The Garden Path (46 page)

“It doesn't sound like much,” he said when they pulled into the lot.

“They have fabulous bakeries, Simon.”

“Oh—bakeries,” he said scornfully. “Bakeries aren't
food.
”

The Café was busy. “I don't know why all these people aren't out ringing doorbells and bobbing for apples,” Duke said. “Who wants to eat out on Halloween?”

“I wouldn't mind,” Lois, the part-time waitress, said. “Hi, Susannah. Good to have you back.”

She found an apron and tied it around her middle, remembering her vision of herself arranging flowers, possibly in evening dress. She grinned, pulled her hair back tightly with string, and stuck it down the back of her shirt. “What do I do?” she asked Duke. She loved the kitchen, all stainless steel and shiny wood. Businesslike. She looked with affection at the big black stove; the fights over it seemed far, far away, years ago.

“Keep an eye on that soup, will you? And slice bread—that black bread. And I'm going to need some more tomatoes peeled. You know how? Take a slotted spoon and dunk them in that pan there—it should be boiling—and then peel them with a—here.” He flung down a knife. “Hell, of course you know how to do it, don't mind me. And will you seed them, too? And when you get a chance we could use more walnuts chopped.” He kissed her quickly. “Please.”

“No kissing,” she said, loving him in this role: how quickly he did everything, how he kept his good humor in the midst of the furor, how oddly handsome he looked in his white apron and his blue denim shirt. “Treat me like a regular employee or we'll never get through this,” she said. “Pretend I'm Simon.”

“Then I'll have to keep the jalapeno peppers out of your reach. Simon thinks hot pepper is some kind of religion.”

“It cleans out your insides,” Simon said, loading a tray. “It clears your brain. Also, it prevents colds.”

“The Jalapeno Pepper Unification and Purification Church. Simon is the Reverend Moon of cold prevention.”

Simon grinned and said, “You see how he can work and talk at the same time? He didn't used to be able to do that. He's coming along, this boy. One of these days he's going to be a fine cook.”

After work, Susannah and Duke drove home. There was a sharp bit of moon in a clear sky, and they sat outside for a while, close together on the steps. “That was fun,” Susannah said, though she was tired, and there was a very small ache, just beginning, at the base of her spine. “The craziness, the rushing around, the wonderful smells. And Simon—he's so funny. And I love to look out and watch people wolf it down.”

“Oh well,” Duke said, pleased. “I suppose it is. But this”—he put his arm around her; it was a cold night, with a wind—“this is more fun.”

“It is,” she said, and then, hugging him, suddenly sat up straight with a little cry.

“What is it?”

He drew back to look at her in alarm, but she smiled and moved close to him again. It was what she'd thought she had felt, earlier, while she was chopping walnuts at the Café—a dreamlike tug, a flutter like a bird. “The baby,” she said. “Kicking. Here—feel.”

They sat in silence, waiting, his hand warm on her stomach. “They never kick when you want them to,” Duke said.

“Maybe she'd like a glass of milk.”

“Try it.”

They went inside, and Susannah drank a glass while Duke fed the cats. “It put her to sleep,” Susannah said, wiping her milk mustache on the sleeve of her shirt. She watched Duke lock the back door, put away the cat food, draw the gingham curtains on the kitchen windows; and she thought of her father, sitting up in bed, maybe watching television, thousands of miles away where it wasn't even dark yet, at this hour, and where it wasn't beginning to get cold and leaves weren't falling. This must have been what he had in mind when he said
be good, be happy
—this dimly lit house, the baby curled asleep inside her, and Duke taking her hand to lead her upstairs.

They made love with drowsy slowness, then slept and woke in the middle of the night with their arms around each other. Susannah looked at the clock—three. Her stomach rumbled, not a kick this time but hunger. “Little Rosetta wants something good.”

Duke yawned and sat up. “You've seen too many cartoons. What does she want? Pickles? Banana ice cream with tomato sauce?”

“Let's do something daring and wicked,” Susannah said. He bent to kiss her, cupped her breasts in his two hands. “No, not that. I mean let's go over to the Café and finish up that mushroom quiche. And the bread pudding.”

He squinted at the clock. “At three
A
.
M
.?”

“Wouldn't it be fun? To sit there on Halloween night all by ourselves having a meal? Think how spooky it'll be.”

“Is your entire pregnancy going to be like this? Five more months of irrational behavior?” He got out of bed as he spoke, turned on a light, reached for a shirt. “Well? Come on. We'll go trick-or-treating at the Café.”

But someone had beaten them to it. They went in the back door and, for one confused moment, Susannah thought they had forgotten to clean up, and then she took it in fully and saw that this was no ordinary mess, not even a salvageable mess. The place had been wrecked.

In the kitchen, pots and pans and implements had been pulled from their hooks, flung down, bent and dented. Food had been thrown at walls and in slimy heaps on the floor along with the shards of broken dishes. The trelliswork between kitchen and dining room was broken, jagged, pulled away from the walls and smashed, and the plants ripped apart and ground underfoot, dirt scattered everywhere. Even the black stove, indestructible, had been pelted with food, leftover quiche and whole-wheat flour and olive oil and melting butter running down its black sides, and one of the oven doors bent down and unhinged. In the dining room, chairs were smashed, tables overturned, the slate where the menu had been was broken to bits, the old cash register lay on its side, half its porcelain keys bent or cracked. Only the curtains at the windows and the door were intact, to hide what had happened.

“Oh, Duke,” Susannah kept saying as they stood looking at the rubble. “Oh, God, Duke.” She put her hands to her hot cheeks, too stunned to weep, or to say anything further. All around them, the destruction cried:
Hate
.

Duke walked around with his hands in his pockets, not speaking, a parody of his usual calm, kicking at things that had been broken and thrown to the floor. A pile of earthenware shards flew into the air, a bag of onions dropped with a loose thud. “You know who did this, don't you,” he said at last in a quick tight voice.

She hadn't known until then, but she thought
of course
, and closed her eyes, dizzied.

Duke walked through the wreckage, kitchen to dining room and back, prodding piles of debris with his foot. She had never seen him angry before, hadn't realized at first that this quiet and controlled revulsion was anger. She felt a cold thrill, as if some dire, monumental fact had been revealed to her.

“I'm going to kill that son of a bitch,” Duke said. “I'm going to find him and kill him.”

She should protest, she was sure, but she stayed silent, and when, soon, he stopped pacing and turned to survey it all, and sighed harshly, she went to stand beside him. “That son of a bitch,” he whispered. She touched his arm; it felt tense, electric. He looked at her, his eyes distant. “I know where he is,” Duke said, and the muscles of his arm contracted sharply, as if he already had Ivan in his grip.

He was just coming out of Ginger's house when they pulled into the driveway: Ivan and Ginger, lit by the spotlight over the side door. Duke jerked his car to a stop beside Ivan's van, opened the door and jumped out. He leapt at Ivan and clung to him, hitting. “You son of a bitch,” he kept saying. “You filthy bastard, you son of a bitch.”

Ginger rushed forward and pulled him by the shoulders. “Stop it, Duke. Stop it. He's going, he's leaving, let him go.” Duke ignored her. Susannah got out of the car, slowly, feeling the baby's fluttery kick. The two men fighting were indistinct, badly lit, like an old movie. Duke hung on like an animal, as if with claws, pounding into Ivan wherever he could reach his fist—awkward, unpracticed blows that nevertheless caused harm. Ivan's nose began to bleed, and it was then that Susannah noticed Ivan wasn't trying to hit back. His struggles with Duke were attempts to get loose, and the look on his face was the look of St. Sebastian pierced by a hundred arrows.

“Duke!” Susannah cried, but he was already letting go, stepping back, panting, from Ivan's silent endurance. Ivan covered his face with his hands and leaned against the van. No one spoke. There was only the sound of Duke's hard breathing.

It was a long moment, like a play stopped because no one knew their lines, like the wait for a prompter who had momentarily dropped off to sleep. They stood, the four of them, in the chilly driveway, the open fan of light casting their shadows far ahead of them on the ground—all but Ivan, whose shadow was compressed between himself and the van. Ginger's frizzy hair looked transparent. A pair of tall oaks, not quite bare of leaves, reached across the road and almost obscured the sliver of moon. A small wind rustled invisible leaves over the ground. Susannah stood there, a long moment, but, still, a moment, during which Duke continued to pant beside her, Ginger continued to cross her two hands in horror over her mouth, Ivan to stand motionless against the bright blue van—and then Ginger walked over to where Ivan was and pulled his hands down from his face, first one, then the other. He had shaved off his beard, Susannah saw, and his face was bloody. He didn't look at anyone; he looked down at his hands, streaked with blood from his nosebleed.

“Ivan,” Ginger said to his bent head, in a voice of such tenderness Susannah flinched. “Ivan? Are you all right?”

“Yeah,” he said after a moment.

“Ivan?”

“Don't worry,” he said. His voice sounded as if he had a bad cold. He raised the back of his hand to his nose, and tipped his head back. The bleeding had stopped. He turned his head, slightly, toward Susannah. “I'm leaving,” he said. “And I won't be back.”

“All right.” She hesitated, felt she should say something further, but she had no words. She was still dazzled, even here in the near dark, by bright lights illuminating wood and chrome and clean white and the outrage and injury done to it all. He would lay his hand on anything, he would defile whatever came in his way. “Yes,” she said. “All right. Good.”

He turned then to look fully at her, but he didn't speak. The play stopped again. Ginger went into the house, and then, on impulse, Susannah left Duke's side and went up to Ivan—another long moment, while they stared at each other. She had meant to say something definitive, something beyond simple acquiescence in his plans, but again no words came. She stood beside him, but she felt miles and years away, and he seemed oddly unfamiliar, as if this wasn't the man she had lived with, just someone similar. Without the beard, he looked very young. She had never seen him beardless, and she thought
this is how he looked during his sad childhood
. The thought didn't make him any less unreal, or any less a stranger.

Ginger came back carrying two paper towels, one wet and one dry. “Here,” she said, coming up to them. Her manner was brisk and motherly—put on, Susannah felt, for her benefit. “Wipe your face, Ivan,” she said.

Ivan ignored her and held out his hand to Susannah. “Good-bye, Susannah.”

She couldn't take his hand. She thought of the broken oven door on the big black stove; he must have climbed up and stamped down, hard, to injure it so. He must have raised casseroles and dishes and glass jars high over his head and hurled them down in a fury, like old prints of Zeus hurling thunderbolts. He must have thought of her, thought of Duke, as he smashed and kicked and threw things and made the little kitchen smell of hate and filth. She could wish him Godspeed, but she couldn't take his hand, couldn't touch him.

Ivan's lips pursed for a second in a grimace, and his hand dropped to his side. His clean-shaven face was strangely expressive and vulnerable. “I'm leaving, then,” he said again, and Susannah was filled with pity for his empty hand, his naked face.

“That would be best,” she whispered.

“Ivan?” Ginger held out the wet towel, and he turned to her and let her sponge his face. Susannah stepped back and went over to where Duke stood. He didn't appear to have moved. They waited, together, watching while Ginger wiped Ivan's face; he stood meekly, enduring it, Ginger whispering to him something Susannah couldn't hear, Ivan nodding. Then he got into the van and started it up. “Take care,” Ginger said. Ivan backed the van past them out of the driveway, and turned up Perkins Road toward Route One. When the engine noise died away, they could hear Ginger sniffling. Susannah held Duke's hand.

“He's been with me all week,” Ginger said. She looked worn out, her face subtly more ravaged than when Susannah had last seen her—or maybe it was just that she was a little drunk. “All week. Just drinking and talking. He kept the van hidden in my garage. He got drunk tonight—really drunk. He told me what he did at the Café. He just went crazy, Duke. I've been pouring coffee into him for the last two hours. He says he's going to drive all night.” As she talked, she got hold of her voice, became brisk again. “He's on his way to Ottawa, Canada. Some kind of lay monastery. He went to a place out on the coast somewhere, a home for troubled priests or whatever, and they sent him back here, to this Canadian place, it's where they go to get their heads together. I just hope he drives carefully. I told him to pull over and sleep if he gets tired.” She smoothed the paper towels in her hand. The wet one had become pinkish but not very; there hadn't, really, been much blood. Susannah wondered if Ginger would save it. “He'll be there—indefinitely, he says.” Her voice broke on the last words and, whimpering, she bunched the towels together and raised them to her face.