Paullina Simons - The Summer Garden

“You’re making fun,” Tatiana said, “but this is serious.”

“You don’t know me because you don’t know what my favorite color is?” Alexander sounded disbelieving. “Ask me anything. I’ll tell you.”

“You won’t tell me anything! You don’t talk to me at all!” She started to cry.

Wide-eyed, flummoxed, stopped in mid-laugh, Alexander speechlessly opened his hands. “A second ago, this was all kind of funny,” he said slowly.

“If I don’t even know a simple thing like your favorite color,” Tatiana said, “can you imagine what else I don’t know?”

“ I don’t know my own favorite color! Or movie, or book, or song. I don’t know, I don’t care, I never thought about it. Good God, is this what people are thinking about after the war?”

“Yes!”

“Is this what you want to be thinking about?”

“Better than what we’ve been thinking about!”

Anthony, bless his small ways, came out of his bedroom, and, as always, prevented them from ever finishing any discussion until he was well asleep. All the things they talked about had to involve him, be compelling to him. As soon as he heard his mother and father talking in animated tones, he would come and take one of them away.

But later, in their bed, in the dark, Tatiana, who still had on her glum face, said to Alexander, “We don’t know each other. It occurs to me now—perhaps a little belatedly—that we never did.”

“Speak for yourself,” he said. “I know how you’ve lived and I know how you like to be touched. You know how I’ve lived and you know how I like to be touched.”

Oh. Alexander may have known theoretically, intellectually, how Tatiana liked to be touched, but he certainly never touched her that way anymore. She didn’t know why he didn’t, he just didn’t, and she didn’t know how to ask.

“Now, can I make love to you once without you crying?”

Certainly she didn’t want to make him touch her.

“Just once, and please—don’t tell me you’re crying from happiness.”

She tried not to cry when he made love to her. But it was impossible.

The goal was to find a way to live and touch where everything that had happened to them to bring them here could be put away somewhere safe, from where they could retrieve it , instead of it retrieving them any time it felt like it.

In the bedroom they were night animals; the lights were always off. Tatiana had to do something.

“ What is that god-awful smell?” Alexander said when he came home from the marina.

“Mommy put mayonnaise in her hair,” said Anthony with a face that said, Mommy washed her face with duck poop.

“She did what ?”

“Yes. This afternoon she put a whole jar of mayonnaise in her hair! Dad, she sat with it for hours, and now she can’t get the water hot enough to rinse it out.”

Alexander knocked on the bathroom door.

“Go away,” her voice said.

“It’s me.”

“I was talking to you.”

Opening the door, he came in. She was sitting bedraggled in the bath with her hair wet and slick. She covered her breasts from him.

“Um—what are you doing?” he said, with an impassive face.

“Nothing. What are you doing? How was your afternoon?” She saw his expression. “One wrong word from you, Alexander …” she warned.

“I said nothing,” he said. “Are you going to … come out soon? Make dinner, maybe?”

“The water is lukewarm, and I just can’t get this stuff out. I’m waiting for the tank to reheat.”

“It takes hours.”

“I got time,” she said. “You’re not hungry, are you?”

“Can I help?” Alexander asked, working very, very hard at a straight face. “How about I boil some water on the stove and wash it out?”

Mixing boiling water with the cold, Alexander sat shirtless at the edge of the tub and scrubbed Tatiana’s head with shampoo. Later they had cheese sandwiches and Campbell’s tomato soup. The tank reheated; Tatiana washed the hair again. The smell seemed to come out, but when the hair dried, it still smelled like mayonnaise. After they put Anthony to bed, Alexander ran the bath for her and washed her hair once more. They ran out of shampoo. They used heavy duty soap. The hair still smelled.

“It’s like your lobsters,” she said.

“Come on, the fish weren’t this bad.”

“Mom almost smells like herself again,” said Anthony when Alexander came home the next day. “Go ahead, Dad, smell her.”

Dad leaned down and smelled her. “Mmm, quite like herself,” he agreed, placing his hand on her hair.

Tatiana knew that today her hair, down to her lower back, glowed gold and was silken and shiny and exceedingly soft. She had bought strawberry shampoo that was berry fresh and washed her coconut-suntan-lotioned body with vanilla scented soap. Tatiana sidled against Alexander, gazing up up up at him. “Do you like it?” she asked, her breath catching.

“As you know.” But he took his hand away and only glanced down down down at her.

She got busy with steak and plantains and tomato roulade.

Later, out on the deck, he said quietly, “Tania, go get your brush.”

She ran to get the brush. Standing behind her—as if in another life—Alexander slowly, carefully, gently brushed out her hair, running his palm down after each stroke of the brush. “It’s very soft,” he whispered. “What in the world did you put mayonnaise in it for?”

“The hair was dry from the coloring, the leaching and then the ocean,” Tatiana replied. “Mayonnaise is supposed to make it smooth again.”

“Where did you hear that?”

“Read it in a beauty magazine.” She closed her eyes. It felt so good to have his hands in her hair. Her hot liquid stomach was pulsing.

“You need to stop with the magazines.” Bending, Alexander pressed his mouth into the back of her head, running his lips back and forth against her, and Tatiana groaned, and was embarrassed that she couldn’t stop herself in time.

“If I don’t read them, how else am I going to know how to please my husband?” she said thickly.

“Tatia, you don’t need to read any magazines for that,” he said.

We’ll have to see about that, she thought, in trepidation at her own anticipated audacity, turning around and stretching out her tremulous hand to him.

His hands behind his head, Alexander lay naked in bed on his back, waiting for her. Tatiana locked the door, took off her silk robe and stood in front of him with her long blonde tresses down over her shoulders. She liked the look in his eyes tonight. It wasn’t neutral. When he reached to switch off the light she said, no, leave the light on.

“Leave the light on ?” he said. “This is new.”

“I want you to look at me,” Tatiana said, climbing on top of his stomach, spanning him. Slowly she let her hair fall down onto his chest.

“How does it feel?” she murmured.

“Mmm.” His hands on her hips, Alexander arched his stomach into her open thighs.

“Silky, right?” she purred. “So soft, silky … velvety …”

And Alexander groaned.

He groaned ! He opened his mouth and an unsuppressed sound of excitement left his throat.

“Feel me, Shura …” she murmured, continuing to rub herself ever so lightly against his bare stomach, her long loose hair fluttering along with her flutters. But it was stirring her up too much; she had to stop. “I thought maybe if the hair was silky,” she whispered, moving her head from side to side as the cascading mane feathered him in silk strands across his chest, “you’d want to put your hands in it … your lips in it again.”