The Wonder Garden

by Lauren Acampora

Watching, she notices gradual changes in David’s face. His eyeballs flicker under the lids like goldfish in a bag. His mouth moves slightly, as if he is speaking to an unseen companion. The baby’s legs finally stop cycling. Squares of blue light fall upon the carpet, and the room is suffused with something sublime and church-like. Madeleine closes her eyes. She pictures David’s tree house, dimly, in the branches of the ash. She entertains the idea of embracing the trunk of the tree and being pulled downward into the ground. Is this how it goes? As she drums, she extends the script, sinking down through the earth, following the tree roots through the soil, to—what?—a sloping underground tunnel. Here, her imagination stalls. What should lie at the bottom? A dark pool of water, or a grassy clearing, or a cave of molten rock. She settles on the pool of water, hovers above it, conjures murky creatures beneath the surface.

  When she opens her eyes again, Annabel appears to be asleep. It has easily been ten minutes since she began drumming. At last, her hands pause, then drum again faster. As she does this, she imagines David racing up through a tunnel as through a mine shaft. She looks for evidence of this effort in his face, but it remains placid, as serene as the face of their sleeping daughter. She beats the drum and closes her eyes. She is in a coal car barreling underground, dimly aware of the turns and dips ahead. There may be water, there may be rock. It is not for her to know the way.

  SWARM

  THE NEW house is a horror. Martin and his wife remark on it each time they turn onto Minuteman Road and are struck by the bald ostentation. The house, constructed in just three months, appears to have been modeled after a Palladian villa. It is fronted by a columned entry with a pediment like a dunce cap, and its symmetrical wings are shot through with fussy, arched windows. Although the structure is set back from the road, the owners have perversely removed the trees at the property’s front edge and installed a squat stone wall flecked with mica. They don’t believe themselves to be prone to prejudgment, but Martin and Philomena are people of modest leanings and allow themselves the small, wicked gratification of condemning the owners’ taste.

  So Martin detects a tone of abashment in his wife’s voice when, over dinner, she tells him she has met their new neighbors.

  “The wife’s name is Coraline,” she says between bites. “I was driving past and she was out by the mailbox, so I stopped to say hello. Anyway”—Philomena sighs—“she seemed very nice. Maybe in her midfifties.”

  “Fifties?”

  “They just moved up from the city. Their kids are already grown.”

  “You mean it’s just the two of them?” Martin says. “In that palazzo?”

  “Yes, I guess so.” Philomena sighs again. “Anyway, I invited them over for Saturday. It seemed the hospitable thing to do.”

  “I wish you would’ve asked me first.”

  “Why? What would you have said? No?”

  Martin looks down to the burnt orange weave of the chair upholstery, then back up to his wife. She is in her usual spot, across from him at the table, her plump form silhouetted by the window behind her, glazed with late-afternoon sun. Her hair shines white gold.

  Martin has seen forty years of skies pass by that window. The interior of the dining room is still lined with wood paneling, as it was the day they moved in. Like a ski lodge. He has stared at the same wooden slabs for forty years, too, his eye settling on their natural flaws, the dark knots in the grain like stationary whirlpools. Forty winters in this room, with chili and cocoa. The zero sound of snow. The shifting, lenticular sky.

  In the summer, Philomena’s garden opens like a garden in a children’s book. Her climbing-rose trellis blooms, and the diagonal rows of marigold. The little pond in the woods comes alive with turtles and frogs. And over those forty years, property values have blossomed, too. Their four-bedroom colonial with green shutters and charmingly darkened shingles is now worth at least a million dollars. Nearly a full acre on a desirable street between train line and school. If this is possible—if it is possible that a boy who sucked licorice on the sidewalks of Flatbush could be a millionaire now, inflation notwithstanding—then the world is a spooky and fabulous place indeed.

  Martin hated their house at first. It took him too far from the city and the cramped studio on Fourteenth Street he’d come to romanticize. He enjoyed watching the restless parade of crooks, bums, and nuns beneath his window. He enjoyed putting a canvas against a wall and making brash marks that clanged like music. But this house has endeared itself to him over the years. The rooms have absorbed something of him, and he of them. And he knows that it was a fortunate confluence of timing and geography that softly deposited him upon a tenure track at the neighboring state university, just a twenty-minute drive from Minuteman Road.

  They’d grown fairly close with some of the neighbors, a handful of couples with children the same age as theirs, with whom they took turns hosting dinners. Martin always had the feeling that these gatherings were building toward some ultimate consummation of friendship that hovered just one or two dinners away. The Loomises were the first to sell. They traded their lovely, weatherworn home on the sound for a Spanish-tiled monster in Jupiter. The Petries were next, once their children were safely launched onto Wall Street. For them it was Sanibel Island. Then the Henrys and the Callahans. They all fell, as if to gravity, to that southerly force so much like the grip of death. They all bequeathed their houses to sweet, anxious families like mirror images of their younger selves.

  Philomena broached Florida just once, and just once Martin said never.

  After dinner, he helps his wife with the dishes, then retires to the studio. In one corner, a sawhorse sits idle. In another, a tower of brittle sketchbooks leans into the wall. The easel wears a thin pelt of dust. Martin settles into the worn easy chair and opens an issue of Time magazine. A fly orbits his head, alights on his ear, clings. There is the brief, eerie feeling of miniature appendages taking purchase on flesh before his hand rises reflexively. The fly finds a perch on the edge of the gummed-up turpentine jar, and Martin sinks deeper into his chair. He skims the pages of Time and naps, as has become his evening ritual.

  The Gregorys come on Saturday. Coraline is a doll, he has to admit, with a fit body beneath her cable-knit sweater and pedal pushers. He shakes her hand firmly—he is still a robust man and wants to demonstrate this—and returns her smile with a handsome set of teeth, still his own. The husband, too, Martin finds likable. Bill Gregory wears a pair of wide-wale corduroys with a brass-buttoned blazer. His collar parts, revealing the pink flesh of a happy businessman. It seems impossible that these are the philistines behind the nouveau concoction on the corner.

  They exchange pleasantries and take seats around the wooden coffee table that still bears the scars of children’s homework. Philomena serves tall glasses of Campari and soda with lemon crescents. Coraline and Bill share the old brown couch, and their hosts flank them in armchairs.

  Bill leans forward toward Martin. “So, Philomena tells us you’re an artist.”

  “Oh.” Martin glances at his wife. “Well, yes.”

  “What kind of work do you do?” Coraline asks.

  Martin looks again toward Philomena, who returns his glance with an encouraging smile.

  “Well, I’ve always been a painter, primarily,” he begins, “but really I’ve dipped into everything.”

  “The Carnegie Museum owns one of his paintings.” Philomena swirls her glass. “So does the Menil Collection in Texas.”

  “Really?” Coraline puts down her Campari. “I wonder if we may have seen your work.”

  “Oh, probably not. It hasn’t been on view in a while,” says Martin, sipping his drink too quickly, the herbal syrup delightfully bitter.

  “Do you work here at home?” asks Bill.

  Martin nods.

  “Could we”—Bill looks at Philomena—“come visit the studio sometime, maybe have a tour?”

 
Martin clings to his drink and considers for a moment its wedge of lemon, curled at the rim like a banana slug. He puts the glass down and stands.

  “Well, why not. Let’s go do it now.”

  For a moment he stands alone, fearing that he has misread the moment. This is the time for dinner, of course, not a studio visit. But the Gregorys stand, and then his wife. He leads them through the breezeway to the studio, which was once the garage.

  He begins with the vertical painting rack. One by one he slides the dusty old abstracts into the light and perches them on the easel. The Gregorys make complimentary noises. Then he moves to the later, experimental sculptures, arachnid shapes. There are many more of these to show, their production having aligned with the art world’s lamentable shift toward performance and politics. He’d been offered only two solo shows between 1970 and 1985. After that, his gallery had relegated him to summer group exhibitions, then ceased to invite him at all. He tries not to mind this. He has no reason to complain, having earned a comfortable living from teaching, having raised two children to adulthood, having stayed happily married. He has retained his health well into retirement, and although he’s never warmed to golfing, he has found ways to stay occupied. It makes no sense to generate more art at this point. It would only take up space.

  “Martin, this is phenomenal work,” Bill says gravely.

  “We’re art collectors, you know,” Coraline adds. “So this is very exciting for us.”

  “What are you working on now, if I may ask?” Bill’s eyes scan the room.

  “Well, to be honest, I’ve been resting on my laurels.” Martin chuckles. “Just a few drawings here and there.” He pauses. “I’ve always wanted to try something large-scale, actually, but it’s a question of space. And funding.”

  Bill and Coraline are quiet. Philomena stares.

  “Let me ask you something,” says Bill, turning to face Martin, his hands thrust into corduroy pockets. “If you had a commission, let’s say, and could do any project you wanted right now, what would you do?”

  There is a long pause. In a dresser drawer upstairs, beneath his underpants, Martin keeps the carefully drawn plans from his youth. The papers are yellowed and the pencil lines faded, but the finished image remains bright in his mind. When he proposed the idea to his dealer years ago, he’d received a look of amused incredulity—an unfair response, given the blatant hoaxes other artists were permitted. It was true that the idea might have seemed a departure, but to Martin it was an extension of his vision, its shadow side. He rarely thinks of the project anymore, but every so often it appears to him in a dream, magically realized, and he feels an exhilaration so complete it brings tears to his eyes.

  He stands for another moment, looking at Bill and Coraline Gregory. Then he goes out the studio door and hurries upstairs to his underwear drawer.

  The Gregorys return the next week to formally commission the work. After their visit, Philomena is strangely quiet. In front of the bathroom mirror, she puts her toothbrush down and finally speaks. “Are you crazy? Do you understand how big their house is?”

  Yes, Martin says, he is aware of the size. It’s perfect. Monumental. He’d seen the excitement in Bill Gregory’s eyes when he unfolded the first drawing. Yes, Martin had explained, those were insects, each individually sculpted and affixed to the exterior of a house. Spiders, moths, beetles, grasshoppers. The house in the picture was a generic 1950s ranch, nearly obscured by a mass of clinging bodies, an enchanting tangle of wings, legs, and antennae.

  “You’d need millions of them to cover it,” Philomena says. “Who’s going to model each one?”

  Martin brushes his teeth calmly.

  “And the Gregorys are lunatics, too. Who do they think they are? The de’ Medicis?”

  “What’s wrong with that?”

  Philomena looks at him in the mirror. They lock eyes for a moment, and her face softens. “I just don’t want to see you disappointed.”

  “That won’t happen.”

  “I hope you’re right.”

  “They’re serious about this. You heard what they said. They’ll cover the cost of materials and pay me the rest when it’s finished.” Martin smiles at himself. “This could be really big. Hell, it can’t be anything but big.”

  “I’m just saying you should measure the house first. You’re not twenty-five anymore. You’ve never even done an outdoor project before.”

  Martin seizes his wife’s soft body. He kisses her forehead and bends her backward, hearing the faint click of her bones. “You worry too much,” he says.

  Bill Gregory gives him a copy of the blueprints, but Martin barely looks at them. He understands that the house is large; he doesn’t need to know the exact square footage. First he will need a stockpile of closed-cell foam, dense enough to carve and score. At the lumber yard, he puts in an order for a hundred sheets of pink insulation board. From the hardware store, he buys spools of black electrical wire and tubes of foam adhesive. The owner calls a supplier in California for a roll of fine-gauge stainless mesh. Lastly, he buys paint. Gallons of all-weather coating in a spectrum of colors. He already has a stack of nature books, including a five-pound insect encyclopedia with color illustrations of specimens cataloged by continent.

  After the insulation sheets arrive and the men deposit them in the backyard, Martin sits at the kitchen table with a glass of lemonade. Outside, a mountain of pink foam waits beyond the marigolds, topped with cinder block weights. He feels giddy, feverish to begin.

  “I hope you’re not planning on leaving that there,” says Philomena, coming through the kitchen in gardening gloves. “It’ll kill the grass.”

  “Don’t worry, they won’t be there for long.”

  On Friday, Martin begins to make the first bug. He goes outdoors, saws a chunk from a sheet of foam, and clamps it into the vise on his workbench. With a coping saw, he shapes the piece, then refines it with an X-Acto knife and sandpaper. He carves textured ribbing along the thorax and abdomen. After lunch, he cuts wing shapes from the stainless mesh and carefully glues wire to their undersides, creating the illusion of veins. Finally, he pierces the thorax with six thick wires: three sets of legs. When Philomena calls him for dinner, he has not yet begun painting.

  He finishes the first insect at ten o’clock that night. There were a few setbacks after dinner—a lost leg, a vein peeled away from its wing—but nothing Martin hasn’t been able to rectify with invisible glue. Finally, he sets about painting the iridescent dragonfly body. Although he is yawning by the time he finishes, adrenaline courses through his bloodstream. He fairly jogs up the stairs holding the piece and carries it to Philomena in bed.

  “What do you think?” he pants, holding the insect in front of her. “It’s a blue darner, Aeschna cyanea.”

  She looks up from her book. “It’s wonderful.”

  “That’s all?”

  “It’s lovely. But at this rate, it’s going to take you ten years to finish.”

  Martin is silent, holding the dragonfly. “It’ll go faster once I get in the swing of things.”

  Philomena smiles and goes back to her book.

  “Or if I had an assistant.” Martin puts a hand to his wife’s shoulder.

  “You can put an ad in the paper,” she says without looking up.

  By Tuesday, Martin has completed two dragonflies, two spiders, and one perfect ladybug. On Wednesday, Philomena agrees to help glue the wings to a gypsy moth, and by the weekend she is sitting with him through whole days, helping to carve new creatures from scratch. The production doubles, then triples—as Martin predicted it would—as they become more adept. Together, they fall into a kind of shared trance, bending wires and sculpting foam as the summer progresses and weeds crawl up the sides of the pink pyramid behind the house.

  Slowly, they produce each species in the book. Despite her bad back and creeping arthritis, Philom
ena works unflagging hours, fashioning the spiky hairs on fly legs, painting the chartreuse wings of a luna moth. She works with a beatific look on her face, like a woman deep in her knitting. By September, they have made a hundred insects. Martin is reluctant to store them in boxes, where they might be damaged. Instead, they rest upon every available surface, until they crowd the studio and overflow into the breezeway. Swarm, Martin decides, will be the title of the piece.

  When the Gregorys invite them for dinner, Martin and Philomena walk down Minuteman Road to the glittering stone wall. On foot, the house is more imposing than ever—six thousand square feet at least. Martin says nothing as his wife glances at him and presses the musical doorbell.

  Bill leads the tour of the interior, pausing to highlight the artwork. The paintings tend to be oversized, lacking in nuance. The artists’ names are unfamiliar. Several gallery pedestals surround the dinner table, supporting bronze blobs. Martin sits quietly beneath the vaulted ceiling as the others converse and a chef serves steak tartare.

  Martin chooses not to return the dinner invitation, despite Philomena’s protests. It is unwise to give his patrons a preview of the piece before it’s complete, he argues, and it will be too much trouble to stow it away.

  By November, a phalanx of insects occupies the kitchen. The first snow comes and lays a clean blanket upon the hill of insulation boards. Alone in the house, Martin and Philomena slide into the timeless ski-lodge feeling. With the exception of supermarket cashiers and hardware store clerks, they speak only to each other. It has been a long time since they were together like this—really together—doing something. Something about their shared concentration on the same objective spurs easy conversation. They talk about people they’ve known, relive their children’s blunders, make each other laugh.

  From time to time, there are phone calls, the ring resounding like a siren through the house, rattling Martin out of his chair. Philomena speaks to their daughter, Melinda, divorced in San Francisco, and their son, Claude, living in Nashville with their two granddaughters.