The Man Who Wouldn't Stand Up

by Jacob M. Appel

  Unfortunately, Guillermo’s fate was another matter. The Venezuelan appeared on the front page of the Times, the morning after his arrest, wearing a restraining belt and an orange jump suit. He appeared wan and disoriented. On public radio, family members of the plane-crash victims expressed their relief and gratitude at his capture. The Cuban government issued a statement accusing the United States of a double-standard when it came to terrorism—but Havana offered nothing that might exonerate Arnold’s office manager. Within days, he’d been turned over to the Peruvian authorities for trial. When Arnold heard the news, he sat on the fire escape and wept. He’d have done anything to help the Venezuelan—even have turned himself in—but, in this case, there was nothing to be done. Guillermo Zambrano was Willie Vargas. He had blown up all of those innocent people. Producing a fugitive botanist as a character witness wasn’t going to do the poor man any good and the NPR story on the plane bombing had shaken Arnold. It crossed his mind that his friend had done something horrific, something that did deserve to be punished. Bonnie Card could say all she wanted about “one man’s terrorism being another man’s freedom-fighting,” but at the end of the day, one hundred forty-two innocent people had died. That was the heart of the problem: every choice made sense from some vantage point. Like butchering Spitford. Several nights Arnold woke in a cold sweat, having dreamed that he was squeezing shut the clergyman’s windpipe.

  The botanist’s first days at Cassandra’s were marked by an intense interest in the world outside the apartment. Denied access to the city, he longed for its bustle. He suffered cravings for vegetarian paella and crepe suzette and oven-hot anchovy pizza from Sal & Joe’s—in short, for anything that would be difficult to bring back to his isolated quarters. But what he longed for most was news, the details of the daily life that he’d abandoned. He sent the girl to check out the nursery, in the wake of Willie’s deportation, and he’d suffered acutely when she reported that the Plant Centre had been closed indefinitely “Due to Unforeseen Circumstances.” He endured another blow when Spitford announced a boycott of “All Things Brinkman,” and several major retailers responded with immediate announcements that they were pulling his books from their shelves. Arnold stewed over this treachery and ranted about suing them from absentia. But then his entire “business empire”—as the media called it—was seized by the government. According to the F.B.I., their HAZMAT team had discovered traces of castor beans at Arnold’s office. These plants were the principal ingredient in the bio-toxin ricin. The authorities described their find as “a weapons-grade cache” that “could be transformed into a mass poison in a matter of weeks.” Which applied to all castor beans. And to every nursery and green grocer in the country that carried them. All through Arnold’s childhood the Baroness had hand-made her own castor oil—and had tortured Arnold with its properties in the name of digestive health—but nobody had ever accused her of being a terrorist. “Next thing you know they’ll brand me a terrorist for growing water lilies,” he told Cassandra. “People can drown in water, you know.”

  As one afternoon drifted into another, all of these setbacks seemed increasingly abstract, as though they’d happened to someone else. Which wasn’t so far from the truth. Arnold the Fugitive felt little connection to the happily married and successful entrepreneur who’d refused to stand up at a baseball game. Maybe this was a psychological necessity, a coping mechanism. Like the women who’d shared the nursing facility with his mother, for whom a few dingy corridors and a sterile recreation centre became an entire universe, Arnold grew more and more focused on his immediate surroundings: the apartment, the wall-to-wall books, the cramped courtyard where the superintendent’s teensy Filipino wife, a mail-order bride, raised ornamental cabbages. That first day, as a gag, the girl bought him a bag of tomato seeds and a tray of soil, but he enjoyed the present so much that soon he was cultivating half a dozen tins of plantlets. Never have garden tomatoes been so carefully tended. His trove included beefsteaks, currants, plums, and a marvellous patch of cherry tomatoes that the dog accidentally kicked off the fire escape. Arnold’s days were spent tending these plants, and reading from Cassandra’s philosophy library, and, as the spring bled into summer, thinking about his relationship with his new roommate.

  Cassandra Broward was, by any standard, an odd creature. The girl appeared to live an entirely hermetic existence. She didn’t have one visitor during Arnold’s first two weeks in the apartment: her only phone calls came from her boss at the Vanguard; once from a telemarketer pitching industrial carpet cleaner. Other than work, and the weekly chores of shopping and laundry, she didn’t spend much time outside the tenement. It was possible that she’d altered her routine on account of Arnold’s presence, but the botanist didn’t think so. Her studio apartment lacked the postcard-dappled refrigerator and photo-clad bedside tables that suggested a network of kith and kin. No, she appeared to be on her own in the world. Yet what amazed Arnold was that the girl didn’t seem to mind at all. She spent most of her evenings reading high-end philosophy—Marx, Schopenhauer, Heidegger—or, later in the week, completing the New York Times crossword puzzle. There was no point in trying before Wednesday, she explained. The Monday and Tuesday puzzles were designed for halfwits—Judith had felt the same way. Arnold loved the first puzzles of the week because they were the only ones on which he could make any headway. He wondered how he kept falling for women who were gifted at word games. Because, in spite of himself, he was developing an unhealthy romantic attachment to his hostess. Arnold recalled an old expression: “Give a man a hammer and he will view all problems as nails.” He told himself his feelings for Cassandra were of a similar nature—he liked her because she was there. ‘Stockholm Syndrome’. But increasingly, he wasn’t so sure that was all there was to it….

  One night, after supper, Arnold asked her about her social life. They were sitting on the fire escape, between the tomato trays and the compost bin, enjoying a fine cool mist that had settled over the city. Cassandra had lit a handful of scented candles, perfuming the night with a pleasant, wax-tinged aroma. Her cigarette smoke also hung in the damp air. The shades were drawn in the opposite apartment, but it didn’t matter, because the girl had draped towels over the upper steps and railing to create a protective screen for Arnold. He took a drag from Cassandra’s cigarette—Judith would have killed him—and watched the girl cobbling together a response.

  “I don’t have a social life,” she finally said.

  “That’s my point,” answered Arnold. “Why not?”

  She reclaimed her cigarette. “Why?”

  Her response wasn’t what the botanist had expected. “Most girls your age like to hang out with friends. Maybe even go on dates.” He regretted the words as soon as they left his mouth—they sounded so parental—but the girl didn’t appear to mind.

  “I’m not most girls my age.”

  “I don’t understand,” Arnold pressed. “Don’t you get…lonely?”

  Arnold had been in her apartment for only ten days and already he felt lonely. He didn’t confess this, of course, because he didn’t want to appear weak.

  “I guess I’m a Calvinist at heart. That sounds totally pretentious, doesn’t it? But it’s true,” answered the girl. She took a deep drag on her cigarette. “The way I see it, life is going to give you what it’s going to give you—and there’s not a fucking thing you can do about it. If someone wants to be my friend, I’m glad to be friends. But I so don’t see the point of going out and trying to make friends. Take you, for instance. I’m fine hanging out with you because you showed up. On the other hand, I’m not going to put up signs around the neighbourhood advertising for fugitives to crash on my floor.”

  “That’s extremely passive, don’t you think?”

  “But I don’t mind, really,” said the girl. “The pathetic truth of the matter is that most people don’t have any friends once they reach a certain age. Sure, they make friends in high school or college—but then they give them up when they have c
hildren. So why bother putting in all that effort when you end up right where you started?”

  “Why bother waking up in the morning when you eventually end up dead?”

  “I like waking up in the morning,” retorted Cassandra. “I don’t care about friends.”

  Arnold gazed up at the orange-tinted sky of Brooklyn. He could make out one solitary star pulsing through the glow. Or maybe it was a planet.

  “I know you don’t believe me,” continued the girl. “But it’s true. Socializing is just not my thing. I’ve always been like this, even before my parents died.” The elder Browards had owned a seafood restaurant; they’d died of smoke inhalation, during an electrical fire, while Cassandra was in college. “Your problem is that it is your thing—for people like you, your whole life is about socializing. Dinner parties and cocktail parties and all that bullshit. That’s how you convince yourself that you matter. I bet you go to twenty weddings a year, every time you’ve got a friend whose kid gets married, and every time, you’re bored out of your fucking skulls. Right? But even though you don’t actually like all that social bullshit, you still can’t handle that someone else—someone like me—doesn’t want to buy into it.”

  She was at least partially right. Arnold did measure much of his own success in terms of his reception by others. He cared deeply whether people liked him—and the more people who liked him, the better. At least with regard to people of his own class and values, of course, not the over-breeding troglodytes one brushed elbows with at sporting events.

  “I do value the approval of other people,” he conceded. “But I can understand why one wouldn’t….I guess.”

  “No, you can’t,” answered the girl. “But that’s okay.”

  Arnold wondered precisely what she’d meant by “okay”: “Okay” for a stranger or “okay” for a companion. He spotted a moth circling one of the candles. It was a large, russet-coloured gypsy moth of the defoliating variety—the sworn enemy of hardwoods everywhere. Arnold usually felt an obligation to destroy these creatures, for the sake of the city’s sweetgums and alders, but he was afraid the girl might not approve, so he watched the insect’s orbit indecisively.

  “Any other burning questions?” she asked. “I don’t want you to think I keep secrets.”

  “Well….,” stammered Arnold. “You don’t happened to have a boyfriend, do you…? Or a girlfriend?”

  The girl grinned. “I happen to like men, if that’s what you’re asking. And no, I don’t have one.”

  “Do you want one?”

  “Of course I want one. Who doesn’t? But most of the men I meet are sub-par.” The girl laughed to herself. “Okay, all of the men I meet are sub-par.”

  “All of them?”

  “More or less. When I was eleven, and we lived outside Miami, I was madly in love with an Indian guy in his twenties who sold cotton candy at the amusement park. Not that I knew him—but I could tell he was the sort of guy I’d like. He had the longest straight black hair and he used to sing while he worked. American show tunes. But eleven-year-old girls aren’t supposed to fall in love. At least not in this country. If I’d lived in Europe, I might have ended up married to him.”

  “Are you making fun of me?” asked Arnold.

  “I’m dead serious. But I don’t usually tell this to people. It tends to make them uncomfortable.” The girl stubbed out her cigarette. “Most people have strange hang-ups about age and sexuality.”

  This was just priceless. He’d set out to discover whether the girl might have a crush on him and they were going to end up discussing the ethics of paedophilia. It was hard to think of a less romantic subject. Besides, this was one of those areas where rational thought and philosophical discourse didn’t do one much good. He’d heard Bonnie Card go on for hours about how child molesters were actually victims of a social structure that unfairly stigmatized sex with toddlers—targeted as unreasonably as homosexuals had once been—but Bonnie’s conclusion, namely that we ought to live in an alternative universe where young children were taught to enjoy sex, including with adults, did leave him nauseous. And he didn’t even like children.

  “I’m making you uncomfortable,” said the girl. “I can tell.”

  “No, you’re not,” lied Arnold. “I was just thinking… So what exactly are you saying? That age shouldn’t be a factor in romantic relationships?”

  “Oh, no. I wasn’t talking about that at all. What I meant to say was that we make a mistake when we deny the sexuality of children. Sure, we want to protect young kids from violence and exploitation….But it isn’t always like that.”

  This wasn’t exactly romantic encouragement. Arnold watched the moth as its wings caught the edge of the flame and ignited.

  “You look so unhappy,” said Cassandra. “Cheer up. I have a surprise for you.”

  Arnold’s spirits rose instantly. “What sort of surprise?”

  “I can’t tell you yet. I’m sworn to secrecy. But it will happen soon, and you’re going to like it a lot.”

  “Can I have a hint?”

  She squeezed her lips together and shook her head vigorously. He asked again several hours later—and once more the next morning—but no matter how hard he pressed her for her secret, she wouldn’t reveal it.

  “If I told you,” she taunted, “then it wouldn’t be a secret.”

  Several days later, while scanning Cassandra’s bookshelves for any volume less demanding that the dog-eared copy of Habermas’s The Theory of Communicative Action that lay on the girl’s nightstand, Arnold stumbled across a hard-cover edition of Please Do Eat the Daylilies. He was impressed, at first. His readership tended to be older and midwestern—porcine, heartland women who had both pounds and flowers to spare. But then he recalled that the girl had once interviewed him at NYU. She’d probably picked up the cookbook as part of her advance research. The collection of recipes was now nearly twenty-five years old and in its eleventh printing—although Spitford’s boycott probably wasn’t doing much for sales. Arnold leafed through the yellowed pages of the old volume: daffodil salads, magnolias au gratin, two different recipes for hollyhock pie. He’d nearly forgotten how much fun it had been concocting these unlikely formulas. There had been a recklessness to it, an abandon—not so different from riding a motorcycle. That night, after Cassandra whipped up a first-rate lobster bisque, Arnold volunteered to take over the dinner duties for a few days.

  “My cooking’s not good enough?” demanded the girl.

  “Your cooking is spectacular,” answered Arnold. “But I’m the one with hours of time to kill, in case you’ve forgotten.”

  “Does that mean we’re eating grass from now on?” Cassandra snickered.

  “You know, for a communist, you’re awfully elitist when it comes to food.”

  “I’m not a communist,” retorted the girl. “I’m a journalist. I’d write for the Gestapo Press if they offered me a lead story.”

  “You would, wouldn’t you?” mused Arnold. That admission made the girl all the more alluring, because amorality was one step above idealism among feminine charms. “And yes, we will eat grass. And daisies. And sweet-william. But I think I’ll start us off tomorrow with a warm spiderwort soup.”

  The girl squeezed lemon onto her lobster. “Spiderwort. Yummy.”

  “What I’ll need from you,” he added, “is a half-pound of spiderwort.”

  He retrieved a yellow notepad from beside the telephone and drew a picture of the heart-shaped violet flowers. Then he explained where in Prospect Park she was likely to find them. “You might as well pick up some bastard toadflax too,” he decided. “Toadflax makes excellent seasoning.”

  After that, Arnold took over the kitchenette. He sent the girl scavenging the city for honeysuckle, bergamot, and trumpet-creeper. These he transformed, with the help of some birchbark and water, into a tepid pink broth that tasted like chicken. He made mock-veal from elecampane and mock-ham from climbing buckwheat stems. On Cassandra’s twenty-third birthday, they cele
brated with a pie made of strawberries, coconut cream and three-toothed cinquefoil leaves. Their new culinary life was not without mishaps, as when the girl accidentally brought home a poisonous species of buttercup. And Arnold didn’t risk having her hunt for mushrooms, though he would have loved to add an umami flavour to their meals. Yet once he got the hang of floral cooking again—it had been several years since his last experimental foray into the kitchen—they ate better than any food critic. He made a conscious effort to impress his roommate. She was supporting him, after all. He’d long since turned over the last of his eighty dollars. The least he could do was send the girl to bed on a full and satisfied stomach. This meant that each night Arnold raised the ante: He fashioned pizzas from mullein and gentian stalks, clover-based yoghurts, a coneflower chop-suey. The lobster bisque that he concocted from nineteen varieties of wildflowers was just at flavourful as the one she’d prepared from shellfish—only cheaper and healthier. Unlike lobsters, most wildflowers came free of charge. The entire experience was empowering for the botanist. He derived the sort of pleasure that he imagined more rugged men might find in shooting a moose or erecting a wooden deck. How many other men in New York could fashion a four course meal for the cost of two hours electrical current and a pot of boiling water? Certainly not Ira Taylor or Spotty Spitford, Arnold thought.

  Arnold was in the process of preparing one of his delicacies, a coleus casserole, when Cassandra returned home from work at the end of the week. Her cargo pants were rolled up at the bottoms, exposing an alluring pink ankle bracelet. She’d arranged her hair into intricate cornbraids. In contrast, Arnold was wearing a pink checkered apron and a pair or well-gnawed slippers. “I got a head start on dinner,” he announced.