The Bucolic Plague: How Two Manhattanites Became Gentlemen Farmers: An Unconventional Memoir (26 page)

There, in the farthest corner of the garden, stood my target. An immense, verdant bush that stood over six feet tall and wider than I could wrap my arms around—which I would, if possible. I’d waited a full year for this moment. The Purple Cherokee tomato is beyond mere tomato-dom. It’s as if the taste of six tomatoes were squished together into one. The fruits are larger and more perfectly round than any other heirloom variety. There are frequently small scars or cracks around the stem, and the skin in that area has a deep green tinge, almost black. The flesh inside is mottled with deep purple and burgundy streaks, not unlike Cow’s. Even more so than other heirlooms, it’s a finicky plant, with little pest and disease resistance bred into its genes. Many gardeners avoid the Cherokee, since it isn’t a very prolific plant. We’d be lucky to get a good half dozen in our short growing season. And of the ones that do ripen, they need to be picked at exactly the correct moment. In the course of one hot afternoon they could go from underripe to rotting on the vine.

Hopefully, I’d timed my treasure just right.

I stooped over to search through the leaves in the general proximity of where I remembered spotting the jewel last weekend. I caught a whiff of the peppery smell of the tomato leaves, something I love nearly as much as the tomatoes themselves.

It was there, huge and impressively round. I hefted it in my hand before picking it. It was heavy, full of water from the week’s rain. I carefully twisted it clockwise to loosen the stem, which separated easily, as if I’d picked it mere seconds before it would have dropped to the earth on its own accord.

Holding it in my hand I marveled at how many things had to go right for such a perfect present on my thirty-ninth birthday. The serendipity went beyond an adequate seasonal rainfall, correct temperature range, or the nitrogen in the goat manure used to fertilize the beds last spring. It extended all the way back to the chance envelope that arrived in a gardener’s mailbox all those years ago.

While the line connecting my rural Wisconsin youth to my drunken drag queen nights to my fledgling goat soap empire might not seem obvious, at that moment I was convinced that it led directly to the simple, decadent fruit I now held in my hands.

Like the slowly ripening tomato, I seemed to embody far more excitement and possibility during the years leading up to this quiet evening. Also like it, perhaps the kindest label for me in the coming years will be “overripe.” I don’t subscribe to the “fabulous at fifty,” or “sexy at seventy” philosophy espoused by our daytime talk-show hosts and aging celebrities. I don’t buy it, well, because I sell it. After this many years in advertising, I know the art of deceiving marketing speech even better than a sixty-year-old underemployed actress touting that she’s sexier than ever. It’s just not true. I see it in my face. I see it in my hands. I see it in my thoughts, desires, and goals. And I see it in this perfectly ripe Cherokee Purple tomato. It will only have one perfect moment on its vine, and then it will be plucked and savored, and ultimately it will be gone.

I might have just slipped past that moment in my own life, I thought. But that’s fine. That’s how things are. Flowers don’t blossom then disappear into thin air. They fade. Then the plant drops its leaves. Then the stem browns. And then the whole thing topples over. I figured I was lucky to have been as colorful a bloom as I had been, and, if all goes well, I’m still several decades from toppling over. My own personal Peony Party might be wrapping up, but there’s still a little summer left before the fall.

I sliced up my prize and added it to the bowl before tossing all of the ingredients together. I forewent the plate I brought out and decided to eat my dinner directly from the large bowl.

The first Cherokee Purple bite was everything I expected and remembered it to be.

Last year at this time Brent and I were at our happiest in the chaos of building our new farm. It was pure Wabi Sabi. But then—seemingly so naturally—the chaos turned orderly…and demanding…and destructive. We didn’t even notice how it happened. But somehow the Beekman had brought out the worst traits in both of us, which were also the very same traits we once respected and admired each other for. His drive and perfectionism. My love of a good time and true experiences.

In short, he was Martha.

And I was Oprah.

It was the growing realization of the half of my life that was gone that was making me so determined to enjoy the half that was left of it. What wasn’t obvious was whether I had the patience to include Brent in it. He had his own Martha goals to achieve. My years with Brent represented the happiest, healthiest, sanest years of my life. And I think he felt the same. Before Beekman, when we had our separate lives and jobs, the two were complementary. Now that we were trying to merge our lives into one life at the farm, the differences in our approaches toward living were becoming insurmountable.

He was
Martha Stewart Living
.
g

I was Living My Best Life.

It wasn’t Wabi Sabi anymore. Sometimes yin and yang is really just black and white. Or oil and water.

I finished my birthday meal and stood in the darkening garden, watching almost four decades disappear behind me and nothing but fog ahead. When first cultivated in America, tomatoes were originally called “love apples” and were considered to be mildly poisonous.

Like love.

Book 3

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Rather than return to the city on Labor Day evening, I decide to take a 7
A.M.
train on Tuesday and head straight into the office. Part of my reasoning is that I wanted to avoid the post-holiday Monday-night rush. But the bigger part is I couldn’t face getting into yet another argument with Brent. I’d had a fairly relaxing birthday weekend while he stayed in the city, and I just couldn’t face returning home to his to-do lists and exasperated sighs at my lack of productivity.

“Call me.”

Brent’s text message comes through at 9:32, just as my train is pulling into Penn Station. I don’t want to call. I’m already late for yet another agency meeting about how to save our giant airline client. The price of fuel has more than doubled in the last few months, and the already strapped airline is being forced to cut corners. One of those corners is rumored to be advertising—which means our agency. As someone who flies fairly frequently, I suppose I agree that if an airline has to cut corners, I’d prefer it to be from the marketing budget rather than, say, rivet allocation.

But the text’s brevity conveys its importance. Since we’re barely communicating at all, two words speak volumes.

I climb the stairs out of Penn Station and stand in a sliver of warm September sun.

“Hey,” I say after Brent answers on the second ring. “What’s up?”

“I got a pink slip.”

“What? Really?” I’m actually more surprised that he used the phrase “pink slip.” Who uses that anymore? Where does it come from? Did Martha really walk around the office with a little pad of pink paper, pausing at everyone’s door to neatly inscribe “you’re fired” on individual slips?

“It’s a bloodbath,” Brent says. “Rumor has it that there’s another dozen or so going down today, and more during the week.”

“Wow. That’s terrible. Are you okay?”

“Yeah, I’m fine,” Brent says in his normal, cool MBA/MD tone. “It’s not like I didn’t see it coming.”

It’s true. Even though we really hadn’t talked about it, we’d both seen it coming. The constricting economy had been especially rough on media companies like Martha’s. Ad sales had been plummeting, her television show was losing ratings, and stores that carried her merchandise were reporting steep losses. There’d been several layoffs already. And since “Dr. Brent” wasn’t directly tied to any one revenue stream, it was only a matter of time before the company began questioning its commitment to Brent’s initiatives. In the face of declining profits, Martha Stewart is not the kind of woman to utter, “At least I have my health.”

Brent explains how the news was broken to him by the publisher of one of Martha’s magazines. They gave him the option of continuing to write his articles and appearing on Martha’s television and radio shows as “Dr. Brent.” The company still wants to have the veneer of health. Which, I suppose, doesn’t surprise me. As long as everything looks well in Martha Land, everyone else will think that it is.

“What did Martha say?” I ask.

“She’s not here.”

“You mean you just spent two days with her, flying on the jet and eating meals together, and she never mentioned that you were going to be let go the minute you got back to New York?”

“Martha doesn’t really handle layoffs.”

I find myself growing enraged. While we may have been drifting apart, I still can’t help but want to defend him against others.

“That’s not right. I’ll be interested to see what she has to say to you.”

“I suppose she’ll come by later in the week,” Brent answers. “I’ve got a lot of projects under way that I’ll have to figure out how to have someone else handle.”

“Is there anything I can do for you?” I ask.

“Nah. It’s for the best, really. The stock is plummeting. I’ll never get anything done here in the long run.”

“Okay.”

“See you tonight.”

“Brent, wait…You there?”

“Yeah.”

“I’m sorry about this. I really am.”

“Yeah. Me too.”

“Love you.”

“You too.”

When I hang up the phone I start to do the calculations in my head. We’ve been good savers. We have our emergency fund. We’ve always been very careful to budget so that we could get by on only one of our incomes. It would be tight, but we’d survive. Financially, at least.

But I also feel more trapped now, as I suspect Brent does too. I’m certainly not going to part ways with someone who’s just lost his job. We’ve been together for almost ten years. We can survive a little longer together. At least until he gets back on his feet. He’s an MD with an MBA from some of the most prestigious schools in the country. He’ll probably wind up making even more money. At which point he’ll dump me for his twenty-year-old executive assistant.

We were going to have an even harder time faking perfection now than ever before. But at least now we didn’t have to worry about Martha coming to visit to rub it in.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

September 18: The Dow loses one-third of its value.

September 23: It loses even more.

October 5: The stock that Brent had received for the past two years’ bonuses has lost 87 percent of its value.

“Wow, these apples are pretty deformed,” Brent says, holding one up to the sun.

“Well, it’s their second year being organic,” I answer. “The bugs have really had time to entrench. It doesn’t matter anyway. We’re pressing most of ’em.”

With Brent having wrapped up most of his work at Martha, he’d been spending more and more time at the farm. I’m both jealous and a little angry. He’s living
my
fantasy. As he was always so fond of pointing out, it was
my
dream to move to the country full time. While I know this is not what he wants either, I can’t help but feel resentful. While I’ve been in the city trying to hold the advertising agency together in the face of a global economic meltdown, he’s been up at the farm canning five times as many tomatoes as last year, along with pickles, pumpkin butter, pear sauce, pickled green beans, and mashed pumpkin for Thanksgiving pies. To me, these chores would seem like a vacation. But to Brent, they’re boring. Plus they don’t involve social interaction. To Brent, a day without a business meeting is like a day
with
a business meeting is for me.

If there is an upside to the situation, it’s that Brent is using his time to grow the Beekman business. Now that he can work on it full time, he has less to nag me about. I have no idea whether we’re going to even keep the Beekman, but for now at least it keeps him busy. In his first few short weeks of unemployment, he already has a new business plan involving cheese, confections, home decor, and garden supplies. He’s using all of his media contacts to get us even more PR than ever.

Except there are fewer and fewer orders.

If we superimposed a chart of our revenues over a chart of the Dow, I suspect they would match up perfectly.

“Well,” Brent says, “we’ll have to find a few perfect apples for blog pictures.”

Even though our sales have fallen, traffic to the Web site has exploded. A lot of out-of-work people are sitting at home with nothing to do, I suppose. Not that this helps us in any way. We don’t make a cent unless people buy something.

“What constitutes ‘perfect’ in your mind?” I ask.

“You know what I mean.”

“Yes, I know…like a Martha photo.”

“People like to see perfect things,” he says. “It’s aspirational.”

“I think right now this country could use a little less aspiration and a little more perspiration,” I say. “Aspiration is what got this country into credit card debt and underwater subprime mortgages.”

“You’re one to talk.”

Here we go again.

“What do you mean?”

“You’ve spent thousands of dollars putting in your heirloom vegetable garden, and your French canning jars, and native perennial flowers for the garden,” Brent says.

“But those are
valuable
things. It’s better than spending money on gas-guzzling cars and McMansions.”

“No, instead we bought a
real
mansion.”

It was true. Were we as guilty as the rest of America for getting the country into this financial mess? We weren’t like the suburban house flippers I see on HGTV who took out some crazy Rube Goldberg mortgage. We got the standard thirty-year fixed delayed gratification of the American dream that our ancestors bought into. We also paid cash for a four-yearold used Ford pickup, not a Hummer. Instead of eating out every night, we lugged fifty pounds of our own vegetables back into the city each week. Plus we still wound up putting the appropriate percentage into our savings account each month. At least we did until Brent lost his job. We’re not supposed to be in financial jeopardy according to the news. We did everything the right way.