Touchy Subjects (10 page)

His father's eyes narrowed. "You high-and-mighty tosser."

"I beg your pardon?"

"You heard me, Professor Pillock, that's if your ears are
operational!
"

His mother flapped her hands. "Ah, stop it now—Trev's just missing his doggies."

Trevor nearly punched her.

His father grunted. "The boy's besotted!"

"Boy?" he repeated. "I'm forty-three years old."

"Then act it. Jesus Christ, if I have to hear one more word about those wretched animals—"

"I don't believe this!" Trevor was practically screaming. "I have to leave my entire family behind, while Greta and Mike jet in with three of the brattiest girls on the face of the planet—"

"Trev!" His mother's voice was a gunshot. "That's enough."

"At least the girls don't climb on your arm and start humping it," his father observed.

Trevor thought he might cry. "This is unfair, it's oppressive, it's humiliating—"

"Sure it's Christmas," said his mother.

He collected his bag and left. The drive was more than seven hours, but at least he was going the right direction this time. It was two o'clock on Christmas morning when he drew up outside the house. There was one light on, in the bedroom. Trevor let himself in quietly. In the hall he almost stumbled over the small table that they always left out for Santa. Suddenly starving, Trevor ate the mince pie in one bite and rinsed it down with the brandy. Upstairs, a door opened and the dogs hurled themselves down the steps. Trevor squinted into the light and grinned up at his wife. "I'm home," he said.

Leroy and Shorelle had always wanted a slate blue house. It had come up on their first date, in fact, driving to the lake: Shorelle said, "When I get a house I'm going to paint it that exact colour," indicating with one long manicured nail a three-storey redbrick Colonial with porch and gingerbread the shade of a rain-threatening sky.

"Me too," said Leroy, unnerved by the coincidence.

"Really? Are you just saying that?"

"No way! That's the colour I've always wanted."

She gave him a smile so slow, so intricately blooming, that he very nearly drove into the curb.

For the first three years they lived in Shorelle's apartment above a discount shoe outlet, then when the baby was coming they managed with the help of Leroy's stepfather to scrape together a ten percent down payment on a nice little two-bed in a neighbourhood that was neither too graffitied nor too suburban, neither too noisy nor too white. On the porch, the Realtor told
them they wouldn't find the house they were looking for at a better price. "Is that because of the colour?" Leroy asked.

The Realtor screwed up her forehead. "What's wrong with the colour? It's a nice sort of faded adobe pink."

He let out a brief laugh. "I'd call it Puke Peach."

Shorelle rolled her eyes at him.

"Well, after closing day you can paint it whatever you like," the Realtor said a little crisply.

But life intervened, of course. Moving in and getting the place fixed up—curtains, wallpaper, bookshelves, magnets to keep the kitchen cupboards shut—took all their energy, and then Africa came along. (Leroy wasn't a hundred percent fond of that name, but Shorelle believed she should have the casting vote. "Twenty-six hours of labour, five stitches," she reminded him stonily.)

There was something the public health nurse said that stuck in Leroy's head: that the days would be long but the years would be short. That was so true; every day with a small mewling baby seemed like a mountain to climb, but
blink!
and here was Africa at her first birthday party, triumphant fists full of chocolate cake. And the house was still the colour of puke.

Leroy would have liked to paint it himself, but the sad fact was he had no head for heights, and now he was a father he was noticing in himself this strange, almost cheerful refusal to do dumb things: His life wasn't his own to risk. He never even rode pillion on his friend CJ's Honda Magna anymore. So he asked around for a painter who wouldn't rip him off. He ended up hiring a quiet white guy called Rod who lived a couple of blocks away.

"You picked your colour yet?" Rod narrowed his eyes at the roofline.

"Not quite, but it'll be some kind of slate blue."

Rod seemed to have been born with a neutral expression. He handed Leroy a brochure. "That's the only brand I use," he said, "but they can colour-match whatever you want."

"Great."

That evening Leroy and Shorelle sat on the porch with Africa stumbling back and forth between them. They flicked through sheaves of paint chips. "Well, not Niagara," said Shorelle with some scorn, "and not Old China, either. Where do they come up with these names?"

Leroy snickered in agreement. "Who'd paint their house Muddy Creek?"

"Or Yacht Fantasy!" She pulled a strip of glaring royal blue from Africa's mouth and showed it to him. "Timothy says his clients come in with scraps of cloth, lipsticks, dead leaves, even, going '
This
is it.' Half the time he's got to talk them out of it."

"Why's he got to?" Timothy, owner of a small interior design company, was Shorelle's best friend from school, whom Leroy had always pretended to like. Before the baby, on nights when Leroy was working late, she used to go over there to watch black-and-white movies and eat Timothy's homemade gelato.

"Because they've got no clue what they're doing!"

"Well, I don't think we need to hire anyone to pick a paint for our house; it's not that big a deal," said Leroy flippantly. He held up three blues against each other; they seemed to melt in and out. "Is there one actually called Slate Blue?"

"Oh no, that would be too easy. Wait up—here's a Blue Slate, but it's not blue at all," Shorelle complained, "it's plain grey."

"This one's kinda nice—Porch Lullaby."

"Yeah, it's nice, but it's not slate blue."

"No."

"I thought we agreed—"

"We do," he assured her. "I just can't tell which is what we agreed on."

She laughed at his grammar, and Africa joined in, looking from face to face.

Finally, when they'd gone indoors, Shorelle found another brochure called Historic Tints. "Look, Leroy, I think we've got it—Evening Sky."

"What's historic about these ones?"

"Oh, that just means more expensive."

He groaned.

Over breakfast, they glanced at the Evening Sky chip and it still looked good, so Leroy dropped it off in Rod's mailbox on his way to work.

For three days it rained, and then they were at Shorelle's parents' for the weekend. By the time they got back on Sunday evening, roughly the top third of the house had been painted. Leroy turned off the car and stared up.

"Wow!" said Shorelle.

"Wow is right," he said in horror.

"Rod's a fast worker. Look, Africa"—as she heaved the drowsy child out of the car seat—"look at the lovely colour our house's going to be."

"That," said Leroy, "is not slate blue."

"Oh, Leroy."

"It's not what we chose."

"It must be. It just looks different against the peach."

"It's purple!"

"It's catching the last of the sunset, that's all."

The argument continued right through Africa's bath and bedtime. "You think it should be darker, then?"

"Not exactly darker," said Leroy.

"Lighter?"

"Just less gaudy. Bluer."

"What, like royal blue?"

"No! I'm just saying, right now it stands out like a neon sign."

"That's because everybody else on this street paints their houses boring neutrals," objected Shorelle.

Leroy stalked out on the porch to gather more evidence, but it was too dark to tell what he was looking at.

"It's a lurid shade of lavender," he told her in bed, in the whisper they always used after Africa had gone to sleep. "If you look at it with no preconceptions—if you didn't know it was meant to be blue—I'm telling you, purple's what you'd see. People are going to say, 'Oh yeah, you're the guys who live in that lavender house.'"

"Well, so?"

He stared at her in the dark. "You're fine with that?"

"Lavender's blue, anyway, like the song says."

He felt frustration tingling in the roots of his hair. "That's a nursery rhyme, Shorelle; they're not supposed to make sense.
Lavender's blue, diddle diddle, lavender's green
...I guess you're going to tell me it's green now?"

"That's the stalk and stuff," she informed him. "The leaves are green; the flowers are blue."

"They're frigging purple!"

First thing in the morning Leroy was out there again, staring at the freshly painted woodwork. He knew he was going to be late for work, but he hung around till Rod showed up in his van. "Hey!"

A nod for answer.

"I think we've maybe got a problem," said Leroy, clearing his throat. "Is that really the colour I gave you?"

Rod produced the dog-eared chip from his back pocket, set up his ladder, climbed up, and held the chip against the paint-work. Leroy could barely see it, which, he supposed, meant it was the same shade. "OK," he said unhappily.

"They colour-matched it."

"Yeah, I'm not calling you a liar. I just—I guess I didn't know it would come out so bright."

Rod climbed down.

"It's awful, isn't it?"

The painter didn't demur.

"Maybe it's because there's so much of it," Leroy hazarded. "And outside, in the sun. Or maybe because it's gloss, that must make it shinier. Or do I mean darker? More intense, I don't know."

Rod stood with arms folded, looking up at the woodwork.

Leroy shaded his eyes. "Shorelle likes it, can you believe that? I told her, it'd be great in a scarf or something, but not on a house."

"Women have different eyeballs," said Rod at last.

Leroy stared at him.

"I mean, literally. It's the layout of the light-receptor cells. So your wife and you are probably seeing different colours."

"Really, is that true?"

"Also, blues can be tricky." Rod seemed to be relaxing into conversation.

"You said it! Seems like they turn green or grey or purple depending what you put them up against." Leroy could hear a whining tone in his voice, so he deepened it. "And the names don't help. Evening Sky, it's nothing like an evening sky." Rod didn't answer, but Leroy became aware how foolish it was to pay any attention to the names some schmuck of a copywriter made up. "What do you think, Rod?"

A massive shrug. "You're the customer."

"I know, but you work with this stuff."

"You can have your house any colour you like. Take your time." He looked at his shoes. "It's up to you." Another pause. "It's you folks who've got to live with it."

What was he hinting? That this colour would be impossible to live with? Leroy tried to reckon up how much they'd already spent on Rod's labour and all those pots of historic lavender paint. "No, but what would you do?"

"Me personally?" Rod scratched his eyebrow with one stained finger.

"Sure."

"I kinda liked the peach."

"No way!" Leroy stared at the old flaking woodwork.

"But if you're looking to increase the resale, go for cream. It's classic."

Later, Leroy told Shorelle, "Rod's agreed to get on with sanding and priming the porch floor, so we've got a couple days to make up our minds about the colour."

"I thought we already had," said Shorelle, shredding a bit of beef with her fork to put on Africa's tray.

"Honey, don't be like that."

"I'm not being like anything. We looked at lots of brochures, we discussed it, we agreed—"

"We were in a rush! The light was bad. And those were the wrong colours. Here, look, I picked up some more paint chips at Home World today—"

"What were you doing way over there?"

"I drove by after from work."

"So that's why you were late picking her up from day care. They called—they left a message."

Leroy decided to ignore that. He would take a fresh tack. "Remember our first date? That house we drove past, the perfect slate blue?"

Half a smile.

"Let's go take a look at it again, compare it to these chips."

"Right now? I don't know. Africa's bath—"

"Oh, she looks clean enough, she can skip it for once."

The sky was pink and pearl, and the breeze coming in the sunroof was delicious. Leroy kept one hand on Shorelle's leg as he drove, and in the back Africa was making her birdlike sounds into her plastic cell phone.

"We've been up and down this street four times," Shorelle pointed out.

"OK, Ms. Clever, where do you think it was?"

She pursed her lips. "One of those side streets past the church?"

He shook his head. "Why would we have gone down a side street?"

"I don't know; you were driving."

"Well, exactly. I was taking you straight to the lake, I was all excited about our first date and maybe making out in the dunes, I'd hardly have started combing the side streets."

Shorelle scanned the houses. "Well, it's not here. Maybe they repainted it."

"Why would they have done that? It was perfect as was."

"Turn here," she told him, and he did, so suddenly that Africa's cell phone flew across the car.

"It can't be down here," he said over the child's screams. "It was a real big house, three storeys at least. Don't you remember?"

Shorelle was twisted round in her seat belt trying to retrieve the toy. "It was years ago," she said through her teeth.

When they got home there was still enough light in the sky for the gaudy shine of the top half of the house to make him wince. He was ashamed to think of people driving by, making remarks about it.

While they were brushing their teeth, he passed on Rod's theory about the sex of eyeballs. "Oh please," said Shorelle, spitting foam. "That's just bullshit male bonding."

"No, you're missing the point, he didn't say we see
better—
"

"Well, if it comes to that, far more guys are colour-blind than women are."

At four in the morning Shorelle took hold of his shoulder. "OK, I give in," she said, gravelly.