Eden Close (24 page)

He hears a rustling in the bushes. a small animal, he supposes, until he sees the boy. The boy is eleven, twelve. He comes near to the edge of the clearing, stops short when he sees Andrew and Eden. He has brown hair and glasses and freckles beneath a summer tan. He has a towel around his neck. His chest is bare. He stares at Andrew. Andrew returns his gaze but doesn't move. Then the boy turns and darts though the underbrush the way he has come.

Andrew smiles and wishes to himself that the boy will remember this scene all his life.

 

A
FTER A TIME
, he puts her head on the grass and unwinds himself from her. His watch is over by his clothes, and when he consults it, he is somewhat alarmed to see that they have only forty minutes left.

"Eden," he says, waking her. "We have to go now. Quickly."

She leans up on one arm. She seems dazed, disoriented. He helps her to her feet and retrieves the still wet dress from the grass. The dress is dirty and wrinkled. She raises the dress over her head and slips her arms through it, and it is then that he has his first doubts. The dress hangs on her, making her look suddenly very vulnerable. She slips on her underpants. Her hair is damp and tangled, with bits of grass and dirt in it. Her face is wrinkled with sleep. For a minute she seems like someone he had no right to touch, to expose.

"I don't know where the tree is, or where my shoes are," she says.

He finds the sneakers and the sunglasses in the place where they first sat down, but he hands them to her rather than putting them on her himself. The easy confidence he had before, or rather the trumped-up confidence—bordering at times, he has feared, on condescension—has left him. She is again a thing apart from him.

"When we get back," he says, trying again for a tone of authority he does not feel, "I'll take the dress and launder it and give it back to you tomorrow. Your hair should dry completely on the walk back. All you need to do is give it a good brushing and put something else on, but we have to be quick about it."

She nods once and lets him take her hand. He squeezes her hand tightly to recapture the intimacy just left. At the cornfields she goes before him, making her way with a more practiced ease and with more speed. He watches her outstretched arms, her fingers flicking gently against the cornstalks. On the other side of the fields, he takes her hand again and nearly runs with her to her back stoop. By his reckoning, they have only five minutes left. She can tell the time, too, here, on familiar ground, for he sees it in her face.

Once inside the kitchen, she begins to unbutton her dress. She slips the bodice to her waist and then steps out of both the dress and her underwear in one movement. She hands the bundle to Andrew like a child giving her clothes to a parent before she enters the bath. He takes them, moved by the ease with which she has done this, by the way she does not shield her nakedness with her arms. He is moved, too, though differently and more deeply, by her beauty, her beauty incongruous in this desolate kitchen, her feet in her blue sneakers so firmly planted on the worn linoleum floor. He aches to linger, to touch her again. He kisses her on the
shoulder, slides a hand down her back. He can think of nothing right to say.

"Jim was my father," she says quietly.

He steps back, still touching her shoulder. "I know."

"No. You don't understand," she says. "I'm giving you something."

He is silent. "What are you saying?" he asks after a minute.

"I was his."

"He was your real father?"

"It's why she hates me."

Her meaning is clear, but his mind balks, unable to take it in.

"How is that possible?" he asks. "I remember the day. I was there when she brought you to the garden...."

"The girl who left me was someone ... he had been with."

"Girl?"

"She was sixteen."

"How do you know this? Did you know all those years?"

She tilts her head to one side, listens. "That's all," she says. She wrests herself from his touch, and he watches her disappear through the doorway to the darkened part of the house. Galvanized, he moves out the back door, down the steps and across the yard to his own back door. He is just inside with his bundle when he sees the Plymouth turn into the gravel drive.

 

H
E DROPS
the dress into the washing machine. The cellar is cooler than the rest of the house. He hopes she realizes in time that she still has the sneakers. He looks at the machine, tries to decide on the water temperature and the cycle. He cannot decide. He pushes buttons. The machine bucks once into life, then begins to throb rhythmically under his hand.

Upstairs, in the kitchen, the air is close, too thick to breathe. Two-twenty. The hottest part of the day. He sits at the kitchen table, brings a hand to his forehead, looks across to her house. He sees Jim sitting on the steps, waiting for Eden to come home. Jim's face, with its long flat planes, comes briefly into focus, then fades. Andrew would have said, indeed people did say, Eden resembled Edith, not Jim, but now he'd like to see the face to search for any likeness. All that comes is an image of height, ranginess, a loose charm when he wasn't drunk. All those years and no one knew. Or did they? Did his mother guess? Did Edith tell her? He sees his mother's back at the sink, slightly stooped, her hands in a stream of water from the faucet. An ache for his mother he is not familiar with knots his stomach. He walks to the fridge, thinking he should have some food, selects a beer instead, the closest thing at hand. Still standing by the fridge, he drinks it down like a Coke, immediately gets another.

Already his memories of Jim are shifting, changing shape to accommodate this new piece of information. He thinks of a scene he remembers from his childhood—Jim coming home from a business trip with presents for Eden, who is playing on a swing—but it means something different now. Indeed, everything about Jim is different now, moving slightly, giving way to something else.

The heat and his empty stomach and the beer, drunk too fast, leave him light-headed. He begins to move about the kitchen floor, pacing from the counter to the table, a slow pace in the heat. He takes his shirt off, drops it over a chair. He can still smell the pond on his skin. He imagines that he can still smell Eden on his skin too. He lets her come into his mind, his head dizzy with images of her. He tastes her skin, remembers how her shoulders felt when she broke. Her hair was dense, shading him. And then she was on her back, arching as if they might merge. She was easy, so easy,
and so quiet. Nothing to show how she felt but the quivering.

He leans against the sink, puts his head in his hands. His head hurts badly at the back of his neck, up the sides toward the temple.

You remind her of the past, Edith said. You'll raise her hopes, her expectations.

He thinks of Billy, waiting for him, needing him. He thinks of Jayne in his office, of the job he must return to. He sees his mother, turning now to look at him, to ask him what he is still doing here. From the cellar, he can hear the washing machine switching into the rinse cycle.

He thinks, knows, he should not have made love to her. He feels dry and hollow. He has done the thing that Edith feared, was right to fear. He glances up. For the first time, the room looks to him exactly as it is: no longer a repository of memories—only a faded, shabby, lifeless kitchen.

He cannot tolerate the silence. He turns on the radio nearly as loud as it will go and takes the stairs two at a time. In his room, his changes into a dress shirt and khaki slacks. He empties the drawers, stuffs his underwear and socks into his leather satchel. Slipping on a throw rug in the hallway, he grabs a carton of mementoes on his mother's bed. His arms loaded, he makes his way downstairs and out the back door, letting it slam. He puts the suitcase and the carton in the trunk of the BMW. Back inside the kitchen, he allows the door to slam again. There is another carton in his mother's room, one in the living room. He takes them out to the car. Impatiently, he forces the cartons into the trunk. He is sweating heavily. The cloth along his spine is wet. Returning to the kitchen, he opens the fridge, thinking to throw away any food that might spoil. Instead, he takes another beer, quickly shuts the door. He lifts the phone out of its cradle, starts to dial T.J.'s number, replaces the receiver. He will call T.J. from the city tomorrow.

He finds his charcoal gray suit in his bedroom closet, picks up another carton in his mother's room. Pulling the kitchen door to, he lets the screen door bang shut one final time. He throws his suit and the carton, spilling the contents, into the back seat.

He puts the key into the ignition, but it jams. He tugs at it, tries again. There are shooting pains in his right temple. He thrusts the gearshift into reverse. He whirls around in his seat to back out the driveway, lets the clutch out too fast and stalls.

He slams the steering wheel with the heel of his hand.

He sees his mother coming toward him, and there is something important he wants to tell her, but the image fades before he can reach her. He sees Billy standing in the doorway of the house at Saddle River, watching Andrew pack on the day he left for good. He feels Eden break, mourning what he cannot comprehend. His head sinks below the surface, and he knows he is drowning. Billy is calling to him, but he cannot hear the words through the water. He cannot leave her, not now when she is causing him to drown. He lets the water close over his head. He feels the weight of his own body. He allows himself the sensation of sinking, of letting go.

He leans his head back against the headrest and opens his eyes. He realizes he has been crying.

He sees that he has left the lawn mower out beside the garage. A wasp flies through his open window and begins to crawl along the inside of the windshield. He takes a deep breath, shudders with a last spasm. In the near distance there are cornfields, and over them the heat shimmers.

 

You are thinking that my world is black. But it is not. When my eyes are open, there is thick fog. Dark fog that turns to white fog
when I go to the window and the sun is out. I can make it brighten and then turn dark. The fog darkens, like before a rain.

You are something warm hovering over me.

You said my name, and until then, I had forgotten how it could sound. You were hungry too, for more than you could say. You are not like the others, not like my memories, but I have always known that you wouldn't be.

I am afraid now to dream of you.

I heard your door slam. And again. And I thought that you would leave me.

In the water, I was free.

I was his, which I knew and didn't. She burned me with it when she thought the time was right.

There is light coming into my world, but there is darkness too.

S
HE IS LYING ON HER SIDE, AWAY FROM HIM, WITH ONE KNEE
bent, the other leg outstretched beneath her, while he traces small designs on her back with his fingertips. In the six days they have had at the pond, he has learned this about her—and, he supposes, she has learned this about herself: that she likes to have her back lightly stroked after they have been together.

Beneath them is a cotton blanket that he brings with him every day, and they have now found the coolest part of the clearing. Sometimes he marvels that they have not been intruded upon, or discovered, apart from the boy with glasses who saw them that first day and fled. He slides a hand down her side, along the curve of her hip. Her skin is smooth, like glass, despite the heat and the humidity. He would like to lie here all his life, he is thinking, just repeating that gesture.

She lifts a shoulder, then drops it. She means for him to keep touching her back. She tells him what she likes, not in words but in small movements and gestures, so that he has found himself alert to this communication, eager to move where he thinks she is directing him. This language, new to him, is exhilarating, heightening his pleasure. In all his years
with Martha, she would never say what it was that pleased her, as if he must blindly guess at her desires, hoping to read her correctly, though he remembers that too often she seemed disappointed that he had not quite found his way.

In the hot days he has been with Eden, they have made no pretense of their desires. Just as she has no gift for small talk, she no longer knows how to be coy. On Sunday, the first day after they had been to the pond, she was waiting for him in the kitchen. He had brought the blanket, which he told her about. They walked in silence to the pond, and once inside the clearing, nearly dizzy with wanting her, he began immediately to help her off with the blouse and shorts and sneakers she had worn. The pitch of his need was keen, knife-edged—he felt only that he had been away from her for too many hours—and was matched by something both undernourished and generous in herself. And though there is within her a core of reserve he cannot yet penetrate—a repository of things she sees that are still unclear to him—their intimacy is intense, unlike anything he has ever known. Only much later that noon hour did he remember the blanket, abandoned at the edge of the clearing. He shook it out and unfolded it for them to rest on, establishing that day a pattern of resting afterward and then swimming.

When she swam that Sunday he made himself keep up with her. He didn't want her leaving him, if only for that. Twice while swimming, she exclaimed something he couldn't quite make out, and when she stopped, breathing so hard he could see her ribs rising and sinking, she was almost laughing. It has been, he thinks, a remarkable stroke of luck, finding the pond again, discovering together something that gives her so much pleasure.

Sometimes they have talked, though it surprises him when he Is away from her how long their silences are, as if they had years together stretching into the future in which
to unfold to each other all there is to know. Occasionally he feels an urgent need to ask her questions so that he will understand her secrets, so that they might reach another kind of intimacy, but he has learned, even in the brief time they've had together, that questions unsettle her, cause her to withdraw from him. What she gives, she gives in her own time, small parcels of knowledge.