by Abby Frucht
WEDNESDAY MORNING, Daniel and I give Stevie a bath, and that’s the closest we come to touching each other. Daniel holds the washcloth to Stevie’s eyes, I pour water from the cup onto Stevie’s hair. I find the baby shampoo, Daniel squeezes a dollop into his hand. Daniel scrubs, I distract Stevie with toys. His favorite bath toy is a laboratory glove of thin plastic, to be filled at the tap, finger by finger until it explodes. When the bath is done I dress him in a sunsuit for daycare and set him down on Daniel’s lap before combing his hair. I comb for nearly half an hour, enjoying such routine, thoughtless proximity. Even breakfast is more complicated, now that the supermarket’s closed. No ordinary toast, and no cereal at all. I buy eggs at a farm stand I can get to by bike, and, from the Epicurean, some breadsticks, a jar of honey, and some apples so fancy they each come with their own little apple-shaped stickers. Now and then I think of borrowing a car, driving sixteen miles to the open foodstore, stocking up, but this is a small town, and the longer I stay comfortably inside it, the more sixteen miles seems like too much of an adventure. And in the end the thought of leaving town is as scary as the thought of stepping free of gravity.
Daniel and I spend the day in a thicket of new-flowering jewelweed in damp woods at the edge of the old Boy Scout camp, near Bloomingham. Daniel had been puzzled to find jewelweed so early this year. The flowers of the jewelweed are a tawny, speckled orange and look like small snapdragons. By clasping, between thumb and forefinger, the two larger enfolding petals, we are able to expose the sexual parts. With a tweezer we pluck off an anther, then move the required distance away to pollinate the stigma of a neighboring flower and mark it with coded embroidery thread. At once we wrap the impregnated flower in gauze so that no bee, carrying offerings from yet other donors, will sully the union.
Daniel keeps a notebook clipped to his belt, along with a tape measure, a magnifying glass, his stopwatch and counter, and a zip-lock bag of cotton swabs. He is meticulous, dexterous, exacting as always, so I wonder if he knows what we are doing or if it has escaped him that in the absence of touch between ourselves we are engaged in this other procreative act, flower to flower, folding back the twin, moist, delicate petals.
Still, I bumble. I drop my tweezers, tear the petals off the flowers, knock off the small heads of anthers, and think of Emily. Today is Wednesday, I am thinking, today is Wednesday, Wednesday, Wednesday. This evening I am going to meet Emily at the bench under the elm. To distract myself, I try to recall the purpose of this particular experiment as explained by Daniel earlier. “To calculate optimal outcrossing distance,” he said. “To see if it’s better to mate with those nearest to you or those furthest away.”
Now I’m all tangled up in a jewelweed bush. When I’m high-stepping out of it, stumbling, trying to keep my balance, I tear a whole clump out of the ground.
“I’m going to ruin your hypothesis for sure,” I say to Daniel, and wave in his direction with the uprooted tendrils. Daniel barely blinks an eye. He is as steady as if peering into a microscope.
“You can’t ruin an hypothesis,” he says after a minute. “An hypothesis is only a supposition.”
“Then I’ll ruin your experiment,” I say, and think of Wednesday, and think of Emily, and drop my tweezers yet again.
Daniel unites another few flowers, then pauses to concentrate on a bee. The bee alights on a fold of petals, tunnels her way inside, stays several seconds, then flies out and hovers for a moment near a flower bagged in gauze, before buzzing away from the patch.
Daniel smiles at me.
“The only thing that can ruin this experiment is rain,” he says, and pulls a treat from his backpack; some gourmet chocolate serrated dessert cups meant to be creme- or cherry-filled, but we eat ours empty, straight from the box.
IT RAINS.
Not a drizzle so much as a crackle. At five, when we get home, is when it begins.
Daniel isn’t bothered, but I stand at the window disconsolately.
“It’s only one day of field work,” he says from behind me, not quite putting his hand on my shoulder. “This kind of thing happens, you know. That day the deer ate half the flowers, that day the jeep drove through the meadow, that summer the gypsy moths came. You just go out there again, start over, there’s nothing you can do about it, it’s natural, it doesn’t matter, etc. Okay?”
“Okay, etc.” I say.
But still I worry. I frown. Not about our wasted morning, our wasted afternoon. No, it’s the evening for which I am pining. Very likely if the rain continues, Emily will not meet me under the elm. I entertain a vision of the naked, slatted bench, rain dripping through the cracks, then myself sitting on it, getting itchy, lonely, soaked.
I sigh.
“Want me to tell you a terrible story?” asks Daniel.
“Please.”
He tells a story about a pig. A male. This male pig, property of some geneticists at a university in Illinois, represents over twenty years of breeding. Having reached maturity, he is to sire a litter of piglets whose genotypes will answer myriads of pivotal questions about heredity. But on the evening before the mating is to occur, some teenagers break into the barn, lead the pig out of his stall, load him into a pick-up, drive him to a pit and roast him for dinner.
“Oh, no,” I say.
And start to cry. Inching yet a little closer behind me, Daniel spreads his arms around and lets his fingertips rest on the desk top. Still, no parts of our bodies are touching. His posture mimics our push-up position in bed except that now I can’t look at his face. Out the window in the pine tree, the blue jay is sheltered by needles. She looks cozy and dry, not in the least put-out. In the distance there is lazy, rolling thunder but no lightning at all. When it’s over, I know, the air will be heavy again with the weight of the atmosphere, newly humid, shot through with lovely, bright prisms. All at once, all the petals will fall from the fruit trees, in one moment that no one will see, and then the sidewalks will be covered with the pink, steaming masses.
Daniel grunts, readjusts, rests his weight on his fingers, then on his palms. He must be standing on his toes. Still the front of his chest isn’t grazing my back, and no breath even tickles the skin of my neck. For how long can this continue? I look up at the clock; it is past five-thirty. Evening? I wonder.
“Why don’t you call her,” he says after a while.
“Who?” I ask.
“You’re impossible,” says Daniel. He taps the window pane. The blue jay squawks. The rain comes down harder.
AT SEVEN-THIRTY I walk to the reservoir in the slight, descending mist that has taken the place of the rain. I wear a man’s hat over big hoop earrings. My legs are bare but the thongs of my sandals lace up past my ankles. I feel light on my feet, hopeful, and romantic. Should I have brought along a bottle of wine? Maybe Emily has. If she has, she has probably brought goblets, too, which will turn out to be the twins of my own “quaint” ceramic ones.
From the road I see the splayed top of the elm rising over the roof of a house, shaking a little although the tops of all the other trees are motionless. How nervous I am. It occurs to me we don’t know each other yet, Emily and I. But I have brought along a photograph of my mother and father, so that Emily, having examined it, will exclaim that my parents resemble her own and that even the house in front of which they are posing resembles the one in which she was raised.
Just be patient for a while, she’ll say after a minute, with a shake of her cheerleader head, a whiff of jasmine. She’ll take a bite of my ribbon of licorice and chew on it thoughtfully. I think you need to take stock.
Of what? I’ll ask.
Of your body. It changes after so many–how old are you now?
Thirty.
And how old when you met Daniel?
Nineteen.
Bodies change in eleven years.
Mine hasn’t, I’ll say, with a glance at my T-shirt, at my bare, tawny legs in the criss-crossing thongs. My body hasn’t changed since I was about twelve.
&n
bsp; A little laughter. More exuberant, invisible pom-poms. Another whiff of perfume, and then Emily will say, Then maybe that’s the problem. Maybe you need to get away from it for a while. Maybe getting away from Daniel is like getting away from your own body. You know, like dying, floating up, looking down at yourself. For a while you float there, no body, all soul. The other day I saw a bed that had been loaded into a moving van. The back of the van was open. The bed was on castors. It was neatly made, the pillows plumped, the pillowcases smoothed, one corner of the blanket folded back. I lay down on it. I needed to. I didn’t have a choice.
Then what? I’ll ask. Had she fallen asleep? Had they driven away with her?
But the bench is empty after all, and Emily is nowhere. The elm shakes again and showers the bare slats with rain water. I sit down on it glumly. If I wait for her, if I believe utterly that she will come – in her letter sweater, her hightops, her hair like yellow satin flashing good cheer-then maybe she will.
But it isn’t Emily who appears on the path at that minute. It’s those two fishing boys with their pail and rods, their skinny father making himself comfortable on the concrete slab, already lighting a cigarette. They walk the other way. They don’t notice me. They position themselves on the bank and aim their lines into the reservoir conscientiously as if it were a bull’s eye. Something bites. They reel it in, examine it, toss it back into the water. Above me the elm shivers again and splatters rain on my hat. I take the hat off, shake it, and am ready to put it back on when the tree reaches down and takes it out of my hand, ever so gently. I scream. It’s the Soho Tree Man. None other than. He dangles, swings, then drops down lightly beside me on the bench.
He has left my hat up in the tree.
“It is you,” he says. “I didn’t recognize you in that hat. I thought you weren’t coming. You don’t look so glad to see me. What’s the problem?”
“Nothing, really.”
“Where is she?”
“That’s just it,” I say. “I thought she would be here.”
“Here? She’s in town?”
“Oh, I say. “Wait a minute. We’re not talking about the same woman.”
“I’m talking about Gail,” he says.
“I’m talking about Emily.”
“I’m talking about Gail,” he says again, insistently. “The lady hasn’t written to me.”
“I know.”
“I haven’t heard from her.”
“I know.”
“Not a word,” he says. “I say she found another man. No one as hot as me. But the lady forgets. She forgets.”
“She’ll come back, eventually,” I say, realizing finally what he wants from me. Not advice, but simple consolation.
“Oh sure. She’ll come back. To me, and to everyone else. Forget it, okay? I’m wavin’ goodbye. This is it for me, you know? This is a first. No lady ever did me this way before.”
“You’re shaking,” I say to him tenderly.
“Don’t mention it,” he says.
He sits there a minute and shakes, and sighs. He wears an open suit vest over a thin, naked chest, blue jeans, and a necklace of russet feathers that blend with his hair where it touches his shoulders. The haircut, well-executed, seems designed as if to augment actual flight. Wings, then barbs, then down.
“Why don’t you fly around looking for her?” I almost ask, but instead say, “We should be better acquainted then we are already. I’ve been worried about you. I don’t even know your name.”
“Arnie,” he says, and then, “I’ve been worried about me, too.” He flips the hair out of his face with a backwards tilt of his head and shakes it to and fro.
“Tell me about yourself, Arnie,” I say.
He tells me he quit his job.
“I already figured that out,” I say.
He tells me he lives in a garage behind his parents’ house on Edgemeer Place, one of the ritzier streets in town. The garage is fixed up like a studio, with carpet, double bed, skylight. There isn’t a bathroom, so Arnie has to use the one at his parents’. His parents’ house is empty since last spring, when they moved to Arizona.
“Then why not stay in the house yourself?” I ask.
“Gail made the curtains in the garage. Plus, me and Arnie Junior are comfortable. He doesn’t need to stay in his cage, in there. In my parents’ house, he’d have to.”
“Arnie Junior?”
“My toucan.”
“I thought maybe he was your child.”
“More or less.” Arnie gets melancholy after that. It occurs to me that unlike a lot of men his age-mid-twenties-he wants an actual baby, and that that’s why he’s stuck on Gail. Gail always tells her partners how fertile she is, as if she thinks they’ll be happy to father abortions. She’s had several since I’ve known her. Challengingly, I once asked her how many abortions she planned to have, but she answered in earnest. “It’s hard to say,” Gail said thoughtfully. “I hope no more than four or five, ideally, but that only leaves me with one more. Christ. I don’t think I could get by with just one more. What would I do?” Maybe Arnie wants to save her. Maybe he thinks he can settle her down. Who knows? Maybe he can. I think of her postcards, the ones she sends to the men around town. How the postcards make her out to be cool and contained. All her fashion shows and exhibits, and how much her stuff brings in at auctions, and who commissioned her for what, and how much money she’s making and how many interviews she’s doing on the radio. That kind of thing-how independent she is-is all she ever talks about except sex.
“The lady’s in love with herself,” Arnie says reverentially, as if reading my mind. “She let me watch her when she was… you know… she could go on forever… and then just when she was about to come she’d stop and look at me but I wasn’t supposed to do anything except watch it lubricate. She had the pinkest, wettest, most tantalizing…
“Let’s take a walk around the reservoir,” I interrupt.
“vulva that I have ever seen, believe me. I can’t get that out of my mind. I’m hypnotized.” He rolls his eyes. For several minutes he won’t look at me but sits with both hands clasped behind his neck, after which we start our walk in silence. He seems edgy about the night although the sky isn’t yet black, just gray and rain-dimmed, and I can tell without his saying that he doesn’t want to go too close to the woods, so we keep to the path on the edge of the water.
A minute later I ask him about it.
“Why don’t you want to go into the woods?”
“You’ve got to be kidding,” he says, and lifts the flap of the suit vest to show me. Some welts, I see, when I get up close. On the pale, thin skin are several raised, purple bruises that throw into relief what I hadn’t seen before; how malnourished he looks, how unhealthy, and suddenly frazzled and limp, like a bird that flew into a window.
“Jesus,” I say. “What’s that?”
“I was mistaken for a deer,” says Arnie. “Or maybe a coyote. Somehow I always wish he would mistake me for who I am but he won’t give me that pleasure. Never. He gets this way. He doesn’t like to be bothered. He likes to practice his German, if you know what I mean. Anyway, don’t ask.”
I don’t ask. I want to, but I don’t, and anyway I already know the answer.
Meanwhile Arnie sighs, takes hold of my hand, squeezes it tight, then lets go. The two boys and their father are gone. I keep expecting Arnie simply to vanish, and in the end that’s what he does. We have reached the bench again, and before I know what’s happening, he’s gone. I am standing there alone when the elm reaches down and gives me my hat. He is perched in the spot where the trunk diverges, his bare chest sweating a silver sheen. Already he looks more composed, less a wreck than he did just a minute ago.
“Has Gail sent any of her famous postcards to anyone else around town?” he asks suddenly.
“What do you think?” and then, seeing how wounded he is, I add gently, “You and I are just about the only people in town who haven’t heard from her. That must mean something
, Arnie.”
A breeze rustles the flaps of his suit vest. Above him, among the upraised limbs of the elm, the sky fades.
“I don’t know what to think,” he says, flustered. And then, “I just know she has the smoothest, slickest, most muscular, most responsive, most insatiable—”
I put on my hat.
“mind in the world. The thought of all of this time—whole years – if I don’t see her again I’ll kill myself.”
“No, you won’t,” I tell him.
“Yes, I will,” he says. He stamps his naked foot on air.
INTERVAL TWO
WHEN AT LAST Ben does receive a letter, on gilt-edged tissue printed with the message “An all night with you would be all right with me,” it isn’t from Leah at all but from Gail, signed with a G and her customary flourish of fraying lace. The fabric itself is provocatively open-meshed, cream-colored, with – yes – a pubic hair caught in the tendril of an orchid.
So of course I hesitate before showing it to Ben, out of Daniel’s earshot and out of sight, even, of Simon, who is too young to have to witness his father’s discomfort. Not that Ben has anything to feel uncomfortable about; Gail sends these letters to every man she ever meets, sooner or later, her way of keeping in touch, I suppose. We are sitting in my driveway, Ben and I, just lazing around on the hood of the car. Across the street on the curb lawn are six ladder-back chairs, abandoned by movers, lined up as if for a show. Already they’ve been sitting there a week and no one’s made off with them.
“I have a letter for you that isn’t from Leah,” is my careful beginning.
“So what,” says Ben unhappily.
“It’s from somebody else.”
“Wow,” he says. “Imagine that.”
“It’s from Gail.”
“I don’t know any Gails.”
“She might not have mentioned her name.”
“Let me see that,” says Ben. He takes the envelope out of my hand, opens it up, then flicks at the lace with a fingernail.