The Walled Garden #4
“Don’t worry. It’s a hypothetical garden.”
I smiled back. “I’ll take that to mean that our secret is safe. So in that case, I have something for you. Something amazing!”
The dancing cool light in his eyes went dark, and he sank down in the chair next to mine. “You went back there, didn’t you? Without me.”
“I couldn’t resist.”
“You went alone.” Something new shone in his face, and I read it immediately and with great pleasure – it was admiration, mixed with a flicker of fear.
Mellon: afraid. My pleasure shaded into amazement. I cleared my throat and straightened the pink lace scarf arranged around my neck. “Yes, alone. I’ve been in worse places alone, believe me.”
He nodded. “You brought something back.”
“Yes! Good student, you know your teacher well. But you’ll never guess what. A map. A . . . map!”
He drew his chair closer to mine, leaned in and whispered, “A map? Of what? And wherever did you find it?”
“I didn’t find it, I made it. And it’s a map of the world beyond the garden wall.”
He drew back with a cry of pain, leaned in and grabbed my shoulders. He gave me a little shake, caught himself doing it, and then almost crushed me in a fierce, all-enveloping hug.
Now there was a reaction I’d never have expected to inspire out of Jonathan Mellon. And here’s the strangest thing: I welcomed that hug. Lost myself in it, in fact. And lost and safe in his arms, I considered what a freaking miracle that sense of safety represented.
“You jumped over the wall!” he murmured against the top of my head. I could feel him swallowing hard. “I can’t believe I didn’t lose you.”
“Of course not. I have the world’s best sense of direction. And if I know how to do anything, it’s to come back no matter what.”
I gently disentangled myself from Mellon’s embrace, took out the folded-up square of paper I kept in the back pocket of my jeans. Unlike him, I took pains to keep my work neat, and the graph paper had a sketched pathway and careful notes covering both sides.
I leaned in and waved the paper. “Look, the walled garden is in the centre.”
I took in the sight of his quick, neat features as he pored over my drawings. While he was distracted, I stole a close-up view of my strange and beautiful new friend’s face. And in that moment, tracing the line of his lips and his jaw with my gaze, I realized I could love this man.
It was crazy, classic-Mireya-crazy. But it also made a certain immutable sense.
Because I had never known a man like Mellon, one who quietly moved mountains and revealed worlds without saying a word.
One who realized that words are jewels, that if you can work magic, there’s no need to brag about it.
He poked me gently in the shoulder. “You’re daydreaming again. Go ahead.”
I smiled up at him, and he wrapped an arm protectively around my shoulder and rubbed at his jaw with his other hand. I watched him take the map and study it, and a slow realization came to a rolling boil in my mind:
He didn’t know about any of this. All he knew personally was the garden itself – he had never gone over the top. And that knowledge put the fear into me for the first time.
Why hadn’t Mellon gone exploring down below the way I had?
He poked me in the shoulder again. “So what did you find?”
Mellon: impatient. I’d discovered a world of wonders in my friend, as well as in the subterranean world he’d opened to me. “Well, once you climb the trellis and go over, across the brass stairs, there’s a cinder path, lined with cactus and these strange purple vines with flowers.”
He nodded for me to go on, an odd expression on his face. I took a sip of my now-tepid tea, and leaned against his warm, strong arm. “About fifty feet down – the pathway slopes down – the way forks. I decided to pick right every time, and the path branched about five times.”
I indicated each fork in the path with my pinkie, touching his finger as we traced my recorded footfalls together on the page.
“And then . . .” I hesitated. What I was about to say was amazing, unbelievable, and breathtaking – but I could never unsay it. I savoured the silence before words.
Mellon nodded for me to go on. He was ready.
“I came to a door.”
He leaned forwards even more. “To another garden.”
“Yes.”
He wrinkled his forehead, nibbled at his lower lip. “And you jumped the wall and climbed the stairs.”
“Yes, Mellon! It was so amazing.”
“And what did you discover at the top of the stairs?” His voice sounded dry and precise, like a lawyer doing a routine courtroom cross-examination in a boring town somewhere far, far away from where we lived.
“It was a speakeasy. I came up through the wine cellar, and all these guys in zoot suits sat in a row along the bar. It had a huge polished bar, even bigger than the West End. And there were – showgirls there, too. Wearing flapper dresses and strappy shoes.”
“Astonishing. And what else?”
“The barkeeper knew me, Mellon! He nodded and smiled. Offered me a ‘whiskey neat, on the house, girlie’!”
Mellon’s face went alabaster, like somebody had turned him into a decorative figurine. “You didn’t take it. Tell me you didn’t drink it!”
I leaned up against the whole side of his lean, warm body and looked up into his face, so close I could have kissed him. But I resisted. I didn’t want to steal our first kiss, not in the middle of his panic. “If I did drink it, Mellon, would I have made it back?”
He hugged me again, and I felt a tremor in his fingers, very slight, where his fingertips pressed against my bare arms. “Promise me you won’t do that again. Jump the wall, all alone.”
“But it was amazing, Mellon. I’m a history major . . . you can just imagine what that was like!”
“No, promise me. As a boy, I swore to my grandfather never to venture past the garden walls. I never imagined you would just go ahead yourself, without telling me first. Mireya, you astonish me.”
I drew back, caressed his cheek until his eyes went from wild to merely troubled. “Mellon, I was free. I met myself down in that pathway, you know? I have to go back. I have to. But I want you to come with me.”
“It’s beautiful, but it’s dangerous.”
“It’s worth it. Come with me!”
When he didn’t respond, I gave in to the temptation and ran my fingers through his glorious, thick blond hair. “Come with me. We’ll take the left-hand path together. Don’t worry . . . your grandfather will never know.”
The left-hand path was wonderful in a completely different way, one that Mellon seemed to find less threatening than the dangerous speakeasy with the all-too-knowing barkeep.
We found a walled garden after only two branchings of the path, and we emerged to rolling fields high on a bluff overlooking what would someday become Passaic, NJ.
I recognized the view – it was the same as the one in my tiny bathroom window.
A single Indian woman with a baby on her breast sat cross-legged, and she nodded as we walked by.
It was autumn, full daylight, and the leaves sprinkling down into Mellon’s hair were orange, white and blood red with purple streaks.
I carefully filled in my map before we returned to the walled garden under the Columbia University chapel.
Over the next few weeks, my hand-drawn map got more complicated looking than the NYC subway map.
I redrew it on to a much larger piece of paper, started naming the pathways so I could keep them straight in my mind, but even so, the twining paths and interlocked gardens crowded each other over the smudged page.
What adventures we had underneath the streets of New York City, Mellon and I.
I could write a whole book about it, and someday maybe I will.
From the days of Peter Stuyvesant to the Revolutionary War, to the Second World War to hazy futures beyond our own lives, Jonathan and I explored a city unfolding in time as well as space.
We always came back, sometimes with difficulty but more often with a familiar, homecoming ease.
But I always left something of myself behind.
In all these times and places I found a single constant, a central point more changeless than our own walled garden: Jonathan Mellon himself.
Steadfast, mysterious, bearer of secret fears he was strong enough to carry alone.
And no matter where and when we went, we agreed our favourite place and time was our own.
The day Mellon brought back his first A+ paper, we didn’t travel anywhere or anywhen, but stayed the night in my room.
I double locked the door and put my desk chair up under the doorknob in the extremely unlikely event that Colleen would stop by – even she had given up on me, and now none of my old friends remained in my life.
We ate turkey sandwiches by starlight with the window open, and the oboe player regaled us with something slow, sad and sweet, like Debussy blissed out of his mind on opium.
When I let down the window shade and took the clips out of my hair, the music seeped into my veins. The room was full of shadows; Mellon’s face shone like the moon. Mellon unlocked my body and my heart like a garden gate, and his loving caresses were the key.
Afterwards, we lay together on the bed, so close that the twin bed was plenty big enough for the two of us. I sighed and rested my cheek on his narrow, muscular chest, and I revelled in the calm cadence of his heartbeat.
“Why did you talk to me that day out by your beat-up Mercedes, Mellon? It was no accident we met, was it?”
I could feel that Mellon was holding his breath. He exhaled with a slow and ragged sigh, held me even closer. “You have a scent of magic, Mireya. I found you irresistible. Did from the first moment I laid eyes on you.”
He rolled me on top of him, arranged my bare limbs to twine all around him like a climbing trellis of roses. “And I intend to never resist you again.”
The night passed slowly and with a blooming sweetness. It was the purest, most uncomplicated bliss I have ever known.