Free The Colorman by Erika Wood Page B

the Sunday paper from his porch or down at her corner deli, while Lucy committed her series of morning poses in the bedroom. When she joined him, James would poach them each an egg, his taken with buttered toast, hers with a teaspoon of wheat germ instead of the yolk, and they would indulge in another hour or so of the Sunday Times , “that great public bath,” as Wolfe called it.
    In the city, they might go to a movie or a play, walk around the Village or Soho, take in a few galleries. In the country, they might take a drive, go to an apple orchard or a regional food or antiques festival. Sometimes they planned these Sundays ahead, but mostly they would just flow into a day of companionship, suggested lightly by one of them from something they’d come across in the paper.
    Always they’d take their leave of each other with a kiss and a date for their next meeting, rarely the following week, rarely more than two weeks on.
    Lucy’s sense of their detachment from one another was exaggerated, however, and this became clear when she came downstairs on this particular morning to find James looking stricken at the breakfast table, no coffee, no eggs or toast. He seemed suddenly old, his jaw slack and his eyes watery and red.
    â€œOh, my God, are you all right?” Lucy asked, genuinely worried. He looked like he’d had an attack of some kind, and Lucy struggled to put down the very attached and unenlightened selfish worry that she’d be stuck caring for him if he’d had a stroke or something. Be here now, be here now , she chanted in her mind.
    â€œLucy,” James said vaguely.
    â€œYes, James?” she asked.
    â€œNo, it’s nothing, it’s…” He trailed off here, rose and started to make the coffee and eggs. “I just lost track of time.”
    Lucy sat at the table and slid the paper he’d been reading over to her. The paper was folded to the obituaries page, with the headline John Ray Morton, 72, Pulitzer Prize–Winning Author, Is Dead ( From Page A1 ) at the top. “Oh,” she said, uncertainly. “Did you know him?”
    â€œWhat?… Yes,” James answered, unconvincingly on to the next task.
    â€œHe wrote Danville’s Mission , right? And Shoes …? Something about shoes?”
    â€œ Shoes of the Trumpeter . Yes—”
    Lucy sat in silence for a while, calculating what she knew of James’ age. She was pretty sure he was still in his sixties. That number, that “72,” coupled with the very Times- ian, rather bludgeonly “Is Dead” were indeed chilling, and Lucy was feeling a distinct distance growing between embracing getting older and her revulsion for that which age ultimately brings. She spent so much time around her younger colleagues, so careful to ignore their generational differences, that she had embraced, she realized, her age merely as a fashion statement, like dressing down pearls, rather than any kind of reality about time. After all, Lucy had achieved something of a rare feat by leaving behind the bodily unease of her youth, the aches and injuries her large body had foisted upon her, and had therefore fooled herself into appreciating this onset of age.
    So James looking suddenly old, his colleagues beginning to appear in obituaries, this brought such an unwelcome feeling of fear and disgust upon Lucy, that she could feel the kitchen turning into a morgue. What she’d always seen as a peaceful Zen-like antiquity started to look gray and elderly, washed out and airless. She stood. She paced a moment. James seemed not to notice her agitation, perhaps being involved in his own thoughts of his lost friend.
    â€œWas this…” Lucy began. “Was this a good friend of yours?” she asked.
    â€œI wouldn’t say…” James paused. He didn’t turn around, but he ceased moving. “No. No, he was someone I knew once. He… he used to live up the road