There was a private garden near the house where my mother worked, in Central London, as the personal assistant to a wealthy widow. Each day after school I took the Tube, from an area where there were no gardens, to meet her. And each day, on the walk from the Tube to the white Georgian house where the widow lived, I passed by that garden’s locked iron gates, accessible only with a key. The keys, my mother explained, were given to only ten lucky families who owned houses nearby. The widow had a set, though she never shared them with my mother. She never thought to offer her employee’s young child a chance to play in the garden while waiting for her mother to finish typing up a thank-you note, ordering more fresh raspberries, making a bed. “Assistant” was a euphemism for housekeeper. “Assistant” gave my mother a professional gloss she liked and took pride in. “Assistant” was the word she used and had chosen for herself. I never knew what my mother did in that house until many years later. I never would have imagined how much she hated it or that she was always tired and that, when I once asked why she was tired she said she was tired “of pretending.” I didn’t understand that at all. To pretend is to escape yourself, and at one time, escape was all I wanted. Pretend I am a princess trapped in a castle with crenellated walls. Pretend I am Joan of Arc, Queen Elizabeth, an Olympic archer. Pretend I am happy. The line between what it meant to pretend and what it meant to lie, if there was one, didn’t concern me then. Then, I was sure if only I could enter that garden, I could be anyone I wanted to be. Pretending, I can hear my very young self say in response to my mother, is not tiring. Pretending is freedom.
The idea of a private garden was foreign to me and yet at the same time weirdly seductive. It implied an invisible hierarchy and the idea that there are things to which you can, or should, aspire. It implied ideas about ownership and access and privacy, an elite, and everything that I was not part of, despite my mother’s fantasies and pretensions. The locked garden implied I was outside of something. My mother was generous with us though we had very little. There were new shoes at the start of school, presents under the tree. But there was also always a sense of living on the edge, the specter that this might be the last pair of shoes that fit, the last trip to the ice rink. The last luxury. And when that happened, I was ready. I had learned to rely almost entirely on my imagination, which was active, for entertainment and pleasure. I would tell myself stories on those Tube rides, and those walks, and central to those stories was that garden. Imagining what was inside, imagining the existence of a gardener who, in my version, possessed magic powers, like an ability to make a rose immortal. I told myself the gardener had inherited his job from his father, and his father before him, that his entire life was the garden, and that he had his own home near the far gate where he would sit on occasion with the owners of those keys and hear their stories, a priest receiving confession. I imagined the lives of the key holders and how they had come to live in this part of the world, this part of London that felt out of a fairy tale. I believed they must have each chosen this spot because of the garden. That garden. It was how I forced order onto what was otherwise a very tumultuous situation, my childhood. I wanted to do everything right, then, and so all the repressed desire for rebellion went into my stories. Even now, I can recall easily each detail of my conjured world. Even now, I keep roses on my desk the color of the roses that peeked through the gates.
I tracked time, then, by which flowers came into bloom throughout the year. Those gates had set my mind on never wanting to be on the outside of anything. What the garden taught me was that the allocation of keys in life isn’t fair, that luck and happiness are not prone to reason or will. Unlike a garden, something I assumed was maintained by care and investment, life for me at that time was an experience of chaos. I can see myself at six standing at those gates. And I remember, as clearly as if it had happened an hour ago, the first time I saw someone inside. It was not a unicorn, or some other mythical beast. It was not the gardener, though I did eventually meet the man who tended the garden, and he shared stories with me of all of the key holders, and of course they were nothing like the characters I had imagined. It would turn out that most of them rarely used the garden at all. No, the first person I saw inside those gates was a little girl. She was about my age. It was raining that day and she was wearing a white dress, an act of confidence in a muddy garden. As if she didn’t care what might happen. As if she didn’t need to care. It occurred to me that she probably had people who took care of her, like most children. No one had ever taken care of me. Only later would I understand the upside of that.
Fifteen years later, and ensconced unhappily in my first job, I was invited to a party at one of the houses that bordered the garden. The wealthy widow had died when I was a teenager and I hadn’t been back to those gates, to that area, in ages. Going back might mean admitting my life wasn’t moving in the right direction, that things were not getting better, or easier, that I wasn’t accruing anything, except debt. By my late teens and as my parents slowly tore themselves apart with anger and arguments, I was swapping out boyfriends and placing pins in maps of places I wanted to go one day, New Caledonia, Cappadocia, Saint Petersburg. One day, I told myself, I would exit my family’s long-standing tradition of resistance to progress. I would leave behind their gray lives and enter a world of color, romance. I had not yet become the woman I knew I was meant to be. The cliff jumper. The free climber. The key holder. That woman wouldn’t look longingly at maps. She would take risks.
At the party that night near the garden I remember looking at all the other guests, certain I was going to run into that little girl I had seen through the gates. I believed that, when we finally met, we would realize that while all I had ever wanted was to get inside the garden, all that she had ever wanted was to get out. You see, I was starting to develop a level of emotional intelligence even if I failed to understand how to use it. I didn’t meet her, but it was at that party I learned that the garden was no longer run according to the system of keys and joint ownership but rather had been purchased by an entrepreneur. “At what price,” I had asked, and the response was, “You can’t imagine.” I learned that the new owner didn’t like roses or really any flowers at all, that he had chosen to gut the garden and to re-create an immaculate Japanese meditation space, complete with twin koi ponds and a Zendo, a space defined by almost invisible rows of symmetrically placed sandstone paths inlaid with circles of sand-colored gravel one could navigate while, ideally, having deep thoughts about the universe. In the place of a pair of antique Persian iron chairs, the new owner had installed a modernist steel bench designed by some celebrated artist I had never heard of to inspire, I gathered, the cleanest possible contemplation of nirvana.
I would learn a lot about the origins of those gravel paths when, at another party four weeks later, the very proud owner of the garden, thirty-three years my senior with a casual charisma as he moved through the room, walked right into my life.
The interesting thing is, by the time I had said yes to his proposal of marriage—it didn’t take long—and absorbed the idea that I was going to be the owner of the thing that had symbolized so much to me for so long, it didn’t seem absurd at all. It didn’t even seem a coincidence, or something you encounter in a fairy tale or myth and know you’re meant not to mock as unreal. What it did feel like was something I had longed for but never been able to articulate. A path. A triumph over my short history of disarray, and trauma. It actually felt, above all, like the end of something. Though of course it was just another beginning.
His name was Marcus.
“Like Aurelius,” he said, on introducing himself. He had little lines like that for everything. Marcus was American, which felt exotic.
People think girls marry much older men as a result of having lost their fathers too young, but the allure for me was less the specter of replacement paternal protection than the idea that Marcus needed me, too. He needed me more than I needed him. Later I would look back and see that in his mind Marcus’s singular accomplishment was deciding to commit to me. He had been, he told me, a career bachelor, devoted to the practice of, in his words, “recreational intimacy.” Before meeting me, apparently, Marcus’s view of women assured him they all had one thing in common—they would all be happier for having been, if only briefly, colonized by him. And his world.
And it was a world, with Marcus. You didn’t just hook up with him, you hooked up with the experiences that pleased him and the places he enjoyed, owned, or felt comfortable in. The culture was only entering a period, then, in which rootlessness was in vogue, and Marcus was an early adopter of the idea that you can live everywhere and nowhere, an idea defined by the absence of family. Family means children, roots. Family means consistency and routine.
With Marcus there was no routine. Aligning with him was to align with a set of ideas and belief systems, that included a reverence for excess always coupled with regular bouts of outrageous asceticism. The eight-figure purchase of a meditation garden, for example, and the destruction of thousands of rare roses to make way for a prayer bench. Marcus kept a minister on his payroll, though he’d never been to church. The “vicar,” as Marcus called him, was from Boston, and he prepared daily lessons and blessings that, according to Marcus, promised “absolution on the margin.” Marcus admired belief systems but could never select then settle into just one. On seeing the beach at night in Tel Aviv, he considered converting to Judaism, but later back in Rome he was all about the epic glory of the Vatican, especially how they managed their money, the fact that “they never even pay a fee.”
Every woman who ever met Marcus, according to Marcus, had wanted to know him. And yet Marcus, I would understand early on, didn’t want to be known. I never asked him to confess any sins, and I didn’t ask him why he had chosen me, a girl with nothing more than a secondary school education. I was so different from the girls who I would learn had preceded me, girls with Ivy League degrees and club memberships, girls who considered themselves special. Beautiful girls. I had never felt special at all. I had felt, in many ways, like a freak. Sometimes when I looked in the mirror in the early days it occurred to me Marcus had simply chosen me because I was young. Or, like the famous explorer said of Everest, because I was there.
“What do you want for Christmas,” he asked, in advance of the first holiday we’d spend together.
“A baby,” I said, which was not the planned response.
I was about to turn twenty-one.
“You see that’s exactly why I adore you,” he said. “You don’t fuck around.”
Marcus had, he told me, made his fortune “fast, the old-fashioned way,” by finding his comparative advantage then working harder than anyone else. And, because he wasn’t born into it, he loved spending money, and fiercely demanded a life fully stocked with the results. When we met, he was barely into his fifties and looked barely into his forties. Only the very edge of his appetites had been tempered by time and experience. Some men in their fifties act out in irrational ways in an effort to stall time, and the most popular irrational way is not a sports car but rather to find a woman from another generation to make them feel young. You can’t understand this until you’re inside the experience of it. I would learn how his childhood had been brutal enough to forgive a lifetime of later indulgence, of choices that appeared vulgar to the casual observer. In the end Marcus indulged less than he encouraged others to do, all at his expense. It was an ability to host that thrilled him above all, the ability to crowd every environment he entered with people who kept him from ever having a deep thought, or pain. Ironic, considering his flashy nods to enlightenment. And yet so very Marcus. Marcus gave irony and contradiction a new edge. He reveled in his contradictions. He deplored easily cracked codes. He was, like me, restless. It was the reason he didn’t sleep. “Sleep,” he would say to anyone who proselytized its merits, “is the only thing that won’t go to bed with me.”
And so it went that, after that party where we first met, we spent Christmas in the mountains, and then it was May and these outrageously beautiful actors from the Oxford Shakespeare Company were rehearsing As You Like It on a sprawling Mallorcan lawn, the kitchens of Marcus’s newly acquired “finca” exploding in preparation for our wedding day. Yes, nothing less than a full-blown, highly personalized production of a play by a “a real writer,” as Marcus put it, would serve as an appropriate herald of our love, though behind my back others expressed skepticism. His friends, not mine, made up the guest list. I had never had deep friendships, part of my unwillingness to trust. If I had been older, I might have asked some questions. I might have asked, will a man like Marcus ever really settle down? Or, will his energy exhaust me? Or even, does money buy happiness and did he just try to buy me? I organized our story, then, with a selection of relevant facts to suit a certain narrative. At the time, it was the narrative that I was a kind of princess, speaking of fairy tales, that it had simply taken twenty years to meet my prince. The thought was, then, this is all unspooling according to plan.
I had become the little girl in the garden.
I had found myself.
As someone from Marcus’s office said casually, “At least he didn’t make us sit through Macbeth.”
Marcus understood limits.
I didn’t mind questions around our relationship, the speed of the engagement, how anyone could make that kind of commitment so quickly. I knew what I was doing. At least, I thought I did. To me, marriage was not a life sentence, it was a lifeline. If Marcus was different from anyone in life above all it was from the men who’d defined my childhood. My father and also my drunk uncles, my mother’s brothers who only cared for dominating other people because that’s what weak men do. Marcus’s absolutely apocalyptic desire for life’s sensations was one I believed would buoy me out of a learned predisposition toward resistance and cynicism, one that would enable me to change and stop the monologue that had run in loops through my mind forever. Then, I still believed people could change. I believed the experiences of my youth wouldn’t mar me for life. I believed Marcus would mellow and that before long we would have dinners for two and spend Sunday mornings reading in bed. What I failed to understand was that Marcus wasn’t an ordinary man and his love for me wasn’t an ordinary love.
Marcus was a lighthouse.
And lighthouses never switch off. The stakes are too high.
The morning of the wedding Marcus rolled over in bed as sunlight pooled through the windows on three sides and said, “You can still call it off.” I think, knowing him, it was more of a flirt than a right hook to my jaw. It may even have been an attempt at empathy, the kind with which Marcus was occasionally able to flip the script on an otherwise consistent sanguinity. I think he woke up, took a look at me, and saw a deer not in headlights, but in the middle of a full-blown crisis, and tried to set the deer free. He looked at me the way a parent looks at a child before that first jab at the doctor’s office. A parent wants to take the pain away. I didn’t understand that in the moment. In that moment I wanted to find a hammer and smash it through those windows.
Failing to find a hammer I found our wedding cake, sliced a small piece with a very large knife, and brought it all back to Marcus in bed. I laid the knife on the pillow, and thought about how that cake cost more than the first flat I had lived in. Marcus was on a call with the television running some Spanish soap opera on mute. Marcus was a happy consumer of media, but he seemed to only ever skim the surface of things, claiming to never remember plot or character or meaning. It was part of how he wanted other people to see him, part of his armor of deflection. The truth was that Marcus noticed everything. Marcus could tell you the third line in the fifth scene of the last ten movies he’d watched, the last line of every novel he’d ever read, and the price of the toothpaste today, as adjusted for inflation, he’d used as a child. Marcus was a hawk. And that morning he had looked at that knife on the pillow with admiration, as if my casual act of destruction had pleased him. Most men would consider it insane, a choice like that, but Marcus looked at me that morning like an avid hunter admiring a child who’d just brought home her first kill. Wrecking your wedding cake before the wedding, no one does that, but I did. I didn’t realize at the time how much that action told him about me, how it was one more fact in a profile he was rapidly forming. A profile of who I was, who I might become.
“Small,” he noted, of the cake, spooling a lick of icing on his finger before slipping it into my mouth.
“Do you want to call it off?” I asked.
“I want,” he said, pulling on a robe embroidered with Komodo dragons, “to live happily ever after.”
He lit a cigarette. Cake, tobacco, not yet nine in the morning. That was Marcus. He would now go spend an hour on the treadmill to repent.
“We are going to define what happiness means, together. No one else matters, not anymore.”
And there it was. His interstellar confidence. His clarity that things would work out. His imperviousness to the opinions of others. And the way in which his spoiled-child veneer was always slyly, effectively counterweighted with an inclination toward the philosophical, toward kindness. Sometimes it was easy to forget Marcus was a man who had altered international commodities markets and then, with over half of the proceeds, “given back,” always anonymously, always to organizations you’ve never heard of who participated in things like microloans. “A hundred million dollars can give you a reputation, but a hundred dollars can change your life,” he would say, reminding me we had both once been locked outside of something, and would never forget what that felt like.
We went swimming before the ceremony. I remember the simple white dress I wore and the ribbons in my hair and how Marcus wanted an Episcopal service because “it’s the shortest.” He gave me a simple platinum band with one tiny diamond and when we sat for the Shakespeare, he held my hand and squeezed it three times on hearing the line about “first love.” He was the first to stand for an ovation, tears in his eyes. He had listened. He’d been present. And yet within minutes the armor was back on, the mask carefully reaffixed, the Marcus show about to start. As he slipped back into character, I followed his lead.
“You’re brave,” said a woman who’d arrived that morning from Lisbon and whom Marcus had installed in the house, in the best guest bedroom. Her name was Annabel and she told me she “was a broker,” and when I asked what that meant she said, “I move money around.” She was maybe ten years older than me. Annabel was Marcus’s “very old friend” and, later, Annabel would help me smooth the edges of my ideas of him, who he was, what exactly had happened. Everything about Annabel seemed totally unstudied in a way I envied. And there was never jealousy between us. We both wanted the same thing, it seemed to me. We both wanted Marcus to be happy.
I could tell the first time we met that Annabel didn’t suffer fools. Everything about her was impeccable, and my jeans and T-shirts made me feel like her child, in ways, or perhaps I wanted to feel that way, perhaps I was looking not only for a father but for a mother, too. By that time, both my parents were dead. I would be reborn entirely according to Marcus’s needs, which sounds simple enough. The problem is, when you reinvent yourself for someone else you are reinventing around your idea of what they want, and this will get you into all sorts of trouble. The irony is, a real lover doesn’t want you to mirror and please. A real lover wants you independent.
“People think Marcus is a racehorse, but in fact he’s a sphinx,” she said, watching him move through the crowd at our reception. “And you know, he was in the war.” I did know Marcus had served in the military, before going into business; he didn’t hide that, nor did he hold it up as something defining. He told me he’d served in Somalia, Libya, and the Middle East, “though not in the trendy spots,” and that it was so long ago he had very few memories. Annabel, I would learn, had spent the weeks leading up to the wedding with a Qatari prince whose son had been kidnapped. I had read the story, which didn’t mention her name, and when I asked Marcus about it, he told me that “the people who get things done don’t get their names in newspapers.”
“Why is a broker involved in a kidnapping,” I asked, and he’d said, “The answer to that question is currently above my pay grade.” I would learn that Annabel had been involved in all kinds of things I would have called dangerous, or even insane. I would learn that Annabel’s skill was less with cash and more with information. And people. Marcus teased her about “all her secrets,” the gentle mock a cardinal sign of his affection. He teased her as if he himself had no secrets at all. He teased her as if her work was something less than deadly serious.
The wedding night was perfect. All the stars were out, and the actors, having pleased their audience, moved among the guests in costume giving the hilltop the illusion of being an extension of Arden Forest. We had our dance, and Marcus made a speech about true love and how “everything had changed” the moment he saw me. It was romantic and felt true. That night as I got into bed I thought about the garden, and whether I had the courage to ask Marcus to bring back the roses.
Had my entire life and all the other things I had endured been a path to this moment? Somehow it didn’t feel quite real yet, like I was the actor in a play only the play wasn’t Shakespeare. I was making up the lines as I went along. I had no sense of what scene would come next, but as each scene evolved, I could start to see the way I would handle it. It never occurred to me that I wasn’t at all in control, that this was not the beginning of a new kind of life filled with comfort, the life I had only read about in books. It never occurred to me that the life you have is only in part the life you choose, because the moment you start to think you know what’s coming next, that’s when lightning strikes, shatters those windows, and rain starts to pool on the floor.
We were leaving in an hour for Dubrovnik. Marcus had hired a sailboat to take us up the coast. A small box sat on the sink in our Spanish-tiled bathroom, a tiny card taped on top with my name written in Marcus’s taut hand. Inside was a gold key engraved with my initials.
“See Dubrovnik, and Split,” Marcus said, explained that was a joke, then admitted he had heard it was Auden’s joke, adding “Poets aren’t very funny.” Marcus had sailed the Dalmatian coast many times and loved teaching me its history. The water in Croatia was a spectacular blue that bled into teal then into an almost fluorescent green as you moved closer to shore. A holiday with Marcus was never absent agenda, and he finally disclosed what his was for this trip at lunch on our second day at sea.
“About the baby,” he started.
“What baby,” I said.
“Our baby.”
He went on to tell me that he wanted to “get pregnant,” as if we were doing it together, “immediately,” as if pregnancy was as easy as flipping a switch, which to be fair, when you’re young, it often is. He presented this plan as if it were a revelation, and presented it with some urgency, and emotion, before turning back to tales of sixteenth-century Cossack assassination campaigns. I tried to contextualize this within the framework of romance even as there was something slightly clinical in his approach. That night he started to ask how I was feeling, and I noticed he’d stopped drinking and was applying new restraint to his diet. When we docked in Hvar, he insisted we visit the iconic monastery. It was dark, and I could barely see him standing a few feet away, his hand pressed against a fresco on the wall, muttering under his breath. Was he praying?
I had walked to the altar, passing pews filled with nuns, and when I turned around Marcus was gone. I called his name, and one of the nuns held her hand out, offering a small paper prayer. I accepted it, thanked her, then walked outside to find my new husband sitting on the stone steps, staring at the sun.
“Look what the nuns gave me.” I thought it would amuse him.
It was The Lord’s Prayer, printed on light green paper barely thicker than an onion skin, English on one side and French on the other. Marcus held it in his hand for a long time, then passed it back to me, as if I might need it more than he did.
“It’s the key to the garden,” he said, finally, and I knew him well enough by that time to track how his mind moved like that, always expecting you to keep up.
“I know,” I said.
“Maybe you will bring back those roses. I wouldn’t mind.”
He took my hand and wiggled the platinum band.
“I love you,” he said. And then, “I’m dying.”
And then slowly, so slowly, as if pulled by an invisible thread, he stood. He looked across the square. I didn’t know what to say or think when he broke the silence with the one line I thought couldn’t possibly come next.
“And that’s not all.”