The Garden Path (10 page)

She used to sit on the bed for hours and hours, with the shades drawn, and Ivan's painting glowing faintly, mistily on the wall, and imagine things: people, usually, and bits of conversation and ways to describe faces, voices, gestures. Tags of poetry ran through her head, fitfully remembered from her college courses: “Fled is that music, fled is that music.…” The line rang and rang through the long afternoons, and so did “I fall upon the thorns of life, I bleed,” and certain words she liked—intercontinental ballistic missile, duenna, martello tower, Sri Lanka—and colors from Ivan's paintings—vermilion, rose madder, heliotrope.… The words had powers to create landscapes around themselves, strange places she had never seen, except maybe as marijuana dreams in her spacier days: underwater vistas with pale plants whose fronds reached wispy fingers out at slippery fish and faceless swimmers; or rocky, dry, hot stellar landscapes, sometimes with a figure—who? what?—lurking, waiting; or desert places where sand blows, and banks itself against the base of a mountain, and then on the horizon after millions of years of nothing but sand, something moves.

These visions, colors, skeins of words got themselves transformed, eventually, into science-fiction stories, a term Susannah rejected as not descriptive of her work but the one editors used whether she liked it or not. She wrote very slowly, and only after weeks of sitting, like a hen on eggs, in her darkened room, watching the quality of the light subtly change around the sides of the window shades, thinking of nothing but that light. Not even thinking of it, just taking it in, her brain purposely emptied out, but differently from the emptiness of that dutiful domestic month—empty so it could fill. She sat caught fast in her stories where the drudgy details of daily life never intruded, where no one ever washed dishes or ironed a shirt or pulled weeds. She forgot to eat, forgot Ivan would be coming home and she would have to slap dinner together, idly petting Keats or Byron or Shelley, whichever of the three cats had achieved the place of honor on her lap during that day's feline power struggle, maybe reading a little but not in any sustained way, opening books at random, mostly poetry or the long Victorian novels she was partial to; and after a couple of weeks of this she would rise one morning and hatch four sentences, a paragraph, and spend the rest of the day reading and sitting and thinking. And the next morning her paragraph would lead to another, by some lovely and unfailing principle of incubation and growth that always astonished her, so that she might end that day with a page, even two. And by these tiny increments, like sand blowing against the base of a mountain, something in the end got built, and she gave it to her friend Carla to type, and then to Ivan to mail, and it always, now, was sold. The stories didn't interest her once they left her keeping. The checks, of course, were nice; they went for luxuries, things she couldn't afford because she and Ivan were hoarding every bit of spare cash—books, dinners out, little presents for Ivan and Edwin and Carla and Carla's little son. But the real reason she wrote stories was for the odd white, or yellow, or greenish light that filled her room, and the visions that came with it. And because she didn't want to work in an office.

One place she liked to imagine, but which had nothing to do with her stories—for some days, while she sat there with the cats in the pleasant gloom, she pondered not her visions but her life—was Silvergate, the estate in England where Rosie was born, and where Rosie's father and grandfather had been gardeners. Susannah remembered, with effort, concentrating so hard she got headaches, what she had learned about the place when she was little. There wasn't much to recall—mainly conversations she had overheard between Rosie and Peter, cozy chats about Rosie's childhood that used to infuriate Susannah with their intimacy, their exclusiveness.

Not that she ever so much as hinted at her desire to be part of them, or let on that she was listening. She would be deep in a book in one room while Peter and her mother chattered in another, but she had picked up certain things, and over the years she retrieved them from the back of her mind: Silvergate, in Kent, which was in the south of England, and her brother Peter was named after her grandfather who was named after the old man—the earl? baronet?—who inherited the place in the 1890s; and the gardens were beautiful, and vast, and designed by her grandfather's father Massimo Liliano—what a wonderful name!—who was cheated of the credit for it; and there was a famous hedge clipped into fancy shapes, and a lily pond, and every kind of flower, and a huge patterned rose bed; and there were sheep whose wool used to catch in the wooden fence supports they scratched their backs against, and little Rosie used to collect it into soft, oily, dirty balls, and she had her own strawberry bed, where the berries tasted better than anything—
anything
—even the ones she grew out behind the house; and Nonna Anna (who died when Susannah was eight) wasn't blind then, and she used to make yellow pasta, hanging it in strands to dry all over the kitchen, on ropes strung across the room and on broom handles propped between two chairbacks; and this was in the gardener's cottage where Rosie was born in the back bedroom, delivered by Nonna Anna because it happened so suddenly, on the birthday of Rosie's mother, whose name was May after the month, and who said to her husband when he came rushing in from the garden to find his baby girl already born, safely flannel-wrapped in a wicker cradle, asleep, before he or the doctor or the midwife could get there, and his wife and his mother beaming and laughing, proud of what they'd accomplished all on their own, “Thank you for my birthday present, Peter!” and they named her Rose.

That was all—not much, though for a long time it was enough. Susannah used to ponder it, feeling a furtive happiness and trying to fill in the blanks, picturing it all in her head with the help of bits of England gleaned from movies and television and books. When she came across Pemberley, Darcy's Derbyshire mansion, in
Pride and Prejudice
, her excitement was so intense that, gripping the book in both hands, she split it halfway down its paperback spine.

On the long trip East, Susannah and Ivan made love once, twice, three times every night, bombarding her womb with possibilities. Ivan was full of ideas about how to manage it a third, a fourth time, how to assist the little fellows—as he called, affectionately, his sperm—on their epic journey. He jammed pillows under her pelvis, massaged her belly, proposed standing her on her head, made her assume fanciful positions that sent them both into giggling fits. Susannah became sore and tired (
tired
? Ivan seized on it, hopefully, as a pregnancy symptom), but their forced lovemaking could still ignite her sometimes. Unbelievably, there they'd be, going through the familiar motions at two in the morning, at a campsite in, say, Ozona, Texas, for the second or third time, and it would suddenly be good, better than ever. She and Ivan would gasp with joy and kiss hungrily and fiercely, and then move slowly, very slowly and carefully, making it last, before the little fellows exploded inside her, and she and Ivan rocked together, ground their bodies together in uncomplicated ecstasy on the narrow bed, while the cats waited politely, whisker-washing on the floor until they were done.

“There,” Ivan would say, stretching out beside her. “That must have done it. Don't move, don't move, let the little fellows swim, quietly, quietly, come on, guys.…” It gave their lovemaking, Ivan said, a whole new dimension, a sane, determined, purposeful quality. “Grown-up lovemaking,” he called it, and when she accused him of being an unregenerate Catholic he protested, and explained to her with great seriousness that his ex-religion had nothing to do with anything, that in fact there could be no greater blasphemy than an ex-priest making babies—
don't move, Susannah, lie still
—that it was the life force he was talking about, primitive nature in the raw struggling to perpetuate the species. That's what he liked—not to mention the immediate, tangible result of grown-up lovemaking, i.e. the possibility of little Virginia or little Louisiana, of diapers and rubber duckies and solace in their old age.

They progressed steadily in straight lines, screwing their way across the country, aiming to see a bit of it. But they never stopped, except to eat and sleep and buy gas, letting everything go by: strange and wonderful vistas, mountains, and flat, flat stretches of dirt, promises of interesting sights advertised along the roads, state capitols and art museums and parks and hiking trails. They preferred to make haste slowly, so that each day was like the one before it: rise, let the cats out, breakfast in the van on thick slices of the whole-grain bread they brought along (getting staler and staler as they progressed east but made palatable with peanut butter and honey and gulps of herb tea); then collect the cats and get on the highway, drive until late afternoon (lunching en route on fruit and nuts); find a gas station and a campsite and, their resolves to stay pure and healthy broken down under the stresses of boredom and cold weather, tracking down a McDonald's or a Pizza Hut for dinner. And then Susannah would, maybe, write for a while, or peacefully daydream, while Ivan went out to talk to people or listened to the radio. And then baby-making, and then sleep, with the cats curled around and between them.

Susannah had plenty of time to think and daydream. Those twelve days on the road were themselves like a long dream, a strange dislocated period of time for her, during which they moved steadily east, never still, and the days blurred together and even the hours, so that she was surprised, at times, to find the sun setting, the day's destination reached, the van pulling into a campsite, and Ivan saying, “I sure could use a pizza or something.”

She would think back later on the trip and remember sex, highways, and the story she was writing, but there was much more to it, of course, than that. Ivan seldom let her drive, and during the long hours on the road, while she sat beside him in the van, they sometimes sang old songs in two-part harmony. They were good at it: “Juanita” and “Moonlight Bay” and “Shine On, Harvest Moon.” But mostly they talked—he talked, while Susannah chewed her cuticles and looked out the window at distant skylines, mountains, storm clouds. What Ivan talked about was the future—the restaurant and what it would lead to, the importance of self-sufficiency in this day and age, the fun of the reunion with Duke. He didn't mention the reunion with Rosie, but she knew he had that in mind. He ruminated endlessly on the restaurant, manipulating the money, designing menus in his head, assigning roles as if they were playing a kids' game:
I'll be the manager, Duke'll be the cook, you'll be the waitress
—
until, of course, you become the Mommy
. Ivan seldom had a past tense; he didn't talk to her any more about his life before they met, or about their first year together when they'd been groping through their experiments with drugs, clinging to each other in confusion. Only her childhood interested him; she knew very little about his. She had a feeling he used hers to cancel his own, but that was unconfirmable. On the road he spoke only of the future, and Susannah wondered if that was good or not—it was fine to be hopeful and optimistic and full of plans, but was he staking too much on this move? Would they be better off back home on Dimmick Street with a steady income and better weather, and her dimly lit room which she missed sorely, and her father dying just a few miles away?

Sometimes, she stopped listening to Ivan's monologues and just looked at him. There were times when she couldn't stop looking at him and appreciating not only his head and profile silhouetted against various kinds of sky and landscape but his optimistic soul, his steady, good-humored voice going on and on, his rambunctious affability.
Ivan
. At such times, she would feel light-headed with love for him, with gratitude for the odd fortune that had given him to her. She never wanted to lose him, and not only because she loathed change and upset—she loved him. She would put out her hand and touch his flannel-shirted sleeve with one finger, as if testing his reality, and he would look at her, still talking, and smile, and turn back to the road. He was a conscientious driver, keeping his eyes alternately on the speedometer—they went a steady fifty—and on the road, gazing with a small frown out the wide tinted windows that he wiped clean every time they stopped.

When they drove through towns, searching out restaurants and gas stations, Susannah looked with interest at the people on the streets, hungry for faces after the long hours of highway and scenery. Some of the people she saw would, she knew, stay with her a long time, maybe turn up in a story. There was a cat-faced black man in front of a restaurant where they had corned beef sandwiches one night, who said, “Howdy, folks” to them; fleetingly, Susannah thought it would be fun to know him, even be his girlfriend; she liked his mad look, his funny chuckle and wide-open eyes. And in a knot of women coming out of a store there was one about her age in a red head-scarf and an old raincoat, with an intelligent, humorous face, and Susannah thought, I would like to be her friend. And a nice waitress in Mississippi; and a middle-aged couple, look-alikes, with cropped gray hair and sensible shoes, who camped next to them at a place in Tennessee; and a boy of about fourteen with a pale, beautiful face and hair dyed pale green and brushed straight up like spiky grass, who filled their gas tank in a little Virginia town. Susannah devoured their faces, and other faces, missing her friend Carla and the long walks she used to take from her apartment to Carla's where she sat listening to gossip about people she didn't know—Carla's landlady, her son's nursery school teacher, her sister, her sister's friend Diana who worked as a jockey, her old college roommate who had become a nun. Carla loved to talk, Susannah loved to listen. When she left, after pots and pots of tea, she would walk home watching the people she passed and pondering Carla's tales, all of whose characters were as real to her as her own friends, or the people in the stories she wrote.