The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg (66 page)

What on earth was she going to do when he didn’t feel like taking care of her any longer? She hadn’t meant to just throw herself in a heap on his floor. On the other hand, she hadn’t meant not to; she hadn’t meant anything at all—she was just scrambling. And now she was going to have to get some money together, herself. And fast, too—she’d almost gone through her savings.

Maybe the best thing about drugs, Rosie thinks now (or, on the other hand, maybe it’s the worst), is the way they unhook you from that stupid step-by-step business—first one moment, then the next, then the one after that. No skipping, no detours, no time off. Which is what she’s had to live through for all these long, recent months, and what she’ll have to live through, now, every day until she dies. No wonder she hadn’t particularly minded working in an office before. Beginning of day, end of day; pure-white time in between. The hands of the clock might sleep or twirl—that was discretionary.

But the laws of human time must have registered on some template lying around in Rosie’s brain, because, facing the prospect of going back, Rosie remembers herself as a miner, hacking her way through the stony mass, instant after intolerably boring instant.

And if only boringness were the whole problem! Again, Rosie’s memory offers up things Rosie didn’t even notice at the time: the sadness of herself, the sadness of all the others—the secretaries and clerks, working away like mice in their little cubicles, at their endless, miniature tasks, their careful clothes and clean hands,
Good morning, good morning, how was your weekend?
And Mr. Gage and Mr. Peralta in their horrible suits and ties, appearing at the doorways of their offices with sheaves of paper, the light from their windows flashing into the fluorescent light over Rosie’s desk.

How polite everyone was, and how cheery! Their cheerfulness lay like boulders over geysers of misery.
Have a nice night. See you tomorrow.
By five in the evening you were abrim with filth.

Rosie asked Jamie: Did he know of any jobs? Any people who worked in an office?

“Are you out of your mind?” he said.

Fine, she thought; that was her opinion of the whole thing, too, obviously.

“You don’t want to do that,” he said. “You’d hate it.”

“Really,” Rosie said.

“Why are you pissed off at me?” he said.

“I’m not,” she said. “Pissed off at anyone.”

“Well, good, then. Hey, where are you going? Aren’t you going to say good night, at least?”

“Good night,” Rosie said. “So you think I should be a doctor, right? You think I should be a famous artist.”

Jamie looked at her. “Wow, Rosie…”

Rosie put her hands over her ears. “Look, Jamie. Could we just not talk about this, please?”

The next day she apologized, of course.

“Hey, I was thinking last night,” Jamie said. “Now please don’t get pissed off again. But maybe you could be my assistant.”

The room dimmed. “I know you’re trying to help me,” Rosie said laboriously, as if she were picking her way through the words in the dark. She was silting up, her blood was draining out. She should have stayed back there, she thought, where the spears just bounced right off. “I appreciate everything you’ve done to help me. But listen, Jamie…” She put her head in her hands.

“…‘Listen, Jamie’?”

“Well, I
can’t.
Obviously.”

“Can’t what? Let’s see. Can you…” He plucked a paintbrush from a jar sitting beneath the kitchen table, and prodded her with the handle. “Perfect,” he said, as her hand closed around it to push it away. “Great reflexes.”

“Oh, Jesus,” she said. “Should I show you how I draw a house? I never even learned to finger paint.”

“Rosie, we are not talking Sistine Chapel, here. Do you know what these jobs are about? The whole thing is ridiculous. A lot of these people like to think that there are only a few special people—really
gifted
people—who can do this shit. They get So-and-So, you know? Or So-and-So.
Artists.
But anyone could do it, a monkey could do it. Plus, do you know what kind of stuff they want? Once, I was flown to the Cayman Islands to paint an extra inch of rug on some guy’s floor. Once, I had to marbleize all of some lady’s toilet-paper holders.”

“You think anyone can do it because you can do it,” Rosie said.

“Wrong,” Jamie said. “I think anyone can do it because anyone can do it. Especially the easy parts, which I’m going to show you, foolproofily, how to do. Look, how do you think people get to be able to do a thing? First they pretend they can do it, and then they do it, and then they can do it.”

Rosie stared; he wiggled the brush. “The main thing you’ve got to learn is to stay out of the medicine cabinet. Hey, lighten up—that was a joke.”

The first job was an hour’s drive distant, and there were four of them—Jamie and Rosie and Marina and Jean-Michel, squashed into Marina’s red pickup truck. Marina and Jean-Michel looked at Rosie. What had Jamie said to them? “Great,” Marina said. “A new face. Someone to bore with our war stories.”

The sun was round and yellow. The city melted away. Lawns and trees and driveways flowed by. Massive houses sat behind hedges. The houses looked like pictures from travel posters: Spanish, Rosie thought; Japanese; English, maybe from some other century. “Where are we?” she said.

“We’re dead now,” Marina said dreamily. “This is the land of the dead. Unfortunately, this civilization wasn’t worth preserving, so all these people fell into their pools and died. Isn’t that sad?”

“Darling—” Jean-Michel sighed. “It’s not for us to judge these people. Scum though they be, it’s just not our job to judge them.”

“No?” Marina looked at him with enormous gray eyes. “So, what is our job?”

“Our job,” Jean-Michel said. “Our job…Right. Well, our job is to make a mockery of our God-given talents.”

“Oh, yeah…” Marina said. “Right…”

Rosie sighed; she was never going to be able to do this stuff…

The red truck rattled and screeched into a driveway; the house at the end of it looked shocked into its whiteness. With noisy rapidity, Jamie and Marina and Jean-Michel unloaded pails and jars and stained rags and cloths, wooden sticks and cans and huge, old sponges, heaping it all up in the driveway like booty. Rosie blinked. “Trash,” Jamie said into her ear. She looked at him. “Trash,” he said again, as if he were patiently teaching a parrot.

The lady of the house came out and greeted them nervously; her glance snagged on Jean-Michel, as if she’d been briefly hypnotized by his elaborate mass of little braids. She probably didn’t see too many black people out here, Rosie thought, who weren’t in uniforms. “I’m so glad you could come,” the lady said confusedly. Jean-Michel inclined his head, disengaging her stare with kingly ease.

Upstairs, the four inspected a room where they were to paint a border of stenciled sheep, and a blue ceiling with white clouds, and then another room, where they were to make a border of stenciled flowers.

“For this she needed
us
?” Marina said.

Jamie shrugged. “It’s only our prices that can justify the misery of her husband’s existence.”

A carton stood in the corner of the room, containing a whole little life—a jumble of soft toys and dolls, and a small, fuzzy blanket. “Hey, wow—” Rosie said, and the three others wheeled around.

“I was just
looking
,” she said.

“No, I know,” Jamie said, as Marina and Jean-Michel returned to setting out their tools. “Just, it’s…”

“Fine,” Rosie said. “So I won’t look.”

Jamie gave her a stencil and a round brush, and showed her how to hold them both and to pat the paint onto the wall instead of stroking it on.

It was hard. You had to hold the brush just right and the stencil just right or you’d smear or drip. Rosie’s heart pounded in her ears as she lifted the stencil from the wall. “Right,” Jamie said. “Perfect.”

Did children really like these little sheep? Or was it just the sort of thing adults insisted they like. Would Rosie have liked sheep on her wall when she was little? Sheep: She doubted they would have applied. She doubted these petrified-looking creatures would have improved her dreams any. She liked them now, though, poor things. Now it was easy enough to imagine them jumping over their fences, on their way off to slaughter…

Painted sheep, stuffed animals, ribbons, sweet little-girly things—it reminded Rosie of sitting in the pretty bathroom back at Ian’s with her cappuccino and her bottle of rubbing alcohol and her needle and her hairbrush. “You’re doing good,” Jean-Michel said, and she jumped.

“Thanks,” she said, flushing with rage and shame. Yeah, thanks. She knew perfectly well she was a charity case.

The others laughed and joked—they didn’t even have to concentrate, though it was all Rosie could do to remember what, out of all the rags and brushes and stencils and containers she had to juggle, she was holding in what hand. “Oh, no!” she said; she’d blurred an edge. “No problem,” Marina said, quickly dipping a rag into some thinner and dabbing it expertly against the wall. “See? All better now.” Without looking at Rosie she returned to her own section of wall.

But, after the third time Rosie smeared, Marina sighed loudly. “Sorry, but stencils are not the easiest way to start,” Marina said. She looked at Jamie. “You’ve got to be really, really careful with them.”

“We’ve got too many people doing this anyhow,” Jamie said. “What we really need are some clean brushes.”

He showed Rosie how to clean the brushes and lay them neatly out on a rag to dry. Fuck you, she thought; fuck you, fuck you. But the fact was it wasn’t all that easy to clean the brushes, either. You had to swish them around in a little jar of thinner, Jamie explained, and just keep changing to new thinner until it stayed clear. Changing it over and over, and over and over and over. And obviously, Rosie thought, the thinner was never going to stay clear.

Marina was applying two bands of blue tape to the wall, in order to paint a thin pink stripe between them; the space between the bands didn’t vary by an iota, as far as Rosie could see. Marina and Jamie and Jean-Michel were working away, bending and reaching, with unhurried, engaged precision as the toxic incense of the paint rose up and swirled around them. Their hair was bound up in brilliant scarves, and their clothing and the exposed parts of their bodies were smeared with glistening colors.

There were times Rosie missed her needle so much she could have burst into tears. She’d done just that, in fact—over coffee at some counter, in line at the bank where she went to open a tiny checking account, and once simply walking down the street she’d sobbed loudly, as if she’d been flung at the wall of a prison.

For a few moments the tears would dissolve the distance between herself and her bartered immortality. When the tears were gone, the distance was back, as solid as before. But each time it happened, she felt a bit better—she’d had a little visit.

“How’s it going?” Marina said brightly, not waiting for an answer. All friendly solicitude now that the walls were out of harm’s way.

Rosie wandered into the bathroom they’d been instructed to use. Oily stains were ingrained all up her arms—phantom badges she had no right to wear. Her skin was already sore and stinging from the turpentine she’d rubbed on it, but she worked at the stains with soap, and then shook her hands to dry them. Were they allowed to use the towels? The lady hadn’t said; best not to. Rosie checked the mirror again, and smiled at it falsely. There. All better now.

Stay out of the medicine cabinet.
Some joke. Well, what did people like this keep in those things? Jamie had aspirin, and that was about it. These people were more serious, of course. Serious people: Rogaine, Aldomet, Propanolol, Zovorax, Imodium, and oh—there. Fiorinal. Marina with that blue tape! The patience of a robot.

The bottle of Fiorinal was in Rosie’s hand, she noticed. She looked at it, and replaced it in the cabinet. She stared into the mirror, then smiled falsely at it once again. Ha—a person. But what a disappointment that
she
was the person she’d turned out to be. She reached for the bottle, opened it, and shook about half its contents out into a Kleenex.

She found Jamie and the other two in the second room they were to paint. The lady of the house was with them. “Well,” the lady said. “Now I want
her
opinion.” She turned to Rosie. “He’s almost got me convinced. And these people”—she indicated Jean-Michel and Marina—“agree with him.” Jean-Michel, Marina, and Jamie stood by, splendid, like rabble in their raggy work clothes, their eyes gleaming and their faces streaked. “You’ve seen the samples, I’m sure. Let’s hear what you think.”

What
samples? Rosie glanced at Jamie.

“You can be perfectly honest with Mrs. Howell, Rosie,” Jamie said.

“I can’t do any worse than I’m doing now,” the lady said.

Rosie gasped, as though she’d been slapped.
Oh, no?

“Well, Mrs. Howell,” Rosie said slowly, “It’s your house, after all, and no matter what
we
think it’s you who—”

“I see,” Mrs. Howell said. “So. Four against one.”

Over Mrs. Howell’s shoulder, the others smiled.

Rosie learned a lot there, she thinks. Well, at least she learned something. And though this place downtown is only her second job, she can clean the brushes without wrecking them or going insane, she can stir the paints and put them out and straighten up at the end of the day without making a mess, she can maneuver her scaffold around with a modicum of authority, she always remembers to lock the wheels on Jamie’s so he won’t go flying through the window, she can navigate the treacherous shoals of someone else’s rooms without dripping, spilling, or breaking a thing, she can manage (once in a while) the huge, necessary array of implements and liquids simultaneously, she’s learned to become invisible at will, and, best of all, she can actually do a bit of the painting, even though this job’s so much fancier and more complicated than the one in Mrs. Howell’s house.