The Color Master: Stories (14 page)

He rested his cheek against the petals for a moment. “It’s okay,” he said, heavily.

“They’re your daughter’s?”

He kept his eyes closed. Shook his head. “No.”

To give him some privacy, I stared at the floor. At the petals he had dropped. At the specks of gold in the green flat carpet weave. I did feel, against my will, creeping into my cheeks, a surge of what could only be called pleasure, which came from the fact that something interesting was starting to happen, something I myself had instigated, a feeling I found repellent in its selfishness but still unyielding.

“Are they from your wedding?” I asked, softly.

“No.” He held a handful of petals close to his face.

A funeral, I wondered. One of his beloved parents. What a rude thing for me to do, to take something precious and throw it all over the room like that.

“No funeral,” he said, as if he had read my mind. He closed his eyes. “They’re from nothing,” he said. “They came in the book.”

I nodded. “What do you mean?”

“The Ohio flora book,” he said. He rested his face on the bedspread again.

“It came with flowers?”

“I found the book and inside were these flowers.”

“You mean when you bought the book?”

“They were in the book when I bought it.” He smoothed the petals near his hair. “I bought it used,” he said, by way of explanation.

I took a step forward on the lush green carpet, careful not to crush the petals he’d dropped. “I don’t understand,” I said, slowly. “They’re not your flowers?”

“No,” he said.

“Then why are you upset?”

He opened his eyes and looked at me straight on. “Because they meant something,” he said.

“To someone else.”

“To someone.”

He kept gathering up the petals, smoothing them over the comforter, gathering and smoothing, and as I watched him I felt the very beginning, the very tiny initial curdles of irritation start to cluster and foment inside me. Something in the house was beginning to close in on me, and my softer feelings of sympathy at his old-man isolation were starting to harden and shrink into a kernel of annoyance that emitted a vaporous cloud of what could only be called entitlement. Like I owned
this house. Like I lived in it, or could, or should. Like I was there to do whatever I wanted, me making the mark for all young women, and he would not, or could not, stop any of it.

“Maybe they did come from a wedding,” he said, bringing a cracked petal to his nose and sniffing it.

I walked over to the old oak dresser and pulled open the top drawer. Empty. Second drawer. Empty. Went to the nightstand drawer, by the bed. Empty.

“What is this place?” I said.

In the hallway, I opened two more doors, master bedroom, master bath, bed made, drawers closed. I turned on the lights. So neat, as if no one lived there, or wore anything, or sweated.

“What are you doing?” he called.

“Who
lives
here?” I called back.

I opened the linen closet, with its piles of fluffy towels in rows. Opened the dresser drawers in his bedroom, full of stacks of white undershirts. His nightstand drawer contained only a Bible and a comb. The Bible’s spine was unbroken, a firm brick of a book, and I was surprised to see it because he had not seemed like a religious man, but more than anything devout, it reminded me of the Bibles in drawers in American hotel rooms, and I imagined this man on a business trip opening a drawer and seeing one and interpreting it as something other people did in their bedrooms, something he then came home to imitate. I felt a wave of revulsion pass through me, thick and heavy, and something else, too, something I couldn’t pinpoint.

“Where’s
Nina
?” I called out.

“Egypt,” he mumbled, from the other room.

“I mean here,” I said. “Where are the photos? Drawings? Where is anything of her at all?”

I looked behind the headboard. Nothing. Under the bed. Nothing. Opened the drawer of the other nightstand. Hearing a rattle from the back, I pulled out the drawer and flipped it over, and onto the taut bedspread fell a silver nail clipper and a ring.

“She doesn’t like having her picture taken,” he called from the other room. “She is unusually unphotogenic.”

The nail clipper was of the same style I had in my own nightstand drawer back at the apartment. I picked it up and clipped a nail, out of habit.

“She has never enjoyed the drawing of pictures,” he said.

I put down the clipper and picked up the ring.

“Too much green,” he said.

I was about to say something about the drawing of pictures, how most kids would be forced to draw a picture in school at some point, even if they didn’t like to, and she could do it without using green, and how most parents would save the occasional picture, even if it sucked, and put it on the wall, or on the refrigerator, when my fingers reacted to the ring I was holding. It’s hard to explain. I had picked up something new, but it did not feel new.

“Hey,” I said. “I know this ring.”

I tried to say it in a friendly voice, but a prickle of fear traveled down the backs of my arms.

“She does send an occasional e-mail,” he said.

“Sir?”

“But I do not know how to save them on the computer.”

I bounced the ring around in my hand. I bounced it, to make it casual. It wasn’t the most unusual ring, just the kind teenagers buy at street fairs for twelve dollars, with a silver band and a yellow-orange stone. But I’d had a ring very similar to it, extremely similar. I’d had it until just that past summer,
when I’d thrown it into the Kern River as a gesture of growth.

I turned the ring over. It was the exact same size as mine. The stone had the same dullness.

“What is this?” My voice came out a little too high. I walked over to the other bedroom. “Sir?”

He glanced up from his curled position by the bed. “Perhaps you can show me,” he said, “how to alter my mail settings.”

I held the ring up to the light. “Where did you get this?”

He sat taller, squinting. “Is that the ring?” He beamed at me. “Oh, good! I was wondering where that was! It’s not a photo, but there! There’s a piece of her, right there.”

“Where did this come from?”

“That’s Nina’s,” he said. “That is Nina’s ring.”

“But where did she get it?”

“She gave it to me on her last visit,” he said, face glowing. “She wanted me to have something of hers.”

“When was her last visit?”

“Four years ago,” he said.

I turned the ring over. It had a scratch on the underside, where mine had had a scratch, too. A very, very similar, if not exact, scratch.

“This is my ring,” I said.

“Oh no,” he said, straightening up. “That is my daughter, Nina’s. She gave it to me. She got it at a street fair.”

“I threw it in the river,” I said.

He frowned. “She said it was collateral, for our next meeting. She loves that ring. Reminds her of the sun.”

I stared at him. He had a petal stuck to his cheek, and he looked like a boy who’d been out playing in the meadows.

“Or maybe it was five years ago,” he said.

The ring slipped around in my hand, just as mine had. I’d watched it sink past the bright water, into the current.

“Have you ever been to the Kern River?” I said.

“The Corn River?” he said.

“In California. Kern.”

“I’ve never been to California,” he said. “What is that look on your face?”

I held the ring tightly. “I had a ring just like this,” I said. “And I threw it in the Kern River. Last summer.”

“I’m sure it was a different ring.”

I opened my hand. The yellow stone deepened to orange in the upper right hemisphere; I used to call it 80 percent yellow, 20 percent orange. The same slightly tweaked setting: a band of silver, not quite symmetrical.

“I threw it in the Kern River as my way into adulthood.”

He wiped the petal off his cheek, and it drifted to the carpet. “Well,” he said. “I don’t know what to tell you. Nina gave me that ring off her finger five years ago and told me to keep it for her until her next visit.”

“But she couldn’t have had it five years ago,” I said.

“Why not?”

“Because I was wearing it.”

“But that’s just what she did,” he said.

I closed my fist around the ring. “Come on! Is any of this Nina stuff even true?”

“Of course it’s true!” he said, and his face washed out a little, panicked. “That’s her ring.”

“But this is
my
ring, too!” I waved it in the air. “Down to the scratch on the inside! Down to the shape of the stone!”

He shrank against the side of the bed. Meekly, he said something about how she’d taken it off her finger, and how she’d bought it at a street fair in Cairo, and how she didn’t like
to use a calendar to make plans, and his words were trembling but insistent, and I had no idea if Nina was real, or never born, or if there could be two rings exactly the same, and he finished what he was saying and slumped down against the bedspread and closed his eyes.

“She told me to keep it for her for a while,” he said, in a low, hollow voice.

From outside came the distant sound of an owl. I slipped the ring onto my finger. It fit, just as it had fit before. Slightly loose, but held in place by the knuckle.

“I bought this ring at a sidewalk sale in Fresno,” I said. “In high school. Age fifteen. And I wore it for five years. And then last summer I was on a trip with my family, and I threw it in the Kern River because it was finally time to grow up. I kissed the stone, said goodbye to being a kid, and threw it in. Then I cried a little and went back to join everybody.”

I twisted it on my finger, as I had for years.

“Here it is again,” I said.

“Do you want to keep it for now?” he asked, in a tired voice.

“No.”

I slid down the door frame to sit on the carpet. I closed my eyes, too. “I’m not Nina.”

“No,” he said.

“I’m Claire,” I said.

“Howard.”

We let the names fill the room.

“Hi,” I said.

“Hi.”

I sat there for a while and maybe even fell asleep again for a few minutes. When I woke up, I went to his bathroom and
splashed water on my face. Went to his bedroom and returned the ring to the drawer with the nail clipper. Went back to the doorway of the smaller bedroom. His head was resting on the bed of petals, and his eyes were open. He looked a little older now, heavier, quiet.

“Here.” I picked up the book of Ohio flora. “Here, Howard. Come on. Let’s put them back.”

We spent the next half hour placing six petals per page, alongside photos of Ohio marigolds and chestnuts and elms. Many of the petals had crunched into triangles on the floor; those we swept up and put into one of the empty drawers.

After we were done, he walked me downstairs, out onto the porch, and down the steps into the star-clear coldness of night. It must have been two or three in the morning.

“Thank you for the lightbulb change,” he said.

“Thanks for the tea.”

He nodded. We looked out past the dirt lot to a road beyond where the houses ended. It was a road that no one drove on unless they were very specifically going to either the recycling plant where Hank had been headed or to the Russian grocery complex. Another owl hoot came rolling at us from far away.

“One more thing,” he said, putting a hand on my shoulder. His voice was still low, but for some reason, now that we were out of the house, it sounded less wavery and broken than it had upstairs; its reediness reminded me of wind whistling, like its own sound now instead of a diminishment.

“Yes?”

“Drop the documentary filmmaker,” he said. “Go to Arlene. Stay friends with Arlene.”

I shrank under his hand. “What?”

“He’s in there rolling his film, cutting and rolling, and
never thinks of you,” the old man said. “Not once. Not ever. She is thinking of everyone. She is a good friend. A good friend is rare. Go to her. Ed loves Arlene because she is a good person. He may have a friend, someone you’ll like. Go to Ed, ask him. Ask her. Eat dinner with them. Bury vegetables. Why not?”

He stood straighter. In the far distance, headlights rounded a corner, coming our way.

“What?” I said again, sharp.

“You don’t have to start with a hundred people having sex,” he said.

I watched the headlights come closer, the approach of big metal-music inside. I could have stepped into the street, flagged down the car, and asked for a ride home. The headlights illuminated the man, his elderly hunch. Then it was gone.

“Have you been stalking me?”

“No,” he said, smiling a little. “You found my door, remember?”

“Did you look in my purse?”

“You don’t have a purse,” he said, which was true.

“Did you hunt down my ring?”

“You threw it in the river,” he said. “How would I do that?”

I couldn’t think up an answer. “Is this what all the air pushing was for?”

He sniffed.

“Or the tea?” I asked.

“Is just good plain barley tea.” He slapped his arms from the cold, and we stared into the night together.

“By the way,” I said, “it’s Fred.”

“Fred?”

“Arlene’s guy. Is Fred, not Ed,” I said, smiling at the ground.

“Fred?” he said, nodding, frowning. Then he patted my shoulder goodbye and turned to let himself back in.

When I arrived back home, Arlene was up, making late-night waffles. She did this sometimes when she couldn’t sleep. Her face was scrubbed clean, and she looked smaller, and about ten times more vulnerable, without that blush on her cheeks and careful mascara.

“Hey,” she whispered when I came in.

She was whisking batter in a bowl and soon would be pouring it into the new waffle iron her father had sent from his kitchen supply store in Asheville. As on most evenings, she was wearing her oldest pink bathrobe, with embroidered suns on each lapel. Her mother had embroidered those suns there, as a gift to Arlene before college. Arlene, unlike most people our age, wore it with pride. She had moved past and through its symbolism, and now to her it was just a nice bathrobe.

I leaned on the cabinets, next to her. I could hear the steady, hunky breathing of Fred in the next room.