The Naked Gardener

by L B Gschwandtner

  I was paddling stern with Charlene. Hope was paired with Erica for the day. I didn’t hear the beginning but Charlene called back to me to pull in closer so we could listen to them. Hope talked and talked, babbling like the river itself, giddily chatty. Did it only take body paint to loosen her reserve?

  When we pulled up, Erica was asking if what Hope meant was that God didn’t want her to have sex.

  “I was taught that sex is only between married people. That’s why I never…”

  This was just too juicy for Roz to let it go. “Well of course we’re all taught not to have sex outside marriage but who listens to that?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “No one. Except maybe you.” She pointed over to Hope. “I think Hope’s problem is she grew up like some bubble girl. She never went through adolescence in the states so she never questioned anything her parents said. Now she’s in a situation where she has no frame of reference.”

  “What did he actually say?” I asked her.

  “He told me he wanted to take me to a restaurant on a lake.”

  “What did you say?”

  Charlene broke in. “What makes you think you have to have sex with him? I mean if you just go to dinner, you have no obligation after that.”

  “Well, what if … ” Hope stumbled.

  “What if it comes up?” Charlene asked. “If you want to, then why wouldn’t you?”

  Hope turned to Charlene. “Are you going to have an abortion?”

  This from Hope surprised me. It surprised Charlene, too. “I hope you’re not going to lecture me. Anyway, what has that got to do with going on a date?”

  “That’s a stall, Charlene.” Erica spoke quietly but with a certain authority. “It’s a legitimate question. Women have so many choices now. That they didn’t have before. No one cares if a woman whose not married has a baby anymore. How do you know what’s right and what’s wrong? Forget what society thinks. What’s right or wrong for you. I mean what have we gotten ourselves into? We can choose the gender of our babies and we don’t have to look like our parents because we can start having plastic surgery as teens, we can live anywhere and do anything we want. So where are the boundaries?”

  “All I know is, I’m glad we have all these choices. I felt stifled in every one of my marriages until I finally figured out that I liked sex but didn’t like marriage,” said Roz.

  “Do men talk about what they should do about women and sex?” Hope asked.

  No one answered her right away until Erica told her, “Men talk about sex but not in the same way women do. And it depends on their age. I doubt if Will and his golfing buds discuss sex much. Maybe when they were younger. Now they talk about annuities and the twelfth hole and what’s on the lunch menu at the clubhouse. And politics. They do talk about politics.” And then she added. “What are you going to do Charlene?”

  “I have no idea. This is certainly my last chance to have a baby. Now or never.”

  “I wish I’d had a child,” Valerie told her.

  “Why didn’t you?” Roz asked.

  “He always said he was too busy building a practice. He told me it would ruin my figure. Besides, I was still modeling and I never thought I had the time to devote to a child. And now … ” Her voice trailed off.

  “So you’re saying I should have it because you regret that you didn’t?”

  “I’m saying I just wish I had known when I was younger what I would feel like now.”

  “We all feel that,” said Erica. “The regret of age.”

  “What about you?” Charlene turned to me. “Don’t you want to have a baby before it’s too late?”

  “Yes I do, but you don’t all sound like great endorsements for marriage and babies. I mean, what can you depend on anymore?”

  “Taxes,” said Roz. “are the best reason to get married. You save on a joint return and you can depend on that.” She pointed to Erica. “You’re the one whose been married longest. Why did you stick it out?”

  “Oh Lord, don’t put this all on me,” she said. “Katelyn, do you love him?”

  “He drives me crazy sometimes,” I told them. “And sometimes we’re so happy together. We agree on everything except whether to get married. We’ve built a life I love. He would be a wonderful father.”

  “So what is it? He doesn’t want to make it permanent?” Valerie asked.

  “It’s not him. It’s me.” Just saying it like that, admitting I was the one who couldn’t make that leap – what did people call it? a leap of faith? – just hearing it, made it sound as if I was some kind of neurotic who couldn’t make up her mind. Maybe this is why people signed prenups. I promise to love and honor you and not to get in your way or subvert who you are or expect you to fit into some idea I have about what married life should be like. I further promise not to change our deal down the road unless we both agree we want to change it and stipulate to those conditions. Yes. That would be my kind of prenup. Nothing about money or property or who gets to drive off in which car. For me it would be about stability. You will not change. We will not change.

  How did you two meet anyway?”

  “We met in Mexico,” I said and thought: But that hardly explains anything.

  * * *

  It was October, two months before the humpback whales arrived for the winter in the Bay of Banderas. The air was pleasantly soft. I rented a little house nestled among bougainvillea and palms halfway up the hills above the beach in a fishing village called Sayulita. The season was changing to dry days, cool nights, the leaves starting to shed from the Quercus trees.. A small, hospitable village. Easy going, low key, cheap to live.

  At that time I was only doing illustrations for magazines and ad agencies. I wasn’t thinking about art and I didn’t know who I was anymore. The love of my life had turned into someone I didn’t know. Nothing was working the way I had expected. I wanted to get back to my inspiration. It’s not easy. You can lose it.

  From my terrace the Pacific Ocean with its long rolling waves sometimes looked like wrinkled satin, sometimes like undulating velvet. When the sun was high, light danced off the water as if ice crystals were bouncing on the waves. Every morning I got up with the first light of dawn and tried to capture the Pacific. But it was no use. Until one day I dropped a piece of framing glass on the patio and it shattered into hundreds of jagged pieces. That crash of glass, sparkly and disorganized, changed the way I looked at the world and I began to adhere chips of glass over the painted canvas. This created a mirroring effect that picked up light and cast it out again. Combined with the colors, and the luminous paints I was using, the paintings came alive. And finally I felt I’d reconnected with the self I’d lost.

  At the cafes and restaurants along the beach, people would gather for the evening meal, a few drinks, some music. One evening the bartender led a man to the table next to mine.

  “’A good view of the sea, señor,’” he said.

  The man, trim and well spoken, an American with sad, blue-gray eyes, nodded to me, told me he hated to eat alone, asked if he could join me. After dinner we walked on the beach to the sound of the rolling surf.

  “Are you living here or just visiting?’ he asked as we walked slowly above the breaking waves.

  “I’m not sure,’ I answered. “Life here is easy. Not like home. What about you?”

  He was there on sabbatical to study the Huichol people, a native tribe that lived way above the sea. He’d just come from the mountains where he’d gone to market day in Penita to meet the people he studied. I told him I was readjusting after a period of disturbance. Like I had lived through a blizzard and was surveying the wreckage

  “That sounds very intense,” he said.

  We walked. I talked. He didn’t interrupt. I thought maybe I was telling him too much but I had gotten started and it just gushed out of me like a tipped over milk carton. Glug, glug, glug.

  And when I finally stopped, he told me his wife had died a year ago. He blurted it out, almost as if he had been carryi
ng a burden for so long he just had to unload it to someone. Pancreatic cancer. He said it without emotion. Just the clinical fact of it.

  What can you say? Sorry? That hardly covers anything. Sometimes it’s better to let silence do your speaking.

  “Every time I think I’ve accepted what happened, I feel like I’m betraying her,” he said.

  Waves came and went, pushed themselves into the shore and then pulled themselves out again, one over the other, leaving behind a churn of popping foam. He went up into the mountains for days at a time. When he returned we had dinner together, walked the beach, hurled ourselves into the surf, ate fresh grilled fish at Don Pedro’s, had lunch at Tacos Yolanda above the Avenue Revolucion, turned a dusky tan in the Mexican sun and together studied the intricate Huichol beadwork and delicate woven jewelry that he brought down from the mountains. One evening, after a fine meal and a bottle ofCalifornia Chenin blanc, we started to climb the dirt trail back to my house. I tripped on a rock or a root and when he reached out to steady me his hand cupped my breast and I fell into his body. We stood like that for a few seconds, both of us realizing it was a point of departure or no return. When we straightened up, we moved toward each other and kissed.

  The next few months were filled with laughter, love making and a kind of teenage sense of sweet timelessness. One evening in January, as we sat on the terrace watching the sun set over the Pacific, he cleared his throat, held up his glass of wine, and proposed that when he left, we go back to the university together. He raised his glass and drank the last of the wine, watched me over the rim.

  “Just like that?”

  He nodded, waiting.

  “Why can’t we stay right here, just the way we are now?”

  “Because,” he said, “this is not real.”

  I didn’t know anymore what was real and what wasn’t. How can you tell for sure?

  * * *

  So?” Roz asked. “You met in Mexico and … ”

  “And it was all very romantic and I was not ready to start something new but there he was.”

  “They always seem to turn up when you’re either not ready or your guard is somehow down,” Roz said. “Anyway, no one’s ever ready. You just have to go with the flow.”

  “How did you and Will decide to get married?” Hope asked Erica.

  “Will got drunk the night before his bar exam, stumbled into my apartment in Burlington and asked me to wake him in time to get there. I asked him what was in it for me and he said, ‘I’ll marry you if I pass.’ And that’s about as romantic as he ever got.”

  We had come to a long curve in the river. From far off we heard a kind of rumbling. The sky was clear, although it had turned hot and the air was heavy. We felt a slight breeze because of our own forward motion, but it would be uncomfortable when we stopped later. As we rounded the curve, we passed large old growth forest and trees with gnarled roots as large as boulders overhanging the banks. Branches heavy with leaves drooped down, grazed the water. Halfway around the curve the rumbling grew louder and then, as we came around the last of the curve, we spotted a tall old wood and steel trestle that crossed the river high above us. Soon now we would be paddling directly under it. As we came closer, the rumbling grew louder and louder and then a train appeared, moving slowly on its approach to the trestle.

  Before coming to the bridge the engineer sounded his air horn, hitting a chord once, twice and then a third long pull on the horn as the train approached the beginning of the bridge. As it lumbered along, clacking inch by inch, slowly, carefully along the old tracks, he looked down and there we were, like open pods floating single file below him on the water. And there he was above us, with a clear view of our naked, painted bodies, his elbow resting on the open window as if he was just taking his pickup truck out for a spin.

  As the train clacked along, the ancient bridge shuddered and I could clearly see his arm, his profile outlined against the light that filled the train cab, his other hand pulling on the airhorn. The train cars rumbled over the rails and he looked straight ahead as the locomotive started over the bridge but he must have made this run a thousand times, maybe every week for years, and he must have seen the Trout River from above like this in sunlight and rain, fog and snow and ice. Still, even though this whole track must have been as familiar to him as any commuter’s route, he slowly turned his head to take in the river below, the lush greenery of the forest, the sunlight sparkling on the water as it flowed under the bridge. And when he looked down, he squinted as if he could hardly believe the scene below. For a moment he just stared. As if he was not seeing us, in our canoe pods, but some mythical creatures never before seen by any man. He stared as the train bumbled slowly along the tracks, freight cars snaking behind him like some Chinese dragon on wheels and then he leaned way out of the locomotive cab, the top half of his body hanging out, one arm waving like crazy, making giant arcs in the air. He hooted and whistled. We came alive then, yelled back and waved with arms and paddles and our boobs bouncing and we just went a little nuts, laughing and yelling “Hi” and “Hey” and “Love you” to him as the train moved slowly over the trestle until he was gone and the only thing left was his air horn sounding a final goodbye. The rest of the freight cars clattered along the tracks for a while as we paddled under the trestle and left it behind and the sound of it finally faded away into the forest.

  CHAPTER TEN

  THE VIRGIN

  In the middle of the day, when the heat was too oppressive to paddle, we tied our canoes together by the riverbank under a large oak tree. I tossed a line over a low hanging limb and secured my canoe to a tree. Erica handed out sandwiches she had made that morning and we opened a couple of bottles of wine we had been dragging in the cold water under one of the canoes. We cut open and sliced up a melon, passed around tiny sweet pickles and Greek olives and enjoyed the day. If we hadn’t been naked and painted up like some escaped tribeswomen, we would have looked like any ordinary campers on the river. As it was, we looked as if we’d come to life from a Botticelli painting, vines wrapped around our bodies, and moth wings painted on our thighs.

  “I just don’t see how you can have gone this long without ever having been with a man.” Of course that was Roz talking to Hope. More precisely talking at her.

  By now Hope had finished three plastic glasses of wine and it seemed to have loosened her up.

  “You,” she pointed her index finger at Roz and waved it up and down a little, although that could have been the rocking of the canoe. “are a sinner. In the eyes of the Lord that is what you are.”

  “Oh, man,” Roz just laughed. “You,” and Roz pointed her finger at Hope, “are drunk.”

  “It’s true,” said Hope and giggled. “and a virgin. I am a drunk virgin.”

  “What you need to do is get drunk with the gardener and then you won’t be a virgin anymore.” That was Valerie. “I remember the first time I had sex. I was seventeen. My parents were away for the weekend and I stayed at my girlfriend’s house. She had an older brother who was so cute. All the girls were after him. Well,” she paused.

  “Well?” Charlene broke in. “Well what?”

  “He went after me. Got a friend of his to take his sister to a movie and leave me there. And he sweet talked me right out of my clothes and before you know it there we were, in the family playroom, naked and writhing around on the floor with some dumb TV game show blasting. I didn’t even know what happened. One minute he was telling me how beautiful I was and the next he was panting and shoving himself at me and then it was over. He got up and left the room and never spoke to me again. I was so humiliated I found some reason to pick a fight with my girlfriend so I wouldn’t have to talk to her. But I don’t think she ever knew.”

  Valerie sighed and tipped her plastic cup up and emptied the rest of her wine. It was ironic, listening to her tell this sad story and yet she was so lovely especially with her body all painted in soft greens and yellows with false eyespots in white on the wings.

 
; Hope patted her arm from the canoe next to hers. “That’s OK Val, I love you even though you are a big green moth.”

  “Oh, that was just the first time. It wasn’t always like that.” Valerie looked across at Hope but I could see her eyes were a little wet.

  “What about you, Katelyn?” Hope turned to me. “What do you think I should do?”

  “Sex and virginity are not the issues. The issues are what do you want for your own life and how do you want to go about getting it? You have a strong moral base already. But that shouldn’t prohibit you from finding pleasure and love and all that goes with it.”

  “Katelyn’s right.” Erica filled her empty plastic cup and dumped the water out over and over like a child playing. “I may make fun of Will, of his golf and his gut, and his kowtowing to the developers, but he’s just doing his best for his family. Is it any more wrong than anything I’ve done? We’re both part of the system. I didn’t refuse the money he made that way. I married him knowing what he was and I bought into it.”

  Then her voice dropped and she was almost whispering. “It’s not fair that I started questioning the system when my son went over to fight for what he believes is the way to defend it. If I lose him, how can I then blame the system for my loss? It’s belonging to someone and with someone that makes a life. Without that, what are we? Just dust in the wind.”

  It may not be fair but it’s when something goes wrong within the system you’ve bought into that you do start questioning it. I didn’t question my life with the music man until he changed the rules of our game. If he had stuck with what we agreed on when we started, I would still be there with him, within the system we had created. The world does operate within laws. Natural laws. Man’s laws. Both flawed. Neither reliable all the time. If the universe is spinning in an expanding spiral pattern as the physicists say it is, if our solar system will one day, some unfathomable millennia from now, blow apart and cease to exist, then the systems we rely on most heavily are falling apart at the same time we are counting on them. And yet, everything looks so normal. The seasons come and go. The sun rises and sets. The stars stay put in the heavens above us, even though some of them are, in our time, actually dead. Planet earth is four and a half billion years old now and likely to last another few billion so what’s the use of worrying about how things may change in my little life? Maybe this is what those physicists mean by chaos theory. Ever since I had read about it, the thought kept coming back to me.