The Garden Party

by Grace Dane Mazur

  “But what would one write to a fox about?” asked Philippa, interrupting the direction her daughter-in-law was going in. Larissa’s concentration on matters Japanese, including her new nickname, apparently after some poet, seemed dangerous and was most likely linked to whatever was wrong with her marriage. Barnes was so silent these days, so submerged in unhappiness, that Philippa could not get herself to ask him about it. The most she had been able to do was to try to steer all talk away from mention of things Japanese.

  “Oh, Fox,” said Issa brightly. “Keep away from my chickens and do not mate with my dog.” She looked at Pindar, holding out her empty wineglass. “Actually,” she added, “in Japan the foxes often take human form and mate with just about everybody.”

  Philippa stiffened.

  “What many things do you actually know, oh, Fox?” said Pindar. “Foxes are full of slyness,” he went on. “But I think they have no sense of humor. If I had to write to animals, I’d write to goats. I would write hymns to them, not couplets. I have heard rumors”—he paused, gazing first at Philippa and then at Larissa, and giving a brief nod to William—“that goats discovered coffee. Somewhere in Africa. Do you think this is true?”

  Philippa laughed nervously. Issa laughed with her and the two women caught each other’s eye. “We shall have to ask my daughter, Eliza,” said Philippa, looking for solid ground. “She knows animals. But you were going to tell me about your book.”

  “Absolutely. Yes.” He meant, Not if I can help it.

  * * *

  —

  “CHOOSE INCOHERENCE?” STEPHEN Barlow asked.

  Celia scanned the table before answering. Naomi was leaning forward to speak to Cameron. Eliza and Adam were up to some sort of monkey business, passing something hidden across the table to Harry. Some of the children had disappeared. “Sometimes incoherence is what can throw light on the matter,” she said.

  “But how supremely useless,” Stephen sputtered. “Frivolous. You might as well have traffic lights in blue and orange and purple. If you want your troops to capture a hill, or bomb a building, you have to tell them which hill, which street and building. With no ambiguity.”

  “Ah, but we were not talking of bombing,” Celia said, her voice almost aggressively soft. “We were talking of poetry and law.” She glanced again at Adam and Eliza. Perhaps they were playing one of their word games. She wondered if she ought to nudge them toward better manners.

  “Don’t you think that there is something rather, how should I say it—sacred—about clarity?” Stephen coughed and reddened at his own use of the word sacred, underlining and disowning his earnestness. It was odd, he thought, the sort of things this conversation brought out in him. He wondered if Pippa was having as strange a time as he was. He found himself asking, “Doesn’t the universal foggy-mindedness bother you?”

  Celia winced at the word universal.

  Stephen Barlow went on. “Legal language strips away the mess, the individual particularities; it reduces everything—people, relationships, actions—to their fundamental structures. Then we can actually see them, like pieces on a game board; we can work with them.”

  “But those messes you’ve jettisoned!” Celia said. “Those tangles of particularity—that is where our humanity resides. When you look at humans as game pieces, aren’t you throwing out truth along with the confusion?”

  “But we are trying to clarify,” he said. “While the poets…” He seemed helpless to finish his own sentence, to speak to this being who was so other. He waved his hand loosely.

  “In the domain of the rational,” Celia began, “language works in a linear manner. It has to, so that things can be written down, one well-defined word at a time, like beads on a string. In the law you do this by stripping things down to fundamentals, to ciphers.

  “Think of poems as trying to get beyond the gates of the rational to a place where everything is happening at once, where the human messes and particulars are tangled with the undergrowth of things in ways that cannot easily be described. In the language of this domain each word seems alive with possible meanings, overtones and resonances, leading to wild evocations, ambiguities, and even contradictions. Things no longer work solely in a linear order. It’s like making an embroidery—the words and meanings are all interwoven. What seems like incoherence on one level may be expressing subtleties and truths on another.”

  Stephen Barlow was silent for a while. “I don’t know what you mean,” he said. “I don’t know how to think like that.”

  A cardinal landed high in the old pine at the edge of the garden, where it proceeded to give a series of calls. Celia waited until they could hear its mate respond in the distance. She smiled. “It’s like taking a walk,” she said gently. “In a forest. An ordinary forest.”

  * * *

  —

  “BUT THIS IS like a bad dream,” Leah Cohen burst out. “It’s such a perverse doctrine. Will your friend allow curry powder on her raw foods?”

  “Not allowed, my dear,” said Nat Morrill. “Curry powder is already a mixture, thus impure. In any case, she does not allow one to sprinkle something on top of something else.”

  “This is worse than kashruth,” Leah said. “What about sushi?”

  “Not allowed. It’s raw, but still, it’s a combination, because of the rice, the seaweed.”

  “Sashimi?”

  “Fine. But no joining, no marriage of the fish with soy sauce or pickled ginger, no green shiso leaf.”

  * * *

  —

  NO ONE COULD see Adam slipping a ring onto Eliza’s finger. Only Eliza could hear him consecrate himself. Harry blessed the other ring and gave it to Eliza. “Say what Adam did, and do the same.”

  * * *

  —

  THE PALE-SKINNED girl slipped up to the table and sat quietly in the seat recently vacated by seven-year-old Liam. She nodded to Harriet and Laurie. The three ten-year-old girls eyed one another.

  “Hi,” said Laurie. “You must be from the other side?”

  “I am Leila. Sometimes I don’t know where I’m from. I’m supposed to be at the party with all the music, but I got turned around in the woods when I tried to take a walk. I like your party better. I saw you all stealing away and I thought it would be good if I filled in here for a while. So the grown-ups don’t notice anything.”

  Even gawky Harriet, with her untucked blouse and tangled hair, looked robust beside the new girl. “Will you come to the pond with us?”

  “Yes, if you let me catch my breath. I’ve been racing about.”

  * * *

  —

  “YOUR BOOK,” PHILIPPA persisted.

  “Well,” Pindar said. “I’ve been wondering if perhaps our greatest appetite”—he paused here, then finished—“is really for sleep.”

  Philippa drew back, as though he had said he wanted to bed her.

  Pindar tugged at his beard, exposing more of the redness of his lips. “We long for it. We can’t give it up. Even the Babylonians knew this, three thousand years ago. For them it was part of our humanity, a sign of our mortality. To gain life everlasting, the greatest Babylonian hero, a man-god, is given the test of staying awake for six days and seven nights. Of course he fails miserably, dozing off the minute he hunkers down on his haunches.”

  “So your book is about sleep,” William Barlow said.

  “Not exactly,” Pindar stalled. “Let me just dash in to the house for a moment and get us some more wine. Then I’ll tell you.”

  * * *

  —

  “WHERE DO YOU put a sky like that?” Leah said to Nathan, pointing to the first streaks of rose gold in a pair of high clouds. “Where do you…well, in what compartment?”

  “Do you mean…”

  “Yes. I mean, shouldn’t it be stowed somewhere, so it isn’t lost? How does it affect, other
wise?”

  “Affect me? You? The world?”

  “Not the world. You. Me. How do you put it somewhere so that its effect on you is something? How do you file it? How do you store it?”

  “Store,” he echoed. He had the sudden image of her taking a sunset and shaking it out like some infinite orange and red and purple blanket, shaking and folding and leveling it, folding it small enough so she could slide it into a cupboard, an armoire. Smelling of, no, he couldn’t yet put a name to the smell. The nature of that wardrobe confused him. How large would it have to be to hold the folded evening sky? It wasn’t tidiness one was after. By putting it somewhere, she must have meant deciding how watching the heralded sunset, even having been watched by the sunset, pressed on him, changed him, until it became part of who he was.

  * * *

  —

  “YOU’LL NEVER CATCH me getting married,” said ten-year-old Laurie, moving the food around on her plate but not eating it. She leaned forward, shook her ash-blond hair into her face, then out of it.

  “How come?” asked Harriet.

  “Look at my parents: My mom is an angel. My dad leaves her every month to go to his law firm’s office in Paris. There he eats butter like a pig, smokes French cigarettes, and fornicates his mistress. He and his mistress have a disgustingly perfect son named Guillaume, who is only a few months younger than me, who speaks disgustingly perfect French, disgustingly perfect English….”

  “Who told you this?” asked Harriet.

  “No one,” said Laurie. “No one will ever tell you. You have to hunt for all the important things yourself. All grown-ups have terrible secrets. You must look in their pockets before your mother or the cleaning lady gets there. My dad never talks about these French people. I heard him talking French on the phone one day when he thought no one was home, and I listened. First there was this lady, and then there was this boy on the other end, calling him Papa. I listen in when I can. Perhaps I’ll marry Guillaume when I grow up, just to show them.”

  “But you just said you’ll never marry,” said Harriet, who could always spot disorders of logic.

  * * *

  —

  “…CONSECRATE YOU TO me,” Eliza whispered to Adam.

  “As I started to say in the attic,” Harry said, “for Christians, marriage is in the spoken promises; for Jews, it’s with the exchange of rings; for Muslims, in the signing of the contract….”

  “But what if we both dropped dead after the promises and before the rings?” Eliza asked. “Would I be married and Adam not?”

  “Hush,” whispered Harry. He looked around, up and down the table. No one was paying attention to them. “Holding hands shows that a binding contract is occurring. Before God, and Leah, who is your only knowing witness, and all these others, who have no clue, and all the bats of evening, you have pledged yourselves. Husband and wife, may God take pleasure in you both. When you get up from this table, you are not as you came to it. Although the families don’t yet know it, your place among them has changed.”

  * * *

  —

  A PAIR OF bats appear, as though called, first one, then perhaps its mate, darting, lifting.

  * * *

  —

  “YOU ARE COMPLETELY wrong,” said Dennis. “We are not leaving each other. I am ashamed for having let you or led you to think that. You should know me better than that. I said we had to talk—face-to-face—because I want to convince you to come to Africa with me this summer.”

  Sara could feel her face redden at her mistake. She could not look in his direction and pretended not to hear him. She waved to her grandmother and lifted her wineglass, the two women toasting each other across the table and through the generations. When Sara put her glass down, she spilled the wine that remained. She blotted it with her napkin as though blotting out her whole conversation with Dennis, the daylong misunderstanding, and the new and alarming proposition of following him to Africa. She hadn’t even had time to savor her relief before this new question took over the landscape. She reeled at the quickness of happenings, then left the table again to go into the house and get a napkin.

  Dennis touched her arm as she left. “Don’t be long,” he said.

  * * *

  —

  “SORRY?” CAMERON BARLOW said to Naomi Cohen. “I missed that. What new pleasure? What did you say?”

  “Let me explain,” Naomi said. “I was driving to the sea”—she leaned across the table toward him—“to meet a group of friends for dinner at a small restaurant. I was happy. And suddenly as I passed the cornfield before the plant nursery, I realized that I was walking or running on top of the corn. I could feel the tassels under my feet, slightly raspy and tickling the soles of my feet. And that’s how I knew I really was then—for those moments—on top of the corn, above the corn, because I could feel it, rather than in the car, which I couldn’t feel. There was an intensity of being, out there on top of the corn, which I couldn’t deny or explain. The memory stayed in my feet and calves all through dinner.”

  “Do you do this often, this dancing on corn?” Cam asked.

  “Never.”

  “Would you stop it if I asked you?”

  “Why would you do that? I am just learning how.”

  Cam could not answer. It did not seem safe to have Naomi hovering above the grain. That was not where he wanted her, unless he could join her there, and he knew that was unlikely.

  “If I were to die,” Naomi blurted, “the entire burden of our friendship with each other would fall onto you.”

  “Die? Are you planning to?”

  “Not at all.” She gave a clear laugh. “I’m so sorry.” She laughed again, inviting him. “I have no idea where that thought came from. Besides, we’ve known each other a matter of hours. Less.”

  * * *

  —

  “NOW THAT I am so old,” Leah was explaining to Nathan, “I live in Cambridge. I like to be where ideas make the air all fizzy. Otherwise I would stagnate like a swamp and my days would seep away. You have to be where other people are constantly learning when you yourself are approaching the age of forgetting. I am not at that age yet, but my friends are. I show up for lunch and they have cooked nothing: They have forgotten they invited me, although it was that same morning they had telephoned. I live alone. My friend Miriam used to come for long visits—we were together in Paris when we were very young; we wrote, she danced, and both of us generally misbehaved. She is dead now. They do begin to flutter off, one’s friends. At first, I thought of it as a competition, staying alive. But then you find that you have won but you are alone. They are dead, mostly, my friends. I think you learn to watch them go.”

  “I don’t.”

  “Your friends don’t die?”

  “No, no. They do,” said Nathan Morrill. “But I don’t learn. I seem to carry them around with me, their loss, I mean, and it all just gets heavier and heavier. When did your friend die?”

  “Miriam? It must have been a decade ago. Oh, Lord. I left Paris in ’36, when I was the same age. As the century, I mean. I didn’t go home to my parents in Britain, as we had been at odds since…forever. I was such an embarrassment to them that they finally sent me to Paris. I loved all the wrong people and refused to marry any of the right ones. They kept wanting me to consort with those little snorty pigs. I suppose I mean prigs, but they all had wretched snaggleteeth and flat little piggy noses. When I finally fled France I came to the States, here to Boston; I was already with Gabriel, Pindar’s father. It was he who realized that it was unsafe to stay in France. Bless the man. His timing was occasionally perfect.”

  * * *

  —

  CELIA WATCHED THE ancient bodies of Pindar’s mother and Philippa’s father as they swayed toward each other. Nathan Morrill waved his ancient hands like flippers. Clearly he wanted to put one of these appendages o
n Leah’s hands, but something was not allowing it. Celia was pleased by this flirtation. Leah was old enough to do what she wanted. And that one could still find reasons to cavort at ninety-one, well!

  * * *

  —

  BARNES BARLOW SCANNED the dinner table. I could probably leave now, he said to himself. I could be at home reading a detective novel, watching an old movie, having thoughts. And he began to count the thoughts he might have but they all cycled back to what he was going to do with his life, now that he had quit his job and his marriage was about to quit him. Government would be the natural direction, but he was weary of doing the expected thing. Besides, that was just another bunch of crooks. Finance did not attract him at all, and he was not at all gifted in the pecuniary direction. But he knew that if he limited himself to where his gifts lay, it was hopeless. How could he talk to anyone at this party when he didn’t know where he was headed? Best to be quiet. He had spent his whole life yelling.

  * * *

  —

  LEAH, HAVING WITNESSED the soft-spoken elopement between her poet grandson and his fair-haired girl who could speak to cows, listened now to the call of a bird, high in the dark pine tree behind the garden. The repeated trill was answered by its mate, farther off, and then another, even more distant, reminding her of a time in her youth when she had spent the night in the Jardin du Luxembourg in Paris, waiting for her lover. As night was falling, the police walked through the gardens, blowing their whistles and telling the few people still sitting on their metal chairs that it was closing time. Young Leah had hidden in the bushes until they passed, and there she stayed, eating oranges, until well past midnight, the hour when her lover had promised to appear. When at last he rescued her from her passionate waiting, he was wearing the uniform of a gendarme. They went off to his rooftop apartment. And later, it seemed like days later, when they had inhabited each other until no one else existed, they went out into the streets of a bemused Paris, strolling under the purple sky to a restaurant, where they ate oysters, then a saffron-flavored ice in a cage of spun sugar whose strands they broke with silver spoons. Where was he now, she wondered, that being of darkness? It had been brief, their affair, and she had ended it long before she met Gabriel.