The Summer Garden (82 page)

Tatiana wiped her eyes first and then turned to him. “Hey,” she said. She pressed her lips together to keep them from trembling.

“I was done early,” Alexander said, taking off his suit jacket, looking around.

“Oh.”

“Where’s Ant?”

“With Sergio. I’m letting him stay over.”

Alexander frowned, his troubled mind reeling. “You’re letting him stay overnight on a Wednesday?” This was incongruous.

“As a treat for him.”

His heart was hammering in his chest.

“Are you hungry?” she asked. “I made a little food.”

Alexander dumbly nodded.

“Well, go wash then. I made some…blinchiki. Meatball soup. Soda bread.”

Without washing, he sank into the chair. She made
blinchiki
? It’s a good thing she wasn’t close to him because she would’ve heard the repentant pounding of his wanton black heart. “Aren’t you going to eat?” Alexander asked.

“I’m not hungry,” she replied. “But I’ll sit with you—if you want.” Tatiana put food on his plate, poured him a beer, water, brought him the day’s newspaper. The music was on, the candle was burning at his table!

Comfort and joy…o tidings of comfort and joy…

God rest ye merry gentlemen, let nothing ye dismay,

Remember, Christ, our Savior, was born on Christmas day…

The sash of her robe had gotten loose. As she stood to pour him another beer, Alexander glimpsed an ivory lace camisole, through which he could see her body, nude except for the white suspender belt and lace stockings. He felt sick. Looking down, he read the paper, and ate—and did not lift his eyes to her. The only things they said to each other during dinner were, hers, “How do you like the blinchiki?” and his, “They’re excellent, we haven’t had them in years.”

When he was done and Tatiana stepped close to take his plate, Alexander put down the paper and stopped her with his hands on her waist, slowly turning her to him. Opening the robe, he pulled it off her shoulders.

“Hmm,” he said. “Chemise new?”

“For you,” she said. “You like?”

“I like.” But he couldn’t look up. He did manage to pull the camisole down, to bare her heavy milky breasts to his wounded hands. Fondling her, cupping her, he put his lips on her nipples, as she quaked and moaned under his mouth, quivering uncontrollably like a violin, alive, soft, perfect. “Why so sensitive?” Alexander whispered, one torn half of him still clambering up from the abyss. Suddenly he became afraid—almost certain—that Tatiana was reading his thoughts. Putting his hand under the camisole and patting her bottom, Alexander let go of her and quickly stood from the table.

He
may
have been able to hide his thoughts from her, but what he could not hide in their bed was the ravening lead gravity of guilt pulling all his organs down into the earth. There was simply no love tonight. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” he said.

“No?” she said, and turned away.

He offered her something for herself. Tatia, remember our fifth wedding anniversary? he whispered achingly to her. Anthony was napping in the trailer and we were in Naples on a deserted Gulf beach in the late afternoon, on a blanket on white sand. We had been swimming and you were briny and wet. I lay stretched out on my back and you kneeled over my mouth. You couldn’t keep yourself upright; you pitched forward and remained on your sandy elbows and knees. My head was thrown back, my face buried in you, and I held your hips in place with my hands. We were in a straight line, you and I, you above me. Happy birthday, happy anniversary, happy napping Anthony, and
on joyful wing/cleaving the sky/sun, moon and stars forgot,/upward I fly
. Everything was forgot for that one hour of honeysuckle bliss on a white sand beach on the Gulf of Mexico. Please, Tatiasha. Kneel over me. Keel forward, let me touch you. Give me honey, give me bliss, cleave the sky, and forget everything.

Her back to him was still, as if she had not heard, as if he had not whispered.

After she was asleep, Alexander spooned her to him, into the crook of his arm, against his chest. Her hair tickled his ribs. It took him hours to fall asleep. Was it his imagination, or was there a promise of future agony that he heard in her clipped voice all evening? She kept trying to say something to him—and failing. He certainly wasn’t going to ask, but how did she go from lying in bed in a fetal position Saturday night to making him his favorite meal and crashing her naked body through his hit parade?

“
Lay your sleeping head, on my faithless arm
,” he inaudibly whispered, trying to remember Auden, suffocating on the poison cocktail of his self-hatred and his conscience.

Baby, Please Come Home

The following morning, Alexander walked into the office
to get his messages, to see his appointments for the day, and to make sure Linda had taken care of the hundreds of Christmas bonuses. Efficient to a fault, she said she had done it weeks ago when he first asked. She said to him, “Were you a bad boy and forget about your appointment last night?”

“What appointment?”

“What appointment? With Mrs. Rosario, Alexander!
You
made it. She was in your book.”

“Oh. I must’ve forgotten,” he said carefully. “Why do you ask?”

“Well, you weren’t home either,” said Linda. “Because she came here last night around nine looking for you.”

“Who?”

“Mrs. Rosario.”

Alexander was quiet. “Linda, what’s wrong with you that you were still here at nine?”

“Don’t you know I have no life?” she said. “I live to manage yours. She came by and asked if she could call your house. I didn’t know what to do. I was
very
worried myself. We thought maybe something had happened. You never forget your appointments.”

“Did she”—Alexander spoke with difficulty—“call my house?”

“Uh-huh. Spoke to Tania.”

“Mrs. Rosario spoke to Tatiana?”

“Uh-huh. She was pretty upset.”

“Who?” Alexander said in a dull voice.

“The client, of course,” said Linda. “You know your wife is constitutionally incapable of getting angry at you.”

Unsteadily Alexander walked outside and sat in his truck. He was doing that a lot these days. Sitting in his truck. Soon it was going to become his home.

Fucking Carmen called his house! Well, that was one scenario he did not imagine—the married woman calling his house, asking for him. That’s the permutation Alexander had not seen, and he thought he had prepared for every quadratic contingency.

He couldn’t think straight. But why
didn’t
bad things go down? Why didn’t they have it out yesterday? They were alone, they had all night. He would have thought of something to say that sounded like the truth. Why did Tania dress down to a see-through chemise for him? Why the food, the candles? What in the name of heaven was going on at his house? Alexander’s mind was baffled and bewildered.

He had to go check on the status of three of his houses. The electricians were coming to one, the foundation was being poured on another, and the Certificate of Occupancy inspector was coming to the third. But at lunch Alexander went to the hospital. Even though he knew Tatiana never had a break long enough to have a cup of coffee, much less a brief calm talk about another woman calling their house asking for him, how could he not go?

He found her sitting by herself in the cafeteria, drinking milk; she looked grim and white. “Hey,” she said, barely glancing at him. “What are you doing here?”

“Come outside for a minute,” he said.

When they were out in the sun-filled parking lot, Alexander stopped walking and said, his teeth grinding, his eyes to the ground, “Why didn’t you tell me Carmen Rosario called you last night?”

“Did you come to the hospital to ask me this? She didn’t call me,” said Tatiana. “She called our house looking for
you
.” She laughed lightly. “She asked to speak to you and when I said you weren’t home, she said, well, where
is
he? in a tone that you can imagine
I
for one found peculiar. I told her you were working late. She said yes, and she was the one you were supposed to be working late with. I’ll tell you,” Tatiana continued, folding her hands together, “she seemed
quite
upset. I didn’t know what to say, since I didn’t know where you were, so I apologized for you. I thought you would want me to do that, right, Alexander? Apologize to Carmen Rosario for you?” She paused. “I told her you must’ve forgotten. It must have slipped your mind. Sometimes your mind does that, plays tricks on you, I told her. Where you forget certain things.”

If Alexander’s head were any lower, it would be hitting the fucking ground. He took a shaky step back. “Why are you doing this?” he said quietly. “Why didn’t you tell me this yesterday? Why did you play this charade with me, make me dinner, put music on? What for?” He could not lift his eyes to her.

“I don’t understand the question,” said Tatiana.

Alexander examined the cracks in the pavement.

“You have a hundred appointments like this throughout the year,” said Tatiana. “You told me you were working late. You’ve told me that many times when you met with clients in the past. Yes, you didn’t show up for your appointment, but I don’t know why. You could have gotten busy with other things. You could have not had her number handy. You could have made a mistake and gone to the wrong restaurant. It’s your business, I don’t get that closely involved in it. You didn’t tell me it was Carmen you were meeting, but so what? You don’t submit to me the names of the clients who are interested in building a home with you. That’s never been our marriage.” Tatiana stopped. Alexander couldn’t even hear her inhale and exhale, that’s how quiet she was while speaking and breathing. “The woman you were meeting to talk about building a house called and said you never showed up. She seemed perfectly within her rights to be irritated. I would think most of your clients would not look kindly on being left waiting in some bar/restaurant down south in Chandler and would probably call our house demanding, ‘Well, where
is
he?’”

They could not continue this conversation in the parking lot. “Tatiana…” he repeated. “Why didn’t you tell me this yesterday?”

“What’s the matter? Why are you getting yourself all worked up?” Tatiana said. Only the tips of her fingers trembled. It was the only part of her, besides her white-stockinged legs and the hem of her white uniform, Alexander could see.

“If you thought I was having dinner out,” Alexander said, because he could think of nothing else—nothing else at all—to say, “why did you make me food then?”

“When does my husband ever refuse blinchiki?” said Tatiana in a straight voice, staring directly at him, “even when he has his dinner out?”

Oh God! “Tania…” he let out in a hoarse breath.

She backed away and said, “Well, listen, if there is nothing else, I have to go back to work.”

Yes, go back to the root of all evil. He didn’t say it, just in case she told him
he
was the root of all evil. “Wait,” Alexander said. His reeling mind couldn’t see through the fog in the clear-blue-sky, broad-daylight, crisp winter day. Should he now lie and say, I really truly was just going to meet up for a drink with Carmen? We really truly
were
going to talk about the house—condoms in my pocket notwithstanding? Should he say, I did
almost
nothing wrong—this Wednesday—aside from premeditating my lascivious and traitorous plans. As opposed perhaps to last Friday, when things really truly were much more murky and tawdry, but I’m hoping you’ll forget about last Friday altogether. And I know it seems bad, me going to meet another woman to take her to a hotel to have sex with her, but I didn’t let her go in my truck on Friday. My truck is pristine. Don’t I get
some
points for that? Isn’t that at least like moving my pawn one square forward on the board?

Alexander couldn’t see one move ahead, one step ahead, one word ahead. He would be damned if he opened his mouth. So he said to her,
wait
, but what he meant was,
I got nothing.

“I really must fly,” said Tatiana. “But you have to go back to work, too, no? Have you rescheduled your appointment with Mrs. Rosario? Will you be working late in Chandler tonight?”

“Tania, no,” Alexander said in a defeated voice.

“Ah,” she said, walking away.

If Alexander didn’t have to meet with the electricians at a 7000-square-foot River Crossing house for a family who needed the house delivered yesterday, he never would have gotten out of his truck. But he had to meet with the electricians, and he was still with them in the late afternoon when Carmen’s sedan pulled up and she got out, all flashy earrings, flashy makeup, flashy tight black and white sweater. Don Joly, the electrician, watching her from the window, whistled softly under his breath. “Va-va-voom,” he said.

Alexander turned his back.

She walked in, found him. “Hello, Alexander.”

“You might want to get out of the house,” he said without facing her. “It’s not safe here. A construction site. I’m not insured for accidents to unauthorized visitors.”

“Um, can I speak to you a moment?”

“Speak at your own peril,” Alexander said, without looking up from the framing, where thirty feet of electrical wire lay tangled. He was measuring the distance between the outlets; according to code they had to be no more than six feet apart and he was afraid the one in front of him was more than six feet from the one on the left, which meant it would have to be redone, which meant, like dominoes, all the rest in a room would have to be redone. He had to measure it out six hundred times in a house this size, and all before Christmas next week.

“Alexander, can you turn around?”

Slowly he stood up and turned around. “What?” he said. “I’m busy.”

“I see that. Were you busy last night, too, when I waited like a fool alone in that restaurant?”

“I was busy last night, too.” Every single thing inside him had shut off to her. He couldn’t believe he was speaking to her.