Page 43 of Center of Gravity

13

Rob

“It’s kind of weird, isn’t it?” Alex said, tipping his roller to one side, excess paint fleeing in pale gray rivulets.

We were in the room my mom had designated as mine, painting over the violently electric blue walls. I had never felt much ownership of it, since I’d only spent time in it when home from college. There weren’t any leftover posters on the walls or cherished ephemera saved over the years, just a few mass-produced drawings of wildflowers and a photo of Summer and me at her high school graduation that Alex had studied for a few minutes, gaze darting between the picture and me before declaring that I looked the same. I wasn’t sure that was a compliment.

There was no further mention of the night he’d stayed over, and though it didn’t feel like we were tiptoeing around the subject, it seemed to hover in the background like a guest hesitating at the door, unsure whether or not they’d be welcomed inside.

I liked watching Alex paint, the deftness with which he soaked up the color on the roller, the absent flick of his wrist to get rid of the excess, and the hushedshooshwhen he laid the saturated fuzz of the roller against the wall. Painting a wall wasn’t a task that required any art, but Alex made it look as if it did, somehow.

“What’s weird?” I’d not been a passenger on his train of thought, so I had no idea what he was talking about.

Alex raked a few strands of hair from his forehead and wiped a smear of paint on the side of his hand against his pants.

“The whole concept of mass market appeal, I guess. Like painting over this room so it will visually appeal to more people.”

It was a little strange, after all, I supposed. I watched another stripe of gray overtake blue. I thought I understood what he was getting at: that we were erasing a bit of someone to make room for others and in order to do that, we had to make the setting as bland as possible.

“I mean, think about it. Paint is simple. This is simple, but I don’t think it’s just the idea of having to paint a room that turns people off. It’s…it’s—”

“It’s like someone else’s history breathing down your neck.”

“Something like that, yeah. It’s like when the buyer walks in on someone else’s personal color choices, this kind of subconsciously-projected territoriality kicks in.”

“Like this blue sublimates one personality with the threat of another?” I gestured to the old wall color and squinted at him. I wasn’t sure if I was following now.

“Yeah, it’s uncomfortable. It makes you think, why did this person originally choose this color? And a buyer doesn’t want to think that. They don’t want to think about the color, so we paint it in a color that you don’t have to think about.”

“Some people would walk in and love the color, though.”

“That’s true, but it’s a risk.”

Alex did this on occasion, I’d noticed, wandered into philosophical thickets of thought. It beguiled me, these deeper glimpses of him, his thought processes. He could be shallow at moments, but those moments were also diffused by ones such as this. I didn’t think I’d ever had such random conversations with Sean. Maybe my sister on occasion back in high school or college, when we were trying to understand our place in the world—if such a thing could be understood. At some point, I’d given up on all of that, lost interest in favor of actionable things. Forward progress, upward progress. Mobility and retirement funds. The wonder of meaning had become uninteresting. Until Alex. I couldn’t say his wondering revived my own, but I liked listening to him and debating it with him. So maybe it was reinvigorating in its particular way.

“I’ll bet ninety percent of the time, people don’t change the colors, that whoever buys this house will live with all of the grays and pale blues. But they want tofeellike they have the option to without someone else’s colors breathing down the back of their neck or forcing them into it.”

I wanted to tell him I thought he was both right and wrong. That most people probably wouldn’t change the colors, because the colors were fine. And at a certain point in life,finewas an acceptable barometer for things like paint colors or couches or the mug you drank coffee from. I thought of my apartment again and its beige walls. When I’d moved in, I’d noticed them only long enough to mark them as fine. And then had left them unchanged. But I would have done the same, even if they were purple.

“What’s your favorite color? I’ve got a feeling it’s not teal.” He inclined his chin to indicate the bright blue wall he was painting over.

“I have no idea. Do people actually have favorite colors after the age of twelve?”

“Sure. Everyone gravitates toward something.” He nicked at his lip ring with his teeth and I looked away.

“I don’t think I have a favorite color.”

“Well, do you have more of a certain color of shirts?”

I thought about that, then shook my head. “Most of my shirts are blue or white because…” I realized I had no good answer. Clothes didn’t matter to me. “Because I guess they go with my suits.”

“You have a favorite color.” Alex gave me an exasperated stare that made me chuckle.

“I really don’t think I have a favorite color.” Was he getting at something with all of this? I had this idea there was an underlying motivation that I couldn’t detect but was failing miserably at satisfying. “What’s yours?”

“White.”

“White is the absence of color.”