“Can we take some out?” he asked, and wished he hadn’t. What kind of man courts a woman by letting her make an enormous bouquet for his wife, then asks her to pare back?
“What would you like me to take out?” the girl asked. Was she annoyed? She had her back to him. Did she think less of him? Did she think he was a cheap bastard who cheats on his wife?
“It’s just that I was hoping to use a particular Arts and Crafts vase on the mantel, which, in my opinion, these would look lovely in,” he elaborately lied. (Actually, there was a vase on the mantel — but so what?) He went on, “What I mean to say is that the vase I have in mind isn’t very big.”
Did he need excuses? Did he need to bring up his home life?
He went into reverse. “Come to think of it, never mind about that vase on the mantel. It would be a shame to wreck such a nice bouquet.”
“I’m not going to wreck anything.”
Was she scolding him? Were things heating up between them? He waited for her next move.
“I can give you a bigger vase,” she proposed, finally.
He held his breath. She had to be at least twenty years younger than he. But it wasn’t their age difference, nor the fact that he was married, that made him feel uncertain of himself. The problem was his thought process: The lithium he was taking in small doses brought a slower speed to reality. It was the lithium or the antidepressant cocktail or all of it in concert. At times, when he spoke, he felt as if a kind of mental wind were blowing his thoughts back at him, forcing him to self-consciously order his syntax as he pushed words out.
“I just got — I just got out of the hospital!” he blurted.
He watched her as she turned to face him; in her hands she held white lilies and a red satin bow, and her eyes looked left, right, left.
“I shouldn’t’ve said that! Forget I said that! I didn’t mean to say that! Give me the vase. I want a vase.”
“Oh!” she said, as if startled to realize that she was still clutching pieces of the bouquet. “Let me run in the back and get one.”
While Jim and the girl sorted themselves out downstairs, Kate was marching around the apartment in her red heels, shoving things into her purse and looking in the usual places for her keys. She had to flee before Jim walked in. She could phone him from the street and tell him that she’d meet him at the restaurant. Going from Elliot to Jim to Elliot and Jim and Susan without a break was bullshit. But, seriously, where was she going to go? It was too cold out to sit on a bench. The bar next door to the restaurant was bleak and depressing, an old men’s dive, and the bar inside the restaurant would be a mob scene of people pushing for tables. She could stand idly flipping through magazines at the newsstand across Broadway, but that would mean accommodating the line of men squeezing past her to look at porn at the rear of the store. She slammed the apartment door behind her and started down the five flights of stairs. Too often in winter she failed to leave the apartment before sunset. It worked hell on her mood.
Outside, the wind was blowing hard. She wasn’t wearing a hat. She tightened her scarf around her neck, tugged up her coat collar, lowered her head, and walked toward Broadway with her fists punched down into her pockets and her purse clinched under her arm. If only it would snow. But when did it ever snow anymore? Hat or no hat, she wouldn’t have minded a few snowflakes swirling down through the city light to settle on her head. When she’d been a girl, snow had lain on the ground all winter. That was what she remembered. Of course, she was thinking of the farm, of New England, not New York. So what was her point? These days, it rarely snowed the way it had back in the years before her parents died. The snowfalls she remembered from her childhood seemed lost to time and, she supposed, the changing climate.
She hurried along as quickly as she could in her high heels. At Broadway, she turned uptown and passed the florist’s, where the pretty shop assistant had just come out from the back with the flowers — flowers for her, for Kate — in their vase.
“Here we are,” the girl announced to Jim. She extended her arms and held the flowers out in front of her, presenting them. Before he could move to take them from her, however — it was the medication, warping his mind and delaying his reaction — she heaved the arrangement onto the counter and explained that she’d had to search high and low for an extra-heavy vase, one that was not only broad enough but also deep enough to properly anchor the bouquet.
Jim and the girl admired her creation. With its stalks vertical and free to fan out or droop down, the bouquet’s real immensity became apparent. Roses with their thorns stuck out everywhere, and the lilies, whose columnar stalks the girl had bunched at the center, shot up through the top of the bouquet like, like, like — like insane trees towering above some insane world, he thought. He was light-headed when he spoke. “I love the way you’ve used ribbons and bows to tie the blossoms into clusters. It looks like a bouquet made of little bouquets! There’s so much to see. I can smell the lilies. Don’t you want to inhale that scent? Do you know the painter Fragonard? Do you know Boucher? Look at Boucher’s flowers. They’re practically obscene. There might be a Boucher hanging at the Frick.”
He went for it. “Do you like museums?”
“When I have time.”
“I could show you the Frick.” He grinned widely and shrugged his shoulders and tipped his head, and she mirrored him, shrugging her own shoulders and making a funny face.
“You’re very good at what you do,” he added, and she said, “Thank you,” then asked him, “How would you like to pay?”
He tried to imagine what he’d be forced to spend. Whatever the amount, it would be too great. The bills from his recent hospitalizations were mainly covered by Kate’s insurance — the policy was hers; they’d gone ahead and got married in order for him to take advantage of it during this protracted (Kate’s word, sometimes used sarcastically) time of crisis in his life — but there were nevertheless many outstanding fees, brand-new bills arriving every other week, plus the only partly reimbursable expense of the aftercare program he attended across town, on the Upper East Side.
“Let’s charge it.” He handed the girl his debit card.
She swiped the card. “It’s not going through,” she said. After passing the card through the machine a second time, she apologized. “This doesn’t automatically mean that there’s a problem with the account,” she said. “You’ll have to contact your bank. Would you like to try another account?”
“I don’t have another. Tell me the total?”
“Three hundred and forty-one dollars and sixty cents.”
His anxiety spiked and he took a breath. How could a bouquet of flowers be that much?
He put his hand in his pocket and felt around for cash, but what was the point?
“Hold on a minute,” he said.
What to do, what to do? He was going to have to call his wife. Was he going to have to call her? He was going to have to call her. He took out his phone and dialed — in that moment he was glad that he had his meds on board — and right away Kate picked up and hollered, “Where are you? I’m at the restaurant with Susan! Elliot is out parking the car. Did you go to your therapy?”
“Could you not shout, Kate?”
“It’s goddamn packed in here!”
“I need to talk to you, privately,” he said, and turned away from the shopgirl. But there was no way, in the small space, to keep the girl from overhearing, so he put his hand over the phone, leaned toward her, and whispered, “I’ll be right back,” then stepped out of the shop, stood on the sidewalk in the freezing wind, and slowly, deliberately humiliated himself, saying to Kate, “I stopped on my way home and bought you flowers, but the bank account isn’t cooperating with my card for some reason and now I’m stuck at the florist’s because I don’t have enough cash on me, and I think the problem is simply that — shit, I don’t know what the problem is, I must not have kept my eye on the balance, and it’s possible that we’re overdrawn. I know we’ve talked about this. But it’s not a serious problem, I promise.”