Honeydew: Stories Part 4

"Perhaps that would be..." he began. Her fingers in his cold wet hand twitched. "No," he reversed. "Come up to my place."

He sat in his easy chair for a long time, looking over some papers and drinking several cans of ginger ale, belching uneasily. He took forever in the bathroom. She was dozing when he finally got into bed. He turned his back in what she suspected was a common marital maneuver.

Fern looked at Barbara. Barbara nodded at her to continue.

But Jamie would not be denied, Fern said. She touched Lev's shoulder, played a little tune on it, and, slowly, he turned toward her. That nimble hand of hers now entered his pajama s.h.i.+rt between the b.u.t.tons and tweaked his nipple. With a sigh he heaved his body onto hers. He waited a few moments. She should excuse him tonight, she thought...but there it was, his erection, making its way through the fly of his pajama bottoms. He kneeled, still clothed, and entered her. A thrust, another thrust, and he fell-so quickly! And she not half begun; he had forgotten to apply his tongue. His face as usual kissed the pillow and his heart thudded against hers.

Only it wasn't thudding. She held her breath. Perhaps he was holding his breath too. She exhaled. He did not exhale.

Five minutes to midnight.

Staring at the ceiling, she remembered that he had had a heart attack in his fifties. His father had died young, and his uncles and his one brother, all of the same thing, he had told her. It ran in the family, sudden fatal infarctions. There were worse ways to go, he'd insisted. Those pills he sometimes took, waving away her concerned flutterings-they must be in his jacket. She leaped out of bed, found the vial, shook it at him. She could force the tablets into his mouth. She could force them into his r.e.c.t.u.m. What was the rhythm of CPR? She had taken a workshop in college, practicing on a puce dummy. She remembered almost nothing. Four minutes to midnight.

She rolled him onto his back. Loosen clothing, she recalled: she unsnapped his pajama bottoms. His p.e.n.i.s lolled. She pressed her fingers to the side of his neck. Nothing. She knocked on his chest. n.o.body home. She placed her mouth on his and blew, and raised her head, and lowered it and blew again. His mouth was foul-hadn't he brushed his teeth during that long stint in the bathroom? Still, there was something encouraging about the terrible smell and taste. His personal bacteria were still alive. She blew one more time, and then reached for the telephone and dialed 911. Three minutes to midnight.

By the time the police and the ambulance came she was again wearing her red dress. She had broken one of the straps in her haste to put it on. He was wearing his trousers. Flat on the bed, his bare brown feet below the pinstripes, his rumpled pajama top above, he looked like a melancholy minstrel.

The ambulance men were so deft, with their oxygen and their resuscitation attempts and their gurney. The police were so kind. One of them was female. What a fine career for a woman, Jamie thought. Yes, she told them, she was his a.s.sistant. Yes, he'd given a lecture. They had returned here to work on his next speech, it would be in Chicago...it would have been in Chicago. How had he seemed? Oh, preoccupied. "Infarctions run in his family," she confided.

They drove her home. Fern had been awake, she said, planning the next day's lesson for her wretched students, when the police delivered Jamie to her. An unfortunate incident was what they said. They left. Jamie threw herself onto her bed, still wearing that red dress, and gagged her story into the pillow.

"I turned her over," Fern said, "and got the unbroken strap off her shoulder and rolled the dress down her body. I was sure that reporters would show up any minute and would seize on the dress, would call it scarlet. I slid an innocent nightgown over my cousin's head. I threw the red heap onto the floor of my own closet."

But the reporters didn't come. Except for one tabloid, the papers left Jamie out of the story. Lev's biography filled their articles; the work he might yet have done interested the pundits.

The staff went as a group to the calling hours at the funeral home. Jamie had planned to wear the red dress but Fern talked her out of it, she said. Jamie wore a black suit instead, with a very short skirt. In the coffin, she said later, he looked rested and handsome. Of course she could not give him a special good-bye, but her gaze traveled through the clothing and snuggled right next to his n.o.ble heart. And then she went into the next room to offer her condolences to the mourners.

They were sitting in a semicircle. The mother: that severe chignon, pewter tinged with bronze. "She grayed in an eccentric manner," Lev had told her. "She never did do things like other people." The first wife, queenly despite an unflattering beige outfit, and her sons and daughters-in-law and grandchildren, all solemn, sad-grief-stricken, you might say. One son looked just like him. Did he also have a heart that would fail too soon? Jamie wondered. The stunning second wife, wearing a silver pendant that resembled a stethoscope. Her teenage daughter, Thalia was her name, whose kneesocks and trashy novels Jamie had found here and there in the apartment. Schmidt, sobbing. Thalia was holding Schmidt's hand. Another older woman-who? Oh yes, the wife of the dead brother.

Jamie, her quick eye sliding from face to face, her fingers tapping her own thigh, her tongue thrumming behind her crossed teeth...she counted them. Nineteen. Nineteen broken hearts. Well, eighteen: the sister-in-law was perhaps unaffected. Eighteen people who had lost a loved man husband ex-husband father grandfather son; who had lost him to sudden death; who had lost him because of an a.s.sistant they were glad to tolerate, no one minded his little failing; who had lost him because the upstart a.s.sistant had fastened onto him, exhausted him with her demands, driven him over the brink; and then, scared out of her silly wits, had shaken pills as if they were castanets, and weakly punched his sternum, and breathed f.e.c.klessly into his mouth, and wriggled a pair of trousers onto his uncooperative legs for the sake of his earthly reputation, or hers. To cover their shame.

The sister-in-law burst into tears.

Nineteen people, then.

"Jamie left New York after that," Fern wound up. "She got a master of arts in education at a state university, and she married a good dull math teacher who gave her two good dull sons. She sc.r.a.ped her hair back, and renounced contact lenses, and bought a lifetime supply of white blouses."

Silence for a while. Then Barbara said, "So she's up in her room now, hair loose, gla.s.ses off, reliving it all, drenched in guilt."

"Yes," Fern said. She was staring at the olive in the bottom of her gla.s.s. "Some people have all the luck."

Blessed Harry.

I.

On the first Monday in March Mr. Flaxbaum received the following e-mail: Distinguished Myron Flaxbaum, I am Professor Harry Worrell from King's College Campus Here in London, UK. We want you to be our guest Speaker at this Year's Unantic.i.p.ated Seminar which will take place Here. We are writing to invite and confirm your booking. The Venue is as follows: King's College campus in Strand, London, UK. The expected audience is 850 people. The duration of the speech is one hour. The date is the 31st of May this year. The topic is "The Mystery of Life and Death." We came across references to you on the Internet, and we say you are up to standard. A formal letter of invitation and Contract agreement will be sent to you as soon as you honor our Invitation. We are taking care of your travel and hotel accommodation expenses and your speaking fee.

Stay Blessed, Professor Harry Worrell.

King's College Campus.

Mr. Flaxbaum reread this epistle, removing his gla.s.ses for the second perusal. "I'm invited to give a lecture," he mentioned to the three boys, who, though hurrying off to school, paused to look at the invitation. "Fab," "Wicked," "Steamy," they agreed one after the other; and, one after the other, backpack following backpack, left the flat, their departure as usual causing a small conflagration in Flax's heart. "Awesome," added Felix over his shoulder, revealing for a moment the abbreviated nose and one of the blue eyes inherited from Bonnie. Bonnie had already been at work for several hours-she was a surgical nurse at a Boston hospital-but she would affirm late that afternoon that the Unantic.i.p.ated Seminar would be elevated by the presence of her Myron. (No one except Bonnie called him by his first name; even his sister called him Flax.) Bonnie would bend her blond, large-chinned head toward the screen and review the topic-"The Mystery of Life and Death"-and then stand erect again, an oversize woman, authoritative as a Roman aedile though she wore pants and sweater and st.u.r.dy shoes rather than toga and sandals. "Darling, you could even do it in Latin."

Now, in Bonnie's absence, and after the noisy departure of the boys-in the presence only of the Flaxbaums' peculiar houseplant-Flax indulged in an unusual activity: he googled himself.

His name came up just once, as he had known it would: on the website of Caldicott Academy, G.o.dolphin, Ma.s.s., the private girls' school where he worked. In a photograph, taken several years ago, Flax's hair was retreating but not yet fleeing. His upper lip had not yet put forth its slim mustache. His plump cheeks did not show the two vertical creases that appeared whenever he produced a smile, and his gla.s.ses concealed the considerate gaze that had made many a slipshod student called in for a conference feel suddenly worthy, though worthy of what she could not have easily said. Maybe worthy of a conference with Flax; maybe that was enough. Most students responded to their conversations with Flax by paying more attention to their Latin grammars, by finding something intriguing in the ablative absolute, by renouncing their trots-one girl actually burned hers in a little ceremony behind the gym.

Under the picture the legend read Myron Flaxbaum, BA Brooklyn College, MA Columbia, MAT Harvard. Teaches first-, second-, and third-year Latin. Coaches the chess team. It was a tribute to the electronic world that this mild entry had brought him to the attention of the director of Unantic.i.p.ated Seminars at King's College on the Strand. What could he invent as a usual fee? More critically, what could he say in his lecture? Let us think for a moment (he thought). Perhaps I can work up something about the history of life-the big bang, the primordial soup, the development of bacteria, the emergence of creatures with a sort of brain and a sort of eye and some locomotion. I will reread Darwin and Linnaeus and Mendel and Richard Dawkins; I will review the Bible. I might require an agent...

And then, shaking his head violently (for him), he stopped considering this daunting task. He googled King's College on the Strand and discovered that it indeed existed but that no Harry Worrell was named on its faculty. Perhaps Harry was blessedly modest. Flax then shrugged himself into his worn overcoat and checked his shabby briefcase, making sure it carried the books and papers necessary for today's lessons. He tested the loose b.u.t.ton on his overcoat-yes, it would probably hang on another day. He lifted from its hook the beret his sons had given him for his recent birthday-an accessory they considered a sartorial improvement on his old tweed cap-and slipped it onto his semi-bald head. He picked up the half-full cup of coffee resting on the computer table and brought it to a familiar dark corner and dumped its contents into a pot of soil and mismatched pedicels, bracts, peduncles, and leaves. Then he abandoned the flat to this plant's caffeinated care.

II.

n.o.body remembered where the plant had come from. It seemed to have been sitting forever in that ill-lit and (for a plant) unwholesome corner of the living room, on a little table whose provenance was also forgotten, protected by the scrolled arm of the brown plush sofa. The middle boy, Leo, suggested that the plant had been sp.a.w.ned by the sofa, which was called Jack, after Flax's dear uncle who had lived with them for some years. Uncle Jack had shared a room with the youngest boy, Felix, and never got in anybody's way, largely because he was usually occupying the sofa, sometimes flicking cigar ash in the direction of Plant. "A lovable schnorrer," said Mr. Flaxbaum of Jack, though not as part of the formal eulogy.

Young Felix suspected that he himself had brought Plant home from the garden shop during an annual giveaway of moribund merchandise. Flax, devotee of Ovid's Metamorphoses, entertained the fancy that Plant had once been a nymph changed like Daphne, although not into a laurel on a hill near Olympus but rather into an ill-favored thing rooted in a pot in their living room. Perhaps she had misbehaved when she still had legs and hips. Bonnie, who had received a cla.s.sical education from the nuns, thought Plant was a household G.o.d responsible for luck, one of the Lares or one of the Penates. Why not? The family had been fortunate so far, unless you were silly enough to consider fat bank accounts and granite kitchen counters signs of luck. Even her Leo, who had a neurologic condition which might prove progressive but might not-even he was not unlucky, not yet, not yet, maybe not ever...Plant might be a succulent, Leo had speculated.

In a family discussion soon after Plant's appearance, Bonnie remarked that it might have been a variety of primrose emigrated from the railroad tracks. Sean, the eldest, taking charge of a one-volume Encyclopedia of Botany no one had known they owned ("Sort of like the plant," mentioned Uncle Jack), said that its pallor indicated that it might be mycotrophic, might "'obtain nutrients from the soil by means of the fungi that inhabit its roots,'" Sean read aloud. Its rosettes made it a cousin to Anacampseros telephiastrum variegata, "'also called Sunrise.'"

"Telephiastrum," Flax repeated. "Greek, not Latin. 'Casting afar,' maybe. Go on, Sean."

"Like Arsaenia, the tip of its leaf is 'elongated, upturned, and coiled.'"

"Only one of its leaves," Leo said. "The striped one is flat."

"There's a hint of a caudex just above the soil," Sean said, and closed the book.

"What's a caudex?" Felix said.

"An early ma.n.u.script," Jack said.

After a while: "Taproot," said Sean.

"Our guest has lots of characteristics," Felix said. "Some growing out of others."

"Some mutually exclusive," Leo said.

Plant's supposed taproot had never been examined (they didn't want to kill the thing). Sometimes it produced tiny flowers in hues of lingerie. Sometimes it put out scramblers which crept to the edge of the pot and then disintegrated. It was probably a hybrid. "Who isn't?" Sean inquired (biology was one of his AP courses). It troubled no one, and it endeared itself to no one. In that way it was different from the little terrier the family had acquired from the pound some years ago. Buddy liked to chase cars. It was only a sometime habit; they hoped he'd outgrow it. Otherwise he was affectionate, recognized the boys by name and also Uncle Jack, who gave him candy in secret. He seemed numerate; Leo thought Buddy might learn to count, or at least to feign counting, like Clever Hans. But math lessons never got started, because one misty morning the fit was on him, and he came to grief with a Camry. Poor Buddy...Plant persisted, like the busy Flaxbaums themselves-like Flax, Bonnie, Sean, Leo, Felix, and the incarnation of Uncle Jack.

III.

The next morning, Tuesday: "Do you want me to print out Professor Harry Worrell's invitation?" Flax asked Felix.

"Thanks, no," Felix said. "Have you answered it?"

"Not yet."

"Well, maybe I'll take the next communication if it comes by mail."

Felix was a scrupulous collector, not a catch-as-catch-can h.o.a.rder. He didn't care for doc.u.ments, though he did admire stamps. But his taste was mainly for odd items like fancy b.u.t.tons and bicycle bells and orphaned circuit boards that might come in handy sometime; and he also liked things with a peculiar beauty, like the last garnet inch in a flask of cough medicine, or his own vermiform appendix, deftly removed from his cec.u.m and preserved in a bottle of formaldehyde. He picked up crosses on chains in secondhand shops-they reminded him of his early childhood when he'd attended Ma.s.ses with Grandma Reilly, his mama's sweet mama. Felix might never have indulged his scavenging habits-or might have been reduced to collecting Pokemon cards-if Uncle Jack hadn't died and abandoned his half of the shared bedroom. Over the next few years the boy built some shelves, bought a gla.s.s aquarium, discovered in a junkyard a small office safe and repaired its lock with Leo's help. There Felix kept his crosses. The aquarium now housed some goldfish, two, three, four, or five of them, their number depending on their own luck and on a larger fate which Felix didn't understand and which he guessed was a mystery also to his dependents. They conducted repet.i.tive exercises under Felix's benign attention. He fed them flakes that looked like dried cilantro. He gave them the names of Latin poets in honor of his father, but whenever one of them was found floating without purpose, he retired the fish while recycling the name. He had thus been guardian of numerous Virgils and Juvenals. Mr. Flaxbaum was comfortable with the monikers but he thought the group as a whole ought to be called by its appropriate Linnaean taxon. So Felix posted a little sign: C. auratus auratus.

Felix played basketball and soccer, but his favorite sport was walking with his head down and stopping to look at a fallen leaf or worm cast that attracted him and sometimes picking it up, bringing it close to his frank Irish face-a physiognomy unusual in the Flaxbaum family but occurring often among the Reillys. He particularly admired a lifeless bug trapped between the two panes of stormproof gla.s.s in one of his parents' bedroom windows. Their bedroom was just off the living room.

"Can't we liberate him?" Felix had wondered. "How did he get there?"

"It's an adult longhorn beetle," said Flax after some research. "My guess is that its pupa was blown between two sheets of gla.s.s when the workmen in the yard of the gla.s.s factory were jamming them together. We have double panes on our windows to keep the cold out, Felix, and they can't be separated-they'd have to be broken. And for what purpose?-to extract the cadaver of a common insect. I know you'd like to add him to your curiosities, so please consider our room your annex."

"Thanks. What killed the dude?"

"Insufficient oxygen. In one way or another that's what kills us all. Uncle Jack..."

"He had a blood disease."

"Yes, in the end his blood couldn't carry oxygen to his heart and he died."

"Oh. The bug didn't disintegrate," said Felix. Flax guessed that the boy was thinking of Uncle decomposing in the earth. He treated himself to a measured look at his son's eyes. If sincerity had a color..."Lack of oxygen again," Flax explained. "He was preserved in an accidental vacuum."

Every morning Felix opened his safe and took out one of the crosses. Then he stashed it again, gave Plant a fish-flakes treat, and took a quick look at the beetle to see if it had been resurrected yet.

IV.

On Wednesdays, Leo's first cla.s.s was at ten. G.o.dolphin's progressive high school mandated attendance at cla.s.ses but allowed freedom at other times. On Wednesdays Flax didn't teach at all. So at eight o'clock the two were home, alone with each other. And on this Wednesday, already afternoon in the UK, Professor Harry Worrell was probably alone in a pub booth, empty steins acc.u.mulating around his laptop, sending messages to distinguished Americans.

While thinking of the blessed professor, Flax was enjoying a lethal breakfast of pancakes and syrup and bacon, Leo a life-enhancing one of muesli and tea and several colorful capsules. There was a resemblance between these two-limp brown hair, abundant in the son and scanty in the father; gentle voice; slow smile; a talent and love for teaching. Leo at sixteen was already helping the ninth-grade teacher explain logarithms, in so modest a manner that his cla.s.smates were unoffended; and on late-afternoon visits to the local elementary school, he tutored some kids who were called intellectually challenged. He hated the term. It was mathematics itself that was challenged. There was something wrong with numbers, their incarnation on paper. They were flummoxing these dear children, preventing them from doing more than count. The children were good at counting when they used words, one, two, three; they also loved gazillion. But the shapes for numbers made their eyes fill. And the visual aids some s.a.d.i.s.tic pedagogue invented: handcuffs for 3, a hook for 5, an ax for 7; 4 was a cruel pitchfork... "I've come to hate number shapes," Leo said.

They washed the dishes. Leo did not feed Plant but he did stand looking down at it. "I wonder if Buddy could really have learned to count," he muttered. He was still thinking about numbers, Flax realized. Might Plant be numiverous? Leo slanted his head forward and Flax imagined ungainly symbols tumbling into the pot; good-bye, 2, 5, 17; good-bye, 9, you noose.

Then Leo picked up his backpack, father and son got their bikes out of the garage. Beneath the helmet Flax's beret flapped onto his forehead. In overcoat and headgear he looked stately on wheels, Leo noticed, though a b.u.t.ton appeared to be missing from the coat. Flax noticed the angularity of his son and experienced that cold dread that someday Leo's dormant disease would dispatch tubers to his organs and turn him into wood. They rode, Flax first, into the empty street and bicycled side by side until at the second intersection Leo with a wave turned toward school and Flax with an arm raised in answer went straight ahead, toward today's job, selling shoes at Dactyl.

V.

Though Bonnie's days were packed with obligations, she nonetheless devoted an hour every Wednesday to minding her man. After work she took the underground as always from the hospital to the central metro station and then, instead of trolleying to the section of G.o.dolphin where the Flaxbaums lived-firm wooden three-deckers, mostly firm families within-she trolleyed to G.o.dolphin's commercial area, Jefferson Corner. Dactyl, where Myron worked Wednesdays and Sat.u.r.day afternoons, was on the historically registered block that included Forget Me Not, an antiques shop; Roberta's Linens; Dunton's Tobacco; and the Local, a restaurant. This stretch of stores stood behind a brick colonnade. Each store had inner doors opening to its neighbors. Historians guessed that the whole arrangement had been part of the underground railway. The door between Forget Me Not and Dactyl had a square gla.s.s window. At three o'clock, Bonnie, wearing a bowler she kept at Forget Me Not and rimless gla.s.ses with no refraction, took possession of the window after first exchanging nods with Renata, Forget Me Not's proprietor. In her long years of storekeeping, Renata had seen far more peculiar things than a wife keeping an eye on a blameless husband.

Bonnie's habit had begun on a July Sat.u.r.day. Coming out of the bookstore across the street, her arms full, she had glimpsed Myron inside Dactyl. She swiftly crossed the street and took a spy's position behind one of the columns and peeked out. She could see him better now. He was standing with his hands behind his back. His chin was slightly lowered as if he were looking down, but his gla.s.ses pinching the tip of his nose indicated that his eyes were raised in order to see over them. She watched for a while. And then, bending the rules of physics and physiology, she entered him. She burrowed between his ribs; she spread her substantial self within his smaller periphery. The sc.r.a.ps and scrolls of his knowledge occupied their now-shared frontal cortex. His lively interest employed four optic nerves. His disappointments made four shoulders slump. She knew his shame at having to sell footwear in order to increase the family's comfort, and she knew the secondary shame that so respectable an extra job should cause that first shame. And so whenever she watched him on Wednesdays-watched only; she couldn't occupy him after that first exalted melding-she was able to feel again what was felt by this father brother husband nephew teacher protector salesman patron of a botanical curiosity lover of Ovid...

So the practical, competent woman, every surgeon's favorite nurse, calmness itself behind her mask and gown, ready always with the instrument needed, her pity always contained, this paragon of unflappability surrendered to her own soft interior every Wednesday and peeped at her husband from the window of Forget Me Not, saw pride and disappointment and shame and resignation, saw him kneeling like a knight-not like a servant, Myron!-in front of some woman shopping for pumps exactly the color of a certain Bordeaux, exactly the height of a certain stair rise, no, no, no, higher, lower, redder, less red, did I say I wanted a bow, a buckle, a golden chameleon climbing up my instep, amphibians give me the creeps...

"Reptiles," corrected Flax.

The woman bought the shoes.

"Can you read their lips?" Renata inquired.

"Not exactly," Bonnie said. "I supply."

"That's the how of communication, isn't it."

"Yes." It was the how of family too, but she didn't say that to the kindly spinster. All commensals supplied each other in one way or another-commensals, from com mensa, eating together. She loved mealtimes, preparing the dinner with help from everybody, using ingredients bought with the money she and Myron supplied. Dinner-table conversations were full of information, not always accurate, and full of earnest misquotations; the boys' manners if not perfect were adequate, and the dining-room mirror obediently reflected them all, her own fat self and Myron's balding self and Sean's and Leo's loved faces, and the back of Felix's loved head, although in his darting way he showed one profile and then the other. "Salt, please," he would say to his father. (Someday she must stop putting salt on the table.) Myron pa.s.sed the salt; Myron, the fellow she had stumbled upon, literally, twenty years ago.

He'd been slumped in a chair in the surgical waiting room while his poor sick father died under the knife, it couldn't be helped, and returning from the sad conclusion of the operation, she had tripped over his legs sticking out into the room. A small woman slept in the next chair-his sister, it turned out. It was three in the morning.

"Oh, I'm sorry," she'd said to his feet.

His eyes flew open. His mouth flew open. He wanted to ask her. It was not up to her to tell him. But she broke protocol with a gesture: she put her hand on his shoulder, and then fled. The woman beside him stirred.