by Ron Carlson
The garlic man, not a farmer but Cummings from the Food Center, had to come all the way through the house and he startled me, appearing at the studio door. I hadn’t heard him for all the water in my ears.
Cummings was also the butcher, and as he stood at my studio doorway in his bloody apron, he seemed one of the Fates come to abbreviate me at last.
“I’ve got your garlic,” he said, and the first glorious strains of the herb drifted my way.
“Good!” I must have said it a little too loudly as Mr. Cummings stepped back and raised his hands in self-defense. To assure him that I meant no harm, I placed my brush and palette aside and asked him in to see what I was doing. He folded his arms over his apron and browsed my canvases, nodding steadily. The spectacle of the three huge canvases, flashed and spiraled with those strange colors, and the volleyball sitting on the table behind them seemed to confuse Mr. Cummings, but his nodding quickened. His assessment was only “Yep,” followed by seven or eight small “Yep, yep, yeps.” It didn’t strike me until we had unloaded two hundred pounds of garlic onto the front lawn, that Mr. Cumming’s yepping had been identical to the sad and final pronouncements of a doctor whose suspicions have been confirmed.
When he left, I didn’t hesitate. I took up my hammer and jammed my pockets with the short galvanized roofing nails, and wondered why the opinion of one of the most prominent village tradesmen didn’t bother me; why in fact, I took his incredulity as encouragement; why, in fact, I felt absolutely encouraged by everything in the world: the flat noon light, the impending thundershower, Mudd Miller’s black Honda motorcycle leaking oil on his driveway across the street. Oh, I just breathed it all in and began tacking the garlic to my own sweet home.
I framed all the doors in garlands first, in case there wasn’t enough garlic, tapping the nails through the center of each bulb, spacing them three fingers apart. Then I ringed the windows, the basement windows, and the storm cellar door. The oil each clove gave its nail slathered down my wrists to the elbows, but after twenty minutes, I couldn’t smell a thing. It all gave our house a fuzzy, gingerbread look, not unbecoming and kind of festive. By the time I finished, I was high, high with a new taut certainty that I was unquestionably on the right track, and high with a sort of major garlic sinus dilation. My eyes felt poached.
I ran to the studio to retrieve my car keys, but was again arrested by the three paintings and worked for a furious moment on the third. This “volleyball” was becoming more elongated than the other two and looked like, I’ll say for now, a rose setting sun in a green and ocher sky. But something told me that when I looked into the canvas I wasn’t looking all the way to the horizon. Something was trying to get out; I love that sense. When the phone rang, I came to and strode out to my old Buick. I sat still in the driver’s seat for a moment, listening to the phone ringing. It sounded like a vague, intermittent alert for the future going off in garlic house.
In my book, Life Before Science, it said:
Garlic and garlic substitutes were often used by tribes in Africa, Asia, Austrailia, and England to heat a childless domecile. The huts were festooned with fresh garlic once a month, and the man and the woman wore garlic in various forms sewn into a garment or on a string around the neck, or crushed into the hair. Some tribes were known to use a garlic mattress, which was rumored to have never failed. In many societies the smell of garlic was synonymous with fecundity.
EIGHT
YOU lay yourself open to attack by a powerful creeping chagrin if you drive miles away from home one fine afternoon, as I did, guided only by your overwhelming desire to have children and by a lurid, illustrated half-page advertisement from the back pages of the scurrilous local shopper The Twilight Want Ads. Just the tabloid illustration mocked me: a crude wood block print featuring, or so it said, Mrs. Argyle, “Gypsy Wizardress, Alchemist, Seer, and Tax Advisor,” her face seemingly radiating small lightning rays of power and—what I took to be—understanding.
So I set my mouth against the thorough feeling that I was a fool, and I followed the directions Mrs. Argyle had given me over the telephone, driving toward the village of Boughton, where I had never been.
The interview that followed, in the woody turnout three point four miles from Boughton, with Mrs. Argyle, is still a mystery to me. Her rusty Ford van was there along with the two jade talismans hanging from the rearview mirror. I stood around for a while, trying to look innocent, and then finally I put two hundred dollars on the seat, as I’d been instructed in our call, took the necklaces, and left.
Driving home was a different matter. Cruising the rural roads in Connecticut after twilight in the early summer, past farmers’ fields and the little roadhouses, their pink Miller Beer signs just beginning to glow in the new darkness, with two guaranteed jade talismans in my pocket, I began to swell with confidence and good cheer. I sang songs that I made up (with gestures) and grinned like an idiot. I never saw Mrs. Argyle at all. I motored toward Bigville, my mouth full of song, the jade glowing at my side.
At garlic headquarters, my house, Story was waiting. I could see my sweet mayor and Ruth Wellner, my favorite county attorney, having Piels Light on the rocks with a twist in the living room. Piels beer is the only thing Story drinks, always on ice with a twist, and I had come to see the brown bottles with their cadmium orange labels as little symbols of pleasure and ease, perhaps celebration. But this time as I walked through the kitchen and saw the bottles standing on the counter, I don’t know, I was worried. Our normal life was amazing; why did I want to tamper with it? But then I thought: okay, if this is what I have to do to create another human being, to have a son or daughter with whom to play catch and Scrabble, and to show Picasso and Chagall, and to teach how to fish and to cook a good garlic sauce for spaghetti squash, someone to send to the fridge for another beer and who will chase his sister through the house with a pair of scissors and to lend the car keys to and to ground for two weeks for being late for some ridiculous curfew and to spend two hundred thousand dollars on and to leave all my stuff to, my collection of Monster Magazines, my hand-tied flies, my railroad watch, though it is broken, and someone to fake-right, go-left past for the hoop, and to paint a thousand versions of before I die, then okay, I’ll do it. I entered the living room.
Ruth Wellner gave me the hardest ride with her eyeballs I’d ever had. “Hi, everybody!” I said. “How’s the township?”
Story smiled at me, which is great about her. She always smiles at me at first. Then, of course, she said, “What’s going on, Dan?” I thought for a moment that she had read my mind or had seen the two lumps of jade in my pocket, but then she went on: “What have you done to the house?”
“Oh! Yeah.” I hadn’t thought of an answer, especially in front of the county attorney. “It’s a conceptual piece I’m trying.”
“Garlic?”
“This one’s garlic.” I said, wishing I’d grabbed a beer. “It’s been done with apples.” I nodded, believing what I’d said myself. “It’s only a temporary piece,” I explained, waving my hands as a kind of truce. Ruth leaned back and shook her head imperceptibly, a subtle gesture they all learn in law school which means: “I don’t believe a word of it, you lying bastard.” But Story smiled at me again, a new smile this time, the ancient smile of women who know their men.
“You missed your class, you know.”
“Oh, sure,” I said affirmatively. “Sure, sure. That’s wonderful.” And it was wonderful in my crazy head. I could see my students waiting for the keys to unlock their lockers, grumbling and then drifting away. Mary Ann Buxton would have drifted right to the department chairman’s office to offer him most of an earful, but it was wonderful. I smiled. I put my hand over the two charms in my pocket and I realized that I was moving through the most centered and affirmative period of my life. And though I couldn’t see them all clearly, there were still things to do.
NINE
IN the morning, I placed the thermometer in Story’s mouth and sang three minute
s from the theme song of High Noon, making the “Do not forsake me, oh my darling!” really mournful, and then read the little gauge: “Ninety-seven point nine. Or ninety-eight flat, I can’t tell.”
I felt an almost impossible intensity, an anticipation that ran me with chills. All my magic was aligned for tonight, all my preparations.
“You’re in a … mood,” Story said cautiously, giving me an odd side glance.
“Good night’s sleep,” I said trying to suddenly appear mature. I stood and the song rose into my throat. “On this our we-e-edding day-ay!” I sang and headed for the bathroom.
In the shower steam rose around me rife with garlic, the very smell of babies hovering in the air. There was nothing wrong with us. Tonight was the night.
Story came into the bathroom just in time to hear the best rhyme in my song:
“He’d made a vow while in state prison,
Vow’d it’d be my life or his’n!”
“Oh, this garlic!” she yelled. “This garlic has got to go!”
“Tomorrow,” I answered. “Just one more day.”
“You know what Ruth thinks?”
“That she could get me off with insanity?”
“That you’re having an affair.”
I poked my head outside the shower curtain and stared at Story. She was naked, brushing her teeth, and the way she bent to the sink burned across my heart. “What?”
Story tapped her brush and looked up. Such a smile. “You’re not having an affair. You’ve got your secrets, but you’re not having an affair.”
Before Story left for the office, I grabbed her lapels and said, “Listen, try this: get the township business out of your head, okay? If you have to, delegate some authority, make a new committee, but get it out of your head. And Story.”
“Yes, sir?”
“Come home alone. No Ruthless Ruth. No complicated preoccupations. Just you. Seven o’clock.”
“Is there something I should know, Dan?”
I showed her my palms and waved one up at the garlic doorway fringe. “You know it all already. I’ll see you at seven.”
She gave me a funny, get-well-soon look, and I thought what it must be like for the mayor to be married to a wizard-master of the dark and light arts, but I also thought: it’s worth it. She’ll go and worry about me for thirty-five minutes, until township troubles hit the fan, and it’s worth it.
After Story had left, I ran up to the campus for my ten o’clock life class, arriving just in time to let Tim, our model, in early. An irrepressible townie, he sits for the group bareassed in a buckskin jockstrap on a wooden stool, one knee drawn up to his chest, his heel on the stool seat. As he passed by me to go change clothes, he said: “One more time! Tomorrow I’m in Virginia Beach, and,” he pointed at me and smirked, “art class is history.”
I had forgotten: it was the last day of school. I was surprised and for the first time in weeks, time became real. My students filed in around me, and I had to smile; this was certainly a waking dream, but a good dream.
Mary Ann Buxton was waiting for me as I drifted among the easels. Seated directly behind Tim, she had drawn an incredibly precise version of the stool and had skipped up and drawn his shoulder axis and neck.
“Where were you yesterday?” she said. “The studio class, all nine of us, waited forty-five minutes. Is this what we pay tuition for?”
I wanted to say: Truce; it’s the last day of school. Cease further hostilities. But I did say: “I’m sorry, Mary Ann; I was away.” Before she could start again, I interrupted her with this whisper: “Mary Ann. What’s he going to sit on?” I pointed to the blank space on her paper where his ass should have been. “Don’t be shy,” I said. “This is art.” I couldn’t stop myself; I winked. “Go ahead, really.”
I was in a daze the whole hour. The volleyball at home. I couldn’t see a thing but the ball and the three paintings emerging in my mind. I wandered the studio muttering, “Good, good,” to everybody, even Mary Ann Buxton and her feathered fluffy version of Tim’s posterior. It was a tangible relief when Tim himself stood up, stretched, and said, “Okay. That’s my twenty bucks. Anybody looking now pays overtime.”
Oh, Bigville! You sweet township! What I did the rest of the day was seen through eyes blurred by heat and vision. I shook hands with my fine young painters and headed out, running across campus, gathering a hundred stares in my wake. If any dean had been looking out the window, I would have received a letter.
At home, I retrieved the ten-pound bag of rice and the fifty pounds of birdseed from the basement and spread them in a blinding flurry of thrown handfuls across the backyard, and incidentally my hair, the roof, and the raingutters.
I went to see Mr. Cummings at the Food Center and he had my two chickens, that is, their innards, and he handed me the plastic pail without a look, my eccentricity gone ordinary in his eyes. At home, crackling across the birdseed and rice, I tossed gloopy handfuls of the intestines, etcetera, around the yard. I stripped off my shirt and made circles on my belly with the blood. I bent and tried to read the throws. I’m not sure what they said, but they looked authentic. I went into the basement and drew on the furnace room walls with charcoal briquets: sperm entering the egg, wiggling tails, hash marks of excitement, seven stars, the blistered moon. When I came back upstairs, blinking into the light, I saw Buster and Sadie, Mudd Miller’s two dogs, rolling on their backs in the chicken guts. It dismayed me at first until I remembered that Sadie had already thrown three healthy litters of five puppies each, and I debated whether to go out and writhe around with them for a while.
The doorbell rang, and it turned out to be Mary Ann Buxton, in her traveling clothes, her little Volvo packed to the windows, still running on the driveway. She looked at me in a three-part glance: my charcoaled face, my bloody belly, and then, stepping back slowly, the aboriginal whole. There was nothing I could do.
“Hello,” I said.
“Mr. Baldwin,” she said finally. “Thank you for the help and encouragement in art this year. I’ve learned a lot. It was one of my favorite classes, and in appreciation, I brought you this little present.”
It was a prepared speech or she wouldn’t have gotten through it, and she managed a “Thank you and good-bye,” handing me something and backing down the stairs with a look of frenzied relief on her face. She was glad to have left the car running.
I looked in my hand. It was her painting of the four birches near the Dean’s garden. My eyes burned inexplicably, and I went back into the house and sat on the floor in the hallway for a moment. Mary Ann Buxton had squatted outdoors for three days frowning at this canvas, chewing her lip, and it was a good painting, two steps beyond representational. I looked at it for five minutes, as if I was counting the strokes. Those damn trees. I love those trees.
In my studio, my three paintings rose to me like live things. I buried my heart into the third and final canvas. I didn’t look up again until I heard Mudd Miller on his porch calling the names of his children, the ones he could remember. Oh, it was a bellow full of love! I looked at myself, covered with blood and paint and charcoal, my face a savage smear in the mirror. “Oh, Bigville,” I moaned aloud. “It’s all going to work.”
I showered and began to cool down. I called the office and Ruth Wellner said the meeting would go another hour. I stood in the dining room looking out through a window ringed by garlic at my yard littered with chicken waste, rice, and birdseed, and I had the momentary thought: “You fool, you’ve ruined your own home.” But it was a fleeting doubt and to quash it, I did an errand. I drove the Sportcraft volleyball over to Luther Allen’s and left it with the groundskeeper.
Story did not arrive home until after ten. I had roamed the house for a while, cruising my new paintings with a hot, fond confusion. I liked them even if I didn’t know what they were. Finally I settled in the living room with Mary Ann Buxton’s four birches propped against the mantel where I could see them, and Life Before Science on my lap. In the new dark
ness, the volume put my legs to sleep and I followed soon thereafter. It was a heavy book.
I was dreaming of Dr. Binderwitz scolding me, pointing his unwashed finger in my face, when Story woke me, bumping me softly with her leg. “Hey,” she said. “Did you eat?”
I checked my watch: ten-thirty. “What happened?”
“Want some chicken?” she said. “I brought you some chicken.”
So we ate cold chicken and drank Piels Light on the rocks at the kitchen table like two characters in a good short novel while I woke up and Story gave me the details of the meeting.
As Story told me the tale, she laughed and ate chicken and we drank cold beer, and the moment in the kitchen light reminded me in a primal way of why and how much I loved her.
“I’m painting again,” I said.
“I knew you would.” She reached and took my forearm.
“Wait here,” I told her, and I rose and fetched my two jade friends from the bureau. I put one around her neck and one around my own. Chin down, Story examined her necklace.
“You need to wear it tonight, while we …”
“Interact sexually?”
I nodded.
“Well, you are dear, aren’t you,” she said. “Confused, but dear.”
“Can you get the township out of your head long enough to conceive a baby?”
“Come here,” she said. “Come get me.”
WE didn’t make it to the bedroom. She started playing Eva Marie Saint in On the Waterfront and sliding down the hall door-frame, her arms around my neck, and by the time we were on our knees, no one was playing anymore, or rather, now we were playing in earnest. Several times we stopped and shifted to gain leg room, and we rolled, twice, three times, I don’t know, but then we were under the piano in a pane of moonlight, and I don’t know, her flesh, her breath, I was on my back and I could see the round moon just like an egg sliding down the blue-black tube of the sky. We were gathering the pieces as she held me, three hundred million coiled swimmers in a garlic sea, and in a rush that grabbed my throat like a fist, they were flying.