The Man Who Wouldn't Stand Up Read online

  Arnold devoted the remainder of the afternoon to his flowers. He’d once feared he’d find an eighth of an acre confining, that maybe they should have chosen a larger plot in Queens or in the suburbs, but over the years he’d come to realize that an eighth of an acre was the maximum amount of soil one man could tend effectively—unless one resorted to artificial herbicides; that was unthinkable. But natural gardening meant daily weeding and pruning. Every morning, before he walked across the square to open the nursery, Arnold spent several hours on his knees with a spade. In most aspects of his life, the botanist was a gentle man—probably too gentle for the world of business. But in his own garden, the kid gloves came off. His neighbours might be content to decapitate their weeds, to let the offending stalks desiccate under the afternoon sun, but not Arnold. He dug up each trespasser by the roots, scooping liberally like a surgeon excising a tumour, and then hacked apart the condemned plant to shake free every last clod of pilfered soil. The scraps of betony and nutsedge and wild radish were carted off, trussed in biodegradable bags, and ultimately composted in a bin behind the tool shed. In the evenings, he did his trimming and separated his perennials. Since it was April, he also set aside at least an hour after work for breeding day lilies.

  Everybody asked Arnold the same question: How can you spend all day growing plants for strangers and still want to work in a garden at home? But it was because all of the plants that he raised at the nursery were carted off to other people’s apartments, presumably to be starved of light or choked on tap water, that he savoured the chance to cultivate for himself. He frequently compared his experience to that of a celebrated chef cooking his own meals, but he actually felt more like an off-duty prostitute taking pleasure in a lover. In his own garden, Arnold might do as he wished. No need to raise hundreds of identical begonias and petunias and geraniums. Besides, he didn’t spend that much time at the nursery anymore. Ever since his books had started selling—first Please Do Eat the Day lilies, then The Flower Power Diet—most of his workday was consumed by lecturing, and writing his weekly horticulture column, and leading foliage-eating walking tours for the Department of Parks & Recreation. He was also finishing a manuscript on the role of plants in classic novels—or plants and fungi, to be precise, because he had given over a full chapter to the pivotal mushroom-picking scene in Anna Karenina—so his manager, Guillermo, more or less ran the nursery on his own. Guillermo was a flamboyantly gay Venezuelan in his sixties. He had two dozen employees to assist him.

  When Arnold squatted down that afternoon to replant day lilies—carefully labelled stems he’d sorted out the previous summer—the sun had already dipped behind the jagged red wall of the opposite building. That four-story structure had once been an egg candling facility, but now it housed office space and a sex toy museum. A faded advertisement for Goldstein’s Packaged Meats still discoloured the brick. While the wall reduced Arnold’s daylight growing time by nearly an hour, it also shaded his plants on torrid summer afternoons. That kept the hydrangeas from wilting, the rhododendrons from shedding petals. Arnold worked carefully, but quickly. He was tamping down the earth around the final set of day lilies when Gilbert Card wandered through the kitchen door. The bearded immigration lawyer carried a highball garnished with a cocktail umbrella.

  “You’re certainly earning your keep,” said Gilbert.

  “Just thinking,” Arnold answered.

  He’d actually been doing the opposite: actively not-thinking, working off steam. He kept replaying the afternoon’s events—altering his own behaviour every time. He didn’t regret remaining seated. Not for a moment. But he wished he’d done something more symbolic, more dignified, than sticking out his tongue. If he had prepared in advance, he would have brought along a political placard. Something like: “The Earth Is Full—Go Home” or “Ignore Our Forests and They Will Go Away.” But if grandmother had testicles, as the saying went, she’d be grandfather.

  Gilbert settled onto the arm of a wrought-iron bench. “We heard you had quite an adventure this afternoon,” he said. The attorney spoke with a syrupy tidewater accent that made him sound folksy, despite his Ivy League credentials, and that had lulled the suspicions of many a credulous juror. Because he was a southerner, the direct descendent of slave-owning planters, people often assumed the litigator shared their own “down home” values. He didn’t. “What got into you?” asked Gilbert. “I’m supposed to be the radical one.”

  Arnold dusted off his overalls. “I figured our lives were growing a bit too comfortable….”

  “I hear you. Whenever I feel complacency setting in, I make a point of thumbing my nose at the entire country.”

  “Get your facts straight, Mr. Big-Shot Attorney. I just stuck out my tongue. No noses involved.”

  Arnold peeled off his heavy leather gloves. He rinsed his hands under the spigot and stepped behind a wooden divider to change out of his gardening clothes. Storing his overalls and boots in the tool shed had been one of the first concessions that Arnold had offered his bride in the spirit of domestic tranquillity: Judith went through the roof if he tracked up the carpets. “To tell you the truth, Gil,” said Arnold, “I was stunned. I thought the days of groupthink were gone with Joe McCarthy.”

  “That’s what I’ve been telling you for years,” answered Gilbert. “You delude yourself that you live in a free country because you never test the boundaries of that freedom.”

  “Have I earned another lecture on open borders again?”

  “I’m just saying….”

  Judith completed his sentence from the top of the back stairs. “He’s just saying that it’s all about borders. That all the ills of the world are derived from immigration restrictions.” Judith grinned. “What’s that you said last time? ‘Patriotism is being convinced your country is better because you were born in it.’”

  “I didn’t say it,” retorted Gilbert. “George Bernard Shaw said it.”

  “Well I doubt he said it on an empty stomach,” said Judith. “You can tell us all about open borders over vichyssoise. And bring Johnny Appleseed with you.”

  Bonnie and Gilbert Card were their closest friends. Judith and Bonnie had first met when they’d shared a hospital room during the blackout of 77. They later belonged to the same support group for young women who’d undergone hysterectomies. Perpetual childlessness permanently allied the Cards and the Brinkmans. As the other couples they knew were sucked, one-by-one, into that unrelenting world of pre-schools and play-dates—even most of the women from their support group acquired children through adoption and surrogates—they found solidarity in their ongoing independence. Bonnie, an eminent professor of bioethics, wrote extensively on the subject of childbearing. She opposed it. Adamantly. In fact, maybe as a personal coping mechanism, she’d made a name for herself by denouncing motherhood as immoral under present social conditions. Arnold was grateful for Bonnie’s views, as radical as they were, because he had no desire to raise offspring himself—and, if Judith harboured any latent regrets, her friend’s withering attacks on parenthood took the edge off.

  Judith had opened the bay windows in the dining room and the breeze carried with it the sweet green scent of blossoming peonies. For supper, Judith had poached wild salmon on a signature bed of edible flowers: yucca petals, chive blossoms, violets. The wine was a cabernet handpicked by the blind Greek merchant on the corner.

  “So where is your little terror?” asked Bonnie. “It isn’t bedtime, is it?”

  She said the word “bedtime” with unmistakable condescension.

  “He went to sleep an hour early,” answered Judith. “We bribed him.”

  “I hope with something good,” offered Gilbert. “Like a nine year old girl.”

  “Or another baseball game,” suggested Bonnie.

  “I promised him a trip to the aquarium,” said Judith.

  “I hear they have a flag there,” said Bonnie. “Maybe Arnold can set it on fire.”

  “Okay, have your laughs. But the whole epi
sode was pretty damn terrifying.”

  “Do you mean you were afraid for your physical safety?” asked Bonnie.

  “Yes, that too. But there was much more to it.”

  Bonnie removed her spectacles and rubbed the bridge of her long nose. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean there’s something unnerving about armchair patriotism. If I’d been at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, it would have been different. And I probably would have stood up too—just to show respect. But what does standing up at a baseball game have to do with loving my country?”

  “Here, here,” echoed Gilbert. “What’s that Chesterton one-liner? ‘My country, right or wrong’ is like saying ‘My mother, drunk or sober.’”

  “In Arnold’s case,” Judith interjected, “it was mostly drunk.”

  Gilbert and Judith laughed. Arnold smiled too—although his mother, a settlement worker, had never touched even a drop of medicinal brandy. But his mother had been a temperamental woman—Judith said irrational—and she was more difficult as a teetotaller than most people are intoxicated.

  “Let’s keep mothers out of this,” said Arnold.

  “To keeping mothers out of this,” said Gilbert, raising his wine glass.

  Bonnie’s expression remained hard and intense. She didn’t take her eyes off Arnold. “Well, do you love America?” she asked.

  “What’s the supposed to mean?”

  “It’s a pretty straight-forward question, Arnold. Do you love America?”

  Quintessentially Bonnie Card. She had a knack for asking these sorts of questions: What was wrong with child pornography? Why was one-person one-vote a good way to organize society? How could meritocracy and inheritance co-exist simultaneously? Bonnie had nearly lost her university post several years earlier when she’d delivered a commencement speech at N.Y.U. in which she’d proposed mandatory infanticide legislation. She’d advocated a strict utilitarian standard that argued for drowning disabled babies before they experienced pain. She’d even compared parents of cystic fibrosis sufferers to child abusers. There had been protests, boycotts. But Bonnie had stuck to her guns. And she’d picked up supporters as well as detractors: The Hemlock Society had given her its public service medal; Jack Kevorkian had written to her from prison. But then the September 11th attacks occurred and the media had little room for baby-killing philosophers. The episode had done nothing to dampen Bonnie’s premise-rattling interrogations.

  “I’m not going to answer that,” said Arnold.

  Gilbert raised his glass. “The defendant pleads the Fifth.”

  “It’s beside the point,” Arnold added.

  “I don’t think so,” said Bonnie. “I think it is the point.”

  “You’re badgering the witness, honey,” said Gilbert.

  “You don’t love America,” Bonnie persisted. “You’re just afraid to admit it. They made you say the Pledge of Allegiance one too many times in elementary school and now you can’t see things clearly.” She forked an olive from the jar and carefully carved out the pit. “Can you honestly tell me you love your country, Arnold Brinkman?”

  “I’m grateful for the privileges I have as an American,” said Arnold.

  “That’s not the same thing,” she answered.

  Arnold had never given much thought to whether or not he loved America—but now it seemed pretty obvious to him that he didn’t. Not in the way Nathan Hale had loved America. Or even in the way his late father, a Dutch-Jewish refugee, had loved America. In fact, he found the idea of sacrificing his life for his country somewhat abhorrent. Moreover, it wasn’t that he disliked abstract loyalties in general. He loved New York, for instance: Senegalese takeout at three a.m., and strolling through the Botanical Gardens on the first crisp day of autumn, and feeding the peacocks at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. If Manhattan were invaded—if New Jersey were to send an expeditionary force of militiamen across the Hudson River—he’d willingly take up arms to defend his city. He also loved Sandpiper Key in Florida, where they owned a time-share, and maybe Brown University, where he’d spent five years of graduate school. But the United States? No one could mistake his qualified praise for love.

  “I like my country as much as the next man,” said Arnold.

  “No offense, Arnold,” said Bonnie. “You wouldn’t know the next man if he bit you on the ass.”

  Judith stood up. “That’s my prompt to serve the fish.”

  “I’ll come with you,” offered Gilbert.

  Card followed Arnold’s wife into the kitchen.

  Arnold found himself suddenly alone with Bonnie. This always made him feel slightly nervous. It wasn’t that he didn’t both respect and trust Gilbert’s wife, but that he was never quite certain what she might say or do next. She possessed just the right irreverence to do a person serious damage.

  Bonnie leaned forward. Too close. (She’d never learned to modulate personal space properly.) Although Gilbert’s wife didn’t smoke, Arnold suffered an irrational premonition that she was about to puff a cigarette into his eyes.

  “Do you know what your problem is, Arnold?” asked Bonnie.

  “I have friends who think too much.”

  “You’re risk-averse. You create these wonderful opportunities for yourself, but then you don’t have the courage to follow through on them.”

  “I suppose you wouldn’t have stuck out your tongue.”

  “That’s water under the bridge,” answered Bonnie. “It’s what you do now that matters. You should call the newspapers and defend yourself. Announce that you don’t love America—that patriotism is a refuge for scoundrels and all that.”

  “Talk truth to power,” said Arnold.

  “Talk common sense,” said Bonnie. “But you won’t do that. I know you too well. You’ll offer some lukewarm apology, something about stress or nerves or whatnot, and you’ll go about your business.”

  Gilbert entered carrying the platter of sizzling fish.

  “You two still going at it?” he asked.

  “I’m saying he should capitalize on his celebrity,” answered Bonnie. “He has a moral obligation to denounce the mob.”

  “Celebrity,” scoffed Judy. She held a tureen of homemade couscous. “This will all blow over. In a couple of days, nobody will remember.”

  “Do you think so?” asked Arnold.

  “I hope so,” said Judy.

  “Me too,” Arnold agreed. “I wasn’t destined to be remembered.”

  “A toast,” proposed Gilbert. They all raised their wine glasses. “To not remembering.”

  “Not remembering,” Judith chimed in. “The national pastime.”

  And they drank.

  CHAPTER 3

  They stayed up with the Cards until well past midnight, talking politics and neighbourhood gossip, polishing off a second bottle of wine, but Arnold was out of bed before the sun rose above the mansard roof of the community playhouse. The morning glories around the drainpipe still kept their blossoms clenched shut against the dew. On the fire escape, sparrows flitted among the terracotta pots. Otherwise, the predawn was grey and still and silent, punctuated only by the periodic rumbling of sanitation trucks. Arnold loved the first hour of a spring morning in Greenwich Village. Wandering through the rows of antebellum townhouses—on their second date, Judith had taught him the difference between federalist-style and Greek revival architecture—Arnold could fool himself into believing he’d stepped back into the previous century. One could easily imagine running into Edith Wharton on a street corner, or exchanging greetings with Walt Whitman, or sharing a stroll with that pioneering American botanist, Nathaniel Lord Britton, who’d live on West 11th Street while he taught at Columbia. Even Britton would have admired the all-indigenous community gardens tucked into the numerous hidden courtyards. What the great naturalist would have thought of the recent horticultural efforts of the block association, the oversized marigolds and snapdragons suffocating the hawthorn roots along the avenues, was another matter entirely—but one co
uldn’t deny these rings of floral invaders were beautiful.

  Arnold retrieved his New York Times from the front steps. He flipped through the Sports pages, then the Metro section. Nothing about tongue-thrusting. Not a word. The incident didn’t even make the article about the game itself, which the Yankees had won on a grand slam in the fifteenth inning. Arnold dabbed his forehead with his sleeve. He wasn’t famous! What a wonderful way to start off the work week! There’d been a small story on the local television news the previous evening—he knew because Guillermo had phoned him—but mercifully Arnold’s social circle did not watch the local news. Most of their friends didn’t even own television sets. If he were lucky, a few weeks would pass before anyone actually made a positive ID on him; by then, some other fool would have lit a match during a gas leak, or bathed his children at an automated car wash, or stuck his penis in an electric citrus peeler, and nobody would care that Arnold had ever been born. His sister-in-law would also be home by then, and Ray would be back in Connecticut, and life would have returned to normal. Or at least to baseline. Normal might be pushing it.

  That morning, Arnold lost half an hour clearing crushed beer cans out of his newly-planted caladium. His neighbour’s son—recently expelled from Binghamton—had been discarding his trash over the fence. The neighbour was Ira Taylor and he had some foggy connection to Taylor & Taylor Securities, the bond firm, but it didn’t appear to involve much in the way of office work, because the man answered his own doorbell at all hours of the day. Arnold found his neighbour abrasive and overbearing. When he complained about the litter, Taylor told him not to “blow his doughnuts.” It would be taken care of, the securities trader assured him. But you had to cut the kid some slack. “Tell me you never tossed an apple core out a car window or put out a cigar on the pavement,” said Taylor. “Let it go, old man. Let it go.” Arnold hated being called “old man” by a guy his own age. But he had cut the son slack. Twice. And the problem, as evidenced by the pizza boxes full of cigarette butts, had certainly not gone away. It was the kid’s lucky morning, thought Arnold. He’d let him have a fourth strike. After standing up to all of Yankee Stadium, Arnold had no hankering to duke it out with his neighbour.