Four
Attraction
Scottsdale, 20 March 1989
Samantha had called him up at work. It was a rare occurrence; usually she was too busy during the day to even have the time to make a call.
‘Let’s go to the Botanical Garden after work,’ she had suggested. ‘I want to get a couple of plants. You like plants, don’t you?’
‘Sure I do, but what about your no pets, no plants rule?’
‘That was when we first arrived in Scottsdale, when I thought we might move on.’
She had hesitated.
‘I take your point about my Lady of Guadalupe, okay?’ she said, sounding a little defensive. ‘I thought we could get something for you. I remember you said you’d like some plants a few years ago . . .’
She had broken off, and he could hear someone talking to her.
‘I have to go, Lewis. I’ve a parent–teacher conference. See you later.’
Lewis had pondered over his wife’s change of heart. She had always been so resistant to getting any plants – especially cacti, which she claimed made her nervous because of their spines.
‘Knowing me I’ll end up speared by one,’ she had always said.
But since he had thrown that statue away, instead of getting mad he’d noticed Samantha clearing out a few of her kitsch ornaments. She had removed the skulls and beadwork from the bedroom, as well as taking down the Kahlo painting from the living room. She was making small changes. He wondered why.
The desert gardens were a revelation. They were visiting at a time when all the wildflowers were blooming. Before he came to live in Arizona, Lewis had always imagined it as this dust bowl America with hardly any greenery at all. How wrong he had been. He had learned that irrigation had transformed Scottsdale into good farming country. Indeed the first white men to move here had been cattle farmers, drawn by its fertility. Surrounding the city there were still cotton fields, hazy white ground clouds that sometimes took him back to snowy days when he was a child in England.
Lewis and Samantha wandered into a section of the gardens devoted to wildflowers. He instantly recognised the Mexican gold poppies, and the scorpion weed, or desert bluebells; different yet reminiscent of the bluebells in his childhood woods, but there were so many more flowers. All different sizes, shapes and colours. He read the signage beside them: lupin, desert chicory, penstemon and globe mallow. These wildflowers appealed to him so much more than the cultivated garden flowers of his childhood – dahlias or roses. The wildflowers were fragile, yet wild, and seemed to speak their own beauty rather than exist to please. Butterflies fluttered around them, but even more thrilling to see were the hummingbirds. He watched one feeding on a hanging red columbine flower. It reminded him of that vision of Joy Sheldon outside the gallery last week, and her connection with the tiny bird.
‘Look at the hummingbird,’ he said to Samantha, but his wife was distracted, glancing at her watch.
‘Lewis, I’m sorry; I just remembered I forgot to pick up some marking. Do you mind if I run over to the school and come back to collect you?’
‘Can’t we go together after?’
‘Well, it saves time this way,’ she said. ‘I’ve a lot of marking to do tonight.’
‘You know, it was your idea to come here,’ he grumbled.
‘I’m sorry.’ Samantha bit her lip. ‘Just get what you want.’
She looked tired. He was being too hard on her. He knew how devoted a teacher she was, always putting in extra hours. He should be supportive, glad that she had intended sharing the evening with him, even if it hadn’t worked out.
After Samantha had gone, he headed towards the garden shop. As he followed the winding path he noticed a woman bending down and removing a candy wrapper that had been speared onto a small shrub. She was wearing a large, wide-brimmed denim hat, but something about her seemed familiar.
She straightened up and he recognised her immediately, even from the back. It was Joy Sheldon, dressed in jeans and those fabulous blue cowboy boots, her curvaceous figure hugged by a violet T-shirt speckled with white flowers. She hadn’t seen Lewis, and he wondered if it was best to sneak away.
Yet he found himself watching her again. There was humility in how she stood, hands clasped behind her back, silently observing nature. This humility was a quality neither his wife nor Marnie possessed. He looked at Joy’s long black hair, cascading over her shoulders from beneath the brim of the hat, and he had an urge to run his hands through it.
He wondered whether he should say hello, or maybe that would embarrass her, or it would be awkward because he had clearly been flirting with her the last time he’d seen her and they were, after all, both married. He really should retreat, but just as he was about to do this she turned round. It was clear she saw him, immediately blushing, her pale cheeks blooming.
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Hello again. It’s you.’
‘Hi,’ he said, feeling like an idiot. ‘Nice to see you. How are you?’
‘Fine,’ she said, her voice a little shaky. Was she shy of him? ‘I love coming here. Actually I volunteer occasionally.’
‘I didn’t know you could do that.’
She took a step towards him, clutching her bag between her hands. ‘Yes, my dad and I used to do it together.’
A small cloud passed over the sun and everything fell into shadow. He pushed his sunglasses on top of his head and smiled at her. ‘It’s my first time.’
‘Have you been on the original desert trail yet?’
He shook his head.
‘Let me show you,’ she offered, not catching his eye. ‘Do you have time?’
Joy led Lewis along the Garden’s main trail. Despite having lived in Arizona for fifteen years, he had no idea there was such a diverse array of cacti.
‘I only ever notice the big saguaros, the prickly pears and the organ pipe cacti. They remind me of the old cowboy movies I saw as a boy.’
‘What about the barrel cactus?’ Joy asked, indicating a clump of round, bulging cacti. ‘I love it when they bloom. The colours are so vibrant.’
‘What do they look like?’
‘I’ll find you one that’s flowering,’ she said, searching the banks of cacti on either side of the trail. ‘Here you go.’ She pointed further ahead to the right-hand side of the path.
He looked at the flowering barrel cacti, the cup like orange flowers on the top of its head.
‘They look like chicks in a nest, opening up their mouths for a feed,’ he commented.
‘Oh yes, they do.’ She smiled at him.
They paused at the cafe to buy glasses of iced tea. It was hot for March, and the sun was still beating down upon his head although it was well after five. He wished he had put a hat on like Joy.
‘So what brought you to the Garden today?’ Joy asked him.
‘Actually I came with my wife,’ he said, feeling self-conscious. ‘She had to leave. Work.’ He shrugged, trying to look casual. ‘I said I would buy some plants for our house and garden.’
‘Oh, that’s nice,’ she said, her cheeks pink again.
‘We’re trying to put the life back into our life,’ he said, immediately feeling stupid by how corny he sounded.
‘What do you want to get?’ She was clearly trying to steer the subject away from anything personal.
‘Something tough I suppose. I’m not great with plants.’
‘Well, for your garden maybe you should plant a lemon or orange tree, or even an olive tree?’ she suggested. ‘It’s hard for much else to survive the summer months without constant attention.’
‘What kind of plant would you recommend for inside the house?’
Her wide-brimmed denim hat almost concealed her blue eyes. Yet he searched them out. Who was Joy Sheldon? This sense of familiarity and yet his inability to remember was driving him mad.
‘I think some kind of succulent with bright flowers would be nice,’ she said. ‘Would you like me to help you pick some things?’
&
nbsp; ‘Do you have time?’
‘Sure,’ she said. ‘I’m just a housewife, you know. Not that busy, stopping over to my mom in a while, but I’ve time.’
He detected a slight edge to her voice. He got the feeling that she wasn’t too happy about being ‘just a housewife’, but maybe she was trying to be amusing.
For the first time in his life he really looked at plants. He had never had time for them before, but Joy managed to make him enthusiastic. He hadn’t liked cacti either because of Samantha, but in the end he found his shopping cart was loaded with the plants. He purchased a sunset aloe for the sitting room, and a selection of succulents for outside, plus a small orange tree for in front of their house.
‘Do you want to buy some crimson star columbine?’ Joy asked, holding up a fragile-stemmed plant with crimson trumpet petals.
‘Well, I’m not sure; I already have quite a lot . . .’
‘It will attract hummingbirds.’ She looked at him with hopeful eyes. ‘And how about this beaver tail with the pink flowers, and a claret cup cactus?’
He felt compelled to buy everything she suggested.
After he had bought a stack of plants, they stood awkwardly outside the garden centre for several long moments.
‘Thanks,’ Lewis said. ‘Our house and garden are going to be transformed. You know, you should do this for a living.’
Joy looked genuinely pleased. She was clutching a cactus with a white flower bursting out of its top. A birthday present for her mom, she had told him.
‘I love coming here so much.’ She took off her hat, and he could see all of her face now. He noticed that there was a new cluster of freckles on the apple of each cheek. ‘It’s my dream to set up my own nursery one day. I’ve even got a name – Hummingbird Nurseries I’d call it.’ She blushed, looking a little embarrassed. ‘But that’s all a bit of a far-fetched dream. Really I just love helping people create their own gardens.’
‘So I bet you have a great garden then?’ he asked her.
Her smile faded. ‘Actually no. Our pool takes up the whole of the backyard, and we’ve no room out the front. I used to have some flowers, an orange tree, but that’s all gone now. I’ve some cacti in pots on the porch.’
‘That’s a shame,’ he said.
‘Yeah.’ She looked uncomfortable all of a sudden, their earlier ease with each other gone.
‘Hang on,’ he said, reaching into his cart and grabbing one of the hummer-attracting columbine plants. ‘This is for you to start up your own garden again. Attract your own hummingbirds.’
She looked mortified. ‘Oh, but that’s for your garden.’
‘I insist,’ he said, thrusting it towards her.
She looked a little upset, and he wondered if he shouldn’t have been so forward.
‘Those invites will be ready on Wednesday,’ he said in farewell, pushing his cart away from her.
As he approached Samantha waiting for him in the car, he wondered if Joy was watching him, yet he didn’t dare turn around.
‘Who was that woman?’ Samantha asked as she helped him load the trunk with plants.
‘Just a customer,’ he said. ‘She’s getting some wedding invites done.’
His wife gave him a cool look. ‘You seemed a little too friendly for her to be a customer.’
‘She’s just ordered her wedding invites off me, Samantha!’ he said, stacking the plants in the trunk. ‘She knows a lot about plants. She helped me out in the store.’
‘I’ll say,’ Samantha grumbled. ‘You went a bit overboard, didn’t you? Just how many cacti did you buy?’
Why had he lied to his wife about the wedding invites? He had never cheated. Yet as Samantha drove them home he could not put Joy Sheldon from his mind. He kept seeing her blushing face underneath the shade of her denim hat, the shyness that he found so attractive. It was all this business of the postcards that was stirring him up. It was not Joy Sheldon he wanted but Marnie.
*
Joy watched Lewis as he walked away from her. He had given her a present. She knew it was a departing moment of generosity, but even so she could not remember the last time Eddie had given her anything. Well, actually that wasn’t true. She could, of course, but it was not a happy memory.
Lewis pushed his trolley through two rows of parked cars to stop by a mustard-yellow Cadillac. She saw a woman getting out of the car. Even from this distance Joy could see that she was pretty. She looked about the same age as her, maybe older, but well maintained, as her mother would say, with silky blonde hair and long, slim legs clad in white jeans.
Joy’s car was parked in the same row. She hesitated for a moment and then turned around. She walked as if with purpose to the far side of the car park, carefully carrying her mother’s Easter lily cactus, and the red columbine plant that Lewis had given her. By the time she had done a full circle and made it back to where her car was parked, Lewis and his wife had driven off. She took a breath; her shirt stuck to her skin with sweat.
Joy tried to work out her odd behaviour on the short drive over to her mom’s house. Why had she become so flustered at the thought of being introduced to Lewis’s wife? After all there was nothing going on between them. She had only met him a couple of times, and briefly. Why had she interfered and made him buy all those plants? Why had she forced Lewis Bell to buy the sunset aloe and the claret cup cactus for his living room, just because she liked them? She hadn’t told him how to care for them. What if he overwatered them, or placed them in the wrong spot, and the spines fell off the cactus, and the aloe leaves withered and died? What if his wife hated those two plants and threw them out? Joy could not bear to see plants neglected. All that potent life wasted through human thoughtlessness.
Their goodbye had been awkward and only had the effect of reminding her how upset she had been about the loss of her own little garden.
She’d had to give up her back garden years ago when they had a swimming pool put in. How would the kids have coped during those punishing hot summers without the pool?
The unspoken agreement between her and Eddie had been that the front of the house was hers. Of course most of the space was taken up by the garage, but she had an area to the side where she’d managed to grow some wildflowers from seed. Each spring it had got a little wilder, a mix of white daisy-like fleabane, purple arroyo lupin and pink Parry’s penstemon. In the midst of them had sat a large agave plant, and shading them all there’d been an orange tree. How glorious those spring mornings had been when the blossom was out and filling her house with the most divine fragrance. At the same time there had been oranges on the tree – the sweetest she had ever tasted.
It had all disappeared a year ago, the week before her father had died, and before he’d told her about the adoption. She had been sleeping over at her parents’ house for several days, but that long Sunday Joy had returned home. She had been feeling guilty for deserting Eddie and Heather, and leaving the cooking and cleaning all up to her daughter. Her father had seemed stable, his best friend Larry had arrived to spend the evening by his bedside and she knew that both she and her mom had needed a break from each other. She had been looking forward to collecting some oranges off her tree and sitting out back by the pool, sucking on their sweet juice.
At first she’d thought she was outside the wrong house. She had pulled up on the road and turned off the engine, her mouth suddenly dry with shock. She had listened to the slow ticking of the car as she’d looked up at the burnt sienna sky above her house, the sun sinking behind the roof. Then she had let her eyes drop again. Where was her wild garden? Where was the orange tree?
She had blinked. She couldn’t believe it. Whose garden was this? Every single wildflower had disappeared and in their place were orderly rows of red and yellow tulips. Worst of all was the fact that the orange tree was gone. In its place was a miniature artificial pond, a statue of a dancing cupid in its centre, with water trickling out of his mouth.
Joy had stumbled up the drive and stood
in shock before the garden. Where was her oasis?
She had felt anger surge up inside her. For the first time in years she was furious with her husband. She would not hold back this time. She had stormed up the steps and into the house, banging the door behind her.
‘Surprise!’
Her husband and daughter had been sitting at the table with grins on their faces. They were surrounded by vases, jugs, jam jars and even old tins, stuffed with all the wildflowers and orange blossom from her garden. Their last fragrant fanfare before they would inevitably wilt and be gone forever. The scent was overwhelming. In the middle of the table was an enormous fruit bowl, filled to the brim with oranges.
She had been thrown by this vision, back-footed. Before she could scream at Eddie and accuse him of murdering all her dear plants, Heather had jumped up from the table, her face bursting with excitement.
‘Do you like it?’ she had gushed.
She had stared at her daughter dumbfounded.
‘Do you like your new garden, silly?’ Eddie had said, grinning at her.
She had looked at her husband in shock. He really had no idea what he’d done. He’d actually thought she would be pleased.
‘Why didn’t you ask me?’ she’d managed to whisper, her anger dissipating.
‘We wanted to give you a surprise,’ Heather had said to her. ‘Something to cheer you up because of Grandpa.’
‘I thought I’d get rid of all these old weeds for you,’ Eddie had said. ‘They look okay once you put them in a few jars, but they were making the front of the house messy.’
‘They’re not weeds. They’re wildflowers.’
Eddie had looked at her, the smile wiped off his face. ‘Did I do something wrong, Joy? You don’t look very happy.’
‘It’s just . . . why did you have to cut down my orange tree?’ she’d said, unable to contain the emotion in her voice.
The Gravity of Love Page 7