The Girl in the Garden

by Melanie Wallace

  But everything had. When Freddie and Gloria and crazy, lovely Rita finally got Sam—who’d crashed on Freddie’s couch for more than a year by then—to finally leave the apartment with them, at least after dark, he found himself in a deteriorated, deteriorating neighborhood rife with runaway kids and ex-cons and lunatics and dropouts and bums and alcoholics and addicts, hookers and pimps who owned the streets after storefront grates were lowered and locked as night rolled in, everyone nocturnal and drifting or claiming a piece of turf that others sometimes safely and sometimes not wandered in and out of. The Lower East Side, the East Village, Alphabet City, were crawling with broken people lounging on broken stoops, unabashedly humping in the alleyways and parks, sleeping like the dead where they chose to or where they fell, everyone seemingly victimized by circumstances of their own creation as well as by one another or by strangers. The volume of trash was breathtaking, garbage cans overflowed or were kicked over, newspapers and takeout containers, oily paper bags and castaway fries and bones, beer cans and soda bottles littered the gutters. Every one of the night’s denizens, to whom the dark streets belonged, hated the cops. Man, you should’ve been here a few years back for the good times, Freddie told him, the Age of Aquarius was something.

  And maybe Sam would still have been there—sleeping on that couch, letting himself occasionally be guided into the nights and finally the daylight to walk through a tarnished world that left him wondering why he’d fought and what he’d fought for, letting hours become weeks, letting months and years pass, staying safe, willfully dysfunctional, at times comatose—if Freddie hadn’t died. But his final drug deal went south, and although Freddie was gone—which spelled the end of Gloria and Rita, both simply melting back into wherever they’d sprung from—his ghost wasn’t. Freddie’s death and ghostly presence shocked Sam into straightening out to the extent he was capable of, set him to call his brother, forced his retreat into a small tenement apartment in the West Village his brother—who was, ostensibly, happily married—to no one’s knowledge, including Sam’s, maintained for trysts he sometimes managed during those long executive lunches. Three conditions, his brother told Sam: keep the place spotless; don’t ever be around between eleven and four, excepting weekends; and stop fucking living off the government.

  His final welfare check and food stamps lasted him more than a month; after that, when he was down to small change, he joined the line at the soup kitchen. Leonard’s place kept him from starving, but not from the humiliation he felt at being there; and maybe that’s what Leonard, who at the time was behind the counter as well as overseeing the prep and cooking, noticed, for he quietly asked one day, Hey, soldier, are you living on the streets? Sam looked at him in surprise—he later pondered that Leonard must have surmised that Sam had been wounded in the war—and met Leonard’s eye, shook his head, said, Nah, I’m all set. Well, if you’re interested in working, come around and see me some afternoon after four, just knock, Leonard told him. Two days later, the way Sam saw it, Leonard saved Sam’s life by giving him a job. You’ll have to tie your hair back, Leonard cautioned, and shave off the beard, I need my kitchen to meet regulations, and no one here is going to give a damn as to what you look like.

  Most everyone cringes when they see me as it is, Sam replied, I’d scare people off if I did that.

  Not my people, Leonard assured him.

  And that was that: Leonard had Sam start by racking cups and dishes, filling silverware trays, putting bread on the tables, bussing, washing plates and trays and pots and pans, washing down counters, setting up for the next day, before he taught him how to handle a knife, to prep and cook for a multitude whose welfare Leonard kept foremost in mind. Sam eventually went on to take stock of inventory, plan the meals, oversee the kitchen and serving and volunteers. Leonard, a fair man, raised Sam’s salary twice, never questioned him about anything personal, never told him anything about himself: Sam, after all this time, knows nothing about Leonard’s personal life, whether he has a girlfriend or a wife or children, and although Sam can guess what the man’s politics are—Republicans don’t run soup kitchens or hire the likes of someone like Sam, even if he has shaved—he doesn’t know how old Leonard is or how or why he runs a soup kitchen, or how he keeps it running smoothly despite what must be funding problems, which Leonard only occasionally hints at; what, if anything, Leonard manages to pay himself—after doling out what he considers paltry checks to those who aren’t volunteers and for those incidentals such as paying off cops to turn a blind eye to the occasional disturbance that occurs in the sidewalk lineup, never mind occasionally bailing out of jail one or another of the kitchen’s regulars—is a mystery Sam hasn’t solved.

  So, Leonard said, walking into the kitchen to find Sam with a faraway look on his face, leaning on the wrung mop.

  Hey, Sam rejoined.

  Where’s George?

  I sent him off.

  That tune get to you?

  His singing did.

  Leonard smiled. You might consider taking some time off, Sam, it’d do you good. And it’s occurred to me that you’re due a break.

  I’m not asking for one.

  I figured Claire might talk you into it.

  Sam resisted the urge to ask what Claire had said to make Leonard as malleable, as willing to do her bidding, as the people she photographed while they stood in line to receive what was most likely their only meal of the day.

  And anyway, I’ve been thinking, hell, I could really use a turn in the kitchen, I’ve been away from it too long. So take this, Leonard continued, reaching into a shirt pocket and handing Sam a check. It’ll cover you for a couple of weeks.

  It’s not a done deal, Leonard. I mean, I’m still mulling it over.

  Well, don’t bother. We’ll survive without you.

  Sam looked at the check, shook his head, held it up in Leonard’s direction. Is she paying for this?

  That check, Leonard pronounced slowly, like every other I write, comes from common funds.

  To which Claire contributes?

  Has for a while. And, I assume, will continue to do so, no matter what you decide.

  You assume.

  Look, she’s been very generous—

  But if I don’t—

  She wouldn’t turn her back on us, Sam. She isn’t like that.

  To tell you the truth, I don’t know what she’s like.

  Then do me a favor, Leonard replied, cash the damn check, take a break, and find out.

  Sam took a deep breath, two, and relented, said: Okay. He told himself he’d drive Claire to where she was, is, from, as a favor to Leonard, and he told Claire as he got behind the wheel of her car his only condition: No photographs. Of you, she clarified. Of me, came his response: he’d caught that appraising glance, her interest piqued by how much scarring the aviator sunglasses didn’t cover—much less than the eyepatch he had in his shirt pocket—despite the blinder cut from suede on the left frame that kept anyone from seeing his deformed eye in profile. Deal, Claire pronounced. Traffic was light, the clutch caught high, the gears changed smoothly. Claire navigated, seldom consulting the map. He was aware that she’d turn her head to glance backward whenever he had to crane his neck to see what the blinder and side-view mirror didn’t allow. He thought of telling her that he was used to driving with these glasses, with this blinder—being behind the wheel painfully reminding him of those day trips out of the city with Freddie, Gloria, Rita—but he didn’t want to be asked questions, didn’t want to remember what he couldn’t help being reminded of, and was relieved when Claire eventually relaxed back into her seat, no longer mimed his glances to the rear, settled into a quietude she finally broke to direct him onto an interstate and instantly interrupted memories he couldn’t stem. He merged into light traffic, broke his resolution to not attempt a conversation. So, he said, you only drive on back roads in the dark.

  In the middle of the night, she affirmed, at a snail’s pace.

  Strange.

  P
urposeful, actually. The headlights capture deer and possums and raccoons, any nocturnal creatures, and while they stand stockstill they’re sometimes even approachable because they’re mesmerized, and there have been times when I’ve been able to open the door very quietly and ease toward them; often even the deer will remain motionless, statuesque, staring with eyes shining like refracted tinsel, shocked at being blinded by the light—no, not blinded exactly, just astonished by the unnatural, by this glare that’s come out of nowhere—until I take the photo. The click of the shutter always sends them on their way, the deer bounding off and the raccoons scurrying and the possums waddling into the invisible, into that swamp of night beyond the road I can’t penetrate.

  And he didn’t know how to carry on the conversation, didn’t know how to carry on with her, not that he had to, for she’d already lapsed back into a silence that enveloped her, him. Which, he sensed, she used to protect herself, remain inviolable. He hadn’t needed to adjust his seat before setting off; whoever had last been behind the wheel was Sam’s height, most likely a friend, someone Claire didn’t trust to not ask questions as to where they were going and why, as to what her childhood had been like, when and how she’d walked away from the place she was from, whom she’d left behind, what she might face upon this returning. She trusted—in a sense, charged—him to remain unfamiliar, to ask nothing; and so he contemplated her strangeness, her seriousness, the pointed effortlessness with which she spoke—that deftness again—that made him consider the way she searched out creatures in the dead of night, made him see them through her eyes, and then—having said all she wanted to—cloaked herself in silence. She was unlike any woman he’d known: unlike his mother, who couldn’t stand to see him the way he was, unwhole and unlike who he’d been; unlike the girls in high school, given to hormonal madness and extreme silliness; unlike the bar girls in Danang, with whom every soldier who chose to had, for a start, a pecuniary relationship, paying for their drinks or paying for them to sit or dance with them, maybe later paying them for sex, none of the girls caring who chose to pay for this or that or the other. Unlike, too, crazy, lovely Rita, making herself at home in Freddie’s livingroom, which included Sam on that couch, a lava lamp on a three-legged stand, a huge TV console that Freddie had bought from the super, who, everyone knew, dealt in stolen goods; Rita shooing Sam from the couch and pulling it out and nice-as-you-please taking to the right side of the mattress and stretching out to sleep, unmindful of Sam sitting on the edge of the bed in a cold sweat, staring at the television, which he’d muted, going sleepless through the night because of her closeness, the delectability of her scent, the way she’d once said to him Sam, show us your hands, and he’d reacted as though given a military order, placed his hands in Rita’s so that she and Gloria could examine them, Rita tracing the lines on his palms and saying to Gloria—they’d been talking about workingmen having manicures on Friday nights, wanting those calluses and broken fingernails to be smoothed, wanting to have soft hands with which to touch their dates, their wives—Now this is what we’re talking about, what woman wouldn’t want these roving all over her. She hadn’t let go quickly enough, left him struggling against thinking of Rita in the way he hadn’t thought of her before—he didn’t want to come to life, he’d been content to be left to himself in that livingroom, he had no desire to rejoin the world, didn’t want to desire anything or anyone—but breathing in the scent Rita left on those rumpled sheets, remembering the way she’d held his hands, made him realize how numb he’d become, and made him want to cry at the thought of what he might never be.

  Eventually he learned to sleep next to her, trusting her to sleep. Which trust was broken one night when, caught in that netherworld between wake and sleep, trapped in transition, he felt her hand on his chest and stilled her, grabbed her wrist. They listened to each other breathe for what seemed an eternity to him before she tried to move her hand, and again he stopped her, held her wrist, whispered, Hey. Hey, Rita, I don’t know about this. And she said, So what is it you don’t know about, is it this?—and kissed him—or this?—and she ran her tongue along the side of his throat—or this?—and covered his thigh with hers. She was gentle, slow, and something in him caved, he gave up, gave in, gave himself over to her, and afterward as she slept he lay awake on the other side of that line he’d never before crossed, the one Rita had gotten him to trespass. And the next day she didn’t act as though nothing had happened between them but wasn’t any different than she always was—chattering and joking and laughing with Gloria in the kitchen, ribbing Freddie, ribbing Sam—except for the ease with which she now made Sam move over on the couch so she could recline, unabashedly let her legs drape over his thighs as though that were the most natural thing in the world, not claiming him but simply making herself comfortable, and he realized, letting one hand rest on her knee, that there had been nothing natural about him or his state of being for a very long time, that he’d broken through, been hauled through, the barrier that had kept him wrapped up in himself, the deformity of his face and shoulder and arm that would always remind him of what he wanted to forget. He realized he wasn’t able to shed his skin, go back in time, forget what had happened except during those moments—which he came to crave—in which he could no longer tell where he began or ended, where she.

  He didn’t fall in love with her. But he loved her dusky skin, the astonishing softness of her, the way she smelled, tasted, the way she was: small-shouldered, small-breasted, with a waist he could place his hands around and almost touch his fingers, her backside taut, high, her legs and arms long-muscled, defined. He loved her voice, the shape of her ears, her touch, her patience, the slowness with which she pulled him out of himself and the steadfastness with which she slowly brought him out into the world, taking him by the hand and leading him onto the streets, protecting and navigating him through a spring and then a summer, into the autumn and beyond, making love to him in the flickering light of the mute television and removing that patch, kissing his damaged face, shoulder, arm, telling him the while, Don’t ever, ever think that you’re not fine, you are perfect, and meaning it, never mentioning love and not—ever—expecting him to mention it either; that wasn’t in the cards and wouldn’t have been even if she weren’t married to someone she never alluded to—it was Gloria who once mentioned that Rita’s husband was doing time in prison; at any rate, they didn’t fall in love, speak of love. Nor did Sam ever thank her for having removed that eyepatch, having made him feel—for moments on end—that he was the same person he’d once thought himself to be.

  Crazy, lovely, laughing, joking, chatterbox Rita, leading him onto the streets and through seasons and snuggling next to him in whatever jalopy Freddie managed to borrow—people always owed him money or favors—and them driving to the reservoirs and lakes and ponds Freddie knew, stopping for hotdogs and hamburgers or ice cream along the way to and from, parking next to breaks in fences that hemmed in state lands, bushwhacking through the woods or following paths he remembered. How Freddie knew these places he never said, but he always had a destination in mind, which they always reached, and on the edge of the reservoir or pond or lake, in some deserted place, he and Sam would strip out of their clothes and ease into the dark waters, gasp at the liquid freeze flowing over their bodies, the two of them swimming out into the deep, Freddie always in the lead but never too far ahead, never leaving Sam beyond reach and rescue, knowing Sam might at any moment suffer an irrepressible fear to do with his, their, vulnerability in these nowhere places, where of a sudden malevolence might erupt, take shape out of the forest or take hold of them from the liquid depths below. Sam tried over and again, when swimming with Freddie, to concentrate on the whiteness of his arms, the rhythm of his strokes and of his breathing, or on the sight of Rita and Gloria sunning themselves like lizards on the shore, gorgeously indifferent to and resplendent in their nudity, or simply on trailing in Freddie’s wake, but he always lost out to paranoia, sooner or later found himself unable to continue
because convinced of impending evil emanating from the woods, or because certain that the drowned were rising beneath him, their hands and mouths seeking to grab and suck at him, destroy him. When that certainty, that conviction, took hold, Sam would feel himself becoming paralyzed, begin fighting for breath, flail about, finally cry out: Freddie, I’m freaking.

  Freddie never needed to hear anything more, and never asked what was wrong. He always herded Sam back to shore. He never questioned Sam’s fixations, and neither of them ever mentioned how they’d met as equally strong swimmers in another world, never spoke of the South China Sea’s jade-like opacity, never reminisced about the expanse of Danang’s beach, the surf, the way people lived in huts and the way they could carry their lives in those buckets that hung from wooden yokes they placed on their shoulders, how beautiful the fishing boats with their prayer flags waving black and blood orange in the wind, the way there was no dawn and no dusk. Sam never recounted that he came to feel that all Vietnamese—those who fawned in pretended friendship, those who collaborated, those who lost everything, those who hadn’t, those on the side of the U.S. fighting in support of the regime in the south—hated him, hated each and every American soldier, even those who had qualms, because they were part of a machine that emptied out and burned down villages, wiped them off the map. The machine dropped thousands of leaflets before strafing and bombing and burning—doing exactly what the leaflets warned they would, demolishing lives and livelihoods without a care as to whether anyone heeded printed commands that probably couldn’t even be read, all those peasants and fisherfolk in their conical hats with their seminaked children and their animals dying or fleeing as their homes and the countryside smoldered, as the rice paddies were cratered and the levees leveled, the jungles eaten by flames, all to no effect. The decimation of what seemed to Sam to have been half of South Vietnam, the relocation of what seemed to him half its population, the pervasive missions to engage and kill what enemy they encountered—which enemy looked like everyone else, dressed in the same baggy pants and sandals or went barefoot like everyone else; you never knew whether some village elder or child walking toward you with a smile would toss a grenade—without taking one inch of territory, without securing one godforsaken square foot of earth, had only one effect and that was to shore up resistance. No, he and Freddie had only spoken of Nam in Danang and never mentioned the place afterward, no matter that Sam for so long had simulated catatonia on Freddie’s livingroom couch, no matter that he couldn’t manage to swim unencumbered of the past, no matter whether Freddie surmised or understood that Sam used his mutilated countenance to shield his worse-wounded psyche. For nothing either of them, or anyone, could say would bring back the dead, or disappear those wounds that couldn’t be seen, the ones that suppurated in minds and souls and wouldn’t heal.