Gus had had girls before, since he was fourteen, but they had been lust pursuits, for none of the girls of the Falls, or of Poughkeepsie, or even the college girl he had touched in Connecticut, stirred in him what he felt with Jo. He called her, to his men, “my Jo,” for he felt that, if things were different, she would not be with this wealthy man with his palsied body, but with him. Gus and Jo—he wrote it on the oak tree down near the river, he carved it into a stone he had placed in the center of the rose garden.
When she kissed him on the cheek, he waited a minute, then grabbed her in his arms, for he could no longer contain himself, and they made love there, in the morning, before the sun was far up in the sky.
He knew that she loved him, so he went that day to find her the most beautiful flower that could be had. It was a passion of hers, to have the most beautiful things, for she had lived most of her life with only the ugly and the dull. He wished he were wealthy so that he might fly to China, or to the south of France, or to the stars, to bring back the rarest of blooms. But, having four bits on him, he took the train into New York City, and eventually came to a neighborhood that sold nothing but flowers, stall upon stall. But it was midsummer, and all the flowers available were the same that he could grow along the river.
As he was about to leave, not knowing how he could return to his Jo without something very special, a woman near one of the stalls said, “You don’t like these, do you?”
Gus turned, and there was a woman of about twenty-two. Very plain, although pretty in the way that he thought all women basically pretty. She was small and pale, and she wore no makeup, but her eyes were large and lovely. “I’ve been watching you,” she said.
“You have?”
“Yes. Do you think that’s rude? To watch someone?”
“It depends.”
“I think it’s rude. But then,” she said, smiling like a mischievous child, “I’ve never been ashamed of my own behavior, only the behavior of others. I’m ashamed of yours. Here I’ve watched you for fifteen minutes, and you barely took your eyes off the flowers. How rude do you think that is? Very. You like flowers, don’t you?”
“I’m a gardener. I take care of them.”
“Lovely,” she said wistfully. “Imagine a life of caring for beautiful things. Imagine when you’re very old, and look back on it. What lovely memories you’ll have.”
Although she seemed forthright, the way he knew city people were, there was something fitful in the way she spoke, almost hesitant somewhere in the flow of words, as if all this snappy talk was a cover for extreme shyness. And yet, he knew, city women were rarely shy.
He had not come all the way to the city to flirt with shop girls. “I’m looking for something out of the ordinary.”
She offered a curious smile, tilting her head back. She was a shade beautiful in the thin shaft of daylight that pressed between the stalls. She was no Jo, but she would make some young man fall in love with her, he knew that much. Some city boy who worked in the local grocer’s, or ran a bakery. Or, perhaps, even a junior bondsman. She would eventually live in one of the boxcar apartments in Brooklyn, and be the most wonderful and ordinary bride. She would have four children, and grow old without fear. Not like Jo, who was destined for romance and passion and tragedy and great redemption, not Italian Jo of olive skin and rose water. The woman said, “I know a place where you can find very unusual flowers.”
“I want a beauty,” he said.
“For a lady?”
Because Gus knew how women could be, and because he detected that he might get further along with this girl if he feigned interest in her, he lied. “No. Just for me. I appreciate beautiful flowers.”
He felt bad then, a little, because now he knew that he was leading her on, but she seemed to know where the interesting flowers were, and all he could think of was Jo and how she loved flowers. Gus was considered handsome in his day, and women often showed him special attention, so he was used to handling them, charming them. “I need a beauty,” he repeated.
“I’m not saying beautiful,” she cautioned him, and began walking between the stalls, through an alley, leading him, “but unusual. Sometimes unusual is better than beautiful.”
* * *
She wore a kind of apron, he noticed, the long kind that covered her dress, and he wondered if she was the local butcher’s daughter, or if she was a cook.
The alley was steamy; there was some sort of kitchen down one end of it, a laundry, too. He heard someone shouting somewhere in a foreign language.
The woman came to an open pit, with a thin metal staircase leading down to a room, and she hiked her apron up a bit, and held her hand out for him to steady her as she descended.
“My balance isn’t too good,” she told him. “I have a heart problem—nothing serious—but it makes me light-headed sometimes on stairs.”
“There’re flowers down there?” he asked as he went down the steps slowly.
“It’s one of my father’s storage rooms. He has a flower shop on Seventh Avenue, but there’s an icehouse above us, and we get shavings for free. They stay colder down here,” she said, and turned a light up just as he had reached the last step. “There’s another room three doors down, beneath the laundry. We keep some there, too.”
The room was all of redbrick, and it was chilly, like winter. “We’re right underneath the storage part of the icehouse.”
As the feeble light grew strong, he saw that they were surrounded by flowers, some of them brilliant vermillion sprays, others deep purples and blacks, still more of pile upon pile of dappled yellows on reds on greens.
“These are all fresh cut,” she said, “you can have any you want. My father grows them underneath the laundry, and when he cuts them, we keep them on ice until we ship them. Here,” she said, reaching into a bowl that seemed to be carved out of ice. She brought up tiny red and blue blossoms, like snowballs, but in miniature. She brought them up to his face, and the aroma was incredible; it reminded him of Jo’s skin when he pressed his face against her breasts and tasted the brightness of morning.
The woman kissed him, and he responded, but it was not like his kiss with Jo. This woman seemed colder, and he knew he was kissing her just because he wanted the blossoms. He remembered the cold kiss all the way to the big house, as he carried the gift to his beloved.
* * *
Jo was shocked by the tiny, perfect flowers.
He’d left them for her in a crystal bowl of water on the dining room table so that she would see them first when she came to have breakfast. He heard her cry out, sweetly, and then she came to the kitchen window to search the back garden for him. She tried to open it, but it had rained the night before and all that morning, so it was stuck. She rushed around to the back door, ran barefoot into the garden and grabbed his hand.
“Sweetest, precious, blessed,” she gasped. “Where did you find them? Their smell—so lovely.”
He had saved one small blossom in his hand. He crushed it against her neck, softly. He kissed her as if he owned her, and he told her how much he loved her.
She drew back from him then, and he saw something change in her eyes.
“No,” she said.
* * *
When those flowers died, he ventured back into the city, down the alley, but the entrance to the pit was closed.
He rapped on the metal doors several times, but there was no response. He went around to the entrance to the icehouse and asked the manager there about the flowers, but he seemed to not know much about it other than the fact that the storage room was closed for the day.
Gus was desperate, had brought his month’s pay in order to buy armloads of the flowers, but instead, ended up in an Irish bar on Horace Street drinking away most of it. Jo didn’t love him, he knew that now. How could he be such a fool, anyway? Jo could never leave her husband, never in a thousand years.
Oh, but for another moment in her arms, another moment of that sweet mystery of her breath against his neck!
He stayed in the city overnight, sleeping in a flophouse, and was up early, and this time went to directly to the laundry. The man who ran it took him to the back room, where the steam thickened. Gus heard the sounds of machines being pushed and pressed and clanked and rapped, as a dozen or more people worked in the hot fog of the shop.
The owner took him farther back, until they came to a stairway.
“Down,” the man said, nodding, and then disappeared into the fog.
Gus descended the steps, never sure when he would touch bottom, for the steam was still heavy. Once in the depths, he noticed a sickly yellow light a ways off. He went towards it, brushing against what he assumed were flowers growing in their pots.
Then someone touched his arm.
“Gus.” It was the woman from the week before. “It’s me. Moira.”
“I didn’t know your name,” he told her. “I didn’t know how to find you.”
“How long did the flowers last?”
“Six days.”
“How sad,” she said, and leaned against him. He kissed her, but the way he would kiss his sister, because he didn’t really want to lead her on.
The mist from the laundry enveloped the outline of her face, causing her skin to shine a yellow-white like candles in luminaria, revealing years that he had not anticipated—he had thought she might be a girl in her early twenties, but in this steam she appeared older, ashes shining under her skin.
“I loved the flowers.”
“What else do you love, Gus?”
He didn’t answer. He pulled away from her, and felt the edges of thick-lipped petals.
She said, “We keep the exotics here. There’s an orchid from the Fiji Islands—it’s not properly an orchid, but it has the look of one. It’s tiny, but very rare. In its natural state, it’s a parasite on fruit trees, but here, it’s the most beautiful thing in the world.”
“I never paid you for the last one.”
“Gus,” she said, and reached up to cup the side of his face in the palm of her hand, “whatever is mine, is yours.”
She retreated into the mist, and in a few moments laid in the palm of his hand a flower so small that he could barely see it. She set another of its kind into a jewelry box and said, “This is more precious than any jewel I know of. But if I give it to you, I want you to tell me one thing.”
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 th
e 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.
* * *
Halloween Chillers: A Box Set of Three Books of Horror & Suspense Page 36
