Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant - Anne Tyler [82]
But he continued watching the other two. He was not the least bit interested in what she might be saying. The kitchen was fully exposed, and could not have concealed the smallest secret. So why was Cody nervous? Ezra and Ruth stood talking with one of the cooks, their backs to the dining room. Ezra gestured as he spoke. He lifted both arms wide, one arm behind Ruth but not touching her, not brushing her shoulder, surely not encircling her or anything like that. Even so, Cody rose abruptly from his chair. “Cody!” Pearl said. He strode toward the kitchen, with his napkin crumpled in one fist. Pearl stood up and hurried after him, and arrived in time to hear him say, “Let’s go, Ruth.”
“Go?”
“I didn’t come here to watch you and Ezra chumming it up in the kitchen.”
Ruth looked scared. Her face seemed to grow more pointed.
“Come on,” said Cody, and he took her elbow. “Goodbye,” he told Pearl and Ezra.
“Oh!” said Pearl, running after them. “Oh, Cody, what can you be thinking of? How can you act so foolish?”
Cody yanked Ruth’s coat from a brass hook in passing. He opened the front door and pulled Ruth into the street and shut the door behind them.
Ezra said, “I don’t understand.”
Pearl said, “Why does it always turn out this way? How come we end up quarreling? Don’t we all love each other? Everything else aside,” she said, “don’t we all want the best for one another?”
“Certainly we do,” Ezra said.
His answer was so level and firm that she felt comforted. She knew things were bound to work out someday. She let him lead her back to the table, and the two of them had a forlorn turkey dinner on the wide expanse of white linen.
Upstairs there are four bedrooms, sparsely furnished, musty. The beds are so sunken-looking, evidently even the courting couples have not been tempted by them. They’re untouched, the drab, dirty quilts still smooth. But a dead bird lies beneath one window. Pearl calls down the stairwell. “Ezra? Ezra, come here this instant. Bring the broom and trash bag.”
He mounts the stairs obediently. She looks down and sees, with a pang, that his lovely fair hair is thinning on the back of his head. He is thirty-seven years old, will be thirty-eight in December. He will probably never marry. He will never do anything but run that peculiar restaurant of his, with its hodgepodge of food, its unskilled waitresses, its foreign cooks with questionable papers. You could say, in a way, that Ezra has suffered a tragedy, although it’s a very small tragedy in the eyes of the world. You could say that he and Ruth, together, have suffered a tragedy. Something has been done to them; something has been taken away from them. They have lost it. They are lost. It doesn’t help at all that Cody in fact is a very nice man—that he’s bright and funny and genuinely kind, to everyone but Ezra.
You could almost say that Cody, too, has suffered a tragedy.
In 1964, when she went out to Illinois to visit them, she felt in their house the thin, tight atmosphere of an unhappy marriage. Not a really terrible marriage—no sign of hatred, spitefulness, violence. Just a sense of something missing. A certain failure to connect, between the two of them. Everything seemed so tenuous. Or was it her imagination? Maybe she was wrong. Maybe it was the house itself—a ranch house in a development, rented for the four months or so that Cody would need to reorganize a plastics plant in Chicago. Plainly the place was expensive, with wall-to-wall carpeting and long, low, modern furniture; but there were no trees anywhere nearby, not even a bush or a shrub—just that raw brick cube rising starkly from the flatness. And outside it was so white-hot, so insufferably hot, that they were confined to the house with its artificial, refrigerated air. They were imprisoned by the house, dependent upon it like spacemen in a spaceship, and when they went out it was only to dash through a crushing weight of heat to Cody’s air-conditioned Mercedes. Ruth, going about her chores every day, had the clenched expression of someone determined