The Plant 3 Read online

  I broke down and cried in his arms and before long his tears were mingled with mine. The upshot of it all was me saying I would be ready for him to slip that gorgeous love-ring on my finger by the end of the week. I think we are going to be married in June.

  You see that in the end I took the coward’s way out, writing instead of phoning, and it’s still taken me the last two days to get this much down — I’ve cut every class and have practically put down roots in the library karel where I should be studying for a Transformational Grammar prelim. But to hell with Noam Chomsky and deep structure! And although you may not believe this either, each word of the letter you’re reading has been like a lash across my heart.

  If you want to talk to me, John — I’d understand if you didn’t but you may — you could call me in a week…after you’ve had a chance to think all this over and get it into some kind of perspective. I am so used to your sweetness and charm and kindness, and so afraid you’ll be angry and accusatory — but that is up to you and I’ll just have to “take you as you are,” I suppose. But you need that time to cool off and settle down, and I need some time, too. You should receive this on the eleventh. I’ll be in my apartment from seven to nine-thirty on the nights of the eighteenth through the twenty-second, both expecting your call and dreading it. I won’t want to speak to you before then, and I hope you understand — and I think maybe you will, you who were always the most understanding of men in spite of your constant self-deprecation.

  One other thing — both Toby and I are in agreement about this: don’t take it in your head to just suddenly jump on a plane and “wing your way into the golden west”—I wouldn’t see you if you did. I’m not ready to see you face to face, John — my feelings are still too much in flux and my self-image too much in a state of transition. We will meet again, yes. And dare I say that I even hope you will come to our wedding? I must dare, as I see I have written it down!

  Oh, John, I do love you, and I hope this letter has not caused you too much pain — I even hope God has been good and you may have found your own “somebody” in the last couple of weeks — in the meantime, please know that you will always (always!) be somebody to me.

  My love,

  Ruth

  PS — And although it is trite, it is also true: I hope we can always be friends.

  interoffice memo

  TO: Roger Wade

  FROM: John Kenton

  RE: Resignation

  I’ve been a trifle formal here because this really is a letter of resignation, Roger, memo form or no. I’ll be leaving at the end of the day — will, in fact, begin cleaning out my desk as soon as I’ve finished this. I’d rather not go into my reasons — they are personal. I realize, of course, that leaving with no prior notice is very bad form. Should you choose to take the matter up with the Apex Corporation, I would be happy to pay a reasonable assessment. I’m sorry about this, Roger. I like and respect you a great deal, but this simply has to be.

  From John Kenton’s diary

  March 16, 1981

  I haven’t tried to keep a diary since I was eleven years old, when my Aunt Susan — dead lo these many years — gave me a small pocket diary for my birthday. It was just a cheap little thing; like Aunt Susan herself, now that I think about it. I kept that diary, off and on (mostly off) for almost three weeks. I might not get even that far this time, but it doesn’t really matter. This was Roger’s idea, and Roger’s ideas are sometimes good.

  I’ve junked the novel — oh, don’t think I did anything melodramatic like casting it into the fire to commemorate the spontaneous combustion of My First Serious Love; I’m actually writing this first (and maybe last) entry in my diary on the backs of the manuscript pages. But junking a novel doesn’t have anything to do with the actual pages, anyway; what’s on the pages is just so much dead skin. The novel actually falls apart inside your head, it seems, like the parson’s wonderful one-hoss shay. Maybe the only good thing about Ruth’s cataclysmic letter is that it’s put paid to my grandiose literary aspirations. Maymonth, by John Edward Kenton, sucked that fabled hairy bird.

  Does one need to begin a diary with background information? This was not a question which crossed my mind when I was eleven — at least not that I recall. And in spite of the great shitload of English courses I’ve taken in my time, I don’t recall ever attending one which covered the Protocol of Journals. Footnotes, synopses, outlines, the proper placement of modifiers, the correct form of the business letter — these were all things in which I took instruction. But on how to start a diary I am as blank as I am, say, on how to continue your life after its light just went out.

  Here is my decision, after a full thirty seconds of weighty consideration: a little background information wouldn’t hurt. My name, as mentioned above, is John Edward Kenton; I am twenty-six years of age; I attended Brown University, where I majored in English, served as President of the Milton Society, and was exceedingly full of myself; I believed that everything in my life would eventually turn out just fine; I have since learned better. My father is dead, my mother alive and well and living in Sanford, Maine. I have three sisters. Two are married; the third is living at home and will finish her senior year at Sanford High this June.

  I live in a two-room Soho apartment which I thought quite pleasant until the last few days; now it seems drab. I work for a seedy book company which publishes paperback originals, most of them about giant bugs and Viet Nam veterans out to reform the world with automatic weapons. Three days ago I found out my girl has left me for another man. Some response to this seemed to be required, so I tried to quit my job. No sense trying to go into my mental state either then or now. It was none too calm to begin with, due to an outbreak of what I can only call Crazy Fever at work. I may elaborate on that business at some later date, but for the time being the importance of Detweiller and Hecksler seems to have receded far into the background.

  If you have ever been abruptly left by someone you did and do love deeply, you’ll know the sort of fugue I have been experiencing. If you haven’t, you can’t. Simple as that. I keep wanting to say I feel the way I did when my father died, but I don’t. Part of me (the part that, writer or not, constantly wants to make metaphors) would like to make it into a bereavement, and I believe Roger was partly right when he made that comparison at the mostly liquid dinner we had the night of my resignation, but there are other elements, too. It is a separation — as if someone told you that you could no longer have your favorite food, or use a drug to which you had become addicted. And there’s something worse. However you define the thing, I find that my own sense of self-esteem and self-worth have somehow gotten mixed up in it, and it hurts. It hurts a lot. And it seems to hurt all the time. I always used to be able to escape mental pain and psychic distress in my sleep, but that’s no good this time. It hurts there, too.

  Ruth’s letter (question: how many Dear John letters have actually been sent to Johns? Should we form a club, like the Jim Smith Society?) came on the eleventh — it was waiting in my mailbox like a time-bomb when I got home. I scribbled my resignation on a memo form the next morning and sent it down to Roger Wade’s office via Riddley, who is our janitor cum mail-clerk at Zenith House. Roger came down to my office as if he had rockets on his heels. In spite of the pain I’m feeling and the daze I seem to be living in I was absurdly touched. After a short, intense conversation (to my shame I broke down and wept, and although I managed to refrain from telling him specifically what the problem was/is, I think he guessed) I agreed to defer my resignation, at least until that evening, when Roger suggested we get together and talk the situation over. “A couple of drinks and a medium-rare steak may help to put the situation in perspective,” was the way he put it, but I think it actually turned out to be more like a dozen drinks…each, maybe. I lost count. And it was to be Four Fathers again, naturally. At least a place for which I have no associations with Ruth.

  After agreeing to Roger’s dinner suggestion, I went home, slept for the rest of
the day, and woke up feeling thick and dazed and headachey — that feeling of mild hangover I am left with whenever I get too much sleep I don’t really need. It was 5:30, almost dark, and in the unlovely light of a late winter dusk I couldn’t imagine why in God’s name I had allowed Roger to talk me into the compromise measure of making my resignation provisional for even twelve hours. I felt like an ear of corn on which someone has performed a fabulous magic trick. Taken the corn and the cob and left the green shield of leaves and the fine yellow-white poll of tassel intact.

  I am aware — God knows I have read enough to be — of how Byronic-Keatsian-Sorrows-of-Young-Werther that sounds, but one of the diary joys I discovered at eleven and may be rediscovering now is that you write with no audience — real or imagined — in mind. You can say whatever you fucking well want.

  I took a very long shower, mostly just standing dazedly under the spray with a bar of soap in one hand, and then I dried off and dressed and sat in front of the TV until quarter of seven or so, when it was time to go off and meet Roger. I took Ruth’s letter off my desk and stuffed it into my pocket just before I left, deciding that Roger ought to know just what had derailed me. Was I looking for sympathy? A tender ear, as the poet says? I don’t know. But mostly I think I wanted him to be sure — really, really sure — that I wasn’t just a rat deserting a sinking ship. Because I really like Roger, and I’m sorry for the jam he’s in.

  I could describe him — and if he were a character in one of my fictions I suppose I would do so lovingly, in too much detail — but since this diary is for me alone and I know perfectly well what Roger looks like, having trod the metaphoric grapes just down the hall from him for the last seventeen months, there is really no need to. I find that fact unaccountably liberating. The only salient points about Roger are that he is forty-five, looks eight to ten years older, smokes too much, is three-times divorced…and that I like him very much.

  When we were settled at a table in the back of Fathers with drinks in front of us, he asked me what was wrong besides the obvious unfortunacies of this evil year. I took Ruth’s letter out of my pocket and tossed it wordlessly across the table to him. While he read it I finished my drink and ordered another. When the waiter came with it Roger finished his own drink at a gulp, ordered another, and laid Ruth’s letter beside his plate. His eyes were still going over it.

  “’Before long his tears were mingled with mine’?” he said in a low just-talking-to-myself voice. “’Each word has been like a lash across my heart’? Jesus, I wonder if she’s ever considered writing bodice-rippers. There just might be something there.”

  “Cut it out, Roger. That isn’t funny.”

  “No, I suppose not,” he said, and looked at me with an expression of sympathy that was at the same time deeply comforting and deeply embarrassing. “I doubt if much of anything seems very funny to you now.”

  “Not even slightly,” I agreed.

  “I know how much you love her.”

  “You couldn’t.”

  “Yeah, I could. It’s on your face, John.”

  We drank without saying anything for a little while. The maitre d’ came bearing menus and Roger waved him away with barely a look.

  “I have been married three times and divorced three times,” he said. “It didn’t get better, or easier. It actually seemed to get worse, like bumping the same sore place time after time. The J. Geils Band was right. Love stinks.” His new drink came and he sipped it. I half-expected him to say Women! Can’t live with ‘em, can’t live without ‘em! but he didn’t.

  “Women,” I said, beginning to feel like a figment of my own imagination. “Can’t live with ‘em, can’t live without ‘em.”

  “Oh yes you can,” he said, and although his eyes were on me he was quite clearly looking somewhere else. “You can live without ‘em quite easily. But life without a woman, even if she’s a shrew and a nag, sours a man. It turns an essential part of his soul into a pimple.”

  “Roger—“ He held up one hand. “You may not believe it, but we’re almost done talking about this,” he said. “We may get drunk and maudlin and run our gums on the subject, but we’ll only be talking about how we’ve got a skinful, which is the only subject drunks ever talk about, really. I just want to tell you that I’m sincerely sorry Ruth has left you, and I am sorry for your pain. I’d share it if I could.”

  “Thanks, Roger,” I said, my voice a little hoarse. For a second there were three or four Rogers sitting across the table from me and I had to wipe my eyes. “Thanks a lot.”

  “You’re welcome.” He took a sip of his drink. “For the moment let us leave what I’m helpless to reverse or alleviate and talk about your future. John, I want you to stay with Zenith House, at least until June. Maybe until the end of the year, but at least until June.”

  “I can’t,” I said. “If I stayed I’d just be another millstone around your neck, and I think you’ve got enough of those already.”

  “I wouldn’t be happy to see you go either time,” he said as if he hadn’t heard. He had taken the cigarette case he carried — it was too old and scratched and beaten to seem like an affectation — from his inside jacket pocket and was selecting a Kent from among what appeared to be several plump joints. “But I could let you go in June if we look like we’re getting on our feet. If Enders swings the axe, I’d like you to stay on until the end of the year and help me wind things up in orderly fashion.” He looked at me with something in his eyes that was very close to naked pleading. “Except for me, you’re the only sane person at Zenith House. Oh, I guess none of them are as crazy as General Hecksler — although sometimes I wonder about Riddley — but it’s only a matter of degree. I’m asking you not to leave me alone in this purgatory, and that’s what Zenith House is this year.”

  “Roger, if I could — if I—“

  “Have you made plans, then?”

  “No…not exactly…but—“

  “Not planning to go out and confront her, in spite of what this letter says?” He tapped it with a fingernail and then lighted his cigarette.

  “No.” The idea had certainly crossed my mind, but I didn’t need Ruth to tell me it was a bad idea. In a movie the girl might suddenly realize her mistake when she saw the hero of her life standing before her, one hastily packed bag in his hand, shoulders drooping and his face tired from the transcontinental flight on the redeye, but in real life I would only turn her against me completely and forever or provoke some sort of extreme guilt reaction. And I might very well provoke an extreme pugilistic reaction in Mr. Toby Anderson, whose name I have already come to cordially hate. And although I have never seen him (the only thing she forgot to include, the jilted lover said bitterly, was a picture of my replacement), I keep picturing a young cleft-chinned man, very big, who looks, in my imagination at least, as if he belongs in a Los Angeles Rams uniform. I have no problem with landing in traction for my beloved — there is, in fact, a masochistic part of me which would probably welcome it — but I would be embarrassed, and I might cry. It disgusts me to admit it, but I cry rather easily.

  Roger was watching me closely but not saying anything, merely twiddling the stem of his drink glass.

  And there was something else, wasn’t there? Or maybe it was really the only thing, and the others are just rationalizations. In the last couple of months I’ve gotten a big dose of craziness. Not just the occasional bag-lady who rails at you on the street or the drunks in bars who want to tell you all about the nifty new betting systems with which they mean to take Atlantic City by storm, but real sicko craziness. And being exposed to that is like standing in front of the open door of a furnace in which a lot of very smelly garbage is being burned.

  Could I be driven into a rage at seeing them together, her new fella — he of the odious football-player name — maybe stroking her ass with the blast unconcern of acknowledged ownership? Me, John Kenton, graduate of Brown and president of the blah-blah-blah? Bespectacled John Kenton? Could I perhaps even be driven to
some really irrevocable act — an act that might be more likely if he did in fact turn out to be as big as his odious name suggests? Shrieky old John Kenton, who mistook a bunch of special effects for genuine snuff photos?

  The answer is, I don’t know. But I know this: I awoke from a terrible dream last night, a dream in which I had just thrown battery acid into her face. That was what really scared me, scared me so badly I had to sleep the rest of the night with the light on.

  Not his.

  Hers.

  Ruth’s face.

  “No,” I said again, and then poured the rest of my drink over the dryness I heard in my voice. “No, I think that would be very unwise.”

  “Then you could stay on.”

  “Yes, but I couldn’t work.” I looked at him with some exasperation. My head was starting to buzz. It wasn’t a very cheerful buzz, but all the same I signaled the waiter, who had been lurking nearby, for another. “Right now I’m having trouble remembering how to tie my own shoelaces.” No. Wrong. That was hip and it sounded good, but it wasn’t the truth — my shoelaces had nothing to do with it. “Roger, I’m depressed.”

  “Bereaved people shouldn’t sell the house after the funeral,” Roger said, and in my state of buzziness that seemed extremely witty — worthy of H. L. Mencken, in fact. I laughed.

  Roger smiled, but I could tell he was serious. “It’s true,” he said. “One of the few interesting courses I ever took in college was called the Psychology of Human Stress — one of these nifty little blocks they give you to fill up the final eight weeks of your senior year after you’re done student teaching—“

  “You were going to be a teacher?” I asked startled. I couldn’t see Roger teaching — and then, all of a sudden I could.

  “I did teach for six years,” Roger said. “Four in high school and two in elementary. But that’s beside the point. This course took up human stress situations like marriage, divorce, imprisonment, and bereavement. The course wasn’t really a Signposts for Better Living sort of deal, but if you kept your eyes open you couldn’t help but notice a few. One was this thing about living out at least the first six months of a really deep bereavement in the house where you and your loved one were living when the death occurred.”