Oliver, already happy at the prospect of this future happiness, feels himself grin.
Sixth Avenue is roiling with New Yorkers engaged in the business of getting what they need and going home, and the crowd seems universally bent on Balducci’s, where Oliver himself is heading. He has not managed to acquire the habit of regular shopping in small, specialized stores. Bread, vegetables, meat, and fish—weren’t you supposed to go from shop to shop, making personal connections with your purveyors and supporting family businesses? Instead, he relies far too heavily on Balducci’s, though he dislikes its snobbery, its assumption of affluence, the maddening lack of toilet paper and other similarly nonglamorous items. That he nonetheless finds himself doing the bulk of his shopping there signifies a lack of discipline, Oliver thinks.
At the store, he joins a crowd of hypercritical foodies, weighing the merits of basil- or chili-infused oils and upsetting pyramids of exotic teas as they reach for the strategically weight-bearing box they must, above all others, examine. There’s a crush two bodies deep at the meat counter, so Oliver takes a number and drifts through the cramped aisles, checking the countdown numeral each time he passes by and accumulating orzo, still-spectacular tomatoes (where they get them he can’t imagine), olives, bread, and the aforementioned basil-infused extra virgin olive oil, as well as an expensive prepared beet and chèvre salad for his own dinner tonight and a wooden box of Burdick chocolates, which Marian loves. By the time his number’s barked, he has assembled a hearty but elegant menu for the two of them, featuring short ribs, orzo, frisée, and artichokes, to be followed, after a decent interval, by the chocolates. If it’s warm, he thinks, ordering the short ribs, they can eat on the roof, though he has a gardener’s perpetual regret about the state of his plants. If not, they will eat in the bedroom, which has a table and, just as important, a fireplace. He does not cook for Marian nearly enough, he thinks merrily, maneuvering his basket before him into the chutelike checkout, where the actress or artist or novelist on duty piles his seventy-odd dollars’ worth of merchandise into a single bag and extends an elegant hand for his credit card. There are flowers in French tin pots and large steel vats against the door, and he frowns at them, critical but admiring. Here is his real competition, he reflects, signing his name to the slip. Not the little groceries with their well-worn blooms wrapped in patterned plastic, but these exotic stems and bunches tied in raffia, so easy to add to the already obscene contents of the cart. They look good, these flowers, and will last fairly well, it seems to him. That is possibly bad news for the very elegant and very expensive flower shop only a few blocks away, and for his own flowers, Oliver thinks, so much lovelier, so much more deserving than these.
He remembers, then, suddenly and quite viscerally, this very morning, early, with fog over the cobblestones in front of the shop, reaching into the truck while the engine was still running and Bell was hauling out the containers, lifting out those Boule de Neige roses, long-stemmed, dripping, and alive. He had known as soon as he saw them, not only that they were beautiful roses, but that they were the right roses. The exactly perfect roses, for her.
For the lady love, Bell had said then, and laughed, clairvoyant, shaking his dreadlocks.
Now Oliver thinks: Yes, exactly. For the lady love.
The cashier hands him his receipt and his credit card.
Then he remembers something else, back before the shopping and the subway and the tears and the sex and the surprising hoot of his pantomime with Barton Ochstein to the moment he was above Marian and inside her and he stopped—stopped still—to look: he remembers how she turned her head away from him, to the side, and how she is self-conscious about her neck, and how she has even admitted that she thinks of having it “done,” whatever that means. He can never risk saying that this is ridiculous, but it is ridiculous. There is nothing wrong with her neck, and it does not make her look old as she thinks it does, though he catches her now and then pushing the loose skin this way and that with her fingertips, frowning at a stray reflection. Besides, she isn’t old. She isn’t even as old as his mother (who isn’t old, either) though they were once classmates—Marian so clever they moved her ahead, one year, two years, what does it matter? Besides, what does a young neck look like, anyway?
He looks at the cashier’s neck. That is what a young neck looks like.
Oliver hands her the signed receipt, hoists the bag onto his hip, and leans against the door to leave. There are other things he needs, other stops he ought to make before going home, and he rejoins the evening crowd.
A block west on Christopher Street, just past the leather men mannequins of the drag boutique, Transformations, Oliver pushes open the door to Christopher Wines and resignedly notes that his winebuddy, his would-be friend, is already grinning at him from the merlots. Oliver waves briefly and heads for the aisle where they keep the perfectly respectable but not-for-the-cognoscenti California reds, and there he chooses, purely for its name (Clos des Fleurs) two bottles of middling price, which he takes to the register.
“Nice choice!” says the assistant, sauntering over to him.
“Oh,” Oliver says noncommittally. “Is it? I just liked the name.”
“Right. You and your flowers.”
Have I talked about flowers with this guy? Oliver thinks. Christ, what a jerk I am.
“I guess.” Oliver sighs and sets down his grocery bag on a ledge.
“So, is this for a special dinner, or what?”
Oliver shrugs. “Not really.” He is wondering if there is another wine store nearby he ought to be patronizing.
“Thirty-six forty-eight with the tax,” says the assistant. “So, what are you doing this weekend?”
Oliver hands over his card. “Oh…not much.” This is an attempt to avoid conversation, but as he says it Oliver realizes that it sounds downright receptive. Sure enough, the assistant nods eagerly.
“I’m going to a Violet Quill retrospective tomorrow night. At Three Lives. You know the Violet Quill?”
“Um,” Oliver says while he signs with a very un-Quillish Bic pen, “no.”
“It was a group of writers in the seventies who started meeting in the Village. Most of them became important novelists. Felice Picano. Robert Ferro. Edmund White?” The assistant is frowning now. He has evidently not expected such a level of ignorance. And he is very definitely not putting the wine into a bag and handing that bag to Oliver.
Come on, thinks Oliver.
“I’m a writer, you know,” he says instead.
“Oh,” Oliver says, wild to get away. “I didn’t know. Well, it sounds interesting. Have a good time.” He makes a grab for the unbagged bottles, and the assistant frowns and tells him to wait. He reaches below the counter and hands Oliver a small paper bag, still folded flat: their romance is over, and moreover it has ended badly. How much simpler, thinks Oliver, it would have been to merely tell the guy many visits ago that he was a poor prospect for a pickup, and spared themselves this. Oliver puts the bottles into the bag. “See you,” he says sheepishly.
“Yeah,” the man says. “Enjoy yourself.”
Now that you’ve cruelly spurned my advances, thinks Oliver, leaving.
The thing is, it doesn’t actually bother Oliver that the guy assumes he’s gay. It would have once, Oliver considers, walking now with the wine and groceries each in one hand. There was a time, certainly, in his teens, when he was preoccupied with the subject, a tangent—he thought at the time—to the subject of his medical status. He would have minded it then. Only a few years ago he might have been rattled, even by such an innocuous, friendly proposition. But now, for some reason, he is untroubled. The questioning, Oliver has come to think, has little to do with him, in the end. In his case, it is not a comment on his voice or his mannerisms or his clothing; it is a form of prejudice—occupational prejudice. Because he is a man and he loves flowers. Apparently, only homosexual men are allowed to love flowers.
His response to this is offense on behalf of flo
wers.
Music is supposed to be the food of love, he knows, but Oliver has never had any special feeling for music. Classical, folk, jazz, or blues—it’s all a buzz to him, and more than one girlfriend has shaken her head at his imperviousness. He’s not even tone-deaf; he just doesn’t care, and would rather have silence. Oliver possesses, as a result, perhaps the smallest collection of music on the island of Manhattan (one CD of Carole King’s Tapestry, two Devo albums left over from high school, and a cassette tape of Madame Butterfly given to him by his stepfather, who adores opera, in a long-ago attempt to make a point of contact between them). For Oliver it has always been flowers, the food not only of love but of life. Flowers to look at, to smell, to be alive with in their brief life spans—they are their own seat of pleasure, endlessly giving. He does not understand people who do not love flowers, or who consider them merely ornamental for the home, like an accent pillow or a Hummel figurine. He does not understand people who assault flowers for their essence, which they rub over their skin like a spoil of war, leaving carcasses of slaughtered blossoms in their wake. He knows that these are extreme, dramatic views, which is why he does not often share them, but it does baffle him that in a world so bereft of pleasure people fail to see that flowers are a part of the solution, that the unlearned lesson of their loveliness bears on the great disconnect between people and other people, between people and the earth, between people and the eternal.
Every now and then, Oliver will catch a glimpse of this passion in someone else, and the recognition will fill him with gratification. He will be in Greenwich, or at the Botanical Garden, or in the flower district, and a woman or a man will catch his eye and they will nod and speak silently in their own language of flowers. Once he smiled at a woman tending the most common of geraniums in her window box on Jane Street. The geraniums were ravishing, and the woman, who was old and spent, was ravishing too, and smiled back. Once it was a man in Central Park who was taking eggshells out of a plastic bag he’d brought from home and placing them tenderly around a bank of daffodils beside Sheep Meadow. And—satisfyingly—sometimes it happened in his own shop, when a person entered and was lit with delight at the same thing that made Oliver so happy when he opened his own door.
He opens his own door now, setting down the shopping bag, hearing the wine bottles clink gently against each other, and then shuts the door behind him with his foot. It is 8:30 and the day has ended with the return of its early fog. The street—which is thinly populated and nearly always empty unless a performance at the Cherry Lane Theatre is beginning, breaking for intermission, or letting out—is very dark and still. Returning his key to his jacket pocket, Oliver’s fingers brush the thin card he’d been summoned back to retrieve from Marian’s doorman, and it pierces his mood a bit to think of the disagreeable Barton Ochstein, with his heavy hand touching Oliver’s thigh through Marian’s skirt. The fiancée of a person like Ochstein was hardly likely to care for flowers, herself—beyond, Oliver thought dismissively, the tiresome brand recognition of one dozen sterile blood-red roses in a cheap white cardboard box. Still, he will have to give Ochstein’s commission some thought. Because Oliver does not sell ugly flowers, or flowers with their smells removed, or bouquets for the season. He assembles beautiful, living flowers, and he sends them out into the world with hope that they might receive their due in appreciation.
Oliver is aware that he belongs to a distinct occupational segment of his demographic group, set well apart from the officially sanctioned career designations—law, business, medicine—that account for an overwhelming majority of his peers. In addition to this majority, the far smaller yet equally prestigious calling of “artist” in its variant forms, is acknowledged, even afforded bragging rights sometimes exceeding the aforementioned career choices, though only in certain families. Between these extremes, however, there is little in the way of viable career territory. The children of well-to-do Jewish families do not seem to join the police department, become aerobics instructors, drive trucks, or run travel agencies. They are not housekeepers, office managers, landscape designers, or franchise owners. But every now and then, one of them might pop up in an unconventional role, salvaged from suspicion (their parents salvaged from pity) only by the undeniability of a very specific talent.
He imagines the members of his parents’ generation at an annual gathering, a holiday open house of sorts, in a venue vast enough to hold the Jewish upper middle class of Manhattan and its more affluent suburbs. In the outer vestibules (the temple grounds, the antechambers to the Holy of Holy) are the younger parents, avidly shaking down the competition on the subjects of SAT scores, GPAs, and, above all, fat letters from the handful of approved colleges. (Adam Weintraub got in everywhere! Simone Sternbaum was wait-listed at Vassar. Juliane Lieberman doesn’t test well. No one can believe Yale took Sarah Gold—just because her older sisters went there and her father is Steven Spielberg’s lawyer. It’s so unfair!) Inside, the parents are older, and while there is even more at stake, there is also an air of calm. (Things are now out of their hands, after all—shrugs all around.) Even so, envy courses in myriad subterranean rivers, because here, finally, points are awarded and the children sorted: lawyers to one corner, doctors to another, Wall Street over here, permissible alternate professions (architecture, publishing, academia, journalism, Hollywood, Washington) over there. Then there is a small designated area for the creatives, the artists, the marchers-to-a-different-drummer: the girl dancing with ABT, for example, the two promising novelists, the composer (with a commission already from City Opera! Only twenty-nine!), the girl who won the Yale Series of Younger Poets and teaches at NYU, the wunderkind painter who sent his slides right from Harvard and got a show at Andre Emmerich, the guy who directed all the musicals at Fieldston and now does off Broadway.
And then there is the place to which Oliver is directed. It is sparsely populated, indeed.
Hello, hello, these few greet one another. Everyone shakes hands. They are very interesting people in this little corner, and they are glad to meet. One of them might be a chef, for example. And that does not mean a cook! It means a chef—and not only a good chef but a wildly gifted and ambitious chef, already with a well-reviewed and thriving restaurant (probably teeming with his parents’ friends and almost certainly on the Upper East Side). Another might have become a carpenter, but that’s all right, because he is not remotely like the guy who comes to your apartment and builds your custom cabinets; he is a “master carpenter” (this is a title deriving prestige from having been in use for centuries) whose exquisite furniture is advertised in the back of Architectural Digest and who was featured in a recent New York Times piece on the new craftsmen. One might have gone to Japan to learn an obscure form of glaze application for a rare type of pottery, which she now produces from her studio in western Connecticut and sells exclusively at Barneys, and which is so exquisite that all three of the Miller sisters registered for her pieces when they were married! Another might be farming in central Virginia, where he raises free-range, cruelty-free veal and has become a rising star in the post–Alice Waters generation of purveyors and an exemplar of the new green entrepreneur. Then again, some of them might do what Oliver has done, opened a shop or a business in which he or she does a very small specialized thing very, very well. Hence, Oliver is not “Oliver the florist” or even “Oliver who owns a flower shop,” but “Oliver who opened a darling shop in the West Village and is doing terribly well because he was always so gifted with flowers. Did you see that piece on him in Elle Decor?”
They know that their parents are proud of them, but it was a close call—it could have gone either way. These Jewish boys and girls toil in uncharted waters and they have a lot to prove, but they are happy, and feel lucky. They are doing precisely what they want to do—in most cases what they have always wanted to do—and even if they suffer a lingering sense that they have missed some important opportunity and will now play catch-up for the rest of their lives, trailing their peers who b
oast retirement accounts and career prestige, they all know it could have been worse. Because their generation is not all accounted for in this room, large as it is. There are the missing ones, the not-mentioned ones, whose positions are no longer tracked by the chattering moms and dads. There is, for example, Jon Levine, sentenced by mandatory drug laws for selling grass at Wesleyan, still in some prison in Connecticut. There is Dana Friedman, who married a Farrakhan follower and moved to Detroit. There is David Rosengarten, presumed still traveling in Asia, presumed still stoned. And perhaps most fearful of all, there is Steven Nathan, who just failed at everything, who is still searching, who has not settled on the right path. What’s Steven doing? What’s Steven up to? How old is Steven now?
It could have been worse, Oliver thinks, looking around at his place. My place, he likes to remind himself. Where I live. And where the lilies of the field, though plentiful, do not toil, but I do.
Inside, the light of the refrigerator glows blue on the unsold dahlias, bittersweets, and hydrangeas. Branches fill the spaces between the bright tin containers, because the white plastic of the refrigerator has an ugly, deflating quality, and he likes to obscure it. There are large buckets of Black Magic roses, deeply red, and Spicy, the orange rose he prefers. The population of Hocus Pocus red roses has diminished since he left this morning, and this encourages him; Oliver is fond of the variety, which is red with yellow flecks, and he would like to be able to increase his weekly order from the Argentinean supplier. The room is long from side to side and short from front to back, unpolished and dark with age. It’s empty, but turning on the overhead light, Oliver notes the general disarray cast in the wake of Bell, who worked until five this afternoon: frayed ribbons on the floor, cut stems of flowers underfoot, and a fat roll of brown wrapping paper left in a puddle of water on the wooden table Oliver uses for arrangements. Tidiness is not one of Bell’s attributes. He is not an orderly person in any sense, but rather a juggler of problems. Having spent his first months with Bell obsessing about what his employee had and hadn’t done, and whether he had loaded the Tribeca deliveries before heading to the Upper West Side so he wouldn’t have to come back to the shop if the traffic was bad, Oliver has learned to back off and breathe deep. If Bell should decide to cross the George Washington Bridge and drive along the river to Nyack for the purpose of surprising an old friend, if he should consider it pleasant to double back ceaselessly to the shop and deliver one arrangement at a time to its destination, if he should spend a long, lazy afternoon talking about rare varieties of orchid with a woman who has happened in off the street and looks unlikely to purchase a single lousy stem…everything still, somehow, and in defiance of all logic, gets done in good time. In fact, since Bell has come to work for him, no customer has ever called to harangue Oliver over the nonappearance of an order, something that was all too common in the pre-Bell era. Oliver does not understand how it all gets accomplished, but it does.
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