“But when you’re back here, working at hospice, it’s okay, right?” Adam’s voice was upbeat, hopeful, as though together they might both avoid desperation.
“Actually I do it because it’s been the only way I can live with myself when I’m back here. I do it just until I get strong enough to go back to my latitudes of disaster. But I’m also terrible at working with the dying. I lark about and try to keep people amused, but I don’t think someone as crazy as I am can be a good comforter. What I’m trying to say is that I’m almost as bad at hospice care as I am in the tropics. Volunteers confuse me with the dying ones. People who don’t know that I’m on staff bring me food and try to get me to eat.”
“Well, that makes a bit of sense, actually.”
“Don’t you start, too.”
“Okay. But you do see the problem?”
“Of course I do. But I can’t eat when I’m panicked. Or in love-catastrophe.”
“Love! How does love come into it?”
“A fucking maelstrom. Every time. Why do you think I shaved my head in Bucharest?”
“I thought—we all thought—that it was head lice. From the orphanage.”
“Not head lice. It was more like love rage. It felt like a good way to disentangle. He was one of the doctors. For a time he was so sweet. He would feed me cakes made of quinces, along with smoky tea. I even learned to cook for him: sausage meat in pickled cabbage leaves. Grilled meatballs with green herbs. Though it was his mother who made the little quince cakes, and she also pickled the cabbages. Hundreds of cabbages at a time. A universe of cabbages. When I’d been with him for about nine months, he decided to also take up with a village girl who had come to Bucharest from the Carpathian Mountains to make her living in the city. The oldest of problems. The oldest of professions. He wanted to save her. He kept asking me for small ‘loans.’ To him, all Americans were rich and undeserving, in equal measure. For some reason I accepted that view of things. When you’re there long enough, you come to see things that way. But when he finally asked me to donate blood, because she needed some sort of transfusion, I knew it was time to save myself. I shaved my head and left him before he could give me any more of her little love diseases. Or bleed me dry. I was like the frog in the vat of slowly heating water. I neglected to jump out as soon as the pain of love surpassed the pleasure. Then it got so bad that I couldn’t. God. Adam. It feels so good to be out of that. Finally I can sleep.”
“Good. And can you eat?”
“Yes, I am beginning to. That has taken longer, somehow. But it is back, eating.”
“As in dinner? Down in the garden?”
“Yes, now, down in the garden.”
“Good.”
“Adam?”
“Yeah?”
“Thanks for talking me down. Listen, will this black shirt be okay? Does the skull disturb you? Is it too visible? Do you mind if I wear black jeans?”
“A touch of goth. You’re perfect. Come.”
“Ah, Stephen,” Celia called. “Come and sit. You are beside me, there.” She felt incapable of talking with anyone and hoped that Stephen Barlow was prepared to show his social graces. She would listen to law, she would listen to heroic tales of golf, if only Naomi would come down from her room.
“Charlotte, you are over here, next to William. Where are the children? They sit at the other end. Liam next to Amy. Yes. Come. Sit. Barnes, you are between Sara and Olivia. William! On Philippa’s left, over here.” Celia wished she could sit beside Sara’s priest. They could talk of plume poppies and the throats of daylilies and the strange properties of herbs. None of these Barlows seemed to have an eye for gardens. “Father Lombroso…”
“Dennis, please call me Dennis.”
“Dennis, yes. Next to Sara, and also young Harriet.”
* * *
—
SHE HAS SURROUNDED me with Barlows, thought Pindar. But it was childish to be upset, for the conjugal symmetries had also imprisoned Celia between father and grandfather of the bride, Judge Barlow on one side and wicked old Nathan Morrill on the other. Perhaps Celia had it worse than he did. On Pindar’s other side was Larissa Barlow, married to one of the sons, but probably not to William Barlow, who sat just opposite him. All those sons. They would be gone before the night was over. It was just a matter of time.
Philippa Barlow spoke around him, now, addressing her daughter-in-law Larissa. “Such a delicious evening,” she said. “I spent the day getting a new dishwasher. Why do machines always break down on the eve of a wedding?”
Pindar decided he didn’t have to answer this. He wondered if there would be dancing at the wedding the next day, but he didn’t really want to ask Philippa about it, even though she was in charge. She might think he was inviting her. He did love dancing, the combination of order and abandon. But he didn’t want to talk about it with this woman he barely knew. He saw that this shyness would confine him to shallowness in all his dealings with her. And if there was dancing—would he have to take her, bronzed and bejeweled, in his arms? Would he have to allow Stephen Barlow to hold Celia, all of them caught in a web of social symmetries?
Pindar was light on his toes and heavy on his heels. When he walked barefoot, Celia told him she could hear his heels drumming on the hardwood floors—even when she was on the other side of the house. And yet at sixty, he still started each flight of stairs at a run. He and Celia were one of those older couples who looked totally ordinary and a bit dumpy standing still, but in motion it was as though they were demonstrating some new principle of physics, implying hidden systems and unsuspected harmonies. Dancing, they made the most intricate motions seem accessible and innate. This was not accomplished through acrobatic leaps or dips; rather they seemed grounded while moving, as though they were digging into or defining the earth, even as their movement seemed to reflect that of the planets. Like dervishes, their dance wasn’t about speed; in fact, you couldn’t tell whether it was slow or fast. You would wonder if their path had been inscribing letters or words on the dance floor, writing something that could be crucial to decipher and to know.
* * *
—
BORSUK STOOD JUST inside the kitchen door. “How do I look?” he said.
“Like a penguin, exactly,” said Chhaya. “Where did you get a tuxedo? You are more elegant than them. Perhaps you will make Mr. Pindar feel ashamed.”
“This is how waiters dressed in my country,” he said. “In the old days, when everything counted.”
“Then how did they tell the waiters from the others?”
“All are waiters,” he said. “But only servers get to walk around. The others must sit there and eat what and when we please to bring them.”
“Like animals?” Chhaya asked, smiling suddenly.
“Like pets,” Borsuk answered. “It is up to us to teach them patience and behavior, like pets.”
Chhaya nodded at him. “You look good,” she said.
* * *
—
NAOMI WALKED INTO the garden with Adam. Pindar got up and embraced his daughter. He could not keep himself from caressing her newly grown curls with his cupped hands, as he had done when she was a child. He always wanted to put Naomi’s soul on some kind of a scale when he saw her, to measure her well-being. “Welcome,” he whispered.
“I’m sorry to be so late. Getting dressed took hopelessly long.”
Celia introduced Naomi and placed her between Charlotte Morrill, the journalist, and young Harry Barlow. She was momentarily taken aback by Naomi’s black outfit with the skull-bedecked T-shirt, but her happiness at her daughter’s presence overcame any misgivings about her clothing and she expected that she would find it all humorous in the future. Besides, her girl looked lovely: Her face had healed; her cropped hair was growing into angelic auburn curls, and her frame, while still angular, no longer looked starved.
&nb
sp; Pindar found that he could largely avoid talking if he kept asking questions of Philippa Barlow and appeared to listen to her responses. She didn’t seem to be paying much attention to their conversation. He wondered if it was haze from the gin she had been drinking since she arrived, or if her mind was simply somewhere else. He himself was so inattentive, however, that several times he wondered which things he had already asked her and which he had only thought of asking, lining them up like peas in a row, ready to be flicked at a stone in the garden. As she chattered, Philippa reminded him of sparrows on a telephone wire, except that they chirped about important things like falling barometric pressure and the sweet possibility of rain. From time to time it seemed as though language had deserted him. He couldn’t think of any topic in common with this woman with the California teeth and the gold bracelets. He couldn’t think of any more questions to ask her.
Philippa turned to him. “Tennis?” she asked. “Which of you play?”
Pindar shook his head. “None of us, I’m afraid.”
“Or golf perhaps?”
Pindar shook his head again, remembering to smile.
“Our older sons also play squash,” she went on. “Stephen used to play, but he’s no longer as nimble as he once was. He really prefers golf.”
“I see,” said Pindar.
“Oh, but games! Surely you have some favorite games. Ping-Pong?” Philippa saw from his quizzical look that Pindar didn’t have any favorite games. “But don’t you miss the thrill of it all?” She would certainly miss it. She played tennis almost every weekday and loved the rules, the seesawing of points, the handsome darting about, even the sweat. She sometimes joined Stephen on the golf course, but never with the craving and exultation that came over her with tennis. She loved winning but also loved the fact that someone would eventually win, even if it wasn’t her. To her the game stood for something much larger than a small fur-covered sphere of rubber walloped over a boundary of knotted string, though she wasn’t sure what exactly. She could not understand how anyone would be immune to its exhilaration. Not to know tennis seemed like such a shame. She wondered if she should offer to teach him. Or would that seem too patronizing? Of course, he might prefer sedentary games. “Bridge?” she offered. “Poker?” Nothing. “What about chess?”
Pindar brightened. “Ah, chess,” he said. “We taught the children when they were little, and Adam and Sara played on their own for a bit. They taught themselves Go, but then, you know, it turned out they both preferred to read.”
“Monopoly?”
“Ah, yes,” Pindar said. “We all played Monopoly together for a time, in the summers mostly, but it sort of faded. The children said they were not so interested in real estate.”
“Ah, children,” Philippa said. “One worries about them so.” She kept her graveled voice low because she didn’t want Larissa, seated on Pindar’s other side, to hear. Philippa knew there was some critical torque in her son Barnes’s marriage. Barnes did not exhibit any of the smug entitlement of his adulterous brother William. It was more likely that someone had been finding the brittle Larissa attractive.
“Excuse me?” Pindar had been woolgathering.
“Yes, yes,” Philippa Barlow was saying, more insistently this time. She could see that Pindar was not connecting to what she was asking. She repeated it: “Don’t you worry about your children?” She nodded at Sara, who was just now running across the grass to take her place at the table beside the priest.
“Worry?” Pindar said this as though it would never have occurred to him. He had no intention of telling Philippa Barlow about his experiences with his daughters. Mrs. Barlow’s feelings about her fair-haired hulking lawyer sons had nothing to do with that mix of silk and bird bone—in airports, orphanages, asylums, supermarkets—that was Naomi, nor the cohabiting with scorpions and with the spiritual that was his daughter Sara.
As Philippa looked at him with her sociably painted lips and her powdery descending jowls, Pindar pulled himself up straight, pressing his spine to the back of his chair so hard that his innards ached. “But what have you got to worry about?” he said, gesturing around the table with his wineglass as though he were toasting her sons in their light-colored shirts. “They are suffused with success, your brood.”
* * *
—
“OH. ANOTHER BAT,” said Stephen Barlow. “Why do they keep coming down here? Are you frightened? Shall I chase him away?”
“Not at all,” replied Celia. “I love them. They are so hard to parse. They have a roost somewhere nearby. They have always been here.”
* * *
—
LOOKING AT NAOMI opposite him, Cameron could see that she was burning. He couldn’t tell if it was a sort of self-ignited state, or from something external to herself. She seemed part gamine, part waif. He longed to touch her hair, her slender arms, and he found her black T-shirt immeasurably daring and funny. She was so different from all the Barlow women, who seemed to enter any new setting waving flags of their own competence and abilities ahead of them. This one needed to be taken care of, and he found himself yearning to do it. His own face had grown hot from watching her. He looked around to see if anyone had noticed. Far down the table his wife, Amy, was deep in talk with Naomi’s sister and the Jesuit. Everyone was elsewhere in their gaze. He looked at Naomi. “Who are you?” he said.
“I am Naomi,” she laughed. “We’ve just been introduced.”
“Yes, but who really?” Then he felt himself blushing even more.
* * *
—
THE END OF the clear brilliant summer day, cloudless, perfect but for a grievous crack in the blue made by a single contrail. Was it grief, or fear of grief? Pindar tried to look around the scar, at the whole beauty of what was left. Something was eluding him. He could feel it slipping through his fingers, escaping from focus like floaters in the eye. If he could only hold on to it. But grasping it would be like netting motes in a beam of sunlight: If the sieve was fine enough, it wouldn’t swing through the air fast enough to catch anything. He often had this feeling when driving home. As his car came to the turn for his street at the top of the hill, it felt as though meaning was about to be disclosed to him at exactly this point in space; all was about to become clear, everything! Clear enough to taste with his mind, and swallow. But always he veered off, his car and his attention, turning in to the street of his home. It wasn’t that his home was in the way of meaning, it was that somehow he always managed to skitter off, looking away just when the one thing that mattered was about to reveal itself. He felt that now, sitting beside Philippa Barlow, and he felt furthermore that if he didn’t catch it now, whatever it was, then he never would, and his life would be at best a gentle letdown, a descent along the known path where he now existed. What if this dinner party was not an interruption in his work, but was the work itself? What if the secret lay here, at this table, even beside this chattering woman, mother of the bride? What if the secret was darting above him, zigzagging, waiting to be noticed and plucked from the sky?
Philippa Barlow broke in. “I am tormented by household appliances,” she said. “Usually they wait until August to go on the blink, but this year they have started already, and it is only June. What is the quietest vacuum cleaner, do you think?”
* * *
—
AS SARA SAT down beside Dennis, she looked around at the seated families. With the oblique angle of the lowering sun, the white tablecloths appeared fringed with lightning. Ripples in the air surrounded her father’s head as he stood to pour wine, and sparks licked at her mother’s silver hair.
The flowers in their brass vases heaved and beckoned. Goatsbeard and Queen Anne’s lace; Black-eyed Susan and Jacob’s ladder. Dennis asked Sara who had arranged them.
“My dad,” she said. “Why?”
“He has paired the sexes, mixed royalty with common
ers, Jews with Gentiles and perhaps even with heathens, if you think of the goatsbeard as Pan.”
“Oh,” she said. “I didn’t know anyone would notice.”
His fingers brushed her arm.
* * *
—
PINDAR PULLED ALL his body so straight that it seemed to freeze around his spine; he scowled with the physical effort.
“Are you all right? Is there something the matter?”
“No, no, a spasm. The back. We were carrying tables earlier.” He gave a bit of a grimace. “I’m afraid I don’t know too much about vacuums.” His eyes ached from looking at the sky. He didn’t want to tell her anything. Something was waiting for him to grasp it, more visible than usual. But how could he do it when he had such a pain in his forehead, when his back twinged whenever he was imprudent enough to forget its existence, when he had such a yearning for his pipe and for a cup of coffee? Beset by small bothers. Wouldn’t it be better to wait until the guests had gone home and his medieval carcass was calmer and all its wants had been satisfied? He saw that this was like saying, I’m feeling a bit off right now, and I have to sit here at this dinner party, so I guess I can’t go looking for the absolute. His objections were nonsense. He would get to the bottom of it this very time. That was the purpose of this dinner party. Of course, everyone else thought the party was in order to knit the Cohen and Barlow clans together, for Adam and Eliza’s sake. He kept forgetting this, kept wandering off into his own universe. But the heart of the matter must be in both places, in the sociability of the dinner and in his own dark grapplings with attention. For that was what it would take, he saw, a staying of the gaze. A not veering away from looking at the light, was that it? Or was it the darkness that he was supposed to be looking at? He didn’t know what texts could help him here. The whole question reminded him of reading Ezekiel, and how his mind always took off on a tangent instead of staring straight ahead until he understood it. Until he could picture the geometry and meaning of the wheels and flames and eyes. The quartet of angels he could see. He had even constructed them, making them out of gingerbread, each winter. They would stand, notched and interlocking, about a foot high. But the “wheels within wheels” that Ezekiel spoke of eluded him; they seemed impossible to construct and bake out of cookie dough. Was he really supposed to understand the vision of some exiled mystical prophet? Or was he supposed to have his own crazed vision? What did he mean by “supposed,” anyway? Who had set up the rules here? How could he figure all this out in the middle of a dinner party when he was supposed to be taking care of his guests and talking about vacuum cleaners?
The Garden Party Page 9
