“No,” he said. “I can’t see where it was wrong, what you did.”
“I don’t mean it was wrong. I just mean there’s something wrong with it.” She laughed briefly. “If you see what I mean.”
“I suppose I do. But, Susannah—”
“No,” she said, answering. “I would never, never, never take him back.” She thought of all the resolutions she had broken; this one, she knew, was unbreakable. “Never.”
They sat in silence. They had lived together a week. It was beginning to seem more natural. They had agreed, wordlessly, to go to bed and get up at different hours. It saved the awkwardness of meeting in the bathroom, of wishing each other good night at their bedroom doors, and the absurdity of parting there. And meals, too, would fall into their pattern: a late, simple dinner, followed by a companionable beer on the porch before Duke, who had to get up early, took himself off the bed and Susannah stayed up to read. Could people live that way, Susannah wondered—a man and a woman who were fond of each other live simply as roommates? She hadn’t realized, while she was living it, how sexual her life with Ivan was—not just screwing, but how much day-to-day touching there had been. Could two people live without that? Oh yes, of course, she said calmly to herself in her head, and at the same time she felt a deep, damp depression, like fog, settle around her.
She spoke. “I’ve got to tell you, Duke—there’s something else on my mind, and I need your advice.” She was determined to make her way through the fog, now, quickly, before Duke yawned, stood up, stretched, said, “Well—” and headed for the stairs, calling back a goodnight.
“Oh, good,” he said. “I love to give advice, and I hardly ever get asked for it.”
She looked at him. He sat slouched, with his feet up on the porch railing. He waved away a bug. She could see, just, that in spite of his light tone he was frowning. “Well, I’m asking for it,” she said. “Because I seem to be pregnant.”
The frown smoothed out, and he closed his eyes and lifted his face to the moon. “Oh Jesus,” he said. “Oh Jesus H. I. J. Christ, Susannah.”
She touched his arm. “I don’t even know what kind of advice I’m asking for, Duke. I want this child—that’s the trouble, I suppose. I intend to have it. I never should have let it happen, of course, but I didn’t think we’d actually break up. I swore I’d never let my marriage get so bad it would have to end. And a child would have helped us—it would.”
“You don’t have to apologize for it, Susannah.” His voice was thick with emotion—but what emotion? She didn’t know. “It’s just—oh, Jesus, what a mess.”
The fog swirled around her and she thought she might scream, smash her glass against the porch rail and with the jagged pieces slash something, anything—her wrist, her chair, the rolled-up awning. Duke stood up suddenly, and looked down at her, holding out a hand. “But you stay with me, of course. You stay right here.”
She sighed deeply, set her beer glass down gently on the floor, and took his hand. He pulled her up to stand beside him, and took her in his arms. She felt his glasses against her temple. “You’re always having to comfort me,” she said. Her hands, in fists, pushed against his chest, resisting any more comfort beyond his words.
“Not enough,” said Duke, holding her tight. “Not enough, Susannah. You go ahead and cry if you want to.”
But she didn’t cry. She unclenched her fists and put her arms around his neck. His hand on her shoulder blades moved down her back, pressing her closer, and he kissed her neck and her cheek, and when she turned her face toward him he kissed her lips, and she sank against him, circling his pudgy middle with her arms. After a while they went inside, locked up, fed the cats, and climbed the creaky stairs together to Duke’s bedroom. Duke lit a candle. There was a copy of Walden on the table by his bed.
“I’ve imagined this so many times,” said Duke.
For a moment astonishment overcame her, but all she said was, “So have I,” and stepped out of her skirt, wondering what the catalyst had been—her abject need, or the simple passage of time, or the yellow moonlight, or the little fish of a baby swimming in her womb.
It began to rain in the night, and the sound woke Susannah. She got out of bed and tiptoed to the bathroom. When she returned, Keats and Byron were on the bed, and she removed them gently to the hall, closing the door on them; she didn’t yet know if Duke minded cats on the bed. She curled up close to his back and pulled the sheet over them both, and, wide awake, listening to the rain tapping, she began patching together what she knew about him: he was gentle and humorous but he took life seriously; he wore glasses; he came from Ashtabula, Ohio; he was a good cook, good with his hands … Susannah smiled, with her cheek against his broad soft back. She liked him. He suited her. He smelled of sweat, soap, sleep. A good man. She wondered whether Edwin, who would never meet him, would have liked him; he had considered Ivan, she knew, a bum, but he’d half admired Ivan’s coarse flamboyance, and she wondered whether he would find Duke dull by comparison—a bit too earnest, too self-effacing. And would he and Peter become friends? And the baby—the baby. Her period was two weeks late, the baby might not be real at all, she must go to a doctor. She wouldn’t let herself hope, wouldn’t even think about it until she had a test. She remembered when Carla thought she was pregnant. Susannah had gone to the clinic with her, sat in the waiting room while Carla went in, comforted her when she came out crying, gone through the months of waiting with her, visited her in the hospital with flowers, and there was Tyler, Carla’s little son. It had all been worth it; Carla got along fine, taking in typing at home so Tyler wouldn’t have to go to daycare, she thought children should be with their mothers, and there was always a man around, what Carla called a “father figure.” It was all right; it worked. Even in the days when Susannah didn’t want a child herself—refused to let herself want one—the sight of Carla and Tyler could bring a lump to her throat. She could still remember the time Tyler fell asleep on her lap and she laid her cheek against his soft yellow hair.
Duke stirred, mumbled something—half a groan. Often, before, as she lay awake down the hall, miserable over Ivan, she had heard Duke turn in his sleep, and once he had cried out, calling what sounded like “Hatchet!” and then sighed loudly, snored once or twice, and quiet returned. His bed squeaked horribly, an old metal thing with springs; they’d have to do something about it before the twins returned. The twins: what a good father he was. Better than a father figure: a father. She remembered Carla saying, “If I only had a father for my baby”—as if a father was some expensive baby gift, like an English pram. Susannah was half asleep. He’s from Ashtabula, Ohio, she thought. He’s chubby around the middle. His name is Ellington James Foster. He reads Walden. He imagined this.…
She didn’t hear the phone. What woke her was Duke leaping out of bed and opening the door to the hall. “What—” But then she did hear it ring, and Duke answer it, and come back and say, “It’s for you. It’s Peter.”
He put on the overhead light—the look of emergency, Susannah thought fleetingly, lights on in the middle of the night. She went naked to the landing, self-conscious, shivering a little. She could still hear the rain.
“Peter?”
“Susannah. Listen, this isn’t serious—I mean, she’s all right now, but she’s in the hospital, and she wants to see you. I know it’s early—”
Even though she knew perfectly well, she said, “You mean Mom?”
“Yes—I’m sorry. I’m probably incoherent. I’ve been here all night.”
“Peter, what time is it?”
“Six-thirty. I don’t even know why I’m calling you so early, it’s just that she keeps asking for you. But she’s asleep now, they gave her something. You can’t even see her until eight or so, I think. Visiting hours start at eight, something like that. But it’s been a long night, Susannah.”
She rubbed her eyes and sat down on the top step, forcing herself awake. Duke came up behind her and put a bathrobe over her shoulders,
and she thanked him with a smile. She could see dawn, now, through the window; it was the rain making it so dark. Duke went by her, down the stairs, touching her hair lightly as he passed.
“Peter? I’m sorry, I don’t understand this. She’s in the hospital and she wants to see me. What’s she in the hospital for?”
“She shot herself, Susannah.” The words hung in the air, distinct as bells. She put her head down on her knees. Her hand holding the phone went limp. The phone dropped to her lap, cool on her bare skin, but she could hear Peter’s voice, high with the held-back hysteria she realized had been there all along. “She tried to kill herself.”
“Oh God, Peter,” she whispered. Distantly, she could hear Peter cough—she wondered if he was crying—then resume talking in a more controlled voice.
“Her neighbors heard the shot, and broke in, and called an ambulance and took her to the hospital. By the time I got here they were operating. She aimed for her heart but apparently she was holding the gun at an angle because it missed her heart and got her in the shoulder and tore some cartilage, and the bullet lodged in there. The surgeon said she was damned lucky.” He paused, took a deep breath, and was silent.
Susannah could hear Duke in the kitchen, making coffee. She said, “Peter, why did she have a gun?”
“She won’t tell me. She won’t tell me anything. She wants to see you.”
“Why me?” Susannah asked, but she knew; she remembered Rosie’s sorry, defeated face, the look they had exchanged.
“I don’t know. She just cries and says she has to see you. It was the first thing she said when she came to.”
Susannah tried and failed to imagine this, her mother weak and bloody, wrapped in white, groaning out her daughter’s name. Oh God. “I can’t come ’til eight?”
“I don’t know, Suse, let me check. I know visiting hours are—wait. Let me go ask a nurse.”
“You’re calling from her room?”
“Yes. I got her a private room. She’s asleep. Just a minute, I’ll go find someone.”
She heard him put the phone down, and imagined it lying on the stand beside the bed—tan metal, the stand would be, like Edwin’s, with a box of tissues and a styrofoam pitcher of ice water. And her mother—white, withered, hollow-eyed—lying on the bed, the bed cranked up to an angle. Susannah strained to hear her breathe, but could hear nothing. Her arm would be in a sling, perhaps? or her shoulder bound round with bandages? Would she be hooked up to tubes? Susannah tried to picture Rosie peaceful and sleeping, but all she could see was her mother’s ravaged face, too much makeup, the eyes looking straight at her and away, the mouth compressed by grief and shame and fatigue. Or did she imagine all that? And then to go home and shoot herself, aiming for the heart.
“Susannah? You can come any time, they said.”
“I’ll be there as soon as I can get dressed, Peter. She’s at Yale-New Haven?”
“Yes—wait—let me—it’s room 553, in the Trauma Unit.”
“You’ll be there?”
“I’ll stay until you come, at least. I’ll stay until she wakes up and I see how she is.” He chuckled a little, and his voice lightened for the first time. “I thought we could all meet under slightly more pleasant conditions—over a drink somewhere, maybe.” He sighed. “I’m sorry about this, Susannah. Dragging you in.”
“I want to be dragged in, Peter. It’s time I was.” It seemed, as she said the words, as if all winter, and spring, and summer had existed to culminate in this.
Duke drove her into New Haven in his Volkswagen. They took their coffee with them in plastic “commuter cups” Ivan had picked up somewhere and Duke made her a piece of toast. She nibbled at it as they drove, absently, agitated. “I’m trying to imagine,” she said, “putting the muzzle of a gun to your heart and pulling the trigger.” The idea made her want to scream, wail, carry on somehow. It was a monstrous, vile idea, something to read about in books or see on the news. She remembered Kennedy shot, covered with blood; she had seen it on television, not long before her parents broke up, blood in the car, on his wife’s pink suit. She had cried all that night—she and Peter. She felt she should be crying now, but she sat in the little car watching the cat’s-paw raindrops and the half-moons left by the windshield wipers, trying to see her mother doing it: placing the gun, taking a breath, closing her eyes, thinking—what? this is the end, good-bye, good-bye, what does it all matter—and squeezing the trigger. And then oblivion, and blood, and coming to in the hospital asking for her daughter. “If she was a person in one of my stories I could understand perfectly,” she said. “But my mother.”
“You said she looked depressed, worse than depressed.”
“She did. But then to do that, with a gun.” She looked out the window. A gray curtain over everything: fog. “I think to shoot yourself takes a special kind of brave soul. It’s different from pills or cutting your wrists or drowning.”
“Violent, you mean.”
“Yes, and reckless. There’s no going back.”
Duke leaned toward her slightly. “But in this case there was, thank goodness.”
She looked away from the bleak landscape to Duke’s gray eyes behind his glasses. In the little car they were very close together. “I’m sorry about wrecking your day off. First keeping you up so late, then dragging you out of bed at the crack of dawn.” It was a brave speech, and she said it with difficulty; they had been brisk and busy since the phone call, dressing quickly, gulping coffee; he hadn’t even kissed her. There had only been that touch on her hair, the bathrobe thrown over her.
Duke smiled, his face very distinct in the clear, unfogged morning light inside the car: the scar on his cheek, neat triangle of nose, soft hair, the wide thin mouth with its funny smile. “Don’t you dare apologize for last night,” he said. “Some things are a lot better than sleep.”
Thinking, she didn’t answer. Were his words a shy declaration? And was she a heartless woman, to be pondering that instead of her mother’s bloody deed? It was the baby, it was the maternal instinct, she told herself, then looked at Duke’s oddly bony wrists, his square hands on the wheel, and knew it was something else besides that. Tenderness for Duke filled her heart, suddenly, and at the same moment she saw Ivan’s face smiling at her, his teeth so white, his beard so dark—false smile, true smile, it had never mattered. She remembered how she had thought of sticking a knife into him, and thought of her mother in a pool of blood. “Duke,” she said suddenly. “Will you marry me? After I divorce Ivan?”
There was a long pause, during which she considered opening the car door and throwing herself out on Route 95. She held back tears, and more words, waiting. This is the end, she thought wildly. What does it all matter?
Duke spoke finally. “I’m going to say something so sappy and awful it’s going to make you sick, Susannah.” Don’t say it, she thought, and pressed her palms to her temples. “I’m still in love with my wife. She’s been dead two years, and I still dream about her. I dream she’s still alive, and when I wake up and she isn’t I wish I were dead, and I think if it wasn’t for the twins I would be, Susannah. I can understand the gun.”
“I’m sorry,” she whispered, and put her hands over her eyes and bent over and began to cry.
He touched her shoulder. “I’m sorry, too, Susannah. Don’t cry. I’m sorry.” The car swerved, and she looked up, rubbed at her eyes, but he had pulled over to the side, stopped the car, and he put his arms around her, awkwardly, in the bucket seats. There were tears in his eyes, too. “Stay with me, Susannah. You can stay as long as you want. Stay forever. I’ll take care of you and the baby and everything. You can write your stories.” Her ear was against his cheek; his voice buzzed like a radio. “It’s just that I don’t have a lot to give.”
They sat in silence for a while. She stopped crying. It was very hot in the car with the windows closed against the rain. She imagined cars passing them, the commuter traffic beginning, people seeing them with their arms around each other, pe
ople smiling or envious thinking: Lovers. She sat up straight, ran her fingers through her hair, wiped her eyes with the backs of her hands. “Enough of this,” she said.
He touched her cheek with his rough hand. “Susannah,” he said, and it seemed to her that he looked at her with love. And yet he said he had nothing to give. I’m always crying, and I’m always wrong, she thought. She smiled, trying for jauntiness, and reached for her coffee. “For years I didn’t cry,” she said. “Ever. My father discouraged it. I got good at not crying.”
“I thought the first thing everyone learned in California was not to repress things,” Duke said, smiling back, and put the car in gear. They slipped back on the highway.
“Maybe I never had anything much to cry about before.”
“I’m sorry, Susannah.”
“Oh, don’t keep saying it.” He looked even sorrier, and she regretted her words. “Now I’m sorry,” she said, and they both laughed. She looked at him, and saw Margie, with gold stars in her ears. “Life is but a paltry thing,” she said. He glanced over at her, raising his eyebrows. “A tattered something, I forget. It’s a quote.” You always forget, came Ivan’s voice. The coffee was lukewarm and tasted of the plastic mug.
At the hospital there was no place to park, even at that hour of the morning. There was a parking lot, not open yet. Duke drove around, swearing, and finally dropped her off at the entrance. “I’ll find a spot and be back,” he said.
The Garden Path Page 27
