Townie_ A Memoir - Andre Dubus [123]
I sat back behind the wheel, handed Liz her cigarettes, and drove toward the highway. I didn’t tell her I’d just seen an old friend, or that the farther we got from Monument Square the more I felt I was turning my back on him somehow.
IT WAS late on a Friday afternoon. Jeb and I had been painting in a closed room for hours. This was a one-day job, and Jeb hadn’t wanted it. He was enjoying the one we were doing with Trevor D. and the crew in Swampscott, framing three new rooms and a roof onto a widow’s house, her long snow-covered yard that sloped down to a stand of pines through which we could see barrier rocks and the ocean. I was the cut man, but under the winter sun I was also learning how to lay out the exterior walls and nail them together on the open plywood deck. Jeb was much faster than I was, especially when it came to the math; he’d pull his tape along the bottom plate of a future wall, marking off studs and the center of rough openings for windows and doorways, going back to mark off where the jack studs would go to hold the headers, then the king studs beside them. A week or so before, Trevor D. had given us each another raise, an extra dollar per hour. He said, “Andre, you focus well but you’re slow. Jeb, you have much more natural talent at this than your brother, but you could use more focus.”
He was right about both of us, and the only reason I may have had more focus is because I had to just to keep up. I could feel myself gathering more skills, though, ones I wasn’t sure I wanted. What did I care about condos and houses, about walls and windows and clapboards and shingles and paint? These were just material objects, weren’t they? What did they have to do with people in the world? Isn’t that who I was more interested in?
I didn’t know. And on that Friday afternoon on that one-day job in that empty old house in Swampscott, something strange was happening. It was a white room to be made even whiter with paint that smelled like rubbing alcohol. Jeb and I had already painted the baseboards and walls and window trim, and I felt a little drunk. It occurred to me that lately I’d been taking too many shots to the head. But when I told Jeb this, he said he felt a little drunk, too. For some reason, we left it there and kept working.
Next came the ceiling; it was ornate with a fluted cornice going around the top of each wall, and in the center of it was a flat four-foot-wide medallion of carved flowers and angels around a hook that once held the chain of a chandelier. It’d been a long time since my brother and I had been alone together, and it was good just talking while we painted. He was a father, something I kept forgetting, and he spoke of his baby son Ethan. How much he loved holding him, feeding him, even changing his diapers. “You can’t believe how much you can love, Andre. You can’t believe it.”
It was true, I couldn’t; I was many years from having a child myself, and I only saw his young fatherhood through a dark lens; he’d knocked up a girl he hadn’t known and was now living with and trying to love; instead of being in some art or music school, he was working construction, the nails of his picking hand no longer long and filed but short and chipped. And his years up in his room with the teacher had done something to him. He looked like a grown man, but there was something raw and childlike about him, as if some clock had stopped for him by staying in that room, a clock that would have kept ticking if he’d left it and gone out into the streets and been with people his own age. He was twenty years old. There was the vague and nagging pull of having failed him somehow. My head began to feel like a ball of gas.
Jeb took the cornice, and I rolled the staging under the chandelier fixture and climbed up there and lay on my back, dipping my brush into the open can of paint, jabbing white into the faces of angels. This made me laugh, but then I’d been laughing for a while, both of us had, and I couldn’t remember when