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This would be the place to start. With my
marriage. Or rather, with how it ended. My wife's name
was Taylor, and she worked as an accountant for Hodgeman-Alexander.
She was a tall, slender woman who had a stubborn streak. I had loved
her for six years, three of which we'd been married. It's not easy
to say why we separated, but I know this: it had to do with Jeffery Branch
and perhaps other men at her company. I do not believe she had an
affair. She was a loyal woman, though also committed to her own idea
of a good life. Just what this life included, I did not fully understand,
but sensed over time that it might not include me. Once, four
months before our separation, she told me: "It's not like I haven't
had opportunities to be with other men."
"Like with whom?" I asked.
"Like with Jeffery Branch," she said.
"Who's Jeffery Branch?"
"He's in Outside Promotions. He's new."
"Are you saying you want to see this Jeffery
Branch?" I asked.
She walked around our kitchen, moving slowly.
"No," she said. "I don't want to see him. But
I did think about it. Thought it might be a way to end things between
us."
"End things," I said. "Why
are you telling me this?"
"Because," she said, "I'd like
you to understand me."
"I do understand you," I said.
"Then maybe I'd like you to understand yourself."
I stayed there, looking at her. She stood
by our sink, sunlight slanting in, surrounding us. She picked up
a dish towel and held it. When the space between us grew heavy with
sorrow, she turned towards the sink and twisted on the tap, allowing the
sound of water to break our silence. She continued to wash silverware
and plates, even though we owned a dishwasher, then set them on paper towels
to dry.
I know, looking back, I should've thrown something,
I should've yelled or at least stormed off, but only stood there.
When she finished, I said, "I didn't know you felt that way,"
and turned to walk out the door, though the opportunity for storming off
had passed.
I walked, as I had after previous fights, through
the local park and along a bike path that sloped down beside a saltwater
marsh. It was there I called my uncle-my only living, blood relative
who, like my mother before, lived in Sydney. "It's like I said,"
he explained, "the bigger the fire, the more the smoke."
"This is not a time for jokes, Will,"
I said.
"That is not a joke," he said.
"It's the wisdom of the ages."
"Don't give me the wisdom of the ages crap.
You probably clepted that from some old Bogart flick."
"Some Hepburn film," he corrected.
"You need to get these things straight. They make the movies
in your country after all."
"I don't give a damn about the movies,"
I said.
"Listen, Kid Courage," he said, "go
back, see how things are. If they're bad, call me later."
In the background, I heard the people milling
around his nursery. "Do you have customers?" I asked.
"Only pensioners masquerading as customers,"
he said, "but now that Basil's gone, I have to help them too."
Basil had been his partner, that is, until he
passed away. "Go help your pensioners," I said.
"You always end phone conversations with
such disdain," he replied. "It's very American."
"It's not American," I said. "It's
just me."
For the next hour I sat among large gray rocks
and felt, as I often did after fights, rather alone and somewhat of a failure.
Over the last few months I believed we were passing through a period of
grief, a rusty turnstile positioned before a three year wedding anniversary,
but that was not true. It was only something I told myself.
Later that day, I would return home, try to patch things up; however, in
four month's time, we would separate, me standing somewhat pathetically
on what-used-to-be our front porch, the last of my clothes bundled into
a cardboard box because, as we'd decided, the luggage would be hers.
On this day, though, I did not know these things. I knew I was hurting
and somewhat angry. My wife was probably still in the kitchen, her
eyes holding back tears, her beautiful black hair falling like fringe into
her face. I sat there for at least an hour, as twilight settled over
the shore. A golden retriever pranced up to me, sniffed my hands,
then trotted away.
When I returned, Taylor was waiting for me on
the couch, a cigarette in her hand, though since I'd met her, she rarely
smoked. "I don't know why you go away," she said.
"It makes me fume."
"I go away," I said, "because you
ignore me and because I don't know what else to do."
"Why are you so much like all the other men
I knew?" she asked.
This was the accusation I hated most, the one
I could not rebut, except with generalities that would not further my cause.
"Why do you always say that," I said. "I'm not like
the other men. You didn't marry them."
She looked at me, as though all hope had
been scraped from inside of her, leaving only emptiness, then moved so
I could sit beside her on the couch. "I don't know why I get
so angry," she said, "and I don't know why you leave."
"I don't know either," I said.
"It's how we deal with things, I guess." At this, her eyes
took on a softness, something I had not seen in a long time, then she turned
away. I took her hand, but slowly she withdrew it from me.
Three hours later, when I called back, my uncle
said, "You should come here. Get on a plane and make a visit."
"That's the last thing I need to do," I said,
"take a trip to Sydney."
"It's doesn't have to be a long trip, Kid Courage.
Trust me, a short trip would be fine. It'd be good for you."
"I shouldn't even take a short trip," I said.
"But it would be nice," he said, "for
you. And for me too. You could get away, and I could be with
someone who remembers Basil."
"Plenty of your friends remember Basil."
"Yes, but in a campy way," he said.
"In singlets and jeans shorts. Around you, he was different.
Kind of classy. I like to remember him like that."
"I definitely shouldn't go to Australia,"
I said.
I heard him breathe over the phone, those short,
shallow breaths indicating contemplation. "You know," he
finally said. "I imagine it must be very hard to be married.
Very nice, but very hard too."
"It is," I said.
A few minutes later, we hung up. I walked
into our bedroom, and once inside, was aware of Taylor's sleeping presence,
her body shielded by an aura of anger and sorrow, protective emotions which,
hours before, filled our house. I looked at how she lay in bed, her
body curled into itself, seeking mainly its own comfort. Even her
hands were twisted into the blanket, bringing it to her chin. I believed
then the thing I did not want to believe, that happiness was slipping from
us, that our hearts were no longer twinned, and that these fights might
be remembered only as a burden and not as part of the cement which fused
us together. I angered her, and she angered me. The saddest
part: we did not court each other any more, and I knew what that meant.
During my first few days in Australia, I followed
my uncle from his home to his nursery and back. His nursery was not
the same one he owned when I was a kid, but a smaller one nestled in the
suburbs of Sydney. He stocked a nice selection of gift plants and
seedlings, ficus trees and small annuals that bloomed well in window boxes.
When friends visited, he introduced me as "his nephew who said he
definitely wouldn't visit this year."
"Shouldn't visit," I corrected.
"Shouldn't, wouldn't," he sang, "all
sounds the same over the phone."
At this point, he would walk off to tend his nursery-line
up petunias or rearrange pink hydrangeas. He would cluster them around
a stone birdbath or around a reproduction of Michelangelo's "David",
the plants brought in close so that, from a distance, customers might reasonably
think it was a naked, albino man emerging from a field of greens.
Often I would stand in the cashier's shack or, if business were slow, help
Susan with the watering. My uncle had hired her two months before,
his first employee since Basil. Like Basil, she was good with books,
good with customers and, also like him, she had been divorced for a number
of years.
"So tell me," she said, "do you
find it strange to be here, you know, now that Basil's gone?"
"A bit," I said. "Did you know
him?"
"Naw," she said, "but your uncle's
told me a fair few things."
"Bas was a good person," I said.
"A bit loud, but most everyone liked him."
Susan considered this, looking up at conifers
that shaded the nursery. "The way your uncle tells it,"
she said, "I figured he was just, plain gaudy."
"He could be that too," I admitted,
"depending on the day."
My uncle, by then, was about finished placing
hydrangeas around the statue. His eye for arrangement was not as
good as Basil's, his lines too straight, his circles too round. Finished,
he stood at a distance to examine his work. "I wish someone
would buy that damn statue," he said. "If you're gay, it's
a bad idea to have statues of naked, Greek men around. People get
the wrong ideas."
"The wrong ideas?" I said.
"Well maybe not the wrong ideas," he
said, "but ones that aren't best for business."
"You shouldn't think like that," I said.
"You should have what you want here."
"If I had what I wanted," he said, "I'd
definitely go out of business."
After the first, few days I was able
to fall into some sort of life-a life complete with routine and work, though
I knew I would only be there a few weeks. As a teenager, I had helped
him work his old nursery, and as a college student, I had visited twice,
learning about my mother who had since died. At that time I became
acquainted with Sydney, particularly the western suburbs that sloped down
to the harbour. I hoped being here would be an act of forgetting,
falling by turns into a comfortable past, but that forgetfulness did not
arrive as easily as I'd wanted. I knew who I was, a man who had trouble
holding on to love, a man far from home who still believed distance might
provide what he most needed.
Each morning we arrived just before eight and
together opened the three gates that , in recent years, had been topped
with barbed wire to keep out what my uncle called "the crims".
We dragged out a large metal sign, which read Strathfield Nursery, Now
Open, so that people might wander over and take a gander. The problem
was, they did little more than that. "One of these days, I'm
getting a new sign," my uncle told me, "Public Gardens.
See if anyone notices the difference." As we reentered the nursery,
we saw a lady pulling blossoms from a hydrangea. My uncle turned
to her and forced a cough. The woman, about fifty, looked at us,
perplexed, as though picking flowers were regular fare at other nurseries.
When she was gone, he leaned towards me. "Inbreeding,"
he whispered, "It's big out here."
Around ten, Susan arrived, wearing a sweatshirt
and jeans. "Good-o, boys," she said before walking to the
cashier's shack. On that day she wore small diamond earrings which
were something I had not seen her wear before. My uncle noticed this
too, his eyes following her in a new way, then he turned to me, his face
somewhat serious. "There's been something I've been meaning to ask,"
he said.
"Sure," I said and turned towards him.
"Well," he began, "I've known a fair
lot of people, and quite frankly, most were of the married variety."
"That's more of a statement," I said.
"If you'd give me a tic," he continued,
"you'd know what I was asking. I'd like to know what finally
broke up your marriage."
"What finally broke us up?" I said.
"When a marriage ends, there's usually a
defining moment," he explained, "a time when you know why it
can't go on."
"If there is," I said, "I'm
not sure what that was. It was more like a series of things, all
piled up."
"If you aren't positive what it was,"
he said, "how do you know you want to get divorced."
"If there was such a moment,"
I said, "it was our fight about Jeffrey Branch. Jeffrey Branch
was this guy Taylor thought she wanted to see."
"Thought she wanted to?" my uncle
said.
"Yes," I explained, "as
a way of ending our marriage."
"But she didn't?" he said.
"No," I said, "not as far as I
know."
My uncle considered this. After a moment,
he said, "Nope, not up to snuff. You need to do better than
that."
"Better?" I asked.
"What do you mean by better?"
"If your marriage is truly over, you
need to know what ended it."
"I know what ended it," I said.
"We weren't very good for each other."
To this he did not say anything. He
simply looked at me, his features beginning to soften, as if he realized
something about me I had not yet realized about myself. "I'm
glad you came for a holiday," he said. "I think it will
do us both a fair lot of good."
When we were done talking, he began to unload
camellias from cardboard crates, six per box, and after giving them a good
drink, placed them at the front of the nursery where people, outside the
gates, could see them.
In years past, I'd wondered why he had taken up
with Basil, though clearly they loved each other. Basil was a bit
racy for him: he wore singlets and jeans shorts. His favorite line
was "Bugger me silly." As in, "You must be joking,
Miss. Two-dollars-ninety for this milk? Well, bugger me silly."
My uncle displayed two photos of him, both in the livingroom. In
one, Basil leans against a rented Jag; in the other, he sits in a friend's
convertible. He was a good time boy, a hang out king, something my
uncle called a bed body because he liked to wake up late. Years ago
I had known his sister. One evening, we'd tried to assemble reasonable
theories-opposites attract, access to unknown worlds-but in the end I opted
for the simplest: they needed each other. Like most people, they
were somewhat afraid of the world and wanted a place to call home.
Under the shade, in what my uncle commonly referred
to as "the indoor plant isle", Susan misted ferns hung from brass
hooks. "Your uncle's in rare form this morning," she said,
and I saw what I had not seen since I arrived, that Susan tried to be close
to him, tried to be his friend, but was kept at a distance. For a
moment, her earrings shimmered again, and I understood they were for his
benefit, an attempt to look what he called "more proper."
"Oh, him?" I said. "He likes
being with plants."
"That I know" she said, "but before
you got here, he was agro half the time."
"He's moody," I explained. "My
arrival had little to do with his good mood."
"Moody," she said, "that's an understatement."
At this I turned to her. She was a small
woman, her face tender, her skin white with pink undertones. "So
why do you stay," I asked, "when you're plagued by him?"
"Why?" she mused. "Most the
time I like being with him."
"I like being with him too," I said.
"As uncles go, I'd give him seven out of ten."
She looked at me, her eyes thin, her features
shifted into a playful reproach. "That high?"
"On his good days," I said. "You
have to remember the extra points he gets for being my only living,
blood relative."
"So if he were to kick off tomorrow, his
rating would fall to, say, a five?"
"Basically," I said. "You
have to have standards."
"I see," she said. "In my
family such standards revolve around a last will." She squeezed
the bottle again, misting the plants. "So has he asked you yet?"
"Asked me what?" I said.
"I figured he would've by now."
And then, after considering it, she added, "To scatter the ashes."
"He told me he scattered them already.
Somewhere up in the Mountains."
"Unless I'm wrong," she explained, "they're
in the kitchen cupboard." She turned toward me, her eyes looking
not only at me, but into me, the type of direct gaze that reminded me of
my wife-or, perhaps I should say of my now estranged wife. "Can
I ask you something personal?" she added.
"Sure," I said, "shoot."
"Are you divorced?"
She looked at me in a way that was meant to tell
me something, though I did not know what. "What brought this
on?" I asked.
"Curiosity," she said, "more
or less."
"Didn't my uncle tell you?" I began.
"My wife and I separated, a little over a month ago."
"My husband and I, we separated too,"
she said, "but it was a fair time back."
"Are you still separated?" I asked.
"Divorced," she said. "Very
easy over here. Married then not."
"It's easy in America too," I
said.
"That's the hard part," she replied,
"how easily everything goes away."
Across the nursery my uncle was at the top gate
helping to unload a flatbed filled with seedlings. He set them on
a special display rack, rows of lettuce, cucumber, pansies, and so on.
The deliveryboy moved quite a bit slower than my uncle, and when he wasn't
looking, my uncle shot us expressions of mock irritation, his face pinched
into a cartoonish mask of exasperation.
"He has a way around the nursery," she
said, "which I kind of like."
"That he does," I said.
"Though," she continued, "I wish
he'd loosen up around me."
But before I could say more, we were approached
by an elderly man, wearing a wool jacket and tie. When he reached
us he withdrew a small ivy plant from a plastic shopping bag, though the
ivy had pretty much had it, its vine clinging to the last of its leaves.
After displaying the sickly plant, he announced in a soft, apologetic voice,
"I bought this here."
"You bought this here," Susan said,
taking the plant into her hand. She turned it and with genuine interest
examined it from various angles. When done, she asked, "So what
do you think you did wrong?"
It was a question much like my uncle would ask,
one that spun a customer around so quickly he did not know what to say.
"Well," he began, "there were a couple times I forgot to
water it. And perhaps the place I put it wasn't the best."
"The place you put it?" she remarked.
"Yes, on me bookshelf. It seemed a
fair place, except for the heating vent."
"I see," she said.
On the other side of the nursery, my uncle was
still making faces which the deliveryboy could not see: crinkling his eyebrows,
raising his upper lip with mock disbelief, gasping at how much he was expected
to carry. I noticed, too, his display was not only for our benefit,
but directed at the seven or eight pensioners gathered by the sandstone
bench. Some of them tried not to watch, but clearly they did, amused
beyond belief that a grown man would carry on like this simply for their
entertainment.
The routine continued for a short while, my uncle
helping to unload the seedlings and, when he could, making quick sardonic
faces, but then it stopped. His antics finished, he smoothed back his aluminum
toned hair then shook the deliveryboy's hand as if he wished only good
things might come to him. The pensioners, which had been watching,
began to disperse, walking toward the front gate where, just beyond, bus
stops waited as did the more distant train station. Mary, one of
the bravest, stopped to wave goodbye, a gesture my uncle pretended not
to see, though right before she left, he winked at her, dropping his mask
of indifference just long enough for her to understand. Out of all
of them, only one man brought a plant to the counter, a single tomato vine,
its value, a meager 95 cents. He dropped a dollar coin into my hand,
and after making change, I placed the plant into a plastic bag.
As the man left, my uncle joined us in the cashier's
shack. He stood close to me so that our shoulders touched, his body
smelling of earth and plants and a very expensive cologne which Basil had
once informed him "did not smell cheap." After the man
was a good ways out the gate, my uncle said, "They come, they go,
they buy tomato plants."
"Just one," Susan corrected.
"Only one tomato plant."
"Oh isn't it awful!" my uncle exclaimed.
"They come, they go, they buy a tomato plant. Life is so very
hard for the wicked!"
But then the man who had purchased the tomato
plant returned, its thin vine protruding from the top of its bag.
He stopped before us and very matter-of-factly said, "Good-o mates,
mind if I took an extra bag. I've got a fair walk ahead and don't
think one's going to do me."
My uncle reached behind the counter and extracted
a single bag, pulling it slowly from its box as though this gesture might
kill him.
The man fit his first bag inside the second and
then, after holding the doubled handles, said, "Ta, maties,"
then left.
Pierce
home page
Smoke,
Part 2
Dinner
at Charlie's, Part 1
Dinner
at Charlie's, Part 2
Dinner
at Charlie's, Part 3
The
Last Good Night |