Midnight Bloom of the Cactus

Once a year it happened. The cactus, inert and nondescript, produced a progeny—a long, slender stalk with a pod-shaped bud. The green smoothness of the stalk and the potentiality of the bud contrasted the rough exterior of the mother form. If one did not take notice of the rare occurrence, the flower would blossom, close up, fall off, and die within a few days, unseen.

Juliana’s attention was always riveted to the cactus as soon as she noticed the bud. Theo’s, too. They were nocturnal by nature, both artists. When the bud opened, always after midnight, they seized the moment to photograph it. The bloom took them on a remarkable journey into itself, into their selves. It was the most beautiful thing they had ever seen and, aside from the photographs they showed to others, they could not convey the mystery and magic the bud and blossom represented. By morning it would be gone—extinct for another year.

Theo had brought the cactus from California. Before he drove the miles across the desert, he sent her a fax: “I am leaving behind sunny California, Hollywood, the Pacific Ocean, my cool friends, my career in L.A., my cat and a fern to spend the rest of my life with you. . .” But he had brought the cactus. Juliana had never lived with a cactus. She watered it, moved it to various locations, took it in as a sort of step-child—one that was not natural to her or to her surroundings.

But once a year there was the bloom.

They came to know its pattern. It would emerge on one of the hottest days of summer, sometimes in July, sometimes in August. Some years it picked a full-moon night to explode into glory. Once, it bloomed on July 9—a Holy Day for them. That year it coincided with the first phone call from her birth child, the daughter she had given up for adoption twenty-three years earlier. The bloom, the phone call, the fullness of the moon—it was almost too symbolic for Juliana to bear.

This year it chose a dark-moon night. “A miracle may occur tonight,” Juliana told their housekeeper that afternoon, pointing out the bud through the window panes on the courtyard door.

The woman’s eyes grew wide as she heard about the bloom that only lasted a few hours. “I wish I could see it.”

Juliana nodded toward the courtyard. “If we catch it, we’ll have photos to show you, but the bloom won’t last until morning.”

Theo had noticed the bud and had pointed it out to her, thinking he was the first to see it, but Juliana had kept the plant watered, so the bud had not escaped her attention. They couldn’t exactly predict the night it would flower, but the anticipation on both sides was heightened.

Juliana knew that she felt the intensity of the flower more but Theo could see it with more detail and clarity. Despite their differences in perception, it was one of those rare intimacies that kept their marriage alive—the common interest in something beautiful. The instinct they each had for the beautiful was both a unifying agent and a trial for them. Most couples fight over finances, housework, or sex, she thought. Our fights, our tangents that take us away from each other, are usually over aesthetics.

She remembered the weekend when they had painted the adobe chimney together. What a horrible, horrible weekend. She had picked the color, had purchased expensive paint, and had started the project, as she was wont to do. They had to erect a scaffold to reach the top of the chimney, and when he saw the immense territory covered with melon-tinted paint, he was sickened. They fought over the color for three days, each mixing new hues and trying it out in sections. They were using rags to get a mottled look, which made it much more time consuming than brushes.

“It needs more white,” he would insist.

“No, more black,” she said, resisting the streaks of lightness he painted, preferring the darker hued shadows. It took eight coats of paint before they were both satisfied. The weekend had been awful, but the chimney was done. And it was finally beautiful, to both of them.

They had gotten through a miscarriage, poverty, his joblessness, her degree in fine art, projects that took them far from the cycle of normalcy, separate travels. But on the night of the midnight blooming, they were always focused on it together.

“Hey!” she called, beckoning to him, her face lit up in excitement. He knew exactly what that meant.

“Let me get my camera.”

“Mine, too.”

He wanted her to wait while he got the first shots digitally, in case the light from his flash caused the bloom to close up. She was impatient to get a few quick shots with her old, taped-together point-and-shoot camera. His was a studied approach; hers immediate, tangible. Mosquitoes bit both of them as they took their shots.

“Ouch,” she said. “Darn mosquitoes. Let me have a turn.”

She managed to get a few shots in between his careful positioning. The night was dark, so they could only see the blossom in detail when the flashes were going off.

“I’ve got to go in,” he said, wiping his forehead with the bottom of his t-shirt. “I’m too hot and itchy.”

“Me, too.”

They went their separate ways, then, both feeling let down by the experience because of the discomforts of nature. She went to work on her e-mail; he reviewed the video reel he had recently made of his work.

The flower is like myself, she thought. It burgeons with a ripe sensibility, but almost no one ever sees it in its moment of real beauty. She suddenly wanted to cry, for all of the artists who ever lived without the slightest glance from the world.

Two hours later, at 3:00 am, she went out again to look at the blossom. He had positioned a light outside and had set up his tripod. A backdrop hung behind the cactus. Typical, she thought, he creates better in isolation. She was always wanting collaboration. She felt a stab of jealousy, for his moments alone with the cactus bloom.

“Let me show you the images,” he said. “I de-activated the flash and used more subtle lighting.”

Without me, she thought.

Together they hovered over his computer screen. The images he had taken seemed to be even more detailed than the blossom itself. A long arm, which was the stamen, held out a little hand-like form in the center of the flower. It seemed to be reaching towards them, offering something with a twist of its small, ripe gesture. Through the details in his photos, Juliana saw more than she ever had looking at the blossom itself. She saw it through Theo’s eyes. Through her, he felt the blossom more, had a keener sense of the significance of the flower. It was what had motivated him to set up his tripod and brave the mosquitoes.

They leaned against each other, knowing it would be another year before they felt this close again.