14
TOWARD THE MIDDLE OF SEPTEMBER, MARIAN’S SEXUAL INTEREST inexplicably abated. She put all her dildi and appliances in the drawer that had once held David’s sweaters. The last two toys she had ordered — a tiny vibe, teasingly canine in appearance but molded from an impeccably comme il faut piece of pickled okra, and a giant Armande Klockhammer Signature Model — she didn’t even bother to try out before putting them in storage. She felt a mild snobbish contempt for people who devoted so much of their free time to solo sex-play. Her perennial garden, for example, was far more satisfying than a bunch of pastless, futureless orgasms. She read bulb catalogs avidly. After much study she ordered several hundred tulip bulbs from Mack’s. When they arrived, via UPS, she gently deflected the eagerly scrotal leer of her friend John in the brown truck. It felt exciting and strange to be more than a sexual being, to have interests. As she looked over the boxes of bulbs, however, she realized that she would need help cutting the beds and planting them all, so she hired the neighbor kid, Kevin.
Ever since she had been mowing her own lawn, she had lost touch with young Kevin. He seemed to have grown an inch or two. He had gone out for the high jump, and he had acquired a girlfriend named Sylvie, whom he said was “a really special person.” For a whole weekend and three cool late afternoons he and Marian worked together preparing the soil in the beds with bags of peat and then setting in the bulbs. The dirt was cool through Marian’s gloves. After shyly asking whether she would mind, Kevin brought over his radio. At first she was a little irritated by the sound, which disturbed her bucolic alpha-state — but over time several of the songs separated themselves from the others. In one, a woman sang something about Solitude standing in the doorway. She sang, “Her palm is split with a flower with a flame.” Marian kept time to this song, first with her troweling, and then with her chin. When she had heard it the second time, she asked Kevin (feeling a little shy herself), “Who does this song?”
Kevin looked up. “Suzanne Vega.”
“Ah,” said Marian. “I like it.”
“Yeah, it’s pretty good,” said Kevin. He was impossible to read. He dropped another dark bulb in a hole and gently mounded soil around it. Marian glanced at him several times. He had a gray track-and-field T-shirt over a gray sweatshirt. When he pushed on the earth over one of her bulbs, she imagined the muscle in the side of his arm, as she had seen it when he had had his shirt off that day, long ago, at the beginning of summer, before she had learned to mow. And later, when the song came on again, he looked up at her and smiled and then went back to planting — and Marian noticed that his ears were quite red.
She watered the bulbs in and forgot about them. The ground began to look cold — three long beds of very cold bulbs. As winter hit, Marian became caught up in a battle with a developer who wanted to build another mall outside of town. It was going to be enormous and in its own way wonderful — but there was already a shopping center with a discount chain in it that was working under chapter eleven, and the downtown would suffer, as it always did. She went out on several dates with a man she met at the mall meetings, and while she enjoyed talking to him (he was one of those men who have a passionate interest in some particular writer which at first seems sincere, and then finally ends up seeming almost arbitrary — in his case it was Rilke: he seemed to be getting things from Rilke that he could have gotten from any number of poets, while missing whatever it was that Rilke had uniquely), she nonetheless didn’t want to do anything more than kiss him cordially in her driveway.
When spring finally came, she went out every day to her tulip beds to watch for activity. It was an unusually dry hot spring, and she felt that she should water to give her beds a good start, but she despaired at her hose. The faucet still leaked tiresomely. The sprayer was rusty. What would make her bulbs really happy, it suddenly occurred to her, was if she could get a plumber to adapt her own Pollenex showerhead so that it would fit on the end of the hose. She needed a very light, very delicate but insistent spray for her tulips — no garden sprayer could offer that. She also thought that the hose water was much too cold — she felt that the bulbs would do better with warmer water. She realized that she wasn’t thinking all that rationally, but her idea nonetheless was: hook up the garden hose to the shower-pipe, run the hose out the bathroom window, and fix the Pollenex showerhead onto the terminal end. Other ideas of interest followed on this one; she called a plumber.
The plumber was a thin derisive man with the usual plumber body-smell who rolled his eyes at her plan, told her she could have done it herself, but agreed, since he was there, to do it for her. He fitted the hose ends and the Pollenex with Gardena quick-clamp adapters so that they could be quickly reconfigured for interior showering or exterior gardening applications. The shower-pipe looked exotic when he was done, knobbed with hex nuts and adapters, but the system when tested worked quite well. And the plumber, as he cleaned up, was cheerful, pleased by now that he had built something he had never built before, and that he would be able to tell his partner about the nutty job this lady had gotten him to do. He even showed her how to use Teflon tape and was expansive about its merits over older kinds of sealant. He carried his heavy red toolbox out to his truck and drove away.
Over the next few days Marian took her early-morning shower and then opened the window, hooked up the shower-hose arrangement, and turned on the taps to water her tulips. She used only the fine pulse-mist settings, treating her plants as she would want to be treated herself. The tulips responded with enthusiasm — after a week her beds were popping with color. They knew the difference between water from a shower, meant for human use, and water from a crude leaky outdoor faucet. She sat on an aluminum chair with the sun on her legs, reading The Machine in the Garden. Every so often she glanced up at her tulips. She felt happy. She had planned this to happen and it had happened: she had delayed gratification and now she was getting the payoff. Young Kevin should see what they had done together, she thought, but when she called, Kevin’s sour mother told her that he was at practice. Just as well, just as well, she thought. She began to give some consideration to her drawerful of dildae. But she didn’t need any of that; no, she’d moved beyond that.
Just then Kevin’s little gray cat with white paws showed up on her lawn, making untoward noises and acting oddly. Quite recently it, she, had been a kitten. Now she was clearly in heat, probably for the first time — and very irresponsible it was of Kevin or Kevin’s mother not to have had her fixed! She crawled along with her forepaws very low on the ground, making low desperate mezzo-mewings, her tail jerking back, her little narrow feline hips flaunting and twitching in the air, her rear paws working with quick tiptoe steps. Marian could see her gray-furred opening; wetness gleamed from within. She went over and pressed her finger lightly against the cat’s tiny slit; gratefully, the cat returned the pressure and tiptoed ardently in place. This was a cat in the grip of a new idea. Wiping her finger on the grass, Marian found that she had gotten hot looking at this creature’s fluttery haunchings. There was a purity and seriousness to the cat’s simple wish to be fucked immediately that Marian found refreshing. The cat didn’t want love — it wanted cat-cock.