Page 89 of Meet Me in the Garden

Ginny is gone now. I walk into my room and it comes back to me:Marriage Bed.

I wrestle my mattress out the kitchen door and down the steps to the studio; I’ll sleep on Felix’s old one. I make the bed with white sheets. PlaceThe Price of Saltsplayed open. Drape the dress Hattie made forme over the foot. I unfasten Ginny’s medallion and set it gently on the pillow.

It’s a Friday and I call in sick to work. I mix creams and whites for the bed. Grays for the shadows. I touch brush to linen and I barely have to try. My body does it all for me. I cry so hard I can barely see, but still, the shapes and the colors build on the canvas. I look to my palette: the perfect chartreuse, mixed as if by magic. The red of the book. The gold of the medallion. Light shifts in the room, time passing. When it’s too dark to work I move the book and the dress, clasp Ginny’s chain back around my neck, climb into the bed and sleep. Wake with the sun the next morning. Coffee in the house and back to painting. The beauty of it propelling me. Not even finished and the best thing I’ve made. The truest.

And then Claire and Adele and I meet the children, Sebastian bursting into tears at the sight of his mother, Rudy dutifully accepting Adele’s kiss on his cheek while Elizabeth and Paul each put an arm around her. Nathalie and Clément hug me tight. I swear, they’ve grown over the weeks they’ve been gone. Clément tells me stories in a rush as we drive home. Nathalie studies my face and asks me if something’s wrong.

“Just tired, sweetheart,” I say. “I was working on a painting but I finished it this morning.”

I wear Ginny’s medallion like a wedding ring. Sleep in it. Wake to find it tangled in my hair. Tuck it safely into my blouses in the mornings, a secret. Each day in the booth, I pray that she’ll come to my door with a record, even if it’s only to sit together for the length of a song. Once, I see her approach. My breath catches but she passes me. Goes to Ivy’s booth instead.

October arrives, Clément’s birthday with it. The gate swings open and the children and I step onto the patio together and here’s Lionel, a cage in his hands. An empty space behind him where Ginny should be. Clément is frozen in disbelief. I undo the tarp and reveal the coop and Clément stares, his slim chest heaving.

“All right, little man. Why don’t you show your birds their new home? These other pigeons aren’t good fliers. They’re just here to keep KR company.” Clément turns to me, incredulous. Sure enough, in thecage is a cream bird with a gray head and blue-tipped wings. “He’s served me well for five years, given me a number of excellent offspring. Only right that you should have a shot with him now.” Nathalie darts ahead and opens the door to the coop so Lionel can carry the cage in. “Time to talk about acclimation. There’s a lot to go over. You can’t let them fly too soon. First, they’ve got to make themselves a home in here.”

Months pass and I stay close to the house, away from the studio, my attention on the children. I check Nathalie for bruises or signs of distress. Ask her about her teachers and her lessons. She tells me everything is fine. After school, Clément goes straight to Lionel’s or home to his coop. Sometimes the group comes to our house, Lionel and his disciples, and they spend hours examining Clément’s birds, discussing their bone structures and wingspans. Lionel chose a young female bird for Clément to buy with the chore money he’s saved, and they bred her with KR, and now little yellow squeakers hop around in their own section of the coop. They’ll change color as they grow.

Elise brings art books over and we spread them out, study them in the light. She hates that I’m not painting but I assure her I will again. “It’s just so hard for me not to get carried away.”

She nods, mouth tight, disapproving but trying not to show it.

Winter comes and goes and in May, Lionel tells Clément it should be safe to fly the three adult birds. “You never know anything for sure,” he says. “They might choose not to come back. Or a hawk could descend at any moment. But KR’s clearly settled here, so it’s as good a time as any to let him fly.”

We gather for it, a hush through all of us. I remember Clément at four years old, shooting his arms skyward when he first saw the Roller pigeons fly, frantic that they’d leave forever. Now, he takes KR from the coop, whispers something to him, pets his head, and opens his hands. He does the same with the other two. Up into the air they fly, and I gasp, watching them. Here’s the world; they’re greeting it. KR spins and dipsin the sky and we watch, hoping he’ll come back, trusting that he will so that we can enjoy the show he’s putting on for us. And then here he comes, home, to the coop. A miracle, it seems to me, but Lionel gives a single nod. He expects it.

Soon after, the phone rings on a Sunday. Elise, back from Mexico City. “Can I come over?”

She hands each of us a hand-painted mask, carved from wood. A jaguar with thin white whiskers and eyelashes for Nathalie, a man with a long black mustache for Clément, a brown rabbit for me, its ears tall and pink. I watch her laugh as Nathalie snatches Clément’s mask and puts it on, sets her hands on her hips, walks like an actor from a Western. Clément dons my rabbit and hops. Elise is delighted by all of it, clasps her hands, catches me watching her, says, “What? They aren’tnormalchildren.”

We go to Pickwick’s the next day on my lunch break. “Hey, Gregory,” Elise says to a plump young man in a beret, our favorite bookseller. “Do you have something naughty for us to read?” He leads us to the fiction section and plucks a thin hardcover from the shelves. “James Baldwin’s latest novel.”

“Giovanni’s Room,” Elise says. “Sounds steamy. I’ll take it.” I buy a copy, too, and we read it over the next few days, discuss it over the phone late at night, meet at our favorite Hollywood bar when we’ve finished. “Well, that was gorgeously written, and horribly depressing,” she says. “Should we get drunk and forget all about it?”

“It reminded me of Felix. The way David craved a normal life, how close he got to having it with Hella.”

“Except you didn’t need Felix to lie. He had full permission to do whatever he pleased. Felix cravedbothkinds of lives, that’s why he agreed to it in the first place.” She cocks her head at me from across the table. “One could say that you wanted that, too.”

“I only want one life.”

“Do you?”

“What about that part when Giovanni thinks David’s come back to him? Crushing.”

“Brutal,” Elise says. “The whole thing. So full of self-loathing. I appreciate Gregory’s attempt at giving us real literature but I’m going to need several dime novels to undo the emotional damage. In fact, let’s go get some now.” Months pass and we read mysteries and pulp novels. We readARTNewsandThe New Yorker.

Clément spends so much time out with the birds that Nathalie and I are often alone in the house. One day I bring home an armload of cardboard from the plant. We cut them into various sizes, lay them out on the studio floor, and prime them. A few days later, once they’re dry, we start making paintings. I paint the pink bathtub. I paint Clément’s necktie, coiled in a spiral. I paint the laundry on the line, that old favorite subject. Nothing precious about them. They’re studies, meant to be started and completed in a few hours. Nathalie paints her paper dolls and the images from her favorite record jackets. She paints Clément’s coop. She paints me.

It feels good, to both of us. It feels like playing.

Elise sighs at the cardboard the next time she comes over. “Well,” she says, “I guess if Picasso did it you can, too. At least you’re working again.”

Autumn comes. I’m clocking out at the plant one afternoon, leaving the building with Claud and Ivy and Janine and a few other girls, purses slung neatly over our shoulders and stepping in stride. A small white car zips through the parking lot—Ginny’s car, but Ginny isn’t driving it. The car pulls over in front of us and a woman in sunglasses and bright lipstick peers over from the driver’s seat. And then here’s Ginny, appearing from nowhere, brushing by me, climbing into the passenger side. It’s the closest we’ve been to each other in more than a year, over in an instant. The car speeds off. Ginny doesn’t look back.

Over drinks at the bar, Claud speaks low to the table. “They’re livingtogether now, in Ginny’s place. She’s a salesgirl in a perfume shop. Pretty, right?”

Ivy lights a cigarette, exhales. “I’ve read both Kinsey reports cover to cover. Nothing shocks me anymore.”

Janine touches the cross at her throat. “It’s still going against God.”