6

When I got back to the house I listened to Nona’s voice on the answering machine.

It was painful pleasure. The machine duplicated the sound of the woman I loved, and yet she was far away from where I was. “How did your meeting with DeVere go? I was thinking about you all day.” There was a long pause as Nona apparently considered the futility of talking, for the moment, to no one. “Everybody’s interested. But I don’t know if that translates into more funds for the children. Everybody says money is tight.”

She sighed into the phone, a breathy whisper exaggerated by the telephone. There was a rustling sound, and I could imagine her looking at her watch. She made a mocking groan. “I have to run. I love you, Strater.”

I did not like the silence of my house. I picked up the phone and calculated the time in New Orleans. I put the phone down again. Nona had sounded weary, distracted. She would be asleep by now, and I did not want to wake her.

When we love someone, we lose a part of our own lives, and even, in a sense, a part of our innocence. We can never be fully at peace away from the person we love, and it is no accident that tradition blames Adam’s love for Eve for the fall of mankind. Without Nona, I felt that I had lost that simple self-centeredness I had enjoyed as a child.

I called Collie’s name, hoping that she was here, by some chance, in the pantry making one of her essay-long shopping lists. But, of course, she was gone. It was late at night. There was no one.

I nearly laughed at myself. I was afraid to be alone.

The house I lived in, the Fields family refuge, was a grand house among grand houses on Alta Street in Saint Francis Woods, although ours had been the first one built in that neighborhood. The house was a modified Georgian, beaux-arts-style edifice, with the pleasing handsomeness that is neither earthquake resistant nor easy to keep up. While the building had survived earthquakes, many of the rooms were rarely visited, and my favorite room, the study, had been in the midst of remodeling when I had been forced to delay further work.

Now some of my treasured books, and my favorite chairs and tables, were draped with plastic dust covers, shrouded, hidden by the work that had exposed the wooden bones of the walls. If I were absolutely free to live anywhere in the world I don’t think I would chose to live in my family home, and yet I felt responsible for it, and respectful of the way the solid walls absorbed the sound of footsteps, the way each window looked out upon a prospect of flowers or ivy, lawn or copper beech hedges.

Some part of me said: Don’t be alone. Call someone. Go somewhere.

The phone rang, and I clutched at it, but it was only Fern.

“I’m all right,” I reassured him. “Cold, but fine.”

He must have realized that I had hoped to hear Nona’s voice. “Don’t worry. I’ll follow up on it in the morning.”

What he meant was: Don’t think. It was one of his enduring beliefs: Thinking got all of us into trouble.

He continued, “If there was a woman out there, she’s dead by now.”

That was another of his tendencies. Be brief, even if it means you have to be unpleasant. Fern was always honest, always reliable, and sometimes his words were a bit heavy. “That’s one way of putting it,” I said.

“You tried,” he said. “There’s nothing more you can do.”

He was right, and I thanked him. I had to feel a certain steadiness in Fern. “I’m going to bed,” I said, lying once again.

I did not feel sleepy. I bathed, and even after that hot, almost painful, soaking I was cold. What did I expect? I had always liked that lingering chill, the weight of the ocean staying with me long afterward.

But tonight I did not like it. And when I was dressed I did not put on nightclothes, but the sort of shirt and trousers I would wear to sit and draw. I did not think that I would be able to sleep even a little.

It was a source of light. Turning the plume in my hand it took on subtle hues, as the throat of a hummingbird will shift from sea green to ruby.

I was careful to put the feather in the pocket of my favorite jacket, the breast pocket, where it would lie across my heart. I wore the jacket now as I worked. I told myself that this plume was a charm, unimportant and yet compelling. I would keep the feather for luck.

Luck. It was an innocent concept. I tried to remind myself that luck was a word for children, for happy farewells, a word that bespoke friendship and a cheery outlook.

“Nice—too nice.” I had lived with comments like this regarding my designs for years. I had sat here in this studio, this retreat in the family home, and adjusted the drafting table, the crook-neck lamp, hour after hour, scratching with my ever-shorter Berol H, designing roof gardens, pavilions, fountains.

“You make the world look the way it should,” Nona had told me. Without knowing it, she had paid me the sort of compliment that hurt. Because this had been the problem: My landscapes and buildings were seen as impeccable art, but unworkable.

I turned on music that I expected to bring some sort of calm, something syrupy by Debussy, all wash and tone. I turned the music way down, and finally turned it off, leaving the only sound the thud of my heart and the high, fine dry hum of the lamp over the drafting table.

I sat in my studio now and reviewed my plans for the new Golden Gate Park. This time I had surpassed all my previous efforts. I was almost hoping to see my drawings as imperfect, but I could not. They were more than good enough to win.

The truth was, I needed to talk to someone. Well, I urged myself breezily, don’t think about it. Keep yourself busy. I sat before a lightbox. I had, for a moment, thought of viewing some of the garden designs gardeners had actually brought into being. There were not many, a plot of plumeria and protea near Hilo, a knot garden for a retired film actor in Montecito, a tulip bed and a lawn with a ha-ha for the widow of a governor in Woodside.

The inner warning returned: don’t stay alone tonight.

The translucent plastic radiated light through the miniature cells of color, gardens contracted to fine points of green and scarlet, each photograph a shrunken, jewellike universe. If a client had, in fact, met me here that night, this is what I would have showed them, my little contributions to the real world.

Crazy. I tested that word on myself. I was going mad.

And yet this self-diagnosis did not quite fit. I felt entirely lucid.

There had been no woman in the ocean. She had existed only in my mind.

But did insanity feel like this—alive, awake to every texture of wood and paper, aware of the solemn hush of the rooms?

I left the house and walked through the darkness toward the greenhouse. I paused and looked up at the grand, half-alive gingko tree, cutting a canyon out of the night sky. I wished there was some way it could recover and become healthy again.

The outbuildings were padlocked, their shutters tight. In these buildings I kept a bicycle or two, gardening equipment, and an assortment of teak lawn furniture.

In the hothouse, in the warm, tropical demi-world, I snapped on a light.

The stepping stones in the hothouse were outlined with green moss. The lobster claw heliconia and the ornamental ginger all blazed, technicolor and unreal in appearance, and even the vanilla orchid suspended from its perch overhead looked like a relic from a lost planet.

I had believed that we needed more sanctuary in our lives. We needed gardens, from rooftop to rooftop, interlinked, as a refuge for all of us. My drawings were found nearly universally “charming, tasteful,” exactly the sort of grand illusion a gentleman designer would cherish.

I seized a pot and hurled it, and the sound of the exploding clay was loud.

I knelt and gathered the terra-cotta fragments. The pot had not been completely empty. A fan of soil spread across the moist concrete, and there were traces of delicate white roots.

Mustn’t hurt anything like this, not here, not among all these living things.

The air was breath-warm, and as I knelt to gather the shards I felt something bend, like a wire, over my heart.

I wished that there was something I could tell Blake, some way of explaining to him what a mistake it was to align himself with DeVere.

Fight back, I told myself.

Powerless. I despised self-pity, but the word kept drifting back into my mind. Why was it, however, that as I stood there in the warmth of the hothouse I did not feel powerless at all?