The Alchemy of Attraction
by Peter Mangiaracina
Part 1 appears in this issue.
conclusion
I attended more talks, but I kept to the back of the lecture halls and shielded my face when she looked out into the audience and in my direction. I loved her from afar, but that was a distance I could not bear.
I devised a plan. Who is less intimidating than a jolly old codger?
My disguise even fooled Jeff. I’d engaged in conversation with him posing as a janitor. With a bucket and mop, I’d stood one foot from him as he yammered about women’s soccer, which he referred to as “the sport with girls in shorts.” He never realized he was conversing with me, Bert Tumnus.
* * *
One day, while I was mulching and mowing, she appeared on the front porch in a long, pale-pink maxi dress. It billowed in gentle breaths of wind. She carried a pitcher of iced tea and two tumblers.
I joined her on the stoop of her bungalow and chose a proffered glass.
I looked up at the sky, cloudless and velvet indigo. “Nice weather we’re having.”
She shot me a slightly cynical glance. “It’s southern California, Vince. We’re always having nice weather.”
“Not always. There was that hurricane back in 2023 down in San Diego. Poster child for climate change, you ask me.”
Calathea took the daintiest of sips from her yellow tumbler. Ice tinkled. “Yes, so the orchids say,” she said.
I raised an eyebrow. “The orchids speak to you?”
The tip of a short, worried nail speckled with grains of soil touched the corner of her mouth. “In a way. Over the past few years, they have been blooming later, as if they fear maturity and what’s on the other side.”
I said nothing.
Calathea regarded me a moment, watching as I took a swallow of my beverage. Then she said, “Such kind eyes.”
“Excuse me? Who?”
“You.” She smiled, squinted. “There’s a sparkle of humor, and the sadness of hope yet unfulfilled in there, too.”
I tried to look in her eyes to return a pithy observation. But it felt like I was on the top of a cliff, thrust into crystal waters peppered with stiletto-sharp rocks.
“How old are you, Vince, if you don’t mind my asking?”
I turned my head away and took a swig of my tea.
I was familiar with the billboards of lust and boredom from women, but was this half-smile, this smooth brow, this softening of Calathea’s eyes as they shifted to different parts of my face affection?
She shook her head as if erasing the doodle-pad of her thoughts. “I want to show you my greenhouse,” she said. “Would you like to see it, Vince?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Calathea!”
“Yes, Calathea.”
She led me across the lawn to the side of her cottage. The air smelled of freshly cut grass. A bumblebee, loud as a mower, buzzed past my ear. I followed Calathea, her swaying hips shifting her dress like wheat in a breeze.
The greenhouse was not as tall but twice as wide as her little two-story cabana. The structure was slightly opaque.
Calathea opened the door. “The glass is frosted to diffuse the light. Direct sun can damage the flowers.”
The air was thick and heavy. I could hear the hiss of machines in the corner as they gently released a haze of moisture. A track ran around an island in the middle of the structure. It was filled with a riot of both pastel and vivid color.
The constant humidity in her greenhouse would explain her perfect skin, like heavy cream and apricot.
Suddenly, I had the feeling someone was watching me. I turned quickly to see a dozen tiny faces staring at me. I jumped.
Calathea giggled. “I see you’ve made the acquaintance of my Dracula Simia. Monkey Face Orchids.”
I looked closer at the colorful blooms. “My goodness! They do look like little monkeys.”
Calathea pointed to two slender leaves drooping from under the bloom. “You see those sepals? Don’t they look like fangs?”
I took a closer look. “Why, yes. They do.”
“Hence the name.”
Was this some adaptation of the flower to discourage conflict? Disguise in service of survival?
My eyes then shifted to some strikingly large and colorful blooms in purple, red and pink. “Oh!” I exclaimed. “Those are beautiful!”
“Yes!” she agreed, gently picking and then caressing a purple petal. “Vanda. Their flowers are usually the largest of all the orchids here. They’re very finicky and need special care.”
I held up an index finger like a professor emphasizing a salient point. “Like everything, the more attention paid, the more impressive the result.”
She frowned. The hand holding the flower trembled. “But always wanting more.”
“The price you pay for accepting the responsibility.”
Calathea sighed. “I guess so. It’s the wanting, though, that baffles me.”
Seeing her mouth turn in a slight frown, I asked, “Are we still talking about orchids?”
She looked up at the ceiling of the greenhouse where diffuse light filtered evenly throughout the building, and the tiny plants reached upward toward the sun. “Desire makes everything blossom, but possession makes everything fade.”
“Marcel Proust.”
Calathea nodded and smiled. “Oh, Vince! There’s much more to you than hedge clippers.”
If she only knew. “But if you don’t follow what you want, unexpressed desires will never die. They are buried and burst out later in uglier ways.”
“Sounds like Sigmund Freud.”
“It is.” Sensing the fragility of the moment, I moved a bit closer to her. Among the heavy hothouse aromas of exotic flowers, her hair smelled of strawberry and her body of lavender. “What do you want, Calathea?”
She dropped her head and whispered, “To consummate a wanting that never fades.”
* * *
Months later, I sat in my pickup truck parked in front of her house applying some more spirit gum to my stubborn nose prosthetic. I waited a few minutes until it dried, then got out of the truck and walked to the door.
Stepping into this persona was taking its toll. I could no longer hold back my feelings for Calathea, so today was the day I would reveal myself. If I could just reassure her of the intentions of an honest man, the one behind the disguise, I could capture her soul as she had already captured mine.
As I raised my fist to knock on the double doors with their neat little glass panes, Calathea threw them open. At that moment, a fragrant, cooling breeze gently swept back a nimbus of loose blonde hair. The late morning sun shone like a spotlight on her delicate jawline and high cheekbones, leaving me breathless.
She wore a light-purple sun dress that came down modestly to her knees. My eyes traveled from her long, white neck to the tiniest hint of cleavage revealed by the horizontal neckline of her bodice.
Her eyes widened in pleasure. “Ah! Vince. Right on time. So happy to see you. Would you like some iced tea? I just made some.”
I nodded, trying not to look too eager. I reminded myself that a wise old man’s thoughts seldom turn to horizons of new love, but rather to duty and respect. “I’d like that, ma’am.”
“And stop with the ‘ma’am’. Calathea.”
“Okay.” I then pronounced the name as if it were an entreaty to a goddess, drawing out the first syllable as if slipping into a warm bath. “Cahhhlathea.”
Calathea laughed.
The cottage was small and well-kept, with plain but sturdy furniture. A quilt covered the old divan, which had a single, well-worn spot on the left side.
Flowers covered nearly every surface. African violets bloomed near the door, peace lilies flourished on the coffee table, and bright red Anthurium soaked up the sunlight from the windowsills. The air was rich with the mingled fragrances of blooms, both calming and intoxicating.
Curiously, on a wall above shelves of potted plants, jutted another platform lined with empty bottles of different shapes and sizes. Empty makeshift flower vases? Looped around the center bottle was a silver cross on a chain.
My feet trod across the luxuriant green carpet of the living room, a verdant meadow. A metal ribbon separated living room from a modest, gray-tiled kitchen in the same mosaic-like pattern as her walkway.
Calathea motioned to one of two walnut wood chairs on either side of a small table. I heaved myself into a chair, as an elderly man might do, allowing my butt to fall the last few inches and letting out a soft groan of discomfort.
Calathea poured us both a glass. She placed one tall tumbler in front of me and sat opposite. She took a dainty sip, her crimson lips forming a heart.
A silence followed as we drank. I would tell her my secret, and all would be well. I opened my mouth to speak, but Calathea apparently had something to say as well, so we suddenly said in unison. “I have something to tell you.”
We laughed.
“You first,” she said.
“No, ma’am—”
“Calathea!”
“Sorry. No, Calathea. Call me old-fashioned, but ladies first.”
Calathea ran her index finger with its ragged nail around the rim, eliciting a high tone like a Tibetan singing bowl. She took a deep breath. “Years ago, when I was just a teenager, I fell in love with a soldier, a few years older than I was. He went off to Afghanistan with a promise to marry me when he got back. He left me his crucifix as his promise.” She shook her head and sighed. “He never returned.”
“The horrors of war,” I lamented.
Calathea sneered. “No, he’s just fine. He lives in Irvine with a wife and two children.”
“Oh!”
“It took me a while to recover.”
“Yes, betrayal is like a death in the family. It takes years to recover, if ever at all.”
“Yes, Vince. You’re right. Death and betrayal. Hard to separate the two.” She lifted her glass to take another sip, but placed it down carefully on the table again. Then she rose, picked up her chair, moved it closer to me, and sat down again.
“Then I met another man: tall, Italian-movie-star handsome, and sweeter than this tea. I nearly forgot my first betrayal. We spent our days walking and talking about everything: ourselves, our future. He would leave little messages in bottles at my front door. Every morning, I’d find a new one on my doorstep, carefully rolled inside a tinted glass bottle.”
“What did the messages say?” I asked, a bit jealous that I’d not thought of a similar gesture.
“Sometimes it would be a simple ‘Good morning!’ Others would be a carefully chosen poem.”
“Very romantic!”
Again, she shook her head and sighed. “It was, it was. I thought I’d found my happiness.”
“Hmm. Apparently not.”
“His last message to me was a snippet of a Shakespeare sonnet:
Farewell! thou art too dear for my possessing,
And like enough thou know’st thy estimate.
The charter of thy worth gives thee releasing;
My bonds in thee are all determinate.
“I never heard from him again.”
“No wife? No kids?”
“No word.”
“No closure!” I put my faux-gnarled hand on hers. “That faithlessness must have been particularly devastating.”
Calathea wiped her right eye where a tear had been welling. “Yes, and that was it for me. I promised myself I would never fall in love with another man.”
Thinking of myself, I protested in my craggy voice. “Surely, you can’t believe that, Calathea. Possibilities for love abound in this world, if you would just allow the vulnerability it requires.”
“No!” she shouted. “I almost allowed myself the luxury of attraction a few months ago, and all those feelings came back. The weakness, the fear, the desire.” She pounded her fist lightly on the table. “But I successfully shut it down.”
“What happened a few months ago?”
“I gave a talk about the ghost orchid. A rare flower. It completely depends on a type of fungus for its growth, food and survival. After the talk, many well-wishers approached me. I love that feeling, to be admired, respected.”
“Everyone does,” I added, smiling.
Suddenly, I felt a tickle above my upper lip. Damn! My nose is separating from my face again! I need to reveal myself to her before my prosthetics beat me to it.
But Calathea was not finished. “A young man stepped out among the people gathered to speak to me. Except for the ghastly pair of green spectacles he wore, he was so beautiful I lost the ability to speak! I felt out of control! I had a sudden urge to kiss him, to wrap myself up in him.”
Me!
“Why? Why didn’t you say something? Why didn’t you engage at least? Talk to him? Get to know him? He might have been the answer to your happiness!”
Calathea moved her chair next to mine until her right knee touched mine. “I didn’t want to get hurt again! But I admit that for weeks after, I could think of nothing but him. I even waited for him to approach me after another show, but he never did. I was at once relieved and disappointed.”
Damn my disguises! Well, I would remedy that right now! I pushed out my chair, ready to get up and rend the stupid mask from my face.
She put her hand on my shoulder and gently pushed me back down into my chair. “And then you showed up at my house to mow my lawn and trim my hedges. You were so kind and easy to talk to. And over these past few months, I’ve come to trust you with my most intimate secrets. But like the ghost orchid, I have grown with your counsel, I have fed off your wisdom, and I have survived the pain.”
“So, you’re saying I’m a fungus, Calathea?” I said, a bit perturbed.
“No, Vince Sylvan,” she said and placed her hand on mine. “I’m saying I’m in love with you.”
That was the moment my nose fell off.
Copyright © 2025 by Peter Mangiaracina
