She met him in the garden

He had simply wandered in off the street after seeing the roses there in full bloom and finding the iron gate in the high brick wall unlocked. He had a camera in one hand, and when she first saw him he was putting his nose into the center of a ‘Queen’s Medallion,’ her own variety, with his eyes closed as he inhaled.

Too young, was her first thought. Tall enough, was her second. His right hand, gripping the camera as if he had been ready to snap a picture before being overcome by the scent of the rose, poised motionless in the air at one side. His left hand–ringless, she noted immediately–was open in the air just inches from the bloom, fingers spread as if in surprise.

She snapped the picture in her mind.

What witty thing would she say? All in an instant she must find the right words for a moment which would not be duplicated again. First moments never were–Stupid thought. Time would not stop. She must speak. She had no idea of the words until they were spoken.

“Like a candy shop, isn’t it?”

He started, nearly fumbling the camera away. Upright, he was taller than she first imagined. Eyes wide, she could see they were earthen brown. The nose could be smaller. He spoke only after a quick grunt of confusion.

“I’m sorry. Excuse me. I just saw them there and couldn’t resist.”

He was an American, by his voice. His eyes ticked down to her own left hand and then up again over the rest of her. Men were so predicable. Especially Americans.

“We charge for pictures. A shilling a snap.”

He squinted at her joke for just an instant and then, straight faced, reached into his pocket and pulled out a coin.

“I’ll only have one then.”

He set the coin down atop the overturned bucket that she had used earlier to bring the worms up from the humus pile. He pretended to focus his camera carefully on the rose, but suddenly turned the lens on her and took his picture.

She laughed.

“Then you’ve wasted it.”

“I don’t think so…Is it your garden?”

“Yes.”

His eyes scanned the yard beyond the neatly squared beds of the roses, first toward the apple trees, and then back to the tomato plants close to the small house. It was little more than an acre, but he took it in as if it were a vast estate.

“It looks very old. Ancient.”

She nodded at the assessment.

“That was the gate house. This was a stable yard in the time of the first Elizabeth.”

He turned his head toward the village, hidden by the wall but noisy with midday traffic.

“The manor is gone?”

“Bombed away in 1941.”

“Ah…” He turned again to the roses. “That’s a lot of flowers. And tomatoes. And apples too. Looks like a couple dozen trees there.”

“Thirty-six. We sell the apples in the autumn. The tomatoes are just ready. They’ll go to Wednesday market. The roses are for the hotel. You tourists love them. Johnson tells me he gets an extra fiver for every room that way, but he only pays me two shillings.”

“Very industrious. Almost American, I’d say.”

“American’s are not the only capitalists in the world. ”

He looked down at his shilling on the bucket. “I can see that. I think we could learn a thing or two, if you ask me.”

“I’d agree with that.”

He tilted his head to the side, but kept a serious look.

“I do have a few shillings left. Would you agree to teach me just a little bit more over lunch?”

She studied his face then. Was it honest, or not? Hard to tell in the bright sunlight. Every feature had a hard shadow. His shirt was massively wrinkled, but then he was clearly living out of the rucksack on his back. A tattered map bent from the back pocket of his shorts. His legs were lean from walking. His hair was too long, but at least he had shaved. She was tired of the unkempt ‘manly’ look they all affected. The camera was expensive. Not one of those small point-and-shoots. It had a lens almost as large as the rest of it.

She should put an end to this fantasy, immediately.

“How old are you?”

“Twenty-four.”

“You’re too damned young.”

He didn’t ask her own age in return. In the sunlight, he could certainly see the wrinkles at her eyes.

What he said was, “I have worse faults. I’m often stupid as well. But I’m not a fool.”

He was a fool, after all, and he did lie to her. He was only twenty-three.

In the morning, seeing another bright sun and feeling the dry air that played across their bodies through the curtains from the window, he had suddenly run down the narrow stairs from the bedroom as if going to catch the postman, but stood naked instead at the stone sink in the kitchen, furiously washing every piece of clothing in his rucksack.

She had made him bathe the night before. He had let her bathe him. And now he was self-conscious of the sour stink from the wad of shirt and shorts and the underwear discarded in haste at the foot of the bed.

“How could you stand me?”

How could she not?

And she had followed him, naked as well, to fry the eggs and make toast–putting on her mother’s old bib-apron against the hot splatter from the stove.

She remembered his eyes so well, just as he had turned from his scrubbing to see her there at the stove and before he had stepped over and held her from behind, with wet hands fondling beneath the bib. Finally, then, it felt as if he had pierced her through to the heart as he brought her backwards to the stool. She was sure, that was the time that had done it.

The eggs had burnt.

She had thought of that, ten thousand times over in the years since. But then, at that very moment, what had been her thought? That was the thing that actually brought a smile to her mouth each time she remembered, despite the sadness to come. She had wondered, in the insane moment on the stool in the kitchen, if her mother had ever done anything so carefree. Careless. Careful. And every time she thought of that moment with him again, she had thought of her mother as well.

Some goggle-eyed psychologist would have fun with that!

And there was worse still.

The evening before, when she was sure he would stay at least one more day, she had rushed to the market before it closed to buy coffee especially for him, but all they had were whole beans. Didn’t old Maggie at the market frown questioningly at her for not buying the usual PG Tips.

And that next morning, after making love to her on the kitchen stool and then finishing with his clothes in the stone sink, he had danced satyr-like out to the line by the edge of the roses in the garden to hang them in the sun–far too confident that he would not be seen in all his glory over the high brick wall by a neighbor in an upstairs window at that late hour (they were all off to work by eight–she hoped). Then he had poured the coffee beans in the heavy black iron grinder clamped to the counter edge, but only after trying to clean the cornmeal from the gears with his breath–puffing with his lips out, as if for another kiss, for which she had obliged him then as well.

Still the coffee had the taste of the cornmeal, and he apologized.

“I can do better,” he promised. But it was fine. It was the best. She had drunk coffee every day of her life since, after never having tasted it even once before. And she ground it each time herself, just as he had done then–with the swing of the curved iron arm back and forth at first, like the arms of the ‘gorilla ride’ at the fair as it gained momentum. Back and forth, higher and higher, and then finally around. And around. Around again.

She had fallen in love with him the day before, in the garden. In that first hour. Perhaps in that first minute. That much he knew.

He said, “How did this happen?”

She said, “You’ve been blinded by the roses.”

He said, “I’ve seen too much that was ugly to be mistaken.”

Thoughts jumbled so easily. Pictures taken from an old box and spread at random. Time had no lapse in her mind.

She had never taken him on that ride at the fair. He had left before the autumn came. She had told him about the fair that morning though, over their coffee and burned eggs and Johnnycake.

Odd. Thinking they were somehow American, she had chosen to make the cornmeal Johnnycakes from her mother’s recipe, written in the margin of the book by the stove, and he had eaten them all, and all her marmalade as well.

First time she had ever made them, but didn’t say so.

She even guessed that she was already pregnant then, but never told him that. But afterward, marmalade always made her think of it.

Another matter she did regret now, so much more–she had not gone on that ‘Gorilla’ ride years later, with her son, just as she had done once with her own father. She might have. But by that time, she didn’t have the stomach for it. And her dad had been sick after the ride as well, hadn’t he?

Not yet twelve, her son bravely climbed aboard the carriage between the gorilla’s arms alone, still pleading for her through the wire cage to join him. The wide net of the thick wire pressed against his cheeks. She had even let the boy lie about his age then so that he could go on the ride without an adult. Without her. It was she who had lied, without speaking.

From the start, her son always loved the Johnnycake with his milk, just as his father had that morning years before. And his father too had pleaded with her, late that summer.

“Come to America with me. Give it a try. Even just to visit.”

“I can’t. This is my home.”

They had the four weeks together. Not quite a month. With the roses always in bloom. And then he suddenly had a job starting in September. Photographs taken of the troubles when he was in Belfast during the Spring–long before he had ever wandered by her garden gate in Plymouth–had been accepted by The New York Daily News. He had a job at a real newspaper. His first real job as a photographer.

So proud of that. So torn.

But she could not be torn. He had pleaded like a child. He even came to tears. But she had not.

“I love you! Isn’t that enough? Come with me. Please!”

She repeated the fact of it again. “This is my home. Where I was born. It was my parent’s home, and their parents before them.”

She would not be moved.

He pleaded that she could be home before the apples were ripe if she didn’t like it. But she knew her place more surely then. She had always been there when the apples were ready. And she had another care. She had his seed within her.

She was forty that September, and he was twenty-three. He never once questioned that fact of it, so obvious from that first moment in the garden, beneath the sun.

Perhaps not a fool. But foolish. And the lie, so small, so brief.

He had written so many letters. More than a hundred, before they stopped.

She answered the first and second. The third letter she opened and read, but could not find the right words. The other letters she would not open for fear that she might give in to him. All of them left unopened in the box beneath her bed.

Her son was born the following May, his hair as black as his father’s from the very first.

After the last of the letters, when another year had passed, she found out why they had stopped coming. It was quite by accident.

She was at her solicitor’s office to sign papers concerning her son’s standing as heir to her parent’s estate. She had selected one of a dozen shabby magazines left on a table in the waiting room to read. The article was about the Americans who were leaving Saigon. Instinctively, perhaps, she thought she might see something of his work there in that brutal display of misery.

One picture drew her eye, and then the caption that referred to the photographer who had been killed some months before.

She read the caption over and again to be sure of its meaning.

She wished at that moment that she could faint. She had wanted desperately to put a stop to all noise and all sensation and all thought in that instant. She wanted the world to disappear from around her. She wanted to be instantly alone and far away from any other eye.

Instead, she waited. Patiently, and with the papers signed, she went home and made herself a cup of coffee. She sat there on the stool where he had made love to her, and finally, an hour or more after reading that caption in the magazine–after recalling that she had even worried about him being killed, and that she had composed a hundred letters–no, a thousand, all in her head–and then remembering the things she had meant to say, and finally, after recalling that she had actually been hurt when his letters stopped coming and she had felt so stupid for it, she remembered that she had in fact almost written him once, one quiet and sunny summer day, when the Queen’s Medallions had filled the air of the garden with the smell of candy. She had carried the stool to the garden to sit there and nurse the baby but then could not get the memory out of her mind of that one morning when her foolish American had buried his face in her breasts and began to laugh so, when he had been sucking for air as much as for her flesh.

“Why are you laughing?” she had asked as best she could in the moment, because the feel of his lips had made her laugh so, too.

“It feels good to be happy,” he had said. “I have never been as happy as this, and just a week ago, I thought I was the saddest man alive.”

And then, at last, she had begun to cry.

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