Garden of Lies

by Eileen Goudge

  “Cigarette?” Sylvie shook her head. The girl shrugged, tossing away her match. “Name’s Angie. Angelina Santini.” She squinted at Sylvie through the haze of smoke drifting from her nostrils. “How ’bout you? Got any other kids?”

  “No,” Sylvie said with a shudder, wondering again why any sane woman would go through that kind of torture more than once. Yet in some small way she felt comforted by Angie’s easy confidence. [17] As far as Angie was concerned, they were two soldiers sharing the same foxhole.

  “It’s rough, I know.” Angie nodded knowingly. “Especially the first time. But you have a way of forgettin’. It’s ... whadayacallit ... human nature. You sorta blank it out ... like when your man’s on shore leave and you ain’t seen him for four months. ...” Angie sighed wistfully, then, at the squeak of footsteps outside their door, she jerked upright and quickly stubbed out her cigarette. “If the sisters catch me smoking in this old firetrap ... say, I didn’t get your name.”

  “Sylvie.” She instinctively felt that Angie was someone she could trust.

  Angie flopped back on her pillow, elbow cocked, hand supporting her head. “You look like hell, Sylvie. No offense. I know I do too. Why don’t we get some shut-eye while we still can?”

  Sylvie managed a weak smile. “Yes. I am tired.” She felt half-dead, as if she could sleep for a year.

  The same picture of Jesus she’d had in the other room hung on the wall opposite her bed. Bloody palms outspread. Eyes upturned in agony. A bloody welt on His chest, making her think of the purple scar above Nikos’s left knee.

  Drifting asleep, Sylvie thought of her lover.

  She remembered that first day. She had expected the person applying for the handyman job to be elderly, or a kid like the others she’d interviewed, males not eligible for the draft. She’d opened the service door, and there was Nikos. She saw him as clearly as if he were standing before her now. It had been raining, and his boots were wet and dirty. At first, that was all she’d noticed. Those knee-high, heavy-duty work boots, so unlike the sleek black rubbers that fit neat as sealskin over Gerald’s Italian shoes. And this new man was tracking muddy footprints all across her immaculate kitchen’s black and white tiles. He walked with a slight limp, and she wondered if he’d been wounded in battle.

  Then her gaze had traveled upward, taking in the stocky figure in a beat-up khaki mackintosh, a mass of black curls glistening with raindrops, a pair of eyes black as new moons in a face that seemed to throw off light. Tiny creases radiated from the corners of his eyes, though he couldn’t have been more than thirty.

  [18] A sturdy arm thrust forward, and she had taken his hand. Huge, she remembered, the skin calloused, his wrist matted with black hair. She had stared at that hand, fascinated, unable to meet those piercing black eyes.

  Then he took off his mack, and she saw the small triangle of black hair that crowned his sturdy chest, disappearing into the collar of his khaki shirt. She’d never seen so much hair on a man. Gerald’s body had practically no hair, except for the sparse silvery fluff between his legs. And Gerald had small hands for a man his size, smooth and dainty as a girl’s. He sometimes reminded her of the tenors in the operas he loved so, barrel-bodied men with a woman’s grace, flitting about the stage like bumblebees.

  “I am Nikos Alexandras,” he boomed. Then grinned, a brilliant show of teeth. “You have work? Good! You work for me.”

  She thought his broken English oddly charming.

  She learned he was from Cyprus, that he’d been a seaman on a British tanker, torpedoed near Bermuda, but survived six days without food or water on a raft. He was one of the lucky ones, he explained in his halting way, though his leg had been nearly crushed. Sylvie understood, now, about the limp.

  What she didn’t understand was the sudden breathlessness that had come over her. Sylvie nodded, and said, “Yes. I think you could work for us. You look very ...” she’d been about to say strong, but she quickly supplied “... capable.”

  He grinned, and pumped her hand once again. The feel of his warm calloused flesh against hers had a strange effect. She felt frightened and exhilarated at the same time, which she could remember happening only once before. When she was fourteen, alone in the house one evening, she’d spied from her window a naked man and woman entwined on a couch in the apartment across the alley. She’d quickly yanked the shade down, but she’d seen enough to make her hot and shaky, as if she had a temperature.

  And through the whole year Nikos worked for them, when he was near, those feelings came creeping over her. Sylvie would watch him surreptitiously as he repaired a broken drainpipe or dug holes in the garden for her roses—his chest bare, shirt knotted about his waist, the muscles leaping in his glistening brown back—and would experience that same secret flash of shameful excitement. She’d [19] wonder what it would be like to be kissed by him, to feel those big rough hands sliding over her. Guiltily, she tried to banish those thoughts. Women would kill for a husband like hers. How could she even look at another man?

  Yet she couldn’t control her private fantasies. Bathing, she would become aroused suddenly by a warm trickle of water between her legs, and feel impaled by a hot arrow of desire. Or napping in the afternoon, she would dream that Nikos was beside her in the big four-poster bed, his sweat soiling the stiff, hand-embroidered linen sheets Gerald imported from Ireland. Then she’d awaken to sunlight sifting through the drapes, and stare up at the tall carved bedposts, filled with a kind of dazed yearning. Sometimes, still half-dreaming, she’d give in and satisfy her desire. But afterwards she’d hate herself even more.

  What was this, she would ask herself, was it love? Yet how could that be? She didn’t admire him the way she admired and respected Gerald. And when she came home from the infertility specialist’s office, aching all over from yet another painful test, it was always Gerald’s arms she wanted about her, no one else’s.

  And yet ...

  It was Nikos’s muscled chest she thought of when Gerald heaved atop her. Nikos’s powerful hands and full mouth. Sometimes she closed her eyes, found herself imagining that Gerald was Nikos, and only then would Gerald’s touch bring her pleasure.

  But the worst thing was that she thought Nikos knew. It was nothing he said or did; it was the way he looked at her. A sideways glance sliding out from under heavy lids as he appeared to be absorbed in the dismantled parts of a faucet. Or a long speculative gaze from atop a ladder as he paused while patching a ceiling.

  Late one sticky summer night with the air so thick she felt as if she were suffocating, Sylvie had gotten out of bed, leaving Gerald asleep, snoring softly. Downstairs, out on the terrace that led off the back parlor, it was cooler, and she could breathe.

  She had seen the red tip of a cigarette glowing in the darkness, and had frozen, startled first, then terrified that the shadowy form half-astride the stone balustrade might be an intruder. Then it struck her that the steps curving down to the garden led around to the basement room where Nikos slept.

  [20] He rose and came forward.

  Silhouetted against the moonlit garden, he appeared somehow darker, more dangerous than an intruder.

  A shiver ran up the back of her neck.

  He offered her a cigarette, which she accepted even though she didn’t usually smoke.

  “I couldn’t sleep,” she explained. “It was so hot I thought I’d come out for some air.” She was self-conscious about the transparency of her silk robe, and fiddled with the sash, talking too fast. “You know what I used to do when I was a little girl? I’d pull my mattress out onto the fire escape and sleep there. Mama would scold me, she was always afraid I’d fall.”

  He laughed, tossing his head back. “And now you have no fire escape.” His English had gotten better over the past year, but was still limited to short sentences. “Too bad.”

  “Yes, it is too bad, isn’t it?”

  A spacious brownstone overlooking Riverside and the Hudson, servants, more money than she could ever have dre
amed of, but no fire escape. She laughed too, a high-strung giggle.

  “And your mama, where is she now?”

  Her laughter shriveled. “Dead.”

  Sylvie looked out at the garden, at the dark cascade of ivy obscuring the brick walls, and at her roses, gleaming in the moonlight like old and precious silver. She even loved their names. Blue Nile. Peace. Old Gold. Her children, probably the only ones she’d ever have. For them, she didn’t mind getting dirt under her fingernails, and her hands scratched from the thorns. And when leaves curled and turned brown, a bud withered and drooped with blight, she felt a stab of grief as, surely, a mother would at a child’s skinned knee, or cut finger.

  She suddenly turned away, needing to run back inside to safety, to her husband’s bed. “I’d better go in. It’s late.”

  Somehow Nikos’s hand was on her arm, burning through the thin silk of her robe. “Wait.” He leaned close, and in the shadowy backlit glow of his cigarette, his black eyes appeared endlessly deep, a void she could tumble into and never escape.

  Sylvie imagined he was going to kiss her. “Please, don’t ... ,” she whimpered, drawing back.

  [21] Then she realized. He was merely offering her a light from his cigarette. She felt so ashamed, humiliated; now he had to know her secret.

  Tears welled up in her eyes.

  He looked distraught. “I have offended you?”

  “No. I’m sorry, I made a mistake. I thought you—”

  He remained silent. Understanding dawned in his face. Then slowly, so slowly it seemed as if she were dreaming it, he dropped his cigarette and drew her into his arms. He kissed her, tasting of nicotine and something faintly, deliciously spicy.

  Sylvie felt as if all the heat of the summer night had seeped in through her pores. She could feel her insides melting, flowing downhill in a slow stuporous slide.

  She had to pull away, stop this instant, run inside. She thought of Gerald, calmly sleeping, trusting her, but she couldn’t move. It was as if her shame and these forbidden tastes were all part of some exquisite paralyzing drug. She’d never been kissed like this before. Slow, sweet, endless kisses, an open sea with no land in sight, and nothing to grab onto to keep herself from drowning.

  She followed him, half-believing this was all a dream, down the curved stone steps to the garden. There, she half-stumbled, her slipper catching against an uneven brick in the path. He immediately caught her, and she grew feverish feeling the hard corded muscles in his arms. He carried her the rest of the way, despite his bad leg, as easily as if she were a child, under a trellis bowed with a profusion of Silver Moon roses, filling the air with their perfume, down the narrow flight of slate steps to his basement.

  Inside, she saw a narrow bed, a dresser, a small window with the moon caught in one of its panes. Wordlessly, he set her on her feet beside the bed. He untied her sash, pushed her robe off her shoulders; it slid to the floor, a puddle of rose silk. Then he took off his own clothes, hurriedly, not bothering to fold them as Gerald always did.

  Sylvie stared at him. His naked body moved toward her slowly, the long planes of his shanks, paler than the rest of him, reflecting the moonlight, tantalizing her, as if he were engaging her in some ritual dance. It was the first time Sylvie had thought of the male body as beautiful. Even the purple scar snaking from his left hip all [22] the way down to his knee seemed thrilling, a tattoo of his ordeal.

  Suddenly too weak to stand, she sank down on the bed, and he came to her. He slid his hands up her arms and took her by the shoulders, gently pressing her onto her back. He knelt on the floor before her, lowering his head as if in prayer.

  There. Oh dear God, he was kissing her there.

  Sylvie was shocked. And that somehow made it more wonderful. And so wicked. She buried her fingers in the springy moss of his curls, pressing his head closer. She was trembling so hard her legs jerked in spasm. Did people really do this? Surely nice people didn’t.

  Right now she knew she wasn’t nice, and she didn’t care. There were only his fingers digging into her behind, his hot sweet mouth. His tongue. She couldn’t stop trembling ... couldn’t stop. ...

  Then he was inside her, driving into her, fiercely, their bodies slippery with sweat. Kissing her on the mouth with her own taste on his lips like some strange forbidden fruit. And she cried out again and again, her arms and legs wrapped all about him, her whole body shuddering with pleasure, with urgency, with need.

  Oh, this exquisite feeling! Is it really me, making all this noise? Could this be what Gerald’s heaving and grunting is all about? Oh God ... I don’t care ... I just don’t want it to end ... so good ... it feels so good.

  He was plunging deeper, faster, his body tensing. Back arching, cords on his neck standing out. She dug her fingers into his buttocks, hard, loving the sculpted feel of them, the way they curved in like spoons. He was crying out too, a hoarse guttural sound, over and over.

  Then, stillness, a delicious floating sensation as if she were a feather that could be picked up by the first breeze, carried off into the night.

  Sylvie opened her eyes to find Nikos grinning at her. “This time you will sleep,” he said.

  She was awakened by the loud popping of firecrackers outside. She peered groggily at the window. It was dark. She didn’t know how long she’d been asleep. Not long enough. Sleep was a cave she longed to crawl back into.

  [23] She felt as if she’d awakened in someone else’s body. Everything hurt. She couldn’t budge without something aching. Her deflated stomach felt like one gigantic bruise. Thick pads chafed between her legs.

  Sylvie saw Angie stir in her sleep. One of the other women snored softly. How she envied them! They would take their babies home to joyful husbands, settle back into their old lives. They had such happiness to look forward to, playing with their baby, fondling it, showing it off to cooing grandparents, walking it in the park on sunny days.

  And where would she be?

  Sylvie felt a chill settle over her, trying to contemplate what lay ahead. She could remember seeing Gerald angry only that one time, but it had shaken her so badly she’d never forget it.

  One gray, foggy afternoon, coming up from the basement after she’d been with Nikos. And there was Gerald, looking down at her from the terrace. God, oh God. Her insides turned to scalding water. Usually he didn’t get home from the bank until dinner time, but there he was, staring, his expression stony.

  Sylvie began to shiver. She had the strange disconnected feeling that this wasn’t really happening, couldn’t be happening. Dear God. He knows I never go near the basement, that I feel suffocated in dark clammy places. What can he think except that I’ve been with Nikos? What excuse can I possibly give?

  But suddenly the lie was there, as instinctive as throwing a hand up to ward off a blow. “Darling, what a surprise!” she called cheerily, her heart hammering in her throat. “I was just bringing poor Nikos some aspirin. He’s in bed with a fever, and since it was Bridget’s day off ... But why didn’t you let me know you’d be home early?”

  Gerald didn’t reply at first, merely continued looking at her in that odd way, as if she were someone he’d never seen before. His eyes, she saw as she came toward him, were cold as frost on a windowpane.

  “I didn’t know myself,” he said in his normal voice. “I came back for some papers I left behind this morning.” When he took her arm, however, it was not in his normal, gentle way, but with the firm grasp of a parent taking hold of a wayward child. “You look a [24] bit feverish yourself, my dear. Your face is all flushed. Let’s hope you haven’t caught something from that man.”

  “Gerald, I don’t think—”

  “You know you really can’t be too careful around the servants,” he continued as if she hadn’t spoken. “There’s no telling what you might pick up.”

  “Gerald—” She wanted to tell him he was hurting her, pinching her arm, but the look on his face stopped her.

  “I’m afraid I must insist you lie dow
n in bed, my dear.”

  He led her through the ground-floor terrace doors, the hollow clack of his footsteps against the polished parquet floor creating shock waves that traveled up into the pit of her stomach. The journey upstairs to their bedroom seemingly endless—and also, like a thorn digging into her, reminding her of everything she stood to lose. Gay, giddy dinners with Gerald and the Golds at Le Chambord, her precious roses, and, oh God, this wonderful house. Passing through the parlor with its arched ceilings and lovely antiques, the Waterford chandelier like a bouquet of dancing prisms, the precious Tabriz carpet, she felt as if she must memorize it, burn it into her brain so it wouldn’t escape her.

  Up, up the curving black marble stairs, her legs trembling with the effort, footsteps muffled by the Chinese runner, past the satin-wood calendar clock chiming the hour in a doleful tone, the Rose Medallion vases standing guard in their hollowed-out marble niches.

  Then their bedroom, the most beautiful of all, only now cold and somehow implacable. The river mist that clung to the diamond-paned windows casting a gray pall over the Aubusson rug, turning its lovely autumn colors winter pale.

  Then he stood there, as if he had all the time in the world, watching her undress, never taking his frostbitten gaze from her. Usually, he averted his eyes politely. Sylvie felt as if he was scrutinizing her for a telltale sign, proof of her crime. She fumbled at the hooks of her brassiere. Was it fastened properly? Dear God, there was a tear in her slip where Nikos had grown impatient tugging it off her. Had Gerald noticed?

  Sylvie was nearly in tears by the time she had climbed into bed and slunk under the coverlet. She was shaking so hard she thought she must be sick after all. The tall posts at each corner of the huge [25] bed seemed to tower over her, the carved dolphins at their peaks no longer delightful, but frozen and ghastly with their fixed sneers.