So Much Blue

by Percival Everett

  “No.”

  “Isn’t there some kind of legal obligation? A father’s rights or something? Don’t you think it’s only fair you tell him?”

  Again, “Oh, please.” She leaned back, knocked against the teetering plate, and it fell to the floor and broke.

  “Give me some credit here. I’m keeping your secret. This is hard.” I knelt to pick up the shards.

  “Again, who it is doesn’t matter,” she said.

  Linda came into the room. “Who what is?” she asked.

  “Nothing,” I said.

  “A plate broke.”

  Linda stepped around to see that it was one of the nice dishes. “April,” she complained, drawing out the girl’s name.

  April looked at me and I looked away to the pieces on the floor. “Wasn’t her fault,” I said.

  “I hate this house,” April said and walked out.

  “Jesus,” Linda said. “She’s driving me crazy. I’ll get the broom.” She grabbed the broom from the closet.

  “I’ve got it,” I said. I took the broom and the pan from her.

  “So, what was that all about?” Linda asked.

  “Teenagers,” I said.

  “What were you talking about?”

  “Oh, I mentioned that Jason Frazar had asked about her and somehow that made her mad. Seems like I can’t say anything right.”

  “Yeah.” She looked out the window at my shed.

  “Something for the painting.”

  “Will I ever see that thing?” It had been a couple of years since she’d asked about it.

  “You know how I feel about the painting.”

  “I know what you say, but I don’t understand it. I feel locked out. In a lot of ways.” In fact she was locked out. Literally. The other ways was a different discussion, a longer and harder one that I chose not to approach.

  “It helps me work. I don’t know why, but it does.”

  “Right.”

  “Can’t there be something in a person’s life that is just his? Or hers?”

  “Right.”

  I dumped the pieces from the dustpan into the garbage. “Are you going to be mad for a while?”

  “No,” she lied. She went to the cupboard. “We have only five of those plates left and Bloomingdale’s doesn’t carry them anymore.”

  “Maybe someone else does. Saks?”

  “Something’s going on with April.”

  “It’s called being sixteen.”

  “Maybe.”

  1979

  Neither Richard nor I felt much like eating. It was just dusk and we lay beside each other looking at the dead ceiling fan. I assumed he’d drifted off to sleep as I did. We awoke, startled by a loud knock on the door. I looked out the window to see that it was still dark.

  “What the fuck?” he said.

  I checked my watch. Midnight. The knock, again. I got up and walked to the door. There was no peephole. There was no chain.

  “Who is it?” I asked.

  “The Bummer.”

  “Go away,” I said.

  “Open the fucking door!”

  I looked over at Richard. He was up and sitting on the edge of the bed. He shrugged.

  “I learned something about the brother,” the Bummer said. “Let me in the fucking room.”

  “Let him in,” Richard said.

  I opened the door and stepped back into the room. The Bummer leaned in and pointed a finger at Richard, “You, come on, I got somebody who knows something about your brother.”

  “Yeah, what’s he know?” Richard asked.

  “Let’s go find out.”

  Richard shook his head and glanced over at me.

  “Whatever you want to do,” I said.

  “We need to go now,” the Bummer said.

  Richard leaned over and grabbed his shoes.

  “I’ll be downstairs,” the Bummer said. He called back from the hallway, “And bring some money.”

  “Here we go,” I said. I sat in the desk chair to lace up my boots. “Maybe he’s got something this time.”

  Richard didn’t say anything.

  “We don’t have to go with him,” I said. “Are you all right?”

  “Let’s go.”

  The Bummer didn’t speak as he led us six or so blocks to a run-down tavern next to what clearly was a brothel. Women wore bright nothings over their thick thighs and asses, their sagging breasts, stood in huddles and smoked cigarettes and cigars. They eyed us with what might have passed for mild interest then laughed us away. There were no women in the bar. It was not crowded at all. Around a couple of tables sat young men who reminded me of fellow university students from Philadelphia, dressed just slightly better than the establishment. There was a half step down well into the room that I did not see and so landed heavily on my ankle. It might have been sprained, but there was little I could do about it.

  “You okay?” Richard asked.

  “I think I sprained my ankle.” I thought better of asking the bartender for a bag of ice—I didn’t need the Bummer’s laughter in my face—and then I felt like a macho idiot.

  The Bummer fell into a chair at a table where sat a wide-shouldered, mustachioed man. He wore a bright white, pressed T-shirt. His bushy mustache was made more dramatic by the fact that his face was so neatly and expertly shaven everywhere else. He did not have much of a chin. The Bummer gestured with his hand for us to sit and we haltingly did.

  “Show him the picture?” the Bummer said to Richard.

  “Who are you?” I asked.

  The mustache paused to take me in, put out his cigarette in the foil ashtray. The Bummer waved him off and then glared at me and told me to shut up. Richard handed over the photograph.

  Mustache stared at the picture for a few seconds. “He vista a este hombre,” he said.

  “This man is my brother,” Richard said, leaning forward, his elbows on the table. “Mi hermano. Is he in some kind of trouble?” He looked at the Bummer. “Ask him if he’s in trouble.”

  “He is not in trouble,” the mustached man said in English, but with a thick accent. He pulled on his bottle of beer. “Of course, it depends on what you consider to be trouble.”

  “Where did you see him?” Richard asked. He took back the picture and looked at it himself. “Where?”

  The man looked at the Bummer and pulled out a new cigarette. The Bummer nodded to Richard.

  “What?” Richard asked.

  “I think you’re supposed to give him some money,” I said.

  “Yeah, right.” Richard took some bills from his pants pocket and put a ten on the table, pushed it over to the man. If a muscle in the man’s face moved I didn’t see it. Nothing. Richard put down another ten.

  “Are you trying to offend him?” the Bummer asked. “The man has some information that you might want.”

  “How do I know he’s telling the truth?”

  “You don’t.”

  Richard turned to me for help, but I could only shrug. I didn’t know what to do, didn’t know what I would have been doing in his position.

  Some young men at another table became loud, rowdy. One stood up and yelled something at the ceiling in Spanish, but I couldn’t hear the words. The thin man swayed with drunkenness. Then he saw us.

  “Americano!” he shouted.

  “That’s right, fuckwad!” the Bummer shouted back. In his face I could see that he enjoyed the possibility of a confrontation.

  The young Salvadoran took a step toward us, but his friends stopped him, tried to get him to sit down. He pulled away from them, lost his balance, and almost fell over, yet kept his distance.

  “Listen, Yankees, our country is not yours,” he said in English. Then, “Vete a la mierda!”

  “Fuck you!” the Bummer shouted back and stood up.

  “Are you the CIA?” the man asked. “The fucking CIA is everywhere, come here to fuck us up the ass and take our country.”

  “We’re the kiss my ass,” the Bummer said and pulled
up the bottom of his shirt to show the butt of his .45.

  “CIA,” the man said, playing brave, but even I could see that the sight of the weapon frightened him. It frightened me.

  “Be cool,” I said to the Bummer.

  “Shut the fuck up,” he said to me.

  The men pulled their friend not so easily back to their table and got him back into his chair.

  “Fuck you,” the Bummer repeated and sat down. He turned his attention to Richard. “Continue,” he said in a calm way that was almost comic.

  Richard put down another eighty dollars. The man calmly raked the bills together then spoke to the Bummer in Spanish.

  “Él está al otro lado del lago. Los campos al norte de Candelaria. Está con Vargas. Es un corredor.”

  “Fuck,” the Bummer said.

  “Why fuck?” Richard asked. “What’s the matter?”

  Neither the Bummer nor the mustache responded to Richard. The man stood and shook the Bummer’s hand.

  “Gracias,” the Bummer said, hardly looking at him.

  To us the man said, with hardly a glance, “Buena suerte.” He drained his beer, walked away from the table and toward the door.

  “CIA whore!” the thin man at the table of students shouted at the mustache, threw a cardboard coaster at him.

  Mustache offered nothing in response, simply left.

  “What did he tell you?” Richard asked.

  “You brother is in the drugs business. He’s mixed up with some Nicaraguans.” The Bummer lit a cigarette.

  “Did he tell you where he is?”

  “You fellows know of course that the shit is about to hit the fan in this fucking country.”

  “Will you take me to my brother?”

  “Or just tell us where he is,” I said. To Richard, I stage-whispered, “We don’t need this crazy motherfucker.”

  “Yeah, I’ll take you to him,” Bummer said. “It’s fucking dangerous out there. I want you to know that.”

  “Okay, okay,” Richard said. “Take me to my brother. When do we leave?”

  “Now.”

  Paris

  Perhaps it was my pathetic accusation and an accompanying need to blot out my hurtful behavior or perhaps it was simply that we knew each other better that second time, but our sex was more vigorous and still just as sweet and open as the first time. Her hands caressed me with a certainty that was at once comforting and bewildering, and I felt that I touched her in much the same way. Like the first time, I was struck by my lack of guilt. Part of it was that I understood that I had chosen to be there with Victoire and so feeling guilt would have been not only disingenuous, but mere show, and for whom? But of course this lack of guilt about what I was doing with this woman with whom I clearly saw no future left me with, well, guilt. I felt guilt for feeling no guilt. I lay there with her head on my chest thinking there should be a term for this guilty guiltlessness. If this feeling were a color, I considered, it would be the orange threads of slightly diluted saffron.

  Victoire suddenly sat up in bed and told me she had something special for me to see.

  “And what might that be?” I asked.

  “You will see.” She got me out of bed and led me naked to the center of the room. She grabbed a chair from the dining table and put it in the middle of the room, positioned to face the wall opposite the window.

  “What is all of this?” I asked.

  “Sit,” she said.

  I did. The wood was cool against my ass. I liked the sensation.

  “Close your eyes. Please don’t look.”

  “My eyes are shut.”

  I heard her move around the room, but I kept my eyes closed. She told me I could open them and I did. Against the wall pinned to a foam-core board that leaned against the wall was a watercolor. The paper was about twenty by thirty inches. The work was green, green leaning into blue in places, edged with blood in the southeast corner. It was abstract, stunning. It was so unlike the country scenes and cityscapes of hers that I had seen before. The painting was rich, dense, and deep. Too deep, I thought, for a work on paper, no matter how heavy the stock, too rich to be anything but oil colors, but it was surely watercolors. I was surprised by it, confused by it. I began to cry.

  “Do you like it?”

  “Did you make this?” I asked.

  “You think a young, pretty French girl cannot paint this picture?”

  “I don’t believe anyone could make this picture. How did you do it?” I wanted to get up and walk over to it, to get right up on it, but I also did not want to end the experience I was having with it. “I love it.”

  Even if I had decided to get up I couldn’t have because Victoire threw a naked leg over me and straddled me. It was only after she had guided me inside her that I realized the painting aroused me. We rocked there in that little chair, her back to the painting, my eyes on it.

  “I want you to come inside me,” she said. “I know you cannot, but I would like you to.” It was right then that I realized that I was not wearing a condom. I did not stop. She felt perfect.

  “I call it Verdant,” she whispered.

  “Perfect,” I said. And it was, the title suggesting a landscape that was not there and the color that was complex and yet just simply that. In the painting I saw Victoire and understood why I was with her.

  I wanted to go to sleep and awake properly, light from a window striking my face, the songs of birds, the sounds of a garbage truck. That was what I did, that was how I awoke, and it felt right until I realized that I was not in my hotel, not near the hotel phone, but beside Victoire in her bed.

  I managed to leave that bed and the apartment without disturbing Victoire too much. She knew I was leaving and she might have even said good-bye or blown me a kiss. Instead of catching the metro near her place I walked all the way up to Saint-Germain and then west to the Odéon. It was half past eight, which meant it was two thirty in the morning at home. I took the 10 line to Sèvres-Babylone and walked to my hotel. On my way I passed the elaborate Christmas decorations in the windows of Le Bon Marché. They were full of moving parts that were shut down at this hour and they seemed like some kind of metaphor.

  I stepped into the overheated lobby of my hotel and peeled off my scarf as the clerk handed me my key. He also handed me a folded pink paper. I stared at the paper in my hand.

  “Your wife,” the very neat man said in English.

  “What time did she call?” I asked.

  “I remember it was around five this morning, but the message says exactly.” He didn’t look at my eyes.

  “Merci.” I slipped the paper into my coat pocket without reading it. I took the stairs to my floor because I didn’t want to stand in view of the clerk waiting for the elevator.

  Once I was in my room I took off my coat, retrieved the message from my pocket, and sat on the edge of the bed. I looked at the phone and jumped when it rang. I let it ring another time then picked up.

  “Monsieur Pace? This is Pierre from the front desk.”

  “Oui?”

  “I neglected to tell you that I did not tell your wife that you were out, only that you were not answering.”

  “Merci, Pierre.” I hung up. I had conveniently managed to talk myself out of feeling guilt, but now with the unsolicited complicity of Pierre, I could not maintain my delusion.

  I took my calling card from my wallet and stared at it, flipped it through my fingers like a playing card. I thought of calling home and then remembered it was three in the morning there. If it had been an emergency Linda would have called more than once. Pierre, in his tight-fitting vest two shades lighter than his suit, had saved my pathetic ass, whether he knew so or not; he knew. I entertained the notion of buying him a bottle of wine, but that seemed not only an admission of guilt, but guilt of something unseemly, perhaps dirty. And though I felt bad, I also felt good and none of what I quite properly had to feel guilty about was to me in any way unseemly. In fact, I felt more myself than I had in some years and
I didn’t even know what that meant.

  I left the room at eleven to find a croissant, which was not difficult. One could not throw a stick and not hit a patisserie. On the other hand, there was no finding a cup of coffee to go, so I sat at an outdoor table of a café a couple of doors away and had a coffee while I ate a pain au chocolat from the bakery across the street. At noon I returned to the hotel then waited another hour before calling home.

  Linda answered.

  “Good morning,” I said. “Sorry I missed your call. The clerk just delivered the message to me a couple of hours ago. He was very apologetic. He thinks he rang the wrong room.”

  “It’s snowing,” she said.

  “Really?”

  “Quite heavily.”

  “I’ll be home in just a week.”

  “Where is the good snow shovel? The new one.”

  I could see the shovel in my head, blue blade, white handle. “It’s in the garage with the old one, beside April’s old tricycle.”

  “Okay.”

  “Linda, is everything okay?”

  “You tell me,” she said.

  “I’ll be home in four days,” I said.

  “They’re thinking about closing the schools. What am I supposed to do with these guys?”

  “Call Beth.” Beth was our part-time nanny who preferred the term babysitter. “Give her some extra hours. That’s why we have her.”

  “Do you know how much that will cost?”

  “Cheaper than a therapist,” I said.

  I could hear an almost smile and just as quickly its evaporation. “Well, I’d better get breakfast started.”

  “The gallery looks good,” I said.

  “Good.”

  “I’ll call you later,” I said.

  I hung up and fell back onto the bed, stared up at the ceiling. My chest was tight. I couldn’t seem to pull in a satisfactory breath.

  House

  Which of my offspring would I sacrifice? I had to test my method of destruction.

  I chose a painting that had been wanted by a couple from Cleveland, but to whom I had decided not to sell. They were confused by my refusal of their money, finally claiming to feel wounded, indignant, choosing to think I had decided that they were not worthy of the work. They would not believe that I was unhappy with the painting itself, even after I offered a similar, and I thought better, painting for considerably less money. It was a smallish canvas, more geometric in composition than most of my work, a wide palate depleting itself as it moved from northwest southeast. I took the canvas into the private shed and locked myself in, put on my mask and heavy gloves, filled a spray bottle with caustic soda, and attacked the work. The chemical foamed ever so slightly but mostly ran down the surface and fell onto the tarp below. I stood back to see how well I had ruined the work and was surprised and disappointed to watch the painting become actually more interesting. Truth be told, my feelings were just a bit injured by the fact that I had made the work better by trying to destroy it. The colors, which had always been too close to primary for me, became richer for their distress, blended more interestingly. More disappointing was that my plan for automated destruction had to be abandoned. I still had no way to control the life—rather, death—of the painting. I lifted my dust mask and sat in the only seat in the barn, an old wooden swiveling desk chair, and stared at the enormous canvas, wondered what kind of selfish need I was attempting to satisfy. Regardless, selfish or no, childish or no, the need was real. The painting was mine, only mine, I wanted it to be only mine, to mean for me and for me alone. I also wondered why I was making it. The painting was supposed to help me understand something, maybe connect with the world that I did not so much like, but as I sat there considering my current dilemma, it offered me nothing at all. Abstract as it was, it was essentially a time line, simple as that, but time didn’t move along it, there were no intervals, nothing changed, accelerated, or stopped. The fact that it was secret served its secrets, my secrets, and suddenly I understood at least one rather simple and perhaps obvious forehead-flattening truth, that a secret can exist only if its revelation, discovery, even betrayal is possible.