The Color Master: Stories

by Aimee Bender

  “What do you mean?”

  “Why did you just say all that?”

  “Because I hate snap judgments,” I said.

  The doctor folded her arms.

  “But how do you know?” she asked.

  “How do I know what?”

  “How do you know we’re making snap judgments?”

  I unwrapped another candy. Green peppermint. “No reason,” I said. “My mother gave you a look.”

  Now the doctor leaned against the wall.

  “So you could see her look?”

  “What do you mean?” I asked. “Didn’t she give you a look?”

  “Yes,” Mom said. “I gave her a look.”

  “But you could see your mother’s look,” said the doctor. “Why?”

  “Why?”

  “You can’t see an old man. You can’t see a soldier getting shot.”

  “I know my mother’s face.”

  “Can you see it now?”

  I looked over. Truth was, I couldn’t really see her face. I could see big red lips because she was wearing lipstick because she likes to look nice for doctors.

  “Make a face, Mrs. Robertson,” the doctor said.

  She did something. What, I couldn’t tell.

  “Can’t tell,” I said, sucking on the candy.

  “But you could tell the earlier look,” said the doctor.

  “Just sometimes,” I said. “Are we done?”

  “Do you see me as a group?” asked the doctor then, in an all-too-friendly voice.

  “I am not retarded,” I said, pulling my shirt back over my head. “I can see that you are one person, and that you have a ridiculously long neck.”

  “William!” barked my mother.

  “William, may I speak to your mother alone for a moment?” the doctor asked.

  I stormed out. I emptied the entire lobby candy jar into my pockets and left the building. There was a candle shop next door, so I went in there and smelled wax for a while; the one that said it smelled like chocolate was wildly misleading. I have an excellent sense of smell. On the street, I tried to look at all the people walking by, but they just looked like walking people to me. I didn’t see why I needed to read their faces. Wasn’t there enough complication in the world already without having to take in the overload of details and universes in every single person’s fucking face?

  The drive home was mostly silent. My mother didn’t wave at the drivers when she changed lanes, which is unlike her. In general, she’s at her best in the world with strangers, and gets great reassurance from a wave or a nod between cars. But on this drive home she changed lanes on her own without acknowledgment of anyone and was quiet until we pulled into the driveway.

  “I just don’t understand,” is all she said then.

  My dad walked in from work late that night, as usual, and found some frozen pizza thawing in the refrigerator by accident. It had never been cooked, but he didn’t bother to heat it up and just ate it cold. “Cold pizza,” he said, smiling at me, as little flecks of cheese fell to the floor. “It’s not the same,” I told him. When he was done, my mother asked if she could speak to him in the other room. Ginny was playing hospital with her torn stuffed animals, and I skulked around their door as they settled in the bedroom and I heard her whisper to my dad that we went today to the doctor who did lots of tests and was very kind and professional and William has a real problem and the doctor diagnosed him with facial illiteracy.

  “Wait, what?” I said from the hallway. I leaned in the door frame. “She said what?”

  My mother’s eyes were enormous. Okay, I could see them. My mom only, sometimes. My father’s hair was a mess from exhaustive mussing, and he said: “Facial illiteracy? What the hell is that?”

  “He cannot read a face,” said my mother, wincing. “He cannot recognize facial or, for that matter, bodily signals. He can’t read people at all. And, Stan,” she said, “it’s true.”

  “Oh, whatever,” I said, kicking the door. “I bet the doctor made that name up right on the spot.”

  “Go to bed, William.”

  “It’s nine o’clock.”

  “You’re a growing boy. Go to bed.”

  “So what does it mean?” asked my father.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “He may have to take special classes. On recognition. Of faces and people. Go to bed, William!”

  I stayed by the door until she came and closed it on me.

  Shoving my ear against the wood, I heard my father’s tones of mild protest and my mother’s rising pierce. “Soldiers!” she was saying. “All dead! He thought they were happy!”

  At the TV, I found Ginny surrounded by her now mended stuffed toys, watching the sitcom about the people who work at the pet store and act like animals. She likes the boss, who talks like a monkey. I tried to look at each actor’s individual face, but all I saw were eyebrows and teeth. No one emerged from the parental bedroom for over an hour, and I fell asleep on the couch. That’s where I woke up with the first light of morning, covered with stuffed bears just barely held together by clusters of staples and tape.

  (There was a moment, once. I was eating dinner with Mom, and Dad was at work late, and Ginny was at a friend’s house learning fractions. I barely remember this; it’s sort of made up, if you want to know the truth. But we were eating spaghetti and cottage cheese, and Mom looked at me, and then all of sudden it was like her face melted; the lines around her eyes all pointed down, arrows down her face to the lines around her mouth, which pointed down, and then her chin caught it all like a net, trapping all the down arrows and feeding them back into her jaw and lower lip, which drooped and sank from the weight.

  She took a sip of her water.

  “Mom, you okay?” I asked.

  “Sure,” she said. “Why?”)

  For about a month, I went to classes across town taught by the long-necked doctor. They involved me and her in a dark viewing room, looking at huge slides of babies’ faces crying and laughing, and I had to tell her which was which. The doctor was stupid, because she kept using the same set of slides, and each time she’d tell me which was which, not realizing that every slide had a small gold number embossed in the corner. I just made notes on my leg: 14 is laughing, 13 is sneezing, 12 is crying, 11 is sleeping, etc. Within two weeks, I got eight out of ten on the test (I missed two on purpose), and she seemed very pleased with both of us. “Let’s see how you do for now,” she said, and she let me have my Saturday mornings back, which I used to climb roofs and mess with people’s TV antennae.

  (I was walking to school with Ginny. She was telling me about her verb project, where she is gathering underappreciated verbs, and putting them to use. “Look, I’m sauntering to school,” she said, doing a little trick with her feet. She tilted her head to the side for a second, and she’s a few years younger than me, and when she squinted, putting her lips to one side, for a second I thought she looked hot. I’m making this up. She’s nine. She crossed the street and yelled, “Behold you later!” over her shoulder.)

  My mother did not pick me up from school again. She was back pounding the streets, looking for a job. She did interrogate me several times at the kitchen table when we were home at the same time, but by now I’d learned my lesson. “His name’s John Gath,” I said to her, as I ate my fifth piece of toast. “He talks the most of anyone, and he is the leader of the group. I like him the best, except on the days when he’s in a bad mood.”

  “John?” she said.

  “John,” I said, chewing the crust. “And his brothers are George and Paul, and his cousins are Rocky and Jo-Jo.”

  “And who talks the least?” she asked, brushing ants into the trash can. I watched them climb out.

  “Jo-Jo,” I said, “is a quiet sort. By the way, my favorite color is blue.”

  “Blue,” she sighed, leaning back on the counter. “That’s a good one. Have you done your homework?”

  “All done,” I said. “Did you get a job?”

 
; “Soon,” she said.

  (We were smoking at the wall at recess, and one of the Gaths handed me a bag of barbecue chips, and when I took it, he had this look in his eye. Glinty. Looking right at me. “What?” I said. “What?” he said.)

  You know what I like to look at? The birdbaths, locked up. The stuffed bear stuck together with staples and tape. The TV. The refrigerator. I like the car. The changing weather. The taste of wrong-color peppermints. The doctor’s neck.

  (There’s a photo of the Robertson family in a blue wooden frame that sits on top of the TV that we got done at the department store’s photo department. I try to focus my attention on the TV, but sometimes I glance up by accident. Mostly I just see hair and all of us in our nice shirts and I remember the dick photographer who made us say “buttercream pie,” but once in a while, I look up and it’s a flash, like the photograph is screaming and everything is imprinted there, everything. Like the shape of my mother’s jaw might as well bleed out the word “disappointment” and my dad’s eyes are way far back and blank in his head and Ginny smiles too big like she’s pouring grout on the world and somebody’s flattened me.

  One night, Mom held it up during commercials and said, “I think this is my favorite picture of us yet,” because she likes how the angle doesn’t show her double chin and she likes to see Ginny smiling with her pretty teeth and Dad with his hair just cut, and how for once I wasn’t scowling at the camera.

  “Look, William, how handsome you are when you’re not being difficult,” she said.

  I shrugged at her. “Can’t see it,” I said. “Sorry.”)

  On a Saturday Afternoon

  I have known them for at least three years, these two; we all went to school together, and at one point I dated the blond but it was brief. The timing was off and both of us were swept along by the river of another match. I have flirted with the brown-haired one for years.

  I have this fantasy, I say one evening, when all of us are slightly drunk, sitting on my apartment steps on Gardner on a clear July night. Would you come back? Four o’clock? Saturday?

  Sure, they tell me, curious. The word marked by brake lights and bitten fingernails. Everybody facing out. We all hold hands at once, and we are all lonely when we go home, but this is helpful, this hand-holding, this sitting on the stoop of my apartment building, watching while other people look for parking.

  I have recently broken up with someone whom I did not expect to break up with, and every morning, the earliest time I wake up is suffused with remembering; I can’t seem to beat that moment, no matter how early I rise. I once thought if I traveled in France I would have a different brain, the brain of a girl who travels in France. I saw myself, skipping through meadows in a yellow-and-blue-print dress. But even with the old buildings, with the bright bready smells, with the painted French sunlight, it was still my same brain in there, chomping as usual, just fed this time by baguettes and Brie.

  In the mornings I write long circular journal entries when I wake up. Too early. Before work. But even though I am making steady proclamations about who I will go for next, and why, and how it will all be different, it is brutal to imagine the idea of meeting a new person. Going through the same routine. Saying the same phrases I have now said many times: the big statements, the grand revelations about my childhood and character. The cautious revealings of insecurities. I have said them already, and they sit in the minds of those people who are out living lives I have no access to anymore. A while ago, this sharing was tremendous; now the idea of facing a new person and speaking the same core sentences seems like a mistake, an error of integrity. Surely it is not good for my own mind to make myself into a speech like that. The only major untouched field of discussion will have to do with this feeling, this tiredness, this exact speech.

  The next person I love, I will sit across from in silence. We will have to learn it from each other some other way.

  On Saturday, there’s a knock at the door right at four, and I open it up. Hi! Hi, hi. We’re all joking and nervous, and they brought beer. Me too. I usher them in. My apartment sometimes reminds people of a warehouse; the space is high and elongated and feels empty. The living room is a stripe. It’s too narrow to watch TV in, so I put the furniture on a diagonal.

  They both look great, thriving out of control. These are solid men, with square kneecaps and loving mothers, who are still sort of awed by women. They have a line of fur instead of hair at the napes of their necks, sometimes dusting the hinge of their cleanly shaven jaws. Me, I’m clothed and workmanlike in overalls with many pockets. A red tank top, legs covered. They have had crushes on me at some point, and me on them, but everyone knew that friendship was best, and it is in this spirit that they walk through my door. They’re good at the greeting hug routine. There is a wild fondness in the air. We grab beers, twist off, fling bottle caps into the air.

  They’re friends with each other, too. Sometimes they play soccer together.

  They said they would do what I asked them to. That’s the agreement. It’s a four o’clock afternoon and the July sun is lazy and inviting and it’s a second-floor apartment, so it’s always a little warm from the rising heat, and here are these two men I’ve captured, inside my house, wearing worn white T-shirts. One of them has a stain right in the middle from the peach cobbler he ate at lunch, left over from the potluck he went to Friday night at Valerie’s. He is the type everyone gives their leftovers to at the end of the party, because they know he will eat them, and he does. Somehow this makes me proud. Whenever these two walk down hallways, or through crosswalks, in their tall boyishness I feel a surge of pride that is faintly motherly and also not. I want to fuck and birth them at the same time.

  Today, they have another beer. Me too. We joke around. We play bottle-cap hockey. I serve cookies on a chipped green plate. They eat them, fast. They have sweet tooths, they say. One prefers the chocolate chip; the other enjoys the texture of oatmeal. They’re deep in the stripe, by the windows at its end, and I sit down in the chair that I’ve placed closer to the door. Stay over there, I tell them, as they swallow the last two bites off the plate. All right, they say. They sprawl out on the carpet, hands propping up their heads, and they know how to own space, how to feel important without realizing it. They have never questioned their right to be alive; it is borne in them, and obvious. One is wearing shorts and has blond hair all over his pale knees. Like poured milk from a glass carton.

  Okay, I say, after the third beer is finished. I bring out tequila. I give each of us two shots. Down, down, down.

  Then: Just touch hands, I say.

  One touches his own hands. No, I say. His. His hand. Touch that.

  It takes until just now for them to realize I want them to touch each other. They have assumed they’ll be touching me. I don’t have shoes on, but I have the rest on, and maybe a ponytail. I’m in the day. Just touch hands, I say. Gently. Please. They look bewildered—not upset, just unsure. They will need my constant reassurance. This is why I will not feel left out.

  It’s okay, I tell them. Just feel his arm. Maybe the back of his neck. Just see what it feels like.

  The sun slants through the curtains as their two hands reach over and they sort of grab at first but then relax. They explore the knuckles, the wrists, the elbows. They don’t giggle, but there is some nervous shifting, some more drinking from beers. Wet barley lips. One is from Oklahoma, and came out west to direct movies. The other lived in Oregon, in a clapboard house with an attic where he gathered bird nests from trees. They remember their first kiss with a girl, the years of masturbating in the shower before their sisters would bang on the door, yelling about hot water.

  They are touching each other’s arms now, with freckles, with downy hair. Touch his stomach, I say, to both. Four eyes beam up at me, frightened. It’s okay, I say. It’s for me, I say. Please. And their hands, shaking slightly, reach down under the loose T-shirts and just glance over their stomachs, which have tiny lines of sweat forming in the creases from
sitting.

  I am in my chair. They feel scared, even from over here, but not awful scared. They’re openhearted and they can stand it. They have untested liberal minds. They are also getting turned on. Their faces move closer together as one grazes the inner arm of the other.

  Kiss him, I say, out loud.

  The light through the drawn curtains is a dark red and partially obscures their clean-shaven faces. They lean in, and their cheeks bump at first and finally touch. Their lips, so soft. They are tentative and frightened, faces pressing gently against each other. Lips meet. Boy lips on boy lips. I love watching them. I could watch them for hours. Their heads leaning and listing, the lips learning what to do, how almost-familiar it all is.

  One stops. Looks at me. Is this all right? he asks. His lips glisten. Why don’t you come join us—

  I’m watching this time, I say. Just watching. You’re so beautiful, both of you.

  The other turns to me, eyes overly brightened. Come on, he calls. Come over!

  I shake my head.

  Absolutely! they both say.

  No.

  I’m on the weird island, over here. They love me too; I’m not totally absented. We all know I’m in the room.

  Keep kissing, I say. I can’t tell you how much I love to watch you kissing.

  Their big young male faces drink more beer and then lean back in and I see the erections, poking up from their pants, and they seem hopeful and nervous and vulnerable, and as they keep kissing, hands moving now down shoulders, to back, to stomach, I tell them to take off their shirts, and they do, because today they listen to me. I will not hurt them. I can only get away with this once. And the shoes kick off, and the pants roll down, and there they are, nude and strong, poking each other in the stomach. More beer. More tequila. Eyes closed. The reddish light flutters on the floor, and cars honk downstairs. I tell the one on the right, the one with the brown curls in his hair, to lean down. To try it out. Please, I say again. Please. My voice is so quiet, but we all hear everything. He bends down. The one on his knees now has on his face a combination of pained concern or confusion over what this might mean and utter joy too, and he opens his eyes and glances at me, and I smile at him, my whole body awake. He can see how turned on I am. There’s a furrow of worry in his brow, so I reach to the overalls straps and unclip them and pull my shirt up so that there are breasts in the room. Visiting. His face lights up, in part because he likes them, but even more because he knows them, he recognizes the shape, they are a marking point for identity and memory.