Curled in the Bed of Love (12 page)

“Those recruits weren't looking at us anyway,” Jim says.

“Hah,” Rory says. “Anybody who's that interested in a long, smooth rifle is ripe for the picking. ‘Come on
down
, soldier boy.'”

Jordan lolls in the sand. “Rory's right. We're all bourgeois. So fucking careful about everything. The only wanton people I know are the artists I work with. They still have great big hissy fights with their lovers and break dishes when they're mad. Jim, you'd never shatter Lenox in anger, would you?”

“Now who's dreaming?” Jim says. “I've been to one too many openings with you. No one ever talks to me for more than five minutes. There's no gain in it.”

“Jim, honey,” Pete says. “Forget it. You can't fake cynicism. It has to come from the heart.”

Jordan gets to his feet. “I'm going to the other end of the beach.” He tugs the windbreaker from his shoulders and knots it around his waist, and then he yanks off his shirt and swim trunks.

“Trying to keep up with Pete's antics the other night?” Rory says. “You're such wild things, you give me the shivers.”

Jordan steps over Rory, splattering sand onto him. He stalks off, windmilling his arms to shoo Guinevere when she races after him.

“Why is he so bitchy lately?” Pete says.

Just as he can't help watching Jordan go, Jim can't help wanting to snatch up his clothes and chase him. Jim believes the old wives' tales about how you catch a cold.

When he catches up to Jordan, Jordan marches on without a word, but he can't exactly stride away when he has to keep batting at the flapping windbreaker. His near nakedness here, where his skin is stippled with goose bumps and washed pale by the harsh light that reflects off the sand, has no more allure than the lumpy bodies of the few naked people watching them pass. Panting, Jim struggles to catch up to him again, shove the bunched clothes at him.

Jordan turns to him with a vindictive expression. “God, you're out of shape.”

“If it's a beautiful body you want, you can always try Lawrence's gym.”

Jordan bats Jim's hand away. “I'm sick of your petty jealousy.”

Where did everything go? Jim cannot reach into himself for the certainty of romance, the plunging risk of their first frantic touching, the seamless fit of their bodies in sleep, the many times in clinic waiting rooms when he folded his hands over Jordan's, when he could imagine their joined hands had the impermeable density of a rock.

“What are we doing wrong?” Jim says. “We should be so grateful.”

Jordan clenches his fists. “Easy for you to say.”

Jim wishes this were just as hard for him. But he does not have to peel back his lips to check his gums for bleeding every morning. Which makes his wish hypothetical. As hypothetical as the readiness
of the soldiers who used to fill the barracks above the beach, waiting ingloriously for their war, while in the city the invisible assault of the plague took more men than did all the battles of the century.

“We've got a chance,” Jim says. “We can fix up the house now. Maybe put in a garden.”

Jordan turns to face the water. “You probably want kids. And then you'll join the
PTA
and volunteer for bake sales.”

Jim and Jordan have never talked about having kids. Jim doesn't even know if an Hiv-positive man could qualify to adopt and has never inquired.

“What's so wrong with that?” Jim says.

“I don't know,” Jordan says. “Leave me alone!”

That's just what Jim has to do, he sees that now. They've sunk the hooks of their love so fiercely into such a small portion of each other's flesh.

Rory's dog races up to them. She skids to a halt before Jordan, barks, then jumps on him, her nails scoring red slash marks on his bare thighs.

“Go away, Guinevere,” Jordan shouts.

Jim bundles Jordan's clothes under one arm and picks up a stick of driftwood. He tosses it for the dog, and she hurtles after it and promptly brings it back. Toss and fetch. Again. Again.

“Look at me,” Jordan says. “These wonder drugs redistribute fat from your arms and legs to your back and belly. I'm gonna have a potbelly that sticks out like a goiter. I might as well make hay while the sun shines.”

“You slept with him!”

“Can't you imagine anything that isn't a cliché?”

There's a kind of betrayal Jim could stand. The soap opera of Jordan sneaking around on him, yes. But not this. He feels as cold toward himself, toward the pillow-soaking, jealous crying fits he won't have, as he does toward Jordan.

The dog trots back to them, and this time Jordan shoves her away from him.

“Don't start crying,” Jordan says.

Jim does not feel a bit like crying.

“Oh, the silent treatment again.” Jordan heaves a shuddering sigh. “Why don't you just smother me now? Sacrifice one of your brocade pillows and get it over with.”

Guinevere, dripping wet, returns with the stick.

“You pest,” Jordan says.

Guinevere takes this as an invitation and leaps for Jordan. By the time they beat her off, Jordan is caked with wet sand.

Jordan scrubs the sand from his forearms with utilitarian haste, when the slope of muscle and sinew there is so beautifully articulated. When Jim reaches out to help him, Jordan holds still, looks away, his cheeks shame-flushed like a child's. The friction of the sand must make the most gentle touch chafe, especially at his elbows, where the skin is bruised, thinned from having blood drawn so often, a tender, near transparent envelope.

Jim hesitates before he brings his hand up along the curve of Jordan's arm. He's afraid now of how easy an embrace could be. What seemed to be a gift withheld turns out to be the hardest thing.

Guinevere noses her way between them, her whole body undulating, her tail whacking their legs, a blunt club of delight.

Jordan laughs. “Can't you leave us in peace?”

Then he yanks the stick from the dog's mouth and arcs it into the air as hard as he can.

When Vince and I lead Elena into the greenhouse, she stands still a moment, breathing in the calm. The air is thick as syrup—a wetness burdened with the acidic odor of the bark chips in which I pot the plants, the medicinal sharpness of pesticides, the idiosyncratic perfume of the orchids. Crowded on benches, the flowers hover on slender stalks, pale or brilliantly hued creatures poised for flight, their waxy petals flared like outspread wings, ruffled like intricate crests, or spurred like the elaborate tails of tropical birds. In this fantastic aviary, the orchids seem about to shift into life, swoop, soar, alight on brittle legs, but they remain forever caught in the arrested stillness of their clever mimicry.

Vince found Elena standing outside the greenhouses crying. I was waiting in the office for her, and he led her back to me. Instead of interviewing her for the job in the greenhouse, I made her tea while Vince fetched her a box of Kleenex. She apologizes now for crying, launches into an unnecessary explanation. She's just come back from Spain, where she'd flown to join her boyfriend on a trip through Europe, a trip they'd planned for months, a college graduation present to themselves. He'd gone ahead of her because
she had to take a last course in summer school. He met her plane with his new woman at his side.

I take Elena through all three greenhouses. When I encourage her to smell a cycnoches—bananas and vanilla—her misery gives way to a pleased absorption that I suspect is her natural state. I work the conversation around to the job I advertised in the local paper. Bolinas is neither city nor country, cut off from the rest of Marin County by long, winding roads and populated by dropouts and artists of various kinds, and I struggle to find people willing to work here part-time.

Elena says she isn't sure how long she'll stay. Her voice wavers. “But I can't live forever on what's left of the traveler's checks I brought back with me.”

Behind her back, Vince smiles. It would be hard for Vince or me not to feel a bit nostalgic faced with Elena, red-faced and snotty, so young, so heartbroken, so surprised to have been slapped so hard. Forgetting us, she gnaws at the inflamed skin around her fingernails, yet still she's lovely in her ungainly sadness, with her silky long hair and her pale skin, so pleasing in her barely plump sleekness.

After Elena starts at the greenhouse, Vince begins finding excuses to hang around. We broke up again a few months ago, but he has always had free access. He does carpentry work for me, and my house is on the property, flanked by the garden he still tends, and Nuala always loves to see her father. Drawn by the nectar of Elena's dogged grief, he tries too hard. He comes by just to tell her a joke or give her a bird book, recklessly generous the way he is with eight-year-old Nuala.

Vince makes a living from construction work the same way that I make a living from the greenhouse, deliberately earning just enough. We met when he came to rebuild one of the greenhouses years ago. Early on he established a pattern of leaving, going away
on trips of four months or more, so that it became part of the natural flux of things. At other times I would get involved in something else—in Nuala when she was small, in the greenhouse when the business wasn't going well—and not have enough energy left over to give him the kind of attention he wanted. Vince likes his romance but only in bursts. He'll waltz me off to the northern coast for a week, and then I won't see him for a month, though he lives only a few streets away.

So of course Elena's single-mindedness fascinates him, even though he's going to such lengths to breakher will. He comes by to pick her up after work, two bikes in the bed of his truck. He shows up with an elaborate springtime bouquet of wildflowers. One morning I catch him stroking the back of her hand when he's supposed to be repairing water pipes. Caught, Vince comes up with an explanation, holds out one of Elena's blunt little paws to show me her scraped knuckles and wonder how she's done that to herself.

I follow him out to his truck when he loads up his tools later in the morning. “She's going to take every little thing seriously,” I say.

He leans against the truck with a sly grin on his face, and like a wave of homesickness, a stirring of desire for him comes over me. He's loose-limbed from all these years on construction sites, always tan, and his hair has an appealing unruliness, just like his crooked and self-satisfied smile.

“I don't want her to be a casualty of your midlife crisis,” I tell him.

We water by hand in the greenhouses. I can tell by hefting a pot whether a plant needs water, though I am having only erratic success in training Elena to do the same. If the plants have well-established roots, they can survive almost anything you throw at them. Most orchids can grow if you slap them on a piece of
wood, seeming to flourish on air alone. They have simple requirements: water, bright indirect light, and a well-aerated potting medium. But it can be tricky to get them to bloom, to recreate artificially the prerequisite of a winter season. When the days shorten, when the dwindling span of light triggers the cryptic code of their flowering, they must be watered less and kept at a cooler temperature. Even then some of them refuse to flower, and I have to switch fertilizers or move them from the temperate greenhouse to the warm greenhouse, trying to guess the reason for their obstinacy.

When Elena and I finish watering, we sort through the plants that have been retrieved that day from clients. I grow my own plants for sale, but the bulk of my business involves boarding orchids for collectors, delivering them to their owners when they bloom, and fetching them backwhen they've spent their beauty.

Elena hears Vince's truck in the drive before I do, and she pauses in her work, confident that this visit is for her. When he comes into the greenhouse, he kisses me first and then turns to Elena, wrapping his arms around her and kissing her hard. Over his shoulder, she looks at me with alarm.

She is clumsy. She overwaters or breaks off still succulent roots when we're inspecting the plants. It's easy enough to do—the oxygen-hungry roots of orchids typically push up through the bark chips and over the rim of any pot. Yet she plows into her mistakes as if compelled, her eyes widening at what her hands are doing, and then apologizes piteously, her feelings far more delicate than her fingers. I have to console her and promise she's done no harm.

“Can you leave work a little early today?” Vince asks Elena. “I have something I want to show you. But you need a warm coat.”

He'll take her out to Kelham Beach in Point Reyes. The sunset is spectacular there on a clear, windy day like this. With Elena, he can watch the sun go down for the first time again, talk her into sleeping on the beach just because they haven't packed supplies, convince himself of the impetuousness of his wooing.

Vince says he has a job to get to, and Elena walks him out, her arm snaking around his waist. She comes back rosy cheeked—been kissed again, further embarrassed by the sheer profusion of Vince's attentions. We work in silence for a while, and then Elena says, “I'm sorry, Jo.”

“What for?”

“It's like he made a point of coming here, showing off.”

Not Vince, but Elena, with the color rising high in her face, seems compelled to show off. “He's in and out of here all the time,” I say. “I don't think he thought twice about it, to tell you the truth. He's got a kid parked here somewhere, after all. And we're friends. We've always been friends.”

“Well, I just think it must be hard.”

I pinch an aphid from a leaf and crush it between my fingers. “You get over these things,” I say.

Elena, at twenty-three, is incapable of recognizing the broad tapestry of the story she's stepped into. With the tunnel vision of lust, she can't see past or around Vince. She can't imagine what it's like to be forty, to have my child's life dependent on mine, to be sated with the passion of that bond, ballasted by the serene and orderly structure of my days in the greenhouse, stuffed full on the bounty of my own kitchen garden and the beauty of this place, privileged to filch an exquisite stalk from a plant in the greenhouses whenever I please.