The Summer Garden (81 page)

“Oh, come on,” said Johnny, drinking and grinning. “Not even a glass of beer? What’s he going to do on Friday nights?”

Alexander, holding a glass of beer at that very moment, said nothing. Johnny turned to Tatiana. “Um—how are you, Mrs. Barrington?” he said with grave solemnity. “May I just say, you’re looking especially fine this evening.” Johnny was always insipidly stilted when he talked to Tatiana. He told Alexander once that he was terrified of her because despite all the charming, polite, nice things he tried to say, she seemed to somehow see right through to the bone, to the asshole that was buried deep underneath.

Alexander had laughed. “She doesn’t think you’re an asshole,” he said. “I couldn’t have hired you if she thought so. She just thinks you’re a bit wild.”

“Yes,” said Johnny. “Wild in that asshole kind of way.”

And so, tonight after he paid her a compliment, she eyed him with spectacular detachment and said, “Thank you, Johnny-boy. Have a late night Friday night?”

“No, no, ma’am, it wasn’t too bad,” said Johnny, glancing frightened at Alexander as if already sensing that he was once again being set up and shown up for being exactly the asshole that he was, not knowing that it wasn’t him who was being set up.

Well. That was that. And that was too bad, because the poker poetry was good poetry and would have gone over well. And she would have believed it. She would have believed it because she wanted to believe it.

Your move, Alexander.

His next move was Tyrone, Johnny-boy’s
really
wild friend. Alexander would say he went with Tyrone to a strip club downtown. Very very very sorry. No poetry this time. Strip club and Tyrone were bad enough.

Tatiana didn’t dance with Alexander, didn’t talk to him, didn’t look at him.

He watched her from afar. When she wasn’t putting on a smiling face for the mingling Christmas crowd, Anthony was right, there was something vanquished in her demeanor. She didn’t look quite herself.

The music was plenty loud, Elvis Presley gyrated on the radio, exhorting the partygoers to be true, to love him tender, be his teddy bear, to not be cruel to a heart that was true…

Nat King Cole sang some Christmas music, played “Unforgettable,” played “Auld Lang Syne.”

Nat King Cole played “Nature Boy.”

Alexander was standing in one cluster in the living room, talking to a group of friends. Tatiana, with Anthony by her side, was standing nearby. “Oh, listen, Dad,” Anthony called over grimly. “Your favorite song.” In front of them was a patch of floor where couples were dancing pressed together. The tree was twinkling, the Christmas candles burned. And Nat King Cole sang of loving and being loved in return.

Alexander made his way over to her and said, “Let’s go home.”

He held the coat for her in front of Shannon and Amanda, who asked if everything was all right, and Shannon gave Alexander a tense non-glance into the plants. “Everything is wonderful,” Tatiana said to her hosts without a glimmer of a smile.

On the way home, it was Anthony who broke the searing silence by starting to sing…
it’s lovely weather/for a sleigh ride together with you…
Alexander leaned forward and shot Anthony a side look that said you better stop this second. Anthony stopped that second but not before he whispered,
it’ll be the perfect ending/to a perfect day…

Alexander stayed outside, read the paper and smoked, and sat so long, he fell asleep on the bench. Waking up freezing and cramped, he went to bed and lay down beside her. He remembered them in Lazarevo, lying clamped together near the fire under the stars, searching for Perseus up in the galaxy. Her family was gone. His was gone. And fifteen and a half years later, in a miracle, in a dream, with divine grace, they lay unclamped in a home they had made for themselves after all they had been through, while she was in a nightgown, possibly wore underwear and a bra, possibly even a steel helmet and flak jacket, and he couldn’t come near her to find out, thinking of all the possible lies for last Friday and all the possible lies for the coming Wednesday.

Poker with Johnny

Till six in the morning—

Stayed out too late

Didn’t want to tell you

When I was half dead

In bed

Upset you for nothing

I’m sorry, I’m sorry

Was going to come clean

Spilled beer on my jeans

The cholla knows nothing

I’m sorry I’m sorry

But Carmen is waiting

For me at the Westin

—Poker with Johnny

Till six in the morning.

CHAPTER TWELVE
Gone Astray

So Blue Thinking About You

Wednesday night after work
Alexander sat in front of an obscure bar-restaurant all the way south in Chandler. He sat in his truck, the engine still running, his unbandaged, barely scabbed-over hands on the wheel. He was in his best suit. He had driven miles from his usual haunts to meet Carmen.

It was past eight, past the time he was supposed to meet her and he—who was never late unless Tatiana made him late—was sitting in the truck. All he had to do was turn off the engine and go inside. What was the problem?

Tatiana was still making him late.

It took something out of Alexander to prepare for this, to prevent questions in case any arose, to think of contingencies. “Can Ant go to Francesca’s after school? I’m working late,” he had said to Tatiana that morning. They hadn’t been speaking, except through and about Anthony. Alexander had been counting—depending—on more unbearable silence, but instead this morning, Tatiana had said, “Oh, I’m sorry. Another late meeting? Like you don’t work hard enough. Will you eat?”

Alexander promised her he would eat.

And now it was eating him up inside.

He said to her as they were getting ready, “I don’t know how late I’ll be. It’s way down south.”

And Tatiana said, “Don’t worry. Just go do what you have to do. I’ll be waiting. How are your hands? Are they feeling better? You want me to rebandage them?”

This after four days of barely speaking!

So now Alexander was sitting here, about to go do what he had to do. And he couldn’t leave the truck.

“Do you want me to call?” he asked just before she left for work, when she was already at the door, cap on, nurse bag in her hands.

“If you’re going to be very late, call,” said Tatiana. “Otherwise just come home.” She did not, however, look at him when she said these things, nor raise her eyes to him.

The engine hummed. The whirling dervish inside him was so unstill and so merciless that he found himself shaking the wheel in a hellish attempt to get control of himself.

It was all right. It would be all right. She would never know—about this. Alexander did not tell her his prepared lies about Tyrone because she had not asked, and he was certainly not going to volunteer. Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, she never looked at him and said, “Where were you till six in the morning?”

Yet things were happening in his tranquil house that he could hardly ignore. Tatiana had not cooked for him since Friday; had not made fresh
bread
! She had not washed his clothes. She had not made his side of the bed, or picked up his cigarette butts, or thrown away his newspapers, or brought him coffee. Tatiana had not gone grocery shopping. Both Monday and Tuesday, Alexander had to bring milk home.

“You haven’t bought milk,” he said on Monday.

“I forgot,” she said.

Tuesday she said nothing and he didn’t ask. Both days she worked, and at night the lamps had not gone on, the candles had not been lit. Both evenings Alexander had to light the Christmas tree himself when he got home. And despite their civil words this Wednesday morning—a fact remained as stark and foreign as the Japanese in Normandy: they had not kissed since Saturday, had not
touched
in bed since Saturday. These were uncharted waters in their marriage. Since they had been together, they had not spent a single day without touching; it was as certain as the moontides; and now they—who slept at night as if they were still on the ground in his tent in Luga—had not touched for four days!

What did Alexander think was going on with her?

He wasn’t thinking about her. He was thinking only about himself and all the lies he could tell her so that she would never find out.

Carmen’s sedan was in the lot. She was already inside waiting. He turned off the engine. He had to go in. They would have a drink, maybe a quick—very quick—bite to eat. Afterward—Alexander had brought cash for the Westin hotel, condoms for himself, he was ready. He’d go with her, spend an hour, maybe two, shower, get dressed, leave.

And here’s where the trouble was: right at the point of showering with hotel soap and leaving Carmen to go home to an “I’ll be waiting” Tatiana. When he came home after having sex with another woman, would he have to look Tatiana in the face, or could he count on her eyes being turned away from him? Or would he have to
not
look her in the face? She would smell the hotel soap. He’d have to shower without soap. She’d smell the wet hair. She would know by the look in his eyes. She would know by his averted eyes. She’d know by touching him. She would know
instantly
.

Carmen was waiting for him. Shouldn’t he have decided not to go through with it
before
the moment he was nattily dressed and freshly showered and had condoms in his pocket?

Condoms.

Alexander’s heart closed in around itself. That’s how deliberate he was, how prepared, how set for betrayal. This wasn’t an out of control moment, like last Friday night. Oh, honey, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to. I just got drunk and lost control. It doesn’t mean anything, honey, honey, honey.

No. This was premeditated betrayal. This was betrayal in cold blood.

Alexander wasn’t drunk, he wasn’t out of control, and he had bought condoms in advance.

He could barely convince even himself about the out of control moment last Friday night. He did, after all, sit at the bar alone, waiting for Carmen to show up. Would that sound out of control to Tatiana’s ears? On the one hand, Tania, my faithful truck, on the other, sitting in a bar for an hour waiting for the party girl. It all evens out, right?

It was dark in the lot. The lights of the bar were twinkling. Through the decorated-for-Christmas windows, Alexander could see people moving about inside, couples talking.

She is so sanguine and
so
busy. She works sixty hours a week. She’ll never find out. Even if she finds out, she’ll forgive me. She forgives me for everything. We will go on as before.

Yet his house was not cleaned and his clothes were not washed. There was no food on his table, nor lips on his face.

Alexander was breathing hard, trying to wade through his mire. Having dinner with another woman! He had never done it, not even in the years before Tatiana when he was in the army—especially when he was in the army. When he was a garrison soldier, he bought the girls drinks, and thirty minutes later, their skirts were hitched up at the parapets. Those were his courtships. Alexander was thirty-eight years old and he had never taken anyone out for dinner before he had sex with them, except Tatiana.

The imagining himself in the awkwardness, in the stilted conversation, in the pretend flirtation was paralyzing his hands behind the wheel, was tamping out his desire for someone new, his excitement for a bit of strange. And then the coming home, showered—or perhaps
not
showered? It was unimaginable. Tamping out with a talon of steel.

And suddenly—
He is lying on dirty straw. He has been beaten so many times, his body is one bloodied bruise; he is filthy, he is hideous, he is a sinner and he is utterly unloved. At any moment, at any instant, he will be put on a train in his shackles and taken through Cerberus’s mouth to Hades for the rest of his wretched life. And it is at that precise moment that the light shines from the door of his dark cell #7, and in front of him Tatiana stands, tiny, determined, disbelieving, having returned for him. Having abandoned the infant boy who needs her most to go find the broken beast who needs her most. She stands mutely in front of him, and doesn’t see the blood, doesn’t see the filth, sees only the man, and then he knows: he is not cast out. He is loved.

What a blithering idiot.

Alexander started up the engine, put the truck into reverse, peeled out of the parking lot and drove home, leaving Carmen waiting for him inside the restaurant. On the way home, he remembered—just in time—pulled into a gas station, and threw out the condoms he bought into the public trash.

He got home after nine thirty.

After parking the truck next to her Thunderbird, Alexander walked quietly up the deck stairs and watched Tatiana from the unshaded window. She was in her short silk robe, her hair was down. She hadn’t seen him yet, hadn’t heard him pull up; the music must be playing. She was sitting at the kitchen table, her back to the door, her head lowered, her shoulders slumped. She was holding her stomach and she was crying.

On the table there was fresh bread. One candle was lit. The Christmas tree was bright, the table lamps were on, the lights around the windows sparkled.

Anthony was nowhere to be seen.

Unable to watch her anymore, Alexander took a deep breath, and with his heart as heavy as a rock, opened the door. Please,
please,
let me keep my brave and indifferent face.