“No,” I said, slowly shaking my head, as if I could barely sustain the weight of it, “no problem at all.”
“Good,” she said, pouring out a clean white glass of milk and setting it down on the counter beside the pitcher as if she were arranging a still life. She clasped her hands over her breast, flashed a look at her sister, and then smiled as if I’d just carved up the world like a melon and handed it to her, piece by dripping piece. “We’ll begin A.S.A.P. then, hmm? The sooner the better?”
“Sure,” I said.
“All right, then. Do you have anything to add, Caitlin?”
Caitlin’s voice, soft as the beat of a cabbage moth’s wing: “No, nothing.”
I started digging out the bushes myself — fuchsia, oleander, mock orange — but I had to go pretty far afield for the tree crew. There were three grand old oaks in the front yard, a mature Australian tea tree on the east side of the house, and half a dozen citrus trees in the back. It would take a crew of ten at least, with climbers, a cherry picker, shredder and cleanup, and as I say, it was going to be expensive. And wasteful. A real shame, really, to strip and pave a yard like that, but if that was what they wanted, I was in no position to argue. I stood to make eleven hundred or so on the trees and another five digging out the shrubs and tilling up the lawn.
The problem, though, as Moira had foreseen, was in finding a non-Mexican crew in San Roque. It just didn’t exist. Nor were there many white guys on the dirty end of the tree business — they basically just bid the jobs and sent you the bill — and there were no blacks in town at all. Finally, I drove down to Los Angeles and talked to Walt Tremaine, of Walt’s Stump & Tree, and he agreed to come up and bid the job, writing in three hundred extra for the aesthetic considerations — i.e., the white jeans and black T-shirts.
Walt Tremaine was a man of medium size with a firm paunch and a glistening bald sweat-speckled crown. He looked to be in his fifties, and he was wearing a pair of cutoff blue jeans and one of those tight-fitting shirts with the little alligator logo over the left nipple. The alligator was green, and the shirt was the color of a crookneck squash — a bright, glowing, almost aniline yellow. We were both contemplating the problem of the tea tree, a massive snaking thing that ran its arms out into a tangle of neglected Victorian Box, when the two women appeared round the corner of the house. Moira was in white — high-heeled boots, ankle-length dress and sweater, though it was a golden temperate day, like most days here — and Caitlin was in her customary black. Both of them had parasols, but Caitlin had taken the white one and Moira the black for some reason — maybe they were trying to impress Walt Tremaine with their improvisatory daring.
I introduced them, and Moira, beaming, took Walt Tremaine’s hand and said, “So, you’re a black man.”
He just stared at the picture of her white-gloved hand in the shadow of his for a minute and then corrected her. “African-American.”
“Yes,” Moira said, still beaming, “exactly. And I very much like the color of your shirt, but you do understand I hope that it’s much too much of an excitation and will simply have to go. Yes?” And then she turned to me. “Vincent, have you explained to this gentleman what we require?”
Walt Tremaine gave me a look. It was a look complicated by the fact that I’d introduced myself as Larry when he climbed out of his pickup truck, not to mention Moira’s comment about his shirt and the dead white of Moira’s dress and the nullifying black of her sister’s lipstick, but it went further than that too — it was the way Moira was talking, taking elaborate care with each syllable, as if she were an English governess with a board strapped to her back. He operated out of Van Nuys, and I figured he didn’t run across many women like Moira in an average day. But he was equal to the challenge, no problem there.
“Sure,” he said, pressing a little smile onto his lips. “Your man here — whatever his name is — outlined the whole thing for me. I can do the job for you, but I have to say I’m an equal-opportunity employer, and I have eight Mexicans, two Guatemalans, a Serb and a Fiji Islander working for me, as well as my African-Americans. And I don’t particularly like it, but I can split off one crew of black men and bring them up here, if that’s what you want.” He paused. Toed the grass a minute, touched a finger to his lips. When he spoke, it was with a rising inflection, and his eyes rolled up like loose windowshades and then came back down again: “White jeans?”
Caitlin gave a little laugh and gazed out across the lawn. Her sister shot her a fierce look and then clamped the grandmotherly smile back on her face. “Indulge us,” she said. “We’re just trying to — well, let’s say we’re trying to simplify our environment.”
Later that afternoon, sweating buckets, I stopped to strip off my soaked-through T-shirt and hose some of the grit off me. I stood there a moment, my mind blank, the scent of everything that lives and grows rising to my nostrils, the steady stream of the hose now dribbling from my fingertips, now distending my cheeks, when the front gate cranked open and Caitlin’s black Mercedes rolled up the drive and came to a silent, German-engineered halt beside me. I’d been hacking away at an ancient plumbago bush for the past half hour, and I wasn’t happy. It seemed wrong to destroy all this living beauty, deeply wrong, a desecration of the yard and the neighborhood and a violation of the principles I try to live by — I hadn’t started up a gardening business to maim and uproot things, after all. I wanted to nurture new growth. I wanted healing. Rebirth. All of that. Because I’d seen some bad times, especially with my second wife, and all I can say is thank God we didn’t have any children.
Anyway, there I was and there she was, Caitlin, stepping out of the car with a panting dog at her heels (no, it wasn’t a Scottie or a black Lab, but a Hungarian puli that was so unrelievedly black it cut a moving hole out of the scenery). She lifted two bulging plastic sacks from the seat beside her — groceries — and I remember wondering if the chromatic obsession extended to foods too. There would be eggplant in one of those bags, I was thinking, vanilla ice cream in another, devil’s food cake, Béchamel, week-old bananas, coffee, Crisco … but inspiration began to fail me when I realized she was standing two feet from me, watching the water roll off my shoulders and find its snaking way down my chest and into the waist of my regulation black jeans.
“Hi, Larry,” she murmured, smiling at me with as sweet an expression as you could expect from a woman with black-rimmed eyes and lips the color of a dead streetwalker’s. “How’s it going?”
I tried to wipe every trace of irritation from my face — as I say, I wasn’t too pleased with what she and her sister were doing here, but I tried to put things in perspective. I’d had crazier clients by a long shot. There was Mrs. Boutilier du Plessy, for one, who had me dig a pond twenty feet across for a single goldfish she’d been handed by a stranger at the mall, and Frank and Alma Fortressi, who paid me to line the floor of their master bedroom with Visquine and then dump thirty bags of planting mix on top of it so I could plant peonies right at the foot of the bed. I smiled back at Caitlin. “All right, I guess.”
She shaded her eyes from the sun and squinted at me. “Is that sweat? All over you, I mean?”