Red flags

A break-up story

When he gave me his key, I added it to the chain I already had, and every time I got home late I would fumble with the clanky bundle. I’d try my old key in the new door, which would fit but not turn—the resistance telling me I had the wrong one between my thumb and index finger.

I couldn’t describe it at the time, but this presented me with a feeling of deep uneasiness. Within a couple of years, though, I was always getting the right key on the first attempt, and that uneasiness faded. Or maybe it was just the strange illusion of confidence that comes with routine.

You know how sometimes at dusk everything almost looks like it’s in black and white? This guy (the one who gave me his key) and I were walking around Philbrook’s rose garden on one of those nights, sometime in very early spring, just before the roses are supposed to bloom. Suddenly, sneaking out from the black-and-white landscape, I spotted it, the very first of the season’s fat red blossoms. Their contrast was startling—like one of those “touch of color” photographs, which always look tacky and weird in real life. 

“Look!” 

“What?”

“Those. The roses.”

“I can’t see them.”

“How? They’re so red.”

“Oh, I’m color-blind. I can’t see shades of red. I mean, it’s hard to distinguish them from green and sometimes they look brown. I think sometimes greens look gray, too.”

“So what color is my hair?”

“Brown.”

But my hair was red. That uneasy feeling came back. If my life were a novel, maybe something Eudora Welty-esque, what would this mean? I came up with a couple of ideas: 

a) His inability to register the color of my hair means he is not seeing a part of me, and therefore can never truly know me.

b) Red is nature’s symbol for danger, and sometimes poison, which is why, I think, animals are biologically inclined to fear red. What if I’m somehow toxic, and he can’t tell because of a color-identifying disability that makes him vulnerable?

He didn’t understand why I became so upset that night. 

Eventually, as most couples do, we broke up. And then, as sometimes happens, we got back together. 

When I decided to move back in, we planned to fix up the living room. Fresh paint on the walls and a new floor. It was something we would do together: rebuild our living room as a way to rebuild our relationship. Truly, a daunting task.

But we didn’t realize how difficult this would be. Peeling back one layer of ugly brown paint only revealed another layer of garish gray. Then, beneath that, some tawdry floral wallpaper from the early 1990s emerged. All those layers. 

Just as my knuckles started to bleed from scraping them against the wall, I realized my metaphor had turned against me. I wondered if, when we finished this project, every time I came home I’d have to recognize that everything was different from before. And if the room turned out looking terrible, I didn’t know what I would do, or what that would even mean. 

But we were too far into this to stop now. I didn’t know about sunk costs back then. I could tell he didn’t really want to bust through all our layers of paint and wallpaper. We gave up after one wall was completely stripped and re-painted, and said screw it to the rest. We added an extra coat of primer so it would look even enough and felt bad for the next tenant who might want a fresh start. We’d just added another layer she’ll have to scrape off. 

We stood in the empty room. The walls, still drying, had not yet acquired any dings or smudges. It was finally time to peel back the brown carpet, a gross mosaic of stains and holes, years of cigarette stink and ash, skin cells, and all the other microscopic dead things that collect under our nails and on our sneakers. 

We ripped it all out. That part felt good. 

My heart sank when we saw what was underneath: a cement foundation with a huge crack running down the middle. We fell into it, it was so enormous.