The garden party
by Brenda Cronin
[ fiction - may 06 ]
"We have to get the invitations out if we want to go with the middle of June," Sam said. "I've jotted down a draft here and I'll send it to the place that does my stationery."
"You mean we'd have them printed ?" That sounded so like a wedding, Juliet could barely speak. Sam had mentioned marriage before only in safely abstract terms, back when it wasn't even possible.
He unfolded the paper and she read:
Sam Wiseman
requests the pleasure of your company
at a fête champêtre.
Saturday, June 20, 2005
at four o'clock
2440 Massachusetts Avenue, N.W.
Washington, D.C.
"You don't think..." she murmured.
"Dearest, I may be seventy years old, but I can still write an invitation! What's wrong with it?"
"For starters, my name is missing." Juliet noticed he had written and centered the words so precisely that if this were indeed a draft, it was far from his first one.
"But we can't!" His lips formed the rectangle of forbearance usually reserved for waiters who let ice cubes slip into his water glass. "My friends don't know you."
"If it said 'Sam Wiseman and Juliet Field,' that might help."
"No, it would just confuse them," he gingerly slid the paper back to his side of the table. "You'll notice it doesn't say, 'Sam and Elsa Wiseman,' so that's sending a message right there. I'm not going to introduce you on a piece of cardboard! I want people to be dazzled by you in person. That's why we're having the party."
Juliet conceded, because she seldom argued with anyone, and never with Sam. She didn't even want her name on the invitation, any more than she wanted the party, which she had thought would just be Sam having a few friends over so he could confirm that he and Elsa were getting divorced and show off his much-younger girlfriend.
"But 'fête champêtre'?" she grimaced.
"It sounds a little precious? But that's what our party will be - an afternoon outdoors with lots of champagne."
"Why not just say 'garden party'?"
"Is that what it's called here? People will know what we mean?" Entranced by the Europe of his memories, Sam occasionally pretended that English came to him less readily than French, German and Italian.
Juliet, who still found these affectations charming, smiled. "I'm confident they'll get it."
He had been - as he would have put it - a coup de foudre for her, but one she had expected to remain unrequited. When they met a year ago, Sam not only was married, but also had a mistress. Juliet - at the time hoping to make ends meet with clerical jobs while she worked on fiction - had answered his ad for a part-time secretary. That arrangement dissolved as soon as she realized that he was never going to get around to his memoirs and that she would do well to return to copy editing at the Washington Post . But Sam continued to call and invite her to lunches where he reminisced about the past and complained about his wife, and in no time, she had unseated the lover in his life.
He had displaced none in hers. Two years after her divorce, she was leery of marrying again and almost relieved that she had yet to uncover anyone whose company seemed preferable over the long haul to being alone. Although at times ashamed of the affair, Juliet also found it an ideal arrangement that satisfied both of them. Besides, Sam's marriage was in tatters by the time they met, and she neither expected nor wanted him to leave Elsa. His asthma and hypochondria were under control, but he was almost twice her age, and she knew their romantic contrivance wouldn't last, which only heightened its poignancy and passion.
She liked knowing that when it ended, the fallout would be contained to the corners they had carved for one another in their lives. Since they had only good times together - no shared property, travel or crises - she knew that their parting couldn't trigger the cataclysmic restructuring of her life, home and friends that the divorce had. She hadn't tried to seduce him; instead, she had been so startled by his first kiss, she could only shake her head no when he asked incredulously, "You don't mind?" No, she wanted him to continue, and had happily ceded the stage-management and pacing of their affair to him.
They met only on Friday evenings, more frequently when Elsa was traveling or at the New Hampshire farm where she and Sam spent summers. Juliet told no-one; her parents in California, who would have been appalled, knew only that the retired ambassador for whom she had done a little typing before returning to her real job at the Post remained a friend. But Juliet also was proud that someone so accomplished and still handsome had fallen in love with her. Sam was seasoned and confident and she welcomed that contrast with her peers, who were timorously pursuing careers and marriages and families - or flailing through their thirties, as she was, on their own.
She never pried about the compromise by which Elsa refused a divorce, but tolerated fifty years of infidelity. Sam said they had remained married first, for the children, then, for his career and finally, from exhaustion. Although their son and daughter were grown and Sam was retired, neither he nor Elsa had the rancorous energy to leave. Besides, their house on Massachusetts Avenue allowed them minimal contact: rooms for entertaining were on the first floor, he had the second and she the third. Consuelo and Nestor, the wizened Colombian couple who had been their housekeeper and gardener forever, lived under the eaves.
The invitations went out, and replies poured in.
"We need a computer to keep track of who's coming," Sam said. "Can't you get someone at work to do that?"
"Of course," Juliet answered. "You're looking at her." He had retired in an era of secretaries and carbon paper, and she suspected that he thought computers literally absorbed information, as if she had only to pelt his notes at the screen to generate a guest list.
"Thank you, dearest. Consuelo can't handle this and keep the house going."
"I'll go to the office tomorrow to type them in." She was pleased to have an excuse for time alone over the weekend.
"You don't need a special trip for these things!" He sifted the paper scraps like confetti. "It will take you five minutes on Monday. Besides, I need you tomorrow. And Sunday. And every day." His smooth olive skin glowed and Juliet smiled back, even as she realized that these words - which not long ago would have delighted her - now left her feeling suffocated. She wished this were just another Friday dinner at the Cosmos Club, and that afterward they would take a taxi to her apartment and an hour or so later, say au revoir until the next week.
But Elsa had changed all that.
It happened on a Saturday in March, when Juliet was spring cleaning and Sam telephoned, breathless: "Can you hear me? She's left me!"
"Left?" Juliet assumed that one of the cleaners browbeaten by Consuelo and Nestor had walked out. "I'm sure you can find another one."
"No - Elsa! She wants to live at the farm year-round and I'm a free man!"
Juliet swallowed. "How did she find out?" she asked.
From Sam's exhilarated torrent, she learned that his wife didn't even know of their affair: money and managing their home had sparked the latest epic fight, after which she agreed to a divorce and said he could have the Washington house while she moved to New Hampshire. Sam then announced, as if advancing to the next square in Emily Post's flow chart for conduct during the dissolution of a marriage, that he was going to check into the Ritz, to give Elsa a dignified berth as she sorted things out and decided what to leave and what to take.
"You're going to move to a hotel just so that she can move out?" It sounded as outlandish as waging a duel. "That's a little extreme, isn't it? And it will cost the earth."
"She's handing me my freedom," he explained. "I can stand the dislocation for a month or even six weeks, if that's what she needs. And it's just a few blocks away."
Exactly, Juliet thought, so there is the excitement of moving to luxurious temporary quarters that are still close enough for Nestor and Consuelo to ferry over clothes and medicine and books. She presumed the couple conveyed with the house, but didn't ask, not wanting to appear too interested in the arrangements. After all, this was the Wisemans' business and it had nothing , she tried to convince herself amid surging foreboding, to do with her.
The Ritz was a plush half-way house between their old routines and new ones. Installed in his outlandishly expensive suite, he went on a tear, living and spending with the energy of a man condemned, rather than one with a new lease on life. Juliet was aghast at how exhausting Sam could be. They had dinner together almost daily, and although there was no reason not to stay over, Juliet rarely did, because they were both accustomed to sleeping alone. He also saddled her with tasks that she assumed Elsa had handled, such as managing the bewildered Consuelo and Nestor, who both appeared overdue for retirement, but were on the job continuously as days and nights blended under Sam's erratic schedule. To her great relief, he didn't bring up the future, or how their relationship might change further.
At work, she laced her desk with pencils and pads embossed with the Ritz's logo, partly so someone might notice and partly as evidence that this existence was real. She would have been too abashed to tell the truth, but was eager to offer up hints of a glamorous existence elsewhere, and wondered what the other copy editors would say if they knew that her solitary evenings of reading and writing had given over to playing house with her lover atop a fancy hotel.
Sam's transformation at the Ritz was nothing compared with his change upon returning home a month later. After discovering that Elsa had removed all the valuable furniture and art, he seemed propelled not by relief but the stronger stuff of revenge.
"She has basically gutted the place!" he shouted so loudly over the telephone, Juliet covered the receiver lest the news room hear. "She didn't hire movers, she hired burglars!"
"It's all right," she said. "We'll get things in order."
"But this is criminal! The place is a shambles - it's unrecognizable! You've got to come over."
"Aren't Consuelo and Nestor there?" She thought wistfully of the Ritz's concierge and room service. Before, her job at the Post merely filled the time between Friday evenings with Sam; now, it was the reef where she felt in control and unburdened by a host of senior-citizen chores, such as collecting asthma medicine at the 24-hour pharmacy and returning dry-cleaning that Sam had found unsatisfactorily pressed.
"They've disappeared. She's probably taken them, too."
"Wait - they're picking up the air-conditioners, out in Maryland. They'll be back this afternoon."
"But I need you here now!"
"I wish I could, dearest," she answered. "I'll be over right after work."
Of course, he had exaggerated. The house almost looked better, now that it wasn't choked with sideboards and armoires and paintings. But the dining room's bare chandelier and blood-red walls were a stark combination with the plastic garden chairs and card table that Nestor and Consuelo had unearthed from the basement.
"She's taken everything!" Sam was almost tearful with rage as his fingertips grazed picture hooks jutting out from the walls. Juliet had seen him like this just once before, when he was trying to explain his tax return to the IRS. The agent had hung up on him, but not before Sam, through pacing and gesticulating, had tangled himself up in the phone cord while Juliet tried not to laugh.
There was no laughing today, and when she sighed: "Well, we aren't at the Ritz anymore!" he looked so startled, she rushed over and hugged him, as if her slender arms could squeeze his fractured world back together.
The next day, he suggested the party. "Summer's coming! If I can ever get this place civilized, I'd like to have a few people by."
"That could be fun," Juliet answered. She knew that it would only escalate the daily drama, but reasoned it might be good for Sam to focus on a project instead of skimming from one crisis to the next. "Your children might want to come."
He frowned, tilting his head in the way that meant he either hadn't heard or understood. "I don't see why. If they happened to be in town for some reason, then, fine, but they wouldn't make a special trip."
"I see," she said, even though she didn't.
"They have lives of their own," he added. "Elsa's visited them, but with me it's mostly by phone."
Juliet had overheard those conversations at the Ritz, and worried at how easily the news went down with the son in Chicago and the daughter in Paris. Although she knew both were in their forties, she was astounded that instead of persuading their parents to stay together, they merely wished them well in their new lives. Sam's friends also took in the news of the divorce with no surprise, just resignation. Elsa had left more than a month ago, and since no-one had intervened to look after Sam and manage Consuelo and Nestor, Juliet wondered, "Who is going to relieve me of this burden?" As long as his health held up, no doctor stepped in and the new footing with Juliet drew no more attention than their affair.
During brief intervals alone in her apartment, when she managed to dodge Sam's flurry of requests, she told herself that the tempest couldn't go on forever, and it was just a matter of holding on until things returned to normal, which pretty much meant when Elsa agreed to come back. But the more time went by, the less likely that looked, as lawyers for both Wisemans pressed on with the divorce. And as Juliet grew more accustomed to Sam's demands and uneven rhythms, she admitted that they made her former life, with its routines such as shopping for the same groceries that she could pluck from the shelves blindfolded, seem unbearably dull.
Three weeks before the party, Sam still hadn't settled on a menu.
"I wanted a light repast and they're recommending boeuf bourguignon ?" He lifted his glasses and peered at the caterer's proposal. "You're going to have to talk to these people. I knew Consuelo would give them the wrong idea. Next thing you know, we'll have a piņata and firecrackers."
Juliet giggled. "I should go home soon."
"Dearest," Sam took her hand with such a grave and tender expression, she was startled.
"Things have changed," he began, and she knew he was going to say: "It's over. You've been suffering since Elsa left, and you need to be free of me." But the thought of life without him left her feeling so bereft, she gasped aloud.
"What's wrong?" he pulled back. "Are you in pain? Where does it hurt?"
"I'm fine," She knew it was going to be bad news and had to keep herself from crouching, as if his words would fall on her like a club. "Please - what are you going to say?"
"I want you to think of this place" - he held out his arms - "as your home. I don't want you to run off. There are four guest rooms upstairs and even if Elsa has ransacked the place, it can be our house. You like it here, don't you?"
"I love it." This was no time for the truth, Juliet decided. The place was a spooky wreck, with the neglect that had been hidden beneath carpets and paintings and furniture now laid bare, but a renovation and caretakers under the age of 70 might make it more comfortable.
She continued to sleep at her apartment during the week and stayed over in "her" room down the hall from Sam's only on weekends, missing entirely the crisis when he was wandering around before dawn, tripped on the belt of his bathrobe and fell down the stairs. Juliet heard one account from Consuelo and several from Sam - each larded with more danger and spurting blood - about how they had rushed him to the emergency room, where the cut on his head was stitched. She was pleased that Consuelo hadn't followed his instructions to summon her, but sadly conceded to herself that a sea change had happened if she was more concerned about getting a good night's sleep than being at Sam's side in the hospital.
She hoped that the accident might be cause for canceling the party, but Sam, his head swathed in a gauze turban, wouldn't hear of it. "If I end up with a scar, then I'll tell our guests that I got it from Elsa," he joked. "Or you!" Preparations continued and as he healed - with no trace beyond a tiny scar that was lost under his white hair - the garden party came together. Juliet silently dreaded it, because it had an air of finality, like a ceremony cementing her publicly to Sam just as she was desperate to turn the clock back to being just a lover, not his nurse-maid, secretary and housekeeper. She wished there were some middle ground, by which she could return most of his life to Consuelo or Elsa, and retain just Friday nights, but she was so accustomed to Sam pacing and directing their relationship, she didn't know how to express or exercise her will.
The night before the party, the marquee was up in the garden and supplies crowded the kitchen and dining room. Even after the sun had set it was still hot, and Juliet dizzily threaded her way indoors and out with her final to-do list until Sam gently took the notebook from her hands. "Enough, dearest. That's why we have caterers. Now, it's Friday night and I would like to have dinner with the woman I love."
The hostess at the Cosmos Club asked why she hadn't seen them for several weeks, and Sam, beaming, exclaimed: "I came within inches of breaking my neck!" Juliet had heard the story so often she felt as if she not only had been in the emergency room but beforehand on the landing, too, watching him pitch down the stairs, ricochet off the wall and glance his head against the wrought-iron banister. But she simply listened and felt as if she herself were falling in love all over again with Sam just as she had at this very table.
"He needs me," she thought, as he waxed on about his sutures. "Why do I want to end this?" She felt as if the relationship she had longed for had been delivered but impossibly jumbled, like the right dress in the wrong size and color. Yes, Sam was intelligent and charming, but he was impossibly old, like a weathered unmovable boulder, while she was still being pitched along by life and taking shape. Yes, he would free her from having to work at the Post, only to become a full-time caretaker for a temperamental - and prosperous - patient. But the evening had been so pleasant, she wanted them to survive Elsa's turbulent wake and prove that life could be fun again. If only after the party, she thought, they could go back to being in love and not letting daily life grind down her affection.
"What are you going to wear, dearest?"
"Tomorrow?"
He nodded. "The pink?"
"I thought about it." It was a dress she had worn as a bridesmaid, with a long taffeta skirt. When she had worn it for her birthday dinner, Sam had said she looked like a Renoir. "But I think I'll go with the black instead."
"Oh?" his eyes widened appreciatively. "You mean, the short one."
"That's right." It was a sleeveless, chic contrast with her cardigans and Peter Pan collars. "And my highest heels."
"That will go perfectly," Sam smiled and placed a tiny velvet box before her, "with this."
Please, Juliet prayed, don't let it be a ring! He had never given her jewelry before. She opened it and found a pair of tiny diamond earrings, and relief and disappointment coursed through her as she realized, "He's not proposing! If I end things, do I have to give these back? I love him, I must love him!" He said nothing, just smiled as she gasped and finally managed: "They're lovely."
Juliet woke and wondered where she was, blinking into the sunlight that spilled through the cracks in the worn Venetian blinds. Only when she saw Sam beside her, his head trussed in an eyeshade and an anti-asthma sleeping mask, did she remember that for the first time, they had spent the night in his bed.
"Wake up," he said. "We've got a party to give."
She had expected him to wind into a frenzy as the afternoon approached, but instead of badgering the caterers, he was serene, waiting while she dressed even as they heard guests arriving.
"Shouldn't you be downstairs?" she asked. "I'm sorry I'm taking so long." She had dawdled in hopes that her trepidation about the party would subside, and while she brushed her hair, they could hear laughter and conversation as things took off downstairs.
"Take your time," Sam had gotten ready earlier, with assistance from Nestor, and was sitting at the little desk that had been his daughter's. "I just like watching you."
His insistence that they descend to the party together and stay that way throughout made Juliet almost unbearably happy. "This could be our future," she thought, as they walked outside through the living room's French doors. She liked being waited on, she loved being the center of attention and most of all, she basked in how Sam, handsome and trim in his summer suit and bow tie, proudly introduced her to his friends. She had feared a parade of guests steadied by walkers and canes, but most were in fine shape and all, as Sam had promised, were eager to meet her.
After dusk, when guests started to leave, Sam began to get tired, and he and Juliet stood almost supporting one another through the farewells, until they were alone on the terrace. Inside, he sat down and sighed and stretched his legs. "Thank you, Dearest. Our first party. And it was a succès fou ! How will we top it?"
"We've got time to think about that."
"I asked Nestor to get my sniffers and puffers ready because I'm going to pay later on for all that time outdoors."
"You mean an attack?" Juliet put a hand on his arm. "Oh, no! Can't you take something?"
"I'll be fine," he pulled himself up slowly against the arm of the couch. "You'll come in and say good night?"
Self-conscious sitting in the living room while the caterers packed up, Juliet wandered around the garden and then went upstairs to find Sam, fresh and redolent of lavender soap, in sky-blue pajamas with navy piping. She sat at the edge of the bed, kissed him and said, "Good night, darling. I love you."
She went down the hall to her room, fell into bed and was asleep in moments, with a panoply of nightmares about not being able to breathe. First, a pillow grew to the size of an air mattress and nearly smothered her, then she was trapped in a sweltering, crowded elevator and finally she was racing through a third-world airport, where the flickering "Exit" sign at the end of each corridor simply fed into another.
She sat up in bed panting, her T-shirt sodden and the back of her neck plastered with slips of damp hair. She dressed, bundled her things into her knapsack, and tiptoed downstairs, nearly shinnying the banister to avoid the steps that creaked. She remembered Elsa, almost a year ago, going to great pains to have the railing reinforced, insisting that if she and Sam had something solid to hold on to, they were less likely to have falls like the one he had just weeks ago.
What if that happened again? Juliet asked herself. Then Consuelo and Nestor would bring him to the emergency room. She crept on, her eyes adjusting to the dark as she rounded the newel post - just about the place where, earlier that evening, she had overheard Sam talking about her.
"She's my life," he had said to the couple he had introduced to her earlier. "I know the split with Elsa hasn't gone according to Hoyle, but that all seems inconsequential because of Juliet. She is all that matters to me."
She had headed for the kitchen and slid back into the party by another door, too pleased and alarmed by his words to let him know she had heard.
In the black-and-white tiled foyer, she inched around the caterer's racks of glasses and dishes. Her knapsack strap caught on a corner and she almost cried out in despair as she wrested it free amid the plink of glass and cutlery. Like a diver nearly out of air, she reached the door in a panic, certain she heard Sam calling just as she slid the chain loose and began to twist the deadbolt.
She paused, listened again and realized he was coughing, not calling her. She knew that if she went upstairs, there would be no leaving; she would end up in his bed again and another day would dawn, weaving her deeper into his world. If only she stayed, she would make him very happy, and might end up so herself, at least some of the time. But even another night felt like being buried alive.
She turned the lock, opened the door and stepped outside, where the flagstones were cool against her feet and the night air tasted like perfume after the humidity indoors. She slipped on her sandals and headed down the path, her breath returning and her heart slowing. Strange to think that walking home in the middle of the night seemed such an adventure! She started off briskly and didn't look back.
