The Man Who Wouldn't Stand Up (10 page)

When Arnold finally arrived at Sheridan Square, shortly before five o’clock, he realized that he didn’t want to return home. Not yet. Judith would be awake, he was sure, waiting to press him for the details of his encounter with Spitford, and inevitably, against his better judgment, he’d share them. Arnold had never mastered the art of lying to his wife, even when it served their mutual interests. So he shared secrets that would have best been kept to himself—whether a clinically insignificant rise in his cholesterol level, which was bound to cause Judith unnecessary worry, or a colleague’s infidelity, which might forever doom the man in her eyes. Once, Arnold had thrown Judith a surprise birthday party—fifty of their dearest friends at the Swiss bistro with the authentic cuckoo clocks—but he’d broken down and confessed on the stroll to the restaurant. He just wasn’t wired for dishonesty. Moreover, the problem with deceiving your spouse was that you couldn’t tell only one lie. Constant companionship forced you to cover your
tracks, weaving more intricate falsehoods until neither of you knew what was true any longer. Arnold wanted no part of that. But he also didn’t want Judith raking him over the coals for losing his cool with Spitford. He cringed at the thought of sharing what he’d said about the content of the man’s character. It wasn’t Judith’s reaction only that he dreaded—although his wife, who’d sided with a contingent of St. Gregory’s parents protesting the use of the adverb “niggardly” in a school budget report, was unlikely to sympathize with his conduct. He was also sincerely embarrassed, not because he would have retracted his statement, but because language that might have been perfectly suited for a heated confrontation would seem ridiculous when repeated in his living room. And there was another reason Arnold didn’t want to return home: He couldn’t handle the thought of waking up to tend the garden that was no longer there.

A whisper of light was already visible in the
pink-grey
sky, and the starlings were scavenging around the mesh garbage cans, when Arnold walked past Sixth Street and headed toward the nursery. The cot in his office might not be the city’s most comfortable bed—he’d have to clear the tubs of pepper seedlings off the mattress—but at least he wouldn’t be disturbed. That would give him time to prepare for Judith. And to figure out his next course of action. Maybe he
would
sue Spitford over the garden. Wasn’t the best defence a strong offense? But all of that
planning would have to wait until after a good night’s sleep. Or at least a power nap. Right now, he could hardly keep his eyes open.

Much to Arnold’s surprise, the showroom lights were illuminated in the nursery. Maybe this was another of Guillermo’s security measures, he figured. But then he crossed through the hangar and found the manager himself awake in his office. The Venezuelan was lying on the sofa, staring wide-eyed at the popcorn ceiling. A bag of soy chips and a no-calorie vitamin drink lay on the floor nearby. On the manager’s desk, at the opposite end of the room, stood a conspicuous orange sunflower in a bud vase.

Arnold knocked on the open door. Guillermo glanced in his direction, then returned his gaze upward.

“What are you doing here?” asked Arnold.

“Thinking.”

“I thought that was my job.”

“We do different kinds of thinking. I’ve been thinking about business.”

“Have you?”

“I had Lucinda run some numbers for me,” said Guillermo. He sat up and rolled down his sleeves one at a time, fastening the buttons. “Do you know how many individual plants we sold last year during the second week of May?”

“I don’t have the foggiest idea.”

“Seven hundred forty-eight,” answered Guillermo.
Arnold had little doubt the Venezuelan could itemize each sale, if asked. “Do you know how many individual plants we’ve sold over the last five days?”

“Not as many, I suppose.”

“Thirty-nine.”

“That’s definitely not as many.” Arnold hadn’t expected the number to be
that
low. “I take it that’s not just a glitch in the business cycle…”

The Venezuelan folded his arms across his chest. “It’s a glitch in the political cycle, Arnold.”

“You mean to tell me people aren’t buying my plants because they don’t like my politics?”

“That’s what it looks like.
Or
they do like your politics, privately, but they’re afraid to be seen here.
Or
they just want to stay clear of trouble. Who knows? The bottom line is that we’re haemorrhaging cash.”

“So you think I should apologize.”

“I’m not saying that. I told you I don’t go near that stuff,” said Guillermo. “What I’m telling you is that if you don’t intend to apologize, you’d better come up with a plan B before we go bankrupt.”

“And if I don’t have a plan B?”

Guillermo removed a toothpick from a tiny
see-through
case and twirled it between his lips. “I’m not too worried. The bosses always have a plan B.”

The Venezuelan stood up. “Time to call it a day,” he said. “Any interest in breakfast?”

“Go ahead,” said Arnold. “I’m not done thinking yet.”

The truth was that he would have loved breakfast—and companionship—but he was afraid to show his face in public.

“Okay, suit yourself. By the way, your wife called looking for you. Twice.”

“I had an errand to run.”

“She told me all about it,” said Guillermo. “I trust you didn’t kill the guy.”

Arnold didn’t say anything.

“On second thought, if you did, I don’t want to know.” The Venezuelan retrieved his cap from the hat rack. “By the way, aren’t you going to ask me about the flower?”

“Sure. What’s with the flower?”

“It’s for you. From that girl. They delivered it this morning while you were going through your
DO NOT DISTURB
phase.”

Arnold walked over to the vase and examined the miniature card. It read:

CAN WE TALK ON THE RECORD? CASSANDRA

Guillermo chuckled. “Are you going to talk to her?”

“She’s off her gourd,” said Arnold. “Why in the word would anyone send me flowers. I own a nursery for Christ’s sake.”

“I think it was supposed to be a joke,” said the Venezuelan.

Some joke. He’d lost the garden it had taken him a lifetime to cultivate and she’d sent him a droopy, dehydrated supermarket flower in a pot of lukewarm tap water. A gift that ranked right up there with sending condoms to nuns or lampshades to holocaust survivors. Who the hell did this girl think she was? The sunflower didn’t make him want to give her an interview—it made him want to call her and scream at her. To tell her that his life was falling apart, piece by piece, and the last thing he needed was some teenybopper cub reporter sending him gag presents and stirring up trouble. What he really wanted to do was to shout at her until she realized that his life was no joking matter and certainly not a tool for left-wing propagandists. Maybe that had been her intended effect.

“Most people laugh at jokes,” said Guillermo, “or at least smile.”

“I’m guffawing in my head.”

“Whatever, boss,” said the Venezuelan. “Don’t forget to breathe.”

Guillermo departed and Arnold heard the manager’s footsteps echoing across the hangar, then the pulse of the door chime as the Venezuelan exited out to the street. The botanist retrieved the sunflower and carried the vase into his own office. He cleared the pepper tubs from the cot, brushing away crumbs of fertilizer, but he was no longer
sleepy. Why couldn’t the damn girl just leave him alone? He was having a hard enough time as it was. Nothing he’d ever done was so horrific that it merited a supermarket cutting. Arnold removed the sunflower from its stand. He clipped the stem with surgical expertise and set the stalk in a glass of distilled, refrigerated water. He verified the temperature. Thirty-five degrees. Next, he checked the pH. Five. Far too high. So he added lemon juice, bead by bead, with an eyedropper. Florence Nightingale could have done no better. Tomorrow, the drooping stalk might hope for at least a limited recovery. When the first aid was done, Arnold reached across the desk absentmindedly and flipped on the television.

The botanist recognized the voice before he saw the face: the affected English accent, the effeminate lisp, the mouth draw tight as that of a ventriloquist. There was no mistaking that voice—like a gay, aristocratic Charlie McCarthy. And there was its owner, Arnold’s
ex-brother
-in-law, being interviewed beneath a coconut palm. Vince Sprague was one of those rare men over sixty-five who actually looked good in a crotch-hugging swimsuit. Celeste’s former husband boasted that he did five hundred push-ups every morning, half of them on his knuckles; at a dinner party, several years earlier, he’d consumed too much port and bench-pressed the host’s piano. Sprague’s chest was tan and waxed and as defined as a Michelangelo sketch. Even the muscles in his neck were as thick as those
in Arnold’s legs.

“Of course, I am
quite
disturbed,” said Sprague. “If you’ll pardon my French, it’s bloody outrageous. Categorically despicable. I am not myself an aficionado of American baseball, you understand, nor am I an American citizen, but on the occasions when I have found myself at such a match, I have always risen for the national anthem. I cannot imagine what lapse of judgment allowed my
ex-wife
to trust our son to such a misguided—if not outright dangerous—influence.”

Arnold pounded his fist on the desktop. “You’re from Staten Island, goddamit,” he shouted at the television. “You’re not a citizen because you renounced your citizenship to avoid paying income tax.”

“I did not know Mr. Brinkman well myself,” continued Sprague. “I tried to avoid him, to tell you the truth. I always thought him somewhat unscrupulous.”

Amazing! The man sells thousands of teenage girls into prostitution, abandons his wife and son for a Romanian gymnast one-third his age, flees the country to avoid a federal indictment so long it contains an index, and doesn’t even send Celeste a dime of child-support—and now he’s calling Arnold unscrupulous. Why didn’t they ask Sprague why
he
hadn’t taken the boy to the baseball game? Why he hadn’t sent the boy so much as a postcard in six years? Because they wanted Arnold to lose, that’s why. Because now the object of this game was to see how
much dirt they could pile on Arnold before he suffocated. They could discover that he’d spent the last thirty years reading bedtime stories to blind nuns, or that he’d been a POW in southeast Asia, and they’d still find a way to spin the news against him. Even if it were discovered that he were a paraplegic who suffered tongue spasms, that the entire incident had been involuntary, they’d rake him across the coals for not seeking pre-emptive treatment.

“I am consulting with my attorneys,” said Sprague. “I intend to take every necessary measure to make certain this blasted outrage does not recur in the future.”

“I’m not the outrage, dammit!” shouted Arnold. “You’re the outrage!”

He stormed out of the office, carrying the sunflower with him. Never in his life could Arnold recall being so worn down—so close to snapping. Usually, a few hours hoeing in the garden would tranquilize his nerves, but that was no longer a possibility. Nor was a hug from Judith. The only other genuine pleasure the botanist could think of were the hothouses, where they kept the tropical plants and exotics. One of these greenhouses was dry and served the cactus. The other, the wet greenhouse, contained
liana-draped
banana thickets and Brazil nut trees festooned with orchids. The Garden Centre’s stock of bromeliads was the most impressive private collection in the world. Nominally, all of these plants were for sale—which was
essential, according to Lucinda, for taxation purposes. In reality, few if any of the rarer specimens ever found a buyer. Even in the West Village, there was little market for $15,000 pitcher plants. Arnold loved the scents of the wet greenhouse: Not just the sweet aroma of bee-pollinated flowers, like mock-orange, or the lemon fragrance of citriodora, but also the pungent stench of the durian fruits and the cadaver-like odour of the Rafflesia. All of it reminded the botanist of the near infinite variety of plant life, the endless promise and possibility. Ornithologists had more or less run out of birds. They might yet discover one or two new species—maybe recover an isolated stand of Ivory-billed woodpeckers every fifty years—but the day to day life of a bird scholar was more like that of a classicist than that of an explorer. But botany! The Amazon basin alone was home to tens of thousands of un-catalogued species, any one of which might cure cancer or taste of ambrosia. Which was why Arnold enjoyed relaxing in the wet greenhouse, as others might savour a Jacuzzi or a sauna, letting the plant world pollinate his lungs. He sat on a wooden shelf with the sunflower braced on his lap.

“Apologize,” he said—and he picked a petal.

He plucked a second petal: “Don’t apologize.”

If only it could be that easy—following the dictates of chance. But of course
it could be that easy
. All he had to do was to beg forgiveness and he’d be off the hook. His life would once again be his own. He might even
win public esteem for his confession like those adulterous televangelists, forcing the genie back into the bottle except that was what everybody expected of him. What everybody wanted. He’d apologize, and adopt a kid, and six months later he’d be at a baseball game singing
God Bess America
—and even he wouldn’t care anymore.

He pulled out more petals. “Apologize. Don’t apologize. Apologize.” Soon the blossom was nearly bald. Before the plant rendered a verdict, he dozed off.

Although Arnold slept less than a quarter of an hour, when he awoke, it felt like a new day. What a difference a few minutes made. Sunshine was already streaming through the skylights and Lucinda’s Myna bird, which she kept behind the lycopodium and old world ferns, was scratching at the door of its cage. The sunflower lay at Arnold’s feet, mutilated, and he’d long lost track of where he was in his plucking. The botanist dropped the remains in the compost bin.