The Snow Garden

by Unknown Author

“The perfectly legal kind,” Eric answered.

  At the note of defensiveness in his voice the detective gave an abrupt nod. She crossed to the chair opposite his and took a seat. “Antidepressants?”

  “Yes. And others.”

  “What were the others for?”

  "To help her sleep. A lot of the . . . serotonin reuptake inhibitors . .. they kept her awake.”

  “How many did she take?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Any idea how many prescriptions your wife had? Total?”

  “I didn’t count.”

  “But enough to fill the medicine cabinet?” Eric didn’t respond.

  “Dr. Eberman, how often did your wife combine these pills with alcohol?”

  “I don’t know if she was deliberately combining them ... I know that she did take them regularly and . . . well, she drank pretty regularly. I warned her, but...” He lifted both his hands from his lap, as if to indicate it had all been out of his control. Had it? Pat Kellerman’s questions stirred others that fell outside her jurisdiction, which he knew would return each night before sleep for the rest of his life.

  Did you know your wife was a drunk?

  Of course I did.

  Did you stand back and let the medicines she craved wreak havoc on her brain? Did you say anything when one pill was magic for several months and then it turned on her, sending her back to bed at four in the afternoon, until that drug-pushing quack of a therapist would write out a prescription for a new wonder cure? Did you ever, once, try to put a stop to the cycles you knew were tearing your wife apart?

  No. Because they made her hate me less. Maybe they didn’t make her forget that I had forced her to come to Atherton, applied for a faculty position without even telling her, forced her to give up her doctorate, but she sure stopped bringing any of it up at dinner. Once she became devoted to fighting her own brain, determined to fight one pill with another until she found the perfect balance, I stopped being the enemy, and instead she took on an enemy ten times as formidable—her mind, which I had helped to warp to the point of illness.

  But the pills did more than spare me her anger. They freed me to open a door I shut years ago, with a man young enough to be my son, not to mention rid myself of a piece of property that held a plague of memory.

  “Mr. Eberman?”

  “I’m sorry....”

  “When was the last time you spoke with your wife?”

  Eric clasped and then unclasped his hands in his lap, thinking, No, not possible. He combed his memory for some chance encounter he had forgotten, some phone call. Something. Nothing came. Nothing beyond her parting note. She had seen, she knew, secrets that he prayed she had not told.

  “Two weeks ago.”

  Fibrous clouds parted over the roof of the Eberman house, revealing patches of stars. The quiet residential streets just east of campus were a hushed counterpoint to the rowdy matrix of freshman dorms only several blocks away. Randall Stone stood just outside the halo of the streetlight across the street, studying the house from a distance for the first time. The two-story house had a broad, gently sloping roof, and an expansive front porch with fat, unadorned columns. The living-room windows were dark. While the home didn’t seem neglected, the paint was weathered without peeling, and the front yard was a dead, brown patch. The house spoke of two owners who had resigned themselves to living in it.

  Eric’s Toyota Camry sat in the driveway, parked next to the empty spot where Lisa Eberman had kept the Volvo station wagon that Eric had said she’d bought only a month before. Only now did Randall realize that it had been a strange purchase for a woman with nowhere to go except her dying sister’s house. As far as Randall knew from Eric, Lisa did little more than use the car to drive her sister to chemo and buy groceries her sister couldn’t stomach.

  These thoughts distracted him from the disturbing image of a residence turned prison. For him, coming to Atherton had been ripe with the promise of a freedom he had intensely imagined, down to the smallest detail. But sooner than he had planned, his life there had become entangled with a man who haunted the rooms of his own home. Now the house would have a ghost that fit the dictionary’s definition, and Randall wasn’t sure whether he had the courage to continue if it meant chasing Lisa Eberman from the house’s many shadows.

  Randall heard the crunch of tires on snow and turned to see headlights rounding the corner. He moved back into the cover of darkness as the Atherton police cruiser halted in front of the house. He held his breath as Eric hoisted himself out of the backseat, shutting the door weakly behind him without any parting words for the driver of the car. Once Eric had reached the front porch, Randall stepped into the streetlight’s halo, crunching snow underfoot.

  Eric turned.

  Randall waited for some small signal to summon him across the street. A sense of duty had brought him to the house, but also a desperate curiosity. Did Lisa’s death mean they were free to be together, or was Eric so crushed by guilt that this awkward stand-off across a dark street would end up being good-bye?

  He was confident he could be seen, but he couldn’t make out the expression on Eric’s face. Eric’s shadow turned and slammed the front door behind him.

  It was too easy for Eric to think he could have prevented it all by not answering the front door. “Who’s there?” he had called out that evening, five weeks ago.

  Eric had cursed his word choice. “Who is it?” would have sounded much more collected. But the loud series of knocks startled him and he was standing halfway down the stairs. Early October dusk darkened the foyer, and on the other side of the door a shadow was cupping its hands against the glass pane, trying to peer inside.

  “Professor Eberman?”

  He didn’t recognize the voice, but no one called him “Professor Eberman.” His colleagues called him “Eric,” of course, and so did most of his grad students, who were the closest thing to family he had if only in that they shared the same obsessions. His undergraduates— that mass of nameless students he was forced to lecture three times a week so that the university could proffer unlimited access to tenured professors in all of its propaganda—rarely called him anything.

  “Professor Eberman.. .” There was a pleading note in the voice now and it drew Eric down the last few steps. He opened the door; as soon as he saw the boy jerk back, hands falling to his sides, he fought the urge to slam the door shut in his face. His name was Randall Stone; the only reason Eric knew this was because after spotting him in the second row on the first day of lecture, Eric went back to his office and leafed through his copy of that year’s freshman face book. A perfectly harmless, private activity, and one he had done many times in the past ten years, in order to put a name to a set of eyes, or the slope of a neck behind the collar of a sweater. With Randall, it had been the glint in his gaze as it followed Eric’s paces across the stage, the way he rested the end of his pen in the corner of his mouth, which was curled into the bud of a smile. Such a knowing, sexual look from a young man suggested experience beyond his years—experience that Eric could imagine in fantasies that quickened his pulse and prevented sleep.

  But now the boy was standing right there on his front porch, and those several minutes of tracking down his name suddenly seemed like a sin.

  “I’m really sorry to bother you but... I’m lost.”

  But he didn’t look remotely lost. There was no fear in his eyes, which Eric could tell, because he was staring at him—expectantly, Eric believed. Randall even seemed amused by the rigid way Eric held the door halfway open.

  “Can I come in for a second?”

  Christ, No. Stay in the second row of lecture where you belong.

  “Do you want something?” The question came out just the way Eric didn’t want it to, but Randall Stone obviously savored the halting sound of his voice, the fear and trepidation. Loved it like a shark smelling blood, because the boy’s lips smiled in small triumph and he moved across the threshold without asking twice. For the first
time Eric noticed that the boy was wet. He glanced back out the door to see a misting rain swirling over the street. In a month it might be snow.

  And now you were supposed to be polite, to remember your age and remember who you are, his teacher, and forget how in lecture he sometimes lets his head roll back on his neck as he stretches out his arms, pulling the hem of his shirt from his jeans and revealing the flat, hairless stomach.

  “Can I get you something?” Eric asked, revising his earlier question. “Scotch?”

  Randall’s eyes met his. He stood in the living-room doorway. “I didn’t peg you as a scotch drinker.”

  “I’m not. My wife is.’’ She drinks it by the gallon and just minutes ago I called her sister to make sure she hadn’t run off the road on the way there.

  Randall removed a silver flask from the inside pocket of his jacket, accidentally or on purpose flashing the Helmut Lang label, uncapped it, and raised it to Eric in a mock toast. Eric felt hugely foolish because he was so nervous that he had just offered one of his students—a freshman—alcohol. And Randall took a slug like a man, without wincing. It was too easy to forget that this boy was eighteen. Eric moved past him into the living room, turning on lamps as he went. Light fell in stages, and when it hit the reproduction of The Garden of Earthly Delights, Eric heard a small gasp.

  “Bosch.”

  “Yes,” Eric answered, even though Randall wasn’t asking.

  “I’ve read your book,” he said nonchalantly, his back to Eric as he stared up at the framed print above the bookcase.

  “El Jardin de las Delicias,” Randall read in surprisingly unaccented Spanish off the bottom of the print, and then looked to Eric for an explanation.

  “I bought that print at the Prado. In Madrid.”

  “I know where the Prado is,” Randall said, without sounding offended.

  “Are you familiar with Bosch? Because the last time I checked we had barely made it past the Hellenistic.” Eric crossed his arms over his chest and felt a tight smirk on his face.

  Instead of meeting the challenge head-on, Randall crossed to his reading chair and eased down into it. He let his head roll back a little and his feet slid out in front of him slowly as his expression became distant and dreamy, his voice softened by a memory he seemed to be looking for just above Eric’s shoulder. “My parents took me to Madrid when I was twelve. It was a disaster of a trip, really. They didn’t have any idea what they wanted to do once they got there, and my mother was so wrecked by jet lag that all she would do is stay in bed and order room service. And by the time we left the hotel everything would be closed for siesta. Anyway, by the fifth day I had had enough. We were staying at the Ritz so I snuck out without asking them and went across the street to the Prado. I was just wandering through the museum when I saw it by accident....”

  His gaze traveled from Eric’s to the print across the room.

  “I bought a print of it too. But when I got back to the hotel, my parents were furious at me for sneaking out, and I remember . . . my father just yanked it out of my hands, took one look at it, and tore it down the center. He said not only had I snuck out without permission, but I had come back with pornography.”

  Randall turned his head against the back of the chair, and when Eric saw the smile on his face he realized the story was supposed to be funny. He managed a slight laugh. But something about the story had seemed crafted, and it was a challenge feeling sympathy for a boy who stayed at the Ritz when he was twelve, even if his mother never got out of bed when they were there.

  “Do you believe him?” Randall looked at him directly.

  “I'm sorry.”

  Randall pushed himself out of the chair and crossed over to the print. “According to you, Bosch was truly a mitigated Cathar, right? Which means that instead of being a believer in the established views of the medieval church, he was a heretic who believed that the earth was the creation of Satan. And that Satan was the ruler of all things physical and corporeal. Including the body . . .”

  The boy was basically quoting the prologue to Eric’s book.

  Randall turned, as if framing himself directly beneath the work in question as he demonstrated his knowledge of it. But now, his voice had a gently prodding tone to it. “To be cursed, to be the ultimate sinner, was to be ensnared in the physical. Was it that easy to be damned? Simply to feel alive in your own body?”

  Eric wondered if perhaps this young man had been spending time with his grad students. Randall’s hard but expectant stare suggested that Eric’s initial suspicion was correct.

  “Where do you live?” he asked.

  “Stockton Hall.”

  “That’s three blocks from here. ..” Eric’s heart was hammering, knowing that he shouldn’t press at all, should shut the boy out with silence and then shut the door after him. “How did you know where I live?” he finally asked.

  Without guilt or the sudden shame of the caught, Randall answered, “I followed you.”

  It was past one and Stockton Hall was winding down from another Friday night, but the glare of the hallway’s fluorescent lights seemed profane and Randall kept his head bowed, listening to the slow scrape of his footsteps over the hallway’s thin industrial carpet. As he approached the end of the hall, he heard conversations muffled by cinderblock and the distant pounding of a stereo. None of it was loud enough to drown out the memory of the sound of Eric slamming the front door to his house. At the end of the hall, he stopped outside Kathryn’s room. He had trained himself to endure moments like these, to fight the urge to confess to Kathryn the truth about what had brought him to Atherton. But the urge was stronger than it had ever been. Once Eric slammed the door, Randall had to suffer the weight of his secret alone. No sliver of light came from beneath Kathryn’s door, so he turned for his own.

  Randall hesitated before he went in, waiting to hear a grunt or a sudden sharp intake of breath. He could only make out Jesse’s voice speaking in urgent, hushed tones. It was the voice Jesse used with only one person, his father. Randall gave the door a gentle shove.

  Kathryn had once observed that no dorm room in Stockton was more cleanly divided between roommates than his and Jesse’s. Jesse’s side of the room was stark; the only thing adorning the wall beside his bed was a print of Salvador Dali's Persistence of Memory, On the four shelves affixed to the wall above his headboard, his textbooks were meticulously organized by course, each one Atherton’s basic introductory gut. Intro to Psych, American History, etc. Across the room, Randall’s wall was an eruption of posters, the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel meeting the edge of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater, competing with anything else he could buy at the student union or tear out of a magazine. Pages detached from the Abercrombie & Fitch catalog—half-naked models, their arms looped with commercialized nonchalance around each other’s shoulders—presided over his desk, their prominent placement an attempt to remind Jesse of his roommate’s orientation and perhaps deter him from loafing around the room in only a pair of gym shorts or boxers. So far the attempt had failed.

  Blue lights from the miniature television flickered across Jesse’s torso where he lay on the bed, the portable phone pressed to his ear. As Randall hung up his jacket, he heard Jesse giving only sporadic grunts of acknowledgment to the person on the other end of the line. The TV sat on top of the miniature, knee-high refrigerator; they both had been jointly rented from the student union, and without protest, Randall had allowed Jesse to keep both on his side of the room.

  Randall sank down into his desk chair, turning his back to Jesse. Shut out by Eric and unable to risk Kathryn’s disapproval of his sex life, Randall had somehow been left with only his unattainable, half-naked roommate as company. Staring blankly at the computer screen seemed like the only way to cope. He brought his hands to the keyboard, but one landed on the edge of his desk as another curled into a fist against his lap. Anger formed a knot inside his chest. He shut his eyes, drew breath, and was startled by the sound of Jesse setting the porta
ble back into its cradle.

  Canned laughter came from the television.

  “Who was that?” Randall asked without turning.

  Springs creaked as Jesse settled back into his bed. “Kathryn hates me, doesn’t she?”

  Startled, Randall turned to see Jesse, his eyes on the television, one arm bent between his head and the pillow, revealing a tuft of dark hair in his armpit. “You two seemed pretty tight at Madeline's,” Randall said, unbuttoning his shirt as he moved to his closet, which allowed him to avoid looking at Jesse for too long.

  “Whatever. It was all an illusion. I’m not surprised, though. The girl’s got so many little voices in the back of her head telling her what not to do that she can barely leave her room without asking all of her friends if it’s a good move. And now she lives across the hall from a guy who goes after whatever he wants.”

  “Whoever he wants,” Randall corrected, balling up his shirt and tucking it into the laundry hamper.

  “What I don’t get,” Jesse continued, “is how she had such a problem with the fact that I sleep around, but it’s perfectly all right for you.” “Since when do I sleep around?” Randall settled back into his desk chair. “Drywater, Texas,” his first attempt at short fiction, was still an open file, designated by a rectangle on the toolbar at the bottom of his screen. His stomach clenched and in his rush to close it, the file exploded onto the screen. He clicked the mouse several more times than needed.

  "Oh, come on. All these late nights have been spent at the library?”

  Randall bent against the back of his chair. "You know, Jesse, Kathryn has a value system we should all respect. Maybe even aspire to.”

  Jesse let out a short, barking laugh as he rose from the pillows, swung his legs over the side of the bed, and turned to face Randall. “No fucking way. I travel across the entire country to get here, to be on my own for the first time in my life, and then I’ve got some prude trying to pile on more rules about what I can and can’t do with my body than I had to put up with as a five-year-old.”