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  But she heard foreign voices emanating from the far left side of the house, and walked toward the kitchen. Carla Posey sat on the floor, surrounded by only cabinets and appliances.

  The TV set on the floor, too. Paula looked at the screen, which showed naked women, their hair in pigtails, tending to what looked like an island of blooming tulips. Paula said, “Carla? I brought you a little get-well something. I’m sorry it’s taken me so long.”

  Carla didn’t turn. She leaned forward and stared at the television, her face two feet away from it. Paula pounded on the doorjamb, but got no response. The women on television seemed to be talking about life and death, the way they held tulips upright, then turned them upside down. “We have a great proposition for you,” Paula Purgason said. “It’s a way for Owe to live forever. We want to give something to Owe.”

  Carla Posey didn’t acknowledge her neighbor. She got up, turned off the TV, pulled her dress off above her head in one motion, and stood still there in the dark.

  The next day Paula Purgason wouldn’t say how she left the brownies balanced atop the staircase newel. She’d go to Roughhouse Billiards, order shot after shot of bourbon, and say how she could no longer sleep.

  CAULK

  ELAINE INSISTED ON MORE SILICONE, AND I STOOD MY ground at least twenty-four hours on how she didn’t need it. I said there was a reason for honest ventilation, for breathing, and that too much silicone would hamper this process. I mentioned how it would be obvious to her both winter and summer, when everything unnatural in the world either contracted or expanded. This was fall—late October—in South Carolina. At noon the temperature got up to the mid-seventies, but the humidity was a low sixty percent. There existed no other time to paint a house.

  “If you don’t caulk right then you’ll have to do the job again before the year’s out,” Elaine said. “I know what I’m doing, Louis. Remember—I lived in Mexico City the spring semester of my junior year in college.”

  I didn’t get the connection. We stood outside. I held a caulk gun in my right hand, with about half of the tube gone. It was the first one of the third case. I turned the lever down so no silicone spilled out, so caulk didn’t exude out on my beat-up noname-brand tennis shoes, making me undergo flashbacks of a time at the Auto Drive-In with my first high school girlfriend who almost gave it up. I said, “I’ve caulked every goddamn seam, Elaine. I’ve caulked boards that were welded together—that were petrified, by God—and needed caulk about as much as a goat needs a can opener.”

  Elaine held nothing. She stood with her hands on her hips and looked at the soffit and fascia. She looked at a point twenty feet off the ground and said, “You didn’t smooth that bead down. You missed a spot.”

  This was near dusk. Elaine had come home from work hoping to find me—I know—not working on the house like I’d promised. Sometime earlier in the week I’d been drinking, and as drinkers might be wont to do I’d said the house needed painting unless we wanted someone like Andrew Wyeth hanging out in the front yard thinking we lived in a weather-beaten barn, and that I didn’t have much else to do, seeing as I’d gotten mad at my last boss and quit a job driving oxygen canisters around to hackers and wheezers. Elaine said, “It needs to be scraped and caulked hard, Louis. Why don’t you let me hire someone to do the job right. There’s no need to even talk about it if you don’t feel committed to do the job right.”

  Of course I took all her talk to be a challenge, and didn’t understand that she knew how to wind me up like a cheap metal mouse that skitters across linoleum floors. I said, “Why would a complete painting stranger care about how this house turns out?” I felt my one eye starting to travel off. We stood outside, still. I pretended to check the soffit and fascia, too. I said, “Personally I think I’m ready to paint tomorrow. If you want, I’ll go over the whole house again with caulk.”

  And I meant it. In my mind, a person scraped flaked paint and caulked up holes, buckled seams, roof flashings, door casings, and paid special attention to window frames. That’s what I did the first day. The goddamn house was airtight, but if she wanted more caulk, then I’d do it.

  Elaine said, “You weren’t drinking up on that ladder, were you?” She took my caulk gun, turned the lever 180 degrees, and shot an invisible indention underneath one of the living room windows. Elaine rubbed it four directions, then handed the tube back.

  “There’s no telling what somebody might charge to paint this place. I don’t even know anyone who knows an honest painter. They say to never let a roofer around your wife, and never let a painter near your liquor cabinet.” I felt my eye wander back even with the other. I’d drunk about half a good bottle of Old Crow during the day. There are two theories: don’t drink and don’t fall off the ladder, or go ahead and drink hard so it won’t hurt so much in case you do fall.

  I’ve tried both in the past. The second’s best. When I worked construction one summer in college sober, I pulled back a shutter where a small but nervous clan of bats nestled daytime. They flew out. I fell off. This is no lie: on the way down the entire history of French literature passed before my eyes. When I hit the ground I got out the “Bo” from “Baudelaire,” but nothing else.

  MOST TIMES WHEN Elaine went off on two-day business trip seminars in order for her to push what she pushed, namely new and improved kitchen accessories—there are more conventions held on blenders and whatnot than the average person thinks—I’d either find a way to get time off from my job delivering oxygen, or I’d stay home looking out the Venetian blinds to see if Elaine hired a detective to see if I left or invited dancing escort women over. But this last time I didn’t get an invitation, even though I’d quit my job and had the time.

  “We’re doing a fair in Atlanta,” Elaine said. “We got I don’t know how many rooms downstairs at the Omni to show off the new products. They’re saying every new micro-brewery pub is sending someone to check out our line of mid-sized Hemingway sampler stemware.”

  I said, “Huh. Not to mention the zucchini thing.” What else could a caulking boy say? Elaine’s company had developed a slicer/dicer/skinner mechanism that worked so clean and easy they thought it might change Americans’ attitudes and diets. Me, I couldn’t tell the difference between zucchini, cucumbers, or dill pickles. I didn’t care to cook or eat any of them, either. As far as the Hemingway line—I’m glad Elaine’s company didn’t market a set of shot glasses.

  I said, “Well, you have a good time, dear. Don’t go down to Underground Atlanta all by yourself. Don’t show up at the Cheetah 3 with your friends just because women get in a strip joint free.”

  Elaine rolled her eyes. She said, “I won’t have any time off, Louis. And if I did—like maybe if there’s a blackout and we can’t showcase our wares—I’d find a museum.”

  “If there’s a blackout it might be hard to look at art,” I said. It just came to me, fast. Sometimes I thought that maybe those oxygen canisters leaked and gave me extra brain cells or something.

  Elaine said, “Caulk. Don’t start painting until I get back. I’ll call you when I check in at the hotel.”

  She kissed me on the mouth, but didn’t mean it. This happened once a month. I knew she had cutlery on her mind. Me, I could only get out, “If you’re going to talk the talk, you better caulk the caulk,” like an idiot.

  I’D STILL BE married if it weren’t for the weather. In a way, Canada’s to blame. If that big Arctic swoop they show during the weather-map section had moved south of Appalachia while Elaine worked in Atlanta, then we’d still be together, I’m sure.

  Whereas it got down to the low twenties in places like Johnson City, Tennessee, it stayed in the low seventies in the Upstate of South Carolina.

  As any reputable caulk tube will point out, caulk cannot be used at temperatures below 5 degrees centigrade, which is 40 degrees Fahrenheit. Hell, the tubes I used even had directions written in French—which I’m sure had something to do with that Canadian Arctic jet stream, seeing as I’ve never seen actual
French people caulking their field stone houses out in the countryside near Dijon or wherever.

  Elaine went off, and I got to work. I finished the last eleven tubes of the third case, and then I called a local hardware joint and got them to deliver another dozen cases and put it on Elaine’s bill. I brought Jason the delivery boy inside and we feasted on canned smoked oysters and Bloody Marys before I got to work on the house.

  I said, “My wife seems to think an entire wooden house needs a layer of caulk before it gets painted,” and handed him some ground habanero peppers for his drink. Jason looked like a college kid going to a Baptist school, but this was a Friday morning and he wasn’t in class. Later on I thought how he looked a little like someone I saw on television who was a member of a white supremacy militia group.

  “A lot of people use primer,” he said.

  “Exactly! You prime the wood, and then you paint it,” I said. This is no lie: Jason poured a quarter teaspoon of ground habanero on his thumb, then snorted it. Jason said, “Pain. Pain’s good so you remember pleasure. That’s one of my mottoes.”

  I poured another drink and put it away. I poured another drink and put it away. I’d made a pitcher, and made a mistake. I didn’t want a delivery boy dead on my hands with hot peppers up his nose. I said, “Prime, paint.”

  “Well, technically, you only prime new wood, man. Or new sheetrock. After your house’s been painted, I wouldn’t prime it again. Maybe that’s just me,” Jason said. I looked across the table at him and thought, How can a twelve-year-old get a job as a delivery boy? Jason said, “I only work weekdays, you know. I help out my friends doing jobs they’re doing—not as a gofer, either. If you need help caulking and you’re willing to pay, I’d be glad to help you out. I can get you references.” He nodded up and down ten times.

  I poured the last of the pitcher and said, “Am I the only delivery you have today? Here.” I handed Jason ten bucks for a tip. I said, “No. This job is something I have to do myself.”

  Jason sat there with his first drink still full and a red powdery stain on his upper lip. He said, “I understand, dude.”

  I said, “Say, do you have any other mottoes?”

  He didn’t blink. He said, “Paining others gives pleasure, too.”

  That night I slept without my wife. Every light, television, radio, and appliance stayed on. The evening low was fifty-two degrees.

  I CUT HALF of the nipples down two inches, and the others only a half centimeter. I needed thick, thick beads and I needed ones so thin I could’ve worked Hollywood as a make-up artist for villains and swashbucklers. I put the twenty-foot extension ladder up at the far gable and set my stepladder up against the front of the house. There was no need for drop cloths.

  When I got four feet down the house in wide rows, I’m sure the bees showed up only because they thought it was the biggest albino hive ever. There are different caulks, I’m sure, but I stuck with siliconized acrylic white. If I’d’ve used a gray color, then wasps would’ve shown up, thinking our house was one big paper nest.

  My right forearm hurt and pulsed like the furthest moon of Jupiter, and at times I thought the four triggering fingers I used might cramp into a claw so hard no middle-weight boxing champion would have a chance with me. I did not think of Elaine flirting with men from Minnesota who owned slight restaurant chains, with men who didn’t come so much for the spectacular as they came for the spectacle—let me say now that I know my wife got hired for her physical attributes more than she did for her culinary or home ec prowess. Elaine majored in anthropology, for Christ’s sake, and I know for certain she spent her first year in college as a pom-pom girl.

  Our house was thick and white, is what I’m saying, by Sunday night when Elaine came back. She only got a sweeping glimpse of it when she turned her car into the driveway. At the door I said, “Hey! You got back safely. You cheated Death again.”

  Elaine said, “There must’ve been too many cars coming my way in the opposite direction. You didn’t paint the house all white, did you?”

  I grabbed my wife’s suitcase. I shuttled her inside as quickly as possible. This was the exact moment when I thought maybe I’d gone too far, out of meanness. I said, “Did people like y’all’s products?”

  “The house looked really white,” Elaine said. She tried to turn around, but I pushed her toward inside. “I could see our house from way far away,” she said. “There’s a glow.”

  “Life in the big city,” I said. “Boy, that really seems to change your way of looking at things. Of seeing things. Of your outlook on what is real and what isn’t.”

  I held my wife’s suitcase. She held a handful of her company’s pamphlets. Ten minutes after I closed the door it got steamy in the house, for reasons other than a wife returning from a business trip.

  ELAINE SAW NOTHING wrong the next morning. When I awoke due to a cramp in my forearm, Elaine stood above me in her robe at an hour past dawn. She held an eight-inch-wide brush in her hand and said, “You can start now.” She had on her robe, and held a blazer outfit she always wore to work, as if she went out to either sell real estate or lead a group of drunks from intervention to committal.

  I said, “It’s supposed to rain today.” It’s the first thing that came to me.

  “No, it’s not. I just watched the local news while I dried my hair. It’s supposed to be warm again.” Elaine brushed something invisible from her coat.

  I said, “How could you hear the weather report with a blow-dryer on? I think you heard wrong. There’s no way you could hear anything right with a blow-dryer on.”

  Elaine smiled, but didn’t show her teeth. She grinned. She said, “I went outside to get the paper. I bet it’s ninety degrees out now.”

  Lookit: I swear it doesn’t get ninety degrees at dawn in South Carolina during October. There might be ninety percent humidity. It might get to ninety degrees by two o’clock in the afternoon, but not before sunlight. One time my grandmother on my father’s side said it reached 110 and rained simultaneously on Christmas day, 1950, but at that point she’d gone through both radiation and chemotherapy—she liked to pull the top of her dress down and show the cavity where one breast existed, then say how smoking was bad for you.

  I got up and said to my wife, “Did you look at the house?”

  “I’m so happy you gave in,” she said. “Let me say now that I thought I’d come home and find that you hadn’t done anything since I left. I’m sorry. I didn’t think you’d caulk the house right.” Elaine walked into the laundry room.

  I stood in my boxer shorts sober. I said, “It’s a joke, you idiot! I caulked every square inch of the house. It looks like a Dairy Queen treat from the road. Yesterday an Eskimo family happened by and asked me the name of our contractor—they said they’d been looking for an igloo like ours ever since they left Lapland, or wherever.”

  Understand, I caught myself hyperventilating, and my bad eye strayed off even though it was morning and I’d not partaken yet. Elaine came back in the room wearing a pair of bicycle shorts so tight she showed camel-lips. I didn’t realize that everything was out of sync. Why did she take a shower and wash her hair before exercising? Elaine held five-pound weights in her hand and said, “What? One-two, one-two, one-two,” et cetera.

  I CAME INSIDE from almost painting to find Elaine on the telephone with her college roommate Amy. They planned their tenth reunion. Elaine laughed too much, I thought, as I came up from behind her. Elaine said, “Well, I wouldn’t know how to react to an uncircumcised man, either. I’ve only seen one once.” I tried to step back out of the room, but made a noise. The floor creaked, is what I’m saying, and you’d think somebody who lived there—namely my wife Elaine—would’ve thought to have caulked the area.

  Elaine hung up without saying goodbye or anything. She just put down the phone. To me, my wife said, “Hey,” and smiled. She could’ve done a commercial for toothpaste or dental floss.

  I said, “Is there a problem with the phone lines?
If you want me to do it, I’ll call the telephone company and say our phone’s gone out.”

  Elaine stood up erect. She’d put on the business suit. “That’s okay,” she said.

  “I couldn’t call the telephone company if our line was out, stupid!” I said.

  Elaine said, “Louis, there’re men who don’t play this game always. I thought you were outside painting the house.”

  What could I say? I knew there were other men out there—younger, better-looking men—who didn’t have the advantage of taking a logic course on the college level. I don’t want to come off as superior or anything, but I’ve noticed how people without four-year college educations tend to buy more mobile homes percentage-wise, and how people like me have noticed that acts of nature, viz. tornadoes, knock over trailers.

  Of course they didn’t scrape, caulk, and paint wood, granted.

  I said, “So you’re looking for a man who ain’t circumcised, is that what you want? I guess that’s what you want.” I’d put minibottles in the gutter the night before. I said, “Four fat men stopped by thinking our house was a pilgrimage to the Michelin man. Did you, by any chance, know that the word caulk comes from the word caucus, which means just a faction of a political party? It’s Greek. It means the whole goddamn house doesn’t need doing.”

  This wasn’t exactly true, but it sounded right. I was pretty sure the word caucus came from some Greek word.

  Elaine said, “You’re full of crap. Caulk comes from a 304-smilliliter tube, which is approximately ten-point-three fluid ounces.”

  I said, “Does Amy have a ten-point-three-fluid-ounce uncircumcised caulk tube she’s worried about? Is that what y’all were talking about, Elaine?”

  My wife actually giggled. She turned her back toward me. She said, “Uh-huh.” Then she went to work, finally, running late.