Turning a Room Blue
I.
Travis and I step onto the linoleum of my spare bedroom, raising a drunken
party of lint and dust motes. We plug in the stereo (unmarked Springsteen
bootleg) and we consider the wall. It is the fact that I have too much storage
space that brings her to mind. Like the wing of a hawk cutting on a down
current toward prey—that smooth, that decisive, she joins us.
I’ve run away to Spain with death snapping at my heels and a fresh love in
front of me, only two duffle bags on my arms. Even with my new bride’s
belongings, we have no hope of filling the extra closet and cabinets and
drawers and lone stripe of shelf, which loom over us. Trav, theoretically here
on vacation but always the utilitarian man of the two of us, hefts a wrench and
studies the strange arrangement. I realize, not for the first time in this life,
that I would be fucked without him. As if to complement his analysis of the
task, I open the door to one of the deep cupboards: motion, a yawn of hinge
perhaps, the quadrangular shadow cast, the sensation of space opening,
brings a notorious mid-90s photo up behind my eyes—it might as well be the
only item inside the cupboard: her, tucked into a dormitory dryer, as if tossed
there, spidery limbs peeking out, drink held magically aloft in one hand, a
slender middle finger on the other, purple bagged eyes daring the viewer to
laugh at what, indeed, ought to be funny.
A bolt chirps under Trav’s forearm, a tendon rising like a bedded snake beneath
the blue star inked there for her. I think maybe he’s already caught memories,
too, but maybe that’s because Bruce sings a line about the state trooper’s
lights on the Jersey Turnpike, or because Trav ignites his Marlboro and the
scent of her brand is like one of her fingers drawn cross my chest, or because
he blinks away what must be the smoke but could have been a tear. I climb up
on the desk, click the screwdriver into place and twist.
There is a momentary mystery when all the pressure screws roll loose in their
sockets and the rivets have to be pounded away—the shit will not come off the
wall. It has to be jostled and banged and leaned on and it finally slides free
with the sound of ripping and lament.
One time they told her the quantity of pills she swallowed should have planted a
bull elephant in its grave. She reported this to me in a voice hoarse with
alchemy—the transformation of disappointment, shame and desperation into a
bitter pride. She’d said it to me over the phone, but it was sharp and loud
enough to leave a visual, like thunder seems to when it coincides with lightning:
The postponed smoke in her throat wings out as she shines nails on her jeans,
twirls her car keys, preparing to escape home, the scene of her crime. She
pretends her mother isn’t lingering nearby, listening, more poisoned than her
daughter has been by an earnest narcotic wish.
(“License, registration—I ain’t got none. But I got a clean conscience, about
the things that I done…”)
By the time the furniture stands in Pisa Towers of rectangular board, Trav has
gone through four smokes, changed the disc (Springsteen live from
Winterland, CA, 1965), and rebound his hair (grown long for the first time since
he shored it off to mourn her). I have become amazed by how much empty
space, in a manner of speaking, can weigh.
Towards the end, when she’d swallowed pretense like cough syrup and signed
the self-made image of CEO like a contract, in her apartment there were cherry
wood armoires that stood at military rest, magazine racks with heavy leather
like bomb cases, and rotating mahogany mirrors that could either reflect or flip
her world. Still, as ever, bed was only a futon on the floor. I remember drifting
off, the white drape rippling over us with the Hudson’s breeze, her thirtieth
Marlboro crackling, fingers stroking my wrist, feeling as if the classy furniture
was a phalanx of dapper, soulless gentlemen watching over us.
* * *
1999
She stands beside her Toyota coupe, slamming the trunk, in which she can fit
everything she owns. Her sunglasses are so big that I can’t see any evidence of
her tears. She’s waiting on me now, to get through whatever I need to say. I
grab her close and try some bastard cheerfulness, talk to her about the
therapy of the road. She’s nodding to get through the moment, but my words
don’t mean any more to her than the Marlboro smoke merging with the gray
sky. She interrupts me, seizes my forearm and squeezes.
It’s ok, Eli—you don’t have to say anything else. Then, quieter, please, don’t
say anything else.
I am relieved that she’s moving home. I suppose I feed myself the litany: she
needs her family, needs to be “home,” nearer the Good Shrink. She needs a
road trip; she needs a fresh start. But it isn’t really about her, it is about me
and what I need: to have her off my conscience.
I am so young and selfish that I don’t even understand a decision has been
made.
II.
The absence of the furniture makes the room feel bigger but colder and older,
too. The largest of cabinets had hidden a gaping wound in the plaster, bricks
peeking through in a rough oval, the Franconian bones of the building. I’m
onto the third Bruce bootleg, Cleveland this time, sometime in the late 1970’s
when she, Trav and I were still only soft stirrings of notions in our parents, like
the opposite of ghosts. Trav is presently off for lunch on top of a sunny hill in
Park Guell with my sister in law, which makes me glad, but the way his broad
shoulders catch some of the hurt for me—to say nothing of his superior
knowledge of home improvements—is sorely missed.
I study the Spanish instructions for the plaster mix. It seems you have less
than four minutes from the time you blend till when the plaster goes hard as a
board. Maybe it’s the technical instructions in my second tongue, maybe it’s
the pressure of the clock, maybe it’s Bruce-induced nostalgia, maybe it’s the
mild dyslexia I share with her. Somehow I switch the ratio of water and plaster
and wind up with a useless beige soup. As it congeals I sit, resigned to my
error, listening and recalling what the song commands.
* * *
1998
Winding California mountain roads toward morning, trying to find our way back
to campus (“I got a bottle of rose, so let’s try it…”). Her sucking Marlboros,
illuminating the car with a crimson glow, trying to sound annoyed but laughing
through her exhalations.
Which way, fucker?
I try to sound confident and hope I’m right, thinking that soon the imperative
to get back may no longer be playful but necessary.
Right, right—go right.
Come on! Driver’s side or passenger’s side? Right doesn’t mean shit to me.
(“I’ll take you all out to where the gypsy angels go…”)
The polluted mountains like dead stars circling us in a benign embrace.
A spoon of diesel kicks fast, she’d say, as if discussing surgery. You’ve got to
get it up into the works before it hardens but not while it’s still too hot. Unless
you want to fill your veins with fire—or tar.
Tricky business.
And I’d shrug or look away, trying to appear uninterested, unimpressed, not
willing to respond the stupid, deadly call of the chic, yet not wanting to judge
and lecture like the impotent hordes of others, yet wanting her to know that I
care, that I love, that I want her to stop.
Tricky business.
* * *
I get the plaster right on the second try and the brick vanishes, the bones re-
fleshed. But the scars and pocks of tape and tacks and nails and screws crowd
the walls in constellations, like a midget artillery battle has been fought here,
just as life-sized artillery battles raged outside these walls on countless
occasions through history. Wounds of time. With a putty knife I fill them,
seeing in my mind a painted fingernail doing the same: rubbing foundation into
the unjustly soft flesh of a slender forearm. The cobwebs come down with the
mere swat of a broom, mocking the terrible predicament of insects, as if it were
an easy, capricious thing to destroy the fibers of our prisons, of our very
demise.
(“Stand up now and let it shoot through you…”)
III.
In the paint store the crooked line that meanders from the counter into the
chaotic aisles is composed of: young amateurs like me; exacting, well made-up
Amas de la Casa who have drawn up another severe task for themselves;
grumpy Catalan contractors resentful at the interlopers. These men’s clothes
are faded but spackled with bursts of loud color, like a black and white film on a
joyously vandalized screen, like dreary ghetto high schools adorned with wild
murals. Their faces are distinct and hard and gray, their eyes are gray, their
hair too. All lining up to purchase unorthodox, bright hues that will change the
way that other people feel while sitting in their living rooms knowing a leisure
that these men do not.
When it’s my turn, my vocabulary faltering, my finger is already traveling
toward the display card of burnt orange that I’ve been planning on, but a deep
sea blue flashes at me from the other corner of the bulletin board and I find
myself hoisting a five gallon bucket with a whole different implication. It was
not her favorite—midnight blue was. Maybe that’s why I buy it, because it was
expressly not her favorite, as if even now, now that it’s folded her away
forever, I’m still defying her blue, trying however absurdly, nominally and late,
to lighten it.
Travis is back, wearing the mix-match look of a man with his heart in two
places: the sweet lunch with his new love fresh in him, the jagged lead of her
Gone love still hanging like a slab of meat in him, too. The long trudge from
the store has worn me down and so I stretch out on the linoleum while he
positions a Marlboro between his lips, puts on a Lucinda Williams disc and
begins rolling the ceiling white. Hands behind my head, watching Old overlaid
by New above me, I wonder if the trick is good enough.
(“Blue is the color of night, when the red sun disappears from the sky...”)
The first coat of the walls is a shock, the sensation of the roller working under
my palms more like erasing than creating. But one layer leaves the bruises, the
scars, the stains staring through, like faces at the window of a lit up house at
night, and we can’t have that—things peeking through. It’s inappropriate, she’
d say, as much to herself as to me, don’t ever let them see. Straightening a
Prada skirt, snapping shut a briefcase, twirling her lip ring so the clasp hid
inside her mouth. Pulling down sleeves carefully. The first swipe of the second
coat is like night falling through the ocean in one fixed column.
* * *
2001
We smoke stale weed somewhere in South Carolina. She pushes a pill on me,
and I go out like a rookie fighter, sinking into the new leather of the Jetta
through Lyle Lovett’s odd crooning. And when I open my eyes again, we are
exiting I-40 into the arms of that all-blues town, Memphis.
I think I could live here, she says, and it sticks with me because I’ve never
heard that before. I nod and she says: It’s just run-down and blue enough.
Just enough honesty to get by with.
I don’t recall where and when we buy the black hair dye. I only remember that
when my scalp starts to burn and I am halfway in the bathtub and I rise
wobbly, she screams at me through her laughter, No! No! Fucker! You have
to stay there—you have to do it twice! Two coats, two coats!
I have this photo from that night, just one: she’s sitting on the cheap motel
bed, right hand plastic-gloved and holding the tube of dye, left hand clutching a
plastic cup of whisky. There are streaks of the dye on her jeans and a thick
lock of hair has swung down over her right eye. She is looking down and
laughing, the way she did when she really got going, and her perfect teeth are
showing and it makes me smile, too, every time I see it.
* * *
I bring the Memphis photo into the room and Travis switches to Mazzy Star,
having come to know silently that this is now ceremony. There are still white
spaces glowing through the blue paint but night has indeed begun falling (in
one fixed column) down the light well outside the window. Singsong tiffs and
chatter in Spanish, Catalan, Gallego, filter through with the braiding scents of
Mediterranean dinners.
There are places on the walls where the brushes and rollers have overlapped—
perhaps some sections where the paint has gone on two, three times, others
where there is only the first layer and it strikes me how many shades there are,
the range of a color’s hues a rainbow in itself. And in one corner—perhaps
where freshly dipped brushes crossed or perhaps only a trick of the light—there
is a stretch of blue I have only seen once before. It was on the last day I saw
my father, when he and my brother and I folded ourselves around our dying
Labrador and whispered farewells and the vet leveled the syringe against the
dog’s mainline vein. The poison was blue—this blue, the same blue as a scrap
of my wall five years and ten thousand miles departed from that March
morning. And it enters me like wind enters a house through a faulty window,
grief that I now know as well as dusk but on that March morning had thought
might madden me for good: The grief of my father’s death previewed in the
slide of that needle. I thought of her that morning, for obvious reasons,
gazing on as the blue poison in the chamber traded places with crimson swirls.
How I thought: I still have her, like a prayer.
(“There’s a blue light in my best friend’s room. There’s a blue light in his eyes.
There’s a blue light…I want to see him shine…”)
When we are finished Trav and I slap each other’s shoulders awkwardly, light
cigarettes and turn out the light. The stereo comes with us. There are only a
few moments of stillness on the sofa before the structures that Travis has built
inside himself begin tumbling down in earnest, like the nighttime is doing out on
the terrace. The sweet music that was hers swallows us like the cigarette
smoke, the promise of her ultimate freedom and yet an entire lifetime without
her dueling inside of us.
As his shaggy head falls to his chest and he quakes with sobs, I place my hand
on his knee and remember all the times I touched her in the same place, the
way the muscles tensed beneath the fabric as she pressed the accelerator, the
smoke and the music banging around us, hurtling forward—as we are now.
Toward her, I like to think.
I.
Travis and I step onto the linoleum of my spare bedroom, raising a drunken
party of lint and dust motes. We plug in the stereo (unmarked Springsteen
bootleg) and we consider the wall. It is the fact that I have too much storage
space that brings her to mind. Like the wing of a hawk cutting on a down
current toward prey—that smooth, that decisive, she joins us.
I’ve run away to Spain with death snapping at my heels and a fresh love in
front of me, only two duffle bags on my arms. Even with my new bride’s
belongings, we have no hope of filling the extra closet and cabinets and
drawers and lone stripe of shelf, which loom over us. Trav, theoretically here
on vacation but always the utilitarian man of the two of us, hefts a wrench and
studies the strange arrangement. I realize, not for the first time in this life,
that I would be fucked without him. As if to complement his analysis of the
task, I open the door to one of the deep cupboards: motion, a yawn of hinge
perhaps, the quadrangular shadow cast, the sensation of space opening,
brings a notorious mid-90s photo up behind my eyes—it might as well be the
only item inside the cupboard: her, tucked into a dormitory dryer, as if tossed
there, spidery limbs peeking out, drink held magically aloft in one hand, a
slender middle finger on the other, purple bagged eyes daring the viewer to
laugh at what, indeed, ought to be funny.
A bolt chirps under Trav’s forearm, a tendon rising like a bedded snake beneath
the blue star inked there for her. I think maybe he’s already caught memories,
too, but maybe that’s because Bruce sings a line about the state trooper’s
lights on the Jersey Turnpike, or because Trav ignites his Marlboro and the
scent of her brand is like one of her fingers drawn cross my chest, or because
he blinks away what must be the smoke but could have been a tear. I climb up
on the desk, click the screwdriver into place and twist.
There is a momentary mystery when all the pressure screws roll loose in their
sockets and the rivets have to be pounded away—the shit will not come off the
wall. It has to be jostled and banged and leaned on and it finally slides free
with the sound of ripping and lament.
One time they told her the quantity of pills she swallowed should have planted a
bull elephant in its grave. She reported this to me in a voice hoarse with
alchemy—the transformation of disappointment, shame and desperation into a
bitter pride. She’d said it to me over the phone, but it was sharp and loud
enough to leave a visual, like thunder seems to when it coincides with lightning:
The postponed smoke in her throat wings out as she shines nails on her jeans,
twirls her car keys, preparing to escape home, the scene of her crime. She
pretends her mother isn’t lingering nearby, listening, more poisoned than her
daughter has been by an earnest narcotic wish.
(“License, registration—I ain’t got none. But I got a clean conscience, about
the things that I done…”)
By the time the furniture stands in Pisa Towers of rectangular board, Trav has
gone through four smokes, changed the disc (Springsteen live from
Winterland, CA, 1965), and rebound his hair (grown long for the first time since
he shored it off to mourn her). I have become amazed by how much empty
space, in a manner of speaking, can weigh.
Towards the end, when she’d swallowed pretense like cough syrup and signed
the self-made image of CEO like a contract, in her apartment there were cherry
wood armoires that stood at military rest, magazine racks with heavy leather
like bomb cases, and rotating mahogany mirrors that could either reflect or flip
her world. Still, as ever, bed was only a futon on the floor. I remember drifting
off, the white drape rippling over us with the Hudson’s breeze, her thirtieth
Marlboro crackling, fingers stroking my wrist, feeling as if the classy furniture
was a phalanx of dapper, soulless gentlemen watching over us.
* * *
1999
She stands beside her Toyota coupe, slamming the trunk, in which she can fit
everything she owns. Her sunglasses are so big that I can’t see any evidence of
her tears. She’s waiting on me now, to get through whatever I need to say. I
grab her close and try some bastard cheerfulness, talk to her about the
therapy of the road. She’s nodding to get through the moment, but my words
don’t mean any more to her than the Marlboro smoke merging with the gray
sky. She interrupts me, seizes my forearm and squeezes.
It’s ok, Eli—you don’t have to say anything else. Then, quieter, please, don’t
say anything else.
I am relieved that she’s moving home. I suppose I feed myself the litany: she
needs her family, needs to be “home,” nearer the Good Shrink. She needs a
road trip; she needs a fresh start. But it isn’t really about her, it is about me
and what I need: to have her off my conscience.
I am so young and selfish that I don’t even understand a decision has been
made.
II.
The absence of the furniture makes the room feel bigger but colder and older,
too. The largest of cabinets had hidden a gaping wound in the plaster, bricks
peeking through in a rough oval, the Franconian bones of the building. I’m
onto the third Bruce bootleg, Cleveland this time, sometime in the late 1970’s
when she, Trav and I were still only soft stirrings of notions in our parents, like
the opposite of ghosts. Trav is presently off for lunch on top of a sunny hill in
Park Guell with my sister in law, which makes me glad, but the way his broad
shoulders catch some of the hurt for me—to say nothing of his superior
knowledge of home improvements—is sorely missed.
I study the Spanish instructions for the plaster mix. It seems you have less
than four minutes from the time you blend till when the plaster goes hard as a
board. Maybe it’s the technical instructions in my second tongue, maybe it’s
the pressure of the clock, maybe it’s Bruce-induced nostalgia, maybe it’s the
mild dyslexia I share with her. Somehow I switch the ratio of water and plaster
and wind up with a useless beige soup. As it congeals I sit, resigned to my
error, listening and recalling what the song commands.
* * *
1998
Winding California mountain roads toward morning, trying to find our way back
to campus (“I got a bottle of rose, so let’s try it…”). Her sucking Marlboros,
illuminating the car with a crimson glow, trying to sound annoyed but laughing
through her exhalations.
Which way, fucker?
I try to sound confident and hope I’m right, thinking that soon the imperative
to get back may no longer be playful but necessary.
Right, right—go right.
Come on! Driver’s side or passenger’s side? Right doesn’t mean shit to me.
(“I’ll take you all out to where the gypsy angels go…”)
The polluted mountains like dead stars circling us in a benign embrace.
A spoon of diesel kicks fast, she’d say, as if discussing surgery. You’ve got to
get it up into the works before it hardens but not while it’s still too hot. Unless
you want to fill your veins with fire—or tar.
Tricky business.
And I’d shrug or look away, trying to appear uninterested, unimpressed, not
willing to respond the stupid, deadly call of the chic, yet not wanting to judge
and lecture like the impotent hordes of others, yet wanting her to know that I
care, that I love, that I want her to stop.
Tricky business.
* * *
I get the plaster right on the second try and the brick vanishes, the bones re-
fleshed. But the scars and pocks of tape and tacks and nails and screws crowd
the walls in constellations, like a midget artillery battle has been fought here,
just as life-sized artillery battles raged outside these walls on countless
occasions through history. Wounds of time. With a putty knife I fill them,
seeing in my mind a painted fingernail doing the same: rubbing foundation into
the unjustly soft flesh of a slender forearm. The cobwebs come down with the
mere swat of a broom, mocking the terrible predicament of insects, as if it were
an easy, capricious thing to destroy the fibers of our prisons, of our very
demise.
(“Stand up now and let it shoot through you…”)
III.
In the paint store the crooked line that meanders from the counter into the
chaotic aisles is composed of: young amateurs like me; exacting, well made-up
Amas de la Casa who have drawn up another severe task for themselves;
grumpy Catalan contractors resentful at the interlopers. These men’s clothes
are faded but spackled with bursts of loud color, like a black and white film on a
joyously vandalized screen, like dreary ghetto high schools adorned with wild
murals. Their faces are distinct and hard and gray, their eyes are gray, their
hair too. All lining up to purchase unorthodox, bright hues that will change the
way that other people feel while sitting in their living rooms knowing a leisure
that these men do not.
When it’s my turn, my vocabulary faltering, my finger is already traveling
toward the display card of burnt orange that I’ve been planning on, but a deep
sea blue flashes at me from the other corner of the bulletin board and I find
myself hoisting a five gallon bucket with a whole different implication. It was
not her favorite—midnight blue was. Maybe that’s why I buy it, because it was
expressly not her favorite, as if even now, now that it’s folded her away
forever, I’m still defying her blue, trying however absurdly, nominally and late,
to lighten it.
Travis is back, wearing the mix-match look of a man with his heart in two
places: the sweet lunch with his new love fresh in him, the jagged lead of her
Gone love still hanging like a slab of meat in him, too. The long trudge from
the store has worn me down and so I stretch out on the linoleum while he
positions a Marlboro between his lips, puts on a Lucinda Williams disc and
begins rolling the ceiling white. Hands behind my head, watching Old overlaid
by New above me, I wonder if the trick is good enough.
(“Blue is the color of night, when the red sun disappears from the sky...”)
The first coat of the walls is a shock, the sensation of the roller working under
my palms more like erasing than creating. But one layer leaves the bruises, the
scars, the stains staring through, like faces at the window of a lit up house at
night, and we can’t have that—things peeking through. It’s inappropriate, she’
d say, as much to herself as to me, don’t ever let them see. Straightening a
Prada skirt, snapping shut a briefcase, twirling her lip ring so the clasp hid
inside her mouth. Pulling down sleeves carefully. The first swipe of the second
coat is like night falling through the ocean in one fixed column.
* * *
2001
We smoke stale weed somewhere in South Carolina. She pushes a pill on me,
and I go out like a rookie fighter, sinking into the new leather of the Jetta
through Lyle Lovett’s odd crooning. And when I open my eyes again, we are
exiting I-40 into the arms of that all-blues town, Memphis.
I think I could live here, she says, and it sticks with me because I’ve never
heard that before. I nod and she says: It’s just run-down and blue enough.
Just enough honesty to get by with.
I don’t recall where and when we buy the black hair dye. I only remember that
when my scalp starts to burn and I am halfway in the bathtub and I rise
wobbly, she screams at me through her laughter, No! No! Fucker! You have
to stay there—you have to do it twice! Two coats, two coats!
I have this photo from that night, just one: she’s sitting on the cheap motel
bed, right hand plastic-gloved and holding the tube of dye, left hand clutching a
plastic cup of whisky. There are streaks of the dye on her jeans and a thick
lock of hair has swung down over her right eye. She is looking down and
laughing, the way she did when she really got going, and her perfect teeth are
showing and it makes me smile, too, every time I see it.
* * *
I bring the Memphis photo into the room and Travis switches to Mazzy Star,
having come to know silently that this is now ceremony. There are still white
spaces glowing through the blue paint but night has indeed begun falling (in
one fixed column) down the light well outside the window. Singsong tiffs and
chatter in Spanish, Catalan, Gallego, filter through with the braiding scents of
Mediterranean dinners.
There are places on the walls where the brushes and rollers have overlapped—
perhaps some sections where the paint has gone on two, three times, others
where there is only the first layer and it strikes me how many shades there are,
the range of a color’s hues a rainbow in itself. And in one corner—perhaps
where freshly dipped brushes crossed or perhaps only a trick of the light—there
is a stretch of blue I have only seen once before. It was on the last day I saw
my father, when he and my brother and I folded ourselves around our dying
Labrador and whispered farewells and the vet leveled the syringe against the
dog’s mainline vein. The poison was blue—this blue, the same blue as a scrap
of my wall five years and ten thousand miles departed from that March
morning. And it enters me like wind enters a house through a faulty window,
grief that I now know as well as dusk but on that March morning had thought
might madden me for good: The grief of my father’s death previewed in the
slide of that needle. I thought of her that morning, for obvious reasons,
gazing on as the blue poison in the chamber traded places with crimson swirls.
How I thought: I still have her, like a prayer.
(“There’s a blue light in my best friend’s room. There’s a blue light in his eyes.
There’s a blue light…I want to see him shine…”)
When we are finished Trav and I slap each other’s shoulders awkwardly, light
cigarettes and turn out the light. The stereo comes with us. There are only a
few moments of stillness on the sofa before the structures that Travis has built
inside himself begin tumbling down in earnest, like the nighttime is doing out on
the terrace. The sweet music that was hers swallows us like the cigarette
smoke, the promise of her ultimate freedom and yet an entire lifetime without
her dueling inside of us.
As his shaggy head falls to his chest and he quakes with sobs, I place my hand
on his knee and remember all the times I touched her in the same place, the
way the muscles tensed beneath the fabric as she pressed the accelerator, the
smoke and the music banging around us, hurtling forward—as we are now.
Toward her, I like to think.
r.kv.r.y. quarterly
fall08.winter08
non-fiction
by eli hastings
fall08.winter08
non-fiction
by eli hastings