Earth Colors Read online

  Needless to say, this image got me thinking about Baby Sloane. Throughout the day I had been pushing away a deep sense of heaviness. Now I realized where that heaviness was coming from: I missed that baby very, very badly. Since her birth, I had not before been separated from her for longer than a few hours, and now the gap was accumulating into days.

  I thought of phoning the Irma Hotel, thinking that Faye would probably have moved there, but knew that if she was there at this hour, she and the baby would be trying to take a nap, and I should not interrupt. To fill the void in my heart, I thought about writing to Jack, but that idea fell flat as well.

  The book closed itself in my lap, my excitement dead.

  At least it’s a female saint that’s bending over the child, I thought bitterly. If Tanya was right, it would have been some guy saint, not this woman in yellow.

  I ate another cookie—or two, or three—took some sips of tea and stared out the window at the street.

  A bright yellow rental van was just pulling up. I surmised that Fritz’s furniture must be arriving.

  I needed to be around another human being, and the sooner the better, so I got up and wandered outside to see if my new neighbor needed any help. I found him lowering a liftgate from the van, getting ready to offload some furniture. “Good afternoon, Fritz,” I said, as I sauntered up the sidewalk. “Can I give you a hand?”

  He turned around and smiled. “Sure,” he said. He had swapped the floppy sweats for a T-shirt and a pair of jeans, and I was pleased to note that all that running and stretching had worked to good effect on his musculature. I decided again with satisfaction that he was sufficiently good-looking—not to mention classy—to turn Faye’s head.

  As I joined Fritz on the liftgate, I set out to make small talk. “I’ve just been reading a set of books about artists’ pigments. In one book, half the chapters are about yellow. Now you drive up in a yellow truck.”

  Fritz smiled at me. “You have a lively mind, Em Hansen. You just stroll up and say, ‘I’ve just been reading some books about pigments.’”

  Pleased at the compliment, I helped Fritz untether a piece of furniture so we could move it out of the truck. “Yeah, well. Funny, the associations colors can have. I see a big rental truck this color and all I can think about is Oklahoma City and the first World Trade Center bombing. Nowadays I see as many of these trucks painted white. I guess they’re trying to edge away from the negative publicity.”

  I looked up. Fritz was looking straight at me, and he was no longer smiling. As I connected with his gaze, he averted his eyes to the floor of the truck for a moment, then looked at me again, this time trying to smile but not quite making it. I could not tell whether he was annoyed, disgusted, or about to get sick.

  I said, “Sorry. It’s just the work I do. You see it’s the colors, really, not the bombing. Bombs—”

  “Let’s not talk about bombs, okay?”

  “Sure,” I said, my curiosity now running rampant.

  “Tell me about another color,” he said firmly.

  I paused, mentally jogging around ultramarine-blue and the associations with it that had propelled me away from my studies. “Well, there’s verdigris; that’s a nice turquoise color that hails from antiquity.”

  “Ah, antiquity,” he echoed, working a nice blue corduroy couch loose from the stack of belongings in the truck.

  “Yeah, these books are great. They list how these guys called colormen used to make some of the pigments. I can practically quote you the line for verdigris: ‘According to the medieval recipes, copper strips are attached to a wooden block containing acetic acid, and then buried in dung,’” I said, daintily crooking a pinkie.

  “Mm. Sounds … delectable,” Fritz said.

  Together Fritz and I hefted the couch out of the truck and into the living room. It’s not a couch, it’s a love seat, I thought cagily, as I helped him settle it in front of the fireplace. The house was an early Craftsman style, with lots of oak flooring and trim, and the big comfy couch looked nice there, inviting. I imagined a warm fire and some cozy snuggling going on, just the tonic Faye needed.

  Next, we brought in some nice side chairs and an end table. “Where do you think I ought to put the table?” he asked.

  I cast an eye around the room. “Over here,” I said. “That way it’s handy to the best lounging spot in the room, but not in the main traffic pattern. You can put your beer here and tuck your copies of Pilot magazine into the rack underneath it.”

  Fritz nodded. “I like that,” he said. “Now, how about the lamps?” “Here and here,” I suggested, pointing at the obvious positions to illuminate reading. “You get good natural light for daytime reading by this chair and ottoman, but at night you’ll want to be over there, facing the fireplace.”

  “Just so.”

  In half an hour, we had set up the entire living room, even putting pictures on the walls. He had some decent serigraph prints of high, floaty mountains, nothing too extraordinary but darned easy to look at, and he held them in various positions while I backed up and checked the proportions of the pictures relative to the other large objects in the room, all the time thinking how impressed Faye would be with his taste. As a finishing touch, he opened a cardboard box filled with carefully wrapped framed photographs of his son at various ages, which I helped him array across the mantelpiece. “Nice-looking kid,” I said, looking at a lovely snap of the boy at about age two, showing a nice round face with big blue eyes and wild blond curls, lit by a gorgeous smile.

  “My son’s very special to me,” he replied.

  “You miss him.”

  “Yeah. Like I said, he’s in Germany with his mom right now. When he’s in the States I get him most weekends.” He shook himself slightly, as if snapping himself back into focus. He looked around the room. “This looks great,” he said. “So, is this what you do for a living?”

  “What?”

  “The colors and all. Are you an interior decorator?”

  I began to laugh. “No way. I’m a geologist. The pigment books are for a forensics project I’m working on.”

  Fritz looked lost.

  I shook my head in amazement. “Pigments are geology, get it? They’re little bits of rock, finely ground up. Some pigments are animal-based, and some are vegetable, but most are mineral. Or, these days, most everything is synthetic, but when you think about it, synthetics are like minerals that are man-made, and they’re derived from mined materials.”

  “Oh. I never knew that. But of course I never thought about it, either. Color is just … color. But I guess there’s more to it than that.”

  “A whole lot. But I’d have to be a chemist or a physicist to really get into all the business about excitement of the electron levels. That part is a total mystery to me. But I can handle the literal part of pigments: A blue rock generally becomes a blue pigment. Plain and simple. Then you hand it over to an artist, who mixes it in oil or water or some other medium, and … then we’re into art, and that’s not mystery, that’s magic.”

  He smiled and shook his head. “I took chemistry and physics in college, but I just design aircraft. Composites. Stabilities. Color is something some other guy paints on the outside of the bird to get it to look sweet.” He gave me an uncertain smile. “Got a little more time? I could use your help with the … well, the beds.”

  Oh, a bit of shyness here? How charming. “Sure,” I said. I helped him muscle the kid’s bunk bed into the first bedroom, and then we went after a nice, big queen-sized sleigh bed that tucked nicely into the larger bedroom toward the back of the house. “Nice carving in this thing,” I commented. I ran a hand along the footboard as I held it so that he could set up the rails.

  “Thanks. I got it at an estate sale a couple years back. Sure beats having the box spring and mattress down on the floor.”

  “How long you been divorced?” I asked.

  Fritz grinned at me. “I like you, Em,” he said. “You want to know something, you open your mou
th and ask, don’tcha.”

  I blushed. “Yeah, well …”

  “The answer is three years. Three years next month, to be precise. We were separated for a year before that. Marsha is an efficient woman, and we didn’t have that much to divide—except custody—so it went pretty quickly. She got the bed. I didn’t want it.”

  “Sorry if I’m being nosy.”

  “You are, but I don’t mind it. Besides, we might just as well get to know each other, eh?”

  “Eh.”

  “Now you: How old is Sloane Renee?”

  “Seven months.”

  “A nice age. Which one of you had her?”

  “Huh?”

  “Which one of you’s the birth mother?”

  My mouth dropped open. I stood there catching flies while the dime dropped and I sorted out what he was saying. “Oh! Oh, you think …”

  Suddenly Fritz turned scarlet. “Oh, shit,” he said under his breath. “I mean—oh, I am sorry. I thought you were …”

  “A lesbian couple? A two-mommy household?”

  He gave me a wilted grin, the kind that looks like a person’s just swallowed about a quart of glue. “I am such an idiot. You know, that was number eight on Marsha’s list of the top ten reasons why she had to divorce me: I am totally clueless about people.”

  My first reaction was frustration: How was he supposed to find Faye attractive if he thought she wasn’t interested in men? I said, “Fritz, you’re a sweet guy. But no, Faye and I are not, uh …” Then it hit home that this guy had thought that I was one of the guys, too. And he wasn’t clueless. No, he’d had some clues, so what were they? Did I look a little too butch in my blue jeans and sloppy shirt?

  Fritz’s posture had gone oddly formal, and he was furtively looking me up and down in reevaluation. I realized that he had just realized he was standing in his bedroom with a heterosexual female he hardly knew. “Let’s see what else needs to come in from the truck,” I said, diplomatically leading the way out of the room, but deep inside, I felt sick. Something strange was happening to me, like waking up one morning to discover that I was a bug. And it was not just a matter of identity: The rules of the world seemed to have shifted. It was as if a hole was opening underneath my feet, and I was hanging over a dark, cavernous space that had no bottom.

  We made short and austere work out of bringing the mattress and box springs in from the truck and hefting them into place, after which Fritz said he was certain he could get the rest in by himself and I excused myself and went back to Faye’s house.

  Like an automaton, I picked up the mail on the way in from the street and tossed it onto the kitchen counter with the rest of the pile that had accumulated while I’d been in Cody. I didn’t even look through it. Certainly none of it was for me, because I did not have a life.

  I decided that I needed a beer. I usually did not drink when I was unhappy, as booze sure hadn’t fixed things for my mother, but just then I could not think beyond the look on Fritz’s face when he realized that I was not what he had assumed. That look had said, Something is wrong with this woman.

  As I reached for the refrigerator door I noticed that the envelope on the top of the stack of mail was in fact addressed to me.

  It was a letter from my mother.

  Another remittance check, guilt money to cover the hole in her conscience where she kicked her own daughter out, I thought bitterly.

  I decided to open it, extract the check, and light a match to it. To hell with her. To hell with Faye and her new friend and his painting. To hell with my master’s degree. I’ll just get a job, any job, find myself a studio apartment and a can of dog food to live on, climb the rest of the way down into my emotional hole, and pull the lid on after me.

  I grabbed the beer and a strike-anywhere match for the letter and headed down the hall to my room, tearing open the slim envelope as I went. Inside I found a check and a folded piece of paper with only one paragraph that read:

  Dear Emily,

  Here’s a miscellaneous contribution toward your education. Let me say as always that I am proud of you for going after an advanced degree. Don’t worry about paying this one back because I have a rather healthier cash flow situation than usual. This is because I have sold the ranch to the Nature Conservancy. Your father and I had to mortgage it to the quick years ago. Revenues have not exceeded costs for many years. With the rise in the value of the land, I can this way pay off the debt and have enough to retire on. I will be moving up to Douglas where I’ll be closer to friends and services, so at least you won’t have to look after me in my advancing years.

  Sorry—

  Mother

  The world went numb and the open bottle of beer slipped out of my hand, hit the floor, and began to empty itself onto the rug.

  She was sorry.

  The hallway seemed to bend. I grabbed at the wall so I wouldn’t go down, and stumbled into my room through a narrowing world.

  10

  FAYE AND SLOANE RENEE ARRIVED HOME THE NEXT AFTERNOON in a big, gray rental car driven by Tert Krehbeil. They came into the house laughing and giggling, all just as giddy as if they’d been having a tickle fight. I withdrew quickly before they spotted me, and stayed in my room for as long as I could get away with it.

  “Em?” Faye called out at last. “Are you here?”

  “Just finishing something for class,” I called back. I was in fact doing nothing, unless you count staring at the ceiling as doing something. This was because I was lying on my back, which was a change from lying on my face, the posture in which I had spent most of the hours since reading my mother’s note. “I’m right in the middle of an important paragraph,” I added, fleshing out my lie. “I’ll be out in a moment.”

  I heard Faye move down the hallway past my room and enter the bathroom. “What’s going on, Em? It smells like a brewery in here!”

  I didn’t answer. Hours after the beer had gone flat in the carpeting, I had used a towel to soak up the worst of it, but had not moved past wringing out the towel into the bathtub and hanging it up over the curtain rail.

  When I did finally drag myself out of my cave, Faye had disappeared into her own room with Sloane to do the things mothers constantly need to do for babies. That left me to face off with His Nibs in the living room. “Hi,” I said, my voice coming out as flat as the beer now was.

  “Hi.”

  “Pleasant drive?” I asked, meaning to be ironical. I managed to sound sullen.

  “Very pleasant.”

  We stood and stared at each other for a while. He appeared just as peculiarly serene as ever. His eyes were so pale that it was almost as if a silvery light played constantly across his face, a sort of Charlton Heston–plays–Moses effect.

  In the long hours of nighttime and daylight since I had read my mother’s letter, I had moved from feeling shock to nausea to extreme self-pity, but now I felt only a deep, cold fury. Apparently this didn’t show, because as Tert spoke again, his tone suggested that he found nothing unusual about the state of my composure. “As I mentioned in Cody, I’d like to hire you to investigate a painting,” he said, coming right to the point. His point. The only point left in the world.

  I picked up a soft fleece baby blanket and began to fold it. It had slid onto the floor next to the few items of luggage that had come in from the car. Had Gray Eyes carried it in and dropped it like this? No, I had to admit, this is more like Faye, to be so casual with the baby’s things. This man I do not know, not really. Perhaps he’s nice. Perhaps he truly cares about people other than himself. Perhaps I’m just imploding on my empty little life, and I should just head out for the evening and leave them to the house, and to their bright future together. I set the blanket on the back of the couch and smoothed it with my hand.

  It was several moments before I realized that I had not replied to the man’s proposal, which could just fund the research for my thesis, that little five- to twenty-thousand-dollar budget item that stood between so many people and their de
grees. Certainly I would not cash my mother’s check. I cleared my throat. “A painting,” I said. “Just exactly what do you want me to do for you?” After another moment, I added, “Tert.”

  He folded his arms across his chest and raised one hand to his mouth. He played the fingers of that hand across his lips, as if exploring his own sensual beauty. “May I count on your discretion?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then I am your client, and you will keep my confidence.”

  “Sure.”

  “I don’t know if Faye told you that the painting in question is a Remington.”

  “Ah.”

  “So it would be quite valuable. It has been in the family since it was first exhibited at Knoedler’s Gallery in New York almost one hundred years ago. Knoedler’s was Remington’s main outlet, aside from the magazine contracts and the occasional sale straight out of his studio.”

  “Mm.”

  He began to move in a circle around the room, arms still folded, now looking at the gorgeous Chinese silk rug that Faye had laid down, now gazing out the window or briefly examining one of her prize Acoma pots. I felt almost as if I were watching him in the museum again, taking in an exhibit, except that this time he was talking to me. His speech sounded odd, as if he were speaking from the depths of a dream. He said, “My grandfather purchased the painting. He brought it home from New York on the train to Philadelphia, thence out on the spur line that comes out to Lancaster. My grandmother met him at the station in a hired cab, and he gave it to her then. It was a birthday present, you see. She had always wanted to travel west, but had been forbidden by her parents. The story goes that they were afraid she might marry a cowboy and live a life of pain and drudgery. They had money, you see—lots of money—and they did not want their daughter to suffer. But my grandmother had read the stories in Collier’s Magazine, and her heart was full of romance.”