“This is not the equator.”
“Could of fooled me.”
“Nowhere near it.”
“You mean there’s some place on this planet hotter than this?”
“I thought you liked it here.”
“Love it.”
“Then stop complaining.”
“It’s because I do love it that I’m complaining. I’d like to know if it’s permanent. Living like this you can’t figure nothing. He might pack up any minute and trot off someplace else.”
“He’ll be here till he dies,” Sydney told her. “Less that greenhouse burns up.”
“Well, I’ll pray nothing happens to it,” she said, but she needn’t have. Valerian took very good care of the greenhouse for it was a nice place to talk to his ghosts in peace while he transplanted, fed, air-layered, rooted, watered, dried and thinned his plants. He kept a small refrigerator of Blanc de Blancs and read seed catalogs while he sipped the wine. Sometimes he gazed through the little greenhouse panes at the washhouse. Other times he checked catalogs, brochures and entered into ringing correspondence with nurseries from Tokyo to Newburgh, New York. He read only mail these days, having given up books because the language in them had changed so much— stained with rivulets of disorder and meaninglessness. He loved the greenhouse and the island, but not his neighbors. Luckily there was a night, three years ago, after he’d first settled into tropic life, when he woke up with a toothache so brutal it lifted him out of bed and knocked him to his knees. He knelt on the floor clutching the Billy Blass sheets and thinking, This must be a stroke. No tooth could do this to me. Directly above the waves of pain his left eye was crying while his right went dry with rage. He crawled to the night table and pressed the button that called Sydney. When he arrived, Valerian insisted on being taken to Queen of France at once, but there was no way to get there. At that hour fishermen had not even begun to stir and the launch was twice a week. They owned no boat and even if they had neither Sydney nor anyone else could handle it. So the quick-witted butler telephoned the neighbors Valerian hated and got both the use of a fifty-six-foot Palaos called
This encounter, born in encouraged hatred, ended in affection. The good doctor let Valerian swallow a little of his brandy through a straw and against his better judgment, and Valerian recognized a man who took his medical oaths seriously. They got good and drunk together that night, and the combination of Novocain and brandy gave Valerian an expansiveness he had not felt in years. They visited each other occasionally and whenever Valerian thought of that first meeting he touched the place where the abscess had been and smiled. It had a comic book quality about it: two elderly men drunk and quarreling about Pershing (whom Valerian had actually seen), neither one mentioning then or ever the subject of exile or advanced years which was what they had in common. Both felt as though they had been run out of their homes. Robert Michelin expelled from Algeria; Valerian Street voluntarily exiled from Philadelphia.
Both had been married before and the long years of a second marriage had done nothing to make either forget his first. The memory of those years of grief in the wake of a termagant was still keen. Michelin had remarried within a year of his divorce, but Valerian stayed a bachelor for a long time and on purpose until he went out for an after lunch stroll on a wintry day in Maine, a stroll he hoped would get rid of the irritable boredom he’d felt among all those food industry appliance reps. His walk from the inn had taken him only two blocks to the main street when he found himself in the middle of a local Snow Carnival Parade. He saw the polar bear and then he saw her. The bear was standing on its hind feet, its front ones raised in benediction. A rosy-cheeked girl was holding on to one of the bear’s forefeet like a bride. The plastic igloo behind them threw into dazzling relief her red velvet coat and the ermine muff she waved to the crowd. The moment he saw her something inside him knelt down.
Now he sat in the December sunlight watching his servant pour coffee into his cup.
“Has it come?”
“Sir?”
“The salve.”
“Not yet.” Sydney removed the lid from a tiny box of saccharin tablets and edged it toward his employer.
“They take their sweet time.”
“Mail’s cut back to twice a week I told you.”
“It’s been a month.”
“Two weeks. Still botherin you?”
“Not right this minute, but they’ll start up again.” Valerian reached for the sugar cubes.
“You could be a little less hardheaded about those shoes. Sandals or a nice pair of huaraches all day would clear up every one of them bunions.”
“They’re not bunions. They’re corns.” Valerian plopped the cubes into his cup.
“Corns too.”
“When you get your medical degree call me. Ondine bake these?”
“No. Mrs. Street brought them back yesterday.”
“She uses that boat like it’s a bicycle. Back and forth; back and forth.”
