The Color Master: Stories

by Aimee Bender

  Nearby stood other mourners, and even through the cold, she could smell the hints of the first dandelion tufts pushing their way to the surface. The man wheeled right up to Hans’s headstone and nodded at her. His face was geometrically compelling, with its triangular cheekbones and rectangular forehead. She waited for him to speak.

  The man thanked her for meeting him. He said he was Hoefler’s brother. His older brother. He inquired after her interest and she explained that it was not professional. “I just think about him,” she said. “I’m not sure why.”

  The man in the wheelchair sniffed in assent. “Good,” he said. “Then I would like you to know a few things.” He dusted his hands on the wheels of his chair, a gesture she could tell he did often. He kept his gaze on the headstone.

  “When I was thirteen and Hans nine,” he began, in a voice louder than was necessary, “I told him my mind was stronger than his. We had been fighting often, or I had been fighting and he had been silent, and I was tired of it, so I sat him down and told him to try to hurt me with his thoughts. He was not a violent young man, and I could see he was uncomfortable, but he tended to do anything I asked, and he stared at me willingly. Even then, he had eyes very big and dark and more like a dog’s than a man’s. You recall?” He glanced up and the secretary nodded. She recalled very well, she said.

  “You were his lover?” the man asked, lips harsh.

  For the second time that month, the woman shook her head. “I was really only a distant acquaintance,” she said.

  “To be stared at by Hans,” the man continued, “made you want to feed him soup, not harm him. Hans thought for a long period of time, and finally took a breath and said he wished I would not always have the first glass of juice. I told him that was an idiotic curse. Almost embarrassing. Just who was this brother of mine, so shiftless in his negativity? I’d been the clear favorite of both our parents and I’d gotten all the extra gifts and sweets. I’d never caught Hans looking at me with any kind of hatred or envy, something I found disconcerting. He tried again, and said that perhaps one day I might lose all the hot water while I was inside the shower, covered with soap. I believe then I reached out and hit him. ‘Come on, brother!’ I said. ‘Curse me! Curse me flat out!’ ”

  The man shifted in his chair. His eyes flicked over to the woman, but not long enough to register an expression.

  “Well,” he said, “something inside the combination of my contempt and that slap did alter Hans a bit, did snap him into a new place. He had always been obedient, and he continued to stare with that wet Hans gaze, but when he finally spoke, he said, in a quieter voice, that he might wish I had no legs. I was by then already a very fine and fast runner in school. He said Mother would not like me so well without legs, which, I must add as a side note, turned out, unfortunately, to be true. ‘Good one, Hans!’ I told him, encouragingly. ‘More!’ He leaned closer and in a whisper said that he wished that all my hair would fall out, as we’d just seen a horror film in which the vampire’s eldest child, the preferred child, loses all its hair and becomes a human snake and eats its father. Also, I had the better hair, the hair all the relatives commented upon. Such lustrous hair, too good for a boy, they all said, about my eyelashes too.”

  The man in the wheelchair blinked, reptilian.

  “I was—to be frank—delighted,” he said, leaning in. “Now, this was the sort of conversation I felt rivalrous brothers should have, and I suppose I felt guilty for all the preferential treatment I’d received, so it seemed better to get it all out in the open. I couldn’t tell if Hans had cursed me because he really felt it or just to please me, but I didn’t care. Of course, I was not to be outdone, and told him that he would turn scaly and dry up like a desert, that he would lose his hearing on the day of his piano recital, and forget how to speak at a crucial moment in his life, whenever that was. I said to him, ‘One day you will open your mouth when it is imperative that you use it, and nothing will come out.’ We were sitting in the room off of the kitchen; it was a small, dark hallway that was always warm from the heating vent, and smelled of nuts, though no one ate nuts in our home. We always loved sitting there. I was fidgety with pleasure. Hans nodded, digesting my curses. I asked for one more. His eyes began to glaze over, and he told me, as if in a trance, that Germany would collapse with me inside it, and I would be legless, dragging my body through the burning streets of a formerly beautiful city, and I would call and call and no one would come, and how I would find my darling wife dead in the flames.

  “He and I sat silent then, until he shook himself alert.

  “ ‘Will that do?’ Hans asked, smiling a little shyly at me.”

  The man raised his forehead where his eyebrows would be.

  “Well, he was quite a bit happier for a while after that,” the man said. “It was probably the longest I’d spoken with him in a number of months. It’s good for brothers to do a little cursing every now and then. Good to have some room to vent. All was well until, of course, the curses started to come true. The final ones didn’t. I was married for ten years, later, yes, but she left me because she fell in love with a younger man. I had no darling wife, dead. I was not present at any bombing.

  “But the rest did,” he said. “We said so many curses that day, and the world was in such tumult that the odds were high that something would stick. None stuck to him; most did to me. Now, I knew an incident with a train took my legs, not Hans. I tended to put myself in dangerous situations. A fire took the hair off my head and eyebrows, a fire I could have avoided. But either way, though it was years later, Hans thought he had ordered it all, straight off a menu from the devil himself, and although I told him it was not his fault, he surely thought otherwise. That there was both greatness and a terrible danger in his mind.”

  A light wind blew through the cemetery. The secretary kept her weight on both feet. She felt a bit too tall, taller than she liked to feel, but she did not want to sit on the grass, as it was wet.

  “Never once did I think it was the power of his mind,” Hans’s brother said. “He had a fine human mind, sure, but he was no soothsayer. Please. I told him that, too—‘You’re just a regular kid, Hans!’—but I’m sure he thought I was trying to placate him. He read the news daily, every single word. It was a terrible time, a terrifying time. We could hardly understand any of it. And I felt terrible that I had encouraged him so. I was older; I should’ve known better. He hadn’t wanted to say anything, and I had made him, and then things came true, and imagination met reality. We all knew someone who had done something. News kept pouring in. Poor Hans. He listened to it all with terror. He stopped seeing his friends. It wasn’t just him; many young men I knew who had frightening thoughts or dreams were extremely vigilant in those days. One neighbor went on serious drugs to sleep so he’d stop having some kind of dream; he never said what it was. We did not know what we were capable of. The lid was off.

  “I even once told him to curse me again, or to bless me—his choice—but by then he was a very different kind of man.”

  He hummed lightly. The mourners on either side huddled back to their cars in the dimming light and drove away.

  “And, you know,” he said, sighing, “it’s not true that nothing stuck to him. In a way, my curses came true too. In a metaphorical way. That moment of speechlessness happened to him over and over, where he could not talk when it was of tantamount importance. He rarely talked at all. He never married or truly fell in love. He never did anything with his life. Just wandered from country to country. We lost touch many years ago.”

  The man closed his mouth, and the two looked at the headstone together, reading and rereading the few words there: Hans Hoefler, and the quote they had decided upon as a group at the court: We need more Hans Hoeflers in this world.

  The words looked wrong, like a carving of incorrect dates. The secretary pulled her coat tighter around herself. She thought of how she had never sat and had a long conversation with her father because he, too, refused to talk a
bout himself. “Someone else should speak instead,” he said. “If I don’t speak, it means someone else will,” which did not always turn out to be true. She spent many, many hours with him in an expectant silence. “Tell me,” she whispered, softly, sometimes, but he would just look at her mildly, a flat blankness in his eyes. He did not even shake his head; it was like words had returned to abstraction to him, just interesting sounds exiting the mouth of the young woman whose nose and hands reminded him of something.

  At the cemetery, she stepped closer and touched the shoulder of the man in the wheelchair, and he reached up to her hand with his own. He was much older, and hairless, but the bones in his face were still handsome. Compared with Hans—worried, dark-eyed Hans—this chair-bound brother still received more appreciative looks from women. There was something broad and fine in the way his cheekbones paralleled his jaw. The secretary walked next to him, and helped him home without seeming like she was helping, and stood with him in the elevator, and accompanied him into his apartment, into rooms that were clean and spare. Without words, as if they had been married for years, the two commenced cooking dinner together, chopping carrots and onions, warming the bread. He showed her a photo album of his childhood, and she could see the hair he had described and the strong legs of the former athlete. They ate facing the window, though it was night, and watched the lights in the building across the street switch on one by one. “Delicious,” he said once, and she nodded.

  Before she left, after stacking the dishes and snapping off squares of dark chocolate from the cupboard, she pulled her chair in closer to him and, placing a hand on each of his shoulders, kissed his cheeks, his head, the heavy flat bones of his eyebrows where no hair grew. She kissed near his lips, but not on them. His eyelids closed, and she kissed their round, soft orbs. Each fingertip. Each palm. The corner where his jaw hinged, and the light lobe of his ear.

  “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.

  5.

  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.

  Lemonade

  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 sh
e 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.

  Before we left the food court, I made a point of waving to the cute little Chinese food lady over at Panda Express who was wearing a chef’s hat, just in case she’d heard me, but she didn’t see me waving anyway because she was serving orange chicken in a rice bowl to some old guy who probably didn’t appreciate her good service at all.