The $64 Tomato

by William Alexander

  Thus I was not happy about the grass paths I had been talked into, but the worst was yet to come. Bridget and George had used, of all things, Kentucky bluegrass. Homeowners love lawns of bluegrass. Why? For the same reason that bluegrass does not belong in a meadow. It spreads like a weed. Not all grasses share this behavior. Perennial rye, which I used in the meadow, does not. Neither does tall fescue. But bluegrass does, which makes it particularly unsuited to a garden, a fact that became painfully obvious as it rapidly made its way into the beds. Seemingly overnight, weeds—actual weeds—had become an afterthought, as my weeding sessions were dominated by pulling out clumps of bluegrass. If I wasn’t vigilant, the border between grass and bed became indistinguishable. Clumps of grass sprouted from the stone retaining walls like air ferns.

  I was not enjoying myself. I wanted to spend my time in the garden gardening, not tending to runaway grass, and the frustration was mounting rapidly. So on this August day, I suggested to Anne that we get rid of all the grass and put in gravel paths.

  “But it’s so—grand,” she protested, obviously still brainwashed, smitten, or both. “Is there something else we could do that would make it easier to deal with?”

  I thought for a while, and eventually it seemed that installing steel edging along the paths might help. The edging would give us a clean division between lawn and bed and, with any luck, cut down on the invasive spread of the bluegrass’s underground runners. And we could fill the space between the edging and the stone terraces with mulch and thyme, allowing us to drop two wheels of the lawn mower inside the edging and cut all the grass cleanly, eliminating the need for weed whacking.

  It seemed like the way to go. There was only one problem: I dreaded the thought of doing yet more labor. Make no mistake, this was backbreaking work, digging a small trench with a spade and laying in the edging. To hire someone would cost a fortune. So I procrastinated. And complained about the grass. And procrastinated. Until finally Anne had had enough, and one Sunday afternoon she announced, “I’m buying you a gardener.” This was to be my Christmas present. Okay, it beats a necktie, but I was skeptical.

  “You’ll never find someone to do a small job like this,” I predicted.

  Anne slid the local newspaper across the table. “What about him?”

  I looked at the classifieds. “Experienced gardener available for weeding, gardening, cleanup. No job too big or too small.” A local phone number. He was in town. And he didn’t have a hyphenated company name. I avoid contractors with hyphenated names, as in Jay-Dan. These are invariably two-man operations formed by a couple of buddies who got the brilliant idea to draw up a partnership on a cocktail napkin over one too many beers at the bar, who are inevitably going to end up fighting over money or a woman or both, becoming ex-buddies in the process and dissolving the business. Any day now. Besides, if Jay and Dan can’t come up with a more imaginative name than Jay-Dan (or Dan-Jay), they don’t deserve my business.

  So this prospect did seem promising. “Okay, give him a call.”

  Now, as any homeowner knows, calling represents merely the first step of the lengthy process of getting a contractor to your house for an estimate. Any painter, plumber, electrician, or gardener worth his salt does not come right over to the house. In fact he doesn’t answer his phone. You leave a message on his answering machine, and he calls back in the middle of a weekday when he knows you couldn’t possibly be home and leaves a message on your machine. And even if you just missed his call, even if you walked into the house as he was hanging up, if you call the number he leaves you on the machine thirty seconds later, he will not answer. You will get his machine. And so on. Until, when the planets finally align in the house of Jupiter and you establish voice contact, he makes an appointment for a week from Tuesday. And shows up an hour late. If he’s really good, he stands you up entirely and you have to return to step one to reschedule.

  The better the contractor, the more difficult he is to get ahold of. So I was rather startled—and a little concerned—when Anne hung up the phone and said, “He’s coming right over.” Now? On a Sunday afternoon? What seemed like only moments later, a movement caught my eye. I turned around and looked out the window, and Christopher Walken was standing in my garden.

  He was, I would guess, in his early thirties, with close-cropped hair, sunken cheeks, and the eerie gray eyes of an assassin. He bore a remarkable resemblance, not only physically, it would turn out, but in mannerism as well, to the actor Christopher Walken. So much so that to this day neither Anne nor I can remember his real name, first or last. We still refer to him as Christopher Walken. I gathered my composure and went out to meet him.

  I AM ALWAYS A LITTLE uncomfortable when introducing myself to contractors, despite the practice that an old home affords. My problem is, I am never quite sure which persona to present to a tradesman. On the one hand, I may have learned some blue-collar skills over the years, but there is no denying (or hiding) my white-collar pedigree. When the white-collar side of me prevails, I feel I risk alienation (and a higher estimate). I’ve heard contractors complaining about the “rich, dumb bastards” they work for, and since I am neither rich nor dumb, and hope I’m not a bastard, I’d rather not be lumped in with that group. On the other hand, I have over the years acquired a fair range of skills in carpentry, plumbing, woodworking, and even electricity, so I can meet a tradesman in my jeans and speak pretty knowledgeably about the job he is being engaged for. Sometimes too knowledgeably, for this has often backfired. I can’t count how many times a contractor has said to me something like, “You seem handy—what if I just frame it out, and you can put up the Sheetrock.” (Note the lack of a question mark at the end of that sentence.) And because contractors and I both hate the same things, they get to do the “fun” stuff, and I’m left hanging Sheetrock and cursing through my breath. It has gotten to the point that I literally hide in the bedroom when someone comes over to give an estimate, so Anne can play the helpless housewife and make sure the whole job gets done without my having to finish it up. This sometimes creates quite a comical scene.

  “Quick, he’s here. Hide!” Anne calls as I fly up the stairs like an illicit boyfriend hiding from the husband who’s arrived home unexpectedly.

  The other issue we have to deal with—and I don’t expect much sympathy on this count—is Anne’s profession. Some contractors charge what the market, that is the client, will bear. During the initial meeting, these contractors will size up your finances and factor that into the bid. While you think you’re making small talk, the contractor is studying you, your house, and your property and trying to figure out how affluent you are and how high he can go with his bid. When we first bought our house, this worked in our favor, as it was a ninety-year-old wreck. But I have seen how influential the contractor’s perception of your wealth can be. I vividly remember one case when we had some carpentry done for a very reasonable figure (although naturally I had to do the trim work myself). We paid by check and, less than a year later, called the carpenter in to do another job. He greeted us warmly, “Hi, Bill. Hi, Doctor.” Doctor? Last summer she was “Anne.” The estimate came in at almost double what we had expected.

  “Why did his prices go up so much?” Anne asked.

  “Gee, I can’t imagine, Doctor,” I answered.

  “Doctor inflation?” she said, coining a new term, her eyes wide. “You know, I wouldn’t mind if I actually made a doctor’s salary.”

  As a primary-care physician practicing old-fashioned medicine in the modern world, she doesn’t make Marcus Welby’s income. I sometimes ask her when she’s going to stop “practicing” and go into business.

  “How did he know I’m a doctor?” Anne wondered. She was still working out of town at the time.

  I placed the checkbook down in front of her, jabbing my finger on the “MD” after her name. Ironically, Anne had never wanted it included on the checks (she only uses her title professionally); it was I who insisted on it after she graduated from medical
school, convincing her she had worked hard for those two little initials and ought to use them. Now I was sorry I had. After a similar experience with doctor inflation, we discussed removing the “MD,” but since we figured that we were done with contractors for a while, we left it on. What we didn’t yet realize was that when you own a ninety-year-old house, you are never, ever done with contractors. Today, with Anne having her own practice in town and counting among her patients some of our contractors, there are no secrets left, so the costly initials remain for good.

  THE INTERVIEW WITH Christopher Walken, which I couldn’t hide from, got off to a bad start.

  “Beautiful place. How much property?”

  Some people would be flattered by this question. I always feel a little embarrassed, as if the next question might be, “How much did you pay for it?”

  I told him three acres. He nodded. “How much did you pay for it?”

  I was a little taken aback. “Uh, not that much. Fore-closure.”

  To move him off the subject, I started to explain the edging project, but he seemed more interested in the large, slightly bloody bandage on my left hand.

  “So you understand what I want here?” I asked. “What happened to your hand?” he replied.

  I had recently sliced off the tip of my left index finger on the table saw. In the emergency room, the nurse tending me had asked me where I lived. I decided to skip the preliminaries.

  “The Big Brown House,” I said.

  She knew exactly what I meant.

  “I used to live there. I kept a horse in the barn.”

  So that explains all the hay I’d had to lug out when building the woodshop.

  “Is it still a barn?”

  “More like a slaughterhouse,” I said ruefully, holding up my finger.

  The surgeon expertly sewed my finger back together, but I’ll never play the violin.

  I told Christopher Walken I’d had a slight accident in the shop, sparing him (to his chagrin, I’m sure) the painful details, and finally got him focused on the edging. Christopher had lots of questions and advice, delivered with a gravity worthy of a neurosurgeon discussing your imminent brain surgery. All the while I couldn’t get over the resemblance to that famous actor; it was downright spooky. As was the gardener. But he did seem to know what he was talking about. It turned out he was fairly new to town and was living as a kind of handyman-gardener-caretaker on an elderly woman’s property—“the estate,” he called it, as if no other identification were required. He had an uncanny way of working the phrase “on the estate” into every other sentence, as in “The way we do this on the estate…” or “Have you seen how I trimmed back those lilacs on the estate?” Anne and I had no idea what he was talking about, and no idea of where in our tiny village anything resembling an “estate” could possibly be located.

  As so often happens with contractors, instead of my interviewing him, he ended up interviewing me. And as I said, he had lots of questions. Some of them good questions, about how high I wanted the edging, and others about how much work we had to keep him employed beyond the edging job. The truth was, I had accumulated enough undone tasks to keep him busy through the fall. I could get used to having a personal gardener. In the end we agreed on initially committing to hiring him (or maybe he hired us) to do the edging and two clearing jobs. He was ready to start the edging Monday morning. As in, tomorrow. Okay, so he wasn’t in great demand right now. He’d just moved to town, so maybe it was no reflection on his skills. Still, I wondered…

  Because the edging came in ten-foot sections, and he had a pickup truck and I didn’t, we agreed that I would stop by the Agway store early Monday morning and pay for the materials, and he would pick them up shortly after.

  When I got home from work Monday evening, I was impressed with how much work had been done. I was standing in the garden admiring it in the setting sun when a voice from behind startled me.

  “Everything all right?” he said. I almost jumped out of my skin. How did he materialize out of nowhere?

  “Oh, Chris—” I caught myself just in time. “It looks great. You got a lot done today.”

  He leveled his assassin’s eyes at me. “It’s hard work. Really hard.” A pause.

  I didn’t know what he was driving at or quite how to respond. “If it was easy, I’d be doing it myself” didn’t seem appropriate. I mumbled something like, “I know. I’ve done my share of digging. But it looks great. Thanks so much.”

  He waited, I guess, for more, until he decided I had missed my cue, then continued, “I was just wondering if you could pay me for today. Cash.”

  Oh. I hadn’t realized that was our financial arrangement. I went into the kitchen and raided the grocery money and borrowed forty dollars from Zach.

  By the next evening, the job was almost done. On cue, Christopher Walken materialized, looking even more tightly wound than usual, if that was possible. He had some bad, really bad, news. “They shorted you half the spikes.”

  The spikes were narrow triangular pieces of metal that got pounded into loops on the edging and served both to attach the edging to the ground and to secure adjoining sections together. They were utterly critical to the installation.

  “Are you sure?”

  His colorless eyes narrowed and his mainspring tightened another click. He looked as if he wanted to slit my throat. “Do you think I’m lying to you?” he asked, dragging out the word as if the very notion was incomprehensible.

  “No, no, of course not. It’s just surprising that they would do that. They’re pretty good over there,” I explained. “And I suspect they’re going to give me a hard time over it.”

  “They’re a bunch of assholes. And if they give you any problem, I’ll come over there and—”

  “Let’s just see what happens.” I had a Deer Hunter flashback and shivered. “Okay, exactly how many short are we?”

  We counted the remaining sections and spikes, finding a couple that Christopher had mislaid in the grass. We were exactly a full bundle—that is, ten—short.

  The next morning, I left for work a half-hour early and swung by Agway. If there is anything I hate doing, it’s showing up at the farm store or the lumberyard in a tie. It marks you as a tenderfoot. A softy. Definitely not one of the boys. And when you’re going in with a dispute, you really, really want to be one of the boys.

  But there I was in my tie and pressed shirt. I told them about the missing spikes. They were polite but skeptical. The woman out front called in the yardman who had handled the order.

  “I remember counting them out myself,” he said softly but firmly. “They must still be in his truck. That truck was some mess.”

  “He swears they’re not. Is it possible he left them behind?”

  “Well, they would still be here if he did. I’ll go take another look.”

  He came back a few minutes later. No such luck. I pleaded, “Look, if you can give me replacements, I’ll pay you for them.”

  “If I had extras, I’d give them to you for nothing. But they only give us enough spikes for the sections of edging they ship. If I give these to you, I can’t sell the remaining edging.”

  I was not about to buy a half-dozen more sections, at thirty dollars apiece, just to get the spikes. I didn’t know what to do, and I told them so. I must have looked as if I was going to cry. The yardman went out back and returned with a handful of spikes. He extended them to me. “You can leave out some of the center ones. This should get you through the job.” I thanked him profusely. “By the way, who is your gardener?” he asked. “I’ve never seen him before. He’s a little… strange.”

  “Christopher Walken,” I said over my shoulder as I walked out of the store. “Didn’t you recognize him?”

  Now thoroughly late for work, I raced home with my precious bounty. Walken was unloading his truck. I started to relate my trip to Agway, which I immediately realized was a mistake. His eyes flashed with anger—the first sign of life I had ever seen in them—his face
reddened, his neck swelled, and he started to stride toward his truck.

  “Where are you going?” I cried after him.

  “Why, I’m going to go punch him right in the nose.”

  Now, I know this sounds like bad movie dialogue from the thirties, but that is exactly what he said: “Why, I’m going to go punch him right in the nose.”

  I quickly put myself between him and the truck. “You don’t want to do that.”

  “No one calls me a liar!”

  “No one is calling you a liar, Chr—” Whoops. “He just thinks he gave you the right amount. Maybe we should look in your truck once more.”

  His eyes flashed again. “Are you calling me a liar?”

  No, I was thinking. Just a psychopath. I tried to be diplomatic. “Look, it doesn’t really matter who’s at fault. He gave me some extra spikes; let’s see if we can make do with what we have.”

  Christopher sulked for a while. I drove to the office, trying to push the image of Christopher Walken laying waste to the Agway out of my head. On the radio an old Talking Heads song was playing, and I sang along with a new lyric: “Psycho gardener, better run, run a-waaaaaay.”

  Christopher Walken managed to finish the job and stayed with us for another week, clearing two weedy, shrubby areas where we wanted to plant grass or ground cover. Each evening, he showed up to collect his day’s wages and to complain about how hard the work was. After several days he felt comfortable enough with me to start sharing some intimacies about his difficult life.

  We’ve gotten to know some of our contractors rather well. Several, as I’ve mentioned, are Anne’s patients. More than a few of the tradesmen in this town are natives whose family trades go back a generation or more, a tradition more commonly found in a European village than in modern America. My plumber, for example, now eighty, is in business with his son. Before that, he was in business with his father. These second- and third-generation tradesmen tend to be the most reliable because of their long-term view of the business.