The Man Who Wouldn't Stand Up

by Jacob M. Appel

  “Do you own a copy of the scriptures, Mr. Brinkman?” asked Spitford. “If you don’t, why not take mine? Maybe it will soothe some of your bitterness.” The minister clasped Arnold’s hands and folded them around the Bible, his own fingers warm against the botanist’s clammy flesh. “Even the most hardened racist can mend his ways.”

  This last accusation jolted Arnold alert. How dare this priggish homophobic Neanderthal—this Uncle Tom—call him a bigot? “I was trying to explain to my nephew what a nigger was,” shouted the botanist. “Well, you’re a goddam nigger. And I don’t mean the colour of your skin. I mean the content of your character.”

  Spitford stepped backwards, apparently nonplussed. His eyes bulged; a vein in his forehead pulsed ominously. He started to speak several times, but all he managed to produce was a short choking sound. When he reached into his jacket pocket, Arnold feared the man might draw a pistol—but instead he produced a paisley handkerchief and dabbed at his temples. “Good evening, Mr. Brinkman,” he said.

  “The evening’s not over yet,” responded Arnold. “Not by a long-shot.”

  He raised the book above his shoulder and hurled it across the churchyard. It slammed into the decorative window, shattering the stained glass.

  “You show up at my house again tomorrow,” shouted Arnold, “and I’ll cut you in half with my chainsaw.”

  The botanist turned on his heels and walked swiftly into the darkness.

  Once he’d left Spitford’s, Arnold wasn’t sure why he’d ever gone. To threaten the minister? To annoy him? If so, he recognized he’d failed on both counts. It was now apparent to him that the minister was one of those fatalistic men who could never be annoyed, not by anything, because every inconvenience and aggravation was part of a divine scheme to draw him closer to Jesus on the cross. If that meant martyrdom, so much the better. Just as the followers of Calvin had once measured their heavenly value in earthly goods, the Spitfords of the world used pain as a benchmark for human worth. The more they suffered, the happier they were. Which made Arnold’s threats utterly futile. Not that he was actually going to attack the minister with a chainsaw—but even if he did, Spitford would count each missing limb as a special gift from God. Or would he? In his gut, Arnold still harboured doubts. He sensed a certain shrewdness, even guile, behind Spitford’s indignation. A servant of the Lord, maybe, but not one above cutting corners. The man would certainly crack a few innocent eggs to make an omelette for Christ. For whatever reason, he’d apparently decided to make Arnold into one of those eggs.

  But what troubled Arnold the most about the encounter—even more than the minister’s intransigence—was his own anger. He had levelled a racial slur at the man and tossed a Bible through a church window. Neither of these were capital offenses, and both had been provoked, but now he understood how otherwise decent people could explode on occasion and gun down their co-workers or their in-laws in cold blood. If he’d had a gun, he could easily have lost his temper enough to take a shot at Spitford. Which meant what? That hot-headed people shouldn’t be issued gun licenses? Or that the enemies of hot-tempered people ought to be issued bullet-proof vests? Maybe that anybody accused of a violent crime should be sent to an anger management course and given a second chance. That sounded like good social policy—but it didn’t excuse Arnold’s outburst. On the other hand, there was no epithet too harsh for a man like Spitford. Even if Arnold had thrown a thousand Bibles through a thousand church windows, or burned Notre Dame to its foundations, it wouldn’t have squared the score with the Bible-thumpers after what those Black Nazis had done to Arnold’s garden. In other words, what he’d done to Spitford had been both highly justified and utterly inexcusable.

  Arnold braved the subway ride to the Village. It was nearly four o’clock on a Friday morning and the odds of extensive human contact were low. The only other person on the platform was a shirtless, disfigured African-American wino strumming a broken ukulele. It sounded like the guy was attempting to sing O Susannah! but he had few teeth and his mouth was far too misshapen to articulate the words. Arnold generally didn’t give to the homeless individually—he preferred to send his donations to reputable, high-profile organizations of the sort that offered complimentary return-address labels—but a sudden yearning to demonstrate that he wasn’t a racist, maybe even to prove that he was a decent human being, took hold of him. He fished in his pockets and handed the man a ten dollar bill. The man growled what might have been a “thank you.” So far, so good. But then a gleam appeared in the guy’s eyes, a burst of sudden lucidity, as though the universe had been clarified for him or his crooning had conjured up a private vision of the Virgin Mary. The man opened his engorged mouth and stuck out a large diseased tongue. “God bless!” he cried. “God bless!” After that, he chased Arnold across the platform as though he might lick him, his tongue hanging from his foaming mouth like that of a rabid hound. Fortunately, the train arrived a moment later and the botanist darted into the final car as the doors closed. Unfortunately, he’d been so aggravated by the episode that he’d boarded an uptown train by mistake. At the next station, he’d had to get off and switch directions.

  When Arnold finally arrived at Sheridan Square, shortly before five o’clock, he realized that he didn’t want to return home. Not yet. Judith would be awake, he was sure, waiting to press him for the details of his encounter with Spitford, and inevitably, against his better judgment, he’d share them. Arnold had never mastered the art of lying to his wife, even when it served their mutual interests. So he shared secrets that would have best been kept to himself—whether a clinically insignificant rise in his cholesterol level, which was bound to cause Judith unnecessary worry, or a colleague’s infidelity, which might forever doom the man in her eyes. Once, Arnold had thrown Judith a surprise birthday party—fifty of their dearest friends at the Swiss bistro with the authentic cuckoo clocks—but he’d broken down and confessed on the stroll to the restaurant. He just wasn’t wired for dishonesty. Moreover, the problem with deceiving your spouse was that you couldn’t tell only one lie. Constant companionship forced you to cover your tracks, weaving more intricate falsehoods until neither of you knew what was true any longer. Arnold wanted no part of that. But he also didn’t want Judith raking him over the coals for losing his cool with Spitford. He cringed at the thought of sharing what he’d said about the content of the man’s character. It wasn’t Judith’s reaction only that he dreaded—although his wife, who’d sided with a contingent of St. Gregory’s parents protesting the use of the adverb “niggardly” in a school budget report, was unlikely to sympathize with his conduct. He was also sincerely embarrassed, not because he would have retracted his statement, but because language that might have been perfectly suited for a heated confrontation would seem ridiculous when repeated in his living room. And there was another reason Arnold didn’t want to return home: He couldn’t handle the thought of waking up to tend the garden that was no longer there.

  A whisper of light was already visible in the pink-grey sky, and the starlings were scavenging around the mesh garbage cans, when Arnold walked past Sixth Street and headed toward the nursery. The cot in his office might not be the city’s most comfortable bed—he’d have to clear the tubs of pepper seedlings off the mattress—but at least he wouldn’t be disturbed. That would give him time to prepare for Judith. And to figure out his next course of action. Maybe he would sue Spitford over the garden. Wasn’t the best defence a strong offense? But all of that planning would have to wait until after a good night’s sleep. Or at least a power nap. Right now, he could hardly keep his eyes open.

  Much to Arnold’s surprise, the showroom lights were illuminated in the nursery. Maybe this was another of Guillermo’s security measures, he figured. But then he crossed through the hangar and found the manager himself awake in his office. The Venezuelan was lying on the sofa, staring wide-eyed at the popcorn ceiling. A bag of soy chips and a no-calorie vitamin drink lay on the floor nearby. On the manager’s desk,
at the opposite end of the room, stood a conspicuous orange sunflower in a bud vase.

  Arnold knocked on the open door. Guillermo glanced in his direction, then returned his gaze upward.

  “What are you doing here?” asked Arnold.

  “Thinking.”

  “I thought that was my job.”

  “We do different kinds of thinking. I’ve been thinking about business.”

  “Have you?”

  “I had Lucinda run some numbers for me,” said Guillermo. He sat up and rolled down his sleeves one at a time, fastening the buttons. “Do you know how many individual plants we sold last year during the second week of May?”

  “I don’t have the foggiest idea.”

  “Seven hundred forty-eight,” answered Guillermo. Arnold had little doubt the Venezuelan could itemize each sale, if asked. “Do you know how many individual plants we’ve sold over the last five days?”

  “Not as many, I suppose.”

  “Thirty-nine.”

  “That’s definitely not as many.” Arnold hadn’t expected the number to be that low. “I take it that’s not just a glitch in the business cycle…”

  The Venezuelan folded his arms across his chest. “It’s a glitch in the political cycle, Arnold.”

  “You mean to tell me people aren’t buying my plants because they don’t like my politics?”

  “That’s what it looks like. Or they do like your politics, privately, but they’re afraid to be seen here. Or they just want to stay clear of trouble. Who knows? The bottom line is that we’re haemorrhaging cash.”

  “So you think I should apologize.”

  “I’m not saying that. I told you I don’t go near that stuff,” said Guillermo. “What I’m telling you is that if you don’t intend to apologize, you’d better come up with a plan B before we go bankrupt.”

  “And if I don’t have a plan B?”

  Guillermo removed a toothpick from a tiny see-through case and twirled it between his lips. “I’m not too worried. The bosses always have a plan B.”

  The Venezuelan stood up. “Time to call it a day,” he said. “Any interest in breakfast?”

  “Go ahead,” said Arnold. “I’m not done thinking yet.”

  The truth was that he would have loved breakfast—and companionship—but he was afraid to show his face in public.

  “Okay, suit yourself. By the way, your wife called looking for you. Twice.”

  “I had an errand to run.”

  “She told me all about it,” said Guillermo. “I trust you didn’t kill the guy.”

  Arnold didn’t say anything.

  “On second thought, if you did, I don’t want to know.” The Venezuelan retrieved his cap from the hat rack. “By the way, aren’t you going to ask me about the flower?”

  “Sure. What’s with the flower?”

  “It’s for you. From that girl. They delivered it this morning while you were going through your DO NOT DISTURB phase.”

  Arnold walked over to the vase and examined the miniature card. It read:

  CAN WE TALK ON THE RECORD? CASSANDRA

  Guillermo chuckled. “Are you going to talk to her?”

  “She’s off her gourd,” said Arnold. “Why in the word would anyone send me flowers. I own a nursery for Christ’s sake.”

  “I think it was supposed to be a joke,” said the Venezuelan.

  Some joke. He’d lost the garden it had taken him a lifetime to cultivate and she’d sent him a droopy, dehydrated supermarket flower in a pot of lukewarm tap water. A gift that ranked right up there with sending condoms to nuns or lampshades to holocaust survivors. Who the hell did this girl think she was? The sunflower didn’t make him want to give her an interview—it made him want to call her and scream at her. To tell her that his life was falling apart, piece by piece, and the last thing he needed was some teenybopper cub reporter sending him gag presents and stirring up trouble. What he really wanted to do was to shout at her until she realized that his life was no joking matter and certainly not a tool for left-wing propagandists. Maybe that had been her intended effect.

  “Most people laugh at jokes,” said Guillermo, “or at least smile.”

  “I’m guffawing in my head.”

  “Whatever, boss,” said the Venezuelan. “Don’t forget to breathe.”

  Guillermo departed and Arnold heard the manager’s footsteps echoing across the hangar, then the pulse of the door chime as the Venezuelan exited out to the street. The botanist retrieved the sunflower and carried the vase into his own office. He cleared the pepper tubs from the cot, brushing away crumbs of fertilizer, but he was no longer sleepy. Why couldn’t the damn girl just leave him alone? He was having a hard enough time as it was. Nothing he’d ever done was so horrific that it merited a supermarket cutting. Arnold removed the sunflower from its stand. He clipped the stem with surgical expertise and set the stalk in a glass of distilled, refrigerated water. He verified the temperature. Thirty-five degrees. Next, he checked the pH. Five. Far too high. So he added lemon juice, bead by bead, with an eyedropper. Florence Nightingale could have done no better. Tomorrow, the drooping stalk might hope for at least a limited recovery. When the first aid was done, Arnold reached across the desk absentmindedly and flipped on the television.

  The botanist recognized the voice before he saw the face: the affected English accent, the effeminate lisp, the mouth draw tight as that of a ventriloquist. There was no mistaking that voice—like a gay, aristocratic Charlie McCarthy. And there was its owner, Arnold’s ex-brother-in-law, being interviewed beneath a coconut palm. Vince Sprague was one of those rare men over sixty-five who actually looked good in a crotch-hugging swimsuit. Celeste’s former husband boasted that he did five hundred push-ups every morning, half of them on his knuckles; at a dinner party, several years earlier, he’d consumed too much port and bench-pressed the host’s piano. Sprague’s chest was tan and waxed and as defined as a Michelangelo sketch. Even the muscles in his neck were as thick as those in Arnold’s legs.

  “Of course, I am quite disturbed,” said Sprague. “If you’ll pardon my French, it’s bloody outrageous. Categorically despicable. I am not myself an aficionado of American baseball, you understand, nor am I an American citizen, but on the occasions when I have found myself at such a match, I have always risen for the national anthem. I cannot imagine what lapse of judgment allowed my ex-wife to trust our son to such a misguided—if not outright dangerous—influence.”

  Arnold pounded his fist on the desktop. “You’re from Staten Island, goddamit,” he shouted at the television. “You’re not a citizen because you renounced your citizenship to avoid paying income tax.”

  “I did not know Mr. Brinkman well myself,” continued Sprague. “I tried to avoid him, to tell you the truth. I always thought him somewhat unscrupulous.”

  Amazing! The man sells thousands of teenage girls into prostitution, abandons his wife and son for a Romanian gymnast one-third his age, flees the country to avoid a federal indictment so long it contains an index, and doesn’t even send Celeste a dime of child-support—and now he’s calling Arnold unscrupulous. Why didn’t they ask Sprague why he hadn’t taken the boy to the baseball game? Why he hadn’t sent the boy so much as a postcard in six years? Because they wanted Arnold to lose, that’s why. Because now the object of this game was to see how much dirt they could pile on Arnold before he suffocated. They could discover that he’d spent the last thirty years reading bedtime stories to blind nuns, or that he’d been a POW in southeast Asia, and they’d still find a way to spin the news against him. Even if it were discovered that he were a paraplegic who suffered tongue spasms, that the entire incident had been involuntary, they’d rake him across the coals for not seeking pre-emptive treatment.

  “I am consulting with my attorneys,” said Sprague. “I intend to take every necessary measure to make certain this blasted outrage does not recur in the future.”

  “I’m not the outrage, dammit!” shouted Arnold. “You’re the out
rage!”

  He stormed out of the office, carrying the sunflower with him. Never in his life could Arnold recall being so worn down—so close to snapping. Usually, a few hours hoeing in the garden would tranquilize his nerves, but that was no longer a possibility. Nor was a hug from Judith. The only other genuine pleasure the botanist could think of were the hothouses, where they kept the tropical plants and exotics. One of these greenhouses was dry and served the cactus. The other, the wet greenhouse, contained liana-draped banana thickets and Brazil nut trees festooned with orchids. The Garden Centre’s stock of bromeliads was the most impressive private collection in the world. Nominally, all of these plants were for sale—which was essential, according to Lucinda, for taxation purposes. In reality, few if any of the rarer specimens ever found a buyer. Even in the West Village, there was little market for $15,000 pitcher plants. Arnold loved the scents of the wet greenhouse: Not just the sweet aroma of bee-pollinated flowers, like mock-orange, or the lemon fragrance of citriodora, but also the pungent stench of the durian fruits and the cadaver-like odour of the Rafflesia. All of it reminded the botanist of the near infinite variety of plant life, the endless promise and possibility. Ornithologists had more or less run out of birds. They might yet discover one or two new species—maybe recover an isolated stand of Ivory-billed woodpeckers every fifty years—but the day to day life of a bird scholar was more like that of a classicist than that of an explorer. But botany! The Amazon basin alone was home to tens of thousands of un-catalogued species, any one of which might cure cancer or taste of ambrosia. Which was why Arnold enjoyed relaxing in the wet greenhouse, as others might savour a Jacuzzi or a sauna, letting the plant world pollinate his lungs. He sat on a wooden shelf with the sunflower braced on his lap.