by Ann Beattie
“In half an hour?” he said.
Half an hour! Well—why not? “Fine,” I said. “Thanks so much.”
I went inside and saw the answering-machine light blinking. The red light upset me about as much as seeing a palmetto bug scurry under the sink. You can do it, I told myself silently. I hit play.
“Mom, hi, I’m calling because I’ve sort of got a situation here. Is there any way you could use your Triple A card to get us towed? I’m in Georgia. [!] Yeah, we’re over here in Marietta, picking up Cindy’s daughter, who’s got an issue with school or something [?], and where I was parked in a parking space over here right on the street? Yeah, a tree fell on our car. I’m maxed out on my credit card, and I could use some help with towing. Cindy’s cell is five-one-eight—” then silence. I stared at the answering machine; if I waited, the other digits of the telephone number might be magically filled in. Roland had a girlfriend named Cindy, who had a child, and they were in Georgia? Ohh-kay (as the exterminator always said when a bug started running). Surely he would call back.
But time passed, and there was no new message. I went into the bathroom and took a quick shower, toweled off, put the same clothes back on, looked again at the answering machine, then headed off across the street.
“Please come in, Flora,” Joe said, stepping aside ungracefully in his doorway but not shaking my hand, though he made a move in that direction and then stifled the impulse. He was wearing enormous baggy jeans. He tried to stuff his unshaken hand into the pocket and failed. He had on what looked like a red cashmere sweater. He’d done something to slick back what was left of his hair.
“Oh! Isn’t this something!” I said. I was in Xanadu. The front room was an enormous, vibrant, multicolored tent. The materials were radiant; some sparkled with tiny mirrors that threw off light; others were woven with threads that seemed to lift off the surface like three-dimensional TV test patterns. I’d never been to Morocco, but maybe this was what things looked like there. Fabric was draped over the walls, and swags dipped from corner to corner. The walls were hung with quilts in various geometric patterns. Only the two front windows, with white shades lowered, were not somehow blanketed. Your eye was constantly drawn to where the material converged mid-ceiling, punctured by a dazzling pink spotlight that looked like it might have just vaporized a flamingo. This must have been what had come in the boxes: the quilts and fabric, the shimmering threads. People thought the back gardens were the hidden secrets of Key West? They should see this!
Joe reentered the room—I’d hardly noticed he was gone—wheeling a two-tier cart that carried a silver tea service. A lovely aroma mingled with the room’s other smells: a bit musty, somewhat cinnamony, lemon-tinged. “White rooms drive me crazy,” he said straight-faced, as if delivering the punch line of a joke. He poured tea into a china cup and handed it to me, the cup teetering on a mismatched saucer. “Cream and sugar,” he gestured. He poured a cup for himself. His free hand swept in the direction of two black butterfly chairs, which of course hadn’t been apparent amid the riot of color. We retreated to the chairs. “Lady Grey,” Joe said, sighing the words, and at first I entertained the notion that it might be a new nickname for me—that he could be making a remark about the color of my hair. He held up the tea bag’s paper tag, like a little magnifying lens, or a bit of unreflective mirror, or a tiny shape from one of the quilts: Lady Grey. “Thank you for coming,” he said.
As you would imagine, we talked about how he created the room. It took a year, he told me. He had the AC revented at his own expense. He called the room “my personal vision.” This was the guy who stood outside smoking, gazing at nothing? I felt like I was a shard inside a vast kaleidoscope. “It’s for rent, now that it’s exactly the way I want it,” he said. “To be perfectly frank, it’s something I hoped to interest you in.”
“Me, rent your living room?”
“No, no. But I’ve seen your talent for flower arranging, and I thought that when very special people came, I might call on you to arrange some flowers.”
“Special people? What do you mean?”
“Flora, if you promise to keep this in the strictest confidence, I can be specific about the first arrivals,” he said.
In the second before he whispered their names, I wondered: Might they be the Queen of Hearts and the White Rabbit? The first name, the woman’s, I recognized, but I wasn’t sure I could pick her out of a lineup. The man’s name meant nothing to me, but he was apparently the husband.
“You know, this is just incredible,” I said. “Are they—I mean, they’re checking in?”
“I’d say checking out,” he said, pleased with his turn of phrase.
“You want me to do the flowers?” I said. “Where would you put them?”
“I have a table in the other room,” he said, sounding a bit hurt. “I’ll bring in the table.”
We sipped our tea in silence.
“So these celebrities are on their way?” I asked. “When?”
“Saturday. They rented it from noon to midnight.”
“I have to do the flowers for a wedding on a catamaran this Saturday, Joe.”
“Won’t they blow away?” he said.
“The vases have bricks in the bottom. I bundle the stems together and put sink weights on them.”
“I’ll give you five thousand dollars,” he said.
“Well . . . do we know what kind of flowers they like?”
“I can ask.”
I nodded. “I feel like that would be taking advantage, though,” I said. “It’s too much money.”
“It isn’t a lot of money to them, I guess.”
I thought about it for a moment. Five thousand dollars was more than I’d make in many months of doing wedding arrangements.
“Well, I can’t very well say no, can I?”
“Good. More tea?”
“No, thank you. But it’s delicious.”
“I’m glad you like it.”
“No one could possibly suspect that walking through your front door, this is what she’d find.”
“I never raise the shades,” he said.
“How did you get the word out that—”
“Craigslist.”
“They were reading Craigslist?”
“Their people were. It’s an anniversary. Not a wedding anniversary. The day their child was conceived or something.”
“Should I allude to that in the flower arrangement?”
“I wouldn’t say so, no. I think that information was just personal. For some reason, the secretary felt she had to explain herself.”
“And you really do believe—”
“The deposit cleared.”
“Wow. All right. Well, I’ll have to give this some serious thought. I’m glad I’ve got time to get flowers flown in from Miami. This is really incredibly kind of you, Joe.”
“I just look like a fat schmuck, don’t I?”
The question startled me. If there’d been anywhere to put my teacup, I’d have set it down.
“No worries,” he said, gesturing to the walls. “This is definitely the revenge of the nerd.”
“It’s truly amazing. To think this exists right across the street from me! So—can I come up with some sketches? How would that be?”
“You don’t have to show me sketches. You’re a genius.”
“Oh, far from it,” I said. “And you’ve barely seen my work.”
“I didn’t exactly level with you before: The UPS guy told me your name, because you’re always so nice about signing for my packages, and I’ve got a book about designers who’ve done amazing Key West interiors, so I realized instantly who you were. I saw one arrangement where you wrapped lace around bamboo shoots and scattered snails on the table! It took a while to get up my courage to approach you.”
“The UPS delivery person knows who I am?”
“He used to have a design store with his wife in Marathon. His wife used to be a guy. She was the roommate of a cook who used to be a f
riend of yours at Tra La La? I think he took photographs of your flower arrangements for their brochure, right? The cook?”
“Yes, he did do that. You know, I fell out of touch with him. I didn’t know he had a roommate. I mean, except for work, I guess I didn’t know him very well.”
“I heard he’s working at a restaurant in South Beach. His health is apparently much better. Has some pump in his chest.”
“I see. So the UPS man married Zachary the cook’s roommate, who had sex-change surgery?”
Joe nodded.
“That’s a very Key West story.”
“It’s why we’re all here, right?”
I momentarily considered the possibility that he’d been referring specifically to sex-change surgery. “What do you mean?” I said.
“So that everything can be a Key West story.”
Relieved, I found myself on my feet, preparing to leave. “This has been quite the day!” I said. “To be continued.”
He rose also, on the second attempt. He said, “I’ll e-mail their secretary and get information about what flowers they like.”
“Good. Let me know.”
He reached out, but it was for my teacup, not to shake hands. Nevertheless, he did shake my hand because it was extended. Then he took the teacup and saucer and returned them, with his, to the cart. He said over his shoulder: “Isn’t it really sad when you lose touch with people you once cared about? Technology has made everything worse, because you feel like you could potentially get in touch, so you assume you will, and then instead of writing a letter, you’re looking for somebody on Facebook, and half the time they’re not there.”
He opened the door enough to let me out. A kid flew down the sidewalk on a skateboard, with all the dexterity of a fledgling. When the boy passed, Joe quickly stepped out behind me, unlit cigarette in hand, and pulled the door closed. “Now you know,” he said.
The words echoed in my head as I reentered my apartment, which looked more than a little shabby, with an afghan thrown over an old chair and a picture hanging crooked. But who lived like Joe? There was something very odd about it—well: Of course there was.
The answering-machine light was blinking, and I knew who’d left the message: Roland, calling to get my help so his car could be towed. “Mom,” he said the second I pushed play, as if his voice had been waiting to jump out of the machine. “Hey, Mom, we had that little trouble here, but some Good Samaritan gave us a ride to the school, so we met up with Frieda, no problem, but when we got back to the car, it’d been towed, so I was wondering if you could call the towing company and point out that a huge tree fell on our car and it wasn’t just a matter of not respecting the rules by moving our car by five o’clock. We had no way to do that with some tree crashed down on it. I’ve got the name of the place here. The thing is, we’re all going to have to get back to Miami, like get a bus or something, and the cash machine won’t take Cindy’s MasterCard. If you—” The line went dead.
I already felt like Alice expelled from Wonderland, but Roland’s phone call was too much of this world. I would have loved to be able to tell my husband about my adventure, though if he’d lived, we’d still be in Washington, D.C. I had heard on the Weather Channel that Washington had gotten two feet of snow. Snow that deep would paralyze the place. I undressed and stepped out of my shoes to lie down and take a nap. I lay on my side, pulling the bedspread from the far side of the bed over me for warmth. What a sad little chenille cover it was, balding a bit here and there as if a caged animal had bitten its fur, a gloomy beige to begin with. Joe would disdain such a cover, though under its warmth I fell quickly asleep.
* * *
Her favorite flowers were anthuriums, birds-of-paradise, and proteas. Mixed in with these would be white irises, for which, when I ordered them, I requested the tightest buds possible, since once they open, they die in a day. It was risky, I knew, but it worked out. I found some white ribbon with red sparkles at Dollar Tree out on the highway and asked a friend if I could prune his bougainvillea—awful, thorny stuff, but it would just be at the base of the arrangement, and what was beauty without a little danger? I found some gallon milk containers in people’s recycling and rinsed them out and cut off the tops with pruning shears. I would use bricks as platforms of various heights to support the gallon bottles, and disguise them under beards of Spanish moss. Under cover of darkness, I grabbed Spanish moss from a tree on White Street. I asked Joe if I could come in Saturday morning to assemble the flowers on-site. There were many flowers, brought at little expense, because Manolo’s assistant (Manolo owned the florist shop in Miami) would be driving to Key West anyway, to deliver orchids to the Marquesa Hotel and to see his girlfriend. Manolo had a very entre nous way of talking. He thought two hundred dollars to deliver them was more than generous. If you’re wondering whether the check to me cleared, there was no check. I had five thousand dollars cash, which Joe had handed me in a bank envelope the day after we spoke. It was a perplexingly large amount of cash to have, but I seemed unable to deposit it in my account. I just kept looking at the envelope, which I tucked in the Yellow Pages and put in a cabinet drawer in the kitchen. Joe told me I could come whenever I wanted that morning, and we agreed that I would begin around ten.
The night before, I had slept badly, and it took two espressos to get me going. I had hoped Joe would volunteer to help me carry the boxes—the birds-of-paradise had been too long-stemmed to keep in my emptied-out refrigerator, so they’d been in the sink overnight, soaking in the porous insert of the asparagus steamer—but he seemed so nervous, I didn’t want to do any more than hint, making it a point to stagger during the three trips I made carrying the big boxes.
I arranged and arranged, repositioned, plucked, and tucked, and when I was finished, I used the tips of my hedge clippers to pick up the bougainvillea branches, feeling as powerful but as humble as a blacksmith dipping into the forge. It was a truly magnificent arrangement. Big-headed proteas dowsed above the bougainvillea. Birds-of-paradise shot upward like torches. The delicate, waxy anthuriums, in white and pink, added an odd texture and were perfectly interspersed with the white irises. I alternated the two, like the rails of a curving staircase Bette Davis would descend. Below the basket I scattered gold stars (appropriate!) that I’d gotten at CVS and musical notes that I’d cut from black construction paper, consulting one of my son’s boyhood songbooks—its pages perforated by silverfish—to make sure I’d gotten them right. Move over, Martha Stewart. At exactly eleven A.M., Joe again pronounced me a genius. He had centered the table under the spotlight. It was really riveting. We hated to leave, but we did, Joe dropping his key in the mailbox, then withdrawing his hand and crossing his fingers. “This is sort of embarrassing,” he said, “but I don’t really have anywhere to go. Do you think I could spend a bit of time in your apartment?”
He could tell I was taken aback. My apartment? What would he think of such an uninspiring place? And how long might he be there?
“I’m agoraphobic,” he said. “I can go a little way from home, but really not that far. This wouldn’t be the day to pass out on the street.”
“No, it certainly wouldn’t. Well. Of course, come over.”
“They had a lot of hope for the Zoloft. Although it’s facilitated our friendship, it doesn’t seem to have stopped me from feeling that if I go far, I might stop breathing.”
“What a terrible affliction,” I said. “I know something about what you’re feeling, because my late husband had asthma.”
“He didn’t die from an asthma attack, did he?” Joe said, eyes wide.
“No, not from that. Joe, are you okay?”
He’d stopped in the middle of the street.
“I look up and down this street, practicing,” he said. “It’s easier at night. I made it to the library three days ago. Then today—wouldn’t you know.”
“Joe, let’s just—” I took his hand, which was quite cold.
“Assholes, you think you’re at a cocktail par
ty?” sneered some skinhead who swerved around us on a bike. He puckered his lips as if spitting over his shoulder, but since the wind would have blown it back in his face, I doubted it was anything but pantomime.
“I don’t think I can take another step.”
“Joe,” I said calmly, “there are chairs out in front of my place, and if you can make it there, you can look right over at your house. Let’s try that.”
“I’m dizzy.”
“Well, Joe, it’s not really safe to stand in the street.”
He crumpled. He was almost bent over double, but he managed not to sink to his knees.
“Everything okay?” a young woman said, passing by, talking on her cell phone.
“Fine,” I said, knowing I sounded doubtful.
“So sorry. I can’t—” He was gasping. “Is there a siren behind us?”
There was nothing. Not even a car. Though as soon as the light changed on the next block, a line of cars would be arriving. The young woman stood on the curb, frowning as she turned off her cell phone.
“Joe,” I said, “we don’t want to call an ambulance or have the police drive up, you know? We don’t want a scene outside when your company might be arriving. Joe?”
“It’s good I haven’t passed out. I’ll be fine in a minute. If only that noise . . .”
The girl walked on. A man with his little boy on his shoulders held his son’s ankles and pretended not to notice us. Slowly, inch by inch, Joe started to straighten up. He leaned on me heavily. His eyes were slits. “So sorry,” he said.
“Much better! You see, you’re coming out of it! You can do it, just over to my porch chair. You’re standing up much better, Joe.”
We lurched forward as the first car slowed to a halt. I met the driver’s eyes, and he met mine. I understood from his eyes that he thought Joe was drunk. Just then Joe took off, a little lopsided, more or less dragging me with him. We made it to the other side. “All right,” he panted, cupping his hands over his ears. “Okay, but I don’t think I can make it to the chair.”
“I’ll bring it to you,” I said.