The sun was round and yellow. The city melted away. Lawns and trees and driveways flowed by. Massive houses sat behind hedges. The houses looked like pictures from travel posters: Spanish, Rosie thought; Japanese; English, maybe from some other century. “Where are we?” she said.
“We’re dead now,” Marina said dreamily. “This is the land of the dead. Unfortunately, this civilization wasn’t worth preserving, so all these people fell into their pools and died. Isn’t that sad?”
“Darling—” Jean-Michel sighed. “It’s not for us to judge these people. Scum though they be, it’s just not our job to judge them.”
“No?” Marina looked at him with enormous gray eyes. “So, what is our job?”
“Our job,” Jean-Michel said. “Our job…Right. Well, our job is to make a mockery of our God-given talents.”
“Oh, yeah…” Marina said. “Right…”
Rosie sighed; she was never going to be able to do this stuff…
The red truck rattled and screeched into a driveway; the house at the end of it looked shocked into its whiteness. With noisy rapidity, Jamie and Marina and Jean-Michel unloaded pails and jars and stained rags and cloths, wooden sticks and cans and huge, old sponges, heaping it all up in the driveway like booty. Rosie blinked. “Trash,” Jamie said into her ear. She looked at him. “Trash,” he said again, as if he were patiently teaching a parrot.
The lady of the house came out and greeted them nervously; her glance snagged on Jean-Michel, as if she’d been briefly hypnotized by his elaborate mass of little braids. She probably didn’t see too many black people out here, Rosie thought, who weren’t in uniforms. “I’m so glad you could come,” the lady said confusedly. Jean-Michel inclined his head, disengaging her stare with kingly ease.
Upstairs, the four inspected a room where they were to paint a border of stenciled sheep, and a blue ceiling with white clouds, and then another room, where they were to make a border of stenciled flowers.
“For this she needed us?” Marina said.
Jamie shrugged. “It’s only our prices that can justify the misery of her husband’s existence.”
A carton stood in the corner of the room, containing a whole little life—a jumble of soft toys and dolls, and a small, fuzzy blanket. “Hey, wow—” Rosie said, and the three others wheeled around.
“I was just looking,” she said.
“No, I know,” Jamie said, as Marina and Jean-Michel returned to setting out their tools. “Just, it’s…”
“Fine,” Rosie said. “So I won’t look.”
Jamie gave her a stencil and a round brush, and showed her how to hold them both and to pat the paint onto the wall instead of stroking it on.
It was hard. You had to hold the brush just right and the stencil just right or you’d smear or drip. Rosie’s heart pounded in her ears as she lifted the stencil from the wall. “Right,” Jamie said. “Perfect.”
Did children really like these little sheep? Or was it just the sort of thing adults insisted they like. Would Rosie have liked sheep on her wall when she was little? Sheep: She doubted they would have applied. She doubted these petrified-looking creatures would have improved her dreams any. She liked them now, though, poor things. Now it was easy enough to imagine them jumping over their fences, on their way off to slaughter…
Painted sheep, stuffed animals, ribbons, sweet little-girly things—it reminded Rosie of sitting in the pretty bathroom back at Ian’s with her cappuccino and her bottle of rubbing alcohol and her needle and her hairbrush. “You’re doing good,” Jean-Michel said, and she jumped.
“Thanks,” she said, flushing with rage and shame. Yeah, thanks. She knew perfectly well she was a charity case.
The others laughed and joked—they didn’t even have to concentrate, though it was all Rosie could do to remember what, out of all the rags and brushes and stencils and containers she had to juggle, she was holding in what hand. “Oh, no!” she said; she’d blurred an edge. “No problem,” Marina said, quickly dipping a rag into some thinner and dabbing it expertly against the wall. “See? All better now.” Without looking at Rosie she returned to her own section of wall.
But, after the third time Rosie smeared, Marina sighed loudly. “Sorry, but stencils are not the easiest way to start,” Marina said. She looked at Jamie. “You’ve got to be really, really careful with them.”
“We’ve got too many people doing this anyhow,” Jamie said. “What we really need are some clean brushes.”
He showed Rosie how to clean the brushes and lay them neatly out on a rag to dry. Fuck you, she thought; fuck you, fuck you. But the fact was it wasn’t all that easy to clean the brushes, either. You had to swish them around in a little jar of thinner, Jamie explained, and just keep changing to new thinner until it stayed clear. Changing it over and over, and over and over and over. And obviously, Rosie thought, the thinner was never going to stay clear.
Marina was applying two bands of blue tape to the wall, in order to paint a thin pink stripe between them; the space between the bands didn’t vary by an iota, as far as Rosie could see. Marina and Jamie and Jean-Michel were working away, bending and reaching, with unhurried, engaged precision as the toxic incense of the paint rose up and swirled around them. Their hair was bound up in brilliant scarves, and their clothing and the exposed parts of their bodies were smeared with glistening colors.
There were times Rosie missed her needle so much she could have burst into tears. She’d done just that, in fact—over coffee at some counter, in line at the bank where she went to open a tiny checking account, and once simply walking down the street she’d sobbed loudly, as if she’d been flung at the wall of a prison.
For a few moments the tears would dissolve the distance between herself and her bartered immortality. When the tears were gone, the distance was back, as solid as before. But each time it happened, she felt a bit better—she’d had a little visit.
“How’s it going?” Marina said brightly, not waiting for an answer. All friendly solicitude now that the walls were out of harm’s way.
Rosie wandered into the bathroom they’d been instructed to use. Oily stains were ingrained all up her arms—phantom badges she had no right to wear. Her skin was already sore and stinging from the turpentine she’d rubbed on it, but she worked at the stains with soap, and then shook her hands to dry them. Were they allowed to use the towels? The lady hadn’t said; best not to. Rosie checked the mirror again, and smiled at it falsely. There. All better now.
Stay out of the medicine cabinet. Some joke. Well, what did people like this keep in those things? Jamie had aspirin, and that was about it. These people were more serious, of course. Serious people: Rogaine, Aldomet, Propanolol, Zovorax, Imodium, and oh—there. Fiorinal. Marina with that blue tape! The patience of a robot.
The bottle of Fiorinal was in Rosie’s hand, she noticed. She looked at it, and replaced it in the cabinet. She stared into the mirror, then smiled falsely at it once again. Ha—a person. But what a disappointment that she was the person she’d turned out to be. She reached for the bottle, opened it, and shook about half its contents out into a Kleenex.
She found Jamie and the other two in the second room they were to paint. The lady of the house was with them. “Well,” the lady said. “Now I want her opinion.” She turned to Rosie. “He’s almost got me convinced. And these people”—she indicated Jean-Michel and Marina—“agree with him.” Jean-Michel, Marina, and Jamie stood by, splendid, like rabble in their raggy work clothes, their eyes gleaming and their faces streaked. “You’ve seen the samples, I’m sure. Let’s hear what you think.”
What samples? Rosie glanced at Jamie.
“You can be perfectly honest with Mrs. Howell, Rosie,” Jamie said.
“I can’t do any worse than I’m doing now,” the lady said.
Rosie gasped, as though she’d been slapped. Oh, no?
“Well, Mrs. Howell,” Rosie said slowly, “It’s your house, after all, and no matter what we think it’s y
ou who—”
“I see,” Mrs. Howell said. “So. Four against one.”
Over Mrs. Howell’s shoulder, the others smiled.
Rosie learned a lot there, she thinks. Well, at least she learned something. And though this place downtown is only her second job, she can clean the brushes without wrecking them or going insane, she can stir the paints and put them out and straighten up at the end of the day without making a mess, she can maneuver her scaffold around with a modicum of authority, she always remembers to lock the wheels on Jamie’s so he won’t go flying through the window, she can navigate the treacherous shoals of someone else’s rooms without dripping, spilling, or breaking a thing, she can manage (once in a while) the huge, necessary array of implements and liquids simultaneously, she’s learned to become invisible at will, and, best of all, she can actually do a bit of the painting, even though this job’s so much fancier and more complicated than the one in Mrs. Howell’s house.
It’s beautiful, what Jamie’s done, in Rosie’s opinion—no matter what Jamie has to say about it himself. And it’s all but finished. Even the garlands near the bedroom ceiling are all but finished now.
It was Jamie who painted the forms of the leaves and flowers and fruit, of course, and it was Jamie, of course, who drew them all on the wall in the first place. And Jamie did the complicated shadings and details. But Rosie actually painted a lot of the veining on the leaves and most of the stems, and today Jamie’s going to show her how to make highlights. Without Marina and Jean-Michel around to make her feel terrible, Rosie can manage reasonably well.
A couple of days later Jamie asks Rosie to work the whole following week all alone. “There’s really nothing left for me to do, now that you’re so expert with the highlighting.”
“But I can’t,” Rosie says. “I can’t do it if you’re not there. How am I supposed to know what to do?”
“I’ll draw you a map,” Jamie says. “Look. You know how to do the grapes, right? You know how to do the plums, you know how to do the pears…It’s just a question of where.”
“But that won’t take much more than a day or two anyhow,” Rosie says.
“And there are a few other things that have to be done,” Jamie says. “Look, Rosie, there’s some stuff of my own I really want to work on, and I’m going to go truly nuts if I don’t get to it right away. And you know what’ll happen if we both disappear. I mean, they’ll absolutely send in the Marines.”
“But—” Rosie says.
“You can,” Jamie says. “I’ve seen you work. Rosie, you can do everything that’s going to be required this week. You can do the highlights, you can stand around on the scaffold looking fabulous, and I know you’ll treat all their tastefully priceless shit with the…the reverence it…Have I ever asked you for anything else? Anything? Please. I’m under a lot of time pressure. And besides. Well, look. Actually, also, I’ve met someone.”
Rosie stares, trying to let all the meanings of the words come to her, through a closing gate of panic. “Oh,” she says. “Well. So, I mean, do you need Vincent’s room back?”
Jamie stretches, and yawns. “Hey,” he says in rebuke. “Besides. I doubt this thing with Trevor is going to work out.”
By Monday afternoon she’s already finished the highlights, and, as instructed by Jamie, she’s working with the blue tape, making a thin gold line around the cornice.
According to Jamie, this bit is the easiest of all. Just a thin gold line! It hardly even requires a monkey—a one-celled organism with an opposable thumb would do. Right. Of course, it’s all but impossible to get the tape on straight, to keep the interval between the strips even, to restrain yourself from diving down onto the bed to relieve your aching back and arm, to work the tape off at the necessary glacial speed rather than yanking down the whole damn wall…A thin gold line. The horizonless depth. Tiny little boats, bobbing…Rosie is gazing out the window when the door opens and a woman strides in. “Sorry,” the woman says. “Have to get some things. Hope I won’t be in your way.”
How very tactful, Rosie thinks. But she stays put: do they want her to work or not?
What you can do if something belongs to you! The way you can behave! Rosie always slips into this room, taking care not to disrupt the serenity so carefully tended by Lupe, but this woman just plunges right through it, as though she’d arrived by diving board. Now she’s tossed a suitcase right down on the bedcover—that fragile bedcover. But why not? The suitcase itself is clearly leather, probably as fine-grained as silk.
The woman goes back and forth between the suitcase and the closet. This is the first time Rosie has seen the closets open. The hangers are the puffy, satiny kind, and the suits and blouses on them are delicious colors: colors that could be worn only by someone who expects people to be glad to see her—coral, pale yellow, the most shamelessly pretty blues. There are plenty of built-in drawers in the closet, too, which must have taken someone a lot of time to make, and racks and racks for shoes.
The woman pauses to consider. Her eyes come to rest on a tiny lacquer box sitting on the table. She scrutinizes it for a moment, then reaches out and repositions it, almost imperceptibly.
As if Rosie would have gone near the thing! The woman’s cream silk blouse is escaping from her skirt. She tucks it back in, and Rosie can’t help noticing the little bulge of flesh over the waistband. She did not ask to be up here watching this!
Flop! Into the suitcase with a dark-blue suit. Now a yellow one. Rosie is surprised by something, she notices; what is it? Ah—it’s the woman’s appearance. Well, she does have good legs, this woman, that’s for sure; anybody might be jealous. Anybody at all. And her hair—thick, glossy, dark gold, like something with a lot of calories. People must just plunge their hands in and grab fistfuls.
But she isn’t actually beautiful. And, Rosie judges, she probably never really was. She must be around forty, and she looks like she’s been used to getting her way every minute of those years. Well, of course. And maybe people say she’s beautiful without actually looking. But if she were just a few pounds heavier, Rosie thinks, everyone would see how it worked: sheer brute force. No one would mistake it for charm or ability or intelligence, let alone beauty.
The woman rolls the two suits up into plastic bags—no question she knows what she’s doing. She jostles everything about in the suitcase, roughly and expertly, snaps the bright clasps closed, and clicks on a little lock. She pulls her suit jacket from the closet and puts it on. Goodbye, little bulge! “Harris—” she calls. She stops to listen and then sighs with exasperation, as though she were an actress in a play. “Harris?” And Rosie’s the audience. The woman picks up the suitcase and hurries out of the room.
Well, she’s gone.
But the sliding door of the closet is still open. It looks as if someone had slashed the wall, and its insides are all exposed, spilling out of the cavity. A scent, too sweet for Rosie, swells out from it, as if it were warm.
The room vibrates with silence, as though the woman had slammed the door on her way out. There are a few slight dents in the bedcover, and on it is something green—a cool green. Rosie wipes her hands with a thinner-drenched rag and climbs down from the scaffold, her legs shaking a little, to look.
It’s a pair of gloves—palms up, wrists tilted away from one another, fingers of one adjacent to the fingers of the other, all slightly curled, as though the body they belonged to were responding to someone’s touch.
Rosie stands, looking; she glances at her own hand: clean, to all appearances. She extends it and picks up one of the gloves, holding it gingerly between her thumb and index finger. It’s amazingly pliant and soft—slightly adhesive.
And so small! Is it possible that this woman’s hand is smaller than Rosie’s? Ladies…used to use talc to get those things on: Rosie observes this fact her memory offers up as if it were a strange object for which she’s just discovered a fascinating use. How tight those gloves must have been—slick smooth, no bones, no veins…
“Ah,” the man says. “Kind of you, but you wouldn’t have found us in any case. That parking lot’s the size of France.”
Without moving from the spot, he extends his hand. His eyes are almost black. Watching him, Rosie reaches the second glove from the bed and then steps forward to drop both into his outstretched palm.
“Thanks.” His hand closes around the gloves, and he smiles. “Thanks very much.”
On Tuesday the room seems different. To the eye, it’s as usual: Lupe has been here, the closet door is closed, the bed is traceless. But something is altered.
Rosie reruns the scene that took place right here the day before, trying to slow it down so she can search into its folds and crevices. But with each repeated exposure the scene slips more out of control. Rosie knows very well, for instance, that she was not watching from far above as the man extended his hand. She could not have seen her hair escaping from the scarf it was bound up in. She could not have seen the glistening smear of fresh paint just under her own ear at her jawbone any more than she could have seen herself standing there, staring, dropping the green gloves into the outstretched palm. She could not have observed her T-shirt flutter slightly with her breathing.
There’s only tinkering left—cleaning up her mistakes and blotches, and she might as well refine some of the highlights and some stems that now look amateurish to her. In the late afternoon, she organizes things for the following day, putting lids on cans and cleaning brushes, and goes to wash up and change out of her painting clothes. The splendid silk slip is still hanging over the screen in the bathroom. Rosie looks at it. She turns away, concentrating on cleaning off the paint she always ends up streaked with, even under her clothing, in the most improbable places, but the slip behind her seems to have some claim on her today; she’d just as soon she’d never seen inside that woman’s closet.
The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg Page 59