The Orange Blossom Express

by Marlena Evangeline

  “The Maitre d’?”

  “He gave your bell-bottoms a once over.”

  “But I’m wearing a sport coat,” Gary laughed. “And I have my tie in case.” He pulled a tie out of his pocket. “I’ve learned. If I get hassled I can slip this on. It doesn’t always work.”

  “So tell me about it,” she said, lighting a cigarette. Lucy and Gary had seemed unsinkable. Perfect for each other.

  “How can you smoke that shit,” he complained thinking he’d just as soon talk about something else.

  “I don’t know. I’m gonna quit tomorrow.” She blew the smoke away from him.

  “Don’t. I’m allergic.” He sneezed.

  “Okay,” she squashed the cigarette. “You’ll have to do all the talking though. Even if I’m not smoking. You’ve got some explaining to do.”

  “Lucy’s so involved with the babies; well, she has changed. She doesn’t have time for much else. Certainly not me. But it’s more. I don’t know.” Knowing how shallow it sounded now that he said it, but the feelings weren’t shallow, he knew; they were ass deep in mud, thick, swampy, stuff, he could barely walk through. And now this quicksand, and this struggle, almost drowning, his nose barely above water.

  “Seems like they’re your kids too,” Maggie said dryly. Assessing her old friend in this new dilemma that she couldn’t quite assess because it wasn’t hers, she only thought she could so she tried like all friends.

  “I shouldn’t try and shift blame. After the twins came, things fell apart. Anyway. That’s when I started seeing Sheila. It wasn’t really serious. She was just someone to talk to. But Lucy was pissed. I guess I can’t blame her. We can barely talk.”

  “I can’t say that I blame her.” Maggie leaned her elbows on the table and moved forward. “I’d be pissed off too.” Thinking she was indeed pissed off. “You’ve made a mess,” she accused. “Lucy’s invited me up, and I’m going.”

  “I think you should. It would be good for her to get out a little. Mary’s there now and that would give you all some time. I can’t talk my way out of this and I’m not even going to try. It’s still good to see you. You want a chilled artichoke or something?”

  “Sure, an artichoke would be good. I hear Melody Foods is booming.”

  “Yeah, I’m making money hand over fist. The product line is growing. I’ve got a good operation, Maggie. I wanted Lucy to get involved in the business and she didn’t want to. She really doesn’t have the time now and she likes clothes better than food. Food is my game.”

  “Yeah, Lucy’s always been good with clothes. If you’re gonna do business, you damn well better be dealing with something you love.”

  “True. But my business is something we could have done together.”

  “You have the children together.”

  “True.”

  “But I know what you mean. I always thought that would be a great kind of marriage. One with common interests. Where two people shared more than physical space. A real connection.”

  “You’re still the idealist, even after Hank.”

  “Doesn’t seem to do me a lot of good, but I can’t seem to shake it.”

  “The idealism?”

  “Yes. Tempered with a bit of reality.”

  “You’re kidding yourself, Maggie.”

  “Why do you say so?”

  “I think you’re a romantic and always will be.”

  “Oh, romance is here to stay. Let’s hope so.”

  “Your reality is romantic.”

  “No idealistic. A bit different. I’m not certain that that makes it easier or better. It does make the focus different.”

  “Ideals are hard to realize.”

  “Oh, tell me. You think I don’t know this. All I know is that I have a life to live and I need to learn how to do it. I have to be able to make a living. All the stuff. But I want it to make a difference. You’re making a difference.”

  “I’ve been lucky. I was in the right place at the right time and I know it. Timing counts.”

  “Why is it so difficult to figure it out?”

  “Maybe you’re making it difficult.”

  “Do you think? Because I want what I do to matter. At some level? Because I’m discontent with the ordinary way of doing things. Maybe I’ll never figure it out but I can promise you I’ll keep trying.”

  “That’s my girl. Do you still see Hank?”

  “Yeah, he’s moving around a lot. Doing a lot of travel from what I understand.”

  “Regrets?”

  “Sure. A pile of them. Plenty.”

  “See. It ain’t easy.”

  “Never said it was. I just gave a bunch of his clothes to the Salvation Army. You know how it is. Things he left behind that I kept wearing. After we broke up, he kept saying he wanted to go back together, all the while living with one girl or another, or some such thing, talking about having a relationship with me and not having it. Sort of laying the whole break-up on me as if it was me who did all the fucking around in the first place, and it wasn’t, it was him, but as it ended, it was me. Do you see? So anyway I gave all that stuff away.”

  “That’s Hank. And you?”

  “Plunking along.”

  “Like?”

  “Still potting.”

  “Playing with clay?”

  “Yeah, it’s what I do for sanity. I do other things for money. Things are better because of it. More balanced. Just doing business was pretty bad, I thought. After I came back from Mexico, I bailed out. It was getting crazy anyway. I’d decided it was sorta like living in poverty. You know? Poverty of the soul. There was money for a while, but I needed something to put my heart into. I can do that with clay. And I read. It satisfies something business couldn’t. Ever.”

  “It turned out being the opposite for me. I wasn’t satisfied with my art.”

  “Yeah. True. Different strokes.” The waiter brought two artichokes and placed them on the table. Maggie pulled off the small spiny outer leaves, and put them on her bread plate. She pulled a fleshy leaf over her teeth. “Good choke, eh.”

  “How are you living?”

  “I still wholesale antiques. But no shop. The shop thing wasn’t for me. I work out of the house. I sell a bit of pottery from time to time, too.”

  “Nice work if you can get it.”

  “I know. I’m thinking about going back to school. Perhaps doing something useful. I’m not sure what. Maybe I’ll teach art, who knows. Something for my old age.”

  “Right,” he laughed. “Let me know when that happens.”

  “I’m serious, Gary. It seems we should be useful somehow.”

  “You are useful, Maggie. Beautifully useful.”

  “That’s not funny. There has to be more, somewhere, that we can offer as human creatures. Don’t you think? You’re doing that. Your business really serves a need in the community, making it better, don’t you think that?”

  “Yeah,” he said thoughtfully. “I do. I always have. That’s part of what’s been good about it. Aside from the money. I’ve grown used to the money.”

  “One has a tendency to do just that. Certainly we have to have it. The problem is how to make it.”

  Maggie had been mulling the problem over since she closed the antique store. How to make money. How to feel good about doing it. How much? Enough. Enough to live on was how much she needed. Not more. And not less either. The world demanded one have enough, and how it comes has importance. This stuff was tough complex business and it didn’t come easy. Somehow she had thought the whole thing would be less hard, but it was the same for everyone else, it seemed everyone she knew was having a less easy time of it. But they had a responsibility to each other somehow. To do the best they could, at whatever they could do. She needed more content in the form of Maggie, it seemed, to do what she would need to do for this life. Not that she thought knowledge was an end in itself; she felt she’d already learned enough for three life times. And the things she had learned would serve her intangibly;
they would help get her through the days. Yet she needed something tangible to hang her hat on, some kind of hook to use if she needed it; something that would be useful, not just to herself, but usefulness in a community sense. Yet she could think usefulness in individual ways that suited her, too. If one lived as best one could, and set an example, that was useful even if it didn’t involve position or community. The small acts a day might be made of were often more significant than large blundering acts; Maggie felt she knew this intimately. But that need not mean one always act smally. One might still dream of largeness. And Maggie’s imagination had not grown smaller over the years, it had ballooned into bigger kinds of thinking, thinking that moved out of her personal life to other lives and how people were living them. Yet she pushed her imagination into the form of the clay she was working, and tethered it, somewhat, by doing so. What happened because of it first appeared in the bowls she threw. They were centered. Each time she sat down at the potters wheel, she could press against the clay, and in minutes, twirl the spinning lump to its absolute center. Each turn of the wheel etched a pattern from her fingers in the clay, as she pulled up gently, one groove followed another, the succession making its ordered appearance in the form of a bowl. The bowls grew easily. She had learned a craft and it pleased her, learning it, but what pleased her more was putting what she had learned into action, the making of centered bowls. It was as if she’d finally found a pattern for the bowls right in her own two hands, like it had been there all along, and her job had been to find it. While she’d always carried the image of the bowls in her imagination, the task of learning to make them was more complex than just thinking. She had to join imaginative thought to action. Sometimes while the wheel was spinning she’d think that the bowls existed in the clay, already, that her mind simply created the shape that her hands uncovered. Or that her mind knew the shape beforehand so the clay grew to meet it, because she had imagined it precisely. But most days she accepted the joint effort of thought and action making practiced harmony: a rhythm that rose from the daily practice of spinning clay. She’d even found a market for the small blue bowls. They were a moderate size of small, not terribly, almost medium, but not quite. The bowls Maggie made were indeed quite usable. It pleased her terribly that people wanted to buy them; it gave her bowls validity. And she liked that. It had simply taken a while to find. Perhaps too long. But just how long was too long? Who’s measuring? Who could decide that for Maggie’s bowls except Maggie? What was important was that Maggie never quite gave up on the bowls. She put them aside from time to time, but she never gave up. And while she perfected the form, the centered bowls, she also worked on a cobalt-blue glaze she mixed herself, weighing the elements, mixing them precisely, firing them in the hot kiln, fusing glass and clay, liking most the surprise: the sudden imperfections forged by the fiery kiln. Like recognition, lost, found, lost. Both the centered form of the bowl and the random explosions of heat that left imperfections in the glass colored her imaginative life that had become a need, like a substance, food for thought, enchantment. With what? Often she wasn’t certain. Surely she was enchanted when a bowl came to life in her hands, or when a certain idea became reality. And the random splashes of color created by the fire, a kaleidoscope in light and dazzling flame, enchantment. The excitement in the particular, the singular bowl, that hovered sometimes in a distant idea not yet tangible, a far-a-way kind of notion, a hazy outline lingering in her mind.

  Gary had reacted against his own hazy outlines when he was painter, finally, eliminating them for the world of food that seemed to serve him better. The world of the particular. He had brought nuts and grains to the marketplace in a nuts and bolts kind of way. A crafty way. He was glad for the decision. It was a matter for him of substituting what worked for what didn’t. He found the freedom of money liberating; he could do as he wished, money allowed him that. He could have any toy he wished. He found quickly when he bought a toy, like the Italian road bike he spent way too much on, that he didn’t have the time to enjoy it. So he had lovely unused toys, by-products of the successful business man. Yet he had become strangely satisfied, he thought, with his business. The particular hard line of thought that it demanded.

  Maggie scraped the soft part of another leaf over her teeth, after dipping it in drawn butter, and then added it to the heap of steamed leaves on her bread plate.

  “What’s happened,” said Gary, shaking a spiny leaf at her, “is that I’ve turned art around in my life. I’ve abstracted my vision from necessity, the necessity of earning a living, but I think it’s more. I’ve sort of made food my thought. You can’t get more basic or simple than that—especially the kind of organic foods I handle—but even as profitable as it is, the basic idea in the beginning was more than profit. I think that’s why it works. Yeah, I think so.” He shook the artichoke leaf at her again before he ate it. “Food is the art of my life.”

  “It’s also terribly profitable.”

  “Yes. Does that bother you?”

  “The question is does it bother you?”

  “Why do you say this?”

  “Haven’t you sold out? Not only in business but your life?”

  “Unfair Maggie,” he said, shocked, but thinking that he was no longer the man Maggie knew in Big Bear, but she was no longer the same girl so it seemed they were both even-steven, not thinking so much about money but about Lucy but how could Maggie really know about Lucy? She could only know what Lucy said about it which was a far cry from the way he thought about it and Maggie had to know that somewhere she had to recognize that she didn’t know as much as she thought about his relationship but she certainly thought she knew and if she hadn’t thought it and said it she wouldn’t be Maggie.

  “I’m taking good care of her, Maggie. Lucy has all the money she needs.”

  “This isn’t about money.”

  “Like hell it’s not.”

  “Damn it, Gary, you sound just like Hank.”

  “So what are you living on Maggie. Air?”

  “As a matter of fact yes,” she took a deep breath. “That’s exactly how I choose to do it. This is about choice. I don’t want to do it like you do it, Gary. Yes. You have it. Money is important. Too damned important. A necessity. Like food. But I can’t do what I do for that alone. It has to be more organic. That’s a word you understand, right?”

  “In dollars and cents,” knowing how very much profit that particular word demanded these days, and with him marketing new products all the time, he knew how very much more the word might generate.

  “What is the matter with you. You’ve just left your wife and children and you talk only of money? What about the rest?”

  “Ah guilt. You want me to feel guilty,” knowing that he felt guilt every time he saw his children and especially when he left, but not just guilt-pain of not having them around, all the little baby bodies that he loves, so it was easier, yes, easier thank you to just deal with money because the rest of it, all the rest of it overwhelmed him, it hurt, it hurt like hell.

  “Why not? Shows you have something inside you,” knowing they were in different dialects now: the he-dialects the she-dialects and pulling back from understanding. “But it probably makes you feel useful in some sense,” she said, weakening. “I’d like the feeling. The usefulness of it.”

  “Beauty is useful, Maggie. And I’m serious now. I don’t mean physical beauty. I mean the kind of beauty you can make. I mean art.”

  “Yes. I think that’s true.”

  “Moreover, I don’t mean plastic beauty. I don’t even mean what most people think of beauty. You know that sucks. In fact, I don’t think I mean beauty at all really. The notion of beauty is so prostituted in this world it’s almost sacrilege to use the word. I mean art. Maybe even imagination. The kind of vision that springs from creative thought. I think it’s organic. Something in the process of becoming that must subject itself to endless revision by virtue of coming into being. Am I making myself clear? I mean, the necessity of
my business incorporates a vision—and that vision extends to the community—and the long and short of that happens by thinking creatively. But it’s a process in those terms. I suppose it’s idealistic and that everyone wouldn’t see it, but I still think this business, the way I do it, is an art. It is born from my imagination, and from my emotional response to the needs it serves. Not from the end product. That has to be the difference. That is the way business should grow, out of the emotional needs of the people that it serves.”

  “Ha. You see you aren’t lost completely. I knew that. We have a social imagination at work right now. We’re learning how to value our communal emotions. That’s happening. Or maybe it’s happened and it’s on the way out. After all, everything is splintering. Love, peace, anger, rage, necessity.”

  “How can I be a socialist and a capitalist at the same time?”

  “Creative thinking.” She laughed.

  “Most people don’t value real creativity, Maggie.”

  “Maybe they simply don’t know how.”

  “Should be basic education.”

  “Yes, but you can’t convince me that business is art. That’s bullshit pure and simple. Business is business. While it employs the imagination, it employs it in the real world. Imagination doesn’t have to have a responsibility to the real world.”

  “What about your desire for usefulness then? What happens to that?”

  “A point well taken.”

  “That’s my point. Things are so complex anymore we have to learn to value the concept of art, and life as art, within the realm of real experience. And imaginative thinking is real experience. The trick is to teach that it has value, maybe in other ways, newer creative ways. I’m not certain I have any pat answers. But it’s the old way of doing business that is bullshit. I think we have to reinvent it.”

  “Hmm. I love this part,” she said, scraping the spines off the heart of artichoke. “It’s always worth the trouble.”

  “I know,” said Gary. And he believed in things of the heart, but when he tried to unravel the problem of his failed marriage, he couldn’t, he couldn’t take the ball of thread back to its original tangle. He just knew that it had happened. He had tried for the longest time to roll it back up, put things back in place, but somehow he couldn’t do it. He wanted to do it for Lucy, and especially for the children, but the ball kept falling out of his hands, rolling beyond his reach.