The Entire Predicament (9 page)

Her laugh is as soft as a charcoal line.

I can remember my parents like this. Two in the morning, coming home, tired and tipsy.This is when I slept on the couch because it was a one-room place with a curtain divider, and Dad flopped into the easy chair, laughing, and Mom flopped onto his lap, shushing, and I said, “I’m awake, you dopes.”

We’re pooped.We did it. It’s over. Let’s turn in.

But first, link arms. First, a walk in the garden.

We survey the lawn for a moment from the great front doors of the house.We leave the doors open as we descend the curving stairs, dramatic in the light behind us, and we pass the cherub, and then we pass the lithe angel, and then we stroll onto the lawn.The lawn is dotted with seven enormous trees, a leafy canopied kind. Old trees. Can’t transplant trees that old. There’s some light from the moon and some light from the lanterns the angel and the cherub are holding. Am I myself? I feel as if I am, if a little wobbly, and with an echo in those words:
myself
,
wobbly
. She left her yellow gown like an enormous rose head on the floor of the hall and now she wears only her underthings, a simple cotton shift, or something called something like that, and she’s taken her necklace off and strung it in her loosened hair so now she’s nymphy, as if we’ve made it to Deco, so perhaps I picked up a little more history than I like to remember.

Under one tree is a man and a woman stretched out next to each other, the man on an elbow. They’re making out near his floppy hat. Under another tree a fat old man is passed out,
spread-eagle on his back, his pocket watch sliding from his pants. We’re arm in arm. We’re strolling. I’m barefoot with my trousers rolled halfway up my calves. The grass is cool. The breeze moves. I’ve untucked my white shirt, and it moves, and her white little shift thingy moves. A paper cup blows by from another era. We’re almost ghosts. We’d be ghosts to anyone watching. Nothing hurts.

When will we speak? Is it possible to speak in this condition? Back in my old life, we’d banter. I wouldn’t call it “banter,” I’d call it “reeling her in,” but that cannot happen here. Too coarse. Here, there are practically no edges. I already know her voice and it’s already an aspect of the bubbling of my own imagination, so what can we do? We weave among the seven trees of the rising and dipping lawn until we come upon a break in the hedges and are in a maze. She shifts half a step ahead of me, because the space is very narrow, quite dark, and I can feel the tips of boxwood leaves on my shoulders. It’s as if I hear the word
boxwood
and as if the maze is moving beneath my feet and I am still, peering past the motion of her hair, the maze turning and gliding. We emerge from it along a stone path in a garden of evenly spaced young trees with silver bark and leaves that clack. A glass greenhouse shines in shards in the dark like teeth, like shifting knives. We are also surrounded by roses, which is lucky, because it’s almost the only flower I know. As we walk we can smell them. Most of the roses smell pale, but we pass one that is sharper. “These are old roses,” she says. “Generation to generation. Passed down.” She is still a half step ahead and although I know the gleaming line of her jaw as if it’s always lived in my periphery, I haven’t seen her face since we entered the maze and I’m a little frightened. I’m
afraid that if she turns to me her face might be cruel, after all. Then the voice that told me “boxwood” begins humming again under the leaves. She turns enough to meet my eyes and says,“It’s my gardener.” She is still herself.Then, around a bend, I see him, crouched beneath a plant that looks like a buffalo, peering at a turtle that is black as a stove and looks like a stone. He’s wrinkled, and muttering. He looks like my grandfather. He looks like a troll. He’s holding a lantern. Bugs and desperate moths flail around it, bouncing against the glass.

She says—and what should I call her? my lady? my girl?—she says, “What do you say?” and the gardener squints in the filmy light, his lips moving. I can see his throat push a little harder. I can see him pushing the sound out. I can tell he hates me. My own grandfather. Her gardener. A troll. He begins what is clearly incantation. I tell you, my education is singing. He says, or he recites:

Is the turtle going to turn into something? “Ignore him,” she says. “Let’s go,” she says, and whisks me away before we can make a choice, before I am even certain there’s a choice to make. She whisks me away as if neither left nor right. She whisks me
up
. Up, up, and away. “He’s a creep,” she says. Then, we disappear.

Darkness and she is almost all sound and smell. I am made of particles. She calls me urchin. She calls me waif. I’m an urchin. “You’re my waif.You are.You are my urchin.” These smiling words, one from the sea, one a limp city leaf. Here I am, in a wave of water, a wave of air, in the motion that makes up matter. I am honey, sugar, darling, all of them. I have the memory of her already. It could be the reason it is so dark, the memory I will have of her filling everything. We remain placeless in a way I almost fathom.

This, love, is simply response to stimuli, I think, although I know enough to know I am not a thinker. An urchin knows nothing, knows only now, and now, and now.When I close my eyes I am overwhelmed by my own light.

Morning and the bed is a boatful of feathers and we are floating under yellow blooming sheets. Her windows are enormous. Minty leaves shiver out there, fringing the view. Beyond them, though, if I squint, the gardener is approaching with a red machine slung by a strap over his shoulder. He’s wearing a cap. He’s hunched and ugly.

What will become of me if I am someone who loves a woman with a gardener?

“I’ll be back,” she says.“I’m famished.” She crosses the room. She’s not wearing the sheet. She’s left the sheet with me. She remains astonishing. From a hook behind the bathroom door she lifts a golden bell. She cups it in her hand like a bird and keeps it noiseless. She holds it in front of her as if she’s going to present it to me, as if she’s going to present it wryly, knowingly, writhing with our in-joke, the joke of how I would never do this; I would never get caught up. “Look, baby bird.” Am I a bird? Is the bell a bird? She keeps it cupped and hovering in
front of her abdomen, and when she lifts her knee to the bed her muscles shift and when she lifts her other knee they shift again, but differently.

I must be the bird; I am so fluttery.

She’s kneeling before me, although we are clearly on the same level. I’m resting on my elbow, head in my hand.This can go on. I can see it. I know it. I can do it. I can see my rags and riches. I can do this, I think. I am tough enough.

My hips are a hill under the blossoms. “Take the bell,” she says. She’s whispering. “Ring it. I give it to you. I give you everything.”

Outside, the gardener is muttering, still. He’s a voice from the past. I believe I remember all of this from childhood.

“I know this one,” she says. “You can listen but it’s best not to take it in. It’s actually a very funny tune.” He’s out of view, now, low, below the window. He revs his engine and under its roar and the spattering of the branches it encounters I hear the incantation rise:

What the spell does is make me remember my dream. In my dream my grandfather tells me the story of Thomas Jefferson from Virginia and his architecturally important house, and the slaves in the tunnels, and he tells me the story of Mrs.
Winchester from California, haunted by a fortune made from guns, the house she built crazily bumping into itself, stairs into ceilings, halls into brick walls, wings tumbling over one another as if out of breath. The houses bookend the country. I know that in dreams, when you dream of houses, you are dreaming of yourself. I don’t know what this means. In the dream, I’m just a little kid. I don’t know anything. “Grampa,” I say, tugging at his nightshirt, “where did you learn this? Did you learn this in school?”

I stretch across the bed, pull myself to the windowsill to see if I can see down. She takes my hand and pulls me back in a swirl of sheets. She’s grinning, dazzling. She says, “Shut up, you fucker!” and slams the window, and the room shakes, and the bell rings in my palm, and several figs tumble into our laps, and breakfast, it turns out, is the most delicious of all.

One of the things he liked best about her was the way she loved his cats. She’d never lived with cats before, but when Carol moved in, she commented about how cats made everything look picturesque, just by being there. She said the cats brought out the pattern on her dress, and how that was a funny, good sign about her moving in.Walker told her that in the eighties, Bloomingdale’s bred a bunch of cats to go with the upholstery of the couches they sold. When you got a couch, you got the cat to go with it, if you wanted. Some of their best times were watching television, whatever was on, really, it didn’t even matter, each with a cat on the lap. He sat stroking a cat on his lap, and she sat stroking a cat on her lap. Seeing the same thing, doing the same thing, it was almost like accidentally being the same for a while, unlike that awful feeling you can get on a family vacation that’s not working.

Sometimes if you’re at a stoplight and you and the car in front of you both have your turn signals on, it’s interesting to watch the car’s blinker and listen to your own, and notice how
they ease in and out of sync. It’s mind-boggling and soothing at once. In fact, both of them, when they were sitting with separate cats, equated it somehow with what it was like to lie in bed next to each other, each masturbating, which they did routinely as well, although neither of them mentioned this equation.

About a year later, Carol got transferred, so they had to move several states over.Walker was supposed to make sure the movers got everything right and meet her there, in the new place she’d picked out. After the moving was complete, they were watching television and Carol said, “When will the cats get here?”

Walker said, “Good idea. I’ll get some tomorrow. I miss sitting here with the cats.”

It turned out Walker didn’t believe in moving cats. He said it wasn’t fair to uproot them. He said it was also unfair to just leave them, not fair to the cats, who were domestic and couldn’t be counted on to reassimilate into the natural order if abandoned, and could also cause a traffic collision. He’d shot them and buried them in the old backyard.

This was shocking; shocking enough that it shocked Carol, who generally wrinkled her nose at gore on television, or furrowed her eyebrows at the evening news, but made little more of it. Walker, certainly, didn’t do it to be shocking, but he did it. Carol’s face had both wrinkled and furrowed when he told her, and he said, “What? What? Are you mad?” but she didn’t say anything. She thought about saying something, and she thought enough to have the conversation out in her mind. It was one she didn’t like, and she didn’t want to have it.