Эйми Бендер - The Color Master

“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, and 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.