Garden of Lies (54 page)

Rose felt as if the champagne she’d just swallowed had suddenly turned to acid. It was burning

its way down her throat, tearing away at her stomach.

She found herself remembering the first man she’d slept with after Brian. One of her N.Y.U.

professors, a short, heavyset man with thick dark hair and a beard like fur, who didn’t look a

thing like Brian except for his glasses—the same tortoise-rims Brian wore when he read. And

she’d gone to bed with him for that. His eyeglasses. He took her out for some beer and pizza,

discoursing on Proust nonstop, and then she’d gone back to his apartment, climbed between his

sour-smelling sheets, and let him make love to her. And she hadn’t felt a thing except sorrow.

There had been other men since then, a few, men she had liked, flirted with, men whose bodies

she’d enjoyed. But no one she’d loved, no one she’d have shed a tear over, no one who could

have ruined her life as Brian had.

Oh God.

How could she go over there now? Talk to him, act as if all this were perfectly normal, just a

bit surprising, two old friends bumping into each another in a strange place—

But somehow, she
was
walking over, breaking away from Max and walking toward Brian

through air thick as water. The sounds around her were all distorted, as if she were under water.

The conversation dulled to a low hum, but the clink of ice in someone’s tumbler sounded to her

like the violent shattering of glass.

Then she was facing him, putting her hand out—a hand [326] belonging not to her, but the

creature from the wax museum that she had just become. She saw the shock registering in his

face. An instant of naked pain. Then he was the same man he had been a minute ago.

Lean and hungry.
The words popped into her head. A cliché from a pulp novel. But it

described Brian all the same. The face she had carried in her heart like a cameo all these years,

only its angles sharper, hair longer, curling over the collar of his brown corduroy jacket, a

shadowing of premature gray at the temples. Those silver eyes, which had seemed so startlingly

lit from within, now like mirrors in which she saw only herself reflected.

“Hello, Brian,” she greeted him.

“My God, I don’t believe it ... Rose!” The glass in his hand slipped, and with a quick jerky

motion he caught it, beads of amber liquid spattering onto the white carpet. That gave her a

moment to swim to the surface, catch her breath before she heard him exclaim, “You’re the last

person on earth I expected to see here!”

She gave a brittle, sparkling laugh that hurt in her own ears. “Well, me too. I mean, you’re the

last person
I
expected to see. How
are
you?”

“Good. Better than ever. I wrote a book. Even managed to get it published and sell a few

copies. Mr. Everest here is giving it quite a send-off in England.”

He was smiling, and it was such a false, strained smile, Rose wanted to kick it in just as she’d

wanted to kick in those posters of him on cardboard propped up in the bookstores. Phrases floated

through her head, snatches of reviews she’d read.

...
the debut of a powerful new novelist ...

... more raw power than THE NAKED AND THE DEAD, more poignant than ALL QUIET ON

THE WESTERN FRONT ...

... DOUBLE EAGLE is the real-life code name for a military operation in Vietnam ... but it is

also the symbol of its hero’s disillusionment with his own country. Don’t read this book unless

you’re prepared to have your heart broken, and how you think of modern warfare forever

changed. ...

She had read it, wanting to hate it, and had been so moved she had cried for hours after

finishing it.

Rose wanted to cry now, too. Hot tears threatening to [327] betray her were gathering at the

back of her throat. She imagined tiny hairline cracks fanning out from the corners of her brittle

smile.

And then, she heard Brian saying, “Rose, I want you to meet my wife ...”

Incredible, but there she was.
She was standing beside him all along, and I just didn’t see her.

Now, suddenly Brian’s wife was the only person in the room.

“... Rachel ...”

Rose thought with a stab,
She’s beautiful. I didn’t expect her to be so beautiful.

Tiny and slender, a good head and a half shorter than Brian, but there was nothing doll-like

about this woman. She radiated strength, a sense of purpose. It was in her eyes, bright and blue as

pilot flames, and in the tiny muscles that leaped under her skin as she angled herself forward

slightly, smiling, to shake Rose’s hand.

Slim fingers tightened about hers in a crisp, surprisingly hard clasp. Everything about Rachel

was crisp, bright, hot, crackling with intensity. And different. Somehow, she was like no other

woman in the room. Everywhere, beads and bangles and sequins sewed onto tie-dyed silk, and

here was
this
woman in a crisp oyster linen suit as clean and simple as a thank-you note written

on a single sheet of expensive stationery. Her hair was the pale amber of good brandy, and she

wore it parted in the center, falling in loose waves to the small of her back, oddly free spirited.

Rose, smiling, shaking her hand, couldn’t take her eyes off the slim gold band on the third

finger of Rachel’s left hand. She wanted to rip it off. It didn’t belong there.

It’s mine. I should be the one wearing it. Brian should be my husband, not yours.

The tears rose, hot and suffocating, and suddenly Rose knew she couldn’t stand here being

polite a second longer. She broke away, and fled, pushing her way through the crowd—
go to hell,

all of you, I don’t care what you think
—down the stairs.

A long hallway, a door in back, and suddenly Rose found herself in a garden. A garden as old

as the house, dark and silent as a well. Brick walls blanketed in English ivy, a moss-grown

fountain guarded over by a headless stone cupid.

[328] Quiet, except for the sound of water dripping off leaves onto the brick patio, a hollow

and somehow heartless sound.

Rose sank down on a damp stone bench, and saw that she was still holding her empty

champagne glass. Like a character suffering a bitter joke at the end of a Noel Coward play. She

started to laugh, but the laughter turned into something else, emerging from her throat as a sob.

She lifted her empty glass to the headless cupid. “Here’s to us, Bri. May we rest in peace.”

Chapter 21

“Rose ... I’m sorry.”

Behind her, Brian’s voice, soft, and somehow shocking in the stillness. Rose felt her skin pull

tight with gooseflesh. Her heart racing in giant uneven bounds, she jerked around to face him.

“Sorry for what?” she asked bitterly. “Sorry you came here tonight? Sorry I had the bad taste to

say hello? Or just sorry you dumped me without a word all those years ago? You know

something, Brian, it’s true what they say, that one picture is worth a thousand words. You have

no
idea just how true—” She trailed off brokenly.

She stared at him, searching his face for what she hoped to find. Hurt. Pain.
Dear God, let him

feel at least one tiny sliver of all I’ve suffered.
But when she saw, in the watery light that filtered

down from the upstairs windows, how pale he was, almost shockingly white, how drawn and

miserable he looked, she wanted only to go to him, throw her arms around him and comfort him.

And in that instant Rose knew why it was she would never be free of him. Because she

couldn’t decide whether to love him or hate him. God, why did he have to make it so hard? Why

couldn’t hating him be a simple thing?

“It wasn’t like that,” he said with profound sadness. “And I’m not sorry you came tonight.

Rose ... I ... I’ve thought about calling you, so many times. But—” He spread his hands in a

gesture of helplessness that said everything and nothing.

Rose was aware of her hands clenching, nails digging into her palms. Her breath raking her

throat in hot, dry gasps. Mother of God,
why
did she have to go through this all over again?

But she knew, deep inside her, that though she wanted to run away, she could not. This

somehow was her destiny, as if she and [330] Brian had both been on a track, coming from

opposite ends, and this meeting was the inevitable collision.

“If I’d known you were going to be here tonight,” she said, “I wouldn’t have come.” She

brought her clenched hands to her face, so cold they were like lumps of ice. “Oh God, Brian,

why?
Why
did you do it? All these years ... I just wish I’d known. That’s what killed me. Not

knowing why.
Why did you marry her?”

A long pause, and Brian said gently, “It wasn’t because I didn’t love you, Rose. I want you to

know that. If it would have made a difference, I ... well, I did try to see you when I got back, but

you ...”

“I hung up on you, right? About a dozen times if I remember. Do you think that changes

anything? Do you honestly, Brian? Jesus, was I supposed to meet you somewhere for lunch,

listen to your lousy explanations, let you tidy it all up into a neat little farewell package? So long,

it’s been nice knowing you, and by the way do you want that corned beef sandwich with mustard

or sauerkraut?” She was weeping now. “We were better than that, weren’t we, Brian? We were

better
than just a couple of kids from Brooklyn screwing up on the roof.”

“Rose ... Rosie ...” He put his hands out toward her, as if he wanted to console her, but didn’t

know how. Those long hands, so pale in the darkness they seemed almost incandescent. She had

loved them so dearly, and they had known her so tenderly, intimately. “I still wish there was

some way to explain. It just ... what I wanted you to know ... it wasn’t simple. It wasn’t one

decision, one day when I decided this was going to happen, this was how it was going to be.”

Rose watched Brian’s hands drop to his sides. He sagged onto the bench, staring sightlessly

into the darkness. She thought helplessly,
Oh Jesus, he breaks my heart just looking at him.

Older, thinner, those bones jumping right out of his face like the stone ridges of a mountain, and

—
I
still can’t believe it
—that gray at his temples.

“A lot of people, they’ll try to tell you what it was like over there, in Nam,” he began,

haltingly. “But no one, not me or anyone else, could ever make you
believe
it really happened

that way. It was like ... well, like
there,
the war, the jungle, was the only thing there was or ever

had been, and nothing else was real. Not home or my [331] family or even you. All of you ...

imagining what you were doing ... it was like watching one of those old black and white TV

shows where the reception is all snowy and you know, even while you’re buying it, all those

dumb lines, you
know
they’re only actors getting paid to act as if they give a shit about each

other. It didn’t matter how many times I
told
myself you were waiting for me, that you loved me,

it just never ... seemed real. Then, when you didn’t write ...”

Rose felt as if he’d driven a knife into her heart. “Your letters. The ones Nonnie kept from me.

Oh God. Didn’t you get my—”

“I got your letter. They forwarded it to me at the base. But not until after I was discharged.

After Rachel and I ...” He trailed off. “So you see how it was.”

“Are you asking me to forgive you, Brian? Are you honestly asking me to believe you married

her
because you thought I’d stopped loving you?”

He turned his face up to her, and she saw that tears stood in his eyes. “I don’t know anymore,

Rose. It’s been such a long time. I honestly don’t know anymore what I thought, exactly, at the

time. I do know how I felt, and that it probably had nothing to do with you or what was real. Then

... after I was wounded ... it got worse, that feeling. It was as if I’d been asleep and had just

woken up, and everything that had happened before that was just dreams. Some of those dreams I

barely remembered.”

“Like me?”

“No. I remembered you, Rose. You just ... you were make-believe. The only thing real was that

hospital, that bed I was lying in, the godawful pain. And Rachel. She saved my life, Rose. She ...

she was
real
.”

Rose thought,
This is real, too, the way I feel now. And I hate him for doing this, for trying to

making me understand. For telling me all this, hurting me even more.

But a part of her
did
understand. He had been far away from home, and something terrible had

happened ... and it was that
something
which had taken their lives and blown them apart.

She understood too, now, after all these years, that Brian hadn’t meant to hurt her. But then,

hadn’t she known that all along—down in the deepest part of her heart where forgiveness lay

buried?

[332] Rose
saw
in his face that he was telling the truth, as best as he knew it. His tear-filled

eyes caught the light, and for an instant they shone bright and sharp as broken glass.

A final truth of her own dawned in her, too: that she loved him, even now, and that she would