Edith Pearlman - Honeydew - Stories

He put his glasses back on. Mist returned to mist, ordinary mist, mist in whose every drop curved what people called the spectrum, such a paltry number of colors. This sight was no truer a reality than the glory of a few minutes ago; no less true either. Truth had nothing to do with the witness of the eyes. What he saw now was simply what other people saw. He chose their limited vision; he meant to live in this world as an ordinary man. He would not remove his glasses again.

On a bright Monday morning in February, Lois and Daniel were reading in their monochromatic living room — gray walls, gray carpet, gray furniture. It was the kind of room that could soothe a panic attack, or cause one. From the stereo Scriabin flung a cat’s cradle of notes.

The doorbell interrupted the Russian madman. Daniel was still in bathrobe and slippers — this was his day without seminars to conduct or office hours to show up at. Lois answered the summons. She was already dressed: stovepipe pants, tee, jacket, all black. Iterations of this uniform in various dark colors hung in her closet like a line of patient men. She had not yet put on her shoes. But even barefoot she was six inches taller than the lanky teenage boy in the doorway, though the offering of gladioli he thrust into her hands rose above them both. “‘Mrs. Daniel Bevington,’” the kid read from a yellow slip. Lois nodded. “There’s a note,” the boy said, and raced to a curbside van that bore the name of a local florist.

Daniel, noiseless as always, had followed Lois to the door. “Have we a vase long enough for those?”

“No.” You can’t really bury your nose in a gladiolus, but she tried. Meanwhile, boots pulled on because of the snow, he headed for the garage. She followed him, still barefoot, the purple shafts in her arms. He scanned the garage’s tidy innards, chose a tall rubber basket the color of earth, picked it up and rinsed it under the outside tap. Then he filled the thing halfway with water. He put it down and returned to the living room, Lois still behind him, her feet turning blue. He spread the automotive section of the newspaper on the floor in front of a bookcase. He went back out for the rubber basket. Lois went into the kitchen.

She laid the flowers on the kitchen table and loosened their wrapping. She slipped the note from between the stalks. Happy Valentine’s Day, it said. Love, Daniel.

She returned to the living room, the gladioli now horizontal in her arms. “Daniel! How sweet of you. So sweet.” She put the flowers in the rubber basket.

“I’m glad you like them,” he said, looking up, sounding briefly young, younger than their twin college-age sons, younger even than the delivery boy, who had probably thought he was fleeing a house of mourning.

“Like them? I love them,” Lois said. Especially since I’m not really dead, she added silently. She walked to Daniel’s chair and kissed him. This was the first time he’d sent her flowers since her lying-in.

He noticed that her eyes were unnaturally bright.

The doorbell rang again.

This time the truck was from a florist in a neighboring town. Another teenager said, “Lois Bevington?” He handed her twelve tall bloodred roses in their own vase.

She placed this gift on the low coffee table. Daniel was suddenly at her side. “Heavens,” he said.

“Heavens,” she echoed. She fingered the little pink envelope before opening it. He took the delay as an invitation to move still closer. Finally she slid out the card. From one who loves, it said. No signature. The words had been printed by a computer.

“Century Gothic,” he identified. “I too was offered the use of the keyboard. I could have selected that font or any other. But I used my own pen.”

“I prefer handwriting,” Lois said in an earnest tone.

They returned to their chairs, though not to their reading.

The third truck belonged to a notable Boston florist. Its delivery person was a middle-aged woman. “Bevington?” she said.

Into the kitchen again, both of them. These flowers erupted from a shallow bowl. The elaborate ribbon and cellophane bright as tears at first prevented their identification, but when she cut the ribbon and removed the cellophane a rush of glory met their two gazes. The flowers were mostly white lilacs, with occasional sprays of heather and spikes of something very blue. She carried the bowl into the living room and placed it on the piano. An envelope fell to the floor. Daniel picked it up, as if the gift were for him. But it was meant for Lois, the four letters rounded, perhaps to disguise the penmanship, perhaps to make it legible.

“Open it,” Daniel said in an unlikely bark. “Please,” he amended. She extracted the card.

Love consists in this: that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other.

Neither could identify the quote. Side by side on the gray couch they consulted their Bartlett’s. The source was a letter written by Rilke.

“I don’t believe those lilacs were sent to you by Rilke,” said Daniel. “Not the tulips either.”

“Roses,” she murmured.

“Roses. They didn’t come from a dead poet.”

“No,” Lois said, but whether she meant accord or disagreement or let’s not speculate…that was anybody’s guess.

In order to understand the sudden beflowering of an unadorned room, one must go back a month in time and half a mile in space — back to the evening McCauley Bell selected the menu for the fiftieth birthday party he was throwing for his wife, Andrea. Lois had been hired to cater the event. She waited in her outsize kitchen, dreading the interview. McCauley Bell was a cardiologist, and so of course he’d forbid meat, soft cheeses, pâté. He’d turn thumbs-down on her signature tiramisu, any mouthful of which could kill you if you were genetically inclined. He’d probably demand fruit salad and hardtack.

But he turned out to be a paunchy man of sixty with a voice as rich as Lois’s seven-layer frivolity. She offered him a slice of frivolity, and then another. He indicated that he wanted to serve his guests exactly what his caterer liked best to make. He took all her lethal suggestions except Brie en croûte; he explained that he had a relationship with a cheesemonger who supplied him every so often with very special wheels of Camembert.

“And every so often you scrape out his arteries?” Lois asked.

He smiled at her. “That’s the surgeon’s work.” He felt a curious sympathy for this bony woman. She seemed to find smiling difficult — was it the slight malocclusion; had no one ever told her that buckteeth were sexy? He knew she was married, but he suspected that she was insufficiently attended to.

“Yes,” Andy said later, at home. She had taken an adult-education cooking course taught by Lois — Sweet Soups and Saucy Pies — and she had formed one of her shallow friendships with the tall teacher. They’d gone to Pirates of Penzance together. “The husband is out to sea and she doesn’t know how to haul him in — that’s my guess. He teaches algebra or something.” In fact Daniel Bevington was a world-class mathematician, but McCauley didn’t trouble Andy with that information. “Lois does know how to monkey with ingredients, combines things you’d never think of. Chilies and melon, say.”

The night before the party, the Bevingtons carried hors d’oeuvres and pastries into the Bells’ permanently disordered kitchen. Lois opened the refrigerator that McCauley and Andy had emptied that afternoon. The Bevingtons stacked trays inside the fridge, taking turns, never bumping into each other. Then Lois and Andy walked through the downstairs discussing the placement of the bar, the various routes from kitchen to the other rooms, the fact that the piano player could play just about anything if he was kept drunk enough.