links. Before he retired he had played weekday golf with the zest of a schoolboy enjoying hookey. Now that the game had become a time-killer, he found golf another form of impotence.
As they drove along Elaine studied young men in passing cars. “Darling! Did you notice just now? It was Manuel.” She waved wildly at the gardener. Manual was slender, dark, romantic in a sweaty Mexican way. Another disturbing vision clouded Fletcher’s mind. “Manuel’s a gentle person but he will keep that nasty stuff in the shed. He says it’s necessary for bugs and slugs and stuff, but I wish he wouldn’t. He says there are no children in the house and the boxes are plainly marked, but I told him,” she laughed slyly, “I’d hold him personally responsible for accidents. Fletch dear, why are you looking so somber?”
A grunt was his answer. He turned a corner swiftly. She slid along the leather seat. “Oh, Fletch, please! Don’t drive so suicidally.”
When they were back at the house and Elaine busy with her groceries, Fletcher investigated the garden shed. Later that day he wrote in his diary:
Today she talked about the poisons in the garden shed. Has she honestly warned Manuel and has he told her that a package labeled POISON is not dangerous to adults who can read? Maybe it is just suspicion or one of those persecution complexes, but there are so many signs of danger in this house that I do not think I am just giving in to imagination. The thought of death is in her mind all the time. I wonder if she keeps talking about suicide to prepare the ground. I am sensitive to signs of danger. They say that the loss of one sense sharpens the others, that deaf men see more, the blind hear whispers in the distance. I used to shout, and now I listen. And learn.
Early in the marriage, when they were so crazily in love, Elaine would wait on edge for the sound of Fletcher’s key in the lock, his “Hi, lovable!” in a shout that shook the walls. Now that he had retired from work and life, she had too much of his passionate possessing. Every hour of every day his vast, useless curiosity was spent upon her. No movement was too trivial for his attention, each chore was supervised. When she bathed he came into the room and perched his big body on her spindly dressing table stool. She had to curb temper and humor, give every moment to the protection of the man’s poor pride. Restraint charged her nerves. Electric tensions quivered like wires in a high wind. She became overcheerful, considered every word, smiled too often. The mask stifled her. Once in a while in sheer rebellion she would prolong her conversation with a headwaiter or bestow charm outrageously upon a boy in a parking lot.
Once a week she had an afternoon to herself. Fletcher’s Thursday appointment with the barber and manicurist, sacred to a man who had nothing else on his calendar, took him into Los Angeles. He could easily have found a more convenient shop, but he had started with this barber and manicurist when he and Elaine had first come to the city and stayed at the Ambassador Hotel. He said the shop was the best in the city; his real reason was that they knew his disability and spared him the ordeal of speaking before strangers. He often lingered for a walk on streets where there were other pedestrians, tourists no doubt, whose presence gave the streets a slight sense of belonging to a city. Sometimes he drove down to the seedy center of the town to move with a crowd or listen to the street orators.
On one of these Thursdays Elaine’s treasured loneliness was interrupted. Kneeling on the garden path, digging up and separating irises, she heard wheels on the driveway, thought that Fletcher had come home early. From the path came a voice, whole and masculine, “I hope I’m not disturbing you. I just want to look at your garden.”
She turned with loam in her hands. From where she squatted, the man seemed very high, a long stretch of gabardine and tweed. “You haven’t changed much in the garden.”
“You know this garden?”
“I grew up in this house.”
“Oh.” She stood up to see him better. A narrow-brimmed hat shaded a narrow face, bony and sparsely covered with transparent skin, freckle-spattered. His eyes were shielded by close-fitting dark glasses.
“I haven’t been on the hill for a long time. But today . . . I had to see a patient on Geranium Drive so”—a long, freckled hand covered the grounds in a wide arc—“I came to see whether the new owners had ruined Aunt Cora’s garden.”
“New! We’ve been here more than a year, and why,” she challenged, “should we spoil your aunt’s garden?”
“Everyone else does. How could I know you wouldn’t pull out all the plants and put in those bestial-looking plants set in white pebbles? All around here,” the long, freckled hand moved in an arc of eloquent contempt, “they hire landscape specialists,” scorn underlined the word, “to make gardens ugly. I’m glad she isn’t here to see it.”
“Who?”
“Aunt Cora. My foster-mother. She planned and planted this garden.”
“It’s lovely.”
“You wouldn’t know the neighborhood. When I was a kid there was a grove of eucalyptus where that horror stands.” He jerked a nod toward a Greco-Roman contemporary with Regency urns on the roof. “And over there were two enormous pepper trees, male and female. I used to wonder how trees made it.” He laughed; Elaine offered an echo. The man paid no attention. “Modern gardeners don’t go for pepper and eucalyptus. They shed too much.” Uninvited he strode to the shade garden where azaleas and camellia shone pink and rose and white among polished foliage. “I used to resent it when she asked me to rake and carry, but in the blooming season . . . by God, it is the blooming season.” He took off his hat in obeisance.
Dusty red hair curled above a tall brow.
Elaine thought him too ardent but said gently, “I’m grateful to your foster-mother. Her garden’s one of the reasons we bought the place. And the privacy, too. It must have been pleasant to grow up here.”
He was too thickly wrapped in memories to give attention to a stranger. Elaine followed while he strode along the path to the pool. Suddenly, “I laid these stones. The path was originally gravel. How well the dichondra’s done. What a job to pull out all the crabgrass. I got twenty-five cents an hour. But why should you care?”
“I do. You made it lovely for me. At twenty-five cents an hour.”
“You haven’t spoiled the house either.”
The stranger’s compliment pleased her. Elaine valued mellowness and texture, thought the Mexican farmhouse architecture perfectly suited to the climate. The neighbors were always remodeling their houses, turning Tudor mansions into French chateaux, Cape Cod cottages into ranch houses with picture windows. Dazzling white stones and marble pillars transformed Mediterranean villas into buildings like funeral homes, and California bungalows were capped with mansard roofs. “Abortions,” said the visitor as they walked the paths he had laid.
“Why don’t we sit down?”
“I don’t want to keep you from anything.”
“I wasn’t doing anything in particular, just transplanting irises.”
“It’s the wrong season,” he said, and he held a chair for her. He asked her name, learned that she was married, that her husband was retired and generally at home, but always went out on Thursday afternoons. “That’s my free day, too,” he said. “I do my hospital rounds in the morning but unless there’s an emergency or necessary house calls, I try to keep Thursday afternoons for myself. Usually there are emergencies and necessary house calls. By the way, I’m Ralph Julian.”
They
