So Much Blue

by Percival Everett

  “That yogurt I like,” I told her.

  “That’s all?”

  “Plenty of fruit.”

  “Okay. Be safe,” she said.

  “I love you,” I said.

  Linda hung up.

  Etienne was hopped up on coke before the evening had even gotten started. I had seen him like this before and it was hardly alarming, but mildly annoying for the fact that many already answered questions were repeated a few times. He told me three times that the Spanish couple from Marseille who had bought a large canvas of mine would be there that night. Each time I responded with a tonally unchanged, “That sounds promising.”

  I was standing alone on the back patio looking up at the now clear sky. Nothing obstructed the bright fingernail of moon. I was drinking cranberry juice, wishing that Linda could see me.

  “Is that cranberry juice?”

  I turned around to find Richard.

  “What the hell are you doing here?”

  “Nice greeting,” he said.

  “Sorry,” I said. “You surprised the hell out of me.” I gave him a hug. His coat was cold.

  “I was in London at the BM for some work and I thought I’d pop over for the big event.”

  “That’s great,” I said, but I knew I was hardly convincing.

  Richard looked around the patio and through the windows back into the gallery. “They told me you were back here. What I saw inside looks good. Very elegant. Très French.”

  “Thanks.”

  “To the French,” he said, raising his glass of red wine.

  “Tchin-tchin.”

  “So, how’s it going?” Richard asked.

  “Good. I’m looking forward to getting home. How long in London?”

  “Just a few days.”

  “So, you talked to Linda,” I said.

  “No, why?”

  “You’ve never been a good liar.”

  “Everything okay?” he asked.

  I held up my glass.

  “Cranberry juice?”

  “Believe it or not, I haven’t had a drink in a week. Haven’t wanted one.”

  “That’s a good thing,” he said.

  “Aye.”

  I could see through the windows that more people were showing up. Etienne would be coming soon to drag me into the mix.

  “I’m glad you came,” I said to Richard.

  “Bonjour,” this from Sylvie. She had come onto the patio without my noticing. She gave me the customary two-cheek kiss.

  Richard was immediately taken. I could see it on his face.

  “Sylvie, I would like you to meet my friend Richard.”

  Richard shook her hand. “Enchanté,” he said.

  I was saddened to see Sylvie’s flirtatious smile. She turned to me. “Victoire sera bientôt là.”

  I glanced to find Richard staring at me.

  “So, you are also a friend of this wonderful artist,” he said to Sylvie.

  I could see Sylvie struggling to understand what Richard had said when Victoire came out to join us. Her cerulean cloud coat was draped over her arm. She came and stood next to her mother, smiled, and nodded hello to Richard. The distance between the two of us was awkward and telling.

  “Ma fille, Victoire,” Sylvie said. Richard shook her hand.

  “Bonsoir, Victoire,” I said.

  “Bonsoir, Kevin.”

  Richard was staring at me again.

  “Maman,” she said. “Voyons les peintures.”

  The women excused themselves and left us on the patio.

  “You dog,” Richard said. “You’re not going to say that this isn’t what it looks like.”

  “No, I’m afraid it’s exactly what it looks like. A goddamn train wreck.”

  “The daughter? How old is she? Twenty-five?”

  “Twenty-two.”

  “What about the mother?” he asked.

  “What about the mother?”

  “She’s beautiful, in case you hadn’t noticed. And she knows?”

  “Yes.”

  Richard whistled. “To the French,” he toasted.

  “I’m an idiot,” I said.

  “Well, I don’t know.”

  “Take my word,” I said.

  Before I was forced to offer any details, Etienne came out to fetch me. “You must be on the floor,” he said. “People want you.”

  Richard raised his glass again as I walked away.

  House

  Linda and I had children late in life. We married fairly young; I was twenty-six and she was twenty-five. However, it took her nearly twelve years to convince me that we should try to have a child and then several more until we actually conceived April. She persuaded me by telling me I was being selfish by refusing. Fact was I liked the idea but didn’t think I deserved to be a father, didn’t imagine I would be any good at it. It’s possible that I wasn’t any good at it after all, though I thought I was fairly decent at parenting when the kids were younger.

  We left the city just after Linda became pregnant with April. I took a job at the Rhode Island School of Design because I thought I needed to be a more responsible, parent-type person. We moved into the house built by an artist friend, what not-so-affectionately became called the house from hell. Would that it had been haunted. At least that would have been interesting. To say that it was designed and built by an artist was to underscore the fact that it had not been designed and built by an architect or, say, someone who actually knew how to build a house. It was completely, absolutely, almost admirably energy inefficient. We could see a quarter-inch of daylight through every join of every window and door. Part of the house, ostensibly a studio, was unheated altogether, yet connected to the rest of the house by a wide, doorless descending stairway corridor and so robbed what heat there was from the living area. The sewage system was designed to recirculate the smell of, well, sewage, through the house and around the yard. Linda hated the house. I hated that Linda hated the house. We bonded over hating the house. The most insulting detail of the house’s history was that it had been created, endorsed, and financed as an art installation. My friend had owned the land and had talked a nearby museum of contemporary art into sponsoring his project. He built a bad house with a few interesting angles and then after the exhibition bought the house from the museum for a fraction of what a house in the area might have cost. I didn’t mind that he had gotten paid to build his house and that he had gotten a great deal to own his house, but every day I was offended by the fact that some serious and decent young artists might have been supported by that money. It became a living metaphor for what was wrong with the art world and art business.

  We nearly went broke trying to heat the place, but what it did offer was a painful yet effective object lesson on what we did and did not want in a house. After April was born we moved into a big block of a New England farmhouse. Squares of rooms set into one big square with rectangles plopped down on a big square of land. It was functional and well crafted. It was simple and right. The new house ordered my life, ordered my work, and I felt good. But after some years the squares began to feel square. The block of a house felt like a block. And my world began to have too many corners and not enough space.

  Our summers on the Vineyard saw us in the same saltbox house every year and though the cove behind opened to the horizon, the house there merely echoed the house at home. Corners everywhere. I felt cornered. My work became predictable like the angles of my spaces. The paintings were purchased, and I found that to be merely injury layered onto insult. Then, when April was seven years old and Will three, I sealed up the small barn and began the painting. Even the first stroke was completely private, wholly my own.

  The painting began after my return from Paris. Linda was pleased to have me home, but still angry that I had been away. The show in France had been a success, so that made my absence a little more tolerable. But whatever palliation the sales offered, my newfound retreat into my newly fortified studio undid.

  I mentioned th
at first stroke. I made that mark of that large canvas and it was alone there for several weeks before I touched the work again. It was not large, that single mark. It was not symbolic or metaphorical. It was not even perfect. It was my first mark. It would be covered and never seen again, but it would be there, always the first mark. Like a first kiss, it could never be repeated.

  Richard never balked at my locking him out of the studio. He regarded me with a cocked head like the RCA dog’s, but let it go by making fun of me. “Oh, the mad scientist at work in there,” he said. We were sitting in the coffee shop in the village.

  “Pretty much.”

  “Galatea?”

  “Very funny.”

  “So that’s completely over?” he asked.

  “Doesn’t it have to be?”

  Richard shrugged.

  “Yes, it’s over.”

  “Would you do it again?”

  I looked across the room at a couple of young women having their frothy coffee drinks. “No,” I said. “Knowing what I know now. No.”

  “What do you know now?” he asked.

  “I have no idea.”

  Richard nodded.

  I raised my teacup in a toast.

  “I was afraid you’d actually fallen in love,” he said.

  “I did fall in love,” I said. “I admit that. It felt wonderful. At the time it even felt right.”

  That fact found me on occasion and depressed me. As did that large canvas depress me, though it perhaps served to round out my corners, my angles; it also reminded me of my indiscretion and my love and that depression led me, several years later, to drink again. Not a lot, but what isn’t a lot? Not a lot is what we drunks say. Any was too much. Any was noticeable and was noticed.

  I was not so much susceptible to guilt, but shame was a different story. Will was eleven. We were on the Vineyard and a storm had come up suddenly. We were in Edgartown doing some shopping when it became clear that we needed to get home. The four of us were in the car and I was about to turn the key when Will said, “Dad, should you be driving?” Shame. I stopped again.

  1979

  Somewhere, somehow, I had lost my watch. I looked at my wrist and it was not there, only the light outline of where it always was. I looked around through the sand. The watch held no sentimental value, was not at all expensive or special in any way, but I wanted to know the time. I wanted to know the precise time. Not for any practical or strategic reason, but only because I didn’t know anything precisely or distinctly at that moment. I asked the others for the time and none of them had it. I could not believe that among the four of us there was not one fucking watch. I seethed about this while marching, limping, rather, while ostensibly leading the way back to the car.

  “Your leg okay?” Richard asked me.

  “It’ll have to be. The Bummer is dead. This is fucked up.”

  I stopped and said as much to the sky as to the others, “I need to know what fucking time it is?!” I looked at Carlos.

  Carlos checked the sky. “Two or three,” he said. “Thereabouts.”

  “I don’t want two or three,” I said. “I want two forty-seven. I want three-oh-six. I don’t want thereabouts.”

  “You’re not in the States,” Carlos said. “This is El Salvador. All they have here is thereabouts.”

  Richard looked up the hill and then to me. “Are you all right? Want to rest for a while?”

  I glared at him.

  “Stupid question,” he said.

  “I don’t know exactly where we are,” I said. “The car is up there somewhere. I don’t know who is or isn’t chasing us.” I looked at Tad. “I thought I might be able to know what the time is, exactly, precisely, certainly.”

  “Can we discuss this later?” Tad said.

  “You know, this is all your fucking fault.” I pointed a finger at him.

  “Nobody asked you to come down here,” Tad said.

  “Your brother asked me to come down here,” I said. “Fuck you, Tad. You really are just a fuckup.”

  Tad looked at Richard.

  “We really need to keep moving,” Carlos said.

  “You shut up,” I said. “Carlos, my ass. Have some guts and use your real fucking name. Hans? Heinz? Himmler?”

  “Come on, Kev, let’s go.” Richard looked scared.

  “All right,” I said. “Let’s go sort of, kind of this way, more or less.”

  We wandered for another couple of hours and though it appeared we had a lot of daylight left I was becoming convinced that we would not find the car. I did think that if we just kept walking up that way we would perhaps find the road.

  “What’s that?” Tad said.

  There was a glint west of us and down the hill. It was the Cadillac. I had never been so happy to see an oversized American gas guzzler in my life. That awkward joy quickly evaporated and was replaced by a sense of dread. That dread was reasonable enough.

  We stood next to the car, looking around, resting.

  “The Bummer is fucking dead,” Richard said as if it was news.

  I said nothing. There was nothing to say about that.

  I wanted to tell Carlos to stay behind, but, even though I thought I could follow the roads back to the city, I considered that we might need him. One wrong turn would be all it took.

  Richard fell in behind the wheel and I into the seat next to him. When he turned the key, nothing happened. He tried again. Not even a click.

  “Fuck me,” Tad said.

  “Turn the key again,” I said to Richard. I lowered my window. “It’s not the battery.”

  “Then what is it?” Richard asked. “You know anything about cars?” This to Carlos.

  “Nothing.”

  Tad got out. “Pop the hood.”

  “What are you doing?” Richard asked, getting out. “You don’t know anything about cars.”

  We were all out now.

  “Staring at it never works,” Richard said.

  “You came down this bumpy-ass road in this?” Tad asked. He wriggled himself far enough under the car to reach the starter motor. I could just see him through the spaces in the engine.

  “Dad’s car did this once,” Tad said.

  “Did what?” Richard asked.

  “Try it now.” He pulled himself out by grabbing the bumper.

  Richard reached in and turned the key. The engine turned over, started. “What did you do?”

  “You knocked the starter motor coming down this road.”

  “Let’s go,” I said.

  I regarded our momentary glee at the starting of that engine and marveled at the idiocy of the human spirit. Our world was fucked. Someone with us had just been shot to death, our hatred of him notwithstanding. Homicidal Nicaraguan drug dealers were probably right behind us. And we were brightened because a Cadillac’s 472-cubic-inch engine had started.

  Richard drove us slowly, carefully up the trail. He stared through the windshield and frequently asked my advice about avoiding big rocks and deep ruts. Tad scanned all around us like a frightened poodle.

  It was dusk when we came to the road.

  Paris

  I would not suggest that spotting me with Richard unnerved Victoire in any way, but she respected my physical space and practiced admirable and much-appreciated discretion. I watched her as she prepared to leave with her mother and found, to my pleasant surprise, that I just couldn’t let her go like that. After all, Richard had deduced the obvious truth. I walked up behind her and helped her with her coat.

  “Will I see you later, my love?” she asked while her face was turned away from me.

  “It’s late,” I said. “I’ll spend some time with Richard. I’ll see you early tomorrow, if that’s okay.”

  “Of course,” she said.

  Sylvie kissed my cheeks good-bye.

  Then, Victoire, and as she kissed my second cheek, she whispered, “Je t’aime,” so softly that even her mother did not hear. I barely heard it, but could not have missed it.


  They left and I returned to Richard.

  “So, do you have time for me tonight?” he asked.

  “I suppose.”

  Etienne was very pleased with the evening and also crashing. He told me that we would talk about the business later. I chatted with a few more people and was finally able to break away. I was reminded by listening to myself that my charm, what charm there was, lay in my utter lack of charm. Richard stood away and appeared amused by my rehearsed, genuine, and comfortable awkwardness.

  “It’s a strange thing,” I said as we walked across the river toward the first arrondissement. “If one is awkward consistently for long enough the awkwardness becomes safe harbor. Is that somehow disingenuous or deceitful?”

  “I think the term is Janus-faced,” he said.

  “Thanks.”

  “Victoire,” he said to the moon. “She’s a beauty.”

  “There are lots of beauties out there,” I said.

  “Right. Aren’t you above it all.”

  “Yes, she’s beautiful,” I agreed. I stopped at the middle of the bridge and looked down at the Seine.

  “Don’t do it,” Richard said.

  “Don’t think I haven’t thought of it.” I looked at him. “So, my friend, am I crazy?”

  “No, but you’re a carrier.”

  “Am I?”

  “Yep.”

  “This can’t lead to anything,” I said.

  “Nope.”

  “I’ve got a beautiful family.”

  “Yep.”

  “Is this pretty much how this discussion’s going to go?”

  “Yep.”

  “I actually have feelings for this woman.”

  “I’m sure you do,” Richard said. “I don’t even know her and I have feelings for her. And for her mother.” He laughed softly. “Don’t listen to me. I know you’ve done the math, but here it is again. She’s nearly twenty-five years younger than you. When she’s thirty-five, you will be fifty-nine. Not quite old, but you see where this is going. Your daughter will be nineteen and will hate your guts. Your son will be fifteen and he’ll excuse himself from the dinner table so he can go to his room and jack off to internet images of Catherine Deneuve.”