Neftali

When Neftali fell, she was watching. She saw him slip from the roof of the long covered walk. With him went diamonds of azure tile. He fell with style and with power, as only he could do. The summer was still, and she thought she could hear him land—bluely. Boosh. Then the tile came down too, ice chipped off the moon. Special gardener. He could never work, never even fall, without coolest color all around.

From where she’d sat watching, on a piney pew in the glass chapel, the fall seemed staged. She almost laughed. Almost, despite her four blond children who thought only of skiing, her brother-in-law who wore second-grade silk, and her husband who refused the cure. Almost, but that she knew Neftali’s worth and had often (hungrily) watched him climb the fifteen-foot sprinkler that he’d built to unlock her garden.

Before Neftali, the grounds of her husband’s estate had cowered under her care. She’d grown dandelions, crabgrass, little orange trees choked out by the dust. After Neftali, the world outside was for monsters: wide lawns, towering trees, flat-faced flowers. This pleased her, as she could walk around feeling equal to nature. Singular gardener. He would not defer to the countryside, not to God, not even to her.

When she hired him, in the moment of sealing the deal, Neftali took her in his sticky hand. Then she’d seen the curtain lift to show the stage she’d set for herself—the lifelessness of a modern column, the idiocy of an arch, the lameness of a library where a hundred men could read and each one think Only I am reading. Life took place outside! She’d known it once, and now she could know it again.

What do you envision? she’d asked Neftali on his first day, gesturing to the scrub, and he’d answered: An allée of cypress, long as my nights. A limestone wellhead, a pleasure pool.

Pleasure was the last car of the train. She had given it up, but all this time it had been coming. Now she looked up from her reading. Now she saw the end in sight. She and Neftali met each morning in the courtyard, where he would whisper to her: How would you like the garden to sound? Like this (and a breath), or like this (and a finer breath). Like this, she might say, and sigh and take off her hat. Or like this, and press her tongue to her teeth and buzz and take his wrist.

Once she’d carried a hard stool into the garden, not sure yet how to take advantage of her leisure, and perched on it trying to read in the heat. She could hear, but not see, the water steps Neftali had made for her, and the sound of the water contained her voice, and the voices of several interesting men. A vague thrill passed through her: elsewhere, Neftali was hard at work. Many men were. Many hard and peaceful men.

The massive plants that kept her secret from her children—these were his monsters. She, too, was one; she relaxed while he labored to grow a home for her free time. And somewhere nearby he was sweating through his shirt—the thought tore through her like anger. Tender of her life, immodest to the extreme. He had become indispensable. Oh, awful need!

Soon she would ask him to move two large chairs out into the garden, then the vase of peacock feathers, then the table she liked best for peeling fruit, then the one she liked for drawing. Then she would ask him to sit with her, and he would pretend to resist, and she would finally say, I need you to sit, and only then would he sit, and take a blueberry from the mound, and hold it in his sticky fingers, and slip it all into her mouth. And afterward he might say, I don’t care what you do when you’re not with me.

But nothing mattered. She thought only of him. She made no...