The Garden Path (27 page)

Ivan's interest in procreation waned. The fertility chart slipped off the bedside table and stayed on the floor until Susannah, cleaning house, found it one day and threw it out. Her own desire to have a child increased. The more she missed the twins, the more real a baby of her own seemed. She imagined a sturdy boy with Ivan's eyes and smile, or a wispy little blonde girl with long pony legs. She took to waiting up for Ivan, sitting in bed reading, kept awake not by desire—not only—but by the need for the grown-up lovemaking Ivan used to talk about, the act that would ignite the miracle that nine months later would nuzzle blindly until it fastened on her breast, and sucked, and began to grow into a person to love. This anticipation kept her alert for the sound of the van turning into the driveway. Ivan, returning after midnight without comment, was always sleepy, sometimes distracted, but never unwilling, and there were tricks to cajole him into enthusiasm. After he fell asleep, Susannah would lie awake a while, clenched tight around her need, and hoping with a fervor that was strange to her.

She took to sleeping late. Often, Ivan and Duke were long gone, the day already hot, by the time she was finally urged from sleep by the rasping calls of the crows that lived in the fir trees behind the barn, or by one of the cats leaping to the bed to nudge her. She would dress in a hurry, breakfast on tea, and sit down with her notebook. She finished the story one humid July afternoon, read it over, put down the pages with a sigh, listening to the stillness of the empty house. It was too early to go down to Ginger's, too hot and sticky to do much of anything. She decided she would go out to the garden, pick lettuce, plunge it into a sinkful of cold, cold water to crisp it up, make herself a salad, maybe—in spite of the heat—make a loaf of some kind of new bread they could have with dinner later, and sit outside with her feet in the creek while it baked. She stretched her cramped fingers, closed her eyes for a moment, reached out a hand to pat Byron who purred on the bed beside her, and thought:
Now, this moment
—
this is what it is to be happy
. And all afternoon, while she ate her salad and baked bread and read outside by the creek, the words kept turning and tumbling in her mind:
This is happiness, this is life
.

Chapter Five

In the Mirror

Never (thought Rosie) had there been such a glorious May, a June so filled with delights: the climbing roses by the porch, the foxglove and daisies and Canterbury bells in the long border, the blaze of poppies against the white fence, the early lilies and the late tulips, and Ivan in her bed.

She had never had such a lover, never been so in love, never known anyone so miraculously beautiful. It was, she told him, as if her life had shifted from black and white into technicolor: “Like in
The Wizard of Oz
,” she said. “When Dorothy enters the Land of Oz.”

He laughed, and ran his hand down her bare arm to her wrist, and circled it. They were in bed: it was only there that she told him such things, in the half-dark. “And who am I?” he asked her. “The Wizard?”

“Oh, no—the Wizard was a sham. You're the tornado, Ivan. You're what makes things happen.”

He put his lips against her neck. “Let's make something happen.”

“Oh Lord, Ivan, I do love you.” It was curiously thrilling to say it, to admit to him that she adored him. It had been years since she had loved anyone enough to be compelled to speak the words. The more she told him she loved him the more she loved him; the more she whispered it, when their bodies were joined, the happier the joining made her. “We're flower and stalk,” she said, with him inside her, his chest against hers, his rough cheek on her face—feeling a bit foolish, carried away by the bliss of it, and yet believing it, feeling it true—that she couldn't live without him; that, like a flower plucked, she would die if she were taken from him.

“My blossom,” he called her, and he would move his lips down her belly to what he called her rosebud, and find it with his tongue, making her tremble and cry out more words of love, more, until she had said them all, and was speechless.

He came to see her, after that first night, two or three times a week, and his presences and absences created in her a compressed cycle of preparation, bloom, decline, and renewal that was like the seasons: no wonder she was worn out and on edge; no wonder Peter called her “hyper”; and no wonder, either, that her book failed to progress.

Her garden, though, was the best she had ever produced. She spent her daytimes—the long, empty hours of sunshine when she knew Ivan was working and there was no chance of his showing up—toiling among her flowers. She tended the vegetables, too; and the snap peas climbed their screen in abundance, the six kinds of lettuce and the parsley and cress burst from the soil in their bright green rows, the hairy tomato stalks reached out to each other over the sides of their cages. She consulted her records—the vegetables had never done better. Everything was early, everything flourished, the weather was perfect, vegetables and flowers and fruits lifted themselves rapturously into the sun. Even the elusive sweet peas grew this year as if it was an English sun shining on them.

She rejoiced in the flowers, but the vegetables were a superfluity in her life. She was too keyed up to eat them, and her only delight in picking and washing and preparing was to offer them to Ivan. He was always hungry, and particularly after lovemaking. “You have the same effect on me marijuana used to,” he told her, with the hesitant grin he always wore when he talked about his wilder days. “I'm starving. And ex-ta-
reme
ly high,” he would say, rolling his eyes at her. Once, at two in the morning, she made him a salad, going out in the moonlight to pick fresh lettuce and peas, and thereafter she couldn't look at the vegetable garden without thinking of Ivan, without a shudder of joy, as if the hot breeze that blew on her, and the sun on her back, were his hands on her, his body pressed close to hers.

The flowers, though, assumed an importance that she recognized but couldn't define. She knew she was obsessed, and that her acre of ground was becoming crazy with blossoms, simultaneously a gardener's dream and a gardener's nightmare. The tasks she set herself were enormous—absurd and unnecessary projects she should have hired someone to carry out. She conceived the idea of digging up a stretch of lawn along the back border of her property, a scraggly, rocky area with a rotting rail fence, where she had never grown anything. She dug out the sod with a shovel, and down on her knees extricated every last root and weed before wheelbarrowing it all, in a dozen back-breaking trips, to a heap behind the compost bin. Then she pried out the rocks, and enough small stones to fill her wheelbarrow twice. It was such hard work she sometimes wept as she did it, and wished she'd never begun, and longed to quit, but she kept at it, knowing herself to be foolish, because it made the days go by and because in some way it made her happy. In the fall she would put in daffodil bulbs, and she imagined the long, even stretch of them, yellow and cream and white, bending at a gentle angle in the breezes of next spring. For the summer, she planted a long row of marigolds and ageratum—plants bought from a nursery—an unheard-of measure, but she had nothing in her greenhouse to fill such a space. The small plants looked anticlimactic in the huge border, but by late summer they would be a brushstroke of bright color against the old rail fence, blue yellow blue.… The spiky little ageratum were the blue of Ivan's eyes, she thought, pressing them tenderly into the earth. “There's no fool like an old fool,” she said to herself, but with a smile—remembering how she had made that comment to Peter when she heard of Edwin's marriage to a woman young enough to be his daughter. Well, she wasn't, thank God, old enough to be Ivan's mother—quite. And what heights of bliss fools could reach, she thought. A cardinal began his piercing dog-whistle, and she squinted up to see one, high in a tree like a rose.
Perfect happiness
, she thought, smiling into the sun.

She supposed she should have waited and dug up her border for the cameras. Nothing like inspiring her fans to hard labor; God knows, gardening isn't supposed to be
easy
. But the cameras, her television show, Janice and the rest of them were another world, mere memories of some other, saner, duller existence. She thought:
I'll always remember this, no matter what, the summer I was fifty, and foolish, and beginning to live for the first time
.

She didn't feel fifty. She wasn't sure what “feeling fifty” meant. Of course, her feats in the garden exhausted her, but such exertion would have worn her out at thirty—would have put
him
in the hospital, Ivan told her. Maybe her back bothered her a little more than it used to—had she always so relished the slow sinking into a hot bath? And she rested, perhaps, oftener—involuntary pauses in her furious activity when she sat back on her heels and bent her head over her lap, waggling her shoulders to loosen them up, thinking dreamily of how Ivan would rub her back for her later, letting the sun beat down on her neck, listening to a cardinal calling and a woodpecker knocking out a tattoo. Had her legs and feet always gone to sleep so fast? She would rise, painfully, stamp over the lawn to get the needles out, and get back to work.

“You're an amazing woman,” Ivan said. He repeated it often, referring to her body, her cooking, her garden. “Just amazing. I can't get
over
you.” She hoped he didn't mean:
amazing for your age
. She didn't think he did. He never mentioned the fifteen years between them. He seemed not to notice wrinkles, the faint jowly droop to her chin, the dark pouches below her eyes, the stringy backs of her hands. He never told her she was beautiful, as Barney had done; but that was all right, she wasn't beautiful, she'd hated Barney's effusions.
Amazing
was all right with her. She knew it was her energy Ivan liked, her bounce, her zest for living.

So she interpreted his remarks and attitudes as she bent over her flowers out in the sun, for what she thought of out there, during the filling of all those long hours, was Ivan. Ivan.

What was curious was that he never spoke of Susannah. He never even acknowledged, really, that he had another life with a wife in it. Rosie began to wonder if they were separated. She knew he still lived with his friend Duke the chef. Ivan was full of stories about Duke—their seminary days, Duke's wife's death, the precocity of his children. She knew, even, that Duke was worried about putting on weight, and that, since he lost his wife, he showed an unhealthy lack of interest in women that worried Ivan, and that he had bought his house and his four acres two years ago for a mere $68,000. Even when Ivan told her about the restaurant, there were Ginger and Garnet waiting on table, Duke and Simon in the kitchen, Ivan himself as waiter, cashier, busboy—the general practitioner, he called himself, doing a little of everything. But Susannah wasn't mentioned.

Rosie knew from Peter, who'd had dinner with them all, that Susannah had been there; surely he would know if she'd left her husband since, but if he did he said nothing. Rosie felt she couldn't ask Peter about it; she was terrified that he would begin nagging her again about a reunion. Rosie remembered that not two months ago she had seen that as inevitable, as a sort of gift to Peter, who seemed to want it so much—even as a relief. Now the idea horrified her. She had always told herself, rightly or not, that the scales on which she and Susannah balanced their relationship—their non-relationship, she corrected herself—were tipped heavily in her own favor. Susannah, after all, had left her mother; there was no getting around that cold fact. No matter what shared misunderstandings and antagonisms had prompted her, Susannah had done the leaving. But now the scales were incalculably askew: Rosie had appropriated her daughter's husband, her son-in-law. Something inside her sank like a stone whenever she put it to herself like that—he was her daughter's husband, her lover was her son-in-law. She tried to keep it from her mind, along with all thought of Susannah, as Ivan did from his conversation, but it kept returning. She would be feeding the roses, or arranging the hay mulch around the sweet peas, and the fact of Susannah would edge into her mind—the grown-up Susannah, a wronged woman, a victim. She felt no joy or triumph at her theft of her daughter's husband; her joy was all for Ivan himself, the pure and perfect Ivan who was her lover; and her triumph was over her fifty years. Toward Susannah, what she felt was a kind of pitying horror—that, and a wholly inappropriate curiosity.

She couldn't ask Peter for information, and she refused to ask Ivan, but one day she stripped off her gardening gloves early, took a fast shower instead of a long bath, and drove to Chiswick. She had been avoiding that stretch of Route One between Perkins Road and the Silvergate Café, doing her shopping in East Chiswick, putting off a visit to her hairdresser, even canceling a dentist appointment because her dentist was located uncomfortably close to the school where she knew Duke's daughters were in kindergarten—Susannah's old school, of which Rosie had a hundred humiliating memories.

But today—it was an afternoon in late June, warm and sunny, and exactly five weeks since Ivan had first come to her bed—today she drove purposefully, consciously putting on courage, talking to herself in the no-nonsense voice she used on television:
don't be absurd, there's nothing to be afraid of, you're just going to the liquor store for a bottle of gin, you have as much right as anyone to shop at the Liquor Boutique
.

She was sweating as she parked the car and got out. Her heart was doing its scary thudding routine. She clutched the shoulder strap of her purse, pushed her sunglasses up on her nose, and approached the liquor store. She hadn't yet seen the finished sign on the restaurant facade—THE SILVERGATE CAFÉ in elegant italic, white outlined in black on a grassy green background.
Nice
, Rosie thought, trying not to give in to the terror the sign created in her—the sign and the glimpse she had through the window of people at tables, green and white checked curtains, a waitress putting down a loaded plate; not Susannah, an older woman. Ginger? Her impression, before she ducked like a fugitive into the liquor store, was of bustling activity, of another life: Ivan's other life, shared with strangers—Duke, the waitresses, her own enigmatic daughter. She felt faint; a pleasant smell of cooking came to her briefly, then disappeared as she opened the door.