The Garden Path (31 page)

“Do you keep track?” he asked as they went upstairs. “Somehow I wouldn't expect you to. You seem so self-sufficient.”

He was behind her on the narrow staircase, and she turned and looked down at him. “I don't know about self-sufficient, Ivan. I used to be. I suppose I still would be if I had to.” She sat down suddenly on the step; their eyes were level, and she took his face between her two hands and kissed him. “But I love you, Ivan. You know that. I'm crazy about you. I don't know how I ever got through my life before I had you to wait for.” She kissed him again, fiercely, and ran her hands over his bearded cheeks. “Yes, I keep track,” she said finally. “I live for the sound of that damned van, Ivan. You can't imagine how I love you.”

He squeezed in beside her knees on the step below and whispered, “I love you, too, Rosie. My blossom. My rosebud. Just because I can't get here to see you, it doesn't mean I'm not thinking about you. Jesus, Rosie, you're on my mind all the time.” He put his hand between her knees. She spread her legs apart and his hand reached higher, his fingers stroked her gently. She took a long, ragged breath. “Come on, honey,” he said. “Let's go to bed.”

Later, they drank Mexican beer and ate Duke's pâté. It wasn't bad, she decided. The pimento was bits of cooked red pepper. “And is this rice? Cold rice?” she asked, holding up her fork.

“I don't know what-all is in there,” Ivan said. He was eating a tomato sandwich, thick ripe slices with cheese between slabs of rye bread. His appetite always astounded her. He would eat anything, in enormous quantities.

“I don't know how you do it,” she said. “Not an ounce of flab on you.”

He grinned and slapped his taut stomach. He was naked except for jeans. “It really bugs old Duke. He keeps trying to drop ten pounds. Keep busy, I tell him. Come on out and play some Softball.” Ivan, Rosie knew, had found a softball team in Chiswick—the Chiswick Champs—and played with them twice a week. “But he'd rather sit around and drink beer and bitch about the strike.”

“Ivan,
you
drink plenty of beer.”

“Only after I've had some physical exercise.” He touched her knee and winked at her lecherously. “If you know what I mean, baby.”

She smiled at him: how beautiful he was in the dark kitchen, with the overhead light casting shadows on his face. “Tell me something about yourself,” she said impulsively. “Something no one else knows.”

He sobered instantly, removed his hand from her leg. “Why? What kind of a request is that?”

“You don't have to if you don't want to,” she said. “It was just a thought.”

He poured more beer into his glass. “But why? What made you ask me that?”

“Love,” she said after a pause. “I love you, Ivan. And you have this whole life apart from me. Your daytime life. I just wanted some little secret, for myself.”

“Hell, Rosie—you're my secret.” His grin returned briefly. “You're the biggest secret I've got, honey. Just sitting here in this kitchen with you is like sitting on a time bomb. You know that?”

“Of course,” she whispered. She put one hand to her throat like a movie heroine who has just escaped strangling. Her throat felt tight. “How could I not know it? I think about it all the time.”

He gave her a sharp look, his eyes narrowed and his lips drawn back over his teeth. She hadn't known he could look like that. “Well, let me give you something else to think about,” he said. “Since you ask.” He drained his glass, tipping his head back. She watched his beard go up and down.

She clasped her hands tight together, tried to swallow, succeeded. “What is it?” It would be something terrible, something about Susannah: he was divorcing her, she had left him, he had left her, he had someone else, someone young.

“This.” He wiped his mouth, with his odd fastidiousness, on a paper napkin and looked at her. “It's funny you should ask that, because this thing has been nagging at me. I've had this awful impulse to tell it to someone, but I didn't know who.” She saw that he was desperately serious, and noticed for the first time that the whites of his eyes were mapped with thin red lines.

“Ivan.” She put her hand over his. “You can tell me anything. Anything.” It astonished her, it touched her heart, that Ivan—even he—could have his private agonies. And why shouldn't he? He was human, after all. It struck her that she had been unfair to him, assumed him perfect, unreachable by what touched common humanity, happy and uncomplicated and libidinous. And had wanted him that way. Just as he had wanted her—she remembered his displeasure at her tears. What a farce all this has been, she thought. She pressed his hand between hers. Her love for him, she believed for a moment, would kill her with its intensity, the way it made her heart tick fast.

“I miss being a priest. Sometimes.”

She dropped his hand, shocked. It was not what she had expected. “That's incredible!” she exclaimed—the wrong thing to say.

He was irritated. “What's so incredible?” Or maybe it wasn't the wrong thing; maybe irritation was better for him than blank depression. “You mean that I could be so horny? I like sex so much? You think priests aren't horny? Shit,” he said, and drummed his fingers on the table, his palm spread out. “I don't know what it is. I always thought I went in for all the wrong reasons. Now I think I came out for all the wrong reasons.”

“What were they?”

“What was
it
. There was only one—
that
one. Sex, of course. I left so I could get laid.”

“Only that?”
Only
, she thought.

“No,” Ivan said. “I wanted to get married. Have a family. My own family, up in Maine …” He paused. All she could think was: this isn't enough for him, then. This body, this bed, all this waiting, this love, wife, mistress—
mistresses
, probably—women worshiping him, legs spread for him all over the place, wherever he goes, women wanting him, me—none of it enough. She would never understand, she thought. She didn't even want to hear it any more. It was beyond her. He was beyond her, he was lost to her, she was one of his wrong reasons. “My own family stinks, if you want to know. I've got a brother in jail for rape. My mother ran off with some Army jerk—years ago. My father's a drunk.”

She didn't know what to say. If she couldn't touch him, stroke his cheek, take his hand, press her lips to his flat stomach, she had no response. A silence grew between them. She looked at the map of England on the wall: south from Heathrow, through Surrey, the Sussexes, east to Kent. Ivan sighed, and she looked at him: dark beard against tanned chest, brown face, long slanted eyes lit blue. “Well,” he said. “None of that worked out so well, did it? The family bit?”

“I don't know. Didn't it?”

“Would I be here if it did?”

“I guess not.”

“I think about going back. Not into the priesthood. I'm not—”
Worthy
, he was going to say. She closed her eyes. He went on. “There's a place out in California—up near Tahoe, the Nevada line. A haven for mixed-up ex-priests.”

“And you think about it.”

“That's all. Just think.” He sighed again, picked up a bread crust from his plate and ate it absently. The silence grew so thick Rosie could hear the old clock tick in the living room. Ivan stood up, finally. “Well. I'd better go, Rosie.”

She stood too, and embraced him hesitantly. “Remember, Ivan, I do love you.” The words sounded as meaningless as the tick of the clock.

“Yeah, I do remember that, Rosie,” Ivan said.

He didn't come back. Days and days went by, and she knew for sure he wouldn't come back again. It wasn't just the usual long interval. Something was missing from the way she waited. The quality of her waiting was changed, clued in by something in Ivan's face that night, or his voice, or his fingertips drumming on the table. Maybe it was her question that had done it, or the impulse that had made her ask it. But her waiting lacked hope, and was transformed, finally, from waiting to the purest, most deep and silent despondency.
No hope
, she said to herself. Even the flowers and vegetables seemed hopeless; so many of them had reached their peak and were on the decline, withering in the sun of mid-August, drooping, drying up, dying. The roses were long gone, the day lilies and daisies finished; the columbines and delphiniums and lupines had gone from purple to brown. All the lettuce had bolted, the ripening tomatoes would rot on the stem—she no longer picked anything. She watched the beans dry up, the peas curl and bleach in the heat. She hadn't the heart for the usual hot-weather tasks: dividing and replanting and extra watering. The change of seasons, summer already beginning to be transformed into autumn, wouldn't bear thinking of. Such futility, over and over until you think there's no end to it and then—wham!—there is. And what was the use of it all? Maybe she should move south, flee like the rest of them do if they can afford it, go someplace where the seasons slow down into one changeless, endless sunny summer. The leaves of the maple tree, the highest ones, that tapped at her bedroom window, were already turning scarlet; now and then one fell, a last beautiful gasp on the sidewalk.

She spent her time with
The Countryman
. “There is a custom still observed in some parts of Kent,” she read, “of eating pancakes as soon as the first lamb is born.” It told her to use a monkey jack for stump grubbing, to visit an ancient monastic guest house in the Cotswold Hills where she could hunt with the Heythrop, to use Ephedrol for catarrh, to send five guineas to the Cremation Society and they would take care of everything. The green cover for Winter, 1935, bore a public relations quote from “the late Thomas Hardy:” he said, “It makes one feel in the country.” 1935, Rosie thought. She had
been
in the country then, running down the stone steps with her dog, brushing her baby teeth with Kolynos, growing flowers from seed in her own patch of garden. Ivan hadn't been born, Susannah was an egg floating somewhere in her little brown body, this issue of
The Countryman
was crisp and green as a new leaf, and her father was sitting in his favorite scratchy brown chair chuckling at it, nodding, reading bits aloud.

Peter returned from Vermont and called her up to say he and Hollis were thinking things over. Hollis had left the woman he had been living with. Hollis was by himself, in a rented summer cottage on a lake. Hollis would be coming back in the fall, if everything continued to work out. Peter was so happy his voice kept breaking, and he sounded on the verge of either tears or chuckles, reminding Rosie of his adolescent self. “Peter, I'm so glad,” she said, aware that her voice sounded odd.

“What about you, Ma? When are you going to come out to dinner with me? Go to a flick?”

She went. It was a measure of her hopelessness that she gave up, went out, didn't sit in her house awaiting the sound of the van turning the corner. He's back in California by now, she thought. Or back with his family: Susannah. One or the other. Gone, anyway. She was silent with Peter.

“You okay, Ma?” he asked her in the restaurant. He kept his voice light—to mask worry, she knew. She was aware her silences worried him, but she didn't know what to do about it.

“I'm fine, honey. Tell me some more about Hollis.” There was a plate of fish before her, and string beans, and tiny red potatoes. Somehow she had to eat it.

Peter talked; she encouraged him. She hoped he would be distracted by his own voice and his own delight from her hopelessness. “Aren't you going to eat?” he asked her.

“I had a huge lunch.” She pushed her plate away. The fish sat in buttery stuff, gone cold. She drank her wine.

At the movie, she dozed off, and awoke to see a handsome man tied to a chair, shot to death.

“You want me to stay overnight?” Peter asked her when he dropped her off.

“Now why on earth would I want you to stay overnight?” she said. She opened the car door, and the light went on above her head.

“You don't look good, sweetie. Are you sure you feel all right?”

“You're worse than a spinster auntie,” she said, forming her mouth into a smile. That wasn't enough, she knew; her eyes had to twinkle a little. “I am just fine, Peter. It's hot, and I'm an old lady.”

He grinned and punched her lightly, twice, on the arm. “You may be old, sister, but you ain't no lady,” he said, trying to make her laugh, but she felt her smile slipping down, and she stepped out of the car before Peter could see.

The next day there was a postcard from California: Lake Tahoe, looking blue. “I thought about it some more,” it said on the other side. “And here I am. Sorry I didn't say good-bye. Love.” After “love” there was a line drawn, a blank space where the name should be. She had never seen his handwriting before. It was angular and choppy, like the outline of a mountain range, and he didn't cross his
t
's. That seemed odd to her, that bit of carelessness; in California, perhaps Ivan was the sort of person who didn't cross his
t
's. A different person from the one who had walked like a god into her garden that day. She kept the card by her bed, to remind herself that he was a different person, that if he walked into her garden now she might not recognize him, possibly wouldn't even love him any more.

She stayed awake all night, walking up and down the stairs, into the living room, out to the porch, back upstairs. The moon shone through the stained-glass window on the landing, depositing ruby and blue petals at her feet. She considered going out into the garden, in the moonlight. It was a fine, clear night. But she decided that was mad, to roam in the dew at three in the morning. What if Kiki looked out and saw her? She drank a bottle of Ivan's Mexican beer. There was a whole six-pack left. She would drink a bottle a night until there was one left, and that one she would save.