Serendipity Green (11 page)

“He'll be sorry.”

“That's what I told him.”

“And he still bought the cheap one?”

“We've got to keep our DC trip a secret,” D. William Aitchbone says, after the waitress at the Wagon Wheel brings his scrambled eggs and wheat toast. “I don't want anyone to know until the VP's visit is chiseled in granite.”

Victoria seals her lips with an invisible key. Reaching over the table, the yoke collar of her spring dress exposes her cleavage to the fake candlelight cascading from the wagon-wheel chandelier above their table. She drops the key into D. William Aitchbone's shirt pocket, the nail on her pinkie finger sliding over his nipple. “I haven't been to Washington for years. And never to the White House.”

“Karen and I took a tour with the kids when we were there last summer,” Aitchbone says, the touch of Victoria Bonobo's finger sending a watt or two of electricity up his spine. “We didn't get to see any of the offices or anything. Just the ceremonial rooms.”

“The VP is just a regular guy,” Victoria says. She presses her palm against her mouth to keep from giggling. “I can't believe I'm telling you this, but he tried to feel me up at my brother's wedding.”

Aitchbone's estimation of the VP takes a nosedive. “You're kidding?”

Victoria takes her fingers away from her mouth and touches the back of Bill Aitchbone's hand before taking a packet of grape jelly from the bowl by the napkin holder. “Well, it wasn't really that bad. I was old enough to be felt up. And he wasn't married yet. Or in politics. And I didn't let him get that far!” She scrapes the grape jelly onto her toast. “I can't wait to go, can you?”

Katherine Hardihood stays in bed half the morning. She can still feel Howie Dornick's hairy belly on her ribs. She can still feel his hip bones on her hip bones. She can still feel the part of him that parted her. She can still smell the sticky stuff that went everywhere, the Ivory Soap and the hazelnut, the Cheez-its dust under her fingernails. Despite Howie Dornick's unappetizing appearance, he'd been tender and thoughtful and apparently quite an expert. She cannot wait to invite him over again.

The weather is suddenly better. Farmers can plow. Men can mow. Women stop cleaning their cupboards and start cleaning out their flower beds. Tuttwyler's collective edginess fades. A collective serenity sets in. Katherine Hardihood invites Howie Dornick over for pizza.

It is supermarket pizza, made on an assembly line in a faraway state, with a minimal amount of mozzarella and sausage, plastered to a cardboard disk and wrapped in plastic. Not much of a meal to offer your lover. So Katherine Hardihood doctors it with fresh mushrooms and fresh green pepper. Howie Dornick thoughtfully brings another bag of fancy muffins.

Between the pizza and the muffins they copulate for the second time in five days.

“You'll never guess what I did Saturday,” he says, pants off, shirt on, crumbs of muffin sticking to his naked knees.

She looks up from the television listings. “What did you do?”

“I bought paint. In Wooster.”

“You went all the way to Wooster to buy paint?”

“I didn't want anyone to know.”

“You didn't want Bill Aitchbone to know.”

“I'm not sure if I'm going to paint or not. He's put me in a real pickle.”

She kisses him on the cheek. “Bill Aitchbone lives to put people in pickles. You heard his uncle died?”

“Think he'll sell the farm?”

“Jiminy Cricket, Howard, he's sure not going to farm it.”

Howie brushes the crumbs off his knees. Rhubarb comes to lick them out of the carpet fibers. “I don't think I bought enough paint, anyway,” he says.

9

Even though Katherine Hardihood invites him over for supper twice more before the end of May—they are getting nearly as regular as Dick Mueller and Delores Poltruski, they joke—Howie Dornick is no more confident with his sexual performance than the first time. Nor is he any closer to deciding what to do with his clapboards. Then walking home from work on the first Monday in June, stopping to scrape a pancake of chewing gum from the heel of his work-boots, he overhears Paula Varney, standing in the open doorway of Just Giraffes, telling someone on her cellular phone that Bill Aitchbone and Victoria Bonobo have gone somewhere together. “Really,” she is insisting, “Vicki Bonobo and Bill Aitchbone! Suitcases and everything!”

At dawn the next morning Howie Dornick calls Mayor Woodrow Wilson Sadlebyrne at home. “Woody, I won't be at work today. I'm sicker than a dog with something.”

“No problem,” the mayor tells him.

With that out of the way, Howie Dornick puts on the worst clothes he has—he has plenty to choose from—and after a quick cup of instant coffee goes to his garage. He rolls out an empty fifty-five gallon drum. He sweeps out the dead flies with a broom. Then he carries out the paint he bought at Bittinger's in Wooster, and can by can pours it into the barrel: the car-wash yellow and the video-store blue and the beauty-shop blue and the fraternity-house gold and the darkroom black. He stirs the paint with the broom handle until his growing worry stops his arms. But it isn't the color that's worrying him. It's the amount of paint. It isn't going to be enough.

And so he goes to his basement and finds a can of satin finish peach his mother once bought with the intention of painting the kitchen. He also finds the two-quart can of shellac she bought with the intention of refinishing the upstairs baseboards and door casings. While he's at it, he gathers up the bleach jug by the washing machine.

From under the kitchen sink he gathers up bottles of floor wax and furniture polish. From the bathroom he takes bottles of rubbing alcohol and Listerine and hydrogen peroxide. He empties it all in the barrel and stirs with the broom handle. It thins the paint but doesn't add much volume.

And so he goes into the garage and collects six cans of 10W-30 motor oil, an almost full jug of windshield wiper fluid, a quart of Kingsford charcoal lighter, and three, two-gallon containers of something everyone in Ohio has plenty of, antifreeze. Into the barrel it all goes. He stirs with the broom handle until the mixture is mixed. He goes inside and pours himself a cup of coffee. He sits at the table sipping, still unsure whether he is actually going to paint. When his cup is empty, he pulls down a bag from the top of the refrigerator and takes out the cheap brush with the plastic bristles that the Bone Head warned him not to buy. He rams it in his back pocket, walks timidly to the garage and pulls his ladder from the rafters. He leans it against the back of his two-story frame.

Only now does Howie decide to paint. He dips one of the empty paint cans into the barrel, and with the cheap brush in his back pocket, climbs, all the way to the top of the gable. His first brushful of paint sinks into the raw gray clapboards like oleo margarine into a slice of hot wheat toast.

When Howie Dornick paints things for the village—the dark green park benches on the square, the egg-yolk yellow crossing lines in front of G.A. Hemphill Elementary School, the smoke-gray walls of the mayor's office—he paints carefully, and slowly, hardly ever dribbling or splattering or smearing, his left hand guiding the brush in smooth even strokes from right to left, his puckered lips blowing away spiders and ants and ladybugs, the nail of his little finger flicking away scabs of bird shit. And he always prepares the surface first, carefully sanding or scraping, puttying or caulking. Now he paints like van Gogh at his maddest.

By nine the back is finished. By two the west side is finished. By seven-thirty the east side is finished. At ten he is finishing the front, standing on the porch roof, flashlight sticking out of his mouth like a thick silver cigar. When the last little corner is covered, he throws what is left of the cheap plastic-bristled brush into his untrimmed shrubs. He carries the ladder back into the garage and slides it up into the rafters. He walks the 55-gallon drum back into the garage, too. It is as empty as when he started, every drop of the brew now slathered on the clapboards of his two-story frame. He washes his face and hands in gasoline and dries off with a greasy rag.

He crawls into his bed feeling proud, feeling potent, feeling fully free of his mother, wishing Katherine Hardihood was under him right now, wishing that D. William Aitchbone's severed head and limbs and trunk were stuffed in that 55-gallon drum. But once his sheet is tucked around his neck, once the cool has faded from his pillow, these fresh and wonderful feelings are gone and his brain is crawling with the same old maggots of doubt: Why in
thee hell
did he paint his house that god-awful color? What in
thee hell
is wrong with him? Why in
thee hell
didn't he paint it white? He could have bought that white paint on sale at Bittinger's. He could have bought the most expensive paint they had. He has $18,500 in the bank—not in a CD he can't touch without paying a penalty—but in a regular old fashioned savings account he can tap any time he wants. He could buy vinyl siding for godsakes. No doubt about it, Bill Aitchbone will have a fit when he comes back from wherever he is with Victoria Bonobo, and sees that god-awful color. What in
thee hell
is wrong with him? Why in
thee hell
did he do it? To please Katherine Hardihood? To show her what a man he was? So she'll continue copulating with him? One thing for sure, there'll be no more copulating with Katherine once she sees that god-awful color! What in
thee hell
was he thinking? Bill Aitchbone will privatize his job and Katherine will put his private parts back in cold storage. What in
thee hell
was he thinking?

Howie Dornick turns his pillow over, to bury his head in the side still cool. He laughs into the dark. What would Artie Brown say about all this? Would he appreciate his son's courage, for standing up to Bill Aitchbone the way he stood up to those Japs on Guadalcanal? Who knows what Artie Brown would say? Probably nothing. Artie Brown never said a word about his son—or to his son—from the day Patsy Dornick returned from Cleveland with her newborn baby until the day he died of a heart attack hobbling across a cornfield with a five-gallon can of gas for his tractor. Artie Brown was a hero in war. But not in life. If his last will and testament was a true measure of his desires, he would rather have spent his life copulating with Patsy Dornick, not Melody Ring. The will was nicely typed by a lawyer's secretary, but at the bottom of the last page in Artie's faltering hand were the most embarrassing words ever put to paper by a Tuttwylerite, and therefore known to just about everyone:
To Patsy Dornick I leave my crank, who loved it so much more than Melody Ring ever did. But before anybody goes running to my casket with a butcher's knife let me state clearly that I leave the above mentioned appendage to Patsy Dornick only symbolically. I have already lost one appendage and neither dead nor alive do I wish to be separated from another
.

Again Howie Dornick laughs into the dark. What anger Artie Brown must have carried around inside him to scribble those words so late in his life, words that spread through Tuttwyler like a wildfire and prevented Melody Brown from ever going to church again. He wonders if it was anything like his own anger. Good God! What in
thee hell
was he thinking, painting his clapboards that god-awful color?

10

D. William Aitchbone watches the suitcases chug along the carousel. He spots the two-suit leather-trimmed Hartmann he bought for his very important trip at the new mall at the I-491 interchange. “There's my Hartmann,” he loudly announces.

Victoria Bonobo spots her Samsonite. “There's mine,” she says.

They ride the people-mover to the parking garage. It takes seven or eight long minutes. They stand apart from each other. Neither says a word. Neither knows what to say. They get in his luxury sedan and fasten their seat belts. They leave Cleveland Hopkins Airport and take the southbound ramp to I-71.

They pass the Strongsville exit.

They pass the Brunswick exit.

They pass the Medina and Lodi exits.

They pass the New Waterbury exit.

They swing onto I-491 and drive to the Tuttwyler exit.

It's been a long and silent drive. But now they are sitting in Victoria Bonobo's driveway, in Woodchuck Ridge, and D. William Aitchbone has already popped the trunk and somebody has to say something.

“Well, we did it, Bill,” Victoria Bonobo says.

“The Democrats are going to shit a brick when they find out the VP is coming to Squaw Days. Sweet Jesus, I wish we could announce it right way.”

Victoria opens her door but does not get out. “You know I'm sorry about the other thing.”

“It's OK, Vicki. I'm just as attracted to you as you are to me.”

“But walking out of the bathroom naked—what was I thinking?”

“Don't beat up on yourself. We'd just come from the White House. Had a great dinner and too much merlot.”

“Not that much merlot. I guess when you've had a bad marriage, you think everybody has a bad marriage.”

“Sometimes I wish I had a bad marriage.”

“No you don't. Karen is terrific.” She reaches over and squeezes his knee. “And so are you. You want to come in for coffee or something?”

“I do need to use your bathroom. I can never pee on airplanes.”

“Me neither.”

So D. William Aitchbone follows Victoria Bonobo inside and uses the bathroom and comes out fully clothed. When they stand at the front door and discuss the village council's upcoming privatization vote, he wants to latch onto her shoulders and never let go, just as he wanted to latch onto them at the Washington Hyatt. They are wonderful shoulders, sloping wonderfully from her wonderful neck, just fleshy enough, just bony enough, just round enough and just square enough, and just strong enough to support a pair of breasts far larger than his wife's. As soon as there is nothing more to say about the upcoming privatization vote he retreats to his car.