Blanton had been making drinks at the time, their evening cocktails. Mango mojitos tonight — splitting open a mango one of his botany students had given him earlier in the afternoon, one of a quartet she’d delivered as a thank-you present. The gift had left him brimming with contentment, and he had been muddling them merrily when Felicia broke the news. An offhand remark — or meant to be.
“Have I met her?” Blanton had asked, adding a splash of white creme de menthe to the cocktails.
“Him,” she said. And the pinpricks became a knife.
“Just let me know when,” he had told her, and then excused himself hastily, the plants suddenly claiming his attention, some spritzing that needed to be done. And at least he was good for that, right?
But for what else? he thought now. Because most men in a situation like this, they’d... But that thought struck him mercilessly too: what most men would do.
Still balancing the watering can dumbly against his side, Blanton glanced over at a lyre-flower Felicia had given him, just one of the many plants the two of them had exchanged — this one a present for his forty-sixth birthday. “A perennial,” she’d said, learning from him, remembering. “Like our love.”
He was so touched by the intention that he hadn’t told her the other name for the flower: old-fashioned bleeding heart. Neither had he told her how some perennials only bloomed once before dying.
“Metaphors,” he laughed now, bitterly, and thought of others — the withered stalk, limp to the root — and about what he couldn’t do now that “most men” still could. His fault that she’d found one of those men, his fault twice, because wasn’t her infidelity his own suggestion?
He’d tried drugs first, then therapy. Then the herbal remedies he’d so thoroughly researched — not just relying on supplements but trying to grow the plants himself: panax ginseng, turnera diffusa, ginkgo biloba, ptychopetalum olacoides. Increased libido, increased bloodflow in those nether regions — empty promises, more desperation. And then...
And then, standing in the solarium, he corrected himself — the bigger, truer picture. Most men, he remembered from his well-worn copy of Thoreau, lead lives of quiet desperation... “And go to the grave with the song still in them,” he muttered aloud to the plants around him, as if they might hear.
“It’s biological,” Felicia’s mother had told her years before, when she hit her teen years. “It’s evolutionary. Now that you’re becoming a woman, they’ll all be sniffing around you. That’s what they do, that’s what they’ll keep doing, all of them wanting a piece. And it’s dog eat dog for them — evolutionary again. Survival of the fittest.”
Felicia hadn’t wanted to believe it, but she’d found out too quickly how right her mother was. So many of them, it seemed, eyes glossing hungrily over a low-cut blouse she wore, mouths nearly salivating over a glimpse of her thigh — and not just the boys at school but men too, men passing her on the street, men at the country club where she worked weekends, teachers in high school, professors at college, her father’s friends, even a distant uncle at a wedding she went to, drunk and leering. Not just dogs, but wolves more like it, sly and relentless, fangs bared, hormones howling. She’d had to learn quickly how to walk among them.
And then had come Blanton — guileless, earnest. He’d brought her an orchid for their first date. He’d typed up tips for taking care of it. He’d kissed her on the cheek at the end of the evening. And she’d said, even then, “You’re not like other men, are you?” and he’d cocked his head and given her that lopsided smile. No, he wasn’t. Not at all.
Felicia sipped the drink he’d made.
When life hands you mangoes, make mojitos. And when life hands you lemons...
But Felicia had tried to be supportive, she had. It’s fine, it happens. No big deal, another time. Perhaps if I...? Or we could try... And then maybe the worrying only makes it worse? Finally, when all his efforts had fallen short and all her efforts too, he’d come home to her one afternoon flush with embarrassment, starkly vulnerable, ripe for martyrdom.
“You’re still a young woman,” he’d said. He held a plant in his hands, a symbol of what she wasn’t sure — the offer he was making? The words he couldn’t bring himself to speak? Peperomia, she found out later, its spiky flowers jutting up like tiny fingers, like phalluses. “I just ask that you keep it discreet. And, please, nothing... lengthy with anyone.”
“I’m not going to do that,” she’d said flatly, and she’d said it once more the next time he brought it up: “Thank you, but no.”
He never mentioned it again, but it was already too late. Appreciation turned to pity, and soon pity began to fester into frustration, then flare toward anger. Where did it come from, that desire to kick a person just for being generous to you, to kick a man not just when he’s down but because he’s down?
Ultimately, her mother had been right in more ways than one. “You’ll want it too,” she’d warned all those years before. “You’ll need it. Simple biology. But just don’t forget who you are in the middle of all that.”
She had needed it. And then she’d taken it. But what about this next step? Dog eat dog again? Was that what this was all about?
If so, Felicia did indeed know who she was.
The bitch in the middle.
Roger had invited a fourth for dinner: Jessica, an old friend who knew about the affair — knew about all his adventures, in fact. Her curiosity always bested her disapproval, and her disapproval always gave Roger an extra little thrill. He liked witnesses to his exploits.
“This dinner,” Jessica had said when she first arrived, “it’s kind of a jackass thing to do, you know? And what’s the point? I mean, are you trying to break up their marriage, is that it?”
“Things with me and Felicia are perfect just the way they are,” he’d told her. “The sex is always better with someone else’s woman.”
Jessica had rolled her eyes. “And so the rooster struts.”
“Make up your mind, Jess. Am I a jackass or cock of the walk?”
The latter, he knew, even though she didn’t answer him, just smiled and rolled her eyes and shook her head.
The first time he’d met the husband of one of his lovers — purely by chance that time, at a cocktail party — he’d felt a surge of adrenaline and pride, a sudden strut to his step. The next time he and the woman tangled in bed had been passionate, relentless, charged.
He wanted that same intensity next time with Felicia, to break through that wall of immovability that he’d tried so many times to penetrate.
“You were bad,” he imagined Felicia saying next time, and he would tell her, “Bad’s what you want. It’s what you need.” The victor. The conqueror.
But to do that, he needed to go to battle first — needed to one-up the competition — and so the richly marbled steaks and the fine French wine and the freshly pressed shirt, gradually mounting more proof of his superiority. So too the plant that he’d moved from the bedroom to the study, where he would lead them all at evening’s end for an after-dinner glass of port — the plant that Felicia had given him just after the first time they’d slept together, now displayed prominently on a small mahogany stand.
It was all perfect, he thought, and when they arrived, he felt geared-up, ready — energized even a little more when he caught his first glimpse of Felicia in the doorway, those long lashes shadowing the dark gleam of her eyes, the corners of her lips curled just on the edge of some sly, elusive grin, that knee-length sundress showcasing those tawny legs.