Serendipity Green (28 page)

“I thought everybody from Georgia was named Bobby Clyde?”

“Igor is not from our Georgia, Hugh. He is from the real Georgia. The one that hangs under Russia's big belly like an udder of sweet milk. He was an officer in the Red Navy for twenty-seven years. Now the fleet is rusting in Odessa and he is in Cleveland, Ohio, selling South Korean automobiles for some Italian millionaire and playing chess with some lazy Persian who makes his patients call and call. His wife is Malaysian, if you can believe it. Eight years ago she came to America to study podiatry and now she is getting rich and famous importing cat toys from Vietnam. They've just bought a big house in Bay Village. Six bedrooms. A Jacuzzi you could swim laps in. So tell me Hugh, why are you going crazy again?”

Dr. Pirooz Aram wedges his tongue between his front teeth and listens as Hugh Harbinger tells him how a rival designer named Koko—the only person in New York with color instincts equal to his—is back from Morocco with a beautiful brown lover and seventy-seven shades of white named after virtuous women; how this Koko is already making deals with the manufacturers of clothes and cars and kitchen appliances; how Jean Jacques Bistrot is already writing articles; how the waiters at Zulu Lulu are already looking at him with pity and disdain; how before long Serendipity Green® only will be popular among the demographically challenged living in the Midwest and Deep South; how before long he will be depressed again and penniless again, and living again with Bob and Eleanor In Parma.

Dr. Aram twists his fingers into his beard. “Can you hear a ripping sound, Hugh? It is the sound of me ripping the hairs out of my head. Dammit! You are under no obligation to jump off a roof just because some phony-baloneys in New York City don't like your color any more.”

“Intellectually I understand that better than anybody,” says Hugh. “I'm one of the biggest phony-baloneys to ever set foot in this city.”

The doctor chuckles. “Stop your bragging. I lived in New York for nine years. I met hundreds of bigger phony-baloneys than you.”

Now Hugh Harbinger begins to cry. He does not want to be depressed again, he says. He does not want to be at the bottom of that big empty gray bowl again, unable to see out, unable to scale its slippery walls.

Dr. Pirooz Aram presses his phone tight against his ear and visualizes the tears trickling down his patient's face. “Let me talk not as your psychiatrist, but merely as someone much smarter than you. May I do that?”

“Shoot.”

“Good. Now listen. God has been watching you like a hawk since the day you were born. And for some reason he likes you. He likes you so much that one day he followed you all the way to Tuttwyler, putting up with your parents' jibber-jabber mile after mile on the Interstate. And he showed you a wonderful color. A color that awakened you and transformed you. A color you could take to the world. And now someone whom God likes just as much comes along with seventy-five shades of white—”

“Seventy-seven,” corrects Hugh Harbinger.

“And you are ready to crumble like a muffin. As if this Serendipity Green® actually belonged to you! Hugh! Are you listening? God shows me the moon every night but that does not mean I own the moon. If one night a big cloud fills the sky and I can't see the moon, it does not mean God wants me to stop looking at it. It only means that once in a while they sky gets cloudy.”

“I know all that,” says Hugh.

“Boool-shit! If you knew all that you wouldn't be calling my office every fifteen minutes while I'm sitting in the mall playing chess!”

“I don't want to be depressed again.”

“I will double your prescription.”

“Double my prescription? That's the best you can do?”

“That is quite a lot, don't you think?” Dr. Aram looks at his watch. He must meet his sweet wife Sitareh at Foon Choon's in only nine minutes. If he is late she will order without him and that means the pepper steak and he will be farting all night. “You must not confuse your fear of getting depressed with actually being depressed. Your Solhzac will keep your chemicals under control until the clouds blow away and you can see the moon again. Go to church and light a candle and thank God for showing you this wonderful color. Ask him to show you more wonderful colors. Make love to someone you care about. Eat a pint of strawberries. Rent the
Wizard of Oz
. When you get a bill from your psychiatrist, pay it immediately. Do these things and you will be fine.”

The silence on the other end tells Dr. Pirooz Aram that his patient has surrendered. “Good-bye my good prince of Serendip!”

He hurries to the parking lot and drives his red sports car as fast as he dares toward Foon Choon's. As he drives he worries about Hugh Harbinger. He worries about Katherine Hardihood. He worries about Ernest Not Irish. He worries about the Americans who come to him by the hundreds, demanding prescriptions for magical medicines, demanding permission to follow their hearts. Who is he, he wonders, to hand out either? He knows he is a terrible psychiatrist. He knows he should have become a dentist as his mother wished. Instead he went to Paris and then to New York and then to hell filling Americans full of drugs and full of dangerous ideas about self-realization. “Damn you, Pirooz,” he growls at himself.

23

It is the rainiest May in memory. And so far the coldest. And for several days now the denizens of Tuttwyler, Ohio have been debating just why the weather has been so foul. The cappuccino drinkers at the Day Dream Beanery tend to blame it on corporate polluters. The beer drinkers at the VFW are certain Moammar Khadafy and Saddam Hussein are to blame. But neither the rain nor cold, nor the uncertainty over their causes, can stop Chiselworth & Tubb Advertising from flying in a crew to film the new Serendipity Green® gazebo commercial for the Bison-Prickert Paint Company. The crew has big nasty lights to burn the rain and cold away. The crew has hot coffee to drink and Serendipity Green® ponchos to wear. Most importantly the crew has a deadline. It must get this 30-second Serendipity Green® commercial shot and edited and on the air by game one of the National Basketball Association's championship finals.

And so the village square is a beehive of activity. There are not only the cameras and crew brought in to film the commercial, there are the cameras and crews from channels 3, 5, 8 and 19 sent to record this historic event for the six-, ten- and eleven-o'clock news. There is a perimeter of yellow crime scene tape and sheriff's deputies parading in SWAT gear. There are two- maybe three-hundred umbrella-wielding local folk who have never seen a commercial being shot before and twelve or so actors flown in from New York and LA to portray the local folk. There are wardrobe people and makeup people and food-service people, and serious-looking people in Burberry raincoats who, when not yapping into their cell phones, are scowling at their big-as-bagel wristwatches. All in all, this cold and rainy day in May is nearly as festive as Squaw Days itself.

The plot of the commercial is simple enough: The happy people of Tuttwyler, Ohio, gather on a beautiful summer day to paint their old white gazebo Serendipity Green®. The actors flown in to portray these happy Tuttwylerites will not actually paint the gazebo, of course. The real painting of the gazebo was accomplished two weeks before by a team of union painters flown in from Chicago. Today is just for pretend, for close-ups of actors brushing and grinning and drinking lemonade and joyfully wiping splatters of Serendipity Green® paint off the nose of a firehouse Dalmatian flown in from LA.

And so the filming begins. The rain comes and goes. The crowd ebbs and flows. Finally there is just one more scene to shoot: A silver-haired actor, who has appeared in several national ads for pain relievers and sinus medicines, will wrap his plaid-shirted arm around Howie Dornick's shoulder and warmly say, “Looks great Howie!” Howie will beam back at the actor and say, “I think I like it!” The real Howie Dornick, being the unappetizing man he is, will not appear in the commercial. He is being portrayed by an actor who has appeared in national ads for cholesterol-free cooking oil, instant gravy and life insurance.

The director, fashionable ponytail sticking from the back of his bald head like the tail of a tadpole, picks up a megaphone. “We've got audio in this shot people,” he says. “That means quiet, quiet, quiet! Am I understood?”

He is understood.

And there is quiet.

There is quiet for exactly five seconds.

Then there is a communal shriek.

The crowd divides like the Red Sea.

Deputies in SWAT gear spin like a tabletop of Hanukkah dreidels into the yellow crime scene tape.

A pewter-colored American-made Japanese luxury sedan, Yobisch Podka's
Insipientia
blaring from its open windows, bulls into the Serendipity Green® gazebo. Splinters fly.

24

Howie Dornick is high on his ladder painting the ceiling of the gazebo when he sees Dick Mueller and Delores walk hand-in-hand across the north end of the village square. He does not care much for Dick and Delores as individuals—they are both a little holier-than-thou when it comes to religion and patriotism, and Dick always treats him like he's a little bit retarded—but he sure admires them as a couple. For years he admired the way they kept their love affair private and now he admires how they flaunt it, holding hands and kissing and patting each other's behinds. He hopes the day will come when he and Katherine Hardihood can be a public couple, shopping together for groceries, eating together in restaurants, walking together across the square, laughing and touching no matter how unappetizing everybody thinks they are.

And Howie Dornick can see that this day is coming. Coming soon. Their collective courage is growing by leaps and bounds. Already they've been a couple in Wooster, unashamedly conspiring with the Bittinger boy. Already they have been a couple in the cemetery, exhuming ol' Seth Aitchbone in broad daylight. How long can it be before they stroll bravely into the Daydream Beanery and sit at one of the window tables and sip their hazelnut coffees and wipe muffin crumbs off each other's chins? Any week now that could happen.

Tonight they will be taking a big step in that direction. They will be going as a couple to Bill Aitchbone's house.

He makes sure he is finished painting exactly at 4:15. He makes sure it takes exactly forty-five minutes to take his ladder and empty paint cans back to the village maintenance garage and to clean his brushes and scrub the specks of Serendipity Green® paint off his face and hands. At exactly five he starts for home. As he walks his stomach feel like it's full of sparrows. He does not want to confront D. William Aitchbone tonight or any night. Still, he wants to get it over with. He passes the freshly repaired and freshly painted gazebo. It looks good as new. He passes the newly painted Serendipity Green® houses on South Mill. No matter how hard he squints, these impressive giants are not the same Serendipity Green® as the Serendipity Green® on his humble two-story frame. How can they be? How possibly can the Bison-Prickert Paint Company mix his lifetime of misery into their paint?

When he reaches his driveway he signs the Serendipity Green® tee shirts of two old women with humped backs and bowling pin breasts. Their tee shirts are not really Serendipity Green®. But the Indonesian sweatshop that made them has come pretty close. He does not sign the tee shirts across the front as the old women ask, but across their humped backs. He picks up a half dozen boxes and tins of Serendipity Green® cookies and cupcakes left on the porch by various pilgrims. When he reaches the kitchen he throws them into the Serendipity Green® garbage can Hugh Harbinger sent him.

His kitchen table and counters are covered with the various Serendipity Green® appliances Hugh sent, none of them truly Serendipity Green®.

He showers and and then sits down on his Serendipity Green® toilet seat and dries off with a fluffy Serendipity Green® towel. He hears Katherine Hardihood's librarian's knuckles banging on his back door.

They are both too nervous to eat anything substantial, so they nibble on oyster crackers and sip a little ginger ale, as if they had the flu. They watch the Cleveland news: an east-side fire has claimed the lives of two babies; a hidden camera has caught the assistant city finance director drinking beer at an east side strip club when he should have been working; a teacher at a suburban high school has been indicted for having sex with eighteen former students, possible many more. Then they watch the national news: Israel is balking at the President's latest Mideast peace proposals; Russian generals are suspected of selling biological weapons to North African terrorists; the attorney general of the United States may or may not appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the Vice President's alleged role in the Montezuma's Revenge affair—or as Dan Rather calls it, Revengegate.

At seven they kiss and hug and head for Bill Aitchbone's soapy white Queen Anne. “You know we've got to do this,” Katherine Hardihood says to him as they force their way up the sidewalk like Columbia River salmon.

“I know,” Howie Dornick answers.

South Mill is never more impressive than in June. The maples and oaks are in full leaf. Men are not yet sick of mowing and fertilizing, and every lawn is as trim and smooth as a golf course green. Many thousands of dollars worth of petunias and pansies and impatiens have been planted. Most impressively, the spring rains have scrubbed the soapy white Victorians and Greek Revivals of their winter filth. They sparkle under the afternoon sun like movie star teeth.

But South Mill is a nervous street this June. A metamorphosis is underway. A number of homeowners have already slathered their soapy white houses with glistening coats of the Serendipity Green® latex paint now being featured at all Bison-Prickert stores. A number of others are busy scraping their clapboards. Soon Tuttwyler won't just be famous for Squaw Days, it also will be famous for its street after street of Serendipity Green® houses.