Flat Water Tuesday (9 page)

I woke up and smelled her in the sheets and walked barefoot across the cold wooden floor to the boundary of the kitchen tiles and looked in at her working, nodding in time to something harsh and loud in her studio headphones. I watched her from my post by the door, the way she hunched over the keyboard like a man over his food, working with a pencil in her mouth and another in her hand that she picked up and put down in-between bouts of typing. She’d edit like that for hours and then would need a massage, need to feel somebody’s fingers—my fingers—drilling into her back, finding the ropes of tension and rubbing them away, the muscles along her spine taking the most strain, her deltoids and traps needing at least forty minutes of attention. I could massage her at night for over an hour and in doing so my hands would grow numb with the pain of it, my wrists would start to cramp, and she’d half-doze through even the hardest, deepest massage and fall asleep like a cat at the end.

I went back to sleep for just a few more minutes. Carolyn dragged me out of bed two hours later. She put on more coffee and we pulled the croissants out of the fridge that I hadn’t touched the day before, and I consumed them sitting on one of the stools that hid under the long, stainless counter sweeping into the living area of the loft. Carolyn drank black coffee with sweetener.

She didn’t need the rigorous diet. She was a woman of beautiful planes, defined by the sweep of her hips, her sharp, high cheekbones and her swept back blond hair. Carolyn had her own toxins. Too much coffee. An on-again, off-again cigarette compulsion. Wine.

She wanted to go over the script for the shark piece with me so that she could start editing the digitized footage, chopping and changing on the editing suite. She needed my input about which of the many tapes had the footage we’d be using. I had a fairly good script already that indicated where the footage should go in, but it was a laborious process nonetheless and would consume all of her time for weeks to come. I trusted her work implicitly and so did
National Geographic
. We were cutting what they would refer to as a “fat” piece so their editors could do further work and provide professional narration, although I would wind up doing a scratch track—a primitive recording dubbed into the tape—that would give the channel something to work with when they removed my voice and put in their own narrator’s.

I had worked with Carolyn for years like this. In fact, we had met because I needed somebody with an editing studio in the U.S. to handle my work once the channel stopped taking raw footage from me and started commissioning finished pieces. Much of my work was not profitable for her—her real money came from editing corporate videos. I met her at the New York Documentary Center on Maiden Lane during a conference I had attended just for the hell of it. She had been handing out cards and we’d fallen into a conversation after sitting through a presentation by the wife of some Hollywood director who’d helped fund the place. That was five years ago. When Carolyn had learned what I did she immediately offered to do some editing for me, I could name the price. She’d made the offer over beers at a Front Street microbrewery under the Brooklyn Bridge that everyone had repaired to by the late afternoon and by that night we were having dinner at an Italian restaurant nearby, which was a long, drunken, romantic stroll uptown.

I remembered walking next to her and feeling her hand inches from mine. She was talking about her work, I suppose. When she finally brushed my hand with hers, my heart ground its gears and I was lost.

Sitting in front of her edit suite, the script spread out in front of us, I watched her carefully sip her coffee, set the mug down, start zipping through the material on screen. Carolyn and I in one sense had nothing in common. Even while she worked from home she was dressed fashionably by my standards. The filmers I worked with, including myself I guess, were a scruffy looking bunch. Carolyn worked with corporate clients and her place was what I once bitterly described to her as “executive-pseudo-artistic.” But I secretly loved having access to this cavern of space at the bottom of the city. I liked the repolished wooden floors, the iron studs in the walls and the naked steel pillars and girders, the wide warehouse windows. Even the freight elevator was charming in its dirty, utilitarian way. She had put in a kitchen near the living area and upgraded the bathroom. The fixtures were flagrantly expensive—brushed stainless steel German faucets and spouts that she had installed after an entire year of saving. She had found oversize, white modular couches to stand on a massive afghan rug, and pedestals and floating shelves displayed the masks and statues I had brought her from Africa, South America and Canada. I regretted getting her that mask collection, though. More than a few lovemaking sessions had been interrupted as I moved us away from the leering gaze of all those contorted wooden faces.

She’d been to Africa and South America with me a few times but she preferred the city and, I felt, work that really paid. Her clients were mostly in New York. She had never romanticized the career of a documentary filmer: the cheap life of third-class flights and overweight baggage and meals on the fly and forced interviews and extreme weather. She liked the cachet that working for
National Geographic
gave her, and liked to help me, but that was it. I had once, in a rage, accused her of being too corporate-minded, said that money was the driving force behind everything she did. She had conceded the point. She had also wondered aloud if anyone really did anything without thinking about the back-end, and reminded me that she could write off the work she did for me as charity.

She sounded like my father when she said that.

Six weeks ago, just before I had flown to South Africa, Carolyn had announced that our relationship was finished. It was an impossible relationship we had, she said. Two people our age had to start making something substantial out of their lives. We agreed on that. It was more than the simple fact we were unmarried, which she claimed didn’t bother her. If I wanted to shoot film and edit, I could do it anywhere. I could do it right here in New York. Anyway, I should be doing more corporate work, she insisted. It was easier, it was fun sometimes and it paid more. Yeah, I had replied, I could just see myself filming the inside of a new bank. Or doing training tapes for sales teams, or filming exterior shots of new offices. I hated the idea of spending weeks shooting restaurant and travel inserts for cable TV channels. Why not? she’d countered. It pays the bills and people care about where they work and where they eat and doing their jobs well.

But there was more to it as well. Our fights had started occurring more and more regularly, almost immediately after I came back from a shoot, with flare-ups through the ensuing weeks until I left again on the next assignment. The very fact I had an apartment in Cape Town irritated her. My Cape Town place was a small, one-room bachelor studio, I had told her, a place to sleep and get mail and lock up my equipment. I wasn’t going to live in a hotel for half my life. No, she’d said, you could live in
our
place. I reminded her it was
her
place. I just helped pay the rent.

And then there was yet more to it, another layer that we couldn’t touch. Even when the arguments came to the point of her throwing things out the window, of her going so far as to demand I leave the loft and find another place to sleep, we never bore down to it. The last night she threw me out, I walked over to our restaurant and got drunk at a table near the kitchen and then returned and begged her to let me in, freezing my ass off on the sidewalk because I’d stormed out of the loft in a T-shirt and jeans and boots into SoHo in February. I had wound up sleeping on the stairs leading up from the factory entrance. Even when she let me in at 5:00
A.M.
and showered with me and brought me to bed, fucked me, and let me lie next to her in drunken silence, shivering, we didn’t talk about it.

The
Titanic
had sailed on after it skidded against its iceberg. It had traveled a couple of miles after it was damaged, water creeping up the sides of the ship. Our tear was deep, under the waterline. I knew when it had happened and so did she and the other stuff was just excuses, really. They were the tribulations you could work through when your things weren’t awash all around you. We just made our plans for abandoning ship.

*   *   *

Channing’s white farmhouse with its overgrown driveway was right after the main town of Fenton and was pressed too close to River Road. The front shutters were peeling but otherwise it seemed in good shape, bigger than I thought it would be. It was a long building and when I walked around the back I realized it was built on a hill and he had a good few acres of property, all of it gone wild. He’d kept his back screens up for too long and they were rusted and bowed crazily in and out from winter. I saw what he was building and what I would be working on: a new shed. The garage right next to his house was obviously too small to store anything in—it was one of those old carriage houses they still had in New England that you swore was slumping over to one side when you looked at it long enough. A hundred years ago there would have been a barn somewhere close by but that was long gone now. The surrounding land and houses were owned by movie stars and investment bankers from New York, who every so often drove out to Fenton to look at the leaves.

I called out Channing’s name a few times and then stepped up to the front door of the little shed. I turned around and looked at the main house; from that angle it was maybe the loneliest looking place I’d ever seen in my life. He’d gone out and bought a stack of pressed wood—too much, I thought, just eyeballing it—and two wine boxes of paint were stacked on top of it. An A&P shopping bag full of stiff old paintbrushes balanced right on top of the gallon cans of paint. There was another box full of the shingles you get at those big outlets for people too cheap to call a custom roofer, who figured building a house was as easy as buying a video on the subject.

Sawdust was all over the ground and dusted the floor and sills of the shed and I knew without walking in there he’d been ripped off by a crew of bozos. I could see the old mugs and dirty rags left in the corners and the coffee rings on the finished sills that they hadn’t bothered about. They’d screwed the job up good and proper. I wished for a second I could give my father a tour. He’d have a laugh. He’d walk in there and kick the walls hard enough to buckle them. I wondered if Channing had only recently wised up and fired everyone once things had progressed to this condition, or if he just didn’t know any better. Boat work and building work were two different animals, I guessed.

“Carrey. Only an hour and a half late, I see.”

There he was now, in the doorway to the porch of his house, without a tie. He walked down the sagging steps, crossed the ragged lawn. “What do you think of my addition?”

“I’d call it a subtraction.”

He made a sound and his deep-set eyes flashed briefly. His hair was tightly curled, fading. He wore brogues, khaki pants that were spattered with flecks of wood stain along the sides and a parchment-crisp shirt that had been ironed thin. Channing had the faded tan you get working outdoors every day. His hands were manicured and clean but beat-up and raw, too. I’d discover it was hard for him to pick a pencil up off the floor, or dig a piece of chalk out of the tray in front of a blackboard. He’d built a sailboat once, he’d tell me, and being the coach of the crew he did most of the work on the shells. But Channing didn’t have woodworker’s hands. They looked like they belonged to a meat packer.

“I thought at first this was going to be a storage shed but now I’m thinking you’re building an office?”

“Possibly; also it will serve as a guesthouse.”

“How much did you pay the morons who built it?”

“Isn’t it possible that I built it myself?”

“Not unless you’re the kind of guy who litters all over his own little playhouse.”

He frowned, looked in at the mess. “I paid them a fair price. And you are exceptionally insulting, Carrey.”

“Straight talk is no insult in this business, Mr. Channing. I can make a recommendation or I can be polite.”

“All right, then. Give me the hard truth. Lay it on me, as they say.”

“The sashes aren’t set right and your wiring’s too low and they’ve spaced the framework wide to save money and they used the crappiest wood they could find.”

“‘Crappiest’ won’t even make it through a spell checker.”

“Flimsiest.”

“The plans were drawn up by some friends at a very good outfit in Millerton.”

“The plans might be great but your builders are killing you. Ten bucks says those nails will be rusted out in the wood by the end of the month and they overbought and overcharged you for materials and then left the site looking like a pig sty. You go get a measuring tape and measure the distance between those wall studs and I’ll tell you now it’s wider than on the plans.”

He grunted. “I had a few reservations…”

“Did you cut them a check?”

He didn’t answer. He ran his hands down the door frames and windowsills, which you could bet had been leaning against each other in a Walmart somewhere downstate a few weeks ago. “Do you think you can put a layer of paint on this?”

“I can do more than that.”

“I need you to paint. That’s all. Let’s keep things simple.”

He stood on the half stoop they’d made for him and looked down the hill leading into a creek by the house, the whole thing weeds and shrub now. I stood in the shade of the house, smelling wood and sawdust and glue and mixed plaster and felt at home for the first time in weeks. “You don’t have to supervise me. It’s not like I’m going anywhere.”

“I’m not supervising you. I’m thinking of how to advise you. I’ve been chosen to be your advisor.”

“What do you mean, like a counselor?”

“I don’t want to counsel you. Every student is assigned an advisor. One who advises.”

“Do you have any advice for me?”

“Don’t get drawn into fistfights or the destruction of school property and you won’t have to paint houses.”