While he and Roger had been alone at the grill, Blanton had tried to reason with the other man — indirectly, of course — to urge him toward Jessica, the beautiful woman available and in front of him, to throw him off the scent of his wife. On their way inside for dinner, he’d considered pulling Felicia aside, pleading with her for them to leave now, to leave forever, for her to stop this once and for all, for both their sakes, but he feared that such weakness might only drive her deeper into the other man’s arms.
And then, amidst the clamor of conversation, the clatter of forks and knives, the clink of the wineglasses, he realized something: There hadn’t been a plant in sight. Nothing green, nothing growing, no life. Could anyone really want to live in a place without that?
“Plants,” he told Jessica toward the end of dinner when she asked what he did. “Plants are my life, really. My plants and my wife, of course.” He wanted to reach out and touch Felicia’s hand, but he held back. He couldn’t even look at her, afraid of what he might find in her expression. “A flower is a beautiful thing. Each of them has a personality, just like we do. Each of them should be respected, tended to, and cared for.”
He talked on then, talking to Jessica as if she were a student of his, speaking to her but pleading with his wife. He listed the plants they had at home: begonias and caladium, bromeliads and ferns, geraniums, succulents, oleanders, ivy... plant after plant, name after name. He explained the different kinds of pots — clay, plastic, ceramic — and discussed the need to watch the humidity and to keep the house temperature in flux, stressing the importance of learning what each plant most wanted. Even when Roger tried to interrupt, Blanton kept going, stressing the difference in yellowing due to water shortage and yellowing due to iron deficiency, explaining how to watch for dormancy, lecturing about how to adjust the lighting to what each plant needed, telling how he cleaned the leaves each week, some of them with a sponge and others — “the fuzzier ones” — with a special camel-hair brush. “And yet despite all that, plants are tougher than you think,” he said at one point. “They’re the most adaptable things, so many of them. They’ll survive even under the most adverse conditions.”
After a while, he wasn’t sure what he was talking about, what he was trying to imply — was it Felicia who was the plant and he the tender? Or was he the plant, tough and adaptable, deceptively so? Metaphors popped into his mind again — more plant names: the lipstick plant; the crown-of-thorns with its red flowers and sharp spines; the screw pine, which drops its lower leaves as it gets older and sends out aerial roots instead — desperately, he thought now, considering it. But he could save the relationship still, couldn’t he? Wasn’t this the way?
“What was it Thoreau said?” he asked Jessica as they entered the study for more drinks, readying his favorite quote. His students joked that each time he repeated it, he pretended he was remembering it for the first time. “ ‘The Finest qualities of our nature, like the bloom on fruits, can be preserved only by the most delicate handling. Yet—’ ”
But his words faltered when he saw the plant sitting on one of the shelves behind the couch — a plant that he recognized too well, the peperomia he’d given to Felicia when he offered her that window of sexual opportunity, that door toward infidelity.
“ ‘Yet what?’ ” asked Jessica. She had been, he thought then, a front-of-the-class kind of girl, and for a moment he imagined what a relationship with her might have been like, how this evening might never have happened.
“ ‘Yet,’ ” he said then, hearing the loss in his own words, the pity for himself and for them all, “ ‘Yet we do not treat ourselves nor one another thus tenderly.’ ”
The plant had never looked right anywhere — that’s what Felicia thought seeing it now. The peperomia with its spiky, phallic flowers.
After Blanton gave it to her, she’d kept it at home for a few days and then taken it to the office. She’d put it on the windowsill, and then at the corner of her desk and then up on a shelf. Wherever it was, it didn’t seem to belong. It caught her eye wrong, caught her mood wrong.
Or maybe it wasn’t the look of the plant itself, but the reminder it provided — opportunities, possibilities, desires, needs.
When she brought it to Roger’s place and placed it beside the bed, it looked even less like it belonged, but the context gave it a new life: responsibilities instead of opportunities, duties instead of desires. Sometimes even in the more blinding heat of passion, she’d look over at the plant and feel the guilt even deeper than Roger’s thrusts, feel the connection to Blanton even more than to the man rising above her.
The boy’s name came to her then. Patrick it was. And she remembered how he’d stopped in the middle of their own lovemaking that night, after the incident in the pizza parlor, and looked down on her.
“You’re not here,” Patrick had told her, accusation in his voice, deprecation too. “This isn’t... This isn’t what you... You’re thinking about him, aren’t you?” And when she hadn’t answered, he’d shaken his head, rolled off her, turned himself toward the wall. He’d known, he was right. That wasn’t what she wanted. He wasn’t what she wanted — this nervous boy who’d let someone steal his pizza, this panting thing who’d retreated into a sulk. What she wanted was someone who would’ve taken the action, fought furiously and recklessly. She wished Patrick had hit the frat boy, wished even that he’d hit her. He could’ve done something; he could’ve done anything.
Damn that Jessica. No sooner had Felicia’s hubby finally stopped talking than she got him started again.
“It’s fascinating,” she said. “I grow some herbs at home, some basil and oregano and cilantro, a little mint.”
“Oh,” Blanton said. “Yes, I mean...” He reddened. “That reminds me.” And he looked around him, patting himself at the same time. He was like a wind-up robot, Roger thought — completely still and then suddenly in motion, and then still again until someone wound him up once more. “I forgot that I was going to provide the after-dinner drinks,” he said. “The mangoes and,” he reached inside his pocket and smiled, “aha, there it is. The mint.” He smiled — feebly, Roger thought — and started up on the plants again. “Could you be a dear and bring me those mangoes, Jessica? Proof that plants can give pleasure, certainly.”
Roger turned away from his view of the other man’s bulging belly and toward Felicia’s slender, sculpted form. Throughout Blanton’s tirade, Roger had tried to catch Felicia’s eye, but she’d steadfastly avoided his gaze, and did so again now.
“Are these like the drinks you made for me the other day?” Felicia asked Blanton.
“Yes. Mango mojitos,” he exclaimed. “These were a gift from one of my students,” he told them as Jessica returned. “I teach botany at the college. One of my students asked for some advice on growing a mango plant from a pit, and so I...” On and on, wound up again.
Roger pitied those students. All those plants, all that lecturing about how plants are people too. Animals, Roger kept thinking. We are animals, not plants, imagining the next time Felicia came over. She seemed the dutiful wife as she took one of the drinks Blanton was offering around — not just demure but tamed, really — and he hated her suddenly for that too, and hated Blanton for turning the evening into a Latin American fiesta, the drinks not just a bad match for the meal, but poorly mixed too, bitter even, though everyone pretended to enjoy them, all of them tamed.