The Garden Path

by Kitty Burns Florey

  “They make me sick,” said the other, a tanned woman who looked like Kiki. “Literally. They make me want to vomit. I don’t know which is worse, the caterpillars or the moths flying in your face or those filthy egg cases.”

  Rosie would have liked to join in, but she felt shy. “I don’t mind them,” she would have said. “Sure, they’re disgusting, but I have faith in Mother Nature. They go in cycles. Wait—next year there won’t be nearly so many. I did have my trees sprayed, but I had to. I’m a professional gardener. I can’t take a chance on having my stuff destroyed. It has to look nice for the cameras.” She said this long speech over to herself, then again. The women at the next table had fallen silent, looking at her. Had she spoken aloud? Did look nice for the cameras echo in the air? She didn’t think so, but she wasn’t sure, and she smiled vaguely and stood up. Time to go, like it or not. They’d be closing. Ginger was up at the blackboard, wiping it clean with a damp sponge. The black man from the kitchen came out with a tray and began picking up dishes. Rosie didn’t see a cashier. “Do I pay you?” she called to Ginger, and Ginger came over with her check.

  “I’ll take it,” she said. “Our cashier is off today. That’s one reason things are so wild.”

  “They don’t seem wild,” Rosie said earnestly. “They seem quite nice.” She left a large tip—three dollar bills under the butter crock—and headed for the door. As she reached it, Susannah opened it from outside. Susannah? Yes. A tall blonde woman, hair in braids, wearing a denim skirt and a pink polo shirt. Edwin’s long nose and blue eyes. Susannah? The tight feeling came into Rosie’s throat and chest again. She couldn’t have spoken; she could hardly breathe. Susannah didn’t speak, either. She held the door, and Rosie passed through it, and as she did so it seemed to her that Susannah gave her a look of miserable, unmistakable, profound comprehension.

  Chapter Six

  Ashes and Sparks

  By the time Susannah ran into her mother outside the Café, Ivan and Garnet had been gone more than a week. She was, Susannah told herself, getting used to it. The empty bed, the painting taken down, the space in the closet, the shocked, rootless feeling—all that was easy enough to get used to, the way an invalid comes to accept the hospital, the nurses, the injections, the pain, as natural and proper. What was difficult wasn’t the actual loss, or the lies, or even the dreadful truths the lies had masked, but the knowledge of her own capacity for foolishness. This is life, she had said contentedly to herself: this is what it is to be happy—and all the while the truth had been going on, picking away at her silly happiness like termites eating the heart out of a beam until it’s nothing but a husk, and can crumble.

  But Susannah refused to think in such melodramatic terms; she would not consider herself a husk, and she would not crumble. She knew what she was, it was simple enough, she’d known it for years—a silly, blind woman married to a philanderer. Even Ginger couldn’t turn her into a heroine—but then Ginger didn’t know the whole truth. “So you threw the bastard out,” Ginger said, and sighed. “I suppose you know what you’re doing.” Susannah imagined Ginger saying to people—to her beleaguered sister Sheila—“She puts up with his goings-on for years, and then all of a sudden, wham! She’s fed up, and she kicks him out. Not that I blame her, looks aren’t everything, God knows, but it’s a shame.” And what would Ginger say if she knew all the truth? Would words fail even Ginger? Would the mechanics of coping grind to a halt? The Dear Abby wisdom run dry? The rueful laughter stick in her throat?

  Garnet had come over and told Susannah. “I think you ought to know,” she said. “Ivan is having an affair with your mother. She lives over in East Chiswick? On this dead-end street? He’s over there all the time. They go upstairs, and a light goes on, and then a light goes off. He stays late.”

  The conversation took place one afternoon in the kitchen of Duke’s house. Garnet stopped by after work. Susannah had made her a cup of tea, had commiserated with her about her sore feet, had asked about school, and then Garnet had said, “I think you ought to know.”

  “How did you find all this out, Garnet?” Susannah asked her. Oh yes, it was true, she had no doubt of that. It explained any number of things; they pounded at her temples, those things, giving her a headache. She felt like throwing up. But she sipped her tea calmly, keeping Garnet in her stern gaze. Garnet was a pretty thing—young, with smooth tanned skin, braless bouncy breasts, big brown eyes, muscular brown legs and dainty ankles. Cow, Susannah thought.

  “I followed him,” said Garnet. She didn’t avoid Susannah’s eyes, and her voice was defiant. “I had to know where he was. And then I asked him, and he told me.”

  “You asked him, and he told you.” A light goes on, and a light goes off. “He actually told you he’s sleeping with his mother-in-law.”

  A smile flickered around Garnet’s lips. “Yeah.”

  “He’s been sleeping with you, too, I suppose.”

  “No!”

  “Come off it, Garnet.” Susannah wondered at her own bravado. She had never actually seen one of Ivan’s teenage tramps before. Garnet was precisely what she had expected—a pretty, stupid, sneaky cow.

  “We’ve never done anything,” said Garnet.

  “Then why in hell did you follow him, you little bitch?”

  She spoke the words with clenched teeth, gripping the edge of the table. Garnet recoiled, and then the sly suggestion of a smile returned to her face. “I have a crush on him,” she said. “Of course. Who wouldn’t?”

  “Don’t lie to me,” Susannah said, but she spoke more coolly. Her mind was racing ahead. He was sleeping with this waitress, sleeping with her—Rosie—God knew who else he was seeing, what else he was capable of. It was as if a light clicked on, illuminating her life, and she could see for the first time how impossible it was. Who could live like this? I must be crazy. And her: she remembered the dead-end street, the house, the flowers, the figure passing the window. The light clicked on, and the light clicked off.

  “Only once, then,” Garnet was saying. “Once or twice, I forget.”

  “Get out of here, Garnet,” Susannah said, but the girl was already on her feet, on her way to the door.

  “Don’t worry, he doesn’t love me or anything,” she said. “I mean, it’s not anything like that. He doesn’t love her, either. He wants to stay with you. That’s why I thought you should know. I’m trying to do you a favor.” Her voice rose at the end, approaching a wail.

  “Just get out of here,” Susannah said wearily. She didn’t get up; Garnet’s well-meant malice took all the strength out of her. Was she, then, to be grateful for Garnet’s prying? For Ivan’s failure to love all his women?

  “I hate you,” said Garnet, and sobbed once. “I just hate you so much. You never even go to his softball games. I go to his softball games. You don’t even care about him.”

  “Go away.”

  She did so, crying and muttering. Susannah imagined her sobbing behind the wheel of her little Datsun all the way to—where? Ivan? Ivan would still be busy at the restaurant, and then he would—supposedly—be home, unless Garnet waylaid him.

  Susannah knew as she sat there drinking her tea that something would happen. It would be like Edwin, finally, dying; like Margie—something final, something horrible. She wondered for a moment if she would kill him. The light in her mind hadn’t gone on for nothing. All these years, she thought, taking the cups to the sink. Garnet hadn’t touched her tea. Susannah found it difficult to think straight, though she knew she needed to. Everything whirled in her mind: Garnet’s bouncy bosom, Rosie’s house lit up in the dark, mother-in-law jokes, Garnet’s sly smile, Ivan going off in the van, the Silvergate Café, Duke. Standing by the sink, she looked out the window at the summer afternoon and tried to see a straight path through the maze. She had a quick vision of herself sticking one of Duke’s sharp kitchen knives into Ivan’s beautiful stomach. The sun shone brightly, equally, on everything, and she stood there a long time without the faintest idea as to wh
at she should do.

  In the end, though, she threw him out. He came home early, with Duke, and while he was out weeding in the garden she approached him and asked him to leave, and told him why. She hadn’t known, until she looked out and saw him bent over, in shorts, pulling weeds, with his whole filthy secret life curled inside him, that what she wanted was for him to go. But of course that was what must happen. It didn’t move her or impress her or flatter her that he begged her to change her mind, and that he professed to love her, and that tears even came to his eyes.

  “I’m so mixed up right now, Susie,” he said. “Can’t you see me through this?” She said she couldn’t. “I can change,” he said, and she said he could change somewhere else, she wanted him to leave. He said it hadn’t meant anything, and she said it had meant everything, and she would be very grateful if he would leave. He could have money, she didn’t care if he took every cent out of the savings account, so long as he left.

  They went over it and over it. “I don’t care where you go,” she said. “Or what you do any more. Eventually, I’ll want a divorce.”

  She left him in the garden. She went inside, to the twins’ playroom, and sat on one of their little chairs playing with a toy tool chest, hammering in wooden pegs and screwing in plastic screws. She heard Ivan come in, go upstairs, open drawers—how sounds carried in the old house—then come down and talk to Duke in the kitchen. She timed it on her watch; they talked for eight minutes, in low voices. It seemed a very long time. She tapped in a peg. The hammer was painted blue, the bench yellow, the pegs red. She turned the whole thing over and tapped the peg through the other side. Finally, she heard Ivan leave—not banging the screen the way he usually did, but closing it quietly—and then the van started up, and crunched down the driveway, those familiar, depressing sounds. I must be crazy, she thought, to have loved someone like him. To love a monster, to be content all these years, and gave the red peg one last whack that sent it skittering to the floor.

  “Susannah?” It was Duke, at the door. “Oh Jesus, honey, I’m sorry about all this.” She stood up, the hot tears running down her face, and he put his arms around her. She cried, it seemed, for hours. Everything made her cry: every word of comfort, every thought that came to her, even the sound of her own sobs. They sat in the kitchen, in the rocking chairs by the cold woodstove. There was a plant on it now, a nice old sansevieria Duke had had for years; the sight of it made fresh tears come, and so did the cup of coffee Duke made for her after a while, and the plate of fruit and cheese he set out.

  “It’ll do you good to eat, Susannah,” he said, and, sitting down at the table, he began to nibble cheese, looking over at her in a worried way. The late afternoon sun shone through the window in a stripe across his pink cheeks. “Come on. It’s good Vermont cheddar and nice fresh grapes. Here. Have a peach, at least.” He cut one in half and held part of it out to her, biting into the other half himself.

  She couldn’t help smiling. She took a fresh tissue from the box Duke had provided, wiped her eyes and blew her nose twice. He continued to watch her steadily, eating fruit. “Wait,” he said, and got up to wet a dish towel with cold water from the sink and kneel beside her with it. “Wipe your face with this,” he instructed, and then did it for her, gently, as if she was one of the twins and had fallen off her bike.

  “Duke,” she said, leaning her face against the rough cloth, inhaling the faint bleach odor, and the curious warm-bread smell that was Duke. “I’m sorry to be such a pain.”

  “You’re not.”

  He patted her shoulder. She took the towel away and looked at him. “I don’t know what I’m going to do. Can I stay here until I figure things out?”

  “Susannah! Of course you can. How can you even ask?”

  She gave a long, shuddering sigh, and stood up, leaning on him. She had a vague idea that she should do something, reject his hospitality or at least prove herself worthy of it: do the dishes? call a lawyer? get a job? “I suppose I had a nerve,” she said. “Throwing him out of your house. He’s your friend, after all.”

  “You’re my friend, too, Susannah. You know that.”

  “I hope so.”

  “You know that,” he said, and made her sit back down at the table and drink coffee.

  “I must look a sight.”

  “You look all sort of flushed and pretty,” he told her.

  “Oh, stop.”

  “No—you do. Except your nose is kind of red. And your eyes are pink.”

  She laughed and drank more coffee. It was black and strong. She hardly ever drank coffee, and it seemed to go straight from her stomach to her brain, clearing it. She started to speak, but he stopped her.

  “You don’t need to think about what you’re going to do yet. Don’t worry about anything. Stay here and take it easy. Stay as long as you want. Hell, stay forever.” She gave him a quick look, and touched one of her long braids. Rapunzel, she thought. “The twins’ll be back in a couple of weeks,” he said hurriedly. “It would be nice having you here. They’d sure miss you if you left.”

  “I could go to Ginger’s,” she said, feeling she must. She started to get up again. He put one finger on her wrist, and dropped a bunch of grapes into her palm.

  “Stay here, Susannah. We’re friends. This has been your home. Please.”

  “All right. I will, then.” She ate a couple of grapes, to please him, and cut herself a piece of cheese. “And thanks, Duke,” she added, taking pains to keep the disappointment out of her voice, and the fresh jolt of misery that choked her, so that the cheese stuck in her throat and she had to will more tears not to come.

  Ivan left for California two days later. He phoned Duke at the restaurant, and Duke passed the news to Susannah, along with the fact that Garnet had gone with him. She took the news out to the porch, where she sat with her feet up on the rail, chewing her cuticles and contemplating the view of road, brook, trees, and beyond them the gently meandering smoke from the factory.

  That was it, then—the black hole gaping, the nightmare come true. She had told him to get out, and he had gone, headed west with a teenage waitress—such docility, such last-minute regard for his wife’s wishes. She imagined him and Garnet on the van’s narrow bed, the fierce lovemaking when they stopped for the night at campsites in Tennessee, in Louisiana, in Texas. She hoped Garnet’s raunchy good nature disguised the soul of an axe-murderess.

  Duke stood in the doorway, keeping her silent company, and then he came out and sat on the railing facing her. “They’re not going to L.A.,” he said after a minute. “They’re heading for someplace up near the Nevada border.”

  “Spare me the details,” Susannah said, meaning to sound merely sardonic and detached, but her voice came out harsh, and Duke winced, mumbled “Sorry,” and went back inside, leaving her feeling lost, and sad, with the urge to throw something.

  She took down the “Cloud House” painting and carried it up to the attic, leaning it against a dusty pile of boxes. She wondered how long it would take for the painting to get its own dust covering, how long before it was just another old piece of attic junk, like the bushel basket full of spidery mason jars, or the stack of rotting leather suitcases. The wall in the bedroom looked huge and bare. Lying there at night waiting for sleep, with the cats stretched out, hot, on the floor or on the windowsills, she was conscious of the empty wall, and she decided she would, in time, get to like it better—far better—than the cheap prettiness of Ivan’s painting.

  But it didn’t help her to sleep—that blankness, and the blankness all around. The old litanies, the beautiful words, the bits of poems, none of it helped: Sri Lanka, Sri Lanka, willow-wood, prairie, heliotrope, mallow pink, season of mists and mellow fruitfulness.… They no longer hypnotized her, conjuring up the visions that entered her dreams and, eventually, her stories. And her old reveries of Silvergate, plagiarized from her mother’s memories, didn’t help either: the roses, the hedge clipped into turrets, the goldfish pond and the lilies, all seemed
irrelevant, more distant than Pemberley. She lay awake, crying sometimes, or trying to plot herself a future, more often simply lying with her eyes open and her mind numb. The house was so still she could hear, from down the hall, Duke turn in his sleep.

  Duke became hesitant with her, and shy. He was, she knew, worried about the fate of the Café. She told him not to be, that the capital was hers, and that she still considered them partners. Ivan could fend for himself; as for her, she had bound herself up with the Silvergate Café and she would gladly, willingly, stay bound.

  “The money is there,” she said to Duke. “And I’m no business genius, but it’s obvious that it’s not going to be long before we start pulling in a profit—especially if we expand in the fall. I’m not worried.”

  “All the same,” he said. “We should have a lawyer. Get it all put into writing.”

  “I don’t really believe you’re going to cheat me, Duke.” Susannah wondered whether Duke had ever read Bleak House, and imagined him explaining earnestly to some Vholes, or Tulkinghorn, the tangled tale of Susannah and Ivan and Duke and the Silvergate Café.

  “You never know,” he said stubbornly.

  “Yes, you do,” she said, and smiled. “Sometimes you really do.”

  It struck her, talking to Duke, that she should tell Peter, and her father, about Ivan’s departure. A broken marriage, like a death in the family, was an event that had to be communicated. Peter, however, had gone to Vermont to work on his dissertation; another friend, with another rustic cottage, had invited him. Not that she could have told him anything but the bare bones of the truth; how do you tell your brother that your mother has been sleeping with your husband? It was like that old song, “I’m My Own Grandpa.” Edwin used to sing it to her; she had a vivid memory of him sitting in a camp chair somewhere—in Mexico?—with a drink in his hand and his head thrown back, singing.