Five Things I Can't Live Without (13 page)

I wanted to talk. I needed to talk. I wanted to ask Vincent how he sustained that look on his face for so long. I wanted to find out how he was able to revel in silence. I wanted to know how he quieted his mind. I imagined him spending his days meandering through the gardens, breathing in and out slowly, savoring the moments. I could see him inside a greenhouse, tending to the sick plants, talking to them, stroking their leaves with his big hands.

The sun was dipping faster now, and it was getting colder. I put on my sweater and hugged myself. It was a pleasant tactile sensation, a diversion from my sudden vague longing toward Vincent.

“Do you know anything about mindfulness meditation?” he asked.

I was startled to hear his voice in the stillness. Could he have known I was thinking about meditation? Well, among about twenty other things, but still. It was a little jarring. “No,” I said.

“The idea is to embrace reality with all your senses. It’s like being the most awake you’ve ever been, all the time.”

“Being in the moment?” I thought of Larissa.

“That’s one way of putting it.” He turned toward me. “It’s about insight and concentration and focus. But it’s not about clearing your mind. You focus on a physical object, or your breath, and then you just let your thoughts pass by.”

“What do you mean?”

“Like I said, you’re not clearing your mind. You’re just noticing. And noticing is a big part of being, as you said, in the moment.” He was becoming more animated as he spoke. “So you notice all your thoughts, but you don’t judge any of them and you don’t judge yourself for getting distracted. You just let it all go by, and you refocus on your breath or on the object you picked.”

“Is that what you were doing while we sat here?”

“I was trying. I just started taking a class, and this is my favorite place to practice.”

“I can see why.” I paused; then I had to ask. “What made you start talking about it? Did you read my mind?”

He laughed.

“No, I’m serious,” I said. “I was sitting here thinking about meditation and about how bad I am at it and about how you seemed to be in this profound Zen state and then you tell me about mindfulness meditation.”

“I don’t read minds, that I know of. I didn’t know what you were thinking about, but suddenly that topic came to me. It’s happened before. People have told me that they’ve been thinking about something, and then I brought it up out of nowhere.”

“That’s wild,” I said, with some delight.

He nodded, but didn’t answer.

“We could use that in your profile,” I said, thinking aloud. “We wouldn’t write it like you’re clairvoyant or something. We’d write it like you’re highly attuned. Mind reading is creepy; attunement is sexy. Women love attunement.”

“Huh.” Vincent turned his focus back to the pond.

“Do you want to sit here longer and meditate?” I realized that might have sounded harsh and tried to soften it. “I mean, I’m fine with that. It’s just getting darker, and I won’t be able to write in the dark.”

“I didn’t think we’d write out here. I have an office over there.” He gestured toward a building in the distance. “We could head inside, if you’d like.” He shambled to his feet. Good Lord, he was big. Even though it wasn’t my job to give fashion tips, I wanted to tell him to stop being so—well, shaggy. He was wearing faded brown corduroys, with ink stains on them, and an ill-fitting plaid shirt. He didn’t seem overweight, just bulky.

We walked toward Vincent’s building. “I haven’t seen any other people,” I said. “Does anyone come here at night?”

“Not really. There aren’t any lights. The people who come here most often are art students, and they come during the day. They paint the pond and the footbridge.” He pointed. I hadn’t even noticed the ten or so suspended planks of wood with their delicate arch, decorative rather than functional. The bridge seemed like an afterthought. It was interesting that students considered it the most worthy subject. I found the trees much more striking.

Vincent unlocked the door to his office and ushered me in. It was disappointingly ordinary. I had pictured him surrounded by fanciful plants, maybe as big as he was, but there was just a desk with a chair behind it and a chair opposite, one bookshelf, and what looked like a standard-issue herb garden and some plants sitting on the windowsill. “I don’t spend much time here,” he said, with a note of apology in his voice. He gestured to the guest chair.

The setup made me feel like I was interviewing for a job, and I said so.

He smiled. “Sorry. Maybe we should go to a cafe.”

“No, that’s okay. I think we should switch sides, though. Just so I can write.”

He vacated his chair immediately. I thought that spoke highly of him (that he was accommodating, didn’t have control issues, etc.), and with the right wording, we could work that into the profile.

Even with our seating reversed, it wasn’t ideal. Our time outside had had a pleasant looseness to it, and now we both seemed more stiff and formal.

“You must really love it here,” I said, trying to recover the earlier atmosphere.

“This office?”

“No, the gardens.”

“I do.” He said it wistfully. “I’ve never wanted to leave.”

There was something in the tense he used and in his tone that made me ask, “Are you thinking about leaving?”

He nodded, with evident sadness.

“Why?”

“I want a wife,” he said.

I know it might sound strange, retrograde even, but when I looked at Vincent’s face, my heart jumped. Not because I had any romantic interest in Vincent (my momentary attraction had vanished), but because it was the purest statement of desire and longing I’d ever heard a man utter.

It took me a few seconds to gather myself enough to respond. “And you think you need to leave to find her?”

He nodded again. “They’re not my people out here. I like them fine, and I like a lot of things about San Francisco. Part of why I decided to take that mindfulness-meditation class was because I thought I’d never get the chance to do that in Nebraska.”

I noticed that his manner of speaking had changed. I could hear the Midwest in him; when outside, as he spoke about meditation, he’d sounded more like California. “If you leave, you’re going to Nebraska?”

“I’m from Nebraska.”

“I’ve never been there.”

“It’s a passing-through place for most people. I know it more intimately. I’ve studied it from the soil up.” He still had that wistful look on his face. “But I love the plants here in California. You know those five things I can’t live without? Well, three of those plants are native to California.”

I glanced at my printout of his profile.

“Betulaceae, also known as the resin birch,” he said. “
Cypripedium californicum,
or the California lady’s slipper. And
Eriastrum luteum.
Those are just three. If I’d had room, I’d have listed a whole lot more. Those are native to California, and you can find them somewhere else, but I get the highest concentration of the most plants that I truly love here.”

I could see that it pained him to think of leaving. “It seems like you could find a wife here. I know lots of women in the Bay Area who want to get married.”

“Women don’t write me back,” he said.

“We’ll fix that.” I tried to inject the three syllables with all the certainty I could muster.

“I hope so. This is it for me. You’re my last-ditch attempt to stay here. If we rewrite and nothing happens, I’m packing up.”

I was Vincent’s last chance. It hit me hard to hear that, because I felt like in a way, Vincent was my last chance. He and all the other clients. If I couldn’t get things right this time … Then there was my relationship with Dan. I was almost thirty. Sometimes everything in my life felt like last chance.

“Well, we’ll do what we can.” I wasn’t sure if I was up to this mission, but I was prepared to give it all I had. “The first thing I noticed was that in the section where you describe yourself, it reads like a CV. You just sort of present your credentials and your areas of study. I think you included the subject of your thesis.”

“I did.”

“I know you love what you do,” I said gingerly, “and you love the world of plants, but your profile seems—academic. The passion isn’t coming through, you know?”

“I’m not a writer.” He got up and started watering the plants on his windowsill with what seemed like great tenderness.

“We can work on the style later.” His watering was a little distracting, but I kept going. “Right now I’m concerned about content. Nearly everything is about plants. In the section where you described what you want in a woman, you mainly wanted her to be tolerant of you searching for different plant species on your days off from work.”

“Yes.” He sat back down heavily and started cracking his knuckles. It was the loudest knuckle-cracking I’d ever heard, possibly because they were the biggest knuckles I’d ever seen. It was apparent that he didn’t want to do this. I understood that. No one likes to take the steps that could be their last.

“I’m just trying to figure out the best approach for your profile. I know it’s not all that fascinating,” I said apologetically. My inexperience was showing. So much hinged on getting this right—for both of us—and I was already letting us down.

“I’m sorry. I don’t mean to make your job harder.” He averted his eyes. “You’ve got your work cut out for you, that’s for sure.”

“I just need to get to know a little bit more about you, and what you’re looking for, that’s all.”

“I understand.” He forced a smile.

“We were talking about what you were looking for in a woman.”

He nodded and thought about it. “I want a woman who can enjoy the things I love. I want her to share those things with me. That’s why I wrote the profile the way I did. I’m putting what matters way up front.”

“You mean what matters to you,” I clarified gently.

“Right. If our relationship is going to work, that should be what matters to her, too. I don’t want to find a woman and change her. I want her just the way she is.”

“Which is interested in plants.”

“Which is in love with plants,” he corrected, his gaze intense.

“That could maybe be a little”—I tried to choose the word carefully—”limiting.” He didn’t seem entirely sure what I meant. “Internet dating—all dating—is a numbers game, don’t you think? You want to get the most responses you can because that’s the most opportunities to find what you’re looking for. Do you know what I mean?”

“I haven’t had a date in three years,” he said. “I’m not about posting big numbers. Love isn’t basketball for me. Love is more like”—he paused to think—”soccer.”

“Sometimes those games end scoreless.”

He frowned. “I guess they do.”

“You haven’t had a date in three years. Let’s just try to get you back in the game. Call it basketball, soccer, backgammon, it doesn’t matter. We need to get you out there.”

He nodded and gave me a smile. “What do we need to do, coach?”

For the next three hours, we hunkered down and worked, question by question. Finally I declared the profile complete. We’d included his enjoyment of soccer, documentaries, and Cuban food. We mentioned his desire to learn Japanese someday and his very passing desire to brew his own beer. We waxed rhapsodic about the way Nebraska looks at night, and compared it to the beauty

of the California coast. Vincent was now looking for a woman with a deep appreciation of nature, someone who would love foliage drives and long walks with a caring botanist to guide her. After a hairy negotiation, of the five things he couldn’t live without, only two were plants. One was a native Californian, the other native to Nebraska.

I read the profile aloud, with satisfaction. Then I said, “You sound sweet, loving, hardworking, and just a little quirky. I think it’s perfect.”

Vincent nodded, but he was frowning again. I’d gotten used to that expression during our hours together, so I wasn’t unduly concerned.

“Is there anything you think we’ve left out?” I asked as a formality. I was ready to wrap up here. A second job well done.

“Yeah. Me.”

“I haven’t known you for long, obviously, but I think it sounds like you. I mean, everything in there is true. It’s you, just reassembled.”

“I sound so …” He struggled to find the word. “Well-rounded.”

“Right. That’s what we were aiming for.”

“But I’m not well-rounded. I’m obsessed. I’ve been obsessed with this world since I was a kid, and it’s who I am. And any woman who went out with me would know that after an hour, because I’m not going to act like someone I’m not.” He was obviously agitated, but fighting to contain it.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I messed this up, and I’ll redo it for free.”

“No, no,” he said, immediately contrite. “It’s my fault. You did exactly what you were supposed to. You’re performing the service I paid for. I’m just realizing it’s the wrong service.”

“But we can fix it! Really, we can.” I wasn’t thinking about the job or the money, but about last chances.

“No,” he said firmly. “My first profile wasn’t broken. It was accurate. You see those men in movies who love plants and they can tell women all about them in some grand romantic way. I’ve never been able to do that. I’ve never been able to woo a woman like that. I’ve never even had the guts to try. I need a woman who just plain finds this stuff fascinating. I can’t make her find it fascinating, because I’m not that kind of a talker. I can tell her a whole lot of information, and if she likes that, if she likes having a man explain a plant, it’ll work out. You said the old profile was too dry, but I think that’s the way I am.”