by Jane Smiley
“Now I wouldn’t say domestic. I wouldn’t say domestic at all. I would say competent, or good at business, never domestic.”
Alice opened her mouth to protest, or at least to exclaim at Susan’s misinterpretation of herself, but the phone rang. Susan, closer, reached for it. After a moment of listening, she looked up at Alice and said, “They can’t find Ray. Ray’s disappeared.”
6
IT WAS Alice who called Noah, half expecting to ease into the bad news, but Noah greeted her with, “I just got back from Studio Midtown and I talked with most of the guys who were there yesterday. No one’s seen him since they packed the band up about five—”
“Why didn’t they tell me that!” Alice couldn’t help exclaiming.
“And I called Murray, too. He plays bass in that band. He says Ray didn’t go uptown with them, and the last he saw him, he was going into that Greek place across the street. They’re all pissed, too, because he made a deal to be there today and tomorrow.”
“I thought Ray was the most dependable guy in New York.”
“So did Ray.”
Alice could hear Rya’s faint shout in the background, “Tell her about—” but then it was garbled. Noah ignored her. Alice said, “Tell me about what?” but Noah was already talking. “The police went over to his apartment this afternoon, when he didn’t show up for the job and nobody could reach him. Clean as a whistle.”
“Tell me about what?”
“What?”
“I heard Rya say for you to tell me about something.”
“Did she?”
“Come on, Noah.”
“I’m sure he’s all right.”
“Are you?”
“We don’t have any evidence that anything has happened to him, or that he’s left town on his own, do we? He probably met someone last night. If it weren’t for this other thing, nobody would give it a second thought.”
“Yeah, but when was the last time he missed a job? He never does. That’s the point. He always told me he was very careful about how his personal life mixed with his professional life. He always said that if he forced anyone to think about his being gay, that would be it in the music business. He was very aware of that.”
“I know.”
“So what’s your answer?”
“Nothing. Don’t worry.” He hung up before she could press him again to tell her whatever Rya had been referring to. Susan came in from the bedroom, where she had been listening on the extension. After looking for a long moment at Alice, she said, “No relief in sight, huh?”
“Doesn’t seem to be. Did Ray—”
“What?”
Alice bit her lip. “Has Ray seemed weird to you lately?”
“He’s been weird for the last year!” Her tone was hard and dismissive, which shocked Alice in spite of herself, and evaporated her wish to confide what she’d seen of Ray in the last week. “Are you still mad at everyone?” They hadn’t spoken of this since the night in the restaurant.
“It’s not a case of being mad. Be realistic, Alice!”
To forestall an argument, Alice said, “What time is it?”
“Almost twelve.”
“Are you working tomorrow?”
“But of course! Zut! We got a whole shipment in from Paris yesterday, les jupes, les chaussures, les bleujeans, le deesplay pour Madame et Monsieur, chop chop.”
“I’m almost envious of you working.”
“Come sit with me behind the counter.”
But when they got up late and Susan hurried off in an unaccustomed cab to unlock before the clerks arrived, there was no talk of Alice’s accompanying her. Alice remembered Henry Mullet and their date. A whole day, no matter how pretty, in some garden with some guy? Henry was handsome enough, she thought, and not without wit or conversation, but there was nothing compelling about him. You might date him for a while, and recite his virtues to your friends with dutiful respect, but at some point you would realize that you had stopped going out with him. Had Susan said a word about coming to the shop, Alice would have cancelled, but she had not. Alice sighed and picked up her keys a moment before she was due to meet him. Out the window on Eighty-fourth Street, he was already there. In a flash, for some reason, she took against him.
Nothing about the rather awkward walk to the subway or the ride itself on the uncrowded Saturday morning train challenged her predisposition. In fact, even the pleasant banter they’d achieved before failed them, and Alice could see that Henry was looking forward to the morning, and oh, God, the afternoon with the same discouragement turning to despair that she was. A mesomorph. She had never liked mesomorphs. Jim Ellis was over six feet, and wiry, with lightning reflexes and limitless energy. On the subway, he never sat, never let the ride shake him down into a lump, a passive lump. And his ancestry was not definable by looking at him. You couldn’t help wondering where the dark, coarse, curly hair came from, the tyrannically beaked nose, the startling blue eyes. WASP to the core, according to the names of his progenitors, and yet Alice had found him exotic. He found himself exotic. Henry Mullet looked about as exotic as hashed brown potatoes. Between stations, she caught her own reflection in the dark window across from her. At least she was slender. No one could say that she didn’t have a pleasing figure. She put her hand to her hair. Her hands were good, big, long fingered, graceful. But why had she worn a white blouse, and, she looked down, green slacks? She stared steadily into her reflection, and dared to be honest. Yes, she looked neat and thin. And pinched, prim, without chic, entirely thirty-one and absolutely a librarian. She sighed.
Henry said, “We’ll go in the museum entrance. Some of the Oriental fruit trees are still in bloom, but the best thing now is the lilacs. You can smell them all over the garden. Are you interested in native plants? In the last few years the botanists and horticulturists have been cleaning up the native plant collection. The public isn’t allowed, but it’s one of my favorite parts of the garden. And the roses are starting, if you like roses.”
“Wonderful,” said Alice, smiling a good enough smile. In spite of himself, Henry, too, sighed. Alice wondered if he hoped that she wouldn’t know how to interpret it. When she looked at her watch it was only ten thirty-five. She nearly groaned aloud. Only a week had passed, exactly a week. At Grand Army Plaza, Henry Mullet forgot himself, took her hand, and ran her off the train. He was physical in a way that Jim Ellis was not. Although Jim hovered around you, desire shooting out of him like sparks, either the desire to do something, or, more uncomfortably, the desire for you to do something, he hardly ever touched. When he did, it was a stroke or a prod or even a glancing light blow. Henry Mullet was a grasper, a holder-in-place, a propeller, a preserver from traffic. Alice wasn’t sure she liked it.
At the turnstile set into the wrought iron gates, he began to fidget, and then grin. Alice realized with some surprise that he was getting excited. “Been here in a while?” she teased.
“Just go that way, to the right, we’ll come back the other way. I was here until dark last night. Why?”
“You seem excited to be back.”
“Do I?” His eyes swept down the long formal promenade toward the fountain and then back to her, with a warm smile. “Maybe I am. I suppose I am. Here, look. These are the Oriental crab apples and the European crab apples. Malus is the generic name. Beautiful blossoms.”
“Hmm,” said Alice politely, beginning down the promenade, but he wouldn’t let her go. Although he was all set to escort her down the walk, to point out the beautiful shapes the trees had been trained and pruned to, he could not help stopping at nearly every tree and inspecting something—a black spot, an ooze of sap, a fissure in the bark. Alice, who was used to drifting through museums and parks, appreciating the beauty by a kind of ambulatory osmosis, felt impatient at first, imagining herself conducting a tour of the library and stopping to pull damaged or inaccurate cards out of the card catalogue, but after a few minutes he began to point things out to her, to identify insects and incipien
t diseases, especially of age, since many of these trees had by now lived ten or fifteen years longer than they had been expected to live. He saw everything—not just the robins and bluejays that Alice would have recognized, but also two phoebes, a group of orioles, a house finch, and a pair of large green birds that looked like, and actually were, parakeets. “They don’t eat here,” said Henry. “We think they steal fruits and vegetables on Park Slope. There’s another pair in the garden, too.” He saw shoots and leaves and buds that were out of place, he saw spider webs that only shone when the sun struck them at one angle. Alice saw that he could not look without noting work that had to be done, situations that had to be looked into, but she saw also that he loved looking. After they had listened to the distinctive calls of the birds, the distinguishable snaps and buzzes of the insects, after they had noted the various herbaceous specimens that Alice would have called weeds, or perhaps not seen at all, after they had walked around most of the trees, looked up, looked down, looked near and far in every direction, Alice felt that she had never really taken a walk before. “And everything lives so effortlessly and plentifully right in the middle of the city?”
“Why not?”
They stepped down from the formal promenade into, and among, the more spacious spreading of grass and lilac bushes covered with white, lavender, and magenta blossoms. Alice gasped, both at the sight and at the sweet fragrance. “The Botanic Garden,” he went on, “is actually a fairly thriving ecosystem.”
“It’s like heaven.”
“Yes,” Henry said, “it is. The funny thing, to me, is that there is very little vandalism. Sometimes people pick the flowers, but no one writes on the trees or defaces them or hurts them. And there are days when you can walk around here and not see anyone. No gardeners, no botanists, no police, no one to stop you if you wanted to break something or spray paint it.” He had her arm and walked her comfortably past the lilacs (always stopping, always pointing out to her the differing perfume of each variety) around behind the roses, which were beginning to bloom, and Alice felt her good nature, and her very flesh, warm and spread beneath his grasp, beneath his detailed, observant, and passionate knowledge.
She hadn’t dated anyone who was particularly informative in a while, and she had forgotten the pleasures of such companionship. Henry Mullet was good at it. For one thing, he wouldn’t let her back away from the plants. He made her kneel close to them and smell them, look at their tiny parts, turn the leaves over gently, take insects (ladybugs, Japanese beetles) on her finger. For another, he loved, not his own talking, but what he was talking about. After a while, every time he paused to scrutinize something, Alice grew anxious to know what he was seeing, not bored with the wait. And he talked in a normal tone of voice, unlike men she had known, most men, perhaps, who tended to switch into Public Speaking rhythms about three sentences into any dissertation. She imagined herself coming here often with Henry, his good friend, a dependable companion for all seasons, if nothing more exciting was going on.
In the administration building, everyone greeted him jokingly, asking if he’d wiped his feet, what was that smell, was Alice really not his sister or his cousin, but an actual date, didn’t he know there were other things to do on your day off than come to work. The women did not come from behind barriers to greet him, but they all looked up and smiled indulgently. While he ran up to his office to pick up some papers, Alice surveyed the rack of cultivation guides, choosing for Hugh and Doreen one on herbs and one on small fruits. The woman behind the counter put them in a bag and stapled it shut without accepting Alice’s five dollar bill. “It’s a lovely day,” she said kindly. “There.” As Henry returned she raised her voice. “Now you make him take you to some nice place for lunch.” She grinned. Across the room, another woman called, “Think he can pay for it?”
Henry laughed. “I was thinking of your place, Helen. About two?”
“You’d be out of luck there, Dr. Mullet! Unless you’d like peanut butter and grape jelly on saltines like my kids.”
“We’ll bring the wine! Got what you need?” As he opened the door and let her into the bright sunlight, Alice felt both privileged and impressed. The most she ever got at the library was a hello or a friendly smile. Administrators were rather trembled at or scorned than teased. She said, “You must like it here.”
“Who wouldn’t? ‘All that in this delightful garden grows, should happy be and have immortal bliss.’ Go left. I’ll show you the bonsai collection.”
And the cacti that looked like rocks, the banana tree, his plantings of day lilies, the flourishing Shakespeare herb garden (he pinched off leaves when no one was looking and put his fingers beneath her nostrils), the lilacs again (“I can’t bear to leave them,” exclaimed Alice, inhaling deeply), and then the wilds of the native plant collection, which looked not unlike someone’s uncultivated backlot. Native American ecology made good talk, nothing personal that might ambush her into the news of Ray and Craig and Denny. Tales of her parents and their enormous garden, of the apple tree and pear tree her father had grafted together, of her grandmother Bovbjerg’s pickled peaches and her grandmother Gustavson’s preserved chilis that her father ate by the bottle on toast served to represent her private history well enough. In return, he told her about what all those Scandinavians would have had to do upon reaching Minnesota, breaking the sod with axes, burning back the chest-high native grass; Alice had never enjoyed the thought of agriculture so thoroughly. Over lunch he talked about his special interest in Chinese plants and his increasing fluency in the identification of mainland species that no one had seen in thirty years, if ever. It turned out that he had an application in for a visa to the People’s Republic. He asked, suddenly, about Jim Ellis, wasn’t that his name? He had found a poem by him in an anthology.
“‘I Said Mistaken Descent’?”
“Something like that.”
“That poem is anthologized fairly often. It’s a villanelle. Did you notice?”
“I noticed that the first line was repeated a lot. I didn’t understand it.”
Alice opened her mouth, possibly to recite or interpret. It was a favorite of hers, as rich in her memory as a bowl of ripe fruit. But she closed her mouth without saying the first juicy lines, afraid suddenly to appear obsessed with her former husband. “He wrote it after a fight with me, but it even took me a long time to make sense of it.”
“Hmmp. Did he write a lot of poems to you?”
“None. I think sometimes, though, that I was sort of the grain of sand that the pearl formed around.”
“None?”
“Nothing ‘for Alice,’ or ‘to my wife.’ Nope.”
“Did that hurt your feelings?”
Alice lifted her fork out of her salad and inspected the oily lettuce leaf sanded with Parmesan impaled thereon. “Frankly, hurt feelings were such a normal condition that I’m sure I didn’t notice.”
“How long were you married?”
“Married, four years. Obsessed, almost nine. I mean, me with him.”
“Still?”
Alice shrugged. “What about you? Any long-term obsessions?”
“Two short, one long. No marriage, though. And I shouldn’t really call them obsessions. I’m not the obsessive type, at least with relationships, which is maybe what went wrong. I was always going off to the Orient or staying at school until all hours. I’m a chronic forgetter of plans.”
“I’m the type who chronically takes that sort of thing personally.”
“I’ve gotten better about it. I almost got engaged once. I spent the night of the party studying for an exam.”
“That kind of forgetting, huh?”
“I have no excuses, but I don’t do it so much any more, really. I’ve changed. I’m ready to move out to Brooklyn in a big way, sometime.”
“I thought you were going to China.” She was only twitting him, but he seemed to take it seriously, and sighed. He replied, “Once I went straight from the post office, where I was mailing a
travel grant application, to a realtor, who was showing me co-ops for sale in Park Slope. Maybe a sign of age is wanting to do everything at the same time.”
Alice smiled. Such a desire seemed much more refreshing than a sign of age to her. “Isn’t it funny,” she said, “the way people trade this sort of personal information on the first date: this is the way I am, this is who I’ve been involved with and what I did to them? Every time I start doing it, it feels like a ritual exchange. I wonder if I even say the same sentences over and over.”
“Don’t you think a date is a fairly personal event?”
“If that’s your main experience, you’re lucky! Anyway, it is with you.” Alice smiled, then blushed, afraid she had implied something beyond incipient friendship, but one of Henry’s virtues was apparently tact. He smiled, but slightly, without making eye contact. It was nearly five when they left the restaurant. Although still not compelling, Henry was not like any other man she knew. She walked in his aura of safety and enthusiasm as under an umbrella, certain, among other things, that Ray was okay and the murder well in the past. Although he himself did not fascinate her—she didn’t care to hear, for example, about his family in Wisconsin or his experiences in grammar school—in his company, many things were interesting, and while Alice felt dull by contrast, Henry did not seem bored with her, and so the familiar worry about being good enough company did not nag her. He talked of books he had read and books they had both read. There were books she had read that he had always meant to read. While he had been to the Orient, she had been to Mexico, and he quizzed her enviously. In his talk there was a vivid sense of the populous, busy world. It was enormously agreeable, and Alice found herself kissing him on the cheek as they waited for the subway train back to Manhattan. Henry squeezed her shoulders. By Eighty-sixth Street, they were holding hands.
And physical contact, she realized, had its own dynamic, especially with Henry. “What’s a taxonomist?” she said. His hand was rough and dry, larger than hers. “Is that like Linnaeus, or what’s his name, van Leeuwenhoek?”
