Page 125 of Meet Me in the Garden

“I remember,” I say.

“There’s color in San Francisco, too. It’s part of why I love it here. And there’s this place—the Conservatory of Flowers. It’s in Golden Gate Park. It’s my favorite place in the entire city. I volunteer there once a week, on Sundays. I know you and Nathalie don’t have much time tomorrow, but I’m certain you’d like it.”

Eventually, I say, “I wish I could see where you live.” Her chest rises and falls. She’s grown tired, but I can’t let her go. Not yet. “Describe it to me,” I say.

“It’s an old building. Victorian, on Page Street, in the Haight-Ashbury. I don’t know if you’ve heard much about the neighborhood?” I shake my head. “So much is going on there. So many young people, and creative people, and people who don’t fit in are forming a little haven there, all about love and connection and speaking truth to power. A new way to live. We’re lucky to be right at the center of it. The top-floor flat is ours. We each have our own bedroom, and we share the living and dining rooms and kitchen. Mary Beth’s a textile artist. She weaves and makes quilts. She’s colored and from the South, like us. We talk a lot about what it costs a person to uproot out of necessity. It’s been very healing.”

“And Pascal?”

“He’s an actor and a waiter. He’s white, and it took me a while to understand that I could be my full self around him. I had all these memories of being with my old neighbors and Bill—the fear and isolation—but it’s not like that at all with him. Lately his boyfriend’s been coming over a lot, which turns every night into a little dinner party. It isn’t always fun though. Pascal has fits of depression. Sometimes they last a long time and get very severe.”

“I’m sure you and Mary Beth take good care of him.”

“We do. And Pascal and Mary Beth help me.”

I can feel the night getting later, feel her almost ready to leave. I don’t want her to. She’s going to put me back into a box, after the night is over. I say, “Tell me more about the apartment. Tell me about the living room.”

“It has a bay window with a reading chair in it, a small wooden table—”

“Hold on.” I walk to the office and ask the night receptionist for apencil and paper. He opens drawers, finds me what I need. I thank him, pause in the restaurant doorway to straighten my skirt. Wipe under my eyes in case my mascara has smudged. “All right,” I say, returning. “Go ahead.”

I sketch out the window, the chair, the table. The ceiling medallions and the chandeliers. She tells me more, going room to room. I ask her about the art on the walls. I ask her about the view from the windows. I ask about their favorite types of coffee and tea and wine. I ask what cold cream she uses. I ask her about the clothes hanging in her closet. I make notes and sketch until both sides of my paper are covered and my eyes are bleary and she tells me she needs to get home, that she’ll fall asleep at the wheel if she doesn’t. I walk her to the door, and we open our arms to each other. Her cheek against my cheek, the rosewater scent of her hair, the tight grip as she holds me, the spasm in her stomach as a sob rises. I let myself lean into her. Let myself hold her and cry. Across the room, the night receptionist shifts in his chair, turns his face to the wall.

The next morning, after breakfast, on our way out of town, Nathalie and I drive into Golden Gate Park. The Conservatory of Flowers rises, grand above vast green lawns and flower beds, palms flanking the path to its door. It’s a Victorian greenhouse, all white and glass, a rotunda at its center, wings on each side. Inside it’s warm and humid. “Feels like New Orleans,” Nathalie says, and I agree. Just steps from the entrance, exotic plants grow thick and tall around a pond. Fish drift through it, their mouths opening and closing. Rush of water from fountains, white-framed windows, a strip of stained glass like in a church. We wander the rooms, each with its own climate, its own rare display of trees and flowers. Orchids and water lilies and carnivorous pitcher plants. Coffee berries and tropical fruits and species of cycads so old they predate the dinosaurs. We find a tucked-away bench and rest there, taking everything in.

“I didn’t steal you,” I say. “I want to make sure you know that.”

“I know you didn’t. I was angry.”

A group of tourists speaking another language stops near where weare. One of them crouches to snap a photograph with a compact silver camera. Rises again and moves on.

“I read the letter this morning. When you were in the shower.” She tips her head upward and I follow. White steel and clouded glass and green leaves and red blossoms. “Do you think I’m going to lose my mind? That’s what it was about.”

“No. I don’t.”

“But what if I do?”

“If there are any signs, anything at all, then Delphine will help us. And you’ll have me, and Clément, and Ginny, and everyone else you love and who cares about you. And you’ll get through it, just like your mother did.” All right again, to be one of two.

She rests her head on my shoulder. “My other mother.”

“We’re both your mothers.” I wonder how many more times in my life I’ll say it. A refrain to get us through.

FORTY

BACK HOME,IT TAKESDAYSto return to myself. To Ginny. To the empty rooms after the crowd of people sleeping on the sofa and the floors. Days to recover from the shock of seeing Delphine. The pain of separating again. Of saying goodbye. The view out the car window—streets gutted, unrecognizable—each time I have to go somewhere.

And then, one morning, I wake up and go down to my studio. I pin the notes I took on Delphine’s apartment to the wall. Stare at them over coffee. Turn the paper around and study the other side over lunch.

Eventually, a shape comes to me—as tall as I am and very long, nearly the length of the studio. I build a frame, worrying that it’s too flimsy. I’ve never worked so large before. It takes me hours, and it’s skewed to the right, and I cry in frustration prying the nails out, call Lionel to help me. He’s here an hour later, showing me where I went wrong, saying, “All right now, let’s start over,” telling me about the apartment he’s found in Compton. We build deep into the night, and this time when it’s finished the lines are straight, the corners sharp and precise, the linen taut. I’ll need to make a stand next. Something like the base of a table so I can reach every part of it without having to kneel on the floor or climb a ladder. He helps me plan it out. It takes me a couple days, and then Ginny and I move the canvas onto it. I spend the next day on colors, asking myself all the while if this is something I can do—paint a scene from some sketches and notes when I’m so used to looking closely, relying on what’s in front of me. The trust in myself that this will take—itintimidates me. Delphine says red-and-white curtains hang above her kitchen window. Says her room has a view of hills and rooftops. A calico cat likes to curl on her pillow, and a rag rug rests on the spot where she first stands in the mornings. She keeps a blue chair in a corner. I scour my art books and magazines for shapes and references, stumble upon the old interview with Jean Dubuffet.I am convinced art has much to do with madness.Still not right. The same swarm in my head from long ago. And then I grasp it, that third place:

Not sanity, not madness, but dreaming.

A new concept rushes at me. A dreamscape. Look closely and find the vase hovering over the table, the cat the size of a mouse, the shadows with lives of their own. The symbols she used to study. The lightness I wish for her. But then I find myself with her rose-engraved compact in my palm, turning it over. Not all lightness, then.

A feverish stretch of days preparing, the house quiet again, save for Clément stopping by to tend to the birds, Nathalie with him sometimes, the sound of her singing carrying down to the studio. And Ginny, every morning next to me, every evening home by the time I come through the kitchen door. We talk about her day, what it’s like to look inside bodies, at bone. She tells me about breaks and fractures and I read to her from a list I’ve made of memories of Delphine and me from when we were girls. She asks me if I’ve started painting yet and I say no, that I don’t know why, that I keep making lists even though I have far too many images already, need to winnow them down. I pace the garden and the house. One afternoon, in front of my bookshelf, a certain red spine calls to me. The other purchase from that night long ago. I page through the final chapters to find the line I’m looking for. Somewhere near the end. Once quoted to me by Elise in a Hollywood bar. And here it is.

“One gets over things,” Carol said.