see, but his expression says, “this is not it.”
“Are you the gardener?” he asks. His face is a blur to me – I’ve
always been terrible at remembering faces – but he is well-dressed and his
car looks expensive, if a bit dirty.
I nod, and lay down my tools. He walks over to me, picking his way
between the plants, eyeing each one. He stoops down for a closer look at
a particularly vivid fruit, then stands back up and pats down the sides of
his pants, even though no dirt is on them. He makes a show of dusting
his hands. He turns to me.
“I hear you’re selling memories.”
The term they use differs. None of them are quite right, but I play
along.
“In a fashion,” I say, “so long as you pay the price.”
He chuckles. The word “price” has elicited some joy in him, but
the chuckle is more bitter than happy.
“I can pay any price you name, old man, so long as you give me
what I want.”
“And what’s that?”
“Something happy.”
A not uncommon request. Most people, I wager, would like to be
happy, even if that happiness is not theirs.
“There are many kinds of happiness,” I say.
“A happiness worth living for, a happiness to blot out the sadness,
a happiness so sweet that when I’m old and dying I can return to it and
live it again.” Closing his eyes, he smiles, and the wrinkles vanish from his
face. “A happiness like the first day of summer vacation when I was a boy,
like the first fish I caught with my father, like hearing my mother sing
‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ as she washed our clothes. Can you do that, old
man?”
For a long time, I do not speak. Happiness is easy enough, but
the precise blend of joy and bittersweet, satisfaction and longing, passion
and complacence, must be handled with care. Occasionally, there is a request so specific, so demanding, so bizarre, that I cannot fulfill it, but not
this one, I think. Getting down on my knees, I search for it in a patch of
rainbow-colored fruits, brushing aside the leaves of more assertive plants.
There it lays, nestled shyly against its stem like a timid child. I pluck the
fruit and hold it up to the sun. It is light orange, the color of a bleached
164