Nocturnes and Other Nocturnes (12 page)

The Flowers of Katrina

Trish hands Katrina a folded piece of paper. Katrina feels the subtle calluses on the tips of her co-worker’s fingers. “You know Lewis – that tall guy with the smooth head, the dreamy green eyes, and always a perfect two-day stubble?”

“No, Trish. I never pay attention to the customers.”

“How can you not know him? He’s our most regular customer. He collects suitcases like my brother collects vintage comics. How can one man need so much luggage?” Trish waves her hand around the shop – World Travel – with its large selection of designer travelware. “But I don’t think that’s the real reason he’s here all the time.”

“Oh, no.” Katrina glares at the piece of paper with disgust.

“He likes you. He asked me all these questions about you, and he was so sweet about it. He really likes you. I mean, really bad. He’s so totally crushworthy. You’re lucky I already have a boyfriend, or I’d totally snatch him.” Trish’s eyes are so glazed over with dream-lust that she’s oblivious to Katrina’s reaction. “Anyway, here’s his phone number. I told him to let me handle it. He’s a little shy for such a hotty, which only makes him cuter.”

Katrina struggles to contain her anger at Trish’s presumption. Trish believes that she and Katrina are friends, but Katrina has no use for friends, much less lovers; yet, despite her best efforts to remain aloof, to remain completely uninterested in anyone, people keep trying to get close to her.

“This is my place of work. I do not come here to get picked up. I do not want his phone number. I do not want anyone’s number.” Katrina doesn’t even unfold the piece of paper. She means to tear it into pieces, but as soon as she looks at Trish she sees.

Overlain on the real Trish, she sees, as Katrina always does, another Trish. Unbidden, the life of that other Trish unspools in Katrina’s mind: this time, it’s a Trish who did not let herself get entangled with Wally, the condescending poseur, jobless slacker, and would-be womanizer who leeches on her already precarious finances. This ghost Trish acted on her crush with Lewis the handsome luggage collector. The ghost Trish is happy and calm. Her posture is proud and confident. Her light brown skin shines with health, youth, and vigour.

So unlike the real Trish, who, despite being childless and only nineteen years young, gives the impression of being on the wrong side of thirty and several pregnancies, with her baggy eyes, cracked fingernail polish, and drooped shoulders.

How can Katrina be interested in anyone as they are, when she is haunted by the potential of who they could have been, by the ghosts of all their bad decisions showing her the better life, the better person that could have been?

Every day at work, Katrina is confronted with the myriad could-have-beens of Trish’s pathetic life. It’s not so bad with the customers, whom she rarely has to interact with more than once. But this constant reminder of Trish’s personal failures is wearing. As she has with everyone with whom she has ever had to endure frequent contact, Katrina has reached the tipping point with Trish. The sight of her now fills her with intolerable disdain.

Katrina feigns illness at lunch and leaves; the next day she quits. Time for another job. Perhaps the next one will last more than a few months.

~

Katrina cannot believe it took her twenty-three years to fall in love with flowers. Yes,
in love
. Flowers are alive and wondrous, but unlike animals they make no decisions. They are always the best they can possibly be in any circumstance. No ghosts of unchosen paths haunt them. Katrina is in love with flowers. All of them. Lilies. Buttercups. Oleanders. Mulleins. Pimpernels. Lantanas. Mallows. Roses. Tulips. Camellias. Hydrangeas. Poppies. Azaleas. Violets. Carnations. Magnolias. Trilliums. Rhododendrons. Passionflowers.

But animals ... humans, cats, dogs, birds ... they all make decisions. All of them decide wrong at some point. All of them are haunted by better lives unlived. Or, rather, their better, unreal lives haunt Katrina.

This is her favourite job, ever. Not only is Bouquet on the Boulevard an easy walk from her apartment, but it’s a tiny storefront and she usually works by herself. She sees the owner for no more than five minutes a day, when Anne comes in to relieve her and work the closing shift.

Most of Katrina’s work hours are now spent alone with flowers. Their colours. Their scents. Their absolute, resolute lack of ever having to make a decision. Their existential purity. Their unambiguous beauty.

Why has she not spent her entire life among these wonderful creatures?

It is true that the customers here are even more intensely haunted by bad decisions. By their errors of love and romance. On the other hand, they do not try to pick her up; when they come to Bouquet on the Boulevard, their romantic focus is already on someone else. She is thus invisible to them.

It does break her heart a little bit every day to abandon her darlings to these defective, imperfect people. But then there are always new flowers to fall in love with. And the flush of new love washes away the bittersweet pain of loss.

Every day, she brings at least one favourite home. She has never enjoyed her apartment – her life – as much as she does now. She hadn’t known that before the flowers she was lonely. Now, her life is full. Full of love and steadfast companionship.

She wants this job to never end.

~

Three years later, and Katrina is still in love, still happy, still working for Anne at Bouquet on the Boulevard. Most days are exactly the same to Katrina: she basks in the aromas of her perfect loves, and thus the world, too, is perfect.

She is surprised when one day at the shop, a tall, fit man – bald, with fashionable beard stubble – gapes at her and boldly grabs her hand. “Katrina! It’s you!”

Katrina is shocked into immobility.

The man looks at their joined hands. He acknowledges his brashness with a mock-bashful nod and releases her hand. “I don’t really want to let go of this hand, you know. You might disappear again. I don’t want that.”

Finally, Katrina manages to say, “I have no idea who you are, sir.”

“Sir? No, that won’t do at all. Lewis – it’s Lewis.”

There’s something peculiar about him, something that commands her attention. It’s not that he’s so very handsome – Katrina doesn’t really care about that. What is it that both nags at her and compels her to keep staring at him?

“You don’t remember me, do you? I never did talk to you. But I realize I wasn’t ready, then. I was too young emotionally, not enough of a man. And a girl like you shouldn’t waste her time on boys.”

“Why are you talking to me this way? I don’t know you.”

“No, you don’t. Yet. But you will.”

Then some memory comes wafting up into her consciousness. “Wait – Lewis? From World Travel? That was more than three years ago.”

“But I knew I’d find you again. There’s no other girl for me.”

And then something else dawns on her. What’s so special about him. So different. So compelling. Unique – unlike anyone she has ever met.

His ghosts are fainter than his real presence, so faint that she can barely perceive them. That’s because they aren’t ghosts of better lives; they’re ghosts of worse lives. Lewis unerringly makes the right choice. And his lifetime of correct decisions has led him here, to this moment, to her.

Katrina gasps. Lewis takes her hand again. This time, she surrenders it willingly.

~

At her apartment, amid Katrina’s flowers and their luscious fragrances, Lewis removes her clothes and kisses her naked body with delicate reverence, as if she were as fragile as a flower. It is the first time Katrina has ever let anyone touch her, kiss her. Every moment is blissful. Even the slight pain of him sliding into her – she was so wet, so ready for him; and he, too, was wet, glistening with desire for her – binds her to Lewis. She becomes his.

With that bonding comes the realization that, even with her beloved flowers, she had still been lonely.

She weeps while he moves inside her; he notices, but he does not stop, does not become overly solicitous. From the way his hands and arms cradle her, she knows that he accepts her emotions without hesitation or questioning. She feels him growing even bigger insider her.

Lewis behaves perfectly. He loves her perfectly.

He says, after they have both come, looking unflinchingly at her, cupping her head with his strong hand: “Your eyes themselves are like flowers: gateways of seductive colour that open to reveal fragile yet savage beauty.”

It is then that she notices the bloody scratches she left on his back. She doesn’t remember doing that. She didn’t know she could be like that. That, too, binds her to him.

She drinks in his masculine musk and surrenders to sleep.

~

The next time, the following night, they meet at his condo. On the walls hang framed, black-and-white photos from cities and locations she has only dreamed of: Venice, Barcelona, Istanbul, Gibraltar...

There are no flowers. It is a little barren. She can change that. She will change that. Nevertheless, like Lewis himself, his home is seductive in its stark simplicity.

He says, “I work for a travel agency. I scout locations, hotels, tours.”

He’s made dinner for her. He tells her the name of the dish, but the word is too foreign; it slips past her, unremembered. She’s so nervous she forgets the taste as soon as she swallows each mouthful. They drink red wine from Sicily. It is so smooth it is like drinking rose water.

They do not speak much during dinner. She feels awkward, tense, inadequate.

Finally, he clears the table.

Then, without a word, without hesitation, he takes her.

He rips her clothes off, ruining them, and bites the soft skin of her neck, hard enough to leave marks. He slings her over his shoulder and carries her to the bedroom. He throws her on the bed.

This time, he is not gentle. Not delicate.

Katrina emerges from sex bruised and raw. Their passion abated, she drowsily locks eyes with him, and both she and Lewis immediately erupt with laughter.

They snuggle and talk all night long, drifting seamlessly and languorously from one sentence to the next.

Katrina is in love, and it is perfect. Lewis is perfect, unhaunted by better decisions not taken.

By the end of the week, she has moved in with him.

~

As the months pass, Katrina comes to appreciate the faint ghosts of Lewis’s other, inferior lives, because they remind her that Lewis is unerring in always making exactly the right decisions. He is not only perfect; he is perfect for Katrina.

She has blended in her beloved flowers to the minimalist esthetic of what is now their shared home. Neither the flowers nor Lewis are jealous of the other. It’s a perfect life, one that she had never imagined nor even known she needed. Now that it is hers, she cannot bear the thought of losing it.

Occasionally she dreams that it slips away from her: that Lewis starts making the wrong decisions and that being near him and those ghosts of better Lewises becomes unbearable. Tonight, the dream is especially vivid. Every time he talks to her, he says something wrong, unkind, thoughtless, imperfect. With every word, a new, better ghost of Lewis superimposes itself over the original, until she can no longer perceive him at all.

She wakes up to his strong musk and comforts herself back to sleep, to love.

~

On their first anniversary, walking hand-in-hand down La Rambla in Barcelona, she finally asks him: “How did you know? How were you so certain that we should be together when we didn’t know anything about each other? How could you know? I was merely a shopgirl. I could have been anyone, anything.”

He grins. “I’ve never told anyone. But I’ll tell you. I can see.”

See?
She tenses as she waits for him to elaborate.

“I see connections. I see the links that tie people together. Like a layer of perception on top of physical reality. Over the years, I’ve come to understand the nature of the different strands between people. Hate. Dependency. Jealousy. Envy. Lust. Admiration...” He squeezes her hand. “Love.”

Katrina sometimes wondered if others, besides herself, might be able to see, but she had never considered that it could be possible to see something other than the ghost lives she can perceive.

Lewis continues: “When I first noticed you working at World Travel, I saw the most gorgeous, complex, alluring connecting strand ... and it united us. We were at each end of it, tethered together. I knew then that you were my girl. That one day, no matter what, we would be in love and that it would be wonderful. I also knew that I didn’t have to rush anything. The strand was so strong. It could never, would never fade or break. I am unambiguously forever yours, just as you are mine.”

Katrina stops walking. She turns to face Lewis; she touches his mouth, kisses him. He accepts the kiss perfectly, reacting exactly right to the probings of her lips, her tongue, her teeth.

They walk in silence for a long time after that. She nearly tells him about her ghost sight, but the moment passes.

~

Katrina’s dreams worsen. These nightmares of Lewis’s potential failures grow both in intensity and in frequency.

It is becoming difficult to hide her anxieties from him, from his focused attention.

She loves Lewis, but the reason the dreams gnaw at her with such ferocity is that she is self-aware enough to know that her devotion, as strong and true as it is, would not withstand the ghosts of better Lewises haunting their relationship.

Katrina’s flowers give her some comfort, but, after tasting love with Lewis, they could never be enough for her by themselves. Not anymore.

She remembers what Lewis told her that first night:
Your eyes themselves are like flowers: gateways of seductive colour that open to reveal fragile yet savage beauty
. She knows what she must do to ensure the survival of their love: she must no longer be able to
see
.

~

She calls emergency just before doing it. She makes up a lie about a badly wounded child. They will come quickly. It gives her urgency, a deadline. She cannot hesitate.