The Summer Garden (68 page)
“It’s so sprawling,” said Tatiana.
“Yes. Our sprawling adobe house is in the shape of a crescent Lazarevo moon,” said Alexander, “curving out to the meandering driveway, the basketball courts and the garages.”
“I love how that looks.”
“You walk in through faux-gilded gates”—Alexander lifted his eyes to Tatiana, hoping she’d remember the reference to the other—not faux—gilded gates, ones that opened a certain elm-filled garden onto a certain white night river. By the dreamy look of her on his bed, she remembered. The blueprints as foreplay. Nodding his head in tacit approval of himself, Alexander continued. “Through these gates you walk into a tumbled travertine square courtyard with palo de fierros around a circular fountain, and then proceed into the heart of the house—the kitchen, gallery, family room, playroom, library, and the long, wide dining room through the butler’s pantry. Nice, right?”
“How
big
is this dining room?” She peered closer.
“Twenty-four feet by fifteen. With a fireplace.”
“That’s
big
,” she said.
“I’m thinking generationally,” he said cheerfully. “As in, three generations down, there will be a
lot
of children. Look—the kitchen connects to the den by a gallery, with wall to ceiling windows for plants and the long wall across for photographs and memories. And here on the left are the children’s bedrooms. And here on the right wing is our secluded master suite…”
“Is that what you call it? A
master
suite?”
“
I
don’t call it that. That’s what it is. Are you listening, or are you being saucy?”
“Why can’t I listen
and
be saucy? All right, all right, I’m listening.” Tatiana made a serious face. “What’s this?”
“A fireplace that faces both the bedroom
and
the
en suite
bath,” said Alexander. “And this just outside is a private stone garden that faces both the mountains
and
the valley. I’m going to build us an enclosure for an outside fire.”
“I like the fireplace in the bedroom,” she said quietly, still brushing out her hair, but quicker. “I’d love to have one here.”
“Yes, well. They don’t put fireplaces in trailers,” Alexander said. “The house is all limestone and flagstone and terra cotta, and hardwood plank floors. Except our bedroom—that’s wall-to-wall carpet.” He grinned from ear to ear. “Where was I? Oh, yes. A covered porch runs the length of the inward curve of the back of the house. Over here is a patio and a walkway that leads to the pool.”
“It’s all extraordinary,” she said.
“The bathrooms are white,” he said, “just like you like. The kitchen is white. But look here, see this island? This is one of the most important features of the whole place.”
“Even more important than the fireplace between the bed and the whirlpool tub?”
“Almost,” Alexander said. “Imagine this black granite island, like Vishnu schist, in the middle of
your
kitchen as the heartbeat of your house. On this island you prepare food and make your dough. It’s where your children and your husband sit on cushioned barstools and eat your bread and drink your coffee and shout and argue and read the paper and talk about their day, and move earth and heaven. It’s the beginning and middle and end of every day. The music plays and your kitchen is never quiet.”
“All isolated and alone in the mountains,” Tatiana murmured.
“Yes,” Alexander said. “Privacy to yell, to weep, to swim, to sleep. Privacy for everything.”
“Shura,” Tatiana said caressingly. “It’s a beautiful dream. I see it. I see it all. I feel it. As soon as I get pregnant, we’ll build our house.”
Pointing out the increasing need for
privacy
now, with Anthony growing up and becoming more aware of things in their little home, Alexander, who had spent
four
years changing and adjusting and tinkering with the blueprints, carefully suggested building the house anyway. Tatiana gently declined.
“Who is going to manage the floorboards and the crown molding and the paint colors and the door handles? It’s a full time job. Amanda can do it, but she doesn’t work. I can’t. My two plates are full.”
Alexander was quiet, it seemed to him for, like, an hour, staring into the blueprints lying on their cream-and-crimson bedspread. “So make one of your plates less full,” he finally said, raising his eyes to her.
From across the bed she gazed mildly and affectionately at him. “Shura,” she said, “as soon as I get pregnant, I’ll leave work. We’ll build our house. What’s the hurry?” She smiled. “We have everything we need for now.
Everything
,” she whispered. “And we have plenty of privacy.” Putting the hairbrush down, Tatiana took off her robe and flung herself onto the bed, right on top of the house plans. Tilting her head back and stretching out her arms, she murmured, “Here on your bed, on her back, lies a naked young woman with her hair down, just as you like it, just as you like her. And to this you say…”
“Um, can you just ease up off the blueprints, please.”
Another year passed. They paid off the note on the land, gave everyone raises, hired new people, for the holidays flew in Esther and Rosa, a miserable Vikki and a sullen Richter, just back from Korea, gave lavish Christmas gifts and parties, had loud Sunday barbecues, went out to dinner every Saturday night, and traveled far and wide on their Sundays together, transsecting Arizona, riding horses in the mountains.
They remodeled the kitchen, bought new appliances. Alexander finished his degree, became an architect.
In the winter of 1954 they started watching television. Tatiana allowed Alexander to spare no expense in buying her one of the new color sets, on which they watched
The Singing Cowboy
and
Death Valley Days, I Love Lucy
and
The Honeymooners
. Sometimes when they watched TV Alexander lay down in her lap—as if they were still in front of the fire in Lazarevo. Sometimes Tatiana lay down in his lap.
And sometimes…as Marlene Dietrich would say,
she had, mmm, mmm, kisses sweeter than wine
.
Around Christmas season 1955, they forgot to lock their bedroom door and Anthony opened it late one night. He came in perhaps because of a nightmare, perhaps because the Christmas music was too loud on their radio, and so while “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus” played on, twelve-year-old Anthony saw his naked mother underneath his upraised naked father, he saw gripped legs and small white hands clutching large arms, and he saw
unspeakable
motion, and he heard his mother making noises as if she were in pain but yet not in pain. He made a noise himself, and Alexander, without even turning around, stopped moving, lay down on top of Tatiana to cover her, and said, “Anthony—”
The boy was out, vanished, the door open wide.
They tried to imagine the things he may have seen. They tried to feel grateful for the other—completely unexplainable—things that he could have seen and blessedly had not.
“Should we build a house
now
?” Alexander asked.
“Why?” Tatiana said. “You can leave the door unlocked in a brand new house just as well as in our mobile home. But now you better go talk to your son, Shura.”
“Oh suddenly it’s a mobile home, not a trailer—and what am I supposed to say to him?”
“I don’t know, Alexander Barrington, but you’re going to have to think of something, or do you want
me
to talk to him the way your mother talked to you?”
“All right, let’s just take one small step back toward reality,” said Alexander. “My family and I were living in a communal apartment where the man in the next room kept bringing in whores he picked up at the train station. My mother had a responsibility. She was trying to scare me off with nightmarish stories of French disease. I don’t need to scare my boy off; I think what he’s seen tonight will put him off sex for life.”
The next day Anthony squirreled away in his room with the door closed instead of sitting at the kitchen table doing his homework and chatting with Alexander. Tatiana came home; they ate. Unable to look at his mother, Anthony disappeared into his bedroom immediately after cleaning up; he didn’t even want to play basketball, despite Tatiana’s offer of a ten-point handicap.
“Has this been the order of things this morning and evening?” she asked.
“Oh yes,” Alexander replied. “He wouldn’t speak to me at breakfast either. And I’m beginning to understand my own father’s predicament. My mother pushed him on me: go talk to him, go talk to him. At the time I thought it was hilarious. Why don’t I think so anymore?”
Tatiana pushed him toward Anthony’s bedroom. “I still think it’s hilarious. Go talk to him, go talk to him.”
Alexander didn’t budge. “It occurs to me—suddenly—that
I
didn’t need the talk from my parents. Why does Ant?”
“Because he does. Stop with your excuses. You keep telling me how you’re the one in charge of him. So go be in charge. Go.”
Reluctantly Alexander knocked on the door. After coming in, he sat by a quiet Anthony on the bed, and taking a deep breath asked, “Bud, is there anything you want to talk to me about?”
“NO!” Anthony said.
“Hmm. You sure?” He patted his leg, prodded him.
Anthony didn’t say anything.
Alexander talked to him anyway. He explained that adults every once in a while wanted to have a baby. The men had
this
, and the women had
that
, and to make a baby there needed to be some conjoining, much like a tight connection of mortise and tenon between two pieces of wood. For the conjoining to be effective, there needed to be movement (which is where the mortise and tenon analogy broke down but Anthony thankfully didn’t question it), which is probably the thing that frightened Anthony, but really it was nothing to be afraid of, it was just the essence of the grand design.
To reward Alexander’s valiant efforts, Anthony stared at his father as if he had just been told his parents drank the cold blood of vampires every night before bed. “You were doing
what
?” And then he said, after a considerable pause, “You and Mom were trying to have a—
baby
?”
“Um—yes.”
“Did you have to do that once before—to make me?”
“Um—yes.”
“This is what all adults have to do to make a baby?”
“Yes.”
“So, Sergio’s mom has three children. Does that mean his parents had to do that…
three
times?”
Alexander bit his lip. “Yes,” he said.
“Dad,” said Anthony, “I don’t think Mom wants to have any more children. Didn’t you hear her?”
“Son…”
“Didn’t you hear her? Please, Dad.”
Alexander stood up. “All righty then. Well, I’m glad we had this talk.”
“Not me.”
When he came outside, Tatiana was waiting at the table. “How did it go?”
“Pretty much,” said Alexander, “like my father’s conversation went with me.”
Tatiana laughed. “You better hope it went better than that. Your father wasn’t very effective.”
“Your son
is
reading
Wonder Woman
comics, Tatia,” said Alexander. “I don’t know how effective anything I say is going to be very shortly.”
“
Wonder Woman
?”
“Have you seen Wonder Woman?” Alexander shook his head and went to get his cigarettes. “Never mind. Soon it’ll all become clear. So yes for building the house, or no?”
“No, Shura. Just lock the door next time.”
So the house went unbuilt.
Wonder Woman
got read, Anthony’s voice changed, he started barricading his bedroom door at night, while across the mobile home, across the kitchen and the living room, behind a locked door, “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus” played on and on and on.
Though Alexander was almost certain that every once in a while he heard Rosemary Clooney croon to him that his mother was right, there were blues in the night.
Tatiana and Alexander were sitting by their pool. The transistor radio was playing, he was smoking, she was sipping her tea, the dim yellow lights by the pool were on. They had been quietly chatting. There is rarely any wind in the desert at night and there wasn’t any now. A song came on that Alexander loved, a slow sad favorite song of his, and he stood and took a step to her. Tatiana looked up at him uncertainly, put her tea down. He pulled her up, he pulled her close. His hand went around her back, their fingers entwined, and on the stone deck they swirled to Nat King Cole’s “Nature Boy,” and Tatiana pressed into him as they glided in slow rivulets, in small circles by the blue ripples of their lit-up pool under the December southwestern stars. She put her head on his chest while Nat King Cole and Alexander sang to her about
the magic day he passed her way
, and when Alexander looked up toward the house, he saw himself, a fourteen-year-old, standing in adolescent embarrassment, watching his own father dance close with his mother near a hammock in Krasnaya Polyana, twenty years ago, in 1935—at the beginning of the end. It had been
the last time
he saw his parents touching gently, touching in love, and when Alexander blinked himself away, he saw his son, Anthony, standing on the deck of the house, in adolescent embarrassment watching his father dance close with his mother.
For the last time?
No matter how close Alexander and Tatiana danced—and they danced pretty darn close—there was still no child, and the relentless tick tock of the clock was heard louder and louder in all the rooms of their home, in the expanse of the plans for a pueblo mansion lying on their table. It lived with them—this white elephant in their just the right size double wide trailer—the white elephant that pored over the blueprints with them and whispered,
why do we need a custom-made castle with courtyards and fountains and dining rooms and playrooms and six bedrooms if there are going to be no more children?