Betty Blue

4

We finished the old couple’s bungalow one evening around seven, just as the sun was going down. It looked unreal-pink shutters on a white background. The two geriatrics hugged each other in ecstasy. Betty and I were dead. We sat clown on paint cans and opened beers, clinking the cans together in a toast. A light wind had come up during the afternoon-it was quite cool out. There’s always something nice about finishing a job, whatever it is, and we took pleasure in it. The fatigue and the pain in our limbs became a kind of special liquor. We started giggling at nothing at all.

We were busy winking at each other and squirting beer all over the place when the owner showed up. His car kicked up a cloud of dust. He drove right up to where we were. We had trouble breathing, especially me. There was whistling in my ears.

He got out of the car and walked over to us with his wet handkerchief. He looked at Betty with a big phony smile. The last rays of the sun gave his skin a purplish tint: sometimes it’s easy to recognize people sent from Hell.

“Well, well,” he said. “Seems like everything’s just fine here. Job moving right along…”

“You can say that again,” Betty answered.

“Yes indeed. Let’s hope you can keep up this pace.”

I broke out in a cold sweat. I jumped off my paint can. I grabbed his arm and changed the subject:

“Come take a good look… check out the workmanship. Great paint, dries in five minutes…”

“Hold on a minute,” Betty said. “What did he just say?”

“Nothing,” I said. “Don’t worry about it. Everybody’s happy, right? Let’s go see the tenants…”

“What did he say?… KEEP UP THIS PACE??”

“Figure of speech,” I said. “What say we have a drink with the…”

But the owner turned toward Betty. I grimaced involuntarily.

“There’s nothing to worry about, miss. I’m not as mean as I look. I’m not asking you to do them all without even taking a breather…”

“AII what…? What do you mean ‘THEM ALL’?”

For about a millionth of a second the guy looked surprised, then he started smiling.

“Well, I’m talking about the other bungalows, obviously. Is there something you don’t understand?”

I couldn’t move. I was sweating blood. Betty was still sitting on her paint can. She looked up at the owner and I thought she was going to go for his throat-that or spit flames.

“You think I’m going to waste my time painting all those things?” She sizzled. “Are you joking or what?”

“Do I look like I’m joking?” he asked.

“I don’t know… I can’t make up my mind… I’ll tell you in a second…”

She jumped up. She grabbed the can of pink paint. The lid sailed over our heads like a Frisbee. Everything happened so fast that no one had time to move. I feared the worst.

“Betty… no!” I begged.

But it didn’t stop her. She ran to the owner’s car and emptied the whole can on his roof. Gallons. Indian pink. The guy sort of hiccuped. Betty smiled at him, her teeth showing.

“See…” she said. “I don’t mind painting your car. It goes pretty fast. But I’m afraid I’ll have to say no on the rest of it. I’m afraid I’m not up to it just now.”

With that she split. It took a few seconds for us to get our wits back. The paint oozed down to the middle of the doors.

“It’s really no big deal… no harm done… It washes off with water… It just looks bad,” I said.

I washed his car. It took me over an hour. It was all I could do to calm him down. I told him everything would take care of itself, that she was having her period, that she was very tired, that the heat made her edgy, that she’d be the first to apologize, that, hey, what say we forget the whole thing ever happened, and why don’t I also paint all the garbage cans and lamp posts while I’m at it…?

He climbed back into his car, gritting his teeth. I gave an extra little polish to the windshield before he drove off in a cloud of dust. Then I was alone in the alley. It was almost nightfall and I was wiped out, at the end of my rope. But, I knew that the tough part was still ahead of me-at thirty-five life isn’t a joke anymore. You have to look things straight in the face. The tough part was going to be Betty. I gave myself five minutes, then started over. I saw the lights shining in the house. Five little minutes, with my nose in the air, to sniff the winds of disaster. I think that was the moment things started taking a strange turn.

Betty had the bottle out on the table. She was sitting in a chair, head down, legs apart, all her hair falling forward. She waited a few seconds before she looked up at me. I’d never seen her so beautiful. I’m a subtle guy-I saw right away that she wasn’t just angry, she was also sad. I couldn’t have stood that for too long.

“Jesus Christ, what the hell is this all about?” she said in a muffled voice. “What have you got going with that asshole?” I walked over to the table and poured myself a drink. I had to breathe a little more heavily, since I was carrying such an enormous weight on my shoulders.

“He wouldn’t agree to let you stay here unless we went to work.It’s not so hard to figure…”

She giggled nervously and her eyes shone like marbles.

“Right. Let’s see if I understand-I have to knock myself out on all those fucked-up buildings in order to have permission to rot in this… Jesus, don’t you think it’s a little like pissing in the wind?”

“In a way.”

She poured herself another drink. I did the same. I was sweating a little.

“You just can’t get away from those bastards,” she went on. “They’re all over the street. But you got to kick their ass, you can’t talk sense to them. What drives me crazy is how you let yourself get fucked by that guy, how you could go for a thing like that.”

“I tried to weigh the good and the bad,” I said.

“You shouldn’t have. You should have just told him to go fuck himself-it’s a matter of pride, for Christ sakes! What does he think-that we’re just a couple of degenerates only fit to shine his shoes? I’m the real jerk, I should have just scratched his eyes out!”

“Listen, if I have to paint the buildings to make sure we can stay together, then I’ll paint the buildings. I’ll do more than that. It seems like nothing next to what I get out of it.”

“Oh shit. Why don’t you try opening your eyes? My God, you’re totally nuts! Look at this hole we live in-and that bastard paying you peanuts to bury yourself in it! Look at yourself! You’re halfway through your life! You want to tell me exactly what you’ve got out of it so far? You want to show me what’s worth getting yourself fucked over for?”

“It’s okay. We’re all still in the same place. There’s no big difference.”

“Excuse me, but that`s bullshit! What do you think I’m doing here with you? What good is it if I can’t admire you, be proud of you? We’re wasting our time here! This place is only good for learning how to die!”

“Okay, all right. But what do you want to do-leave here with your hands in your pockets, only to go somewhere else and start the same shit all over again? You think you can just go out and pick money off trees? You think it’s worth the trouble?”

We had another drink. We had to gather our strength to continue bitching.

“Anyway,” she said, “how in the world can we keep living like this-without any hope, with nothing at all, no ambition. Shit, you’re still young, healthy-it’s like they’ve already cut your balls off. I just don’t get it.”

“Yeah, well, there’s another way to look at it,” I said. “The world is a zoo. At least here we have a little peace, far from the madding assholes, with a porch and a nice place to fuck. I think you`re the one who’s nuts.”

She looked at me and shook her head. She finished her drink.

“Oh shit,” she said. “Here I go again, stuck with another jerk! I should have known better. Something always goes haywire with men.”

I went to the fridge to get some ice cubes, I had just about had it with this discussion, after the day I’d had. I went and lay down on the bed, my glass on my stomach, one arm behind my head. She turned around to look at me, her chin resting on the back of her chair.

“What’s really wrong with you? What is it that doesn’t work right?”

I raised my glass to toast her. I took my shoes off. It probably was not the best thing to do. It was like giving the signal to charge.

She jumped to her feet, legs firmly planted, hands on hips.

“Don’t you feel suffocated here? Don’t you want to breathe? Well, I do! That’s right, I need a little air!”

Saying that, her eyes started sweeping around the room with a crazy look in them. I felt she was going to attack something-maybe me. They settled on the cardboard boxes-there was a stack of them piled up in the corner. I didn’t have much room, but it never bothered me. I just filled up boxes from time to time and left them there.

She let out a small shriek and grabbed the first box she could lay her hands on. She lifted it up over her head. It didn’t have anything too important in it-I can’t say that I remembered exactly what was in there. I didn’t try to stop her. It went right through the window. I heard the sound of things breaking.

She did the same with two other boxes. I finished my drink.

At the rate she was going she’d tire out quickly.

“Yes!” she said. “I need air! I need to BREATHE!”

Then she went for the box that I kept my notebooks in. I stood up.

“Hold on,” I said. “Leave that one alone. You can finish off the others if you want…”

She pushed the hair out of her eyes. She seemed intrigued. She was out of breath from her little cleaning spree.

“What’s in there?”

“Nothing special. Just some papers…”

“You seem pretty concerned all of a sudden. What kind of papers are they?”

I didn’t answer. I walked past her and got myself another drink.

My mind was starting to get cloudy.

“I want to see…” she said, and turned the box upside down over the bed. All my notebooks spilled out, like a display in some used-book store. I didn’t like that-it made me feel edgy. I took a long swig. Betty grabbed two or three at random and started leafing through them.

“Gee, what are these?” she said. “Who wrote this? You?”

“Okay, look. They’re just some old things that don’t matter anymore. Let’s go on to something else. I’ll put them away…”

“YOU wrote THIS?”

“Yes, I wrote THAT. It was a long time ago.”

She seemed to get off on it. In itself this was pretty good, but I would rather have talked about something else.

“You’re not going to tell me that you filled up every single page of all these notebooks! I don’t believe it!”

“Betty, I think we ought to forget about this for tonight. I think we should just go to bed. I feel totally sapped and…”

“Jesus,” she interrupted me. “But what is this, exactly? I don’t understand.”

“It’s nothing. Just some things I wrote when I had a few minutes with nothing to do.”

She looked at me with eyes big as saucers-an expression of pain and wonder at the same time.

“What’s it about?”

“Nothing. About me-about whatever came into my head…”

“How come you never talked about it?”

“I forgot it even existed, sort of…”

“Come off it! You don’t just forget about something like this.”

She slowly assembled the notebooks, running her fingers between each one like a blind person. There was dead silence in the room. I was starting to wonder if we’d ever get to bed. She took the stack over to the table and pulled up a chair.

“The numbers on the covers… that’s the order?” she asked.

“What are you doing? You’re not going to start reading that now!”

“Why not? You have something more interesting in mind?”

I was going to make a snide remark, but I didn’t. Better to leave well enough alone. I got undressed and lay down on the bed. She opened up the first notebook. I’d never shown those things to anyone-never even mentioned them. Betty was the first person to see them. It meant something. It made me feel funny. I smoked a long cigarette before falling asleep, staring at the ceiling while the calm came back. By the time you’re thirty-five you get the hang of living. You appreciate it when they let you breathe a little.

The next morning when I rolled over in bed, I saw she wasn’t there. She was sitting at the table with her chin in her hands, poring over one of the notebooks. It was already daylight but the lamp was still lit. The room was full of smoke. Jesus, I said-Jesus, she’s been at it all night. I got dressed in a hurry, watching her, my mind going a mile a minute. I couldn’t decide whether I should say something clever to get the day off to a good start or just shut up. She didn’t pay any attention to me. Once in a while she’d turn a page and put her forehead in her hands. It made me nervous. I walked around the room aimlessly, then decided to heat up the coffee. The sun had started climbing the walls.

I ran some water over my face and put the coffee on the table with two cups. I poured one for her. I pushed it toward her. She picked it up without looking at me, without saying thank you, her eyes swollen from lack of sleep and her hair going every which way. She tossed the whole cup down before I had time to put the sugar in, turning her head to drink and read at the same time. I waited to see if something was going to happen-if she was going to pay a little attention to me or fall off her chair from exhaustion. Finally I got up. I slapped my thighs.

“Well, guess I’ll take off now…” I said.

“Uh-huh…”

I knew she didn’t understand what I said.

“How’s it going? You like it?” I asked.

This time she didn’t hear me at all. She groped around the table for her cigarettes. At least, I thought, the thing is entertaining, and maybe it’ll help settle things down a little around here. It shouldn’t be too much to ask. I just wanted to keep her.

I turned the light off as I left. She hadn’t looked at me once.

I walked out into the nice fresh morning. There was a beautiful yellow light with a few lingering shadows. It was early. Nobody was out yet. I found myself alone, with just a slight hangover.

I went to get a can of paint out of the shed. I grabbed one off the top of the pile but it got away from me and I fell over backward into the side mirror of the VW. Right in the kidneys. I saw stars. The guy from the garage had offered to buy the car from her for next to nothing, and we’d turned it down. Now I was sorry. We had a wreck on our hands I didn’t know what to do with. I rubbed my side and swore. One more problem to take care of-the list was starting to get long. I closed the door and headed off with my paint can, squinting in the sun like some sort of imbecile.

I got to work on bungalow number two, thinking of Betty poring over my little notebooks. It gave me strength. I rolled on a first coat, feeling better.

I hadn’t been at it five minutes when I saw the shutters snap open and a guy’s head poke out. He was unshaven, in an undershirt, just out of bed-one of those types who’s a regional representative for something-eyeglasses, in this case.

“Oh, it`s you,” he said. “What the hell are you doing?”

“Can’t you tell?”

He tipped his head back and laughed.

“Nice to see you working for a change. You gonna come in and do the inside too?”

“Right. Start moving the furniture…”

He yawned-a wide one-and handed me a cup of coffee. We talked for a minute about the weather, then I went back to work. The roller made a loud sucking noise with every stroke. I wished I had something quieter.

The time passed easily. Nothing much happened-I went up and down the ladder a few times and it got hotter. I was in no hurry. I felt a little numb; the white was making me half blind. The only thing that bugged me was the little rivulet of paint that kept running up my arm. It’s unpleasant, and no matter what you do you can’t get past it-it tickles you, it drives you nuts. To be honest, painting is not one of my pet projects. Paint gets all over everything. It gets stale in a hurry.

But painting was just what the doctor ordered that morning something mindless. I felt like insulating myself. I made myself breathe slower-closing my eyes halfway. It worked so well that I didn’t hear the truck. I just saw it go by, with Betty behind the wheel.

It was like getting punched in the gut. She’s gone, I said she’s gone and I’m alone. It was a wound. I felt the panic rising but I kept moving the roller across the wall until nothing more came out of it. Then I just let loose-racing off toward the house, praying that she hadn’t left for good-especially with the company car. I tore into the house like a wild animal, out of breath. It took me a few seconds to realize that all her things were still there. I had to sit down. I was weak in the knees. I must have been nuts to react like that. I got up again. I went to touch her clothes-her skirts, her T-shirts. I kicked myself. I noticed that my little notebooks had been carefully put back in the box. I downed a big glass of water and went back to work.

I came back later to eat, but she was still gone. That’s always how it is when women go shopping, I thought-it always takes a while. I made myself some eggs, but I wasn’t really hungry. The place didn’t look right without her. I felt wrong being there. I couldn’t sit still for five minutes. I did a few dishes, then went out to bring back the boxes she’d thrown outside. I reinstilled some semblance of order. Still, I had the feeling that something had changed. Objects seemed less familiar to me, the air had a funny taste to it. It was like I was in a stranger’s house-an uncomfortable sensation. In spite of the heat I decided I’d rather return to my paintbrushes. I backed out the front door.

No matter how many times I told myself that she’d just gone into town for a few things, I couldn’t shake the anxious feeling. I worked with little wild strokes, and the paint spattered all over the place. I looked like I’d caught some skin disease. From time to time a car passed by and I stopped to follow it with my eyes. Except for a few branches that were in the way I could see for miles. I felt like a lookout in the crow’s nest of some half-sunk tub floundering in the Sargasso Sea. I wore my eyes out watching the road. For the first time I started to see the town as a sort of desert-a hellhole. I started to understand what she meant. Seen from that angle, it was not a happy sight. My paradise suddenly looked like a lost wilderness, baking out in the sun-a place nobody would want to live in. I saw it that way because she wasn’t there. Still, the fact that a girl can take your world and turn it inside out can shake you up.

When I finally saw the truck coming back, I hooked my roller to a rung of the ladder and lit up a cigarette. The countryside became calm again, the leaves rustled lightly in the trees. I relaxed. Little by little everything came back to normal. I struggled against my desire to go see her. When I felt that I was about to give in, I drove my fist into the side of the house. I lost a little skin off my knuckles, but it worked. I didn’t come down off my ladder.

The glasses salesman came out to see what was going on. He had a nudie magazine in his hand, I saw the tits.

“Hey, is that you making all the racket?”

“Yeah. I swatted a mosquito.”

“You teasing me? There aren’t any mosquitoes this time of day.”

“Come up and see for yourself. The little feet are still moving in a pool of blood.”

He waved it off, then rolled up his magazine and looked at me through it.

“How you doing up there?”

“I was beat a little while ago, but now I feel it coming back, full speed.”

“Shit,” he said. “I don’t know how you can stay out there in the sun like that. Talk about your idiot jobs…”

He went back in with his naked girls folded under his arm and I got back to work, charged with new energy. I started painting like a madman, a smile on my lips and my jaw set.

I stopped working a little earlier than usual. I’d already proved what I wanted to prove-no sense going overboard. The wait had gotten me excited, and it was all I could do to walk back to the house at a normal gait. I felt sparks going through my arms and legs. I was ready.

I had barely opened the door when Betty threw herself into my arms. This got me. I hugged her. Over her shoulder I saw that the table was set with a huge bouquet of flowers in the center. It smelled good.

“What’s going on?” I asked. “Is it my birthday?”

“No,” she said. “Just a little dinner, for lovers only.”

I kissed the nape of her neck and didn’t try to understand. I didn’t want to ask any questions-it was all too beautiful.

“Come on,” she said. “Sit down. I’ll pour you a glass of cold wine.”

I maneuvered around gently, still under the effects of the surprise. I looked around me, smiling. It was a fabulous little wine, just right for sipping under a setting sun. Women, I thought, they really know how to take you from Hell to Heaven. They know how it’s done.

I poured myself another glass while she looked in the oven. She told me about her stroll through town, her back turned toward me, crouched down in front of the stove, her little yellow dress rising to the tops of her thighs, stretched to the max. I wasn’t really listening. I was watching a little bird who had just landed on the windowsill.

“In ten minutes we eat!” she said.

She came and sat down on my lap and we drank a toast. I ran my hand up between her legs. It was the good life. I was hoping she’d remembered to buy cigars. I started diddling around in her panties, but she stopped me. She leaned back away from me. Her eyes lit up.

“Gosh,” she said. “Let me look at you.”

I was in heaven. I let her caress my face without moving a muscle. She seemed to like that. I downed a few glassfuls of wine. “Now I understand why you came here to bury yourself,” she whispered. “It’s because you had something to WRITE!”

I didn’t answer but just smiled. In truth, it wasn’t at all what she thought-I hadn’t settled in that town to write. The thought had never crossed my mind. No, I was just looking for a place that was peaceful, sunny, and away from people, because the world had been getting on my nerves and there was nothing I could do about it. Writing had come much later-maybe a year afterward, and for no real reason-as if that sort of thing happens to you automatically after a few months of solitude: a way to get through sleepless nights, the need to feel alive.

“You know… I don’t know how to say this,” she added. “You have no idea what it does to me. I’ve never read anything like it! I’m so happy that it’s you who wrote it! Kiss me…”

I thought she was going a little overboard, but I didn’t need to be coaxed. The evening’s temperature was just right. I slid into it as into a warm bath of cinnamon perfume. I was totally relaxed, all the way to the tips of my toes.

Betty was radiant, witty, desirable, I felt like I had gone into outer space and was floating in a vacuum. All that was left was to batten down the hatches and land in bed. But all she was interested in was my notebooks, my BOOK-the hows and whys, this and that. I realized I had really shaken her up, broadened her horizons with what had come out of my brain, and the idea simply overjoyed me. Had I been a genie, I might have knocked her off her feet with my stare.

I tried to calm her down but there was nothing doing. She covered me all over with her tender eyes. She caressed my writer’s hands. Her eyes shone like those of a little girl who had broken open a stone and found a diamond. I had been given the red carpet. The only slight dark spot in the picture was that I had the feeling she was mistaking me for someone else. But I told myself I might as well take advantage of my attributes-my big writer’s dick and the vast depths of my soul. Life resembled an automat-you’ve got to know how to grab the food before it passes you by right under your nose.

Around eleven o’clock the writer started flapping his wings. Two little bottles of wine and it was all he could do to keep from falling off his chair. He was happy-ogling his girl, smiling-he no longer understood what she was saying to him and did not have the strength to ask her to repeat herself. The wine had made him drunk, the tenderness had made him drunk, well-being itself had made him drunk, but it was mostly the girl with the long black hair who was rolling her chest around in front of him who made him drunk. It wouldn’t even have taken much for her to make him want to go reread all those notebooks himself-she had given them a new dimension. In bed, he amused himself, removing her panties with his teeth. She took him in her arms and hugged him. She’d never hugged him like that-it made him feel odd. She clung to him as though they’d come through a storm, her legs hooked across his back. He went into her gently, staring into her eyes. He clutched her behind and licked her breasts, and the night moved on. They smoked a cigarette. They were drenched with sweat. After a while the girl lifted herself up on her elbow.

“When I think that you’re out there painting houses…” she said.

The writer had a witty comeback all ready-it was his stock-in-trade.

“What the fuck difference does it make?” he said.

“It’s not where you should be…”

“Oh yeah? Where should I be?”

“At the top,” she said.

“You’re sweet,” he said. “But I don’t think the world is exactly tailored to my measurements.”

She straddled the writer and took his head in her hands.

“Now, that…” she said, “that’s what we’re going to find out.”

He paid no heed to what she had just said. He was a writer, not a fortune-teller.