As Robin toed open the door to her apartment, it was always the first thing she saw. She had not really appreciated how much it pissed her off to look at it until now. Withered, papery stems and leaves, the plant was entirely desiccated now. It still clutched the purple bells of the hyacinth flowerets. They were like dispatches lacking events. The bulbs were crowded into a white porcelain pot with very little room and some sort of dirt-like substance. Like an unpleasant odor suddenly becoming apparent, she finally registered her disgust.
It wasn’t the flowers’ fault, poor things. They had no idea their fate had been to live and die the only martyrs in this tiresome passion play. The hyacinths had bloomed with all their hearts, the way flowers do, not knowing they were doomed from the beginning. While they dreamed of purple splendor in the quiet dark of Robin’s hallway closet, just like the directions said, they began their liability to death. When the whole thing came down, Robin stopped watering them. She put them on the hottest windowsill and watched them die.
Now, as she put her packages on the kitchen table she considered what to do with the hyacinths. The sentimental part of her wanted to keep them, or at least the beautiful china pot they had come in. The instructions said well-fed, these bulbs could produce stunning blooms for four, maybe five years. With the proper care. But no, she thought. If the flower makes me make me think of him, why even keep the pot?
“What an asshole I am,” Robin said aloud, and sat down at the table, opened a can of soda and absently looked at the offending hyacinths.
They were from Ernesto, the second in a year-long flowering bulb gift-of-the-month line. She had sent him such wonderful treasures cards that had taken her hours to select, three boxes full of significant trinkets and meaningful books, photographs, love. Ernesto’s boxes never arrived. He would talk endlessly about the lavish, expensive gifts he wanted to send her but never actually got around to mailing.
The first in the bulb program, paper white narcissus bulbs, had come all the way from Greece. They sat in a museum shop knock-off pot, featuring a satyr and nymph frolicking in a meadow. The whole thing arrived in a tiny wooden crate with beautifully printed instructions on the care and feeding of the bulbs.
In the beginning, Robin had been dutiful and was rewarded with gorgeous white blooms with pinkish-yellow centers that lingered for a month and a half.
As she thought of the narcissus she remembered the long phone conversations with Ernesto, tearful, dripping with desire and longing over the miles that separated them. All the time she spent on the phone, she studied the nearly translucent petals of the narcissus. The simple arrangement of pot, dirt, bulbs, stems and radiant crowning glory, seemed perfect.
She had met him in Washington, D.C. He was delivering an important paper on ethics and the internet, and she had been visiting her mother. Across the mezzanine in one of the Smithsonian galleries she had seen him just as he registered her presence in the room. Nostrils flared, eyes dilated, they had circled each other, round and round. The hair on Robin’s neck had stood on end. It was something she’d always remember.
Her mother had been enchanted by him Italian, handsome, well-spoken, and probably wealthy. She had not objected an iota when Robin suggested they make separate dinner plans.
The first night in his hotel room, Ernesto’s flair for oral sex had been surpassed only by his romantic use of language, his other Italian tongue, which he employed in eight languages, each spoken as he licked along the tender creases and recesses of Robin’s hungry body.
She remembered how, in the days and weeks that followed on the phone, they pretended those first-time passions. They teased and tortured each other with their ragged breathing and needful moaning. They made do with their hands and imaginations as each whispered and coaxed one another to orgasm, Ernesto in his bed, Robin on her couch in the living room. The circumstance of distance and longing only added to the passion.
She now recalled with disdain the hours she had spent on the phone with him, tears flowing constantly, it seemed, and the longing becoming a palpable wreathe around her.
She shook her head. The first time, when he called to say he couldn’t bear the desire any longer and would not leave his lover, Katrina, there in Italy, Robin had understood. She had not asked him to leave her. An exclusive relationship was not what she was after. But Ernesto said he was an all or nothing man.
At the time, she had been sad but supportive, and when she hung up that first time, she thought she would probably never hear from him again. After two weeks, the painful memory had become a little less sharp.
But he called again, and this time the desire was worse more tearful, more full of shame, hurt and regrets. The lovemaking over the phone became painful, not releasing. She began to dread the ringing phone. A couple of times, she did not even answer. When he broke it off the second time, it was actually a relief.
Then, two weeks later, a delivery man knocked on the door with a second little wooden crate. This time, it was the purple hyacinths. The bulbs were already pushing out with little green shoots, nubs just waiting for encouragement to grow.
And despite her pain, she decided to give the plant love and care. She was giving it water for the first time when the phone rang. It was Ernesto. He could not stand another day without her, he cried, begging her to understand. He did not want to leave Katrina, but could they still have their talks? He had become addicted to her sultry voice and her sexy talk. Maybe they would see each other again, and since Robin had no desire to upset his life, she told him she was fine with things the way they were. She said she was just glad they could talk again, because she had missed him, too, missed his voice, his learned choice of words, his tender use of tongue.
And so she welcomed him back, this time, knowing the score a little better. She kept more in reserve for herself. Not so much of her soul went sailing out through the telephone lines. Tshe and Ernesto sighed and moaned with renewed vigor and imagination in their little telephone sex landscape together.
Then he called, tearful, full of remorse and pain, saying he had to decide between them, Robin and Katrina, and that he had decided to make his life with Katrina, because she was dear to him and faithful too, he added. He had proposed to Katrina in a fit of guilt and recrimination, and she had accepted. It was for the best, he said. They ought to say good-bye, he said, sniffing and blubbering a little over the line.
Robin remembered how she let the phone slip from her shoulder as she lay on the couch. She recalled how she could hear him calling her name as she returned the receiver of the cordless phone back to the cradle. She figured he was asking her no, begging her to be kind as he prepared to tell her about the whole thing over the phone.
She never heard from him again. Two days later, she called the bulb company, hoping to avoid ten more months of parceled-out misery. They understood perfectly, and seemed unfazed. Robin reasoned they were possibly familiar with this kind of call.
Now she stared at the innocent hyacinths and wished she had not been cruel to them. Poor flowers they meant no harm. But it was too late to cry over any of it, Robin thought.
She picked the hyacinths up, carried the pot to the back porch and opened the top of a plastic garbage bag she had set outside earlier. As she dropped it in, she heard the satisfying crack as the pot hit the concrete of the porch. She imagined the china shattered, broken against the noisome atmosphere of the garbage last night’s chicken skins, carrot peelings, and now dead hyacinths.
