by Peter Wild
‘It’s not that. I’m not worried about that, that’s not what I mean–I know he’ll come back. I’m worried that when he does, I won’t be here any more–Ceylon, for God’s sake, now take them to the laundry room!’
Ceylon glanced at her, startled, as if she’d been hit. She looked down at the pile of linens that had been her focus of attention for the last couple of minutes, scooped them up into her arms quickly but with much care, as if a crying baby were hidden among their folds, and scurried out of the room. Behind her she left a trail of napkins, crumpled white leaves, collapsed snow birds, fallen from a winter sky.
Chinaman’s Hat (Petasus orientalis). Stolen from greenhouse at 1804 Tuckahoe Ln. World’s largest recorded example. Perfectly symmetrical striations. Irreplaceable and unmistakable. Reward for information leading to its recovery available upon request.
The town hall was packed. Julia had never, in fact, seen it quite so full. The meetings about the illegally large residence, the uproar over the splinter group of beachfront property owners attempting to incorporate their own town for insurance purposes, even the great summer parking permit debate, had not generated such interest and attendance. From their places on the panel on the stage, East Hampton’s two police officers were attempting to calm everyone down, but it wasn’t working. The mayor’s last comment–that they were only plants and could easily be replaced once people’s insurance came through–had not gone down well. Lawrence stood next to her, screaming, ‘We’ll replace you! Maybe we’ll replace you!’ Other people’s comments were less intelligible.
As she looked around, she noticed Henrietta was the only other person beside herself who wasn’t shouting at the stage or talking to the people next to her. She seemed to be text-messaging someone, but Julia couldn’t be certain and she found herself wondering vaguely whether her own cell phone could do that. She looked back at Lawrence, his face red from the yelling. Poor Lawrence. Unable to uproot his Maori Plums, the thief had taken cuttings from the most established trees. Now the pride of Lawrence’s garden looked crippled, the hard, gnarled wood lopsided and leaking sap. Lawrence was unsure whether they would recover and was already saying he might replace the copse with some Albanian Figs. Julia knew it was just talk. Lawrence had raised those plums from cuttings he had brought back from New Zealand and, just as she knew he would be able to nurse them through this trauma, she also knew that every time he looked at them he would see the branches that were now missing, not the branches that were still there.
‘Listen, this is pointless–I’m going to head home, OK?’ Julia tried to say over the general din. The police had sat back down and the mayor, playing patient principal, was tapping a pencil on the table, waiting for the room to quiet of its own accord. Lawrence, now shouting ‘This isn’t about that! This isn’t about that, you fool!’, didn’t seem to hear her, so she simply turned and walked out into the cold evening air. The way it stung her face felt pleasant after the stuffy heat of the hall; when she breathed now, she could feel it. She walked down the main street to where she knew Harold was waiting with the car, but before she got there, she turned and walked back the way she had just come.
Past the town hall was a small bar. When Robert had first bought the house, it had a Genovese Cream Ale sign in its one small window. Now there was a menu offering broccoli rabe and pizza with Jerusalem artichokes. Inside, Julia found it empty but for the mother of the current owner, whom Julia had seen down front, near the stage, just minutes before. The old woman could barely see over the bar, but she stood back there waiting for her son to return, or perhaps for the employees to turn up for the first shift. Julia felt a little guilty asking her for a drink, but then again, what she had in mind wasn’t very complicated.
‘Champagne, please, Mrs Taleggio.’
The woman seemed surprised that Julia knew her name, which made sense really since they had never met. Julia didn’t even really know her son either, just that Antonio Taleggio had bought the bar from its original owner, Bill O’Hare.
The old woman placed the glass of champagne in front of her. ‘Seventeen dollars, please.’
‘Thank you,’ said Julia, handing her a twenty. She didn’t wait for her change, but instead, wanting to avoid sitting at the bar with the old woman so near, wanting to avoid feeling the polite necessity of talking to her, she made her way to a booth near the back. Once she had taken off her coat, sat down and settled in, the old woman slowly, laboriously, made her way to the end of the bar, exerted tremendous effort in lifting the bar trap high enough to make her way underneath, and shuffled slowly over to her.
When she was very close to Julia she said at last, ‘The tables are for eating. Are you eating?’
Julia looked at her for a moment. Even though she looked directly into her eyes, the old woman didn’t seem to see her. It was as if she were blind, which, of course, she couldn’t be. There was no hint of humour in her question.
‘No, no I’m not.’
‘Then I’m sorry, but you will have to drink at the bar.’
Julia looked at her again for a moment. Again, there was no trace of humour. She sighed and picked up her coat. ‘Never mind,’ she said, standing, ‘never mind.’
She looked back just for a second as she left. The old woman sat in the booth, looking at the ceiling, her hands around the glass of champagne.
As Harold pulled out of the parking lot, Lawrence’s Bundeswagon pulled up next to them. Julia lowered her window as Lawrence lowered his. The Bundeswagon was packed. Julia could see Miriam in the back seat along with three other members of the Garden Club. Henrietta sat in the front passenger seat, clutching several thermoses.
‘Sweet-thing!’ cried Lawrence. ‘We’re vigilantes! We’ve decided we’re going to drive around all night and catch this bastard in the act! Kind of a neighbourhood watch sort of thing. Do you want to come? I’m sure we can make room!’ Miriam squirmed slightly at this comment, but said nothing. Lawrence’s breath clouded out into the space between them, smelling both slightly sweet and slightly sour.
‘No, thank you, Lawrence. I’m actually quiet tired. I think I’m just going to have Harold take me home and go to bed…’
‘Are you sure? We have mulled wine and Miriam brought some of her girl’s Christmas cake–it’s very good!’
‘No, really, I just need to get to bed. Thank you, though. And good luck being vigilantes–it does sound like fun.’
‘Fun-schmun, we’ll see how much he likes having his plums pruned!’
Julia smiled. ‘Goodnight, Lawrence…’
‘Goodnight, sweet-thing!’ He tore off down Millbrook Road, narrowly missing the town’s single police car, which swerved to get out of his way.
As Harold carefully turned out on to the road in the other direction, Julia raised her window, the thick glass of the Bentley blocking out the cold, if not the night.
Gleaming African Broadback (Dorsum robustus fulgere Africanus). Entire tree missing from 181 Church Road. Barkless Ebony, extremely rare, many hundreds of years old, several carvings on trunk of ancient and primitive origin.
When she woke, Julia wondered why it was of her own accord. Then she remembered, she had given everyone the day off, there would be no one waking her this morning with her cappuccino and croissant and Belgian hazelnut praline spread. It irritated her that she hadn’t been woken by the phone, that no one had yet called her to wish her a Merry Christmas-especially Charlie, who was seven hours ahead. At least both Robert and Sarah were an hour behind. Strange they could be in the same time zone and yet so far away from each other.
She got out of bed, slipping her feet into her slippers, and looking at the phone console on her nightstand. Nothing. No blinking red light. She hadn’t slept through anything. The clock surprised her, though; it was only 7.10 a.m. She usually asked Martina to wake her at seven, so she had expected to sleep much longer today. She sighed and stood and shrugged into her bathrobe.
Downstairs, in the kitchen, it took her some time t
o find the coffee and, even then, the milk she steamed remained flat. There didn’t seem to be any croissants. She sat at the table in the kitchen where Martina and Harold–and more recently Ceylon–took their meals. It was actually a nice, comfortable space, less austere than the real dining room or even the TV room where she remembered eating when Charlie and Sarah were younger. Through the window she could see the herb garden, all trace of the damage left by Jorge’s men now long gone. When the phone rang, she hit the table with her thigh as she got up, spilling coffee.
‘Hello? No. Thank you. I said no.’ She hung up and cursed as she looked back at the table, the coffee dripping down on to the heated slate floor. She realised, as she crouched and wiped it up with a paper towel, that this was the first time she had cleaned this particular floor since they’d had the house. At least she knew where the trash was.
The television only made her depressed. Carol services and preachers and Christmas cartoons from twenty years ago. ‘When did they stop making Christmas cartoons?’ she wondered. She walked about the house aimlessly, picking up objects almost at random. Was it strange she could remember where every single one had come from and when? Here was the Wade porcelain boar Robert had bought on their honeymoon in Barcelona, assured by the woman who sold it to them that in Catalonia it was good luck for newlyweds. They found out later it was, in fact, a fertility symbol. And here the Lalique crystal bowl with the orchid flower rim, a gift from Charles when he was in college, Christmas his sophomore year. That the money for the present had come from her hadn’t mattered as much as the fact that he had remembered her favourite orchid and then sought out a piece incorporating it. She realised now she had never asked whether this had been intentional; now, on this morning, she wondered whether it might have been nothing more than coincidence. And there, up there, the tetratych of Versailles Sarah had bought for her on her junior year in France, each panel a season, each border gilded. The vases, the books, the teapots and the masks. So many gifts over so many years. Perhaps I should start a museum? She laughed to herself.
Standing, she ate some salad from a Tupperware bowl she had found in the refrigerator. As she forked the arugula and endive into her mouth, she looked down at the table where she and Robert (or perhaps just she) kept the family photos in a variety of frames. These moments she remembered less or, perhaps, had been taught to remember less by the photographs themselves. As she looked at the image she knew had been taken of Charles on his second birthday–confused, a little terrified, a little happy, astride a handmade rocking horse, his eyes focused on something off-camera–she could not recall that specific instant or what he had been looking at. Rather, she remembered the photograph. If she thought of the rocking horse, still intact as a matter of fact, stored in the basement against the possibility of grandchildren arriving before woodworm, if she thought of the rocking horse, she could remember other moments, other times she had seen Charles riding it, but not the one in the photo. The same went for Sarah, fresh faced, in skiing gear at Whistler, at the bottom of a lift. She remembered skiing with Sarah that year, remembered buying her that hat with her favourite cartoon character emblazoned on its front, but not the moment the picture was taken. There was Robert in black tie at a Met fund-raiser, her brother in the Atacama crouching over three small mummies, the colour of their headdresses still vibrant in spite of their dry, grey, almost petrified flesh, both moments a mystery, although she remembered laughing at someone’s jokes at that dinner, remembered touching those same mummies. There she was herself even, in a blue pashmina, ten years ago, sitting like a little girl, legs dangling over the edge of a pier, the flash catching her unawares in the dark, looking into the water. She remembered it had been lit by the moon, remembered the way the moon had shimmered out over the surface of the water, leading somewhere, but she couldn’t remember what she had seen there or even why she had been looking.
All at once, she had to be in her garden.
The day was crisp and the air clear. Listening to the MP3 player Charlie had given her for Christmas the year before, Julia walked from one zone to another with no particular agenda, snapping off dead limbs and pulling up winter weeds when she saw them. The orchard seemed to be wintering well, the few wasted apples and pears a deep, deep brown in the sun, like underwater egg sacs hanging from the brittle, leafless coral of the trees. The vegetable garden looked almost barren, belying none of the roots that slept below the soil, and she stopped here to tie up a broken trellis or two, mending the joints where the rope had rotted through, reknotting what was left now it was no longer hidden behind tomatoes’ tentacles. Passing the bottom of the path that wound up to the front door, Julia paused and looked along its length. As they should be, the beds of Indonesian Crystal Slipper that lined it remained hidden beneath the winter grass, buried deep in the hard, cold ground. She squinted as she tried to imagine what they would look like in the spring, when the rows and rows of tiny white bells would once again hang silently in the air, but she couldn’t quite picture it. Even though she knew the bulbs were there, unlike anyone else who might look at the path, even though she had seen them flower in the past, the knowledge didn’t help. It had always been a weakness of hers, imagining how sections of the garden might look in bloom. Charlie had once bought her a landscape design computer program to help her, but it remained in its shrinkwrapped plastic on the shelf above her computer. And yet now, as she looked, she thought she saw not a flower, but the outline of a flower, some distance away, close to the house. She squinted harder and realised it was not her imagination, but that one of the bulbs really was blooming in the dead of winter. Still, it seemed off somehow, different. She walked up the path, along the invisible rows of flowers, remembering planting them for her and Robert’s fifth wedding anniversary, the same year he’d bought the house. As she’d supervised the two girls from the nursery, he had snuck up behind her, wrapped his arms around her waist, and whispered in her ear, ‘What do you think, Cinders? Is it perfect?’ She bent to look at the flower and could see now what was different about it. Completely lacking in pigment, its petals were transparent. It was almost as if it wasn’t there at all, which, of course, it shouldn’t be, not now. She plucked the oddity, wondering whether there might be a steam pipe running beneath where she stood. As she slipped it into her pocket, she tried to remember her answer. She knew what she must have said because she knew what she had been expected to say, but that wasn’t the same as remembering.
She rounded the corner of the hedge enclosing the orientalist pond and looked with a certain melancholy at the misplaced bushes. She reached out to the Pua Keni Keni and stroked the topside of its furry leaves. It would be spectacular in just a few months. Who could say, perhaps the mistake, the asymmetry, would be beautiful in its own way. Her nails were a wreck now she noticed, full of soil, one cracked. Against the surface of the leaf, with its delicate spotting, they appeared all the more wild. Julia wondered whether the nail salon she went to in Sag Harbor would be open today. She would go if they were. After all, why not?
As she walked back to the house, she noticed the birds overhead. Not that it was ever noisy, but the neighbourhood seemed especially silent today and the birds’ cries and calls had caught her attention. The geese were migrating again and flocked across her land, honking as they went. What could they possibly be saying to each other? she wondered. Do geese really have so much to talk about? As she reached the house, she saw a tiny black bird flying by itself, too far away to identify, puffed up against the cold and the wind, football shaped. If you watched birds fly, she realised, none of them really flapped their wings. This one just beat against the enormity of the sky in little frantic bursts, a jellyfish, a black heart pulsing through the air.
Inside, when she reached for the phone, she saw the red light blinking. She had three new messages. With a sigh, she checked each one. Sure enough she had missed all of them. Each message was the same, more or less–sorry they’d missed her, hoping she was having a nice day, they were goin
g out but they’d try back later, and so on. She turned the delicate pages of the phone book slowly as she looked for the number of the salon, and she paused between each digit as she dialled the number. But when, in her broken Korean–American English, the woman told her they were open, she was still pleasantly surprised.
It felt strange to be behind a steering wheel and she sat for a moment, her hands on the hub, trying to remember the last time she had driven. But, like the moments in the photographs, it was gone. She remembered driving Charles to the doctor late one night, remembered picking Sarah up from a date or two, but these incidents were a long, long time ago, and she felt certain she must have driven herself somewhere in the interval between then and now. As she started the car at last, a single goose flew overhead, honking as furiously as any of the flocks. The engine drowned out its voice.
Then, crossing the wooden bridge over the railroad tracks, as the rubber wheels thumpity-thumped, she passed Jorge walking along the side of the road. He was with what Julia could only assume was his family. Immediately behind him walked a plump woman about his age followed in turn, single-file, by six children of varying ages–the youngest just old enough to walk on her own, the oldest about Charles’s age. Dressed in cheap parkas and baseball caps and sneakers and jeans and synthetic scarves and ski gloves and mittens, they were all talking to each other, their words becoming fog before their lips, obscuring their mouths. She slowed down and watched them recede in the rear-view mirror, growing smaller and smaller and smaller. It occurred to her to stop, to ask where they were going, to give them a lift–especially when she thought she could just make out Jorge waving to her–but she decided not to. Instead, she accelerated, drove on, wondered where they were going and how long it might take them to get there.
