Jermaine fisted both hands as if he wanted to hit him, and Gregory pushed his chair away from the table. Gradually the fists relaxed until the finger lay flat on the table. He said, “I’m going home. Enjoy her while she’s still fresh.” He stood, all four-and-a-half feet of him and said, “You know what I wonder? I wonder if being plucked hurts. I wonder if it pisses them off. The beer’s paid for.” He left.
When Gregory got home, the smell hit him as he opened the door, a whiff of wet, old vegetables. He took a step onto the carpet and sniffed carefully, turning his head side to side, testing the air. “I’m home,” he said and felt immediately stupid, and then, because he was alone in his own apartment and there was no one to hear him, he said it again, “I’m home, dear.” He sniffed once more and rushed to the back of the house.
In the bedroom, the case leaned against the end of the bed where he’d put it in the morning. The room smelled fresh with a hint of his deodorant and shampoo. Nothing else. He put his hand on the case, snapped open the latches, but hesitated with his hand on the edge of the lid. No, he thought, it couldn’t be from here. Not yet.
In the hallway he couldn’t smell anything. Pictures on the wall of Sara and him horseback riding stopped him for a moment. He straightened the close-up that showed them side by side holding reins to horses that were blurry brown shapes in the background.
In the living room he caught it again, a deep, damp solid smell like packed leaves gone gray and slimy at the bottom of a barrel. He wondered how he could have missed it in the morning before leaving for work. The trash can under the coffee table was empty and dry. He moved into the kitchen where he checked the garbage can, the trash compactor, the garbage disposal and the refrigerator, all dry and odorless. Frustrated, he stood in the middle and clamped his hands on his hips to survey the room. He sniffed loudly.
“Ahhh,” he said. The field of African Violets on the counter top looked suspicious. Their leaves drooped colorlessly over the edges of the pots, and when he leaned close, the source of the smell became obvious. He poked at the gummy soil at the base of several of the plants. He’d over watered, something Sara had warned him about before she left, and now the dirt was muddy and rotting the plants.
He opened the kitchen window, turned on the stove’s exhaust fan and went back into the bedroom.
Later, in bed with the plant/woman, the light on, Gregory examined her skin. He pressed his finger into her upper arm, one of the few places he had discovered he could touch without triggering some kind of motion. The skin compressed exactly as if it were real, a quarter of an inch of give and then a hard resistance as if he were digging into bone. Close up, he could see nothing plant-like about her. He stroked her arm, which felt real. Even the slight whisper of his fingers moving back and forth was convincing.
He jerked his hand back and wiped it on his thigh.
An hour later, after lying beside her but not touching her, waiting, bizarrely he realized, for her to do something, he rolled away and dialed the telephone.
“Sara,” he said when she answered, “The violets are dying. I over watered.”
She said nothing. He listened to the wisp of static, a thread of a ghost conversation from some crossing of the lines.
“I can’t talk to you now,” she finally said and hung up.
The dead phone in his hand, Gregory sat on the edge of the bed. He looked at the plant lying on her back, and he couldn’t detect even a thread of passion within himself. He hung the phone back up, but before he let go it rang, startling him into knocking it to the floor. He grabbed it and pressed it hard to his ear. “Sara?” he said.
“Jermaine.”
“Jermaine?”
“Yes.”
He squeezed the phone hard. “Jermaine?”
“I shouldn’t have bothered you about borrowing your plant.”
At first, Gregory couldn’t figure out what Jermaine was talking about. Then he remembered. “Oh. That’s okay.”
“No. I mean it, Bucko. I apologize. I won’t do it again.”
They talked for a few minutes, and when they hung up, Gregory realized he felt more sorrow than revulsion for the little man.
In the cafeteria the next day, Gregory saw a haggard and unkempt Jermaine walk through the door, his tray in hand, and when their eyes met Jermaine looked quickly away and sat at another table. Gregory ate alone.
The African Violets weren’t any livelier that evening as Gregory contemplated them. If anything, despite the open window, the smell was worse. He put a thick layer of paper towels under all the pots, using up two rolls and part of a third, reasoning that if he could blot away as much of the water as possible, he might be able to reverse the rotting. After a half hour, he replaced the soaked towels with a new layer. He called a florist who said, “If they ain’t dead yet, don’t water again until the dirt’s like rock. Them violet’s hardier than they look. Try talking.”
“To the plants?” he said weakly.
“Sure. Plants got feelings too.”
He turned up the heat in the apartment, figuring that the violets would dry out quicker, but he couldn’t bring himself to talk to them.
Even though he had stored the plant/woman in her case, he slept that night on the couch.
Late in the night, something woke him. His neck hurt. One arm of the couch held his head higher than his pillow; the other arm forced his knees to bend a little bit so that the back of his thighs ached. He rolled to his side. What woke him? He strained his eyes in the darkened room; the DVD clock glowed a steady green, 2:17 a.m. A sound, he decided, some small sound that didn’t belong. The refrigerator motor kicked on and he almost screeched. A click, maybe, a metallic sound like a briefcase unlatching. Carefully, slowly, he raised his head and listened. The refrigerator hummed. Something rumbled in the distance outside, a train, perhaps, or some industry that day noises muffled. Something thumped. He pushed himself onto one elbow. A neighbor, maybe, opening a door or dropping a book? At 2:17? But it sounded like it was in the apartment. What in his apartment could make such a noise? A latch opening and then a thud? He thought of the plant/woman’s case leaning against his bed, the dead shape within, waiting only to be used.
His head raised in the dark, super aware, he listened for another minute, but heard nothing. Were these imagined sounds? Sometimes in a strange room he would hear things, creeping steps on a carpet, the tiny pop of lips separating, the crack of a knuckle or knee, and these could be like those. He began to believe he had imagined them. Then he smelled the rotting violets, but he’d been smelling them for hours and hardly noticed them now. Something else, though. He thought he smelled something else, something familiar. Cut grass. Wet, cut grass. Was she in the hallway now, hidden in the shadows, waiting for him to put his head back down? He thought, how patient is a vegetable? and he almost laughed, but he choked it back. Could her eyes really see? Jermaine didn’t say that she couldn’t see. Plants are light sensitive. He reached for the table lamp at the end of the couch, a lamp he couldn’t see but knew was there. His arm felt naked, hairs on end, and he almost expected something to grab his wrist, a warm firm inhuman grip to stop him from turning on the light.
He turned on the light. The room was empty. The hallway was empty. He wrapped the blanket around himself, took a carving knife from the kitchen, and stalked down the hallway to the bedroom.
The top latch on the case was open. Thoughtfully, Gregory pressed it closed. The mechanism barely held. He touched it from behind and it snapped open. The sound was the same he’d heard, the one that woke him. He tested it again to make sure. It had popped open on its own, he concluded. Taking a deep breath, he unlatched the bottom one, which was firmly shut, and opened the case. She stood the way he’d left her: her head turned to one side, one arm straight and the other slightly bent so the elbow pressed against the case.