The Other Half

by Jess Whitecroft

  There’s no sign of Chris, and I’m eager to find something to clean, so I put on my work clothes and head downstairs. The parlor is on my left, the living room on my right, the two rooms separated by a wide hallway, with a fireplace of its own and bookshelves built into the wall on either side. The stairs creak as I go down them. I go into the living room, which is the biggest room on the first floor. I don’t think I can stomach the parlor yet.

  The living room carpet is old and brown. The walls are a tired shade of that harvest gold shade that screams ‘seventies’ as loudly as the paneling in the parlor. The fireplace is big and might once have been beautiful, but it’s been painted who knows how many times. Beneath the mantel is a woodburning stove, and I start there, since there’s ash and crap all over the place. It’s only when I get through the first few layers of grime on the fireplace tiles that I realize they have been painted the same deathly tobacco brown as the carpet. As I remove the paint I see that there’s green underneath, a deep bottle green that gives me the same buzz as that glowing red tulip above the front door. It’s like finding buried treasure, and I feel like a kid again as I carefully scrub away the paint.

  “Hey.”

  He startles me. I didn’t even hear him come in. He moves quietly for such a big guy.

  “You sleep okay?” I ask, but it’s a dumb question. Of course he didn’t. He looks like his own ghost. His skin is ashy and there are dark circles under his puffy eyes.

  “Nope,” he says, folding his arms tight across his chest, his elbows cupped in his palms. “Kept thinking of my own bed. Which is another thing that’s now completely ruined for me.”

  Holy shit. Does this mean Legolas got it on in their bed? That’s rough.

  He perches on the edge of the rickety futon couch, still hugging himself against the morning chill. His feet are bare and he wears a pair of old, old jeans, the kind where the denim has worn until it’s soft as a second skin. His thighs fill them out nicely, but it’s hard to picture the person he is when he’s not as wrecked as he is right now. The elf prince has done a real number on him.

  “So,” I say. “When did this all go down, anyway?”

  “Yesterday.”

  “Yesterday? Holy shit, man. No wonder you’re so raw.”

  Chris sniffs and his eyes leak again. “That’s a good word for it,” he says, and distracts himself quickly, turning his attention to the fireplace tiles. “What are you doing down there?”

  “I was cleaning,” I say. “But then I realized I was taking the paint off. Someone painted the tiles. Who does that?”

  He gets down on his hands and knees beside me. One of the tiles is almost completely paintless now, revealing a molded rosette pattern. The glaze is cracked all over, but I like the fine, spidery lines. They speak of age, and things built to last. He runs his fingertips over the tile with a care that makes me think that – if he let me – I could like him. He can mouth asshole words like ‘probate’ and ‘tautology’, but the way he touches that tile makes me think he cares about beautiful things, cares about them beyond the usual rich-person desire to simply own them.

  “They painted the fireplace, too,” he says, looking up at it.

  “That’s gotta be more than one layer.” The fireplace and mantel are all one piece, but it’s been painted an ugly shade of beige. Badly. You can see where the paint has run before it was dry, and in places it’s wrinkled like nail polish, when you put on a second coat before the first is dry.

  Chris puts his hand against the fireplace, then he picks up the steel wool and starts to scrub gently at a spot near the floor.

  “Be careful,” I say. “That could be wood under there. You’ll scratch it.”

  I watch as the beige comes away to reveal brown and I want to stop him, but at the same time I’m curious. He keeps scrubbing and beneath the brown there’s black, then blue, then more brown. Layer after layer of paint, until there’s no more left and we’re staring at a bald, blue-gray spot. When I reach out to touch it the spot is smooth under my fingers, and cold.

  “Is that marble?”

  “I think so,” he says. “Even through the paint it felt too hard and cold to be wood. I think it’s all one piece.”

  “All marble?” That bald spot has made me greedy, and my head is spinning with the thought of what this place could be. All that history, all those Victorian glories waiting to be discovered. “Let’s take the paint off.”

  He sits back on his heels. “With what?” he said. “You’re going to scrub all that down? More to the point, are you even supposed to scrub it down? What if we damage it?”

  “We’d have a hard time making it look worse than it does already.”

  Chris gets up and walks out of the room. I follow him into the kitchen, where he’s checking his phone. “It says we need a stripper,” he says, after a brief Google session.

  “That would be me.”

  He doesn’t laugh. “What?”

  “Oh. Joke,” I say. “Probably would work better if you knew I was actually a stripper, but never mind.”

  The phone in his hand shudders. He shudders right back at it and sets it down on the shelf of Becky’s Hoosier cabinet. “That must be…interesting work,” he says, with a cool politeness that would have made me smile if he didn’t give the impression that he was covered in more tiny cracks than the tile I just uncovered.

  “It’s okay,” I say. “I do mostly bachelorette parties. I won’t say the girls don’t get a little grabby from time to time, because they do. Like that time with the barbecue sauce.”

  He blinks. “Barbecue sauce?”

  “Sweet Baby Ray’s. Ended up exactly where you think it did, and that wasn’t even the worst thing that happened to me that night.”

  “Why? What else happened?”

  “Well, that was the night your aunt died, so…”

  He leans heavily on the back of a chair. “You were there? Here?”

  “Yeah. She called me, I came over and there were paramedics all over the place. They wanted to take her back to the hospital, but she didn’t want to go and then she had that…”

  “Embolism,” he says.

  “Yeah.” I can still hear the sound she made when her breath stopped. “I never actually saw anyone die before then.”

  Chris exhales. “I’m so sorry.”

  It is what it is, I start to say, but I stop myself. He’s right. It does mean nothing. Maybe even less than I’m sorry for your loss or thoughts and prayers. Just another one of those noises we make to keep us from feeling like complete monsters.

  “Oh my God,” he says. “The funeral.”

  “What about it?”

  “The whole time I didn’t even think to ask you how well you knew her. It didn’t even occur to me that you might have been the last person to see her alive, because I was too busy whining about my boyfriend being too pretty.”

  “It’s okay,” I say, although he’s not totally wrong.

  “No, Jody,” he says, and it’s the first time he’s ever called me by my name. “It is not okay. I am such a fucking asshole.”

  “You’re not. Come on. Think about it. We were strangers. You were going through your own shit, I was going through my own shit. Our shit was very much separate, and that doesn’t make us psychopaths. That’s how most people live their lives.”

  He sniffs. “It doesn’t make it right.”

  His phone demands attention again, but he just gives it the stinkeye.

  “You gonna answer that?” I say.

  “Nope.”

  “Is it him?”

  “Probably,” he says. “But like you say, that’s his shit and I’m dealing with my own right now.” His stomach gurgles audibly and he blushes. “And I’m definitely not dealing with it on an empty stomach. Is there food? I can’t remember the last time I ate.”

  I make a mental inventory of the fridge. Cold pizza, some sausage links and a carton of Half and Half. “Why don’t we go into town? Grab some breakfast. May
be we could get some paint remover while we’re there.”

  “Sounds like a plan.”

  We go into town. It’s like having breakfast with a ghost, the ghost of someone who has been very recently and very brutally murdered and can’t quite figure out that he’s dead yet. He moves as though the world has too many sharp edges and when he reaches out to pick up the salt shaker he looks genuinely surprised to find that it’s solid.

  There’s a moment where he remembers something that hurts him. His eyes get wet and the sheen of tears on them makes them look green as grapes. I nudge my knee against his beneath the small Formica table and I’m surprised when his knees come together around mine, clamping it. He looks at me in a kind of panic, and the rush of lust is so unexpected that it almost steals my breath away. It takes me back to the big, saggy bed, only this time we’re fully naked, with my legs wrapped around him and his tears pooling on my breastbone. I’m sore and bruised and glowing from playing willing shock absorber to all his hurt and rage, my lips moving against his hair as I make the appropriate noises. It’s okay. Everything’s going to be okay.

  “Are you okay?” I ask, and the spell is broken. He relaxes his knees around mine and forces a thin smile.

  The hardware store makes things better. All those tungsten screws and tins of chemicals seem to give us a rush of testosterone to the brain and we’re all boys again, grunting suggestions as we pretend to know even the first thing about home improvement. He knows even less than me. In New York – he confesses – he called out a plumber to fix a trickling toilet and then almost totally lost his mind when the plumber couldn’t make it, leaving him stuck listening the trickle and getting up to pee five times a night. When his sister came round, lifted the cistern lid and turned off the water, using a butter knife as a screwdriver, he reacted like she’d just parted the Red Sea.

  “I don’t know how to do anything,” he says, as we pack away groceries. “I’ve turned into that millennial meme about how we’ll never be homeowners, because we waste all our money on avocados. And it’s probably just as well, because I thought a stopcock was like a cock block, only more aggressive.”

  I grab the can of paint remover, eager to get into it all over again. He was very particular about getting all the right things to do the job properly – plastic scrapers instead of metal, so as not to damage the marble underneath. He bought face masks to keep us from breathing in fumes, and when I open the can he starts looking worried.

  “It said to use only in a well-ventilated room,” he says.

  “Yeah?” I say, waving an arm around the living room. “There’s a gap under the windowsill that’s as thick as three of my fingers put together.”

  He goes to look. “Oh shit. What is that in there? Newspapers?”

  “Yep. It’s probably going to get chilly over the winter.”

  “No kidding. Is it even safe to live here?”

  “Who knows?” I say, and slather on the first of the paint remover with a brush. He lets out a motherly gasp and hurries over with the mask I forgot to put over my nose and mouth. I don’t see what all the fuss is about. I’ve breathed in worse poisons just walking down the street, and he definitely has, being from New York and all.

  We smother the fireplace in the jellyfish-like goo, then sit back at a safe distance. He looks horrified when I start assembling a joint, as if the room is so full of fumes that my lighter is going to send it sky high, but he doesn’t turn it down. I expect he’s desperate to have something to take the edge off, and we get a little bit too into it, until we’re sliding down the couch cushions and staring at the fireplace, waiting for the paint to blister.

  “I think this was a mistake,” he says.

  “Huh?”

  “I’m serious. I can’t feel my lips. Do you think we just inhaled a bunch of paint thinner?”

  We’re over six feet away, but sure. Why not? “Almost definitely,” I say.

  He screws up his nose. “Paint thinner and weed. Well, that’s…”

  “Hey, don’t knock it. We’re living the New Hampshire high life, Boo.”

  For a moment I think he’s about to giggle, but he sobers again. He’s obviously a reflective stoner. “I thought New Hampshire high life was Oxy?”

  “Nah. Oxy’s getting old school. It’s all Fentanyl these days. Or that Carfentanyl shit.”

  “Oh, I’ve heard of that. Is that the one where you inhale literally two grains of it from fifty feet away and it puts you in the hospital for a year?”

  “Yep. At twenty-five feet it skips the hospital and dumps you straight in the cemetery. Like, what the fuck? Why would anyone even make a drug that strong? Was it some kind of pharmaceutical dare or something?”

  “Well, I guess you can’t get much more out of it than dead,” says Chris.

  “I swear, pharma in this country is out of control.” I’ve got the whole rant ready to go, about Oxy and pill mills and Purdue, but his mind is elsewhere.

  “If you ever want to talk about it…” he says.

  “Hmm?”

  “About Becky. I know it must have been rough for you to be there and all…”

  “Yeah. Thanks.” It’s sweet of him, but I’m really not in the mood. “Also, you know – you. If you ever want to talk about your thing.”

  He pushes his lips out as he exhales. “Thank you, but I don’t think I’m ready to do that without screaming yet.”

  “Okay. I get it.”

  Chris looks over at me. He looks tired, but better than he has all day. “Yes,” he says. “I think you do.” He gives me a small, sad smile. “You’re really nice.”

  It’s back again, that same unexpected wave that hit me in the diner, only this time we’re alone and there’s less than a foot between us. Such a tiny distance to cross, but I can already taste his tongue and feel the weight of him on top of me.

  “Stop it,” he says.

  “Stop what?”

  “You know what. I’m not going to have sex with you.”

  “Uhm, who said I wanted to?”

  He gives me a comic sidelong look and for the first time I can see the person beneath the damage. Softer, warmer. Playful. “Queen, please,” he says. “I saw the look on your face.”

  “You must be confused,” I say, plastering on the most innocent expression I can muster with this much of a buzz on. I’m suddenly hyperconscious of my facial muscles. “It’s the paint thinner. It’s getting to you.”

  “Really? Is that what it is?”

  “Totally.”

  “Okay,” he says. “I’m just going to put it right out there; we are not going to have sex.”

  “Fine with me,” I say, and almost mean it. “I don’t do rebounds anyway. It gets messy, and I don’t do messy.”

  “Good,” he says, folding his arms and staring straight ahead.

  “It is. It’s great that we got that cleared up. Like adults.”

  “Exactly. I mean, when you think about it we’re going to have way too much to do around the place to have any kind of time for sex anyway.”

  “You’re right. Lots of other things to do.”

  “Like getting fucked up on weed and paint thinner,” he says.

  “Absolutely.”

  I feel the couch shake. My first thought is that he’s finally given in to what he’s been holding in the whole time and started to cry, but then he lets out a loud, honking snort from behind his cupped hand and I realize it’s a different sort of damburst.

  And it’s really kind of beautiful. He rocks back into the couch, head thrown back as he gives into the giggles. It’s the first time his body language has been anything but closed and protective. The air bursts out of him in a wheeze that sets me off.

  “We are literally…” he says, with another snort in the middle, “Literally watching paint melt.”

  “So? It’s better than watching it dry.”

  I can’t stop laughing, and neither can he. His smile is white and so infectious that I know without a shadow of a dou
bt that Elf-Prince Zoolander is the dumbest motherfucker in the entire state of New York right now.

  6

  Chris

  “I’m coming up there.”

  “No, you’re not,” I say, for what feels like the twentieth time today. “This house is not baby proof. I’m not even sure it’s adult proof. There’s paint thinner and holes under the windowsills and…debris everywhere.”

  That’s partly my fault. I started ripping off the rotten baseboards in the dining room and couldn’t stop. It was like picking a scab; I couldn’t resist it, even though I knew it was going to bleed.

  “Debris?” says Jo. “It didn’t look that bad the last time I was there.”

  “It needs a lot of work,” I say, peering around the doorway, because I hear Jody stomping about in the hall. He’s too quick for me, but I notice he’s left a puddle on the floor behind him. It better not be pee. I don’t think he’s in the habit of peeing on floors, but so far I have to admit he comes off slightly feral. I peer into the kitchen. Jody – wearing nothing but a pair of Doc Marten boots – is happily washing his balls from a bucket in the kitchen sink. The upstairs bathroom is already too cold to contemplate getting naked in, which is only a partial explanation for why he’s turned the kitchen into spongebath central.

  “It’s just a very R-rated sort of place right now,” I say, ducking back into the dining room. “I’ve taken off some baseboards and dealt with some of the rot and now it looks like that house in Fight Club.”

  “Chris, please don’t go off on some nihilist Palahniuk thing. I don’t think Mama’s nerves could take it. She’s already terrified we’re going to find you dangling from a light fitting.”

  I laugh. I can’t help it. “Yeah, I don’t think so,” I say, glancing up at the chipped plaster ceiling rose. One corner of the ceiling looks at least four inches higher than its opposite. “I doubt any of the fittings around here would take my weight.”