ALIZARIN CRIMSON

He always feels a bit sick standing in front of 114 Theodore Street. But it isn’t the peeling, sun-bleached paint that makes Jonah’s stomach churn, nor the four flights of stairs he walks up in the scorching heat, Tupperware tucked under his arm and dripping sweat in his white three-piece suit. No—it’s the building’s name itself. Paradise Towers.

What a sham. It was like some property baron saw this square of land between all the other beige apartment buildings in Phoenix and thought you know what? There’s something about this place. This isn’t any old Rising Sun Residence or Saguaro Suites. This is paradise right here, and I’m gonna paint this sucker brown to prove it.

And hell, it worked. The place is full of all kinds of people: ponytailed women clutching last decade’s iPhone, rushing down the metal stairs to their carpool below; retirees sitting beside the dirt-crusted pool, flipping through paperbacks whose spines are as worn as their own; and people like his mother, who never leave their apartments except to grab deliveries or take the bus to doctor’s appointments. His mother, who could have been living in a place that deserved to be called “paradise” had she not been possessed by the same type of spirit that makes someone kick puppies or spit in the faces of children.

He stops at her door and wipes his feet on the mat. At one point it had said “Welcome,” but now it says “come,” and he scrapes hard at the letters because there’s nothing inviting about this place and they shouldn’t lie about it. The building’s name is enough of a lie as it is.

Out of the peephole’s sight, he starts his exercise. He grimaces at her scuffed, maroon door, contorts his face into the most grotesque expressions he can muster, his jaw tight and teeth clenched and lips pulled back. And then he relaxes.

When his therapist had first told him to try the exercise, he’d argued that it would cause premature wrinkles. But then his therapist told him he already had wrinkles and they would only get worse if he spent every visit to his mother’s apartment squeezing his muscles like he was trying to pop a baby out of who-knows-where.

So he fired him. But he was right—the exercise does help.

He settles his lips into a soft smile and rings the bell. It opens just a crack.

“Who are you?” says his mother’s roommate, Clarissa, her pointy nose barely visible behind the door chain. She’s in her forties, with splotches of freckles on her cheeks and receding gums and a different fitness watch on either wrist—in case one is “a little off,” she’d told him once.

“You know me,” says Jonah, and he holds up the cupcakes he bought on his way over, disguised in Tupperware as home baked. “I’m Judith’s son. The real estate agent?”

She shakes her head.

“The one who had you guys over for dinner last Thanksgiving?”

Her eyes are like loading icons, and then her giant mouth opens into a grin. “Ohh, you’re the one with the fancy apartment! Of course I remember you, Joanie.”

“Just call me Jay.”

“That’s not what your mom calls you. She calls you Joanie.”

She slides open the lock and he toes out of his white leather loafers in the one-by-one square of linoleum that the floor plan has the audacity to call a “foyer”. When he’d helped his mother find this place and the agent had used the word “foyer” to describe what was no more than a designated shoe receptacle, he’d started wheezing, almost choking, and the agent had threatened to call the paramedics. If they didn’t want people to laugh, why call it that?

But his mother didn’t mind the false advertising or the kitchen from the 80s or the south-facing windows or the smoke-stained walls—or the fact that she still couldn’t afford a two-bedroom apartment without roommates, so they signed the lease and he didn’t put himself down as guarantor.

Which is why he’s here in the first place.

His mother is in the kitchen, piddling around with her back to him, as if he can’t see her through the cut-out and as if she hasn’t heard any of his conversation with Clarissa. But maybe her hearing’s going. Or maybe she just doesn’t listen, and he can’t fault her for that. Sometimes people aren’t worth listening to.

“Judith,” Clarissa calls her way, passing by the kitchen. “Your kid’s here. Why didn’t you tell me he was coming? I woulda put on jeans or something.”

“Who?” She turns around and her bird’s nest of blonde hair falls into her eyes. There’s red paint on her palm and she squints at him even though her glasses are around her neck. “Oh. Well, I didn’t know he was coming either. What are you doing here, Jay? I told you to call before dropping by—I’ve really got a lot of things to do and I can’t just stop everything to chat with you.”

He drapes his white suit coat across the back of the paisley couch and points to the calendar that’s taped to the fridge. “I wrote it here so you wouldn’t forget.”

“Well, I forgot.” She turns away from him again and scrubs her hands with Dawn. “And I just finished painting, so I’ve got a lot to clean up and if I let the paint sit on my brushes it’ll just take me ages to scrape it all off, ages really, and I don’t have that kind of time. I mean look at your dad—I don’t want to be in some nursing home with arthritis and think ‘Oh, I should’ve painted more but I spent all my time cleaning up, and now my hands hurt too much to me to lift my damn spoon to my mouth,’ you know what I mean Jay, you know what I mean?”

“I know what you mean, mom. Let me help you clean up.”

“It’s a mess in there, I don’t think you need to see that.” She eyes the Tupperware. “What do you have? Just put that on the counter here and go on home to your…”

She stops drying her hands on the stained dish towel and looks away. Purses her lips. Smacks them. “You know.”

And he does know. But this is what the cupcakes are for, and he peels off the lid and puts them on the counter. Lemon drizzle with crystallized citrus on top. They don’t even make his stomach rumble, he’s so sick inside from what he’s about to say, but his mother reaches for one with her arm out as far away from her as possible.

“I’m not seeing him anymore,” he says, and though it’s a lie, it hurts like a bee sting to the tongue. “I broke up with him last month. I think you’re right about all this. People like him aren’t for me.”

She takes a big bite of the cupcake and chews slowly with her mouth open, frosting all over her thin, pale lips. She swipes her tongue around and swallows. “You mean… you’re seeing women now?”

“A woman.” But goddammit, he hasn’t been with a woman since he was sixteen and he’s never wanted to be with one since he brought home that boy from soccer practice. He stayed the night and they slept in the same bed because the floor was too hard, but his twin bed was only big enough for one person, and they were so, so close that night, and Jonah was so, so entranced by the way his chest moved in the moonlight and the way their bodies were so similar and the way it felt when the hair on their legs brushed up against each other, and no mom, no, we didn’t do anything that night I swear. I don’t like boys, I promise.

But the next week, he still had bruises to show for it.

“What’s her name?” says his mother, and she puts on her glasses as if she needs to see him 4k to believe what he says. “And why haven’t I met her yet?”

He can hear Clarissa’s open-mouthed breathing in the hallway. “Can we go in your room to talk about this?”

She finishes her cupcake and washes her hands again, the cardinal-red pigment swirling down the drain. “Alright, come on.”

They pass by Clarissa, who ducks into the bathroom and closes the door, but he knows she has her ear pressed against the wood like every other time they’ve retreated to his mother’s room to talk. Only this time there will be no yelling and Clarissa will have nothing to gossip about—nothing except his lie.

His mother’s room is more studio than sleeping quarters. Two easels stand opposite her metal-framed bed, tucked away from the window so the globs of oil paint don’t dry too fast and crack. The thin carpet is covered with an off-white tarp, and the walls are studded with sketches of people he vaguely recognizes. His grandfather. Clarissa. Even their old beagle, Woody.

But there’s no sketch of him, not even a picture on her bedside table, which is instead full of cups of grey oil and trays of paintbrushes thick with pigment. He rolls up the sleeves of his white Burberry button-up and picks up a brush between two fingers, feeling its weight. How much effort would it take for her to paint one damn picture of him? Has she ever even thought about it? Maybe there are sketchbooks and canvases of him as a child hidden under her bed. Or has he always been this thing in his mother’s life, this burden, this creature she tried to ignore but was forced to feed and clothe and take care of in the most basic sense of the phrase?

It’s one thing to be an accident. It’s another to be a mistake.

“Be gentle with that brush,” she says, and she hands him a silver can. “These things aren’t cheap, and I’m on a fixed income, you know.”

He pops open the can of mineral spirits and loses a few brain cells. “Christ. You use this stuff with the windows shut?”

“It’s hot out.”

He opens them anyway and perches the can on the windowsill, dunks the brush into the paint thinner and swirls it around. She does the same on the opposite side of the room, nowhere near the window, eyeing him with flat lips.

“So, what’s her name?”

He gazes at the multicolored liquid and pulls out the brush, wipes it on a rag. “Her name’s Jessica. You haven’t met her yet because we’ve only been dating a month.”

“A month—that’s good.” But when his one-year anniversary with Andy had passed, she’d told him it was nothing and the relationship was hardly more than a friendship. Relationships take time. And there’s no point in wasting your time on a man that will leave you for a woman the moment one comes around. “Tell her I want to meet her. We can go to one of those restaurants by your apartment. The steakhouse—she likes steak, right?”

“That place is expensive.”

“Don’t lay that brush flat, you have to hang it to dry.”

“Did you hear me?”

“Did you hear me?”

He puts the brush on a pegboard that takes up half of one wall, and it drips onto the tarp below. “Steak dinners are expensive.” He reaches into his back pocket and pulls out an envelope. “Remember last month? I told you all these little things add up. The paint, the brushes, the food, the appointments—the rent.”

She scurries over and he hands her the envelope. She tears it open, looks at the check, and nods several times. “Right. Well, that’s why you’ve got to be gentle with the brushes. I’m telling you, if you ruin those brushes, you’re just throwing away money. But I don’t need any more brushes this month.”

“And you don’t need a steak dinner either.”

“You know,” she says, sliding the check into her nightstand drawer, “you’d have a lot more money if you stopped paying for that nursing home.”

“I don’t want to talk about this again.” He turns away from her, picks up a handful of brushes and dunks them in the spirits.

“I’m just saying. He doesn’t have to stay at Broadstone Estates. There are plenty of cheaper options around here, and then you’d have a lot more money to spend on yourself and your girlfriend and—”

“Don’t be envious of him. You had your chance at a nice place.” A duplex all to herself, courtesy of an outrageous commission he’d earned. But she’d said no.

“Envy?” She scoffed. “He’s practically dead. I don’t envy living in a home full of walking corpses.”

And a little part of him wishes she was dead too, an angry thorn in his belly, one that prods at his insides and makes him wish he’d never come here. What the hell was he thinking? That he would live the rest of her life being someone else? That he would rent a fake girlfriend off Craigslist and his mother would believe that it was anything more than a screenplay, a business transaction, a reason for her to stop hating him for who he was? A reason for her to love him again.

But she never really loved him, did she? Who could love their worst mistake?

He hangs up the other brushes and wipes his hands on a clean rag, his skin stained with reds and yellows. “Look, mom—I’m trying to help you, and you’re not making it easy.”

Her jaw hangs open, then snaps shut. “Geeze, I was just telling you how I like my brushes cleaned. If you don’t want to help, then go on home, but you’re the one who said—”

“It’s not about the brushes and you know it.” His muscles start to tighten and he crosses his arms, squeezes his chest and lets out a long breath. “I thought you wanted me to find a woman. Aren’t you happy for me? Or happy at all?”

The room is silent save for the clink of brushes against metal, and his phone buzzes in his pocket.

“You can answer that. I don’t mind.”

“Mom, this is the one time I don’t fu—don’t care about work.” Was he wrong to expect something from her? A hug, a smile, anything? “Why aren’t you happy for me?”

“I am happy for you.”

“You look miserable.”

She drops a brush into the spirits and finally looks at him, idly shaking her head and gesturing with one hand as if she wants him to just disappear. “I’m not. But you know… this doesn’t make up for what you put me through.”

“What did I put you through?” He feels himself start to come apart, unfolding like an origami swan, all creased and crumpled. “I was living my life. You weren’t even a part of it.”

“You didn’t give me a chance.”

“I did!”

She flinches. And for a moment he wonders about Clarissa, wonders what she and his mother will talk about once he’s gone, wonders what she thinks of all the half-conversations she’s heard and who she really cares about—but she doesn’t even know his name. She must only know him by the sound of his raised voice, and when it starts it doesn’t stop.

He takes a step forward, points his finger at her. “Why else do you think I come here? I keep trying and trying, but all you want is money!”

Her body thumps against the wall behind her, pressed into it with her arms wrapped around herself, and he can’t stop it, can’t keep his mouth from moving and the spit from flying out.

“I missed Thanksgiving with Andy’s family because of you. They think I’m some kind of absent boyfriend, like I don’t exist. And you won’t even look at me! Come on, mom. You’d be on the street without me. Don’t you care about me? Even a little? Look at me!”

She doesn’t, and he comes right up to her, raises his hand, and then—she’s trembling. The papers behind her crinkle with her tiny movements, tangled hair in front of her face, the figure of a sixty-five-year-old woman who is hardly his mother, but rather a lost and terrified soul just like he is.

He puts his hand down. “Mom.”

She’s quiet.

“Mom. Mom, look at me.”

She won’t. He takes a step back and looks around and—what happened here? Cups of dirty oil are splattered on the tarp, brushes are everywhere, papers have fallen to the floor. Her canvas is torn and tossed in the corner. Her bedspread is smeared with alizarin crimson paint. His hands are covered in it.

The sick feeling is back, and he turns around. Clarissa stares at him in the open doorway, her hands in front of her mouth, her eyes bulging and unblinking, and he pushes past her. He grabs his coat in the living room and paint rubs off on it, and in the “foyer” he slips on his shoes, staggering from one side to the other.

He reaches for the doorknob.

“Don’t come back,” says Clarissa, her voice tight. “I’ll call the cops if you do.”

“You don’t even know who I am.”

“I won’t forget you now.”

His oily hands slip on the knob and he yanks the door open, flies down the staircase and leaves paint on the handrail, bumps into that ponytailed-girl on his way to the parking lot, where his BMW waits for him under the cover of a carport, still running with the AC on. The doors unlock before he can even pull out his keys, and he wipes his hands on his pants because this car is new, and he can’t ruin another thing in his life with crimson and ichor.

He falls into the passenger’s seat and Andy revvs the engine. On the fourth-floor balcony, Clarissa leans over the railing and swings her head from side to side. Jonah curls up in the seat and turns his palms toward himself, sweat trapped between beads of oil, pigments nestled in the crevices of his skin.

“What happened to you?” says Andy.

“I don’t know,” he whispers.

But he does know. And they drive off toward his apartment, with its white walls and white carpet and white furniture, not a speck of beige to be found. And he never looks back, not because of Clarissa or the police, but because he knows he’s the reason Paradise Towers has never lived up to its name.

But maybe now it will.