A Tale for the Time Being

She closed the diary, took off her glasses, and placed both on the bedside table. Pushing the cat off her stomach, she switched off the light. “Good night, Oliver,” she said, turning her back to him.

“Good night,” he replied. The cat curled up in the gap between them and fell back to sleep. They lay there, side by side, in silence. A few thousand moments passed.

She spoke to the far wall, keeping her voice even. “I’m sorry,” she said. “But I just don’t understand you. The girl is attacked, tied up and almost raped, her video gets put up on some fetish website, her underpants get auctioned off to some pervert, her pathetic father sees all this and instead of doing anything to help her he tries to kill himself in the bathroom, where she has to find him—after all that, the only thing you can say is Babette is cool? It’s sad about the bugs?”

“I see your point,” he said. “But it’s good that she has a nice friend, isn’t it?”

“Oliver, Babette is a pimp! She’s not being nice to Nao, she’s recruiting her. She’s running a compensated-dating operation out of that awful maid café.”

He thought about this for a while. “Well, I guess maybe I was wrong about Babette.”

She lost it then, sat up and switched on the light. “Are you fucking kidding me?” she said, bringing her fists down hard onto the puffy folds of the comforter. “He learns about the hentai site and so he takes pills and tries to kill himself? How exactly is that helpful?”

He didn’t look at her, or he would have seen she was even angrier than she sounded and he might have backed down. The cat knew. The minute Ruth started pounding on the covers, Pesto was off the bed and out of the room. They heard the sound of the cat door slam as he slipped out into the safety of the night.

Oliver stared up at the ceiling and defended his point. “He did try to help. He was bidding. He was trying to win the auction. It wasn’t his fault that he lost.”

“Bidding.” He looked confused. “On her underpants. You didn’t realize that?”

“C.imperator? The guy who lost the auction? That was him. That was Nao’s father.”

“It’s the Latin name for the staghorn beetle,” he explained. “The one he folded out of paper? It was a flying Cyclommatus imperator. He won third place for it in the origami bug wars.”

Of course she remembered that. She just hadn’t recalled the Latin name, and she hated that he had. She hated that now he felt he needed to speak slowly and carefully and explain everything as if she were an imbecile or had Alzheimer’s. He used to use this tone of voice on her mother.

“Nao recognized the Latin name immediately,” he said. “That’s why she was so upset. As soon as she saw the suicide note, she knew. ‘I should only make myself ridiculous in the eyes of others if I clung to life and hugged it when I have no more to offer.’ Her father was referring to the bidding, and Nao figured it out, which was why she went to check her computer. That’s my theory.”

“He had no more to offer, you see? In the auction, which is why he lost. And he didn’t want to appear ridiculous in the eyes of—”

“I get it,” she said, cutting him off. “It’s disgusting. He was bidding on his daughter’s panties. What kind of sicko bids on his daughter’s underpants?”

Oliver looked surprised. “He was just trying to rescue them so no one else would get them. He didn’t want some hentai to buy them. It’s not like he was getting off on them himself.”

“I didn’t mean that,” she said. “You called me crazy. You called me a sicko. I was angry.”

But it was too late. She watched his blue eyes veil over as the wall went up and he pulled his tender parts in behind it. When he spoke, his voice was distant, alien.

She turned off the light again. It was too late to fix things. She spoke into the dark. “If he loves her, then he should stop trying to kill himself. Or he should do a better job of it.”

They didn’t fight often. Neither of them liked to argue, and there were certain places they were careful not to go. He knew better than to needle her about her memory. She knew better than to call him a loser.

He wasn’t. He was the most intelligent person she knew, an autodidact, with a mind that opened up the world for her, cracking it like a cosmic egg to reveal things she would never have noticed on her own. He’d been an artist for decades, but he called himself an amateur as a matter of principle. He had passionate botanical hobbies: growing things, grafting, and interspecies hacking. He would come in from the orchard, triumphant, crying “It’s a red-letter day!” after he’d succeeded in getting a rare tree to germinate or a whip graft to take. He grew cacti from seed on his windowsill, collecting specks of yellow dust from the males with a tiny sable paintbrush and transferring them gently to the female flowers. He made little mesh hats that looked like dunce caps for his Euphorbia obesa, which he placed on the females’ round heads to catch the fertilized seeds as they sprayed into the air.

Before he got sick and they moved to the island, he used to get grants and the occasional land art commission, supplementing their income by teaching and giving talks. After they moved, he kept up his art practice, even when he was ill. He wrote papers, participated in arts events remotely, and started projects like the NeoEocene. He traveled down to Vancouver to create an urban forest called Means of Production, growing plants and trees for local artists to use: wood for instrument makers, willow for weavers, fiber for papermakers. Wherever they traveled, he collected seeds and cuttings: ghetto palms from Brooklyn; metasequoia from Massachusetts; ginkgos, a living Chinese fossil, from the sidewalks in the Bronx. In the Driftless before 9/11 he’d collected hawthorn root stock onto which he’d grafted a medlar.

“It’s my greatest triumph!” he said, and while she cooked, he sat on the stairs and told her all about the history of the medlar, about the applelike fruits, which were best eaten rotten, in spite of their nasty, unmistakable smell.

“They’re much maligned,” he said. “In Elizabethan times, the English used to call them open-arse fruit. The French called them cul de chien, or dog’s asshole. Shakespeare used them as a metaphor for prostitution and anal intercourse. Where’s your copy of Romeo and Juliet?”

She sent him upstairs to her office to fetch her Riverside Shakespeare, and a moment later he was back, with the heavy book on his lap, reading the passage out loud.

If love be blind, love cannot hit the mark.

Now will he sit under a medlar tree,

And wish his mistress were that kind of fruit

As maids call medlars, when they laugh alone.

“It’s Mercutio, making fun of Romeo for not getting it on with Juliet,” he told her.

She turned the burner down and covered the soup. “Where do you find this stuff?”

He told her about the website he’d found for medlar enthusiasts, where he’d come across the Shakespearean references. The idea for the medlar-hawthorn graft he’d found while perusing Certaine Experiments Concerning Fish and Fruite, published in London in 1600, by John Taverner, Gentleman.

“It’s a book of that gentleman’s observations of fish ponds and fruit trees,” he said, wistfully. “I would like to publish a book like that.”

He was the least egotistical man she’d ever met, nor was he particularly ambitious. His land art projects, like the Means of Production, he deemed successful only when he himself had disappeared from them.

“That’s not the point. It’s not about any system of credit. It’s not about the art market. The work succeeds when all the cleverness and artifice have disappeared, after years of harvest and regrowth, when people begin to experience it as ambience. Any residual aura of me as artist or horticultural dramaturge will have faded. It will no longer matter. That’s when the work gets interesting . . .”

“It becomes more than ‘art.’ It becomes part of the optical subconscious. Change has occurred. It’s the new normal, just the way things are.”

By his own measure, then, his work was successful, but the more successful he became, the more difficult he found it to make a living.

“I’ll never be a captain of industry,” he said, ruefully, one night when they were looking over their finances and trying to figure out how they would pay their bills. “I feel like such a loser.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” she said. “If I’d wanted a captain of industry, I would have married one.”