The Color of Home: A Novel

by Rich Marcello

  “Ready?” Sassa asked.

  “As I’ll ever be.”

  “The universe knew exactly what I needed, to paraphrase one of those books you gave me last year, and sent me Brayden. What he gave me, I’m certain I couldn’t have found from anyone else.”

  “How come?”

  “Because he helped me take an unforeseen step toward myself.”

  The couple sat down at the table next to them. The man reached across and stroked the woman’s hand. Their wedding bands, intricate and handmade, matched. With his free hand, the man placed two cubes of sugar into the woman’s coffee and stirred for her.

  “You really care about him.”

  “I do.”

  “I was so jealous last night.”

  “Do you know that the average emotion lasts ninety seconds?”

  “Really?”

  “What we do after that time is what gets us into trouble. We give ourselves—sometimes for years—to emotions that were meant to last no more than a couple of minutes.”

  “You’re not mine,” he said.

  “True. I don’t belong to anyone.”

  “Nor do I. So . . . why did things end with Brayden?”

  “Because he was a teacher more than a partner. Because he was learning how to see another person after a lifetime of only caring about himself. Because he knew I needed to search more and that I had to finish by myself.”

  “I’m so sorry for last night. Do you want another green tea?”

  “No need. Tea would be great.”

  Calm for the first time in twenty-four hours, Nick approached the counter and ordered more coffee and tea. What had just happened? She’d sat with him, leaned in, and together they blasted away the wedge. She wasn’t moving away. Neither was he. When had she become a lifelong relationship, no matter what? When had he decided that he would always stick by her side? When he returned to her, he softly placed her tea on the table and slid it over. “How do you feel about Brayden now?”

  “Check-in time. How are you doing?”

  “Better. Calmer.”

  “Good. Me too. I’m grateful for Brayden. He’ll always have a piece of my heart.”

  Brayden really had helped her. Nick could see it in her face, feel it in her touch. One person wasn’t enough for her on the way to whole. That was much easier to accept when it was just an idea, just part of a conversation from two years ago. Flesh and bone, time and distance, ego, whatever, had complicated things. “The hardest part is accepting that I can’t give you everything that you need.”

  “I know.”

  “I clearly haven’t even accepted that we aren’t together anymore. Entering last night, I had this fantasy that we’d get back together.”

  She loosely clasped the spoon and stirred her tea for a long time. The fractals in her eyes seemed to float as her gaze went weightless. “Some things are unknowable, Nick. We won’t be able to say for sure how and when we’ll get where we need to go. About all we can do is let it happen and try to stay connected as everything unfolds.”

  “This conversation is a good start, don’t you think?”

  “Yes. It could have driven a wedge between us, but it didn’t. There’s something about telling the truth and then staying in the conversation that’s, well, generative.”

  A grin spread across his face. What to call a relationship that was generative for a lifetime? They were lacemakers. Their job—create vulnerable, fragile works of emotional beauty that, with care, morphed anew time and time again. And do it in a world that seemed destined to tear things apart. “I do feel closer to you now.”

  “A little closer to whole. So, tell me about your year.”

  “Are you up for a short walk?”

  “Sure.”

  “I need to make a quick call, then we can go.”

  • • •

  Nick and Sassa exited Joe’s and headed toward Bleeker Street. He didn’t tell her where they were going until they crossed an intersection about a block away from the studio, and even then, only divulged that he wanted her to meet a friend.

  “A dance studio?” she asked as they entered the building. She put her hand on his shoulder, pushed up on the balls of her feet, and said, “I’m so happy for you.”

  “Wait.”

  They stepped inside the studio and were immediately greeted by a slender, gray-haired woman. “Sassa, this is Adrienne. She’s been my teacher for the past six months. She’s worked a miracle and taught me to dance.” Sassa and Adrienne chatted for a few minutes about dance, about the studio, about Nick as a dedicated, but challenging, student.

  “Would you like to dance?” Palm up, he extended his hand to Sassa.

  “Of course.”

  When he’d booked the studio, he had preselected the songs. Adrienne had them queued up and ready to go. They glided out onto the parquet dance floor. Beautiful mahogany inlays finished the floor and surrounded the two of them, separating them from the rest of the studio. The ceiling, twenty feet high, made the thirty-foot square room seem larger. The walls, painted white, held enormous black and white photos of couples, young and old, dancing.

  They started to triple swing to Marvin Gaye’s “How Sweet It Is.”

  “You’re good,” she whispered.

  Their bodies, fluid, intertwined, found grace, as if they’d been dance partners for a long time, as if they’d discovered a new way to create beauty. They didn’t speak until the last song finished, their rumba to “Love Will Keep Us Alive” by the Eagles.

  “Wow!”

  “Yeah, I even surprised myself on that one.” He imagined Jackie for a moment and smiled, sending her a mental thank you. She was much more than his therapist, and he was finally more than an observer.

  Silent, breathless, and sweating profusely, they plopped down on the floor and leaned against the wall to cool down. He’d made it through the dance knothole, and had no need to fill the silence. Perfect moments followed, rare, beautiful, each like a new song. After an album of them, he invited Sassa back to his apartment.

  As they strolled toward his home, they talked through gestures and half-sentences offered by one and completed by the other. During a lull, they played cutting-each-other-off-as-you-walk, a game they had perfected during their year together. Contentment percolated.

  • • •

  “Nothing has changed!” Sassa blurted out. “All of the same stuff is in exactly the same places.”

  Nick surveyed his living room as if he were detailing it for the first time. The furniture, seemlingly bolted down, sturdied the place. Pictures of Sassa lined the walls in the same order. His Martin guitar stood upright in the usual place. An extensive library of CDs and vinyl records, cataloged alphabetically by artist, remained the room’s centerpiece. The CDs he had pulled from the library to make Sassa Soars, still out of their cases from a year ago, covered the tops of his speakers. The flat screen TV, the one they had watched so many movies on, hung from the same wall.

  She ran her fingers from left to right along the top row of CDs. “Let’s see. Aimee Mann . . . Ani DiFranco . . . Animal Collective . . . Arcade Fire. All the same.”

  “Weak year for new music.”

  “What’s the bedroom like?”

  In the bedroom, the same clothes and shoes lined his closet in the same locations. The empty drawers Sassa had left behind remained empty, and her designated space in the much-too-small closet remained free.

  Smiling, she ran her finger along the top of his bureau. “Just like the living room.”

  A few minutes later, they sat down on the living room sofa, and parked their feet on the coffee table in unison. He flicked on SportsCenter.

  “I see you still like background noise,” she said. “So, tell me about your year.”

  A lot had happened. The crash had made him stronger, had knocked him down to his foundation so he could build wider and eventually higher. Jackie had helped him. Through talk. Through dance. And then there was Halfa. “The first three months, I
didn’t do much of anything. I was down. I wanted you back. I crashed. I worked a lot. I ate a lot. I drank, even by my measure, a lot of Diet Pepsi. I stole weeks and slept almost the entire time. I went to visit my mom.”

  “How is she?”

  “The same.”

  “I miss her.”

  “She misses you, too.” His mom had loved Sassa from the first time they met, as if they’d recognized some common purpose in each other, as if they spoke a secret language. Even after the break-up, she’d stayed connected to Sassa by sending her regular recipes and articles.

  Nick detailed his trip to Sedona: The plane ride with therapist Jackie. How an unexpected conversation about “Dancing Ground” had changed his path. Shaman Halfa and the vibrational energy in the vortexes. Cord cutting. Soul retrieval. The medicine wheel ceremony. Ayahuasca. The old man hallucinations. As he spoke, Sassa, more than attentive, almost riveted, asked a lot of questions.

  After he finished his story, she came back to cords. “During the cord-cutting ceremony, did you reconnect one with me?”

  “Yes.”

  “With modifications?”

  “As is.”

  “Good.” She eased down from the sofa to the floor. Sitting cross-legged, she patted the floor with her hand.

  Pushing the coffee table out of the way, he sat cross-legged as well facing her, and rubbed both of her knees as if he was dialing one up and one down. “During the last part of the trip, I camped two days and nights in the canyon alone. On the first night, I built a fire and played a little guitar. I felt connected to the land and sky, maybe even to a higher power, I don’t know. I fell asleep content for the first time since you left.”

  “Sounds beautiful.”

  “At about three in the morning, I heard something outside. I peeked out of the tent and made out a large gray wolf standing on the other side of the smoldering fire, staring right at me.”

  “Were you scared?”

  “Surprisingly, no. We must have stared at each other for a good five minutes before he ran off.”

  “A sign?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. When I tried to go back to sleep, my family came to mind: Different Sundays when we all ate too much and then crashed watching NFL doubleheaders. Thanksgiving-week trips to Larson’s Turkey Farm, where we picked out the turkey we would eat later that week. Toy runs with my father to Five Guys from Belleville, where he marked down prices himself on Christmas Eve. We filled our mini-van with so many toys that I had to straddle the stick shift on the way home. I fell asleep after about an hour of reminiscing.”

  “Those are great memories.”

  “Yeah.” He had nothing but good memories for the first seventeen years of his life. Did he ever fight with his father? Was there ever any conflict in his family? Did he ever get anything but straight As? Ever lose a game? Truth white-washed with time, with death. Why was that?

  “Where did you go just now?”

  “More about home.”

  “Ah.”

  “The next day, once again quite peaceful, was filled with hiking, meditation, and guitar playing. That turned out to be a good thing, because on the last night in the vortex was something.”

  “How so?”

  “I went to sleep at about the same time. The peacefulness from the day had carried over and deepened. At around 2:00, like the night before, I picked up a noise outside the tent.”

  “The wolf again?”

  “No.” He pressed his palms into his thighs and drew in a deep breath. He wasn’t sure if he should tell her. But that was their deal. Complete truth, with no masks. “Well, sitting outside my tent on a rock about five yards away, I saw my father.”

  “Your dad? Really?” She reached out with both hands and pulled his hand toward her. She gently stroked his palm with her thumb.

  “Yes. We had a long conversation. He asked if I was happy. He wanted to know if I was in love. He wanted to know about you.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I told him the whole story.”

  “I would give almost anything to talk to my parents and sister again.”

  “I know. I thought about that right after I spoke with him.” For a moment, he forgot they were no longer together. During their year as a couple, when at their best, they’d created their own balm through talk. There was nothing else in the world as soothing, as connected, as loving. Yet the balm from the current conversation had come from doing work on their own, and it was somehow better. Maybe there was something to separate-together.

  She smiled, as if she knew his thoughts.

  “Finally, he told me that he was sorry for leaving, for putting me through so much pain, for not taking better care of himself. He promised that, after he left, I could talk to him anytime I wanted and, even if he didn’t answer explicitly, I should imagine what he might say.”

  She swallowed slowly, and tears welled. “What did you say to him?”

  “I mostly wept. I told him how much I missed him. I told him I had felt lost for years and how I changed for the better when I met you.”

  “Do you believe he was real?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe it was an after-effect of the ayahuasca.”

  “He was real, Nick.”

  Sassa stayed with Nick that night. They held each other on top of Nick’s bed without a blanket to cover them, mostly in silence, joined in a way that neither of them fully understood. She’d stayed true to herself for the entire visit, and he’d hung in there with her. They’d practiced truth, and grew as a result of it.

  “Sorry about the rise. I can’t help it,” he said.

  “Probably not a good idea.”

  “I know. It will pass.”

  “I know Brayden was hard to accept.”

  “That’s one surefire way to get it to pass.”

  “Sorry.”

  “I guess he did help you.”

  “I love you for that.”

  “Cambridge in the morning?”

  “Cambridge in the morning.”

  PART 3

  CHAPTER 11

  “Is help on the way?” was the subject line of Rachel Lyst’s email. Nick tapped his fingers on his keyboard as he read the body of her message, a deluge of questions about the online recording process. Dead on arrival. He could always tell. Rather than waste time answering her questions in detail, he replied, Why don’t you give me a call?

  A moment later his phone rang.

  “Hey, Nick, to build on my email, I’ve got a song and could use an edgy backing band. No polish, plenty of edge. Can you help?”

  “Tell me more about the song.”

  “Alternative-punk-folk. I don’t know. I don’t like labels; it’s music, man, you know? I need good drums and bass, and keys if we can strange them up a bit. Maybe an electric guitar, if it’s not overpowering. I can handle the acoustic work and vocals. ”

  “I can do whatever you need. I don’t need much to get started, just your song idea. I can take that sketch and build the full song. You’ll approve every step of the process.”

  “That’s for sure. Well, here’s the thing. I live in the city, and I’d like to check you and your studio out before I hand over any of my extremely limited dollars. No money in music, Nick. Love, that’s all. Do you love? Can you help out a starving artist?”

  “When do you want to visit?”

  “How about now? I’m in the neighborhood.”

  “You’re close?”

  “Hey, Nick, this is New York. You can’t be that far away. Are we on or should I take my business elsewhere?”

  “1423 Avenue J. Call when you get here and I’ll come down to let you in. The buzzer doesn’t work.”

  “Okey dokey.”

  Nick lost himself in mixing an alternative song. The band, the Huffing Posts, blended Zombie-like harmonies with Nirvana-like soft-hard guitars. He loved soft-hard guitars; steep contrast in music had always appealed to him, though it had never found its way into his own songs.

&nbs
p; “Hey, man, the door opened so I popped in,” Rachel shouted over the mix.

  “Give me a second.” Seated with his back to her, he remained engrossed in making minute adjustments on the mixing board. A little more reverb on the vocals. A guitar panned further right. The snare volume upped a tad.

  “Who’s the band? They’re fucking kick-ass.”

  “The Huffing Posts. Good, aren’t they?”

  He wheeled around in his chair and faced Rachel. She stood smiling, flipping a guitar pick between the fingers of her left hand, as a gambler might do with a casino chip. In her right hand, she grasped the handle of a Santa Cruz acoustic guitar case. Small, even in military boots that added a few inches to her height, she had long brown braids and dark brown skin. A white sleeveless pullover shirt highlighted the tattoos on both of her arms. Her jeans were tight and tattered at the knees. He couldn’t make out the detailed tattoo designs from where he was, but they appeared elaborate, artistic.

  She moved closer. One tattoo portrayed an older bearded man and the other outlined a portrait Picasso might sketch of one of his lovers. Peppermint and lemon scented the air.

  “I love your tattoos.”

  “My dad and someone who helped me out once. I probably wouldn’t be here without the two of them, so I did the human billboard thing.”

  “Solid acoustic by the way, I like what Santa Cruz Guitars is building these days.”

  “Me too. Let’s check out your gear. Time’s wasting.”

  “Okay.”

  “How did you end up here?”

  “The Beatles.”

  “What?”

  “I persuaded the owner to renovate and rent me this space for cheap during an all-night, fourteen-shot tequila binge where I inched out a victory in a Beatles trivia contest.”

  “Most famous cult Beatles song?” she asked.

  “‘Rain.’ Not even a close second.”

  “Right on.”

  Beaming, he gave her the tour of the studio, starting with a fully loaded Apple Mac Pro in the control room that, running Digital Performer, acted as the brains of the studio. “I prefer Digital Performer. It’s cheap and sounds just as good.”