New American Stories

A HAPPY RURAL SEAT OF VARIOUS VIEW: LUCINDA’S GARDEN by Christine Schutt

They met Gordon Brisk on a Friday the thirteenth at the Clam Box in Brooklin. They pooh-poohed the ominous signs. The milky stew they ate was cold — so what? They were happy. They were at sea; they were at the mess, corkskinned roughs in rummy spirits, dumb, loud, happy. And they really didn’t have so much to say to each other. They were only a few months married and agreed on everything, and for the moment nearly everything they did — where and how they lived — was cheap or free. They expected gifts at every turn and got them.

So it was at the Clam Box on a Friday night — lime pits along the rim of the glass, Pie feeling puckered — when Gordon Brisk introduced himself as a friend of Aunt Lucinda’s from a long time ago. Nick said he had seen Gordon’s paintings, of course. And Gordon said, “Am I supposed to be surprised?”

Gordon told a story that included Aunt Lucinda when she was their age, young. There were matches in it and another young woman who almost died. Aunt Lucinda in the story was the same — all love, love, love and this time for Gordon — and as for Gordon himself? He held up his hands. His hands had been on fire. He said, “Just look at these fuckers,” and they did. They looked and looked. The hands should have scared them, but they were drunk and sunburned and happy. They were glad, they insisted, glad to have met him. “Our first famous person,” Pie said after the after-dinner drinks when she and Nick were in the Crosley driving home. Pie was driving, too fast; she was saying how she loved those amber-colored, over-sweet drinks, the ones floated with an orange slice and a cherry. She had had too many, so was it any surprise she hit something? She hit what they thought was a raccoon. It was definitely something large and dark, but fatally hesitant. Pie was driving the Crosley, a gardener’s mini-car, which had no business on a public road, but Pie had wanted to drive it. The Crosley was a toy, yet whatever Pie hit hobbled into the woods, dragging its broken parts.

Home again and in their beds, Pie and Nick took aspirin and turned away from each other and slept. Next morning — frictive love — and then as usual in the garden, Aunt Lucinda’s garden, the famous one, a spilling-over, often photographed, sea-coast garden. The garden was how they lived for free. They were the caretakers in an estate called the Cottage. Some cottage! Why would Aunt Lucinda leave this paradise they asked, but she had told them. His name was Bruno and his wealth exceeded hers. The villa he owned in Tuscany was staffed. “Everything here is arranged for my pleasure,” so Aunt Lucinda said.

Gordon had said, “Scant pleasure.” He had said, “I’ll tell you pleasure. The killing kind.” And then to most everyone at the Clam Box bar, he described his wife: shoe-black hair and pointy parts. That cunt was the source of the fire, or so he had said at the Clam Box. “I was fucking around” was what Gordon had said, “but who wouldn’t?”

They were untested, Pie and Nick. They were newly everything; and now here they were caretakers for a summer before the rest of life began, and on this morning, as on so many mornings, the cloudless sky grew blue, then bluer. White chips of birds passed fast overhead, and the water was bright; they looked too long at its ceaseless signals and at noon they zombied to it. They let the water assault them until, cold and helpless, they let the waves knock them back to shore and up the beach. Sand caught in all the cracked places, and it felt good to take off their suits and finger it out. They lay directly on the sand; they dozed, they woke, they brushed themselves off. They wanted nothing. They were dry and their suits were dry and, for a moment, warm against them, and they walked to the shore; Nick and Pie walked along the shore and then into the water and they knew the water all over again. So went the afternoon in light — no clouds — whereas indoors was dark. It was dark, but they ran through the mud room toward the phone. They ran, and then they missed it. Who cared? They had the late afternoon before them. They tended the garden. Nick and Pie, they watered the deep beds; they flourished arcs; they beaded hooded plants and cupped plants and frangible rues. They washed paths. The wet rock walls turned into gems. What a place this was! How could Aunt Lucinda’s Bruno match it? Of course, the sunsets could be overlong if all they did was watch them, but they were distracted. The hot showers felt coarse against their sunburned skin and the lotion was cold. They put on pastel colors and saw their eyes in the mirror — another blue! Another summer dusk, stunned by the sun’s garish setting, they stood close to the grill and the radio’s news. They were in love and could listen, horrified but untouched, to whatever the newscaster had to say. But the flamboyant infanticide accomplished with duct tape was too much. Just north of them it had happened in the next and poorest county.

“Turn that off!” Nick said, and Pie did.

For them, nothing more serious than the dark they finally sat in with plates on their laps and at their feet melted drinks that looked dirty.

“Death: will it be sudden and will we be smiling? Will we know ourselves and the life we have lived?”

“Don’t even think such things!”

But Pie did, and Nick did, too. He said, “Think of something else,” and Pie came up with Gordon.

Gordon at the Clam Box. His high color and his scribbled hair. The way he startled whenever they had swayed closer. Was he afraid he might be touched? But there were all those women. An actress they had heard of. A lot of other men’s wives. Aunt Lucinda. “A beauty,” was what he said of her. Cornelia Shelbey had been a girlfriend, too, until the Count swooped down. A prick, the Count. Cornelia Shelbey was a cunt.

“What are we?” they had asked.

“Conceited!”

Nevertheless, Gordon called them. The picnic was his idea. Midmorning and already hot, the coast, a scoured metal, stung their eyes. Even as they drove against the wind, they felt the heat. There was no shade for a picnic. The tablecloth, cornered with rocks, blew away. The champagne was wavy. The food they ate was salty or dry; no tastes to speak of. Nick wanted peanut butter and jelly on pink, damp bread. Instead here were cresses and colored crisps. Then the champagne began. Pie swallowed too much of an egg too fast and it hurt her throat. Gordon said of Aunt Lucinda’s Bruno, “The man’s a fool. He knows nothing about art, but he lets people play with his money.” Gordon picked at the knees of his loose khaki pants and what he found he flicked away in the sea grass. He asked, “How do you play with yours?”

They told him just how little they had.

“Too bad!” he said. “Poor you.”

Pie washed her sticky hands in the cooler’s melting ice. Gordon yawned. Then they all three pushed the picnic back into the basket, didn’t bother to fold, drove home. A storm the next day; the power thunked out. Nick and Pie still had a headache from the picnic — too much champagne and whatever they had drunk after — so they took more aspirin. They napped; they looked at the sky; they shared a joint, and they knocked around in bed and felt rubbed and eased when they were finished. It was quiet in the Cottage except for the sound of the rain. They talked about money until they made themselves thirsty. Downstairs on the porch they saw Gordon in the garden under the tent of a golf umbrella. Gordon said he’d walked all the way from the village to them, walked in the rain to get sober. “Last night,” he said sadly. He shut the umbrella and sat on the porch with his head in his ruined hands. So they lit the fat joint rolled against the threat of all-day rain, and Gordon was glad of it. “Yes,” he said, and inhaled deeply and exhaled in a noisy way, seeming satisfied, which was how they felt, too. Forgotten were the woozy picnic and the problems of money. After all Nick and Pie were a handsome couple, young and loved. Aunt Lucinda was rich even if they weren’t. Hundreds of people had come to their wedding, and now they were caretakers to a scenic estate called the Cottage. The Cottage on Morgan Bay. For them the sky cleared and the sun came out and the garden began to sizzle. Gordon stayed on. He watched the happy couple, swatted by the waves: how they exhausted themselves until he was exhausted, too, and he slept. They all slept. They slept through the white hours of afternoon when the light was less complex. When they woke, the sand was peachy colored, and the sky was pretty. Gordon said he wanted to do something, but what? Why didn’t they have any money! They had the Crosley. “Fun,” Pie said. “Some fun,” Nick said. “You killed some kind of animal in that toy.”

Pie said, “I could bike to Gary’s and see if he has any clams. We could have a clambake.”

“Down here? After five? It’s damp and cold and there’s not as much beach.”

“You come up with something why don’t you.”

“The lotion’s hot. It can’t feel good,” Gordon said, but Pie said he was wrong.

“I’m so sunburned anything against my skin feels cool,” she said.

Gordon wiped his hands on her breasts. He said, “Lovely.” He said, “Maybe you’ll think of something to do. I’ll call you.”

A line they had heard before — had used themselves. I’ll call you augured disappointment.

Nick’s handsome face was crinkled. “What the fuck?” he said.

“What’s this?” Pie asked.

“You’re more ambitious” was what Nick finally said.

A cup of soup was dinner; the radio, left off.

“Find some music,” Pie said, and left Nick to wander through the Cottage. She swiped at Aunt Lucinda’s clothes until she found it: Valentino tap pants, and she tapped downstairs to nobody’s music but her quavery own.

“The best you could do?” Pie asked.

“Look at you,” he said.

On the beach, they agreed, their daydreaming was sometimes dangerous. The memory of Gordon’s misanthropic breath against their faces came in gusts.

“Jesus,” Pie said, remembering.

“What?”

The hollows of her body, especially at her hips, were exciting to them both, and they smiled to see the sand running out of Nick’s hand and into the ditched place between her hips.

“Jesus,” Pie said.

“I was thinking I would lick.”

Back to the garden, to the doused and swabbed, every morning, afternoon. Nick staked the droopers and Pie cut back. The heavy-headed mock orange, now past, Pie hacked at and hacked until the shorn shrub looked embarrassed.

“Poor thing,” Nick said.

And Pie laughed. “I’ve turned the grandpa of the front walk into a kid.” Pie, a long girl, wobbly in heeled shoes, bow-legged, shifty — bored, perhaps — but friendly, quick to laugh, on any errand making an impression. Nick left her on the village green the next afternoon, a lean girl in a ruffled bib. What was she wearing exactly? Something skimpy, faded, pink. She wore braids (again) or that was how Nick remembered her when he described Elizabeth Lathem Day — Pie was her father’s invention. A girl, a pretty speck, a part of summer and passing through it. She was. Pie was a white blonde, a blonde everywhere — it made Nick hard to think of her. She had close blond fur between her legs. He liked to comb it with his fingers, pull a little bit. Fuck.

“Where the hell is she?” Nick couldn’t help himself.

Lucinda said there was no family precedent; no one was mad that she knew of.

“Don’t think we weren’t getting along. Quite the opposite.”

Dogs snuffed in the woods off leashes. Heavy yellow and black dogs, their rheumy eyes mournful; their hard tails always looked wet and swapped against the shrubs. Once the dogs barked; Nick heard though they were out of sight. Something they had found dead and offensive — not her, not Pie — thank God! Although after the dogs, the reports, the calls, the case grew fainter. Also, also Nick was drinking. He was forgetting he had this job. He found himself standing in front of open broom closets and cabinets, in front of the dishwasher and sinks. Sometimes his hands were wet.

Watering; he finished watering the wilted patches, then sat on the porch and worried his roughed-up hands, cut and dirty and uncared for, ugly as roots and clumsy. Hard even to phone, to push the buttons accurately, but he did and to his surprise Gordon Brisk answered, and said, “I’m only just home but I’ve heard. I’m sorry.”

And that was that.

What was this guy all about was what Nick wanted to know.

“Tell me,” Nick said to Lucinda. Addresses, historic districts, the watch he wore, his antique truck, Gordon’s conversation was an orange pricked with cloves — an aromatic keepsake of Episcopal Christmases; so it came as a surprise when she said he was a Jew. A Jew?

“You’ve not seen a lot of the world, Nick.”

True, he hadn’t. He had married young.

But Nick did not want to travel: he wanted to stay at the Cottage at least until spring, maybe through another summer. Who knew? Pie might come back. Why would Gordon say more? Nick and Pie hadn’t seen him since — when? That hot, flashy day Brisk discovered they only looked rich; they had money enough to get by. But how much was that? How much did it cost to get by pleasantly? They were young, newly married. The most expensive things they bought were medicinal, recreational.

“You have no idea how happy we have been here,” Nick said. This was the truth uttered later, after whatever had passed for dinner, after the bath that made him sweat, the third or fourth Scotch. “We were really, really happy.”

The mothers and fathers — on both sides — made visits. They remarked on the garden and the ocean; they said no one would leave such a place voluntarily. So Nick stayed on at the Cottage. He watched the seasons redden then blue then brittle and brown the plants. The decline could be beautiful, but Nick’s hands, ungloved, grew grotesque. A fungus buckled and yellowed his thumbnail. His hands, all rose-nicks and dirt, reminded him of Gordon’s hands. Gordon talking about something to do with love, saying they had no idea, speaking in his seer voice, the old, pocked, vacant voice, prophesying horrors they could not imagine.

Not us, Pie thought and Nick thought, too; weren’t they always harmonious after Gordon left? They said, “We’re lucky.” Together: “We are.”

“You have no idea,” Gordon had said another day on the beach. He had said to Nick, “Someday your mouth will bleed in your sleep, and her cunt, too, will stain whatever it touches.”

“Love?”

Gordon in the buff on the beach that time, pulling at the bunched part between his legs, lifting up a purse of excitable skin. The black-haired, peaky creature called his wife had been a cunt. Gordon had said, “I was on my way home when I saw the smoke. Up in smoke! My wife and some of my paintings.” Gordon had asked, “You know what I tried to save, don’t you?”

Nick had suspected it was not his wife.

But what was Nick doing to find his?

Why was it Gordon that Nick thought so much about when Gordon had shut up his house and gone somewhere south, southwest?

Oh, the summer! The summer felt next door despite the cold. Nick talked to anybody. He shut the place up. He was there after last call, at the bar, saying his good-byes at the Clam Box, already shivering yet still polite. Likable boy.

It was a dry cold, a snowless night, and Nick, so exposed in the Crosley, hurt driving into it. The starless sky was friendly, and the moon, if there was one, was wide.