Black is Not a Color: Unless Worn By A Blonde #featured

Chapter 1 - Zsolt the Lightning Bolt

I had a lot of conflicts and they all conflicted with each other. To begin with I wanted to look like Audrey Hepburn and I didn't. I wanted to act like Jackie Kennedy Onassis, but I couldn't. That's where my father came in. He was a connoisseur of precisely the brands of femininity I wished to cultivate within myself. He hadn't been in the picture for the first nine tenths of my life, but we were now approaching the final one eightieth of his, so I decided to be around, in the event we could do anything for each other. Turns out, we could.

Considering my father's high regard for Jackie Kennedy Onassis, it was clear he had a thing for hoity toity bitches, as did a lot of other men I'd come across. When he started referring to himself as Père Goriot, I realized my father thought I was a hoity toity bitch too. Secretly I'd always wanted to be one, though I was far from the type. It gave me a rush to think my father thought I was.

We sat in the window of Kleine Konditorei, a German coffee house on East 86th Street, sipping cappuccinos.

"Black is not a color, Ava," he said, not terribly sternly, wagging his right index finger in mock disapproval, as his eyes swept over my dress.

"What do you mean? It's a really dark color, isn't it?" I looked down at my jersey-knit black dress. I'd chosen it because I'd thought my father would admire me in it. What was his problem? The more I got to know him, the less I understood anything about him.

"Black is not a color, except in one case." He leaned toward me, his index finger now pointed up, apparently ready to make a scholarly point.

"What's that?" I asked, curious.

"When it's worn by a blonde." He sat back and laughed, his slanted blue-green eyes dancing.

"Ohhh."

His remark washed over me—spray from a cool fountain. My father was undeniably cool. That fact alone, made up for a lot of other things he wasn't. Moneyed, for example. Statused, for another.

"You mean black is not a color except when it's worn by a blonde?"

"Yes, darling." In his heavy Hungarian accent, it came out as "dah-ling." That accent Zsa Zsa Gabor had wasn't put on. That's the way Hungarians speak English. With flair.

"Well, thank you."

He winked at me over the rim of his coffee cup.

"Didn't someone else say that too? Renoir or someone?" I guessed.

"Manet," he corrected, referring to the French impressionist painter. "But he just said black is not a color."

"But it is, isn't it?"

"Not for him, it wasn't."

"I mean isn't it white, technically, that isn't a color?" It was either white or black, I couldn't remember which. But black was pretty dark not to be a color, no?

"It depends."

"What do you mean?"

"Are you an artist or a scientist?"

"I think you know, Papa." No one had ever mistaken me for a scientist. Especially not my father.

"Okay, artist. For you, black is a color and white is not. But for scientists, white is all colors combined and black is the absence of color."

"But you're an artist, not a scientist!" I exclaimed. My father had been a poet and journalist in Hungary. He'd had a wide readership. Here in the United States, not so much.