Grey Gardens

Cynthia Belmont

I lay on the white-planked table smoking my first-ever cigarette, alone because everyone else was on a delivery and I had been left to watch the store. Dazed, I stared at the foggy, sun-charmed glass roof, everything wet around me in the euphoric air of petrichor and potted geranium, the terrible burning of pristine lungs and nauseous whirl, the bougainvillea’s draggy magenta flowers dripping from the steel beams, its arms and fingers reaching from the huge winding trunk at the center of the main greenhouse like the tree of knowledge, spreading pink everywhere. It was a new smoker’s high—you only get that once.

I’d been working there for a couple of weeks. I was just a student and I’d never worked retail before, but my mother had connections and had scored me this summer job because she organized chamber concerts and Grey Gardens, a chaotic but sterling operation, did the floral arrangements for her events. I don’t remember where I got the smokes; they could have been anyone’s. Everyone smoked then. It was 1985 and glass bar ashtrays, clay saucers, and Moroccan brass bowls overflowing with ancient soggy butts were stashed all over the greenhouses like Easter eggs.

Seventeen and unsure but suspecting I was gay, I was in love with a girl, my best friend, though I wouldn’t have said this aloud or even held it as a whole thought. I just wrote oblique odes to her various parts—clavicles, ankles, her quizzical blonde eyebrows, the golden down on the back of her neck. It was overwhelming, and there was nothing for it but to pine. It was difficult to find distractions, and Grey Gardens was a good one. I had worked on a landscaping crew and I understood gardening in volume, how to sweat all day in the Kansas City heat and keep things alive; now, I could learn the art part bit by bit, planting pansy pots, cutting and soaking Oasis blocks, trimming rose stems, watching the owners build towering whimsical old-money confections of lily, hydrangea, gladiolus.

Grey and John were gentle, sinewy lovers, settling into their forties after a disco-era West Coast youth. Their house was a slim Victorian featuring burnout-velvet settees and marble-topped tables, peeling in high style among the other pre-gentrification historical properties in their downtown neighborhood. Ornate gilded mirrors, mahogany cathedral chairs, Majolica vases, beat-up Persian rugs—I was there to pick up décor for a party and walked through slowly, trying to take it in.

Grey was delicate, charismatic, nimble, otter-eyed. He sang what he spoke and sometimes just sang, filling the greenhouses with inspired smoker’s arias. He had purplish sores on his forearms and forehead and often napped in the shack next to the dumping area outside the far greenhouse. It was Grey’s place, his vision, his beauty and humor, titling his namesake business after the Edith Bouvier Beale legacy, but also it really was like that, mossy at the seams and vined with overtaking green, decrepit and gorgeous, unimpeachably genteel, from the cracked handmade tile floors to the dusty Murano glassware lining the shelves in the office.

John was tall and somber with black shaggy hair and a dominant gaze. Though they were careful never to touch intimately in public, I could imagine him dancing with Grey, enfolding him. He was wound tight, carrying the defensiveness, the frustration, for them both.

Grey’s sister Janet helped out with large orders and did the books. I loved to work with her, loved her freckles, the gap between buttons of her faded denim work shirt, thin gold chains, long auburn hair, cracked pale lips, her tan veiny feet in weathered work sandals, silver toe ring, eyes that were both ice-blue and kind.

Grey, John, and Janet treated me like one of them. They expected me to work hard and get their jokes, invited me to join them after work at the blues club where I watched them shake the ice around in gin they’d ordered by brand name, City Light Orchestra swinging around us, effortless.

By August I knew how to pair plants in urns and hanging baskets. I’d developed opinions—sophisticated asparagus fern over low-rent leatherleaf and baby’s breath. I knew something was wrong with Grey, though no one ever mentioned it. No one talked about what was happening.

I knew there were half-empty jugs of Carlo Rossi hidden under the work benches and that they were John’s. I knew that Grey’s shack next door held a terrible sadness. I went over there once while Grey and John were away for a few days, tasked to retrieve something for Janet, and I saw a counter piled high with old newspapers and crusted cups and dishes, buckets scummy with rotted plant matter in gelatinous brown water, a rumpled cot in the corner. I closed the door behind me and tried not to think about it later when I watched Grey’s twiggy masterful bruised hands at work in the flowers.

I knew how to smoke with panache—how to hold a cigarette casually between my lips while elbow-deep in dirt or freezing water, how to exhale through my nose. I knew what love looked like outside the public flaunt of heterosexuality. It looked real. It looked possible.

When I went to college, I brought a little clay planter shaped like a sleeping cat with a cutting from Grey Gardens’ mother asparagus, duchess among ferns, lacy and thorned, sinuous and soft. Still thriving after Grey died two years later, after John followed him, after the greenhouse closed, it lived, sometimes ripe with small green berries, root-bound, stems twining whip-thin, fox-tailed, for twenty years.