I’ll be reading this weekend, of course — Gene Hackman (yes, THAT Gene Hackman, he of “The French Connection”) and Daniel Lenihan are coming to Lexington later in June to promote their book, Escape From Andersonville: A Novel of the Civil War. So far, I can tell you: It starts with a lengthy description of the smell of blood. So there will be blood — and also gut-spilling death, bullying and some of the worst prison conditions ever. I’m up to the initial escape, which reminds me how very much I hate the idea of being in any kind of tunnel, anywhere, anytime.
But I’m also painting my 17-year-old daughter’s room while she’s far, far away. It’s now a color called “swimming pool,” which is the sort of blue-green that seems to smell like a hot chlorinated day from even down the hall. I can surely understand why she wanted to get away from the bubble-gum pink walls that were there when we moved in — complete with a hand-painted, glitter-studded castle that consumed an entire wall. But why not emo black? That you can accessorize with.
(By the way, I did an article a while back about Beth Harper, aka The Lone Rearranger. One of Beth’s decorating rules is: No white ceilings. Initially, I was skeptical about this idea. But having had the chance to skip the white ceilings on several occasions now, I am here to testify: No only do the walls seems to flow together better, it’s infinitely easier to paint if you’re not constantly trying to avoid the wall color-ceiling paint overlap. Aesthetics is always best when it facilitates laziness.)
Don’t laugh — or laugh if you must — but I’m starting to believe that there are environments that encourage reading. Our living room never felt so comfortable to sustained bookishness until it got a coat of that Sherwin-Williams Irish Cream; I liked that color — beige in some lights, yellow in others — so much that I painted my bedroom as well, gleefully slinging paint over the, ahem, sponge-painting job that had bedeviled me for five years. (Remind me: Why did otherwise sane people think that sponge-painting was a good idea and indicative of fine style? Because when you look at it every day for years, it looks like nothing so much as the detritus on your dishes before you wash them. Done badly, sponge painting looks like a mudhole.)
When my kids were younger and I lived with a set of car keys in my hand at all times, there was a flute teacher who had a living and dining room that was a lovely, soothing color of peach. To this day, I associate blissful half-hours spent with Portrait of a Lady with the cool darkness of those rooms. Henry James to me means a nice subdued orange. I suspect that Edith Wharton, who was a decorator as well as a novelist, has some ideas on the subject; I’ll look them up.
So what color did I end up with? A clear bright blue called Sausalito. It’s not the vivid purple or electric orange or stop-sign red my daughter wanted, and I suspect there will be friction when I dismantle her 43-can Red Bull “art object”: We differ on the beauty of this. She calls it a monument to consumption, and I call it an invitation to rodent infestation.
Still, check back with me in a few weeks: I’ll let you know whether she’s settled down with Ian McEwan’s Atonement or Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News — items on the summer reading list for her English class – or whether Sausalito Blue is the kind of color that makes her remember just how much she has missed text-messaging and cable surfing. Also, constructing ”art” from energy drink cans.
I hope for the former, suspect the latter. This is how the teen years work.
