Mrs. Whoever was always putting on airs. He closed his eyes. Then he heard his parents talk about Mrs. Baird.

  “Edyie has some bold taste,” Dad said.

  Mom said, “What you mean?”

  “Those Ali Baba turbans.”

  “You know she has alopecia. I think she’s made lemonade out of lemons.”

  “All right, all right. But that quilt she had was ugly. She got it for two-fifty, and it’s worth two thousand?”

  “You think she’s lying? I don’t. Edyie knows her stuff. She used to work down at the Smithsonian.”