The Wonder Garden (13 page)

The following day, he drives a loaded car to the Gregorys' house. The draining sensation in his gut has been replaced by something heavy and solid like an iron brick. He drives up to the scene of his wife's collapse and feels a dull distance, as if he were viewing it through a periscope. He sees, through the periscope's tunnel, that the scaffolding has been removed. A small group of insects clings to the upper corner of the house's face like a mole.

Martin goes to the door, clothed in his denim work shirt, and shakes Bill Gregory's hand. He accepts repeat condolences, and then asks when he might resume work.

The Gregorys cautiously express their appreciation that he intends to finish. They consult briefly, out of earshot. Finally they agree to let the project recommence, with the condition that they hire a crew to install the rest of the piece. Martin, of course, will serve as artistic supervisor.

It feels good to get out of the house. Martin's family has made no move to decamp, nor have they sought rapprochement. The accusation in the air is oppressive. He goes out into a fine spring day and walks along the side of the road to the site. The iron brick remains lodged in his gut, and the periscope vision persists. Far away, he hears a sound that he identifies as the trill of birds. The scaffolding is in the process of being replaced by men who do not appear to be artist assistants but construction workers.

The Gregorys give Martin a pair of binoculars, with which he can survey the work from a director's chair on the ground, and for several weeks he enjoys shouting out the names of the insects to the men. Despite their casual manner, the men are prodigious and accurate workers, and Martin watches as, day by day, the house grows a beard of exoskeletons and wings.

At last, Martin's family takes their leave. He observes their preparations through the periscope and feels little emotion as they load Claude's car with luggage and some of Philomena's things. He knows that he should be affected. He should plead with them to stay, ask for more time to grieve, more consolation. Or perhaps he should ask to accompany them, sell the house and live the rest of his days warm and watched over in Nashville. Instead, he bends down to let his granddaughters hug him and waves from the front door as the car reverses out of the driveway.

The men affix the final insect on the last day of May. When they take the tarps and scaffolding down and pack up their equipment, the house looks dazzling in the noon sun. Martin backs away, all the way to the road. Not a glimpse of the original brick is visible. The entire facade is completely shrouded in dark, voluptuous texture. Here and there, dashes of color—fuchsia butterfly, lime-green caterpillar—pop like jewels. It is exactly, incredibly, the way Martin imagined it. The manifestation of the house from his dreams, the improbable pinnacle of his career. As he stands at the end of the driveway, he sobs like a child.

The Gregorys come out to join him. Bill pats him on the back and Coraline holds his hand kindly. They are very pleased with how it has turned out, Bill says. It is a masterpiece, unlike anything they've ever encountered.

Martin is unable to speak for a moment. “I just wish Phil were here to see it,” he says.

Within days, the first phone calls come in. The Gregorys field these with aplomb, listening to the neighbors' grievances and politely asserting their own rights as Old Cranbury property owners. They've been preparing for this kind of reaction, they tell Martin. They know that not everyone shares their avant-garde tastes. With a little time, they predict, the calls will taper off. People will grow accustomed to the sight, perhaps begin to appreciate its aesthetic value. Eventually,
Swarm
might even become a beloved town landmark.

But, over the summer months, the calls overflow to the town hall. The house is a travesty, disgusting to look at. It is bringing property values down. One passerby telephones in a panic, thinking the creatures are real. The house was already bad enough, some snap, but this is a middle finger to the rest of the town. There need to be regulations to suppress people like the Gregorys who believe the world is theirs to deface.

Finally, in November, Martin reads in the
Old Cranbury Gazette
about the lawsuit against his patrons. The art installation is incorrigibly offensive to the residents of the town. A black-and-white photograph of the house accompanies the front-page article. Martin sees his own name captioned beneath the image, and his breath catches for a moment. In the fuzzy photograph, of substandard resolution, the piece does look horrific, like the scene of a crime.

All publicity is good publicity, he reminds himself. Lying alone in bed, habitually on the right-hand side, he allows his mind to drift through the possibilities. The art media will surely catch wind of the controversy, and there might be a write-up in one of the monthly publications. The longer the Gregorys resist, the better for his own career. Perhaps other suburban iconoclasts will contact him about commissions. He feels a sweet shudder at the thought, despite the heavy awareness of the empty space at his left.

Later that week, Bill Gregory comes to the door. He shakes Martin's hand firmly, gives a brief, beleaguered smile, and announces that they are going to take the piece down. The battle is grueling already, and it has only begun. The situation is emotionally depleting for his wife, in particular, who has not taken well to being the town pariah.

They will cover the cost of de-installation, Bill says as he rises from the couch. And Martin, of course, will keep his commission payment. As Bill speaks, Martin sits quietly and watches his neighbor's gesturing hands, the gold wedding band making designs in the air. He watches the knob in Bill's throat move up and down the pink column of his neck. When Bill shakes his hand, Martin receives the grip impassively. As Bill leaves, the storm door lets in a crisp breeze before closing with a flatulent sigh.

The next week, a truck comes to Martin's house. A man rings his doorbell and asks where they can put the crates. There is no room in the studio—the garage—he tells them. He signs a paper and closes the door. He watches through the window as the men unload wooden crates onto the driveway. Then the truck pulls away.

Martin steps outside, and the autumn sun hits him flat in the face. He walks, partly blinded, toward the maze of crates on the pavement, each sealed tight. Fingering the perimeter of one lid, he feels the divots where each screw is firmly countersunk. There are at least twenty screws in this one lid. He sits down on the box. The sunlight crowns his head, indiscriminately loving. The fiery trees flap their excitable hands.

He thinks of the little pond behind the house, icy in winter, covered with algae in summer. He remembers chasing frogs with the kids, capturing dragonflies. Just now, the water would be clean and cold beneath a scrim of vibrant leaves. He entertains a vision: a pond bejeweled by insects. Floating grasshoppers and bees, the water shuddering alive. The foam would keep them afloat, and he would go in after them, sink down among them. He would drop through them with his iron weight, completing the piece and bestowing its meaning.

Martin sits for another moment, then uses both hands to push himself up. He leans down to the crate he'd been sitting on and tries to lift it, but the strain on his back is too much and he lets it drop back to the ground. Straightening, he surveys the jumble of boxes—too many to count, identical, equally impossible. He squints into the sun. A car approaches, loud and filled with children. A boy sees him with his boxes and waves. He waves back instinctively. The car rumbles out of earshot, and the small sounds of birds return.

V
ISA

T
HEY MEET
in the parking lot. She supposes that this is one of the more dampening aspects of suburban dating, this kind of public, day-lit rendezvous. They shake hands on the strip mall sidewalk like business associates. He is tall—taller than she remembers—with a pronounced jaw that hinges on the brink of ugliness. For a moment, she is thrown. In the blush-toned glow of O'Reilly's Pub, postmidnight, his profile had reminded her of a Roman statue. It is possible that she had even said this. Now, studying the flat-sloped nose and deep, suggestive cleft at the top lip, she understands that this is the kind of face that defies easy categorization. The kind of face that does not reveal itself at once, but alters with the faintest breeze of feeling.

In the Japanese restaurant they are enveloped by cool, regulated air, the sounds of synthesizers and burbling water. As they settle at their table, Camille watches his hands. Smooth and slender with neat oval-shaped nails, the type of quasi-feminine, erotic hands she notices on men from time to time. She meets his eyes—granite gray, dominating—and her initial distaste is interrupted by a slight shudder. All at once, the patchwork of his face seems to harmonize and become familiar, inevitable.

“So,” he begins, without prelude. “How old is your daughter?”

Camille smiles sourly. It is unfair to start this way. “She's three.”

He nods. This is the moment when another woman might take the bait and lightly ask if he'd like to have children of his own someday. Perhaps he is already testing her. She drops her eyes to the menu, allows the moment to extend uncomfortably.

“You don't look like a mother.” He is not smiling, but staring with a directness that creates an animal confusion in her, a concurrent swelling and shrinking.

They eat their sushi rolls carefully, with strict restraint. She has heard it said that surgeons are wild. As he looks at her over the bamboo bento trays, she feels a pull from these darkening eyes that seem to tunnel away light.

He's never been married, he confirms in a neutral voice that reveals neither regret nor pride. A surgeon's life doesn't leave much time for meeting women, he says, especially in a place like this.

She pictures his condominium, a spare shelter like her own with few furnishings. He must make money, she thinks, and have nothing to spend it on. She can tell from his clothing, a pale gray dress shirt with mother-of-pearl buttons, that he has a foundation for elegance.

“You must feel isolated,” Camille suggests.

“Sometimes,” he says.

Camille wants to reach across the table and squeeze his hand, tell him that she knows. Things are impossible here. Since Nick left, she's been locked in a prison of women. Her days are nearly bereft of the male sex. She rarely sees Mark and Harris anymore and, anyway, they don't count. From time to time a rogue father will join the crowd of mothers for preschool pickup. When this happens, she finds herself standing differently, out of habit, generating the old energy regardless of what the poor man looks like, however paunchy or beaten down. And he looks at her. They always do. She supposes that she receives some trifling pleasure from this, some pellet of reward, like a pigeon that pecks a lever for birdseed. But afterward, the satisfaction fizzles and she's left with a vacant feeling, as if she's shoplifted something too easily.

They finish a bottle of sake together. He asks questions and listens intently, gravely, as if the answers were credo. She hardly notices her noodle dish vanish and be replaced by pistachio ice cream, which vanishes in turn.

“I've always dreamed of living in Paris.” Camille allows herself to shift into a kittenish purr, leaning closer. “I was there once, during college. I thought someday I'd find an apartment with big windows and a fluffy white bed.”

“Mmm.” He smiles.

She laughs a tinkling arpeggio. But it is the truth. She has always romanticized living abroad—Paris, Barcelona, Rome—imagined herself living alone, the way a man might live. It is a quaint, clichéd nineteenth-century idea of liberation, perhaps, but the impulse to roam is native in her, and its continued denial a source of panic.

Of course, living alone is impossible now with Avis. So Camille has revised her vision of Paris to include a partner. The fluffy bed, she reasons, would be even better with a man in it. Now it's only a matter of finding him, whose passion is equal to hers. Sadly, it's nearly impossible to imagine such a man in a town like this, for whom the hills beyond the supermarket beckon with urgent promise. Nick, she has to admit, had been like that. He'd had that hunger in him. That much they had shared.

She does not mention Paris again, but it floats in the air between them like a specter. And the brief kiss they share in the parking lot, amid the doltish Volvos and Volkswagens, is like a pact, the first upward tug of a kite.

At home, the babysitter already has her coat on. Camille can hear Avis still awake in her room, singing to herself.

“I was supposed to be home by ten,” the girl grumbles.

“Can your mom pick you up?”

“I told her you were driving me home.”

On the road, Avis sits in her car seat in her pajamas and screams for a cookie. The cookies are in her other purse, Camille patiently explains, but her daughter does not relent. Already, within moments, she feels herself deflating.

“I wonder what your
father's
doing right now,” she calls back, unconcerned about the preteen slumped in the passenger seat, listening. Let her hear it, let her be warned. Camille laughs bitterly. “Definitely not this, that's for sure.”

Avis shrieks, and Camille rolls down the rear window to give her daughter a blast of cold air. Nick is fifty miles to the south, elevated in his pseudo loft on Spring Street, living some approximation of a 1980s fantasy with his black-haired, thin-lipped dominatrix. This is how Camille pictures the woman, anyway, the older coworker whose name,
Victoria
, she'd found infesting his call history. The fact that this Victoria is allegedly pregnant, thanks to some medical miracle, does not change the picture.

On the way back from the babysitter's house, Avis falls asleep in her seat, and Camille carries her to bed. Asleep, she is a dreamy thing. Her eyelashes form a golden mesh, and her face is innocent, forgetful of the dramas and torments of the day. Camille puts her face close, inhales the sweet breath. These little moments are hers alone now. Let Nick try to find them with his new child.

The next morning, the sake has receded like the tide and left her brain dry and seaweed strewn. She goes out in big sunglasses, a shearling coat, and boots over jeans. The sun throbs in the sky as she leads Avis to the entrance of Bright Beginnings. The two self-appointed “class mothers” are there, flanking the door, smiling with their horse teeth. One of them thrusts a flyer at her.

“Hope you'll contribute!”

Her hand trembles as she takes the sheet. A bake sale.
All families are invited to contribute a healthful, nut-free treat. Gluten-free and vegan especially encouraged!
She would like to throw the flyer into the recycling bin. In these first few weeks, she has received flyers discouraging plastic utensils at school, prohibiting tree nuts in the building, requesting awareness of branded clothing in the classroom.

“Twinkies okay?” Camille smiles broadly at the mothers, despite the pain of it, and herds her daughter through the door. Avis's hair is still matted from sleep, gathered in two stubby pigtails like horns on top of her head. Still, she is the prettiest girl in the classroom. The other children are cropped and bobbed, uniformed in drab organic clothing. Avis regards them coolly through glass-blue eyes, her father's best feature. She is long lashed and bubblegum pink in her ruffled skirt and sequined Mary Janes.

It delights Camille to dress her daughter this way, in the frothiest clothing she can find, if only to scandalize the other mothers. You would think the Disney princesses were succubi by the way these women talk.
I just don't understand why so many parents buy into the marketing,
they say
. They're basically grooming their girls to become appearance-obsessed little consumers.
These are the kind of primitive feminists, she is certain, who began referring to themselves as “women” at age eighteen, who sat with straight faces through college demonstrations of dental dams. She has no use for women like these, who would keep musty, second-wave feminism on life support. The rest of the world has moved on. It has thanked the poor, neutered mothers and grandmothers for the dreary work they did, and put on stilettos again with free-ranging pride.

So when Camille comes across such women standing together, their faces grave as crusaders, she finds herself pausing, despite herself, pretending to look for something in her bag. Always, she tells herself to back away, but feels her face heat. It is a public service to shut them down.

Excuse me,
she'll say.
But I can't help overhearing, and I have to ask, do you really have a problem with little girls playing dress-up?

The mothers will glare in their oatmeal bouclé-knit sweaters. After a moment, the most emboldened, ugliest mother will collect herself and reply,
We don't mean that they shouldn't play dress-up. We just think it's important to put some thought into what we offer our daughters. You know, rather than just accepting whatever's marketed to them?

Mmm, right. The personal is political.
Camille nods.
But you know this stuff is marketed to little girls for a reason. Because they
love
it.

She knows they talk about her. That's what happens to independent-minded people in this place, to anyone who isn't brainwashed by beady-eyed mommy culture. They resent her, she knows, for preserving her pre-parent self, for dressing like a woman, for not surrendering to the dowdy, practical fashions that make the rest of them look like they've always just come from the gym, or bed.

Her only female friend in town is Madeleine Gaines, who'd risen from the city like a benevolent spirit. Her husband had been a colleague of Nick's at Clarkson-Ross, and they had all gotten together once for tapas in Union Square. When Camille first saw Madeleine in town, shuffling through the grocery aisles in a fabulous retro block-print maternity dress, she called and jogged up to her in a rush of bonhomie. She'd invited her over that very afternoon, and their roles were set from there: Camille was the outrageous, demonstrative one; Madeleine the good listener.

Perhaps she calls too often. Madeleine would be too polite to ever say so. But, today, she doesn't care; she's just happy to have a confidante she can tell about her date. Her old city friends would be too loyal, or hostile, to Nick's memory—like Mark and Harris, whose shared distaste for her ex still unaccountably rankles her. It is liberating to detach from them all, to begin a fresh history here.

They sit on beanbags in Camille's bedroom, like college roommates, sipping Cape Codders from margarita glasses.

“Where does he work?” Madeleine asks.

“Some hospital around here, I guess. I didn't ask.”

“What kind of surgery does he do?”

Camille looks curiously at her friend. This is the difference between them, she decides. This anchor of practicality—or its sweet absence.

“What the hell should I care?” Camille smiles and takes a drink. Madeleine lifts her eyebrows and smiles in return, then tucks her feet under herself like a cat. She had removed her shoes at the door, although Camille had asked her not to. This is one of the small changes she's noticed in Madeleine lately. Concern about floors. Clothing that has shifted away from bright, geometric prints to dull plaids and country colors. Today she is wearing, of all things, a quilted vest.

“I think you should consider joining the book group,” Madeleine says, swirling her glass. “At least come with me to a meeting and see what it's like. Really, it's just an excuse to get together with other women.”

Camille stares. Madeleine, she knows, can do better than that. Last year, she and her husband had gone to South America and brought the baby. It was part of some spiritual quest of David's, something that Madeleine does not like to discuss, but that thrills Camille. She knows that, since moving to the suburbs, David has undergone a drastic and mysterious change—­abandoning convention rather than embracing it. According to Nick, he stopped attending client meetings at work and refused to use the computer. After his dismissal, he started hosting “clients” at home. This all makes Camille like Madeleine even more. To be married to a man like that, she must be a dissident, too. Camille praises herself for having unearthed a kindred spirit, for allying herself with the town's only other fearless woman.

“Mmm.” Camille grins, holding her stare. “You know what I miss? The Cooler. Passerby. Do you remember those?”

“Of course,” Madeleine says, her face neither brightened nor clouded by memory.

“I wonder if we might have seen each other out somewhere. Oh, and remember Lit Lounge on Second Avenue? I think it's still there.”

She keeps a lock on Madeleine's eyes, seeking a hint of understanding. What she really wants to know is whether she still feels the burn. Does she, too, listen to music from her youth while driving and detect a carnal urge inside the traffic, catch the glances of strangers through car windows? It is an accepted truth, of course, that the reckless impulses of that music are dead now. There is nothing useful to be done with them. Still, the old rhythm catches in her, and she feels like a club princess trapped in a Toyota. In this state, she becomes aware of the hidden, parallel world beneath the mundane. Just beneath the surface of every defunct moment—waiting at a stoplight, finding a spot in the supermarket parking lot—lurks another moment, sexual, adulterous, waiting to be chosen. It shimmers faintly, a phosphorescent arc of lighter fluid ready to catch fire, detectable only to those attuned to it. She parks the car and watches the men and women going in and out through the automatic doors. Which of them are alight, secretly smoldering?