Life was always skittering away from Flora like that, diving into hedges. Her career as an artist. Well, those drawing classes she took until the instructor asked her in front of the entire class to draw something that we all might recognize. That man she met in the gallery who eventually slipped his cold hand down her shirt as if he were fishing for forgotten change in a pocket. Without meaning to, when he asked for the time, she scowled at the man with the Great Dane puppy, up to his thigh in hedges, and shouted, “Five thirty-seven!” in the same tone she might have shouted, “Get out!”
On the street, people walk by wrapped like packages in coats and scarves, making twisted faces at the weather. The Great Dane puppy pulls his owner down the sidewalk and then stops dead in his tracks, cowering at the wind. Naked trees line the block like rows of skeletons, and Flora pulls a chair up to the window to smoke as the night grows darker, though it’s been on the verge of dark since half past four. The cigarettes mark time as she waits for Rock to call her back. She wills him with every exhale to pick up the phone and dial her number, to respond to her comment. “You don’t know anything about me!” he might yell. What she would give to hear him yell.
There are voices on the steps as Rock lugs boxes with the new tenants, the wordless buzz cutting through the thick, musty air of the old building. The clunk of the radiator kicking in startles Flora, not because it scares her but because it will continue to clunk this way through winter whether it is happy or not.
Flora retreats to her bed and decides to nap until Rock calls back. Again she dreams she has insomnia. She’s dreamed a variation of this dream for weeks now; sleep exhausts her — she never gets any sleep in her sleep. In her dream now, she wanders her apartment, room to room, trailing her quilt behind her like a child. She makes herself warm milk and finishes only half before she puts the mug on the tub’s edge, draws a bath, and slides into its heat, letting the washcloth lie across her belly, ears dipping below the surface into watery silence that sounds like the blood rushing through her body. In these dreams Flora knows how to take care of herself; she knows what to do to survive. But always, still, that constant angry buzz—I drive people away. How to love? How to love?
“People are just silly,” the woman says pertly on her way past Flora’s door, and Flora lurches out of the gray weather of sleep. The woman’s voice sounds like an effort to be cheerful at the end of hours of moving, with the first night to spend ahead of her in the new apartment stacked with boxes stuffed with things that have lost their meaning moved from their rightful places. Flora imagines the standing lamp in the corner by her door out on the street, unrecognizable. She holds it by its neck for balance as she leans against her door. There is no bump, bump, bump of boxes, so they are finally empty-handed on their way upstairs. Silly is a word that means nothing, Flora thinks — like crazy, nice, weird, or interesting. Flora convinces herself that the woman must be talking about Rock, helping her husband to see that Rock is just a child, not a man who might come between them. She rushes to the hole in her kitchen floor.
Pulse. Rock turns on his TV — a sitcom with canned laughter every third line — to go with his cereal while upstairs in the new tenants’ apartment a chair slides across a room, newspaper crackles, a giggle trickles like water through dry stone. The silliness, Flora thinks, fighting back. She puts the phone by the bed in case Rock comes to his senses. She sleeps in the T-shirt she’s worn all day, dreams brightly colored flannel pajamas into the back of her dresser drawer. In her dream she pulls warm wool socks up to her knees and walks outside in the snow. The socks are quickly soaked through and the hairy wool clings damply to her calves as she wanders the neighborhood, though even here in her subconscious she is exhausted.
The next day at work, she sits in the tiny back room of the art gallery surrounded by piles and piles of haphazardly stacked art books. The front room of the gallery is just as tiny, filled now with a series of paintings with brightly colored backgrounds — red, orange, pastel blue — each with large overlapping gold rings like the symbol for the Olympics. All the paintings are framed in shiny gold frames. Flora thinks they are hideous. She told her boss, Samson, and he agreed but said, “Flora, sometimes art is hideous. Sometimes art isn’t pretty.” It’s something Samson has been saying since Flora first starting working for him, a refrain that has become sound without meaning. Now Flora stares at the paintings — her scratchy gloves, scratchy hat, scratchy scarf, and scratchy coat piled at her feet — trying to recapture that season when life hid mysteriously around a corner up ahead, mischievous and playful. “Sometimes, Peter, art isn’t pretty,” she used to say, getting up from the table and slithering around the mostly empty Indian restaurant à la Samson. Peter would have to spit his tandoori chicken into his napkin. She could make him laugh that hard. “Sometimes art is like a pimple — hideous and yet salaciously succulent, on the verge of bursting.” She would go on and on.
A man wanders in, looking for warmth. Flora hopes he will linger, but he scans the wall dubiously, not understanding that sometimes things in life that are ugly are actually trying to be beautiful, then pulls his jacket collar up around his ears and heads back out into the night.
No one calls except the collectors or art dealers, who are tired of her excuses. Samson isn’t here, she swears. Even when he is here, he tells her to say that he’s not. He owes money. Lots and lots of money. He will be back this afternoon, Flora promises, this evening, tomorrow, next week. Would you like to leave a message? Would you like to leave another? Would you like to hold? There is no hold option on this antique phone. There isn’t even call waiting. Flora just hangs up. A man in coveralls comes in near the end of the day and without looking at Flora walks up to the biggest, ugliest painting — thousands of those Olympic rings against a washed-out background — and plucks it from the wall.
“Marty sent me,” he says. “Smile, it’s not so bad.”
Flora thought she was smiling.
Flora thinks of the new tenants sorting through boxes, holding items up—“Where should this go?”—and making love on their bare, dusty floor because even the dust holds temptation in their new home. She never wanted to marry Peter; she wanted to be his deepest, darkest friend, and when that didn’t work out, she headed others off at the pass. But with Rock she feels a connection surging up through the hole in the kitchen floor. She leaves work early, eager to return to her post at the window.
There is a knock on Flora’s door just as Flora is speed-dialing Rock’s number, and she is furious at whoever it is because she knows it is not he. She can hear him scuffling around his kitchen. Every couple of scuffles she glimpses tufts of his unwashed hair through the hole.
“It’s Rock here,” his answering machine message says. There’s music in the background — the wail of background singers hitting notes of blissful despair. “You know what to do.” The casual indifference of his voice causes Flora to speak in a higher pitch than she’d intended.