The Color Master: Stories

by Aimee Bender

  By then it was well after midnight. The same flicker of TV light still broke against the windowpanes, but I didn’t even know if the watcher was awake until he quickly bounded up to the door.

  “Yes?” said the voice, through the door. A male voice: reedy, elderly.

  “I’m sorry to bother you,” I said. “Did you see what happened?”

  “Something happened?” He pulled back the flimsy curtains that covered the window in the center of the door. He was an older man, probably close to sixty-five. Whitish hair. Bushy eyebrows that could’ve commanded authority but on his face brought to mind squirrels and hairbrushes. He could’ve been my grandfather, except my grandfathers were robust men, who strode through the world and stepped on people, including both of my parents.

  “A hundred people were robbed right next to you,” I said, through the glass. “While having sex.”

  “Robbed?” He looked startled. “Here? Sex?”

  “While you were watching Law & Order,” I said.

  He let go of the curtain and opened the door. He was shorter than I was. Although I was female and he male, I felt very clearly that I was the threat in this situation.

  “Did someone call the police?” he said. “Are you a student?”

  “No police,” I said, waving behind me, at the dark emptiness. “I’m a student.”

  He stared. He was observing me as keenly as I was observing him. I could see the observations floating through his face, him observing, me observing him observing.

  Finally he asked, “Would you like to come in?”

  He didn’t seem scary, and the house looked warm. He led me through the living room. It was inviting, with the flat-screen TV nestled above the fireplace and lavish plants in metal holders marking the corners, everything tidy and clutterless, but not in an oppressive way. In the kitchen, he put on a kettle without asking, which I appreciated. It seemed we both understood that if I didn’t like tea I just wouldn’t drink it.

  The kitchen had pale-green tile and light wooden cabinets. I made a note of the placement of the knife block, just in case.

  He prepared a Japanese barley tea as my hands and cheeks thawed.

  “I lived in Kyoto for many years,” he said when the water was ready, pouring the mugs full. “And I drank this every day. Not the same here. There, it’s fresh, roasted. Here, it was packed long ago. Whispers.”

  He tilted his head to the sitting area, by the window overlooking the empty lot.

  “They’re building a new house there, supposedly,” he said, handing over my mug. “It’s been three years.”

  We sat down and looked out the window together, at the leftover sock.

  “That’s where it happened,” I said, taking a sip.

  “They all had sex?” he said.

  “A hundred of them.”

  “And then?”

  “The guy stole their wallets.”

  “What guy?”

  “The guy who told them to have sex on Mother Earth as a war protest.”

  “Ah,” he said, nodding.

  “You didn’t hear anything?”

  “Not a thing.”

  “I fell asleep,” I admitted.

  We sat and sipped, the warm tea spreading through my chest. Barley tea. It felt good to be doing something. Not that I was quite sure what I was doing. I tried to think up an interesting question to ask him, maybe about his childhood, or his first love, or if he’d fought in any war, when he turned to face me, his squirrel eyebrows up. By then most adults would’ve launched into their usual list of annoying questions—my major, my plans for the future, my hopes and dreams—but he just raised a hand and poked at the air between us, as if to poke those questions aside.

  “Was it a good episode?” I asked.

  “Of?”

  “Law & Order,” I said.

  He shrugged. “I’d seen it before.”

  He poked again at the air between us. Raised his hand, dusted the air aside, put his hand down. Waited. Raised his hand again, pushed at the air, put his hand down again.

  “What are you doing?” I asked, trying to laugh.

  When he did it again, I raised my hand back. While he dusted the air on one side, I dusted the opposing side. I pushed some air at him. He smiled. Pushed it back.

  “Could you do me a favor?” he asked.

  “Depends,” I said.

  He indicated upstairs with his chin. “I need a lightbulb changed in the guest room,” he said. “You’re taller than I am.”

  It was true; I was. I looked at the flight of stairs past the kitchen, the dim light above. It was a small two-story house, probably two bedrooms upstairs, one his, one guest. No sign of a cat, dog, or any other resident. A lightbulb. It was, by all accounts, dumb to go upstairs in the house of someone I did not know, especially a male stranger’s house at one in the morning. With everyone nearby fast asleep. That said, I still felt that if anyone were at risk, it was actually him; I’d trusted what I’d read about following my own fear instinct, and instead of feeling fear, what I felt was a slight thrill or even a flicker of aggression, like I might harm him, like he should be cautious about inviting me up.

  “It’s a dumb idea,” I said, sniffing. “Stranger’s house.”

  “I’ll sit right here,” he said. “I won’t move, I promise.”

  “Oldest trick in the book,” I said. “Lightbulb changing.”

  “It is true, though,” he said.

  I sipped my tea. “Nah.”

  Still, I felt a strange and powerful pull to his second floor.

  “I’ll come by in the daytime with a friend,” I said, “and we’ll change every lightbulb you need.”

  “Sure, of course,” he said, shrugging. “Thank you.”

  He refilled his cup with hot water. From our spot in the kitchen, I could make out the side frames of paintings lining the stairway walls, chosen carefully over time to represent whatever he wanted to observe while ascending. He stirred his tea.

  “Okay, fine,” I said, standing. “Twist my arm.”

  He raised his eyebrows, surprised.

  “I might steal something, you know,” I said.

  “Go ahead,” he said, warmly. “Take whatever you like. It’s the first room on your left. Thank you, thank you so much.”

  I left my mug and climbed the stairs, past paintings of green hills dotted with trees and sheep, painted by a person named Hovick. The old man sat at the table downstairs, sipping his tea. I could hear him, sipping loudly, nearly slurping, and he had been a polite and quiet sipper earlier, so I figured he was doing it to let me know he was staying put.

  “Where’s the bulb?” I asked, at the top of the stairs.

  “On the dresser,” he called.

  The room was cheerful enough—a small bedroom with a twin bed, a vase holding a graceful twig that required no water, and a lush, light-green carpet that matched the kitchen tiles. A desk lamp glowed through a sheer, paisley-patterned shade. On the dresser was the new fluorescent bulb with its squiggly spiral up, and I turned off the overhead light, stood on a wooden chair, and unscrewed the fixture. The bulb was warm. With a bit of balancing, I reached up with the new bulb and screwed it in, and on with the fixture again, and a twist and a turn, and his loud sipping below reminding me I had nothing to fear. I pushed the chair back to the desk and surveyed the room once again, my gaze settling on the bedside table, where a book about Ohio flora lay next to a fluted lamp. “Done,” I called.

  “Thank you,” he said, from the kitchen.

  But I did not feel done. I picked up the book on Ohio flora. Inside, between pictures of dogwood trees, I found pressed petals, wrinkled and overlapping and folded, page after page. He had saved a whole bouquet. I punched the bed’s pillow in the center, to make it look as if a person had slept on it at some point. It was a headless pillow, a pillow that had not made contact with a head, a sight that made me feel inexplicably angry. I moved the twig to the other side of the vase. I looked under the bed and saw
two slippers lined up neatly, the kind with a band over the toes made of floral terrycloth. I shook and emptied the book of Ohio flora petals all over the bed, until it was covered in dry purple flowers, like a honeymoon bed for one.

  Downstairs, the man was staring out the window.

  I settled into my seat.

  “Thank you,” he said again. “I’ve heard so much talk about these fluorescent bulbs.”

  Some kind of mood had descended upon him while I was in the room. His voice drizzled into nowhere as he spoke.

  “Whose room is that?” I asked, reaching for my tea.

  “My daughter’s,” he said.

  “Is she okay?” I asked.

  He turned to me. His eyelids flickered lower. “She lives with her mother.”

  “Where?”

  “In Egypt.”

  “Does she visit you?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “She is allergic to green,” he said.

  He was looking out the window at his little side garden again, so I looked too, at the budding spring trees, half-lit by someone’s porch lamp, and at the hints of grass in the garden, peeking through winter. Soon enough, the whole town would be covered in green.

  “All shades?”

  “Every one,” he said.

  “So why don’t you move to her?”

  “I need it to live,” he said.

  “Need what?”

  “Green,” he said.

  He turned back to the table and resumed what he had been doing before: pushing at the air with that faint, focused look on his face.

  “Egypt has green,” I said, squinting.

  “Not much,” he said. “In the southern part. Mostly browns and golds and blues.”

  “A person isn’t allergic to a color,” I said.

  He kept his eyes on the air between us. “Most people are not.”

  I sipped my tea. I could not wait to tell all this to Arlene. “It’s not like cats,” I said.

  He paused, his hand on the air. “I had this idea,” he said. “The other day. While drinking tea.”

  “Or peanuts,” I said.

  “While looking out this same window,” he said. “I thought that if a young woman ever happened to knock on my door, I would have a job for her. That the young woman could go into Nina’s room. And if she did, it would make the mark of young women and somehow it would bring her—my daughter—closer.”

  He sorted some air to the right, some to the left.

  “I would somehow summon your daughter?”

  He nodded, briskly. “The way we put flowers in a room to bring joy,” he said. “The way we—” With a measured effort, he slowed his gestures and stopped messing with the air and folded his hands on the table.

  I tipped back in my chair. I felt unusually comfortable in his house.

  “By green, do you mean an environmental reference?” I asked.

  He frowned. “No,” he said. “I mean actual green.”

  “But, then, so what if I did summon her? She’d still be allergic, right?”

  “Correct.”

  “And you have green tile and green carpet and green hills on the wall.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you refuse to change your décor,” I said.

  “I need it,” he said. “With less green, I get vertigo.”

  “Oh, come on,” I said, balancing on the back chair legs. “Are you kidding? Did the lightbulb even need changing?”

  “Of course,” he said, “those lightbulbs last twelve times longer.”

  He pressed at his eyes with a napkin. I lifted my hands off the table for a second. Balanced. Swung the chair back down. “Oh,” I said, “speaking of flowers. I think I may’ve spilled some of yours on the bed.”

  He finished his tea. Dabbed his mouth dry.

  “There are no flowers in that room,” he said.

  “The dried ones in the Ohio flora book?” I said, sipping my tea.

  He peered at me.

  “Purple?” I said. “Purple petals?”

  He rose.

  “Was that bad?” I said.

  We headed up together, past Hovick’s pastures. As soon as he walked into the small bedroom, he knelt at the edge of the bed, his knees on the slippers, his hands clutching at the flower petals, clutching and letting go, like they were the most special thing in the world to him.

  I watched for a minute. I could not tell what he was feeling. “I’m very sorry,” I said. “I don’t know why I did that.”

  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, an
d 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.