The Bucolic Plague

  We were swamped and tired. The Beekman 1802 beast needed to be fed constantly. Brent and I blogged about every move we made, and followed each other around with cameras to record every minor accomplishment during the weekend.

  But we were also thrilled. Beekman 1802 had become a reality, and my plan to retire early to the country was falling into place quicker than I’d ever imagined. Oprah would be proud of me. Which reminded me, I needed to follow through on a PR contact about an article about the soap with O magazine.

  “Should we lay out the last row, or do you want to call it a day?” Dan asked me. I must have looked as exhausted as I felt. I’d been working at least sixty hours a week at the ad agency. The relaunching of the airline account had worked even better than expected, so we were getting inquiries from several potential new clients each week. Between advertising, the farm, my magazine columns, and the new business, there wasn’t a moment left for beauty sleep.

  “Let’s finish it up,” I said. “Gotta get the peas in.”

  We worked another hour and a half laying the final eight beds into place. After Dan went home for supper, and John left to start his evening chores, I stayed behind to cart in the final loads of gravel. As I was raking level the last pile of rocks, Brent pulled in the driveway. He parked over by the house and was heading up the porch when I shouted for him to come over to inspect all that we’d accomplished.

  “Look!” I said excitedly. “Just about done!”

  He looked even more tired than I did. At least I’d been out in the springtime sun all day. He’d been hunched over indoors wrapping and filling soap orders.

  “You’re done?” he said. “This is it?”

  I wasn’t sure what he meant. All of the boxes were in place and filled with soil, and the aisles were covered with neatly raked gravel.

  “Yeah,” I answered tentatively. “All put together.”

  “You’re not going to level the boxes anymore?” he asked, nudging one with his knee.

  “What do you mean?”

  “They’re not all the same height.” He squatted down and peered over the edge of one like a surveyor.

  “Well, they are sitting on the ground,” I replied, getting defensive. “The earth isn’t completely flat, Columbus.”

  “I think you mean Magellan.”

  “I think you mean ‘Great job, Josh. Good work.’”

  “No, it’s fine. It looks…fine,” Brent said, wearily turning to head back toward the house.

  I looked back over the 7,500 square feet that I’d spent four weeks planning, building, and laying into place. “Fine.”

  I knew what he really meant: “It doesn’t look like something Martha would put in her magazine.”

  Ever since Martha mentioned that she’d like to visit the farm, Brent had been seeing everything through her eyes. And when one peers through Martha glasses, the world isn’t rose colored. It’s a great big collection of disappointing imperfections.

  I’d thought the garden beds looked more than fine—pretty great, actually. Dan, John, and I had put the entire garden together in an amazingly short time period. But now that Brent had pointed out its imperfections, I too couldn’t help viewing it as a ragtag collection of wooden boxes laid out in rows, just like the woman driving by who mistook it for a cemetery.

  And if I thought it looked like a cemetery, I could only imagine what Martha would think of it. Martha had recently asked Brent again about visiting the farm during an editorial meeting. Her assistant followed up with Brent to schedule two possible free summer weekends for Martha to come. Martha was curious how we traveled to the Beekman, and she’d decided that she’d probably take the train up with us on a Friday and return with a driver on Saturday evening. The thought of driving Martha from the Albany Amtrak station to the farm in the backseat of our pickup seemed like a scene from a Samuel Beckett adaptation of Driving Miss Daisy.

  And even though we hadn’t mentioned the possibility to anyone in Sharon Springs, the buzz about a possible Martha visit had grown exponentially since the spot on her show. We’d even had to enlist Doug, Garth, and George to squelch any rumors they overheard at the hotel bar—the epicenter of the town’s gossip orbit. They’d become our own personal Homeland Security team, monitoring “chatter levels” about possible Martha attacks.

  A visit from Martha would probably mean another round of publicity for Beekman 1802. She would no doubt blog about it, and her words and pictures about us would reach another million or so readers. What if we could get another appearance on her show? Maybe a summer gardening segment? Now that I too had basked in the glow of Martha’s approval, I could feel my own addiction to perfection setting in.

  But the cost of perfection is steep, and can only be paid for in elbow grease.

  I grabbed my shovel.

  Those garden beds weren’t going to level themselves.

  Chapter Twenty

  “Where are all these orders coming from?” I finally reached Brent in his office on a Friday. Lately it felt like if I didn’t make an appointment to get on to his calendar, we’d never speak during the week. As if our day jobs weren’t busy enough, we found ourselves staying in our offices, working late into the evening catching up with Beekman 1802 business. Whoever came home to the apartment last quietly slipped into bed trying not to wake the other.

  “DailyCandy picked up the soap,” Brent answered.

  “We’re getting, like, five orders every minute,” I said. “I can’t even set my BlackBerry down or it vibrates off my desk.”

  “I know. Terrific, right?”

  It was terrific. Beekman 1802 continued to explode. At this rate it was looking like we’d have to leave our jobs sooner than either of us expected just to keep up with it.

  “When are we going to get all these orders out?”

  “We’ll have to do it this weekend, I guess,” Brent said.

  “But I’m three weeks behind on the gardening.”

  “Soon to be four,” Brent said. “Oh, and on your way home from work tonight, I need you to transfer 10K into the Beekman account.”

  “Ten thousand dollars?”

  “Yeah. We need to order more packaging, and Deb wants us to get another five hundred soap molds. She can’t keep up production with the few she has. And we have to pay Deb’s mother-in-law for all the wrapping she’s been doing.”

  “Ten thousand dollars is a lot of money,” I said. “Can’t we just pay Rose at the end of the month after we’ve got the cash from these orders?”

  “You want to give an IOU to a ninety-year-old woman?”

  “Seems like a shrewd business gamble to me,” I said. “Okay, gotta go. Someone’s at my door. See you at the train?”

  “Four forty-five. Be on time,” Brent answered.

  Jess, the head account person on the airline account, came in and sat in the chair next to my desk.

  “You’re not going to like this,” she said.

  “I already don’t.”

  “We have to come up with a national fare sale ad to run on Monday.”

  “Monday?!”

  “They just called.”

  “Why didn’t you tell them it was impossible?” I already knew the answer, of course. If our largest client asked us to clean the bathrooms on every one of its planes, we’d print up celebratory T-shirts and use our own toothbrushes. It was the element of advertising that I’d miss the least. As a farmer, I’d be beholden to things like weather and goat whims—no more jumping through hoops for marketing departments to earn my paycheck.

  “We have to have eight variations for twelve different papers,” Jess said. “They’ll look at them Saturday night, and we can make revisions overnight to send to the printers on Sunday morning.”

  “I’ve got a lot to do at the farm this weekend.”

  “So write a few headlines in between mucking or whatever. Just don’t let on that you’re not slaving away in the office.”

  I wasn’t sure how I was going to manage getting out all
of the orders coming in from DailyCandy, plus update the Web site, plus do the regular spring chores, and crank out dozens of headlines.

  I couldn’t wait until the day I never again had to write a line like: “You Toucan Save on Flights to the Caribbean.”

  The 4:45 was packed, and Brent and I had to take aisle seats across from each other. We hated when that happened as it made it harder to catch up on all the Beekman tasks we saved to discuss on the train ride.

  As soon as we sat down, I began complaining about all the work that needed to be done over the weekend—including the airline ads.

  “Remember,” Brent reminded me for the hundredth time since January, “this was your resolution.”

  “I know, I know.”

  “And also remember—”

  “Stop lecturing me,” I said, interrupting.

  “I just wanted to remind you that we have that photo shoot you arranged this weekend.”

  “Oh Christ,” I said. “I forgot all about that.”

  We’d become so busy that I was no longer forgetting things as simple as car keys and phone numbers. I was forgetting high-fashion photo shoots in our backyard. A month or so ago I’d agreed to let Out magazine use the Beekman as a location for a shoot by a famous photographer.

  No matter how busy we were becoming, however, I refused to give up our Friday-night ritual of stopping in at the American for a drink on our way home from the train station to the Beekman.

  “I’m sorry,” Doug said as we entered. “We’re a respectable establishment. We don’t allow prostitution at the bar.”

  “You’re just afraid of competition,” I rebutted.

  “Well, it is tough to compete when you’re just givin’ it away. Slut.”

  “Whore.”

  Garth stepped in to give both Brent and me a hug. George the bartender/mortician began making my drink.

  After we’d exchanged pleasantries, Garth turned a little serious.

  “So…how is John doing?” he asked.

  For a moment I was worried that he was going to reveal that John had an incurable disease or a secret drug problem. Garth was not the type of person to spread gossip, so his even bringing up the subject meant that whatever the issue was must have great importance.

  “He’s doing great,” we said. “We love him.”

  “He hasn’t complained about anything to you guys?” Garth asked.

  Immediately, our concern turned toward ourselves. We knew that even the slightest bit of information about us usually streaked its way through the village, being twisted and turned as it was repeated.

  “Why. What did we do?” Brent asked.

  “Well, it’s more of what you didn’t do,” Garth said. “John was in the other night and he seemed kinda down. So we asked him what was wrong and, after two beers, he told us that when he’d moved into the Beekman, he’d thought that you and Brent would be, well, that you’d be…”

  Garth struggled getting out the truth. We’d be more what? Generous? Were we underpaying him? Not friendly enough? Too New York City abrupt?

  “Well, he thought you guys would be…gayer.”

  “Gayer?”

  “Apparently, he read your first book about your days as a drag queen. And he just thought that you’d be a little, I dunno, sassier.”

  I couldn’t imagine what John could have possibly meant by that. Did he expect us to have giant rave parties in the backyard? That we’d fill the pool with skinny-dipping hired hustlers? Sure, we had some gay couples come to visit us occasionally, but like us, they were more popcorn-and-pay-per-view-movie gays than poppers-and-pay-by-the-hour gays.

  Then again, his timing couldn’t have been more perfect. In a matter of hours the farm would be swarming with male models, fashionistas, and designer labels. The farm would be less about goat herding than animal magnetism, and more about photo cropping than crops.

  John wasn’t merely going to get a little more gay this weekend, he was going to be at the epicenter of a gayquake measuring seven on the hipster scale.

  “Just come downstairs,” I prodded Brent, who was lying across the bed the next morning paying Beekman bills on his laptop. “For Christ’s sake. There are male models changing clothes in our dining room and you won’t come down to watch?”

  “They’re scratching the floor,” he said. “I don’t want to see it.”

  “They’re not scratching the floor,” I said, sighing. “The wardrobe racks all have rubber tires.”

  “Then they’re getting black scuff marks on the floor.”

  Brent had been torn about the prospect of the photo shoot ever since I’d arranged it. It brings into direct conflict his two most prevailing neuroses. His control issues usually mean that we don’t invite more than a couple of guests up at one time. He can’t handle any sort of domestic chaos. Everything in the house always has to look like it’s ready for a magazine shoot.

  But today, faced with an actual magazine shoot, he was on the verge of a panic attack with all of the crew and models roaming around the house and grounds.

  We’d been told that the photo shoot’s “story” was “Depression-era farming” and “dust bowls.” Even after so many years in advertising, I was still just barely fluent in the language of high fashion. Photos aren’t pictures; they’re “narratives.” Models aren’t models; they’re “talent.” On my best days I’m lucky to choose pairs of pants and shirts that have somewhat similar colors. But on fashion shoots, the clothing has “textures,” “shadows,” and “lines,” and can be “derivative” and “expository.”

  I went back downstairs alone and found a short, slight, middle-aged Asian man standing in our front hallway.

  “Hello, I’m the photographer,” he said, holding his hand out. He’s a very well-known fashion photographer whose work has appeared in nearly every magazine on any newsstand around the world. “This place is beautiful. Amazing. Such historic textures!” Apparently textures exist in time as well as in space.

  Two of the models emerged from the dining room for the photographer to inspect. Marcus and Jaithan. They were stunningly beautiful. Marcus had perfectly curled jet-black hair and a jawline sharp enough to cut firewood. Jaithan had close-cropped hair and soft blue-gray eyes that made him seem more vulnerable than his wide shoulders and impossibly broad chest suggested. Both seemed almost not quite human, more like creatures that mustn’t be approached directly for fear of marring their physical perfection with the accidental grit of day-to-day existence. While the crew bustled around setting up its stations, the models waited patiently on the sidelines, waiting to be called into non-action. Jaithan went to lean against the wall and put his hand down on a small collection of zombie flies on the windowsill. He winced and withdrew his hand quicker than last season’s line from a Barneys window.

  In addition to turning the dining room into the wardrobe room, the kitchen was taken over as the makeup and hair station, and the center hallway served as the staging area. I turned around to see Brent leaning over the second-floor banister. Curiosity had gotten the better of him, but I could tell from the look on his face that he was not happy with all the activity.

  “C’mon,” I said. “Let’s at least get a little time in the garden while they’re setting up.”

  “There are so many of them,” he whispered as we headed out the side door.

  “Well, it’s a lot of work,” I said. “The Depression didn’t just happen. A lot of work went into plunging the nation into glossy sepia-toned narrative textures.”

  We’d at least gotten the garden bed weeded by the time the photographer, crew, and models came out on the porch. They followed the photographer around the yard en masse as he scouted possible locations and angles for the first shot. Finally settling on a spot by the pond, he instructed the models to recline on the grass in their meticulously styled designer “work clothes.”

  Brent went down to watch while I continued my war on stinging nettles. He returned in less than fifteen minutes, with John in tow. br />
  “Wow. That’s boring,” Brent remarked. Having once spent two days filming a caramel pull for a candy bar television commercial, their progress seemed almost nimble to me.

  “They just take the same picture over and over again,” John said.

  “But the models are cute, aren’t they?” I asked John.

  “I guess. If you like ’em skinny.”

  John joined us with the weeding. He knew how incredibly busy we’d been over the last couple of months, and how busy he’d been trying to pick up our slack.

  An hour later, the photographer, the models, and crew moved on to their next location—by the woodpile. We watched from a distance as one of the models carried logs to the other one, who was resting his foot seductively on the large mechanical log splitter.

  “Look at the huge log on that model,” I joked.

  “Did they even have power log splitters in the Depression?” Brent asked.

  “You’re sooo literal,” I sighed. “It’s supposed to be derivative.”

  I wondered what the Beekman actually did look like during the Depression. We knew the Beekman family no longer lived in the house by then. From the history we’d read, the mansion in the 1930s was only a decade or so away from being completely abandoned. It certainly didn’t look like how it was going to be portrayed in these shots. Whoever the farmer’s wife was at the time wasn’t spending her days weeding a vast formal flower garden. The closest she probably came to makeup and designer labels were soot smudges and hand-me-down aprons.

  Eventually either she or someone who came right after her failed in her quest to keep the Beekman alive and productive. From the late 1940s until the day the Selzners purchased it, it disintegrated into a rickety shell. Though we can’t quite piece together the lineage exactly, we knew that it was by turns a boardinghouse, then a camp for migrant laborers, and then, for long stretches, it was simply nothing. We had a photo hanging in the living room of the grand center hallway, given to us by a local, taken sometime in the mid-1970s. Scrap lumber leaned against the peeling plaster walls. A dented birdcage rested on a pile of debris. And someone had spray-painted the name THEO in large letters on top of the ripped wallpaper.