The Garden Path (33 page)

They went over it and over it. “I don't care where you go,” she said. “Or what you do any more. Eventually, I'll want a divorce.”

She left him in the garden. She went inside, to the twins' playroom, and sat on one of their little chairs playing with a toy tool chest, hammering in wooden pegs and screwing in plastic screws. She heard Ivan come in, go upstairs, open drawers—how sounds carried in the old house—then come down and talk to Duke in the kitchen. She timed it on her watch; they talked for eight minutes, in low voices. It seemed a very long time. She tapped in a peg. The hammer was painted blue, the bench yellow, the pegs red. She turned the whole thing over and tapped the peg through the other side. Finally, she heard Ivan leave—not banging the screen the way he usually did, but closing it quietly—and then the van started up, and crunched down the driveway, those familiar, depressing sounds.
I must be crazy
, she thought,
to have loved someone like him. To love a monster, to be content all these years
, and gave the red peg one last whack that sent it skittering to the floor.

“Susannah?” It was Duke, at the door. “Oh Jesus, honey, I'm sorry about all this.” She stood up, the hot tears running down her face, and he put his arms around her. She cried, it seemed, for hours. Everything made her cry: every word of comfort, every thought that came to her, even the sound of her own sobs. They sat in the kitchen, in the rocking chairs by the cold woodstove. There was a plant on it now, a nice old sansevieria Duke had had for years; the sight of it made fresh tears come, and so did the cup of coffee Duke made for her after a while, and the plate of fruit and cheese he set out.

“It'll do you good to eat, Susannah,” he said, and, sitting down at the table, he began to nibble cheese, looking over at her in a worried way. The late afternoon sun shone through the window in a stripe across his pink cheeks. “Come on. It's good Vermont cheddar and nice fresh grapes. Here. Have a peach, at least.” He cut one in half and held part of it out to her, biting into the other half himself.

She couldn't help smiling. She took a fresh tissue from the box Duke had provided, wiped her eyes and blew her nose twice. He continued to watch her steadily, eating fruit. “Wait,” he said, and got up to wet a dish towel with cold water from the sink and kneel beside her with it. “Wipe your face with this,” he instructed, and then did it for her, gently, as if she was one of the twins and had fallen off her bike.

“Duke,” she said, leaning her face against the rough cloth, inhaling the faint bleach odor, and the curious warm-bread smell that was Duke. “I'm sorry to be such a pain.”

“You're not.”

He patted her shoulder. She took the towel away and looked at him. “I don't know what I'm going to do. Can I stay here until I figure things out?”

“Susannah! Of course you can. How can you even ask?”

She gave a long, shuddering sigh, and stood up, leaning on him. She had a vague idea that she should do something, reject his hospitality or at least prove herself worthy of it: do the dishes? call a lawyer? get a job? “I suppose I had a nerve,” she said. “Throwing him out of your house. He's your friend, after all.”

“You're my friend, too, Susannah. You know that.”

“I hope so.”

“You
know
that,” he said, and made her sit back down at the table and drink coffee.

“I must look a sight.”

“You look all sort of flushed and pretty,” he told her.

“Oh, stop.”

“No—you do. Except your nose is kind of red. And your eyes are pink.”

She laughed and drank more coffee. It was black and strong. She hardly ever drank coffee, and it seemed to go straight from her stomach to her brain, clearing it. She started to speak, but he stopped her.

“You don't need to think about what you're going to do yet. Don't worry about anything. Stay here and take it easy. Stay as long as you want. Hell, stay forever.” She gave him a quick look, and touched one of her long braids. Rapunzel, she thought. “The twins'll be back in a couple of weeks,” he said hurriedly. “It would be nice having you here. They'd sure miss you if you left.”

“I could go to Ginger's,” she said, feeling she must. She started to get up again. He put one finger on her wrist, and dropped a bunch of grapes into her palm.

“Stay here, Susannah. We're friends. This has been your home. Please.”

“All right. I will, then.” She ate a couple of grapes, to please him, and cut herself a piece of cheese. “And thanks, Duke,” she added, taking pains to keep the disappointment out of her voice, and the fresh jolt of misery that choked her, so that the cheese stuck in her throat and she had to will more tears not to come.

Ivan left for California two days later. He phoned Duke at the restaurant, and Duke passed the news to Susannah, along with the fact that Garnet had gone with him. She took the news out to the porch, where she sat with her feet up on the rail, chewing her cuticles and contemplating the view of road, brook, trees, and beyond them the gently meandering smoke from the factory.

That was it, then—the black hole gaping, the nightmare come true. She had told him to get out, and he had gone, headed west with a teenage waitress—such docility, such last-minute regard for his wife's wishes. She imagined him and Garnet on the van's narrow bed, the fierce lovemaking when they stopped for the night at campsites in Tennessee, in Louisiana, in Texas. She hoped Garnet's raunchy good nature disguised the soul of an axe-murderess.

Duke stood in the doorway, keeping her silent company, and then he came out and sat on the railing facing her. “They're not going to L.A.,” he said after a minute. “They're heading for someplace up near the Nevada border.”

“Spare me the details,” Susannah said, meaning to sound merely sardonic and detached, but her voice came out harsh, and Duke winced, mumbled “Sorry,” and went back inside, leaving her feeling lost, and sad, with the urge to throw something.

She took down the “Cloud House” painting and carried it up to the attic, leaning it against a dusty pile of boxes. She wondered how long it would take for the painting to get its own dust covering, how long before it was just another old piece of attic junk, like the bushel basket full of spidery mason jars, or the stack of rotting leather suitcases. The wall in the bedroom looked huge and bare. Lying there at night waiting for sleep, with the cats stretched out, hot, on the floor or on the windowsills, she was conscious of the empty wall, and she decided she would, in time, get to like it better—far better—than the cheap prettiness of Ivan's painting.

But it didn't help her to sleep—that blankness, and the blankness all around. The old litanies, the beautiful words, the bits of poems, none of it helped: Sri Lanka, Sri Lanka, willow-wood, prairie, heliotrope, mallow pink, season of mists and mellow fruitfulness.… They no longer hypnotized her, conjuring up the visions that entered her dreams and, eventually, her stories. And her old reveries of Silvergate, plagiarized from her mother's memories, didn't help either: the roses, the hedge clipped into turrets, the goldfish pond and the lilies, all seemed irrelevant, more distant than Pemberley. She lay awake, crying sometimes, or trying to plot herself a future, more often simply lying with her eyes open and her mind numb. The house was so still she could hear, from down the hall, Duke turn in his sleep.

Duke became hesitant with her, and shy. He was, she knew, worried about the fate of the Café. She told him not to be, that the capital was hers, and that she still considered them partners. Ivan could fend for himself; as for her, she had bound herself up with the Silvergate Café and she would gladly, willingly, stay bound.

“The money is there,” she said to Duke. “And I'm no business genius, but it's obvious that it's not going to be long before we start pulling in a profit—especially if we expand in the fall. I'm not worried.”

“All the same,” he said. “We should have a lawyer. Get it all put into writing.”

“I don't really believe you're going to cheat me, Duke.” Susannah wondered whether Duke had ever read
Bleak House
, and imagined him explaining earnestly to some Vholes, or Tulkinghorn, the tangled tale of Susannah and Ivan and Duke and the Silvergate Café.

“You never know,” he said stubbornly.

“Yes, you do,” she said, and smiled. “Sometimes you really do.”

It struck her, talking to Duke, that she should tell Peter, and her father, about Ivan's departure. A broken marriage, like a death in the family, was an event that had to be communicated. Peter, however, had gone to Vermont to work on his dissertation; another friend, with another rustic cottage, had invited him. Not that she could have told him anything but the bare bones of the truth; how do you tell your brother that your mother has been sleeping with your husband? It was like that old song, “I'm My Own Grandpa.” Edwin used to sing it to her; she had a vivid memory of him sitting in a camp chair somewhere—in Mexico?—with a drink in his hand and his head thrown back, singing.

That evening she telephoned Edwin, intending to tell him about the breakup, but he couldn't come to the phone, he was sedated, he was having a bad night.

“Nothing out of the ordinary,” Mrs. Panza said. “Just pain.”

Just pain
. Susannah hung up, knowing she couldn't have told him and added to it. She remembered the tears in his eyes when she had promised to give him a grandchild, the slackness of his cheek when she wiped the tears with her finger. She was tempted, for one weak, perverse moment, to fly out to California, kneel by Edwin's bed, and cry—just cry into his shoulder, blubbering “Daddy,” for the comfort of his trembly hand patting her back, his reedy voice breaking into some corny old song to cheer her up.

Duke hired a new waitress, a friend of Ginger's called Lois. “She's forty-one, and she's got three kids,” Duke said.

“You're not going to run off to California with her?”

“I'm not going anywhere,” he said, not smiling. She laughed, inappropriately, in confusion, and changed the subject. It was easy, now that they lived alone together, to stumble close to what wasn't going to be said.

The summer days went by, long, slow, hot, silent days that seemed to Susannah unreal, days that hovered like bees, tentative and waiting. The longer hours kept Duke later at the Café—that, or Susannah's desperately faked good humor—and when he did come home, at night, the house felt huge around them. Ginger kept inviting the two of them down to dinner at her place that first week, and they accepted each time, as if their crisis was so immense it precluded normal life. It was the house's silence they were fleeing from, and the awkward intimacies it pressed on them.

“You should marry Duke,” Ginger said bluntly to Susannah after dinner one night. Duke was watching the Yankees on Ginger's color TV, and she and Susannah sat in the kitchen over second cups of tea. The joint grumblings of the dishwasher and the air conditioner enclosed their words.

Susannah flushed, and decided to be honest. “I think about it sometimes, Ginger,” she said, and wished immediately that she hadn't. No: this was nobody's business; she briefly disliked Ginger's warm niceness that had dragged even that much out of her. “But it's absurd,” she amended. “Duke and I are friends. I think about it only because I feel so lost. It's hard to be married so long and then all of a sudden be alone.”

“Don't I know,” Ginger said with feeling.

“But I'll get used to it.”

“I'm sure you will. I did, in about three days. Got to like it a lot.” Ginger grinned, leaned forward and said softly, “But I still think it's a good idea.” She jerked her head toward the other room where Duke sat in front of the television.

She and Ginger went in to join him. The Red Sox beat the Yankees 4–2.

“Damn,” said Duke, then got up to snap off the television. “But I can't complain. At least the strike is over.”

He was getting paunchy, Susannah saw. She thought of Ivan's perfect movie-star body and couldn't tell whether the emotion she felt was revulsion or longing. The paunch made Duke seem genuine—not someone she'd made up. Her fantasies about Duke were all of comfort, ease, simple pleasure. She must have been crazy to love Ivan; how sane it would be to love Duke. And how right, of course, Ginger was. And yet there was Duke, as brotherly as Peter, patting her shoulder and making her tea, and going off to bed each night early, with a smile at her that was almost apologetic, faintly embarrassed, fond maybe, but certainly not inviting. The idea stuck in her mind, though, tempting her, affording a kind of comfort—assuring her, if nothing else, that she was sane, and capable of judgment. Sometimes she summoned up the fantasies herself; sometimes when they filled her head she tried to force them out, but they persisted no matter what she did, inventing themselves right along with scenes for her story.

Her story: it was another new one, about a science-fiction writer whose tales came true. It was called “Ashes and Sparks,” a phrase from a poem she had read long ago. After the first few rough days, she was, incredibly, working well again, and the story filled her time, progressing with a logic of its own, originating from a part of her that was unaffected by events, a part that had its own life and its own emotion. She worked every day, with great concentration and very slowly, for hours. Then she went outside to sit, reading, on the ragged, shady grass by the pond or, sometimes, to work in the garden in the sun. She had to force herself, at first, into the garden. It was Ivan's job; she had driven him away, therefore it became her responsibility. But she was beginning to like it, at least in short stretches. She was getting a pinkish tan; she had never had a tan in California, and she looked in amazement at the distinct white line on her wrist where her watchband went. She mulched the lettuce with straw to keep the moisture in; it seemed to flourish, and she was pleased when Duke said he'd never been able to keep it from bolting in August. She read somewhere that once a string bean is left to rot on the stem the whole plant withers and dies, and she inspected the beans daily, picking them before they got big and mealy.