Before the Fall(72)

They are talking about him on the television. He doesn’t need to turn it on to know that. He is part of the cycle now, the endless worrying. Whitewashed floorboards creak underfoot as he pads into the living room (white). The fireplace is still charred from recent use, and Scott crouches on the cool brick lip and searches the ashes. He finds a lump of charcoal by feel, pulling it forth like a diamond from a mine. There is a floor-length mirror on the far wall, and as he straightens he catches sight of himself. By coincidence his boxers are white and he wears a white T-shirt—as if he too is slowly being consumed by some endless nothing. Seeing himself in the mirror in this all-white world—a pale, white man draped in white cloth—he considers the possibility that he is a ghost. What is more likely, he wonders, that I swam for miles with a dislocated shoulder and a toddler on my back, or that I drowned in the churning salt, like my sister all those years back, her panicked eyes and mouth drawn under the greedy black water of Lake Michigan?

Charcoal in hand, he goes around the apartment turning on lights. There is an instinct to it, a feeling not exactly rational. Outside he can hear the grinding brakes of the day’s first trash truck, its geared jaws pulverizing the things we no longer need. The apartment now fully illuminated, he turns a slow circle to take it all in, white walls, white furniture, white floors, and this single turn becomes a kind of spin, as if once started it cannot be stopped. A white cocoon punctuated by black mirrors, window covers raised.

Everything capable of producing color has been piled on the low white coffee table. Scott stands with ashen charcoal in hand. He switches the lump from left to right, his eyes drawn to the feral black stain there on his left palm. Then, with gusto, he claps his dirty palm to his chest and draws it down across his belly, smearing black ash onto the cotton.

Alive, he thinks.

Then he starts on the walls.

*



An hour later he hears a knock on the door, and then the sound of the key in the lock. Layla enters, still dressed for evening in a short gown and high heels. She finds Scott in the living room, throwing beets at the wall. His T-shirt and shorts are ruined in the common parlance, or much improved in the eyes of this particular painter—stained black and red. The air smells vaguely of charcoal and root vegetables. Without acknowledging her arrival, Scott pads over to the wall and crouches, lifting the smashed tuber. Behind him, he hears footsteps in the hall, hears the sound of a breath drawn in. A startled rush.

He hears it and doesn’t hear it, because, at the same time, there is nothing but the sound of his own thoughts. Visions and memory, and something more abstract. Urgent—not in the sense of earth shattering, but as it feels to urinate finally after a long drive home, stuck in stop-and-go traffic, the long run to the front door, fumbling for keys, fly unbuttoned shakily on the hurried move. And then the artless stream. A biological necessity fulfilled. A light, once off, now turned on.

The painting is revealing itself to him with every stroke.

Behind him, Layla watches, lips parted, taken by a feeling she doesn’t really understand. She is an intruder on an act of creation, an unexpected voyeur. This apartment, which she owns and decorated herself, has become something else. Something unexpected and wild. She reaches down and unstraps her high heels, carrying them to the speckled white sofa.

“I was at a thing uptown,” she says. “One of those endless who cares—and I saw your light on from the street. All the lights.”

She sits, one leg folded under the other. Scott runs his hand through his hair, his scalp now the color of cooked lobster. Then he goes to the coffee table, chooses a lipstick.

“A fifty-year-old man said he wanted to smell my panties,” she says. “Or wait, that’s not it—he wanted me to take off my panties and slip them into his pocket and then later, when his wife was sleeping, he said he would hold them to his nose and jerk off into the sink.”

She unfolds and walks to the liquor cabinet to pour herself a drink. Seemingly oblivious, Scott tests the lipstick color on the wall, then recaps it, chooses a different shade.

“Imagine his wide eyes when I told him I wasn’t wearing any,” Layla says, watching him select a color called Summer Blush. She sips her drink. “Do you ever wonder what things were like before?”

“Before what?” says Scott, not turning.

She lies back on the sofa.

“I worry sometimes,” she says, “that people only talk to me because I’m rich or they want to f*ck me.”

Scott is a laser beam, focused on a spot.

“Sometimes,” he says, “they’re probably just wondering—do you want to order an appetizer or potentially a cocktail.”

“I’m not talking about if it’s their job. I’m saying in a room full of people. I’m saying socially or at a business meeting. I’m talking about somebody looking at me and thinking, There’s a human being with something meaningful to add to the great debate.”

Scott caps the lipstick and steps back to inspect his work.

“When I was seven,” he says, “I ran away from home. I mean, not from home, but from the house. I climbed a tree in the backyard. This’ll show them, I thought, for who remembers what reason. My mom—from the kitchen window—saw me up there, a boy in the bough of a tree with his knapsack and a pillow, glaring, but she just went about making dinner. Later, I watched them eating at the kitchen table—Mom, Dad, my sister. Pass the biscuits. After the dishes were done, they sat on the sofa watching TV. Real People, possibly Full House. I started getting cold.”