The Colorman (14 page)

Anne sat down next to Rain at the kitchen bar and Chassie lowered the lights. It felt like a restaurant kitchen after closing.

“Good to see you,” Anne said, and kissed Rain breezily on the cheek. “How've you been settling in?” Anne took her gin and tonic from Chassie with a mouthed thanks.

“Good. Fine, I guess,” Rain said. “I've been enjoying it more than I expected. Lots of hiking. I thought I'd be in the city more, but I seem to be spending all my time here.”

“Oh, my Lord, if I could do that!” Anne stopped herself and laughed, “Actually, no, I'm lying. I couldn't live without the city. Love it there. Love my stores.” She took a sip of her drink. “But I have to tell you, that first mouthful of country air when I get off the train every night? It's the best thing I've ever tasted in my life.” Anne leaned back and ran her hands through her hair. It fell back around her face in abundant freshness and she shook her head lightly. “Love the city. Love the country. Lovin' life!” She offered up her glass for a clink with Rain.

Rain took another sip of the limey, sweet-and-sour drink Chassie had made for her. It was exotic, kind of Mojito-like, but felt foreign on her tongue.

The doorbell rang again. David and Melia. Rain was trying to remember names as the room began to fill up, but finally just looked for Anne when it was time to head into the dining room. Her sour had been magically kept full regardless of what she thought was rather constant sipping, but everyone left their cocktails in the kitchen when they retired to the enormous dining hall, so with one last gulp, she put the thing down and found her way to a seat near Anne.

“Right here, honey,” Anne was saying, holding onto a chair next to hers. The dining room was right out of central casting. The table was filled with plates and silver and cutlery and linens and fully lit candelabras. Tangles of berried vines snaked around the center of the table; they were decorated with what appeared to be nests holding huge stalks of artichokes, giant, red and white turnips and some kind of pocked vegetable Rain couldn't identify. It all had a Peter Greenaway feel, odd, but utterly opulent.

“Violetta, all Violetta,” was all Chassie would say as she brushed off all of her guests' gasps and compliments. Chassie poured wines all around, reds and whites. The first course was already served at each guest's place. A white gazpacho with a large cube of lightly charred bread at the center and a rough sprinkling of fresh chive.

Rain had attended her share of lavish meals in her life. She used to go with her father and Gwen to penthouses and back rooms of restaurants in the city, but there was something so purely enjoyable about this meal and the generosity with which it was offered. Chassie was pleased by pleasing her guests, and even the self-absorbed Marisol seemed to be enjoying herself.

Just as Violetta's uniformed help were clearing the first course plates, a commotion in the kitchen grabbed Chassie's attention and a huge smile split her face. “HUNTER!” she cried, jumping up.

Just then, through the kitchen's swinging doors came a young man with dark-cocoa skin, small sprightly dreads and light green eyes. He lit up, matching Chassie's smile and the two of them snapped into a tremendous bear hug, the door smacking Hunter from behind, but not budging them a bit.

“Hunt,” she murmured, fixing on his eyes and holding on to his arms.

“Chase,” he echoed.

Chassie turned around. “Everybody? You remember my brother, Hunter?”

Alvaro came around the table and slapped him on the back and Anne stood to kiss him. Hunter's face was still wide open with greeting when he encountered Rain awkwardly still in her seat. “Very nice to meet
you
,” Hunter said sweetly as he went on to embrace and shake hands with everyone at the table. “But I've interrupted!” Hunter bellowed. His place had been set and he joined right in as the main course came from the kitchen and made its rounds.

“So Rain. You're painting,” Anne said finally when the din had died down a bit.

“Yes. Most of the time. Though I'm a ways off from making a living off it,” she said.

Anne looked over at Alvaro, who was engrossed with talking to Hunter. “Well, you don't know unless you try. He could quit, but he'd rather keep the day job until his music can support him instead of me.” Anne gave Rain a sidelong wry smile. “Well, that, and his sick-puppy attachment to Morrow.”

“Morrow seems to have everybody intrigued around here,” Rain said, giving Anne a slightly quizzical look. One that invited information, but allowed her to take a pass on gossiping if she wanted.

Anne nodded and smiled. “Morrow intrigues people. I can't say I know any more about him than anybody else. Alvaro's probably closest, and yet he said it's sometimes like taking care of a wild animal, a circus lion. It all looks mellow and calm and almost boring, but you have to remember to keep this intense respect and do everything it needs before it needs it.”

“A lion?”

“Oh, no. He never gets worked up. It's more this sense of what's behind him. You're getting this second hand from me, and I think Alvaro's a little too much in awe of him for some reason.”

“Maybe the lion's drugged,” she said laughing, “or neutered.”

Anne laughed. “Well, evidently the yoga teacher wouldn't agree.”

“Ah-ha!” Rain said. “Never too old.”

“I don't know, he seems pretty well-preserved, don't you think?”

“I guess,” Rain said. “Though I've never done the whole daddy-boyfriend thing.”

“No. Ick,” Anne chortled. They looked again over at Alvaro, who Rain realized must be a bit younger than Anne. They were similar looking in a way—thick black hair on pale skin, fine features and thick lips—though her features added up to snowwhite Irish, his to Euro-South-American.

“So what do you do the rest of the time?” Anne asked. “When you're not painting.”

“Nothing all that interesting,” Rain said. “Worked in a gallery for a while, temped a little, do a little graphic design.”

“What brought you up here?”

“Well,” Rain laughed. She thought about all of the disclosure required to answer such a simple question.

“That's alright,” Anne said, giving her another of her wry smiles. “Nah, stay mysterious, that's okay…”

“No!” Rain exclaimed. “No mystery at all. My husband is an art history professor, and he got a fellowship in London this semester. I'd just inherited this cabin up here so we rented out our place in the city for the fall and I came up to do some painting.”

“Nice!” Anne said. “Wow, it makes this place seem like an art colony. So often people come here either because they've just had babies or are just about to!”

“Oh, God,” Rain said. “I always say I'm on the five-year plan with all of that, and if you ask me next year, I'll tell you I'll think about it in five years…”

Anne laughed and looked down at her plate. “What about you?” Rain asked, but someone said something to Anne from across the table and she seemed not to have heard her, so Rain dropped it.

Hunter was telling a story about being in Bangladesh. He had just gotten back from there, and he very soberly described the street scenes, the intense poverty and disease and then more glowingly he talked about the fantastic, quirky and generous musicians he stayed with and the project he'd been involved in there.

Dessert was served along with port in the music room. Chassie built a fire in the enormous fireplace. Candlelight was the room's only other illumination. It cast the most romantic light on all of the faces. Even Violetta looked like the twenty-year-old she clearly paid a great deal to resemble.

“I adore art,” she said, sidling up to Anne and Rain. “I want to meet this Morrow, and I think we have a dinner, nah?”

Anne said, “That sounds great.” She looked at Rain.

“I will take care of everything,” Violetta said. “The Halloween, nah?”

Rain nodded, unsure of what she meant. “Yeah, that sounds great.”

“Okay, it's good,” Violetta said and she almost pursed her lips.

As she walked over to sit with Marco, Anne said, “She's a character. I'm surprised she doesn't know Morrow already.”

“I couldn't figure out if she worked for Chassie at first,” Rain said quietly to Anne.

“Oh, no,” Anne said. “She could probably buy and sell Chassie ten times over. She was a big model in the sixties, I think. Started a little makeup line in the seventies, which was bought out. She'd be a caterer if she could bear to earn money, but she just throws these huge events at other people's houses. Won't do local politics or charities. Just fun. She's a little,” Anne rolled her eyes, “you know, eccentric. But sweet.”

“She doesn't have parties at her house?”

“Nope. I'm not even sure where she lives right now. Some penthouse in the city, and a rented place up here, I think. Got places all over. Stays with people a lot. Hotels. She's a lot of fun.”

The music was a pleasant loose noodling on the keys by Alvaro while Hunter accompanied with resonant chords and moody rhythms on his steel guitar. They all watched, transfixed, as the two played a lazy, glowing, unending set.

Riding home on the Vespa down and up dirt roads and Route 9D's dark stretches, Rain comforted herself with the thought that the only person she could kill driving this thing drunk was herself. She hummed and droned out
vroom-vroom
noises to herself as she rode down the long mountainside and along the smaller roads back to her little house. And despite the fact that she was feeling no pain that night, she resolved to buy herself something against the impending cold.

The next morning, a phone message broadcasted through the house, waking her up. It was Chassie, congratulating her on her Halloween plans. “Don't worry, though,” she said, not very reassuringly. “It'll only be Violetta, Marco, Anne and Alvaro, me, Marisol and Hunter
and
your special guest, Mr. James ‘Reclusive' Morrow. We're counting on you!”

Rain lunged for the phone. “Chassie? Chassie?” but Chassie had already hung up.

Yellow, yellow, yellow, yellow!
It is not a color.
It is summer!
It is the wind on a willow,
the lap of waves, the shadow
under a bush, a bird, a bluebird,
three herons, a dead hawk
rotting on a pole—

—W
ILLIAM
C
ARLOS
W
ILLIAMS

Y
er Yella. Coward.

Bile, piss, puss, disease.

So too sunshine, flowers, lemons and warmth.

Bananas, bread and eggs.

The sweetness of melons, tomatoes, peppers, corn and the sizzling skins of roasted fowl.

Yellow used to be protected by law. Not any pigment in particular, but yellowness. The dairy lobby forced margarines to be sold lard-white with a tiny spot of yellow dye inside for the buyer to knead into it, so as not to infringe upon the yellowness of the real thing. So important to them and to the consumer was the yellow of that fat.

It was a Tuesday in late fall. Like any other Tuesday, he supposed. Just another Tuesday. Morrow rose early as always. As every day of his adult life, he lay in bed for a moment in the dark considering the broken rectangles of pale light fighting their way around the pitch black of his shuttered windows and remembered.

But this morning he felt shaken. He had been shoved out of his routine. It used to be he would lay there and remember, think of the woman he lost so many years before, and, like a mantra, tell himself how he could have changed things, kept her from leaving, kept her love.

This morning, Morrow lay in bed thinking about her once again. But her youthful face was more alive in his mind now. Alive and right down the road. He felt wide awake and confused, zinged up with hope and heartbeat and energy, an energy that rose up around the crumbling feeling of his illness, buoying up whatever was left of him in a foamy, numbing sea.

Clinging to his routines as if to a life raft, Morrow dressed, took his tea and went over to unlock the factory doors. But this morning, rather than getting to his paperwork, Morrow returned to his house. He was haunting his own house now, standing there feeling like it was the wrong time of day, the wrong Tuesday. Something was terribly wrong. Everything about the way he had made it through his days before was wrong. He needed to remake it. To fix what had broken.

Suddenly he saw it. It was all clear to him. He could stop fighting it, just embrace what felt right to do. He had no other plans, no kind of trajectory before. It was like he was waiting for her to come and give him this purpose. His imminent death, something to arrange for and work toward. That it could matter and might be felt.

Morrow took the stairs two at a time, a ringing in every muscle and bone in his body propelling him upward toward his project. He felt healed. This Tuesday, today, would begin it. He'd figured it out.

The day came and went, Morrow began to feel the familiar achy fatigue returning to him, so he took stock of his progress. The attic room he'd been working in was empty now. All of the Riker boxes were emptied and stacked neatly by the door, boxes and bags were heaped by the stairs.

Photographs, letters, a journal and a few small paintings were stacked next to the Riker boxes and these were the only items that remained when James carried out the bags and boxes filled with the rest of her belongings. These items that made her his. The proof of their shared experience. These he hauled across the lawn in the dark toward the glow from the now silent factory. Inside, on the main floor, James shook out the plastic bags and shoe boxes onto the vast clean metal counters.