Now Gabriel’s mistress comes to the table. Leah and Gabriel sway imperceptibly from each other. Gabriel asks with studied patience, “Céline, darling, what is it?”
“I can’t find my purse.”
“How do you women lose these things?” he says. Then, relenting, “What does it look like?”
“Red. With a strap.” Céline pouts, flicks her head back, a posture that is no longer beguiling.
“Red?” he says, as though the color is new to him and incomprehensible.
“It’s the one I always have. You know what it looks like.”
Gabriel gives a subtle kick, nudges something under the table. Leah feels this, wonders if it is Céline’s purse, and realizes that she is blushing. She tells herself he might have been kicking a cat or a stone.
“Chérie,” Gabriel says, brighter now. “Did you leave it in the house?”
As Céline hurries away into the molten darkness, Gabriel turns to Leah, who sways toward him again. “So lovely.” You, he means, but shyness makes him add, “The evening.”
Leah asks him, “Do you really have to be off? Won’t you stay? I’ve hardly gazed at you.” Her voice has a breathless desperation she has never heard before. She can hardly talk.
But now Leah’s lover, Pierre, hurries by, chasing Leah’s fox, which has escaped from the house. Leah found the fox half dead in a trap, when she was on a spring walking trip in the forests of southern France. It was a time when she was half-feral herself: The end of a love affair had left her unable to paint or to sit in company with others. She had lost all desire and to be around anyone at all felt like touching a new burn. Her soul had shriveled to the size of an olive pit. All she could do was take long walks, not because she wanted to, but because she could not stand to be indoors.
The fox had tried to savage Leah when she freed him from the trap, but she wrapped him up in her canvas coat so he couldn’t attack her and took him home in order to nurse his leg. At first they sat up nights; together they refused to eat. He spurned her but tried to snatch wine from her glass. She pushed him away. Sleepless, they snarled at each other, swore in their own tongues, his vocabulary—screams and growls and sharp ratcheting fox calls—much more varied than her own. Over time, however, they both took to eating again. The fox grew used to her, allowing closeness and caresses, though his hind leg never completely recovered from being smashed by the trap and he ran with a syncopated gait. One day, when Leah found him licking curiously at a dried puddle of linseed oil, she remembered her own taste for painting as well.
Running among the guests on the terrace, Pierre finally catches the fox and drapes it over his shoulder. This is new, for the animal has always been skittish with anyone but Leah, and Pierre has always complained that its musky scent was too close to that of skunk. Pierre now leans toward Leah, cupping her chin in his hand, saying softly, “You must let them go now, your guests. They have to get home. It has gotten late. Time to sleep.”
Leah tries to pull away from his grip. “Sleep!” she exclaims. “I couldn’t possibly. Look up at that sky: too much throbbing up there ever to sleep.” She points toward the heavens but her arm swings wildly. “What a voluptuous clangor,” she tries to say. She is dwelling on her consonants, for vowels have become like bubbles. “What about a swallow of cognac? A finger of scotch?” She wishes Pierre would crawl off somewhere to sleep, but he stands there, watching her, the fox on his shoulder.
Gabriel glances at the house and turns back to Leah. “You’re right: The night is very full,” he says. “It deserves notice.” Then, seeing the older couple who have still not left, he gets up. “Goodbye, Murray. Good night, Olga.” Handshakes and watery sounds of kisses.
Leah is puzzled, for she thought that Olga and Murray left hours earlier. She wonders exactly how many layers of scarves and shawls Olga is wearing to hide her bruises. How does Oliver cause such violence? This is not the first time he has provoked one of his women. Isn’t Olga too old to slash canvases and men? Leah tries to imagine a knife in Olga’s pudgy hands—palette knife? Fish knife? When does it stop, she wonders, the vehemence of love?
Olga touches Leah’s face. “Such young skin,” she says. Then she grabs a handful of Leah’s hair. “This mane of yours. You look like a mermaid. You are too young to color this yet, I think.”
Leah does not like Olga’s fetid breath and wants to get away, but one of Olga’s elaborate finger rings has snagged in her hair and she must wait while Olga disentangles herself, muttering, “So black, so black,” then calling out, “Clara! Has Leah sat for you? Have you painted this siren?”
“She won’t let me,” a voice calls back, laughing. “I ask her every time I see her.”
“Oh, Leah! Shame!” says Olga. “Are you so shy? Everyone has painted me at one time or another.”
Leah flings up her hands in a little shimmying dance, twisting free of Olga’s grasp. A painter herself, she knows the power of gaze and prefers to be on the observing end of it. She is not shy, exactly, but does not want her body held captive in the plane.
Gabriel and Leah sit down again. Pierre stands a little distance away, watching her with Gabriel, as he has all evening. Leah wishes he would stop lurking. “I thought they had already left, Murray and Olga. Several times, even,” she says. “It must be the Bordeaux.” She raises her eyes toward Pierre and the animal. “It is pure folly for me to keep that fox in the city. But I would hate to let him go. He shares my table….”
“That’s not all he shares,” a woman’s voice calls out from the garden.
Leah looks up. Turning to Gabriel she says softly, “Before tonight, he has never attacked anybody, at least not since his very first days with me when he was miserable and wild. Since then, never.”
“Well,” says Gabriel. “Perhaps no one else tries to tease him by dangling pieces of cheese as bait.”
This is not where Leah wants the conversation to go. But with Pierre there listening to them, she cannot figure out what she needs to say. Instead she points to the russet fox, who has woken up and is following the conversation with its yellow eyes, tall ears pointed forward, black nose quivering. “He always knows when I am talking about him,” Leah says. “He wakes up at three in the morning,” she continues. “He howls, carving out new tributaries of alarm in my veins. Throws me out of bed. We slip downstairs. I let him out, but he doesn’t want that and he just sits yelping on the doorstep.” She pauses again.
“Every night?”
“Many nights,” Leah says. “We stay in the kitchen. He calms down if there is something good to eat. He likes strawberries. Apple tart. If there is nothing sweet, we both stay awake and vigilant: We sit at table together and shudder till dawn.”
Pierre looks uncomfortable at these confessions; he approaches, putting a proprietary hand on Leah’s shoulder. “Did you have a good time at your party?”
Leah flinches. There’s something she has to say and if she can’t find it, can’t call it out, she will gutter like a candle. If she does say it, though, Pierre will tear her to pieces. Already his hand is gripping her shoulder bones too tightly, twisting her spine, crushing her lungs. All Leah can think to say is “I still am.”
Wait, she thinks. That is not it. Stay. The evening is slipping through her grasp. Time is opening up like the chestnut tree above her into endless branchings, then budding into leaf, exploding into the white panicles of its flowers, then coalescing again, folding in, washing over her like waves.
The fox chooses this moment to leap down from Pierre’s shoulder and run off toward the garden. When Pierre chases after it, Leah touches Gabriel’s hand, then draws back. “Is it true?” she asks him. She does not know yet what she is asking. In the thrill of nearness her temples throb.
Before Gabriel can answer, Clara dashes up to them, her white shirt flamboyant in the darkness. “Oh, Leah. Leah. I am so sorry. I’ve done it agai
n.”
“What is it? What have you done?”
“I’ve ruined your dinner party. No wonder no one invites me.”
“But, Clara, everybody invites you. Look: Here you are!” Leah stands up and throws both her hands out to indicate the garden, space, being. “Let me see that poor arm.” She draws Clara’s arm toward her, pulls up the flowing sleeve, and lifts the bandage. She winces. For a moment she can’t speak. She shakes her head. “It makes my own arm hurt just to look at it. I can’t think of what got into him. It’s my fault: I should never have brought him down to dinner. I am such a fool.”
“No, no,” says Clara. “You mustn’t blame the fox. I was teasing him with Camembert. I wanted to see if he would jump.”
“I will take you to my doctor in the morning.”
“Oh, no, really,” Clara says. “I barely feel it. Besides, I ruined your party. Daniel and Louisa left before we sat down to eat. I don’t even know how I managed to upset them. I thought everybody knew. All I said was that she looked beautiful and not at all pale, considering.” Clara hesitates. “How could she have kept such a thing from her husband? How on earth do people lose track of each other? Do you think I should stick to the weather? God, hasn’t it been glorious these past few days? Look what the sun has done to Gabriel—all the dark gone from under his eyes—and you, Leah, you look all startled and radiant as though you had just invented something like moonlight or love.”
Adopting a broad sweet smile, a desperate foolish innocence, Leah gambles, “Clara. What about a cognac?”
“Oh no, I couldn’t possibly stay,” says Clara. “It’s gotten so late. I’m deluged with sleepiness. Good night, Leah. Thank you so much.” Then, turning to Gabriel, “Watch your step here, Gabriel,” she adds. “More men have swooned in this garden than anywhere else in Paris. You’re just the type to be totally defenseless against Leah’s charms….She’ll probably ask you to teach her something, to give her lessons, and she will be serious. That’s the trouble.”
“Oh,” laughs Gabriel. “I’d love to, but no danger there, I’m afraid. What would a painter want with old languages? What would a painter want with Greek?”
“Well, you watch out for her. Leah’s immensely clever. And you can never tell whether she prefers men or foxes or absolutely no one at all. Good night, Gabriel.” Noisy kisses. “Good night, Leah. Good night, Pierre.”
Pierre approaches when she calls to him, and Clara blows him a kiss, careful to keep her distance from the fox. “Come, Clara,” he says. “I’ll walk you out.” He meanders with Clara to the gate; the fox crouches on his shoulder, the white tip of his tail flicking back and forth.
Gabriel turns to Leah. “Could we go into the kitchen and steal a glass of water? A wild thirst has come.” His hand feathers her back, then rests there.
“Come,” Leah says, taking his arm. Then at the kitchen door she stops. “Greek,” she says.
“What?”
“Afterward, Hebrew, but first Greek. Clara was right, that I would ask you for lessons.”
Gabriel drops his voice. “But how will you have time? First you have Pierre, then you seem to have Oliver. Oliver will probably strangle you if you study with me.”
“Forget them both,” Leah says. “We have all the time in the world.”
“When?” he asks, the single syllable like a gong.
“Tomorrow,” she says, pulling on the vowels to keep them from burbling. With her head tilted back Leah looks up into the chestnut tree and the Parisian night sky above.
“When,” Gabriel says again.
“Noon. Café du Dôme.”
“Consider it done,” he says. “We are already there.”
Leah and Gabriel stand together just outside the house, watching as his ex-mistress Céline makes her way toward the empty table with its scarred cloth where they were sitting. She kneels down to dive underneath for the red purse.
In an instant Leah sees that she will run off with Gabriel, leaving the fox with Pierre. Gabriel will give her lessons, he will give her children, they will marry. Suddenly the evening flutters madly, billowing like a length of white linen, slipping through Leah’s grasp. She wants to press it into limestone, anchor it there, among the whorls and helices of fossils tunneling through the stones of the terrace and the walls of the house itself. There, in the candlelight by the kitchen door, standing with Gabriel, her fingers just touching his, she can see a skeleton of sorts, embedded in the stone of the doorframe, some ancient fish, spine and head and eye and ribs and fins, captured and pressed into the ancient limestone.
More voices:
“Has the last metro gone?”
“What about the all-night ‘bus’?”
“Is anybody going toward Père Lachaise?”
“Champs-Elysées?”
“Have some,” a man’s voice says, very close to her. “This is for you.”
Then it is dark again.
* * *
—
NOW, IN HER old pond in Brookline, Leah stopped pulling at the arm that was dragging her across the water. She needed all the strength of these last moments to watch the ending of the day that had escaped the colors of the earth to a hue far beyond emerald. The nearer heavens grew darker and yet more luminous, for light was no longer separated from shadow and night was no longer separated from day. Time had ceased quivering and coiling back on itself. It had become taut and resonant and she was enfolded in its infinite smoothness.
All the birds of dusk now burst into song and noises come from every rock and tree and fern as though the thoughts of each thing, living or not, can suddenly be heard. The songs call space into existence and give it shape. Here exists. And here. It is what it is. At this moment. Now.
For Barry, Sasha, and Naia
In memoriam
ZEKE MAZUR
1969–2016
Work on this novel has been going on for as long as the millennium. It is a joy—finally—to thank friends and family for their inspiration and guidance.
Barry Mazur, the late Zeke Mazur, Sasha Makarova, and Naia Zostriana Mazur have always acted as igniters of soul fire and helped me with the conflagrations that followed. Zeke Mazur, although he claimed not to be a reader of fiction, gave a generous and close reading of a late draft, making comments on almost every page, saving me from numerous missteps and follies, and pointing out felicities I had not seen.
Elizabeth Dane, Dustin Beall Smith, Jamaica Kincaid, Sue Trupin, Susan Holmes, Persi Diaconis, Elaine Scarry, Philip Fisher, Michel Chaouli, Jane Hirshfield, Eva Brann, Cecie Dry, Paul Dry, Joyce Olin, Chris Nelson, Milen Poenaru, Valentin Poenaru, Dorina Papaliou, Apostolos Doxiadis, Nan Cuba, Alison Moore, Marta Maretich, Michael Alford, Ed Howe, Kim Keown, Ellen Kaplan, and Robert Kaplan have long influenced and inspired me by their lives and their works and their astonishing gardens. Discussions with all the members of the Brann/Kutler Seminars at St. John’s College over the past fifteen years have been crucially important.
Conversations in beautiful and otherworldly settings with Margaret Hearst, Will Hearst, Jennifer Saffo, Paul Saffo, Mary Lee Coffey, Shelby Coffey, Stacey Hadash, Terry McDonell, Danny Hillis, Russell Chatham, and the late Jim Harrison have been wonderfully provocative and catalytic. I’m grateful to the Hearsts for bringing these conversations about.
I’ve long been blessed by the warm companionship and wise counsel of the late Alexandra Dor-Ner, the late Zvi Dor-Ner, Tamar Dor-Ner, Dan Krockmalnic, Daphne Dor-Ner, Aaron Kammerer, Win Lenihan, Anna Lenihan, Vida Kazemi, Paul Horowitz, Melissa Franklin, Sarah Kafatou, and the late Fotis Kafatos. My thanks to them for their constancy.
Thanks, also, to my faculty colleagues, fellow alumni, and students at the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson for their intense listening to early drafts of these chapters.
I am immensely grateful to Andrea Walker at Random Hous
e for her editorial vision, brilliance, and generosity. Every interaction with her has brought joy during a difficult time. Many thanks to Janet Wygal and her team of copy editors, whose edits have been meticulous and pleasing.
I am wildly lucky to have Esmond Harmsworth as my agent. His intellect, generosity, fearlessness, and patience are astonishing.
But most of all, my thanks to Barry, who endows the world with light, and my life with passion.
BY GRACE DANE MAZUR
The Garden Party
Hinges: Meditations on the Portals of the Imagination
Trespass
Silk
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
GRACE DANE MAZUR is the author of Hinges: Meditations on the Portals of the Imagination; Trespass: A Novel; and Silk: Stories. She was deep in postdoctoral research on morphogenesis in silkworms when she left biology completely in order to write fiction. Most recently, she has been on the fiction faculty at Harvard Extension School and at the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. A native of Brookline, she lives in Cambridge and Westport, Massachusetts, with her husband, the mathematician Barry Mazur.
gracedanemazur.org
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