Эйми Бендер - The Color Master

“I am too old—” he began, and she shushed him. She took his weathered, hairless hand, and placed it gently inside her shirt, on her breast, and she just let him hold her there, listening to her heart beat. In some quiet basic way, it was the opposite of the scarf given to her by the old woman the previous month. Here was a tasselless moment, without instruction or order or guilt or implication.

“Thank you for calling me,” she said, and she loosened the bowl of his palm, and said good night. His eyes were closed then. Not asleep, just cupping the tears that had gathered under the lids. She let herself out. The night was windy but clear, and since she had already eaten dinner, earlier than expected, the time felt unusually spacious. She stepped into a music club and listened to a violinist play Bach while a piano player waited his turn, and she sipped a glass of wine so acidic it seized her throat lightly, and she thought of the man who was sleeping now, and although she still dreamed of both of them often, she never investigated into Hans again.

The story would be over about Hans Hoefler except for one piece.

The week after the secretary’s visit, the brother decided to return to the grave; something about her visit made him want to go back.

It was a gray-skied October morning, and the brother wheeled over the knots of grass to the headstone, where he stared at Hans’s name for at least half an hour.

It is difficult to want to tell a grave that it is not immortal. It’s so obvious at that point. And yet the brother wheeled as close as he could, and, leaning down from his chair, he grasped the cold sides of the headstone with his hands.

“You weren’t that powerful, kid,” he cried. “You died, didn’t you?”

And yet, even as he said it, he realized, with new clarity, that Hans had killed himself. And that it did not seem like an act of fear or great despair. It seemed almost like some sort of trick. The vampire’s child, from that horror film, had been a creature thousands of years old. Perhaps Hans had thought he would live forever, would curse and be cursed forever, would rule the world with his mind, forever. No one could ever prove to Hans now that he was as mortal and helpless as the rest. He had circumvented the question.

It altered the taste of the brother’s spit, thinking this. He took his hands off the headstone and wheeled away. It was beginning to rain anyway, and a heady mossy smell overtook the grassy hills of the cemetery. He wheeled as quickly as he could, past the chapel, through the iron gates, to the steadying relief of slick wheels on hard concrete. He popped open his umbrella and fixed it to the arm of his wheelchair. The rain was loud and pointed.

Had we left him here, the bitterness would be where we saw him last and maybe where he died, for wherever we see him last is where we assume he will stay forever. But we will not leave him there. Soon after the visit, his mouth relaxed, and within a week, there were tears, and the tears changed the muscles of his face, because they were not bitter tears but tears of sadness—sadness at the parents who had died long before, tears for Hans and his desperate delusions, tears for his country’s impossible recovery, tears for the fact that life happened once and choices were exactly what they were. Hans was still dead. The world went on perfectly fine without him, just as the war had started, happened, and ended without his playing a role as either hero or villain. One could not spend one’s life in the imaginings of another life; if the brother spent too much time with that, the wheelchair would crowd out all other thoughts. So he poured himself a glass of cold coffee from the coffee jug which he had put, unlidded, into the refrigerator, and the caffeine relaxed him, clarified his sight, as he looked out the window into the rainy afternoon. He would not call the auburn-haired woman who had been so kind, because what they had shared had been completed. But he could keep his eyes open now for the next point of meaning. He could watch the sky all day long. He could return to the restaurant with the fine herb omelettes where he had deliberately left his umbrella because he hadn’t wanted to leave. There was love to be felt, and discovered, still. There was a powerlessness that was kind.

I was at the Bev with Sylv and we were eating Chinese food takeout from Panda Express and I said about how the chicken chow mein would be a good street, like Chow Main? Like a Main Street in a food part of town? Get it? And then Sylv said she had to go to the bathroom and she left for a really long time. And I got nervous because she was gone too long and I thought maybe she’d even left the mall. Because maybe she is part Chinese and I just didn’t know? Her hair is black. And maybe I had totally offended her with my Chow Main Street idea; Mein and Main are not the same and here’s me, trying to make the Chinese into something American, and that is offensive, right, like I was that loud American taking over all the Chinese words, like saying it was Ciao Main or something, like Italian Chinese? And Chow is our word for eat—chow—but in China it’s probably something really different. So I was feeling really bad and really racist by accident and she came back and sat down and it had been I swear twenty minutes? and I said, Sylvia, I just wanted to say I’m really, really sorry about the Chow Main comment, and she looked at me through her new blue eyeliner which I noticed just then and said, What? And I said, Just I didn’t mean to offend you with the using of Mein as Main, I know that’s different, and she said, I don’t know what you’re talking about, Louanne. And she took a big sip of her Diet Coke. Behind her, by the movie theatre, two girls from school who are bitches strolled by; Sylv didn’t see, she was going on about how she’d checked her messages and Jack hadn’t called even though he said he would but maybe he was caught in traffic. Even though he has a phone? But I’d never say that out loud. Sylv’s the first friend I’ve had in a long time who really is way high on the friend pyramid, and the way she dances! She bops around really energetically but she’s also still. Like she’s moving her torso but her feet don’t move, and then sometimes she’ll take one step, and it feels like a thesis statement. Like it is a topic sentence about her butt.

And then I couldn’t help it, I made another Chinese joke! Because I said that the popcorn shrimp would be good to take to the movies. And she was quiet and I thought: Oh my God, I did it again, didn’t I? Why do I do that? And I was about to say I was really sorry again when her cell rang and I could tell it was Jack because her whole face got all shimmery. It made me feel a little bad, actually, to see her face change like that. Because I think I’m pretty good company and I even have a few jokes I keep stored in my mind just in case there’s nothing to say but from the look on her face it was like she was released from jail. And she giggled to Jack, and I thought maybe the popcorn shrimp joke was okay because there were no Chinese words in it? And did she have a Chinese cousin somewhere or what? But it didn’t matter if she did or not because this is America so she should be offended anyway, on behalf of America. I should have offended myself. And I just thought maybe it was in bad taste, because movie popcorn is an old tradition but doesn’t take a whole lot of skill but popcorn shrimp, for all I know, could be passed down from many years of Chinese cooking classes and generations only to show up here at the Bev food court for all of us to enjoy. I really liked mine. I ate it all and it was kind of sparky in my mouth and then I ate two of hers, and I would’ve eaten more but she gave me that look with her eyebrow up and then she threw them out in the trash, which was hard for me just because they’re so delicious, but I wasn’t going to pick them out of the garbage or anything. Even though the garbage looked pretty clean.