Cupid’s Painbrush
by Liz Starbuck
illustration by Shannon Purcell
Who is it who talked me into this? I must have suffered some severe lapse of acuity when I said I’d do it. It’s 7 o’clock in the morning and I’m watching 4000 shiny happy people doing jumping jacks in the Boston Common. I seem to be one of the few people here who has managed to avoid the contagion of this touching community spirit, this thousand-points-of-light or whatever our current administration is calling the happy, wholesome attitude that has gotten us all out here at this ridiculous hour. Jumping. Jeeezus Christ. All I can think is, “If any one of you spills my coffee, if any fucking one of you even threatens to touch my coffee, the carnage begins.”
That’s my community spirit. In a high school flashback, I wonder which is more difficult: Conjuring the required enthusiasm to join the party or facing the unpleasant realization that I’m being sullen, bitchy, and a really bad sport. As usual, cheap knee-jerk leftist politics comes to my aid: what kind of militaristic behavior modification routine are they trying to work us over with anyway?
Actually, I do know why I said I’d do it. I’m sick of my life and I’m sick of everyone I know. I wanted to meet people I wouldn’t meet in, say, Central Square. It’s just my luck that they’ve put me in a group which consists of a small handful of friends and friends-of-friends, and an entire fraternity of business school students. Thanks. Thanks very much.
So they send us off to South Boston to paint the office of a housing project. And I admit that as I start to paint, I’m really getting into it. There’s a kind of Zen to dipping the paintbrush in the paint can just deep enough, and then sliding it across a window sash, holding it at the perfect angle so it passes smoothly along the edge of the pane without touching it. They’re blasting ‘FNX and even though the music totally sucks it’s appropriate for this activity, “shiny happy people painting, shiny happy people painting, shiny happy people painting walls…” I’ve phased everyone out so I get to partake in one of my favorite pastimes: Pointedly ignoring future corporate clone assholes.
There’s one guy here who seems a little different from the others – pleasant, good-natured, with a functional mind and a healthy distaste for investment banking. I talk to him for a few minutes during lunch and try to well up some sexual interest just for the sake of the argument, but he’s really tall and a bit too gawky for me. He has kind of a nice mouth, but most of his face is eyebrow. Oh well. A decent guy at least.
As the afternoon wears on, the shiny people start to slough off and lose interest in their well-meaning community-minded ideals and leave their paintbrushes to atrophy in the trays. I’m still caught up in the catharsis of the paint, so when the job is done and all the masking tape peeled away, I’m not quite ready to pack up and go (nor do I want to hang out and talk venture capital). I start to collect all the brushes and trays left to ruin by my spoiled coworkers.
As I’m walking through the office collecting tools, I run across my friend from lunch, who has donned a bandanna to keep the paint out of his hair. I don’t know why, but a little bell goes off in my head and my internal Cupid – or Dionysus more likely – says, “Hey, this guy looks kinda cute with that thing on his head.” Uh-oh. The wheels are turning.
I take the brushes and trays into the little bathroom at the end of the hall. Starting to wash the brushes one by one in the sink, I try not to get paint all over myself, but it’s kind of hopeless. I dump everything in the tub, start to run the water, and plunge my hands wrist-deep into the mass of gloppy paint. Running my fingers between the brush bristles I start to develop a true appreciation for the texture of the latex; smooth and viscous, it slides over my hands like a skin of wet silk. The bandanna guy is still nestled in my mind somewhere and there is some intangible tension building between my thought of him still working down the hall and the feeling of the slippery paint on my skin. Hurriedly, I rinse my hands off and bolt out of the bathroom. Now I’m on a mission.
I look in each of the rooms to the right and left of the hallway, but I don’t see him. The idea is firmly planted in my head and if I don’t find him or if he resists me I don’t know what I’m going to do; a sacrificial virgin will have to be found. When I get clear down to the end of the hall and there’s only one room left, I start to panic a little. I turn the corner into the room. Oh. Okay. There he is. I’m crunching down every shoot of trepidation but they’re sprouting faster and faster: keep moving. I stride over to him.
“You’re not shy are you?” I say.
“Uh, well, no, I don’t think so.”
“Come with me.” I grab his hand. I pull him behind me as I walk back down the hall quickly. This is the longest hall I have ever been in. “Come on, hurry.”
We get into the bathroom, and I close the door. He is looking at me like I’m insane, but he’s smiling. Good, he has his sleeves rolled up. I immerse my hands deep in the thick paint in one of the trays and smear it all over my hands and wrists. Like a mother washing her child, I take his hands and work the paint all over them, between his fingers, across his palms and the backs of his hands and part way up his lower arms. He’s grinning at me as his fingers start to move, smoothing and kneading the paint into my hands. He pulls me toward him and envelops my mouth in his mouth, plunging his tongue down into my throat. Our tongues explore and slip around each other’s tongues as our fingers slide and entangle. Hurriedly I steal my hands from his to undo his shirt buttons and I turn away quickly to take more paint into my hands, then smear it over his chest. He slides my shirt up, pushing my bra above my breasts, and we crush our bodies together, rubbing and smearing the slippery paint all over each other. He reaches to get a handful of paint and massages it smoothly into my breasts, then squeezing them and pinching the nipples. When he bends down slightly I can see that it’s his instinct to take a breast into his mouth, but he hesitates and we snicker. I go to bite his lower lip just as there’s a banging on the door: “Anyone in there?” We freeze, on the edge of bursting out laughing.
“Yeh, just a minute!”
We lunge at each other’s mouths, and with them glued together, try to adjust our clothing over the sticky, drying skin of the paint on our chests. Now we are laughing, trying to maintain as much oral contact as we can while turning the taps on full blast and washing our own and each other’s hands. We straighten out, step back from each other and look down at our bodies, shaking our heads. We’re a mess. Our clothes are stuck onto us rakishly and there’s paint all over them. “Oh well,” he shrugs, so I open the door. We walk out as nonchalantly as we can manage under the gaping stares of some of the future masters of industry.