OPUS 21 (35 page)

-which is how I was when I began! Learned once to identify all the flora and fauna in the Adirondacks. Moved away and never seen the region since. Couldn't tell bluebells from burdock. Well, maybe those. But--"

"Is all that the truth?" Yvonne asked doubtfully.

Paul chortled. "The funny thing is, it is! Old Phil's spent his whole life trying to discover something he could learn!"

"I draw myself up," I answered, "with dignity. As a modem gentleman, I am the complete sciolist. The most-smattered man you'll meet in your lifetime. There is almost nothing that I'm not slightly versed in and pretty poor at. Why--I even took archery lessons, once. Got second prize in Palm Springs--"

"Good heavens!" she said.

"I gave him some lessons in quantum theory, myself," Paul continued. "Rotten student. Wants to know the final formulation and what it means--and detests to brush up his calculus first. He can do magic tricks, too--earned his high school pin money that way. He used to spin ropes--jump through 'em. When I was a very small kid, I looked forward to seeing him. Like a one-man circus. Then I caught on--at about four years old.

Uncle Phil was in kindergarten in about every subject there was. Never got any farther.

Just took different primary courses every year."

"In a minute," I said, ''I'll leave you guys to your libel and go back to my serial.

Somebody taught me how to write fiction, along there someplace--"

Paul grinned and said,
"Touché
--a little."

I felt better than I had all weekend. Paul surely would calm down with Yvonne.

And she wasn't going to loiter with Gwen that evening.

It left me with nothing to worry about except a no longer very sore spot in my throat--and with no emotion to grapple--except a feeling of being lonelier than God.

I went back to my room and turned the lights on bright and sat down and looked at the roses Dave had sent. They were my flowers-for-the-living and, being alive, they should be appreciated.

There they stood--with lighter green stems and leaves than most roses and perilous, pale-green thorns. The blooms weren't quite full blown, in spite of the heat, and they were as large as any I'd ever seen--as long as my fingers. The many lamps in the room highlighted the curved outer edges of the flowers and left only the deep, inner shadows. The petals were as voluptuous as a woman's skin; they seemed to glow, like an aniline dye in ultraviolet rays. A slightly sharp perfume filled the room--a mnemonic of things that could not be materialized, of tea roses in childhood gardens and people who had been nice to you and died a long time ago. There they stood--stiff and radiant and hopelessly beautiful.

I let myself feel them--feel them the way you let yourself feel when the concert hall goes dark and the baton makes its first, swift oval.

They came from hothouses.

I thought of gardens.

All the gardens I had made or cared about.

Roses of my own, on carefully pruned canes standing in New England mulch.

Rented roses on rose trees in Hollywood. I thought of sweet peas--fragrant rainbows along old fences. Of delphiniums--hybrids taller than my head, rockets frozen at the climax of blue burst. Lilies and phlox and poppies. I thought of annuals--of planting the grains, setting out the frail seedlings--and walking the later carpet--a hundred styles of color: zinnias and marigolds and asters, verbenas and lavender, sweet William and candytuft and pansies, nasturtiums, forget-me-nots and primroses. I thought of foxglove, too, and Canterbury bells. For a long time, of hollyhocks regimented against white clapboard--red, mauve, yellow, pink, purple, orange. Then I thought of sunflowers growing like Jack's beanstalk. Spring flowers and the years I'd spent changing a steep rise of field into a rock garden, plowing, bulldozing, wading in a cold brook to collect the great, flat stones, trucking them home, embedding them one by one in the slope--on aromatic rainy days, in the sweet spring sun, and in the hard dirt of October. A wall here, steps there, an outcrop yonder, and a place for a pool below.

Then the little hill opened into memory's bloom of crocus and narcissus, daffodil, tulip, hyacinth and scilla, the creams and livid whites, pale yellows and money-gold hues, and the many blues of springtime, bright, pastel, lilac. The bells and stars and cups-and the spring scent that is the honeyed promise of summer coming.

Next, I thought of the woodland flowers--flowers before men found them. The precious arbutus, inexhaustible spring beauties, violets, the anemones, the lady-slippers, bloodroot, showy orchids standing in a wet glade beside a moss-shawled log, and pitcher plants--red rubber flowers on the sphagnum belly of weird bog. All summer long the rues and cardinal flowers and gentians; ferns--goldenrod, when the clear air cooled--when night's sky throbbed with wings and carried to earth the enthusiastic, strange twitter of migration.

I, too, migrated.

I came to my other home in Florida--the crashing flowers, the trees bigger than houses and bright as a florist's potted plants: poinciana, bauhinia, spathodia, jacaranda.

Extravagant vines--alamanda, yellow as these roses, trumpet flowers as orange as Mexico's sunsets, pandoreas, solandras, and the holy, nepenthic stephanotis. Jasmine.

Glade hammocks with orchids blooming on stumps like swarms of sucking butterflies--

great white wading birds watching and vultures pinned above in the blue, cloud-dappled sky.

Brief glory of flower-upholstered deserts. Alpine flowers in the high, thin, whimpering air with near snow.

And trees. Great God, the trees!

It was, taken by itself, a many lifetimes.

All good.

All beautiful.

A great magic given to the modern man who thought of beauty never. Or who thought beauty was a ship's engine, or the line of high ferroconcrete, or the color scheme of a porch, or--adoring Christ forgive us, a new car! Something
he
made, anyhow.

This was some of my lives.

Ricky had shared a number of them with me--created and divided the hours and days in the years of the flowers.

Why should I wonder concerning anything, who knew and loved flowers like this-

-why not, in the continual floral celebrations, take all content from marvel itself?

Men missed it, most of them.

Generals detailed insensate GIs to set square borders of ageratum around the headquarters lawn.

Statesmen wore bachelor's-buttons into their deadlocks. Or maybe carnations.

Dowagers and whores--cattleyas: spilled on avid breasts and icy shoulders.

Millionaires decreed. Gardeners dug. Who looked--who saw?

Business executives had something sent up for the office, daily, and never noticed the color or knew the name. Flowers executed and embalmed to add their priceless prestige to dirty bucks.

Schooboys planted beans and watched the halved cotyledons ascend. Then grew and prospered and spent their lives sawing women in half.

At last, tired relatives recriminated while they embedded melancholy metal pots in the green grittiness of graves.

Who cherished?

Who left them alone in the forest?

Who else--like Ricky--knew each plant to be an individual?

I put a call through.

"Hello, darling," said her clear voice.

Oh, look--love--we've had--centuries together-so beautiful, so various--people, yes--each other, yes--the topaz mornings and the amorous unsleepiness--the vague rainy Thursday afternoons--the incandescent, rose-petal you--the touching--we've had--places--

Havana, for instance--this vaulting steel town--but also flowers, dear. I was thinking how long flowers really lasted. Surely, you won't mind, that the end is here? After entire histories of evolution shared by just the two of us? I knew you wouldn't--now.

I said, "How's Rushford?"

"More important--how are you?"

"Sprung-witted. Weary. And pursuing."

"Nearly finished?"

"I should make it--tomorrow. If I hold out tonight."

"Phil! What's wrong?"

The echo--the electrical overtone--that long way.

"Nothing's wrong, dear. Things are picking up. I picked up a blonde, for instance-

-and Paul's taking her out. So maybe his mental health is improving."

"And maybe you should have taken her out yourself! You sound like somebody playing an ocarina in Mammoth Cave; positively sepulchral."

"The heat. Expanded my sinuses. Gives me that hollow ring. Is it hot up there?"

"Eighty-six tonight. The natives are dying of it."

"It must be a hundred here."

"I read about it in the Buffalo papers. Gee!"

"It's pretty lurid. They had a veterans' parade yesterday--and I went over to Fifth to watch--and it was damn near immobilized in the asphalt. It would have been funny--

millions of guys stuck there--blocking traffic all winter--!

If you go out just to get a paper, you need asbestos shoes. Any minute, this joint may run like paraffin."

"I think you ought to knock off and go see somebody."

"Town's evacuated. "Wouldn't be emptier if Molotov was threatening to A-bomb."

"Do you feel all right?"

"Sure, Tud. As all right as you can when you're standing by to swim up out of your own sweat, any minute. How's mother? What new mess has Popcorn made?"

She gave me the country news.

"Won't be too long now," I said.

"Miss you."

"Miss you. Been thinking about the gardens. See you day after tomorrow--barring acts of God."

' I'd rather wait longer--and have you sounding better."

"You wait till I get there and I'll do my own sounding."

"Good night," she said. "I love you."

When I hung up, I was quivering.

I'd come pretty close:

Well, Ricky, I am worried. I went to Tom's. Of course, it's probably going to turn out to be nothing. But until I know for sure I feel--the hell with it! I'm ashamed of being this way!

I sat there, taking divots out of myself and not getting on the green.

I looked at the roses again.

They were just yellow roses--big ones--in a glass vase.

I yanked out the bridge table, batted the bridge lamp around, sat, and bent into it.

6

Yvonne came through the connecting doors about one o'clock. I was still bent-bent enough so it took a moment to turn and straighten after she said, "Hello, Svengali!"

She was drunk. Not happy-drunk, or mean-drunk, either. Nervous-drunk.

"Your pure relation left me," she said.

"Left you how?"

"Left me in this condition. Buy me a Scotch."

I sent the word.

She threw herself on the divan, blew down the front of her rose-pink dress--which was wrinkled now, wet under the armpits, city--smudged at the edges--and fixed her fidgety eyes on me. "We went down to the Palais and danced a bit. He's lousy. We started in having a flock of drinks. He talked. Good God, how Wylies talk! He told me the story of his life--including the full saga of Marcia. He got to that later--at the Club Mauve."

"Nice little spot!"

"He said we were both in a revolting mood and so we should go to some repulsive place."

"Then you told him the story of your life, too?"

"Do to when I met you."

"Is that going to be a date, from now on? Milestone? And millstone, too? Try to bear in mind--it's your life and you're of age."

"So all right, lambie-pie! No hard feelings. The point is--the more he told me about his Marcia--the less he noticed me. We switched to Planter's Punches, in due time, and had a zombie somewhere along the way. For a while I thought the rum was going to do what my gilded fleece couldn't. We necked. It's dark as a bat's groin there, anyhow."

"Pretty metaphor."

"We necked, I said. Back in the old days--last week--I could neck with a boy from the time he cut me out at the prom until bacon and eggs at Child's--and never feel a thing I didn't want to feel. Tonight--though--I lost ground so fast you'd think I was a juvenile delinquent trying her first reefer."

"Poor premise--but I get the idea."

"And what?"

She turned and smiled with excess brightness at George, when he carried in the round, silver tray.

"And what--?" She revived the question. "Just as your cute little Paulie-pie was getting interesting--and I thought, interested--he talked himself right into going on the hunt for his Marcia again!"

"That's too bad."

"It's too bad--and what are you going to do about it?"

"Remember what I said concerning how I don't like girls when they drink too much? Even a little bit too much?"

Yvonne gulped explosively. "All right, then! So I call up Gwen! And that's your fault!"

"Telephone's right beside you."

She looked at it sulkily. Then she grabbed it and gave the number.

"Hello . . . this is Mrs. Roland Prentiss . . . is Gwen Taylor there?" She stuck out her tongue at me. "Gwen, darling! . . . dad's gone, at last . . . sure . . . that would be lovely

. . . of course!"

"Ace-in-the-hole," I said.

"Don't be--" She shrugged and laughed restlessly. "Oh--all right. It's my life, though, isn't it?"

"That's the idea."

"Phil!"

"Present--and unaccountable." I didn't feel witty.

"You come with me--" She was standing and she finished the highball standing.

I shook my head. ''I'm going after Paul."

"Where?"

"Here and there." I had one idea, anyway.

She undid her dress and stepped out of it and threw it over her arm. She looked at me for another moment with eyes both jumpy and expressionless. "You wouldn't regret it."

"Some other time, baby. I got to go find that cluck."

"See you," she said and swept out in her bra and petticoat. This time, when I heard her shower begin, I locked my door. Then I put on a dry, newly pressed seersucker, a light silk tie, and went out before she decided to try again.

The cab tooled along Fifth Avenue a ways, dove through the Park, and rattled into a semislum section--an area of delicatessens and bowling alleys, dated, disreputable hotels, massage parlors, shrieking truck brakes, trickling electric signs, jaded cafeterias, and a crosshatch of streets narrower than the avenues, darker, lined on both sides with identical brownstones that exuded a smell of senescence and rotted brick tenements upon the façades of which hung rusty fire escapes. On the fire escapes were people, their pets, bedding and potted plants, beer pails and radios, along with their accents of Crete, Sicily and the Balkans, Bohemia and Slovakia and Sudetenland-the wonderful poor, the authority for democracy--they said, the intellectuals who had made gods of them without touching them.