Chris Adrian - The Great Night

She was pretty close to Will’s own age, with short brown hair and very large brown eyes that gave her the appearance of being pleasantly surprised by something, and Will thought perhaps she was favorably surprised by his appearance (though his picture was all over his website). But then she cast the same pleasantly surprised look at his toolbox, then down at the doorknob, and he realized that she looked like that at everything and everyone.

“I’m so glad you’ve come,” she said.

“Sure,” Will said, and followed her into the house, which was both grander and more decrepit than he could have guessed, just by looking at it from the outside. It was enormous, but the rooms were alternately fancy and dilapidated; lovely murals alternated with cracked plaster and bare lath, and though the kitchen was done up as snobbishly as any he’d seen in Seacliff, there was a hole in the floor. Big expensive rooms made him both a little anxious and a little bored. He had enough rich clients that any wonder at the dizzying extremes of wealth in this city had worn off a while ago, but it made him unsettled in some small way to see what he didn’t have, and would never have, with his combination career of tree surgeon and ultra-obscure short-story writer. He wondered very briefly what she did, and did so well, that she could afford a place like this, even in its partially ruined state, and then he got distracted watching her walk and nearly ran into her when she stopped suddenly. They had proceeded through the foyer and the dining room and living room and the kitchen, and a couple of rooms whose purpose Will could not divine, and finally come into a sunroom empty except for five large pillows uncarefully arranged on the floor. To Will’s left a whole wall was covered with photos of a man, a little younger than him, another Monchhichi-like creature with a fuzzy brown head and big brown eyes.

“My brother Ryan,” Carolina said. “He’s dead.” Then she picked her way swiftly through the pillows and went outside. Will followed, wondering briefly if people came to kneel on the pillows and worship the pictures. Any other arborist might have dismissed her as crazy, but Will was in a position to sympathize with someone who had plastered a wall with pictures of her dead brother, and who paused conspicuously to draw the attention of strangers to them. He had a dead brother of his own and had thrown up his own sort of worshipping wall over the years since Sean’s death.

“Come along,” Carolina said, standing in the door to the garden. She went right to the tree, the oak that looked even worse in real life than it had in the picture, but Will’s attention was captured by the sorry state of its neighbors, a peppermint willow and a carob tree and a Grecian laurel, all suffering some variety of rot, a tristania overgrown to the point of strangling itself as well as an adjacent pear tree, and a slimy koi pond, which wasn’t even his responsibility, yet he longed to clean it as soon as he saw it.

“What do you think?” she asked. “Can you help?” She was standing next to her tree, one arm around the trunk. She looked like she was about to cry, and Will thought, dismissively and uncharitably, She thinks the tree is her brother. She thinks he came back as that tree or went into that tree. He shook his head at himself and considered that maybe she just wasn’t ready for anything else in her life to die just yet.

“You can’t?” she asked. “But you haven’t even looked at him yet. Can you really tell from over there?”

Will realized he was still shaking his head. “No,” he said. “I mean, yes. I can help. Probably. Maybe. Do you know what kind of tree this is, exactly?” He asked because, as he got closer, he saw that it was not an ordinary specimen. The bark was a silver color that the photograph had not properly represented, as it had not represented the heaping tarry excrescences that dotted it on every limb. The parts of the leaves that in the picture appeared discolored and diseased were in fact the healthy parts — he could only tell when he touched them that the silver and gold portions had the texture of health, while the green parts were rubbery or brittle.

“No,” Carolina said. “It came with the house. It was planted a long time ago. It’s an oak, isn’t it?”

“Or something,” Will said. He walked around the tree once, staring up into the branches and listening to the odd rustle of the leaves; there was something metallic just at the edges of the noise. “This whole place is a mess,” Will said, not looking away from the odd oak. “Do you want me to fix them all up or just this one?” He turned to look at her and wished he had phrased the question differently, because her wounded posture and the sad expectant look on her face made him feel churlish and rude. “Please,” he said, unthinkingly, and then, “Sorry. This garden could be magnificent. But there are a lot of sick plants.”

She straightened her back and frowned at him. “I don’t really care about the rest of it,” she said, “but you can do whatever you want. Just save this tree.” Will stood there a moment, careful to be nodding instead of shaking his head, and then, trying to sound as solicitous as possible, offered to show her around her own garden.

As he expected, she didn’t know a quarter of what was growing in her own yard. It turned out that she had only been in the house a few months; before that her brother had lived there for years. Will showed her the tristania and the pear tree and the laurel, crushing some leaves for her, but she acted like she had never smelled a bay leaf before. She nodded politely at everything he showed her. He was not exactly puzzled. He’d passed behind walls all over the city into gardens that were as sumptuously ignored as this one.

In the next few weeks he put a lot of work into that garden and that tree, eventually neglecting his other clients. That neglect was initially on account of the peculiar oak and the professional challenge of figuring it out and restoring it to health, but more and more, as the weeks passed, he went back for the peculiar lady. Initially, Will perceived her as a challenge as well — a challenge to figure out and a challenge to get to know and a challenge to befriend — and he didn’t quite know why he should want to do that right away. He had other clients who were as pretty and as strange, whose gardens were as ramshackle, and yet he was only as interested in them as he was in their money. He supposed it must just be her wonderful tree that set her apart, the tree whose leaves appeared in none of his reference books and which were recognized by none of the experts he contacted.

Back then he was relatively celibate. He masturbated all the time, like everybody else in his neighborhood, it seemed — he had accidentally left his shades up one night as he sat reclining at his desk and whacking away to sensuous Playgirl porn, which was the only sort that didn’t make him feel as guilty as it made him feel aroused, since the portion of his imagination that was always at work to spoil his boner inevitably pictured the women in the more patriarchal porn in poses of unsexy victimhood, black-eyed, methed-up, and crying every time they had off-camera sex. The soft light and misty lenses of the Playgirl porn left him imagining a lady with a monocle and a cigarette holder behind the camera, who arranged gift bags for all her starlets and provided day care. He didn’t need the porn to get off, but every now and then it was fun, and he might spend hours at his desk, at the same place he wrote, shooting seven times in the course of a two-hour film. The seventh time was always a little difficult to manage: he had been working away vigorously for an hour before he realized that night had fallen and his neighbors were watching from across the courtyard, four men and a woman, each in their own window, arranged like a bunch of masturbating Hollywood Squares. Will laughed when he saw them, and thought, What a fucked-up city I live in. But he didn’t close the curtains.