The Summer Garden

“That rule is only for floods and war, Tatia. What are the chances of either here?” He stared into the blackness.

“Husband …” she whispered, “you see nothing down there now, but can you imagine in a few years’ time, all the twinkling lights from streets, from houses, from shops, from other souls in the valley? Like New York is lit up, this valley will be lit up, and we could sit here like this and watch it below us.”

“You said a second ago we were selling the land tomorrow!”

“Yes.” Tatiana was warm, open, until a part of her shut off, became tense like her fingers. Her wistful desire to see the desert bloom in the sometime spring was strong, but the trouble in her clenched hands was strong also. “Just a dream, Shura, you know? Just a silly dream.” She sighed. “Of course we’ll sell it.”

“No, we’re not selling it,” Alexander said, turning her to face him. “And I don’t want to talk about it anymore.”

She pointed to the tent. “We’re sleeping there?” Her palms went around his neck. “I can’t. My bravery is fake, as you know. I’m scared of scorpions.”

“Nah, don’t worry,” said Alexander, his hands tight around her ribs, his lips pressing into her pulsing throat, his eyes closing. “Scorpions don’t like loud noises.”

“Well, that’s good,” Tatiana murmured, tilting her head upward. “Because they won’t be hearing any.”

She was so wrong about that … christening their ninety-seven acres, and Pinnacle Peak and Paradise Valley, and the moon and the stars and Jupiter in the sky with their tumultuous coupling and her ecstatic moans.

The next morning as they raised camp and packed up to go north to the Grand Canyon, Alexander looked at Tatiana, she looked at him, they turned around and stared at Anthony.

“Did the boy not wake last night?”

“The boy did not wake last night.”

The boy was sitting at the table doing a U.S. puzzle. “What?” he said. “You wanted the boy to wake last night?”

Alexander turned to the road. “Well, isn’t that interesting,” he mused, reaching for his pack of Marlboros. “Something calm to make us sane.”

Missing Time

At Desert View, they stood over the ageless rim of the Grand Canyon and stared west into the blue haze horizon and far down to the snake of the Red River. They drove a few miles west and stopped at Lipan Point and then at Grandview Point. At Moran Point they sat and gawked and walked in silence, even the normally chatty Anthony. They walked along the rim on a wooded path under the Ponderosa pines to Yavapai Point, where they found a secluded spot to sit and watch the sunset. Anthony came too close to the edge, and both Alexander and Tatiana jumped and yelled, and he burst into tears. Alexander held him in a vise, finally relenting and releasing him only after literally drawing a line in the sand and telling the boy not to step an inch over it if he didn’t want a military punishment. Anthony spent the sunset building up that line into a barricade with pebbles and twigs.

The sun in the indigo sky set over the Canyon, painting crimson blue the greening forests of cottonwoods and juniper and spruce. Alexander stopped blinking, for while the sun was setting, the hues of the Canyon had changed, and he could not catch his breath in the silence while the cinnabar heat fell like rust iron mist over two billion years of ancient temples of layered clays and fossiled silt, and from its cream Coconino to its black Vishnu schist, all the ridges and Redwalls and cliffs and ravines, and the Bright Angel shales and the sandstones and limestones from Tonto to Tapeat, all the pink and wine, and lilac and lime, and the Great Unconformity: the billion years of missing time—all was steeped in vermilion.

“God is putting on some light show,” he finally said, taking a breath.

“He’s trying to impress you with Arizona, Shura,” murmured Tatiana.

“Why do the rocks look like that?” asked Anthony. His barricade was nearly a foot high.

“Water, wind, time erosion,” replied Alexander. “The Colorado River below started as a trickle and became a deluge, carving this canyon over millions of years. The river, Anthony, despite your mother’s aversion to it, is a catalyst for all things.”

“It is precisely because of this catalysis that the mother is averse to it,” said the mother as she sat under his arm.

Alexander finally stood up and gave her his hand. “At the end of His geological week, God surveyed His rocks in the most Grand of all the Canyons in all the Earth He had created and all the life that dwelt upon them and behold, it was very good.”

Tatiana nodded in her approval of Alexander. “Who said that? You know what the Navajos say, who live and walk and die in these parts?” She paused trying to remember. “With beauty in front of me, I walk,” she said, stretching out her arms. “With beauty behind me, I walk. With beauty below me, I walk.” Not a sound came from the Canyon below. “With beauty above me, I walk.” She spoke quietly. “It is finished in beauty.” She raised her head. “It is finished in beauty.”

“Hmm,” said Alexander, taking one long inhale of his cigarette, eternally in his mouth. “Substitute what you most believe in for the word beauty,” he said, “and then you’ve really got something.”

In the eerily soundless night at the Yavapai campsite, Anthony was restlessly asleep in one of the two tents, while they kept listening to his stirrings and whimperings, waiting for him to quieten down, sitting huddled under one blanket in front of the fire, a mile from the black maw of the Canyon. They were shivering, their icy demons around the worsted wool.

They didn’t speak. Finally they lay down in front of the fire, face to face. Alexander was holding his breath and then breathing out in one hard lump.

He didn’t say anything at first. He didn’t want to talk to her about things that could not be changed. And yet, pain he could not forget kept creeping in and prickling his heart in a thousand different ways. He imagined other men touching her when he was dead. Other men near what he was near, and her looking up at them, taking their hands to lead them into rooms where she was widowed. Alexander didn’t want the truth if it wasn’t what he wanted to hear; he didn’t know how he would bear the unwelcome truth, and he hadn’t asked her in all the time he’d been back, but here they were, lying together at the Grand Canyon, which seemed like a rightful place for mystical confessions.

He took a breath. “Did you love to go dancing?” he asked.

“What?”

So she wasn’t answering. He fell silent. “When I was in Colditz, that impenetrable fortress, whittling away my life, I wanted to know this.”

“Looks like you’re still there, Shura.”

“No,” he said. “I’m in New York, a fly on the wall, trying to see you without me.”

“But I’m here,” she whispered.

“Yes, but what were you like when you were there? Were you gay?” Alexander’s voice was so sad. “I know you didn’t forget us, but did you want to, so you could be happy again like you once were, dance without pain?” He swallowed. “So you could … love again? Is that what you were thinking sitting on the planks at Mercy Hospital? Wanting to be happy again, wishing you were back there, in New York, reciting Emily Brontë to yourself? Sweet love of youth, forgive if I forget thee …”

He was leading her to temptation of clarity. But he could see she didn’t want clarity. She wanted a jumble that she could deny.

“Okay, Shura, if we’re talking like this, having these things out, then tell me what you meant when you said I was tainted with the Gulag. Tell me what happened to you.”

“No. I—forget it. I was—”

“Tell me what happened to you when you went missing for four days in Deer Isle.”

“It’s getting longer and longer. It was barely three days. First tell me what you were thinking at Mercy Hospital.”

“Okay, fine, let’s not talk about it.”

He pressed his demanding fingers into her back. He put his hands under her cardigan, under her blouse, into her bare shoulders.

He turned her on her back and kneeled astride her, the fire, the maw behind them. No comfort, no peace, he guessed with a sigh, even in the temples of the Grand Canyon.

Anthony’s whimperings turned into full scale miseries. “Mama, Mama!” Tatiana had to rush to him. He calmed down, but she stayed in his tent. Eventually, Alexander crawled in and fit in sideways behind her in the little tent on the hard ground.

“It’s just a stage, Shura,” said Tatiana, as if trying to assuage him. “It too will pass.” She paused. “Like everything.”

Alexander’s impatience and frustration also burned his throat. “You wouldn’t say that if you knew what he dreams about.”

Tatiana stiffened in his arms.

“Ah!” Alexander raised his head to stare at her in the dark. He could barely see the contours of her face, as the fire diffused muted light through the slightly raised flaps. “You know!”

Tatiana sounded pained when she said yes. Her head remained down. Her eyes were closed.

“All this time you knew?”