Color me frustrated

Naturally, the GWW text stresses the importance of revision. While your writing may seem pretty good the first time through, it will be one hundred percent better after the fourth or fifth re-write.

Of course, the same thing goes for many things in life. We were very happy with our last apartment, including its décor. However, with respect to our new apartment, we needed to revise our approach to getting to that end product.

When we moved into our old place, we decided to paint. We knew we’d be there for a few years, and thought it was worth it to go through the rigmarole, though it was just a rental. And so we went to Home Depot and chose paint for the living room, bathroom, and kitchen.

It was the first time in our marriage that we had the opportunity to choose colors for our living space. Naturally, we agreed upon almost nothing. The husband wanted Tuscan yellow in the living room. I wanted brown. He wanted navy in the bathroom. I wanted anything other than navy. I wanted red in the kitchen. He wanted anything other than red.

But we compromised. The kitchen is my domain; I got to choose the color. That left my husband to choose the paint for the bathroom. We decided to sample both yellow and brown for the living room, and in the end, went with brown.

Right. Let’s paint.

But.

Um.

We weren’t unpacked. See, it is very difficult to unpack when your living space is small. There’s no place to spread out. You want to unload the box of large utensils but you have to put it to the side until you find the box with the container for large utensils. But there’s no space to put anything “to the side.”

In fact, our apartment looked like this:

We decided that if we were going to paint, we should probably just push everything to the center of the apartment and do it. If we waited until we were unpacked, it’d never get done.

But I was starting a new job. As was my husband. And we had moved to Manhattan, so we didn’t have a car. This made going to Home Depot and loading up on brushes and ladders and drop clothes challenging. To say nothing of the fact that there was no storage space for brushes and ladders and drop clothes when the painting was complete.

And that’s when we decided to bring in Willy.

Okay. So who is Willy? He is both a highly-skilled painter and a highly-functioning alcoholic. My father-in-law discovered him when he was preparing to sell his home. He politely describes Willy as “a character.”

Character. Vagrant. Same-same. To give you an idea, Willy doesn’t have a phone. In order to get in touch with him, it is necessary to call a saloon in Yonkers, NY. He gets his messages from the bartenders.

But he’s a good painter. And he doesn’t charge much.

And so it was that Willy arrived at our unpacked apartment at seven o’clock on the morning I was to begin my new job. I had just exited the shower and was in a bathrobe, so I quickly closed the door to the bedroom and dressed. My husband let him in and gave him instructions. He then left for the office. I emerged from my room to find Willy already at work, accompanied by the blaring AM radio.

Willy began assailing me with questions and stories. He had used the same brown on someone’s study up in Westchester. He missed seeing my father-in-law on a regular basis. He was almost done his novel and heard that I was good at proofreading.

You will recall that I was trying to get ready for my first day of a new job.

“Um, okay, Willy. You can send me your manuscript if you’d like.”
“Thanks, Actchy. It’s great to see you. You know, I was saying to your husband, it’s weird that I never have had the chance to meet your folks.”

Whaaaa? My parents? Um, yes. It is weird that I haven’t introduced my parents to my father-in-law’s painter.

On and on. Eventually, I was ready to go. I bade Willy farewell. But he stopped me.

“I think your husband forgot to leave me some money for lunch.”

Money for lunch? Does one give cash to one’s painter for his meals? Well, okay.
I looked in my wallet. I discovered $10.

“Willy, all I have is a ten. This should get you a sandwich at the bodega.”
“Perfect, Actchy. That’s all I need.”
“Okay. Well, there’s orange juice in the fridge if you’d like.”
“Oh, that’s okay. I had orange juice hours ago.”

Fast forward. Midway through the afternoon, my husband goes in to check on Willy, who was finished the living room and had begun the bathroom.

I receive a call from my sheepish husband.

“Well, the living room looks excellent. But the bathroom looks like the murder scene of one of the Blue Man Group. I’m not sure we can live with this sort of wild blue yonder.”

Wild blue yonder indeed. Hoo-boy: white tiles, and blue paint that was far darker than we ever dreamed.

I refrained from the “I told you so” dance. Sort of. And only because we determined we’d have the same problem with my red kitchen. So the kitchen stayed white.

We sent Willy out for a pastel blue that neither of us would’ve chosen but for the fact that we needed something fast, and hell, it matched a shower curtain that we already owned.

Problem corrected. No more Greek-flag-themed bathroom.

Finally I reached the end of the day. I was exhausted from meeting people and being on my best behavior and figuring out a new computer system. I got home to discover that Willy was done. In fact, he was paid and had left the premises by the time I got home.

And things looked…pretty damn good.

I went into my still-white kitchen.

Huh.

There were four empty 24 oz. cans of Bud Light next to my trash can.

Wow.

I did the math and realized that Willy had a liquid lunch with the sawbuck I gave him.

Well, okay. I mean, I knew he was a drinker. And the paint was no worse for his alcohol intake.

But then I looked in my fridge.

Missing were one half of a block of fancy imported Irish cheese and three of a five-pack of Italian sausages.

We had just moved in; we had almost no groceries. I had picked up the sausages and cheese so that we’d have something at home for dinner my first night of work. I was sort of in a quandary. I saw no evidence of cooking: no pots – dirty or clean. No plates. Had he eaten the sausages raw? Had he cooked them with no container in the microwave? Shudder.

And I then I saw my bottle of Chardonnay.

The bottle of Chardonnay was the last remaining bottle of a wedding gift from my best friend. She had sent us two great bottles of wine each month for six months. I had saved this one, and went through the effort of packing it with my overnight bag for safe transport in my car when we drove from Chicago to New York. It was a celebration bottle. We were going to open it on our first wedding anniversary, which was fast-approaching.

Now it was 50% empty.

And now I was angry.

I called my husband in a rage.

He talked me down. There was nothing we could do at that point, save to contact the pub in Yonkers and ask the bartenders to tell Willy to call me so that I could chew him out.

“For what it’s worth, I did tell Willy to help himself to whatever we had in the fridge.”

Okay. Fair enough. I mean, I had offered him orange juice, too. We didn’t have all that much in the fridge. Regardless, I wouldn’t think that an invitation like that would lead him to open the wine. He was the painter, not a freaking house guest. And really, what house guest opens a bottle of wine without asking?

And for that matter, how did he open the wine? I had absolutely no idea where our corkscrew was.

Amazing. Okay. Let it go.

I checked the freezer. It was with relief that I noted Willy had not defrosted the top tier of our wedding cake, which we had also saved for our first anniversary.

Revision: prior to our move to TriBeCa, I contacted a painter. I gave him the code for a paint color. I mailed him a check.

On moving day, Acey’s nursery was a soft, gentle green.

And our wine reserves were intact.