Flying in the Heart of the Lafayette Escadrille (14 page)

The delivery man was scrawny and short. Gregory thought he could be a jockey if he got out of the delivery business. The heavy, blue plastic crate, like a huge Smurf coffin, stood on end in the living room. The delivery man unsnapped the buckles that held the lid closed, but he didn’t open it. “You got instructions, right?” he said. Before Gregory could answer, he continued, “Keep it out of the sun. Otherwise you’ll get sprouts. Wet its skin once a day. Otherwise you’ll get cracks. A damp sponge’ll do the trick. Unpadded manacles, whips, vibrators or anything sharp will bruise or break the skin, which will void your warranty. Keep it out of direct breezes, like a fan, air conditioner or heating duct. Store it in the carrying case when you’re not using it.” He paused to consult a card he held. Gregory felt like he was having his Miranda Rights read to him. “A diluted alcohol wipe will kill bug infestations. Forcing the limbs beyond normal range will void the warranty. So will the use of oil-based paints, electrical devices or abrasives, like sandpaper or nail files.”

“Sandpaper?”

The man sighed. “The stories I could tell.” He looked at the card again. “The case is heated, so plug it in and it’ll stay at body temperature. The plant will hold heat for several hours. Sort of like a waterbed.” He laughed then grabbed a pair of recessed handles in the lid and pulled it open. “Of course, it’s a little green. Newly picked this morning. A couple of days, the color should be fine.”

“She’s wearing a robe.” Gregory’s voice squeaked.

“Part of the service. You can keep it. Most people don’t. We’ll be by in two weeks with a fresh plant.”

“Two weeks?”

“Two weeks, three weeks, depends on the weather, they get soft. Like an old tomato. It’s in your contract. Didn’t you read it?”

Gregory had thrown the papers in his desk without looking at them. “Yes, I’m sorry. Slipped my mind.”

The delivery man shut the case, looked Gregory over sagely. “Your first one, right? Nothing to it. Read the instructions. Just like when you were a kid with a model airplane.”

The delivery man was in the truck and halfway down the street before Gregory realized what he meant.

During dinner, he felt the presence of the coffin-sized case in his bedroom where he had moved it, but he made himself eat slowly. Sara used to complain that he chewed his food twice as much as he needed to. She’d smiled and said, “Gregory, you’re like a cow.” But she stayed at the table until they were done, and on the nights they made love, they did it right after dinner.

After he cleaned the dishes and put the leftovers away, he stood in front of the case in his bedroom with the lights out a long time. When he finally opened it, the smell of grass wafted out, pasture grass after a rain.

She was, as Jermaine promised, fully reflexive.

Gregory met Jermaine the next night at a popular fern bar, The Block and Tackle. Under the dark oak sign that hung from rusted chains and illuminated by hidden lights was the Block and Tackle’s slogan, “Everyone Gets Lucky.”

Jermaine waited for him at a back table, far from the dim lights over the bar. Too obstinate to sit on a book or use a booster seat, his arms just cleared the edge of the table where he cradled a schooner of beer.

“So what did you think, Bucko?” asked Jermaine. Gregory flinched. He hated being called Bucko. “Was it everything I promised?” He pushed a beer toward Gregory as he sat down.

Gregory sipped from the mug for a while before answering. The beer, cool and smooth, felt good on his throat. “Different. Very different.”

“Good, though, right? What did I tell you? Never a better time.” Jermaine tipped his beer and swallowed a huge gulp.

“Yes.” Gregory didn’t know what to add to that. After he had put her on the bed, he lay beside her. The light from the window shone off her eyes, and he marveled at how lifelike, how utterly human, she appeared. He watched her breasts, perfectly formed, for a rise of breath that never came. The bedroom was utterly silent, and it made him remember Sara the last weeks before she left when she would lie beside him, awake but not speaking, aware that he was watching her, not asleep and barely breathing. Stiff, weighing down the mattress and mentally not in the room, the plant reminded him of her, so he reached across her belly and caressed her side. The plant/woman rolled into him and wrapped her arms around him, startling him so that he almost jumped from the bed, but he didn’t. She was warm and felt good, her skin soft and firm; her smell, again he noticed, like wet spring grass. She pulled him tighter. For a long time he did nothing but let himself be held.

Jermaine rested his chin on the table, a posture Gregory had seen him in before but that had always unnerved him. A grown man shouldn’t look comfortable that way. When Jermaine spoke, his chin anchored to the table, the top of his head bobbed up and down like a talking clam in a comic. “Give her a week. In a week she’ll be at her best. Don’t plan on working then, either. Stay home. She won’t get any better than that.”

At the bar, behind Jermaine, Gregory saw women sitting, glasses beside them. All were turned so they were looking into the tables, but shadows hid their faces. Jermaine glanced over his shoulder, then put his chin back on the table. “Beautiful, aren’t they?” he said.

“Yes, they are.”

“You’re lucky now. Got one of your own at home.”

Surprised, Gregory said, “Don’t you too?”

Jermaine sighed and closed his eyes. After a few moments, Gregory thought he had gone to sleep. Then Jermaine said, “They all go rotten, you know, Bucko. All rotten.” He rolled his head to the side and opened one eye. “Pick ‘em while they’re fresh and dump ’em before they go bad. I haven’t had one in the house for six months. Before that I went through dozens, one every two weeks.” He covered his face with his hands and kept talking, muffled. “I fell in love with everyone, too. I know that sounds stupid, but I did. They’re dead, you know, or dying. As soon as they’re plucked. It was like loving someone with a terminal illness.” His breath caught, and Gregory wondered if he was crying. He wondered what he should do. Jermaine continued, “Sometimes I come here just to look, but underneath the air I smell ’em going bad. It’s all bad, bad, bad.” He drank deeply again.

Gregory saw a man walk down the row of girls at the bar, pause at one, look her over and then motion to the bartender who took the offered credit card and handed the man a key. He disappeared through a door at the end of the bar where Gregory supposed one of the girl’s “sisters” waited. Gregory had never “gotten lucky” at the fern bar.

“If you feel that way, why don’t you go out with a real woman?” Gregory asked. “I mean, Sara and I had a lot of problems, but we were together.”

“Doesn’t matter, Bucko. You hold them long enough, their love rots away.”

“Jesus, that’s depressing. So what’s left if nothing lasts?”

Jermaine said, “Lots of sex. Sex, sex, sex till it hurts. And even that’s a short haul, but maybe, you know, you could tie into something you can’t let go of. Something that’ll stick to you, and it’ll either kill you then because it’s so good, or you’ll remember it forever when nothing else will measure up.”

Sickened, Gregory looked into his beer. Because of the darkness of the bar, the liquid seemed black.

Abruptly Jermaine said, “Let me borrow your plant. I can’t buy here. They’re clean, but it’s the smell, you know, alcohol wipe and aftershave on their skin. Just for the evening.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Jermaine.”

Jermaine fisted both hands as if he wanted to hit him, and Gregory pushed his chair away from the table. Gradually the fists relaxed until the finger lay flat on the table. He said, “I’m going home. Enjoy her while she’s still fresh.” He stood, all four-and-a-half feet of him and said, “You know what I wonder? I wonder if being plucked hurts. I wonder if it pisses them off. The beer’s paid for.” He left.

When Gregory got home, the smell hit him as he opened the door, a whiff of wet, old vegetables. He took a step onto the carpet and sniffed carefully, turning his head side to side, testing the air. “I’m home,” he said and felt immediately stupid, and then, because he
was
alone in his own apartment and there was no one to hear him, he said it again, “I’m home, dear.” He sniffed once more and rushed to the back of the house.

In the bedroom, the case leaned against the end of the bed where he’d put it in the morning. The room smelled fresh with a hint of his deodorant and shampoo. Nothing else. He put his hand on the case, snapped open the latches, but hesitated with his hand on the edge of the lid. No, he thought, it couldn’t be from here. Not yet.

In the hallway he couldn’t smell anything. Pictures on the wall of Sara and him horseback riding stopped him for a moment. He straightened the close-up that showed them side by side holding reins to horses that were blurry brown shapes in the background.

In the living room he caught it again, a deep, damp solid smell like packed leaves gone gray and slimy at the bottom of a barrel. He wondered how he could have missed it in the morning before leaving for work. The trash can under the coffee table was empty and dry. He moved into the kitchen where he checked the garbage can, the trash compactor, the garbage disposal and the refrigerator, all dry and odorless. Frustrated, he stood in the middle and clamped his hands on his hips to survey the room. He sniffed loudly.

“Ahhh,” he said. The field of African Violets on the counter top looked suspicious. Their leaves drooped colorlessly over the edges of the pots, and when he leaned close, the source of the smell became obvious. He poked at the gummy soil at the base of several of the plants. He’d over watered, something Sara had warned him about before she left, and now the dirt was muddy and rotting the plants.

He opened the kitchen window, turned on the stove’s exhaust fan and went back into the bedroom.

Later, in bed with the plant/woman, the light on, Gregory examined her skin. He pressed his finger into her upper arm, one of the few places he had discovered he could touch without triggering some kind of motion. The skin compressed exactly as if it were real, a quarter of an inch of give and then a hard resistance as if he were digging into bone. Close up, he could see nothing plant-like about her. He stroked her arm, which felt real. Even the slight whisper of his fingers moving back and forth was convincing.

He jerked his hand back and wiped it on his thigh.

An hour later, after lying beside her but not touching her, waiting, bizarrely he realized, for her to do something, he rolled away and dialed the telephone.

“Sara,” he said when she answered, “The violets are dying. I over watered.”

She said nothing. He listened to the wisp of static, a thread of a ghost conversation from some crossing of the lines.

“I can’t talk to you now,” she finally said and hung up.

The dead phone in his hand, Gregory sat on the edge of the bed. He looked at the plant lying on her back, and he couldn’t detect even a thread of passion within himself. He hung the phone back up, but before he let go it rang, startling him into knocking it to the floor. He grabbed it and pressed it hard to his ear. “Sara?” he said.

“Jermaine.”

“Jermaine?”

“Yes.”

He squeezed the phone hard. “Jermaine?”

“I shouldn’t have bothered you about borrowing your plant.”

At first, Gregory couldn’t figure out what Jermaine was talking about. Then he remembered. “Oh. That’s okay.”

“No. I mean it, Bucko. I apologize. I won’t do it again.”

They talked for a few minutes, and when they hung up, Gregory realized he felt more sorrow than revulsion for the little man.

In the cafeteria the next day, Gregory saw a haggard and unkempt Jermaine walk through the door, his tray in hand, and when their eyes met Jermaine looked quickly away and sat at another table. Gregory ate alone.

The African Violets weren’t any livelier that evening as Gregory contemplated them. If anything, despite the open window, the smell was worse. He put a thick layer of paper towels under all the pots, using up two rolls and part of a third, reasoning that if he could blot away as much of the water as possible, he might be able to reverse the rotting. After a half hour, he replaced the soaked towels with a new layer. He called a florist who said, “If they ain’t dead yet, don’t water again until the dirt’s like rock. Them violet’s hardier than they look. Try talking.”

“To the plants?” he said weakly.

“Sure. Plants got feelings too.”

He turned up the heat in the apartment, figuring that the violets would dry out quicker, but he couldn’t bring himself to talk to them.

Even though he had stored the plant/woman in her case, he slept that night on the couch.

Late in the night, something woke him. His neck hurt. One arm of the couch held his head higher than his pillow; the other arm forced his knees to bend a little bit so that the back of his thighs ached. He rolled to his side. What woke him? He strained his eyes in the darkened room; the DVD clock glowed a steady green, 2:17 a.m. A sound, he decided, some small sound that didn’t belong. The refrigerator motor kicked on and he almost screeched. A click, maybe, a metallic sound like a briefcase unlatching. Carefully, slowly, he raised his head and listened. The refrigerator hummed. Something rumbled in the distance outside, a train, perhaps, or some industry that day noises muffled. Something thumped. He pushed himself onto one elbow. A neighbor, maybe, opening a door or dropping a book? At 2:17? But it sounded like it was in the apartment. What in his apartment could make such a noise? A latch opening and then a thud? He thought of the plant/woman’s case leaning against his bed, the dead shape within, waiting only to be used.

His head raised in the dark, super aware, he listened for another minute, but heard nothing. Were these imagined sounds? Sometimes in a strange room he would hear things, creeping steps on a carpet, the tiny pop of lips separating, the crack of a knuckle or knee, and these could be like those. He began to believe he had imagined them. Then he smelled the rotting violets, but he’d been smelling them for hours and hardly noticed them now. Something else, though. He thought he smelled something else, something familiar. Cut grass. Wet, cut grass. Was she in the hallway now, hidden in the shadows, waiting for him to put his head back down? He thought, how patient is a vegetable? and he almost laughed, but he choked it back. Could her eyes really see? Jermaine didn’t say that she couldn’t see. Plants are light sensitive. He reached for the table lamp at the end of the couch, a lamp he couldn’t see but knew was there. His arm felt naked, hairs on end, and he almost expected something to grab his wrist, a warm firm inhuman grip to stop him from turning on the light.