The Summer Garden (25 page)

You want me to whisper to you
, Alexander whispers on another blue night on the quilt, blue night now but heather dawn already much too near. She is on her back, her arms above her head, her gold hair smelling freshly washed of strawberry shampoo. He is propped up over her, loving her taste of chocolate and wine, kissing her open lips, her throat, her clavicles, licking her breasts, her swollen nipples.

Maybe not just whisper?
she moans.

He moves lower, happier, presses his face into her stomach, on his knees in front of her; he kisses lingeringly the femoral flesh, listening to her whispering pleas. To draw out his time with her, he caresses her as lightly and arhythmically as he can. When she starts to cry out, he stops, giving her a breath to calm down. She is not becalmed. He pours a little bubbly wine on her—it fizzes, she curves—and licks it off her, softly kisses it off her, softly sucks it off her. She is gasping, she is clenching the quilt.
Please, please,
she whispers.

His palms are over her inner thighs, so exquisitely open, so alive.
Do you know how sweet you are?
He kisses her.
You’re so soft, so slippery…Tatia, you are so beautiful.
His mouth is on her, adoring her.

She gasps, she clutches, she cries out and out and out.

I love you.

And Tatiana cries.

You know that, don’t you?
Alexander whispers.
I love you. I’m blind for you, wild for you. I’m sick with you. I told you that our first night together when I asked you to marry me, I’m telling you now. Everything that’s happened to us, everything, is because I crossed the street for you. I worship you. You know that through and through. The way I hold you, the way I touch you, my hands on you, God, me inside you, all the things I can’t say during daylight, Tatiana, Tania, Tatiasha, babe, do you feel me? Why are you crying?

Now
that
is what I call a whisper.

He whispers, she cries, she comes to him in unconditional surrender and cries and cries. Deliverance does not come cheap, not to her, not to him, but it does profoundly come at the price of night.

And in the gray-purple morning, Alexander finds Tatiana by the basin in the bedroom, washing her face and arms. He watches her and then comes to stand behind her. She tilts her head up to him. He kisses her.
You’re going to be late
, Tatiana says with a small smile. His chest is bursting with the night, aching for her. Saying nothing, he hugs her from behind and then slips her vest down from the shoulders, lathering up and running his wet soapy hands over and around her breasts, cupping them, fondling them.
Shura, please
, she whispers, quivering, her raw pink-red nipples standing straight out, piercing his palms.

Anthony’s awake. Alexander pulls the wet vest back over her, and she says, well, now
that’s
useless, isn’t it. Not completely useless, says Alexander, stepping away, watching her in the mirror as she finishes washing, the breasts full, the vest see-through, the nipples large and taut against it. She dances all day in his heart and in his drunken, unquenchable loins.

Something has awakened in him here in the wine valley of the moon. Something that he thought had died.

Perhaps a young woman who was being made love to so thoroughly in the night, who was lavished with such ardent caresses, could not walk around in daylight without all the pores of her skin glistening, exuding her nocturnal exuberance. Perhaps there was no hiding her small sensual self, because the clientele sure beat against her wine trays. They came from everywhere and sat outdoors at her little patio tables, and she, with Anthony by her side, would shimmy up to them, her perpetually pulpy, slightly bruised mouth smiling the words, “Hi. What can I get you?”

Alexander didn’t think it was his son that the city dwellers kept creeping back to in their gray flannel suits on weekdays. Alexander knew this because he himself crept up from the fields one day to have lunch at one of her tables. Actually what he did was sit down at one of her tables, and Anthony came running to him and sat on his lap, and they waited and waited and waited and waited, as their mother and wife flitted about, humming like a hummingbird, laughing, joking with the customers like a comedienne—particularly with two men in pressed suits who took off their trembling hats to speak to her, gawking open-mouthed into her bedroom lips as they ordered more wine. Their expressions made Alexander look down onto his son’s head and say carefully, “Is Mommy
always
this busy?”

“Oh, Dad, today is a slow day. But look how much
I
made!” He showed his father four nickels.

Alexander ruffled his hair. “That’s because you’re a good boy, bud, and they all see it.”

Anthony ran off and Alexander continued to watch her. She was wearing a white cotton sheath tank dress, straight, sleeveless and simple, empire-waisted and hemmed just below the knee. One of the men in the flannel suit looked down and said something, pointing to the pink bubble gum toes she had painted, naked for Alexander last Sunday afternoon while Anthony lay sleeping. Tatiana jingled out a little laugh. The flannel man reached up and brushed some strands of hair out of her face. She backed away, her smile fading, and turned to see if Alexander noticed. Oh, he noticed, all right. And so finally she made her way to
his
table. He sat cross-armed in the round metal chair with spindly legs that scraped across the stone tiles every time he moved.

“Sorry, I took so long,” Tatiana murmured sheepishly to him, with a smile now even for him, in his dungaree overalls, not in a suit. “See how busy I am?”

“I see everything,” Alexander said, studying her face a few moments before he took her hand, turning it palm up, and kissed it, circling her wrist with his fingers. Not letting go, he squeezed her wrist so hard that Tatiana let out a yelp but did not even try to pull away.

“Ouch,” she said. “What’s that for?”

“Only one bear eats from this honey pot, Tatia,” he said, still squeezing her.

Blushing, bending to him, she said in a low mimicking sing-song voice, “Oh, Captain, here’s your apple cobbler, Captain, and is my dress going to blow above my head because you’re going so fast, Captain, and have you noticed my bobbing boobs, Captain?”

Alexander laughed. “Bobbing boobs?” he said quietly, delightfully, kissing her hand again and releasing her. “Oh, I’ve noticed those, babe.”

“Shh!” She ran to bring him food and then perched down by his side, while Anthony climbed on his lap.

“You have time to sit with me?” he said, trying to eat with one hand.

“A little. How’s your morning been?” She brushed a grape twig out of Alexander’s hair. “Anthony, come here, sit on Mommy, let Daddy eat.”

Alexander shook his head, eating quickly. “He’s fine. But I’ve been better. We were getting a shipment of grapes from another vineyard, and half a ton of it fell off my truck.”

“Oh, no.”

“Ant, do you know how much half a ton of grapes is?” Alexander said to his son. “A thousand pounds. I went over a bump in the road.” He shrugged. “What can I tell you? If they don’t want the grapes to fall, they should rebuild the road.”

“Half a ton! What happened to the grapes?” Tatiana asked.

“I don’t know. By the time we noticed and came back for them, the road was picked clean, obviously by unemployed migrants looking for food. Though why anyone would be unemployed is beyond me, there’s so much work.”

“Did Sebastiani yell at you?” asked Anthony, turning around to look at Alexander.

“I don’t let anybody yell at me, bud,” replied Alexander, “but he wasn’t happy with me, no. Said he was going to dock my pay, and I said, you pay me nothing as it is, what’s to dock?” Alexander looked at Tatiana. “What?”

“Oh, nothing. Reminds me of that sack of sugar my grandmother found in Luga in the summer of 1938.”

“Ah, yes the famous sack of sugar.” Dipping a small piece of bread in olive oil, Alexander put it into Tatiana’s mouth. “Not very pleasant, what happened to your grandparents, but I’m suddenly more interested in the truck driver who dropped the sack of sugar in the first place.”

“He got five years in Astrakhan for being cavalier with government property and helping the bourgeoisie,” she said dryly, as he got up to go.

“Aren’t you going to kiss me?” she asked, lifting her face to him.

“In front of the flannel lepers so they can see your lips open? Never,” he replied, running his hand lightly down her braid. “Stay away from them, will you?”

As he was walking past the two men, he knocked into their table so hard their glasses of wine spilled.

“Hey, man, easy!” one of them said, glancing up at Alexander, who slowed down, stopped, and leveled him with such a stare that the man instantly looked away and called for the check.

October warmly came and warmly went. Though foggy at the day’s edges, November remained mild. Alexander didn’t work in the fields anymore or drive trucks; now he was down in the cellars. He hated being in the dark basement all day, for when he started work it was barely light and when he finished it was just after dark. He worked at the steel fermenting drums or the oak barrels, riddling the sparkling wine behind closed cellar doors and dreaming of sunshine. The night visions still ground him down. He stopped trying to figure them out; their mysticism was beyond his scope and his mystic guide was busy navigating through her own unstill waters. Anthony still crawled in next to her toward dawn.

The three of them looked forward to Sundays when they had a whole day to themselves. On Sundays they drove around the Bay area. They saw Sacramento and Montecito, and Carmel by the Sea, so blissful and briny—which was a good way to describe Tania also. It was there that she asked him if he wanted to leave Napa and go to Carmel, but Alexander declined. “I like Napa,” he said, taking her hand across the table as they sat in a small café, eating New England Clam Chowder out of a bread bowl. Anthony was having French fries, dipping them into Tania’s soup.

But Tatiana liked Carmel. “It has no weather. How could you not like a place that has no weather?”

“I like a
little
weather,” Alexander said.

“For weather we can go south to Santa Barbara.”

“Let’s just stay put for a while, okay?”

“Shura…” Leaving Anthony to her soup, she got up and moved to sit close to Alexander in the booth, holding his hand, caressing his palm, kissing his fingers. “Husband…I was thinking…maybe we could stay in Napa for good?”

“Hmm. Doing what? Harvesting grapes for ten bucks a day? Or,” Alexander said with a small—very small—smile, “selling wine to men?”

Tatiana’s grin was wide. “Neither. We sell our Arizona land, we buy some land here and open our own winery. What do you think? We wouldn’t see any profits for two years while the grapes grew, but then …we could do what the Sebastianis do, just smaller. You already know so much about the business. And I could count the money.” She smiled, her sea eyes foaming. “I’m a very good counter. There are so many little vineyards around here; we could grow to be successful. We’d have a little house, another little baby, live above the winery, and it would be ours, all
ours
! We’d have a great view of real mountains, like you want. We could go a little north to a place called Alexander’s Valley”—she kissed his cheek—“see, it’s already conveniently named after you. We could start with two acres; it would be plenty to make a living. Hmm? How does that sound?”

“So-so,” said Alexander, his arm going around her, bending to her exalted, turned-up face.

Vanishing Dreams of the Valley of the Moon

Alexander left every morning at six thirty.
Tatiana didn’t have to be in until nine. She and Anthony walked the two miles to the winery. After he left, Tatiana sat by the window, paralyzed with fear and indecision. She desperately needed to call Vikki. But the last time she called, Sam had picked up Vikki’s phone.

This morning Tatiana was bent over the sink, retching. She knew she had to call, she
needed
to know if Alexander was safe, if they were safe—to stay, to begin to live their little life.

She called from a public phone near the common dining room downstairs, knowing it was still five thirty in the morning in New York, and Vikki would be asleep.

The voice on the other end of the line was groggy. “Who is this?”

“It’s Tania, Vik.” She held the phone receiver so tensely in her fingers, she thought it would break. Her mouth was pressed to the mouthpiece, and her eyes were closed.
Please. Please.

There was scrambling, dropping of the receiver, sharp cursing. Vikki didn’t say what happened, but the things she did say when she finally got back to the receiver were quite sharp and cursy themselves.

Tatiana backed away from the mouthpiece, seriously contemplating hanging up before she heard another word. She could tell that everything was not all right.

“Tatiana! What is
wrong
with you?”

“Nothing, we’re fine. Anthony says hello.” But this was said in a low, defeated voice.

“Oh my God. Why haven’t you called Sam, Tania?”

“Oh, that. I forgot.”

“YOU WHAT?”

“We’ve been busy.”

“They sent Federal agents to your aunt’s house in Massachusetts! They’ve been talking to her, to me, to Edward, to the whole hospital. They’ve been looking for you in New Mexico where you called from, and in that stupid place you bought your stupid land; Phoenix, is it?”

Tatiana didn’t know what to say. She was losing her breath.

Federal agents on the path called Jomax.

“Why didn’t you just call him as you promised?”

“I’m sorry. Why was he there last time I called?”

“Tania, he’s practically moved in. Where are you?”

“Vik, what do they want?”

“I don’t know! Call Sam, he’s dying to tell you. Do you know what Sam said to me when I told him I was going to change my telephone number? He told me I’d be arrested for conspiracy because it could mean I was protecting you!”