Ghost Orchid

Chapter One I came to Bosco for the quiet. That's what it's famous for. The silence reigns each day between the hours of nine and five by order of a hundred-year-old decree made by a woman who lies dead beneath the rosebushesa silence guarded by four hundred acres of wind sifting through white pines with a sound like a mother saying hush. The silence stretches into the still, warm afternoon until it melts into the darkest part of the garden where spiders spin their tunnel-shaped webs in the box-hedge maze. Just before dusk the wind, released from the pines, blows into the dry pipes of the marble fountain, swirls into the grotto, and creeps up the hill, into the gap- ing mouths of the satyrs, caressing the breasts of the sphinxes, snaking up the central fountain allee, and onto the terrace, where it exhales its resin- and copper-tinged breath onto the glasses and crystal decanters laid out on the balustrade. Even when we come down to drinks on the terrace there's always a moment, while the ice settles in the silver bowls and we brush the yellow pine needles off the rattan chairs, when it seems the silence will never be broken. When it seems that the silence might continue to accumulatelike the golden pine needles that pad the paths through the box-hedge maze and the crumbling marble steps and choke the mouths of the satyrs and fill the pipes of the fountain and finally be too deep to disturb. Then someone laughs and clinks his glass against another's, and says . . . "Cheers. Here's to Aurora Latham and Bosco." "Here, here," we all chime into the evening, sending the echoes of our voices rolling down the terraced lawn like brightly colored croquet balls from some long-ago lawn party. "God, I've never gotten so much work done," Bethesda Graham says, as if testing the air's capacity to hold a longer sentence or two. We all look at her with envy. Or maybe it's only me, not only because I didn't get any work done today, but because everything about Bethesda bespeaks confidence, from her slim elegant biographies and barbed critical reviews to her sleek cap of shiny black hair with bangs that just graze her perfectly arched eyebrowswhich are arched now at Nat Loomis, as if the two of them were sharing some secret, unspoken jokeand set off her milk-white skin and delicate bone structure. Even Bethesda's sizeshe can't be more than four nineis intimidating, as if everything superfluous had been refined down to its essential core. Or maybe it's just that at five nine I loom over her and my hair, unmanageable at the best of times, has been steadily swelling in the moist Bosco air and acquired red highlights from the copper pipes. I feel like an angry Valkyrie next to her. "Magic," says Zalman Bronsky, the poet, sipping his Campari and soda. "A dream. Perfection." He releases his words as if they were birds he's been cupping in his hands throughout the day. "I got shit-all done," complains Nat Loomis, the novelist. The famous novelist. I'd had to stop myself from gasping aloud when I recognized him on my first day at Boscoand who wouldn't recognize that profile, the jawline only slightly weaker than his jacket photos suggest, the trademark square glasses, the hazel eyes that morph from blue to green depending (he once said in an interview) on his mood, the tousled hair and sardonic grin. Along with the rest of the world (or at least the world of MFA writing programs and bookish Manhattan), I had read his first noveGoodman, Carol is the author of 'Ghost Orchid ', published 2006 under ISBN 9780345462138 and ISBN 0345462130.