The Garden Path (16 page)

“I'm sorry,” she said to Barney. “If I've been bad company lately. Tonight. I hate having what's past and done with pop up again, things I've worked out for myself and put in their place and gotten to terms with coming back to haunt me.”

It was a cold early April night. Dinner was overcooking in the oven. They were sitting on the floor by the fireplace, drinking, and Barney had his hand companionably under her skirt, on her stockinged thigh. “I like my life to be settled,” she said.

She felt Barney's hand tense, then relax. His thumb went back and forth, back and forth. “So do I,” he said, in a voice full of meaning. He took her drink from her with his free hand and set it at a distance, and then he applied both hands to various parts of her body, pinning her down on the hearth rug. “Rosie, Rosie,” he said with his lips against her ear. “Marry me, Rosie. I love you, honey,” he said, and the hand on her thigh moved up, wiggled under her pantyhose and down again, and he sighed happily as he got to work. “Marry me, Rosie,” he said. “I love you so much, baby.”

She didn't need to answer just then. In a second they were both busy with buttons and zippers. Rosie didn't know what it was, but she hadn't felt such need in years. Maybe it was simply knowing that sooner or later—and sex on the floor in the firelight would make it later—she'd have to say no to his proposal. Whatever the reason, she wanted him frantically, and she tore at his belt, his pants, his shirt, she whipped out of her clothes and sat astride him, lowering her breasts to his mouth while she rode him slowly up and down—a fairly awkward procedure but one that made him grip her bottom hard with his two hands and moan with pleasure. “Ah, Rosie, Rosie,” he mumbled and sighed, but it wasn't marriage he was thinking of by then. She prolonged everything, keeping it all slow and dreamlike, while the
coq au vin
dried out in the oven and the fire burned down to coals. She waited for the old detachment to take her over, as if it were some powerful force watching and waiting to turn her to stone in the midst of her pleasure, to say: you shall not enjoy yourself with this dear man. But it kept back, it let her be, and she fell on Barney and rocked him against her with a cry and nearly wept into his shoulder with happiness when they were done.

But the reckoning came. You can't make love on the hearth rug forever. They dozed a bit, woke, felt chilled, kissed and hugged, poked the fire, threw on a log, dressed, and sat down to their ruined dinner. Barney looked at her across the table, his electric hair rumpled and his eyes still bemused from the hearth rug.

“What about it, Rosie? You going to marry me?” His Georgia voice was slow and calm. She could hear him cracking his knuckles under the table.

The words
you'd be crazy to say no
crossed her mind, and in the same instant she said no. “I can't, Barney,” was what she actually said. “I don't want to be married.”

“Why not?”

“I've tried it. I don't like it.”

“Honey, I'm not Edwin. We're happy together, Rosie.”

“We wouldn't be if we were married.”

“We would.”

She put down her fork and leaned across the table. “
I
wouldn't be, then,” she said with great distinctness. They stared at each other a while before she sat back and resumed eating. The chicken was practically melted, falling off its bones at the touch of a fork, bits of bones wandering around in the sauce. “Don't ruin things, Barney,” she said. “It's so nice the way it is.”

“I want a wife, Rosie,” Barney said, looking forlorn. She didn't pity him, though. He had a good life. You can't have everything.

“Then you don't want me,” she said.

“I
do.
”

“But I'm not a wife, and I don't intend to be.”

“I'm getting old, Rosie, dammit. I want to settle down, preferably with you.”

She still refused to pity him, though she could see that he was pitiable, also lovable, also—probably—right. She should have said yes. Who was she, at her age, to take offense at “preferably with you”? But she did. She said, “Ah, I see. Preferably with me. In other words, it's some abstract notion of a wife you're looking for. It's not me you love, it's wifiness. And if I don't choose to settle down with you, you'll find someone who will. Some
wife
. Right?”

“Aw, come off it, Rosie,” he said, pushing bones around on his plate.

“Am I right?”

He stood up and whacked his fork on the table. “You're a hell of a woman, Rosie, but you're no spring chicken, either, and one of these days you're going to find yourself all alone and you're not going to like it.”

“Yes, I am,” she said perversely, though of course that wasn't true. It wasn't that she hadn't thought of solitary old age and a life narrowed to the TV, a doggie, her own cold flesh, and too much drink. “Why don't you sit down and eat, Barney? We can still be friends. You can still come over and pull my knickers down while you look for a wife.”

It took him a few seconds, but he laughed and sat back down, and they finished dinner. He even stayed the night, and the next, as always. They played Scrabble, drank, watched Vincent Price in
The Fly
on the late movie, took a long walk—not toward Chiswick—on which Rosie told him more about Silvergate, the real Silvergate, the sacred one. When they got back she showed him, again, the National Trust booklet, with its color photographs of the box hedge, the lily pond, and the pinkish brick manor house topped with the octagonal cupola. They no longer plotted to sail to England some day, but he let her talk, and he had the tact not to try any more to persuade her of Susannah's admirable motives.

It was a normal weekend in every way, except that they were unusually considerate of each other. They were retreating, warily, from each other's province; even their friendly, intimate talks were no more than a smoke screen thrown up to disguise and soften the split. And there was no more lovemaking, except for a Sunday morning before-church quickie, and that was Rosie's idea. She felt bad, because she knew she had hurt him, and because their time together was up, and so she seduced him—a laughably easy task, as ever—and sent him off to mass. They smiled ruefully at each other at the door, and kissed lightly, formally, with a certain reluctance, and then she let him go. She was sorry—even, once he was safely out of sight, weepy—and though she knew she'd feel, before too long, a kind of ultimate gladness, like a long sigh of relief, she knew she'd miss him too, probably forever, as she continued to miss Larry Bruner, and Dennis of the sweatpants, and a man named Dan Powers whom she almost married when she was on the verge of forty, and vulnerable.

Jim and Kiki Sheffield, tanned and wrinkled, returned from Florida, and filled some of Rosie's Friday nights with Scrabble tournaments. Besides her, they invited two other couples and Jim's older brother, Ralph, a hard-smoking bachelor of sixty or so who wore suspenders and did magic tricks. He used to reach across the Scrabble board and pull little plastic bunnies out of Rosie's ears—a nice man, good at Scrabble and crossword puzzles and checkers and bridge, with a store of funny anecdotes from his days as a television newscaster in Boston, but so patently designed for her by the Sheffields that Rosie obstinately considered him a buffoon and nothing more.

“What do you think of Ralphie?” Kiki asked her one day, girl to girl, over tea.

“He's a real card, Kiki,” she said. “Har de har har.”

“Really, Rose,” said Kiki, disappointed, looking down into her cup: a matchmaker thwarted, but a smile twitching at her lips because she knew what Rosie meant.

They were pals, Rosie and Kiki—or as palsy as it was possible for a divorcée and a devoted wife to be. In Rosie's opinion, there were always limits in those friendships—territories in each other's lives they hesitated to enter because they were alien or threatening or downright impenetrable. Kiki didn't like to hear, for example, about Rosie's beaux. She had married Jim at twenty-one, after a two-year engagement, and had never known another man; not that Jim wasn't a perfectly nice chap—a more dignified Ralphie—but Rosie had a feeling Kiki didn't want to think about what she had missed. Nor did Kiki dwell on her own domestic felicity, for the same reason, but reversed. And they carefully disguised their mild disapproval of each other's way of life—Kiki having to dash home to get Jim's dinner, Rosie having to dash home to primp for a date—disapproval in which there was always a smattering of envy.

Rosie had never told Kiki much about Susannah and Edwin, beyond the bare facts. When Kiki mentioned, one day when the two women were outside sighing over a late dusting of snow covering their gardens, that there was a health food restaurant opening up in Chiswick, Rosie said, “My daughter and her husband are running it. Don't eat there.”

“
What
?”

“My estranged daughter, from California. And her husband—an ex-priest.” Rosie piled it on, keeping her voice even and her face straight.

“Your
daughter
?”

“My estranged daughter. We don't get along.”

“But,
Rosie.
”

She was so flabbergasted and, when she realized Rosie wasn't kidding or exaggerating, so horrified on her behalf—Kiki had two daughters and two sons, all of whom she was selflessly devoted to—that Rosie invited her in for tea and told her the rest of it.

“You
must
go see her,” she said when the story was done. Rosie could detect in her face something of what she'd seen in Barney's—the desire to be the instrument of reconciliation.

“Nope,” she said. “Not a chance.”

“Well …” Kiki hesitated over her words, treading carefully. She was dressed in a navy blue wrap skirt printed with green whales, a matching green jersey with her monogram on it, and blue knee socks. Her knees were as brown and bony as a monkey's, and Rosie stared at them while she waited for Kiki to go on. “I'm sure she'll come to you, Rosie, but perhaps she's afraid to … you know … she may be a little … but if you approached her, Rosie, it … she would …”

Rosie said, as gently as she could, “This is hard for you to believe, I know, Kiki, but I don't want to make it up with her.”

“Oh, Rosie.”

“I mean it. I don't know what
your
method of dealing with unpleasantness is, but mine is to face up to it and then
eject it from my life.
” She was no longer speaking gently, but it wasn't Kiki she was scolding.

“You're her mother,” Kiki said, bringing one brown hand to her cheek as if a tooth ached,
mother
being one of her sacred words, like
marriage
.

“That girl hurt me to the depths of my soul, Kiki,” Rosie said, not wanting to. “Over and over. I don't feel like her mother any more.”

They dropped it. Kiki, it was clear, could say no more. Rosie was her friend, she liked her, they'd known each other for years; and yet her friend had spit on the floor of Kiki's favorite temple. She was shocked. Her eyes damp with puzzled sympathy, she went home to fix Jim's dinner.

Rosie avoided the Post Road into Chiswick. She didn't want to see the progress of the Silvergate Café. She imagined it plenty, picturing not so much the roomful of tables, the water-spotted silverware, the inevitable scrawled blackboard menu, as her daughter: tall, pale, sharp-nosed, sloppy, lank-haired Susannah, in an apron, yawning without covering her mouth while she took orders for tofu burgers. Now that she was actually in town, Rosie couldn't help fancying that Susannah was inching closer to her, like plague germs or a cold front, and that it was, as Peter said, only a matter of time until they met. She tried to contemplate this prospect calmly, tried for resignation, for indifference, for maternal tenderness, for detached amusement, but all she felt was an irritable dread.

“It's just that you don't know her, Ma,” was Peter's opinion. He gave it one lovely April night when he came over to have dinner with Rosie. He was leaving the next morning for a friend's cottage on the Cape. He hoped to surmount his writer's block there. Who the friend was, he didn't say, so Rosie didn't ask. She wondered, though. She also wondered if he had gone to see Susannah. She couldn't believe he would keep it from her if he had, but he kept saying Rosie should give her a chance, get to know her, then decide whether to go on with what he had begun to call “this absurd family feud.”

“It's the strangeness and the awkwardness you're afraid of,” he lectured her. “Right now you see her as an ogre. Once you actually meet her and talk to her, she'll be just like anyone else. I'm not saying you two will become soul mates, Ma, but you might not find it that hard to be civil to each other.”

She looked at him. He sat across from her at the table in the kitchen-nook, calmly spooning up his soup, slurping a bit, half-smiling at her while he ate. No doubt about it, he had lost his dapper
joie de vivre
. He was dressed in a blue work shirt and khakis—a bad sign. She didn't even know he possessed such clothes, and she wondered whether he had bought a whole new wardrobe to go with his new mood.

“Have you seen her, Peter?”

He flushed a little, and stopped his spoon halfway to his mouth. “No, but she calls me.”

“Still?”

“Yeah.”

“For what, may I ask? Still trying to get my support? Or have you two become soul mates?”

“She's all right, Ma. Really.” He spooned in more soup. “She's not so bad.”

“Peter?”

He looked from his soup to Rosie, smiling. “She's family, Ma. For years that didn't mean anything to me, but now it does. Maybe I'm getting old, I don't know.”

His smile was pleading, a sad smile. She sighed. How could she deny him a sister when he had just lost a lover? “Tell me about her,” she said cooperatively, keeping her mind in a narrow groove that didn't admit that impudent sign in the window, or even any sour memories. She would think of Susannah as a stranger, someone she didn't know very well. “What do you mean, she's
all right
?”