by Ed Kurtz
In the afternoon, he situated a step ladder directly beneath the ceiling stain and climbed up with a bleach-soaked scrub brush in his hand. He scrubbed at the spot until his arm started to feel sore, then he switched hands and scrubbed some more until that arm got sore, too. The bristles on the brush had turned dark brown, but the stain itself remained unchanged. He frowned at it and stepped back down to the floor. More serious measures would be necessary, but it was just going to have to wait. Walt needed to get ready for dinner with Amanda.
***
Walt and Amanda’s first date, nearly three years ago, was at a small Cajun restaurant on Markham called Louisiana Joe’s. The place had since changed hands, and now a slightly fancier dining spot took its place. The new joint was called Maggie’s, and that was where he met her just after sunset.
He had asked her to go ahead and get a table, but she was seated on the long divan in the waiting area when he arrived. Her curly brown hair was done up with only a few wild spirals cascading down the back of her neck and framing her freckled elfin face. She wore a dark blue dress Walt had never seen before; it looked elegant and it flowed down her small frame like a waterfall. He felt underdressed when he saw her, strangely self-conscious for a man nearly ready to propose. But Amanda did that to him—she made him feel like he didn’t deserve her, like he’d won the lottery every day for almost three years straight. She smiled sweetly when he came into the restaurant. He returned the smile and accepted a peck on his cheek.
“It’s changed a bit, hasn’t it?” she said.
“A bit,” Walt agreed.
“What do you suppose it’ll be like in another three years?”
“Too rich for me, I’m sure.”
“Don’t be cheap, dear.”
“You haven’t seen the house yet. It’s going to cost me a bundle before I’m done. Hope you like ramen.”
“Love it.”
“Then I do believe everything’s going to be all right.”
Amanda giggled, effectively ruining the playacting, but Walt didn’t mind. On a list of things that made life worth living, her unique and infectious giggle was easily in the top five.
A college-aged kid in a starched white shirt collected a pair of menus and led them to a small, round table in the middle of the restaurant. They ordered mid-priced wine, white asparagus in sabayon sauce, and they each had filets de poisson. They ate and talked and laughed a little too loud, judging by the looks some of their fellow diners shot at them. When they finished eating, Walt paid the check and they walked hand in hand out to the parking lot where Amanda lit up a cigarette.
Walt frowned.
“Just give me until New Year’s,” she said between drags. “It’s a psychological thing, I think. Quitting on New Year’s, I mean.”
“You said that last year, as I recall.”
“And I may say it again next year, but you can’t say I’m not trying.”
Screwing up his mouth, he sighed through his nostrils. He hated that she smoked, but she always had and he felt more than a little uncomfortable trying to change her. All he really cared about was her health, but he also wanted to never smell that acerbic cigarette smell in his bed again. He loathed to ruin the mood of an otherwise terrific evening, so he let it go. Reading his mind, Amanda smiled and gave his hand a squeeze.
“Let’s have a look at that house,” she said.
“Oh, not yet,” Walt protested. “It’s a shambles, really. I want to get the place fixed up before you see it.”
“You were a shambles the first time I saw you and that turned out all right.”
“Funny.”
“Come on. It’s hot, and I just can’t see sweating through the night for no good reason.”
“You’d rather be sweating for a good reason,” he smirked.
“You got that right, pal.”
A pleasant shiver rocked his spine. He hadn’t expected the evening to end like this, but now that events were turning that way, he had no intention of objecting. She planted a lingering kiss on his lips and said, “I’ll follow you in my car.”
***
Amanda wandered the house while Walt made coffee. He listened to her heels click-clacking on the hardwood floors. He liked the sound. He hoped to hear a great deal more of it.
“You installed these baseboards yourself?” she called out from the dining room.
“Sure,” Walt called back as the coffee maker started to drip. “I’m a regular Bob Vila.”
Amanda laughed. “That so?”
“I am a man of many talents. I’ve even made coffee all by myself.”
She click-clacked her way into the kitchen.
“I’m speechless,” she said. “How did I ever get so lucky?”
“You must have been a saint in a previous life.”
“I must have been twenty saints,” she said, leaning in for a deep kiss. She gave a soft moan and said, “Make that a hundred.”
“I hope it’s paying off.”
“In spades,” she said.
Releasing himself with regret from her grip, he collected two mugs from the cupboard. As he did so, she reached into an open box on the counter and pulled out two dusty wine glasses stuffed with tissue paper.
“Got any wine?”
“I just made coffee.”
She arched an eyebrow. He grinned boyishly, melting inside.
“Yeah,” he said. “I’ve got a bottle of Brunello. Will that work?”
She pushed the glasses toward him and said, “Fill ‘er up.”
After he rinsed the glasses and poured the wine, they took their glasses and wandered to the dining room. There they sat among the piles of books, crammed together away from the new baseboards toward the center of the room, while Amanda sipped and Walt watched her adoringly.
“Have you read all of these?” she asked, grabbing Martin Chuzzlewit from the nearest stack.
“No, not all. My reading list is miles long. I buy them faster than I can read them.”
“This one?”
“Sure. I’ve read all of Dickens. Until some mysterious, heretofore unknown manuscript appears, anyway.”
“Any good?”
“My dear,” Walt said, putting on a condescending, professorial tone. “There is no such beast as subpar Dickens.”
She set the book down on the floor and turned her narrowed eyes back to the stack.
“Hmm,” she said, searching.
She reached for another volume, settling on a dog-eared copy of Tom Jones, but tipped her glass, dumping its contents all over Martin Chuzzlewit.
“Uh-oh,” Walt said as he leaned forward to take her wine.
“Oh, shit,” she yelped, looking down at the fruits of her clumsiness.
“You’ve stained my Chuzzlewit.”
“Oh, shit,” she said again.
“And that’s not even a euphemism.”
“I can’t believe it. Fuck, I’m such an idiot.”
“Not at all,” he assured her. He gently took the volume and held it up between forefinger and thumb. Red wine dripped from the leaves like blood from a wound.
“Oh, man,” she moaned. “Good news is, your lady just so happens to own a bookstore.”
“Don’t worry about it…”
“Shut it. I’m ordering a brand spanking new copy first thing tomorrow. I’ll even be sure to get some super academic notated edition, better than this poor mess.”
“For God’s sake, don’t do that.”
“Why not? I’ve got a distributor’s discount.”
“Print’s too small.”
“You’re shitting me.”
“Have you ever tried reading one of those things? You’d go cross-eyed!”
“All right, then I’ll order a large print edition. And a magnifying glass.”
“Such a dear girl,” he said in a shaky, ancient voice.
“How about some butterscotch candy, too? Would grandpa like that?”
“I’d like some of your candy, my dear.”
He tucked his lips over his teeth and smacked them noisily, a grotesque parody of an elderly letch.
“You dirty old man,” she said, and began kissing his neck.
“Grandpa likes,” he said.
“Chuzzlewit can wait.”
“Yes,” he agreed. “I suppose it can.”
Together they rose and Walt went into the kitchen with Amanda close behind. He set the cups on the counter and let her lead him by the hand toward the bedroom.
***
They made love quickly and breathlessly. It lasted only ten minutes, but they climaxed simultaneously. Afterward, Walt and Amanda lay side by side on the unraised mattress, breathing hard and fast in harmonic union. When her breath began to slow down to a normal rhythm, she rolled onto her side and said, “Now, how about that coffee?”
He took his black, she added loads of milk and sugar. Cups in hand and dressed only in bathrobes—her dwarfed by one of Walt’s—they retired to the front porch. They sipped at their coffee and Amanda chain-smoked, but Walt kept quiet about it. Instead, he waxed philosophic about the impressionable young minds he hoped to mold in the coming months, wondering out loud how many kids per year he might be able to turn onto Dickens or Conrad or even—fingers crossed—Herman Melville. In the long run, he hoped to include some of the macabre writers like Poe and Blackwood, but he had no intention of pressing his luck the first year in. The tight-assed parents in the PTA could get a little touchy about that sort of thing, so he aimed at ingratiating himself to them. Amanda absently commented that it sounded like a good plan.
They turned in a little after one in the morning. Walt slept six hours and might have slept a little longer had the racket in the hallway not woken him. He cracked open his bleary eyes and struggled to focus until he eventually made out the shape of Amanda standing on the stepstool.
“What’re you doin’?” he slurred.
“Putting shellac on this stain. Ought to seal it up. Then you can paint over it.”
“Oh,” he said.
“But don’t let it go. If there’s a leaky pipe or something, this is only going to be a temporary solution.”
“Right.”
“I might put a stain sealer on it, too. So it doesn’t show through the paint.”
“That stuff smells awful.”
“How do you think I like it up here? You’re ten feet away from it.”
“If you were a hundred saints,” he said, sitting up, “then I was a thousand.”
“There,” she said as she descended the three steps back to the floor. “Give it a couple hours and then put on the sealant if you’ve got some. I’ll paint it for you tonight, if you want. Got to go to work now, though.”
“All right, but don’t wear yourself out.”
Amanda pulled her jacket over her shoulders and shot him a glance.
“Why? You got some strenuous activities planned?”
“Yeah—I need you to patch my roof, too.”
She stuck out her tongue and blew a raspberry at him. He returned the gesture in kind before she click-clacked across the house and out the front door. Walt lay back on the mattress and grinned while he listened to her car rattle to life and drive away. And, a few minutes later, he was asleep again; dead to the world.
While he slept, ever so slightly, the stain grew.
3
He awoke to a rhythmic noise, persistent and loud. He scrunched up his face and glanced at his watch. It was noon. Planting his hands on the mattress, he hoisted himself up and listened closely. Drip, drip, drip. Rubbing the sleep out of his eyes with the balls of his fists, Walt peered into the hall and saw the source.
The stain on the ceiling had spread, and now it dripped down to the floor below, forming a small, reddish-brown puddle.
“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” he groaned.
Crawling out of bed, he stepped into a pair of gray sweatpants and staggered to the doorway to peer up at the spot on the ceiling. The shellac held, but the relentless stain had simply spread out around it, forming a rusty doughnut on the ceiling. Whatever the source of the leak, the shellac was not going to solve the problem. Walt let out a frustrated grunt and padded out into the hall, careful to avoid the puddle on the floor. His sleep-addled mind ran through a chronological list of duties, starting with making and drinking at least half a pot of coffee. After that, he admitted to himself, he would have to call a plumber.
So much for do it yourself.
***
The plumber—a bone-thin man of about sixty with hair in his ears—clambered up the ladder to the attic and called down for Walt to hand up his toolbox. Walt followed, curious to see what the old guy would find. After the floor was torn out and the paneling and ceiling joists were exposed, no obvious leaking was found. The plumber sat back on the rafters and scratched his head.
“Now that’s odd,” he said.
“What’s odd about it?”
“No pipes here. None at all. Drywall’s fine. Sturdy, intact. Blocking’s fine, too. Nothing on any side leaked at all. But looky here.”
The plumber leaned over the hole in the attic floor, pointing his flashlight down at the paneling. In the center of the knotty wood panel, between the joists and the squared-off blocking beams, there was a faint brown spot.
“Ain’t that about the strangest thing I ever saw,” the old man said.
“What is it?”
“It’s your stain, is what it is. ‘Cept this is pushing through from the other side, instead of the other way ‘round. Like if your house was upside-down.”
“Upside-down?”
“Hell, I dunno,” the plumber said. “All’s I can tell you is maybe somebody’s playing tricks on you. Having a bit of fun.”
“Fun,” Walt mumbled. “Sure.”
“If I was you, I’d just clean up my ceiling, paint it over, and watch who I let in my house.”
Walt smiled and thanked the old guy for his advice. He purposefully neglected to inform the plumber that the only person he had ever let in the house was Amanda. And that was after he first noticed the stain.
All the same, he slapped a twenty-dollar bill in the plumber’s palm—despite the man’s protest that he hadn’t really done anything—and set to painting the rust-colored circle on the hallway ceiling. It took all of five minutes, and when it was done, Walt gazed up at the newly white area and smiled. He then retreated into his bedroom where he began undressing for a shower. Once he was completely naked, the doorbell jangled.
“Of course,” he grumbled, pulling the sweatpants back up and reaching for his ratty old REO Speedwagon T-shirt.
Shuffling across the house, he bisected the shafts of sunlight that knifed in from the windows. At the door, he stared at the impatient-looking man on his front porch for a moment, and inwardly cursed himself for having forgotten all about the roofer.
“You been having a go at it yourself?” the roofer asked upon seeing the attic steps still pulled down to the floor.
“No, I just had a plumber in.”
The roofer raised his eyebrows.
“It’s a fixer-upper,” Walt said.
“I’m gonna have a look. Might take a little while to assess your situation.”
Walt nodded and informed the man that he was going to take a shower. The roofer set to roofing, and Walt vanished into the bathroom. He ran a near-scalding hot shower, stood under it until his skin turned red, and toweled off in the steam-filled room. No one had ever installed a ventilation fan in there, which would inevitably lead to mold or worse. Then again, he thought, he could always take a moment to wipe down the mirror and walls after a shower and save himself the time and cost. Slipping into his terrycloth bathrobe, he resolved to worry about it later. Much later. One thing at a time, he reminded himself.
He could hear the roofer moving around in the attic, stepping on creaking rafters and talking to himself. Walt glanced up at the ceiling then, and a gasp caught in his throat.
The stain had bled through both th
e shellac and the paint. It was bigger than ever, now spread out over an area of ceiling at least a foot in radius. And it was dripping all over Walt’s bathrobe.
He dabbed at a thick red droplet on his should with the pad of his finger. Raising it to his nose, he inhaled. It was vaguely metallic; rusty, just as he suspected.
Walt said, “What the hell?”
The roofer stamped down the ladder steps from the attic, his tool belt clattering against his hips.
“Good news is I can do the job,” he said before stepping off the ladder. “But it won’t be cheap.”
“Do it,” Walt said as he wiped his finger on the front of his robe. “I can’t stand the leaks anymore.”
***
Amanda gazed up at the stain with equal measures of wonder and disgust. Walt had long since wiped both ceiling and floor with a dirty rag, but the stain went on dripping. Now there was a plastic bucket on the floor, directly beneath the stain, catching every drop.
“And there’s no leaks?”
“Not up there, there isn’t.”
“Then what’s between the drywall and the paneling?”
“Nothing. They’re pressed right up against each other.”
“Have you looked? I mean, have you actually pried them apart?”
“That would tear up the ceiling. And then I’d have to pay yet another contractor to fix something else.”
“Yeah, but if it’s between that and the stain that never dies…”
He let out a discontented breath and sagged his shoulders.
“This is why I rent,” she said.
“Hand me that flashlight,” Walt said as he started to climb the ladder. “It’s in the tool bag.”
“Are you going up there right now?”
“No time like the present.”
“But it’s pitch black up here!”
“It’s driving me crazy. Seriously. Flashlight?”
Amanda crooked her mouth to one side and passed the flashlight up to him. A second later, he disappeared into the attic.
As soon as he was out of view, she began to feel the slow crawl of anxiety building inside her. On the one hand, she hoped Walt determined its cause right away, so that it would be over and done with and they could both move on to more imperative issues, like their future and what she hoped it might entail. But on the other hand, she could almost feel a desperate cry building up in her chest, bellowing out to insist he come back down right this instant. Instead, she just stood there, gazing up at the dark square in the ceiling into which he’d vanished, frozen with indecision. Why all the anxiety all of a sudden? Then, after a minute or two, there was creaking and scraping, following by a grunt and a loud crack.