He pushed his wire-rims on top of his head and rubbed his hazel eyes. “However you want.”
I began. “I met him at Central Market. You know Central Market?”
He nodded. “Terrell did all her shopping there.”
“That’s how come I knew it. I’d met her there on the trip for Mother’s birthday, five years ago. Big public place.” I looked to see if he understood.
“Good idea.” A muscle was moving in his jaw.
I got to the basics. He didn’t need to know about the NOTREES cap, about the Buddy Marshall resemblance. He didn’t need to hear anything that would force him to see the guy, sitting there with me. “He knew about the crash. I gathered he was—waiting out there, for the plane.” I gave him time to ask something, but he sat still. “He didn’t come to the funeral.” I thought a minute, then smiled and added, “He didn’t want to put on a suit.”
Red smiled back, with effort, no doubt understanding that I’d left a lot unsaid.
“He scarcely mentioned his wife; if he knew you’d moved out he didn’t say.” The busy waiter swooped up my plate and side dishes, and it wasn’t the time to stop her and ask her to leave the tortillas for me to chew on.
“This can’t be easy for you,” Red allowed.
“Not for any of us,” I conceded.
The guy who’d given out his Amex number to the room at large had pulled up a chair at a table for two, now seating four, all heads bent over someone drawing a diagram.
I reapplied my chewed-off copper lipstick, and took a sizeable breath. “He called her Terry.” I tried to give Red time to deal with that.
He flushed but said nothing. He tasted his coffee.
Then there wasn’t much else to hedge about, beat around the bush about. “He bought her a piano.” I said it straight out, looking at him.
“He what?” The color left his face, and he sat silently hunched over, as if he’d sustained a blow.
“A baby grand.”
He cleaned his glasses and put them on. “Did she know?”
I nodded. “She was going out there to see it.”
What could be worse? Your wife fucked someone else, well, in this case, you were moving out anyway, she was pissed you were leaving the cushy job, maybe, or maybe the other guy had buckets of new oil money or old cattle money. Maybe his spread went back to the first land grants, maybe to Santa Anna. Maybe he got off to rustling a civil lawyer’s wife. But if he called her by her girlhood name, if he gave her a gift of what had been the most important thing in the world to her back then, how could you deal with that?
Not well, I judged, from the looks of him. I’d finished off Skip’s handkerchief and had none of my own to offer. Red cleaned his glasses again, blinking and looking away.
At least with Buddy, I had got some closure. For one thing, he took up with a woman loaded not only with a paid-up yacht but with a clutch of offshore leases as well. That’s whose boat he was steering in that last shot of him with the black wraparound shades. Loud, rich, older. I could deal with that. What had made me wiggy in the extreme was finding out she had children. “You gave her kids,” I screamed at him the last time I saw him. “I don’t mind that you’re eating foie gras and soft-shelled crabs and I’m scraping by here on scrambled eggs, trying to learn enough about what grows in pots to fake myself a career. I can live with that. It could be worse: I could be holed up in my old room at Mother’s. And I don’t even care anymore that you never kept your pecker in your pants, not from hardly day one, all right, day one hundred, one thousand. But you could have given me a kid at least.” “They were already hers,” he said, fishing up his shirtsleeve for a cigarette. “Same dude who bought her the boats. The same old guy who hung around a dozen years trying to get his hands on those drilling ventures.” “I don’t care; she’s got kids. You’ve got kids now.” “You want a kid, we can walk right through that door and make one on the spot.” He’d nodded in the direction of the lone bedroom of my then one-bedroom apartment. He thought he was calling my bluff. But I called his, reasoning I might never again be (a) in his vicinity, (b) off the Pill, and (c) young enough. He nearly came back, he told me later on the phone, when he heard he’d actually pulled off the job.
Red handed me his napkin. It seemed my eyes had filled up again. For all of them. For Skip Rowland, in his skintight T-shirt through which you could watch his heart trying not to break. For Terrell, making the marriage she was supposed to make, making the children, doing the big house. Finding love, and flying toward it. Mostly for my old friend, who had no way to handle the idea of somebody else knowing to give his estranged wife what he never even knew she wanted: a baby grand piano.
“What will he do with it?” Red asked.
“He didn’t say.” My feeling was Skip might have wanted to beat it to death with a hammer, but I didn’t suggest that.
“She swore to me she never wanted to play another note. At Christmas, at your folks’ house—”
“I know, she told me that, too. That she hated playing on demand, those Christmas carols for Mother.” (I could see again the young Terrell practicing her first recital piece. Hear Mother come into the living room and interrupt: “You’re going to ruin your posture, dear, bending over the keys that way. Why not take a little break?” I could hear Terrell, the last time I came home, before we went out for coffee, “I saw your girl at the piano, does she play? I never think about it anymore, except when Mother makes me. You get over those things you think you can’t live without. Is she interested in music? My boys are such jocks, though. I’m proud of that, I have to say, and getting them out on the boat and the tennis courts is, I guess, my contribution, because all the brains come straight from Rufus.”)
“You gave him a chance to talk to someone.” Red’s voice sounded ragged.
“Yes. That’s what we wanted to do, wasn’t it? To give him a hearing?” I shivered. The air-conditioning was running so cold I actually had goose bumps on my bare legs, although that might have been a sign of shock. I paid the waiter, giving her an extra something for not rushing us from the table. Every chair in that back room was taken, people scrunched together, calling for more coffee, getting a number off their beepers, telling techie jokes. After what seemed a river of time, I asked, “What do we do now?”
Red seemed to shake himself. He pushed back his chair, looked around as if to get oriented. “I want you to come home with me,” he said.
My heart lifted.
“I have something to show you.”
21
Following Red’s new Nissan in my old Chevy, caravan style to his house in Pflugerville, late that baking August morning, my mind was no longer on Mr. Emu. I had done that, made that very difficult contact. Now my thoughts turned to us, Red and me. I remembered coming here the last time, how I had kissed him, how we had drawn apart. I remembered us sitting on that wide sofa in the large bare-floored living room, the children two rooms away, talking of us.
This time, he’d made clear, we would be alone. Taking care to let me know that his computer crew had gone to their main jobs, would not be there moonlighting for him, that his boys were out gathering essentials for Borden’s move to New Haven.
Parking, going up the flagstone path under the gray-green live oaks, my chest felt tight, my head light. He led me into the big front room where once his mom and dad must have slept. “Shut your eyes,” he said. Then, “Open them.”
And, sure enough, he did have something to show me. Every screen had rolling oranges in bright variations, turning round and round like globes. And, on the wall to our left, where before he’d had a blowup of workers at computers, he now had a world map with orange pins indicating the gross national production in order: Brazil, the U.S., Spain, Mexico, Italy, China, Egypt. And, below that, a wide banner reading, WHERE ARE THE ORANGES?
“Red, how fantastic!” And it was.
“Welcome to oranges dot com.” He began to talk of the contacts they were making with the different countries, of wh
at they’d sent out from Texas.
As he talked, I tried to imagine WHERE ARE THE ORANGES? going around the globe (an orange with the continents superimposed) in every tongue. Drawing on my very pidgin use of two: Où sont les oranges? ¿Dónde están las naranjas? Trying to imagine a vertical row of pen-brushed Chinese characters. The languages of Egypt, India, Indonesia.
Everywhere, he had filled pottery bowls with oranges, oranges in shapes and shades I’d never seen before. Smooth skins, pebbly skins, pocked skins, nearly red to deep orange to almost green; round, oval, pear-shaped, apple-shaped. Wondrous. Only one thing was missing: the smell of the fruit. I fished out my key chain, and opening the small Swiss Army knife I carried for snipping off rose leaves (or thorns), and selecting an orange with a thick rind, I began to peel it in a counterclockwise direction. My fingers stinging a little as the oil was released. I passed a strip of peel to Red, scoring it slightly for a stronger scent (the way you could do with green pecan husks, making a sudden incense). I tore at the sections, feeding one to him, and as I licked the juice from my fingers, the taste of orange filled my mouth, and I thought of us again.
“It’s magic,” I told him, watching the six varieties of orange scroll on the screens.
“You can take credit. When you asked, ‘Where are the oranges?’ that got me to rethink our approach. To ask myself, ourselves: Who tends the trees? The first step was to stop thinking in terms of worker, a class word, and to start thinking in terms of citrus gardener. First, I looked up the term for someone who grows roses—”
“Rosarian.”
“Then I looked up the comparable term for someone who grows and develops new varieties of fruit.”
I shook my head. I had no idea.
“Pomologist.”
“Apple lover?” I laughed aloud, drawing on my rusty French.
“Fruit lover.” He stood leaning against the counter, arms crossed, looking happy. “That opened up the whole thing for us. Once we got off talking about workers’ problems and started talking about the concerns of the orange grower, we opened up the conversation to research developments, to climate management. The guy who bred the new navel orange that has the slight taste of both a mango and a papaya, you don’t call him a worker. You call him a pomologist. Hell”—he waved a hand around the room—“a naturalist.”
“Yes,” I agreed, pleased at his excitement.
He pulled two computer chairs together. “Come sit, Ella. I have something I want to run by you.”
All at once I had a sinking feeling. Was all this, the show of oranges, just a way to bring up another matter having to do with my sister? Was I again, as at the Pink Cafe, as back in his law-school car, thinking something was going on between us when it wasn’t? “What?” I asked, wary, watching the orange spheres roll on and off the screens. Where moments before it had seemed erotic licking the dripping juice from my fingers, now they merely felt sticky.
“What would you think,” Red began, “about writing a letter for us, the way you wrote about that pink house in Old Metairie and those antique roses to Terrell and your mother?”
“My pretend house and garden.” I felt embarrassed.
“You made that real, believable. I’d like you to write a newsletter we can put on the Web, the science and practice of fruit culture, the different trees, their care, the dangers, what research is going on. Sort of a letter-to-your-mother on a larger scale.”
“Dear Mother, Dear Mother, Past the birdbath on a cleared slope, I have planted six orange trees—”
“A Marrs.” He smiled. “A low-acid navel bud sport unknown outside Texas.”
“A Marrs.” I pretended to be writing.
“A Parson Brown. Grown from a seedling that made its way from China to a Florida grove.”
“Oh, yes, a Parson Brown.”
“A Hamlin, a Pineapple, a Valencia.”
Trying to get my mind around the idea, I peeled another orange, this one sweeter, less acidic, and draped the curling rind around my neck, a fragrant citrus lei. How strange: the very idea of being rewarded for my deceitful letters home, creating that cottage in the old, dear part of our parish, with a magnolia in the yard, inventing the garden with the stone wall, the blooms that I transplanted from Belle Vue to my imagined beds.
Red took my hand and pretended to write across my palm. “The freezing point of oranges is twenty-eight degrees. Some groves in Florida and some orchards in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas try spraying the trees with water all night in freezing weather, because freezing releases heat and so it never gets below thirty-two degrees. On the other hand, they say, if you wait too long, the weight of the ice destroys the trees.”
Dear Orange Gardener, Dear Orange Gardener. I was greedy for information. How much you had to know, to pass on even the smallest mention. “And—?” Light-headed from his touch, the flavor of the last orange lingering on my tongue, I wanted more.
He tugged a bit at my hair, wrapping it lightly around his hand (something Buddy used to do). “Fruit breathes,” he explained. “All fruit breathes, my researchers say. If you want to un-green oranges, you put them in a room with bananas or apples, and those breathe them into full color.”
“I don’t know about doing your letter,” I told him. “I’ve had enough of making things up.”
“We could ship you an orange crate full of books.” To demonstrate, he got up and piled a stack of paperbacks, all with oranges on their covers, smooth and glossy, into my arms.
“Do you have catalogues?” I asked. “I love catalogues.” The idea was appealing. New plants to learn about. Redolent. Remontant? (Did fruit trees bear more than once a year?) With histories, genealogies. I grew thrilled with the notion that every single growing thing in the world had such a past.
“We can send catalogues.” Red let his hand slip down my arm to the wrist. “You could work on it from Metairie.”
“Maybe you ought to find a Henry of Orange,” I countered. “Someone who already knows the way of the trees, their blooms and fruits.”
“I want Ella,” he said, standing close to me, reading my face, “the lover of roses.”
“Am I to become also a lover of oranges, then?” I let him put his arms around me, wanting to taste the fruit on his lips.
“Don’t you see?” he urged. “It’s a way we can work together, a way we can keep in touch. A way for us to see each other that has nothing at all to do with family.”
“Are you sure?” I asked him, a near whisper at his ear.
“I’m sure about that, and I’m sure about this.”
22
He took my hand and led me into his large, fairly bare room—a bed, dresser, old cane-seated rocker, small oak desk and chair. “This was mine,” he explained, “growing up.” (Which accounted for his setting up the workplace in the front room: no one wanted to sleep in what had once been the parents’ bedroom.)
I felt terrified, I had to say. “I have to say I’m terrified,” I told him. “Like really scared. I know you too well; I don’t know you well enough.” I hadn’t the words for it, the knowledge that he and I were going to be something different to each other, and so maybe couldn’t go back again to what we had been.
Red pulled the thick white curtains and locked the door. “I’m scared, too,” he said, his voice low. “I’m scared it’ll go wrong and we’ll pretend this never happened. A one-time aberration.”
“We won’t pretend.”
He took off his shoes, and I took off mine. Sandals which I placed beside my keys and sunglasses.
I got under the covers of the bed, still in my black tee and best watering shorts, and held the sheet and white spread for him to crawl under, too. “The thing is,” I said, “when you start out having sex you’re young and dumb and eager and you neck until you think you’ll go brain-dead and then when he finally gets it in there—I don’t know how it is for the guy—it’s such a relief because, hey, you did it.” I wriggled out of my shorts and unbuckled his belt. Which gave me
such a rush I almost forgot to breathe. “Could you make love to a mutt like me?” I asked, pulling off my skimpy white cotton panties.
“You remember that?” He pulled me so tight against him I could feel his appendix scar.
“I remember a lot,” I told him, “but I’m forgetting a lot, too.” I let my hands get him out of his shorts, taking the big step, feeling him. “Say my name,” I croaked in his ear.
And he did. “Ella,” he said, straight out and loud, so I’d know (and he’d know) exactly who he was opening up with his fingers. “I wanted you in the car in the rain in Old Metairie.”
“I wanted to stay when we had that great barbeque supper here. Unplug the coffee, wind up the kids, turn off the fruit pickers, and climb into bed.”
It felt as if everything that was happening had happened every day for years: making love to Red, my old friend Red, and it wasn’t like in the movies, lots of shrieking and clothes tearing. I didn’t reach out and grab the headboard, moaning. We weren’t pressed together, wild, adulterous, in some seaside summerhouse. I just wanted it until I thought I’d go out of my mind, and took it, and he did, and then, after, we sort of collapsed, still under the covers. Like lovers in the daylight, still shy and breathing hard.
“Was that incest?” I asked him.
He shook his head. “You’re not the kid sister anymore.”
“It still feels clandestine.”
“Anything two adults with children do feels clandestine.”
“Because it is—” I had to laugh, looking at it that way.
“Do you need to call home—?” He might have been talking to a sixteen-year-old.
“Just stay here a bit. In bed, if you’re sure we have time. Tell me about when you were a kid here. Tell me about the boy whose mother wouldn’t call him ‘Rufus.’ Something from then, before, you know, you showed up at our yellow frame house on the bluff above the creek.”
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