Everlasting

by Nancy Thayer

  Catherine relaxed. She sipped her wine, which was delicious, a ruby Burgundy that swirled through her body, releasing memories, tight buds, large blossoms, velvet petals of remembrance. For just a few moments she held herself back from her usual rush through life. She let herself look at Piet. She let the memories stain her body from inside.

  “I’m very happy, Piet. Kit is a wonderful husband, and my children are healthy and as happy as adolescents can be.” Suddenly, the wine made her bold. “Piet, I’ve always wondered. If I hadn’t been engaged to Kit when you returned—what would have happened?”

  Piet studied Catherine, his eyes serious. She had forgotten how dark his eyes were, not black, but the deepest purple.

  “I loved you,” he said. He said it as easily, as simply, as saying hello, and Catherine was shocked. “I think you loved me. And I still care for you, I always will. But you and I are strong individuals, ruthless in our ways. I am very powerfully drawn and connected to Amsterdam. I worked in the States to get established, but I am only at home here. I think the same is true for you. You are at home in New York, and perhaps at your grandmother’s. Oh, I suppose that long ago, when I was young and full of foolish dreams, I intended to present you with a fait accompli, the wholesale business, a partnership, and marriage. But it wouldn’t have worked. You would have been unhappy here. I would have been unhappy there. Besides, you’re too bossy.”

  He had taken her through a range of emotions in the few moments he spoke, and his final words made her burst into laughter of appreciation and relief.

  “Oh, dear Piet,” she said, reaching across the table for his hand. “I did love you so much at one time. You’re right, I still care for you. I wish someone loved you madly.”

  Piet smiled. “Don’t worry. Someone does.”

  “Tell me about her!”

  “I think we’d better turn back to business instead. It’s getting late. It will take about an hour to drive out to Aalsmeer. Have you finished your coffee?”

  “Damn you, Piet! You like keeping yourself secret from me, don’t you? Why?”

  Piet shrugged. “It’s just my way, I suppose. Just my nature.”

  * * *

  It was pitch black when she and Piet slid into his small dark Peugeot. As Catherine shut her door, she realized how intimate European cars were compared with American ones. She could hardly avoid touching him as they sat side by side. She could not help but breathe in his clear spice scent.

  “We are going south and a little west, back toward Schiphol airport, and past it to Aalsmeer,” Piet said. “Did you know that Schiphol lies thirteen feet below sea level? All this area is a polder, hollow land claimed from water. In fact, we are driving along the top of the dike that keeps the polder dry. If you had come in the spring or summer, I could treat you to a beautiful sight—seventy miles of bulb fields in bloom. However, in November the fields are not such a pretty sight. I’ll show you the hothouses instead. All the flowers are grown in about eight hundred acres of land and nurseries all around Aalsmeer, so there is no time lost in getting the flowers to the auction fresh. Tomorrow we’ll see the Bloemenveiling. Tonight, my offices.

  “You know, when I first started wholesaling by air, I was only working with you. GardenAir. That is still the only wholesale business I have with the U.S. Shelly came to Amsterdam about the time I was expanding, so it worked nicely for me to put him in charge of the GardenAir export business. But for various reasons, some to do with my mania for privacy”—in the dark Catherine saw the flash of Piet’s smile—“I have kept the U.S., and GardenAir, separate from the rest of my export business—separate offices, separate staffs—though we’re all in the same building.

  “All the flowers I export to the U.S. go through GardenAir, exclusive with you. But as you know, in the past two years the value of the American dollar has dropped. So America has to pay almost twice what it used to pay for each stem—and as a result, I am exporting to the U.S. perhaps half of the amount of roses, carnations, and mums we did only two or three years ago.”

  “Yes. I know. We’re starting to buy a lot from Colombia now. They fly flowers fresh into Miami each day.”

  “Well, I export all over Europe, and I’m developing a branch with the Far East. You are welcome to inspect all my books, but I think you will really need only to look in Shelly’s office. Here we are.”

  Piet’s company was housed in a modern and rather ugly stone-and-glass building. He led Catherine through a maze of low-ceilinged rooms, switching on lights as he went. He stopped in a warren of desks to fish a key out of a secretary’s desk drawer, then unlocked the door to Shelly’s private quarters.

  Shelly’s office was unmistakably his—the domain of a handsome, wealthy man, a man who didn’t take his work too seriously. A low comfortable sofa stretched along one wall; across from it was long teak table holding a CD player and shelves of cassettes, a television and VCR, and a silver tray with lots of glasses, a selection of alcohol, an ice bucket. The walls were hung with photos of Shelly with family and friends, for here was a picture of Andrew and Lily and Kit and Catherine, and here was a picture of Ann, Ned, and their son, Percy. An exercise bike sat in one corner and next to it a chrome valet covered with clean terrycloth towels. An unobtrusive door led into a small private bathroom.

  Almost incidentally, there was also a desk in the room, and Catherine sank down onto the leather chair behind it.

  “Would you like me to leave you alone? I could go to my office—”

  “No. Stay. Please.”

  “Of course.” Piet poured himself a drink and sat on the sofa.

  Catherine flipped through the piles of papers on Shelly’s desk, finding only normal forms and letters, some recent memos from her. The middle drawer and the two top side drawers were filled with necessary paraphernalia: pens, pencils, paper clips, boxes of staples, letterhead stationery and envelopes, stamps, Scotch adhesive tape, rubber bands, labels, stickers. In the second drawer she found only a pile of men’s magazines.

  “I might have to get into the computer,” she said.

  “I can do that for you.”

  “Wait a minute.” Catherine had opened the bottom drawer, a deep file cabinet. Mixed in between folders of letters were two green account ledgers. Catherine pulled them out. “Piet, come look at these with me.” She placed them on top of the desk and opened them. “The arrogant little fool! Couldn’t he go to a little more trouble to conceal his stealing!”

  Piet bent over Catherine’s shoulder, reading, then switched on the computer and punched a few keys. After a few minutes he said, “Look. This book matches with what is printed out on the computer, here in our office, and what is sent on to you with each shipment. It shows exactly twenty less sent every day than what is entered in this book.”

  “I’m taking these books with me,” Catherine said. “God damn Shelly! I could kill him!”

  “What are you going to do?” Piet’s voice was cool, curious, almost amused.

  “I’m going to fire him, of course. How dare he steal from Blooms!”

  “Catherine. If he has developed a drug habit …”

  “Yes? What if he has?”

  “You might want to do more than fire him. What I’m saying is that he might need help. Getting off it. An addiction—”

  “Don’t make me responsible for my brother again—I’m not his mother! I’ve done what I could to make his life work out for him. It’s not my duty to take care of my brother for his entire life!”

  “All right, Catherine. I’m sorry. Forgive me. Please. Calm down. Here. Have a drink.”

  “I’m just so angry at him, Piet. That he would betray me—cheat me! Doesn’t he have any responsibility for himself?”

  “Please. Catherine. Look, let me take you home now. You’re tired, and we have to get up early tomorrow.”

  They rode back to Amsterdam in silence. Catherine cradled the two account ledgers against her chest. She was too tired to think and gave Piet a perfunctory goodnig
ht kiss on his cheek when they arrived at the hotel. As soon as she was back in her room, she put through a call to Kit. It was after midnight in Amsterdam, but only evening in New York. Briefly she explained what she and Piet had found. She still wanted to see the Bloemenveiling, she told Kit, but she planned to fly home that evening. She was very tired, and sadly, she had accomplished what she’d come for.

  * * *

  Almost. She still wanted to see the flower auction, so she left a wake-up call for three-thirty and was ready at four-thirty in the morning. Piet had warned her there would be a lot of walking, so she wore a cashmere sweater with jeans and loafers, and her mink coat and scarf. Piet was waiting for her just outside the hotel. It was still dark, and slightly misty.

  “Are you tired?” Piet asked as she slid in next to him.

  “Tired? I don’t even know. I feel the way I did when Drew and Lily were first born—exhausted but functioning.”

  “Why not lean back and nap? We’ll have almost an hour. It will be too dark to see anything, and there’s nothing to see in November anyway.”

  “I doubt if I could fall asleep,” Catherine said. “I feel a little crazy. I keep thinking about Shelly, all I’ve done for him. He’s my brother! How could he do this to me!”

  “I’m sure he doesn’t think of it that way. That he’s doing it to you. I think Shelly sees you as being terribly self-sufficient, even invulnerable. And he wasn’t taking enough money to really damage Blooms.” Piet leaned forward and switched the radio onto a classical station. “Relax. Lean back. Close your eyes.”

  Catherine obeyed, even though she was certain she wouldn’t sleep. And she didn’t sleep, but her mind drifted free on the humming of the car’s engine and the music.

  Piet’s voice broke into her daze. “Ah, Catherine, there it is. Wake up—you can see it, the Centrale Aalsmeerse Bloemenveiling. It is only two stories high, but in terms of floor space, it is the largest building in the world.”

  Yawning, Catherine opened her eyes and saw a streak of dawn light illuminating the dark around an enormous building sprawling in the midst of a flat landscape. Piet drove his way past armies of cars, vans, and trucks through a parking lot and around to the side.

  “There are many wings in this building. Many different auction rooms. I will take you to the wing that is only for export. The Dutch and local people can’t buy here; they have their own wing. There are auction rooms for potted plants, cut flowers, bulbs, roses. Roses are very important always. I will take you to the rose auction. You’ll like it.”

  The bright lights of the corridors and rooms of the auction building jarred Catherine awake as she trailed behind Piet. She was here at last! Most of the flowers she and Jason and Leonard placed in their arrangements began their mornings here, fresh-picked from the acres of hothouses and greenhouses in Aalsmeer. They passed groups of men, most of whom nodded and greeted Piet. She saw few women. She was aware of how foreign she looked.

  “Here,” Piet said, pushing a door open for her. “The roses.”

  Inside the echoing, gleaming hall were hundreds of thousands of long-stemmed roses, laid in bunches on dozens of carts. Mostly the roses were the much loved deep red, but there were also white, yellow, and every shade of red ranging from pale pink through coral to vermilion.

  “Everything here has been inspected by the auction commissioners and the price negotiated and established with the grower,” Piet said. “Also the buyers, like me, must inspect the roses and compare what is available with what we need. The roses are sold in bundles of twenty-five or fifty. Depending on what Blooms and GardenAir need for any given day, I buy around a thousand or more lots each day. Now follow me. I will introduce you to Harrie Brouwer, my main buyer. He inspects the flowers on each cart and makes note of which carts have the flowers we want.”

  Catherine looked around cautiously. “Will Shelly be here?”

  “Probably not. Not in this room. He comes in at the other end of all this. He supervises the packing and attaching the appropriate invoices and loading. He’ll be in another room. We’ll go there after the auction.” He turned. “Harrie, I want you to meet Catherine Bemish. The owner of Blooms. She’s finally come to see our auction.”

  “I hope you enjoy it, Mrs. Bemish,” Harrie said formally.

  Then a Dutch voice over a loudspeaker announced that the auction was about to begin. Piet led Catherine up the banked seating arena to their seats. At each desk, each wholesaler had in front of him a microphone and a computerized button linked electronically to a gigantic clocklike machine on the wall. Piet explained to Catherine that the numbers at the rim of the clock were the price, in Dutch guilders, of each lot of roses, beginning with the top price agreed upon beforehand by the grower and descending as the clock hand moved clockwise. Television screens set on walls displayed the quantity of roses, the length, the precise color, the name, and the set bottom price the roses had to bring in order to be sold.

  The room buzzed with activity. It was always a gamble, Piet told Catherine, for the buyers to get the amount and quality of roses they needed at the lowest-possible price, but before another broker had bought them. Overpayment of even a few cents each day could eventually bankrupt a company, while buying carefully could make the company wealthy.

  Today, for example, Harrie Brouwer needed to buy five hundred lots of red roses for export. The Dutch guilder, like the American dollar, was divided into 100 cents, and the clock started ticking at 100 cents per rose, which was approximately 50 American cents per rose. Harrie watched breathlessly as the clock hand ticked down to 99 cents, 98 cents, and at 88 cents he pressed his button, stopping the clock. He then spoke into the microphone in Dutch, and immediately the television screens recorded that he had bought five hundred lots of twenty-five red roses for 88 cents a rose. The remaining amount of roses would now be sold for less than 88 cents, but Harrie had gotten the quantity and quality of roses he needed.

  Several lots of roses were not bid on at the price the grower had demanded, and as Catherine watched, those roses moved along a conveyor belt through a glass wall to a chopping machine. Mechanized knife blades rapidly sliced through hundreds of luscious blood-red blooms.

  “Oh, Piet, look! What a waste! All those lovely roses!” Catherine whispered, not wanting to disturb Harrie’s concentration.

  “It’s necessary,” Piet said. “To keep the market up and stable. So that these roses don’t go out through the back door to be sold on a black market. The only way they can be sold is in this building. It protects the market.”

  “It’s bizarre,” Catherine said. “Like the American government paying farmers not to grow wheat to protect the American market, while millions of people are starving for bread all over the world.”

  “If you want to change it, you have a lot of work in front of you,” Piet said, smiling.

  When the auction ended, Piet led Catherine to the shed where the flowers Harrie had bought were being speedily bundled into special air freight boxes, all bearing the GardenAir or Blooms label. The room was cool. Rough-looking men, much like the men on 28th Street in New York, were handling the fragile long-stemmed flowers with practiced efficiency.

  And there, in the midst of the work tables and carts, clipboard in hand, was Shelly.

  Catherine clutched Piet’s arm, signaling him silently. They watched as Shelly supervised another man bundling flowers into the boxes. Shelly wrote something on his clipboard. The air was full of laughter and the guttural grace of the Dutch language.

  Catherine had decided not to confront Shelly yet; she didn’t want him to call Carla. So now she smiled, trying to look happy to see him.

  “Little sister!” he called out, startled but easy with it. “What a surprise! What are you doing here? Hello, Piet.”

  “I decided it was time to see it all,” Catherine said. “Business is quiet in New York, and I just had the urge to come.”

  “You always do things impetuously,” Shelly said. He pulled Catherine to him in a
bear hug and kissed her cheek.

  Catherine returned his hug. As she did she looked down into the box of flowers he had overseen being packed. Next to the bundle of long-stemmed red roses lay a plastic container of blue chemical ice to keep the flowers cool and fresh. Caught in a red rubber band around the dark green thorny stems of the flowers was a small plastic packet of white powder—cut-flower preservative, according to the label.

  Of course, it could actually be flower preservative. Or it could be cocaine.

  Shelly caught Catherine’s look. So did the worker.

  “I didn’t know we packed the flower preservative at this end,” Catherine said.

  “We don’t for Blooms,” Shelly told her smoothly. He was completely relaxed. “But for GardenAir it makes it all much easier. Much quicker. Our clients can buy the flowers the moment they’re unloaded from the truck. We don’t have to hold them up putting on the packets, and they don’t have to hold up their customers. It’s just another service we offer.”

  “Good idea,” Catherine said. “Look, do you have to stay here? Or can you come have breakfast—or lunch—or whatever you eat at this ungodly hour—with Piet and me?”

  “We’re shorthanded today. One of the packers is sick. You and Piet go on without me. But let’s have dinner tonight. Somewhere interesting. There’s a great Turkish restaurant—”

  “Shelly, I’m sorry. I’m flying back today.”

  “What? Why? You just got here.”

  “It was just an impulse trip. A spur-of-the-moment thing.”

  “Well, damn,” Shelly said. “I guess I could leave these guys—”

  “No. Don’t. It’s not as if we never see each other anymore. Look, when will you be back in the States again?”

  “I don’t know. Christmas, I guess.”

  “That’s fine. I’ll see you then!” Catherine gave her brother a hug, and as she did, she was overwhelmed with a melancholy love. Touching her brother, she thought, My brother, and she felt his broad shoulders, strong arms, she smelled the maleness and the health of him. She wanted to weep with anguish and anger, she wanted to pound her fists against his chest.