The Color Master: Stories (18 page)

“So?” she said. She opened her eyes. “We get along. I see you almost every day.”

“Too risky.”

“That is such bullshit!” she said. She glared at the table. She began to shell peanuts. “Are you just not … attracted?”

Susan is a good-looking woman, I’ll give her that. She wears blouses with one button unbuttoned right where you’d want that to happen. Her glasses make her look like you want to take off her glasses. She gets plenty of dates, or she could, if she wanted.

“You’re smug,” I said. I laughed at myself, surprised.

“What do you mean?”

“ ‘Wordkeeper’?”

“Is smug?”

I winced. “Yeah,” I said. “Kind of.”

“I’m old-fashioned,” she said. She swept her shells into a little pile.

I smiled, but not an agreement smile.

She shook her head. “I don’t mean to be,” she said. “I just like the feeling of finding the right word in my mind and employing it. I get pleasure from that feeling. I prefer language to gesture. I figured other people might, too.”

“Sure,” I said.

“I don’t think I’m better than you.”

“It’s okay. You probably are.”

We sat there for a while. She liked to run her long nail down the length of each peanut and then open it up like a present.

“I suppose sex is all gesture,” she said.

“Not even really gesture.”

“I guess not. Not indicative at all.”

“No.”

She ate the peanuts. She was flushed from the wine. She wanted to take off her clothes, I could feel it, the same way she was undressing peanuts, and I felt it as cruel then, how I didn’t want to do anything with her. Maybe cruel to both of us. But the truth is, I just felt like I had e-mail to check. I could masturbate faster. It was easier, in terms of fallout. Who wants to be in an argument with a neighbor?

She held the bottom of her wineglass down hard with her fingers, like otherwise she might just fling it across the room.

I checked my phone. Sent a couple of quick texts. After a few minutes, she left.

The phone is about the same size as a cigarette pack. It’s no surprise to me that the traditional cigarette lighter in many cars has turned into the space we use to recharge our phones. They are kin. The phone, like the cigarette, lets the texter/
former smoker drop out of any social interaction for a second to get a break and make a little love to the beautiful object. We need something, people. We can’t live propless.

It wouldn’t bother me except it bothers me. In the shower I gave myself a test. That stuff I put in my hair for suds? Is called shampoo. The silver tray hanging over the shower top? Is a caddy. The string I use to get crap out of my teeth? Is known as dental floss. She’s in my head all day, Susan, so why have sex with her too? All day I hear her chiding me.

She doesn’t come over for a few days, which is unusual. On Saturday I walk up to her place. I had a dream about her and it was nice, and in the interest of living in the moment, I made a tray of chocolate-dipped strawberries. I made them Friday night. Good chocolate. Good with wine. Organic strawberries, because they are very high on the pesticide list otherwise. She opens the door.

“Yeah?” she says.

She looks tired. Her hair is less planned than usual. I step in. I give her the tray.

“You brought me these?” she says, suspicious.

“I did.”

“What for?”

I was in the middle of her living room. I had had a plan, I knew that. But the rest of it had vanished.

Our store was expensive, I mean Ex-Pen-Sive, as anything would be if all its requests were for clothing in the colors of natural elements. The duke wanted shoes the color of rock, so he could walk in the rock and not see his feet. He was vain that way; he did not like to see his feet. He wanted to appear, from a distance, as a floating pair of ankles. But rock, of course, is many colors. The distinction’s subtle, but it is not just one plain gray, that I can promise, and in order to truly blend, it would not do to give the duke a regular pair of lovely pure-gray-dyed shoes. So we had to trek over as a group to his dukedom, a three-day trip, and take bagfuls of rocks back with us, and then use them, at the studio, as guides. I spent five hours one afternoon just staring at a rock, trying to see into its color scheme. Gray, my head kept saying. I see gray.

At the shop, in general, we build clothing and shoes—shirts and coats, soles and heels—we treat the leather, shape and weave the cloth, and even when an item isn’t ordered as a special request, one pair of shoes or one robe might cost as much as a pony or a month’s food from the market stalls. Most villagers do not have this kind of money, so the bulk of our customers are royalty, or the occasional wealthy traveler riding through town who has heard rumors of our skills.

For the duke’s shoes, all of us tailors and shoemakers, who numbered about twelve, were working round the clock. One man had the idea to grind bits of rock into particles and then add those particles to the dye-washing bin. This helped a little. We attended visualization seminars where we tried to imagine what it was like to be a rock, and then, quietly, after an hour of deep thought and breathing, returned to our desks and tried to insert that imagery into our decision about how long to leave the shoes in the dye bath. We felt the power of the mountain in the rock, and let that play a subtle subtextual role. And then, once the dye had reached ultimate intensity, and once the shoes were a beautiful pure gray, a rocky gray, but still gray, we summoned the Color Master.

She lives about a half mile away, in a cottage behind the scrub-oak grove. We summon her by sending off a goat down the lane, because she does not like to be disturbed by people, and the goat trots down the road and butts on the door. The Color Master set up our studio and shop in the first place, years ago; she has always done the final work. But she has been looking unwell these days. For our last project—the duchess’s handbag that was supposed to look like a just-blooming rose—she wore herself out thinking about pink, and was in bed for weeks after, recovering. Dark circles ringed her eyes. She is growing older. Also, her younger brother suffers from terrible back problems and cannot move or work and lives with her, lying on the sofa all day long. She is certainly the most talented in the kingdom, but gets zero recognition. We, the tailors and shoemakers, we know of her gifts, but does the king? Do the townsfolk? She walks among them like an ordinary being, shopping for tomatoes, and no one knows that the world she’s seeing is about a thousand times more detailed than the world anyone else is looking at. When you see a tomato, like
me, you probably see a very nice red orb with a green stem, fresh and delectable. When she sees a tomato, she sees blues and browns, curves and indentations, shadow and light, and she could probably even guess how many seeds are in a given tomato based on how heavy it feels in her hand.

So we sent over the goat, and when the Color Master came into the studio, we’d just finished the fourth dyeing of the rock shoes. They were drying on a mat, and they looked pretty good. I told Cheryl that her visualization of the mountain had definitely helped. She blushed. I said, too, that Edwin’s contribution of the ground rock particles had added a useful kind of rough texture. He kicked a stool leg, pleased. I hadn’t done much; I’m not very skilled, but I like to commend good work when I see it.

The Color Master approached, wearing a linen sheath woven with blue threadings. Her face hinting at gaunt. She greeted us all, and stood at the counter where the shoes were drip-drying.

Nice work, she said. Esther, who had fronted the dyeing process, curtsied.

We sprinkled rocks into the dye, she said.

A fine choice, said the Color Master.

Edwin did a little dance in place by his table. The goat settled on a pillow in the corner and began to eat the stuffing.

The Color Master rolled her shoulders a few times, and when the shoes were dry, she laid her hands upon them. She lifted them to the sunlight. She picked up a rock and looked at it next to the shoes. She circled both inside different light rays. Then she went to the palette area and took out a handful of blue dust. We have about one hundred and fifty metal bins of this dust in a range of colors. The bins stand side by side, running the perimeter of the studio. They are narrow, so we
can fit a whole lot of colors, and if someone brings in a new color, we hammer down a new bin and slide it into the spectrum, wherever it fits. One tailor found an amazing rich burgundy off in the driest part of the forest, on a series of leaves; I located, once, over by the reddish iron deposits near the lake, a type of dirt that was a deeper brown than soil. Someone else found a new blue in a desiccated pansy, and another in the feathers of a dead bird. We have instructions to hunt for color everywhere, at all times.

The Color Master toured the room, and then took that handful of blue dust (and always, when I watch, I am thrilled—blue? how does she know, blue?), and she rubbed the dust into the shoe. Back to the bins, where she got a black, a dusty black, and then some sage green. While she worked, everyone stood around, quiet. We dropped our usual drudgery and chitchat.

The Color Master worked swiftly, but she added, usually, something on the level of forty colors, so the process generally took over two hours. She added a color here, a color there, sometimes at the size of salt particles, and the gray in the shoe shifted and shaded under her hands. She would reach a level and ask for sealant, and Esther would step forward, and the Color Master would coat the shoe to fasten the colors and then return to the sunlight, holding a shoe up, with the rock in her other hand. This went on for about four rounds. I swear, I could start to feel the original mountain’s presence in the room, hear the great heavy lumbering voice of it.

When she was done, the pair was so gray, so rocklike, you could hardly believe they were made of leather at all. They looked as if they had been sheared straight from the craggy mountainside.

Done, she said.

We circled her, bowing our heads.

Another triumph, murmured Sandy, who cannot color-mix to save her life.

The Color Master swept her gaze around the room, and her eyes rested on each of us, searching, slowly, until they finally settled on me. Me?

Will you walk me home? she said in a deep voice, while Esther tied an invoice to the foot of a pigeon and then threw it out the window in the direction of the dukedom.

I would be honored, I mumbled. I took her arm. The goat, full of pillow, tripped along behind us.

I am a quiet sort, except for the paying of compliments, and I didn’t know if I should ask her anything on the walk. As far as I knew, she didn’t usually request an escort home at all. Mainly I just looked at all the stones and rocks on the path, and for the first time saw that blue hint, and the blackness, and the shades of green, and that faint edge of purple if the light hit just so. She seemed relieved that I wasn’t asking questions, so much so that it occurred to me that that was probably why she’d asked me in the first place.

At her door, she fixed her eyes on me: steady, aging at the corners. She was almost twice my age, but had always had an allure I’d admired. A way of holding her body that let you know that there was a body there, but that it was private, that stuff happened on it, in it, to it, but it was stuff I would never see. It made me sad, seeing that, knowing how her husband had gone off to the war years ago and never returned, and how it was difficult for her to have people over because of her brother with the bad back, and how, long ago, she had fled her own town for reasons she never mentioned. Plus, she had a thick cough and her own money questions, all of which seemed so unfair when she should’ve been living in the palace, as far as I was concerned.

Listen, she said. She held me in her gaze.

Yes?

There’s a big request coming in, she said. I’ve heard rumors. Big. Huge.

What is it? I said.

I don’t know yet, but start preparing. You’ll have to take over. I will die soon, she said.

Excuse me?

Soon, she said. I can feel it, brewing. Death. It’s not dark, nor is it white. It’s almost a blue-purple. Her eyes went past me, to the sky.

Are you confusing me with someone else? I asked.

She laughed.

Do you mean it? I said. Are you ill?

No, she said. Yes. I mean it. I’m asking for your help. And when I die, it will be your job to finish.

But I’m not very good, I said, twisting. Like at all. You can’t die. You should ask Esther, or Sven—

You, she said, and with a little curt nod, she went into her house and shut the door.

The duke loved his shoes so much he sent us a drawing, by the court illustrator, of him floating, it appeared, on a pile of rocks. I love them, he wrote, in swirly handwriting; I love them, I love them! In addition to a small cash bonus, he offered us horse rides and a feast at the dukedom. We all attended, in all our finery, and it was a great time. It was the last time I saw the Color Master dancing, in her pearl-gray gown, and I knew it was the last even as I watched it, her silver hair swirling out as she glided through the group. The duke kept tapping his toe on the side, holding the duchess’s hand, her free one grasping a handbag the perfect pink of a rose, so vivid and fresh the color seemed to carry a sweet scent even across the ballroom.