A Thing of Beauty

by Lisa Samson

  Here’s to nothing being better than something.

  So I strip Edwin bare immediately and pitch his ridiculous velvet suit with the giant lace collar onto the discard pile. Passing through the hallway, no light beams from under Josia’s door. I don’t think he’s come home yet and now it’s almost eleven fifteen. I hope he’s okay. But the crib ends had gone missing again when I woke up earlier in the day, so I know he’s continuing his work. I picture a forge fire escaping its confines and burning down the whole operation.

  That would be so sad. Maybe I’ll get to see the forge someday. I don’t know. Extending me an invitation at this point would be way out of line, and Josia knows that.

  I pour a glass of chocolate milk, then grab my phone on my way upstairs. I bathe poor naked Edwin in my bathroom sink, scrubbing years of grime off the porcelain. In my bedroom I dress him in one of my old white T-shirts, the smallest one I can find. He looks like a little ghost.

  Ten

  The next morning I practically collide with Josia as I navigate the last step and spin toward the corridor. The “delightfully delicious, slow-roasted flavor” of my instant coffee must have been calling to me more loudly than I thought.

  “Oh!” I veer to the right. “Sorry!”

  Laughter emits from behind a stack of boxes in his arms. “Hang on and let me get these in the truck. I need to show you something if you’ve got the time.”

  Somebody stop me from laughing. I’ve got nothing but time.

  “Wait!” I cry. “Are those the boxes from the porch?”

  “Yes.” He stops and turns around. “I figured these were part of a pile you were wanting to throw out.” A doll arm flops over the top box. “But if you don’t want me to haul them away, just say the word.”

  This is it. I stand upon the border of the land of no excuses. He’s willing to get this stuff out of here. Gone. Everything I don’t want. I don’t have to figure out if there’s a junk man who hauls stuff away, if I have to rent a truck to take unwanted items to Goodwill, or if I could just put them on the street and let nature take its course. This is a hard thing to figure out.

  I’ll bet Jack’s mom doesn’t have a house full of supplies like I do. I bet she enjoys a cup of tea in peace every morning. I know Jack does. And Big Mike? Well, he’s got the things he loves, and there are probably a lot of those because he seems to have a lot of love, but I’m sure he drives by garage sales and junk on the side of the road all the time and never stops to load up the trunk.

  “I’d be grateful if you would.”

  “Good. Be right back.”

  I watch him from the long, slender window to the right of the door as he walks down the front path, the same spring to his step as always, and sets the boxes in the back of his pickup.

  “Let me help,” I say when he enters the house.

  “How about making me a cup of coffee while I finish carting out the rest?”

  Before I can really think about all the major implications of this, I agree.

  He stands at the doorway to the kitchen five minutes later. “I’ve got something to show you,” he says. “Shouldn’t take but a minute.”

  “Okay.” I don’t have it in me to tell him he’s breaking one of the rules. The man is, after all, hauling away my follies. “Coffee’s almost done.”

  I don’t invite him into the kitchen. No sense in going crazy with the latitude I’m extending this morning.

  Water now boiling in the pot, I pour it into two mugs, one a dollar-store burgundy, the other a dollar-store green, where I’ve already spooned in the space-age coffee crystals— because they’re so much more essential than the humble old coffee bean.

  For a brief moment, my grandfather’s face comes to mind, how at the end of each meal he’d have a Sanka. “Here’s to some things being better than nothing,” he’d always say, raising his coffee cup, a pink plastic one that matched my grandma’s everyday plates. I moved here to Baltimore to be close to him and now he’s out at College Manor, unable to guide a spoon to his mouth.

  “Here’s to some things being better than nothing.” I raise my mug to Josia.

  He raises his, and we sip simultaneously in that tentative, inaugural, “I’m-not-sure-how-hot-this-really-is” sip.

  Josia wants to wince, I can tell, and not from the temperature. I guess not everyone appreciates space-age crystals the way I do. “You ready?” he asks, curving the index and middle fingers of his left hand around the curlicue handle of the mug.

  They’re beautiful hands. Not in the perfectly groomed manner of the manicured men of this world. They’re large, but so graceful I can imagine my own placed in one of his as he helps me aboard a sailboat. And I’d trust him not to falter. They’re the hands of a man who knows what he’s doing, who knows what needs to be done and exactly the time to move forward.

  Timing is everything. If Hollywood teaches you nothing else, it’s that.

  Josia’s right hand circles around the doorknob of cut glass at his bedroom door, twists to the left, and pushes inward.

  “Just one second,” he says, slipping inside. But before the door closes behind him, I catch a glimpse of the room in a quick flash of red walls and gleaming floors.

  How about that? I muse. For some reason it doesn’t feel wrong to want to rely on him like it does other men. But maybe it isn’t about reliance. Maybe he just makes a fine teacher, and his way is a way to emulate.

  He backs out a few seconds later, an iron piece about the size of a small dinner plate in one hand, the cursed coffee still in the other.

  “For the porch,” he says, handing me a sun, somehow delicately rendered, its features pierced into the metal surrounding it. “I made it for you.”

  “This will look so pretty hanging from the ceiling. Thank you!”

  He shuts the door. “Good! I’m glad you like it.” He takes another sip, then downs the rest of the coffee in a few what must be throat-scalding swallows. Then again, the man does work around intense heat. He probably breathes in air every day that would char my throat. “I’ve got to get to the forge. Maybe we’ll bump into each other again.”

  And in that last sentence, all my fears are assuaged.

  After he’s gone and I’m finished with my coffee, having sipped it on my now-cleared porch, I hang the sun, and it makes me happy that someone made something just for me.

  Maybe Josia’s inspiration will continue dripping off onto me. I head down to my workshop, take off the button necklace, and stare at the table before me, wondering what to do next. I decide to string all the buttons onto their own length of twine.

  Why buttons?

  I don’t know. But these hold a sort of fascination for me. And I think about my maybe-project at the Bizarre and hope and pray that something right here will inspire me.

  After the stringing is done, I arrange them all in lines, knotted string beginning at the top, leading down to the button.

  I watch them.

  “Tell me what to do with you,” I ask, or maybe demand. “I need you to tell me what to do.”

  So I can’t stand it anymore. After enduring a chilly bike ride and eating Subway takeout on the back porch, and wishing for more creative inspiration the likes of which you see in documentaries of artists obsessed, I wad up my sandwich wrapper and pitch it in kitchen garbage can number three.

  Thoughts of those red walls in Josia’s room have plagued me all day. The floors too. And that quick flash of a visual can only lead me to believe that’s the least of it.

  He said to knock anytime, okay, and right now fits that description, so I step across the hall to his doorway and rap five times.

  Nothing. Of course. He’s gone. His truck is gone and he most likely will come home after I’ve gone out for this evening’s date. I’ve been thinking a lot about my escorting life since the ride with Big Mike. But tonight I’m going over to Jack’s, thank goodness.

  I knock again. Wait.

  What’s that I hear? Surely I’m not imagining that
muffled, “Come in,” am I?

  I push the door open and step inside. Room empty. Guess I did imagine it. But as long as I’m here, and this is the present moment and all, well, wouldn’t you go in?

  What I’m not imagining is this room. The sneak preview provided earlier, while beautiful, did nothing to prepare me for a full production beyond my own imagination.

  The red walls are a darker, softer shade that invites the eyes, a shade more Christmas than Valentine’s, a shade that conjures up family dinners, not heart-shaped beds in the Poconos.

  And the woodwork gleams like the floors. The missing and injured portions have been carefully replicated and replaced, stained in a mahogany shade and protected by a glossy coat that picks up the light descending in diamond shapes from the repaired window.

  So the woodworking required power tools, obviously, but why is there no smell? Paint? Stain? Polyurethane? That’s even more of a mystery.

  A black platform bed rests in the spot his cot occupied, a single mattress covering the top, a white down comforter topping that. A single pillow, plumped and smooth, crowns it all. All that softness looks as if it would suck every care I own from every cell in my body. It is the very picture of the utterance, “Ahhh.”

  Josia replaced the card table with a two-by-four piece of birch plywood, finished to match the woodwork, and attached to the wall with hinges. Four twelve-by-twelve-inch matching boxes beneath hold his clothing.

  Over the bed, a shelf supports his books. I take a look. All of them are design books, except for a few on auto repair. Two stand out from the rest, obviously read for years: The Art of War and The Art of Peace.

  A floor lamp he rescued from the back porch has been painted a wrought-iron black; its shade, fashioned from four storybooks, stands in the corner near the bathroom door.

  Even knowing the man as little as I do, I’m certain he didn’t reserve his improvements just for this room. The bathroom might just be a cave of wonders, and since I’m trespassing in here already, I might as well go ahead and take a peek.

  Again, my imagination did it no justice.

  Not surprisingly, his magic has infiltrated this room as well. Does the man ever sleep?

  While I was out in the night on my empty romps, he was in here, replacing the tile floor with the slate stacked in the yard and using the leftover octagonal floor tiles to patch the gaps in the wall. Only he didn’t just fill in the missing rectangles, but created a sunburst pattern starting in the upper corner of the wall by the bathtub, the tub he must have lacquered over because it practically glows, a clean so clean it promises nothing but a very peaceful bath devoid of those questions we ask ourselves:

  Who has been in this tub before me?

  What kinds of germs are somehow surviving in the pores and pocks of this thing?

  Will I get some kind of venereal disease here that, if forced to explain, nobody will believe came from simply taking a bath?

  Am I gross because I like baths more than showers?

  Even more wonderful are the crib ends, and how glad I am he used them, one with a mirror mounted to it and placed over the pedestal sink, another for the front of a new cabinet placed against the opposite wall.

  I can’t help but chuckle at what he’s done with the light fixture over the mirror. He painted the fixture itself black, but now, instead of the grimy globe, the bubble from a child’s pushable “popcorn popper” diffuses the light around the room, livening it up further.

  Red towels hang from two wrought-iron bars. Clearly made in his forge, they’re mounted on the walls, a small one by the sink and a longer one by the tub. At each end a little robin figurine sings.

  Beautiful. Just beautiful.

  Maybe in my haste to draw up the rules, I should have thought them through a little more, but upon further inspection of Josia’s room, it’s evident the old coffeemaker and microwave simply don’t belong in here. I’ve never once smelled the aroma of coffee or food emanating from his room. He just put them here to be nice.

  Is that the person I’ve become, the person for whom people do things they really don’t want to do? That difficult aunt you always tuck a little gift in your bag for so you don’t have to hear her criticize you? That blunt guy friend you can’t really tell anything to because you’re afraid of his reaction?

  So I scribble out a note.

  Use the kitchen from now on and feel free to do whatever you’d like in there,

  mister nice guy, because if you’ve got all this in you, I want more.

  But just the kitchen.

  I add to be clear about it. Everybody should be able to use a kitchen if there’s one nearby. What kind of person rents out a room and doesn’t allow the renter to use the kitchen?

  Me?

  I tape it to his door and then write a PS upon further thought.

  If you want to get rid of the rest of the crib ends, or use the wood however you see fit, please do so.

  Eleven

  Sitting once again on the outer wall of Fort McHenry, I muse on the mystery of Josia. No young lovers with nothing better to do enhance the scene before me today, but that’s just as well. I want to clear my mind, not observe the tender workings of the world, tenderness the world seems to lack. Or maybe my growing years—years on sets, in makeup chairs, at parties and photo shoots; years of having to fly hours at times to whichever parent felt the most guilty for being gone; years being awakened at 5:30 a.m., if I was lucky, by Elena our housekeeper; years of questioning the sincerity of every friend I ever made and “boyfriend” I ever had—colored my vision, somehow taking away the ability to notice those tender moments unless they’re playing like a Hallmark movie right before me like those two young lovers by the waters of a glistening river.

  A chill wind ruffles the water today, my beast of a sweater unable to cut it much. It’s been so long since I talked to Brandon. And as much satisfaction as giving him a title other than sperm donor would provide, I simply cannot do otherwise. I miss my father.

  He wasn’t all bad.

  Am I insane?

  Before I can talk myself out of it, I dial his number. (Before too much credit is given, I should disclose that it always goes straight to voice mail.)

  “Hello there, Fia!”

  Figures, doesn’t it?

  “Hi, Brandon. Just calling to find out how much of the latest tabloid exploits are based on a true story.” I try to sound as sour as possible.

  “Thirty-three and one-third percent. The woman is not true, that I’m filing for divorce is true—”

  “Does Mom know that?”

  “She should. The papers were delivered three weeks ago.”

  Oh. “So what else isn’t true?”

  “I’m not trying to get into her bank accounts.”

  Well, phew. I’m glad he’s got that much to him. Figures Jessica zeroed in on that. Of course, she didn’t dream I’d actually call him. That only happens once a year, if even.

  “Is this time for real?” I ask, a little shocked at the harshness of my tone.

  Unsaid: because you’ve jerked her around like this for the last thirty-five years.

  He clears his throat, a no-no for someone who uses his voice to make a living, but he’s never been able to give up the habit. Like his girlfriends. “Last time I checked, Fia, you legally gave up any right to ask me questions like that.”

  I hang up. So be it.

  And I’m whisked up in the grip of my own memory, set back down on the set of Dog Ears, the only television series I ever did, a one-season-only experiment by Gregory Campbell, a famous producer/director of epically funded motion pictures. It was some of the best work I ever did, not just up to that point, but forever and ever. Since my future in acting seems doubtful, I guess I’ll dare to admit, Dog Ears is the best work I will ever do.

  I was only twelve.

  To this day, it has a cult following. No network, cable or otherwise, was willing to pay the price for Campbell’s genius, so Dog Ears went to video aft
er pirated copies sailed out like ships spreading the plague. Campbell was smart enough to get control back and sold enough VHSs to probably pay off the mortgage on his ski lodge in Aspen.

  I paid the price, though. The kicker is, he comes off as such a nice guy to 99.9 percent of the world. It would be like accusing the father on 7th Heaven of such behavior. Who in the world is going to believe Reverend Eric Camden is capable of such things?

  “Couldn’t you have seen it was more than either/or?” I ask them out loud over the waters, my voice captured and muffled by the heaviness of the wind.

  All these years later I can see the obvious solution: pull me out of the business and keep up with your precious work. Elena and I would have been just fine there in the hills, swimming, carpooling, shopping for school shoes . . . although hanging out at a school with a group of friends feels as foreign as going to live in remote Tibet. Even Elena, just Elena, would have been enough, though.

  My phone chimes and a text message from Jack lights up the screen. I’m free. Got a couple of hours? Come on over if you can.

  Might as well.

  After a soak in the hot tub on Jack’s back deck, the mellow temps of a warm spring allow us to lounge in ivory bathrobes and sip on beers he bought from a local brewery. A pair of his giant tube socks swaddle what would have been my cold feet, despite the mellow air around us.

  “What did you think of Lucy?” he asks.

  “Mom was great. I didn’t realize you came from such a normal upbringing.”

  “Fi, everything seems normal to you when compared to your own childhood.” He raises his beer to me, looking like everything every woman would want. So why does he call me to come over? A man who looks like Jack shouldn’t be paying for female companionship.

  “Then how about this? She seemed really down-to-earth.”