Secrets of Eden (11 page)

“I don’t believe you’re a phony at all,” I said.

“A bit loopy, maybe,” she suggested. “But not phony.”

“You’re putting words in my mouth,” I insisted. “Just last Sunday a fellow in my church who is five years younger than I am and dying of cancer gave the children’s message, and he talked all about the angels among us. He told the kids angels don’t always have wings.”

“He’s right.”

“He said they were the women who drive him to and from his chemotherapy. Who make him his carrot juice.”

She nodded. “I have readers, of course, who see angels in a pretty literal sense. When I was in Vermont the other day, I had one reader tell me that a particularly amazing angel had caught her husband’s small plane in midair when the engine flamed out and stopped it from crashing.”

“How?”

“You know, with his hands.”

“Just brought it safely to earth?”

“Because the angel had wings,” she said, as if this explained everything. I found myself imagining, no doubt as this reader had, an angel in a white robe flying atop a Cessna, holding the fuselage in his hands while flapping his wings to keep both him and the plane aloft. “As you might imagine, my books do better with some sorts of readers than with others.”

She was wearing black jeans and a white linen top, which was untucked. Her feet were bare, and she had curled them beneath her on the couch. Her toenails were plum.

“What would you be doing if I hadn’t appeared?” I asked.

“Going through the piles of mail my assistant prioritized in my absence. Reading e-mail. Grocery shopping. It was going to be a pretty glamorous Saturday.”

“How long have you lived here?”

“Oh, let’s see. Today’s the first day of August. A little less than two years. I call this the Loft That
Angels
Built,” and I understood she was referring to her first book.

“And you’ve always lived here alone?”

“I have.”

“May I ask you something?”

“You seem to be asking me a great many somethings. Go ahead.”

“Do you pray?” I hadn’t meant it to be an especially challenging or antagonistic inquiry—though I did hear in my head the homonym,
prey
, and that part of me that I have discovered is capable of unexpected bouts of savagery and anger may have lent an edge to my voice—and she sat back and seemed to be contemplating the question, her eyes growing a little stern, her forehead slightly creased. I imagined her suddenly as a child struggling with a math equation that was beyond her ken. “Everyone prays,” she said finally, “even if they don’t use that verb. Even if they’re not completely sure who or what they’re imploring. Why? Have you stopped praying?”

“So it seems,” I answered, and I told her how hard I had tried that past week to connect with a living God—and how I had even faked it late Tuesday afternoon before the altar with Joanie Gaylord. I had, in truth, spent a good part of Wednesday afternoon at the church. I was either alone in my office in the wing by the Sunday-school classrooms or in the sanctuary itself trying to pray. I let Betsy or the answering machine handle the usual sorts of calls that came in—a request to give the invocation at a special Masonic gathering at the lodge in Bennington, a change in the date of an upcoming Church Council meeting,
the increasingly urgent need as September approached to find a Sunday-school teacher for the third- and fourth-graders—as well as the barrage that was linked directly to the Haywards’ deaths and upcoming funeral: The mortician. A deacon. The high-school principal. Ginny.

In theory I knew a very great deal about prayer, so praying shouldn’t have been all that difficult. I had studied it at seminary, I had read all the right books. I’d led prayer groups in my little church, I’d conducted seminars for pastors and lay people in our region. And though I never had expectations of a miracle when someone was actively dying, there had been a period in my life when I had believed fervently in the healing powers of prayer. For over two decades, I had prayed every single day of my life.

Yet when I’d fall on my knees in the days immediately after Alice and George Hayward had died, praying in different measures for forgiveness and healing and understanding, I’d come to realize that I didn’t know a bloody thing about prayer—at least not anything useful. When I needed to find the Lord most desperately, I hadn’t a clue where to begin.

“Can you tell me why?” Heather was asking. “A minister must have a reason to stop praying.”

“I was no longer confident that anyone was listening.”

“In that case you sure put on one hell of a good show on Thursday morning.”

“At the funeral service?”

“Yup.”

“Thank you.”

She shook her head—bemused, incredulous, I couldn’t say for sure—and a lock of her hair fell over one of her eyes. It was, perhaps, the most arousing thing I had seen since the last time I’d been alone with Alice Hayward and I’d allowed myself to savor the sight of the
small of her back when she rose from the bed to get dressed. The sense that no one was listening—no one was watching, no one cared—had begun to feel unexpectedly liberating since I had climbed into my car and left Vermont. Originally I had felt only loneliness and despair at the realization that there might be nobody out there. No more.

“Did you always know that your faith was so weak?” she asked.

“No. I actually thought it was rather strong for most of the last two decades. Trust me, it withstood plenty of sickness. Plenty of death. I have prayed with parents who have lost children, I have knelt before the very old in the moments before they would die. I’ve done funerals for teenagers and young mothers. I know the inside of the hospice as well as anyone who works there.”

“But your faith couldn’t withstand the deaths of the Haywards.” It was a statement, not a question.

“Apparently not.”

“What made their deaths so different?”

“Guilt. Anger.”

“I understand the guilt. What is the anger?”

“Isn’t it obvious?”

“No.”

“It’s George. It’s the fact that he killed her. It seems that faith—at least my faith—is perfectly comfortable with benign disgust but absolutely no match for rage.”

“Come with me,” she said, and she stood and brought her glass of iced tea to the kitchen island with the black marble countertop. “We’re going out.”

“Okay.”

“You need to do something completely different. You need a change of pace.”

“We’re going dancing?” I asked playfully.

“Oh, I doubt you could dance with me. I used to be a pretty serious dancer.”

“So I read in
Angels
,” I said. “And you’re right, I couldn’t keep up with you. I would embarrass myself rather badly.”

“Stephen, I was kidding,” she said patiently. “You wouldn’t embarrass yourself at all.”

“I would. Trust me. It wouldn’t be pretty.”

She was already slipping into a pair of black lace ballet flats and motioning for me to leave my iced tea on the table beside the daybed. “I want to show you something,” she said.

“Nearby?”

“In the city.”

“Are you going to tell me what it is, or am I supposed to be surprised?”

She shrugged. “Nothing mysterious. I’m going to show you an angel.”

“I thought you were my angel,” I said. It was the first optimistic remark that had occurred to me in nearly a week, and I found myself smiling.

“I am,” she said. Then she took me by surprise and stood on her toes and kissed me softly on the lips.

LATER THAT DAY
a colossal thunderstorm would rumble over Manhattan and raindrops the size of dimes would dance upon the sidewalk. The air was electric and the sky the color of slate. We stood in nothing but T-shirts before the windows of her loft and watched the pedestrians below us race across Greene Street, leaping like long jumpers across the rivers that suddenly lapped at the side of each curb while trying to avoid the spray from the yellow cabs and delivery trucks. Earlier that afternoon, however, the clouds had been far to the
west, and we had gone to Central Park, where she had showed me an angel: a tall, confident bronze woman with wings who, Heather told me, had looked out upon the terrace since the nineteenth century. She was striding purposefully atop a fountain, the water cascading from her feet into a bluestone basin below her, the sheets a precursor to the soaking rains that would fall from the heavens in hours.

The bronze statue was Heather’s favorite angel in Manhattan, but I would learn that there were others she liked a good deal in Brooklyn and the Bronx. Though angels were easy to find in cemeteries, she said that she didn’t especially care for funereal angels and tombstone cherubs—she wanted her angels among the living, not watching over the already dead—and thus she scoured parks and gardens for the angels with whom, on some level, she seemed to want to commune.

At the park we ate ice-cream sandwiches on a bench just beyond the shade, and we ate quickly because we were hungry and the ice cream was melting fast in the sun. We were surrounded by softball players and sunbathers and people picnicking on the grass who, I imagined, were falling in love, and I felt at once a part of them all, a select member of a club of people who were happy—unencumbered with doubt and despair—and completely separate from them. I never forgot that Alice was dead and Katie was an orphan and there was a congregation in Vermont that I had deserted. That afternoon, on the bench in the park and then in the bed in the loft above her writing desk, Heather told me more about her parents’ marriage and deaths, and we talked about our siblings—including her sister, Amanda, and the strange ways that the girl had responded to their mother’s death at the hands of their father. Some of this I knew from Heather’s books, but some she had kept from the world as a courtesy to Amanda.

“It’s why I wanted to meet Katie,” she said as we stood in her window frame and watched the rain fall with a Polynesian intensity. “It’s why I worry about that girl.”
Amanda was living in a moldy log cabin in the woods in upstate New York with a circumspect—possibly agoraphobic—bird carver, and the two of them went weeks without so much as venturing even to the general store in some dot on the map called Statler. She was an alcoholic who no longer drank, but she no longer attended AA meetings, either. And once she stopped drinking, she shed weight the way a snake sheds its skin. She wasn’t strictly speaking an anorexic in Heather’s opinion, but the woman was five-four and couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred pounds when they had seen each other just after Memorial Day. She smoked relentlessly, and her skin looked as fragile as papyrus. And yet, Heather said, her sister was still wise and funny and capable of parlaying her badly socialized lover into an artist of some cachet among curators and collectors. She was, despite her outwardly brittle façade, a formidable business presence. She was appealing and charismatic when she needed to turn it on for a well-heeled dealer at a Spring Street gallery.

And as Saturday night turned to Sunday morning, we talked of the lovers we had had in the past, though I did leave one name conspicuously absent from my short but deeply personal inventory, and, like so much else that I did and said that week, this would come back to haunt me.

I found it interesting that just as I had asked one woman to marry me and she had declined, Heather had been asked once to get married and she had said no. She had loved this fellow, she said, but she hadn’t wanted the life that would have come from marrying a bookish religion professor at a small college in Pennsylvania. The fact that this was precisely the path I almost had taken was an irony that was not lost on either of us, since by then she knew this part of my history. I realized as we chatted and dozed and made love that I was not merely a reclamation project for Heather—a notion that had crossed my mind the first time I entered her, though it had not diminished my ardor at all—but
was more precisely a much-needed respite. She did, as I had suspected, need to be needed, though it would be a while before I would begin to realize how literally she had meant it when she had agreed that she was my angel. But she also saw in me someone who hadn’t had the slightest idea who she was when we first met and then hadn’t given a damn when she’d told him.

When we awoke Sunday morning, she asked me if I wanted to go to church. It wasn’t quite eight, and if I’d been in Vermont I would have been making last-minute changes to the service or chatting with the choir director about a hymn or checking my props for the children’s moment. I might have been making sure there were candles on the Communion table or, perhaps, simply listening as a few members of the choir rehearsed. There was an energy then that I can liken to the sensations an actor or a stage manager must savor in the half hour before the house opens and the audience starts filing in for the eight o’clock curtain.

“No,” I answered. “I’d rather not. But I don’t want to stop you from going. I should…”

“You should what?”

“Well, I was going to say I should be leaving. You do have a life, after all.”

“Where would you go?”

“I don’t know. Somewhere. I do have options.”

She sat upright in bed on her knees, and her head almost touched the ceiling. “I had fun yesterday. I had fun last night. I hope you know that.”

“I do.”

“Did you?”

“Though I feel guilty saying so, yes. Yes, I did.”

“And you feel guilty because you should be in Vermont? Or because you couldn’t prevent Alice Hayward from dying?”

“Not couldn’t. Didn’t. There’s a difference. And I think I feel guilty for both reasons—though I do feel far worse about the reality that Alice Hayward is dead than I do about the fact that I’m AWOL.”

What I did not feel bad about—then or now—was my attraction to Heather Laurent. People would vilify me further that autumn by suggesting I was some sort of immoral, overly libidinous Casanova. How could I have gotten involved with another woman so soon after Alice’s death? they seemed to ask. My response—had anyone had the decency to inquire to my face—would have been rather straightforward (assuming I even deigned to proffer a response). I would have pointed out to them that Alice’s and my affair, such as it was, had lasted but six months; that the affair had been over for two and a half months when I allowed myself to fall into bed with Heather Laurent; and that Alice’s and my separation had been amicable. I was devastated by the fact that Alice was dead and her daughter was an orphan. But sleeping with Heather Laurent was neither an act of disloyalty nor a barometer of my callousness as a person. I needed comfort, too. If there is a grimoire for grief, why should it not include romance? The bereft have taken solace in vices far worse.