Free Rose's Garden by Carrie Brown

man’s weeping reached Conrad, he was surprised. The man’s grief sounded like a child’s, a fretful child shedding tears in some distant, private place where he did not expect to be discovered. Conrad looked down, caught his breath again, and noticed with a perverse clarity the action unfolding below, as the people gathered there became alerted to the men’s plight.
    They were rescued in short order, the other man hauled up and poured upon the floor, his bowels and stomach having released their contents. He could not be pried from the floor and made to stand. Conrad knelt beside him, the floor spinning under his knees, breathing hard, breathing in the stench. Afterward he hadwanted only to get away, be alone, had excused himself with a vague wave and taken himself to the diner across the street from the bank, the bell jangling loudly above his head as he pushed open the door with a shaking hand. Seated in a booth, wedged into its corner, he had eaten and eaten—a roast beef sandwich with gravy and potatoes, and then another; two pieces of apple pie; and then a piece of Boston cream pie. He finally had to force himself to stop. He wiped his mouth shakily, then he reached for his wallet and, frightened, discovered it gone, as though everything that established him as a certain person had fled from him in that moment when he hung in the sky, as though he had been emptied, turned upside down and shaken, stripped of all possessions, identity, and substance.
    When he returned home two days later, the job having been completed without further incident, he let himself in through the front door. The radio in the kitchen was slightly mistuned, an unsettling static interrupting the voices. He felt a sudden alarm and called for Rose.
    But she was upstairs, seated at her dressing table, applying her makeup, the long blue bars of the afternoon light falling through the curtains and over the floor. Rose belonged to an amateur theater troupe, a group of seven women who called themselves the Pleiades. They performed publicly once a year, a charity event held in Conrad and Rose’s garden on the upper terrace, the tree branches hung with paper lanterns. But they met weekly for rehearsals, to sew their costumes, and to simply talk, these seven women who revolved around one another in perfect order, no need for a sun at their center. Their performances were, for their respective families and for the town itself, events of signal importance. Two Chinese screens from Rose’s childhood home in Brooklyn formed the wings of the stage, the women disrobing there between scenes,their white spreading backsides and heavy breasts briefly exposed to the chill as they shed gowns for togas, armor for pantaloons, hurriedly shaking their feet free of clothing. Rose always hired a band to play on the front steps—a tambourine player, a fiddler, two trumpeters, and a pianist, who sat down at the old black upright, which had been wheeled out to the porch. A cranberry goblet of champagne trembled on top of the piano; a bouquet of roses in a silver tumbler dropped petals on his hands.
    Sometimes before their weekly meeting Rose would sit at her dressing table, her hair brushed back from her face and caught in a net, and make up her face, just as an experiment. Conrad never failed to be startled by Rose in full costume, but the effect of her transformation into someone he did not know seemed even more complete when it was partial, just the woman herself, her dressing gown slipped to her shoulders, her bare feet hooked over the rung of her chair, her new face staring back at itself in the silvery mirror. This was how he came upon her that afternoon, her face flecked with green shadows, her mouth painted into a tiny bow.
    â€œConnie!” Rose spun in her seat, pleased, as Conrad entered the room. She turned her strange face to her husband. “You’re early!” She held out her arms. Conrad crossed the room, kissed her mouth