The Colorman (18 page)

“Do you think I care where you go live? At Daddy's funeral?” she said, stepping out of the tub now, pacing away from him. “When I couldn't even find you?” Rain started clearing bottles and stray silverware from the table. “It all makes sense now.” She climbed the steps to the kitchen and slammed a glass down onto the countertop. “How occasionally you'd just be so mean. You were probably late to go see her or wanted to call or something.”

Karl remained an inert lump on the couch. “Rain,” he pleaded. “I'm broken. I'm in little pieces right now. Please!”

“Seriously though, that
Penelope
?” He folded a little deeper with the mention of her name. Rain stared at him, hoping he would say no-not-her. Though why it made any difference, she wasn't sure. But it did make a difference. That woman irritated her. She was intimidating and beneath Rain at the same time. Exactly the wrong woman to have broken open her marriage. Precisely the woman Rain would like to have scratched from her husband's acquaintance, let alone the center of his piggish little heart. “That one, huh?” she said. “Had to be her?”

“She's cruel,” Karl moaned, his face inside his two hands now.

“Oh, yeah, I'll bet,” Rain said. “You obviously don't like the nice ones.”

“Rain, I…” Karl began, his eyes softened toward her. She knew he was going to start in with something worshipful. She was inside him in some ways. Five years of being together, three of being married, and you know how the other person thinks. You know what they're going to say just by the expression on their face.

“Don't!” Rain interrupted him. “Really, really don't even think about doing that right now. It's disgusting and creepy right now to even think of you and me. You are sitting here broken into little pieces over that person and I'm feeling all sorts of anger and nausea and, yes, even jealousy, but I think it's all FALSE. It's false, and I don't think you even deserve the kind of jealousy I'm feeling, which has a lot more to do with hating her as a person than anything to do with you, Karl. No, but because she is a nasty, self-centered, angry, bitch and your being suckered by that, makes me see what I believe was always in the core of you, which is an empty, shallow, little pit of need.”

She was cleaning up full-throttle now. “That's right,” she said, talking as if to herself. “I wish you had let this slip earlier, Karl. Really. I wish I'd known. It would have spared me so much hassle. You haven't wounded me, not that you seem to care about that. You hurt me slowly and steadily over such a long time that I built up a huge Karl-shaped callous in my heart that I hadn't even realized was there.” She looked up at him suddenly. “Did you drive here?”

“I have a rental car,” Karl said into his lap, not appearing to grasp the significance of the question.

“Good,” Rain said, taking a reprieve from the cleaning. “Karl,” she said. “I know I've said a lot of things tonight.”

“I deserve it,” Karl said abjectly.

“Well, I couldn't care less how you feel about it. I don't want to talk to you anymore. I'm finished. I don't want to talk to you ever again.”

Karl looked up, a little shocked maybe. “People,” he said, “people work through…”

“First, ‘people',” Rain said. “Not me. Next, this thing with this woman is just an excuse. You were wrong for me. You've been bad for me. I quit graduate school for you. I skipped countless trips with my Dad to be with you and now he's gone…”

“You want to blame that on me, too?” Karl asked, rallying briefly.

“No. Just makes it all the more obvious what a bad decision that was. So I'm making a good decision now.”

Rain slid open the screen door and pushed Karl's suitcases out from against the wall with her foot.

Karl looked up at her from the couch. “Rain, please! Where am I supposed to go?”

“Away,” Rain said. “Just away. From here.”

“You can't,” Karl protested.

Rain said. “I can. And I am.”

“Am I nothing to you? Now that you have your house and your inheritance, you don't need me anymore?” Karl's face was twisted now, his despair turning to righteous indignation.

“I'm not going to argue,” Rain said. “I'm not going to let you make this my fault.” She stood her ground at the door.

Karl rose slowly from the couch. “I guess I thought we meant something to each other.”

“What I thought you might have been meant something to what I am now. But you aren't and now I realize you never were.”

Karl laughed bitterly. “That makes no sense.”

“I don't care what you understand,” Rain said. “Could you leave, please?”

He strode toward her, but she stepped back from the doorway as he neared her. She looked away from him as he struggled his luggage out the door. As he left, Rain pulled shut the garage doors against the night and stood listening to doors slamming, the engine starting up and the crunch of gravel as the car pulled away down the road. Her relief grew with that distance, but she couldn't shake that teetering feeling. Her little house suddenly felt echoey and frightening. Her body tingled and her mind raced. The wine from dinner and the port and all the confusion and emotion left her a shambles. When she couldn't hear the car anymore, she threw open the smaller door and looked out.

The decision started in her stomach. She didn't give it time to reach her head before she was out the door and on the Vespa in the warm night.

It was late, too late for trick-or-treaters. None had knocked during the party, though Violetta had left bags of candy in a cauldron by the door. The guests had assured Rain that this was normal. Any local kids were trundled into the next village with its Main Street and tight gridwork of houses. She passed a group of partially costumed, marauding teenagers, furtively tossing eggs. Rain swerved toward one of them menacingly. They dispersed and howled and whacked each other as she sped away.

Although she had not gotten completely comfortable riding the Vespa at night, she performed this ride on automatic, barely aware of what she was doing. She was inside her head, examining her reaction to Karl's affair. A part of her felt for him, which was disturbing. Felt sorry for him, that is. Really sympathized with all that grief and heartbreak. Was the remainder only ego? Was it just a matter of pride that made her kick him out with so little hesitation?

It struck her then as a revelation. However she thought she might have reacted in that kind of situation, even if she had been able to imagine it in her deeper self, even if she knew, it was nothing like how it actually played out. Betrayal struck at her at a primitive level, and there was nothing she could have done to rise above it at that moment. She had felt like a child presented with options for immediate gratification versus future possibilities of abstract goods for others. Yeah, she knew what the grownups wanted her to say, but hell…

It was too overpowering, too much having held it together while the things she depended on in her life collapsed. And too much her turn now.

The lights were still ablaze within the castle as she pulled up and jammed the kickstand down on the Vespa. She marched to the front door, a few strides ahead of her self-awareness. Hunter answered.

Rain pulled at his arm, nervously averting her gaze from him. He came into the fragrant night with her, slowly closing the heavy wooden door behind him.

Though her face was downturned, she was broadcasting her feelings to him clearly with her silence, her hand lingering on his arm, the slight tremble there. Hunter said nothing. He just slowly wrapped her in his arms as if they had already been lovers, holding her still and close a long time before whispering, “I have to leave tomorrow for Jaipur.”

Rain was warm and buried in his chest, her face tucked in by his arm. “I know,” she whispered. Looking up at him she said quietly, “That's perfect.” And she kissed him, bringing her lips to his like magnets. Kissing him filled her, welled up inside her, crowding out all the emptiness, filling every corner and crevasse of her. She could feel it in her fingers, in her hips, along her breasts, down on the soles of her feet. With Karl it had always felt like he was drinking up, drawing something from her. But with Hunter, she felt she fed a hunger she never knew was there. His soft, warm lips and perfect, gentle-firm kissing gathered her whole body and mind up into him. She had to rise up to her toes to reach him, but as their kissing got more intense, each of them taking small steps into more daring, more heat, more openness to the other, suddenly Hunter picked her up in his strong arms and hoisted her onto the waist-high stone wall at the entryway. Rain opened her knees and drew him closer to her and kept on kissing him, neither of them in a hurry, just enjoying this give and take, this communication of everything they'd both been feeling since the first time they had seen each other. It was a conversation. A
yes, I said, yes, me too, yes, I did too
. A giving, an offering up, a grateful taking, like discovering they had something very rare in common and then having more and more and more confirmation of it. Rain had this confident feeling of knowing him, of a kind of trust that was built out of having no expectations of him. She could feel the unhurried pleasure he was taking in kissing her and it told her that even though he would be satisfied if nothing else were to come of that evening, he just
had
to kiss her, kiss her for no other reason than the kissing. And somehow, this almost involuntary compulsion, combined with his exquisite self-control, made Rain's head swim with desire for him. When they eased up, laying their brows against each other, catching their breath, she felt him giving her the lead, but eagerly following her wherever she wanted to take them. It felt like they had been out in the doorway for hours, and when the lights switched off inside, they both let out a small laugh at the same time.

Finally, Rain said, “You stay in the barn?”

“Mm-hmm,” Hunter replied, low and quiet.

“Can we go there?” Rain asked, matching that low tone.

Hunter wrapped his arms around her waist again, lifting her up off the stone wall and letting her body slide slowly down his until her feet gently touched the ground. He was holding her tight enough to press on her breathing, but it was a delicious kind of pressure, just at the edge of too much. Every way he touched her seemed to tell her things, affirm volumes of hopes and secret wishes. As he let her go, he ran his hands down her arms and took one of her hands. It was warm and dry and she felt her small hand fitting into his large one like it was where it always belonged.

They began walking side by side and Rain said, “I think…” and then she laughed. It seemed absurd all of the sudden, she didn't want it to come off the wrong way.

“What is it?” Hunter asked.

It felt like they had to resort to spoken language now that they were not pressed up against each other. Sad, fallible talk.

“I don't want you to take this the wrong way,” Rain said, looking up at him quickly, “but your leaving tomorrow makes me feel,” she paused, “reckless.”

They continued walking together, unhurried, but steadily. “I get it,” Hunter said thoughtfully, “and I trust you,” he added quietly.

As they walked on silently, Rain realized that she had just told Hunter she was glad he was leaving and that he had just witnessed her husband's return. His trust surprised her. It somehow made him vulnerable, though he had struck her as so much the playboy. The connection she felt and his claim of vulnerability were unexpected, but she still felt that the end marker on their being together was a good thing. It created this opportunity to let their feelings roam freely, carelessly. It both locked them to the present and liberated them.

Once inside the dark studio, then to the four-poster bed, the night became a blur of love and loss of self. A tangle of bodies, his dark skin and her pale skin blending into perfect caramel. Rain lost track of limbs, eyes, lips, time, colors, meaning, space. Their movements felt purposeless. It was an instinctual dance, just expression and pleasure, no taking turns, no work, just a gathering and gathering and gathering each other, no peak to end things, just being lost in the mountain range of peak after peak, rolling cozily down into one valley after another, drifting off as they both finally succumbed to a dazed exhaustion.

It was still dark when Rain awakened in Hunter's bed. She looked around his studio, the barn that Chassie fixed up as an apartment to hold some of his things and bring him back from time to time. The full moon beamed brightly through the paned windows. They were under a thick down comforter, Hunter facing away from her, his broad brown shoulders an angular promontory. “Perfect,” Rain whispered, and kissed him lightly right at the tip of his shoulder. She dressed quietly, found a pen on a desk and pulled an envelope from a waste paper basket below.
Have a great trip, thank you for the healing. ~R.
, Rain wrote and left her note on the bed.

The skies were lightening and a chillhad descended over the valley as Rain pulled her collar in tight and sped home, realizing she hadn't worn her helmet. She took it slow on the empty roads all the way back, passing shaving-creamed mailboxes, eggs pitched on the roadway and silly-stringed bushes. Thankful y, there was no such damage to her little house, being on such a secluded dirt road. But inside, it still had a stale post-party feel.

Pulling her jeans off, Rain climbed right into her chilly bed with a great sigh and a cozy shudder, thinking maybe she would survive all this after all.

I am not a painter, I am a poet.
Why? I think I would rather be
a painter, but I am not….
…One day I am thinking of
a color: orange. I write a line
about orange. Pretty soon it was a
whole page of words, not lines.
Then another page. There should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is
and life. Days go by. It is even in
prose, I am a real poet. My poem
is finished and I haven't mentioned
orange yet. It's twelve poems, I call
it ORANGES….