Chapter 146: Primer
The gray house with the blue shutters needed work, and Owen refused to hire anyone.
That was how I ended up owning a paint sprayer.
Two houses, two doors. That was the deal. But the deal had never said anything about weekends.
His house, ten minutes around the lake from mine, had good bones and terrible walls.
The previous owner had favored a yellow that could only be described as a cry for help.
We primed it. Together, badly, laughing.
There is a specific intimacy in ruining a wall together and then fixing it. I recommend it over counseling.
He was precise in a courtroom and chaos with a roller. There was primer in his hair for a month.
We argued about colors the way other couples argue about money.
He wanted the living room white. All white, floor to ceiling, gallery white.
It is clean, he said. It is honest. The light does the work.
It is a deposition room, I said. You are cross-examining a house.
He considered that a compliment. That should have told me everything.
We settled on a warm off-white with a name like a poem, and I won, and he claimed he had let me.
It was slow work, and I loved it with an intensity that surprised me.
Ruth called it my hobby phase. Helen called it his trick for free labor. Both were wrong. It was the first thing I had made in years that could not be subpoenaed.
For two years, everything I built had been built out of documents.
Now I was building something out of primer and drop cloths, my back hurt, and I was happy.
Vera came by once a week to supervise.
That meant sitting in a folding chair with iced tea and telling us we were doing it wrong.
You paint like a lawyer, she told Owen. All edges, no middle.
I am being careful, he said.
You are being slow, she said. Careful is what slow people call it.
He put her in charge of the trim, and she was magnificent.
We never spoke of the incident near the window frame.
One Saturday in June, late, we hung the things he had kept in boxes for years.
Diplomas. His mother's recipe cards, laminated. A photograph of Victor at a groundbreaking, mid-laugh.
And Victor's second page.
He had framed it. I had not known he had framed the short page about him.
The original, in my father's hand, behind museum glass.
Set in a plain dark frame he must have ordered months ago.
I watched him hold it against the freshly painted wall, deciding where it should live.
And I watched him read it again, slowly, touching none of the glass.
Trust him with everything. Including her.
He stopped with one hand on the frame.
It was not sadness. I knew that posture. This was something else.
This was a man checking a lock he already knew was secure.
He held the frame very still, and looked at my father's handwriting for a long time.
Then he looked at me.
What? I said.
Nothing, he said. The light in here is good.
Owen Blackwood, who had never once in his life been unprepared, was lying to me about the light.
He hung Victor's second page in the hallway, where we would pass it every day.
Passing it every day was the point, I thought then.
I watched him do it and noted, with the old instinct for unfinished business, that he had made a decision about something.
He did not tell me what.
Men think their faces are locked rooms.
His face was a document, and I had been reading him for years.
Whatever he had just decided, it had my father's blessing framed and hanging in the hall.