Love Is Red (14 page)

I can relate. In this city we adopt people; our friends become our family.

So I know what it means for Andrea to say this about David, and this is why I ask again. “That would be okay?”

“I said so, didn't I?” Andrea turns now and smiles.

“Think he's a keeper?”

“I do.”

“What do you think of Sael?” Andrea has always been a good judge of character.

“Well, he really is amazing-looking,” she says. “But—”

“But what?”

“There's something there . . .”

“Yeah?”

“I got the sense that he was holding something back, keeping something in. You get a feeling for that in my line of work.”

“Think he's sketchy?”

“It's not exactly sketchy.” She pauses, thinking. “He's the
kind of man other people describe as being ‘the quiet guy,' or ‘I never saw him lose his temper, he always seemed so polite.' The kind of man who makes work colleagues say, ‘So-and-so had a long fuse.'”

“So what are you saying?” I think of the first time I saw Sael, watching, poised to strike.

“I'm saying that you don't want to be around him when the fuse burns down.” She looks at me for a beat too long. “Anyway, you're with David, so it doesn't matter.”

“That's right.”

“Well, good, I give my blessing.” Then she yawns. “I'm exhausted. Tonight was fun. Lucas and I had a great time.”

“We all did,” I say.

I can feel the faint outline of the folded drawing in my pocket.

I'm finally in bed. I think about the evening, which could have been so much worse. It could have been a disaster. It turned out great, actually. Even though he brought Sael. Everything seems to be fine now.

I look at my phone, thinking about that missed call from earlier, yet another call from a number I don't recognize, like yesterday's phone call and the one the day before. I don't answer them. Now I listen to the message. A robotic voice greets me.

 

 

“Daniella Zaretti?” I'll have to call them on Monday and let them know they have the wrong number. What a pain in the ass.

My phone gives an angry little buzz. I look down.

 

 

I bolt upright, heart pounding.

 

 

I look up, preparing to run.

Sael stands on the fire escape. I stare at him. He mimes furiously at me to open the window.

I could shake my head and refuse to let him in but I'm terrified he'll fall. The fire escape was built probably a hundred years ago. It's rusted and tiny and looks as treacherous as hell.

I get up, cross my room, and open the window. He bends down and eases himself through as a large cat might, letting in a breath of warm night air.

“What are you doing here? Are you crazy?” I'm whispering despite my fury. I don't want to wake up Andrea or Lucas.

He stares at me. The intensity in his eyes is frightening. His voice, though a whisper, is urgent. “Katherine, I'm sorry, but I had to see you.”

“You need to go. This is wrong. You need to go right now.”

“Katherine—”

My lips are numb and tingling. “Seriously, you need to—”

“Can I stay here tonight?”

“What? No!”

“Please, not for sex, I promise, just to sleep here.”

I've never seen him like this. So pressing, so focused. As if at any moment he could lose control. “No, you can't.”

“Katherine—”

“Sael, we're done.”

“It's not that, I just need to sleep.”

“What?”

“I've been having these nightmares, I can't sleep, I just need to be with someone.”

“Sael, you say that David is your best friend.”

He recoils as if I've struck him. In a way I guess I have.

“We can't do this to him. It's bad enough what happened before.”

“Don't you think I know that?” He practically spits this back at me.

“So why are you here?”

He glares furiously, and for a moment I think he'll leave, but he won't be deterred, no matter what acts of betrayal I throw at him.

“Katherine, please, just this once. I promise if you let me sleep here tonight I'll never bother you again. I won't make a move. I just want to . . . to be here with you.”

“
We can't do this.
”

But he senses weakness. “It's only for tonight, no sex, just sleeping, I swear—”

There is a charge between us. I think of the night we spent together, his broad muscled back, his acres of smooth skin under my fingers, moving together, the weight of him.

I hesitate, and then I think of David bringing out the sweetness in the strawberries, with his easy grin, his affectionate laugh.

The thing I love about you is . . .

The thing with Sael and me is a poisonous spider bite that grows inflamed and itches and itches, but when you scratch it, it turns septic, oozing.

“No, I'm sorry, I can't do this.”

His voice cracks a little. “
Please.
”

“No, you need to leave.”

There's a final frozen moment. His eyes burn in his white face. He moves toward me and I think he will take me by force. I open my mouth to call for Andrea when abruptly he turns and climbs back out of the window. I see him shadowlike on the fire escape, and then he's gone.

I sit on the bed, my heart thudding.

I lie back. I wonder what his dreams were, why they're so bad.

I think about his pale face, his feverish eyes.

I can't sleep.

 

Love is red.

Anticipation is aquamarine, it glistens like grapes and smells of melted pizza, it brushes against your cheek like party streamers, it feels like the hush of a theater as the lights dim and the curtain rises.

You smell it in three people who are waiting for the train, scratching their lottery tickets, and in that little girl standing with her father, who only gets to see her on the weekends and is now taking her to her first Broadway show.

Ambition is orange, the color of a traffic signal. It sizzles like bacon. You smell it in the bartender pretending to listen to what the red-cheeked guy is droning on about, droning on and on, and on and on, and meanwhile the bartender is working out a plot point in her book; meanwhile she's thinking about characters; meanwhile she's planning chapters, making revisions, editing lines.

Anxiety is light blue, the color of varicose veins; it has the old stale-coffee smell of a long flight, the musk of a high school
locker room, of the corner the cat urinated in when it found out it was going to the V-E-T.

Here in the subway car, riding down to Union Square, you smell this on passengers almost too numerous to count, on a beautiful woman still wearing her sunglasses and standing next to an older woman who's going to be cleaning her apartment later in the week, hired from a service she found on the Internet and—

He hasn't called me yet, they never stay past the first two months, and my boss is driving me crazy, how am I supposed to do the intern's work as well as my own? And I'm gaining weight, I'm gaining weight, I shouldn't have eaten those chicken wings last night—

The older one sits staring off because—

My sons, one in the army and one who can't seem to make it past high school, both of them trapped—what did I do, what didn't I do?

Hatred is the color of a dried-up scab. It smells like a bar the morning after. It reeks of menstrual blood. You smell it less, but when you do it's strong. On the elderly woman who stares at a group of too-loud teenagers—

Fooling around, putting their goddamn feet on the goddamn seats and cursing, being too goddamn loud. They don't care for anyone else. They're like animals—

She wishes them dead.

On the “not old, but older” woman who stands, leaning against the pole. She was offered a seat. She said no, thanks—

Am I really that old? I'm really that old. Paul ruined my life. He took all my good years from me, that fucking waste of space. Once I was beautiful and believed in love. Now I'm being offered seats. It's over—

She holds the pole tight with hatred.

Jealousy is piss yellow, it tastes of old cough syrup, it tastes of cotton candy and of bile. An unhappily married woman whose friend just “met someone”—

I'm so happy for you. That's awesome. Congratulations. Great, wonderful, good, cool, fantastic news. It couldn't have happened to a nicer person. Well done—

Contentment is eggshell brown. Contentment smells like the fine hair on an infant's head; it tastes like French bread with a widely spread helping of butter.

You hardly ever smell this.

And you walk up the stairs with the crowd into the summer evening.

Here you stand in Union Square. The humidity is drawing away, unveiling a soft and perfect sky. Up the broad curved brick steps the crowd shifts and murmurs. Some commuters descending the subway stairs give only a passing glance, determined not to be drawn in, but others stop midstare. The park is filled with summer ghosts. Hundreds of people wearing white: white shoes, white shirts, white skirts, white dresses, white tanks, white shorts. The skateboard kids with the hanging pants and the pierced girls with green hair have moved to the benches on the paths under the trees. They respect the crowd and their purpose. Only the old chess sharks fold their arms and lean back on their plastic chairs, their passive, lined faces giving nothing away; they've seen it all before.

You, who are wearing white, close your eyes and breathe in.

Inhale the sorrow, which is the color of a bruise. It smells like Sunday evenings; it tastes like old cucumbers.

Inhale the desire, which is the color of a clean pool. It prickles like the fine hairs on your arm standing up, and smells of the sandy dip in the dunes just before you spot the ocean.

Women are here, mothers, young girls, students. Young men and older men, fathers too with little kids on shoulders, have
come to give support. There is little shoving or jostling; people are kinder, muttering sorry when they occasionally step on toes, nudge into others' backs. There are dead girls, dead women, to be remembered and it's important because—

I was here, I was here, I was here.

They are pushing a little, though, trying to see the families up on the stage, the families speaking in quiet tones because they are weary unto the bone, trying to hear Susie Ranford talking through a microphone.

Weariness tastes like your mouth does after you brush your teeth when you have a cold; it's the milky gray of a forgotten mug of tea. It whirrs like an old fan.

You also smell a sullen resentment, an itch to hurt, to stir up trouble.

Resentment hums like beehives and stings of smoke and drain cleaner; it sticks like old Band-Aids and the arid stink of jam-packed classrooms.

They are all here because of you. All these beautiful, passionate, sad, frightened, anxious, excited, grieving, lecherous, hopeful, mournful souls, their colors flickering like the flames of the candles they hold.
We will not forget you
, they say to the dead. But they will, they always do, faces fade, lives seep away into anecdotes. As the years pass, change, inexorable, plows through; wheat is reaped, seeds sown, young shoots rise, stalks are grown and then reaped again. The numbers of those who do remember when, and when, and when grow few.

Tonight is an unfolding flower, as perfect and impermanent as each of the women you've taken. You honor all their wonderful colors caught and lashed within you.

The crowd listens as the names are read.

Kathleen Walsh.

Samantha Rodriguez.

People seeking faith—
My God, My God
—which is a deep blue; it feels like parchment under the fingertips, it smells like hospitals, it dissolves like white icing on the tongue and curls like incense.

You breathe in, ecstatic.

People overcome by hopelessness—
There is no God, no God would let this happen
—hopelessness, which is putrid yellow like moldy cheese, creaks like a child's bedsprings supporting too heavy a weight, snaps like a tarpaulin wetly flapping where a wall used to be.

Jennifer Wegerle.

You stand patient in the crowd, waiting while the members of each woman's family stumble forward to call out their child's, their sister's, their niece's name. To say it aloud, to acknowledge that they lived.

Emily Ranford.

Melissa Lin.

And now you see her. Here she is. The one who is truly responsible for all of this, the one who has brought you here.

Lauren Cooper.

Katherine. Her laughter single grains of sugar, her breath warm pink. Her skin, her eyes, her words are water. Her fingers on your arm, their weight.

Rebecca Lamb.

Each time you see her, you drink her in. Often you watch her. Watch her in the distance, walking to work. You follow her. Look at the way she resists gravity. The way her skirt moves and shifts over her side, how her shirt pulls up as it strains against the confines of the waistline.

Daniella Zaretti.

Then silence. A grief-stricken man clutching a piece of paper totters up.

Katherine and the crowd bow their heads as he begins to read in a faltering voice, “Dear God, we pray you grant us peace . . .”

Peace is the color of the underside of clouds, dove gray, almost pink. Peace is an ancient smell. It's very faint here tonight. Green pears, bay leaves. It tastes like melting snow; it tastes like rice paper that once wrapped sweets.

Love is red. A little green, a little gold, but love—real love, true love, divine love—that love is red. It smells like pavements washed by the rain. It smells like the nape of your lover's neck. It smells like fresh dirt. It sounds like a match being struck, and a jar being opened. It feels like a hand on the swell of your hip. It sounds like a song sung in the dark.

Katherine is not that color yet.

There are shoots of doubt, tendrils of gray and black threaded through the wonder. There is hope. There is lust. There is tenderness. But there is the spotted and mingling green and yellow of mistrust and the lingering blue of uncertainty.

Blood is red. Wombs are red. Hearts are red. Apples are red. Fire is red. The sky is red.

Blood unto blood, womb unto womb, heart unto heart, apple unto apple, fire unto fire, sky unto sky, love unto love unto love unto love.

Katherine. Here she stands. She does not see you. But it is enough for you to watch and think.

Soon the seeds will be sown, and they will bud and flower and twist up and out and through, and the spheres will shift off course, and the Universe shall falter and stammer, it can't end. Danger is red. Courage is red. Pain is red. Love is red.

And so soon now, so, so soon, Katherine will turn red. All the Vessels do, soon enough.