C.B. Murphy  .:. Writer

Ben stood on the patio in his bare feet, arms outstretched, waiting for the sun to warm the red stones. This was the ritual he performed religiously every day of the month since his father, Joe the Wolf, died. He wore what he called his Tarzan outfit: cut-off jeans like the kind he’d worn as a kid. Kay had made him agree to put on a shirt when he gardened in the front yard, and thinking of her, he glanced at the wall of picture windows above him, but the glare made it impossible to see if she were watching him. But she was there, he knew, drinking coffee and worrying about when he’d return to his normal life and stop acting strange. She’d stand at the window for a few more minutes, then join the commuters flowing out of the nearby houses—and he’d be alone with his plants.

Ben heard the distinctive roar of a yellow school bus—driven by a reforming alcoholic?—while electricians, plumbers, and handymen were hitching up their pants, perhaps fantasizing some lady of the house would prove to be a nympho-mom. Hispanic maids popped out of beater Fords, laughing and waving goodbye.

Ben knew that if he could get through this last hour of the morning rush, he could be free again to pretend the world beyond his backyard didn’t exist, especially the world of real jobs. Somewhere, as far as he knew, he still had a desk, a secretary, work piling up, and young men eyeing his office hungrily. He was fully aware that by all standards—Kay’s, his mother’s, his secretary Evie‘s, surely those of his ambitious young co-workers (who had named themselves the Young Turks)—his sabbatical had already crossed over from acceptable grief into questionable sanity. He would have to make a move soon, take a stand.

The patio stones were finally heating up. His mother Cass had told Kay she knew what Ben was doing: waiting for Cass herself to confront him and shame him into reactivating the Protestant work ethic. She could say something no one else could say: “I loved your father more than you, and I’m functioning normally. You don’t see me skipping out on my responsibilities and walking around the yard half naked. Whatever you call this, it’s ruining the family’s reputation, and it isn’t what I call grieving.”

Ben agreed with that in part. This thing he was doing wasn’t exactly grief, though he didn’t know what it was. He had read an article, years ago, in one of Kay’s art magazines, about a woman (a dancer or performance artist, he couldn’t remember) who lay on her floor for days until she found what motivated her to move. From there, ostensibly she rose and created the work for which she was being interviewed. But Ben couldn’t tell anyone about how this woman’s story reminded him of his own; even Kay would think he was putting her on. He wished he could find what motivated him to move before something tragic happened.

He had full days planned. Once the suburban world completed its shift into daytime maintenance, he became a gardener, pure and simple. A laborer. He loved this. But first he had to finish his porch ritual.

He hated that Kay watched, but he wouldn’t let that stop him. He closed his eyes, rested his arms a moment, then stretched them out again thinking of that dancer as she rose for the first time from the floor. Kay officially tolerated eccentricity. It came with the territory of working for a cutting-edge “visionary art” museum that featured the art of the untrained and the insane. Ben suspected her associations there didn’t help his standing with her. He had always been a counterpoint to that world, the stable one who laughed off the irritating eccentricity of her comrades and clients and brought home most of the bacon they lived on.

He sensed the duration of this “time off” of his was beginning to scare her in a way it hadn’t before. He took a bit of satisfaction in this. She should have known when they got married that she was getting a strange bird. Hadn’t she bragged about it to her girlfriends (who had worried about the ten years between his age and hers) that Ben had an exotic past he’d rather not talk about? Ben assumed that part of her fascination with him was about the era he had experienced and she had not, that age of free love, when masses of people took mind-altering drugs and danced naked on beaches. She did not hide the fact that she wished she had been older then. What she hadn’t known before they married was that, after their wedding, he would more or less shut up about that era, like the World War II vets who killed German boys with their bare hands only to sit on their porches staring. Ben once overheard Kay say on the phone that Ben was like Jack Keruoac without alcohol. He wasn’t totally sure what he thought about this assessment, but he accepted it. Suits and deals grew over his other life like mold covered forest floors.

Nevertheless Kay’s arty peers saw Ben as a Willy Loman or worse—a Stepford husband tolerable mostly for the paycheck he brought home. Kay said she didn’t care about the money, claimed she could go low-income and live in a trailer any time, but Ben doubted how easy it would be for her to give up the style to which she had become accustomed, including an Audi with satellite radio. They never discussed the fact that her paycheck became essentially petty cash, disposable income, mad money.

Then, out of nowhere, had come her desire for a baby. Ben wondered if she could still walk away and live in a trailer with a dirty-faced toddler in tow.

He tried to force all of these thoughts out of his mind. He imagined himself bombarded by subatomic particles originating in the sun. Photons, gamma rays, neutrinos, negatively charged ions, and all the new particles so recently discovered their names weren’t even in textbooks yet. These building blocks of the universe converged, passed through or bounced off the electromagnetic field that constituted his body, the illusion of solidity people call flesh. Some particles were attracted to his gravitational mass, others deflected. Some were so tiny they zipped through him as if he weren’t there. Some caused changes as they passed through, leaving a barely perceptible burn only an electron microscope could identify. These burns, Ben imagined, eventually would kill him through their encouragement of subtle cell mutation. On the other hand, some rare particles, he speculated, might help. It was not impossible that, in such a chaotic and unknown swarm, one or two could knock out at a cold virus or kill evil bacteria.

Ben felt Kay eyeing him critically from an upper window. He imagined her drinking coffee from an oversized cup held with two hands. He wondered if he should consider her worry a motivation for changing his behavior. Looking down, she would see a man in his late forties with thinning hair, a slim athletic build, a tan deeper than a grownup should have knowing what the world now knew about skin cancer. She would see a man a decade older than her, but one she still hoped would father her children.

Ben wondered how strongly she was clinging to the official explanation for his odd behavior—that it was all about his father and employer, one and the same, dying a month ago. Obviously his father’s death was hitting him harder than anyone expected, especially given the publicly combative nature of thier relationship. Kay might have taken comfort in the fact that Ben was exhibiting some erratic, spontaneous behavior, a precious human quality so valued in that era she’d missed. But working against this was his maleness. What did men know about handling grief? Whatever her rationalization for not demanding he take a serotonin uptake inhibitor, he knew her restraint was wearing thin. Lately she had begun to snap at him and criticize him. If he wanted to hurt her, he could say she was doing it like his father had. Worse, she had taken to talking to his mother on the phone, perhaps seeking a childhood paradigm that might explain his behavior.

Cass, no doubt, gave her an earful.

Just yesterday, Ben had decided that today was the last weekday of his grief sabbatical. Should he tell Kay? Monday he would go back to work, all this Tarzan-in-the-garden nonsense behind him. He couldn’t just blurt out his decision, though. It had to be the right moment. He was ready to be a man in the world again, to put away childish things.

Ben heard a click, then metal sliding against metal as the patio door opened. He turned to catch a glimpse of Kay’s white leg protruding from a blue kimono. Her big toe touched the red patio stones as if she were testing bath water. She had not at all begun to dress for work. Since when had she started acting like the others at the museum, not caring about arriving on time? Everyone there was always coming from or going to something: therapy, Pilates, traffic court, volunteering for some utopian cause they assumed the museum would agree with.

“They’re so hot!” she said. “How can you stand out there in bare feet?”

“I just dance around every few seconds.”

“Wait—my coffee,” she said, disappearing.

She returned wearing flip-flops, then moved tentatively out of the dark interior of the house, shielding her eyes from the sun. She carried her yellow latte cup in one hand and a cordless phone in the other.

“Should’ve brought my sunglasses,” she said, laughing self-consciously. It was an old joke—her simultaneous disdain for and need of stuff, lots of stuff.

Embroidered snow cranes flashed from the back of her blue kimono as she closed the sliding door with her foot. She liked to make a show of honoring Ben’s obsession about keeping the house cool.

“You can do amazing things with those feet,” he said.

She walked toward him, squinting, holding the phone as if it were a visor.

“God,” she said, handing him the phone. “I almost forgot why I came out here. It’s Evie.” She nodded at the phone.

This startled Ben. Evie was his secretary. Hadn’t he made rules about not accepting calls? Evie, the hapless ambassador of MM&O, represented the world he had been avoiding. She had called once before during his time off, but it had all been about where to put his father’s personal things. She could have called Cass, but Kay had understood and dealt with it.

Ben took the phone, trying not to glare at Kay. “Evie!” he said with gusto. It came out stronger, crazier, than he expected. In the second before she answered, he wondered if this were really her. It could be a prank by one of the Young Turks who coveted his office. Could it be something Kay was in on, something she cooked up with Cass to jar him into reshouldering his responsibilities?

When Ben heard the sound of chewing followed by a quick swallow, he knew was Evie. “Um, Mr. Wolfe?” she said in a breathless voice.

Ben had forgotten how sexy she sounded on the phone. Her voice always made him think of women in old movies. She was addressing him more formally than usual, which might foreshadow the seriousness of her mission. Certainly there were new power configurations coalescing since Joe The Wolf died a month ago. In the eulogy, a Young Turk had said Joe had died at his desk, kindly leaving out the fact that someone found him face down in his lunch.

“You can call me Ben, Evie.”

“Ben. Yes,” she said. “I’m so, so sorry for calling you on your wife’s line, but…”

“It’s okay, Evie?” Ben said. “I know this has been hard on you, too.”

“You do?” she asked with sudden enthusiasm. “J.P.’s been great to me. He’s been giving me all kinds of, uh, new things to do.”

Ben frowned; J.P. was an enemy. He wasn’t exactly Ben’s boss; only Joe had had final authority over Ben, but J.P. had to report to management the results of everything Ben did or attempted. Thus, functionally, Ben had answered to J.P., nepotism sub rosa power structures aside. Ben had assumed J.P. hid his resentments—and subtle affinities with the Turks—behind enlightened management phrases like “circle of trust.” In Ben’s opinion, J.P. had advanced mainly because he knew how to enhance his persona with business vocabulary and character-building vacations.

“J.P. said you would approve,” Evie said. “Of all I’m doing, I mean.”

“I’m sure I will,” Ben said.

Kay mouthed, What’s wrong? from her wicker lounge chair. She sipped from the latte cup, managing to look spaced-out, competent, and worried all at the same time.

Nothing, Ben mouthed back. But Kay was right. Evie’s conversation was stilted, her chewing restrained.

“Is something wrong, Evie?” he asked.

“I got a another memo–from Mr. Maher?” Maher was Human Resources—they called him The Worm behind his back. “You got a memo,” she said. “It sounds kind of bad. He said you had used all your vacation time, and the policy on medical…”

“I know all about that,” Ben said. “Email him back that I’ll be in on Monday.”

All of the chewing sounds stopped. There was no sound at all from the other end of the phone. Then chewing began again, faster and louder.

“Oh. That’s, uh, good,�? Evie said. “Can I, uh, tell anyone?”

“No,” Ben said. He was winging it. “It’ll be a surprise to the others when I come in Monday morning. Maybe I can catch someone rifling my desk.”

“No one’s been–” Evie started, then seemed to get the joke, forcing a sexy little laugh. “I’ve been protecting it. Grr.”

Ben looked at Kay expecting to see surprise, shock, possibly anger. But she wasn’t even looking in his direction. This was not how he had planned to make his announcement, though it occurred to him now that he’d never decided precisely how he would make it.

He glanced at Kay, but she was staring, unblinking, toward his garden. He put his hand over the phone and said, “I’m sorry, I meant to tell you earlier I was going back.”

She nodded and tightened her mouth.

Evie was saying something about Ben’s project, Legacy Planning, the one everyone but him hated. The project would position MM&O for the next decade of demographic shifts and market uncertainties. But it had needed to get past Joe the Wolf.

“You gave me tons to do on it,” Evie said. “That research and retyping…” She choked—whether on her carrot or on emotion, he couldn’t tell. “J.P. said that project won’t be getting off the ground any time soon, so I needn’t bother doing the research and the type-up. He said maybe they’d make a new department for you. You’d be the head of it. Isn’t that great? But by then he said I would probably be a broker…” She was talking more quickly than normal.

“Take a breath, Evie.” Ben glanced at Kay, who looked away quickly.

“J.P.’s kept me so busy!” Evie said, clearing her throat loudly in his ear. She sounded like a daughter at college telling her dad about a new course she was taking. “He said I could start working on my broker’s license, and that some client contact, under his supervision of course, would be good training.”

Ben stifled his reaction, not wanting to leak concern. “Have you been talking to my clients?” he asked.

“Some, yes. J.P. said someone had to help you out, and they knew me. He took some of the harder ones and gave them out to some of the boys.�? The Boys was one way some people referred to The Turks. Ben heard half of his last breath release itself slowly, a football crushed by an SUV’s tire.

“J.P. said someone had to reassure them that the firm was here working for them. I only talked to the old ladies, the ones who liked you. I didn’t tell them to change anything.”

“Good.”

“J.P. told them.”

Bad, Ben thought. “Interesting,” he said.

In a pleading voice, Evie said, “I tried to call you, but you never answered. Oh, and your mother was here.”

“My mother? What was she doing there?” Ben felt his jaw tighten.

“Cleaning out Mr. Joe’s desk.”

Damn her! Ben thought.

“Has she started sending out memos yet?” Ben asked. It was an old joke that Cass would be like those senator’s wives who stepped into their husband’s jobs the minute he died.

Evie giggled, then hiccupped. Kay made a display of looking at her watch and tapping it. Then she headed back toward the sliding door, walking slowly over the hot stones, watching Ben’s call over her shoulder.

Ben covered the phone, then placed the phone against his chest. “What?”

“Your mother invited us for dinner. I said yes. She’ll be so happy about you going back.”

“OK,” Ben said to Kay, and he held the phone against his ear—and realized Evie had hung up.

He’d had more to ask her but couldn’t remember what it was. He turned to his thoughts back towards subatomic particles. If this were the last day of his Tarzan vacation, he didn’t want to think about Evie and Cass and the Young Turks for the rest of the day.

He heard a knock on the window and turned around. Kay, still dressing, air-kissed him through the glass. She was holding up something, the Australian aboriginal fertility doll the Cass had brought her back from Hong Kong. She was kissing it and rubbing it.

Ben nodded and smiled.

He didn’t understand women, not one bit. How had she made this jump? Now that his crazy period was over, did she assume he would want to get into serious baby making? Why had he stopped liking sex anyway?

Kay rubbed her belly with her free hand as she tapped the wooden doll on the glass. Maybe she’s trying to tell me something, Ben thought. Something she’s afraid to tell me in person. Could she already be pregnant? When had they last made love?

He tried to imagine himself like J.P., with a photo on his credenza. He would be holding his child swathed in Patagonia microfleece against a backdrop of Aspen. He grimaced and turned back to the garden. Not only did he not understand women, he didn’t understand men. He didn’t understand much except plants. He shut his eyes and imagined being bombarded by the very tiniest sub-atomic particles originating from the nucleus of the sun. These mystical particles imparted self-knowledge, and some were rewiring his brain while others repaired his libido.

And the gods of the garden said it was good.