Herbert Tolland, 56 and retired, sat every afternoon in the living room with his wife so that he could wear slippers, work crossword puzzles with a mechanical pencil and sip black decaffeinated coffee from a china cup. A large wall-mounted wind-up clock in a wooden case ticked away the minutes and chimed the hours with neither joy nor remorse. Tucked comfortably at the end of a cul-de-sac in a three bedroom, one-story house, they were far removed from the sounds of the city, children and stray animals. It was the kind of life they were perfectly content with after decades of professional work that no longer interested them.
It was not unusual for Herbert to put down his book of crossword puzzles and look out the sliding glass door at the patio. He often did this when he wanted to rest his eyes or have a word with Elizabeth, the woman he had married 35 years ago in a brief ceremony that was still dignified and, for people like themselves of modest means, sensibly priced. It was not unusual for him to look at the wooden fence he had built himself, or to look at the wedge of blue sky just above it. But today something else caught his eye. At first he was not even aware that he was looking at anything, but then, gradually, it came to him that what had caught his attention was nothing more than a patch of sunlight on a corner of pale cement. There was something about it that made him feel instantly warm on the inside, as if he had just eaten a slice of cherry pie or watched a particularly beautiful sunset.
Even more astonishing, shapes and colors began to fill the usual darkness of his inner vision: green tendrils on red, plump, fleshy fruit.
It wasn’t unusual for Elizabeth to set one of her large, hardcover books down and look at the clock, but it was unusual for her to stare at her husband. In fact, it was unusual for her to look at him at all. But the fact that Herbert-a man who never laughed and rarely smiled-was staring at something out the window and actually grinning like a school boy set off a mild twitch of alarm at the tail end of her spine.
“Herbie,” she said. “Is something wrong?”
“Why, no, Lizzy,” Herbert said. He twisted the mechanical pencil shut, then looked at the yellow plastic instrument in his hands as if he were trying to mentally calculate its weight or remember why he was even holding it. For the past two minutes, which he had now entirely forgotten, he had been trying to think of a three letter word for a kind of bed.
“I just had a rather pleasant thought is all.”
Elizabeth looked over her reading glasses, formed a little O with her lips and let the sound vibrate softly on the inside of her cheeks.
“Well,” Herbert said, setting both book and pencil down on the coffee table. “Now that I have some time on my hands I thought I might do something. It’s been on my mind lately and just now I had a thought that rather pleases me. You see, out there on the patio? We’ve never done anything with it. I think I would like to get a few pots, some soil, and grow tomatoes on our porch. It’s on the south side of the house and gets sunshine almost all day. If I’m not mistaken, I think tomatoes require sunlight. I’m sure we could grow a nice little crop of tomatoes in our own backyard.”
“My dear,” Elizabeth said, picking up her book with hands that felt the pulse of her heart. “If you are trying to amuse me you are not succeeding.”
“Nothing of the kind, my dear,” Herbert said. “I’d like to go to the hardware store today and ask them what I need to get started. Let’s see, seeds of course, planters, soil, a watering can, fertilizer. I wouldn’t think it’s very complicated.”
“Herbert,” Elizabeth said, snapping her large, hardcover book shut. “If you are now trying to frighten me you’ve succeeded.”
“My dear!”
“What has come over you?” she said. “Are you ill?”
“I feel fine. What has come over you?”
“I happen to like our house,” she said, feeling each word fall like a stone in her chest. “I happen to like our life and I don’t appreciate you sitting there making these kinds of ghastly jokes.”
Herbert could not have been more astonished if a giraffe had just trotted into their living room. He had announced his intention to grow tomatoes, not play the electric guitar in a rock and roll band! What had come over him? What had come over her!
What the devil was the matter with tomatoes!
His lips moved but said nothing audible as he folded his arms across his chest and looked out the window at the patch of sunlight falling on the pale cement. He was angry and baffled but also frightened, and it was fear more than the other two emotions that kept him from saying anything to his wife as he pushed himself deeper into his chair and thought. What had he missed? Did she think he was talking about something else? No, and he was definitely not in the habit of joking. Good lord, when had he ever told a joke? He knew that she wasn’t allergic to tomatoes. Neither one of them had any such sensitivities. Maybe, he thought with a chill, it’s some kind of mid-life crisis thingamajig. And so, he thought, pleased with his own magnanimity, it should be left alone for now. She had always been a reasonable woman. What ever was really bothering her would come out in time; and then he could get on with the business of growing tomatoes.
“Well, my dear,” he murmured. “I didn’t mean to upset you. It was just an idea. Perhaps I can do something else to keep myself busy.”
They barely spoke to one another for the rest of the day, as was their usual custom; but their silence today seemed to hang oppressively fog-like in the air, and several times Herbert wished bitterly that he had kept his mouth shut. He wondered what he could have been thinking when that strange idea popped into his mind.
But try as he might, it would not go away. That night, as Elizabeth put on her nightgown in the bathroom, Herbert wound his old Timex watch and asked himself, for the first time he could remember, where his life had gone. He was a sensible man and he had married a sensible woman. As he searched his usually dormant memory he could find nothing to regret. It had never before occurred to him that perhaps a life with no regrets isn’t worth living. He set his watch down and felt something cold come down like a hood beneath the skin of his face. The walls seemed to provide an answer. Yes, they seemed to say, this is where your life has come.
He put on his robe, then turned his back to the door of the bathroom so that he could undress and put on his pajamas. From inside the bathroom came the sound of running water and Elizabeth brushing her teeth. Fifteen seconds for each section of her mouth.
Herbert, now properly dressed, sat on the bed and squeezed his clasped hands between his knees. He saw once again in his mind’s eye the patch of sunlight on pale cement, the green tendrils on red, fleshy fruit. And then he saw himself wearing a wide floppy hat to keep the sun off his face, plunging his hands into the warm, sandy potting soil, watching the tomatoes grow quickly, like images in a speeded up film. They would have fresh, home-grown tomatoes for salad, for sauce, for sandwiches; and they would pile them into plastic pails, then wrap them in red plastic for gifts.
When Elizabeth came to bed he rolled over, wished her good night, then closed his eyes and tried to sleep. He heard the clock in the living room tick away the minutes, he heard it chime the hour and then the next hour. Every concession, he thought heavily, had been his to make. She didn’t want to discuss the news at the dinner table, so they didn’t. She didn’t want him to chew gum in the house, so he didn’t. He allowed her to correct his grammar (“You are not aggravated, Herbie, you are irritated”) and he had even been told that it was childish for an adult to drink root beer, even though he had always had a fondness for the drink.
He stared into the darkness and saw once more shapes and colors form in his mind; and as this happened he realized, with a mixture of horror and fascination, that he yearned to grow tomatoes with such intensity that it made him wonder if he had ever really wanted anything before. Maybe he had only pretended to want what he had been told to want, what was safe for him to have. Had there always been something not only wrong with their marriage but, more fundamentally, with his life? They didn’t love one another-he was not so shallow as to imagine otherwise-but there had always been a kind of quiet comfort in their union that gave him the strength to get through years of mind-numbing routine and office back-stabbing. Should he have walked away? He tried again to sleep but heard himself giving logical, and then impassioned, speeches to his wife. They all sounded ridiculous.
It had been a strange day, when everything that should have gone as he expected, and as it should have, didn’t; but the day of disturbing revelations wasn’t over, for when Herbert awakened at his usual time and in his usual position he remembered something that he had never before had a memory of: a dream.
He sat up and then, before putting on his robe and slippers, recalled everything he could. There had been people standing in a line inside a room that looked like an abandoned warehouse. And then he realized that he was standing in line, too. As he shuffled forward he became increasingly anxious that he didn’t have money, a ticket or some kind of paperwork. He looked around but couldn’t see what, if anything, the others had in their hands. And then he realized with horror and astonishment that he had no idea of what to say or ask for once he did reach the head of the line. With no memory of being married, of how he had arrived there or why, all he knew was that he had to wait in line. No world outside of it existed.
Elizabeth played piano in the study while he sat in the kitchen and drank black coffee. This had always been his favorite time of day, but as he listened to broken chords coming through the closed door of the study, and as he ran his finger over the rim of his cup, he felt weirdly listless, as if he had awakened in a much older, and badly used, body. This was his time to use the step machine. But he could hardly move.
What seemed like an hour later, he got up and then, as heavy as an elephant, shuffled to the bedroom. He took a hot shower, washed his hair twice, dried off with a thick blue towel and then shaved. With clean clothes and combed hair, he studied the face in the mirror, looking especially closely at the blue eyes and the black rings beneath them. There was unexpected concern in those eyes but clarity, too.
“There must be a reason,” he thought as he walked out of the bedroom. “A man has to have a reason.”
They ate a breakfast of bran flakes with skim milk and sliced bananas. He had never before noticed how nosily she chewed, or how often she hit the sides of her bowel with her spoon. Munch munch munch, clang clang clang. Was it always like this?
“I’m going to the library today,” she said, putting down her spoon so that she could pick up her cup of sugar-free hot cocoa. “Do you want me to look for anything while I’m there?”
“A book about gardening,” he thought, but said instead, “No, my dear, I don’t think so.”
“Are you all right?” she said, looking at him sharply.
“I’m fine.”
“If you’re constipated again you should take those pills.”
“I’m fine,” Herbert repeated as he took his bowel to the sink. “I think I need some fresh air is all. Maybe I’ll take a short walk while you’re out.”
But instead of taking a walk, he sat in the living room and stared out the window. The house sounded as if it were humming under its breath. He tried to pick up his book of crossword puzzles but sat back and put the tips of his fingers together, making a little arch. Tomatoes, huge and almost unbearably red, appeared like the clearest of photographic images in his mind.
He pressed the palms of his hands against his eyes and saw something else that pushed the walls of his chest against his heart. A memory he thought he had forgotten. Alone with his mother on a cold, wet day, he had wandered into the bathroom out of boredom. A tube of lipstick lay on the edge of the sink like, he imagined, a spent bullet. He picked it up, and then twisted it at the base, sending up the soft, crimson column inside. There was something about it that made him think of a crayon, and so he reached up and dabbed it against the mirror of the medicine cabinet. To his delight it left a mark. He put dots on his fingernails and then proceeded to draw a picture on the mirror. Hands whirled him about, sending the lipstick flying through the air. The slap that followed was so hard he saw bright spots in front of his eyes. His mother’s face hovered above him like a reflection in broken glass. What terrified him was not the sudden shock of pain but what he saw in that face. There was no anger or frustration in it. It was something else that, raw and unflinching, made the very bones in his face feel pulverized.
I got into something I shouldn’t have.
Herbert said nothing to Elizabeth until dinner. As they neared the completion of their broiled salmon, steamed asparagus and rice pilaf, he took a sip of ice water, set the heavy glass down and then said, “I’m going to the hardware store tomorrow, see about getting supplies for the tomato plant. I know you don’t like the idea, my dear, but the more I think about it the less reasonable…I mean, you know, it’s a tomato plant. What harm could there be in growing tomatoes in one’s own backyard?”
He waited for the explosion, but none came. His wife set her fork down, dabbed her lips with a linen napkin, sighed and then got up from the table.
“Maybe that put an end to it,” Herbert thought. “The storm is over and she’s back to her old self again.”
That night, however, as Herbert sat on the edge of the bed winding his old Timex watch, Elizabeth said, “Herbie, I talked to Janet this afternoon. Now, I want you to listen carefully to what I have to say because it isn’t easy, what I… have to say.”
Herbert put his feet up on the bed and frowned. His wife’s sister, as far as he was concerned, was a meddlesome, buck-toothed imbecile who had only succeeded in graduating from beauty school and marrying a man who could make toadstools look ambitious.
“She was very depressed after she lost the baby,” Elizabeth continued, taking off her robe and then sitting down on her side of the bed. “She saw a doctor who helped her.”
“What kind of a doctor?” Herbert said, feeling the lining of his throat turn to lead.
“One who specializes in depression and obsessive thinking,” his wife said after a pause.
“You think I’m crazy because I want to grow tomatoes!” Herbert said, turning to look at her.
“It’s not that simple and you know it,” Elizabeth cried, pressing the robe she had just taken off against her face.
Herbert stared at the figure of his wife for a moment, struggling with a torrent of thoughts and emotions. He had just raised his voice to his wife, something he had never done before. Over the last few days she had revealed a face he did not recognize, and this terrified him. Of course there was nothing wrong with him but if something were the matter with her-if she were disturbed, then, dear God, how could he live with it? All their work for a secure, quiet and comfortable retirement…
He put his feet back on the floor and stared blankly at the space between his knees. After several minutes of silence thoughts began to form. There was nothing the matter with him so what would he say to this doctor? Perhaps there was an opportunity to talk about the real problem.
“Doctor,” he heard himself say. “My wife has developed some strange phobia of tomatoes. I’m here because I said that I wanted a tomato plant. What is wrong with my wife?”
He spoke slowly, with a stinging sensation of shame in his face, for he had never practiced any kind of subterfuge with his wife.
“If you think that I should see this doctor, well, then, my dear, I will. Tomorrow we’ll make an appointment.”
Elizabeth lay now on her back, her bare face, wet and splotchy, fixed on the ceiling.
“Thank you, Herbert,” she whispered.
Three days later Herbert sat on a hard leather sofa looking stonily at magazines that threatened to spill off a glass covered coffee table. Most of them looked as if they had to do with either fishing or golf, two sports he had never been able to tolerate for more than a few seconds at a time. A pleasant looking young woman with blonde hair sat behind a desk talking on the phone. It didn’t, to Herbert, sound like a professional call, since most of the conversation seemed to be about drinking, ski resorts and where someone had hidden something in the trunk of her car.
After filling out the usual forms that asked him if he were suicidal, taking medications or had allergies, he knotted his hands nervously and looked at his watch. Elizabeth came with him but then, at the last moment, decided to stay in the car so that she could listen to a program on the radio about a new “semi-fictional” (whatever that meant) biography of Beethoven.
Beethovenest cords pulsated in his gut. Here he was, about to meet the head shrinker. And why? Because he had the absolutely insane idea of growing tomatoes.
It seemed like a thousand years ago when they met each other in college. They were both studying piano, and they both agreed, almost simultaneously, that from a strictly financial point of view, music was a waste of time. Hard working and full of ambition, they took their degrees in business to the foot of the ladder, began to climb, and ended up running large hospitals with such efficiency that flattering articles appeared about them in The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post. That, too, seemed a long time ago.
At last the receptionist, who had hung up the phone when he hadn’t been paying attention, got up from her swivel chair, took the forms he had neatly filled out, and then motioned with a hand that had a purple tattoo of a butterfly on it.
“He’ll see you now, Mr. Tolland,” she said brightly, as if he were about to enter an amusement park.
Dr. Bernstein, a genial looking, middle-aged man with solid gray hair and large black eyes under busy eyebrows, met Herbert at the door with plump, fleshy hand extended.
“Please come in, have a seat,” he said softly, releasing Herbert’s hand.
The room looked more like a den than the office of a psychiatrist. Pictures of mist covered mountains, deer, foxes, bears, and framed photographs of a slightly younger looking Bernstein gawking at the camera while crouching on skis covered one entire wall. On the wall to Herbert’s right were the obligatory diplomas and certificates set along side posters for ski resorts in Aspen and Mammoth Lakes.
Herbert wondered how many times the good doctor had invited his young, tattooed receptionist along for a winter vacation at a cozy mountain retreat.
After sitting down and then signing more stark, unfriendly looking forms having to do with confidentiality and exchange of information, Herbert was startled by Dr. Bernstein’s abrupt question.
“What can I do for you?”
“I told my wife,” Herbert said. “That I wanted to grow tomatoes in our backyard.”
This was the speech he had rehearsed several times just after agreeing to make the appointment. He knew that if he came across as frank, with nothing to hide; and if he didn’t say something stupid like, “I’m not crazy!”, he would quickly be able to get down to the real business: Elizabeth.
“And what did your wife say to that?” Dr. Bernstein said, rubbing the tip of his nose with a long index finger.
“She became hysterical, said I was doing something that could somehow get us into danger. I was flabbergasted, didn’t know what to make of it. She insisted that I see you.”
“So,” the psychiatrist said, folding his arms across his chest. “You don’t understand her concerns?”
Herbert felt as if he had just gulped ice water. His throat and intestines were suddenly numb. Concerns? What was there to be concerned about?
“I’m not exactly sure what it is she’s afraid of,” Herbert said at last. “She’s never expressed any apprehensions about tomatoes before.”
“But you do understand, Mr. Tolland,” Dr. Bernstein said. “That there are certain risks if one proceeds without the proper authorizations, and that those are quite difficult to obtain. Sanctions against unauthorized growing of a controlled plant like tomatoes are very severe.”
Herbert could barely hear him through the beating of his own heart. Sanctions? For growing tomatoes! It had to be a joke!
“Look hear, doctor,” Herbert said, struggling to control his quavering voice. “I have no idea what the hell you’re talking about.”
“Tomatoes are controlled by the Council of Tribethian, Mr. Tolland, as I would think you’d be well aware of.”
Herbert looked at the doctor in stunned silence.
“It may not be fair,” Dr. Bernstein continued. “But it’s part of the political reality.”
“Who the…what did you say,” Herbert said. “The…Tri…what?”
“The Tribethians are the inhabitants of Venus. They exist in the eighth dimension. Unfortunately for us, they…”
“You’ll have to excuse me, “Herbert said, getting to his feet. “I, uh, think I have to use your restroom.”
“Mary will show you where it is,” the doctor said.
As soon as Herbert was out the door, however, he didn’t bother to glance at Mary, the tattooed receptionist, but hurried out the exit and ran for the stairs.
When he got to the car he was panting and sweating.
“Herbert!” Elizabeth cried, snapping off the radio. “What is it!”
“The man’s a lunatic,” Herbert shouted. “An absolute, an absolute madman. I was afraid he’d kill me! Do you want to know what he was babbling about! Some beings on Venus. I’m not making this up. Insane authorizations and, and sanctions.”
“Herbert.” Elizabeth shouted. “The Council of Tribethian is not to be trifled with!”
Herbert didn’t feel himself bolting out of the car. He was so light that he felt as if he were made of helium. For a moment he didn’t know what he was doing outside of his car, and then he started walking.
Traffic moved past him in a blur. The sidewalk pressed against the soles of his feet. He looked at skinny trees, then the window of a store. There were signs for whole wheat bread, lettuce, cucumbers, zucchini and tomatoes. Herbert walked on, then took a step back in order to take a closer look at the advertisement for tomatoes. Beneath it, in tiny red letters, were the words
C.O.T APPROVED.
Herbert wheeled about and saw cars and trees moving past him. He didn’t know where his car was and then became aware that he was standing next to it.
C.O.T APPROVED.
At first he thought that he had hiccupped. His stomach lurched and he took a deep breath. The laughter that came was so hard, so spasmodic, that he felt his face swell like a balloon. Tears rolled down his face and his sides pressed painfully against his ribs and still he continued to scream with laughter even as he heard the terrified screams of his wife coming from inside the car.
James Hazard
Copyright 2007
La Verne, California
