Cleo’s smile collapsed as soon as the taxi pulled away. Her face was a white tent with the ropes coming loose, everything falling at once. The evening had brought a freezing wind and people were huddled together, hurrying into the warmth of restaurants and homes. She walked south toward her apartment, shivering. She was trying to think of a single person she admired who lived a happy life. Quentin was certainly no example. He wore himself like an elaborate, glittering costume full of pins.
It occurred to her that Anders seemed content, in his own selfish way. The thought was unbearable. She’d called him the day after Frank returned. No answer. It had taken weeks of silence for her to finally understand that she would not hear from him again. The phrase she kept thinking was that Anders had washed his hands of her. She was the smut, and he wanted to be clean. When Frank told her Anders had accepted a job in LA, she knew he had rinsed her off him for good. Frank had been looking to her for comfort, but she’d only stared at him mutely. On the night of Anders’s going-away party, she’d feigned sickness and lay, unsleeping, in bed for the whole evening and night. Just his name sent a hot wave of humiliation through her. Of course she couldn’t have been happy with Anders. She couldn’t imagine herself being happy with anyone. Quentin was right. She was not those kind of people.
Cleo had reached the gardening store near her and Frank’s apartment. She had always loved glimpsing the courtyard filled with palm trees as she walked past, an unlikely slice of the tropical between the blandly gray. Without thinking, she walked through the entrance. Plant life was all around her instantly. It was like being in a Henri Rousseau painting. Cleo closed her eyes. The air smelled green.
“Need help?”
A young man wearing overalls was looking at her.
“How did you know?” asked Cleo. She began to laugh. Why was she here? She was there to buy a new blue orchid, that must be it. She had broken the blue orchid. “Do you have orchids?”
“Most of them are in the hothouse. You want me to help you pick one out?”
Cleo shook her head and walked in the direction he pointed. The warmth of the hothouse enveloped her immediately. A sweet, pungent odor enfolded her. Cleo could feel the pores of her skin pop open like hundreds of curious eyes. Everything was so close, flooding back inside her. The orchids were arranged in rows; creamy white, hot fuchsia, buttery yellow, vulva pink … but no blue. There was only one indigo-blue orchid, and she had destroyed it.
She looked at the rows of pert little flower faces staring up at her. They were so fleshly, so human. Cleo stroked a crimson petal with the tip of her finger. She had expected it to feel supple, velvety, but it was waxen and stiff. So they were not faces at all, but cadavers. These flowers were all dead and pretending to be alive. They were rotting behind their waxen masks. The fragrance of flowers plugged her nostrils and filled her throat. She was choking on the sweet, putrid scent. She grasped for the door and escaped back into the cold evening.
Outside the glass structure, she gasped for air. She should have known on their wedding day when Frank bought her the blue orchid, dyed with poisonous ink, that he didn’t understand her, never would. She needed to return to the earth, simple and unadorned. She had been living too long in Frank’s false world. She thought she would find security there, but she had not. She entered the main store and bought a wheelbarrow and four large bags of soil, ignoring the quizzical look of the man in overalls. She understood what she needed to do now.
The wheelbarrow was a struggle, heavy and unwieldy, but she managed to maneuver it the two blocks home and into the building’s elevator. She could hear the neighbor next door as she pushed it inside. Music and laughter, the clattering of plates and men’s voices. She released the wheelbarrow in the center of the living room and smiled in relief. The humiliation of the note that morning felt very far away.
First things first. She went to the record shelf and searched the sleeves until she found what she was looking for. She withdrew a stained copy of Puccini’s La Bohème that had been her mother’s. Cleo carried the record out of the apartment and gently propped it against the next-door neighbor’s front door. All would be forgiven. He would not bother Frank.
Cleo came back inside and poured herself a glass of milk. She looked at her hand resting on the counter. There was her band of gold. She thought of the gold reflection on the marble floor of the lobby earlier that day. Slowly, she sank her finger into her mouth and withdrew it, pulling the ring loose with her teeth. She balanced it on her tongue, took a long draught of milk, and swallowed the ring in one smooth gulp.