The Wonder Garden (14 page)

Madeleine waves her hand dismissively. She reaches into her tote bag and retrieves a copy of the book that her group will be discussing. Camille looks at the cover, a tablescape with dropped flower petals. Some bleak, bestselling woman's memoir. She can think of no book she'd less like to read. Without checking the jacket flap, she is certain that the book has been marketed as “empowering,” that it is tailored to a nation of dispirited women looking for someone to pity, some way to cheer themselves.

“It's a good way of meeting people around here. Really, it's an excuse to get together,” Madeleine repeats.

Camille softens her eyes and smiles. What she wants to say is that she has no need to meet people. She only needs one friend, and Madeleine is it.

“I appreciate the offer, I really do. I guess I'm just not in the mood for reading right now.”

Later that night, Camille allows herself to type the doctor's name into the computer. As she'd suspected, the name is so commonplace that nothing useful surfaces. She checks the rosters of local hospitals, hoping for a photograph of him, but there is no matching name, no matching picture.

“Oh, they never update their websites,” he says about the hospitals later. They are tucked at a corner table in a Spanish restaurant in the woods. “I'm at St. Joseph's.” The way he says this is so offhand, so uninterested, that whatever seed of doubt Camille might have had is hurriedly interred.

His condominium complex has just been fumigated for termites, he tells her, so they go to her house instead. They wait in the driveway until the babysitter comes out to the car. The girl stares, and Camille widens her eyes in imitation.

“Yep, home early.” She fights back tentacles of embarrassment while rummaging for cash in her purse. “Get in, let's go.”

The babysitter sits in the back of the car, behind Camille and the doctor. It's only a five-minute drive to her house—easily walkable, but nobody lets their kids live anymore—and Avis is safely asleep in her bed. Camille has no patience for the kinds of people who consider it criminal to leave a sleeping child alone for ten minutes. Those are the kinds of people whose lives are governed by fear, or at least fear of vilification by their peers. The kinds of people who, with all the late-night news they watch, remain ignorant of the practices of the real world outside their bubbles: the contortions and improvisations of those without resources, the risible logistics of single parenthood.

Still, the awkwardness inside the car is painful. Camille feels a slight irritation with the doctor for forcing her into this situation. She would rather screw in a fumigation tent for twenty minutes than go through this whole production. After dropping off the babysitter, they drive back to the house in silence, toward a flat moon netted behind tree branches. Camille watches her feet pass over the concrete walkway and, inhaling the sharp night air, is stunned for a moment by her own autonomy, the giddy sweep of her jurisdiction, so completely and finally adult. She can choose whatever she wants. And she chooses this. There is a feeling like expanding helium in her as she thinks of it, filling her head and groin.

A draft comes through the bedroom window, itself marked with dried edges of paint and the residue of old decals. Usually, while dressing and undressing, she prefers to leave the window shade open, just for kicks, but tonight she pulls it down. Her bed is a futon on the floor, the same she's had since graduating from college, the same she and Nick shared for ten years. Beside it rests a stereo and vintage turntable, and above hangs a battered poster for Le Chat Noir, its slanted yellow eyes like a call to a more instinctual, hedonistic time. This futon and poster have been pillars of Camille's environment for decades. She hasn't bought a new item of furniture or decor in years—just entering a Bed Bath & Beyond gives her an anxiety attack—but that's all right. It's better to keep her bedroom minimalistic, unobtrusive, deferential to the sovereignty of its inhabitant.

Tonight, she goes through her box of vinyl and settles on Nina Simone. The doctor smiles in comprehension, and they fold together onto the futon. Camille is grateful not to be one of those women for whom beds are ruined by past partners. For her, history is continually erased so that each man is the first. There is no trace of Nick on this mattress. The doctor puts his hands in her hair and presses his fingertips into her scalp.

Only once does she think of Avis, asleep in her bed, but this comes to her from afar. There is nothing to keep her from falling, spiraling back to the raw sensations of her younger days. Each touch of this man is a discovery, and she nearly cries with gratitude for this renewal, this unexpected springtime.

He does not spend the night. This is an important trait, Camille recognizes, this unspoken consideration of her circumstances.

They spend an evening in the city. Camille drops Avis off with the housekeeper at Nick's apartment, wishing that her date were beside her instead of waiting downstairs in his double-parked BMW. She wants the housekeeper to see him, so that she might describe him to Nick. Looking over the woman's shoulder, she glowers at the loft's furnishings, the antiseptic white and chrome, backlit by a wall of blinding windows. She nearly throws Avis's toy bag inside, and presses a baggie of cookies into the housekeeper's hand.

Within an hour, she is on a hotel bed with the doctor, talking about Paris. He's been there several times, it turns out, and speaks workable French. There may be opportunities for him abroad. Camille expresses disbelief that he'd be so easy to sway, so amenable to adventure.

He kisses her. “If not now, when?” As simple as that.

When the night is fully dark, they wander down White Street to a new restaurant with black leather banquettes and brushed nickel sconces. She appreciates the gesture, but her head is already in Paris. The preening patrons of this restaurant—of Manhattan, of America—strike her as uptight and vainglorious. Even the food is pert and prude. She longs for the bloody steaks and stained-wood bistros of the Left Bank. She longs for the rancid smell of the Métro. She grips his hand under the table, and he gives her the thundercloud look.

“Let's do it,” he says. “Let's go for a week or two, just look around, see what the properties are like.”

Camille lances an endive and brings it to her mouth. It is inexpressibly tender. The space it leaves on her plate is like an opening to the future, a smooth white channel. She chews slowly. This is a moment to capture. The doctor is in front of her, staring in his turbid way, his protean face taking on new and amazing arrangements. His lips lift in a sly smile meant only for her, those devastating, cloven lips.

“We could look at Montmartre,” he says with a convincing French inflection. “Or the Marais. It's very hip right now.”

Camille sips her Grenache. This bottle—his choice—is like none she's ever tasted, with a palate of blackberry, chocolate, and things that couldn't possibly be there, like roses and pine needles. She waits until the last of the taste has dwindled in her mouth before speaking.

“You should get to know Avis,” she says quietly.

The doctor takes a drink of water, nods.

“Maybe we could spend a Saturday together,” Camille ventures.

“That's a fine idea,” he says.

When he drops them at the house late that night, he pets Avis on the head tentatively, and Camille thinks she sees something recoil in his eyes, as if he's received an electric shock from her hair. This is to be expected, of course, from a man without children.

Avis pulls back and clings to her mother's leg.

“It's all right,” Camille says with a little laugh. “She'll get used to you.”

The fact that he's here is what matters. He does not need to be a father. Camille will make certain that Avis does not require more than he can comfortably give. She will make certain that this remains a pleasurable endeavor for him, all the way through.

It's already October, but she puts on a Betsey Johnson ikat dress over leggings. Little girls are right, she thinks, to wear their Easter best to school. Why not be beautiful every day? Today, it pleases her to watch the other mothers' eyes slide to her cleavage and vault back as if scalded. She feels sorry for them, without any hope of such regeneration in their lives. There is nothing newly available to these women, sunk as they are in the sludge of marriage and family, that could match this kind of elevation. Who can blame them for packing together like nervous ewes?

She has begun arriving a few minutes late for pickup to avoid the bleating flock. The school has yet to levy the ten-dollar penalty they are forever threatening. But today, the teacher meets her at the classroom door with a portentous smile. Camille prepares an excuse: broken traffic light, clogged parking lot.

“Mrs. Donovan,” the teacher says in her nursery school falsetto, “do you have a few moments to talk?”

Ten dollars, Camille decides, is a fair price to pay for the benefit she receives. She smiles deferentially and enters the classroom. Avis is involved with a dollhouse, a pathetic thing built of unvarnished wood. The teacher gestures to a squat little table, and Camille lowers onto a tiny chair, her knees jutting up. Everything in the room is custom-built for children, so that she feels like Alice in a dream.

The teacher is younger than Camille, dressed in head-to-toe L.L.Bean. “We don't want you to be alarmed,” she begins, “but we've noticed that Avis seems to be having some trouble expressing herself verbally. Of course, our children are all at different stages of development, but at this age, we encourage them to make their needs known with words rather than screeching or pushing. But this can be difficult when there are underlying problems.” The teacher maintains sympathetic, professional eye contact as she speaks in her girlish voice. “We think it might be a good idea for you to bring her in for an evaluation.”

Camille nods. She should have known this might happen. Every child seems to be diagnosed with something these days. The classroom is crowded with physical therapists, occupational therapists, speech therapists. There are new disorders now: attention deficit disorder, sensory processing disorder, oppositional defiant disorder. She supposes there's money in it somewhere. It must behoove someone to capitalize on the micromanaging compulsions and amorphous fears of all these hysterical mothers.

“Professional guidance can make a meaningful difference,” the teacher continues.

“Thank you for the suggestion,” Camille says, rising from the midget chair. There are plenty of things she could say, plenty of ways she could poke holes in this girl's authoritative facade, but it isn't worth it. Soon they will be a thousand miles over the ocean.

She researches visa requirements and buys a French language book. If they end up staying in Paris, she'll look for a waitressing job. Even better, the doctor will find a position in a hospital and she won't have to work at all. They'll hire a French nanny for Avis.

“When are you planning to do this?” Madeleine asks.

“Soon. November or December, maybe.”

Madeleine nods. She glances at the floor, then back up. “How well do you know this person?”

Camille looks at her friend, the pleasingly regular features, smooth skin, thick auburn hair. There is nothing shadowed in her face, no canyon or concavity that speaks of pain or regret.

“How well do any of us know anyone?”

Madeleine is quiet. She smiles in a sad way, as if thinking of something private. She almost never talks about her own husband. When Camille brings him up, asks for details about his eccentric behavior, Madeleine changes the subject.

“What about Avis's school?” Madeleine asks. “Aren't you going to let her finish the year?”

Camille laughs. “It's nursery school. And she'll learn more from a nanny in Paris than she will here, don't you think? She'll become bilingual. Not to mention there's a healthier balance in Europe, for mothers. Women don't have to apologize for having lives, you know? They aren't expected to spend every minute of the day in the playground. Kids play with kids, like they're supposed to, and adults play with adults. That's the way it used to be here, too, until the mommy police came into power.”

“Huh,” says Madeleine. “Well, I've never been to France.”

Camille sits straight up in her beanbag. “You should come! Well, not right away, of course. But after we get settled, if we decide to stay, you and David should come visit. We could show you around, and then who knows? Maybe you'll want to stay, too. We can be our own little expatriate community.”

Madeleine smiles wistfully. “If we hadn't just bought the house, maybe I'd consider it.”

“Oh, I could totally see you in Paris.” Camille nods. “You'd fit right in. You'd flourish.”

Again, a class mother stands sentinel at the preschool entrance, holding a clipboard with papers, an alert, searching smile on her face. Camille puts on a rushed, apologetic look and manages to duck past with Avis. But on her way back out of the building, the woman ambushes her.

“Please, would you sign? Here's a flyer.”

As many of you are aware, many citizens of Old Cranbury are unhappy with the nature of the “art installation” that is currently being displayed on the property of our neighbors on Minuteman Road. Please sign this petition if you would like to see this inconsiderate eyesore removed and the property values of our town restored. Thank you!!!

Camille reads the flyer again, unable to decipher its meaning. She looks at the woman. “What art installation?”

“Oh, I'm sure you've seen it. That big new house on the corner of Minuteman and Edgeware, all covered with rubber? Do you know what that
is
? It's thousands of foam insects. I'm sure you've seen it. It looks like the Swamp Thing.”

“That's what this petition is about?”