The skin of the world.
“Does it hurt them?” I asked.
The man looked at me, startled, and I wondered for a moment what I had said that could startle a man who had cut his own feet off.
And it dawned on me, too, what I had just asked.
Does it hurt them?
The man didn’t have to say anything, because he knew then what I was made of. That I could even ask that question. And what that question meant.
He looked like he was about to tell me something, maybe advise me, but he knew and I knew that only a man who had given up would ask that question.
Does it hurt them?
Because, maybe if it doesn’t hurt, maybe it’s okay that my son went in there, and got pulled through the seam of the world, the asshole of the universe. That must be what a man like me means when he has to ask.
“How would I know?” the stranger said, and hobbled across the grass, moist with the sweat from the skin of the world.
3
I stood in that doorway, and could not bring myself to call to my son.
I shined the flashlight around in that inner darkness, and saw forms rising and falling slowly, as if children played beneath a blanket after lights out.
Soon, the evening came, and I was still there, and the man had gone off somewhere into the field of junk.
I thought of Tommy’s mother, Anne, and how worried she would be, and perhaps the need she would have that I could respond to.
I began to smell the odor that the man had spoken of: it was gently sweet and also pungent, like a narcissus, and I remembered the day after my brother Ray had not come home, and how my mother and father held each other so close, closer than I had ever remembered them being before.
I remembered thinking then, as now, it’s a small sacrifice for happiness.
O, Rare and Most Exquisite
“What is human love?” I have heard my mother ask when she was sick, or when she was weary from the wood-rotted dams of marriage and children. It’s a question that haunts my every waking hour. I, myself, never experienced love. I once learned about it secondhand. When I was seventeen, I worked in a retirement home, in the cafeteria, and on my afternoons off I went up to the third floor.
This was the nursing facility, and I suppose I went there to feel needed; all the elderly patients begged for attention, often someone to just sit with them, hold their hand, watch the sun as it stretched down across the far-off trees heavy with summer green. I don’t know why I was so taken with the older people, but I felt more comfortable around them than I often did around my peers.
One day, an old man was shouting from his bed, “O, rare and most exquisite! O, God, O God, O, rare and most exquisite creation! Why hast thou forsaken me?”
His voice was strong and echoed down the slick corridor; his neighbors, in adjacent beds, cried out for relief from his moans and groans. Since the orderlies ignored all this, routinely, I went to his room to find out what the trouble was about.
He was a ruffian. Bastards always lived the longest, it was a rule of thumb on the nursing floor, and this man was a prince among bastards. Something about the lizard leather of his skin, and the grease of his hair, and the way his forehead dug into his eyebrows as if he were trying to close his translucent blue eyes by forcing the thick skin down over them. He had no kindness in him; but I sat down on the edge of his bed, patted his hand, which shook, and asked him what the matter was.
“Love,” he said. “All my life, I pursued nothing but love. And look where it’s gotten me.” He was a rasping old crow, the kind my brother used to shoot at in trees.
“Did you have lunch yet?” I asked, because I knew that the patients would become irritable if they hadn’t eaten.
“I will not eat this raw sewage you call food.”
“You can have roast beef, if you want. And pie.”
“I will not eat.” He closed his eyes, and I thought he was about to go to sleep, so I began to get up off the bed. He whispered, coughing a bit, “Bring me the box under the bed.”
I did as he asked. It was a cheap strongbox that could be bought in a dime store. When I set it beside him, he reached under the blankets and brought out a small key.
“Open it for me,” he said.
I put the tiny key in the hole, turned, and brought the lid up.
The box was filled with what appeared to be sand.
“Reach in it,” he said, and I stuck my hands in, and felt what seemed to be a stick, or perhaps it was a quill. I took it out.
It was a dried flower, with only a few petals remaining.
“Do you know about love?” he asked me.
I grinned. “Sure.”
“You’re too young,” he said, shaking his head. He took the dried flower from my hand and brought it up to his nose. Dust from the petals fell across his upper lip. “You think love is about kindness and dedication and caring. But it is not. It is about tearing flesh with hot pincers.”
I wondered if he was sane; many of the patients were not.
He said, “This is the most rare flower that has ever existed. It is more than sixty years old. It is the most valuable thing I own. I am going to die soon, boy. Smell it. Smell it.”
He pressed the withered blossom into the palm of my hand, and cupped his shaking fingers under mine. “Smell it.”
I lifted it up to my nose. For just a second, I thought I smelled a distant sea, and island breezes of blossoming fruit trees and perfumes. Then nothing but the rubbing alcohol and urine of the nursing floor.
“I will give this to you,” he said. “to keep, if you promise to take care of it.”
Without thinking, I said, “It’s dead.”
He shook his head, a rage flaring behind his eyes, a life in him I wouldn’t have expected. “You don’t know about love,” he grabbed my arm, and his grip was hard as stone, “and you’ll live just like I did, boy, unless you listen good, and life will give you its own whipping so that one day you’ll end up in this bed smelling like this and crying out to the god of death just for escape from this idiot skin so that the pain of memory will stop.”
To calm him, because now I knew he was crazy, I said, “Okay. Tell me.”
“Love,” he said, “is the darkest gift. It takes all that you are, and it destroys you.”
And he told me about the flower of his youth.
His name was Gus, and he was a gardener at a house that overlooked the Hudson River.
The year was 1925, and his employer was an invalid in his fifties, with a young wife. The wife’s name was Jo, and she was from a poor family, but she had made a good marriage, for the house and grounds occupied a hundred acres. As head gardener, Gus had a staff of six beneath him. Jo would come out in the mornings, bringing coffee to the workers. She was from a family of laborers, so she understood their needs, and she encouraged their familiarity. Her husband barely noticed her, and if he did, he wouldn’t approve of her mixing with the staff.
One morning she came down to Gus where he stood in the maze of roses, with the dew barely settled upon them, and she kissed him lightly on the cheek. He wasn’t sure how to take this. She was wearing her robe, as she always did when she brought the coffee out to the men, although it revealed nothing of her figure. She was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, with thick dark hair, worn long and out of fashion, a throwback to the long Victorian tresses of his mother’s generation. She had almond-shaped eyes, and skin like olives soaked in brandy.
He had never seen a woman this exotic in his hometown of Wappingers Falls.
She smelled of oil and rosewater, and she did not greet him, ever, without something sweet on her lips, so that her breath was a pleasure to feel against his skin. She drew back from him, and with her heavy accent, said, “Gus, my handsome boy of flowers, what will you find for me today?”
Gus had had girls before, since he was fourteen, but they had been lust pursuits, for none of the girls of the Falls, or of Poughkeepsie, or even the college
girl he had touched in Connecticut, stirred in him what he felt with Jo. He called her, to his men, “my Jo,” for he felt that, if things were different, she would not be with this wealthy man with his palsied body, but with him. Gus and Jo—he wrote it on the oak tree down near the river, he carved it into a stone he had placed in the center of the rose garden.
When she kissed him on the cheek, he waited a minute, then grabbed her in his arms, for he could no longer contain himself, and they made love there, in the morning, before the sun was far up in the sky.
He knew that she loved him, so he went that day to find her the most beautiful flower that could be had. It was a passion of hers, to have the most beautiful things, for she had lived most of her life with only the ugly and the dull. He wished he were wealthy so that he might fly to China, or to the south of France, or to the stars, to bring back the rarest of blooms. But, having four bits on him, he took the train into New York City, and eventually came to a neighborhood that sold nothing but flowers, stall upon stall. But it was midsummer, and all the flowers available were the same that he could grow along the river.
As he was about to leave, not knowing how he could return to his Jo without something very special, a woman near one of the stalls said, “You don’t like these, do you?”
Gus turned, and there was a woman of about twenty-two. Very plain, although pretty in the way that he thought all women basically pretty. She was small and pale, and she wore no makeup, but her eyes were large and lovely. “I’ve been watching you,” she said.
“You have?”
“Yes. Do you think that’s rude? To watch someone?”
“It depends.”
“I think it’s rude. But then,” she said, smiling like a mischievous child, “I’ve never been ashamed of my own behavior, only the behavior of others. I’m ashamed of yours. Here I’ve watched you for fifteen minutes, and you barely took your eyes off the flowers. How rude do you think that is? Very. You like flowers, don’t you?”
“I’m a gardener. I take care of them.”
“Lovely,” she said wistfully. “Imagine a life of caring for beautiful things. Imagine when you’re very old, and look back on it. What lovely memories you’ll have.”
Although she seemed forthright, the way he knew city people were, there was something fitful in the way she spoke, almost hesitant somewhere in the flow of words, as if all this snappy talk was a cover for extreme shyness. And yet, he knew, city women were rarely shy.
He had not come all the way to the city to flirt with shop girls. “I’m looking for something out of the ordinary.”
She offered a curious smile, tilting her head back. She was a shade beautiful in the thin shaft of daylight that pressed between the stalls. She was no Jo, but she would make some young man fall in love with her, he knew that much. Some city boy who worked in the local grocer’s, or ran a bakery. Or, perhaps, even a junior bondsman. She would eventually live in one of the boxcar apartments in Brooklyn, and be the most wonderful and ordinary bride. She would have four children, and grow old without fear. Not like Jo, who was destined for romance and passion and tragedy and great redemption, not Italian Jo of olive skin and rose water. The woman said, “I know a place where you can find very unusual flowers.”
“I want a beauty,” he said.
“For a lady?”
Because Gus knew how women could be, and because he detected that he might get further along with this girl if he feigned interest in her, he lied. “No. Just for me. I appreciate beautiful flowers.”
He felt bad then, a little, because now he knew that he was leading her on, but she seemed to know where the interesting flowers were, and all he could think of was Jo and how she loved flowers. Gus was considered handsome in his day, and women often showed him special attention, so he was used to handling them, charming them. “I need a beauty,” he repeated.
“I’m not saying beautiful,” she cautioned him, and began walking between the stalls, through an alley, leading him, “but unusual. Sometimes unusual is better than beautiful.”
She wore a kind of apron, he noticed, the long kind that covered her dress, and he wondered if she was the local butcher’s daughter, or if she was a cook.
The alley was steamy; there was some sort of kitchen down one end of it, a laundry, too. He heard someone shouting somewhere in a foreign language.
The woman came to an open pit, with a thin metal staircase leading down to a room, and she hiked her apron up a bit, and held her hand out for him to steady her as she descended.
“My balance isn’t too good,” she told him. “I have a heart problem—nothing serious—but it makes me light-headed sometimes on stairs.”
“There’re flowers down there?” he asked as he went down the steps slowly.
“It’s one of my father’s storage rooms. He has a flower shop on Seventh Avenue, but there’s an icehouse above us, and we get shavings for free. They stay colder down here,” she said, and turned a light up just as he had reached the last step. “There’s another room three doors down, beneath the laundry. We keep some there, too.”
The room was all of redbrick, and it was chilly, like winter. “We’re right underneath the storage part of the icehouse.”
As the feeble light grew strong, he saw that they were surrounded by flowers, some of them brilliant vermillion sprays, others deep purples and blacks, still more of pile upon pile of dappled yellows on reds on greens.
“These are all fresh cut,” she said, “you can have any you want. My father grows them underneath the laundry, and when he cuts them, we keep them on ice until we ship them. Here,” she said, reaching into a bowl that seemed to be carved out of ice. She brought up tiny red and blue blossoms, like snowballs, but in miniature. She brought them up to his face, and the aroma was incredible; it reminded him of Jo’s skin when he pressed his face against her breasts and tasted the brightness of morning.
The woman kissed him, and he responded, but it was not like his kiss with Jo. This woman seemed colder, and he knew he was kissing her just because he wanted the blossoms. He remembered the cold kiss all the way to the big house, as he carried the gift to his beloved.
Jo was shocked by the tiny, perfect flowers.
He’d left them for her in a crystal bowl of water on the dining room table so that she would see them first when she came to have breakfast. He heard her cry out, sweetly, and then she came to the kitchen window to search the back garden for him. She tried to open it, but it had rained the night before and all that morning, so it was stuck. She rushed around to the back door, ran barefoot into the garden and grabbed his hand.
“Sweetest, precious, blessed,” she gasped. “Where did you find them? Their smell—so lovely.”
He had saved one small blossom in his hand. He crushed it against her neck, softly. He kissed her as if he owned her, and he told her how much he loved her.
She drew back from him then, and he saw something change in her eyes.
“No,” she said.
When those flowers died, he ventured back into the city, down the alley, but the entrance to the pit was closed.
He rapped on the metal doors several times, but there was no response. He went around to the entrance to the icehouse and asked the manager there about the flowers, but he seemed to not know much about it other than the fact that the storage room was closed for the day.
Gus was desperate, had brought his month’s pay in order to buy armloads of the flowers, but instead, ended up in an Irish bar on Horace Street drinking away most of it. Jo didn’t love him, he knew that now. How could he be such a fool, anyway? Jo could never leave her husband, never in a thousand years.
Oh, but for another moment in her arms, another moment of that sweet mystery of her breath against his neck!
He stayed in the city overnight, sleeping in a flophouse, and was up early, and this time went to directly to the laundry. The man who ran it took him to the back room, where the steam thickened. Gus heard the sounds of machines being
pushed and pressed and clanked and rapped, as a dozen or more people worked in the hot fog of the shop.
The owner took him farther back, until they came to a stairway.
“Down,” the man said, nodding, and then disappeared into the fog.
Gus descended the steps, never sure when he would touch bottom, for the steam was still heavy. Once in the depths, he noticed a sickly yellow light a ways off. He went towards it, brushing against what he assumed were flowers growing in their pots.
Then someone touched his arm.
“Gus.” It was the woman from the week before. “It’s me. Moira.”
“I didn’t know your name,” he told her. “I didn’t know how to find you.”
“How long did the flowers last?”
“Six days.”
“How sad,” she said, and leaned against him. He kissed her, but the way he would kiss his sister, because he didn’t really want to lead her on.
The mist from the laundry enveloped the outline of her face, causing her skin to shine a yellow-white like candles in luminaria, revealing years that he had not anticipated—he had thought she might be a girl in her early twenties, but in this steam she appeared older, ashes shining under her skin.
“I loved the flowers.”
“What else do you love, Gus?”
He didn’t answer. He pulled away from her, and felt the edges of thick-lipped petals.
She said, “We keep the exotics here. There’s an orchid from the Fiji Islands—it’s not properly an orchid, but it has the look of one. It’s tiny, but very rare. In its natural state, it’s a parasite on fruit trees, but here, it’s the most beautiful thing in the world.”
“I never paid you for the last one.”
“Gus,” she said, and reached up to cup the side of his face in the palm of her hand, “whatever is mine, is yours.”
She retreated into the mist, and in a few moments laid in the palm of his hand a flower so small that he could barely see it. She set another of its kind into a jewelry box and said, “This is more precious than any jewel I know of. But if I give it to you, I want you to tell me one thing.”
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