She placed this gift on the low coffee table. Daniel was suddenly at her side. “Heavens,” he said.
“Heavens,” she echoed. She fingered the little pink envelope before opening it. He took the delay as an invitation to move still closer. Finally she slid out the card. From one who loves, it said. No signature. The words had been printed by a computer.
“Century Gothic,” he identified. “I too was offered the use of the keyboard. I could have selected that font or any other. But I used my own pen.”
“I prefer handwriting,” Lois said in an earnest tone.
They returned to their chairs, though not to their reading.
The third truck belonged to a notable Boston florist. Its delivery person was a middle-aged woman. “Bevington?” she said.
Into the kitchen again, both of them. These flowers erupted from a shallow bowl. The elaborate ribbon and cellophane bright as tears at first prevented their identification, but when she cut the ribbon and removed the cellophane a rush of glory met their two gazes. The flowers were mostly white lilacs, with occasional sprays of heather and spikes of something very blue. She carried the bowl into the living room and placed it on the piano. An envelope fell to the floor. Daniel picked it up, as if the gift were for him. But it was meant for Lois, the four letters rounded, perhaps to disguise the penmanship, perhaps to make it legible.
“Open it,” Daniel said in an unlikely bark. “Please,” he amended. She extracted the card.
Love consists in this: that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other.
Neither could identify the quote. Side by side on the gray couch they consulted their Bartlett’s. The source was a letter written by Rilke.
“I don’t believe those lilacs were sent to you by Rilke,” said Daniel. “Not the tulips either.”
“Roses,” she murmured.
“Roses. They didn’t come from a dead poet.”
“No,” Lois said, but whether she meant accord or disagreement or let’s not speculate…that was anybody’s guess.
In order to understand the sudden beflowering of an unadorned room, one must go back a month in time and half a mile in space — back to the evening McCauley Bell selected the menu for the fiftieth birthday party he was throwing for his wife, Andrea. Lois had been hired to cater the event. She waited in her outsize kitchen, dreading the interview. McCauley Bell was a cardiologist, and so of course he’d forbid meat, soft cheeses, pâté. He’d turn thumbs-down on her signature tiramisu, any mouthful of which could kill you if you were genetically inclined. He’d probably demand fruit salad and hardtack.
But he turned out to be a paunchy man of sixty with a voice as rich as Lois’s seven-layer frivolity. She offered him a slice of frivolity, and then another. He indicated that he wanted to serve his guests exactly what his caterer liked best to make. He took all her lethal suggestions except Brie en croûte; he explained that he had a relationship with a cheesemonger who supplied him every so often with very special wheels of Camembert.
“And every so often you scrape out his arteries?” Lois asked.
He smiled at her. “That’s the surgeon’s work.” He felt a curious sympathy for this bony woman. She seemed to find smiling difficult — was it the slight malocclusion; had no one ever told her that buckteeth were sexy? He knew she was married, but he suspected that she was insufficiently attended to.
“Yes,” Andy said later, at home. She had taken an adult-education cooking course taught by Lois — Sweet Soups and Saucy Pies — and she had formed one of her shallow friendships with the tall teacher. They’d gone to Pirates of Penzance together. “The husband is out to sea and she doesn’t know how to haul him in — that’s my guess. He teaches algebra or something.” In fact Daniel Bevington was a world-class mathematician, but McCauley didn’t trouble Andy with that information. “Lois does know how to monkey with ingredients, combines things you’d never think of. Chilies and melon, say.”
The night before the party, the Bevingtons carried hors d’oeuvres and pastries into the Bells’ permanently disordered kitchen. Lois opened the refrigerator that McCauley and Andy had emptied that afternoon. The Bevingtons stacked trays inside the fridge, taking turns, never bumping into each other. Then Lois and Andy walked through the downstairs discussing the placement of the bar, the various routes from kitchen to the other rooms, the fact that the piano player could play just about anything if he was kept drunk enough.
McCauley watched the two women confer, Andy’s soft freckled beauty facing Lois’s profile. The sweet awning of the caterer’s upper lip did not quite cover the uncorrected teeth. Her husband was still in the kitchen, looking out the window. There were probably rabbits in the backyard; there might also be coyotes. Rabbits with their rapid hearts, 335 beats a minute in some breeds, can go into shock when a coyote comes close: convenient for the predator. But McCauley saw as he too neared the window that there were no rabbits just now. The mathematician was staring at something else, maybe the birches, white as the snow.…The man’s pulse was seventy to eighty if his heartbeats were normal. McCauley estimated them to be on the slow side.
He positioned himself in the dining room so he could see both husband in the kitchen and wife in the living room. He already knew that the caterer was competent and reliable, and she probably was master of the renunciation you often saw in people who cooked for a living: she knew she must taste only enough of her creation to test its merit and not enough to satisfy her appetite. But she had that streak of inventiveness Andy had reported…He shook his big head. Other people! Other people’s marriages! He himself could be considered imperfect as a husband: he never noticed clothes, he’d be damned if he’d make the bed. As for Andy: she buried herself in idle novels, talked forever on the telephone, played tricks on people. All is lost. Fly—once she had telegraphed this message to her cousin, an importer of wines; and the fellow did leave town for a while…She forgot to buy toilet paper and pick up his shirts and complain to the electric company about the bill. But he loved her tolerant nature and ready arms and generous bosom and the light laugh when he reached his peak — he was still capable of it, even if the postcoital heartbeats had become more irregular and the breathlessness more prolonged. Then she’d laugh again, again lightly, while his slow detumescence brought her to her own pleasure. All couples have their peculiarities. Suddenly he wanted to get rid of the skinny pair who had invaded their house to do their work so capably, like dancers who knew each other’s moves.
“Darling,” he said to Andy and Lois. “I think you’ve obsessed enough about the pianist; just make sure the minions keep his glass filled.” And then, gliding into the kitchen, his belly shaking just a little, he said to the mathematician, still staring out the window, “You must be sure to come back in the spring and see the three hundred tulips I planted last October, like the October before, and the October before that. Many of the old ones keep coming up. Nature has its way with us.”
Daniel had not been looking at anything in the yard. Instead he’d been recalling an episode he’d witnessed earlier. It was brief, and soundless, and reversed — he’d seen it through the black mirror of the window, superimposed on the backyard geometry. He had been standing here then as he was now. All the stuff had been brought in. His dogsbody role had been played and he was at liberty. Lois was rearranging a tray of carved carrots and little pots of condiments. The Bells had been standing in the dining room behind Daniel. That is, in reality they stood behind him, but reality be damned; they were stationed right before his eyes in the very middle of the backyard. McCauley’s left arm slid across Andrea’s shoulders. Her right hand busied itself unseen, no doubt thrusting itself into his back pocket, curving her fingers around his pouf of a buttock. They didn’t look at each other, but she moved her head a couple of millimeters so her hair would tickle his nostrils, and he bent his head to ensure that result. That was all, decorous foreplay reflected in a window, yet he’d felt as if one of Lois’s wooden spoons was stirring his entrails. He roiled first with jealousy and then with painful relief: for why envy the fat cardiologist his unkempt wife when he had as his own companion a gentle-voiced person who had painted all the rooms of their house gray and had grayed the rest of his life too, just the way he’d wanted it, perfect for contemplation. She’d even developed an interest in Scriabin. But such consideration must be commutative, or should be — what had been placed on her side of the equation?