LITERARY SUPPLEMENT 2002

Yellow Isn't Supposed
to be a Lonely Color

Hayden drives nice and steady, the way a lot of men do, like he’s not even thinking about it. He keeps his right hand on your knee the whole time, which makes you glad his car is automatic, and every time you look over at him you see his lips set in this tight, even line with only the corner of his mouth slightly raised, making you think of a dog about to bark. And every time you look at his mouth your heart thumps once, hard, like a finger tapping on a wall, searching for a joist, and you start blurting things out to him again and you know that it’s only partly because of that joint you smoked before, back at the waterfall. Once in awhile you feel self-conscious, just like you do when you trip over your own foot, and you hesitate and look out the car window. But he tells you to go on; he says he finds your tendency to babble highly attractive.

You’ve been telling him that you’ve always wanted a big brother, ever since you realized there was such a thing, which means you must’ve been three, maybe even two, and even now that you are over forty and possibly even menopausal anyway—except you didn’t mean to bring that up now, you don’t really want to talk about that here, in the car, oh god—there is still this part of you that wants to find your big brother. In fact, you have realized that this is what lies at the crux of all your problems. You tell Hayden how you begged your parents to adopt an older boy, once you understood that they could not automatically produce one, and how they took this as a criticism of your baby sister, who was tiny and red-faced. You didn’t know yet how to like her, but you were not allowed to admit this. She screamed all the time. She was like one of those little pink rubber balls, the kind with the perfectly round hole that lets its air out all in a rush when you stomp on it or squeeze it hard enough. Your parents got so tired of hearing you ask for a big brother that they began to smack you when you’d start in about it. You even came up with contingency plans: Please, if you can’t adopt somebody then can’t Cousin Jamie be my big brother? Cousin Jamie was only a year older, but he led you into unknown territory even while he did your bidding. You’d stand on the little bar on the back of his tricycle and shout: To the tree, to the cellar door, to the car!, and he’d crash anywhere for you. The truth is, you realize now, that Cousin Jamie could have been brought up with you as your big brother, after all, what with Uncle Santo running off to Mexico with some tiny little Mexican dancer who had abandoned her own son for him. Soon enough, she regretted it and ran away from Uncle Santo, leaving him high and dry to fend for himself down in Texas, where he bought himself a house in some little border town and filled in every single window to keep the Spics out, he wrote home, and started a tiling business and tiled his own home in intricate patterns, inside and out—walls, ceilings, floors, which must have made it echo like a public bathroom—and used the place as a demonstration model, to which he admitted potential customers through a tiled front door with eight deadbolts in a row. He never ever sent a nickel of child support to Aunt Carina back home in Newburgh, hitting the booze and refusing to leave their apartment ever again, not even for new school clothes for her boy, not even for groceries. Her sisters had to come up from Brooklyn to do it all and Cousin Jamie grew up to be one of those men of whom it was said, back in the ‘70s, still needed to find himself.

You always hated being the oldest, you tell Hayden, you hated being the oldest and a girl. They wanted a boy, you tell him, they never said it but they made it clear enough. Always getting so excited whenever they met somebody with a kid called Michael, saying she was going to be Michael, and beaming from ear to ear. Hayden says, That must have been terribly damaging to you, to know from such an early age that you weren’t what they ordered, and you reply, Whoever’s in charge of these things should have given them their boy first and let me come afterward. You tell him, Then I’d have had a big brother to protect and tease me. You tell him, That would have made me feel special, and, shit, my life would’ve turned out completely different. Because, you tell him, You know that Platonic ideal of love? Well, I guess I’m not looking for my other half so much as an older, more experienced, masculine version of myself, somebody who’s just slightly bigger in the world than I am and is willing to show me whatever I haven’t seen yet. You tell him you think you’re crazy, and you ask him if any of this makes any sense and when he says you’re not crazy and it does make a certain kind of sense, you tell him to consider it an example of how pot smoking actually can be useful.

Hayden nods. Hayden drives, steering with the palm of his left hand. He says, Look at that barn, Look at that old rock wall, Didja see that cute front porch, that sweet little garden, that poor, chained-up dog, that hawk, that cow? Do you think black bears really live up here? He doesn’t ever squeeze your knee. He just lets his hand sit there on it. The right side of his mouth twitches a little sometimes when you say something funny, but otherwise, his lips stay frozen in that little grimace that you recognize as the one people make right before they break into a full smile. You realize that it is not peculiar to Hayden; it’s just what we do when we’re gearing up to looking happy. But it is that very expression which, captured in photographs, makes some people unphotogenic. You don’t know yet whether or not Hayden is photogenic because you haven’t been together long enough to take pictures, but you know how he looks in your mind’s eye, with that mouth of his, and so does he. He says if he were a dog, he’d be a boxer hound. He says that you’d be a golden retriever.

It’s a Sunday afternoon before the leaves have peaked, the day after the Autumnal Equinox, and you are out driving aimlessly through the Catskills and doing precisely what people would normally do on a day like this when the light is in the midst of shifting and becoming thin and gilded and prescient, looking the way it must look in somebody’s aura—but you are not a person who sees auras. You and Hayden are driving around idly looking at woods, fields, rocky outcroppings and each other, but more than anything you are both looking at other people’s houses. He is high again for the first time after twenty solid years thanks to you taking it up again recently, only because it takes the edge off having to deal with living in this new state-of-being that the media and the government call high terrorist alert. Hayden didn’t really want to smoke pot, he told you before, sitting on the rock in front of the waterfall behind the cabin where you stopped before lunch to show him where you’d spent your weekends last summer, sitting alone at the rickety kitchen table with your laptop, trying to write and trying to feel like you deserved to have been awarded use of the cabin as a writer’s residency, and missing your kids, not just for themselves but because they are forever keeping you from trying to write. Hayden says getting high reminds him of his cousin Cricket, who died early—end of story, at least so far—and that’s why he doesn’t do it. But today he’s made an exception, and you’ve driven away from everything together, leaving behind the headlines and CNN and all those droves of people, some of them even boasting a modicum of international fame, who’ve driven up to Ulster County to escape the city. This morning three of your friends called, separately, to boast Hey, guess what? I just saw Uma and Ethan! They were walking the baby, they were eating ice cream, they were hanging out in Paradise; they looked so normal; his hair was greasy and she wasn’t wearing any makeup at all. All these people have driven up here like it’s Columbus Day Weekend or something, for the privilege of wandering up and down Tinker Street, shopping and eating in an effort to escape the threat of Anthrax and the constant clouds of dust and the already legendary plume of smoke and the sharp, sickly smell that everyone is saying is still rising up like steam from a pothole over a subway line on a cold day, out of the wound that now gapes where the twin towers used to stand before terrorists plowed hijacked planes into them eleven days ago and our country officially declared an unofficial war, or else our country unofficially declared an official war, depending on who you listen to, a war with either a terrible concept or an as-yet-unnamed enemy. Ah, semantics, says Hayden. You’ve managed to make a few jokes about the semantics of this so-called war, and Hayden has managed to laugh at them, but then you both stop short because it is only the semantics of this thing that could ever possibly be considered funny. That, and the war’s local consequences, like the tourists lining up outside Paradise, which you refuse to patronize, not just because of its ridiculous prices, but because the waitresses have kicked out too many of your friends for bringing in their tarot cards or laptops or taking too long to drink their coffee. You and one of your friends have a running joke about the place, which makes you wonder if either one of you will ever grow up, which is a really pretty parochial thing to say anyway when you think about it, which goes like this: If you haven’t been thrown out of Paradise, then you just haven’t arrived.

Before, back at the cabin, you giggled as you unlocked the bolt on the door while Hayden stood on the porch behind you, fingering the faded, shredded American flag that hangs from the porch roof and looking down at the hill you’d just climbed up together from the waterfall. He said, Hey, do you think it’s fair to say that everybody who puts a flag on their car is an asshole? and you said, Nah, they’re just a bunch of presidential-motorcade wannabes, and the cabin door swung open and you said, Viola! and took his arm. But then you both stopped on the threshold and gasped. There was a fire going in the stove and Hayden said, Someone’s taken it, someone’s stolen your last weekend here, what’s going on?, but when you peeked into the kitchen the utensils you’d washed in August still lay untouched on the counter and the towels were still hanging where you’d left them to dry, and the fridge was empty, and the glass bowl on the table held the same wildflowers you’d picked at the end of summer, but now their petals were stiff and drained of color. Upstairs there was no suitcase and the sad little single bed with its chipped iron headboard and hard gray mattress was still bare and stood where you’d moved it last time you’d stayed there—at a right angle to the corner, facing the window—and its gauzy yellow curtain, tied with thin yellow ribbons to a birch branch nailed to the windowframe, billowed in the breeze. There, beyond the curtain, was summer turning into fall, everything tremulous and just past green. Hayden strode into the next bedroom, where two cots faced a vanity with a heavy mirror and came back holding what looked like a dancer’s crinoline. What’s that? you asked him, and he said, It’s this, and draped it over the little bed and winked at you and then bolted down the stairs at the foot of the bed to try to lock the door from the inside so that whoever had lit the fire could not get back in, or at least not so fast. You sat down on the bed and stretched your arms out toward the curtain and felt the breeze and held your hands open as if you were reaching for the warmth of a fire. When Hayden came back up the stairs and you stood up, the crinoline slipped to the floor and he stooped to reach for it, but you touched his arm and said, No. You told him you didn’t want to lie down on something so ripped up and dusty and he reached for you and bent you backwards down onto the mattress, holding you, for that instant, in the shape of an arc.

And now it’s late afternoon and you are driving around in his car, seeing everywhere the yellow curtain, which turned golden as you watched it from the bare little bed, turned the same exact golden as the afternoon light. You realize that you really like the color yellow after all, or at least that shade of it, that yellow is not simply the facile, crayon color of a smiling sun and superficial happiness. This yellow was the embodiment, not of autumn light or even a Sunday afternoon, but of the light of September 22, 2001, the day after the Autumnal Equinox, of a world that suddenly had something terribly wrong with it, and nobody, least of all you or Hayden, could say what it was, even though every last person alive had seen the shit go down, had seen those flames burst from the buildings like blood from a deep cut and then bloom like a roses, and then it was now-you-see-them, now-you-don’t, as the towers fell to nothing. Over and over. And who hadn’t heard that African-American woman on the news say to the reporter, You want to see blood? I’ll show you blood, look at this, oh lord, oh god, and seen her pull up her thin floral skirt and hold her leg and then her bare foot up to the camera. But today you let the color of the curtain be greater than all that. You saw it as a yellow deeper than the center of a daisy and softer than a buttercup and harder than a rose. And now you look out the window of Hayden’s car and you watch the scenery and feel the light pressure of his hand on your knee and think of how he placed his watch and his glasses on the floor next to the bed before he got undressed and then kicked off his shoes and sent them flying down the stairs, and how you both laughed. And you admire the houses you are driving past, commenting on them the way people do when times are normal and they are simply out for a Sunday drive in the country, not trying to escape the fact that everybody’s life is changing in a way nobody yet understands, or that it was way too early, in the first week of September and the very start of the bloom of love, for you and Hayden to have been discussing getting a dog to share, but that it’s also way too early, now, to have talked this morning over breakfast about how to grab your kids and convince your ex-husband and his wife to flee to Australia, which some people believe will be the only place on earth that’s left, come the Apocalypse. As if either of you is anywhere near stupid enough to buy into that idea—but still, you never know. Isn’t that what we’re all learning?
And so now in a kind of fit of defiance you are looking at houses but only you know that you are seeing them from completely different, maybe even opposite, points of view. Hayden is sizing up each house for the drama of its setting and its overall sweetness but when you look at a house you still seek after it even when it’s right there in front of you, at the beck and call of your beholding, even when Hayden slows down his car so you can take a good long look. Every house you pass you long for. Some of them you covet and some you reject, simultaneously sometimes, as can only somebody like you, because you have returned to live in your place of birth after spending nearly half your life away, returned specifically, not so much out of a sense of belonging, but so that you no longer have to think at all about where you are, so that you can delete that from your list of daily considerations, so that you can take the concept and practicalities of place, if not time, for granted—but only in the most reverent sort of way, of course. After nearly seven years back home, you still cannot get a foothold of your own. You have been priced right out of your own real estate market, and you feel rejected by the very place that gave rise not only to your existence but to your very essence.

You cannot explain any of this to Hayden. Not now. Not yet. You don’t know if you could ever put it into words at all. What you want to say is too slippery to grasp, and filled with so much ether. Hayden is quiet, sitting there next to you, driving, with his mouth in its fine line as he studies the winding roads and the sloping fields and the lumpy lawns with the eyes of someone newly arrived to this place, someone with a mere two years under his belt following his exit from the city, someone to whom the concept of quaintness might still whisper and be heard, someone who could still turn around and simply leave. You do not know if that is true, and you are hesitant to find out. And you are ashamed to think that, when it comes down to it, you are doing exactly what the real estate agents want you to do: when you look at houses it’s as if you don’t really notice them at all, but instead, you look past them into all the different ways that you could live and be.

Hayden’s fingertips press lightly through your jeans and you sigh and turn your gaze away from the window and say, Actually I think it’s my whole entire problem, and after a long moment he says, What is? And he turns toward you slightly, just so, and the corners of his mouth rise and, oh god, there’s a dimple in his cheek you’ve never noticed until now, and you remember before at the cabin, his face above yours, his mouth no longer a line, his eyes all hard and soft at once, his hair in your hands even finer than the hair of your own babies, and you remember kissing the cleft in his chin and thinking, This is enough, this is utterly and completely enough. You answer him, This searching for a big brother. It must have motivated every relationship I’ve ever had with men. You ask him, Why the hell am I only realizing this now? And then you go quiet and you wonder what he thinks of what you just said, and if you really meant it at all, or if it’s only the joint still talking. Your forehead is feeling dense and you want to blow your nose and the shimmer on everything is fading. Suddenly you feel sapped and stupid, but he’s nodding, and nodding some more. His fingers on your leg are thin and fine and tapered and the skin on the back of his hand has wrinkles that are deeper and darker than the wrinkles on your hands. You stroke the back of his hand. He says, I think you are always trying to do the right thing. He squeezes your knee. He says, I think you work way too hard at it.

In three months this day will be nothing but emblematic, but you will not know of exactly what. You will ask Hayden to come meet you to enact that old cliché, the pre-Christmas-defunct-relationship-cleanup lunch, during which he will stand up and stoop over the table to hug you and kiss your hair and tell you that he misses you and he’s sorry he was such a shit. He will make dates with you and break them one by one, and you will call him to leave a message saying, Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, and fuck you, not necessarily in that order. One night, not long after New Year’s Eve, you will run into each other at a bar and sit drinking Becks and admitting a lot of things that your friends are tired of hearing about, like the fact that nobody that either one of you has dated since you were together has held a candle to each other, but that apart, you have each discovered at least a tentative sort of solace. You will say All I wanted was for you to tell me everything was going to be all right once in awhile, and he will say that he couldn’t, that he really did think it was the Apocalypse, and all he ever wanted was time, since you and he both came into your own so late in life already and now you’d finally found each other and the whole fucking universe had fallen apart. By then you will have bought yourself and your kids a condominium, since that’s all you could afford. On a clear day you can see the Shawangunk Ridge resting just above the edge of the parking lot, and even though you remain unpacked and are still painting, you’ll be feeling quieter and more settled since you finally got a foothold on the place to which you know now that you belong to like no other. You will have dated someone who finds dancing too intimate and someone else whose main attraction to you seems to be your kids, and yet another man who thinks you’re a magnet for crazy people because a woman approached you together outside the movie theater once and grabbed your shoulder and pointed up toward the sky at what was supposed to be Saturn. And you will be having an intense e-mail exchange with a Transylvanian-American math professor from Brooklyn who looks exactly like the man who convinced you finally to leave your husband five years ago, that is, if you are reading the pixels right, who says he believes in the reduction of friends to a mere two or three who are then judged according to a mysterious theory applied rigidly and coldly and without exception to ascertain their level of usefulness in enhancing one’s life. A man who will tell you when you respond to his theory with an e-mail saying simply, Woah. Ouch, that yes, indeed, he does have time for a relationship and he’d very much like to see a picture of you before you continue to follow the path this e-mail exchange seems to be clearing for both of you.

But none of that has happened yet. Right now you are still lying there on a hard single bed in a cabin with Hayden, holding him, after your bodies have given way to each other’s, feeling your flesh slowly parting as spaces work their way mysteriously between the layers of each of you on the old, uncovered mattress, and you are looking out the window as your bones shift ever so slightly to free you again from each other, thinking of how you did something today that you have never ever done before while making love—that you looked up at Hayden and you smiled, your eyes wide open, and that he looked surprised and smiled back—and you are watching the yellow curtain, which is just barely trembling now, like a body freshly touched by a lover, as it hangs from its crooked birch branch curtain rod. Someday sooner than you think, on the first Sunday after what we now politically correctly call the winter holidays, and two days since you will have run into Hayden in a bar, you will remember this color in a way that will enlighten but not altogether please you. Late that morning, while the kids are at their father’s house, you will take a shower and put gel in your hair and outline your eyes and apply lipstick and throw on one of your hipper sweaters and you will take your camera and hold it out at arm’s length, as you stand back against the living room wall, and you will point-and-shoot yourself over and over. A few hours later at the one-hour photo place you will spread the pictures out on the counter and see your face in all its usual guises— pensive and hopeful and wry and quizzical and only slightly bored. But it won’t be your facial expressions that make all these pictures meant for Prof. Matrix all wrong: it will be the color in the background, that yellow, deeper than the center of a daisy, softer than a buttercup, harder than a rose. It was the yellow of shifting light and changing seasons, but now it has become a yellow caught and splayed forever behind you, exposing itself and you for something that you hope is not quite true: you will see it as a lonely yellow, a stuck yellow that can never glow or become an extension of the light itself.

You take home your pictures and sit down on your living room couch and stare across the room at the wall where the Christmas tree recently stood, and you sit back and shut your eyes and remember how it was that afternoon in the cabin when you lowered your eyelids to soft-focus so you could barely see that the curtain was there, so that it was only a shimmer of color in the air like the afterimages you frequently induced yourself to see, back in college. And in your mind you touch Hayden’s baby-fine hair again, and you turn his head so gently to the side, feeling the start of his beard scrape your clavicle. His sweat is on you and it smarts. He is facing the window now, and sighing as if he might fall asleep. You are thinking secret thoughts, wanting to sneak back up here to the cabin with a camera, soon, without him, before the light turns hard and brittle with autumn, one afternoon like this one, when the light seems to flow upward instead of down from the sky. Maybe later this week you can do it, make up some lie at work, tell them the school called, your kid is sick, you have to leave, and then you can take the long winding drive up here, alone, and use the key you should be handing back in, soon, to the arts council people who awarded you the residency in the first place, and for whom you have yet to produce any kind of definitive work, and you can walk up the stairs and sit alone on the hard bed to take a photograph, maybe not in color, perhaps in black and white instead, so that you can paint in the yellow curtain and leave everything else in gray tones. Then you can frame the print in an old wooden frame, the kind you collect from garage sales, and sand it a little to mess it up a bit more, make it a little more rustic, and maybe give it a blue-gray mat board, and wrap it up in silver paper and give it to Hayden for Christmas.

But you will not do any of this; you will never get back to the cabin again, and come mid-November the road up there will be iced over and closed until spring. By Christmas you will not even be talking to Hayden. He will have called you to say that he can’t be with you because of the war, because his starting to love you coincided with the terrorists plowing planes into buildings. In response, you will have taken back the meteorite you gave him eleven days before the world fell apart, on the night of his birthday, with a card that said From one writer to another: A little bit of impossible magic to hold in your hand. You had taken it off your own desk and he had kept it on his until mid-September, when he started to say that the meteorite reminded him of the war. You tell him that the little lump of meteorite is bigger than any war could ever be, but he won’t listen. You will be filled with a terrible ache that sometimes disappears on its own and other times is impossible to relieve. You will replay in your mind Hayden’s saying you brought him bad luck, you brought him the war. It won’t matter that this doesn’t make any sense.

But on the twenty-second of September you will lock up the cabin, laughing over something that you’ll forget about, and you’ll both agree that the caretaker is likely to come around to check on the fire, since he must have been the one who laid it, since he must have been wandering the property and seen you both climbing up the hill from the water, and prepared the fire and sneaked away, and you will drive through the mountains until it gets dark, looking at other people’s houses, with Hayden’s hand on your leg. And that night he will tell you that he is in love with you after all, that he knows it now, that he’s finally over his ex-wife, that he’s sorry he got all confused when he found out her plane was supposed to be hijacked by terrorists too, and that he felt himself give way to you this afternoon at the cabin, to start to trust you, because you held back nothing. But before all that happens, you will unwittingly imprint upon your world that embodiment of the light of the strangest of all autumns, that shade of yellow that, for a single afternoon was larger than the rest of the world, being deeper than the center of a daisy, softer than a buttercup, harder than a rose, and you will not even realize until it’s too late to change it, until you attempt to take pictures of yourself for someone else, that you have surrounded yourself in your new space, in the foothold you have gained on your world, with the color of all that could have been between you and Hayden. Lying there on the cabin bed, holding him, you will tell him, Look, look at the window. Look at that curtain blowing. You will feel his weight shift as he reaches for his glasses and then gives up. He will pull his arm back to the mattress and edge his hand underneath you to cup the small of your back. You will hear him whisper, I’m almost blind right now. But that’s such a beautiful color.