A Tale for the Time Being (42 page)

She hated that he had a theory and that he sounded so smug.

“He had no more to offer, you see? In the auction, which is why he lost. And he didn’t want to appear ridiculous in the eyes of—”

“I get it,” she said, cutting him off. “It’s disgusting. He was bidding on his daughter’s panties. What kind of sicko bids on his daughter’s
underpants?”

Oliver looked surprised. “He was just trying to rescue them so no one else would get them. He didn’t want some hentai to buy them. It’s not like he was getting off on them
himself.”

“How do you know?”

“Oh, wow. You’re crazy. If that’s what you think, you’re the sicko.”

“Thanks.”

“I mean, the guy may be a loser, but—”

“Well, I guess you should know.”

4.

As soon as the words were out of her mouth, she wanted to take them back.

“I didn’t mean that,” she said. “You called me crazy. You called me a sicko. I was angry.”

But it was too late. She watched his blue eyes veil over as the wall went up and he pulled his tender parts in behind it. When he spoke, his voice was distant, alien.

“He’s not a hentai. He just loves her is all.”

She turned off the light again. It was too late to fix things. She spoke into the dark. “If he loves her, then he should stop trying to kill himself. Or he should do a better job of
it.”

“I’m sure he will,” Oliver answered, quietly.

5.

They didn’t fight often. Neither of them liked to argue, and there were certain places they were careful not to go. He knew better than to needle her about her memory. She
knew better than to call him a loser.

He wasn’t. He was the most intelligent person she knew, an autodidact, with a mind that opened up the world for her, cracking it like a cosmic egg to reveal things she would never have
noticed on her own. He’d been an artist for decades, but he called himself an amateur as a matter of principle. He had passionate botanical hobbies: growing things, grafting, and interspecies
hacking. He would come in from the orchard, triumphant, crying “It’s a red-letter day!” after he’d succeeded in getting a rare tree to germinate or a whip graft to take. He
grew cacti from seed on his windowsill, collecting specks of yellow dust from the males with a tiny sable paintbrush and transferring them gently to the female flowers. He made little mesh hats
that looked like dunce caps for his
Euphorbia obesa
, which he placed on the females’ round heads to catch the fertilized seeds as they sprayed into the air.

Before he got sick and they moved to the island, he used to get grants and the occasional land art commission, supplementing their income by teaching and giving talks. After they moved, he kept
up his art practice, even when he was ill. He wrote papers, participated in arts events remotely, and started projects like the NeoEocene. He traveled down to Vancouver to create an urban forest
called Means of Production, growing plants and trees for local artists to use: wood for instrument makers, willow for weavers, fiber for papermakers. Wherever they traveled, he collected seeds and
cuttings: ghetto palms from Brooklyn; metasequoia from Massachusetts; ginkgos, a living Chinese fossil, from the sidewalks in the Bronx. In the Driftless before 9/11 he’d collected hawthorn
root stock onto which he’d grafted a medlar.

“It’s my greatest triumph!” he said, and while she cooked, he sat on the stairs and told her all about the history of the medlar, about the applelike fruits, which were best
eaten rotten, in spite of their nasty, unmistakable smell.

“Kind of like sugar-frosted baby shit.”

“Nice,” she said, stirring sage into her soup.

“They’re much maligned,” he said. “In Elizabethan times, the English used to call them open-arse fruit. The French called them cul de chien, or dog’s asshole.
Shakespeare used them as a metaphor for prostitution and anal intercourse. Where’s your copy of
Romeo and Juliet
?”

She sent him upstairs to her office to fetch her Riverside Shakespeare, and a moment later he was back, with the heavy book on his lap, reading the passage out loud.

“It’s Mercutio, making fun of Romeo for not getting it on with Juliet,” he told her.

She turned the burner down and covered the soup. “Where do you find this stuff?”

He told her about the website he’d found for medlar enthusiasts, where he’d come across the Shakespearean references. The idea for the medlar-hawthorn graft he’d found while
perusing
Certaine Experiments Concerning Fish and Fruite
, published in London in 1600, by John Taverner, Gentleman.

“It’s a book of that gentleman’s observations of fish ponds and fruit trees,” he said, wistfully. “I would like to publish a book like that.”

He was the least egotistical man she’d ever met, nor was he particularly ambitious. His land art projects, like the Means of Production, he deemed successful only when he himself had
disappeared from them.

“I want viewers to forget about me.”

“Why?” she asked. “Don’t you want credit for your work?”

“That’s not the point. It’s not about any system of credit. It’s not about the art market. The work succeeds when all the cleverness and artifice have disappeared, after
years of harvest and regrowth, when people begin to experience it as ambience. Any residual aura of me as artist or horticultural dramaturge will have faded. It will no longer matter. That’s
when the work gets interesting . . .”

“Interesting, how?”

“It becomes more than ‘art.’ It becomes part of the optical subconscious. Change has occurred. It’s the new normal, just the way things are.”

By his own measure, then, his work was successful, but the more successful he became, the more difficult he found it to make a living.

“I’ll never be a captain of industry,” he said, ruefully, one night when they were looking over their finances and trying to figure out how they would pay their bills. “I
feel like such a loser.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” she said. “If I’d wanted a captain of industry, I would have married one.”

He shook his head, sadly. “You picked a lemon in the garden of love.”

1.

Sometimes when I sit here at Fifi’s writing to you, I find myself wondering about you, what you look like, how tall you are, how old you are, and whether you’re a
female or a male. I wonder if I would recognize you if I passed you on the street. For all I know, you could be sitting a couple of tables over from me right now, even though I doubt it. Sometimes
I hope you’re a man, so you’ll like me because I’m cute, but sometimes I hope you’re a woman because then there’s a better chance you’ll understand me, even if
you don’t like me as much. Mostly I’ve decided it doesn’t matter. It’s not such a big deal, anyway, male, female. As far as I’m concerned, sometimes I feel more like
one, and sometimes I feel more like the other, and mostly I feel somewhere in-between, especially when my hair was first growing back after I’d shaved it.

Here’s a good story about in-between. The first date that Babette set me up on was with this guy who worked for a famous advertising agency that you’d probably recognize only I
can’t mention the name of it because I don’t want to get sued. He had loads of cash and suits and watches that were to die for, all the best Armani and Hermes and stuff, and Babette
said she thought we would really hit it off. We would be a perfect couple. It was my first time and Babette chose him, I’ll call him Ryu, for me because he was rich but also very polite and
gentle. He asked me if I wanted to go out to dinner first, but I was so nervous I thought I might throw up, so I told him I just wanted to get it over with. He took me to a nice place on Love Hotel
Hill in Shibuya, and he opened a bottle of champagne and took off all my clothes. We had a bath together and he got me pretty drunk. He kissed me a lot, until I started to get annoyed, and I told
him, so he stopped. He washed me all over, and he was polite enough not to say anything about my little scars or to ask for a refund on account of them.

Afterward, he dried me off and took me to bed, and that’s when I kind of freaked out. I mean, it was my first time, and I was scared because I didn’t know what to do. Probably if
he’d just been an asshole and held me down and gotten on with it, I would have just gone to my silent place inside the iceberg where I can freeze out the world, and probably I wouldn’t
have even noticed what he was doing to me or felt anything at all.

But Ryu wasn’t an asshole. He was being really nice and gentle, but I was too tense, and it was like trying to push a breakfast sausage through a glass window—it just wouldn’t
go. Every time he tried to put it in, I started trembling and couldn’t stop, and suddenly I was overcome with sadness that was like a wave washing over me. Maybe it was the champagne making
me weepy, but it hit me that here was this really nice guy who I thought would be a total jerk but it turned out he wasn’t, and he’d paid all this money for a date with me, and now just
when he was hoping to have some nice virgin sex, instead he had a hopelessly weeping schoolgirl with an impenetrable vagina on his hands. I felt like such a loser. It seemed like all I could do was
cry these days, first over some stupid bug wars, and now this.

He was way too polite to force me when I was crying. He sat up in bed and watched me for a while, and then he went over to the chair where his suit was laid out and he got a beautiful pressed
linen handkerchief from his pocket and gave it to me to blow my nose on. Then, because I was shivering, he brought his shirt over and draped it around my shoulders. It was so soft and silky
feeling, and before I knew it, I had slipped my arms through the sleeves, so he buttoned it up. The next thing was his pink silk necktie, which he tied in a lovely Windsor knot for me. Then his
pants, and then the suit jacket, and by the time I was dressed in his clothes, I had stopped crying, and he took my hand and led me over to the mirror and turned me around and around to admire my
reflection.

I was beautiful in his suit. He was a little bit bigger and taller than me, but really we weren’t so different. I’d taken off my wig, and under it, my head still looked pretty
buzzed, which he said he liked. He said I looked just like a bishonen,
¹⁴⁴
but actually I was cuter than any boy. Honest. I swear I could have fallen
in love with myself. He was standing behind me, naked, and he reached around into my breast pocket and took out a pack of cigarettes. He shook out two, put them in his mouth, and then lit them with
a classy platinum lighter that was hardly bigger than a match. He put one of the cigarettes between my lips and then went back to the bed to smoke the other one and watch me. Luckily I’d had
puffs from my dad’s cigarettes before, so I knew how. I cocked my head to one side and studied my reflection. I let the smoke trail from my pouting lips, which were red and puffy from all
that kissing we’d done. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see him in the mirror. He lay on the bed, smoking his cigarette, and I could see he was really turned on. I turned and poured
myself another glass of champagne and drank it down, and then I stubbed out my cigarette and went over to the bed and climbed on top of him.

“Close your eyes,” I said. “Pretend you’re me.”

He closed his eyes and let me kiss him for a while, and then he reached up and undid the Windsor on his pink silk tie and unbuttoned his shirt. He unzipped the zipper on his fly. He pulled down
his pants and I kicked them off, but I kept his shirt on while I straddled his hips, and he guided me down, and it hurt, but only for a while.

Afterward, we lay side by side, and he lit another cigarette, and he asked me if I wanted one. I told him no thank you. Then he asked if the sex had been okay for me, and I said sure, and thanks
for asking. I mean, that’s nice, right? I bet a lot of guys wouldn’t even bother.

“Did it hurt?” he asked, and I told him a little, but I didn’t mind because I have a really high pain threshold. He smiled and told me I was funny.

“How old are you anyway?” he asked, and I was just about to say fifteen, when suddenly I remembered.

“Sixteen,” I said. “I’m sixteen.”

He laughed. “You sound surprised.”

“Yes,” I said. “It’s my birthday. I almost forgot.”

He said he was sorry he didn’t have a gift for me and then gave me his slick little lighter. We had a couple more dates after that, and we always did it the same way, with me wearing his
suit. Once, I made him put on my school uniform, but he looked so ridiculous with his knobbly knees sticking out from under the pleats that I got angry and wanted to hit him, so I did. I was
wearing his beautiful Armani, which is a cruel suit, and he stood passively in front of me, wearing my skirt and my sailor blouse, and kept his eyes fixed on the floor. His passive attitude made me
even angrier, and the madder I got, the harder I wanted to hit him. I slapped him until I was almost hysterical, and when he raised his eyes, they were so full of sadness and pity for me, I thought
maybe I would have to kill him. But the next time my hand came toward him, he caught my wrist.

“Enough,” he said. “You’re only hurting yourself.”

I was wearing Haruki #1’s sky soldier watch. The old metal buckle on the watchband cut into my wrist, where he was gripping it. The skin on his face looked red and angry. I put my other
hand on his swollen cheek.

“I’m sorry,” I said, starting to cry.

He brought my stinging palm to his lips and kissed it.

“I forgive you,” he said.

He really liked Number One’s sky soldier watch, and once he asked me if I would trade it for his Rolex. The Rolex had real diamonds in it. I was tempted, but of course I said no.

2.

Sometimes, after we made love, Ryu just wanted to lie in bed and drink Rémy and watch porno on the television, so I would get dressed in his suit and leave him there and
walk around. Sometimes I even left the hotel, making sure I walked by the side where our room was, so he could see me from the window if he happened to be looking. He liked that.