Eden Close (28 page)

Outside, the lightning comes again, but it is nothing and barely registers. The thunder is more muted than it was when they entered the room. The storm, he thinks, must be moving on. The panes rattle in the loose window frame as if from a farewell gust. He glances over at her desk, at the clothes on the chair, at the clay on the blotter. His eyes stray back to the slanted ceiling directly over him. He squints at the paper. There are tiny holes surrounding the crumbling plaster, he now sees.
Of course,
he thinks,
from the shooting.
And there will be other tiny holes in the room too.

He forces himself to a sitting position. He stands and walks across the room to the window. The window sticks, then gives. On the lawn between the two houses, he can see eddies of leaves and twigs, twisted into dust devils by the wind. On the horizon is a seam of bright light beneath the cloud bank.

Her robe is still raised to her waist. He walks back to the bed and bends across it. He lifts her hand free of the edge, where she is clutching it. He smooths the robe over her legs. He walks to the chair and sits down.

He watches as she turns onto her back. She wipes away a patch of sweat near her temple with the palm of her hand. Already, through the open window, there is the faintest suggestion of a chill in the air.

On either side of the well of the desk are the drawers, the bottom drawers the deepest. He opens the one to his right. Inside is a forest of gray clay shapes. He lifts out one of the small sculptured pieces and puts it on the blotter. It is a figure of a nude woman, sitting on a straight-back chair, not unlike the one he is on. Her head is bent forward, and
her long back is curved. One leg is stretched out, the other bent. The sculpture is about fifteen inches high, but he can make out the fine depressions to the side of one eye. The hair, thick and tangled, cascades down the back of the chair. It is an extraordinary likeness, but it is not just the likeness. It is the remarkable softness of the body against the square shape of the chair.

He looks over at Eden on the bed. She has to have heard him open the drawer. He draws out another. It is again a self-portrait, a woman in a sundress with buttons down the front, bending to the floor to pick up a shirt. He runs his fingers along the folds of the skirt, admires the way it opens as the woman has bent forward.

"These are wonderful," he says.

She says nothing, turns her face slightly away from him.

"This is what you meant," he says.

He takes another from the drawer. It is a woman in a nightgown, lying on her side.

"She brings me clay," she says. "But they dry up after a while, and they break."

"But they could be kiln-dried, couldn't they? Or reproduced in metal? They're beautiful." He feels a sensation, something like relief, that she has had this—and then another sensation, one of admiration, that she has been able to create such beauty in this barren room.

She hugs her arms as if she were again cold. She rises to a sitting position. Another gust whistles against the window.

"I'm sorry," he says. "I should never have forced you like that."

"It's all right," she says.

He runs his fingertips along the nightgown of clay. "I went for a walk this morning," he says, "and I found a dog lying in the middle of the road. It had been hit by a car and couldn't move. But it was still alive. I carried it to the side
of the road. I lay down beside it while a storm passed over, and when I sat up it was dead."

She draws the robe more tightly around her legs.

"A man came by with a pickup truck and let me bring the dog home. I buried it this morning under the hydrangea tree."

She hunches her shoulders forward and rubs her arms.

"But the thing about the dog is it never cried," he says. "Do you remember any of it—the skating, the railroad tracks, the baseball?"

She tilts her chin up, as if thinking.

"I was remembering this morning," he says, "after I found the dog, that day you were hit with the puck on the cheekbone. Do you remember it? Sean had whacked it, and it caught you right under the eye. Your face turned white, but you didn't cry. I'll never forget it. You never made a sound."

She stands up and walks to the window, her back to him. Her arms are tightly wound over her chest.

"He was always in my bed," she says, "from the very beginning. He would lie down with me to tuck me in when I was little, and sometimes we would sleep side by side."

"You don't have to tell me," he says.

She rubs one of the panes with a finger. "She didn't like it, his being with me, but there wasn't anything she could do. She didn't want to touch me herself."

He watches her from the chair. She is making perfect circles on the glass.

"When I was older, she told him I was too old for him to be doing that. She could say it then, so he stopped. But she started working nights, and he came when she was away. It started then, when we both knew we were hiding from her."

As we have,
he thinks suddenly but doesn't say.

She turns toward him, leans against the sill. "I never
said no, not the first time, not ever. It was what I had to offer him. To offer anyone."

He massages the sculpture in his hands. There is nothing he can say. He could say,
It wasn't your fault,
but the phrase seems meaningless, the world
fault
without reference. It is an intimacy he doesn't entirely comprehend. He knows there must be consequences, ramifications to this unnatural life she has had, and perhaps he could say it was this that made her the way she was then, but these would be shallow suppositions, made without understanding.

His eye falls to the chocolate floorboards by her feet. Somewhere on these floorboards, Jim died and Edith found him, and then his father found all of them. The ground lurches when he tries to bring Jim into focus. Soon his memories of Jim will have to be recast, redrawn again. And of Edith too, he thinks dizzily.

"Did she know?" he asks.

She doesn't answer him directly. She leans her head back against the window. "I've had all these years to ask
why,
and I still don't know the answer. I knew the answer better then; I could feel it. Now I can't. She wasn't cold to him. It wasn't that. He liked young girls. He needed to drink before he came to me, but he was always gentle, he never hurt me. It wasn't like you think. I don't know the word you would give it. I don't even remember his face now."

He puts the sculpture on the blotter, walks to where she is. He lays his hands on her shoulders, pulls her head to his chest. He is afraid to form the question, knowing that her answer will be permanent, unshakable. But he has to know.

"You'll come with me now," he says. He tries to say it casually, though she must hear his heart racing beneath his voice.

She doesn't make him wait. She nods, a small gesture.

The balloon inside his chest expands, bursts. He lifts
her, taking them both by surprise, and carries her to the bed. She is weightless, no longer resisting him. He drapes her gently on the pink bedspread. He sits on the edge of the bed, looking down at her, holding her by the wrist. Then he is bending over her, kissing her while he unties the sash at her waist. His hand finds her skin, and she moves to make room for him to lie beside her. He tries to free her arms from the robe, and she helps him. His stomach and chest are suffused with warmth—she must feel the heat radiating from his pores. He slides over her, hunkering down. She is feeling his face, reading him. He tastes the salt at the edge of the almond eye. She murmurs something he cannot quite make out. He thinks she is saying his name into his ear. She opens her thighs and guides him, and he feels, as she takes him in, a gathering there of more love than he thought was inside him. She moves against him slowly: there is no time against which to measure this. She has her arms hooked around his shoulders from underneath. He feels her curl a foot around his calf. Soon they will drive south on the thruway, toward the city. He will buy her clothes, and she will wear them, and she: will cast her portraits in precious metals. He will make it up to her; he will give her what was taken from her. The bed creaks merrily and loudly under their double weight. He pictures a pair of ribald characters in a play he read somewhere years ago, and he wants to tell her of this lusty image. He bends his head down to kiss her breasts. He wants to tell her of the drive south, of all there is ahead of them. He is full of images, like bright bits in a kaleidoscope. They are with Billy, and Andrew is making pancakes for the three of them. They are under his mother's quilt on his bed in the city, drinking wine. They are in a concert hall, listening to a piano. He slides his mouth along her neck, reaches his hands down underneath her to hold her there.

But she is pushing at his shoulders. He doesn't understand. He is confused, thrust too quickly away from her, away from the images. He feels her fingernails cut into his skin.

He rises up to see her face, and there is terror there. He hears, too late then, what she has heard, on the floorboards. He whirls around to face the doorway.

Edith is standing just inside the door with something large and strange in her arms—a sight as incomprehensible and as meaningless in the universe they have just created as a code he will never decipher. He struggles for sense, for clarity. He hears Eden cry out behind him. Instinctively, he raises an arm, a hand, to separate himself from the apparition in the doorway, even as it brings the large and strange thing closer to its face. He wants to shout
Wait,
and perhaps he does. The adrenaline hits his thighs then, his calves. He leaps up.

It is the leap of an athlete, a left fielder grazing the sky for a fly ball, a goalie catapulted off the ice to make a save. He will catch the ball, the puck. He knows it. He cannot fail.

But it is not Andrew the gun is intended for.

T
HE NIP IN THE AIR TASTES OF COLD WATER
. E
VEN ON THIS
second Saturday in September, he can see his breath, the steam rising from the mug of coffee. The maples are already turning, in the sunlight, a translucent pink, and he knows that down by the pond the leaves of the birches will be the color of brass.

He finds T.J. in the dining room of the Closes' house, standing with his hands in his pockets, surveying the stripped walls. The shades and curtains in the room have been removed, so that the sun makes the newly washed windows gleam. A few last remnants of the old paper, a mildewed and darkened pattern of cabbage roses, fill a plastic trash bag by the doorway.

"I brought you these," says Andrew, handing T.J. a pair of stained jeans and an old blue plaid flannel shirt. "And I brought you a cup of coffee."

"Thanks." T.J. cradles the coffee. "I called Didi, told her I'd be hanging out with you for a while. The kitchen looks great, by the way. Like an ad for
Country Living
or something."

Andrew laughs. But he is pleased with the kitchen. He
has sanded away the green paint on the walls and cabinets, replaced it with a semigloss white. He has torn up the cracked linoleum and sanded and refinished the wide old plank flooring underneath. He threw away the shades and gave the table and chairs to the Salvation Army. The kitchen is now pristine and simple, waiting for new owners to walk in and claim it. He likes standing in the center of the kitchen, drinking his morning coffee there. His only regret is that Eden cannot see what he has done. She has rubbed her bare feet along the satin finish of the floorboards, felt the glossy paint on the cupboards, smelled the fresh tang of new paint in the room. But he could tell, by looking at her face, that to her the room was still green and dark, still contained too many memories. After that day he did not ask her again to "see" his work, and she has not returned to her house, not even when he emptied and packed her own room. She stays now with him at the other house, across the yard.

T.J. finishes the cup of coffee and sets the mug on the sill. Andrew watches as T.J. strips off his brown leather jacket, his expensive safari pants and a vivid lime green and blue cotton sweater. He puts on the flannel shirt Andrew has brought, zips up the jeans.

"You look better," says Andrew. T.J. acknowledges the dubious compliment with a wry grimace.

Actually, Andrew is thinking, T.J. doesn't look well at all. His face has lost its color, and new vertical lines have appeared in the center of his forehead. Although his stylish clothes are the same, the panache seems to be gone.

"How is she?" asks T.J.

"Good. She's sleeping."

"I thought she looked very good when I came around ... you know, right after. I woulda been back sooner, but you both looked like you needed to be left alone for a while."

"Thank you. We did. But it's better now."

T.J. surveys the dining room. "Where do I start?" he asks.

"I've got the walls down to the plaster, sanded the woodwork," says Andrew. "I'm going to paint the walls a linen white, do the trim in the same color, but a semigloss. I've only got one roller, though. Which would you rather tackle—the walls or the woodwork?"

"I can do the walls," says T.J.

"OK. Give me a hand with the dropcloth, then."

The two men unfold the dropcloth and draw it up to the baseboard. T.J. crouches down, opens a can of paint and begins to stir it with a wooden stick. Andrew, with his own can of paint, does the same.

"It was a great save, whatever you did," says T.J. "I've heard the story now twenty times, and each version is a little different. You're a goddamn hero in the town, you know that?" The statement is an invitation. T.J. looks at Andrew.

Andrew shrugs, a gesture that belies the memory of that moment—the many epiphanies in that single frozen leap.

"I hit the barrel with my hand," he says. "The shot deflected to the ceiling. Then I took the gun. In fact, when I did that, she just sat down."

He remembers how she walked to the chair, and how she folded her hands in her lap, resolutely refusing to look at Eden, who had, in the tussle, risen to her feet and was tying the sash of her robe. Andrew, naked, had held the gun, with the barrel pointing toward the floor, and had told Eden, in a voice that wasn't entirely composed, to go to the phone, dial the operator and ask for DeSalvo's number, then to call DeSalvo and ask him to come out at once. If he wasn't at home, to call the luncheonette. Curiously, his nakedness in front of Edith Close had caused him no embarrassment—in retrospect, he imagined it was because they had all passed, in an instant, onto another plane of guilt and shame—but he walked nevertheless to the chair on which Edith was sitting
and lifted his clothes from behind her. He sat on the bed, the gun beside him, and dressed, his hands shaking so badly he couldn't tie his sneakers. He had said to Edith—feeling like a poseur with the gun now in his hands, slightly raised in her direction—to go down to the kitchen. Following her, not knowing exactly what would transpire when DeSalvo arrived, he began composing fragments of stories to see if they might hold, might be plausible, until he reached the kitchen and glanced at Eden, in her robe, at the table, and saw in her body and on her face that she knew that she was free now. She would say whatever she would say, whatever she had longed to say.