THE BRO-MAGNET (14 page)

Helen wants the bathroom to be in a soft moss color – OK, it’s called Young Forest – and this time I don’t make the mistake of saying something dorky like that it’s a very classy selection for a bathroom.

I just think it to myself.

Upon arrival, I note that just like the week before with the living room suddenly being fully decorated, now it’s the dining room that’s been transformed. There’s a sleek table with a flower arrangement on it and a breakfront with delicate china.

“It’s funny,” I say in the kitchen a few hours later, after she’s tapped me on the shoulder, I’ve told more lies about the opera, and she’s asked me if I want any coffee, “the way you asked me to come back this week to do your bathroom.”

“What’s so funny about that?” she asks, suddenly looking awkward and flustered. “I just need my bathroom painted.”

“Yeah, I get that. But this is the third week in a row.”

“So? What are you getting at?”

“It’s just that most people usually just have one room that needs to be done, like Steve having me do his dining room, although in his case his wife has me do it over and over again.” I think about how Helen keeps asking me to do more rooms and how the whole place looked so barren when I first saw it and how now, as I do each room, she’s filling those rooms with stuff. “Hey,” I say, a light bulb finally going on in my brain, “did you just buy this place recently?”

That’s got to be it. She only just moved in, hasn’t had time to do anything with the place, and now she’s starting to.

“No,” she says, “I’ve been here five years come September.”

Oh, well, there goes that theory.

But if she’s been here for five years, and she hasn’t bothered doing anything about her environment in all that time, why the sudden urge now to change everything?

Somehow it reminds me of when a bird starts putting together a nest – nesting, I think it’s called.

I finish the coffee, finish the bathroom, but contrary to Sam’s expectations, I do not try asking Helen out again.

I tell myself if she calls me back to do one more room, I’ll ask her then.

* * *

The following Saturday, as I’m painting Helen’s bedroom Tranquility Sea, as I’m rehearsing in my head the persuasive lines I’m going to use later when I ask her out, it hits me:

Why else would a woman suddenly change her whole place after five years? 

There can be only one answer.

She’s doing this all for some man. Somehow, this nesting involves a man.

This is borne out by the fact that she doesn’t ask me if I want any coffee; that she does ask me to step out of her bedroom so she can change, emerging a short while later in a plain T-shirt and shorts instead of her usual jeans; that she does race to the door when the doorbell rings, her ponytail bouncing behind her like a schoolgirl; the way that she shouts over her shoulder, “I won’t be back until later – can you lock up?”

When I hear the door click shut, I hurry to the window to see who rang the bell for Helen, who’s tearing her away from our Saturday coffee together. I peek through the curtains, not even knowing what I’m expecting, secretly hoping it’s just a girlfriend and they’re going shopping, and who do I see holding the door to a red Porsche with Jersey plates…

Monte Carlo? Helen’s doing all this to impress Monte Carlo?

* * *

“I’m not letting you go back to that hellhole,” Sam informs me.

“It’s not a hellhole,” I say. “It’s a respectable cape.”

“I don’t care what the accurate architectural description is. I’m not going to let you go back there and be used by that” – she pauses, strains to think of a despicable enough word, finally settling on – “
D.A.
”

“It’s a paying job, Sam.”

“We have other paying customers. Lots of them. We don’t need her.”

True, we don’t need her. But one of us still likes her.

“It’s not fair,” Sam says when I don’t respond. “You do all the work and now some
shyster
from New Jersey’s going to get the girl?”

“We don’t know he’s a shyster.”

“His name’s Monte Carlo and he’s from New Jersey. What else do we need to know?”

“I don’t know why you’re getting so upset about this anyway. We did the living room and the dining room, I did the bathroom and finished the bedroom. Steve paid us for the one room and she paid us for the rest. The kitchen’s all tile. There’s nothing left to paint. We’re done.”

* * *

Only it turns out we’re not exactly done.

Monday morning I’m at another job, my cell rings and it’s Helen.

“Helen!” I say, surprised.

“I have one more thing that needs painting,” she says.

Sam’s shaking her head at me: no.

“But I thought we did every room,” I say, wondering what I missed. Maybe a closet?

“Can you come again this Saturday?” Helen asks.

“This Saturday?” I echo.

Now Sam’s practically hopping up and down. She grabs my free arm in one of her hands, grabs my paintbrush out of the bucket and scrawls across my forearm in screaming magenta,
No more Saturdays!
It’s like my arm’s a mirror in a horror flick. I feel like I’ve been violated here.

“I can’t really do that,” I tell Helen.

“Then what about the following Saturday?”

“That neither. See, the first Saturday was a favor to Steve that just got out of hand. But we don’t normally work Saturdays. You know, even us house painters deserve a real weekend.”

I don’t know where that last proletariat outrage came from but I see Sam pumping her fist in the air: Yes! Blue-collar workers of the world, unite!

“So you see,” I go on, “it looks like I can’t hel – ”

“What about tomorrow instead?” Helen says. “I could take the day off. Could you come then?”

* * *

“I can’t believe you’re going back to that hellhole,” Sam says the next morning.

She came by while I was still eating breakfast, asked if she could borrow a bowl of cereal, finished all my milk.

I ignore her, read the side of the cereal box instead. It looks like if I save five box tops and send them in with this form, I can get a decoder ring.

I put my dish and glass in the sink, run some water in them.

“I’m ready to roll,” I say. “You coming?”

“This early?”

I shrug. “I figure I’ll get an early start, get it over with.”

“Did Helga ask if you’d come earlier?”

I feel my cheeks color. I also notice that while Sam had previously honored Helen by calling her by her real name, she’s revoked that privilege now that she’s decided she doesn’t like her anymore.

“Oh, you are so whipped, Johnny.”

“So, you coming?”

“We should start saving these.” She rips the box top off. “No,” she says. “You want to go back to that hellhole, you go alone.”

* * *

I pull up to Helen’s and it’s only eight-thirty in the morning. I haven’t gotten to a job this early in, like, ever.

“So what am I working on today?” I ask Helen without preamble once she’s ushered me in. We’re standing at the edge of the hallway leading from the living room to her bedroom and there’s a door about halfway down I’ve never noticed before. I gesture at the door with the can of paint I’m holding, Arizona Ecru, which is basically the color she asked me to get even though she didn’t exactly call it that. “The basement?”

“No!” she says, moving quickly so her back’s against the door.

“What have you got down there – Norman Bates’s mother?”

“It’s just a mess down there.” She relaxes. “This hall,” she says. “I want you to paint the hall.”

“Oh. Right. Well, let me get to it then.”

A few minutes later, I’m prepping the walls when I hear the sound of the TV click on in the kitchen. Next thing I know, I’m hearing Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski going at it with some guest on
Morning Joe
. I can’t help myself. Like a moth to a flame, just like if I were at home I find myself drawn to the TV.

“You watch this show?” Helen says when she sees me in the doorway.

“Of course,” I say, but instead of looking at her for once, my eyes are all over the TV.

Joe and Mika have That Guy on. You know That Guy. I hate That Guy.

Before I even think about the fact that Helen’s sitting right there, I go off on the TV like I’m at home and it’s Sam sitting there instead.

“Can you believe That Guy?” I start. Later I won’t be able to recall exactly what I said, only that it involved politics, the Constitution, and the inadvisability of wearing yellow plaid on television.

“You’re really smart,” Helen says when I’m finished.

“Yeah, well.” I feel like an idiot.

“No, I mean it. Funny too.”

Now I feel like a funny idiot.

“There’s something I’ve been wondering, John.”

“Yeah?”

“You
are
smart. You listen to opera. You have sophisticated political views.”

This could be taken as being condescending and yet I don’t hear that in her voice.

“Well,” she adds, “except for the part about the yellow plaid.”

“I know,” I say ruefully. “The ad hominem attack has always been my weak suit.”

“Um, exactly.” She laughs, then turns serious. “That’s what I don’t get. You could probably be almost anything you want to be. Why a house painter?”

This is not the first time I’ve been asked this in life. Really, with the exception of Big John and possibly Aunt Alfresca, just about everyone I’ve ever known has asked me this question at one point or another.

I sigh, preparatory to launching into the litany.

“Sure, I’m smart. I even graduated Magna Cum Laude. I could have worked on Wall Street like my friend Billy, not that that’s anything to brag about these days. I could have been a doctor if I was more interested in science. And no offense? I definitely could have been a lawyer.”

“No offense taken. But I still don’t get it.”

“Well, see, that’s one of the problems with America. Just because a person can be a certain thing, everyone thinks they should do it, like it’s a requirement. Like you have to make the most money or work at the most professiony profession you can get a job at.”

“Professiony profession?”

“A slightly poor choice of words. My point is: What’s wrong with making a decent, even if it’s not fantastic, living at something you love?”

“And you love paint?”

I realize Big John’s always been right about one thing even as I say the words, “It never lets you down.”

Helen doesn’t say anything to this and I hear Willie Geist asking the eternal
Morning Joe
question:
What, if anything, have we learned today?

“That’s my cue,” I say, hooking a finger toward the doorway. “Time to get back to work.”

Helen’s voice stops me. “John?”

I turn around. “Yeah?”

“I was wondering…would you like to get together and do something sometime?”

I’m not processing this. “Like what? You want to help me paint the hall?”

“No, I was thinking of something outside the house. You know, at night. Or in the afternoon, if you prefer.”

Is she asking me out?

No, she can’t be.

“We could go to – ” She stops herself. “What do you like to do in your free time?” She brightens. “The opera! That’s what you like, right?”

“Helga asked you out?” Sam is incredulous.

When I arrived home from Helen’s I found Sam on my couch, watching a replay of the 1986 World Series, the year the Mets won.

“Can you believe Darryl Strawberry was on
Celebrity Apprentice
?” she said. “How the mighty have fallen. And that former governor of Illinois was on too. You know, the one whose wife ate a tarantula on that other show?”

You really can’t make this stuff up.

But I didn’t have time to dwell on the fickle nature of fortune just then, or on how reality is often stranger than fiction – I mean, a disgraced governor whose wife ate a tarantula and a world champion baseball player who had more ups and downs than a yo-yo, both on Donald Trump’s
Celebrity Apprentice
together; the mind reels – because I had to tell her about Helen right away. I was bursting with it. I had to tell someone. Which is how we got to…

“Helga asked you out?”

“I don’t know if I’d go so far as to say she asked me out, per se.”

“There you go with the per se again. What’s per se about it? She either asked you or she didn’t.”

“Well, see, that’s the confusing part. She asked if I’d like to get together and do something sometime. You know, something other than me painting her house. But it’s not like we set a specific date and time or anything. So when you get right down to it, it’s kind of like with two guys who don’t know each other so well when they run into each other someplace and one of them says, ‘Hey, we should get together and have a beer sometime’ and the other says, ‘Yeah, let’s do that,’ and then it’s a crapshoot whether they actually do it or not because nothing’s been formally set in stone.”

“I hate that,” Sam says.

“I know, right? Because you don’t want to be the one to call first, because what if the other person was just being polite and didn’t really mean it? You don’t want to force getting together on someone who really doesn’t want to get together with you. But then, what if the other person calls first and you’re not really sure they’re sincere – maybe they’re just being polite? Maybe they don’t really want to get together after all? Or maybe
you
don’t want to get together and you’re just – ”

“But you do want to get together with her, right?”

“Well, yeah.”

“So put on your big boy pants and call her.”

“Call her?” The idea sounds so…intimidating.

“That’s what I just said, isn’t it?” Sam shakes her head in disgust. “Only wait until tomorrow so you don’t appear too eager.”

“Right. I don’t want to appear too eager. I’ll wait until tomorrow.”

This is good. I’ve got a plan, or at least a plan is forming, and I don’t have to do anything about it until tomorrow. This is really good.

“As far as it being a date or not goes,” Sam says, “maybe you can figure that one out when you’re actually on it.”