The Greenhouse

Thirteen

Personally I just don’t have the strength at precisely this point in my life, fresh out of the operating room as it were, to go through the steps required to lure a woman into bed. My friend’s early return has taken me totally by surprise and thrown me off guard. Had she planned to surprise me? Thorlákur, my ex-friend, would say that women never do anything without a plan.

I ask her why she’s come home so soon.

— You said you were only going to be here for a few days and that you were going to buy a secondhand car and head off for some garden, she says, surprised. I expected you’d be gone, she adds.

I watch her almost completely disappear under the duvet and sink into the mattress. She’s clearly going to sleep in the bed with me, and since there aren’t any other beds in the room you could say we’ve skipped quite a few steps in the getting-to-know-each-other-a-little-bit-better process.

— But I’m not pushing you to go, she says under the duvet.

— I had to have my appendix out, I say. The stitches will be removed tomorrow.

I tell her about my misfortunes, she shows some interest in the matter, but I pray to god she doesn’t ask to see the scar.

— Can I see the scar? She’s as excited as a child dying to see a puppy.

Thank god I’m in the pajamas Dad gave me, even though they reflect the taste of a man who’ll be eighty in three years’ time.

— Nice pajamas.

— Thanks.

I pull back the pajama trousers, just far enough to reveal the scar. Which is quite far down, way below my stomach.

She bursts out laughing. Literally everything about her is new to me and surprises me.

— Didn’t you have braces at school?

— Yeah, thirteen to fourteen.

She takes off her glasses and places them on the bedside table. This is her way of saying she won’t be reading in bed. I’m still holding my book with a finger stuck inside the chapter on genetic changes in plants.

The thing that throws me the most is seeing my friend without her myopic glasses for the first time, seeing the eyes that have been hidden behind those thick lenses. It’s as if they’ve never been exposed before, like she’s premiering her eyes for the first time. She couldn’t be more naked without her glasses.

— Are those nearsighted glasses? I ask, shifting the spotlight to the strength and thickness of the lenses in the hope that it will distract my mind from the fact that I’m in bed with my ex — schoolmate who has practically no clothes on. I’m still hoping the glasses can save me and lead us on to the next natural step in our conversation.

— Yeah, minus six on both eyes.

— Have you never considered laser treatment?

— Yes, I’ve been thinking it over.

I feel a hot shudder moving into my stomach in the cold bedroom and break into a sweat. The pain in my gut has given way to some other kind of feeling.

— Haven’t you got some gardening job? she asks. Didn’t you say you were going to some rose garden?

— Yeah.

Actually I’m not just heading to any garden, but to a garden that has centuries of history behind it and that’s mentioned in all the books about the most famous rose gardens in the world. Some of Father Thomas’s letter of reply was a bit hazy and vague, but I was warmly welcomed.

— And weren’t you working at sea?

— Yeah.

— What happened to the Latin genius?

— He just evaporated.

She switches subjects.

— Don’t you have a child? she asks.

— Yeah, a seventh-month-old girl, I say, but this time resist the temptation to pull out the photograph and show it to her.

— Aren’t you a couple, you and the mother?

— No, we just had the kid. It wasn’t planned. She was actually a friend of a friend of mine, do you remember Thorlákur? He had a real crush on her for a while, that’s how I met her, mainly because he talked about her nonstop, but the feeling wasn’t mutual.

— Didn’t he go into theology?

— Yeah, so I hear.

— So you’re not running away from anything?

She talks like Dad.

— Not at all.

We lie there motionless for a moment, each of us on our own side of the bed. She shuts up. We both shut up.

It was the first winter after Mom died, on my twenty-first birthday, and we’d kind of broken away from the group, Anna and I. It was well into the early hours, and it was snowing. When we stepped into the crunching snow in the garden, the first footprints of the day, we dropped into the snow and made two angels; then I was going to show her the tomato plants. She was studying physiology and was interested in the genetics of plants on this particular night. It might have been five in the morning, and I no longer remember when we got into the greenhouse. There was always light on the plants, and the roses let off a sweet smell. As soon as we staggered into the greenhouse we were hit by hot, humid air, as if we were suddenly on the other side of the planet, inside the thick undergrowth of a one-hundred-square-foot jungle. The gardening tools were kept right by the entrance, and there was also an old sofa bed that I’d moved in there myself when I was studying for my exams, to be able to read close to the plants. And then it was never moved again. Mom also kept an old record player in the greenhouse, and her record collection was a weird concoction from various corners of the globe. Her watering can and pink floral gloves were there, too, as if she’d just popped out a moment. Not that I was thinking of Mom at that moment. We took off our coats, and I chanced upon a record with some kind of climbing plant on the cover, like some ornamental growth from an Indian palace garden, and we danced one close dance. I was used to dancing with my brother Jósef. We were probably talking about botany and, before I knew it, were starting to undress close to the green tomatoes. Most of the rest is blurred in my memory. For a moment, though, I thought I saw something glowing in the night, so strangely close, like a light beaming through the falling snow. For an instant, the greenhouse was filled with a blinding brightness, and the light pierced through the plants projecting petal patterns against my friend’s body. I caressed the rose petals on her stomach, and at the same moment we both clearly felt a whirlwind, like the sound of a fan that someone had just switched on. It wasn’t until much later that I remembered the detail of the whirlwind and started to think about that glow in the darkness as if it hadn’t been an altogether natural phenomenon. Immediately after it, we heard the voice of a man outside the greenhouse, standing beside the mound of snow. As I suspected, it was the neighbor holding a flashlight, calling his dog. When daylight broke there were two angels printed in the snow, linked together at the hands, like part of a chain of paper dolls. If Mom had been alive she would have stared at me over the breakfast table with a mysterious knowing air. And because I had no appetite for my breakfast, she was bound to have said that I was getting too skinny.

— Or are you still growing? she’d ask, gazing up at her lanky son with a smile. She was always worried about the three men in her life wasting away and that I in particular didn’t eat enough. Then I didn’t hear from the expectant mother of my child for another two months. It was just around the New Year that she phoned to ask if we could meet in a café.