The Garden Party

by Grace Dane Mazur

  The sky was now a dancing yellowish green, but the forest path led into darkness. The heat had not yet abated. Ferns brushed against Leah’s dress as she peered into the woods; something moved in the fallen leaves. She was glad for that kind of company. She walked on, as if time pressed. Overhead, the gossamer of a web stretched between high branches caught an errant tangent of sunlight and glinted in the warm breeze. Not the single strand of the gypsy moth; more likely, she thought, a spider. The feverish air made familiar objects strange. As she walked, the rustling in the leaves persisted, as though some thing or being traveled beside her, tracing a line along the forest floor, its shudder braiding together the seen and unseen. A fox perhaps. Decades ago when she had owned this property there had always been a den or two behind the blackberries.

  Leah had seen the children leave the table—there must have been five or six of them—during the asparagus course. Now, at the pond, she saw that they had made their own dinner. On the rock by the rushes a candle stood in a pool of wax, still burning. Beside it, charred sticks and a fish carcass, half-eaten, the rest blackened, skeleton askew. Probably carp. Fish was best for important dinners; red meat led to sluggish thoughts and vapid talk, the guests lethargic, senses dulled, eyes bland. But with the eating of fish, new connections sparked everywhere, electric.

  The dinner in the garden was meant to celebrate her grandson Adam’s wedding. It was the “rehearsal dinner,” though everyone had been refusing to call it that, as though the term were somehow bad luck. So it was to celebrate the wedding, but it had also, she knew, been performative. Finally. At table, under cover of broad daylight, well, of early midsummer evening daylight, and in full company, Adam and his bride, Eliza, had eloped. Leah had been the only witness. The only witness aside from Harry, but he was the celebrant.

  Weddings, with their sewing together of the older generations, always seemed to open up something as well, revealing an uncanny cleft in time, and Leah could suddenly feel the presence of her dead, of friends long gone. Her mind felt split, as though she were swinging between now and then.

  Of course, it had been salmon, too, at a party Leah had given in Paris many decades earlier when she was a very young woman, back when love was new and fierce and so often connected with violence and wine. Of her friends at that party, all were now dead except for her husband. She and Gabriel had never been formally divorced or legally separated, but except for the rare times every decade or so when they would happily reconvene, they lived as though sweetly divorced. None of their friends could understand why they both preferred this ambiguous situation. They were not together, yet Leah knew, and Gabriel agreed, that they each felt somehow bound to the other. At least this way, she thought, they never chafed, never tired of each other, though there were times when she would have welcomed taking those risks. If Leah had ever wanted to marry someone else, she would have requested, and he would have given, his blessing.

  Gabriel was living in France. He had sent a sweet note regretting that he could not be present at the wedding. He was alive, but all those others were gone. Where was the museum of her dead? She had never said goodbye to them, to Murray, for example, who was old even then and sodden with absinthe. Murray, who started museums all over France and said his museums were like caviar—fish eggs, he meant—because so many were spawned but few survived. Leah had not said goodbye to Oliver and his Olga, who assaulted each other at dinner parties and sometimes had to be separated and bandaged after the soup course. She had not said goodbye to Clara, who used the truth as a scimitar; or to Céline, who was “so pretty she didn’t have to know how to read,” as Clara had said. Even to Pierre, her charming and suffocating lover during that time, Leah had not said goodbye. That dinner in Paris was also in a garden, also on a summer night. It was between the two wars, although one didn’t know that then.

  But on this night in 1991, here in Brookline, Leah was glad for the interruption of the children forcing the recess in the dinner, allowing her to walk to her ancient pond. She needed these moments alone, partly because she had been so taken with, so intoxicated by, her dinner partner. She had thought that she and the century were too far gone to be capsized like this. She had thought she was unenchantable.

  When Leah had lived on this property she had shaped the gardens, cleared the pond. She had dug the water lilies into the muck and planted the scarlet cardinal flowers to exclaim among the rushes.

  And now, partly because the pond had once been hers, and partly because she was both old enough and still young enough to do what she wanted, she took off her mauve silk dress and walked toward the water in her slip. No one would see her. Everyone down at the house was rushing about—all those agitated children with chattering teeth and stories of frights in the woods.

  How close the water felt to air—that warm black surface reflecting the yellow-green of the sky. Under her feet, mud soft as kisses. Nearby something roiled the surface. A fish brushed against her legs, then came back and nudged her, as though pushing her away from the edge.

  Was it too odd for a woman in her early nineties to be wading alone in a pond, under the black of the pine trees and the clear chartreuse of the evening air? It was her pond, or had been once. And on this evening her pond was one of those hinges of being, letting her swim back through her past, back to bathing as a girl in England. All those sun-splashed river outings around Oxford with her older brother and his friends. Then, later, with her own friends. Her parents tried to forbid such expeditions, protesting that she was too young and her companions unsavory. Leah disobeyed and went anyway. Later still, after she had been exiled to Paris and was living on her own, there were trips to the outlying forests at Fontainebleau and Rambouillet with daylong picnics in the dappled shade, gatherings that always engendered more yearnings than there were people to go around. At sunset she and her companions would migrate through the woods to one of the ponds, where they would swim far into the night.

  Surely Leah must have led some sort of existence between the watery places of her life, but thinking back this evening, her entire history seemed collapsed into a succession of lakes, rivers, oceans. Perhaps she had been a water creature in a former life: a speckled trout, a dolphin. When she and Gabriel and five-year-old Pindar fled from France to America in the mid-1930s, she discovered the great sand beaches of New England. She introduced them to her son and then to his two sisters born in America, who never loved the water or their mother as much as he did. As Gabriel traveled more and came home less, there were fewer excursions north to Crane’s Beach (as it was known then) or south to Horseneck or the Cape. Finally, when Gabriel seemed to have settled in Europe without them, Leah’s life with her children became centered around this house in Brookline and its small pond, this old pond where she was floating now, on her back, looking up at the sky, floating and being prodded by some sort of snout. She splashed, floundered, gulped water. Then she saw the distinctive fin and smiled.

  The immense carp had first appeared in the pond in the 1940s. She had fed him in the old days, bread scraps mostly, and had always fancied that he knew who she was. He had seemed ancient even then, with his long feelers and the half-moon-shaped bites taken out of his tail fin. She saw that fin now, unmistakable as he flicked it above the surface. She lunged for him and he seemed to allow her to hold him for a moment or two, before he twisted and was gone.

  Leah spiraled out to where the waterweeds would not reach her. Away from the shallows, springs bubbled up and the water had a velvety feel, making her want to float just under the surface.

  Attack. Something gripped her from within, gorging her with pain. She tried to move her arms but succeeded only in flipping over, facedown. As she tilted her head back to breathe she felt the muscular body of the carp nudging her higher in the water so she could take a breath. He was trying to save her like the ancient Greek dolphin saved the lyre player Arion. She was in too much pain to thank him.

  * * *


  —

  “LEAH! IS THAT you?” Celia Cohen made a heavy leap into the water. Weighted down by her dress, her shoes, she stroked clumsily to the middle of the pond.

  The carp swam away as Celia clutched Leah’s chest and wrenched her around. The two women flailed in the dusk. Much the taller, Leah coughed and clawed, then tried get on top of Celia, to step on her and hold her down, to stop the pain.

  Celia, grappling with her mother-in-law’s surprising strength, gulped water, sputtered. “Let go, Leah. It’s me. I’m saving you.”

  Leah twisted her head around to see, her long face looming with terror and incomprehension. She scratched at Celia’s eyes.

  “Off me,” Leah said, eloquent for a moment, majestic. “I am looking for something.” She spat and tried to roll over. But Celia acted as though she hadn’t heard and pinioned Leah’s arm behind her. “Ow,” Leah grunted. “That’s my arm.”

  Darkness after.

  Voices. Voices through the watery dark:

  “Le…ah.”

  “Are you walking?”

  “Only if the S omnibus has stopped.”

  “Oh, it’s long gone.”

  “I have to get to Gare Saint-Lazare; I live on the Right Bank.”

  “Why on earth go home? Come and see my place; I’m right near Denfert.”

  “Leah?”

  “Leah, Leah! Is that you? It’s getting so late. I have to say good night.”

  Leah recognizes old Murray emerging from the shadows with his ancient undulating gait. She is standing at the edge of the garden of the little stone house she rented in Paris in the mid-1920s. She is young. It is the end of her dinner party, the one where she lost a fox and found a husband.

  Old Murray weaves toward Leah. Always more formal than anyone else, he is wearing tails of an ancient scalloped cut, his bow tie askew with the lateness of the evening. He purses his lips and kisses her, tickling her face with his drooping mustache that looks a bit greenish in the dim light. “Thank you so much,” he murmurs. “Your salmon was superb. Everything.”

  “Goodbye, Murray,” Leah says, backing off a bit, for his breath smells of swamp. “Stay well. You didn’t think the fish was too dry?”

  Up above, the lingering twilight of Paris in midsummer has given way to night, saying, Here, you take over, and the immense hinged dome of darkness is speckled with stars. All of Leah’s other guests—full of strange and sudden energy—are roaming the limestone terrace and the garden; under the trees they catch each other and embrace, holding on a moment too long, then reaching for a hand, a waist, a breast. No one wants to spin apart now into separate elements. This is when things get said that wouldn’t otherwise because the hour is so late. Censors are off. Secrets blurt themselves. Explanations filigree into narratives, stories compress themselves into a handful of syllables.

  Beside the fountain, Olga confides about Oliver, “I slashed canvas, arm. He held my throat, strangled me. I’d no voice for days.”

  Leah’s own arm aches at these words; her throat constricts as though someone is holding her too tightly.

  A man’s voice, behind the trees, can barely be heard as he summarizes, “But it was not his. Nature came to her rescue. He was not to know.”

  Although Leah has not meant to neglect her other guests, all evening she has given her attention to dark-eyed Gabriel Cohen. After drinking wine under the chestnut tree they walk through the garden naming flowers, listening for night birds; finally she sits by his side at one of the tables on the terrace. They talk and listen as though already interlocked.

  Why have they never met before? Gabriel, a scholar of classical languages, has always lived in Paris; Leah has been here now for five years, sent from England when she was twenty by her parents, who were bewildered by her behavior and shocked by her paintings. From the family lawyer in Oxford, Leah receives a generous allowance—as long as she consents to stay in France. Her parents come and visit from time to time.

  Gabriel and Leah, for five years, these two souls wandering through Paris, always with the negative coincidence of just missing each other: Several times they have been in the same cafés, at the same gatherings, for though Gabriel is a scholar he prefers to spend his time with artists. For a while Gabriel and Leah each had an affair, unbeknownst, with the same dancer, a Parisian woman as mysterious and discreet as she was unfaithful. Perhaps they glimpsed each other after all, but only just. Perhaps Gabriel’s reflection lingered a moment in the mirror one afternoon when he was just leaving, and Leah just joining, their shared lover. But their meeting never locked into focus as it finally has on this summer evening in the mid-1920s in Montparnasse.

  The women scatter now, looking for handbags and feather boas and tasseled shawls; brief flares and pools of light appear as the men strike matches for a last pipe or cigarette.

  Everyone else is standing, ready to say their terrible goodbyes, but Gabriel remains seated, his hand stroking the stained tablecloth toward Leah, who sits beside him. She is chattering to keep her guests from noticing the hour, for parties can collapse, everyone deciding at the same instant that it is time to go, as when at the opera the applause dies all at once, or like those animal species who spring apart after mating with neither tenderness nor regret.

  It is in the ending of the party, Leah knows, that we can see the whole thing: what has gone on as well as what failed to happen, what was served up, what ignored, all the delights, gaffes, torments. What glories! Hopes! Desperations! Of course, the extremely late hour can also bring strange urges—for folly, substance, change.

  Then, too, there are those special demons who hover at the ends of parties, come to make mischief. Some are simply the demons of fatigue: Let us flee! they whisper in your ear. Say anything, say whatever you must, but get us out of here. Stronger, deeper, though, than any fatigue or fear is the grief of leave-taking, full of its own compulsions.

  “Leah!” Oliver interrupts.

  Leah inhales, coughs, puts a hand on the table to steady herself, notices how small the space is between her own hand and Gabriel’s. She is drunk with him. She knows the signs: mind on edge, soul stung, the piracy of longing. Smiling, she stretches out her legs and finally stands up.

  “Leah, angel,” Oliver says. “Your soup was tart and green as English virgins and your garden is an invitation. The roses alone are enough to drive one to folly. Cuisse de nymphe…cuisse de nymphe…well, exactly.” As he kisses her, he smells of tobacco and turpentine and stale sex. “I’m so sorry about the broken windowpanes and all the wineglasses. I’ll send my ancient carpenter in the morning. I’m embarrassed about my matches. I’ve ruined your tablecloth. I’m so clumsy with my arm like this. What a damnation.” Like some ungainly bird he flaps his bandaged arm in its sling. “Such a lovely cloth it was.”

  “No, really,” Leah says, her own arm aching as she looks at his. “It doesn’t matter. Not at all! It was a rag from the flea market.” She looks beyond him into the shadows, where other guests appear as though floating in the pools of darkness between the garden candles.

  “I will take you to buy a new cloth. We will go searching. And then we will have lunch. Yes?”

  For a moment Leah despises Oliver for not being Gabriel, whose every offer she yearns for. She assumes it is Olga who has wounded Oliver’s arm, but his love affairs are many and convoluted, often tangled with obscure violence. “Lunch?” she says to him. “No one will mind?” Suddenly bitter, she realizes that she herself will mind: To spend her breath with anyone but Gabriel will lead to suffocation. Thinking of it she can hardly inhale, wants to free herself from such a rendezvous. But what she wants is decoupled from what she can say, and she sees herself about to accept Oliver’s invitation. Perhaps it is the wine that is making things waver so. The world feels billowy, the pull of gravity distorted, as though the earth’s rotation has taken on a wobble. Though buoy
ant, she feels uncertain and may stumble into the laps of the wrong gods.

  Oliver smiles, strokes Leah’s black hair with his good hand. “Mind?” he replies. “They are all too busy.” He smiles as though pleased that he does not have to hide or explain the other women in his life to her. “They are minding one another.” Then he embraces her; it is awkward, with his bandaged arm up in the air. “When shall we do it?” he asks. “When shall we do that thing?” There was a time when Leah would have done anything with Oliver, but now, even with only one of his arms around her, the hug is too constricting and she pulls away from him, gasping.

  “Good night, Leah darling,” says Olga, whose pale expanse of bosom is framed by her black fringed shawl and by the purple boa she has kept around her neck all evening, barely hiding her bruises.

  Leah embraces Olga, with her scent of patchouli.

  “The salmon?” says Olga. “Not at all dry; your fish was distinguished and your meringues with wild berries…”

  Old Murray navigates through the darkness to join them. “Olga,” he says. “There you are. I couldn’t leave until I found you, but I no longer see so well in the dark.” He nibbles at the ends of his drooping whiskers, then says, “You will let me visit you tomorrow? If I don’t see you, I will flood with melancholy.”

  Olga takes Murray’s arm and walks off with him.

  These people are so old, twenty-five-year-old Leah thinks. They cannot still, at their age, be feeling what they claim to feel. They are simply playacting gallantry.