The Summer Garden

by Paullina Simons

  If Alexander’s head were any lower, it would be hitting the fucking ground. He took a shaky step back. “Why are you doing this?” he said quietly. “Why didn’t you tell me this yesterday? Why did you play this charade with me, make me dinner, put music on? What for?” He could not lift his eyes to her.

  “I don’t understand the question,” said Tatiana.

  Alexander examined the cracks in the pavement.

  “You have a hundred appointments like this throughout the year,” said Tatiana. “You told me you were working late. You’ve told me that many times when you met with clients in the past. Yes, you didn’t show up for your appointment, but I don’t know why. You could have gotten busy with other things. You could have not had her number handy. You could have made a mistake and gone to the wrong restaurant. It’s your business, I don’t get that closely involved in it. You didn’t tell me it was Carmen you were meeting, but so what? You don’t submit to me the names of the clients who are interested in building a home with you. That’s never been our marriage.” Tatiana stopped. Alexander couldn’t even hear her inhale and exhale, that’s how quiet she was while speaking and breathing. “The woman you were meeting to talk about building a house called and said you never showed up. She seemed perfectly within her rights to be irritated. I would think most of your clients would not look kindly on being left waiting in some bar/restaurant down south in Chandler and would probably call our house demanding, ‘Well, where is he?’”

  They could not continue this conversation in the parking lot. “Tatiana . . .” he repeated. “Why didn’t you tell me this yesterday?”

  “What’s the matter? Why are you getting yourself all worked up?” Tatiana said. Only the tips of her fingers trembled. It was the only part of her, besides her white-stockinged legs and the hem of her white uniform, Alexander could see.

  “If you thought I was having dinner out,” Alexander said, because he could think of nothing else—nothing else at all—to say, “why did you make me food then?”

  “When does my husband ever refuse blinchiki?” said Tatiana in a straight voice, staring directly at him, “even when he has his dinner out?”

  Oh God! “Tania . . .” he let out in a hoarse breath.

  She backed away and said, “Well, listen, if there is nothing else, I have to go back to work.”

  Yes, go back to the root of all evil. He didn’t say it, just in case she told him he was the root of all evil. “Wait,” Alexander said. His reeling mind couldn’t see through the fog in the clear-blue-sky, broad-daylight, crisp winter day. Should he now lie and say, I really truly was just going to meet up for a drink with Carmen? We really truly were going to talk about the house—condoms in my pocket notwithstanding? Should he say, I did almost nothing wrong—this Wednesday—aside from premeditating my lascivious and traitorous plans. As opposed perhaps to last Friday, when things really truly were much more murky and tawdry, but I’m hoping you’ll forget about last Friday altogether. And I know it seems bad, me going to meet another woman to take her to a hotel to have sex with her, but I didn’t let her go in my truck on Friday. My truck is pristine. Don’t I get some points for that? Isn’t that at least like moving my pawn one square forward on the board?

  Alexander couldn’t see one move ahead, one step ahead, one word ahead. He would be damned if he opened his mouth. So he said to her, wait, but what he meant was, I got nothing.

  “I really must fly,” said Tatiana. “But you have to go back to work, too, no? Have you rescheduled your appointment with Mrs. Rosario? Will you be working late in Chandler tonight?”

  “Tania, no,” Alexander said in a defeated voice.

  “Ah,” she said, walking away.

  If Alexander didn’t have to meet with the electricians at a 7000-square-foot River Crossing house for a family who needed the house delivered yesterday, he never would have gotten out of his truck. But he had to meet with the electricians, and he was still with them in the late afternoon when Carmen’s sedan pulled up and she got out, all flashy earrings, flashy makeup, flashy tight black and white sweater. Don Joly, the electrician, watching her from the window, whistled softly under his breath. “Va-va-voom,” he said.

  Alexander turned his back.

  She walked in, found him. “Hello, Alexander.”

  “You might want to get out of the house,” he said without facing her. “It’s not safe here. A construction site. I’m not insured for accidents to unauthorized visitors.”

  “Um, can I speak to you a moment?”

  “Speak at your own peril,” Alexander said, without looking up from the framing, where thirty feet of electrical wire lay tangled. He was measuring the distance between the outlets; according to code they had to be no more than six feet apart and he was afraid the one in front of him was more than six feet from the one on the left, which meant it would have to be redone, which meant, like dominoes, all the rest in a room would have to be redone. He had to measure it out six hundred times in a house this size, and all before Christmas next week.

  “Alexander, can you turn around?”

  Slowly he stood up and turned around. “What?” he said. “I’m busy.”

  “I see that. Were you busy last night, too, when I waited like a fool alone in that restaurant?”

  “I was busy last night, too.” Every single thing inside him had shut off to her. He couldn’t believe he was speaking to her.

  “I don’t understand anything,” Carmen said. “I thought we had agreed to meet. Did you forget?”

  “That’s right,” he said. “I forgot.”

  Sharply inhaling, she said, “I don’t believe you. We made plans. You couldn’t forget.”

  “Except I did, Carmen, I completely forgot.”

  “You’re trying to humiliate me! Why?”

  “Why?” He took a breath to calm himself. “Why did you call my wife?”

  “I didn’t call her! I was calling you.”

  “At my fucking house?” Alexander’s voice was too loud. He was disgusted by her. And by himself. Don Joly amid planks on the second floor must have been listening, and how could he not, Don Joly and all his merry men, listening to Alexander fighting with a woman not his wife. This was crossing the border into another country, and it was going to get around to everyone, all because of his own indecency.

  “Yes, at your fucking house!” Carmen said, just as loudly.

  Alexander had enough. He took her by the elbow and led her out into the street. “Look,” he said. “I work here. Work. Do you understand? Also I’m married. Do you understand that? Unlike you I don’t have a pretend marriage, I have an actual marriage. You were calling my home, where I live with my wife, to ask her why I didn’t show up for our rendezvous! Have you got no fucking sense at all?”

  “That’s not what I did,” Carmen said defensively. “I was very professional.”

  “Professional? Screeching into the phone, ‘Where is he?’ That’s professional?”

  “Your wife was very composed,” Carmen said. “More than you are right now. But if you didn’t want me to call, then why didn’t you just show up like you promised?”

  They were standing on the sidewalk in the middle of a new street, in the middle of a new community, Alexander and a woman, arguing!

  “Carmen, I never thought about it again after Friday,” said Alexander. “That’s why. But besides that, first priority to my wife, second to everything else.”

  “You weren’t thinking about your wife last Friday,” she said, raising her voice, sticking out her ridiculous chest. “She was quite far from your thoughts then.”

  “Not as far as you flatter yourself into thinking,” Alexander retorted. “But are you even fucking kidding coming here and raising your voice to me?”

  “Stop talking trash!” she yelled. “I’m not your wife. You better show me some respect.”

  “Who the fuck do you think you are, lady?” said Alexander, stepping closer to her and speaking quieter. “Respect? You get into
a car with a complete stranger and you think because I let you suck my dick for two minutes you deserve respect?”

  She gasped. “Let me?” She turned red in the face.

  “As opposed to what? Not only did I let you, Carmen, but you didn’t get as much as a free drink from me.”

  “Oh!” She was flushed and wheezing. “Oh—oh—you’ll be sorry, Alexander!”

  “I’m already plenty sorry.”

  “Because of your deplorable conduct, your wife—”

  “You know what,” Alexander said, cutting her off, coming up close, too close, and leaning into her face. “Before you say another word, this is what you’re going to do. You are going to get into your car and drive the fuck away from here. You obviously haven’t read the papers carefully about me, and you might want to go do that, but I’m warning you right now, don’t threaten me, don’t insult me, don’t rail at me, just get quietly into your car and drive away— while you still can—and don’t ever come near me or my houses again.”

  She opened her mouth but Alexander shook his head, taking one more half step until he was inches away from her face. “Not near me, or my houses, or my wife, ever again.”

  She opened her mouth.

  He shook his head. “No, Carmen. When I said, not another fucking word, I meant—not another fucking word. Just get into your car and drive away.” He was talking so menacingly that she finally shut up, hearing him loud and clear.

  Her stockinged knees shaking, chest heaving in her va-va-voom sweater, Carmen managed to open the car door, get in, and drive away.

  Having a fight with a woman not his wife! It was so unseemly, it was so scandalously wrong.

  “Where is my mother?” Anthony said at ten o’clock that evening.

  That was a good question indeed. Where was his mother? When Alexander called the hospital, Erin told him Tatiana was working a double shift.

  “She is what?” Alexander put his hand on the counter to steady himself. “Erin, let me speak to her.”

  “I can’t, she’s in major trauma, she can’t come to the phone. I’ll ask her to call you when she gets out.”

  Anthony didn’t believe his mother was working a double shift. Alexander didn’t believe it himself. They didn’t know what to do as they sat numbly at the kitchen table. Earlier they had eaten the remains of yesterday’s blinchiki, and Anthony—still happy then, his mouth full— said, “Oh, Dad, thank you, what did you do so right that we have blinchiki tonight?”

  What did he do that they had blinchiki? Certainly nothing right.

  But at ten thirty in the evening, with the food long gone, Anthony said, “Something’s happening, isn’t it? Mom shuffled me off to Sergio’s in the middle of the week as if another Dudley is lying dead in our house.”

  Alexander thought his son’s association was quite apropos.

  An unquenchably upset boy was Alexander’s ostensible reason for driving forty miles at midnight on Thursday to see Tatiana. They sat in the waiting room with two drunks, a man with a broken leg, a woman with a hacking cough, and a feverish tiny baby.

  They paged her again, and again. They had to wait another thirty-five minutes before she rushed out through the double doors. The son ran to her. The husband stayed put in his seat, grimly studying his scabbed palms.

  “What’s wrong, what’s happened?” she said, extremely stressed.

  “Nothing,” Anthony said. “Mom, why are you here? Why are you working a double shift? You never work a double shift. And why didn’t you call us back? We were so worried. Why didn’t you tell us you were working tonight? Why aren’t you coming home?”

  Alexander thought the boy did pretty well with the questions. He forgot these: What do you suspect that I can instantly deny so I can make you feel better and touch you again, and never have to think or talk about this in my life? What have I done? What lies can I spin out now to undo it? And when is the coroner’s crew coming to clean our house of Carmen, Tatiana? That’s the question Alexander thought Anthony should ask.

  Tatiana sat down in the chair. They tried to keep their voices low. The drunks were listening. “I’m working a double shift, bud, that’s all,” she said. “It’s Christmas. We’re short-staffed, and very busy. Everybody is getting hurt. Everybody,” she said, “is getting very very hurt.”

  “Please,” said Anthony. “You threw me out of the house yesterday. You think I’m a child? Yesterday Dad said he was working and not coming home. Tonight you’re working and not coming home. You’ve been fighting since last week. You think I don’t see things going on?” He was near tears. “Please.”

  Tatiana took his face into her hands. He was already seven inches taller than she, and fifty pounds heavier, and yet he stayed in the space where she held him, his head pressed into her neck, as if he were three. Alexander sat with his elbows on his knees, looking at the floor. He knew that space himself.

  “There is a Christmas concert in my school tomorrow,” said Anthony.

  Tatiana nodded. “I know. I’m coming.”

  “Mom!” Anthony exclaimed. “Are you upset with Dad? Please don’t be upset with Dad about the other—”

  “Anthony!” That was Alexander. “Not another word.”

  “Yes, Anthony,” said Tatiana. “Not another word.”

  She was paged. Another ambulance came in. She tried to disengage herself. “Bud, I’m sorry. I’ll be home soon. But right now I really have to run.”

  The triage nurse called for her. One of the drunks crept up to her. Anthony was still pressed to her. Someone was wheeled fast and bloodied on a stretcher. Alexander couldn’t look at her. He knew she needed his help with Anthony, but he wasn’t giving it to her until she called him by name. “Anthony,” said Tatiana, “tell your father I have to go.”

  “He’s sitting right here, Mom,” said Anthony. “Tell him yourself.”

  Alexander got up. Very quietly he said to her, “As always—you can do without all of us sinners, can’t you?” And then physically dragged Anthony away from his mother. “Come on, bud,” he said. “Mommy is busy. Let’s go home. Look what I bought today.” He took out a bag of peanut M&Ms. “Have you seen these? M&Ms with peanuts in them. What a country. Want one?”

  David Bradley flung open the double doors, in scrubs. “God, where is she?” Then he saw her. “Tatiana, please!” he called. “Now!”

  “Don’t worry, son,” Tatiana said to Anthony, standing up. “Your father will take care of you. Go home.” She didn’t even glance at the father before she rushed away.

  At eight in the morning on Friday, Tatiana was not home. Alexander waited until nine. Anthony’s concert was at 9:30. He drove to the school, watching for her car coming up Jomax. He found her in the packed auditorium, still in her nurse’s uniform, and she hadn’t even saved him a seat! He had to stand in the back. The principal came out, the piano played, the children sang, the band performed. He watched her clap clap clap for their son, she stood up, took pictures, and even talked to the other parents about what a nice job the children had done of rendering the Christmas classics. The children went back to their classrooms, and she vanished in the departing crowd. By the time Alexander caught up with her, she was already at her Thunderbird. His hand slammed shut the car door. “Tania!”

  Her head was down. “Can you let me open my car, please?” she said.

  “No. Can we do this like adults?”

  “Do what?”

  He leaned in to her. “What are you doing?”

  “Nothing, what are you doing?” They stared at each other for a moment before he looked away. She looked immensely tired. She couldn’t stand straight.

  “Did you get off work at seven?” he asked quietly, standing close, wanting to touch the pallid cheek, the blonde eyebrows.

  “Yes.”

  “Why didn’t you come home?”

  “Why didn’t you come home?”

  “I did come home,” Alexander said, his fingers reaching for her face. “Come on. Let’s go. I to
ok the morning off work.”

  “You did? Great!” Tatiana said, moving away from his hands. “One thing though—I don’t want to talk to you.”

  “I know,” said Alexander. It was no longer a question of what lie to spin that she would believe. It was becoming in a whirlwind a question of how much truth to give her so that she would ever believe him again. “I know you don’t want to, but you have to talk to me.” He took her upper arm. “Come on, let’s not do this in the middle of the school parking lot. All these people . . .” The other parents were ambling to their cars, chatting happily about Christmas plans, gifts for the kids, the lovely weather, the sleigh rides together. Alexander and Tatiana stood mutely to let them pass.

  “I know you’re upset with me—”

  She raised her hand to stop him.

  “What do you want to do?” Alexander said, opening his hands. “Go on like this? Not speaking? Eventually you’ll have to talk to me, no?”

  “No,” said Tatiana, barely shaking her head and opening the car door. “I’m all talked out.”

  How can you be talked out, you haven’t spoken three words to me since Saturday! Alexander wanted to say. “Let’s go home,” he said cajolingly. “You can yell, you can do whatever—”

  “Do I look to you like I can yell or do whatever?” Tatiana stood at the open car door. “And do I need to yell?” She looked like she would fall down or faint if she didn’t sit down. Alexander reached out to hold her steady, to touch her, but she put her hands up as if she wanted him to disappear from her sight. “No.” She leaned against the car, crossing her arms, and shut her eyes.

  “Open your eyes,” said Alexander. She opened them. They were almost obsidian, the color of the Black Sea. “Tania . . .” he said, keeping his voice from breaking—just. “Babe, please. Let’s go home. Let me explain, let me talk to you.”