The Girl in the Garden Read online

  1977

  Sam

  WHEN LEONARD CAME into the kitchen and said nonchalantly, You might consider taking some time off, it’d do you good, Sam suspected that Claire had spoken to the man. And shortly after Leonard left, there she was in his stead, having no right so far as Sam was concerned to enter his domain. Claire stood without saying a word, just leaned against the stainless steel counter not yet dry from being wiped down, silent and waiting and watching him, ignoring George altogether—the man was mopping with his back to them, working the same corner he’d been swishing that mop over, swaying over, for the last ten minutes. She folded her arms, remained without saying a word until Sam finally shook his head, then averted his gaze and went on about what he was doing, actually much of nothing—the pots and utensils were clean and hung, the dishes and trays cleaned and stacked, the glasses drying in the dishwasher—in order to avoid her eyes. She had, Sam knew, a way of getting what she wanted not because she was argumentative or even insistent but because she was, at least from what he’d witnessed, unbelievably patient, impossibly present in an implausibly unobtrusive way. He knew Claire wasn’t leaving, that she’d be there, leaning against that counter with her arms folded, waiting for him to speak when he finally finished doing what didn’t need to be done. She’d stand there statuesque and motionless, although maybe she’d have crossed an ankle since he’d last looked, for as long as it took for him to acknowledge her, even if that meant the rest of the day or until hell froze over. So Sam wiped down both sinks and then the gleaming tiles behind them, finally folded and racked the dishrag and put both hands on the edge of a sink, hung his head and sighed before pushing off and turning around, then leaned back and mirrored her stance by folding his arms and an ankle and cocking his head.

  No, he said.

  That’s probably the wrong answer to the wrong question.

  Doesn’t matter.

  Of course it does.

  Sam glanced over his shoulder, said: George, you’re wearing that corner out, try stepping back some. Claire still didn’t look at George, waited again for Sam to give her his full attention and he knew that she knew he couldn’t put her off forever by commanding George to move a few feet back now and then and rewarding him with a nod whenever he found a new patch of floor to clean. George did as he was told, casting a grin over his shoulder, and began crooning Jeepers Creepers, where’d ya get those peepers in a croaky, off-key voice so low that anyone within range could only be thankful he could barely be heard. Sam looked at the ceiling and closed his eyes, shook his head, faced her again and saw that Claire wasn’t bothered: George never annoyed her, and Sam—despite his own recalcitrance—knew he also couldn’t, that most likely no one ever could, exasperate or dismay or irritate this woman whose imperturbability was as confounding as it was incomprehensible.

  So, Claire said, the question of the day is: Are you a good driver? And that caught Sam off-guard, for it meant she’d learned if not from Leonard then maybe from George—who rarely spoke in sentences that could be understood, his speech being as garbled as his mind, but then Claire had a way of making people intelligible, who knew how?—that Sam wasn’t blind in the eye over which he always wore a patch that also covered his eyebrow and some of his scarred, dented cheekbone.

  Well, some people say I am, and some say I’m not, he told her.

  In that case, I’ll chance it.

  Chance what.

  That you’ll be fine behind the wheel.

  He looked at his feet, back at her. I’ve said no, he said, and I don’t know why you can’t take me seriously, or why you don’t have one of your friends—I mean, you must have friends—go with you to wherever it is you’re going. Which, by the way, you haven’t bothered mentioning.

  I take you very seriously, Claire said after a long moment. I’ll explain this much: I need to go back to where I am—was—from. I haven’t been there since I left, when I was seventeen. I don’t need a friend because friends assume they’re privileged to pry. You and I don’t claim to know each other, and that seems to suit us both. My guess is I can trust you to not ask questions. About anything. It’s only a day’s drive. Spend the night and then do what you want, stay for a while or, if you want to turn right around, I’ll arrange to get you to the closest airport and a ticket back the day after we get there. All expenses paid.

  Go alone, drive yourself.

  I’m not any good at driving except on back country roads in the dark, at about twenty miles an hour, tops. With the high beams on.

  But you have a license.

  And a car. But I can’t manage highways, and I’ll need the car when I’m there.

  For those back roads.

  That’s all there is, back where I’m from. Was.

  That repeated where I am—was—from, where I’m from. Was echoed in Sam: she didn’t say home, just as he hadn’t when he returned to his parents’ place after he recovered—that’s what the staff at the military hospital said he’d done, recovered, although he found himself discharged without those blown-away pieces of bone and flesh he’d lost. He couldn’t recognize himself—or at least not that part of his face, almost half, that was now scarred, deformed—in the mirror, and he was no longer who he’d been when he’d left. Claire had never asked him about the eyepatch, the pockmarks, those scars, the partial earlobe, hadn’t ever queried whether his disfigurement had come about in an accident, a crash, or been caused by what Sam, as many but not enough others, came to see as a calamity of history; and he’d come to trust that she’d never inquire, in the same manner she trusted him not to ask questions about her. That where I am—was—from didn’t leave him wondering what she meant; her meaning was, as always in his experience of her, exact, she’d never spoken to him with anything but the utmost precision, had never allowed herself to be misunderstood, never left herself open to interpretation, never left herself open. He pondered the situation, her request, acutely aware that she hadn’t said home, and this affected him, she’d allowed him a glimpse into her psyche or soul, whatever it is that dwells within that outer human shell of skin he, she, wears. He mulled over what she’d said about friends, about not being friends, about being able to remain guarded with each other: he knows nothing about her, she has never told him or, to his knowledge, Leonard, certainly not George, or anyone within Sam’s earshot anything personal, and it’s a comfort to him that he doesn’t know her history any more than she knows his, that she doesn’t pry or, god forbid, talk about herself—Sam doesn’t want to be subjected to the mania of someone else’s story and sentiments, for he is, was forced to become, an expert at keeping his own story and emotions under wraps. And maybe, he considered, he and she were sufficiently alike, shy of intimacy and judgments; perhaps she, like Sam, long ago learned that it’s easier to remain content with the superficial in human relations, to never violate the calm that lies upon the surface of things.

  I have to talk to Leonard, he finally said.

  I’ll wait.

  Don’t, he told her.

  See you tomorrow then, she replied gracefully, no tension in her expression, her voice, her stride as she left. He realized that the ease with which she handles herself should make him feel comfortable, but it doesn’t. How awkward he might feel, being with her in a car for hours on end, being with her alone, bothered him: he lives a solitary existence when he isn’t in Leonard’s soup kitchen, where he’s spent three years, more, listening to George at the end of the shift trying to carry the only tune he’s ever sung in Sam’s presence. And maybe he does need a break, Sam thought, maybe it’d be all right to leave George to himself mopping one of the corners rather than worrying him onto other parts of the floor or, as he did now, telling George to call it a day and taking the mop from his hands and then listening to his off-key singing fade as he left. Sam mopped methodically, found the work soothing, tried to convince himself he should indeed talk to Leonard, that Claire had always struck him as someone not so much aloof as self-contained, deft: yes, deft.
He’d been impressed by the way she got the homeless and mad and addicted and sick and deformed—wasted, broken people, all of them down and out and not fitting in in one way or another, some in many ways, some in all—to talk to her as they lined up waiting for the kitchen to open, the way she listened to them, the way she let them convince themselves that they should allow her to photograph them, which they did. For she somehow made them feel worthy, unique, to be among the counted. He’s spent a lot of time, on that break between cooking and serving, watching her work—Leonard having told him nothing about her except that she’d been a photojournalist who’d walked away from the job, and that she’d come to volunteer—as the toothless smile for her and the mad pause long enough to stare into her lens, the heroin addicts bringing their swollen, sore-infested hands to their faces and gazing at her with that faraway look in their jaundiced eyes, the sick unselfconsciously displaying their skeletal or obese frames, the deformed revealing their stumps or humps or scars, the homeless drawing themselves up to their full height with great pride or insolence despite how matted their hair, how filthy their clothes or skin. No matter, Sam had concluded some time ago, her reasons for photographing them—reasons he couldn’t fathom, although he’d had to quell his suspicion that she might be preying on the gullible: he knew full well that people who have nothing are often the most credulous, the most given to delusion. But he’d suppressed his misgivings, hadn’t judged her; after all, it seemed to him, her subjects, the men and women who came here to eat, became before her camera the human beings they’d once been and still were, capable—at least for that split second in which she captured their likeness on film—of the self-esteem, dignity, Claire gave them. To give that, he believed, she’d had to have found them blameless to some degree for what had befallen them, or at least seen something other than shame in their condition, which condition they willingly bared before her camera, allowed her to record.

  Yes, she was deft, deft also behind the counter as she filled their plates, seeing to it that each got no more or less than another. Claire didn’t have to be told to stay out of Sam’s way, knew without asking what needed to be done from the start, Leonard announcing before lunch one day that she’d be an addition on the line—Sam fumed at the short notice, thinking things wouldn’t go smoothly—and there she was, as though she’d been born to the work, knowing which pans needed refilling and when, which utensils to use, watching that the line moved and that everyone was able to carry their trays and find a seat without incident, without rubbing elbows. She asked no questions, didn’t chatter, didn’t joke, and never once commented on George being uselessly everywhere underfoot with that mop and his constant, croaked crooning of the one refrain he’d ever learned or remembered.

  Jeepers Creepers: six days a week, with Saturdays going long, those three and more years. Hell, Sam thought, why not talk to Leonard.

  The way Sam saw it, Leonard was more than just a decent man who put out food for those who hadn’t eaten, who couldn’t afford to eat: he was someone Sam credited with saving his life, not that Leonard ever knew. Though maybe Leonard suspected Sam faced empty nights that sometimes still held those terrors which were—when he first came out of the hospital and spent two months at home before moving into Freddie’s—constant and incomprehensible to his parents, with whom he couldn’t speak, his mother always crying at the sight of him, his father stiffbacked and proper and acting as though nothing at all had happened, as though his son hadn’t been maimed, disfigured and somewhat deranged by what he’d seen and what he’d done, what he’d finally suffered in Nam. Sam refused to see aunts, uncles, cousins, either of the two girls from high school to whom he’d written and who’d written in return during his tour of duty, and that worsened his home situation, what with his mother unable to hold back her emotions at the sight of him, of what had become of him, and his father impatient with what he considered unmanliness, remarking that everyone had a cross to bear and that Sam should be grateful to have survived and proud to have served his country and now needed to get on with his life. Eventually Sam simply locked himself in his room, leaving it only after his parents were asleep but never setting foot outside the house even then, until Sam’s brother, older by a decade, managed to get him to open his door and found beyond the clutter the shadow of his brother, who hadn’t cut his hair or shaved and smelled as though he hadn’t bathed, and said: If you can’t live with them, leave.

  And so Sam showed up with a duffel bag on Freddie’s Lower East Side stoop one midnight and rang his bell, got buzzed in, and walked as many stairs as he had to before coming to Freddie’s open door. Jesus, Freddie said, they really messed you up, man, come on in. And then showed Sam the couch, which he crashed on for what turned out to be the longest temporary arrangement he or Freddie had ever known. Freddie didn’t ask questions, let Sam withdraw, didn’t prompt him to go out, didn’t complain that Sam spent aphasic hours just sitting on that couch with his arms around his knees and his heels on the cushions, staring at the peeling walls, at the flakes from the ceiling that littered the floor. Freddie, with that peace symbol tattooed above his ankle and beads around his neck, came and went, played pickup basketball games on the neighborhood’s courts, bought groceries, did the cooking and laundry, did his drug dealing in other boroughs, and never asked Sam for money. He didn’t leave his bedroom until late afternoon whenever Gloria stayed over—she rarely arrived on weeknights, came mostly on weekends and was sometimes accompanied by crazy Rita, lovely Rita, who unabashedly that first time she found Sam there made him move over after Gloria and Freddie had gone to bed and pulled out the couch Sam hadn’t even realized was a convertible, then stretched out and slept on it, breathing like a baby, not making a sound and not stirring while Sam fretted, sat on the mattress edge, went sleepless. And Freddie always started the day with a sampling of what he was dealing or keeping for himself, Freddie always generous with whatever drugs he had on hand and Sam partaking gratis until he was able to contribute a bit of cash, which was after Sam’s brother managed to get him to a shrink who was more than willing—Sam never knew what the man owed Sam’s brother—to certify he was incapable of holding down a job. That brought in welfare and food stamps, which, as Freddie pointed out, finally got Sam out of the apartment, once for the appointment and then for the once-monthly journey around the corner to the check-cashing joint.

  They’d met in Danang, swimmers at dawn in the South China Sea who afterward homed in on each other and sat in their skivvies at the shore’s edge complaining of the relentless heat, the ants, the rats, the jungle, the impossibility of knowing who the enemy was if not everyone. Freddie told Sam that the mission, whatever it was, in Nam was insane, that he’d spent his first weeks at Saigon’s airport unloading the dead in body bags and freaking out at what the future obviously held for him. That when he learned of tryouts for a general’s basketball team—The fucking idiots have teams, can you believe it, oh let us not go without some good old-fashioned, red-blooded amusement in this lovely country, Freddie quipped—he saw his only chance at salvation. He’d played ball in Alphabet City and at the Cage on West 4th with the best nonpro guys in the universe, and when he tried out for the team he knew he was playing for his life. At five-eight and 150 pounds, Freddie gave better than he got on court during the tryout, backing into and racing around guys who were almost a foot taller and a lot heavier than he was and confounding them with his moves, shooting over their heads; and he was perfect from the foul line. Back in the city, Freddie told him, he’d practiced making nine out of ten shots from half-court, spent a lot of time perfecting that because—given his size—fearlessness and quickness and great hands only counted for so much.

  He made the team, was playing his way through the war, and he got Sam to talking and later took him drinking at hooker bars where the girls, who were always pimped and usually by their brothers, weren’t so mercenary as those in Saigon, Freddie told him, offering to pay for two girls; but Sam admitted that he couldn’t imagine in
timacy with anyone who looked exactly like everyone else who was trying to kill him. Freddie sympathized, said, Well, no hard feelings, and the friendship they struck up survived that and their time together, and they kept in touch after Freddie got out, Sam writing to him what he couldn’t to his parents and brother or those two girls from high school, to hell with the censors, and at the bitter end of his tour of duty, with half his face and some of his upper body blown to bits, he’d gotten a letter from Freddie with his address and phone number and an open invitation to come by whenever he got home, that he had a small pad and knew some crazy chicks and where to get the best of everything that Nam, Mexico and Jamaica had to offer, that life was good and the good life was what anyone who’d seen action and survived it could surely use. For the transition could be rough.

  It was. There had been no debriefing. No one at the hospital could or even thought to tell Sam how he might get on with his life looking the way he did; they considered him fortunate to be alive and not to have lost that left eye, whose shape now bore no resemblance to the other eye’s and whose lid would remain scaly. Neither doctors nor nurses flinched at the sight of him, they’d seen worse than eviscerated earlobes, cheekbones that couldn’t be put back together again, shrapnel scarring, missing shoulder and chest flesh. Sam’s leaving the hospital consisted of nothing more than being handed his pay and discharge papers and being accompanied to the door, and once outside he found that eyepatch counted for little, for it didn’t cover enough: people gasped, or stared, or turned away at the sight of him. Which sight left his mother weeping, his father pretending nothing had changed.