I first turned to botany like anybody does because I found flowers terrifyingly attractive and had been raised by reasonable people who didn’t put beauty at the center of their lives. I thought I could put it there.
Now the study of beauty and how it grows has become my work, and I think that’s the best way of keeping it. But it also leaves the door open for something else to fill in the beauty-as-beauty center. The useless beauty. The not work. And I think what is really useless is the way I love you. I want to put that in the center.
One example of non-uselessness is how I filled up that first notebook. I didn’t expect to get to the end of it, maybe because I believed you when you said I’d never do anything ever again. But today I had to put on public-facing butt-hushing outdoor pants and go out and buy a second book from the bodega man, you’ll see I’ve even maxed out the margins of the first one. I’ve always admired my particular bodega man for carrying black-and-white Compositions behind the register, and one box of blue ballpoint pens, as if they were treats people might like to buy on a Thursday with loose cash. I also bought a strawberry Yoo-hoo. Having drunk the sixteen fluid ounces of milk beverage in one gulp I commence now a new notebook, a night season. I’ll call this notebook December. We haven’t had a storm since Thanksgiving, but between storms the darkness lies like a little snow over the streets.
Day and night the city’s electronic flakes never fall. These four-foot glow-in-the-dark geometries dangle overhead, threatening to impale the holiday. There are so many attractive, ambitious, well-dressed people in this city with well-shaped arms and goals and for the next four months they’ll be invisible under their parkas. We’ll all be walking eyes, impossibly equal to each other, and then my castor plant will bloom.
I’m writing this behind the bar. I ended the last notebook with Cheese and that’s where you praised me so I’m sticking to only edible titles in this book. I don’t know what to call this one, so far we’ve only got Yoo-hoo. A woman’s sitting at the bar with good posture. She keeps looking to see if I have become the person she’s hoping will arrive. I’m still anonymous. Sometimes I make a little noise with my shaker to remind her that she nevertheless isn’t entirely alone. She ordered one chardonnay half an hour ago and hasn’t drunk any of it. I’d like to refill it for her but she’ll have to make a little progress first. Mishti isn’t here to keep the pours flowing, she’s out on a date with your husband. She looks really, really great. She’s wearing the top of a purple sari and pink jeans and some extraordinarily fancy earrings that hang down to her beefy shoulders.
What you underestimated about Mishti is her thoroughness: when you said Thursday night she went exponential to every Thursday night. What have you been doing on your Thursday nights, Professor Kallas? I haven’t come near you since you praised me because I want to ride it a little longer. The next thing you say to me will be so rude, wisely, in the name of balance, that I won’t be able to trust or enjoy the memory of your praise anymore. Right now I can be Jasmine (talk about pants) on this soft carpet you wove me and fly above the city alone because I am also Aladdin, the thief. I get both seats on your carpet.
Chardonnay just looked up from her totally full glass and told me I ought to be a psychologist. I asked her why. She said because I’m willing to wait. Everybody’s always rushing her, she said, I don’t make her feel rushed. She said I have a patient face.
I told her that I’ve never expected very much to happen. Easy to wait when there’s nothing to wait for. She said, Oh, you’d be shocked by the things that happen. To ordinary people. They’ll tell you stories to melt your head. I said, Melt your head? When you’re their shrink, she said.
Chardonnay then abruptly settled her tab and left, so I’m drinking her glass, Merry Christmas. Joan the Christmas rose has another name, it’s hellebore. Nobody has ever been stupid enough to say “hella” in your presence not even in 2001 and I don’t think roses are boring so we can call it Christmas rose to be festive. It’s blooming now. I bloomed one on my kitchen windowsill. What a menace! The sap is a skin irritant and one medicinal dose of it killed Alexander the Great. The leaves, though, are deep and lustrous and the blossoms are unfathomably maroon. I’ve grown it for your office so that you have a little seasonal weapon on hand next time Barry and Carlo come to play. Barry is a balding Alexander and Carlo’s skin has never, not once, been irritated. You being you, what you’ll love most is the foliage green so dark it approaches black.
There was a Wednesday five years ago when I’d nowhere to go for Christmas, the Wednesday was Christmas Eve. It was my first year in the graduate program. I went to the student center to collect my mail but I hadn’t gotten any mail, so I was just standing in the student center. You rushed in to leave a couple graded papers in mailboxes. You saw me standing there, Mabberley’s Plant-Book about to fall from my elbow. What I remember best—I don’t even remember what we ate for dinner that night, aside from the sweet potatoes—is how long it took you to speak, and how oddly and patiently you waited for yourself to decide what to do about me. We are neither of us inherently social. We stood parallel to each other, both facing the mailboxes, but I could feel you reading me in your periphery, and I stood very still because I wanted to be read. Then you said, “Where are you from?”
I knew who you were, I’d applied to Columbia to study with you. Like a brat I said, “Kansas, Professor Kallas.”
You said, “Assistant Professor.”
I said your breakdown of leaf trait evolution was the single most inspired and inspiring work of contemporary botany I’d ever read. You explained that your boyfriend’s cousins were coming over for dinner and that you wished painful deaths upon them. Your boyfriend’s name was Barry. I’d probably met him as a counselor at freshman orientation. I said I had. You said he always encouraged student interaction and that you’d openly avoided it but that this time he’d approve. I think you actually called me a charitable case. I promised to sit between you and cousin four. You took me, quietly, efficiently, home.
That was your old apartment in Astoria. You were thirty-five and I was twenty-five and I was so impressed by your fortitude, your magnitude, by the apartment you rented alone as if living alone in New York were possible. By the authority of your blank walls and the unheard-of oranges striping the thin, not warm, and very sophisticated quilt on your bed. By the ceiling-high walnut shelf of multicolored encyclopedias, itself a jumbo encyclopedia of encyclopedias, that sternly faced your bed and must have been the first and last thing you saw each day. By the one little St. Bernard’s lily growing on your windowsill and the cat who nibbled at it. I wanted immediately, with my whole self, to be your cat.
You took me, in your equalizing uninflected way, entirely seriously. You let me peel the sweet potatoes. You introduced me to Barry as “a botanist.” I’d only told you as the N train crossed the Queensboro Bridge that I wanted to study the harshest grossest facts about the world’s prettiest organisms. You’d nodded at that as if I’d said I needed to use the bathroom, something basic and inevitable about my body. I think the bottom line is that we’re very similar.
Barry (very different) proposed with a princess-cut gray diamond that New Year’s Eve and by the following Christmas you’d moved into Riverside Drive. I declined your repeat invitation, which I still believe was a relief to you. It’s cute to have a student in the mix in Astoria. It’s weird to dilute Riverside Drive with me.
I’d spent the year reading everything I thought you’d ever read, so that I could speak to you. I didn’t want to sit across from you at a dinner table, I wanted us to coauthor a grafting treatise. You were always working on a paper of your own because the department had laid its tenure hoops out before you and asked you to start jumping. Still you read my abstracts and poked the right holes in them. Sometimes you’d ask my opinion of something we’d both read. I learned my own opinions by giving them to you. I did my own work and you did yours and in that way you and I grew older for a good couple of years.
The person who believes in you is the most dangerous person you know. The person who believes in you can unbuild you in an instant. We haven’t learned how to curb that danger. We don’t know what to do with the person who names our life. The one who says Do this, right now, not that and the this that person casually suggests becomes your entire livelihood. The one who lends you a hat that allows you to enter a room. A coat to survive your own winter. We don’t know how to thank, because gratitude is traded in sexual currency. If you don’t marry the person you’re most grateful to, if you don’t fuck them or pretend you want to, the part of you that person created shrivels a little. The part of me you created has overtaken the rest of me, as a weed, because all I do is thank you, is thank you, is thank you.
It isn’t as if you aren’t beautiful, you are beautiful. It isn’t as if you don’t find me, in whatever way you find me, beautiful. It’s that our interest in each other is a cold lake and neither of us wants to jump in. We want to stand together, at the edge of the cold lake.
Maybe I ought to become a psychologist. Maybe I ought to melt my own head.
The splendid thing is that right now, as I write, all the heat in the world has collected in the bread basket that sits between my best friend and your husband. Between Mishti’s vigor, and Barry’s lust, their combined temperatures could maybe warm us, maybe even at this distance.