The Garden Party

by Grace Dane Mazur

  “Bless you for remembering. That is correct. Without cooking and without mixing. No salt, except alone, in a course by itself, called ‘salt.’ ”

  “Raw? Even meat?”

  “Meat, too, she keeps away from fire, and from mixtures. It is better to keep things pure, she says.”

  * * *

  —

  “AND KEEP HER,” Harry said to Adam. He wondered why marriage was so much more mysterious to him than to each of the couples he had consecrated. They’d seemed to waltz right into it, or rather tango right in—for what they did was dashing and romantic, with much twining of bodies and twisting of heads. They never realized that people are really trees, whose roots need to grow into each other’s hearts. The danger and the force of it all sometimes gave him a fright.

  “Eliza, I will keep you,” said Adam.

  * * *

  —

  “FINALLY HE SAYS they keep transforming his chamber pot all night long into a vase of aromatic perfume.”

  “Who?” asked Naomi.

  “Proust,” said Cameron.

  “No, I mean who are ‘they’?”

  “He’s still talking about asparagus. As creatures.”

  “Oh. Animals?” said Naomi.

  “Not animals,” Cameron said. “Beings. Exquisite beings.”

  * * *

  —

  “BESIDES,” SAID OLD Nat Morrill to old Leah Cohen, raising his large hand and wanting to put it on her sleeve but letting it drop to the table. “There’s no real need for animal meat at all. A single apple gives you as much protein as a side of beef.”

  * * *

  —

  “AND GIVE HER your attention,” Harry whispered to Adam.

  “Eliza, I will give you my attention,” Adam echoed.

  “Eliza? Harry? Adam? What are you three whispering about down there? Still planning your charades? Can’t it wait until after dinner? It’s getting a bit impolite, you know.”

  “No, no, Philippa dear,” said Leah. “They’re behaving correctly; they’re discussing the nature of marriage….”

  “Well,” broke in William Barlow, “if they figure it out, I hope they’ll tell the rest of us.”

  Everyone laughed politely; Olivia gripped Barnes’s arm for a moment.

  “Oh, marriage, marriage,” Nat Morrill growled. “I never married half the girls I really loved.”

  “And you, Liz,” Harry said in a joking voice, afraid now to whisper, lest he draw attention to himself. “Men are more difficult, you know, than cows. Would you consider growing old?”

  “Old?”

  * * *

  —

  “OLDEST OR YOUNGEST? Who goes first, I mean,” ten-year-old Harriet whispered to the other children. She fiddled with her buttons. “It better be Eli because he doesn’t talk. If anybody asks, we can say he’s gone to the bathroom. One of us should go with him; he’s too young to go alone.”

  “I’ll go last,” said Laurie. “Of course, you don’t know if I’ll tell on all of you. Or I might stay here and simply eat up all the dessert. But probably I won’t.”

  * * *

  —

  LARISSA TURNED TO her brother-in-law. “What is it, Cam? You’re not eating. You look all strange.”

  Cameron shook his head unknowingly. Filled with longing, his attention elsewhere, he was unable to do more than put his hand on Issa’s shoulder to assure and dismiss her.

  “You’re sure?” she said.

  Cameron nodded.

  * * *

  —

  “NATHAN MORRILL, YOU are dumbfounding me,” said Leah. “A side of beef? Less protein than an apple? Are you quite sure? Half a cow?”

  “A smallish cow is what I’m speaking about,” Nat Morrill insisted. “But I’m not speaking about a calf.”

  “You were a chef and still you say this?”

  “I was and do.”

  * * *

  —

  “WITH HIM.” HARRY looked at Adam.

  “Oh, grow old with him.” Eliza gulped at her wine. “Of course. I would even give him the rest of my wine….”

  “Liz, you have to say it better,” said Harry softly.

  “Adam,” Eliza started. Then she froze with a half smile on her face and her hand half cupped around her wineglass. She saw suddenly that if tomorrow’s ceremony was a formality simply to please parents and clans, then this secret ritual was the real one. These clandestine utterances were dreadful and important. If she took this one as a lark it would be as meaningless to her as the parental forms that she was casting off. Only if she could say her part correctly, now, would she emerge from this dinner table, her marriage altar, changed. She felt stripped and naked and nightmarishly unprepared to be examined in the language of ritual. She did not know how to receive or contain the spell.

  Suddenly alone, Eliza had fallen into the hole at the center of the language of lawyers—the abyss whose presence their protective edifices had evolved to hide—even while pointing at it. In order for this all to work, this secret intimate rite, she would have to construct her soul in a few moments, in the space of a few words. First she would have to recognize that she had no idea what marriage meant. Perhaps no one did—so many did it so poorly. Worse, though, she would have to slip out of being, until she no longer knew what I meant, the I that was to utter the marriage words. She would have to split apart into atoms and then build herself up again. Eliza sat deathly still, brushed by wings.

  Harry willed his sister to remake herself, here, between sentences, in the middle of the dinner party, where the parents did not know that she was marrying during the asparagus course, where even Adam did not know what she was going through, where she herself might not have the words for what she was doing. How could one say in public how one would feel and behave in private over years and decades? The distance was so great; the ritual language only served to obscure the distinction between utterance and observance, the terrifying sacrament of promise.

  Eliza sat there, barely touching the bowl of her wineglass.

  Harry watched how Nathan Morrill and Leah Cohen were leaning toward each other; his brother Babar and Babar’s wife, Issa, sitting far from each other, seemed to be further averted than their distance along the table would account for. He followed them with his eyes, hoping that Eliza would catch the way that existence emerged from the language of the body, hoping that she would see this hint that the others were inadvertently sending her, as they swayed toward each other or away.

  Eliza leaned toward Adam.

  “Liz?” Adam said. “Where have you fled to?”

  Harry was shiver-happy with the way the wedding was splicing itself into the dinner table conversation; the way it gave a snaking quality to time, slithery and strong, spiraling in order to move forward or backward, a subjunctive contrary-to-fact sort of time, as well as an upside-downness to it all. Catercorner. Topsy-turvy.

  “Lizzie?” Adam said. His fork, with a stalk of asparagus speared on it, hovered in midair, as though he thought maybe one should refrain from eating during these moments.

  Eliza shook her head with the slightest movement and lifted a finger, hesitantly, vaguely, to show she needed time.

  Harry nodded slightly, to tell her she was right: She couldn’t answer them yet or all would be lost. All around her people were engaged in construction with words, lawyers and poets, critics and linguists and journalists, but what was really happening, he willed her to see, was simply the play of their bodies, more eloquent and more truthful. He wondered if she could seize that what being meant was how she walked through the rooms of her life in all her daily ordinariness.

  What you have to trust, he told her silently, is the continuous history of ritual going all the way back. The extreme age of the wedding ceremony. Descent and derivation.

 
It was all his fault, Harry thought, if his sister didn’t see any of the things he had been trying silently to convey. Why had he not spoken to her about this yesterday, or the day before?

  “Adam,” Eliza said again. “I will take you and keep you and give you light and dark wine and perhaps children. In spring, after we have planted, I will sit and watch the warm rains with you on the covered porch. In summer and in fall I will walk with you in the gardens. And when the snows of winter come, I will wrap us both in a quilt of starry darkness.”

  * * *

  —

  CELIA LOOKED UP and down the length of the table. The heat of yearnings, conspicuous and latent, shimmered the air. There was her daughter Naomi talking with Eliza’s brother Cameron, entangling each other in neon threads. They couldn’t be serious! This man had no business with Naomi. His life lay elsewhere. And who knew where Naomi’s life lay. And yet, Celia had to admit, her daughter looked happy and playful, almost robust. Then, too, if Naomi were involved with someone here at home, she might not need to fly off on her devastating missions. But Naomi was still raw, so newly healed. What could she handle? Oh Christ, she was forgetting, not only was he a Barlow, he was married. Stop it, Naomi. Back off.

  Celia had wished for all her brood to find mates. But oh, why had she not been more careful in her wishes? Pindar was always so prudent in the formulation of his wants, but she just wished haphazardly, and look what had happened: Adam was with someone who might never understand him; Sara had lost her head over a man of the cloth––charming, but the wrong cloth because celibate. Though she wouldn’t have wanted her own cloth, either: some old fly-specked rabbi who would feel married half to God, leaving only the other, lesser half of himself for Sara. No, all cloth was undesirable for marriage, she thought.

  * * *

  —

  “OH, HEART,” DENNIS whispered. “Last dinner for the two of us? What are you talking about? Are you leaving me?”

  “I thought you had decided that it was time for both of us to leave each other,” Sara said softly. “Isn’t that what you meant by ‘We have to talk’? In my experience, that is what it always means.”

  “Perhaps I have much less experience in these things,” he said. “But no, that isn’t what I meant at all.”

  They sat not quite touching, yet the sleeve of his white shirt at times brushed her bare arm. What did they want from each other? What could they give?

  * * *

  —

  CAM WATCHED NAOMI. What was it about beauty that made it hard for him to take enough breath? He wondered if he should sob; that would give him more air. He couldn’t stop looking at her. He thought of the smoked glass one was supposed to use to look at the sun during an eclipse. Surely this much beauty must be an evolutionary mistake: To steal the breath of onlookers cannot lead to increase of the human species. Perhaps such beauty didn’t have anything to do with humans. Perhaps he was merely standing in the path of something else, caught in the crossfire of the gods as they signal with their sacred mirrors.

  * * *

  —

  LISTENING TO PHILIPPA Barlow, watching her gestures, Pindar saw himself as a sort of still center, like the inner core of the axle of a giant cart, with everything revolving around him, not because of any power or importance of his own but rather because of some inner stillness. This came not from being without desires but from hundreds of tiny yearnings that pulled at him like threads, so many that they seemed to cancel one another out, most or all of them being for the things he loved to stay unchanged. He could not tell if his feeling of stillness was a deep happiness, the exhalation of meaning that the gods had breathed into him, or simply the quiet inhalation at the leading edge of chaos and disruption. Everything was turning around him, and he could feel the whistling roar of it all.

  Pindar had to do this alone. He could try to tell Celia, but it was something that was in the doing rather than in the telling; talking about it was just a kind of fuzz, a steam emitted from the elements of the doing. It couldn’t be told, but it shouldn’t be entirely kept silent, either, because then there would be no tradition, no invitation or permission given to others from knowing that someone had found the path.

  Pindar noticed his son, Adam, making a gesture with his fists, rotating one under the other as for a brace drill. Adam had caught Sara’s eye, and she was laughingly making the gesture back at him. This was one of the oldest things Pindar remembered about himself, this gesture. His parents had always laughed when he did it as a young child, though he had never figured out why. He was about to ask Leah about it, but she was leaning so far toward Nathan Morrill that it seemed as though they were whispering. She was flirting, his mother, in her nineties, not with the beautiful young Harry but with tremulous Nathan Morrill. After all her proclamations about not wanting to be seated next to someone as ancient as she was, she was leading the old man on. Pindar had so many questions for her all of a sudden. Why had he never asked? He wanted to know about Leah’s charm, and about his father: Why had Gabriel left the family? Was it some behavior of Leah’s, or some caprice of his own? Leah was both noisy and private; she fended off Pindar’s questions before he could formulate them. She had that way of diverting, subverting, certain lines of thought that she was unwilling to play with. They seemed to him now to be the ones that would lead most directly to her core.

  “Oh, come…come…come!” Leah said now to Nathan Morrill, laughing. Pindar tried to think of where he had heard that phrase, that invitation. It felt important, but he couldn’t place it. Leah had always had a shockingly engaging quality that Pindar lacked, although it had reemerged in his daughter Naomi, who was now happily settled among the other guests. From this distance he couldn’t tell if Naomi’s fierce attention to the young Barlow fellow was due to courtship or fury. They both looked serious, advancing, falling.

  * * *

  —

  HARRY LEANED TOWARD Adam and Eliza. “Rings were used for marriages four thousand years ago,” he said. “Outward and visible sign of an inward and endless love. Oh, Lord, bless this ring, that he who gives it and she who wears it may abide in peace and delight You.” Harry reached across the table, as though wanting the salt, and Adam, checking to see that no one was paying attention, took the ring from him. Harry told him what to do and what to say. Adam draped himself around Eliza. Under the tablecloth he took her hand.

  * * *

  —

  DOWN AT THE other end of the table, seven-year-old Liam quietly slipped out of his seat and walked off into the bushes. The ten-year-old girls, Harriet and Laurie, were the only children left.

  * * *

  —

  HEARING HER GRANDMOTHER repeat the word come, Sara thought of her parent’s friend Jacob, a sometime minister who lived by the sea, and whose definition of prayer was Please. Thank you. Oh. Entreaty. Gratitude. Awe. Perhaps her grandmother’s invocation was actually a fourth kind of prayer: incantation or call. In any case, it seemed a change of dimension from the others, a demand not pertaining to actions, future or past, but simply to be present, to manifest. Please. Thank you. Oh. Come.

  * * *

  —

  PHILIPPA HAD BEEN listening to the faint jazzy music coming from the neighboring party beyond the forest. When the saxophone descended to notes too low for her to hear, she tapped Pindar’s sleeve. “Eliza tells us that you are working on a book.”

  Across the table, William Barlow looked at him expectantly. Pindar tried to think of what he could tell them about cooking in the ancient Near East, but he took fright. “I had a friend,” he began. He hoped they would not notice that he was completely avoiding Philippa’s question. “She told me once that the only Greek witch she ever knew wrote rhyming couplets to foxes on white papers and tied them to trees with string.”

  Again Philippa Barlow looked at Pindar; she was sure that the real party was not here with this madman, but in
some neighboring elsewhere that she could just hear beyond the trees. At that other, luxurious gathering—the one she was missing—people were elegant and beautiful. They were having a marvelous time. They had ideas that didn’t tumble out of their mouths like rocks falling from a cliff. At that party farther up the street, the people made themselves understood; their irony was clear, their joking transparent. She looked at Pindar to see if he was serious. How to respond to his new outburst about couplet-writing witches? She did not know any witches. He had the mouth of a turtle, Pindar Cohen, and rather too much beard, gray and black and white. It looked a bit anatomical, his beard, with his too-red mouth half-hidden. He always seemed to be chewing at something. “Foxes,” she said at last. She drank some wine. She was going to need as much as she could swallow. “Your friend, she writes poems to foxes.”

  “No, no, no. Correction,” Pindar laughed, delighted that he had managed to sidetrack her from his book. “My friend knew a witch in Greece, who is no longer living, alas, and that witch was the woman who wrote to foxes. Couplets, she said. I suppose they rhymed.”

  “But why don’t you ask your friend about this witch that she knew?” said William.

  “You’re right, of course. That is what I should do. But my friend is no longer living, so I can’t ask her and she can’t tell me about the witch.”

  “It’s a striking image,” William said. “A tree hung round with white papers to foxes.”

  Issa Barlow, on Pindar’s right, joined in. “They do that in Japan, you know. Rather a lot.”

  “Poems to foxes?”

  “Perhaps, but I mean they’re always tying white paper on strings around trees—it looks as though the trees have necklaces or garter belts. Are you sure your witch friend wasn’t Japanese? Their spirit world is full of foxes. They are called kitsune, and some are divine and some are mischievous or wicked.” Issa smiled and gulped her wine.