Mulch (5 page)

T
HE
V
IRGINIA NIGHT TREMBLED WITH WET
heat. Out-of-sync cicadas screeched in the woods so that the eleven people on the patio—the entire adult population of the cul-de-sac—had to raise their voices to be heard. Louise noted how wet they all looked, herself included, despite the powder she had dabbed on her face before she and Bill crossed the street to join the party. Sweat glazed faces, bare arms, and legs. She smiled in the light of the high torches, thinking of another patio,
her favorite, the one in Tel Aviv. The garden there had been buffered against the dry, hot desert winds by filigreed brick walls. Once inside, it was an oasis of calm and color, with soaring palms, clamoring roses on the wails, and Turkscap lilies swaying in the breeze. Prize stands of tulips, an ancient heritage of the Middle East, bloomed in spring, so perfect the blossoms seemed to be carved of translucent soapstone. Amidst this beauty, she and Bill and friends sipped their gin and tonics and talked about the state of the world. That seemed so long ago.

Her eyes refocused on the present, and on the strangers-cum-friends in the lively circle around her. She knew Washington well, not only its unrelenting tropical summer heat, but the political heat present in almost every activity, and the competitive heat as people clamored for success and status.

This Washington fever was represented best in the question people asked soon after they met them for the first time. “And where did you get your degree?”

“Cook County Community College,” Louise always felt like answering, but didn’t, of course, being a well-trained foreign service wife. Bill’s Harvard degrees conferred immediate approval. Her degree worked two ways: Northwestern was good; English, wimpy. She had gotten used to it years ago, but these days, tart retorts came to mind.

Now she studied her neighbors and wondered how much of this Washington pressure burbled within them. Some had paid welcome visits during the past few weeks; a few they were meeting for the first time. The sweat and vocal competition from the cicadas made everyone seem a little frantic. And the alcohol was obviously working faster in the heat, as if introduced
intravenously. Suddenly she conjured up a mental picture of everyone in the Washington area sweating and straining and getting drunk together in this soupy summer night.

It was obvious these people were used to having fun together. Bantering, jousting, silly, a close-but-not-too-close-knit group of people who genuinely liked each other. With hosts Eric and Jan gracefully leading the way, they had gathered her and Bill in like old shoes.

Louise had learned a little about them all: Sam Rosen, a congressional aide, living next door to them. Roger Kendricks, on the international desk at
The Washington Post.
His wife, Laurie, owner of a thriving boutique in nearby Alexandria. Eric Vande Ven, the host, Washington city planner. Hostess Jan, an elementary school teacher. Ron Radebaugh, consultant on businesses in the Pacific. His wife, Nora, a poet, of all things. Then Richard Mougey, a State Department employee like Bill, an expert on the Middle East. His wife, Mary Mougey, a fund-raiser for international causes. An interesting collection, thought Louise.

No sexual jealousies here that she could perceive, although Nora, who was leaning over talking to Bill, was a smoky woman with eyes luminous in the torchlight. She looked like the sort that all men fall in love with.

Richard slumped down beside Louise and turned his pale Modigliani face her way. “I can see you’re suffering, my dear. You should be drinking gin like me instead of that 7-UP. Or maybe Eric and Jan should have entertained us all inside in the air-conditioning.”

“Oh, no,” she said, smoothing back her long, damp hair. “We might as well get used to it again. I didn’t remember it
being this sticky but tonight brings it all back to me: One is
insane
to stay in Washington in August. One should just go off to Maine, or Michigan.” She didn’t know why she had fallen into this pompous style of speech. She was downgrading Richard Mougey by assuming this drivel was what he wanted to hear. She sounded like the kind of person she hadn’t liked in the foreign service crowd. The kind who talked in their own little code and sent each other little verbal signals like “n.o.c.d.,” standing for “not our class, darling.” And spouted worldly little aphorisms beginning with “one should” or “one is.”

She tried to relax her hands against the metal arms of the deck chair.

What she thought was pompous was obviously everyday fare for Richard. He didn’t blink an eye. “You’re so right, Louise. We shouldn’t be here at all.” He slid an arm around the back of her chair. “Mary and I were planning to be in Austria, but we had to postpone it.”

As he talked, she noted that he slyly looked her over, from her breasts to her legs. She wondered if his slight drunkenness would go beyond the garrulous level; she guessed not. As he examined her, she did the same to him, noting that he was not a healthy-looking man. Maybe fifty. He probably had smoked and drunk much more than a person should all through what Bill told her had been a solid if not illustrious career in foreign service.

“In Foggy Bottom,” Richard continued, waving his highball glass in a northerly direction, “where your husband and I both work, we have always called Washington a hardship post—”

“Too bad we don’t get hardship pay,” finished Louise, smiling.

“Oh, come on, Richard,” said Roger, a balding, professorial man with surprising red plastic frames on his glasses. “A little hardship is in order for you guys. It makes up for all those years you were posted to Paris and Bonn, drinking fine wines and taking in all the good rathskellers and restaurants.”

“Yeah,” agreed Eric, the host. Eric was big, blond, muscular. According to what Louise had heard, he drove his family into the hardest sports. “While Roger and I were back here solving the problems of the city and the country, respectively, you were across the pond collecting wines.”

“And that brings us to the subject of wine tasting,” said Laurie, Roger’s handsome red-haired wife. Understandably, she advertised her boutique on her back. A layered look with checks, in an array of patterns—a little hot for tonight?—matching perfectly with her patterned shoes and patterned earrings. Louise noticed
she
wasn’t sweating; what was her secret?

Laurie prodded Richard: “When are we going to have a wine tasting again?” She made a wide gesture. “Oh, why do I ask you when it’s Mary who will plan it. Mary, we’re overdue. Set a date, and we’ll all bring something for dinner.”

Mary was pale and quiet. Louise guessed her blond hair once was beautiful, but now, untouched by dyes, was faded comfortably to half white. This made Louise like her before she uttered a word.

Mary leaned forward and began. “I’m
afraid
—”

“She’ll do it,” interrupted Richard. “She’ll do it in mid-September. Won’t you, honey?”

“As I was saying—” She gazed amiably at her husband. “—I’m afraid we’ll have to make it later, Richard. I think you’re forgetting Austria.” She looked at the others and gently shook her head in regret. “Our light bags are all packed for Austria. It’s been an exhausting summer, with so much travel involving our latest fund drive.” She looked straight at Louise. “I raise money for world hunger, I don’t know if you knew that. It’s extremely satisfying, if enervating, with all the travel and the speeches. So now, Richard and I are going to recuperate for a couple of weeks—hide in Vienna with old friends.” Louise was entranced. The woman, so small in stature, had a deep, mellifluous voice. Then she remembered hearing that Mary was a singer when a young woman. “How about doing it in mid-October, instead?” She smiled over at Louise. “But I hope you and I have a chance to get together before then. Can I come over and spend a minute with you?”

“I’d love it,” said Louise.

The bourbon-damaged Richard no sooner unwound himself from the chair than it was commandeered by Eric. He sat erect but slightly swaying, no more immune to the heat and alcohol than his guests. After Richard’s low current, Louise found his athletic presence high-voltage, and he had a faint aura of a gutsy men’s cologne clinging to him that she rather liked.

Eric opened up with a little host speech: “Louise and Bill, we are happy to welcome you here in Dogwood Court. It’s obvious by Bill’s long, compulsive working hours and Louise’s energetic enhancement of the woods, you fit into this place like a couple of old shoes. Why, from the very moment you moved in, it was obvious nothing would remain the same over there. And it doesn’t really intimidate us too much the way
she reels off the Latin names for all those new trees and bushes: Why, we just run home and call up the library reference department and plead with them to tell us what a
Lobelia syphilis
is, and assure us it isn’t contagious.” This was followed with appreciative laughter. Louise remembered the day Eric had come over and hung around while she laboriously planted a half-dozen of the plants.

She responded before she could stop herself. “It’s
Lobelia siphilitica
, actually, a kind of wildflower category. Has unobtrusive blue flowers, spreads well, and is much more reliable than
Lobelia cardinalis.”

Eric put his arm around her shoulders and everybody applauded. “See, the woman cannot stop talking about plants even at a dinner party.” Louise blushed and grinned, and he settled easily back into his welcoming speech. “Well, we hope you have us all straight now. It’s easy. Just think of all the men here as dreamers, working somehow for the perfection of man; metro Washington, the EEC, the State Department, the—whatever
The Washington Post
stands for, the Pacific Rim—that’s Ron’s specialty, and a very damned profitable one, too.” More laughter.

“While the wives, now”—he saluted them—“and I salute you—do the important jobs. They’re the realists. Teacher, merchant, fund-raiser—”

“Wait a minute,” said Roger. “Mary funds idealistic causes. That surely throws her into the column of those working for the perfection of man, doesn’t it?”

“And how about Nora?” asked Bill. Louise immediately tensed. “What do we say about her?” He looked at the
woman sitting beside him in a way Louise hadn’t seen before. It was the way she was used to him looking at
her.

All eyes turned to the smoky woman. Even in her worn, sleeveless dress, gray denim, it appeared, plainer than all the other dresses, the woman was utterly striking. Louise felt embarrassed to look at her and yet did not know where to turn her eyes. She was not accustomed to this feeling, which she realized was jealousy.

As if reading this, Nora looked straight at Louise and locked in the connection. “I think the whiskey is talking in all of us. With that disclaimer, I can say this: As a poet, I hope I can communicate with both the realists and the dreamers.”

“Hear, hear,” said Sam, chortling. He was a slight but handsome man Louise and Bill had talked to several times in the yard. They had stood as if on either side of a nonexistent fence—fences were not fashionable in Sylvan Valley—while his friendly little dog did figure eights around their legs. “You’ve expressed a noble sentiment, Nora. It’s dated nonsense to divide people into categories, especially us. Although of all of us, I’d identify Nora as one of the true dreamers of this world.” He turned all his attention to her. “I can tell from your garden alone—all those lilies, and thistles, pretty little white things scrambling over the rocks …”

“She is a dreamer, indeed,” said her husband, Ron, in a lazy baritone voice. Large, elegant, with white hair, he seemed much older than his wife, whom Louise had pegged to be about her own age. “Any person who can back our new car into a concrete wall at the rear of a parking lot because she was thinking so hard about a poem surely qualifies as a dreamer.”

Everyone laughed. Nora smiled and put a garden-worn hand gracefully on her husband’s knee. “Darling,” she said in a soft, low voice that caused the others to lean closer to hear, “please don’t give Louise and Bill a distorted picture of us.” She looked first at Bill and then at Louise. “Despite his remarks, he is not a chauvinist, and I don’t want you to think that he is. As for the women being the realists, I see more than just that: I see in Jan and Laurie and Mary people who help other people achieve their dreams, whether they’re schoolchildren, or shoppers, or people in developing countries. As for myself, well …”

All ten of them waited, silent, while she paused. “I am not
just
a poet; I am a published poet with an agent who gets fifteen percent—which places me, just like all of us here, with one foot in the order of dreamers and the other foot in the order of realists.”

Merry applause greeted her words. Nora smiled gently at them. Ron grinned and reached over and massaged his wife’s supple arm. Eric took final drink orders.

This woman could make an interesting friend … or would it be enemy?

P
ETER SCOOPED IN THE LAST FORKFUL OF
creamed herring, then carefully patted his mouth with the white linen napkin. His eye caught that of one of the other diners, and he realized this person and probably others in the restaurant were watching. It wasn’t him; it was because the president’s well-known chief of staff, Tom Paschen, sat opposite him. They occupied Paschen’s favorite table at Pomodoro, apparently the man’s favorite restaurant.