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The Girl Next Door

Joseph Kraus

    “I think I heard the thud when they cut his body down.” I hadn’t really, but I couldn’t help dishing out that scrap for Susan to sink her teeth into on the other end of the line. “Of course it’s weird,” I said. “Having it happen on the other side of my wall. I was probably home.” The living room around me was populated with gunky metal tubes, cratered where I had squeezed gobs out of them, and colored over canvases whose scenes seemed to fade further with each passing day they sat propped against my wall unviewed by the world. I didn’t even dare look at them for fear of what they’d become since yesterday. “Maybe I was painting. Maybe I could’ve stopped him.” There were more maybes, but the maybes could bury you.
    I plucked at a curl in my hair while outside my window college kids straggled by on the sidewalk dragging along in their ratty sweats, regretting their hangovers, and looking no better than the lost souls who climbed out of the alleyways in the morning and sought out the dumpsters behind restaurants to see where their next meal was coming from. These were the hope for tomorrow.
    Susan asked a question, but I went on with what I was saying. “I knew him a little. He came over here maybe a dozen times.” I went to the door and looked out the peephole. Nothing but a bubbled out section of empty hallway. “I never went over there. He gave me two hundred dollars on the first day we met. He saw me staring into my empty mailbox where my financial aid check should’ve been. I mean, two weeks into the semester, and I didn’t have any books, was down to a couple of boxes of rice in the cupboard. We started talking in the hall, and I was telling him about my parents so far away in New Zealand, how I couldn’t ask them for money because the currency exchange made it cost them double to send. That’s when he offered.” Another question. “No, I wasn’t hinting. I tried to refuse. I knew he couldn’t have much more money than I did, but he kept insisting, said it was hard enough not having family close by, without having to worry about money on top of it. Maybe I shouldn’t have taken it. Maybe he did need it.”
    The phone cord was stretched as far as it would go. Back in high school, Jimmy Benson blew his head off with his father’s shotgun, did it inside his bedroom closet with a blanket wrapped around his head like he wanted to hold in the mess. Nobody had two words to say to Jimmy while he was clunking down the halls in overalls and boots still muddy from working on the farm, but after he was gone, everybody knew him, sharing stories about him from as far back as the third grade, some people claiming they saw it coming while others insisting he showed no indication, but everybody competing to be the one who knew him best of all.
    And here I was latching onto every last detail and shoving it at Susan who’d never even met him. Maybe this time I was that person who knew him best. “He used to write stories,” I said. “He was so clumsy when he talked to me, couldn’t put three words together without tripping over them, but his writing was different.”
    No sleep last night. I should’ve put on make-up this morning, but I hadn’t felt up to it. In the shadow of the mirror, my cheeks were cavernous black holes like overused ashtrays in a bingo hall, emptied of their butts but forever caked with the stubbed out ash of a million cigarettes. “He had a new story every time he popped over, always wanted me to read it, waited there while I did, leaning against the wall, never daring to sit down even when I insisted.
    “No, he didn’t write about it. There was one about a little kid who got mad at his parents because they wouldn’t let him go to a traveling carnival in town, so he ran away from home and got a job there helping cook corn dogs and cleaning off the cars when somebody got sick in one. He got to eat as much junk food and ride as many rides as he wanted. It was a funny story. At the end, the parents are driving around looking for him, and they see him riding away in the front of the Ferris wheel truck. They never caught up to him.”
    I could remember other stories, like the guy who ran his cheating girlfriend down with his car and waited for the other guy to leave for work, broke into his apartment, and propped her mangled corpse up onto the couch. He turned on the TV and poured her a soda from the fridge, even added ice, so she could be comfortable while she waited for her lover to get home. That’s where it ended. Susan would’ve feasted on that one, but suddenly I had to hold back.
    “I used to hear him talking over there, when I knew he was by himself. He just talked to himself as casually as you talk to the guy next to you in class.” I found the wall of my apartment, the wall I shared with him, and I fell back against it, couldn’t move. Susan hadn’t spoken for over a minute. I didn’t even know if she was still there, or if I was just spilling things to a dead line. “Last week, he came over looking like he hadn’t slept or showered in a week. He had a story for me to read, but it didn’t make any sense. I kept reading, tried to figure it out, but he was standing there, watching me. I couldn’t. I ended up handing it back to him, saying it was good, that I liked it. He went back to his place without saying anything. That was the last time-” The receiver dropped from my fingers and clattered against the wood floor, swiveling on the end of the unwinding cord. I left it.
    He used to always fumble around trying to find something in what I painted, some detail or image from each one that spoke something to him, not like the kids in my class who pretended that they knew everything about my work, made it all about declaring their own genius by identifying the transparency in what I’d I done. He just wanted to make me appreciate what I’d created, because he knew that it took more than saying it was good, more than saying you really liked it. Those were just kiss offs, coming from people who didn’t care enough to take the time to really consider it.
    The painting on the easel was almost finished after over a month working on it, putting it aside, and picking it up again. It was of a girl sitting down next to a freshly laid sidewalk and dragging an S with her fingers through the wet concrete. He had seen it when it was only three quarters done, had been the only one yet to see it, told me it reminded him of being young and not having to worry so much about messing up, or about what other people thought of you. In a couple days, I would take the painting to my art class where the others would tell me every stroke that was too heavy, too obvious, too vague, too tired, too scattered, or too much like the paint by numbers produced by assembly line hacks in the back room of the mall art store.
    There were other paintings in here that I hadn’t shared with anyone else. My family was too far away, and Susan was a biology major only interested in art if it involved nude models and finding out if they ever went hard while we drew them. Some of my paintings were just for him, like his stories were written only for me, the ones I had become tired of always being expected to read, wondering why he couldn’t ever just come over empty-handed.
    The vacancy on the other side sucked through the wall, and I could hear the crackle of the oils solidifying inside all the tubes scattered over the coffee table. The next time I squeezed one, it would produce nothing but rocks. I could see the color draining from all the canvases I’d painted over the past two years of going to school here. By tomorrow the entire collection would be nothing but a whole lot of empty space.
    I had hung up on Susan before getting to the point of the call. It was the money. I had received my financial aid check a couple days before and had the two hundred dollars tucked in a jar in my kitchen ready to give him the next time he came over. I should’ve delivered it, but had just never been to his place before, figured he’d come over sooner or later. Now what? I could find his parents at the funeral or when they came to clean out his apartment. Should I give it to them? Did I still owe him? Did it matter?

******

    He set the pencil and yellow pad onto the coffee table. It was enough for one day. He’d been at it for two straight hours now, most of the time not writing but deciding how far to go.
    He stared at the last question until the words became something heavy sinking down into a deep lake and melting away out of reach. The answer was the last thing to know. He could’ve written down something, could’ve finished it off any way he wanted, but he wasn’t sure.
    He wiped the back of his hand across his eyes as the knock came at the door. He stayed fixated on that last question. It took a second knock for him to move from his spot to open the door.
    She’d never come to his door before. “My financial aid check finally came.” The first time he had ever heard her speak, he had guessed Australian, but she had quickly informed him of the difference. “I’ll deposit it, and then I can pay you.”
    Her fingerprints were embedded with blue paint. She’d been at it today, probably putting the finishing touches on that little girl’s dress. “I told you it’s no rush,” he said. “I’m getting on okay.”
    She must’ve seen the legal pad on the coffee table, maybe could read from there what he’d written. Maybe he would’ve invited her in, would’ve let her read it the whole way through if she was so curious. Sure, had she only asked, but all she said was a quick thanks again, she really appreciated it, he’d really saved her; before telling him she had to get back to what she was working on, was burning candles too, didn’t want to burn the whole building down. One too many excuses.
    She went back into her apartment, leaving him standing there. Before closing the door, he looked over her shoulder at the section of wallpaper in the hallway, the vine pattern vanishing from the sun shining on it all day through the front window. Soon all the color would be gone, and there was nothing anybody could do to stop it.

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