Lights Out

by Douglas Clegg

  He waited to hear her request.

  “I want you to tell me—no, promise me—you will take care of this better than those last ones. This should live, if cared for, for over a month. You do love flowers, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” he said, and, because he wanted this tiny flower so much for his Jo, he brought Moira close to him and pressed his lips against hers, and kissed around her glowing face, tasting the steam from the laundry. He wanted it so badly, he knew this flower would somehow win his Jo. Somehow, she would manage to leave her husband, and they would run away together, maybe even to the Fiji Islands to live off mango and to braid beautiful Jo’s hair with the island parasite flowers.

  Yet there was something about Moira that he liked, too. She wasn’t Jo, but she was different from any woman he knew. When he drew his face back from hers, her face was radiant and shining, and not the middle-aged woman he had thought just a minute before. She was a young girl, after all, barely out of her teens, with all the enthusiasm of fresh, new life. He wondered what his life would be like with a girl like this, what living in the city with her would feel like, what it would be like to live surrounded by the frozen and burning flowers.

  There were tears in Moira’s eyes when she left him, and he sensed that she knew why he wanted the beautiful flowers.

  And still, she gave him the rare and exquisite ruby blossom.

  The tiny flower died fourteen days after.

  Gus could not return to the city for more than six weeks.

  A drought held the valley in its grip and he had to take special pains to make sure that the gardens didn’t die. Jo didn’t come and see him, but he knew that it was for the best. She was married, he was merely the gardener, and no matter how many gorgeous flowers he brought to her, she would never be his. He thought of Moira, and her sweetness and mystery; her generosity was something he had never experienced before in a woman, for the ones he had known were often selfish and arrogant in their beauty. He also knew that the old man must suspect his overfamiliarity with Jo, and so his days would be numbered in the Hudson River house.

  One afternoon he took off again for the city, but it took several hours, as there was an automobile stuck on the tracks just before coming into Grand Central Station. He got there in the evening, and went to the laundry, but both it and the icehouse were closed for the day.

  He remembered that Moira had mentioned her father’s shop, and so he went into the flower district and scoured each one, asking after her. Finally, he came to the shop on Seventh Avenue and there she was, sitting behind a counter arranging iris in a crystal vase.

  She turned to see him, and in the light of early evening she was the simple girl he had seen the first day they had met.

  How the mist and the ice could change her features, but in the daylight world, she was who she was!

  “Gus,” she said, “I thought you weren’t coming back. Ever.”

  “I had to,” he said, not able to help his grin, or the sweat of fear that evaporated along his forehead, fear that he would not find her. It was like in the moving pictures, when the lover and his beloved were reunited at the end. He ran around the counter and grabbed her up in his arms.

  “Oh, Moira, Moira,” he buried his face in her neck, and she was laughing freely, happily.

  She closed the shop and pulled down the shade.

  “Gus, I want you to know, I love you. I know you might not love me, but I love you.”

  Here he was, a gardener, and she, a flower shop girl. How could a more perfect pair be created, one for the other?

  “There’s something I want to give you,” she said.

  “You’ve given me—” he began, but she didn’t let him finish.

  “Something I want to give you,” she began unbuttoning the top of her blouse.

  When she was completely naked, he saw what was different about her. “I could never give my heart freely … knowing I was … different … like this …”

  He stepped back, away from her.

  “Who did this to you?” he asked, his voice trembling.

  She looked at him with those wide, perfect eyes, and said, “I was born this way.”

  The threads.

  There, in the whiteness of her thighs.

  He was horrified, and fascinated, for he had never seen this before.

  Her genitals had been sewn together, you see, with some thread that was strong, yet silken and impossibly slender, like a spider’s web. She brought his hand there, to the center of her being, and she asked him to be careful with her. “As careful as you are with the flowers.”

  “It’s monstrous,” he said, trying to hide the revulsion in his voice, trying to draw back his fingers.

  “Break the threads,” she said, “and I will show you the most beautiful flower that has ever been created.”

  “I can’t.” He shivered.

  Tears welled in her eyes. “I love you with all my being,” she said, “and I want to give you this … this … even if it means …” Her voice trailed off.

  He found himself plucking at the threads, then pulling at them, until finally he got down on his hands and knees and placed his mouth there, and bit into the threads to open her.

  There must have been some pain, but she only cried out once, then was silent.

  The skin beneath his fingers curled, blossoming, and there was a smell, no, a scent, like a spice wind across a tropical shore. Her pelvis opened, prolapsed like a flower blooming suddenly, in one night, and her skin folded backward on itself, with streaks of red and yellow and white bursting forth from the wound, from the pollen that spread golden, and the wonderful colors that radiated from between her thighs, until there was nothing but flower.

  He cupped his hands around it. It was the most exotic flower he had ever seen, in his hands, it was the beauty that had been inside her, and she had allowed him to open her, to hold this rare flower in his hands.

  Gus wondered if he had gone insane, or if this indeed was the most precious of all flowers, this gift of love, this sacrifice that she had made for him.

  He concealed the bloom in a hatbox and carried it back to the estate with him.

  In the morning, he entered the great house without knocking, and his heart pounded as loud as his footsteps as he crossed the grand foyer. He called to the mistress of the house boldly.

  “Jo!” he shouted, “Jo! Look what I have brought you!”

  He didn’t care if the old man heard him, he didn’t care if he would be without a job, none of it mattered, for he had found the greatest gift for his Jo, the woman who would not now deny him. He knew he loved her now, his Jo, he knew what love was now, what the sacrifice of love meant.

  She was already dressed for riding, and she blushed when she saw him. “You shouldn’t come in like this. You have no right.”

  He opened the hatbox and retrieved the flower.

  “This is for you,” he said, and she ran to him, taking it up in her hands, smelling it, wiping its petals across her lips.

  “It’s beautiful,” she said, smiling, clasping his hand, and just as quickly letting go. “Darling,” she called out, turning to the staircase, “darling, look at the lovely flower our Gus has brought us, look,” and like a young girl in love, she ran up the stairs, with the flower, to the bedroom where the old man coughed and wheezed.

  Gus stood there, in the hall, feeling as if his heart had stopped.

  “It was three days later,” he told me as I sat on the edge of the nursing room bed, “that the flower died, and Jo put it out with the garbage. But I retrieved it, what was left of it, so that I would always remember that love. What love was. What terror it is.”

  The old man began weeping, like a baby.

  “It’s all right,” I said, “it’s just a bad dream. Just like a bad dream.”

  “But it happened, boy,” he said, and he passed me the flower. “I want you to keep this. I’m going to die someday soon. Maybe within a month, who knows?”

  “I couldn’
t,” I said, shaking my head. “It’s yours.”

  “No,” he said, grinning madly. “It never was mine. Have you ever been with a woman, boy?”

  I shook my head.

  “How old are you?”

  “Seventeen. Just last month.”

  “Ah, seventeen. A special time. What do you think human love is, boy?”

  I shrugged. “Caring. Between people. I guess.”

  “Oh, no,” a smile blossomed across his face. “It’s not caring, boy, it’s not caring. It’s opening up your skin to someone else, and opening theirs, too. Everything I told you is true, boy. I want you to take this dried flower—”

  I held it in my hand. For a moment I believed his story and I found myself feeling sad, too. I thought of her, of Moira, giving herself up like that. “She loved you.”

  “Her? She never loved me,” he said. “Never.”

  “How can you say that? You just told me—”

  His voice deepened. He sounded as evil as I have ever heard a man sound.

  “Jo never loved me.”

  “Not Jo,” I said as I looked at the dried flower. “Moira.”

  He plucked it from my fingers and held the last of its petals in his open palm.

  “You thought that was Moira? Oh, no, boy, I buried her beneath the garden. This is Jo. She eventually left her husband for me. And then, when I had her…O, Lord, when I had her, boy, I tore her apart, I made her bloom, and I left her to dry in sand the way she had dried my heart.” He laughed, clinging more tightly to my arm so that I could not get away. “Her flower was not as pretty as Moira’s. Moira. Lovely Moira.” He sniffed the air, as if he could still smell the fragrance of the opening flower. “I made Jo bloom, boy, and then I stepped on her flower, and I kept it in darkness and dust. Now, boy, that’s what love is.” He laughed even while he crushed the dried blossom with his free hand, turning it to dust.

  “O, rare and most exquisite!” He shouted after me as I pulled away from him and backed out of that madman’s room. “O, why,” he laughed, “why hast thou forsaken me?”

  The Little Mermaid

  The beach house was large, and an entire glass wall looked out upon the flat brown sand below the hill, to the brief line of pavement for the boat landing, down where the pelicans and gulls cracked their clams and oysters and crabs.

  Alice didn’t see the birds or the beach much. That first year she kept the curtains drawn shut. Sometimes she opened them, standing at the window, smoking a cigarette. The ocean was a haze most of the winter, but that was fine by her. She wasn’t an ocean person. She could not even swim, and she never waded. She considered herself more of an isolationist, and that is precisely what the beach house offered. She drank a lot of her father’s stored wine (a wood bin had been converted into a wine cellar), and left the house only twice a week to go see a therapist in Nag’s Head.

  Molly came down for a visit that lasted approximately six hours before the mother-daughter anger got out of hand; Molly still didn’t understand the divorce, and being a mother now herself, and perhaps (Alice surmised) in a bad marriage, Molly was young enough to still believe in staying together for the sake of family.

  Alice read a lot of books, particularly long fat ones that took her mind off life and her miserableness at it. When she thought of it, she practiced her own brand of yoga based on having watched a morning television show once. When the hangovers from the red wine became unbearable, she slacked off drinking and became a coffee addict. This prompted her to frenetic activity in the winter; she began jogging on the beach, finally unable to avoid the outdoors and health (which she kept in check by smoking and drinking coffee sometimes into the wee hours), and thus she met the old man who collected shells.

  He was, at first, barely a face to her, for while her jogging was slow enough to distinguish features on the few beachcombers who came down her way, she had stopped looking anyone in the face. She noticed his hands, actually, and the cracked, wormholed shells he held in them. His hands were tanned and rough. Then, another day, she noticed his knees: rather knobby, with fat blue veins down the sides of them. Finally, she met him the day she sprained her ankle at a place where the sand sank. She sat on a large piece of driftwood—moving the red kelp to the side—and rubbed her ankle. He walked right up to her. “You okay?”

  She nodded. She still could not bring herself to look at his face. She looked at his feet: he was barefoot, as was she, with a particularly nasty looking ingrown toenail on his big toe.

  “If you run, you should wear shoes,” he said. “The sand tugs at your heel. It’s very bad for your arches. It’s made for crabs and seaweed, not people, this beach is.”

  “I’ll take that into consideration next time,” she said testily. She rubbed her foot.

  “Here,” he said, dropping to his knees. She could no longer avoid his face. He was probably in his late sixties; old enough to be her father by a hair. He had brown eyes and thin lips. He must’ve been handsome, but it had turned to sand, his skin had, and his nose, the shiny red of a lifelong drinker.

  He took her foot in his hands and rubbed.

  “Please,” she said, pulling her foot back. It hurt when she did it.

  “I’m a doctor,” he said. “Retired now, but I know something about feet. We’ll just massage it a little.”

  “Well,” she said noncommittally. No one was around to watch, and it did feel good. He pressed his thumbs into the soft flesh at her ankle; the sensation burned at first, but then, as he continued, it felt warm and pleasant. She had had a headache; it melted.

  He watched her. “You need to keep off this for a few days. I can wrap it for you, if you like.”

  Because she was financially broke from countless therapy sessions and the divorce itself and would not be able to afford any medical expense if her foot’s condition worsened, she agreed to this. She leaned against his shoulder, and he guided her back to her house.

  In the master bathroom, he heated torn rags of old towels in the sink with hot water. Then he squeezed them, and tied them around her ankle and foot.

  “The heat,” he said, “it helps. They say it’s ice that helps, but not for this. It’ll swell up from the heat, but it needs to.”

  Alice, who knew nothing of medicine, nodded as if she did.

  “Sometimes we need fluids to collect. They carry away the bad stuff.”

  She almost laughed. “Sorry, sorry,” she said, “it’s just that it sounded so undoctorly.”

  He grinned. He was a warm man, she decided. Not like her ex. This old man, he was a good country doctor who cared. He was a house call kind of doctor. He said, “I try my best. I find that all that medical jargon gets in the way of patient care. Sometimes nature knows best.”

  “I couldn’t agree more.”

  He continued to massage her foot through the warm wet rags.

  “You collect shells?” she asked, not wanting him to stop.

  “I’m rather aimless these days. Since my wife died.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Oh, we had quite a life together. Life, while it lasts, has its own secrets.”

  Alice didn’t quite understand him, but she really didn’t want to get into the dead wife as a topic of conversation any more than she wanted to start prattling on about her husband.

  “So I walk the beaches like I’m waiting for a ship to come in or something. Like an old salt. Do you believe in mermaids?” His eyes glistened a bit, as if he practiced this question and its anticipated response.

  “No.”

  “I used to, when I was a boy.” He grinned dopily. “Do you know that when a man becomes old, he begins to remember what he believed in as a child and it all comes back to him?”

  Something sweet in his voice; that boy that was him thousands of years before, that little boy, was still there in his eyes. She smiled. He rubbed.

  “I believed that out in that ocean was a lovely mermaid. She and I knew each other, and when I was four, I would go down to the bea
ch early in the morning, before anyone else was up, and stand on the edge of the land and sing mermaid songs to her. I imagined her fins and her tail, how if she were on land I would carry her to a safe place, and how she would tell me all the secrets of the sea. And I, in turn would tell her how much I loved her, how much I wanted to be with her,” he said.

  Alice began weeping upon hearing this. She could not control it, and it was not just about the pathetic little four-year-old who sang to the nonexistent mermaids; it was about everything she’d wished for as a child, all within her grasp, gone now, like sand, like seawater, the way memory always left her bereft and longing for innocence. He slid his hands from her feet and placed them on either side of her face. They were comfortingly cold.

  “A beautiful woman should never cry,” he said.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “No, don’t say that either. Your tears are like the mermaids’.”

  She opened her eyes to him and felt that lustful heat of first love again, just as if he were not old and she were not middle-aged.

  He caressed her, and they fell across the bed, her ankle’s throbbing becoming a distant and occasional pinching. They kissed, weeping, both of them, and then he kissed her every arch and turn and curve.

  Afterward, she fell asleep.

  When she awoke, the pain was excruciating. The room, shrouded in darkness. The curtains were still drawn shut. She gasped; a light came on.

  Her doctor-lover stood over her.

  The pain was in her foot. She wasn’t thinking clearly because of the pain.

  She reached down to touch her foot, anticipating a throbbing ankle.

  But her hand, sliding down her leg, ended at a stump.

  She touched the air where her foot should’ve been.

  He said, “I had to operate, Alice.” He knew her name now, even though she didn’t know his.