The Wonder Garden (23 page)

She rises, goes mechanically to the sink, fills the teakettle. While the water is warming, she looks for Avis. The house is utterly quiet, with only the sound of her shoe heels tapping the hardwood floor. She finds the girl in the living room, on her knees, peering into the Victorian dollhouse. Her head is bent sideways, unaware of being watched. It is a perfect picture, a suspended, breathless moment of childhood. Helen stands quietly, guarding it.

There is a sharp knock at the door, a series of hammering raps. The girl looks up and finds Helen in the doorway.

“Hello, Mr. Tanner, Mrs. Tanner,” a voice booms, “Old Cranbury Police.”

The knocking ceases, giving way to an extended pause. Helen stands in place, holding the girl's gaze. The instinct to answer the door, that forceful inborn decorum, bubbles up in her. There is, however, something in the girl's eyes, some tunneling, bottomless need, that overwhelms it. Helen feels that she must not look away.

She is conscious of her figure being sheltered from view by the display cabinet. And as long as Avis remains crouched like that behind the dollhouse, she will not be visible from the living room windows. The sound of the doorbell peals through the house, and the hard knocking resumes. Avis begins to stand, but Helen gestures for her to stay down—and, miracle of miracles, she does. The police officer calls out again, less robustly this time, a note of futility in his voice. Then, there is quiet. Finally, the sound of a car ignition in the driveway.

Helen feels a fizz of relief. They will have one more night. It will be best to spend the evening upstairs, she thinks, behind the bedroom curtains.

She will talk to the police, of course, in her own time. When she does, she will simply tell the truth: that the girl was left alone, that she'd taken it upon herself, as a concerned neighbor, to look after her. It is the mother they should be questioning. The mother. This is what she will tell them, what she will repeat and repeat, until they understand.

Gradually, a low whistle comes through the house. Helen startles, then remembers the teakettle. The whistle amplifies, gaining force like a strengthening wind. Avis is still crouched in place. The kettle's shriek rises, becomes penetrating. Helen takes a step toward the girl, extending a hand to help her.

E
LEVATIONS

M
ARK IS
arranging terrier pillows in the back when the door chime jingles. A smartly dressed couple comes into the store, a parrot-faced blonde with a hard leather purse at her armpit and a neat man in clear Lucite eyeglasses—gay, or German. They exchange smiling nods with Harris, who is bent at the window over a vintage watering can display.

Abandoning the pillows, Mark retreats farther back to a box of new inventory. A cache of rubbery, handmade insects. Harris has made a case for their playfulness, their novelty, for the arthropod silhouette's outpacing the antler and the owl. Each piece is lovingly painted, some in iridescent shades of blue and green that to Harris are reminiscent of Fabergé. The insects were supposedly created as part of some larger installation that was gunned down by the town, and Harris is hopeful that their notoriety will appeal to customers. The people here love a conversation piece, a flash of rebellion on their own terms. Mark lifts a smooth-domed beetle from the box, Aegean blue, its underside so realistically ridged that he shudders.

After the statutory period of quiet browsing, Harris straightens himself in the window and addresses the customers in a creamy baritone.

“That's a nineteenth-century Russian sleigh bed,” he says, stepping toward the couple with a shuffle in his gait that means his knees are hurting again.

The blonde exclaims in delight, and the dance begins: Harris's lavish descriptions and the customers' musical declarations, as if each object were hand-curated just for them.

“Oh, yes, I knew you'd find that. It's a Zapotec blackware olla pot. We were in Oaxaca last year, but didn't have enough room in our suitcases to bring back everything we wanted.”

Here in the store, lined with wood wainscoting like an aged oak cask, objects from around the globe radiate casual exoticism. Harris's offhand way of cataloging them is designed to flatter, presuming the customers' shared worldliness.
Oaxaca
—naturally. He won't mention the security guards at the hotel. He won't mention the beggars on the street, the women with their snaking braids and smudged children. He won't mention the way he'd haggled with the vendor in his oversized sun hat, Mark cringing at his side; the way he'd gallantly conceded the last few pesos before tucking the rest back into the money belt under his shirt.

Oaxaca had been a turning point for Mark. Coming up the jet bridge at Newark behind Harris and his engorged suitcase, he'd felt that he was walking against a reverse magnetic current. The car service had picked them up and squired them back into this softest pocket of the continent, this deepest pouch of forgetfulness. They had closed the door of their house, unloaded their bags, and re-canopied themselves in the safe tarpaulin of their lives.

Since then, Mark has suffered from a dissonant feeling, something like the antipathy of adolescence. He remembers the first time he'd been nettled like this: during a childhood trip to Jamaica, when his family had driven through a shantytown, past cornrowed, bright-uniformed children walking barefoot on the side of the road—and his mother had locked the car doors.

“Oh yes, my partner and I discovered this beauty on our trip to Brittany in '95,” Harris is saying, stroking the top of a cherry demilune table.

He pronounces “my partner” without any meaningful beat. Mark does not look up from the box of insects. Harris is in his tangerine polo shirt today, the one he thinks makes him look preppy and straight, but which has become conspicuously tight across his belly. It seems impossible that he hasn't noticed this, and yet there is no kind way to point it out.

While they are triangulating the demilune table, Mark slips out the back door for a cigarette. He feels an urge to call Camille, to hear her sardonic voice, something salted to neutralize the gush of self-congratulation in the showroom.

He calls, tells her about the box of bugs, plays up the bitchiness for her benefit.

“Oh, I
remember
those,” Camille sings. “This old man glued them all over his neighbor's house. It was supposed to be an avant-garde installation but it turned into a big scandal. People said it was bringing down property values.”

“Of course. Well, at least they're on consignment.” Mark pulls on his American Spirit, the mellow varietal, a half-stride toward quitting.

“Are you smoking?”

Mark exhales. “God, you
people.
So what?”

“Just asking. Go ahead if you want.”

Camille had been the first to leave the city. Mark and Harris followed later the same year—in the midst of the Wall Street encampments, the haphazard arrests—and joined her in the same cosmically quaint town an hour north on the train line. What incredible fortune, they agreed, that life should have washed them on this same high rock together. They would throw scandalous parties, now on ambrosial back patios rather than spongy rooftops, more
Gatsby
than
Bright Lights
. Then Camille gave birth, got divorced. Mark and Harris had never really liked her husband and toasted her freedom with a bottle of Cristal, but frolicsome times had not followed. Instead, over the course of the past year, Camille seems to have pulled away, succumbing to the plague of insecurity that besets all single women alike. Her foray into Internet dating has become something heavy, secretive. She no longer calls Mark with stories that make him laugh until he wheezes.

Harris appears in the doorway. Mark hangs up, stubs his cigarette.

“Come in,” Harris stage-whispers, “I want to introduce you to these people.”

“Why?”

“Oh, just come in.”

Inside, the customers are smiling expectantly.

“Mark, this is Gretchen and Caspar Von Mauren.”

Gretchen
. Not what Mark would have guessed.

“They just bought one of those gorgeous old homes on Cannonfield and are looking for a designer.”

“It's a bit of a mess right now,” Gretchen says in a voice that is surprisingly deep. “But we have big renovation plans. Harris tells us this is something you do?”

Immediately, Mark feels exposed. Most likely he is the same age as these people, but inside he is still a boy, a student.

“Yes,” he says as casually as he can, “and I especially enjoy working with historic homes.”

“How serendipitous!” the woman pronounces, glancing at her gay German husband. “I'm so glad we came in today. You never know who you'll meet. Well, Mark, could we ask you to come by one day and have a look?”

Mark glances at Harris, who is smiling paternally at him.

“Of course. Which house is it?”

“Four-thirty Cannonfield.”

Mark pretends to think, pulls out his phone, pretends to check his calendar.

“They're taking the olla pot
and
the demilune table. They put cash down on the spot.”

“That's great.”

“I had a feeling when they walked in. You know how sometimes you can just tell? I knew by the guy's shirt, the French cuffs, that he was all business. And the way the woman's eyes scanned around, quick like an eagle. She's had practice.”

“Like an eagle sighting its prey.”

“What? Why do you always have to mock everyone?”

“Who's mocking? I just didn't see anything so special about them. Also, I drove by the house. It's a disaster.”

“So what? You don't have to deal with the outside.”

Mark doesn't answer. It's true that he hasn't been hired for a big project in years. In a recession, even the eternal clamor for interior design is muted. Only high-end firms with physical showrooms can expect to thrive. So he's been spending more time at the store, helping with bookkeeping and inventory.

“It's perfect timing,” Harris continues. “You'll probably finish up by next summer, just in time to go somewhere. We still need to do Africa. I was thinking Tanzania.” Harris pauses. “While we're there, maybe we could go on a safari.”

Mark's lips tighten. A safari will mean staying in a luxury lodge, surrounded by primitive villages with no access to clean water. It will mean dropping enough money to feed one of those villages for a year, in exchange for the indulgence of looking at wild animals that would prefer not to be looked at. He has no interest in feeling like a descended extraterrestrial again, touching ground just long enough to take something.

“I don't mind going to Tanzania,” he pronounces carefully, “but only if we can stay in a village and do something useful.”

“Oh, honey.” Harris stares for a moment, smiling, as if at a child who has said something amusing. “You're not serious, are you?”

Mark is quiet. It is at times like these when he feels their age difference most sharply, feels a returning undertow of regret like a soft tug in his gut. It is at these moments, unbalanced and vulnerable, that Seth sweeps back to him in a flood, like a mythical ocean creature. No future there, no destination. It would have been like riding a sea horse, dipping and diving and drowning, over and over. He was in Nairobi, last Mark heard. He was in Cairo, Marrakesh, Damascus. It's been fifteen years. The choices that had seemed fungible, reversible, whimsical fifteen years ago have finally cemented. Time goes in only one direction; a hackneyed truth, but suddenly as dense as iron. Their bodies, young and beautiful as they were then, will never again be seen on this earth.

Mark looks at Harris, large and able. His autumn-brown eyes give the warmth of a thousand hearth fires.

“We used to talk about it, you know,” Mark reminds him quietly. “We used to talk about how important it was to give back. You agreed that maybe we could join a volunteer service someday.”

“Someday we could still do that.”

“But why not now?” Mark bleats. “Why not rent out the house and go away for a while?”

“When you say volunteer service, do you mean like the Peace Corps?”

Mark lets a beat pass. “Yes, like that. Now that we're married, we can apply as a couple.”

“Oh, sweetheart, you know we can't do that now. Not with the store.”

Mark doesn't answer. He doesn't mention that he's begun filling out their applications for next year. He is hopeful that his architecture degree and sustainable design training might make him an attractive candidate. Perhaps there is a need in some far-flung outpost for environmentally responsible interiors. He imagines himself wearing a bandanna in an equatorial African village, reflooring huts with cork, lining walls with hemp board. As for Harris, his art history degree won't count for much, but with some volunteer experience at home and language training, he might make an adequate English teacher.

“I'm not saying we should
never
do it,” Harris continues. “But there's plenty of time. We're still getting settled here, the store's just taking off.” He pauses, then adds, “And your business is starting to blossom.”

Mark nods his head, does not argue. On the Peace Corps website, there is a whole section detailing the strain on romantic relationships for volunteers who serve without their partners. Twenty-seven months is a long time. There are many scenarios to consider before one partner should embark without the other, many eventualities to discuss before sending in a solo application.

When he and Harris were first in love, they sometimes played a game called “Deal Breaker.” What degree of sin or betrayal would make the other leave?

“What if I kissed your brother?” Mark would ask.

“What if I put up Laura Ashley drapes?” Harris would counter, laughing.

“What if I wanted a threesome with a woman?”

“What if I wore whale-print golf pants?”

It has been a long time since they've played “Deal Breaker.” There is a comfortable formality to their evenings now, the two of them reading in bed, a stack of books and magazines upon each nightstand, a sense that every waking moment must be squeezed for gain of further information. Mark can't help but contrast this with their first helium weeks together, holed up in Harris's Bond Street apartment, lightened by the exertion of talk and sex, when he wondered if he would ever read a book again.

Harris accompanies Mark on his consultation visit with the Von Maurens. Together, they drive away from the dollhouse center of town, through softer acres with gated residences hidden in the trees. It's true that Mark loves the aesthetic refinement of this area. He loves the exquisitely restored farmhouses, the expensive masonry that makes new stone walls appear old, the blanketed show horses. He can't help but thrill to the effortless elegance of the weathered barns, the convertible sports cars—to his sheer proximity to this most rarefied class, peppered with private film stars, financiers, icons of fashion and design. There is an aphrodisiac in this aura of informal exclusivity that is absent from the city and its brassy rivalry.

They pull up to number 430, a flat-faced white saltbox with an ugly blue tarp on the roof. The Ezekiel Slater house, according to the plaque at the side of the door, built in 1740. The date alone, Mark admits, gives him a frisson. He has never worked on anything predating the Victorian era.

Gretchen opens the plank door before he and Harris can knock, her jeweled ears and neck discordant in the rustic doorframe.

She pulls them inside and begins talking. “The elderly woman who lived here didn't do
anything
to the house. I don't think anything's been changed for forty years.” She clips over the wood floor in snakeskin pumps. “Anyway, we interviewed designers in the city, but none of them had a feeling for the history. They wanted to do everything new. Then we had a problem with the roof, as you can see, and the historical commission got involved. So now we're in the middle of a big exterior restoration in keeping with their guidelines. Of course that won't affect what we do to the interior.”