The Summer Garden

  “I don’t think so. Ant, do you want to come, help me steer?”

  Anthony ran to his father. The girl turned around to glance at Anthony and at Tatiana, who smiled, giving her a little wave.

  “Is this your son?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is that, um...?”

  “My wife, yes.”

  “Oh. Excuse me. I didn’t know you were married.”

  “I am, though, nonetheless. Tania, come here. Meet...sorry, I didn’t catch your name.”

  As Tatiana walked past the girl to get to Alexander, she said, “Excuse me,” and added evenly, “I think the wind might indeed kick up that immodesty you were talking about. Better grab on to the skirt.”

  Alexander bit his lip. Tatiana stood calmly next to him, her hand on the wheel.

  That evening walking home, he said, “I either continue to invite questions or I can grow out my hair.” When she didn’t say anything— because she didn’t think her husband with a head full of shiny black hair would be repellent enough—he prodded her to tell him what she was thinking.

  She chewed her lip. “The constant female attention . . . um . . . wanted or unwanted?”

  “I’m indifferent, babe,” he said, his arm around her. “Though amused by you.”

  Tatiana was quiet when Alexander came home the following evening.

  “What’s the matter? You’re more glum than usual,” he asked after he came out from the bath.

  She protested. “I’m not usually glum.” Then she sighed. “I took a test today.”

  “What test?” Alexander sat down at her table. “What does the husband want for dinner?”

  “The husband wants plantains and carrots and corn and bread, and shrimp, and hot apple cobbler with ice cream for dinner.”

  “Hot apple cobbler?” Alexander smiled. “Indeed. Indeed.” He laughed, buttering his bread roll. “Tell me about this test.”

  “In one of my magazines. Ladies Home Journal. There’s a test. ‘How Well Do You Know Your Husband?’”

  “One of your magazines?” His mouth was full. “I didn’t know you read any magazines.”

  “Well, perhaps it would behoove you to take that test, too, then.”

  He was twinkling at her from across the table, buttering another roll. “So how did you do?”

  “I failed, that’s how I did,” Tatiana said. “Apparently I don’t know you at all.”

  “Really?” Alexander’s face was mock-serious.

  Tatiana flung the magazine open to the test page. “Look at these questions. What is your husband’s favorite color? I don’t know. What is his favorite food? I don’t know. What sports does he like best? I don’t know. What is his favorite book? His favorite movie? His favorite song? What’s his favorite flavor ice cream? Does he like to sleep on his back or his side? What was the name of the school he graduated from? I don’t know anything!”

  Alexander grinned. “Come on. Not even the back or side question?”

  “No!”

  Continuing to eat his roll, he got up, took the magazine out of her hands and threw it in the trash. “You’re right.” He nodded. “There is nothing to be done. My wife doesn’t know my favorite ice cream flavor. I demand a divorce.” He raised his eyebrows. “Do you think a priest will give us an annulment?” He came up to her, sitting dejectedly in the chair.

  “You’re making fun,” Tatiana said, “but this is serious.”

  “You don’t know me because you don’t know what my favorite color is?” Alexander sounded disbelieving. “Ask me anything. I’ll tell you.”

  “You won’t tell me anything! You don’t talk to me at all!” She started to cry.

  Wide-eyed, flummoxed, stopped in mid-laugh, Alexander speech-lessly opened his hands. “A second ago, this was all kind of funny,” he said slowly.

  “If I don’t even know a simple thing like your favorite color,” Tatiana said, “can you imagine what else I don’t know?”

  “I don’t know my own favorite color! Or movie, or book, or song. I don’t know, I don’t care, I never thought about it. Good God, is this what people are thinking about after the war?”

  “Yes!”

  “Is this what you want to be thinking about?”

  “Better than what we’ve been thinking about!”

  Anthony, bless his small ways, came out of his bedroom, and, as always, prevented them from ever finishing any discussion until he was well asleep. All the things they talked about had to involve him, be compelling to him. As soon as he heard his mother and father talking in animated tones, he would come and take one of them away.

  But later, in their bed, in the dark, Tatiana, who still had on her glum face, said to Alexander, “We don’t know each other. It occurs to me now—perhaps a little belatedly—that we never did.”

  “Speak for yourself,” he said. “I know how you’ve lived and I know how you like to be touched. You know how I’ve lived and you know how I like to be touched.”

  Oh. Alexander may have known theoretically, intellectually, how Tatiana liked to be touched, but he certainly never touched her that way anymore. She didn’t know why he didn’t, he just didn’t, and she didn’t know how to ask.

  “Now, can I make love to you once without you crying?”

  Certainly she didn’t want to make him touch her.

  “Just once, and please—don’t tell me you’re crying from happiness.”

  She tried not to cry when he made love to her. But it was impossible.

  The goal was to find a way to live and touch where everything that had happened to them to bring them here could be put away somewhere safe, from where they could retrieve it, instead of it retrieving them any time it felt like it.

  In the bedroom they were night animals; the lights were always off. Tatiana had to do something.

  “What is that god-awful smell?” Alexander said when he came home from the marina.

  “Mommy put mayonnaise in her hair,” said Anthony with a face that said, Mommy washed her face with duck poop.

  “She did what?”

  “Yes. This afternoon she put a whole jar of mayonnaise in her hair! Dad, she sat with it for hours, and now she can’t get the water hot enough to rinse it out.”

  Alexander knocked on the bathroom door.

  “Go away,” her voice said.

  “It’s me.”

  “I was talking to you.”

  Opening the door, he came in. She was sitting bedraggled in the bath with her hair wet and slick. She covered her breasts from him.

  “Um—what are you doing?” he said, with an impassive face.

  “Nothing. What are you doing? How was your afternoon?” She saw his expression. “One wrong word from you, Alexander . . .” she warned.

  “I said nothing,” he said. “Are you going to... come out soon? Make dinner, maybe?”

  “The water is lukewarm, and I just can’t get this stuff out. I’m waiting for the tank to reheat.”

  “It takes hours.”

  “I got time,” she said. “You’re not hungry, are you?”

  “Can I help?” Alexander asked, working very, very hard at a straight face. “How about I boil some water on the stove and wash it out?”

  Mixing boiling water with the cold, Alexander sat shirtless at the edge of the tub and scrubbed Tatiana’s head with shampoo. Later they had cheese sandwiches and Campbell’s tomato soup. The tank reheated; Tatiana washed the hair again. The smell seemed to come out, but when the hair dried, it still smelled like mayonnaise. After they put Anthony to bed, Alexander ran the bath for her and washed her hair once more. They ran out of shampoo. They used heavy duty soap. The hair still smelled.

  “It’s like your lobsters,” she said.

  “Come on, the fish weren’t this bad.”

  “Mom almost smells like herself again,” said Anthony when Alexander came home the next day. “Go ahead, Dad, smell her.”

  Dad leaned down and smelled her. “Mmm, quite like herself,” he a
greed, placing his hand on her hair.

  Tatiana knew that today her hair, down to her lower back, glowed gold and was silken and shiny and exceedingly soft. She had bought strawberry shampoo that was berry fresh and washed her coconut-suntan-lotioned body with vanilla scented soap. Tatiana sidled against Alexander, gazing up up up at him. “Do you like it?” she asked, her breath catching.

  “As you know.” But he took his hand away and only glanced down down down at her.

  She got busy with steak and plantains and tomato roulade.

  Later, out on the deck, he said quietly, “Tania, go get your brush.”

  She ran to get the brush. Standing behind her—as if in another life—Alexander slowly, carefully, gently brushed out her hair, running his palm down after each stroke of the brush. “It’s very soft,” he whispered. “What in the world did you put mayonnaise in it for?”

  “The hair was dry from the coloring, the leaching and then the ocean,” Tatiana replied. “Mayonnaise is supposed to make it smooth again.”

  “Where did you hear that?”

  “Read it in a beauty magazine.” She closed her eyes. It felt so good to have his hands in her hair. Her hot liquid stomach was pulsing.

  “You need to stop with the magazines.” Bending, Alexander pressed his mouth into the back of her head, running his lips back and forth against her, and Tatiana groaned, and was embarrassed that she couldn’t stop herself in time.

  “If I don’t read them, how else am I going to know how to please my husband?” she said thickly.

  “Tatia, you don’t need to read any magazines for that,” he said.

  We’ll have to see about that, she thought, in trepidation at her own anticipated audacity, turning around and stretching out her tremulous hand to him.

  His hands behind his head, Alexander lay naked in bed on his back, waiting for her. Tatiana locked the door, took off her silk robe and stood in front of him with her long blonde tresses down over her shoulders. She liked the look in his eyes tonight. It wasn’t neutral. When he reached to switch off the light she said, no, leave the light on.

  “Leave the light on?” he said. “This is new.”

  “I want you to look at me,” Tatiana said, climbing on top of his stomach, spanning him. Slowly she let her hair fall down onto his chest.

  “How does it feel?” she murmured.

  “Mmm.” His hands on her hips, Alexander arched his stomach into her open thighs.

  “Silky, right?” she purred. “So soft, silky...velvety...”

  And Alexander groaned.

  He groaned! He opened his mouth and an unsuppressed sound of excitement left his throat.

  “Feel me, Shura . . .” she murmured, continuing to rub herself ever so lightly against his bare stomach, her long loose hair fluttering along with her flutters. But it was stirring her up too much; she had to stop. “I thought maybe if the hair was silky,” she whispered, moving her head from side to side as the cascading mane feathered him in silk strands across his chest, “you’d want to put your hands in it . . . your lips in it again.”

  “My hands are on it,” he let out.

  “I didn’t say on it. I said in it.”

  Alexander stroked her hair.

  She shook her head. “No. That’s how you touch it now. I want you to touch it like you touched it then.”

  Alexander closed his eyes, his mouth parting. His gripping hands pulled her hips lower on him, while he pulled himself higher. Tatiana felt him so geared up and searching for her that in one second all her grand efforts with mayonnaise were going to come to the very same end that had already been happening in their bed for months.

  Quickly she bent to him, moving herself up and away. “Tell me,” she whispered into his face, “why have you stopped caring how I keep my hair?”

  “I haven’t stopped.”

  “Yes, you have. Come on. You’re talking to me. Tell me why.”

  Falling quiet, Alexander took his hands away from her hips and rested them on her knees.

  “Tell me. Why don’t you touch me?”

  Alexander paused heavily, looking away from her searching eyes. “The hair is not mine anymore. It belongs to the other you, the you of New York and red nail polish and high-heeled dancing, and Vikki, and building a life without me when you thought I was dead—as you absolutely should have. I’m not against you. But that’s what it reminds me of. I’m just telling you.”

  Tatiana put her hand on his cheek. “Do you want me to cut it? I’ll cut it all off right now.”

  “No.” Alexander moved his face away. They were quiet. “But nothing is ever enough, have you noticed?” he said. “I can’t touch you enough. I can’t make you happy. I can’t say anything right to you. And you can’t take away from me a single thing I’ve fucked up along the way.”

  She became deflated. “You’re here, and you’re forgiven for everything,” she said quietly, sitting up and closing her eyes so she wouldn’t have to look at his tattooed arms and his scar-ribbon chest.

  “Tell me the truth,” Alexander said. “Don’t you sometimes think it’s harder—this—and other stuff like the magazines quizzes—harder for the two of us? That magazine quiz just points up the absurdity of us pretending we’re like normal people. Don’t you sometimes think it would be easier with your Edward Ludlow in New York? Or a Thelma? No history. No memories. Nothing to get over, nothing to claw back from.”

  “Would it be easier for you?”

  “Well, I wouldn’t hear you cry every night,” Alexander said. “I wouldn’t feel like such a failure every minute of my life.”

  “Oh my God! What are you talking about?” Tatiana yanked to get off him, but now it was Alexander who held her in place.

  “You know what I’m talking about,” he said, his eyes blazing. “I want amnesia! I want a fucking lobotomy. Could I please never think again? Look what’s happened to us, us, Tania. Don’t you remember how we used to be? Just look what’s happened.”

  His long winter’s night bled into Coconut Grove through all the fields and villages in three countries Alexander plundered through to get to the Bridge to Holy Cross, over the River Vistula, to get into the mountains, to escape to Germany, to save Pasha, to make his way to Tatiana. And he failed. Twenty escape attempts—two in Catowice, one ill-fated one in Colditz Castle, and seventeen desperate ones in Sachsenhausen, and he never got to her. He had somehow made all the wrong choices. Alexander knew it. Anthony knew it. With the son asleep, the parents had hours to mindlessly meander through the fields and rivers of Europe, through the streets of Leningrad. That was not to be wished upon.

  “Stop it,” Tatiana whispered. “Just stop it! You didn’t fail. You’re looking at it all twisted. You stayed alive, that was all, that was everything, and you know that. Why are you doing this?”

  “Why?” he said. “You want it out while sitting naked on top of my stomach with your hair down? Well, here it is. You don’t want it out? Then don’t ask me. Turn the light off, keep the braid in, get your”— Alexander stopped himself—“get off me, and say nothing.”

  Tatiana did none of those things. She didn’t want it out, what she wanted, desperately, was him to touch her. Though the aching in her heart from his words was unabated, the aching in her loins from her desire for him was also unabated. She remained on him, watching his face watching her. Gently she stroked his chest, his arms, his shoulders. Bending to him, she flickered her moist soft lips over his face, over his neck, and in a little while, when she felt him calm down, she whispered to him. Shura . . . it’s me, your Tania, your wife . . .

  “What do you want, Tania, my wife?” His hands grazed up her thighs, up her waist, to her hair.

  She was so ashamed of her craving. But the shame didn’t make her crave it any less.

  His hands traveled down to her hips, holding her, pulling her open. “What are you clamoring for?” Alexander whispered, his fingers clamoring at her. “Tell me. Speak to me.”

  She moved a litt
le higher, rubbing her breasts over his mouth.

  Cupping them into his face, Alexander groaned again, his mouth opening underneath them.

  Moaning, Tatiana whispered, “I want you to stroke my hair...rub it between your fingers, knead it like you used to. I used to love that, you touching me.” Her body was quivering. “Hold it tight, so tight... yes! like that . . . touch my blonde hair that you used to love...do you remember? Don’t you remember?”

  Very slowly Tatiana moved up on his chest, and up and up and up, until she was kneeling over Alexander’s panting parted mouth. Please, please, darling, Shura, whispered Tatiana, touch me . . . grasping on to the headboard and lowering herself slightly. Please . . . touch me like you used to . . .

  This time, Alexander, with no breath left in his lungs, did not have to be asked again. When she felt his hands spreading her open and his warm soft mouth on her for the first time since their return to America, Tatiana nearly fainted. She began to cry. She couldn’t even hold herself up; if it weren’t for the headboard and the wall, she would have surely pitched forward.

  “Shh...Tatiasha...shh... I’m looking at you... and what do you know, it turns out that blonde...is my favorite color.”

  She couldn’t last three gasping breaths, milling into his mouth, trying to remain upright. Crying, crying, from happiness, from arousal, Please don’t stop, darling, Shura, don’t stop . . . pulsing into his lips, moaning so loudly the heavens were about to open up... Oh God, oh, yes ...Oh Shura . . . Shura . . . Shura . . .

  The next morning before work, when he came to the kitchen to get his coffee, Tatiana said to him, deeply blushing, “Alexander, what would you like for breakfast?”

  And he, taking her into his arms, lifting her, setting her down on the kitchen counter in front of him, embracing her, madness in his eyes, said, “Oh, now that it’s morning, I’m Alexander again?” His open lips were over her open lips.