The Garden Path (20 page)

Would he come? On the sixth day she abandoned her chores and planned a menu. Nothing heavy, nothing that might not set well on her butterfly stomach, nothing gassy, nothing that looked awkward to eat (no artichokes or lobster or spaghetti) and nothing that required strenuous cutting or chewing or—she closed her eyes and thought,
Yes, I'm going insane, truly
, but nevertheless she came up with a menu that met her specifications. Baked chicken, rice with mushrooms, asparagus from her garden. At the little Town Market, where she tried to imagine Ivan trundling one of the tiny shopping carts up and down the congested aisles buying his pimentos and cornmeal, it came to her as she stood musing over the display of chicken parts:
what if he's a vegetarian
? she remembered the tough omelets, and stood for several long moments in a sweaty panic. What to do? The image of the baked chicken on its platter sat firmly before her; she couldn't dislodge it. Barney had loved her chicken; she remembered his greasy fingers, greasy smile. “Excuse me,” said a woman with a loaded shopping cart who wanted to push by, and Rosie moved on, calmed, toward the fish department. All vegetarians eat fish. She would substitute some nice filets. It was simple, no need to sweat, no need to clench her stomach muscles together until she felt sick.

Standing at the fish counter, she laughed at herself, and reflected that she always seemed, lately, to be laughing at herself. Rueful laughter had become her trademark, it was the price one had to pay for, for, for … what? There was no acceptable way to think about Ivan, to think about how much she wanted him to like her and be her friend.
Hers
. She stared glassily at the sole filets until the fish man asked her, for the second time, if he could help her.

Ivan showed up that evening, while Rosie was sitting in her chair chuckling over
The Countryman
, October 1933. “Munch,” she read. “The perfect cereal in biscuit form. It is neither indigestible nor filling. The flavour is unique and irresistible to old and young alike, while the …”

She heard the sound of the van—
could
it be the van? O Lord—and dashed to the window to see him swing out of the front seat and up the path, whistling, looking for her at the door. She panicked, then calmed. She was in her bathrobe, just out of the tub, her hair in a knot on top of her head, her face not made up, her new dress still in the back of her closet—disaster! And yet
he was here
, and evidently meant to stay because he had a six-pack with him, and a package. She hugged herself with happiness and ran to the door to let him in.

He whistled when he saw her, whether in amazement at her getup or as a compliment, she didn't know. “Don't tell me—I'm a day early. Right?” He grinned and stepped inside from sunshine to dimness, and his teeth gleamed. “Darn it, I was afraid of that. I thought it was tomorrow, and then I said to myself, you couldn't have made it for the night of the day the restaurant opens—could you?” He ran one hand through his hair and shook his head. “But I guess I did.”

“It's quite all right,” Rosie said. His loud, sunny presence overwhelmed her anew. “Have a beer, make yourself at home, and I'll go up and get dressed. I won't be two seconds.”

She was hardly more than that, and when she came back down with her heart beating fast, and her face made up and her new dress on, but barefoot and with her hair still in its loose knot, there he was, leafing through
The Countryman
and drinking Mexican beer out of the can.

“I like your house,” he said. “You did a show by this fireplace once. Am I right? And are you going to give me a tour of the garden this time?”

“If you like,” she said, delighted. Oh, he was perfect, perfect—handsomer than ever there in her living room, too big for the elegant chair, his hair tousled, his blue chambray shirt the color of his eyes. She'd thought she'd had him memorized, but there were new surprises, like the sprinkle of freckles across his cheekbones, and his neatly trimmed nails with their large half-moons. She wondered what excuse he'd used to get away, or if he'd told the truth, or if the relationship with Susannah was so deteriorated that he needed neither excuses nor truth. She pictured the two of them doggedly not communicating, like Edwin and herself; a fleeting sadness accompanied this thought, a thin chime of pity for Susannah and her ugly inheritance. Then Ivan stood up, with his brilliant smile, and they went through the kitchen to the backyard. He had brought her a pan to replace the one he'd burned.

“You didn't need to,” she said. It was a cheap pan, and smaller. She put it away hastily in a cupboard and poured herself some sherry.

“That's a great dress,” Ivan said, looking at it in a way that made her blush. Maybe the neck was too low, she thought, ever watchful for absurdity.

“Just an old sundress,” she smiled. Would she ever be able to drop this spurious nonchalance, to say frankly: I bought it because of you, because I thought you'd like it, like
me
.…

She did show him the garden, after they had a drink together on the porch. Drink affected her oddly when she was with Ivan; one glass of sherry made her head light, her feet slow; she moved languorously, with a dreamy smile, and leading Ivan into the garden she had the odd sensation that she had no need to show it to him—the fading iris, the scarlet and gold Rembrandt tulips, the white azaleas and spirea against the old fence, the trillium in the grass. She felt that he was part of it, he looked as natural in the garden as a stone statue of a god. She moved with him through its green-gold light, with hints of pink sunset just beginning in the west, as if the Sheffields next door and the Andrews across the street had ceased to exist, and there was only Rosie and Ivan in the garden. She forgot, even, to laugh at herself and to stay alert for unbecoming absurdity. They sat on the bench under the flowering dogwood, by the tightly budded roses, and she drank her second sherry while he sipped beer and told her about the incredible greenness of downtown Los Angeles.

“I know it's hard to believe,” he said. “All anybody thinks about is smog and traffic and movie stars when it comes to L.A. There—you can tell I'm not a native and don't even
like
the place, or I'd never call it L.A. But it's beautiful, all right, some of it.” He turned and looked at her, with a bemused smile like her own. “I dream about it sometimes, or I did during the winter, on cold nights. I'd just dream I was walking down some street, some little nothing street out there, on my way to work, say, and it would be lined with flowers, and the sun would pour down.” Under the beard he seemed to have dimples, his mouth was pink and swollen-looking, his blue eyes were narrowed slightly against the low sun. “You should take a trip out there, Rosie. I mean, as a gardener. Every gardener should see California, just to see what lushness really is. Go to the Palisades, Rosie. Go to Bel Air. You could even do a couple of shows out there, just for fun. Get old Janice to set it up. take the cameras into some of those fabulous gardens, show these poor New Englanders freezing by their woodstoves what it looks like to have an orange grove in the backyard.” He grinned at her. “I've seen all your shows, some of them twice. I always thought you were terrific, Rosie—a nice, earthy broad.” He laughed. “Literally! You always had dirt on your hands, you were always wiping your hands off on that apron.”

“I was always afraid of looking too eccentric,” she said, pleased. “Too much absorbed in my own messiness. But Janice said I was the Julia Child of the garden—that should be my image, so involved in what I was doing that I didn't notice if my hair came down or my face got smudged.”

“The agony in the garden,” Ivan said, and laughed again. She remembered that he was a renegade priest—unfrocked? or one of those who left voluntarily? She'd never been told. Well, whatever the case, he could now make gentle little jokes against his church. “Your
image
, Rosie,” he went on. Yes—a dimple appeared on one side when he smiled. She longed to press her fingers against his face where the hollow was; she recalled the softness of his beard brushing her cheek when he kissed her. “What a way to look at it—as
image
, as if you were Nixon, when it was obvious that it was all real, that it would have been impossible for you to be any other way.”

She didn't tell him it was partly cultivated, that manner, that naturalness before the cameras. “You can't garden neatly,” she said. “I mean, in order to keep the garden relatively neat you have to forget about keeping yourself that way.” What a boring conversation, she thought, he must be bored to death and wishing he hadn't come. But in the middle of this thought, while she still smiled brightly at him, she recognized, with a jolt, just what kind of a conversation it was that they were having. She hadn't had one in years, not since her first meeting with Barney. It was a—what could you call it?—a seduction conversation, its purpose only to fill a certain amount of time with words, to set up a decorous interlude before …

And—she caught her breath—they were in it together. He was talking about a vegetable garden he'd had in Buffalo, in the rectory backyard, but it was a skimming kind of story, not meant to settle them down into a real talk, but something to fill the time, a warm-up exercise before the real event.

She listened carefully, she prolonged it, just to make sure. Her head cleared; she must be very slow, very certain. The possibilities for absurdity were enormous, were staggering. But she knew the signs well, she could tell by the way he looked at her while he sipped his beer, by the amount of space between them on the bench, by the number of times he called her by name—oh, there were dozens of signals, there could be no mistake. She felt breathless, tense with hope, ready to burst into bloom like the swollen heads of the peonies over by the toolshed.

When they stood up and began to walk slowly toward the house, close together but not quite touching, the familiarity of it all made her want to laugh, and she knew that if she did laugh it would be a harsh, abandoned sound, near to hysteria. Her heart ticked faster as they went up the path, and when they paused by the back porch, well screened by the rhododendrons and the latticework fence, and looked at each other, she understood that he depended on her to act, to break the spell or cast a new one; so she moved close to him and, with her fingertips lightly on his cheek, she turned his face so that his lips came down readily, firmly, warmly on hers.

Chapter Four

Rapunzel

“I should become a vegetarian,” Susannah said. “I love animals so much. Every time I eat a hamburger I have to brace myself against the idea that it used to be a cow. Big brown eyes. Pink nose. Moos.”

She and Duke were sitting in the empty restaurant on an April morning, drinking tea. The sun shone through the paper banner in the window:

The tables were set up, in two rows of four each, birch tops sanded smooth by Duke and Ivan, coated with polyurethane, and set on metal bases. The sturdy old oak chairs, with their calico cushions, were pulled up neatly. The serving counter in back had been covered in white formica, and a latticework screen surrounded it, hiding the kitchen and harboring plants. The kitchen was ready to spring into action except for the gap between the wooden counter-tops where the stove was to go.

“And I remember at one of my schools we had to learn to farm, and we had three milk cows, and we had calves.” She sighed. “Sickening sentimentality. I know, don't tell me.”

“It doesn't strike me that way,” Duke said. “Margie and I didn't eat meat for years, until I got the job at Luigi's. The pepperoni pizzas did me in. But if we're going to run a vegetarian restaurant we ought to go all the way. What about it? You want to?”

Susannah sighed again and looked around the pristine room, a place that should smell of cheese and eggplant and oranges but stank instead of fresh paint. It looked like a stage set. “Ivan says I worry too much.”

“What's more important—what you think or what Ivan thinks of what you think?”

She smiled wryly at him, and he got up and went to the front window to peer out. Whenever Ivan's name came up lately, in her conversations with Duke, it seemed charged and dangerous, enclosing volumes of explosive words left unsaid. Susannah watched Duke wipe an imaginary smudge off the window with his sleeve.

“Dammit,” he said, returning to the table. “I wish that blasted stove would get here.”

“We couldn't just open anyhow, and serve salads?”

“No!” They'd had this exchange before; their conversations had begun to meander in circles. “We can't even boil water,” Duke said. “We can't even—” He broke off, shaking his head and smiling at her so she'd know he wasn't really angry—just mildly frustrated, as usual. “How can I show off my cooking without a stove? I want to lure people in here with my black bean soup, my stir-fried veggies, my pizzas.”