When Joan wakes, the sensation of hatred so close to the skin is still running through her. She understands the bike riders, considering what Martin is doing, but the matricide makes no sense.
She presses a finger to her thigh, sees redness on top of her tan, and wishes she didn’t always forget to apply sunscreen before she swims. She wraps herself in the towel, gathers her clothes and her iPod, and walks up from the glen to the top of the knoll. She can smell the lilacs and the field of lavender from here. In early spring, without a word passing between them, Martin assumed Joan’s long-standing role as gardener, mulching, pruning, planting, fertilizing, and the flowers have risen up, undulant fields of intense colors. Her plots of staid vegetables are still in place, but Martin has expanded upon them, researching the unfamiliar, purchasing the seeds, planting them, tending to the shoots, yanking out encroaching weeds, feeding them his own mixture for their growth. The Ronde de Nice zucchinis, currant tomatoes, golden beets, Rat Tail radishes, and all the other difficult vegetables he is nurturing are growing with great success. Here is the other new plot he planted—fennel, chives, lime-basil, cilantro, and lemongrass—herbs he uses in the experimental meals he had been cooking for them since the start of the year. Had she known he had culinary talents, she would have put him to work after Fancy left, when making dinners for growing boys and sometimes a hungry husband had been a nightly chore she bore alone. She inhales the tangy aroma of the cilantro, crushes a blade of the lime-basil, breathes in its tart smell. Had Martin sensed the coming changes months ago, before she told him about the book last night?
A ladybug lands on her finger, and she carries it with her through the gardens, until it flies away.
The weeping willow is forty yards ahead and behind it is the gardening shed she intends to turn into her writing studio. When she stepped in there yesterday, the windows of wavy old glass reduced the sun’s glare, turned the light serene, transformed the gardens she built into pointillist paintings. She had thought of Fancy, the letters they traded for a few months after her departure, but they lost touch long ago, and she has no idea if Fancy and Trudy gave in to their love, raised children together, if their experiences have been easier than her own. Tomorrow, she’s going to move all the instruments of gardening labor into the garage.
Up the bluestone tile path to the patio, with its outdoor table and chairs and Martin’s upgraded barbecue, and through the glass doors into the sunny kitchen. She makes a pot of coffee and pulls down her regular mug, finds a folded piece of paper inside. It is a note from Martin, his first in years: I love you. She knows he’s deluding himself, thinking little will change when she fully resumes her life as Joan Ashby.
She fills the mug with coffee, takes a sip, and wonders what Daniel will say when she tells him about the book. Since Eric’s time in rehab, no longer do they ramble for forty-five minutes or an hour, their daily conversations falling away. Now he keeps their conversations short, asks if Eric is still doing all right, if he’s enjoying India, adroitly eludes her attempts to find out more about his mysterious project, says that he is finally following his creative heart, which she hopes is true. He came home only twice last year, and has not been here at all this year. Last year, when Eric was still running Solve from the house, Daniel showed up for a weekend in June, surprising her when he asked to read her collections, and then another weekend in November, when he hugged her and said he thought the stories were wonderful. Brief praise, when it had taken him all of the summer and nearly all of the fall to read and respond. But it was a sweet moment, and she had batted away the hurt because she owed Daniel for providing her with rare sweet moments these last years.
She has let things be, simply enjoying the feeling of being carefree, but now she wants to hear what he is up to. She wants to know the details of his mystery project, how exactly he’s heeding his creative heart beyond his articles for Think Inc., if he’s received emails from Eric about the letters he’s writing to the Dalai Lama seeking a personal meeting. She wants mostly to tell Daniel about Words.
The ring of the phone startles her, smashing into the eleven o’clock quiet of the kitchen, Martin’s new gadget calling out Daniel Manning, Daniel Manning, Daniel Manning. She was going to call him when she refilled her mug, but she’s so pleased he’s phoning.
“Love,” Joan says when she answers.
26
When Joan hangs up the phone, her skin feels too tight, as if she might at any moment start shedding like a snake. Rubbing up against any rough surface, a rock, a tree trunk, until the old skin peels away. Snakes are said to be in the blue when they are about to shed, and all at once she is feeling that way too, a little blue that Daniel rushed off the phone, did not give her time to ask her questions, to tell him her news. Soon, she will have no further interest in mothering even him, and she would have liked fifteen minutes to talk about the coming changes. She has put in her time and more than paid her dues.
In the study, the ergonomic chair fights her as it always does, resisting her adjustments, her pleas to submit to her will. She used to think Eric’s minions had screwed it up, but each time Martin demonstrates how the levers work, raising the height of the chair, firming up the supporting back, everything moves as it should, and he says, “You can tame this baby.” Defeated again, she props herself up on one bent leg and thinks she needs a booster seat.
Annabelle Iger has sent her an email.
Joan,
Men: Many, as ever, and delighted that the years are behind me when every boudoir dalliance involved the thought: Do I want a kid or not? I never did, you know, but societal dictums and upbringings are hard to shake.
Home: I bought the apartment next to mine, and the plans for combining the two should be finished in a couple of weeks. Work to start when building permits come through. In six months there will be plenty of space for you to come and stay, a wing, or something of the sort, of your own. You can come for a good long visit or the rest of our lives. Start writing again! Here’s hoping you’ve finally decided that marvelous Martin and married life and children are not worth it. Well, Eric’s troubles might have demonstrated that to you already. But how much fun we would have when you weren’t working away. Though I know you once were so intense and focused, and could be again, I’d stand over you with a whip, just for the fun of it.
Work: Going well. Having great success with two books written by the same author that I published in tandem in March. Paradise of Artists and The Blissed-Out Retreat. They remind me of your work. Let me know if I should send copies.
You: What’s new?