The Naked Gardener (5 page)

At the edge of the huge lake that was so long it disappeared beyond the pine trees, they had roped off swimming pens and designated these by bathing cap color. White Caps were the girls who had lived their entire lives in a city and were afraid to go in the water past their knees. Red Caps were beginning swimmers. The doggie paddlers. Blue Caps were accomplished in two strokes, usually the breast stroke and sidestroke, and Gold Caps (there were only a few) could go anywhere they liked in or out of the pens and swim freely at any time. These girls could do every stroke including that most underused of all swimming styles, the butterfly. My father once told me that if I had a shark circling me in the water, the butterfly stroke should not be my first line of defense.

Being the youngest girl in camp that first year, they stuck me in with the White Caps. I swam around and slipped under the rope and joined the Reds, kept on going under the next rope and popped up with the Blues, did a couple of laps of the crawl with a racing turn against the dock, and finally disappeared underwater again until I joined the two teenaged Gold Caps who had been attending Camp Minnehooha for six years. I headed for open water but a counselor whistled and stopped me before I hit the falls about a half mile down the lake.

They made me pass a bunch of tests that I undertook with fervor since I had set my sights on a bigger target. Gold Caps could learn canoeing. After they passed the rowing test. Thus I learned early that they always make you do the boring stuff first. Life is packed with prerequisites. They stuck me in a heavy tub of a rowboat, a pram I think it was and pushed me off from shore with instructions to follow the course laid out with small red floats. Turn first to starboard and then to port and then row backwards and keel haul and ship oars and stow oars and name the parts of the boat, gunwale, stern, and like that. It was pretty easy. The next day they had to let me take out a canoe. Which had been my chief objective all along. I’d never been in a canoe before. They looked pretty sleek. Not an aluminum canoe. These were wood and fiberglass. Very light. Tippy. But elegant.

I sat in the bow and a counselor sat in the stern. I liked everything about the canoe. The way it floated on the water. The way it was so responsive to the slightest touch. Even its wobble if you shifted your weight the littlest bit to either side. And the woven seats. Airy, light, as if you could almost float like a dragonfly over the water.

I listened to every order she barked at me and swung my paddle from side to side watching as we miraculously slid through the water, turned, made a circle, paddled in figure eights against the side of the canoe to bring us up alongside the beach so we could both get out easily, backpaddled, me paddling like crazy to keep up my part. Pretty soon we switched seats and I gave the orders. After a few days I got good at it. And then came the final test to determine if you could take a canoe out on your own. We paddled out to approximately the middle of the huge lake, where the water was an undetermined depth – and who was going diving down into that cold, brown water to find the bottom anyway – and we stopped.

I looked around. The counselor told me to hand her my paddle. I did what she asked. Then she held both paddles up high and with one athletic thrust she sent them, javelin like, as far away from the canoe as she could. And then she lurched sideways, dumping me and herself over the side, capsizing the canoe in the process. And then, as I was catching my breath and swimming to retrieve the paddles, instead of leaving the canoe upside down with a large air pocket underneath, she pulled the canoe onto its side and let the thing fill up with water. I swam back, pushing the paddles in front of me. When I reached the canoe, she told me to right it and figure out how to get rid of the water so we could paddle back to shore. And that was the final test. If you were ever in a capsized situation, they wanted to be sure you knew how to get back in the canoe, get your paddle and empty the canoe so you could get to shore. So I did it. The canoe floated fine. It really wasn’t that hard to get enough water out of it to get in. Once in I used the paddle to get most of the rest of the water out. Then I used my hands. And after a while, that canoe was floating well enough to paddle it back to shore, with the counselor swimming alongside

***

“Are you crazy?”

Maze had never spoken to me this way before.

“No. I am not crazy.” I glared. I rubbed a dinner plate hard with the soapy sponge.

“Well you can’t go.” Maze pushed back from the table and stood by the barn door, his back to me.

“Aren’t you going to say ‘And that’s final?’ ”

“Stop it. It’s way too dangerous.”

“More dangerous than hang gliding?”

My hands were shaking. I dropped the sponge into the soapy water. A poof of bubbles splashed back at me. Foam clung to my fingers.

“That’s totally different.” He went all logical then. “We’ve been gliding together for years. We know each other. We’re a team. We know how to work together.”

“You hang glide alone. You don’t need a team.”

“But we have a system we’ve worked out. If someone gets in trouble we have a plan, and we have confidence in each other to execute it.”

“And women can’t work as a team? Can’t execute a plan?”

“That’s not what I’m saying. You don’t know these women well. You’ve never canoed with them. They may be a bunch of airheads. You might get stuck with them on the river in the middle of nowhere. What if something happened?”

“Like what?”

“Like anything. You know the water. It’s unpredictable. And you’ve told me the Trout River is all but wilderness until the falls. It’s crazy to do this.”

I turned back to the dishes. Maze sat down at the table and alternately stared at his tea mug, then out the little cow windows. It was getting dark. Crickets chirped. The barred owl hooted. It was their time of day. Dawn and dusk. Maze put down the mug. I sat down across from him.

“You can’t keep doing this.”

“Doing what?”

“Trying to put a line around me and tie me down. It won’t work. I’m not her. I’m sorry your wife died. I’m sorry she got cancer. I’m sorry you still miss her so much. But I’m not her. And you can’t hold me so tight just to reassure yourself I won’t leave you like she did.”

He frowned. A deep line appeared between his eyebrows. His face reddened.

“This is not about her.”

“Of course it is. It’s about you not being able to let go of her and not wanting me to have the autonomy I need to breathe. If you keep holding me so tight, you’re going to crush the life out of us.”

He squirmed in his seat and pushed at his mug. It made a rasping sound against the wood table. “I think this is about you not feeling connected enough to us to give up some of your independence so we can really be a unit. And you think you’re competing with a dead woman but in reality you’re using her to keep us separated. I don’t understand why.”

“That’s not true,” I almost whispered it. I was getting so angry I was afraid of what I might say. Or do.

“Well it’s not about my dead wife, as far as I’m concerned,” he said.

“Then this is about you.”

“Of course it’s about me. What else would it be about?” He was almost yelling.

“I was hoping you’d be able to think about me once in a while.”

I got up. My chair nearly fell backwards. I caught it and gave it a shove against the rough floor.

“I think about you all the time,” he said. He was calm now. Logical again. “We can’t keep doing this.”

“Doing what?”

“Fighting over whether we’re going to be permanent. We have to make a move one way or the other.”

“Are you giving me some kind of ultimatum?”

“I think maybe I am. You have to decide to stay or go. You can’t have one foot inside the door and one foot outside. It doesn’t work.”

“That’s really funny. I’m the one who found the farm. I’m the one who planted the garden and got you to help fix up the barn and the coop. I made a studio for myself from the old pig sty and … ” I stopped to take a breath.

“That’s all just about the place,” Maze said. “A relationship is not only about the place where it happens but what happens inside it. What about me? Am I just another one of your art works?”

“That’s a terrible thing to say,” I told him.

“Maybe it is, but at least it’s honest. You accuse me of wanting a replacement for my dead wife when you’ve just replaced one temporary man with another. Anyway, if you’re so tied to this place, then maybe I should leave. Why do you need me here anyway?”

I rushed by him headed for the barn door. All I could think was to get out of there. But he grabbed my arm and pulled me over to him. He hugged me around the waist, held onto me so hard I couldn’t get away, buried his face in my breasts even as I struggled to get free.

“Is it too much to ask for you just to give in?” he asked.

“I can’t. One day you’ll want something else, something more than we have.”

He’d want a wife. A good wife, a loving wife, someone who would make his breakfast and not resent his little habits and pack a bag for his hang gliding trips and lay out his clothes the night before. A good wife would make sure he was all neat and tidy, well fed, comfortable, pampered even. A good wife.

Who was this good wife? No matter what the contract, it always came down to the woman giving up. I felt we hadn’t made any progress at all. Maze wanted a wife. He had liked having a wife. But he was still talking.

“You always say that but I just don’t get what you think I expect of you.”

“You don’t even realize it,” I said. “But you have expectations. They’re built in.”

“You know what I think?” He nuzzled my breast.

“I know what you’re thinking
about
.”

“Besides that,” he whispered against my skin.

“What?”

But he never got around to the answer, only pulled me down onto his lap. That night we made love in the coop in our bed, with the stars hidden behind a slow moving layer of clouds. When we were done, a soft rain fell, plinking on the metal roof of the coop, rustling the leaves.

CHAPTER FOUR

THE FERRY RIDE

When I was twenty-one, halfway through my senior year at art school I decided I had to “study abroad.” So I applied for a Fulbright grant. Because I was working with glass, I applied to go to Venice. I didn’t want to become a glass blower but at the time I was making prints from photographs. From these prints I made transfers – like T-shirt type transfers – that I ironed onto pieces of glass. When the transfer paper was pulled away, a transparent color image remained behind on the glass. In my Fulbright application, I said I was after a new way to envision images as a series of transparencies within the three dimensions of a sculptural space. Sounded very high falutin’ and, I thought, a bit unintelligible the way most writing about art does, so when my application was accepted, I was amazed. Off I went, camera in hand, a few pieces of clothing in a bag, and not much else. My plan had been to make the photographs, study glass blowing and other things that could be done with glass so I could understand how glass handled, the range of its possibilities and limitations. Problem. They sent me to Rome instead of Venice.

At the airport, my musician boyfriend from college handed me a small box with a silver ring inside.

“Wear it while you’re away,” he said. “When you come back, we’ll get married.”

This was not a total surprise. We had been living together for a year already. He had been against the Fulbright. But neither of us ever expected I would get it. When I did, I convinced myself they were short on women recipients that year. Or maybe it was the glass thing. How many applicants wanted to explore transferring photos onto glass?

I walked down the jetway to the unknown with a promise from my music man to reunite in nine months – same place, who knew what time.

In Rome I found lots of stone. Lots of monumental sculpture. Famous marbles and ceilings and church frescoes. A lot to see. But not much glass. So I concentrated on photographing the people of Italy. Anyway, I didn’t expect to come to grips with what I wanted to achieve in just nine months. But I hoped to get my mind around a vision, to realize it in some parts at least. To define what I wanted to do as an artist. To return home with a vision that no one else could or would create.

I lived frugally. No phone. No computer. No car. Not even a bike. Internet cafes weren’t in yet. I walked the city everywhere. There was a fairly large American community but I stayed away from it for the most part. I lived alone. Kept to myself. Took pictures. Bought an iron. I collected pieces of broken glass wherever I could find it – frame shops and the like. The Romans were generous, friendly, bemused by me. When they found out I was an artist, they fed me, saved broken pieces of glass for me, and offered advice on everything from love to where I should go for the best Cappuccino. This became my one extravagance. I even kept a photo diary of the intricate little drawings they made at different Cappuccino places. Each cappuccino artist had a signature design to top off the milky coffee.

I wrote long letters to my music man. He wrote short ones back. I was happy with the way my work was going. He was playing music and fighting with club owners to get paid. He missed me. I missed him. But I was a world away. And it
was
another world.

One day as I waited for my Cappuccino at a small table at a café called Rosati, a young man sitting at a nearby table said, “Excuse me, are you American?”

He was medium tall, with curly light brown hair and about three days growth of beard that set off his blue eyes. His smile, glittering, even white teeth against tanned skin, radiated like a movie marquee.

He picked up his espresso and moved over to my table. I didn’t know it yet but my photo-taking, glass-collecting adventure was about to take a detour.

Although his English was nearly perfect, he had a slight accent. Origin impossible to identify. He had grown up in Corsica cared for by a grandmother while his parents – one Corsican, one French – worked the photography concessions on various cruise ships plying the Mediterranean. Like most Europeans, he spoke a number of languages, including Italian.

“My American friends call me Pete,” he told me. “But my grandma calls me by my Corsican name, Petru.”

Once he had shaved, I swore he could have been the model for the Eros statue at the Museo Capitolino. Only a few years older than me, he looked innocent, almost pure I thought.

I never found out what Petru’s life plan was, but at the time he was acting as the “official” photographer for a theatre troupe that was ensconced at the Palazzo D’something or other, owned by the Marquessa D’something or other, up in the hills about twenty minutes outside Rome. Since Rome is nothing but hills, this did not exactly pinpoint the villa’s location. Not to worry, he would take me up there to see it for myself. On his classic Lambretta, circa 1957, a gift from the Marquessa to one of the troupe’s directors who had passed it along to Petru. The better to run errands on.

Two weeks and many late afternoon cappuccinos and espressos later, I climbed onto the seat behind Petru and hung on while he tooled around Rome, zipping between cars and circling around Piazza della This and Piazza della That until we began the ascent to the Palazzo itself.

I must say, having a title – whether real or manufactured – in Italy had its advantages. Although the Marquessa was not in residence during my brief visit, I did have the chance to see the splendor the other one millionth was enjoying. Not to mention the hundred-some-odd theatrical types who were feasting and lolling about like a troupe of monkeys in Roman Nirvana. Beautiful young people, intense looking veterans of the stage, and the hangers on, an odd mixture of sycophants, aspirants, and one English quasi journalist who was chronicling the feats of the troupe as it performed its way through Europe. It appeared to me that their wanderings had come to a screeching halt here at the palazzo. There was an ancient amphitheater in the round a few hundred yards below the palazzo gardens and Petru explained that the Marquessa had rented the old stone pit for the entire summer’s scheduled weekly performances.

Petru introduced me to the troupe’s director, named Eduardo or Eduard. I never did get it right.

“Ah,” he said with a flourish, “so you are the little American friend of Petru. You are here for the studies, no?”

“No,” I began.

But he turned to Petru and in a low voice said, “Michaela and Roberto want to see you on some urgent matter. I will embrace your friend here all over the palazzo, yes?”

He took my arm and embraced me off to the gardens where nude coed sunbathing was well underway. I spotted dozens of wine bottles lying about on tables, on the ground, in the flower beds.

“So, Kate? Like in Shakespeare, no?” he said. “Has Petru tamed you yet?”

“Katelyn,” I corrected him. “Party last night?” I pointed to some bottles on a bench in the garden.

He shrugged. “You will come to see the performance tonight? Very entertaining. With deep meanings.” He nodded as if we had just shared a secret.

“Is it in English?” I asked.

“If you like,” he answered.

As if that was not enigmatic enough, we took a turn onto a path flanked by tall, very thin old cypress trees and came upon two of the actors practicing a sword fight in the middle of the path. I had fallen into a Fellini movie for sure. Then Petru emerged from between two cypress trees and waved with that big grin. Every time he smiled at me I felt like a disappearing ice cube.

I never did see the performance. Instead, Petru proposed a trip. To Morocco. Together. Starting the next day.

“Are you kidding?”

We were back in Rome, outside my building below my tiny apartment. I didn’t know whether I should invite him up. It was so small that I barely had room to do my work in it. I slept on a pad that I unrolled every night. One old table and chair. The landlady let me set up my iron in the hall when I made glass transfers. These were stacked against one wall, neatly separated by newspaper. I had done about thirty so far. Some of them were on broken pieces of glass, odd shapes and sizes.

“Say you will come,” he pleaded and grinned. “No pressures. I promise.”

He meant I didn’t have to sleep with him. So far he had not made one move on me. I was beginning to wonder about that. I also wondered what I would do about it if he did. I didn’t feel engaged. But I did feel committed to the music man back home. Yet it was so far away. And for almost a year.

Petru reached forward and pushed a long curl of my hair back off my shoulder. Again the flash of a smile. He dropped his hand. Moved toward the Lambretta.

“It will make me so happy if you will say yes,” he said as he turned to face me, his hands now on the scooter. “It will be an adventure.”

“Can that thing make it all the way to Morocco? I asked.

“Not to worry about anything. We go by water. I pick you up at eight. Pack very light.” He pointed to the small wire luggage rack on the back.

Off he zoomed into the traffic. I thought there must have been something they were wafting through the air at that palazzo. Something that made me light headed and scrambled my senses. I hadn’t even asked him how long we would be away.

It was mid August. We departed from Rome on the Lambretta at eight the next morning. We took the Via Aurelia northwest up to the port town of Civitavecchia where we boarded a ferry which would carry us across the Mediterranean smack between Corsica and Sardinia all the way to Barcelona on the coast of Spain. It was breathtakingly beautiful. The sea calm and deep blue. The sky the same. Porpoises followed along as we pulled farther and farther away from land. We did what most ferry passengers do. Watched the sea. Let the breeze caress our skin. Chatted with the few other passengers. Wandered the decks until I finally got around to asking for some details.

“How long is the ferry ride?”

“Oh, we’ll be there tomorrow morning. Very early I think. Maybe seven.”

“You mean we’ll be on this overnight?”

“Sure. And we go past my ancestral home. But far away at night. You can’t see. But I would like to show you. Sometime.”

He looked a little sad. Ancestral home is not a phrase you hear in America. I told him so.

“No?” He looked surprised. “But don’t your people come from somewhere in America?”

How could I explain that there was nothing ancestral about coming from Akron?

“Where do we sleep?” I asked. It was getting on into the late afternoon. We had eaten at the ferry restaurant. There were bathrooms and a bar and lounge. Had he rented us an overnight room I hadn’t seen?

“Over there.” He pointed next to the Lambretta, between two large shell shaped vents.

I followed his finger and pointed also. “There? On the deck?”

He took my hand and turned it palm down and touched my ring.

“You are engaged?” he asked.

I didn’t pull my hand away. “Not technically.”

“But practically?”

“We are,” how to characterize our arrangement, “committed.”

“And this means you are,” he hesitated, looking for the right word it seemed. “Lonely for him?”

“Well yes. I am,” I said. “But I’m not sure what I want for the rest of my life.”

“Ahhh,” he nodded and dropped my hand. “I wish we could be on the fast ferry, the one with nice rooms. The other passengers will sleep in the lounge I think. Or in their cars. We have the sleeping bags. It will be all right.”

Later, in the dark, under the phosphorescent sky like a sea above us, we lay side by side zipped into our cocoons, with the soft rumble of the ferry motor and the rhythmic slap slapping of waves against the hull. I slid my arms up and out from the sleeping bag to feel the cool night air on my skin.

“Later, after we have returned to Roma,” Petru was awake. He must have been watching me. “Then I can take you on the fast ferry to Campomoro in Corsica where my family has a home. You would like that?” The air was so fine, the night sky so close, the sound of the sea so soothing, I would have liked anything. I even liked sleeping on deck behind the big clamshell of a vent.

When I said, “That sounds wonderful,” nothing else seemed to exist but that moment and I did not think past where we were and what happened next did not seem at the time to be out of place or wrong in any way.

I felt his fingers on my arm, soft, gentle. He slid the zipper of my sleeping bag down slowly until my leg was exposed and his hand moved down to my ankle where he cupped the arch of my foot. He held it like that, as if it was an apple in his palm and then his hand moved slowly up my leg.

He must have unzipped his own bag, or maybe he had never closed it at all. Maybe he had planned all this. I never asked. I don’t think I wanted to know. There were other mysteries about Petru. How such an innocent looking young man could have become so practiced in the art of love making? How he could know that a woman would say yes without actually asking her?

He moved slowly. First next to me. Then on top of me. Then inside me. Slowly, with the rhythm of the ship, the rumble of the engines. I had no idea of time and when it was over, and we lay there staring up at the night sky, he twined his fingers between mine and said in a soft voice, “You bring me luck. I feel it.”

We arrived in Tangiers by taking another ferry, a short trip from Algeciras this time, and once off the boat, Petru gunned the little one cylinder motor and off we went. I had no idea where or why. I was drunk with him by then. He could have taken me anywhere.