garden

The plant sits on an age-battered cedar table on the balcony, soaking air and light.

I wonder if she’s making sport of me. But no—the curling lines of her handwritten script are perfectly frank, guileless. Bobbi White feels and then writes in a clean translation from thought to fingertips, her only barrier the habitual formality of patrician language: the way she writes I am rather than I’m, quite instead of very, or her studied politeness when she asks would you kindly and won’t you.

Antiquated, genteel graciousness from a brat rich girl: how she ordered a venti out of petty irritation with me, and the barista from the no-name café had frowned mutely back.

Lingering ghost of fragrance, a hint of her Chanel No. 9 still clings to the letter between my fingers. She’d sent a gift with it, an apology for material destruction she’s hardly aware of causing. Now, a day after Corbin’s suggestion to pay the pretty child a visit, and I had declined out of—what? Selflessness, caution, or simple vain pride?

My pride tells me I don’t need you. I don’t need anyone, except as means to my ends. I take and use and throw away, because that’s the way it has to be, because if you’re lucky you’re all destined for the trash fires—Ge Hinnom, Gai ben-Hinnom—and Paradise if you’re not. If I don’t break you down and ruin you (I’m a predator, I’m a parasite) none of us will ever get what we want, deserve, our birthrights.

But she’s pure, pure, how pure. How far she could fall, how low I could bring her, how much power she could bring me. And (the cruel, indulgent thought makes me shudder with possibility, with Sartre’s vertigo of consciousness) how beautiful her soul would look regaled in black, lovelier than even its present whiteness.

But this isn’t truth, either; or only half-truth like the meticulous perfection of my face, like my false name. A prince of lies. I’m not protecting her. I’m protecting me.

She writes, the afternoon light through the open balcony door turning the letter’s pale cream paper into a sheet of soft gold, You will visit me again … You will, won’t you?

I can see her gift, the dwarf tree with its wizened twisting trunk and the diminutive fruit hanging from slim leaf-laden branches. Does she understand what something like that means to something like me? Watching the sunlight gilt the leaves’ edges, I can’t escape remembering the Garden: the vague and distant impression left stamped on my mind, its landscape another dream haunting the fringes of my ravaged memory.

Maybe, after all, she understands without knowing why.