Michael Martone - Four for a Quarter - Fictions

CONTRIBUTOR'S NOTE

Michael Martone published his first book, Big Words , in graduate school. The children's book could only use thirty age-appropriate words taken from the Dolch Word List. A kind of poetry.

CONTRIBUTOR'S NOTE

Michael Martone grew up in Fort Wayne. Philo T. Farnsworth, inventor of electronic television, was his neighbor. Martone spied on Farnsworth. He watched the inventor watch the local stations sign off.

CONTRIBUTOR'S NOTE

Michael Martone grew up in Fort Wayne. Each August, his mother took him downtown to shop for new underwear (briefs). Always August meant underwear. Later, married, Martone switched to boxers.

CONTRIBUTOR'S NOTE

Michael Martone worked for the Fort Wayne newspapers, where he wrote the obituaries and maintained the morgue. Everyday he would add details to his own obit he kept on file.

32-V

SOAP OPERA

32-V-1

If you ask him, her husband finds it strange that she paints and repaints so often the living room of their house. If you ask her, and he never does, she would not tell you the real reason she paints and repaints the living room of their house. She paints and repaints the living room when she believes she will, finally, break it off with her lover of long standing, a man she has slept with, off and on, for a dozen years now. Sometimes she paints after she has told him it is over, painting as a distraction, or painting as a reward, or painting as a dramatization that she has moved on, but, by the time she finishes, she has called him or he has called her. Inhaling the heady odor of the drying paint, she weeps into the phone to say she wants to meet again. At other times, she begins to paint to build up momentum to tell him it is over, the painting a kind of mental conditioning, a signal for her to signal her lover that their affair must come to an end. It is perhaps the thick rich smell of the paint, the vapor of its evaporation, that is the trigger — canned inspiration. That perfume's endnote is the endnote of the affair. Or, perhaps, the end is signaled by the visual stimuli of blur, the blur the paint-mixer makes at the paint store as it mixes the cans — the cans vice-locked in place with the thumbscrews, plates, and springs. The electric motor whirs, the slurring glug of the liquid inside the cloud of can, that metallic blubbering blurring. Or there is the folding and the unfolding of the paint-splattered drop cloth with its sloppy archeological record of the past paintings, the drips and smears in stark contrast to the pristine walls whose color never really has time to age or dull or even fade. Sometimes the paint hasn't had time to dry, has barely even dried before she begins to mask out the window sills and doorjambs with the blue, blue masking tape whose sound, that long zipped ripping, also contributes to this ritual of change — the whole elaborate complex of her particular compulsion that the larger project, consciously and unconsciously, conspicuously represents. To mask. It is complicated. It has never been easy for her, the affair, and the energy expended in meeting, the anxiety of discovery, and the persistence of guilt — all of it goes into the walls regularly. Painting draws this thing to a close, and painting promises a new beginning. Clean slate. Eggshell finish, of course. And painting, the sheer act of painting, is a soothing contemplative repetitive exercise, an applied yoga of application, that allows her to meditate on the course of the affair, its ups and downs, her marriage, its lefts and rights. As she paints she eyes the various shades of aching grief, the tint of ecstatic pleasure. She paints with brush and roller. She stirs and stirs, watches the paint slide down the stick, drip, like paint, into the soup of this occasion's color. The drips drip, disturb the surface tension on the surface of the paint in the can. She knows, now, these four walls intimately. Here the slight buckle of the load-bearing, there a water stain that she never quite seals or covers. She's spackled again, patched the holes made by the picture hanging. The wall opposite the window warms differently than the wall with the window. Painting the four walls again brings her face to face with memories of painting these four walls before. In that corner she thought this, or along the floorboard, there, she thought that, and when she gets to those places again with this new paint she will remember what she was thinking two or three coats ago and remember remembering, just a coat before, what she was thinking and remembering about her thinking now all mapped on the wall, a location that coordinates with the wiring in the gray matter of her brain. Here around this outlet she thought of her thinking, thinking about her gray brain. She loads the brush — always a new brush — to begin again to paint the living room. The furniture pushed to the center of the room covered by the dappled drop cloths that form a kind of scale model of an idealized mountain range, its glacial folds falling to the floor covered by the new unspoiled ice-blue tarp.

MARBLEHEAD

32-V-2

It will be a gray this time, another gray. She is thinking this, this gray, even while her lover is finishing behind her. Her hands are flat against the wall, pushing the wall to push back against him as he pushes into her. She has already come. The wall in front of her is a gray. She can't be sure. There's a trick of the light in the room as the late afternoon shadows break across the surface before her eyes. She senses an unevenness, what seems to be another kind of shadow, a shadow of the drywall in the space between her spread arms, flexing, springing back against him. No amount of paint can disguise it, a sloppy application of the mud, that lack of sanding. Tomorrow she will look through the paint chips for the right gray. There are hundreds of chips, each tweaked to register the slight variation of brightness, intensity, saturation. After she has been with him, she likes to paint the living room of her house. She has lost count of the number of times she has painted the living room. She has been seeing him a dozen years. There must be a dozen dozens of layers of paint, a gross of layers. How many layers will it take to contract the volume of the room, to build up, to fill in the in of the room? She likes to stay with the neutral colors, the whites and all the off-whites, the grays, and the other grays. Other colors bleed through the new paint, taking too long to cover, needing too many extra coats to cover. The paint's been rolled on here in this room or maybe sprayed. He is moving faster and his hands have left her breasts and moved to her hips. And in the mix, she thinks she sees, some sparkle, a mica fleck. At least it isn't paper with its patterns and seams. Her husband never asks why she paints the living room over and over. He compliments her on the room once it is done as she washes the brushes in the sink, asks her if he can move back the furniture. Her lover likes to make love to her after she has made love to her husband. She doesn't ask him why. The color of come, she thinks, is the color of this wall, the wall she is looking at as her lover finishes behind her, inside her. It lacks the pearlescence of semen though, cloudy nacreous mix of light and its reflection, the wet paint sheen that encapsulates the flat depthless milt beneath the shiny marble glass skin. She likes to watch it dry. The come. The paint too. She sits for hours in the living room, after she's finished painting it once again, to watch it take on its color, steep and deepen. Sand. Stone. Marble. Mountain. She imagines that a woman somewhere thinks of the names for all the grays, a kind of poetry. Now, he tells her when he is about to, stops, holds still, then does, waits, waits, waits then slides out of her. She lunges away, disconnects, no longer up on her toes, collapses forward, falls onto the wall as if the wall emits its own gravitational pull. She's drawn in, adheres. She presses her whole body along the wall, flattens herself against it, wants to pass right through it into the next room. She turns her head to the side to feel its cool color, feel its pallor, the pigment rub off on her breasts, her belly and thighs, her flushed cheek.