Arnold woke the following morning to the scent of wet dog. The German shepherd, covered in lather, was tracking suds around the apartment. Great balls of foam covered its pointy ears. When the animal noticed that Arnold was moving, she lunged at him and rubbed her wet coat across his face.
“We went for a walk,” the girl explained. “Son of a President found a skunk.”
Cassandra grabbed hold of Son of a President and pulled the dog toward the bath. The sound of splashing water soon filled the apartment. Here was yet another advantage of Manhattan that he and Judith had taken for granted: You didn’t have to worry about skunks. Or rabbits. Or woodchucks. In contrast, Brooklyn was a jungle of herbivorous pests just waiting to sink their canines into burgeoning flowers.
Arnold wiped the soapy dog-froth from his lips. “You need ketchup.”
“What?”
“Don’t waste your time with soap or shampoo. Cold water and ketchup works wonders.”
“Are you for real?”
“I had a Fulbright to Italy a couple of years ago. I came up with the ambitious notion that I was going to do for tomatoes what George Washington Carver did for peanuts.” Arnold stood up and stretched; his muscles ached from sleeping without a blanket on the cold floorboards. “Dried tomato paste is also an excellent adhesive. Not to mention a very efficient source of automotive fuel. If I ever find a way to show my face in public again, I’d love to market a tomato-powered car.”
“You call that ambitious?” answered the girl. “I call that wacko.”
She shut the water off in the bathroom and set about preparing breakfast. It struck Arnold how easily they’d settled into a domestic routine—as though they were a married couple. As peculiar as it must be for this girl to have a stranger twice her age sleeping on her floor, and a fugitive on top of that, she acted as though it were nothing out of the ordinary. Arnold glanced at his watch. It wasn’t yet six o’clock. When he pulled open the heavy damask curtains, the sky was still grey.
“I like to get up my ass up early,” said the girl. “Otherwise you lose half the day.”
Cassandra sliced a mango with a pocket knife and ate a sliver directly off the blade—a sin for which Arnold’s great-grandmother, The Baroness, had once fed him castor oil. Then the girl handed a morsel to Arnold. The fruit tasted perfectly sweet. For their main course, Cassandra prepared granola and blueberry pancakes—a far cry above the botanist’s standard fare of orange juice and toast. It was impossible to imagine Judith labouring over a frying pan early in the morning unless she were arranging a still life. He could never forget the first meal his wife had cooked for him. She’d baked eggplant lasagne, but she’d forgotten to boil the pasta before she put it in the oven. The end-product had displayed the consistency of birch bark. Judith had learned her way around the kitchen over the last thirty years, but she was a one-meal-a-day chef—and that meal was dinner. So it was a treat it was to wake up in an apartment that smelled of sizzling butter. As soon as he made the comparison, though, the botanist hated himself for it. How could you weigh three decades of companionship against a stack of organic flapjacks? Besides, he’d derived more pleasure from cracking the birch-bark lasagne with Judith than he ever could from a five-star meal. Arnold’s thoughts drifted to his life with Judith, to the memory of one morning when he’d ducked out of a symposium on “Environmentalism & Diet” to meet his wife for breakfast at McDonalds, not because they enjoyed fast food—they probably ate it a total of two or three times in thirty years—but because sometimes a healthy serving of hypocrisy was just what the doctor ordered. When Arnold looked up from his reminiscences, the girl was examining him intensely.
“So, Professor Tomato Cars,” she asked. “How exactly do you intend to go about showing your face in public again?”
“The way I see it,” continued the girl. “You’ve got three choices.”
“Do I now?”
“Yes, you do. You want know what they are?”
Her matter-of-fact tone struck Arnold as smug. “Enlighten me,” he said.
“First, you can turn yourself in right now and face the firing squad. Or death by hanging. Or whatever it is they do to accused terrorists these days. Maybe they’ll even tear your tongue out as a symbolic gesture—a warning to other would-be traitors.”
“Sound like a great choice to me.”
“It wouldn’t be my top choice,” said the girl, feeding batter scraps to the dog while she spoke. “But at least it would all be over with. I imagine they’d put you out of your misery pretty damn quick.”
“Or subject me to slow torture. What’s my second choice?”
“You could try to escape. While you were sleeping, I printed out a list of countries that don’t have extradition treaties with the United States. You actually have quite a selection. You could probably become a leading botanist in Uzbekistan or Kazakhstan or Tajikistan. Assuming they have plants in those places.”
It amazed Arnold what odd prejudices ordinary people had about vegetation. How could you possible have a country without plants?
“The Uzbeks actually have a first-rate botanical garden in Tashkent,” he observed. “Persimmons and Magolepian cherries come from the Caucasus.”
“Well, I’ll be damned,” she mocked. “But I guess that’s a good thing for you. There’s only one problem with your escape to who-knows-where-istan plan.”
“Getting there.”
“Bingo,” said the girl. She began clearing the plates. “So much for those leprous cherries.”
“Magolepian cherries.”
“Which leads us,” the girl continued, “to choice three.”
“I’m not going to like this, am I?”
Cassandra stacked the dishes on the drainage board. “You can lay low until the furore subsides,” she suggested. “I don’t mean for a few weeks. I mean years. Like the Weathermen or any of those Puerto Rican nationalists from the 1950s. When you eventually do poke your head out again, you’ll still draw a prison sentence, but it will be much lighter—maybe a couple of years and a long parole.”
“You’re suggesting I go underground for years?”
“It’s an option,” said the girl. “It’s an amusing one too, you have to admit. You’re so not the sort of person who usually jumps to mind when people think about underground fugitives.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” demanded Arnold. He didn’t relish the prospect of life on the lam—but that didn’t mean he wasn’t capable of it. Nobody had any business questioning his adequacy as an outlaw, at least not until he’d had a chance to show his mettle. “I’m more resourceful than you think,” he insisted.
“Yeah, whatever. That’s why you’re crashing on my floor.”
She sat down opposite him at the table and lit a cigarette. The smoke smelled both toxic and inviting. Arnold said nothing. It was amazing how easily this damn girl got under his skin.
“Can I ask you something?” asked the girl. “Off the record.”
“That’s a first.”
“What I mean is, I’m not asking you for my article. But I am curious. Would you do it again?”
“You mean not stand up?”
“All of it. Not stand up. Stick out your tongue. Refuse to apologize.”
Arnold hadn’t really thought about this before—not in such explicit terms. He’d been too busy dealing with the consequences of his actions to consider the desirability of undoing them. Moreover, he sensed the girl was delving beyond the specific incident. She wasn’t asking: ‘Do you regret not standing up at the baseball game?’ She was asking: ‘Do you really think you can possibly make a difference?’ That wasn’t a fair question, because you could ask the same thing of almost anybody who defied the rules. The big rules. Arnold realized he might indeed be one of those rule-crushers, one of the rare few who are actually part of history. He might even have it in him to murder a lout like Spitford to make that happen. But he wasn’t prepared to share these thoughts with his hostess.
“I really don’t know what I’d do,” he said. “My brain is a bit addled these days.”
“Well, you’ll have a long time to think about it,” said the girl. “I should be home around six-thirty.”
“Say hello to the Revolution for me,” said Arnold.
The girl tossed her canvas bag over her shoulder. “By the way, I hope you weren’t planning on wandering the neighbourhood in that mask of yours.”
“Why not?”
“You’ve got to stay on top of things,” answered the girl. “They’ve detained your two transvestite friends. There’s a manhunt on for a fugitive in a costume.”
“They’ve arrested Gladys and Anabelle?”
“Detained,” said the girl. “As material witnesses. But they haven’t specified what sort of costume—so it looks like they’re keeping your secrets. For now.”
“This is outrageous. They haven’t done anything. Anabelle wasn’t even awake….”
“The noose tightens,” observed Cassandra. “Being friends with you comes with all sorts of advantages, doesn’t it?”
Arnold thought of the two old ‘sisters’ being carted off in handcuffs and his entire body surged with anger.
“I totally have a death-wish for letting you stay here,” added the girl. “If I had half a brain, I’d take the $125,000 and turn you in.”
Cassandra was right: Arnold did have a lot of time to think about what had happened at the baseball game. During the initial phase of his captivity—for during the workday, when the girl was gone, her tiny, nearly plant-less apartment did feel like a prison—Arnold thought principally of Judith. He wondered what his wife was doing, what she was thinking. In moments of weakness, he contemplated surreptitious ways to contact her. He could ask Cassandra to act as an emissary, at least to let Judith know that he was safe. Or he could have the girl post a letter for him. Or, if he felt particularly daring, he might even telephone the townhouse from a nearby payphone during the middle of the night. But all of these plans came with substantial risks. Moreover, he wasn’t sure what he would say to Judith. She’d held a press conference two days after his disappearance, in which she begged him to return home. Gilbert Card had stood behind her, sober and erect. The pair didn’t look at all like lovers—but looks meant nothing. Many couples who appeared happily married stood on the brink of divorce. Moreover, Judith was still Judith. She’d still want him to apologize and to raise a child. It was difficult to see the point of risking his neck for a conversation that would change nothing. Better to lay low. He reconsidered only once, when they arrested his wife as “an accessory after the fact,” but the authorities quickly released her to home confinement, pending trial. Arnold doubted she’d ever face a jury. Or that the elderly transvestites would remain in custody much longer. This was just the police-version of the hard sell: They were harassing his loved ones in the hope of pressuring him into surrender.
Unfortunately, Guillermo’s fate was another matter. The Venezuelan appeared on the front page of the Times, the morning after his arrest, wearing a restraining belt and an orange jump suit. He appeared wan and disoriented. On public radio, family members of the plane-crash victims expressed their relief and gratitude at his capture. The Cuban government issued a statement accusing the United States of a double-standard when it came to terrorism—but Havana offered nothing that might exonerate Arnold’s office manager. Within days, he’d been turned over to the Peruvian authorities for trial. When Arnold heard the news, he sat on the fire escape and wept. He’d have done anything to help the Venezuelan—even have turned himself in—but, in this case, there was nothing to be done. Guillermo Zambrano was Willie Vargas. He had blown up all of those innocent people. Producing a fugitive botanist as a character witness wasn’t going to do the poor man any good and the NPR story on the plane bombing had shaken Arnold. It crossed his mind that his friend had done something horrific, something that did deserve to be punished. Bonnie Card could say all she wanted about “one man’s terrorism being another man’s freedom-fighting,” but at the end of the day, one hundred forty-two innocent people had died. That was the heart of the problem: every choice made sense from some vantage point. Like butchering Spitford. Several nights Arnold woke in a cold sweat, having dreamed that he was squeezing shut the clergyman’s windpipe.
The botanist’s first days at Cassandra’s were marked by an intense interest in the world outside the apartment. Denied access to the city, he longed for its bustle. He suffered cravings for vegetarian paella and crepe suzette and oven-hot anchovy pizza from Sal & Joe’s—in short, for anything that would be difficult to bring back to his isolated quarters. But what he longed for most was news, the details of the daily life that he’d abandoned. He sent the girl to check out the nursery, in the wake of Willie’s deportation, and he’d suffered acutely when she reported that the Plant Centre had been closed indefinitely “Due to Unforeseen Circumstances.” He endured another blow when Spitford announced a boycott of “All Things Brinkman,” and several major retailers responded with immediate announcements that they were pulling his books from their shelves. Arnold stewed over this treachery and ranted about suing them from absentia. But then his entire “business empire”—as the media called it—was seized by the government. According to the F.B.I., their HAZMAT team had discovered traces of castor beans at Arnold’s office. These plants were the principal ingredient in the bio-toxin ricin. The authorities described their find as “a weapons-grade cache” that “could be transformed into a mass poison in a matter of weeks.” Which applied to all castor beans. And to every nursery and green grocer in the country that carried them. All through Arnold’s childhood the Baroness had hand-made her own castor oil—and had tortured Arnold with its properties in the name of digestive health—but nobody had ever accused her of being a terrorist. “Next thing you know they’ll brand me a terrorist for growing water lilies,” he told Cassandra. “People can drown in water, you know.”
As one afternoon drifted into another, all of these setbacks seemed increasingly abstract, as though they’d happened to someone else. Which wasn’t so far from the truth. Arnold the Fugitive felt little connection to the happily married and successful entrepreneur who’d refused to stand up at a baseball game. Maybe this was a psychological necessity, a coping mechanism. Like the women who’d shared the nursing facility with his mother, for whom a few dingy corridors and a sterile recreation centre became an entire universe, Arnold grew more and more focused on his immediate surroundings: the apartment, the wall-to-wall books, the cramped courtyard where the superintendent’s teensy Filipino wife, a mail-order bride, raised ornamental cabbages. That first day, as a gag, the girl bought him a bag of tomato seeds and a tray of soil, but he enjoyed the present so much that soon he was cultivating half a dozen tins of plantlets. Never have garden tomatoes been so carefully tended. His trove included beefsteaks, currants, plums, and a marvellous patch of cherry tomatoes that the dog accidentally kicked off the fire escape. Arnold’s days were spent tending these plants, and reading from Cassandra’s philosophy library, and, as the spring bled into summer, thinking about his relationship with his new roommate.
Cassandra Broward was, by any standard, an odd creature. The girl appeared to live an entirely hermetic existence. She didn’t have one visitor during Arnold’s first two weeks in the apartment: her only phone calls came from her boss at the Vanguard; once from a telemarketer pitching industrial carpet cleaner. Other than work, and the weekly chores of shopping and laundry, she didn’t spend much time outside the tenement. It was possible that she’d altered her routine on account of Arnold’s presence, but the botanist didn’t think so. Her studio apartment lacked the postcard-dappled refrigerator and photo-clad bedside tables that suggested a network of kith and kin. No, she appeared to be on her own in the world. Yet what amazed Arnold was that the girl didn’t seem to mind at all. She spent most of her evenings reading high-end philosophy—Marx, Schopenhauer, Heidegger—or, later in the week, completing the New York Times crossword puzzle. There was no point in trying before Wednesday, she explained. The Monday and Tuesday puzzles were designed for halfwits—Judith had felt the same way. Arnold loved the first puzzles of the week because they were the only ones on which he could make any headway. He wondered how he kept falling for women who were gifted at word games. Because, in spite of himself, he was developing an unhealthy romantic attachment to his hostess. Arnold recalled an old expression: “Give a man a hammer and he will view all problems as nails.” He told himself his feelings for Cassandra were of a similar nature—he liked her because she was there. ‘Stockholm Syndrome’. But increasingly, he wasn’t so sure that was all there was to it….
One night, after supper, Arnold asked her about her social life. They were sitting on the fire escape, between the tomato trays and the compost bin, enjoying a fine cool mist that had settled over the city. Cassandra had lit a handful of scented candles, perfuming the night with a pleasant, wax-tinged aroma. Her cigarette smoke also hung in the damp air. The shades were drawn in the opposite apartment, but it didn’t matter, because the girl had draped towels over the upper steps and railing to create a protective screen for Arnold. He took a drag from Cassandra’s cigarette—Judith would have killed him—and watched the girl cobbling together a response.
“I don’t have a social life,” she finally said.
“That’s my point,” answered Arnold. “Why not?”
She reclaimed her cigarette. “Why?”
Her response wasn’t what the botanist had expected. “Most girls your age like to hang out with friends. Maybe even go on dates.” He regretted the words as soon as they left his mouth—they sounded so parental—but the girl didn’t appear to mind.
“I’m not most girls my age.”
“I don’t understand,” Arnold pressed. “Don’t you get…lonely?”
Arnold had been in her apartment for only ten days and already he felt lonely. He didn’t confess this, of course, because he didn’t want to appear weak.
“I guess I’m a Calvinist at heart. That sounds totally pretentious, doesn’t it? But it’s true,” answered the girl. She took a deep drag on her cigarette. “The way I see it, life is going to give you what it’s going to give you—and there’s not a fucking thing you can do about it. If someone wants to be my friend, I’m glad to be friends. But I so don’t see the point of going out and trying to make friends. Take you, for instance. I’m fine hanging out with you because you showed up. On the other hand, I’m not going to put up signs around the neighbourhood advertising for fugitives to crash on my floor.”
“That’s extremely passive, don’t you think?”
“But I don’t mind, really,” said the girl. “The pathetic truth of the matter is that most people don’t have any friends once they reach a certain age. Sure, they make friends in high school or college—but then they give them up when they have children. So why bother putting in all that effort when you end up right where you started?”
“Why bother waking up in the morning when you eventually end up dead?”
“I like waking up in the morning,” retorted Cassandra. “I don’t care about friends.”
Arnold gazed up at the orange-tinted sky of Brooklyn. He could make out one solitary star pulsing through the glow. Or maybe it was a planet.
“I know you don’t believe me,” continued the girl. “But it’s true. Socializing is just not my thing. I’ve always been like this, even before my parents died.” The elder Browards had owned a seafood restaurant; they’d died of smoke inhalation, during an electrical fire, while Cassandra was in college. “Your problem is that it is your thing—for people like you, your whole life is about socializing. Dinner parties and cocktail parties and all that bullshit. That’s how you convince yourself that you matter. I bet you go to twenty weddings a year, every time you’ve got a friend whose kid gets married, and every time, you’re bored out of your fucking skulls. Right? But even though you don’t actually like all that social bullshit, you still can’t handle that someone else—someone like me—doesn’t want to buy into it.”
She was at least partially right. Arnold did measure much of his own success in terms of his reception by others. He cared deeply whether people liked him—and the more people who liked him, the better. At least with regard to people of his own class and values, of course, not the over-breeding troglodytes one brushed elbows with at sporting events.
“I do value the approval of other people,” he conceded. “But I can understand why one wouldn’t….I guess.”
“No, you can’t,” answered the girl. “But that’s okay.”
Arnold wondered precisely what she’d meant by “okay”: “Okay” for a stranger or “okay” for a companion. He spotted a moth circling one of the candles. It was a large, russet-coloured gypsy moth of the defoliating variety—the sworn enemy of hardwoods everywhere. Arnold usually felt an obligation to destroy these creatures, for the sake of the city’s sweetgums and alders, but he was afraid the girl might not approve, so he watched the insect’s orbit indecisively.
“Any other burning questions?” she asked. “I don’t want you to think I keep secrets.”
“Well….,” stammered Arnold. “You don’t happened to have a boyfriend, do you…? Or a girlfriend?”
The girl grinned. “I happen to like men, if that’s what you’re asking. And no, I don’t have one.”
“Do you want one?”
“Of course I want one. Who doesn’t? But most of the men I meet are sub-par.” The girl laughed to herself. “Okay, all of the men I meet are sub-par.”
“All of them?”
“More or less. When I was eleven, and we lived outside Miami, I was madly in love with an Indian guy in his twenties who sold cotton candy at the amusement park. Not that I knew him—but I could tell he was the sort of guy I’d like. He had the longest straight black hair and he used to sing while he worked. American show tunes. But eleven-year-old girls aren’t supposed to fall in love. At least not in this country. If I’d lived in Europe, I might have ended up married to him.”
“Are you making fun of me?” asked Arnold.
“I’m dead serious. But I don’t usually tell this to people. It tends to make them uncomfortable.” The girl stubbed out her cigarette. “Most people have strange hang-ups about age and sexuality.”
This was just priceless. He’d set out to discover whether the girl might have a crush on him and they were going to end up discussing the ethics of paedophilia. It was hard to think of a less romantic subject. Besides, this was one of those areas where rational thought and philosophical discourse didn’t do one much good. He’d heard Bonnie Card go on for hours about how child molesters were actually victims of a social structure that unfairly stigmatized sex with toddlers—targeted as unreasonably as homosexuals had once been—but Bonnie’s conclusion, namely that we ought to live in an alternative universe where young children were taught to enjoy sex, including with adults, did leave him nauseous. And he didn’t even like children.
“I’m making you uncomfortable,” said the girl. “I can tell.”
“No, you’re not,” lied Arnold. “I was just thinking… So what exactly are you saying? That age shouldn’t be a factor in romantic relationships?”
“Oh, no. I wasn’t talking about that at all. What I meant to say was that we make a mistake when we deny the sexuality of children. Sure, we want to protect young kids from violence and exploitation….But it isn’t always like that.”
This wasn’t exactly romantic encouragement. Arnold watched the moth as its wings caught the edge of the flame and ignited.
“You look so unhappy,” said Cassandra. “Cheer up. I have a surprise for you.”
Arnold’s spirits rose instantly. “What sort of surprise?”
“I can’t tell you yet. I’m sworn to secrecy. But it will happen soon, and you’re going to like it a lot.”
“Can I have a hint?”
She squeezed her lips together and shook her head vigorously. He asked again several hours later—and once more the next morning—but no matter how hard he pressed her for her secret, she wouldn’t reveal it.
“If I told you,” she taunted, “then it wouldn’t be a secret.”
Several days later, while scanning Cassandra’s bookshelves for any volume less demanding that the dog-eared copy of Habermas’s The Theory of Communicative Action that lay on the girl’s nightstand, Arnold stumbled across a hard-cover edition of Please Do Eat the Daylilies. He was impressed, at first. His readership tended to be older and midwestern—porcine, heartland women who had both pounds and flowers to spare. But then he recalled that the girl had once interviewed him at NYU. She’d probably picked up the cookbook as part of her advance research. The collection of recipes was now nearly twenty-five years old and in its eleventh printing—although Spitford’s boycott probably wasn’t doing much for sales. Arnold leafed through the yellowed pages of the old volume: daffodil salads, magnolias au gratin, two different recipes for hollyhock pie. He’d nearly forgotten how much fun it had been concocting these unlikely formulas. There had been a recklessness to it, an abandon—not so different from riding a motorcycle. That night, after Cassandra whipped up a first-rate lobster bisque, Arnold volunteered to take over the dinner duties for a few days.
“My cooking’s not good enough?” demanded the girl.
“Your cooking is spectacular,” answered Arnold. “But I’m the one with hours of time to kill, in case you’ve forgotten.”
“Does that mean we’re eating grass from now on?” Cassandra snickered.
“You know, for a communist, you’re awfully elitist when it comes to food.”
“I’m not a communist,” retorted the girl. “I’m a journalist. I’d write for the Gestapo Press if they offered me a lead story.”
“You would, wouldn’t you?” mused Arnold. That admission made the girl all the more alluring, because amorality was one step above idealism among feminine charms. “And yes, we will eat grass. And daisies. And sweet-william. But I think I’ll start us off tomorrow with a warm spiderwort soup.”
The girl squeezed lemon onto her lobster. “Spiderwort. Yummy.”
“What I’ll need from you,” he added, “is a half-pound of spiderwort.”
He retrieved a yellow notepad from beside the telephone and drew a picture of the heart-shaped violet flowers. Then he explained where in Prospect Park she was likely to find them. “You might as well pick up some bastard toadflax too,” he decided. “Toadflax makes excellent seasoning.”
After that, Arnold took over the kitchenette. He sent the girl scavenging the city for honeysuckle, bergamot, and trumpet-creeper. These he transformed, with the help of some birchbark and water, into a tepid pink broth that tasted like chicken. He made mock-veal from elecampane and mock-ham from climbing buckwheat stems. On Cassandra’s twenty-third birthday, they celebrated with a pie made of strawberries, coconut cream and three-toothed cinquefoil leaves. Their new culinary life was not without mishaps, as when the girl accidentally brought home a poisonous species of buttercup. And Arnold didn’t risk having her hunt for mushrooms, though he would have loved to add an umami flavour to their meals. Yet once he got the hang of floral cooking again—it had been several years since his last experimental foray into the kitchen—they ate better than any food critic. He made a conscious effort to impress his roommate. She was supporting him, after all. He’d long since turned over the last of his eighty dollars. The least he could do was send the girl to bed on a full and satisfied stomach. This meant that each night Arnold raised the ante: He fashioned pizzas from mullein and gentian stalks, clover-based yoghurts, a coneflower chop-suey. The lobster bisque that he concocted from nineteen varieties of wildflowers was just at flavourful as the one she’d prepared from shellfish—only cheaper and healthier. Unlike lobsters, most wildflowers came free of charge. The entire experience was empowering for the botanist. He derived the sort of pleasure that he imagined more rugged men might find in shooting a moose or erecting a wooden deck. How many other men in New York could fashion a four course meal for the cost of two hours electrical current and a pot of boiling water? Certainly not Ira Taylor or Spotty Spitford, Arnold thought.
Arnold was in the process of preparing one of his delicacies, a coleus casserole, when Cassandra returned home from work at the end of the week. Her cargo pants were rolled up at the bottoms, exposing an alluring pink ankle bracelet. She’d arranged her hair into intricate cornbraids. In contrast, Arnold was wearing a pink checkered apron and a pair or well-gnawed slippers. “I got a head start on dinner,” he announced.
“I like the apron,” she said. “Very becoming.”
“I stole it off one of your neighbour’s laundry lines, the tubby fundamentalist with the blotchy skin,” said Arnold. “She’ll probably think it was an evil spirit.”
This particular neighbour, who Arnold knew only from sight, sold evangelical tracts from a folding table on the sidewalk. Her fire escape, opposite Cassandra’s, contained the desiccated remains of what had once been a philodendron. Arnold held against her the double sins of religion and vegecide.
Cassandra frowned. “Don’t mess with the other tenants,” she said. “I have to live here after you leave.”
That was the first the girl had ever said about Arnold’s leaving, at least since the evening of his arrival, and it caught the botanist off guard. He’d begun to believe he was welcome to stay indefinitely. The girl must have seen the alarm on his face, because she smiled in amusement. “Don’t worry, I’m not throwing you out,” she said. “At least, not yet. I’m actually getting used to you. But absolutely no more screwing with Mrs. Poxly’s laundry. Or anybody else’s laundry, for that matter. If you want women’s clothes, you can buy them yourself.”
“Yes, ma’am,” said Arnold, relieved.
The girl reached into her canvas bag and produced a bottle of red wine. “Besides,” she said. “Tonight, we’re celebrating.”
“What’s there to celebrate? My one week anniversary in hiding?”
“Better than that,” she answered. “Have you seen the paper yet?”
“No, I listened to the news at lunchtime.”
She uncorked the wine bottle with a dull pop. “Radio is a second-rate medium,” she said. “It’s like television for blind people.”
They’d actually argued about the merits of television over breakfast. Arnold had been anti-TV all of his life—but now that he was confined to one-hundred-forty square feet of floor space, he wanted Cassandra to invest in a portable set. The girl thought that was a waste of resources and brain cells.
Arnold slid his casserole into the oven. “Are you going to tell me?” he asked. “Or do I have to wrap bandages around my face and buy a Times at the bodega?”
The girl poured them each a glass of wine. “It wouldn’t be in the Times.”
“Let me guess. It’s in the Vanguard. You ran my interview.”
“It’s in the Vanguard, all right. But we didn’t run your interview. I’m not that stupid.” She reached into her bag again and pulled out a copy of the radical broadsheet. “Take a look at that,” she said.
“What is it? Has socialism triumphed? Or has Lenin risen from the dead?”
He’d stockpiled a whole slew of sarcastic quips to level at Cassandra’s employer, which usually ran articles laced with words like imperialism and hegemony, but the banner headline brought his mockery to an immediate halt:
THE MINISTER’S TWO WIVES
Far Right’s Spitford Spotty on Monogamy.
The exposé covered the entire front page and included photographs of the clergyman with his wife in New York and his other wife and five children in Tampa.
“I told you you’d like your surprise,” said the girl.
“I should throttle you for not telling me sooner.”
“Take a look at the by-line,” urged the girl.
There was her name:
CASSANDRA BROWARD, INVESTIGATIVE REPORTER
“A toast,” proposed the girl. “To my promotion.”
They clicked glasses and drank.
“That should give him a taste of his own medicine,” she said. “So much for Mayor Spitford. Now what was that you were saying about Lenin’s resurrection?”
“I stand corrected, once again. I guess I should go eat my hat.”
“There’s no need for anything so drastic,” she answered. “You can thank me by pouring me another glass of wine.”
Arnold poured them each another glass and they toasted again. Her face flushed from the alcohol.
“I also have something else for you,” said the girl. “A present.”
“What more could I possibly ask for in life? Don’t tell me Ira Taylor also has two wives?”
“Who?”
“An old nemesis of mine. Never mind.”
“You have an awful lot of enemies, don’t you?” observed the girl. This might have been true—but she didn’t give him a chance to think it over. Instead, she withdrew a small appliance from her bag. “But now, at least, you can track their progress from home on your new portable television.”
“But I thought you said television was the root of all evil.”
The girl’s eyes twinkled. “I didn’t mean it. I just like arguing with you.”
Arnold was truly happy, practically giddy, for the first time in weeks, so happy that he could have kissed the girl in gratitude—but he didn’t dare.
