Love poems, and love art, along with flowers, sweets, and tea. Anyone would have been happy to receive a present like that. And the first offering would have seemed marvelous — a gift from a mysterious admirer, perhaps even someone Ruth-Anne Grant thought she knew (and secretly hoped cared for her as much as she cared for him).
Over time, though, as the gifts became routine, as she started asking her friends and colleagues who sent them, Ruth-Anne Grant must have realized that the presents which had given her so much pleasure had a sinister undertone to them.
A bell tinkled in the main part of the shop. A young man, no more than twenty-five, stood between the orchids and the eucalyptus, looking lost. He wore a black suit — a Ralph Lauren knock-off by the way it gathered at the seams — and a pale pink shirt. His tie combined both colors in just the way a sales clerk might think was attractive.
He didn’t have a lot of money, then, but he had a job that required others to think he had.
I sighed and set down the faxes from the various shops. Normally, I would have bounded into the front room. I loved helping customers.
One of my simple pleasures, which might now be gone. Because as I stood in the back, my fingers stained with the ink from my cheap fax, I found myself wondering who this man, this new customer, wanted to hurt.
I helped him anyway. I made myself smile as I walked out of the back room, and I questioned him like I would any other new customer. We talked about his sister, the one with MS, and how much she loved flowers. We talked about his critically ill mother, who was worried about his sister’s care after she was gone, and we talked about his budget, which, as I expected, was tight.
Normally the conversation would have been enough for me, but my mood was so odd, my discomfort so great, I flirted with him — not obviously, but just enough to let him feel the personal interest.
He finally pulled out his wallet and showed me his sister’s latest picture. She was younger than he was — high school, still — and cute in that fresh-faced way most teenagers had.
As I studied her, as I saw that spark of intelligence in her eyes, mixed with a touch of sadness, I realized I had seen a lot of family photos over the years.
I handed the wallet back to the young man, undercharged him for two arrangements of spring flowers — one for Mom and one for the sister — and sent him on his way.
Then I stood near my cash register, trying to identify what I was feeling. It was the edge of an idea, a memory, a thought that I had nearly captured just a moment before.
When I was looking at the photograph. When I was realizing how I interviewed all of my new clients.
I would never have sold that bonsai over the phone. I always made it a policy to hand-sell special items, to make certain the customer saw them, and approved of them.
I had talked to him.
He had told me whatever story he had made up — or had he made it up? Had he convinced me of his delusion, that there was some special woman out there for him, some woman he was trying to impress, some woman that he loved?
What would I have told him? Bonsai needed nurturing, a tough hand but a gentle one. Bonsai weren’t for everyone, but the person who appreciated them had a botanist’s heart.
I wished I had found out more about Ruth-Anne Grant. Something about her, or this sick creep’s fantasy of her, convinced him to send her flowers. Convinced him — convinced me — that she deserved a plant that required a commitment.
I shut down the register and hurried to the back, stopping in front of my stack of video tapes.
I had January.
All five weeks of it.
My hand shook as I looked for the date, and when I found it, written across the label in Magic Marker, my heart nearly stopped.
“Gotcha,” I said as I pulled the tape out of the pile. “You son of a bitch, I’ve got you now.”
And the hell of it was, I remembered him.
As I watched the tape, images grainy and unfocused, not professional at all, I went back to that afternoon.
It was dark at three. A storm had threatened all day and finally hit, mixing rain, snow, and sleet. I had stood near the window for a long time, moving plants, wishing that the old building that housed the store had a better heating system and better insulation.
He had come in, black hair dusted with snow, a traditionally handsome man wearing a silk suit that looked, to my inexpert eye, like Armani. He had the body for the suit, broad-shouldered, narrow-hipped — legitimately GQ.
I’d let him browse a bit — sometimes the high-end types stumbled into the wrong store to kill a moment before a meeting — but after a while I realized he was actually shopping, and I went to help him.
He had flirted with me — it was visible on the tape, his hand on my sleeve ever so casual, the way he tilted his head so that he could look into my eyes, the slight smile.
I remembered him, not just because he fit my idea of gorgeous or because we had flirted, but because I had led him to the bonsai. I had talked him into it — for his lover. The lover he had described.
A man.
My hands shook as I searched for that original order form in my stack of faxes. Mine were at the bottom, of course. I should have looked for them there. And sure enough, the evidence was before me.
I hadn’t sent that first plant to Ruth-Anne Grant. No, it had gone to R. A. Grant at Ruth-Anne’s address. R. A. A deliberate lie.
None of the others were lies. Over the phone, he had ordered flowers for a woman. In person, just that once, he’d told me, convinced me, he was ordering for a man.
I sank into my chair. I no longer try to hide who I am. I learned that lesson long ago the hard way, when I was an upscale defense attorney with an infatuation for the civil litigator down the hall.
He had outed me, vindictively, one afternoon in a staff meeting. I had flirted without realizing what I was doing, hoping that no one saw my infatuation, hoping that no one understood.
And his outing was cruel, in an upstate old boys’ club, which in the mid eighties wasn’t half as liberal as it thought it was. I wasn’t fired; I was shunned, given cases so obviously tailored to forcing me out of the firm that I should have fled in panic.
Instead, I decided to retaliate. I invited the litigator’s wife to lunch, and instead of dining with her I gave her flowers. I still remember how her eyes lit up, the way she had smiled at me. It was clear litigator boy hadn’t given her flowers in a long time, and she found them special.
And at that moment, I realized I didn’t have it — the balls, the stomach, the cutthroat attitude that made the best attorneys. I couldn’t even avenge myself on a man who had made my job hell.
I couldn’t take that light from that woman’s eyes.
I decided that I couldn’t be miserable for the rest of my life trying to be someone I wasn’t and I gave it all up. I sold my house, my wardrobe, and my life, and came to Manhattan and bought on a whim a flower shop which I made my own.
Flowers saved people; flowers shouldn’t destroy them.
And somehow he — this stalker, this GQ man who was obsessed with another person without regard to that person — somehow he had known who I was, what I believed in, and he subverted it.
He used it to play his little games.
Sometimes with the memory of my past I get a kind of clarity. Not an understanding of who or what I am — I know that deeply now — but a way of seeing the world, the patterns I had learned in law school, the ways that I was supposed to view the world in the adversarial system I had found myself in.