Chapter 38

Part of my job is gardening, so I spray everything with twice the recommended strength of poison, weeds and real plants alike. Then I straighten the beds of artificial salvia and hollyhocks. The look I’m after this season is a fake cottage garden. Last year, I did artificial French parterres. Before that was a Japanese garden of all plastic plants. All I have to do is yank all the flowers. Sort them, and stick them all back in the ground in a new pattern. Maintenance is a snap. Dull flowers get a little touch-up with red or yellow spray paint.

A shot of clear lacquer or hair spray stops silk flowers from fraying at the edge.
The fake yarrow and plastic nasturtiums need the dust hosed off them. The plastic roses wired onto the poisoned dead skeletons of the original rose bushes need a shot of smell.
Some kind of blue-colored birds are walking around the lawn as if they’re looking for a lost contact lens.
For the roses, I empty the poison out of the sprayer and fill it with three gallons of water and half a bottle of Eternity by Calvin Klein. I spray the fake Shasta daisies with watered-down vanilla from the kitchen. The artificial asters get White Shoulders. For most of the other plants, I use aerosol cans of floral room freshener. The artificial lemon thyme I spray with Lemon Pledge furniture polish.
Part of my strategy for courting Fertility Hollis is to look ugly on purpose, and my getting dirty is a start. Looking a little rough around the edges. Still, it’s hard to get dirty gardening when you never really touch the ground, but my clothes smell from the poison, and my nose is a little sunburned. With the wire stem of a plastic calla*** lily, I chop up a handful of the hard dead soil, and I rub it in my hair. I wedge the dirt in under my fingernails.
God forbid I should try and look good for Fertility. The worst strategy I could pursue is self-improvement. It would be a big mistake to dress up, make my best effort, comb my hair, maybe even borrow some swell clothes from the man I work for, something all-cotton and pastel shirtwise, brush my teeth, put on what they call deodorant and walk into the Columbia Memorial Mausoleum for my big second date still looking ugly, but showing signs I really tried to look good.
So here I am. This is as good as it gets. Take it or leave it.
As if I don’t care what she thinks.
Looking good is not part of the big plan. My plan is to look like untapped potential. The look I’m going for is natural. Real. The look
I’m after is, raw material. Not desperate and needy, but ripe with potential. Not hungry. Sure, I want to look like I’m worth the effort. Washed but not ironed. Clean but not polished. Confident but humble.
Honest is how I want to look. The truth doesn’t glitter and shine.
Here’s passive aggression in action.
My idea is to make ugly work in my favor. Establish a low baseline for contrast with my later on. Before and After. The frog and the prince.
It’s two on Wednesday afternoon. According to my daily planner, I’m rotating the oriental rug in the pink drawing room so it won’t get a wear pattern. You have to move all the furniture to another room, including the piano. Roll the rug. Roll the carpet pad. Vacuum. Mop the floor. The rug is twelve feet by sixteen feet. Then turn the pad and unroll it. Turn and unroll the carpet. Drag all the furniture back.
According to my daily planner book, this shouldn’t take me more than half an hour.
Instead, I just fluff the traffic patterns in the carpet and untie the strand of fringe the people I work for tied in a knot. I tie another strand on the opposite end of the rug so the whole thing looks rotated. I move all the furniture a little and put ice in the little divots left in the carpet. As the ice melts, the matted divots will fluff back up.
I scuff the shine off my shoes. At the makeup mirror of the woman I work for, I put her mascara up inside each nostril until my nose hair looks thick and full. Then I catch a bus.
Another part of the Survivor Retention Program is you get a free bus pass every month. Stamped on the back of the pass it says: Property of the Department of Human Resources.
Non transferable.
The whole way to the mausoleum, I’m telling myself I don’t give a shit if Fertility shows up or not.
A lot of half-gone church district prayers recite themselves in my mind. My head is just a mishmash of old prayers and responses.
May I be of complete and utmost service.

Let my every task lie my grace.

In my every labor lies my salvation.

Let my effort not be wasted.

Through my works may I save the world.
Really I’m thinking, oh please, oh please, oh please, be there this afternoon Fertility Hollis.
Inside the mausoleum front doors, there’s the usual cheap reproductions of real beautiful music to make you feel not so alone. It’s the same ten songs only with just the music and no singing. They don’t play it except for certain days. Some of the old galleries in the Sincerity and New Hope wings never have the music. You don’t hear it anywhere unless you really listen.
It’s music as wallpaper, utilitarian, music as Prozac or Xanax to control how you feel. Music as aerosol room freshener.
I walk through the Serenity wing and don’t see Fertility. I go through Faith, Joy, and Tranquillity, and she’s not here. I swipe some plastic roses off some dead person’s crypt so I won’t show up empty-handed.
I’m heading into hatred, anger, fear, and resignation, and there, standing at Crypt 678 in Contentment, is Fertility Hollis with her red hair. She waits until I’ve been walked up next to her for two hundred and forty seconds before she turns and says hi.
She can’t be the same person who was screaming her orgasm at me over the phone.
I say, Hi.
In her hands is a bunch of fake orange blossoms, nice enough but nothing I’d bother to steal. Her dress today is the same kind of brocade they make curtains out of, patterned white on a white background. It looks stiff and flame-retardant. Stain-repellent. Wrinkle-resistant. Mother-of-the-bride modest in her pleated skirt with long sleeves, she says, “Do you miss him, too?”
Everything about her looks martyr-proofed.
I ask, Miss who?
“Trevor,” she says. She’s barefoot on the stone floor.
Yeah right, Trevor, I tell myself. My secret sodomite lover. I forgot.
I say, Yeah. I miss him, too.
Her hair looks gathered in a field and piled on her head to dry. “Did he ever tell you about the cruise he took me on?”
No.
“It was completely illegal.”
She looks from Crypt Number 678 to up at the ceiling where the music comes down from the little speakers next to the painted-on clouds and angels.
“First, he made me take dancing lessons with him. We learned all the ballroom dances they call the Cha-Cha and the Fox-trot. The Rumba and the Swing. The Waltz. The Waltz was easy.”
The angels play their music above us for a minute, telling her something, and Fertility Hollis listens.
“Here,” she says and turns to me. She takes my flowers and hers and puts them against the wall. She asks, “You can waltz, right?”
Wrong.
“I can’t believe you could know Trevor and not know how to waltz,” she says and shakes her head.
In her head, there’s a picture of Trevor and me dancing together. Laughing together. Having anal sex. This is the handicap I’m up against, this and the idea I killed her brother.
She says, “Open your arms.”
And I do.
She comes in face-to-face close with me and cups one hand on the back of my neck. Her other hand grabs my hand and pulls it out far away from us. She says, “Take your other hand and put it against my bra.”
So I do.
“On my back!” she says, and twists away from me. “Put your hand on my bra where it crosses my spine.”
So I do.
For our feet, she shows me how to step forward with my left foot, then my right foot, then bring my feet together while she does this all in the opposite direction.
“It’s called a Box Step,” she says. “Now listen to the music.”
She counts, “One, two, three.”
The music goes, One. Two. Three.
We count over and over, and step each time we count and we’re dancing. The flowers in all the crypts up and down the walls lean out over us. The marble smooths under our feet. We’re dancing. The light is through stained-glass windows. The statues are carved in their niches. The music comes out the speakers weak and echoes off the stone until it’s moving back and forth in drafts and currents, notes and chords around us. And we’re dancing.
“What I remember about the cruise,” Fertility says, and her arm is curved to rest against the whole length of my arm. “I remember the faces of the last passengers as their lifeboats were lowered past the ballroom windows. Their orange canvas life vests sort of framed their heads, so their heads looked cut off and put on orange pillows, and they just stared with big wide-open fish eyes at Trevor and me still inside the ship’s ballroom while the ship was starting to sink.”
She was on a sinking boat?
“A ship,” Fertility says. “It was called the Ocean Excursion. Try to say that three times fast.”
And it was sinking?
“It was beautiful,” she says. “The travel agent said not to come crying back to her. It was an old French Line ship, the travel agent warned us, only now it was sold to some outfit in South America. It was very art deco. It was trashed. It was the Chrysler Building floating sideways in the ocean and cruising up and down the Atlantic coast of South America full of lower-middle-class people from Argentina and their wives and kids. Argentineans. All the light fixtures on the walls were pink glass shaped into gigantic marquise-cut diamond shapes. Everything on the ship was in this pink diamond light and the carpets had big stains and worn-out spots.”
We’re dancing in place, and then we start to turn.
The one, two, three, box step of it. The forward and back of the hesitation step. The lift of the heel in a perfect bit of Cuban step-two-three, I turn with Fertility Hollis bent inside the hug of my arm. We turn again and again, we turn again, turn again, turn again.
And Fertility says how the lifeboats were gone. All the lifeboats were gone, and the ship trailed its empty lifeboat rigging in the relaxed Caribbean evening. The lifeboats rowed off into the sunset, the crowd in their orange life vests starting to wail and scam for their jewelry and prescriptions. People were doing that sign of the cross thing.
Fertility and I one, two, three; waltz, two, three, across the marble gallery.
In her story, Fertility and Trevor waltzed across the tilting mahogany parquet, the Versailles Ballroom tilting as the bow sank and the stern pointed the four-leaf clovers of each cloverleaf propeller into the evening air. A flock of little gilt ballroom chairs hurried past them and collected under a statue of that Greek moon goddess, Diana. The gold brocade curtains hung crooked across each window. They were the last passengers aboard the SS Ocean Excursion.
The steam was still up because the pink chandeliers—"Just like regular chandeliers,” Fertility says, “but on an ocean liner they hang rigid as icicles"—the chandeliers in the Versailles Ballroom sparkled, and the public address system still filled the ship with a crackling music, one after another of elevator waltzes melting into each other as Trevor and Fertility turned, turned, turned.
As Fertility and I turn, turn, and step in place, then slide toe to toe across the mausoleum floor.
Below decks, the Caribbean was rising in the Trianon Dining Room, floating the edges of a hundred linen tablecloths.
The ship was drifting with all engines dead.
The warm blue water was spread out flat to the horizon in every direction.
Under even a little water, the checkerboard floor of mahogany and walnut parquet looked lost and out of reach. Here was one last look at the continent of Atlantis, with salt water rising around the statues and the marble pillars as Trevor and Fertility waltzed past the legend of a lost civilization, gold-painted carvings and carved French palace tables. Sea level rose diagonal against life-sized paintings of queens wearing crowns as the ship tilted and vases spilled flowers: roses and orchids and stalks of ginger into the water where bottles of champagne bobbed and Trevor and Fertility splashed past.
The metal skeleton of the ship, the bulkheads behind the lining of paneling and tapestries, shuddered and groaned.
I ask, was she going to drown herself?
“Don’t be stupid,” Fertility says with her head against my chest, breathing the poison smell all over me. “Trevor was never wrong. That was his whole problem.”
Never wrong about what?
Trevor Hollis had dreams, she told me. He’d dream a plane was going to crash. Trevor would tell the airline, and no one would believe him. Then the plane would crash and the FBI would bring him in for questioning. It was always easier to believe he was a terrorist than a psychic. The dreams got so he couldn’t sleep. He didn’t dare read a newspaper or watch television or he’d see the report of some two hundred people dying in a plane crash he knew would happen, but couldn’t stop.
He couldn’t save anybody.
“Our mom killed herself because she had the same kind of dreams,” Fertility says. “Suicide is an old family tradition for us.”
Still dancing, I tell myself, At least we have something in common.
“He knew the ship was only going to sink about halfway. Some valve or something was going to fail and water would fill the engine rooms and some of the big public rooms on the lower decks,” Fertility says. “He knew from his dreams that we’d have hours with the whole ship to ourselves. We’d have all that food and wine. Then someone would come along to rescue us.”
Still dancing, I ask, Is that why he killed himself?
The music is my only answer for a minute.
“You can’t imagine how beautiful it all was, the flooded ballrooms with pianos under water and all the needlepoint furniture floating around,” Fertility says against my chest. “It was my nicest memory, ever.”
We dance past statues of saints in somebody else’s religion. To me they’re just rock shaped into glorified nobodies.
“The Atlantic water was so clear. It was pouring down the grand staircase,” she says. “We just took off our shoes and kept dancing.”
Still dancing, counting one to three, I ask, does she have the same kind of dreams?
“A little bit,” she says. “Not very much. More and more all the time. More than I want to.”
I ask, so is she going to kill herself the same as her brother?
“No,” Fertility says. She lifts her head and smiles at me.
We dance, one, two, three.
She says, “No way would I shoot myself. I’d probably take pills.”
At home is my stash of government-issue antidepressants, hypnodes, mood equalizers, sedatives, MAO inhibitors in the candy dish beside my goldfish on my fridge.
We dance, one, two, three.
She says, “Just kidding.”
We dance.
She puts her head back on my chest and says, “It all depends on how terrible my dreams get.”