Chris Adrian - The Great Night

Mrs. Perkins lived in a big pink house in Russian Hill with a garden out back. She was a familiar type among Will’s clients, though not a common one: a lady whose great wealth made her eccentric instead of crazy. She became interested in her garden for a period of a few weeks once or twice a year and kept Will occupied moving plants and trees to make room for a pond or a little temple to her first husband that had to go just here or there. In the intervening months Will would make his regular visits, but only see her from a window, and it was her current husband, much younger but still a little pickled-looking, who brought Will his check. But when she was interested she was very interested, so it wasn’t unusual when she came out while Will was working. Usually she stood around with her hands over her eyes or pressed against her forehead, her two poses of active imagination in which she made rearrangements in her head before she commanded Will to execute them, but that day — which Will marked later as the beginning of the end of his relationship with Carolina — she sat down near him in a redwood chaise, flipping languidly through a book with a joint hanging out of her mouth.

“Mmm?” she said, which he knew from experience meant she was offering him a drag off the joint.

“No, thanks,” he said. “Might make me water something too much.” She threw back her head and laughed. She was wearing a fancy muumuu and a turban, with a crystal dangling above her eyes. The crystal sparkled when she tossed her head and then bonked on her forehead in a way that looked quite painful, though her smile didn’t falter at all. Will had never hated her before — she was a harmless lady who took good care of her plants and whose only crime was being obscenely wealthy — but just then there was something about her laugh and the way she tossed her head and the ridiculous turban that made him want to hit her in the face with his shovel. He leaned on it instead, and sighed, deciding he was a bad person for thinking such a thing, and considered that there must be something wrong with him, a thought that had been occurring and recurring to him, in yards and gardens all over the city, for the past few months. He might not actually be a terrible person, but there was certainly something wrong with him. He thought he ought to be able to describe it to himself better, but when he tried all he could do was make lists in his head of episodes of real and imaginary bad behavior: he wanted to hit harmless Mrs. Perkins in the face with a shovel; he was cruel to his clients’ plants and actually hurt a lemon tree in Bernal Heights, pruning at it furiously and unnecessarily until it was reduced to such a violated nubbin that he moved a fern in front of it to hide it from the owner. And just that morning he had looked up at Carolina at breakfast and found her not very attractive.

That was a surprise every time it happened, though it happened more frequently all the time. It felt like a crime to find her unattractive, or at least like some sort of aberration — he was aware, even as he looked at her, that other men would find her quite attractive, in that moment when he could take her or leave her. Something always snapped back into place and then she was as lovely as ever, and his return to his senses was usually marked by the special boner he had only ever gotten for her, an entity he wasn’t sure he had ever actually convinced her was real, but it was true that there was a different quality about it when he was with her, which went beyond ordinary stiffness. “A hard-on is a hard-on is a hard-on,” she’d said to him when he first told her about it, though she said later, not entirely jokingly, that it was the first time she had ever been touched emotionally by a penis. He wanted to ask her what was wrong with him now, but she was the last person in the world he could talk to about it.

Mrs. Perkins toked ostentatiously and made satisfied noises while Will worked, and neglected to offer any opinions about the garden. Will was waiting for her to say something, and was getting preemptively angry at her uninformed opinions and her inability to make up her mind, but she remained quiet. He continued working, escalating his imaginary argument with her until he couldn’t stand the silence he would ordinarily have appreciated. He turned toward her chaise and saw that she was reading a book.

“Have you read this one?” she asked, showing him the cover. It was his collection of short stories.

“I heard it wasn’t very good,” he said.

“It’s written to a particular taste,” she said. “But I wouldn’t say it’s bad.” She closed the book and rubbed it against her cheek, a weird gesture, and one that Will always thought should have inspired him to flee from the garden and Mrs. Perkins’s orbit and influence. But he only leaned on his shovel and stared at her. “I had no idea you were an artist,” she said. “You ought to come to my salon.”

“I’m really more of a gardener,” Will said, which was what he always said when people asked him what he did for a living, because nobody knew what an arborist was, and the one time he had told some girl he was a landscape architect she had asked him where he went to school to be one and then caught him when he lied about it. If he was still a writer he was the kind that didn’t really write anymore, and to say that was his profession would have been like saying he was a kindergartener or a virgin. When he sat on a pillow in Carolina’s sunroom, ostensibly working on a story while she worked on a painting, he usually ended up just describing what she was doing in a dozen different ways — she mixed her paints languidly or anxiously or she attacked or stroked her canvas or the light made a triangle on her back — but nothing he wrote about her painting or her life or his life or the life they shared ever added up to a story.

Mrs. Perkins made as if to throw the book at him, and he flinched. “Oh, please,” she said. “It’s every Wednesday afternoon at three. I’ll set a place for you.”

“Is it lunch?” he asked.

“Of a sort,” she said.

“All right,” he said. “I’ll bring my girlfriend. She’s the real artist.”

“No guests,” she said. “Until you are a senior member of the salon. But promotions are easy and I have a feeling you’ll go far and fast.” She lay back on the chaise with the book on her chest, face down and open to the place she’d stopped reading. She closed her eyes and adjusted her turban before she folded her hands over the book. “Such dispiriting stuff,” she said. “I need to take a little break.”

He ignored her for the rest of his stay in her garden that afternoon and didn’t say goodbye or even ask to be paid. It bothered him that Carolina wasn’t invited, and it bothered him when people said his stories were dispiriting — he thought they were as hopeful as anybody could reasonably expect from a collection of stories about dead brothers — and he was thinking all the way home about how the salon, which he imagined to be a circle of dried-up pretentious people stuffing Fabergé eggs up one another’s asses all afternoon, could go fuck itself. He almost told Carolina about it, but she was in a sad mood when he got home, and he didn’t want to make her any sadder with news of a rejection, no matter how inconsequential. At first he considered the invitation strictly as a rejection of Carolina, and he couldn’t understand how anybody could fail to invite her to anything.

But he got a little more curious about it as the week passed, and when Carolina scolded him for peeing all over the bathroom he had a moment of small resentment in which he very privately cherished the invitation that had excluded her. It passed in an instant but came again and again; she happened to be particularly scoldy that week. The anniversary of her brother’s death was approaching, and she seemed to get angry at everything during that time. At first it seemed a fascinating contrast to the way he got sad and retarded around the anniversary of Sean’s death — everything seemed to slow down and he felt like he wanted to sleep for the whole week that preceded and followed the eighteenth of April — but now she was starting to seem shrewish. It had to be its own special sort of crime, he thought, to withhold sympathy from the person with whom, of everybody in the world, he ought to sympathize the most, and when he tried to hide his annoyance from her he ended up acting sullen, which only angered her more. He started to dread breakfast, because again and again her beauty seemed to fall away over a plate of scrambled eggs or pancakes or the grapefruit he had prepared for her, carefully cutting out the triangles of flesh so she could lift them out with her spoon. He had put half a maraschino cherry in the center of the grapefruit and was waiting for her to say it made it look like a boob, but she only picked it up, squishing it with her thumb and forefinger, and put it aside. It was an unlovely gesture, and she looked particularly unlovely doing it. “What?” she asked, because she saw him shaking his head. “I don’t like cherries.”