The Colorman (21 page)

Someone knocked at the door, closed now against the growing cold.

After a long pause, a slight stirring disturbed the rumpled bed.

Another knock.

No further movement.

When Rain caught the first glance at her hair in the bathroom mirror she let out a laugh. A kind of “oops!” Rain's hair had gone from thick and long with shaggy bangs brushing her eyelashes, to a shorn pixie shag. Natural y a dark chestnut brown, it was dyed all the way to white-white, with touches of neon blue at the tips. She did remember doing it. Remembered her satisfaction at its brightness and oddness. On the toilet, Rain put her face in her hands and her elbows on her knees and rested there, letting everything that led up to the haircut sink in. When she had first came back to the house, her odyssey to New York City felt as if she had returned to the house to assess its betrayal of her, and to reassert an ownership she had never real y felt in the first place. Homer's Penelope was the very ideal of fidelity and undying marital faith, but in her own version of the epic poem, Rain was Odysseus' men, dragged along through something they never asked for, Karl's Odysseus casting them through all kinds of hell to get to a woman who was a tease tempting everyone for her own entertainment. Let them play out their own drama. Rain was jumping ship.

As loud as this haircut was, Rain hadn't done it for anybody else's reaction. It was simply that her hair was bothersome. It needed to go. She needed a change that she could register for herself. She was still slightly drunk when she awoke at two that afternoon, but she was well aware of how people overreact to hair.

In her teens, Rain had cut her own hair now and then. Once to the scalp. She had liked it choppy and odd like that and she'd colored her face with beams of orange and green eyeshadow and worn huge earrings that she felt complemented the ‘do. Once on an airplane, a woman had asked her what had made her do it. That was curious to Rain, since the woman hadn't known her. Just seeing a choppy buzz on a young girl seemed to require an explanation. Rain didn't mean it as any kind of statement. She wasn't trying to provoke, just to please herself. Maybe that was provocative enough? She told the woman it was just hair. It keeps growing.

Cutting her hair this time wasn't without emotion or defiance or even self-mutilatory urges urges, but like before it really wasn't for anybody else's benefit. If she wanted to let the truth of it out, it was something inside her that reacted against the normal consumer culture. The getting a regular job, the having regular belongings, a regular relationship and a regular routine. The hair would prevent her from being hired anywhere too regular. It was strange to her, when she allowed this thought in, that she had so little trust in herself that she felt she needed to brand herself to avoid this fate. These thoughts made her want another drink, however, so she figured she'd better get one piece of business out of the way before reentering her comfortable haze.

Yanking a big knit cap down over her ears, Rain held a second wooden chest she had found outside her door in both hands in front of her rather formally like something she didn't want to disturb. She walked down her road without a coat in the fortydegree chill, grateful for the hat.

Though Alvaro wasn't around, the other employees knew Rain by now and she walked right in to find James in the oil room.

“Rain!” Morrow said with a rare smile. “I came by to drop… well, to drop that off.” He glanced up at her big hat.

“Thanks,” Rain said, shifting her head down self-consciously. “Yeah, that's why I'm here.”

James brought Rain to a counter over by a window that looked out over the marshes stretching to the Hudson. Rain placed the box, this one larger than the first one he had given her, up on the counter and gave it a tiny shove toward him.

“I can't accept this, James,” Rain said. “I really appreciate your belief in me, but I can't.”

Morrow stared at her.

She didn't return the gaze. “I'm not a painter,” Rain said carefully. “I'm not painting…anymore.”

“That's,” Morrow said, “that's not true.”

“I wanted to give this back so that somebody who'll use it can have it,” Rain said. “Not me.”

“But it has to be you,” James said quietly.

She looked up at him, confused. “No,” she said. “No, you don't understand. I'm not going to do it anymore. I give up.” Rain realized she was hearing the edges of desperation in her own voice, but she couldn't stop it.

“I'm afraid this is no good to anyone else. It's for you, Rain,” he said. “I made it for you.”

Rain cupped her hand to her forehead, rubbing her temple under the itchy hat, just trying to hide her face.

“Look,” Rain began, her voice betraying her again. She coughed to cover it. “I found out there was no show, and it confirmed what I think you were trying to tel me the other night.” She gave him a fake smile. “Yep, you were right. Weak stuff. Uninteresting. And now I've got to figure out something else to do with my life.” Her voice cracked. She didn't have a plan. Nothing.

“Stop,” Morrow said quietly.

Rain began crying openly. She didn't care whom she was talking to, where she was; she just went on as if to herself. “I don't know what to do anymore. Dad's gone. Gwen doesn't care. I'm alone…”

Suddenly Morrow shouted, “Stop! Stop it now!”

They looked at each other, both equally horrified. She, surprised and baffled. He, surprised and distraught. Then he turned abruptly and left.

Rain staggered back to the cabin alone, freezing in the November chill. She poured a huge tumbler of scotch and climbed into bed. Put the iPod on and drank herself to sleep.

It must have been the end of November. Rain was fairly certain that it had been almost a month by then of existing on booze and soups and cans of beans. She considered the nearly bare branches outside with detachment. There was no pressure to render them, to see them as anything but a static symbol for the approaching winter. There was no need to judge the depth of light and shadow, to learn from the cools and warms or see how the oranges of the few remaining leaves combined warm yellows, reds, even dusty greens and purples. That blackish brown of the branches, really an amalgam of silver on steel blue with chill, yellow highlights was nothing she needed to grasp.

She could just be.

And let them be.

She could just live without this. Maybe she would, after all. Get some kind of job where you go and you do something and then you walk out of there and weren't doing it any more for a whole evening and night and morning. Entire weekends of nothing you have to do.

The small black-and-white television got bad reception, but Rain had been watching it night and day ever since she got it in one of the boxes Karl sent. She ran long wires with sheets of tin foil along the antennae to achieve a rough, grainy picture. Once, back in the city, she had defiantly cut the cord on the thing, having forgotten to unplug it first. She must have jumped two feet in the air at the resulting pop. A fat, black, electricaltape bandage bound the cord now. She had left it behind on purpose. But Karl was methodically shipping to her everything she'd owned at the apartment, every shred she'd ever brought, bought or been given.

So the broken TV asserted its ugly pul on her. She especial y enjoyed watching the most base reality shows she could find. There weren't too many, since she was relying on what she could tune in on network TV alone. But she liked watching the ones where people wallowed in their worst selves, building themselves up on teetery self-righteousness, being torn down to child-like tears and tantrums and then ral ying again for something she suspected they didn't even believe in themselves. It was fascinating. Especial y the shows with teenagers and young adults. Their lectures and little fights sounded like sharpened echoes of whatever they must have grown up around. You could feel the shadows of screaming parents in their practiced head-bobs and devastatingly dismissive body language. Surely they were unaware of the hardened selves they were portraying. They appeared so ruthless. So self-assured. But of course self-doubt didn't read on television. Just the way it could inadvertently concede defeat in the middle of a fight, rather than indicate the opportunity for—or the process of—growth that it actually was. But if you could never be seen actually learning anything, and if you had to be televised around the clock, there was not going to
be
an after, was there?

The clock was meaningless to her. The days were light or dark in random order. Rain had unplugged the landline and turned off her cell, but mail still came along with the stoic postman. She had occasional face-offs with him over Karl's boxes or fat envelopes from lawyers wanting signatures. For all his blankness, his knock was an earth-shattering banging at the door. He had become her alarm clock. Rain waited for his shock or even some kind of judgment since she had been a cave-dweller now for weeks. The hair at least. The blue tips fading and the roots growing in. But no reaction came. This guy—young really, kind of hip—kept a preternatural detachment. Before her self-confinement, Rain had tried to greet him with a few words when she had to sign for something or when he caught her outside on his rounds. She always got the impression that he had absolutely no interest in speaking to her. She was starting to take it a little personally until it occurred to her that he went to every house in Vanderkill Township. Every house. Shut-ins must have been nothing to him. He'd surely already witnessed squinted eyes, funky bed-head and morning breath at two p.m.; that, and the acrid stink of chicken broth and daytime television wafting out through doorways.

Time was like a ski rope, Rain decided. You could either grip onto it and be carried forward or just let go and watch it slip by, bringing whatever it drags along past you. Then you can grab on again if like, and just keep moving along with the pointlessness of its never-ending cycling. Not being a skier, the climb of the mountain to make the run thing was not part of the metaphor for her. So it worked. It's how time felt at the moment. She watched time's sequences scroll by like TV.

Drinking helped. The month became a slidey blur that was just ow-kay to her scotch-soaked self. Having inherited her father's iron veins when it came to alcohol, Rain could keep up a fairly steady buzz without resorting to a hangover. But it was in a particularly ow-kay state that Rain found Chassie in her doorway one evening rather early. The sun had started to disappear at four-thirty, so it seemed night enough to Rain. It was only with the regular-sounding knock at her door that Rain realized she was drunk. She literally had to tip her torso at the stairs and force her legs to churn the steps until she swung open the door and found a familiar face there.

“Oh!” Rain exclaimed, with a small laugh designed to show just how “ow-kay” everything was. The introduction of this familiar, yet unexpected, element into her house suddenly made Rain feel very very drunk. When before it was, you know, just a teensy buzz.

“Come in!” Rain said, with what she realized immediately was an overdramatic swing of her arm. She turned her head away to avoid putting a swimmy gaze on Chassie and stepped back.

Chassie entered slowly. “Hey,” she said, laughing low. “hey there cowgirl. Nice ‘do.”

“Thnkyoo-p,” Rain said in a little clip, trying to rein in the horses of her drunkenness; she wasn't sure why. It was just embarrassing to be drunk all by yourself in your stupid little house and not even painting at all.

Chassie headed on in. “Place looks…uhm…kinda empty,” she remarked. “What's goin' on, what-cha smokin'?”

“Smokin' some smokey shit,” Rain muttered casually, following Chassie down into the living-room. She picked up a bottle of the Lagavulin and tilted its bottom toward Chassie.

“Holy mackerel, that's the real deal, innit?”

“Mmmm-hm, straight?” Rain asked, poking the bottle toward her guest.

“Whew,” Chassie said. “Some ice maybe?”

Rain was relieved to see Chassie bounce up the steps back to the kitchen to help herself. Rain slumped into the couch. Hit the TV button off with her foot.

Chassie joined her with a splash of scotch in a lowball glass filled with ice. Rain tucked her tumbler out of sight around the side of the couch.

“So what's going on?” Chassie asked. “You've disappeared!”

“Yeah,” Rain said, rubbing her hand around her tousled rough hair. “Yeah, I'm…I have no excuses,” Rain said finally, looking at Chassie and readjusting her posture.

“Just worried about you a little,” Chassie said, taking a smell of her glass. “Hunter keeps calling me, blah, blah Rain, blah blah. He can't get in touch with you. Nobody's seen you.”

“I…”

“Is everything okay?”

“I don't know,” Rain said. “I hope I didn't…I didn't mean to, uh…I guess I thought since he was leaving it would be alright to, uh…”

“No no!” Chassie said, getting her drift. “You know, I mean, TMI and all. Don't want to be all in your business. Just so you know, my very independent brother would totally kill me for coming here and checking up on you. But I don't really operate that way. He's wanting to be in touch with you. I don't see you anymore, so here I am.”

“Oh…em…gee…” Rain sniggered sarcastically, but she looked down, picking at her pajamas.

“You are not okay,” Chassie declared finally, lowering her glass.

“I will be,” Rain said. “Just woodshedding.”

“I thought that involved actually bringing along your instrument,” Chassie said, looking around at the empty space and taking a sip of the scotch. She coughed. “Seems like your instrument's been put away.”

Rain felt her head swimming again and kept her gaze down in her lap so that Chassie wouldn't realize how drunk she really was. It was making her feel pathetic and she was starting to resent it. Not the booze, but the intrusion. Chassie's bright light shining on her. Everything had been nice and dim before Chassie walked in here. But now it was glaring and humiliating.