So Much Blue

by Percival Everett

  I fell in behind the wheel. The Caddy balked when I tried to start it, but started after a third try. I looked in the rearview mirror and saw the man’s feet, hoped that they would move. They didn’t.

  I pulled slowly away, as if that made me harder to see. I had killed that man and with him a part of me evaporated. I could feel myself leaving, and yet staying behind on that sidewalk, lying down on that sidewalk beside that small man. I was burning in that can’s fire. Maybe the small man had a wife, children. He would not be coming home to them. I had taken him away from them. For a brief second I tried to justify my action, however accidental, by reminding myself that he had shot at me and that just made me hate myself more.

  Paris

  “If I had not been in that country I could not have shot that man, I would not have killed him,” I said.

  Victoire cried beside me without sound. Her mother was apparently still asleep in the bedroom. If she had come out then I would have been completely lost and probably unrecoverable. I had told Victoire something I had never been able to tell Linda or had chosen not to tell her. For twenty years I had not shared this with Linda. But here I was, telling this young woman with whom I had absolutely no future. Perhaps that’s why I could tell her.

  “I’d better go,” I said.

  “Why?”

  “Well, your mother is liable to wake up any minute now. I’m sorry I put all of that on you. You’re so young and beautiful and you didn’t need to hear that. It’s ugly and I’m sorry.”

  “I asked you for a secret.” She held me. “My secret is that I tried to killed myself.”

  I have to admit that for some reason that news did not surprise me.

  “I’m okay now. I was depressed. But I’m okay now.”

  “I’m afraid that I am hurting you. That I will hurt you,” I said.

  “Of course you will,” she said. “I know you cannot be away from your children. I don’t have some fairy-tale dream that you will come live with me. I am young but I am not naive.”

  I nodded. “No, you are anything but naive,” I told her. Again she had left me feeling like the younger one. I touched her cheek. “You are such a lovely person. You are pure color.”

  “Lovely, that is an interesting word.”

  “Isn’t it,” I said.

  She took my hand.

  “So what is this, us, what we have?” I asked.

  “Love,” she said.

  “Love,” I repeated as if listening to the word. “That’s such a big word.”

  “Just love me,” she said.

  “I do love you,” I said.

  House

  April’s coolness was hardest to take. Though I had been on the verge, the very rim of betraying her trust, I had not in fact done so, as I had been interrupted by nature. What was more was that my crime, in her eyes, her complicity notwithstanding, was that I had somehow shown a lack of care and love for her by not breaking her confidence, by actually keeping her secret to myself. I was in what might have been called a lose-lose situation.

  I believed that Linda would eventually forgive me or at lease excuse my behavior, but she would never forget and so things would always be different. What was significant was that I did not want her to forgive me. It was not only that I could not forgive myself, that was a given, but somehow I needed some kind of change and that change had to come as a conciliation with my past. I didn’t know what such a rapprochement would look like, but I had to explore the possibility of it.

  The secret that I held closest, the secret that I never told anyone, that I shared with no one, was that I had married Linda without loving her. I wanted to love her. I liked her immensely, thought the world of her, respected her, but I could not then say that I loved her. I probably came to love her. I certainly shared life with her enthusiastically, happily, willingly. I was pleased that she was the mother of my children, but my heart never ached for her, my skin never longed for her touch. I had in fact used her. I had used her to feel whole again, normal, to feel like a good man after what I had done in El Salvador. She held my head and stroked my temples when I was depressed without knowing the cause. She considered me the moody artist. And that I was. The irony, of course, one of them, was that my depression actually fed my work, made my art better, gave it a gravity, a depth that it hadn’t had before. A certain amount of guilt came with that truth, a guilt that never went completely away, a guilt that became easier to live with and yet more profound.

  Again, Linda and I were older parents because it took me so long to accept myself as worthy of that step. Mainly, however, I agreed to it because she wanted it so much. I might have done it because I finally wanted it as well, but I don’t honestly know if that’s true.

  We were camping by a lake in upstate New York. Linda was tired from the hike and I had just set up our tent. It was cool but not cold in May. She sat on a log on the shore and looked west across the water.

  “What are you thinking about?” I asked as I sat beside her. The sun was just beginning its decline. “It’s going to be a nice sunset.”

  “Yes, I think so,” she said.

  I picked up a stone and skipped it.

  “I can never do that,” she said.

  “Here’s a question for you,” I said. “You find the perfect skipping stone.” I picked up a flat rock. “Say this is it. Imagine that this stone is beautifully flat, that it’s Payne’s gray in color, just like this one, oval but not egg-shaped. It’s made for the art of skipping.”

  “Okay,” she said.

  “It’s perfect. Do you throw it or keep it?”

  “You throw it,” she said.

  “Really?”

  “Yes.” She took the stone from me. “You can keep it until you die and then you’ll never see what it can do.”

  “What if you mess up the toss?” I asked. “It just goes splash into the water. No skip, not even one.”

  “How is that different from dying with it in your pocket?”

  I looked at the water.

  “You don’t agree?” she said.

  “No, I agree completely.”

  “So, what’s the point of all this?”

  “About this baby thing.”

  A light rain began to fall, but we didn’t move. I might not have loved Linda, but I belonged with her.

  1979

  That small man, that small, charcoal likeness of a man who lay dead on that street would not be going home or anywhere for that matter. I didn’t really care about justice. I didn’t care about honor, probity, or character. I thought only about getting back to my own home, my safe home, my safe bed. I drove the route I thought Richard and Tad would have walked. I turned onto a street with a disturbing amount of pedestrian traffic. People walked in the middle of the street, caring nothing about the rain or the car I was driving. I leaned on the steering wheel to see as I inched forward, tried to find Richard and Tad in the crowd. Young men peered in through the windows at me, angry men, and I was tempted to roll up the windows in spite of the heat. Their eyes were threatening, but no one acted against me.

  The light was unreal, which is to say it was all too real, harsh, coarse, shrill. I would not have been surprised to see mobs carrying torches, chanting. I imagined that in some part of the city people were doing just that. People walked across the street in front of the car and behind me. A woman slapped the Caddy’s hood with both hands when I inched toward her and got too close. The man with her glared and shook a fist, shouted something.

  I saw Richard and Tad. In fact they saw me first and were trotting toward the Caddy. They weaved through the crowd and squeezed into the car. Richard tossed my bag and his into the backseat.

  “I thought you were going to wait,” Richard said.

  “I had to move on. Did you get it?”

  He showed me his passport.

  “What a fucking mess,” Tad said from the back.

  “It sure is,” I said. “This is what I was afraid of.” I needed to be headed in the oppos
ite direction, but the intersection ahead was crammed with bodies. I had to turn around where I was. “I don’t know how to turn this whale around.”

  There was loud noise, a boom or crash, a cannon or a car wreck, somewhere we couldn’t see. People at the intersection ran in all directions, some toward us. I pushed the nose of the car slowly left into the crowd.

  “What are you doing?” Richard asked.

  “I’m trying to turn around!” I tried to back up. People pounded on the trunk and the hood, bouncing the car on its weakened shocks. I moved forward again, sounded the horn. Doing that made a couple of men even angrier. I ignored them and that made them angrier still and the anger it seemed was contagious. The men and others took to punching and kicking the Cadillac, rocking us. A man reached in and grabbed me by the front of my shirt. I raised the window.

  “I don’t like this,” Richard said. “I don’t like this one little bit. Get us the fuck out of here.”

  “I’m trying.”

  “They’re going to turn us over,” Tad said.

  I got the car pointed in the right direction and I pushed through. There was another loud boom behind us and that sent our attackers running, shouting, and screaming again. I didn’t even bother to look into the rearview mirror, just concentrated on moving the car forward.

  “It’s a fucking tank,” Tad said. “I saw it. It just went through the intersection. A fucking tank!”

  There was an opening in the crowd and I covered a little more street. Finally I was able to speed forward, if fifteen miles per hour could be considered speeding. The gap in the throng opened even more and once we were away from the center we were on our way to the airport.

  Richard stared at me. “What do you think?”

  “What the fuck do you mean what do I think? I think we’re fucked. I think we’ll never make it to the airport. I think a tank is going to blow us up!”

  He turned back to the window.

  We did make it to the airport and it was surprisingly, eerily calm. We parked and abandoned the Cadillac for good in a lot for cargo pickup. We went to the ticket counter and Richard bought three tickets to Los Angeles, the next plane out, and paid for them with his Master Charge. It all went so well, so smoothly that I was unnerved. It was late and the airport was all but empty. Our flight would leave seven hours later at seven thirty. That was plenty of time for everything to turn bad, I knew that. The soldiers still patrolled the terminal with the same nonchalance they had when we arrived, and just like then they gave us long looks. It was as if nothing was happening in the city. The ticket counters went dark and food vendors had already shut down their carts.

  “I’m starving,” Richard said as we walked away from the counter.

  “Me too,” Tad said.

  “I suppose that’s a good thing,” I said.

  They looked at me.

  “It means we’re still alive, so to speak. What would it mean if we weren’t hungry?”

  Richard cocked his head. “Since when did you become a bright-side person?” he asked.

  I was looking back at Richard, but all I could see was the face of the small soldier, his light-blue socks.

  “What’s wrong? We’re in the airport. We’re about to go home.”

  We sat in chairs across from the baggage claim area. I reached down and rubbed at the pain in my calf.

  “Kevin?” Richard said.

  “I’m okay.”

  “Did something happen?”

  I looked at Tad sitting just on the other side of Richard, then around at the deserted airport. A man operated an electric floor cleaning machine not far away. The machine appeared to get away from him every few feet and he’d have to regain control. The noise of the machine was strangely soothing. “Did something happen?” I repeated the question. “The last three days happened.”

  “We’ll be back in the States soon,” Richard said.

  “Not soon enough.” I shook my head to clear it. I looked again at Tad.

  Tad caught me looking at him. “What?”

  “Tad, are you holding?”

  “What?”

  “Are you holding?” I asked. I looked at Richard, then back at Tad. “I don’t want to get back home just to get locked up because that idiot has drugs on him.”

  “Who are you calling an idiot?” Tad said.

  “Do you have any drugs on you?” Richard asked, sounding the words exaggeratedly slow.

  “No,” Tad said. “As a matter of fact.” He looked at both of us in turn. “If I had anything I’d be doing it right now.”

  That was reasoning I couldn’t argue with.

  Tad kicked out his legs and crossed his ankles, put his head back and closed his eyes. “Now, just leave me the fuck alone.”

  “We’ve got a long wait,” Richard said. “Let’s all just relax.”

  “Aye.” I let my head rest against the wall behind me and shut my eyes too. Behind my lids I relived the killing in excruciating detail. I fought the urge to open my eyes and instead watched the event over and over, wanting desperately for it to end differently, but it never did, wouldn’t.

  Paris

  I had walked a lot through the rain since coming to Paris. I could think of no paintings with rain in them and I realized I wasn’t about to make one, either. But as I walked through the sixth arrondissement so late at night, so early in the morning, I saw the blue of rain, how it tinged the darkness of night sapphire and how Alice blue made lavender the leading edge of morning. The rain fell with no feeling for me, was as indifferent to me as I was to it. All it did was make me wet and cold.

  I would be home two weeks before Christmas, a holiday that I had never fully embraced. I understood that it was not a religious celebration but a secular one, yet I still could never find the flow of it. I would go through the motions for Linda, help her string the lights I found offensive and help her find and put up a tree that I considered a sad sacrifice. The kids would also feign excitement for Linda. They were hardly wanting for anything, but still, like the little kids they were, they loved to open wrapped gifts—rather, they loved the look on Linda’s face when they unwrapped gifts. So we would awake earlier than our custom, sit around uncharacteristically in our flannel pajamas and robes, and break into presents. It was always a nice time and Linda would be made happy.

  I was eager to return home. Without drink I felt closer to my family in spite of the geographical distance. I would have said that I felt like some old self, but better, I felt like someone altogether different. I didn’t know myself and it felt good. And at the same time, being already out of Paris in my head, I was missing young Victoire. I was in love with her the way I was never in love with Linda, but it had nothing to do with being with her. Perhaps I needed her to be just an idea.

  It was four in the morning when I walked into the hotel. The clerk was not at the desk, so I sat in the lobby to wait for him even though I could have simply reached across and grabbed my key from its cubbyhole. The nattily dressed man finally came back and was just a little startled at seeing me.

  “Monsieur Pace,” he said.

  “Bonsoir, Pierre,” I said. “Or is it bonjour now?”

  “C’est le matin.”

  “Any calls?”

  “Non. Not tonight.”

  “You probably think I’m a foolish man,” I said.