Free The Color Master: Stories by Aimee Bender Page A

all had to have a plan.”
    “How old were you? Can a person eat hair?” asked the secretary, who stood awkwardly by the bed, and felt that she was being lied to.
    “Of course,” said the woman, dangling the hair over her mouth. “You young people don’t understand. You think all poison is in a bottle. I was a very bright child.”
    “I am trying,” said the secretary, “it’s just—”
    “Look,” said the woman, waving the hair. “Look, yes?”
    And because she knew she was supposed to, the secretary stepped up and pushed down the older woman’s hand, though she was tempted to let the woman eat the hair, to call the bluff, to shut down the opera. By her estimation, the woman had probably been five years old during the height of the war. Listening to panicked voices in the next room. The majority of the living memories now owned by then-children.
    The older woman began laughing; her shirt had lost its top button, purposefully or not, and you could see her skin under the luminous blouse, the settled wrinkles, the breasts, which struck the secretary as almost intolerably lonely.
    “Hans was lousy,” said the woman, slipping the hair back into the locket. “He was lousy and he was wonderful. He was lousy, he was wonderful, and he was a self-centered bastard.”
    She clipped the locket shut and announced that the secretarywas no fun. “You should be wearing more textures,” she suggested. “Your face is too plain for standard cotton.” She stood and rummaged in her closet and returned with a brightly colored silk-and-sheep’s-wool scarf, tasseled at the ends. “Wear it,” she said. The secretary waved her hand. “Wear it,” said the woman. The secretary opened her mouth to protest, and the woman said: “Put it on, or I will call the police and tell them that you broke into my apartment.”
    So it was that the secretary left the building, her coppery hair wrapped in the burgundy, ochre, and forest-green scarf, which did become her small precise features, and which did protect against the cold creeping in from the north in a streamy wind. She knew nothing new about Hans except that he did not invite fellatio when he was a young man and he had loved a woman as flamboyant in her inventions as he. They both had been so young. It said very little to her. Now she had a new scarf and a strange feeling in her hands and thoughts, as if the poison had somehow crept from the woman’s lock of hair into her, and so, when she was suitably far away, she found the first person who looked cold, handed her the scarf, and said take it, and that person, whoever it was, took it, because it was gorgeous, and because it was warm.
    The secretary’s own family had survived the war, but barely. All her men had slotted into different ages than were required. They did not have to fight; they were either too old or too young. Her grandfather, her father, her brother, her first love. This generational split freed them all from making any of the torturous decisions that Hans Hoefler had made for himself regardless. They formed their identities in the negative space instead.
    4.
    The judge’s secretary was typing one day, details about a couple out walking who had been robbed at gunpoint, a fairly unusual crime for these quiet streets, when she received a call. “I hear you want information on Hoefler,” a man’s voice said.
    She held her fingers above the keyboard, as if typing would scare off the voice. “Yes,” she said. “Please.”
    “Meet me at the cemetery,” he told her. “Twenty minutes.”
    “Which cemetery?” she asked, but she knew as soon as she said it, and the man had hung up. It was only a five-minute walk, and Hans was buried there.
    She finished up the tail end of the report, swallowed herself inside her coat, and walked the ten blocks east, past the pawn shop and the bakery that specialized in crusty rolls soaked in chicken fat and sesame seeds. When she arrived at Hans’s grave, apprehensive, holding