Chapter Eleven

Jerry had been a little less than truthful when he said his place wasn’t far from Caroline’s. I hopped into his car and we traveled out of the downtown area completely and into a stylish, yet more modestly priced sub-street of the area.

“I’m not as tragically hip as Caroline,” Jerry admitted. “But I like to have a lot of space where I live.”

This turned out to be absolutely true when we pulled up in front of a house too large to be in a metropolitan area.

“Is this your house?” I asked.

“Yes,” said Jerry.

He said so with pride, but not as much pride as when he began speaking of his artwork to me.

I immediately understood his pride. It was definitely one of the more well-kept houses in the area. There wasn’t even a hint of peeling paint on the exterior which (though it was hard to tell in the dark) was a sort of purplish gray. Along the perimeter, perfectly manicured hedges bordered the yard like a yard in a turn of the century children’s story written by a mathematician.

“You live here alone?” I asked.

“Yup,” Jerry said with a chuckle. “Like I said, I’m a little greedy when it comes to space. I like to sprawl.”

That wasn’t my intention in asking him the question. The exterior of the house looked too pristine and well thought out for just one working person to live there. It had made me think that a spouse or someone he was dating had put effort into making the place look so beautiful. It wasn’t long before I realized that the effort put into the yard and the exterior of the house didn’t extend to the interior.

When we went in through the front door, Jerry had to struggle to open it as a massive pile of mail, magazines and various publications blocked it at the bottom.

“Heh,” said Jerry. “I haven’t been using the front door lately. I know; it’s bad. I’m only just realizing how bad I let it get.”

The rest of the house wasn’t much better. Laundry was draped over furniture and dirty dishes laid asunder. However, the floor looked like it had been recently waxed and the actual accouterments were well-maintained. I could tell that this was the sort of house whose owner let things get cluttered for far too long until things got out of hand and then did a deep clean to fix it before starting the cycle all over again.

“I’m sorry, it’s a little cluttered right now,” Jerry apologized. “And I really wasn’t expecting company.”

“I should be the one apologizing,” I said.

What was I saying? I didn’t know where this was coming from; of course I didn’t need to apologize. Jerry was the one who invited me. There was just something about him that made me feel like I had to do silly little things like apologize for everything.

“Why are you apologizing?” Jerry asked the exact same thing I asked myself. “I was the one who invited you.”

That was it. There was a weird ping of satisfaction. Deep down, I had wanted my presence to be validated by my gracious host.

“I know,” I said. “It’s just that I don’t want to be an intrusion. But I really don’t mind clutter here and there, anyway. You should see my place!”

I said that as if my place were messy! My place back in California was completely spotless at all times and my place in Milwaukee was pretty clean too because I was never there to mess it up! Something about Jerry was turning me into both a liar and an insincere apologizer!

“It’s not an intrusion,” said Jerry.

He said so in a way that was truly sincere. As someone who had worked with people in customer relations for as long as I had at that point, I could pick out faux sincerity like a bowling ball in a bag of beads, but there hadn’t been a single moment that entire evening that Jerry had been inauthentic.

This was a rare quality. Usually, I caught somebody straining to smile or nodding and pretending to be interested in the conversation at least once per half an hour of one on one conversation and yet, here we were. We had been talking to one another the entire night and I had failed to feel the uncomfortable twinge I normally felt under the circumstances.

It’s probably just because you find him so interesting, I chided myself. Get a hold of yourself; you’re not at work all the time. Just because you didn’t catch him pretending doesn’t mean he hasn’t been this entire time. He could just be an incredibly good actor.

“Anyway,” I said. “I don’t mind a little bit of clutter if you don’t mind a little bit of clutter.”

“Then I’ll show you to the room where I like to paint,” Jerry said. “It’s the most cluttered of all! But first, would you like a drink?”

“Just water,” I said. “Your sister knows how to make a heck of a cocktail.”

Jerry moved to the kitchen which was adjacent to the room we had just entered. Luckily, there were a few clean glasses left in the cupboard. Based on what I had seen in the other rooms, I would have assumed they had all been used and strewn about the house.

Jerry filled a glass of water for me using the water cooling dispenser installed in his refrigerator.

“You should have seen her in college,” he commented. “She used to push the shots real hard onto everyone. I learned after the first five or six times that one simply couldn’t take a drink every time she forced one into your hand. Luckily, she used to have a thing for shots of gin for whatever reason.”

“Gin?” I asked.

This came as a surprise to me. Caroline had given off such a sophisticated façade. It seems like she’d be the type of girl to know that gin was better served in mixed drinks.

“Tell me about it,” said Jerry.

He leaned against the counter. He had jettisoned his suit jacket sometime in the process of introducing me to his home. He was loosening his tie and the way his thin dress shirt clung to his long torso showed a potential of washboard abs. Suddenly, I wasn’t terribly concerned about his sister’s terrible taste in liquor in the past.

“But it was good in a couple of ways,” Jerry went on to explain.

This was interesting and everything, but my primary reason for wanting him to keep talking was so that he’d keep the pose he was in and try to figure out what his chest looked like underneath his shirt.

Jerry remained oblivious to this as he continued to extol the virtues of being forced to take shots of pure gin.

“First of all, it’s a heck of a lot better than beer when it comes to what it does for your breath,” Jerry explained. “Most kids that were her age at the time drank beer and even the fanciest microbrew can make a mouth smell like it could peel paint off the wall two or three sips in. Gin is actually an ingredient in some perfumes, so it doesn’t smell half bad, that is, if you drink it in moderation. If you drink too much of anything, your breath’s going to be a bad time.”

I nodded and took a sip from the glass of water he had just given me. It was so cold, it hurt my teeth.

“But, anyway, I’m getting off track,” said Jerry. “The other good thing about gin is that it’s completely clear. So, whenever I was in the process of being entertained by Caroline, I was always sure to have a glass of water nearby. When she would inevitably peer pressure everyone into taking shot number seven or eight of gin, I was able to hold the shot in my mouth for a short while, pretend to take a sip of water and then spit the shot into my glass of water. As far as I know, Caroline was never any the wiser.”

“But that meant you had to hold a shot in your mouth,” I objected.

“Yeah,” said Jerry.

I sympathetically shivered in sympathy with Jerry from all those years ago. I didn’t even like having undiluted, pure, hard liquor in my mouth for a short time much less for long enough to trick someone into thinking I had swallowed it when I hadn’t.

“It was all right,” said Jerry. “The stuff she was fond of buying didn’t have much of a kick. That was part of the problem, too. It was so mellow that many of her guests didn’t even realize that they had gone too far before it was far too late.”

For Jerry’s sake and my own, I was glad that his little sister’s penchant of plying everyone with excessive liquor had abated by the time I was invited to her tasteful cocktail party.

“When did she stop doing that?” I asked.

“Around senior year of college,” Jerry said. “Caroline is the sort of person who is so desperate to make sure everyone’s having fun, that she’ll overlook the fact that her efforts to make sure everyone’s having fun are preventing everyone from having fun.”

I laughed at Jerry’s convoluted wordplay.

“But she’s better now, right?” I asked. “At least, she seems to be.”

“Oh, definitely,” said Jerry. “She matured a lot in the latter half of college. She saw that maybe her occasions weren’t the best time if everyone who had attended was miserable the next morning. So, she dialed things back and thank god, because I was beginning to feel guilty. I must have wasted thousands of dollars of that gin I was pretending to drink. All the same, I think she still pushes things a little too far every now and then. Sometimes, I feel a little guilty about it all. Like… I should be having more fun just to appease her.”

“But it isn’t really having fun if you’re only having it to make your sister happy,” I said.

“Exactly!”

“I think she appreciates that you attended, anyway. She seems really proud of you.”

“She seems really proud of you, too.”

I was taken aback by this. Jerry seemed like he meant what he said, but he couldn’t have. This actually worried me because it was becoming more and more likely that Jerry was simply the world’s best actor and I was being dazzled into buying into flattery.

“But she’s really only met me once before,” I explained. “She hardly knows me. I don’t think there’s really anything to be proud of.”

“Oh, there is,” Jerry argued back. “Behind party planning there is one thing in this world that Caroline is exceptional at: being a judge of character. When she introduced you to me, I instantly knew we were going to be friends.”

I could feel my head cock sideways at this. I must have looked like a confused puppy dog.

“Did you, now?” I asked.

“Oh yes,” said Jerry. “You see, my sister has always been a good judge of which of her friends will get along with other friends she has. She is the maid of honor in at least three weddings every summer because she has introduced so many happily married couples. People she has introduced to one another have started successful businesses together. There was even a woman she introduced to another friend of hers that became so close with the others person that one gave up her kidney for the other when she needed it.”

My mouth dropped open.

“You have to be kidding me,” I said. “That sounds made up.”

Jerry’s eyes twinkled.

“I couldn’t make it up if I wanted to,” he said.

“Your sister must be some kind of fairy godmother,” I said.

It was the only explanation. Jerry stood up straight. I was slightly disappointed to see him move from such an appealing pose, but I was delighted that he did so to move closer to me.

“That sounds about right,” he said. “But here’s the thing…”

Jerry paused for dramatic effect.

“Caroline has never met anyone she thought would make a good friend for me,” he said. “Don’t get me wrong. I’ve gotten to know a lot of people I wouldn’t have known if not for her and she’s always polite enough to casually introduce everyone to me. Lord knows, I’ve heard about all sorts of different people she has met throughout her life, but I’m a little bit of a natural recluse. I like to do solitary things. All Caroline’s friends are outgoing people who need a lot of external stimulation. That’s just not my sort of person. In all the years that I’ve known Caroline to do this sort of thing, she’s never once made a point of seeking me out in a heavily populated social gathering to specifically introduce me to someone.”

Jerry had come very close to where I was standing. It wasn’t that I minded or anything. A strange sort of bond was forming, and it only seemed appropriate that friends like the ones we were supposed to be should have smaller personal bubbles than mere acquaintances. All the same, he was so close, that I should have been able to see all the imperfections on Jerry’s face… if he had any. It was as if he had been borne without pores.

I, on the other hand, have had a long history of dry skin and breakouts. If there was any flaw on my face at that moment, Jerry was sure to see it. That’s not to mention the dark circles that had been forming under my eyes ever since I’d been assigned to my job. He could see how hideously imperfect I was. A cold sweat broke out through my entire body.

“It means a lot that she made a point of introducing me to you,” Jerry continued. “It means she thinks I need you in my life right now and that’s why she was so proud of you.”

My ears grew warm with embarrassment at this revelation. Jerry was one of the most interesting people I had ever met. How would someone like him have trouble socializing and how could someone like me be the answer to his problem?

In the absence of either of our voices, my breathing seemed so unbearably loud to my own ears. Paired with the crickets chirping their late night serenade just outside the kitchen window, I feared that I was making the moment awkward by not saying something that was perfect in response to what Jerry was telling me.

But what would the perfect thing to say be? Would it be funny? Sincere? Should I step back? Jerry was so close to me in the moment, I wondered if I was standing in the way of something he was trying to retrieve or blocking the way of somewhere he wanted to go. Then again, different cultures have different thresholds for how close people having a conversation with one another typically stand. I believe it had been Shelby who told me that wealthier Americans typically stand close to one another when they were having conversation as a method of keeping their voices low because an inappropriately loud volume was considered gauche.

Time was ticking down and the silence had already lasted too long. I had to say something.

“So,” I said. “When am I going to get to see these paintings of yours?”

“Oh yeah!” said Jerry. “That’s right! You came here to take a look at some of my paintings! I’m sorry, Ron. I kept yapping on and you must have been like ‘when is this guy gonna get on with it?”

From the way Jerry was rambling, I could tell he was nervous. I didn’t know why, but thought perhaps he was having second thoughts about showing off his paintings and was trying to stall.

“It’s all right,” I placated him. “Everything you’ve been telling me is actually really good to know. I’ve sort of been lost ever since I came here, but I don’t want to keep you up too late or anything.”

“Don’t be worried about that!” Jerry exclaimed. “It’s not like I have anywhere to be tomorrow morning. Unless you have somewhere to be tomorrow morning…”

“I don’t,” I said with a smile. “And it’s not like I’m tired or anything, so don’t worry about that.”

“Well,” said Jerry. “You could stick around here if you wanted. I’ve got an extra bedroom you could crash in and everything.”

“Sure,” I said. “That sounds great.”

It actually really did sound great seeing as how I was having a really good time with Jerry and didn’t really feel like waiting for a taxi at that time of the night.

“Awesome!” Jerry said. “We’ll make a slumber party out of it, then! Also, I feel really lame for just having called a friend crashing a ‘slumber party.”

I laughed at this. There are very few people who could look so good while being so awkward and Jerry was one of them. I finished my glass of water which Jerry took from me.

“Refill?” he asked.

I shook my head “no”.

“In that case, I’ll show you some of my paintings,” he said.

I allowed him to lead the way through a narrow hallway. The house was clearly on the older end of things. If I had to guess, it was probably built in the nineteenth century as indicated by the layout. I could see that there was a separate staircase leading outside from the back. Historically, this would have been so that the live-in maid could come and go without waking the rest of the family.

“You ever think about renting out a room in here?” I asked.

“Why? You looking to rent?” Jerry asked with a crooked smile.

“It’s just that there’s so many rooms in here that would work for a tenant,” I said. “You could turn quite the profit.”

Jerry sighed.

“Oh Ron,” he said. “Sweet, innocent, naïve Ron. I forget that you’re new to the city.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“The renting situation around here is not good to say the least,” Jerry explained. “The poverty rate is higher than ever even though the city tries to cover it up.”

“That doesn’t make sense,” I said. “I’ve seen the rental prices for the places downtown. Some of them are higher than prime real estate in Southern California!”

“Yes,” Jerry agreed. “But what you don’t know is that very few of those apartments are occupied. The landowners downtown are trying to encourage a real estate boom by pretending there is one. They only need to rent out a few apartments to cover the cost of the buildings, anyway. However, for the rest of the city, things are far more complicated than that. We’ve got landlords around here who buy up properties on the west side, never bother to keep up with the code and when they get fined, they never pay them.”

“And they get away with that?” I asked.

“By the time the city seizes the property, they’ve bought up several more properties with the money they’ve made off of renting to previous tenants,” Jerry explained. “The cycle continues, and they keep getting people to live on their properties because so many people are just too poor to live anywhere else.”

My jaw clenched as I compared the situation to what was going on with Fresh Face. Their flagship location was in one of the poorest neighborhoods in town where no one who lived in the vicinity could afford it. It made me wonder if there were a handful of people making all the major decisions about who was allowed to buy, sell, work and live in the city. The thought made me feel a little like a conspiracy theory nut, but it was something that had been known to happen before. I resolved to look into what was going on in the background.

In the meantime, however, I was having a really good time spending the night with Jerry. It was the first time I had an enjoyable time to myself since arriving in the city and it was doing wonders for my state of mind. Everything seemed much less grim even when we were talking of sad or rage-inducing topics and for whatever reason, I felt taller as if my posture improved when I was around him.

He led me into a spacious room that smelled of paint. He didn’t lie; his work room was really cluttered, but I stopped noticing the errant dirty dishes and empty soda cans when I saw the paintings.

I had never seen anything like them before. Each one was an intricate study in whatever subject he had chosen.

I slowly approached them with the sense of reverence one holds when approaching an altar at church.

“All these are yours?” I asked. “Right?”

“Yeah…” said Jerry.

He was trying to play things cool, but I could tell he was nervous from the way he shifted his feet to and fro. It was adorable, and it took all my personal sense of restraint not to immediately tell him how much I adored every single one of them.

It’s not that I didn’t adore the paintings. They were an eclectic mix of subjects from people to tree stumps to fairy stones. I could tell what each and every single one of them were. They weren’t photorealistic, but they weren’t abstract either. There was something more truthful about Jerry’s paintings than any other collection of paintings I had ever seen before.

I was jealous of the lucky few people he had chosen to paint, only in a different way than I was before. It wasn’t that these people were so exceptionally beautiful that they wouldn’t be out of place on the cover of a magazine (even though that was the case with a few of them), it’s that Jerry saw something about them that was incredibly compelling that might have been missed had someone like myself merely been passing by. Whether it was a flash of light in their eyes, the curve of their jawline as they cocked their head in wonder or the way they bent over to pick up trash matched the exact curvature of the sun, they were like natural inhabitants of a mystical world where everything was beautiful.

In fact, based on all the paintings I saw, everything in Jerry’s world was beautiful. I turned to him.

“Is this what the world looks like to you?” I asked. “I mean, the way it is in these paintings.”

Jerry shrugged.

“Some of it, more or less,” he said. “I mean, I try to only paint things that I find beautiful, so the collection of my work is biased in a certain direction.”

I could see that. Even things that might have been written off by the average viewer, like a stain on the sidewalk or a broken window glimmering in the light of a rising sun were beautiful. I thought I might know what Jerry may have been feeling as he painted them and it was a feeling that could only be described as beautiful.

“Have you ever tried to paint something that made you feel ugly?” I asked. “I mean, I know it seems like a silly question, but haven’t you ever wondered what it would be like.”

Jerry let out an aggravated little laugh and looked down. His eyes were so incredibly sad as if he were remembering a grandparent’s funeral.

“It’s funny that you should ask,” Jerry answered. “Because I have. Almost everything I draw at work makes me feel that way.”

The way Jerry announced this made me feel sick. I was half curious to ask to see what he has drawn for work, but I didn’t do so out of respect. I doubt I would have liked what I saw, anyway.

“Believe it or not,” I said. “I think I know how you feel.”

From that point, I continued to allow my eyes to peruse the acrylic feast laid before them in silence. There was something sacred about the moment and I was in no mood to disregard that.

Besides, I don’t think either one of us wanted to acknowledge the implicit vulnerability of the moment. We were destined to be close friends, Jerry’s confession made that much apparent, but we were still just getting to know one another. I wasn’t sure if vulnerability was something grown men shared with one another very often, especially all the way out in the Midwest.

My eyes fell upon a particular painting, making me stop right in my tracks. It depicted bedsheets, white as snow, rumpled and laying in the dim light of what I could only imagine was the sun being filtered through a shaded window.

“Did you paint this here?” I asked Jerry.

When I failed to hear him answering my question, I glanced over in his direction to see if he was still with me. He was nodding to indicate an affirmative answer and I understood why he did this rather than speaking the answer out loud. There was something so intimate about the soul of the piece and it was almost embarrassing, though I couldn’t tell anyone why. It just was.

It made me blush and look down.

“I really like it,” I said.

Jerry’s voice was small and a little reedy, like a child’s.

“Yeah?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I whispered, eyes still glued to the hardwood floor. “I can’t say why, I just… do.”

Admitting as much evened things out a little bit. It was a vulnerable painting and I felt as if I had seen a part of Jerry heretofore unknown to me. It was only fair that he knew how it made me feel.

“It’s just…” I started to say how it made me feel, but I couldn’t finish. “I don’t have the right words.”

“That’s okay,” said Jerry. “Neither do I.”