The Garden Path (45 page)

He looked up in mock surprise. “I thought you'd know by now.”

“I mean—ultimately. About us. Tell me, Duke.”

He frowned down at the whale. “Just that I was wrong, Susannah. It's you I love. You know that.”

The silence returned, the sun continued to shine in, Duke traced the tail of the whale with his fingertip.

“But what else?” Susannah asked finally.

“Ivan,” Duke said.

“Ivan?” It was like a hard blow to the head. She put down her coffee cup, pressed the bone between her eyes with two fingers. “Ivan seems about as relevant to this discussion as—I don't know—cat yummies.”

“It's his baby you're pregnant with.”

“Oh Lord, Duke. For heaven's sake.” She stood up and walked to the door. The sun shone on Duke's apple trees. She could see red apples through the leaves. “For heaven's sake.”

They went outside, not holding hands. How absurd, how
stupid
to be at war with the man she loved.
I'm a peaceable person
, she thought, not for the first time. “But it's
my
baby,” Susannah said. They were on the path to the pond. A scrap of the twins' kite from April still flapped high in a tree, yellower than the leaves. Here, last summer, she had walked after her writing hours. She had sat with her bare feet in the pond and thought of the years she had wasted with Ivan, all those blind years. “He has no claim on it,” she said to Duke. Leaves floated on the surface of the pond, and a dull green scum near their feet was laced all over with a tiny star pattern. “I don't intend for him ever to know about it. And I told you, Duke, I'll never take him back.”

“You said
never never never never never
. If I recall.”

“I meant it. I meant every one of those
nevers.
”

Duke threw a stone into the pond; the ripples rocked the leaves, rippled the scum. “It feels like stealing to me, Susannah. That's all.”

“Oh crap, Duke. Dammit.” She didn't have much of a bad-language repertoire. “What do we do, then? You say you love me. You invite me into your bed. You make suggestive remarks about where the baby can sleep. You ask me to stay—what do you mean by all that? And now you tell me I belong to Ivan, as if this was fifteenth-century Italy. Or
Porgy and Bess
. What do you want us to do? Where do we go from here, Duke?”

Do I want this man? she thought. Why won't he just plunge in?
Fierceness
, Rosie had said. Maybe she was right.

He took her hands—fists—and held them to his chest. “Susannah. I want you to live with me. I want you to be a mother to my twins and I want to be a father to your baby. But I can't see how it's that easy, I don't see how we can look at it as a permanent thing. It's not because I don't love you. I just don't want to bind you down to anything yet.”

“Duke, I'm getting divorced. Give me time, can't you? First there's this thing with Ivan, then there's my mother, then this trip. I'll call a lawyer right now.” She pulled her hands away; he let her go. “Don't you
want
me to get a divorce?”

“Of course—God, yes, Susannah. You know I do. But I get everything out of this. Don't you see that? And I don't want to have it unless we're fair to Ivan.”

“You mean tell him I'm pregnant.”

“Well.”

She sighed, turned away from him, and walked back up the path. He followed. “He'll
want
it, Duke,” she said. “Joint custody or something. I don't want my child to grow up in California hanging around bars with Ivan while he picks up women.”

“I really don't think that would be a problem, Susannah,” Duke said mildly.

“Oh,
don't
you?” She walked fast, talking over her shoulder. “You don't know Ivan. When he's in the mood, what he wants more than anything is children. He'd get lawyers—Duke, in California they have lawyers who specialize in wangling custody for the wrong parent. Ivan always gets what he wants.”

“It's a pretty hard secret to keep all your life, Susannah.”

She stopped under an apple tree, and crushed a rotten apple on the ground with her foot. She remembered, that day in Stonington, telling herself she'd keep her pregnancy secret from Ivan. “I don't want him involved,” she said, and kicked another apple away. One of the cats chased it briefly. What a child she had been that day—Rapunzel. As if life was something out of a book—magical and under control.

Duke, coming up beside her, picked an apple from the tree, polished it on his sleeve, and handed it to her with a courtly gesture.

“No, thanks,” she said. “They look good, though,” she added more amiably. Duke bit into the apple and chewed in silence, looking thoughtfully up into the tree. Oh, why couldn't they just go back to bed, forget Ivan? This was what she had dreaded, these complications of honor, these subtleties and barriers. First Margie, now Ivan—ghosts. She wanted only to lay her tangled life down beside Duke's and let them mingle, braid together like hair. She loved him because he was exactly what he seemed to be, and because he didn't want to change her; the only way he could disappoint her would be by deviousness, or by lecturing her about hanging up her clothes. And she liked his gentleness, his cleverness, the way he could make things, fix anything, the way he would take on a project and see it through. The garden was all dug under and mulched, the twins' playhouse freshly painted to protect it from the winter, the porch screens taken down. He never claimed he didn't have time for things, he didn't hang around bars and chase other men's women.

“I thought I saw him over in Chiswick yesterday,” he said. “On the street. Then I thought I saw the van, I thought it passed me down by the turnpike entrance.”

“Oh,
damn.
” She gripped his arm, pulling away the apple he had halfway to his mouth. He dropped it. “Damn Ivan. I really can't see how it affects us, Duke—where he goes or what he does.”

“Don't you think he's here for a reason, Susannah? Don't you think he's here to see you, and talk things over?”

“I don't know, and I don't care,” she said fiercely, but she could feel it sneaking up on her, like a monster in one of her old stories: the thing that would happen. How could she think it would be over so easily between her and Ivan? That she could slip from one man to another like a library book?

“Well,” Duke said again, started to reach for another apple and thought better of it.

I'll have to put him in a story
, Susannah thought.
The rescuer, the prince, the strong man. I'll just have to beef him up a bit
. And then, seeing the look in his gray eyes, the double crease between his eyebrows, the tense set of his head, as if his neck hurt—the way he was grappling with it, trying to incorporate her, his dead wife, his children, Ivan, the unborn baby, and God knew what else into his scheme of life—instantly she was full of love for him. She touched his sleeve again, rubbed her hand up and down the tweedy sweater. “You're right, Duke.”

His face lost some of its tenseness. “I am?”

“I'll see Ivan. I'll search him out if he doesn't get in touch with me. It simply never occurred to me, Duke,” she said, with a hesitant laugh. “You know me. I never—” She was afraid he would think her selfish, unrealistic; all the faults she knew Ivan had laid out for his old friend would come back to Duke and cancel out love. Who could love a dipshit, a dingbat, a woman who couldn't keep her mind on the situation at hand? “I was so busy forgetting him. I was so busy with the relief of it all finally happening. I didn't think it through.” She looked closely at him, found nothing in his eyes but love and concern, and saw that she could tell him anything, be guilty of any number of faults, and the look in his eyes wouldn't substantially change. “I'll settle it with him,” she said. “Tell him about the baby, work something out. I want him out of my life, Duke.”

He drew her to him, and they stood a while under the apple trees, and then they walked arm in arm to the house. Duke pulled her down beside him on the step. “Talk to me, then,” he said. “Be my Susannah.” He kissed her and undid her shaggy braid, and pulled her hair around her shoulders. “
Carpe diem
,” he said, like Peter.

So they talked—talked on and on, there on the step, and not about Ivan. Susannah told Duke about the innkeeper in Chiddingstone who thought Connecticut was Cleveland, and Duke told Susannah about Simon's recipe for red chili muffins, and Susannah told Duke about the royal wedding panties she had seen in an English shop, on sale, and Duke told Susannah about a bar out on Route One that had opened and closed since she'd been gone, called Topless Towers, and Susannah told Duke about Jane Austen's grave, and Duke told Susannah about Seymour's, the ailing seafood restaurant he had his eye on. They went over the books for the Café and decided maybe they could think of moving the place after the first of the year—maybe in the spring. Duke told Susannah about the root cellar he wanted to dig out in the basement, and Susannah told Duke about a girl she and Rosie met at a country fair who was first runner-up for Miss Cheddar Cheese. After a while they went inside and ate bread with English jam on it, and Susannah made a phone call to California; Edwin's strong voice disconcerted her. “He's been doing well, Mrs. Cord,” the nurse told her, “but it's nothing to hope on. Just be grateful for it while it lasts.”

When the twins got home, bounding off the school bus like puppies from a kennel, they all went out and raked leaves and picked apples, and then Susannah took them to Pizza Heaven for dinner. As they passed a bar on Route One called Smokey José's Susannah saw a van like Ivan's parked in the lot, but she said nothing. The world was full of vans like Ivan's. The twins carried their stuffed dolphin and whale and wore their bead necklaces, and chattered to Susannah and Duke about Mrs. Curtis, their teacher, who was on a diet and who promised to take them all out to McDonald's when she lost twenty pounds. Over pizza, they asked again where the baby would sleep. In the little room next to theirs? So they would hear it if it cried?

“I think that would be a perfect place,” Susannah said.

Duke smiled. Susannah pictured him with the baby, cradling it in his square hands, pinning on diapers as neatly as he eased pie crust into a pan.

She moved in on Halloween. “Do you mind, Rosie?” she asked. “Tell me honestly.”

“A little,” Rosie said, but smiled over at her. It was early evening, and they were in the car, hauling Susannah's things back to Duke's—a suitcase, the green canvas bag, and a grocery bag full of notebooks and papers. “I like to see my children happy, though.”

These statements, Susannah felt, were literally true. Rosie would miss her a little, not a lot; and she did rejoice in her happiness, and Peter's; there was never a hint that she would have preferred more orthodox happinesses for them.

Rosie helped her haul her things into the kitchen, then kissed her and left. She was going to a Halloween party dressed as a gypsy. “At my age, you go as something glamorous,” she said. “Lots of makeup and jewelry. No witches, no ghouls—too close to home.” She had a date with a man she had bought a tape recorder from. “I'll see you bright and early Tuesday morning,” she said to Susannah as she left. With the new tape recorder, and Susannah's pages of notes from England, and Rosie's scribbled inspirations, they were going to work on the book in earnest.

Susannah carried her bags up to Duke's room and then walked down the road, in the twilight, to Ginger's. The twins—dressed as witches—had gone to a sleep-over Halloween party. Susannah thought she might have a cup of tea with Ginger and then get Ginger to drive her over to the Café. She wanted to tell Ginger about her trip, about Rosie's recovery, about the progress of her pregnancy. Ginger had been out of town herself, Susannah knew—taken a week's vacation to see her harassed sister Sheila through a crisis. They had thought she would be home by now, but no one answered when she knocked, and there were no lights on. Susannah felt bereft. She had looked forward to an intimate, gossipy chat, to the latest word on Sheila, to talk of Ginger's likes, dislikes, friends, feuds. Walking by herself back up the road, she halfheartedly planned out an evening, resigned to a lonely Halloween until Duke got home at ten. She considered phoning him at the Café, asking if someone could come and get her. She'd gladly cashier or chop onions or simply sit in a corner and stay out of the way; it was company she wanted. But it seemed presumptuously wifely of her, somehow, to call Duke and beg a ride. She would turn on the radio, read old
Preventions
and
New Yorkers
, stay alert for any stray witch or gypsy who ventured down Perkins Road. She would call Edwin—later, between his dinner and his sleeping pill.

She leafed through two magazines. She ate a brownie and some sunflower seeds, and then, remembering little Rosetta, drank a glass of milk. She was playing the minuet from
Don Giovanni
on the old claw-foot piano in the living room when Duke called to ask her if she could come in to the Café and work. “Ginger was supposed to be back tonight,” he said. “I don't know what's gotten into her. Or she must have told me tomorrow, not tonight, I don't know. I hate to ask a pregnant woman to come into this madhouse and actually
work
, but I've got Simon out there waiting on tables, and now I need someone to help me in the kitchen.”

“I'd love to,” she said, so promptly he laughed.

“You're lonely.”

“Everyone's at a Halloween party but me.”

“I wouldn't exactly call this a party, sweetie.”

Simon picked her up. He was a tall, graceful black man, barely twenty, always in a shirt and tie, whose only interest seemed to be food. He made her tell him about English food all the way to the Café.