The Garden of Love
by David Green
Home > No. 17 > Texts

Mrs. MacPherson wasn’t happy. With the perverse satisfaction of the aggrieved, she declared that a woman who keeps such hours “has no regard for her character.” I said I thought it was a little too early to tell and did my best to disguise my interest. My tolerance, what she took to be my indulgence, she endured, desperate as she was for an ally in her battles. Mrs. MacPherson lived across the hall. Normally we only spoke on the stairs when we happened to be collecting our mail at the same time, but when something important came up, she’d call me. As far as she was concerned, this was something important. The integrity of the building was at stake, and by extension, the integrity of the world.

“I don’t know what’s gotten into Bill,” she said. “Try to find us someone nice, I said. You know what we’re like. Remember, this is a quiet house. He said ‘not to worry, not to worry,’ that he’d find someone who’d fit in. I don’t know what to think. I really don’t. People rushing around. You tell me, does she look like the quiet type? If she comes in like that again and wakes everybody up, I’m going to call the police and let them deal with it. I’d just taken my medicine and once I wake up, there’s no way I can get back to sleep.”

“Maybe she’s just on a tight schedule,” I said. “Anyway, if I see her, I’ll ask her to keep the noise down.”

“Well I wish you would. I hate to be the only one who ever says anything.”

Mrs. MacPherson was right, of course. It was obvious our new neighbor was not someone most people would consider to be the quiet type. Her first visit, the one that upset Mrs. MacPherson, occurred the night after the former tenants moved out. She pulled in to the carport just after two in the morning with the radio up loud enough to wake the neighborhood. All I could see from my bedroom window was her hair, volumes of it, streaked with bronze highlights. For the next ten minutes, I heard her boots on the hardwood floor as she walked back and forth. And then she was gone. Her two subsequent visits also occurred after midnight, but on those occasions, she was accompanied by the landlord’s son, which is probably what Mrs. MacPherson was referring to when she exclaimed, “there’s more to this than meets the eye.” When she finally moved in what little she had, she was on her own in the middle of the afternoon. The car turned out to be borrowed.

I met her the following morning when she appeared on my back porch. She introduced herself as Téa and asked if she could use the phone. Hers hadn’t been connected yet she said, and she needed to call her sister. I left her in the kitchen and went out on the porch. When she finished, she came out and we talked about the neighborhood for a few minutes. Then she asked if I had any plans for the afternoon. I told her I didn’t.

“How would you like to help me move my sister?” she asked.

“When are you leaving?”

“Whenever you’re ready.”

I put on a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt, and grabbed my keys on the way out the door. We drove northeast on the interstate to a large apartment complex where her sister Brenda lived and for the next two hours loaded a rental truck with furniture and boxes. Then Téa and I set off for their mother’s house while Brenda stayed behind to lock up. When we arrived, Téa fixed me a cup of coffee and went to the basement to check on some things she had already stored. The curtains all around the house were drawn, but I could see flashes of light coming from a television in the living room. I stood in the hallway and looked through the door, watching it idly as I waited.

“So you’re the new boyfriend,” a woman’s voice said.

The presence of a person surprised me. I looked into the darkness at the back of the room and saw a ghostly figure sitting in a chair with a small dog on her lap.

“I’m just her neighbor,” I said.

“Just her neighbor? Not too many neighbors help somebody move their sister.”

“I suppose not,” I said.

“I’d get up except for the vertigo,” she said. “It’s the medication.”

“That’s all right,” I said.

“You know anything about TV’s?”

“I know something about them.”

“You know what a Zenith is?”

“Sure.”

“Tell Tamela to get me a Zenith.” Without waiting for me to respond, she turned her head toward the basement door and shouted, “Tamela, your friend here says you should get me a Zenith. Says those foreign TV’s aren’t any good.”

“They’re all the same now, mom.”

“Ask him yourself, if you don’t believe me.” She took a draw on her cigarette, and then looked back at me. “She tell you her name was Tamela? Tamela Jane.”

“No,” I said.

“She’s ashamed of it. Ashamed to be named after her own aunt.”

“I only met her this morning,” I said.

“She’s waiting for me to die. They both are.”

Téa came upstairs and quickly led me back to the kitchen where she thanked me for my help and explained there wasn’t much more I could do. “It’s going to take us a day or two to move everything in and arrange it,” she said. She asked her mother for the keys to her car and drove me back to her sister’s apartment where mine was parked. The next morning there was a bottle of red wine inside my screen door with a note.

I saw her several more times during the week that followed, and one evening we sat on her porch and finished off the wine. That’s when I began to learn a little more about her. What she referred to offhandedly as her “story.” She had one sister, Brenda, who was two years older, and no brothers. Her mother, a lifelong smoker, was probably dying of emphysema. Her father was an alcoholic who had abandoned the family twenty years earlier. The last time anyone had heard from him, he was living on a navy pension in south Florida.

“And you?” I asked.

“Married and divorced by the age of twenty-three,” she said. “Ancient history.”

Her husband had been a pilot for Air Afrique and they had lived in Dar es Salaam for a couple of years. Then she came home, divorced officially, and worked as a sales assistant at Saks. She had attended a community college off and on and was now what she called an associate manager at an upscale restaurant.

Her apartment was sparsely furnished. There was a narrow mattress on the floor half-covered by an African blanket, a television sitting on a wooden crate, a closet bulging with clothes, a couple of chairs, a lamp, a simple table serving as a desk, boxes stuffed with underwear and costume jewelry, a mirror on the floor tilted against the wall, and, in the midst of the chaos, a homemade shelf full of neatly arranged books including a family Bible bound in leather and works by Dante and Ovid, Blake and Kafka.

Over the next several weeks, we fell into a routine. After work on Mondays, we went to the grocery store together. Every other Thursday, I took her to the laundromat. And sometimes when she had the evening off, we’d rent a movie. She was interested in someone named Matthew, but when she needed a date, I became one by default. Not that we were going out. It’s just that certain occasions arose requiring a companion, and I was happy to oblige. There were times when I thought it might be something more than that, but the attraction of our friendship was precisely what kept us apart. And she had an odd way of looking at things. “Love,” she once said, “is what happens when the fear of being alone overcomes the hope of finding someone better.” I wasn’t afraid to be alone and she was still hoping to find someone better.

One morning I got up early to take her to a doctor’s appointment on my way to work. She was usually punctual, so I was surprised when she didn’t appear after a few minutes. I knocked on her door. When there was no answer, I looked in the window. The apartment was empty. No books. No mattress. Nothing. She was gone. Upstairs, Mrs. MacPherson was taking down her hummingbird feeders.

“Do you know what happened to Téa?” I asked.

“Moved out yesterday while you were at work.”

“Moved out?”

“Just up and went. Two fellows in a pickup truck came by and half an hour later they were on their way.”

“Did she say where she was going?”

“Not to me she didn’t.”

A postcard arrived a week later. It was a picture of Dealey Plaza in Dallas. I turned it over. “Surprise! It’s me! Got a job at Neiman Marcus. Met this great guy. More later. XXX.” I had to wait until the next weekend for the “more later” when she came back to pick up some clothes at her mother’s. Even then there didn’t appear to be any reason for her leaving, no good reason that is. After a fight with Matthew, she had decided she couldn’t take any more of him or this town.

We drove west about an hour into open country, then parked on the side of the road and climbed a hillside of mesquite until we came to a large flat boulder where we lay down. In the valley, the maples were scarlet and the hickories were yellow. We talked without looking at each other. She had already started dating someone in Dallas who worked for Merrill Lynch or A.G. Edwards. He wore Italian suits and smoked Cuban cigars. And became abusive when he drank too much. I told her she should forget about him.

“You’re probably right,” she said. She turned on her side to face me and propped her head up on her arm. A broken formation of sandhill cranes crossed the sky. Neither of us said anything for a while and then I asked her what made her happy.

“I don’t know,” she said. “It doesn’t take much. Memories. Reveries. The light on a summer evening. Certain moments when everything just seems right, like sudden openings in a sky of longing.”

We walked along the crest of the ridge as the afternoon shadows lengthened. The mountains in the distance were gray silhouettes and the clouds in the west seemed to drift toward the sun.

I asked her where she thought she’d be in ten years.

“Raising a family,” she said. “Living in a ranch house in a suburb on the east side. Spending half the day driving the kids around and half the night talking about things like the new addition on the Harrison’s house or if it’s safe to plant the tomatoes yet. ‘You can’t be too careful. It’s been known to freeze right up to the end of April.’ Twenty or thirty years down the road, I suppose I’ll wake up in the middle of the night wondering what it was all about.”

“It doesn’t have to be like that.”

“A slow form of suicide. That’s what it would be.”

We argued about this on the way back. Then I said I didn’t think there was any point in arguing and we argued about that for a while.

She bought a used car at Christmas and visited several times over the holidays. Then in early February her mother broke her hip and Téa was coming back every weekend. The good news was that she had enrolled in a community college. The bad news was that Merrill Lynch was gone and someone similar had taken his place. By the time spring arrived, I was seeing her less frequently and had the impression she had grown tired of my company.

I found out she’d moved back to town when she called one night to invite me down to a bar where she was working. It took me half an hour to find a place to park, and I had to walk several blocks in a cold rain. The bar was a fairly simple Irish place with a few tables and Celtic music playing in the background. It was her day off and she was wearing a man’s leather coat and too much make-up. I shook hands with the bartenders who spoke with Irish accents. She said she was thinking about going to Europe. Maybe Ireland. I asked her why she had quit school.

“I wasn’t interested anymore,” she said

“What’s changed since January?”

“I don’t know. I just don’t care one way or the other.”

“But at some point you’ve got to—”

“I don’t have to do anything,” she said.

“I just thought—”

“College isn’t the only thing in life.”

“I know.”

“Everyone has to find their own way. Maybe they’ll fail. Maybe they’ll have regrets. Maybe you’ll have regrets too.”

Her friends at the bar had turned away from us. I didn’t know what to say. As I took a sip of my beer, a woman in dark glasses came in from a Bronco double-parked at the curb. Téa was suddenly standing. One of the bartenders put his hand on my shoulder and told me the beer was taken care of. The woman had tickets to a concert. Before I could put down my glass, they were filing out the front door. Téa waved at me over her shoulder and said she’d call soon.

I sat where I was for another five minutes and drank about half the imperial pint. A waitress was making rude suggestions—something about oysters—to the remaining bartender, and an old Irishman pondered his imponderable pint at my side. When I was back outside with the wind and the rain lashing my face, I wondered if this bartender with the accent understood her any better than I did, and then I decided I wouldn’t see her again.

The next time I saw her was to say good-bye. We got together at a bakery on a Sunday morning a couple of months later. There was a small terrace beside the parking lot where we sat outside and had coffee. Her hair was auburn and raked in wild tresses. She had just come back from Ireland and was talking about someone named Dermott, but she had also met an Englishman whose cousins owned a game preserve in Kenya where she said she could work as a guide. I’d already told her I’d be leaving in a few weeks. I’d been offered a job in Michigan. So this was it. We were slow to finish our coffee, stretching out the time a little. She laughed and pulled her hair back only to let it go again. When I reached for the check, we argued briefly and then she picked up her purse and went inside to look for the restroom. When she came back out, we hugged like we used to do. This time for a little longer. Then everything seemed to happen very quickly. She was laughing at something I’d said and walking sideways across the parking lot. I followed her to her car. She got in and fumbled through her purse for the keys. Then she leaned forward and started the engine. The car lurched a couple of times as she struggled with the gears. I stepped to one side. She backed out, turned, and headed toward the street. As she drove past, she rolled down the window and waved one more time.

In that moment, I felt a despondency, not of loss, the loss of a friend, but of failure, a failure on my part toward life, an unwillingness to act. I wanted to say something to her, something that might redeem the time we had spent together. She stopped at the entrance of the parking lot to wait for a break in the traffic. I walked over to her car and asked her to marry me.

*

In the year that followed, things went fairly well. I don’t mean to say we didn’t have our differences. We did. But we worked them out. We made the necessary effort. I kept my job and she went back to school. We were able to save a little money by giving up her apartment, but as a consequence, we had to sell some things we didn’t want to sell and put some others in storage. Most of the furniture we kept was mine; most of the clothes were hers. Then things took a turn. Her mother died in early March, and a few weeks later, her sister moved to Florida to look for her father.

By then it was spring, the time of year when sunlight surprises an indecisive world with bursts of color, and in the midst of change, because of the change, you feel timeless. But for some, the warmer skies, the longer days, revive memories of loss. And this was the case with Téa. She grew more distant, and our brief conversations were followed by long stretches of silence. One day we had an argument that was worse than most. I don’t remember what it was about. And it doesn’t matter. After ten or fifteen minutes, I left to avoid saying something I might regret. As I walked the streets, I told myself I should try to be more understanding, but at the same time, I felt there was nothing more I could do. That it was really up to her. I let myself in after the lights were off and slept on the sofa. The next morning, she left for school without a word.

A woman at my office suggested flowers. I wasn’t so sure. Téa wasn’t really a flower person. But I went against my better judgment and stopped by a florist’s on the way home. It was a modest shop on the east side run by an African woman. As I opened the door, a cowbell on the lintel rang and a horse fly buzzed against the glass. The woman was standing behind the counter holding a duster made from the tail of an animal.

“What can I do for you?” she asked.

“I’d like to buy some flowers,” I said.

She asked me what the flowers were for. I told her about the argument.

“Trouble settling down,” she said thoughtfully, as if she were a physician diagnosing an illness. The woman leaned over the counter and rested her chin on the back of her hand. After a moment’s thought, she moved laboriously to a door behind the counter. When she emerged a few minutes later, she was carrying a bouquet of yellow flowers. “She will delight in these,” the woman said. “They come from the mountains of Amhara.”

“What are they?” I asked.

“Some call them the flower of love. Some call them the flower of illusion.”

“What do you call them?”

“You must decide that for yourself.”

Sunlight filtered through the grass blinds. A ceiling fan creaked overhead.

“They are beautiful aren’t they?” she said.

“Yes,” I said.

I arrived home later than usual. When I entered the living room, Téa looked at me with an expression of puzzlement. Perhaps skepticism.

“Flowers?” she asked. “Since when?”

“Since now,” I said. “I thought you’d like them.”

She took them in the crook of her arm the way she would have held a baby.

“It’s just—”

“What?”

“No one has ever given me flowers.”

I knew then that I had made a mistake. In fact I knew before I gave her the flowers that they were the wrong gesture. The distance between us seemed greater than ever.

She put her free hand on my back and pulled me close to her. As we embraced, one of the stems or small thorns scratched her through her shirt and drew a few drops of blood.

At first she hardly noticed what happened. A scab formed and flaked away within a week, leaving a small, but perceptible swelling on her stomach. Then the skin around the swelling grew hard and white, and tiny veins appeared on its periphery.

“It’s nothing,” she said, but I knew she was concerned.

She complained loudly when I touched it, and began walking around the apartment in her underwear to avoid the irritation of her clothes. When it itched, she scratched it gingerly with the tips of her nails, and in the shower, she examined it closely to determine if it had changed its size or shape.

“Maybe you should see a doctor,” I said.

“It’s just a swelling,” she said.

Within a few more days, a small, clear cap of skin covered the spot. Then one morning there appeared to be a slight infection, as the contents of the swelling were distinctly green. I suggested she lance it, but she declined, replying that it would take care of itself in time. She was right in a way. At the end of the week, the cap of skin broke and a slender white stalk emerged unfolding a pair of delicate green leaves.

At this point, it would have been easy enough to pull it out, and I assumed that’s what she would do; in fact, I strongly suggested it. But the plant had already taken hold of her imagination. That night, she slept on her back. When I went to work the next morning, she was sitting in a wicker chair beside the bedroom window waiting patiently for the rays of the sun to reach her. She was in the same chair when I returned in the evening. As soon as I opened the door, she called to me and pointed out that two more leaves had appeared and the stalk had dried and hardened. I tried to convince her that this was something serious, that she needed to do something about it. She told me to leave it alone. It was her body, she said, and I had no right to tell her what she should do.

With every new leaf that appeared, she became more protective of the plant and directed more of her attention toward it. I had no choice but to go along with her and try to be as supportive as I could even though I didn’t agree with what she was doing.

She called the college and withdrew from her classes. The errands and housework she left to me as she continued to spend her days in the chair beside the window. She became a votary of light. And though she seemed happy enough sitting on her own, I joined her whenever I could, and on warm, clear days wondered what it was like to feel the sunlight on her leaves. As I came to accept the plant as a part of her, its welfare became my concern. Every evening I washed each leaf with a cotton cloth. And on cloudy days, or at night, when they seemed to languish, I tried to lift her spirits by describing bright, sunlit scenes I could remember from my travels. I told her about the blazing light of Mediterranean beaches, and the fishing villages where little white houses cluster around the blue ports and seagulls disappear into the noon sky.

With unnerving patience, she sent small shoots out to seek moisture from the windowsills where condensation dripped on cool days. She fretted over her leaves, brushing them away from her eyes and worrying about their rough edges or lack of gloss. Sinuous roots spread beneath the skin of her abdomen just as they would have burrowed beneath the surface of the ground. And soon more shoots sprang from these runners, appearing on her side and around her breasts. Once again I urged her to consider cutting the plant out before it was too late.

“But it’s me,” she said. “I fed these leaves with my own blood. How can I cut out something that has grown from my body and is a part of me?”

When the branches grew in more thickly, she could no longer wear anything but long strips of cloth I cut from old sheets and wove through the tangle of stems and twigs that surrounded her, and when this became too much trouble, she went naked beneath her foliage. Everyday she appeared more lethargic and soon began dragging her feet when she walked. Her fine hair was matted in snarls of dry tendrils and her breasts hung wide-eyed and dull upon her body as if stunned by the transformation. Finally, when the weight and awkwardness of the branches became too much for her, she stopped walking and spent all her time in the chair beside the window.

The random outline of her branches softened the harsh angles of the room and what was human seemed curiously contrived. She showed me that my refuge from nature was nothing of the sort. That in fact we lived in a world of dust and dirt that constantly encroached upon the corners and surfaces of our rooms. Mites were legion in the carpet and upholstery. And the woodwork was slowly decaying, like the dead timber of a forest floor. She made my world her own. And made me recognize the exile of the life I had been living.

On cool, rainy days, when no one else was home, I carried her outside and placed her in the garden where she was barely visible among the nandina and holly. As the rain washed the dust from her leaves, I could hear her small sighs above the sound of trickling water. I tried to do everything I could to help her, but because I was afraid of being scratched, I handled her very carefully and no longer embraced her. She chided me for this, but understood the reason for my caution.

She often spoke of the desire to feel her feet in mud and squeeze it between her toes. So one Friday after work, I went out and bought a plastic trash bin and the largest garden pot I could find. When I came home, I put on a dark shirt and dark trousers and asked her what kind of dirt she wanted.

“Look for something brown,” she said. “Something that smells sweet in the morning.”

“I’ll do my best,” I said.

I took the first load from a golf course, but she complained that it contained too much fertilizer. Then I went down to the river. Too much clay, she said. Then I drove east as far as the county line where I filled the bin with a fine, pale brown soil. Too chalky, she said.

Finally she sent me to an abandoned farm where her uncle had lived. “It’s the only dirt I really trust,” she said. “Dirt that was good to me as a child.”

When I returned, I filled the bottom of the pot with several inches of the rich dark soil and then lifted her from the chair and placed her squarely in the middle of it. With a small trowel, I packed handfuls of the dirt around her feet and legs until she told me it was tight enough. Because chlorine made her dizzy, I filtered the water from the tap twice before pouring it out for her. And when the humidity was low, I left the shower on until the windows were covered with steam.

Despite the odds, she was thriving. Vigorous branches and searching tendrils enveloped her body in a bright green cocoon, and dozens of healthy buds surrounded her head like a halo. More than ever, she yearned for the freedom of the outdoors, so I opened the windows and screens to encourage the summer breezes to enter our rooms and looked forward to the dance of bees among her branches.

When her buds finally blossomed, the effect was extraordinary. I had never seen her so radiant. Each flower was a bright yellow circle of thick-veined petals. Where the corolla parted, the pistil, like a fantastic fruit tree, rose delicately to a pale green sphere spotted with clusters of yellow pollen. The stamens circled around it like flares frozen in the instant after an explosion. She reached the height of her beauty for a week, and for that week we lived each moment fully, in the freedom of a timeless present. But as fresh blossoms opened, others peaked, and then others, until finally all the buds were gone and all the blossoms had passed their moment of perfection. Flowers that had been so glorious only days before were now bruised, limp rags that fell in sticky clumps and had to be swept from the floor.

But there was some consolation in this loss. Where the flowers had been, she produced small, green fruits that ripened into pale, speckled orbs early in the fall. She told me to try them. But I declined. I had no idea what they might do. Instead, I gathered them up and threw all but one out in the yard where the birds dropped down like stones to feast on the exotic food. When they returned to their trees, they sang songs I had never heard before all through the night and into the next day.

She persisted. “This never would have happened if it hadn’t been for you,” she said. “If you love me, you will do what I ask. Promise me you will eat the last piece of fruit.”

“I promise,” I said.

That was the last time I heard her speak. In a sense, the last time I was with her. I still had many things to say to her. To ask her. But now the only sounds she made were faint sighs in the night.

I had no way of knowing when she was gone. There was no precedent for determining such a thing. As the days grew shorter, she seemed to droop. Several leaves turned brown and fell to the floor. Because I could no longer ask her, I wasn’t sure if I was giving her too much water or not enough. I loosened her soil, but was afraid to expose her roots or change her pot. Every morning before going to work, I swept up the fallen leaves and continued to turn on the shower to moisten the air. One morning, I forgot to turn it off. I suspect Mrs. MacPherson said something to Bill about the running water. In any case, he entered the apartment after I was gone and found the ceiling blistered from the humidity, sticky spots of sap on the hardwood floor, and the walls etched with small trails where Téa had run her shoots out for support. He left a note on the back door telling me the plant was in violation of the lease. Worse, though, he opened a window on the north side of the room. The temperature that morning was unexpectedly low.

By the end of the week, she was nothing more than a dry stalk and brown leaves. I took a penknife and made an incision in a small branch to determine if there was any green wood left. But it was brittle all the way through. As I lifted her out of the pot and washed off her roots, her leaves dropped away by the dozens, scattering across the floor. I took a sheet from the closet and wrapped it around her, but despite my efforts, leaves continued to fall as I carried her out the back door and down the stairs. I picked them up and slipped them into the sheet. Then I put her in the back seat of the car and drove around for hours trying to think of a suitable place to leave her. Finally I decided on the hilltop where we had gone to talk two years earlier. I carried the sheet up the slope to the spot where we had rested and opened it. As soon as I did, the wind blew the leaves off into the air and the stalk into the tall grass beside the boulders.

*

I worked late in the evenings. And when I came home, I went straight to bed. But I slept fitfully. During the night, her death returned to me in countless ways. And every morning began with her loss. I would wake before daylight and listen to the silence. At times it seemed the world was empty and I feared I would live the rest of my life alone.

The last piece of fruit sat where I had left it on the windowsill above the sink. It was pale and speckled, like a dawn sky flecked by the silhouettes of a few small clouds. She had asked me to eat it, and I had told her I would. But I had failed to keep my promise. Until one morning the following spring. Without giving it much thought, I picked up the fruit and bit into it. To my surprise, it was still fresh and tasted like apples. When I finished it, I put the seeds in a matchbox in a drawer in the kitchen and set off for work. I had no idea what to expect, or whether I should expect anything.

Because the morning was clear and warm, I decided to walk. I took my usual course through a neighborhood of large houses built at the turn of the century, and then cut across the campus of a private school. From there, I continued toward downtown through an area of brick tenements and vacant shops. The streets were still in shadow, but the upper stories of the buildings were lit by the morning sun. As I passed an aging apartment house, someone above me opened a window and a reflection of sunlight suddenly raced across the sidewalk. The movement startled me, and for a moment I paused, feeling somewhat disoriented. I dismissed the feeling and continued walking, but immediately sensed an undeniable change in my perception of things. Buildings I had seen countless times now possessed the wonder and freshness of a first encounter. And the morning light edging down the streets and alleys appeared strangely out of place—as if it had escaped the white porches of coastal houses to brighten the brick façades of the city with a wash of ocean color.

By the time I reached my building, I was convinced that something out of the ordinary was happening. My office, like everything else, appeared to be both foreign and familiar. Faces I had known for years were new to me in unexpected ways, conveying strange attractions, even sympathies, in manners and expressions I had never noticed before. When I sat down at my desk to begin working, I was confused by a tumult of unusual associations that accompanied every thought. Colors, faces, names, numbers, words, and letters now possessed positive and negative connotations I could not explain. For example, I felt an aversion to the number eight, which was purple and reminded me of obesity. An orange stripe coding the edge of a folder was the awning of a street merchant in Africa. Names I saw while leafing through a phone book led me to more incongruous images. “Macafee” brought to mind the flutter of a bird, while “Camberwell” suggested a yellow bottle of liqueur, and “Persyn” evoked a feeling of brooding antipathy, although I had never met anyone with that name.

My attention was momentarily arrested when I came across the word “august” in a pile of papers on my desk. At first, the appearance of the letters evoked impressions of gold and ringing connotations of empire. But when I realized I was looking at a calendar, I thought of dry grass and sidewalks that retain the smell of summer heat long after the sun has set. The calendar itself was a wheel whose months occurred in many lights, from many angles, both approaching and departing. August, having passed the zenith, was moving downward. September was a shore of contentment curving toward winter with warm winds and skies of softening blues. October languished with low, rolling clouds and the smoke of burning leaves, and November darkened in lavender shadows and the odor of cedar.

It soon became clear that my ability to concentrate had abandoned me completely and I was concerned that people in the office would notice there was something wrong. I also felt a need to get out and enjoy the fresh air and sunlight. So, complaining of an upset stomach, I gave up the pretence of working and told the woman at the front desk I was going home. She offered to call a taxi, but I said I’d find one on the street. Of course, I had no intention of going home. On the way down to the lobby, I decided that the best place to be on such a day was Prospect Park, a high point of open spaces and isolated woods.

When I reached the park, I took a footpath across a large field to a remote corner where I sat on a weathered bench looking out over the city and hills beyond. In the field, people were walking their dogs and sunbathing. For a few minutes, I watched a child run back and forth as he tried to lift his kite on the light wind. When I turned to look at the trees on the other side of the path, I was struck by their forms and the rhythms of their moving leaves. Catching the light at random, the small, irregular planes of green stirred and shimmered, gem-like, in waves against the background of a warm blue sky. Among the trees were gray, nocturnal shadows, but the gentle motion of the branches also revealed flashes of bright sunlight deep within the woods as startling as the appearance of white bone beneath open flesh.

I left the bench and walked down a long slope on the western side of the park. Threads of gossamer, glinting like strands of silk, floated beneath the noon sky. Meadowlarks sang in tones of soft mauves and soothing blues. And just inside the western gate, not far from the house where Téa had grown up, children were feeding a crowd of ducks along the embankment of a small pond. One child, an awkward girl, ran ahead of her mother as a pair of swans scooted out from their muddy cove. Sparrows flitted nervously in the bushes by the water. The child’s mother uttered the word “swan” from above. “Swan.” A second child, frightened by the enormity of the birds, clasped her mother’s leg tightly. The light breeze. The sun glaring off the water. The large white birds gliding over the green. And in their wake, reflections of light rolling out in thin streams over the still surface. I said the word “swan” to myself and saw the long white neck of a bird entering a thicket of brown rushes. And then the strangeness, the wonder, of its whiteness, and the ruffle of dirty water as it dunked and rose from its rooting.

I recognized the second child first, then her older sister. I had seen their photograph countless times on our dresser, but in my mind I had always reconstructed their childhood around the overgrown yard and the weather-stained siding of their mother’s wooden house and the dark room where the old woman sat dying. Now they were alive before me in the innocence and delight of childhood. And I could see them on the day the photograph was taken, see them in the fullness of that life: a girl in her backyard, her sister in braids, missing a front tooth, laughing in the sunshine, laughing so hard she lost her balance and had to lean against her sister.

After leaving the park, I wandered without direction, aware not so much of the hour as of the dominion of early afternoon, the struggle and sway of inexplicable moods and memories. Undistinguished streets became the source of vivid reveries. Patches of sky among the trees brought to mind morning on a distant island, and weeds along the base of a wall evoked images of an English garden. The houses I passed seemed weary, sad, angry, content, friendly, or curious, expressing, I thought, the lives of the people within. I explored alleys and side streets I had never seen before and neighborhood shops with wooden floors and vacant lots with wild enclosures. And as I went, I saw the places and people from new perspectives. I saw a bride dressed in white walking across a green lawn and wondered if she had found a trust that would last a lifetime, or merely an ideal in her devotion to ritual. I saw an old woman leaning on a cane coming out of a hairdresser’s as if she were a schoolgirl embarrassed by her beauty. I shared the happiness in a mother’s face when a young woman stopped to speak to her handicapped son. And when I passed a group of people standing among hedges of white azaleas and citronella torches, a man and a woman looked at me and smiled, and in their smiles I saw the absurdity of love without illusions.

As afternoon turned into evening, the world was transformed by the alchemy of changing light. Narrow streets seemed to lengthen with the growing shadows. And overhead, thin, dark clouds floated beneath a towering cumulus like sleek predators prowling the blue waters below a reef of golden coral. I arrived home just as the sun was setting. Mrs. MacPherson was watering the garden in the half-light of dusk. I stopped and spoke to her for a few minutes. The clouds on the western horizon flowered into pink orchids and then darkened. The sky above them went clear and hard like the glaze of a widow’s fine porcelain. I entered my apartment through the front door and stopped before the mirror in the hall. It was already dark inside, but I could see myself clearly. Only it wasn’t the image of myself I was accustomed to seeing. The person who appeared in the mirror was me and yet, at the same time, someone else. Someone larger. Stronger. I studied the veins and muscles in my arms. There was a freshness, even a mystery, about my appearance that surprised me.

Though I hadn’t eaten since breakfast, I wasn’t hungry. Having walked most of the day, I had no appetite for anything but sleep. To escape the heat of the apartment, I stepped out on the back porch where a cool breeze was blowing and the moon was just beginning to clear the highest branches of my neighbor’s elm. I went back inside and brought out an old blanket. I spread it over the porch and lay down. A few cars passed on the next street and I could hear people speaking in the darkness. Then everything was quiet. I listened for something to draw me back from the brink of sleep, but the silence continued until I heard what sounded like waves on a distant shore. I closed my eyes for a moment. When I opened them again, the moon had climbed above the tree. My thoughts floated past like clouds slowed by its trance. Then, drifting in and out of sleep, I followed them into the depths of night, beyond hope or despair, to fields of lost time. Unconsciously assuming the ways of unknowing, I passed the abandoned wills of the dead, the conceits of loss, the illusions of common sight, drifting over evanescent horizons of dreams unbidden, desires that never ripen, as far as the distant light of a fading sun, flaring in defiance of the empty darkness.

When I awoke, the moon was in the west. The sky was a pale gray. Mourning doves had gathered in the drive. And the air was moist and heavy. I looked around the yard for something out of the ordinary, but there was nothing unusual to note. Everything appeared as I had always known it. I thought back over the experiences of the previous day. “Swan” was now merely a word that had once submerged the fears of a child in a fate of language. The effect of the fruit had passed.

I went inside and lit the stove to take the chill off the air and then I made a cup of coffee. Still in the same clothes, I sat down in the living room. Birds began to chatter under the eaves and thick, morning light invaded the darkness of the room. I took Téa’s book on Cézanne’s paintings from the shelf and looked at several plates. When I turned to his painting Etang des Soeurs, Osny, I recognized the trees I had seen in the park. They had the same shingled patterns, the same effect of motion. I looked at the painting for a long time and then I closed the book and put it back on the shelf. I knew what had happened. I didn’t need any confirmation. I knew that she had seen those white porches and that awning in Africa. The moldering brick in an English garden and the reefs of golden coral. If not in this world, then somewhere in her dreams.

I called and left a message at work telling them I expected to return in the afternoon. Then I put on some old clothes and sat in the wicker chair beside the window. When I heard Mrs. MacPherson stirring in her apartment, I took the seeds from the drawer in the kitchen and went over and knocked on her door. A moment later, she appeared from the darkness.

“What is it?” she asked in a tired, but patient, voice.

“I have some seeds,” I said. “I want to plant them in the garden.”

“Let me see what you’ve got,” she said. “What are they?”

“They’re an African flower.”

“Just a minute,” she said, and went back inside. When she returned, she was wearing a straw hat and carrying an old rug under her arm. We took a couple of trowels from an empty pot on the porch and went down the steps to the garden. She considered the possibilities and then chose a spot where the seeds would get plenty of afternoon light. She spread the rug out on the ground and we got down on our hands and knees and dug into the earth, which smelled sweet in the morning air.

This is an excerpt. To read the rest, please continue your travels in the Republic by purchasing No. 17, Spring 2007.

David Green lives in Massachusetts and is the author of the novel Atchley (Station Hill Arts).