Hot Pink (20 page)

“It seems like the right thing to do,” he said.

“I think it's strange.”

“I know,” he said. “But I don't mind.”

“Can we talk about the crack?” she said.

“I'd rather not,” he said.

“Can I just say that I think, with the baby coming soon, I think that we should really consider trying again to replace that wall. I don't know what that gel that comes out of it is, and I'm worried it's doing something to you that I don't like. And I'm worried about what it might do to me or, God forbid, the baby.”

The man stopped digging to stand and hug his wife. “The gel,” he said, “won't do anything at all to you or to the baby. I would never let that happen. I
won't
let it happen. I will tend to the crack every morning. The wall stays.”

“You're insisting.”

“I'll put my foot down if I have to. Do I have to put my foot down?”

“No,” his wife said. “You don't have to put your foot down.”

He raised a leg high and slammed his foot down on the patio. Then he did it again. His wife laughed, kissed his cheek, and went back inside to watch TV. He joined her once the burial of the jar was complete.

But for one brief moment, the man spent the rest of his life feeling ebullient. The crack oozed gel, he wiped the crack, threw the kleenex away, his teeth were clean, his home was lovely, he backed his car in, he thrived at his job, his coverage was solid. His child was born, the child was cute, the child was healthy, his wife was healthy, they had another child, who was also cute and healthy, his investments matured well, and, after the second child started grade school, his wife sold real estate and thrived at her job, and by the time that he and his wife retired, his children were wealthy, and they had their own children, and the man died smiling in the middle of a dream, and his wife collected millions of dollars in insurance, wiped the crack in his stead, bought higher education and condos for the grandkids, lived mostly in her memories, nearly all of which were good, and then she died, too, in her sleep. In the months before her death, she'd had the house remodeled, but she'd let be the wall with the crack in the bedroom, and in her will's only codicil, she made it clear to all her progeny that if her youngest grandchild, to whom she'd left the house, were to alter the wall in any way or fail to wipe the crack with a kleenex as needed (as the years marched on, the gel emerged less frequently), the house would go to her eldest grandchild, whom the youngest despised, and the youngest did nothing to alter the wall, and he tended to the gel on the crack as needed, and he continues to do so till this very day.

The brief moment the man's ebullience faltered occurred on the steps of the church, following the baptism of the couple's first child (named after the dog). The man saw the painter going to his German sedan and realized that although he'd greeted him earlier, they hadn't had the chance to have a conversation. The man felt terrible, not just for having missed a perfect opportunity to be fraternally warmed, but also because the receding painter's posture was slumpy and defeated, which suggested to the man that fraternal warmth was something the painter direly needed, and the man had failed to provide him with it. What a crummy feeling the man had on those church steps! But he made a decision to call out to the painter, and he followed through, and the moment passed, the crummy feeling died, and his ebullience resumed.

No sooner had the man yelled the painter's name than the painter turned from his car and waved. “Don't leave!” the man shouted. “Wait!” he shouted. He walked down the steps and went to the painter. “I wasn't leaving,” said the painter. “Just getting one of these.” The painter opened the door of his car and, from a cooler on the floor, removed a narrow orange can containing an energy beverage called
ZOINKS!!!
. “For bravery,” said the painter. The man told the painter, “I know just what you mean! I could've used a can of bravery the last time I went to a baptism, also. It was my wife's brother's kid's baptism, and a funny thing—well, not really funny, not funny at all really, but maybe just kind of
interesting
or
strange
, or, I guess,
coincidental
, which I'll get to why in a second—the thing was my wife had just miscarried a few weeks earlier, and we were really upset, especially she was, and then we're at this baptism, her nephew's getting baptized, and holy moly was I not feeling brave. I mean, I was just kind of waiting for her to completely break down, and I was so scared because I had no idea what I'd say. We'd been over it so many times, you know? There's no way to—there's nothing you can say when something like that happens. All you can do is kind of throw your hands up and hug her and tell here it'll be alright, that you'll try again, that as hard as it is—as
impossible
as it is—to make sense of what's happened, you just have to accept it, the way you accept, I don't know, math. Death. The weather. Your metabolism. See? It's not comforting at all, but your role, as the husband, is to hug her every time, and not try to explain it, but I'm saying this in retrospect—at the time, at that baptism, I still thought I could somehow explain it to her, show her the bright side, but I couldn't even explain it to myself and I wasn't able to admit that. Anyway, I could've used some of that energy drink, I think. To keep the spirits up. To be brave for my wife. Though I heard it rots your kidneys or your liver or something. But oh! So the weird coincidence, I was saying—what I've wanted to tell you, ever since you came over to paint the crack and we had that amazing conversation on the driveway, was how I almost bought the exact same car you drive, but last minute decided to buy the Swedish one I drive because the Swedish one's the safest there is—not that yours isn't safe, but the Swedish is
the safest
—and the reason I bought the Swedish one instead of yours is that we had a baby on the way, the baby you just saw baptized thirty minutes ago, and because of the miscarriage during her first pregnancy, my wife—and, look, I'll admit to it too—my wife and myself
the both
, we were superstitious about telling people she was pregnant because we thought it would jinx us somehow. Counting our chicken before it hatched, as it were, huh-ha! I mean, you like to think of yourself as a sane, scientifically minded person, but the truth is you're not. And by
you
, I mean
me
, you know what I mean? But so how's the car? Is it still an exciting car to own?” The car, the painter told the man, was fine. More than fine, actually. Maintenance was easy and, unless his calculations were off, he got even better mileage than promised, especially on the highway. “What I want to talk to you about, though,” he said, “is something I feel really bad about—it's why I needed to get all this bravery in me.” The painter turned the narrow orange can upside down, and a single, hot pink drop of
ZOINKS!!!
splashed onto the concrete surrounding the sewer grate. The painter went on: “That crack in your wall that you called me about? You know how it came back even after I painted it? The paint was bad. Now, I didn't know that when I painted the wall, or even when I repainted the wall. I mean, I knew it wasn't great paint like in the rest of the house, and I felt a little guilty, but I didn't know just how bad it was. But that's not even an excuse, because by the time you had that second wall put up, I
did
know how bad it was, and I didn't say anything about it to you, not even when you called me, and you're
such
a nice guy, with
such
a nice family, so I just want to come clean with you, and that's what I'm gonna do if you'll let me. Your builder, who pays me—and I'm implicated, too, don't get me wrong—but the builder is a shyster, and a serious cheapskate, and there's this guy who works for him, a foreign guy, Polyp, you might have met him—he wears his pants funny, makes weird faces—this Polyp's a jerk, even worse than the builder, and just a couple days before I finished painting your house, Polyp says to the builder, who's building like twenty other houses in your development alone, he says to the builder he wants a raise, an unheard-of-type raise, like fifty percent. And not just for him. Polyp tells the builder his whole crew wants a raise, and if the builder, Polyp says, refuses to give them this raise, they're gonna walk away, just like that, leave the builder in the lurch, and not only that, but there's this veiled threat that's in there, because if you want to know how a fresh-off-the-boatsky chucklehead like Polyp, who, by the way, is also a degenerate gambler and a part-time pimp—if you want to know how a guy like Polyp gets such a plum job building houses for nice couples in the suburbs, I'll tell you this much: it's not because he
doesn't
have crooked uncles in the unions who know how to set structure fires that look like acts of God. So what can the builder do? Take a personal loss to pay Polyp's crew? Well, yes, he could do that, he could make less money, but like I said he's a shyster, so instead of cutting into his profits, what he cuts is corners. All kinds of corners. Luckily, like I said, this all happened just a couple days before we finished your house, so the only corner left to cut there was the paint, and not even all the paint, just the paint in the master bedroom. The paint we used for the rest of your house was good, but the brand that we used in your bedroom was this recently banned Indonesian brand of paint. The builder got hold of hundreds and hundreds of cans of it for cheap from I don't know where—probably Polyp's uncles. The thing about this paint, though, was some of it was tainted with mold or bacteria or something—I never got it straight—but some of it was tainted with something weird and Indonesian that, first of all, cracks sometimes, to varying degrees, and second of all, sometimes, especially in the dark, it attracts some other kind of mold or bacteria that causes that paste stuff to form. Thus: banned. Now, I'd never seen this paint before I painted your bedroom, but the builder, who supplies me with my materials, he brought me two cans of it with the labels stripped off, which should have told me something, but I refused to imagine what that something could be. The first can must not have been tainted, though, right? Because the rest of your bedroom walls didn't crack, right? But the second one, which I barely used—the one I left in your basement closet—that was the one that your cracked wall got painted with. Anyway, after I painted over the crack in your wall, I saw the builder the next day, and I told him about your pasty crack because I figured he owed me money for going over to your house like that on a Sunday, especially considering how that jerk Polyp was getting such a big raise and I was getting nothing. And that's when he came clean about how it wasn't just cheap stuff in those label-stripped cans, but tainted Indonesian stuff. And he told me that if you ever called me again, I had to call
him
, and he'd go out there himself to smooth things over with you and replace the wall, because some of those other houses we used the tainted paint on? The newer houses that we used
only
the tainted paint on? Some of them had wall-cracks oozing pastes and gels like your one wall did, but then a couple of them—the walls were actually, like,
crumbling
. And so the builder, he was scared that if he didn't replace the tainted-painted walls, something terrible would happen—some kid would eat the pasty stuff and die, or a wall behind a crib would crumble violently and a pointy chunk would fall and spear a fontanel or something, and then the jig would be up. Not just for him, but for me, too—I'd painted a lot of those walls myself. Lucky for us, the one thing you can always count on the owner of a newly built home to do is complain. So every time there's been a complaint about a crack, the wall gets replaced and I paint it using good stuff. If it's any comfort, you probably got hit by the taint less badly than anyone else. I want you to know, though, that I'm sorry for using cheap paint in your bedroom to begin with, but what I'm even much sorrier for than that is that I didn't say anything to you about the paint being tainted that night you called me, after you'd painted the wall yourself, especially because I assumed, at the time, that you'd used the tainted paint I'd left in your basement, which obviously you didn't because the crack didn't come back, right? But please accept my apology, man. I am humble before you, and I'm telling you the truth now. I was just really afraid that I'd ruin my reputation or even go to jail is why I kept quiet, and I consider you a friend, even though we don't know each other that well—that conversation we had on your driveway about cars, and that killer Rwandan coffee we drank together… I feel like we bonded, and, above all, I just hope you appreciate the risk I'm putting myself at here, in telling you all this stuff that could really, if the wrong person found out—it could really ruin my entire life—and I hope you can forgive me… Why are you looking at me like that? What's that look mean, man? What is that? You laughing? Are we okay? Are you laughing because we're okay or because…?”

The man took a step forward and hugged the painter. “What a man!” he told him. “What a decent man you are! What a true friend!”

And what a tale! That the painter would be willing to speak all those lies—Polyp a
jerk
? The builder a
con-man
? The painter, himself,
plying his trade in a dishonorable manner
? Please! Oh please! Likely story! Get out!…That the painter would be willing to tell all those big lies—and to do so with such artfulness;
the crack didn't come back, right?, the risk I'm putting myself at here,
etc.—in order to convince the man to repaint the wall, or
replace
the wall… Clearly the man's wife had not been as okay as she'd seemed with the attention the man continued to lavish on the crack, and, still worried that the gel could endanger their child (she was a dutiful mother), had, from desperation (a desperate need not only to try do everything in her power to protect their child, but to, at the same time, continue to be seen by the man as nothing less than the loving, faithful, and above all
supportive
wife she and he the both [the man and his wife] knew that she was), called up the painter, prior to the baptism, and concocted, or asked him (the painter) to concoct, this crazy story of tainted paint and crumbling walls in a last-ditch effort to rid the home of the gel and the crack from which it oozed, and, clearly, the painter had agreed to tell the man the made-up story in order to ease the strain he (the painter) imagined the crack might be putting on his good friend's (the man's) marriage.