White Plains

by David Hicks

  *

  The next day, after picking up Judy Lee from the Orchards, he asked her if she knew of a good sushi place. They were at the Dunkin’ Donuts drive-through in Clarks Summit on their way to the Lieberthals’, where the plan was to plant tulip bulbs and bleeding hearts along the front porch, aerate the back lawn, install two garden beds he would fill now and plant in the spring, lay the groundwork for a Zen garden in the northeast corner (by way of weeding, laying down landscape fabric, and wheelbarrowing a ton of pea gravel), pull up the multitude of weeds in the northwest corner (Flynn refused to employ chemicals like Roundup, given their heinous effect on bees and the nation’s food supply), spread some organic 50/50 mix, layer onto that some untreated mulch, and plant a variety of bulbs.

  Earlier that morning, while thinking of Louise and loading his truck full of tools, bulbs, cedar two-by-fours, and the huge roll of landscape fabric, Flynn had felt loose-limbed and carefree. It felt good to work with his hands, and to have his evenings free (no papers to grade, no books to re-read, no desperate student emails); he was seeing his children fairly regularly (thanks to court orders, the assistance of the guardian ad litem, and the mollifying effects of Rachel’s boyfriend); and best of all, he was starting to enjoy his own company. His only concern on this day was the Lieberthals’ two big mastiffs, who loved to run around, dig up the backyard, and generally get in the way of whatever Flynn was trying to do. It being a weekday, Mr. Lieberthal would be at work, and Mrs. Lieberthal (whom Judy Lee had dubbed Her Royal Thighness due to her affinity for short skirts) had thus far showed no predilection for governing her precious puppies’ precocious, at times riotous, behavior.

  Judy Lee raised her eyebrows while accepting her ham-egg-and-cheese bagel.

  “She said it had to be a ‘friendly date,’” Flynn said, “but I vetoed that.”

  “I’m afraid it can’t be a date date” is what Louise had said when Flynn called, for she was, technically, still in a relationship (an important detail Judy Lee had neglected to mention during her lengthy promotional campaign), although it was “in its death throes.” When Flynn said he couldn’t imagine containing himself enough to keep things friendly, Louise had laughed her poppy laugh, thought about it for a moment, and then said okay, she supposed it could be a “friendly date date.” Flynn was so happy he didn’t know what to say next, and when he did speak, he said something like Should we ask Judy Lee? but he had drunk three beers for courage prior to making the call and his tongue got in the way so it must have come out Should we have sushi? because Louise said, “Oh I love sushi!”

  After biting into her sandwich, Judy Lee said there were a couple of good options nearby; she preferred Atami—“right over there,” she said, pointing across the street. “But wait,” she said, “you’ve never had sushi?”

  Flynn proceeded to convey to his friend his miserable food history: the overcooked-meat-and-potatoes of his upbringing, his avoidance of any meal worth more than eight dollars in grad school, the baked-chicken-and-Ore-Ida-french-fries dinner his ex-wife had expected every week, the lack of fresh seafood in the mountain towns of Colorado, all the fast-food he ate during his time in Grand Junction.

  “Do you even know how to use chopsticks?” she asked.

  Later, in the Lieberthals’ backyard, she demonstrated for him, snapping off two twigs and using them to pick up a leaf. But when Flynn tried it, he was all thumbs. “Never mind,” Judy Lee said, taking the twigs from him and tossing them on the ground. “They’ll probably let you use a fork. But how pathetic, using a fork to eat sushi. You should be deeply ashamed.”

  As it turned out, he was. At the restaurant that evening, Louise used her chopsticks with great dexterity, but Flynn, he just couldn’t get the hang. He fumbled for a while, his face burning—the entire date, the slim remnants of his pride, his last best shot at true love, all of it falling apart before his eyes. But what did Louise do? She smiled, set down her chopsticks and said, “I prefer to eat sushi with my nice fingers.”

  She looked even prettier than she had at the Halfway Café, so pretty Flynn could barely look her in the eye, and several times he tried to tell her so, but the first time the waiter came by, the second time she dropped her napkin, and the third time a sushi chef yelled out something. She wore a white blouse and a bright blue cardigan that turned her eyes a color Flynn had seen only once before, when poking holes with his ski pole into the deep snow of the Continental Divide. Finally he blurted out that she was as pretty as an angel, and she told him that nobody deserved to be called such a thing, least of all someone who had screwed up as much of her life as she had, but that it was certainly nice of him to say so.

  “Okay, a flawed but interesting angel,” he said. For she was kind, kind to the core, that much was clear, and she had told him some things about herself—she was a published poet, she had worked for the Department of Justice in D.C., she liked punk music, she was addicted to home-improvement shows—that he had found enticing.

  “I’ll take it,” she said. “Thank you. You’re really nice too,” she said. “And terribly handsome. For a gardener, anyway.” She took a demure sip of sake.

  Well, how about that. Flynn had worn olive pants for the occasion, with a charcoal shirt and his freshly polished tried-and-true Dr. Martens, which he thought he might have to remove upon entering, but they’d been escorted to a table near the sushi chefs. Flynn had let Louise fill out the order form, since he didn’t know unagi from anago, to say nothing of what on earth constituted a Dragon Roll. When the sushi showed up, he mimicked her actions, so when she dribbled soy sauce into the little bowl and mixed in a dollop of green paste, he followed suit—and then yelped when a chunk of wasabi burned its way down his throat.

  Now, smiling deviously as Flynn turned halfway around to blow his nose, she squeezed a lump of salmon-and-rice between her fingers, dipped it into the tiny bowl, and put the whole enterprise in her mouth. As the wasabi struck home, tears filled her big blue eyes.

  Judy Lee had warned him that the Japanese were dessertly challenged, so when the waiter made a lame attempt to pitch the virtues of green tea ice cream, Flynn asked for the check. Louise took the opportunity to go to the ladies’ room, and as she headed toward the rear of the restaurant, her golden hair shimmering, Flynn wondered if this was what people meant by love at first sight. He had asked Rachel to marry him out of some inherited sense of obligation, back when they were living a mean, meager life in the East Village; there had never been anything like this, his knees knocking under the table and his deodorant long since rendered useless. This was big. Nothing in his life had prepared him for this. He wasn’t sure he was up for the task.

  He handed the waiter his credit card, calculated how much he had available, and hoped to God it was enough. The date was ending. He would drive this lovely human being home. He would not try to kiss her. He would simply open the door for her, maybe gently peck her on the cheek, toss and turn in bed all night, then call her the next day to ask for a second date.

  But as she returned from the bathroom with lipstick reapplied and hair freshly pouffed, she asked if he wanted to get dessert elsewhere, her treat. Judy Lee had been telling her that Manning’s Dairy Farm had the best ice cream in the world, she said, and she’d always wanted to verify that for herself.

  During their drive out to Dalton, Flynn nodded or provided hopefully appropriate guttural responses as Louise spoke. What about? Flynn couldn’t say. It was all he could do to focus on the road and cease his shivering. It’s not cold out, he told himself. It’s only September. When he finally looked at her (she was talking about how things had deteriorated with Jeremy, the guy she’d been dating) he saw the streetlights reflected in her eyes.

  When they arrived at Manning’s, Flynn took Louise’s hand as they walked past the cows, and they entered the shop that way, like a couple of teenagers, just before the place closed. But as they bent to inspect the flavors and she mention
ed her fondness for cookies-and-cream, he let out a weird laugh and said that had been Rachel’s favorite flavor as well.

  “Oh,” Louise said. And straightened.

  He had told her he’d been married, and that he had kids. She’d asked a lot of questions about Nathan and Janey at dinner. But this wasn’t about that. This was about a moron talking about his ex-wife’s favorite ice cream on his first date with the woman of his dreams. He could hear Judy Lee already: Smooth one, Ace.

  Louise ordered blueberry and sweet-cream instead, took a few licks, and threw the rest away.

  *

  Two days later it was sunny and bird-crazy, a perfect day for tree-planting according to Judy Lee, so they stopped at Avallone’s Nursery for a red dogwood, a birch, and two cherry trees, balled and burlapped. Flynn had tried to talk Mrs. Lieberthal out of the cherries, but she’d been adamant. Her husband was a New Yorker who had once worked for the Attorney General’s Office in D.C., whereas she, judging from her posture, her accent, her daily misjudgments regarding skirt length and her injudicious use of eye shadow, was a New Jersey WASP, and like most transplanted New Jersey WASPs, while easy on the eyes, she was nothing if not persnickety. “Offensively sexy,” Judy Lee declared in the truck, after Flynn had outlined their plan of attack and they had moved on to their daily appraisal of Mrs. Lieberthal’s figure. “One of those women who turns you on, and then you hate yourself for being turned on. You might as well masturbate.” Judy Lee bit into the glazed donut they’d picked up from Krumpe’s. “And in the spirit of the public trust,” she said while holding the donut in the air, “no skirt should ever be above the vagina.” Flynn tried to remember if he had ever seen Judy Lee wear any skirt of any length. “In sum,” she said, “the woman is abrasive, obstinate, and spoiled. And yet, her golden thighs redeem her.”

  When she finally got around to asking about his date, Flynn shook his head and told her not to bother; as she well knew, Louise already had a boyfriend, it would probably take forever for them to break up, don’t even ask about the chopsticks. He described the Mishap at Manning’s and told her he had called Louise afterwards to re-apologize, but her response had been nothing short of forlorn. “I should never have agreed to the date in the first place,” Louise had said with a sigh. (Flynn pictured her reclining on her chaise longue in silk pajamas and a cashmere robe, reading an old copy of he’s just not that into you.) “It’s not your fault,” she said. “I am, technically, still in a relationship.” Her dog started yapping then, and she put her hand over the phone to say Leave it! which caused Noah’s ears to perk up. “And so, apparently, are you,” she said.

  No, Flynn said, no no no, it had just been a slip of the tongue, that’s all, certainly not an indication that he was still defined by his unhealthy co-dependency with his ex-wife. “Look,” he said, “I don’t know this Jeremy guy from Adam, but why don’t you just put him out of his misery so you and I can work this thing out?”

  She made a sound, a cross between a moan and a growl. “Is that what you would do to me?” Louise asked. “Just toss me aside when someone new came along?”

  Now, turning the Ram onto Country Club Road and dropping down a gear, Flynn speculated to Judy Lee that the boyfriend didn’t even exist. Lord knows he had pulled the same trick himself, telling a woman he was taken when he wasn’t, as soon as he detected the need in her eyes, the plaintive tone in her voice, the feeling that she was seeing him as The Answer to All Her Prayers. And look at him: he had acted that same way to Louise, and she had intuited the danger therein. Smart woman.

  “She hardly talks about him,” Judy Lee said as they parked in the Lieberthals’s vast driveway and got out of the truck. “That’s why I never mentioned him to you. But he certainly exists; she’s not the type to lie.” She hoisted the saplings out of the truck bed and yoked them onto her shoulders. She was thin and strapping, pound-for-pound stronger than any man Flynn knew, and with her cap tugged down she looked like a teenaged boy.

  “What she is,” she said, “is a serial monogamist who never actually commits.” She paused, repositioning the saplings. “Whereas you, my friend, sabotage relationships before they even happen. Or as they’re happening.” She shook her head and started walking toward the back yard. “I don’t know what I was thinking,” she said. She nodded toward the flagstone path Flynn had made the day before. “Hey, nice and level!”

  Flynn had just grabbed two shovels and a bag of compost from the truck bed when the Lieberthals’ slobbering mastiffs appeared, tumbling down the steps of the back deck and galloping towards Flynn like defensive ends with unobstructed paths to the quarterback. As the lead dog lunged at him, Flynn dropped the bag and flung out a shovel. The dog yelped as it caught him in the tender parts, just as Mrs. Lieberthal came out the sliding door.

  “Mister Hawkins!” she yelled, putting her hands on her hips. She wore a half-open mini-bathrobe, her dyed-blonde hair loosed and curled, and at the sight of her, Judy Lee’s jaw went agape. The mastiff, instantly cured, bounded back across the yard and scampered up the steps for some Mommylove. “That will not be tolerated,” she said, tick-tocking her finger at Flynn. Then she pointed at Judy Lee. “Young man,” she said, “drop those trees and leave my property immediately.”

  *

  Flynn was never good with days off, especially when the game plan had been to dig in the dirt all day. He wandered aimlessly around the house, confusing Noah to no end, before settling onto the couch, reading a chapter of Blood Meridian (he was on a quest to read one book a week for the rest of his life, but he kept choosing bleak books with no concluding hints of redemption), then honoring his late father by indulging in an AMC Clint Eastwood marathon: Pale Rider, The Outlaw Josie Wales, and Hang ’Em High. Dinner was Triscuits with salami and Swiss cheese, followed by Tastykake cream-filled buttercream cupcakes from Lochen’s Market. He spent two full days like this.

  On the third day, his son called him after school, with Janey on the extension, to ask why he hadn’t phoned of late. Were they going to see him soon? Did he not love them anymore? (That from Janey, of course.) Flynn told them he was just a little down, that’s all, and he’d be sure to see them not the coming weekend but the one after that. He told them to have fun with their aunt and cousins and know he was thinking about them all the time and would love them dearly until they were dead. After they hung up (when Rachel came into the room and shouted, “Who’re you guys talking to?”), Flynn stayed slumped in the armchair, staring at the dirty baseball glove hanging from a nail, at the old banana-seat bicycle in the corner with plastic Star Wars light sabers wedged under the seat. Once again he’d be unable to give them classy presents for Christmas. And once again he was allowing Righteous Rachel to prevent him from seeing his children. Eight more days seemed far too long to wait before giving Nathan a back-cracking bear hug and blowing a raspberry on Janey’s little neck.

  Flynn Hawkins sat in the Contemplation of Life Room and, for the first time, contemplated his life. Where, oh where, had his little balls gone? And what exactly was he doing, planting trees for rich people by day and watching spaghetti Westerns by night? He had quit academia in order to live life closer to the bone, like Thoreau, to find some honest work that left him a good kind of tired at the end of the day, and he’d started his own business so he would feel less like an indentured servant and more like an adult, not to mention bringing his taxable income down to stealth level. But where had these bold career moves taken him? When he kicked the bucket in his late fifties like most of his male progenitors, what would his offspring say about him in their semi-tearful eulogies? And what good were even his minor accomplishments (1991 All-County Baseball Defensive Team, 1994 Daytona Beach Spring Break Dance Championship, 2008 Fairfield University Professor of the Year) if he wasn’t loved by another grown-up? To date, leaving aside his mother’s sporadic and ill-timed expressions of affection after his father’s death and Rachel’s all-too-occasional and suspiciously tr
ite declarations of such back in the increasingly distant past, no woman had ever truly loved him; and not one had he truly loved, not in the My-One-and-Only way. Surely the problem was with him, not with everyone else. Surely a sea-change was in order, for everything he’d done to this point had proved an abysmal failure. He needed to get out of his own head, as he had in Colorado, and live in his body, in the land, to connect with what was bigger than himself—to be selfless instead of self-absorbed, to do instead of think, to act instead of react, to be instead of seem.

  He slapped the tweeded arms of the armchair and heaved himself to his feet.

  Start with the body, he told himself. Eat some real food. In the kitchen, he turned the heat on under the griddle, made a thick patty of organic ground beef, and opened a can of baked beans. Then, he couldn’t help it, he imagined cooking dinner for Louise: some lasagna maybe, with sausage and parsley in the sauce, or better yet grilled salmon with mixed greens—that would be more her speed. He hunted around the fridge and found some pepper-jack cheese. Since when had he given up on someone or something so easily? Was this his modus operandi? Here, perhaps, was the problem: to this point, he had either chosen the wrong woman and gamely stuck it out, or flirted with the right one and bailed at the first sign of trouble. But he hadn’t been like that as a professor (when his students botched their rough drafts, he always worked with them to bring their writing up to speed), or as a father (he routinely told his kids that failure was the only sure-fire way to success, so they should persist in all their worthwhile endeavors), or as a gardener (if his plants and flowers were drooping, he didn’t give up on them; instead he weeded, toyed with water distribution, considered sun exposure, even relocated them if necessary). Why couldn’t he adopt a similar strategy regarding women? Louise had originally expressed a desire to be friends first, before dating. What had been so wrong with that? Wouldn’t that have been a substantial improvement over the jump-into-bed-first, hate-each-other-later method he had heretofore perfected? And as for his kids, they certainly wanted to see him this weekend, and they probably wanted to see their cousins too. Why couldn’t they spend one day with him, the other with their cousins?