“Okay.”
“See the dead ones? Can’t you tell by the bark? Those are the ones you lop off. Right close to the trunk. I already showed you this once.”
I had to keep one eye on her as I pruned because she changed her mind from task to task and I rarely had the chance to finish anything. My main job was keeping up as she strode around directing my efforts here and there while quite obviously drifting off in thought as I started each thing destined for incompletion. One bed I was supposed to spade up for annuals turned out to be full of crocus bulbs. She’s the one who forgot she’d put them there, but she blew up: “Christ! Couldn’t you stop digging when you saw the first one?”
“I didn’t know what it was.” I thought it was onions.
“What it was, was an annual bulb, for crying out loud!” But then she ran her hand over my buttocks while watching the street, so I felt I was forgiven. She said, “Baby, let’s go to Florida.”
5
THE HANSONS ALWAYS ENJOYED A COCKTAIL between Karl’s return from work, his face often heavy with fatigue, and supper. One end of the living room served as a small private bar of a kind that flourished before the age of the exaggerated “wet bar.” A leaded-glass cabinet held glasses, cocktail shakers with the patina of age, a cylindrical device into which CO2 cartridges were inserted for the making of one’s own carbonated water, a leather-bound ice bucket; then, on display, the “top brands” lined up with their somber labels to the fore. I would have a ginger ale on the rocks, while the Hansons tossed back highballs, invariably Crown Royal and soda. Audra, having long since made herself the bartender, lately cast melancholy glances at the three of us, once we had our drinks, before making an uncharacteristically mousy exit. This evening, when Karl came in trailing the smell of cold and snow, he joined us vigorously at the bar, clapping his hands together in a spirited effort at warming them, and directed Audra to make it a stiff one. I already had my ginger ale, resentfully proffered by Audra, Shirley her accustomed highball, and Audra now prepared Karl’s, filling the whiskey to the usual level, then teasingly drizzling some a bit before adding soda. Karl watched every drop with enthusiasm, then suddenly said, “Audra, it’s time you joined us for a drink.” I saw Shirley cut her eyes at him, but if he noticed he didn’t let on. Audra posed primly at the bar, indicating by the tiny space between her thumb and forefinger that a small amount of the libation was all that a little princess should want. To cover the silence, Shirley went on a bit about what a cold, snowy spring it was, and Karl, turning from the preparation of Audra’s drink, raised his glass to one and all and said, “We need the moisture.”
* * *
Hanson asked me to help him in the yard. He did very little work around his property and was a fellow best seen in a suit and tie. In fact, on the weekends when he donned work clothes, usually worn-out elements of his office attire, he seemed almost a different person. As a fourth-generation lawyer in a small town, he supported a tradition that prided itself on its separation from people with work-hardened hands. He was not exactly prissy; delicate was more like it. He picked up any tool, even a leaf rake, suspiciously. But once he started, the lawyer came out and he became an authority—“You don’t do it like that, let me show you,” etc. — until the appearance of the first blister, which he regarded with an accusing and tragic air.
We raked leaves, but we didn’t rake them very long before he stopped and, clutching the rake handle against his chest, leaned toward me and said, “I hope you will extend all the courtesies of a gentleman to Audra.”
“I sure will,” I said.
“I’m confident Audra will offer no provocation whatsoever. She is a brave wanderer in a very cold world. I don’t want to say defenseless, but there it is. I know you’ll respect that.”
“Why even tell me this?”
A spark of irritation crossed his face. “Why? Because you’re an aardvark and you never know what an aardvark will do.”
I had no idea if this was a compliment or not. Later, I looked up “aardvark” without bringing any light to Hanson’s remark. I didn’t think of myself as a living fossil, nor did I eat ants and burrow at night. I was surprised, though, at Karl’s concern for Audra.
Hanson volunteered to walk Audra through change of address requirements for her green card, but it meant going to his office and getting some help from his secretary. Shirley offered to make lunch for me, and so I came back between classes and found bacon-lettuce-and-tomato sandwiches on either side of the dining room table, as well as a mountain of material about Florida vacations. Shirley sat down heavily and stared at the pile as though this were the source of her fatigue. “I’ve been through all of this and as soon as you finish lunch, I’m throwing it out. The trouble is, we’re stuck with the dates of your vacation and finding someplace in Florida that’s not a spring break hellhole has been a problem. However, I have not failed us, Honey-Child. I’ve found a sedate little island where we can spend sunny days on the sand gazing out at the Gulf, a real change of pace. We’ll eat fresh seafood, collect shells, feed pelicans, ride bicycles—”
“Hide the weenie?” I asked through a mouthful of BLT. I thought I was being funny but Shirley didn’t take it well. She swept up the Florida material and left the room.
When she came back in, she said, “When people have time, and commitment, the full benefits of their God-given sexuality, they do not call it ‘hide the weenie.’ ”
“I’m very sorry.”
“Of course you are. You’re not stupid. You’re ignorant. That’s worse.”
In the evening, as the sunset watchers were leaving, the locals with their dogs and the vacationers, Shirley and I, with frozen drinks in to-go cups, followed the avenue of banyan trees to the Gulf. Then we swam, sometimes, shoulder to shoulder, as far out as we could go. We swam naked, out until our feet couldn’t touch the bottom, and made love in a silence disturbed only by the lapping of salt water stirred by our movement. Another time, during the day, with other swimmers nearby, this antic lawyer’s wife manipulated me underwater, surprising me when the sperm floated to the surface. Evidently I made a bit of noise, as the other swimmers stared and Shirley admonished me sharply to “get a grip,” adding that there was no reason to behave like a trained seal. This all was new. I had had the straightforward initiation at the hands of my libidinous aunt, but she seemed to know exactly what she wanted and what I ought to have. With Shirley it was quite different; lots of elements imperfectly understood by me bore upon our activity.
Anthropologists say that every sexual act is a cultural collision, and I think this was true of my Shirley days. Shirley, I learned, was a hometown girl from the wrong side of the tracks, and her marriage to Karl was widely regarded as a rapprochement between elements that had not mingled since the nineteenth century. When Shirley told me one dinnertime quite proudly that both of their great-grandfathers had fought in the Civil War, Karl said, “Mine was an officer” and Shirley said, “Mine was born in America.” If Shirley ran up too many charges at the local department store, Karl said she was trying to ruin him. I don’t think Shirley understood any of this, and she had little contact with her own family or the people she’d grown up with, though they lived nearby. When Karl said, as he more than once did, that some social event was beneath him, Shirley said that everything is beneath you if you’re on Mars. Karl found most things to be “too new,” and he quaintly — I think this was him trying to be funny — viewed my home in the West as being on the frontier; he called it a “homestead” and asked if I, like Audra, wanted to apply for a green card. These days, Karl was full of merry jokes that left people uncomfortable. I did like Karl but noticed that he had no friends. To be fair, it’s hard to have friends in an old small town if you are born to be dignified.