She smiled woozily, feeling the gin, holding out her arms to him. “I had a long, hard, hot day in the garden.”
That was better. He knelt alongside her chair, put his arms around her, buried his face in her lap. “Those are mighty suggestive adjectives,” he said, and she felt his smile against her thigh.
She conceived the idea of going to England with him. Taking Ivan to England was how it first came to her, swiftly amended: they could go to England together, visit Silvergate, rent a car and tour the south, maybe drive up to the Lakes. Neither of them had ever traveled abroad. Maybe what she needed was a vacation before she plowed into her book in earnest.
She had had a phone call from Joyce, her editor in New York—a friendly call, just to see how she was, with no mention of the book. Two weeks later there was a letter, gently reminding her that time was ticking away against her contract; Joyce couldn’t wait to see a draft of the opening chapters, no matter how rough.
“I don’t think it’s writer’s block any more,” Rosie said to Peter on the phone. “You have to be a writer to have writer’s block. And I haven’t got the faintest notion how to write a book.”
“Why don’t you try talking into a tape recorder? You can certainly talk up a storm, God knows. And leave it to someone else to transcribe it and edit it.”
“You mean ‘as told to’? Like a movie star?”
“Why not? In fact, you should get Susannah to help.” A silence. “Mom? Susannah—your daughter. I didn’t tell you she’s doing a book?”
“She’s doing a book. What in hell does doing a book mean?”
“Writing a book. She has a contract. Science-fiction stories. I guess I never told you she’s a writer. Or did I? Actually; I didn’t even know it until recently.”
The flicker of interest she had had in Ivan’s Susannah, in the blonde waitress she had fled from seeing, flamed up again for this new daughter, the writing Susannah who was doing a book. She remembered, again, Susannah as a child, her flatness, her lack of shine—had that concealed, really, the empty, receptive soul of a writer? And how could it be that what eluded her so humiliatingly should come with ease to her daughter? But did it? Maybe it was damned difficult, maybe the girl sweated blood, wept, tore her hair, vomited, broke windows, kicked holes in the wall over her book. Fought with her husband, stormed out of the house. Humiliation faded in the flame of curiosity. “You mean she’s been published already? Before?”
“Short stories. Millions of them—well, dozens. I don’t know. A dozen, maybe. But now they want to collect some of them into a book.”
She would go to the Chiswick Library and see if she could find anything—wouldn’t it be odd, to read a story written by Susannah? Like hearing a ghost speak. She tried to remember her daughter’s voice. A whine, that was all. Screams, yelling, tears, and then a whine.
“But, Peter, what about—?” She wanted to ask, couldn’t. We should drop this subject right here, she thought, and looked out the window at the flowered patchwork of her backyard; if she squinted it blurred into blobs of rose, pink, violet, yellow, twenty shades of green, like a painting seen close up.
“She doesn’t waitress any more. Just writes. They’ve hired a college girl.”
Did that mean she still lived with Ivan? Would Peter forget to tell her they’d separated just as he’d forgotten about the book? I see Ivan all the time, she couldn’t say, and he never mentions her name. Why? Why?
“The restaurant has really taken off,” Peter was saying. “It’s strange, too, with businesses failing right and left—restaurants, especially. Ivan told me”—her stomach lurched, she pressed the phone so hard to her ear it hurt; Ivan—“the failure rate for new restaurants is something like 95 percent. But you’d be amazed how good the food is. Vegetarian nouvelle cuisine. Not bean-sprout stuff. Heavy on the goat cheese, the braised endive, the sorbet—you listening, Mom? Why don’t you let me take you to lunch there one of these days?”
“No.”
“She won’t even be there. Who will even know it’s you? Hell, you met her husband once for five minutes—right?” Her husband. “I’ll introduce you as one of my professors. My thesis advisor.”
She had to laugh. “Peter, maybe you’ve never noticed, but you and I look rather obviously related.”
“Okay. You wear a blonde wig, and I’ll wear a false nose. Or wear a black veil over your face like Nonna Anna used to wear to church. With a hole in front so you can eat.”
For a mad moment she was tempted; then she laughed and changed the subject. “Please. Be serious. I really need your advice. Should I get myself a tape recorder? I’ll try anything. Maybe I could talk into it and have it transcribed and use it to work with, like the scripts from the show.”
“I thought you’d already tried using the scripts.”
“I’ve looked through them. I can use them for the later chapters—the specifics. But this is supposed to be half gardening tips and half autobiography, reminiscence—I don’t know what-all. I thought I’d write about my father, about Silvergate.” She hesitated. “I’ve thought of going over there. Going back to see what it’s like and how it stacks up against my memory of it.”
“That’s a great, great idea. You need a vacation.”
“I thought it might break this block or whatever it is.” Said aloud, though, the idea seemed less attractive. Ivan was the point of it: Ivan. Not the book. Not hanging around England worrying about muttering her impressions into a tape recorder. “But I really couldn’t leave my garden at this time of year,” she said.
“Hire someone.” Peter’s voice was bordering on exasperation. Talking to her as she had to him when he was a teenager. “The damn flowers don’t need you lurking out there every second. Any old anonymous arm can turn on the sprinkler and pull the weeds. Face it, Ma—they’re not going to miss you. They’re plants.”
Absurd, how the words hurt. The pinks and greens and blues blazed more brightly than ever; she longed to be out there in the sun and the dirt. “I’ll think about it,” she said to get off the phone.
She did think about it, though. She let the book fade from her mind and thought about being in England with Ivan, alone, for a week, two weeks. She knew it was a rainy country, she’d even read that this particular spring and summer were the coldest and wettest ever in the British Isles, but she remembered nothing but sunshine, flowers, dusty garden paths, high blue skies with clouds like white roses. She would have Ivan all to herself. What fun it would be: they’d pay their £2 admission to see Silvergate—house and gardens, described in the National Trust booklet as “magnificent Palladian manor house, with extensive landscaped grounds; rose garden; topiary hedge …” And then dinner in a pub with Ivan, and a room in an inn with a big bed and an eiderdown and a little mullioned window to let the sun in. She felt a tremor of unease, imagining the morning sun lighting her unmade-up face, her mouth sagging in sleep. But she would train herself to rise early, she was used to rising early in the summer, and she would shower, fix her face, greet him fresh and energetic the way he liked her.
“Let’s go to England sometime, Ivan.” She tried it out one night.
“I’d love to,” he said promptly. “I’d travel anywhere, any time. I love it. That trip cross-country—” He broke off, smiled at her duplicitously, as if that trip was their secret. “Name a place—anywhere. Pittsburgh. East Oshkosh Junction, Maine. England. I’ll go—this minute.”
“The south of England,” she said. “We’d tour the southern counties. Kent and Sussex—there’s an east and a west Sussex, we’d hit both—and Surrey and Dorset, and over to Devon and Cornwall.” She didn’t, after all, specify Silvergate. He would have heard of it from Susannah, and she didn’t want to hear him say so—or not say so, either. “Wouldn’t it be fun, Ivan? To get away?”
“It would be great, Rosie.” He spoke with such fervor that she wondered what he needed to escape. Or was it enthusiasm for the idea of going away with her? Or both? She regarded him fondly, puz
zling it out. They stood out in the garden. It was a cloudy night, nearly dark, and the light was slowly gathering up into the whitish sky. From the next street they could hear the shouts of children still playing ball. Ivan’s blue eyes were colorless in this light—opaque and depthless.
“Could we, do you think? Could we really do it, Ivan? Just pack up and go?”
“I don’t see why not. Later this summer? We could go to England. Or we could go to California. Let me take you to the Coast, Rosie. We could go up to San Francisco—it’s pretty hot in Los Angeles right now, and it gets worse, but we could go up the coast a little bit, give you a look at the other ocean—the real ocean, not this tame little trout stream you’ve got over here.”
“I thought you were a true blue New Englander, Ivan,” she teased him, but she had to force a lightness of tone. She didn’t want him to be missing California. “Weren’t you born someplace like East Oshkosh Junction, Maine?”
“I’m homesick for the West Coast, Rosie.” He was serious all of a sudden. He stood before her with his hands in his pockets, his face lifted away from her, up to the blank sky. “I don’t know what it is. The weather, maybe. Everything outdoors. The space. I’ll tell you, sometimes Duke’s place really gets to me, all those little boxy rooms, all those doors to shut. And then the backyard. Except for a few scraggly apple trees and the vegetable garden, it’s all bare ground. Grass won’t grow, nothing grows but weeds. It’s just old, worn-out dirt. And I stand out there and I feel as if I’m being pulled back, like a magnet. I miss the look of the place, Rosie. The look of it, the smell of it—I don’t know. It’s another world.”
He stopped, and she stood silent too, possessed by the fear that he would hop into his van this minute, seduced by his own words to head back west where things grew and there was real ocean. It would be better, she thought to herself, if they haven’t separated, if he has a wife to tie him here. Don’t go, she thought. Don’t leave. She squeezed her lips shut, afraid she would say the words aloud; better not to beg, she told herself, or to give orders.
He raised both his hands, suddenly, and ran them through his hair, scratching his scalp, rubbing his neck, running one hand down through his beard to his side and embracing her with the other. “But what the hell,” he said in her ear. “Here I am, and I’m not going anywhere. Unless you and I take a trip out to the Coast. You say when, Rosie. Any time.”
She leaned against him, amorous with relief. Her bear, her lovely, shaggy bear, with his bear hugs. But it was England she wanted to go to. California was for movie stars, for crackpot religions, for Edwin and his dreadful women. She and Ivan would go to England, maybe later in the summer after the royal wedding had absorbed the bulk of the tourists, maybe in August when England would be quieter, a paradise of gardens, a Garden of Eden. We’d have that, she thought, no matter what. (That refrain was beginning to figure prominently in her thoughts: no matter what.) We’d have those weeks together visiting gardens and drinking in pubs and walking in the lanes. And Silvergate: she imagined being there with Ivan at her side, and the more she thought about it the more certain it seemed that she could never visit Silvergate without him—the place all her memories ran back to, the place she would consider until she died to be her true home, the one she was exiled from. With Ivan, she could bear it. Even in the rose garden; even seeing how the ivy, with birds nesting in it, covered the side of the gardener’s cottage; even going down the broad stone steps to the terrace where she used to run with the old dog—even there, detachment would be possible, but only with Ivan at her side. He was the one thing dearer to her than those memories. Ivan at her side—she’d have that, at least, no matter what.
She went to the library, and found one of Susannah’s stories reprinted in something called Sci-Fi Feast: Best Stories of 1979. The cover was dark blue, printed with stars and, in silver, a row of names in alphabetical order down one side: Susannah M. Cord was there. The story was called “Songs Forever New.” Rosie watched the librarian stamp the book and run it under a light that coded her card number and the book’s number into a computer—the closest she and Susannah had come in years, she thought, first with mild amusement and then with an insane desire to laugh aloud. She carried the book gingerly to the parking lot, as if it were alive, or might explode.
Home, she got herself a cold beer and, sitting on the bench in the garden, opened the book immediately. Susannah’s story began with an epigraph from a poem by Keats:
Ah, happy, happy boughs: that cannot shed
Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu;
And, happy melodist, unwearied,
For ever piping songs for ever new;
More happy love! more happy, happy love!
For ever warm and still to be enjoy’d,
For ever panting and for ever young.…
She didn’t recognize the lines, but she recalled, vaguely, having had to read the poem in high school. The lines reminded her of Ivan, and she wondered if Susannah had chosen them for that reason. She wondered if Susannah read poetry, if using poetry as an epigraph was a sign of pretentiousness, if Ivan had read the story, what he had thought of it, of the lines from Keats. It came to her, suddenly, that Ivan and Susannah must once have been in love, if they weren’t now. She remembered how he had helped her out of the church that horrible day of the funeral, with his arm around her, protective, the two of them hunched together like old people, shuffling out the door. They took drugs, Ivan said—pills. Speed. But they must have done other things as well, laughed and made love and talked together as she and Ivan did. And other things? She wondered. Ivan might be a different person altogether, with Susannah. She pictured them—it must have been a scene from some movie, transposed—picnicking together by a picturesque river, Susannah all in white, Ivan with a crown of daisies in his hair, Susannah braiding daisies while Ivan read aloud from an old calf-bound volume of Keats.
She snapped the book shut, afraid that by reading Susannah’s story she would learn more than she wanted to know. She sat in the heat drinking beer until the bright blossoms, and the bees traveling in and out of them with their metallic noise, and the sun beating on her head and arms, comforted her and made her drowsy. She was roused by Kiki Sheffield coming across from her yard with a plastic container.
“Pesto, Rose. I made you a batch.” She set it down on the bench. “Don’t you look comfortable. Isn’t it hot?” She looked with admiration at the striped Rosa Mundi in full bloom against the fence, and put out one finger to touch a petal, a thorn. “Look at that. I’ve never seen anything like your roses. What’s this one again? I can’t keep them all straight.”
“Rosa Mundi—rose of the world. It’s supposed to have been Henry II’s favorite rose. Henry II of England.”
“Is that so?” Kiki’s nut brown hands reached out again to cup a blossom, and she leaned forward to sniff it, then sighed and smiled at Rosie. “Your garden is amazing this year. I wish I had more time to put into ours. Margaret’s having her baby, you know, in October, and I’ve just been on pins and needles.”
“The first grandchild, Kiki,” said Rosie, rising from her bench with the beer bottle in her hand. She took a swallow, emptied it. “You’ll get used to it. Or so they tell me.” She started toward the house; she didn’t want to talk to Kiki.
“Lord, I hope so. I’m a bundle of nerves. And there’s so much to get ready, I’m worn out. Margaret can’t do much, she’s just huge.” There was pride in her voice, and a dash of triumph over Rosie’s grandchildlessness. She put out a hand to keep Rosie there. “You know, I’ve been meaning to tell you, Rose. I ate at that restaurant—the one your daughter and her husband run? Twice, in fact. And it’s just fantastic.” She had a way of emphasizing and prolonging certain phrases: she got her lips into position for the j before she uttered it, and drew out the a’s in fantastic. “Truly a marvelous little place,” and the m in marvelous buzzed like a bee.
“So I’ve heard,” Rosie said shortly, continuing toward the hous
e, then remembering the book and the pesto. She retrieved them from the bench while Kiki went on.
“And such a handsome waiter. Lord, a regular movie star. Is that your son-in-law, Rose? Or is he the cook? I saw another fellow out in the kitchen, just a glimpse through this sort of serving counter they have—really an ingenious arrangement, and so tastefully decorated. And a pale blonde woman? Would that be your daughter?”
“I don’t think so, Kiki. I don’t think she actually works there.” Even that was more than she wanted to say, and she headed resolutely—rudely, probably—toward her back door again.
“Well, you’re missing a treat if you don’t eat there,” Kiki said. “Try the soups. And they have the creamiest quiche.” The last word rose and fell on two notes as Rosie reached the door. “When can we get you over for Scrabble, Rose?” Kiki asked her as she turned to say good-bye. “Ralphie keeps asking for you.” A mischievous grin across the peonies.
“Oh, one of these days,” she said. “I’m really working well on my book, and I hate to commit myself. I never know when the mood will strike.”
“Rose, that’s wonderful.” Kiki trotted with tiny steps up to the door. “You never told me that you’d conquered your writer’s block.”
“It comes and goes,” Rosie said. She felt uneasy with any lie, even this tiny, necessary, wishful one.
Kiki was nodding, still smiling. “It comes and goes, I suppose, like the fellow in the van.” Rosie started to say something—her chest tightening up, the sweat coming out on her forehead—but Kiki reached a hand out and touched her shoulder and said, “Oh, Rosie, you’re blushing like a teenager. Listen, I’m glad you’re happy. I don’t want to butt in. When you get some free time you let us know. Meanwhile, I’ll give Ralphie your love. No, not that.” She laughed. “Your regards. Meanwhile, enjoy the pesto.”
“Oh—yes—I will. Thanks,” Rosie called belatedly, but Kiki was already on her way to her own yard. She raised one mahogany arm in a jaunty wave.
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