queens of the flower world.”
“Meaning what exactly?” his father chimes in. He looks from Eve to Micajah, Micajah to Eve, like a boxing referee before saying the word “Fight.”
“The whole sickening cultural orthodoxy of them,” Micajah says. “The fake valuation, like that ‘a diamond is forever’ crap. The environmental destruction of the factory rose farms, gobbling up the land in places like Kenya while the local people starve. It’s like their whole purpose in the world is to lie. I screwed around on you, darling, so here’s a bunch of roses. And that’s not even getting into the S&M of it. A symbol of love that makes your fingers bleed? Except, no, let’s pretend roses don’t have thorns, and hire slum kids to slice them off with razors.”
“He’s a hothead,” says Robert.
“I care,” says Micajah. It seems like an old battle between them.
“Do you really think it’s possible to have love without hurt?” Eve asks Micajah, then wishes she hadn’t.
“I don’t know,” says Micajah. “Is it possible to love deeply and choose not to feel the pain? Hell, it’s worth a try. Because if you don’t, what happens? You end up wrecking what’s beautiful.”
Like Bill. And like that unknown person who smashed the instrument but couldn’t bring himself to destroy it completely.
“Are you going to get it fixed?” Micajah asks Eve. “Or, you like broken things.”
It’s a statement, not a question. Again, she feels him looking straight into her heart. Flustered, she glances around the restaurant: the other diners chatting and laughing, the waiters moving competently about, the gerberas in vases on the tables.
“What were you doing in a junk shop in the Bronx, anyway?” asks Robert. “Looking for secondhand plants? I guess you found one!” That barking laugh again.
“Scouting for a friend’s antique shop. It’s what I do on weekends, sometimes. Now that my son’s grown. Allan.” Even after twenty-four years, she feels a warmth in saying his name. “He’s in Cambodia right now, taking a year off after pre-med, working for Smile Train.”
“What’s that?” asks Robert, though he doesn’t sound genuinely interested.
“A charity that fixes cleft palates on kids,” says Micajah. “That’s seriously cool,” he says to Eve. “You’re proud of him.”
“I am.”
“You should be proud of yourself too. You brought him up right.”
Flustered, she manages a half-smile in response. She’s glad she doesn’t know what to say, as she doesn’t trust her voice. Whatever words she’d find might come out as a squeak, or shaky, or have no sound at all.
“I’d never think you could have a grown son, if I didn’t know better,” says Robert with automatic chivalry.
Eve feels a warm, gentle pressure against her foot. As she looks to Micajah in surprise, the pressure vanishes. Imperceptibly, he shakes his head.
No, what? Eve wonders. No, don’t respond to him? No, you don’t look younger than your age? No, you do—or you don’t—but it doesn’t matter?
Eve takes a drink of water and smells muskiness on her skin. There’s a melting sensation at her core: her body is rushing ahead on a path she knows she should not follow. This boy—he’s a boy, she insists to herself, though she knows he must be twenty-eight or twenty-nine—is throwing her off her axis. In college, she lived for that feeling. Before today, she thought she’d outgrown it, and comforted herself in the dull succession of her days with the relief of knowing she would never feel that fizzing confusion again.
When she dares to look back at Micajah, the green gaze is like a wave rushing across the space between them to drench her, sweep her up, carry her away. Stop! she thinks. But she does not want it to end.
In the library, Eve forces herself to concentrate. The closest match she can find is called a viola d’amore, with a blindfolded cherub crowning its curving tip. But there is no other carving except the usual violin holes, and the blindfold is just a cloth. Plus, the shape of the viola d’amore’s body is different, and it has many more strings. She cannot find anything like those eerily lifelike vines.
As she drives home, Micajah’s words swirl around in Eve’s head. Has he ever felt that depth of love and loss? she wonders. She would like to know.
This is wrong, she says to herself. Then she overlays the first judgment with another one: that she is being old-fashioned and anti-feminist. Yes, she is married; but that doesn’t mean she should be caged and chaperoned like a Saudi wife. She is allowed to have male friends.
Still, the likelihood is that she will never see him again.
She makes an extra effort with dinner, buying halibut despite the expense. It was always Larry’s favorite, but they haven’t had it in the last year or so, since the day he came home from what he said was a company retreat and informed her that he’d found his totem animal. An “empowerment teacher” had led him on a vision quest, during which a wolf had appeared to him. The wolf, the guru told him, had come to guide him into the full expression of his self.
It was hard to imagine anyone less wolflike than Larry, but perhaps that was the point: the wolf’s qualities were what he needed. She could see that. A vague dissatisfaction had been gnawing at him. He’d followed the signposted corporate path to a solid management job, but a bitterness had crept into his accounts of the office, and she realized that his success felt so bloodless to him, so mediocre, that it was beginning to feel more like defeat. He began to buy uncharacteristic articles of clothing—pink socks, a leather bomber jacket—which disappeared after a few outings.
“I feel like I’m an illusion of myself,” he said to Eve once, in a rare moment of vulnerability. When she asked him what he meant, he couldn’t quite explain: he was blurred into a mass of people, and the idea that he, Larry, was an individual person, distinct in any way, was just a trick. It wasn’t a Matrix-like sci-fi horror vision; it didn’t apply to everybody. Just him, and people like him. He was losing his outline, or doubting if he had ever had any, seeping into a general sludge.
From the first hours they spent together, Eve had loved Larry’s surreal sense of humor, the way he imbued inanimate objects with motives and desires. It added a liveliness to his practical reliability. But he rarely found anything funny anymore. Eve felt a chill as she recognized, in that vision of human sludge, the imagination she’d once delighted in soured by despair.
He watched sports on TV as he always did, but his eyes became foggy, his hand held the beer bottle as awkwardly as an amateur actor holding a prop. He stopped seeing his old friends, and Eve doesn’t know if he’s made new ones. Their social life contracted, until Eve felt she could count her own friends on the fingers of one hand. Gradually, Larry moved into the spare bedroom: first his clothes, then his comb and nail clippers, and finally his nighttime self. The solidity, the sense of rational, practical certainty, that she was so strongly drawn to had abandoned him.
She has tried again and again to locate the moment in time when the slide started. But she cannot pin it down. His dissolution is like a creeping stain, reaching further and further into the past.
