The Language of Flowers (21 page)

Many nights I slept in the water tower. Grant had taken up cooking in a serious way, and his kitchen counter was stacked with illustrated cookbooks. As I sat at the kitchen table and read, or looked out the window, or told an obnoxious bride story, Grant chopped and seasoned and stirred. After dinner he would kiss me, only once, and wait to see my reaction. Sometimes I kissed him back, and he would pull me to him, and we would stand intertwined in the doorway for half an hour; other times my lips remained cold and unmoving. Even I didn’t know how I would react on any given day. About our deepening relationship, I felt fear and desire in equal, unpredictable parts. At the end of each night he walked outside to wherever it was he slept, and I locked the door behind him.

On a weeknight in late May, after months of this ritual, Grant leaned forward as if to kiss me but stopped just inches from my lips. He put his hands on the small of my back and pulled me to him so that the length of our bodies touched but not our faces. “I think it’s time,” he said.

“For what?” I asked.

“For me to have my bed back.”

I clicked my tongue against the roof of my mouth and looked out the window.

“What’re you afraid of?” he asked, when I had been quiet for a long time.

I thought about his question. He was right, I knew, that it was fear that kept us apart; but of what, specifically, was I afraid?

“I don’t like to be touched,” I said, repeating Meredith’s long-ago words. But even as I spoke them, I knew they sounded ridiculous. Our entire bodies were pressed together, and I didn’t pull away.

“Then I won’t touch you,” he said. “Not unless you ask me to.”

“Not even when I’m asleep?”

“Especially not then.” I knew he wouldn’t.

I nodded. “You can sleep in your bed,” I said. “But I’m sleeping on the couch. And I better not wake up with you beside me or I’m driving straight home.”

“You won’t,” Grant said. “I promise.”

That night I lay awake on the love seat, trying not to fall asleep until Grant did, but he wasn’t sleeping, either. I heard him rolling around above me, rearranging the covers, knocking over a stack of books. Finally, after a long period of silence, when I was sure he had fallen asleep, I heard a soft tapping on the ceiling above me.

“Victoria?” A whisper came spiraling down the stairs.

“Yeah?”

“Good night,” he said.

“Good night.” I pressed a smile into the orange velour.

After a full season of jonquil, Annemarie was a different person. She came in every Friday morning for a fresh bouquet, and her skin was pinker and her body, finally free from the belted jacket, curved underneath thin cotton sweaters. Bethany, she told me, had gone to Europe for a month with Ray and would come back engaged. She said it with certainty, as if it had already happened.

Annemarie brought her friends, many with frilly-dressed little girls and all with disappointing marriages. They leaned on the counter while their children pulled flowers out of buckets taller than they were and spun around the room. The women discussed the details of their relationships,
trying to reduce their problems to a single word. I had explained the importance of specificity, and the ladies clung to my words. The conversations were sad, and amusing, and strangely hopeful all at the same time. The relentlessness with which these women tried to repair their relationships was foreign to me; I didn’t understand why they didn’t simply give up.

I knew that if it were me I would have let go: of the man, of the child, and of the women with whom I discussed them. But for the first time in my life, this thought did not bring me relief. I began to notice the ways in which I kept myself isolated. There were obvious things, such as living in a closet with six locks, and subtler ones, such as working on the opposite side of the table from Renata or standing behind the cash register when I talked to customers. Whenever possible, I separated my body from those around me with plaster walls, solid wood tables, or heavy metal objects.

But somehow, over six careful months, Grant had broken through this. I not only permitted his touch, I craved it, and I started to wonder if, perhaps, change was possible for me. I began to hope my pattern of letting go was something that could be outgrown, like a childhood dislike of onions or spicy food.

By the end of May I had nearly completed my dictionary. I captured images of many of the remaining, elusive plants at the Conservatory of Flowers in Golden Gate Park. After printing, mounting, and labeling each photo, I put
X
’s in my dictionary and scanned the pages to see how many flowers were left. Only one: the cherry blossom. I was upset with myself for the omission. There were plenty of cherry trees in the Bay Area, dozens of varietals in the Japanese Tea Garden alone. But their bloom period was short—weeks or even days, depending on the year—and I had been too distracted by spring to capture their brief moment of beauty.

Grant would know where to find a cherry blossom, even now, long past its season. I wrote the single missing flower on a scrap of paper and taped it to the outside of the orange box. It was time to bring it to him.

I put the box in the backseat of my car and strapped it in with a seat
belt. It was Sunday, and I got to the water tower before Grant got home from the farmers’ market. Letting myself in with the spare key, I opened the cupboard and helped myself to a loaf of raisin bread. The box, bright orange on the weathered wood table, took up more space than it should have. It felt loud and new in the small kitchen of quiet antique appliances. I was about to take it upstairs when I heard Grant’s truck settle into the gravel.

He opened the door and went immediately to the box.

“Is this it?” he asked.

I nodded, handing him the scrap of paper with the missing flower. “But not quite complete.”

Grant let the scrap of paper fall to the floor and opened the lid. He flipped through the cards, admiring my photographs one at a time. I turned one over to show him the printed flower meanings, then replaced it and shut the lid on his fingers.

“You can look later,” I said, retrieving the note from the floor and flapping it in the air in front of him. “Right now I need help finding this.”

Grant held up the paper and read the missing flower. He shook his head. “A cherry blossom? You’ll have to wait until next April.”

My camera tapped against the table. “Almost a full year? I can’t wait that long.”

Grant laughed. “What do you want me to do? Transplant a cherry tree into my greenhouse? Even then, it wouldn’t bloom.”

“So, what can I do?”

He thought for a moment, knowing I wouldn’t give up easily. “Look in my botany textbooks,” he suggested.

I wrinkled my nose and leaned forward until I was close enough to kiss him, but I didn’t. Instead, I rubbed my nose against his stubbly cheek and bit his ear. “Please?”

“Please what?” he asked.

“Please suggest something more beautiful than a textbook illustration.”

Grant looked out the window. He seemed to be debating something
internally. It was almost as if he had possession of a late-blooming cherry blossom in his pocket and was trying to decide if I was important and trustworthy enough to receive it. Finally, he nodded.

“Okay,” he said. “Follow me.”

Grant walked out the door. I put my camera around my neck and walked in his footsteps. We crossed the gravel and climbed the steps of the main house. He withdrew a key from his pocket and unlocked the back door, which opened into a laundry room. A pale pink woman’s blouse fluttered on the drying rack. Grant led me into the kitchen, where the curtains were drawn, and the counters were dusty and dark. All the appliances were unplugged, and the absolute quiet of the refrigerator was unsettling.

From the kitchen we walked through a swinging door to the dining room. The table had been pushed to the side and a sleeping bag was spread out on the wood floor. I recognized Grant’s sweatshirt and balled socks beside it.

“When you had evicted me from my own home,” he said, smiling and pointing to the pile.

“Don’t you have a bedroom here?”

Grant nodded. “I haven’t slept there for a decade, though,” he said. “To tell you the truth, I’ve only been upstairs once since my mother died.”

The stairs loomed on my left, a wide wooden banister curving up the side of the room. Grant took a step toward them.

“Come on,” he said. “There’s something I want to show you.” At the top of the stairs we came to a long hall, with doors shut on both sides of the corridor. The hallway ended in front of five steps. We walked up and ducked through a low door.

The small room was hotter than the rest of the house, and filled with the smell of dust and dried paint. I knew before locating the gabled, boarded-up window that we were in Catherine’s studio. When my eyes adjusted to the light, I took in the paneled walls, the long drafting table, and the shelves of art supplies. Half-empty glass jars of purple paint lined the top shelf, paintbrushes frozen in hard pools of lavender and periwinkle. A string circling the room displayed drawings—large, intricately
rendered flowers in graphite and charcoal—hung with wooden clothespins.

“My mother was an artist,” Grant said, gesturing to the work. “She spent hours of every day up here. For most of my life, she drew only flowers: rare ones, tropical ones, or short-blooming, delicate ones. She had a fear of not having the right flower to express what she wanted to say at any given moment.”

He led me to an oak file cabinet in the corner of the room and opened the middle drawer. It was labeled
L–Q
. Every file was marked with a plant name, and each held a file folder with a single drawing: parsley, passionflower, peppermint, periwinkle, pineapple, and pink. He thumbed through the
P
’s until he got to poplar, white. He withdrew the file folder and opened it; it was empty. The drawing was in the blue room, still wrapped in a silk ribbon with the inked day and time of our first date.

Grant closed the drawer and opened another, looking through the files until he found a drawing of a cherry blossom. He placed it on the empty drafting table and disappeared through the door.

I sat down, admiring the work. The lines were quick, confident, the shadows deep and complex. The blossom filled the entire paper, and its beauty was nearly overwhelming. I bit my lip.

Grant returned, watching my expression as I studied the paper. “Definition?” he asked.

“Good education,”
I said.

He shook his head. “
Impermanence
. The beauty and transience of life.”

This time, he was right. I nodded.

Grant held up a hammer he had retrieved and pried the board off the window. Light flooded through the broken glass and onto the tabletop like a spotlight. He placed the drawing in the rectangles of light and sat on the edge of the table. “Shoot,” he said, caressing first the camera and then my body beneath it.

He watched as I extracted the camera from its case and turned to the image. I shot from every angle: standing on the floor, on a chair, and then in front of the window, blocking the harsh light. I adjusted the
shutter speed and the focus. Grant’s eyes were on my fingers, my face, and my feet crouched on the tabletop. I went through an entire roll. His eyes did not waver as I loaded a second roll and then a third. My skin lifted under his gaze as if the surface of my body were reaching toward him without the permission of my mind.

When I was done, I returned the drawing to the file folder. The next day I would have the film developed, and my dictionary would be complete. I turned the camera to where Grant sat, unmoving, on the table, and studied his face through the viewfinder.

Sunlight illuminated his profile. Circling, I captured his face in light and shadow. The camera clicked as I walked around him, starting at the top of his head and following his hairline down to the collar of his shirt. I rolled up his sleeves and photographed his forearms, the tight, protruding muscle in his wrist, his thick fingers and dirt-filled fingernails. I took off his shoes and shot the bottoms of his feet. When I ran out of film, I took off the camera.

I unbuttoned my blouse and took it off, too.

The bumps disappeared from the skin of my arms and appeared on Grant’s. I climbed onto the table.

He folded his feet under him and moved to face me, then pressed his hands flat onto my stomach and held them there. His fingers lifted and fell as I breathed deep into my belly. My own fingers, clutching the edge of the table, were white.

He moved his hands around my back to my bra, unhooking it gently, one clasp at a time. Peeling my fingers from the tabletop, he slipped the bra off one arm, then the other. I reached for the table’s edge again, squeezing as if trying to maintain balance on a rocking boat.

“Are you sure?” he asked.

I nodded.

He lay me down on the table, supporting my head as it eased onto the hard surface. He removed the rest of my clothes, and then his own.

Lying down next to me, Grant began to kiss my face. I turned my head toward the window, afraid I would be repulsed by his nudity. The only adult I had ever seen naked was Mother Ruby, and the image of her wet, hanging flesh had plagued me for months afterward.

Grant’s fingers traveled my body with skill. He took as much care with me as he would have with a delicate sapling, and I tried to focus on his touch, the warmth he pulled to the surface of my skin, the weaving of our bodies together. He wanted me, and I knew he had wanted me for a long time. But directly below the window was the rose garden, and even as my body responded to his touch, my mind seemed to hover among the plants, thirty feet below. Grant moved on top of me. The rose garden was at the height of its bloom, the flowers open and heavy. I counted and categorized the individual bushes, starting with the reds, navigating up and down the rows: sixteen, from light red to deep scarlet. Grant’s mouth traveled to my ear, open and wet. There were twenty-two pink rosebushes, if I didn’t count the corals separately. Grant began to move quickly, his own pleasure eclipsing his attentiveness, and I closed my eyes at the pain. Behind my eyelids were the white roses, uncounted. I held my breath until Grant rolled off me.