Grace’s Tree
by Selen Ozturk
Paul asked me to kill a tree. I needed a permit under the Marin County Municipal Ordinance Code §223.24. I shat and ate permits at this point.
Bay tree roots spread like fingers from palms below broad leaves. Over this one bent two redwoods that lived a century, before its mother’s mother ever lived, hence §223.24. The mayor was in a rush to sell the lot after a sexual disgrace so Paul said $95 an hour. I learned this about the redwoods from the arborist’s email.
He wrote in it that coast redwoods live a thousand years so it’d be like killing two ten-year-olds, proportionally.
He attached a grainy picture of the bay tree’s roots bending the redwoods’ chapped black thigh-thick trunks toward its melted face.
The week I started at the North Marin Weekly Globe, our housing reporter Glenn died of a rare organic cause so I reported housing. The state said the hilly empty north part of Marin had to build cheap houses or lose money. My eighty-six-year-old boss Gray got letters every week advising him to fire me, but the county people liked me.
From noon to sunset Gray would crack Modelos sweaty from a little fridge below his desk. He’d snore into them editing more typos in my stories than when I’d file them. He’d say he was celebrating being old enough to drink at all, being born on a leap year. Once his left cheek jerked up and froze in a Cheshire grin and his lumbering grand sag of a body trembled like the sea beating itself to pieces.
After that, every afternoon, a wheezing woman on the phone told him to stop drinking. Gray couldn’t turn off the speaker and crack Modelos and this was a one-room office. There was my plywood desk by the door, his at the back end, and Glenn’s in between. Glenn’s abortively ergonomic chair now suffered under Gray’s loud daughter Beth. She called herself a content manager and did the ads. Half the Globe was ads, mostly real estate, which was why Gray got letters every week advising him to fire me.
I don’t know about the wheezing woman. Gray wore no ring but any nurse he could’ve bought thanks to the Globe wouldn’t have called him every afternoon. When she told him to stop drinking, he’d drink slower.
The county contracted Paul to get the planning commission reelected even though they had to build cheap houses. Paul looked thirty years older than me and was, but was the most arresting man I’d ever seen, like Richard Burton before the alcoholic scream-match bloat. Halfway through the second time I interviewed him about zoning laws, I nudged his office door shut with my foot. Promptly, I learned that he tasted like steak. Thinking of it, my heart chokes like the redwoods.
I liked reporting. Everybody wants to know what’s new and it’s always something infernal. But one morning the office didn’t smell of beer.
Beth was in Gray’s chair using words like “deliverables” and “accountability”. Gray didn’t pull a Glenn but he was out for who knew how long after a brain hemorrhage surgery and I’d sooner have Glenned myself than answer to Beth. I left while Beth was informing me of “scope creep.” Gray did nothing except finally send me a check.
And that week, for nothing, another. I figured it was the hemorrhage or Gray saying sorry about Beth.
With no more of what Beth would’ve called “workplace conflict,” my life zeroed into Paul. I’d drive to his apartment across town the two nights a week he’d let me. He’d make pasta with fried bacon, cream, parmesan, and peas, or else thick stew with carrots and sour red wine, and I’d pour us wine. Three minutes to drive there, four back in the morning.
Blind-slatted sun-glint on the coffee dripping in a big pot on the counter on those mornings.
I’d bring to Paul’s bed two hot mugs and I’d stay in it long as I could through his leaving-for-work routine. All my money then was from permit help he wanted. Emails. I felt heavenly about doing this as long until eventually helping Paul fill bedpans in a linoleumy room somewhere. Most people make me feel there is no hope for hope. Paul filled my body and head so deep that hope seemed a silly way to wait for less. He is still there.
Once, the stew burned while I straddled him at his desk. He was typing a plan to crowd houses into the least reelection-suicidey places. It got sad and funny. He spun back his chair and typed while I rode him in his little cold bedroom until he let me, rocking, fuck it, up, legs around his hairy trunk, thrust up, thrown onto bed. Love isn’t this but it’s all that feels good to think of. Worse, there’s no reason pleasure is so rare.
Thanks to that plan, the county approved many cheap houses and barely anyone got fired. Paul’s job was done in a year. It was November. The mayor, Grace, lost reelection. Gray told me Beth’s fat daughter Ruth couldn’t go on her Unitarian service trip building huts in Cabo because she woke up with mono. Ruth went to her boyfriend Chris’ house to tell him.
Chris was in his driveway in his Jetta screwing Grace.
Ruth, pissed, told Beth who, pissed, told Gray about the Jetta sex, but Gray would never break the story because Grace sent us a case of birthday Modelo every leap day, or the day before if there was none that year, and also Grace was pretty and divorced, so legally Gray had a chance.
Loud Beth disgraced Grace forever in Marin. Grace rushed to sell her house and buy a condo in Ann Arbor, where Chris was pre-law that fall. Grace liked Paul. I’d trust no woman in the world who didn’t. When Paul was done with the county, Grace paid him to kill the bay tree bent over her roof, and so kill the old redwoods bent over the tree, because a permit was cheaper than a bashed-roof house.
But Paul was neurotic now.
He said it was that we’d never integrate our lives but I knew all that meant was that we’d never get to hear our in-laws yell over a shitty turkey every year. I knew he was just neurotic that he cared enough to be neurotic. It bode low for a lovely middle-class man his age to feel higher than sexual about me. He saw himself as no such man. I saw myself horny, devoted, stuck and sad, wiping his incontinently pendulous ass-flaps while his mind went and his body greyed and folded into a mushing heap that some morning seized grinning like Gray’s.
For reasons probably hormonal, I would’ve signed everybody else I’ve ever loved or kind of liked off into slavery forever just to be Paul’s lonely menopausal asswiper.
Paul will regret leaving that.
No pleasure left is not regretted, barring the sanctity of marriage or that pleasure being bad like heroin or statutory. Most people make me feel there is no hope for hope. Paul said he was leaving town. It hurt like getting skinned not to ask where. But I knew it was to see his crazy mother who was dying from heart cancer outside San Diego. He’d said a lot that he felt guilty not to see her, and I’d say at least she was past the point of remembering to hate him for it. He’d say that was true.
It was also true that he’d already told Grace he’d kill her tree, so he asked me. Maybe he figured if our screwing didn’t encumber public service, why would our not screwing. I said yes to feeling bad at $95 an hour. How wouldn’t I? I am as I write this. Many things matter more than money but they’ve all hurt me. I am wasting my life asking something to stay with me.
Paul left. I started walking in the June fog from my dark apartment to the corner store. The fridge in the back had shrink-wrapped slabs of discount flank steak I’d fry in a charred rust-orange pan. When I moved in, it was the only thing in my apartment not attached to something else. There’s not much more now. It’s maybe sickening my heart like Paul’s mom’s.
There’s something sickening my heart but at least we could’ve still been fucking. Instead I ate cold steak from a Tupperware until it was time to walk again. All this would not happen if I could lock my need for beautiful nookie in a psychic drawer but self-denial is less lovely than steak.
I was eating steak when Paul called to say Grace was putting her house on the market early, the last day of June, because her realtor learned that in July the new mayor would pass a law overturning §223.24 so no one could kill risky trees until they’d damaged. You kill trees to build in beautiful places.
On his auto-replies, the arborist signed off “Walter Whitman.” I imagined a long-bearded man writing too many sonnets about singing the timber electric to check his fucking emails. Until then, I’d just send emails to him every day asking for what he called a “risk-use assessment report,” or to the county for what it called “approval setbacks,” or to Paul for what he called “invoice processing,” and nothing happened and peace runs on that.
What the county needed for a permit was the arborist’s report, and what he needed for that was the county to say the bay tree wasn’t so dangerous we couldn’t kill the redwoods, and what the county needed to say anything about that was another permit which needed a report. I sent follow-up emails and ate fridge steak and on June 30 I realized it was June 30. Paul called asking how things were and I said they were great and that meant he’d return.
I was eating steak in my kitchen watching the sun set out the window above my crumby table. The dusk dimmed the patchy dandelions and grass around my landlord’s driveway. He’s too old to cut it and too cheap to pay someone. Wind through weeds. Bland black meat. I chewed a tendon. I’d heave into Paul’s chest like a chaise in his ice bed. A big hot nothing-will-ever-leave-again penis would pang in and out of me, jerk out of me, and could maybe enter me again if I cut Grace’s tree posthaste. I considered Grace swapping spit in Michigan with her pre-law he-coed.
Paul said Grace said November was so cold in Michigan that when you cried it bounced.
I had no car. I called a Lyft to Grace’s house. From all the emails I’d sent concerning 2 Pine Drive, Woodacre, California, 94965, I’ll probably still remember that brain-hemorrhaging with no Paul to wipe my ass.
I’m not a handy woman. I can fix nothing. I can’t fix one thing in my life. I break, trash, replace, or abide the things in my life. But last winter, when the rain swelled my front door so it sealed me in, I cried and my landlord brought a handsaw and a crowbar. He forced that crowbar through my mail slot and coughed a few times. I whittled and jerked my door free and he wasn’t there. No one was out in the world waiting for me.
I took that saw and crowbar and looked for a bag so the Lyft driver wouldn’t worry. I found a Chinese food bag the saw ripped the “Thank You!” part of. The rip ripped until the bag was tissue paper in the murring white sedan in the salmon dark. All the driver said was I should mind the leather because he’d just bought this thing. Brown sky, earth road, black sky, dirt road under trees, redwoods, more trees than paper for all the permits you’d need to kill them. That steel wind-ringing bridge across the canyon to Woodacre.
Paul said that in the ‘90s, bullied high school girls jumped off the bridge in lonely herds. The county asked an engineer to build a suicide net. Paul filed permits for him. The engineer drew two designs. One net was like steel wool. You’d leap into splintered nail-brooms, splat into a tetanus bed, the sea lapping you cold as toilet upslash. The other net was like strong silk so close below the bridge you could crawl in, nap, reconsider life, crawl out, decide that, fuck it, you were right, goodbye cruel world, and leap back in like a fuck-warm bed on Sunday morning, so nevermind. The city built the first net because pain turns the mind from what it wants.
Rut-road curving under trees to Grace’s.
Bead-eyes in the rearview mirror watched me clang the metal too loud in its crinkling sheet and shut the car too soft. It left me. I felt so pathetic it was pathetic and that felt so pathetic it felt meaningful again. I walked left up a clearing curving off the driveway up a small hill sloping sharp against the roof. The bay tree was thick as a fat man. The redwoods were tall as tall men made of chapped black wrists. I wondered at what point in a thousand years they stopped strengthening. If I pushed my weight on one, I could snap it. I did, fuck it. Then the other. They were at my knees.
They weren’t fully severed. The cracked rods pattered on and off the ground, lighter than dead weight, deader with each up-down crack.
I sawed off both like cheese.
Then the bay tree. Like clawing stone, like a cheese knife patting stone. Bark barely ripping under all my hacking. Now my crowbar, fuck it, I was whacking it.
I’d whacked a cut. I’d hacked a hand-wide, palm-deep cut. This slit is what a century did. Whacking, I was wailing a little, but I was scared to be heard in the quiet woods so I just grunted in a soft brute female way. I dug my crowbar in the sap. I jerked the bent end in and up and deeper in and up the wood like a medieval torture shoehorn. I wanted to push quiet this tree’s life. Violence keeps things from ending. I wanted to hurt away the dribbling canker of this tree, then feel it with my hands. I knew something would happen if I did.
I pushed my crowbar in and up to split the oozing tar gluing my rod into the slit. I let go of my rod and it stuck straight out the sick tree like a crowbar in a hard fat man. I felt like crying forever. I checked my phone. It was 11:51. I thought of how to parse this into billable hours for Paul. I liked thinking of my worst hours as line items. Humiliation keeps things from being over, so what humiliation.
The crowbar fell out the sap and hit my boots so blunt my toes felt broken. Even buckling groundward to want to die hurt hard, so I just stooped over the sap-black crowbar on my feet. I waited for the muscle-pain to rash in weaker layers. It frizzled hot up my cold legs and I checked my phone.
There were four minutes left of June 30 and §223.24.
I’d lie.
I’d tell Paul it was career vandals or drunk kids or principled critics of our andro-ephebophile ex-mayor. I’d take a picture Paul could send to the county as evidence to buy us time. I turned on my phone. I turned on the camera. I switched the flash.
White light on that wet tree gash. Gnarled trunk with a knobby hole, a wound in it I made.
I looked at Grace’s tree through my camera. If I did nothing, it would outlive me. My need would not outlive what it’d take now to ease it. Paul, ease my slavering. Forever my slavering. I’m wasting my life asking you. How wouldn’t I? I’m wasting my life asking something to stay.
Selen Ozturk is a San Francisco-based writer with work in The Point, Full Stop, minor literature[s], Necessary Fiction, and Socrates on the Beach.