A Garden of Earthly Delights
He caught up with her and took hold of her as if he had been waiting for this for hours. Clara heard his breath come brokenly. They lay down and he was ready for her so fast that it seemed this must just be another dream, Lowry's face obscured from her while she gripped him around the neck, tensing herself, the cords in her throat getting taut and anxious. “Come deep. Deeper,” Clara said. Then she stopped thinking and abandoned herself to this man, sinking down to that great dark ocean bed where there were no faces or names but only shadowy bodies you reached out to in order to calm yourself; nothing came before and nothing came afterward. She shut her eyes tight and had no need to think of Lowry, who was with her in this stranger's body, and at the end she moved her teeth hard against the bone of his jaw to keep from crying out. Afterward he didn't roll off her but stayed where he was, holding her down as if she were a prize he had won by force, and he kissed her to make up for what they had not done before. His chest was heaving, his body drenched with sweat. Clara brushed his wet hair back off his forehead and framed his face with her hands while she kissed him. She felt as if she were drowning in the heat of his body, in the heat of everything wet and drugged that she could not control or get clear in her mind, and that she loved whoever had come to her like that, she was lost in love and would never get out of it.
When she got back to the house it was early evening. Revere's cousin Judd was playing with the baby in the front yard. Clara saw that he had a weak, vulnerable face and that something in the urgency of his look meant that he had been worried about her. She got out of the car and looked down at her wrinkled dusty dress and her dirty bare feet, and for no reason at all she set the black hat on her head and came over to meet them. She picked the baby up and kissed him, closing her eyes with gratitude. The very earth before her feet seemed to her solid and transformed; the baby's happiness was her own happiness; her body had not been like this since those days with Lowry. Seeing Judd's look she said, “I got lost somewhere,” and pressed her face against the baby so that she would not have to look at Judd.
10
“Honey where are you? Swan?”
Clara was working in the side garden and it occurred to her that the boy had been gone for a while. She let the hoe fall. “Swan? Where are you?”
Revere said she fussed over the boy too much and she knew it, but it was partly just loneliness; anyway, she liked to talk, and if Swan wasn't with her she couldn't talk without thinking herself a little crazy, like a few women in the vicinity she could name. She looked around the garden and out toward the orchard, letting her eyes move easily from thing to thing, all her possessions. She had been living here for four years now; she was twenty-one. If she thought of the time behind her, she felt no regret, no doubts at all. All those years when Revere came to visit her and occasionally stay the night were kept here in the look of the land he had gifted her with, the slightly shabby farm with its tilted and moss-specked barns, the wild grass that to Clara was so beautiful, the wildflowers and weeds and bushes sprung out of other bushes like magic—all this was hers.
She tilted her head back to let her hair fall loose. Her hair was warm and thick, too thick for August. Sometimes she wore it pulled back and up, in a great clumsy knot that fell loose all the time and made her feel childish; most of the time she let it fall wild. It was bleached by the summer sun, like her boy's, almost white, a pale gleaming moon-colored blond that seemed to be kin to the burnished tips of certain weeds and the way the sun could slant its light off the tin roof of the old barns. Clara said, “Swan?” without bothering to raise her voice and went through the garden toward the back of the house. It was a large garden for just a woman to handle, though Revere and Swan could help her. But it was her garden and it bothered her to have someone else working in it. A year ago, before his marriage, Revere's cousin Judd had put in some large-petaled roses for Clara, and in a way she had minded even that—though she had not let on. Now, since his marriage, Judd never came to see her. His wife would not allow it. So it was Clara's garden and no one else's, and when her eyes moved from plant to plant, pausing at each dusty familiar flower and occasional insects she'd flick off with an angry snap of her fingers, a feeling of accomplishment rose up in her. The garden was as much of the world as she wanted because it was all that she could handle, being just Clara, and it was beautiful. She did not want anything else.
Her mother had never had a garden, Clara thought. If her mother were still alive she'd maybe like to sit on the back porch and look at this garden, and be pleased at what her daughter had done.
To Clara it was all transformed by the sunlight that bathed the land every day, changing those old rotting barrels out back and the dilapidated chicken coop and everything her eye might come across into things of beauty. Even the most dwarfed of the pear trees could be beautiful: she only had to look at it with that fierceness of satisfaction that had now become part of her. And if Swan should run back there with the dog, jumping and playing in the grass, she would stand transfixed, as if she were at the threshold of a magic world.
Clara came through the backyard. Revere had bought a few chairs for it from a store in the city—tubed metal, painted bright red (the color Clara had thought she wanted) and glaring like splotches of paint dashed right on the land itself. She paused to look through the back screen door, thinking he might be in the kitchen somewhere. “Swan?” she said. On either side of the back stoop were great lilac bushes banked up close, not in bloom now but heavy with leaves. Over the house elms seemed to be leaning, like people watching Clara, and she thought of how quiet everything would be except for Swan's dog and how the world had moved back from her—the worry and bother of which old person was sick now in Tintern or what Ginny would do with that boy of hers whose teeth had to be pulled, all of them—all rotted—and who would win the war over in Europe, so far away from her on this land and impressing itself upon her only through the few signs she saw nailed on trees and in town: JOIN NAVY, RED CROSS, WORK AT GARY, WORK AT DETROIT, WORK AT WILLOW RUN, GIVE BLOOD. “Give Blood” made Clara think hard; it was the only sign that got to her. She went into town as much as she wanted now, no one bothered her—most of the men were gone and quite a few of the families, following their men down out of the mountains to work in the defense factories, disappearing. Many old people were left and the mail now was everything to them; they were jealous over one another's letters. The world had suddenly opened up the horizons falling back far beyond the ridge of mountains that had seemed at one time to be the limit of their world. And so nobody cared about Clara now; after four years, she was almost as good as Revere's wife, and so they did not bother her.
“Give Blood,” those signs said. Clara sucked at her lip to think of what that meant, why it was nailed up everywhere. Men were dying, drained of their blood; did it sink into sandy soil, or into dust, or into mud, across the ocean where Revere would never have to go?—when you owned what he did you went nowhere, you stayed home and managed things, even Judd did not have to go, but that was for a different reason: nerves. But the husbands and sons and brothers of people in town, Caroline's husband and Ginny's husband (though Ginny's husband had already left her) and anyone you could name, many of them were not just gone now but dead or reported missing, which was the same thing. Clara could not keep this in her mind and there was the remote, haunting idea that she should keep it in mind and think of it all the time, that someone needed to be thinking of it—it was so strange, this sudden opening up of the world. But she put it all out of her life and thought instead of Swan, who was a child and therefore safe. When she went to town and someone cornered her, some woman, she listened with her eyes lowered as she heard about some young man or boy who was “all right,” didn't she think so, because everyone knew they were treated well in the prison camps? She thought instead of Swan.
Out here, north of Tintern and south of the Eden River, in the slow gentle slope of the valley that encompassed so much land, history had no power for her. It was hardly real except i
f you listened once too often to one of those old women. Clara kept up her house and sewed for herself and the boy and worked outside and made supper for Revere and took care of him when he came to her, telling him what he wanted to hear and letting him love her and say to her what he always said, as if he were kept young by saying these things, pressing his face against her body and losing himself in it. Out here time might pass, but it was just weathertime or daytime, seasons blending into one another or days turning into night, nothing that got you anywhere: she was older than before, maybe, but she looked better than she had ever looked in her life. Time had nothing to do with her.
The dog was barking. It rushed around the corner at her eagerly as if it had something to tell her, a dog of no particular type Revere had bought her one day. Clara ran around the house and saw first a car parked out by the road and thought That's strange, and then she saw a man at the end of the drive, just where it branched off to go to the barns and back along one of the old pastures. Swan was standing by this man. He was facing him and the man was bending a little to talk to him, his hands on his thighs. Clara approached them and the dog came up behind her and overtook her, barking. Once or twice she had been bothered by strangers and one winter morning she had even discovered footprints out in the snow, under her windows.…
The man was Lowry.
As soon as she saw that, she stopped. She stopped, panting, her hand against her chest as if she were stricken with pain. They looked at each other across the patch of scrubby grass, and the boy turned to look at her too. When she got her senses back she walked to Lowry, slowly, and he came to meet her. Clara said in a voice that was too faint, “What the hell do you want?”
Lowry looked the same. Or maybe not: something was different. He wore a blue shirt and dark trousers and shoes smudged with dust from the walk down the lane. His face was the same face, with its thick firm jaw and that expression that played for innocence, as if he'd been gone a week at the most and why did she look at him like that?
“Mommy—” Swan said.
She wondered, staring at the boy, if Lowry knew. But how could he not know? She let Swan push against her, he was frightened; in another minute he would hide behind her legs. “It's just a visitor,” she said, a little sharply. She wanted him to be brave in front of Lowry. “You go over and play with the dog.”
The air between her and Lowry must have been choked with heat. He kept looking at her, smiling. No one should be able to smile that way, Clara thought. But she could do nothing in return, not make her face ugly or hard against him. She felt rigid, as if a small ticking mechanism inside had suddenly failed.
“Well, what do you want? What do you want?” she said.
“I came to see you, that's all.” He held out his hands, not to suggest an embrace but just to show that he was carrying nothing, had no surprises.
“You—you dirty bastard,” Clara said. She looked over to where Swan was playing, pretending to play, then her eyes shot back to Lowry. “Why did you come here? You want to ruin everything for me? Didn't they tell you about me?”
“Sure.”
“You asked then in town?”
“I asked them in town.”
“Well?” Clara said shrilly, “what do you want, then? He isn't here now, it's lucky. You want to see him?”
“Why should I want to see him?” He leaned toward her and laughed. She heard the familiar laugh but saw something flash from inside his hair, something flat against his skull; this frightened her. It might have been a scar around which hair wouldn't grow. “I just came to see you. I thought you might want to see me.”
“I don't know why in hell you thought that,” Clara said, trying to make her words hard enough to keep down her trembling. She turned away from him suddenly to stare out at the fields that ran to the road—thick with dandelion fuzz that was white and fragile as she felt. Out there his car was parked. “Why did you leave your car out there?”
“I don't know.”
But she thought it was strange. He had come back to the house on foot. “How did you find me?” she said.
“They told me. But they didn't think I should come.”
“Well—what do you think? What do you want?” she said. She stared at him and felt in this instant that she was too young to go through such things, that this moment was terrible for her because she knew what he wanted and what she would say to him, as if everything had been rehearsed in her dreams for years without her knowing about it.
“Honey, I came back for you,” he said. He took her hand. He slid his hand up to her wrist and jerked her a little as if waking her. “He's a real cute little kid,” he said, nodding over toward Swan. “I knew he was your kid right away—he looks like you. I knew I was at the right place then.”
“But—what do you want?” Clara said.
“Do you love him, this Revere?”
Clara wanted to say something but could not. Her lips parted but Lowry's eyes had too much power over her, they wanted too much. She felt that she would fall helplessly from him if he released her wrist.
“I said, do you love him?”
“I don't need to love anybody.”
Lowry laughed. His face was not as tan as one might think, this late in August. “Aren't you going to invite me in? Have supper or something—what time is it?”
“Suppertime almost, but I don't have anything fixed—I—”
“Don't you want me to stay?”
She looked around to where Swan was kneeling with one arm around the dog's neck. They might have been whispering together or crying together. The impulse to tell Lowry that this child was his was so strong in Clara that for a moment she could not speak at all. Then she said, “You can come in. I'll feed you. He isn't coming over tonight.”
“That would be real kind of you.”
“You're probably hungry.”
“I'm hungry.”
“You look tired—you've been driving a long time.”
“That's right.”
At the door her foot slipped and Lowry had to catch her. “Swan, come on in,” she called. The boy was waiting on the path, his clever, silent face turned toward them. Then Clara said, confused, “No, never mind. You don't need to—it's hot inside.” She started to cry. It had something to do with her foot slipping on her own doorstep—mixing her up, frightening her. Lowry laughed and put his hands on her waist and pushed her up into the house.
“This is nice,” he said, “but Revere could do better for you.”
“I know that.”
“Don't you mind, then?”
“I don't want anything else. I told him to stop buying me things a long time ago.”
He walked through the kitchen and looked into the parlor. There Clara's plants were everywhere, on the windowsills and on tables— broad, flat leaves, ferns, tiny budlike leaves, violets you might almost miss if you didn't look closely enough. She saw Lowry looking at them. “You have a house all your own now,” he said.
Clara followed him into the parlor where it was cool. She was still crying, angrily. Lowry turned and said, “I see you got grown up.”
“Yes.”
“When did that happen?”
“After you left.”
“Not before?”
“No.”
“They said you've been with him a long time. Four years, maybe? That's a right long time, it's like being married.”
“Yes,” Clara said.
“You like him all right?”
“Yes.”
“What's this here?” And he reached up to take hold of the small gold heart she wore on a chain around her neck. “So he gives you nice things. This is expensive, right?”
“I don't know.”
“What about his other wife?”
“He's only got one wife.”
“What about his other sons?”
“I don't know.”
“They don't mind you?”
“I suppose they hate me—so what?”
“Doesn
't it bother you?”
“Why should it?”
“Being out here like this—for him to come visit when he wants.”
“You used to do that too,” Clara said, pulling away. He let go of the heart. “I suppose you forgot all that.”
“I didn't forget anything,” Lowry said. “That's why I'm here.”
Then the trembling started in her, a rigid violent trembling that began far down on her spine and passed up her back to her shoulders and arms, a feeling she had never known she could have. All those years with Revere were being swept out into sight and considered and were maybe going to be swept out the back door, as if with a broom Clara herself was whisking about impatiently.
“Let me get you a beer,” Clara said.
“Are you cold?”
“For Christ's sake, no,” she said, looking away. “It's summer out.” She felt the shivering start again and made herself rigid. Lowry sat down and she went to the refrigerator and got two bottles out. At the window she saw Swan by one of the barns, alone and lonely, a child without other children, with a mother who was now about to desert him and betray him, just as she must have always known she would. And the worst betrayal of all would be her giving him this father who had come down the lane without even driving up, apologizing for nothing and already bossing them around. She saw Lowry through the doorway, his legs outspread and his hands fallen idly across his flat stomach.