Secrets of Eden

by Christopher A. Bohjalian

  “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 straight-forward (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.

  “Have you ever preached on remorse?” she asked.

  She slept in a T-shirt and old dance shorts with a drawstring, and abstractedly she fiddled with the cord. When she asked the question, she
had the slightly puzzled look on her face that I was finding more and more appealing. It was the face she made when she was deep in thought, and it was unguarded and childlike, and it made me want to sit up in bed and kiss her. (Imagine the sorts of monstrous names I would have been called had I ever suggested during the investigation that I found something childlike in a woman to be appealing. The aspersions upon my character would have been far worse. And while my mother wouldn’t have believed that such a thing was possible, my attorney and I took dark comfort in the reality that I was a Baptist and not a Catholic, and the crimes of which I was accused, thank heavens, at least did not involve altar boys.)

  “Yes, I’ve preached on remorse,” I answered. “I’ve preached on guilt and I’ve preached on shame. I’ve preached easily seven hundred and twenty-five sermons in my life. There isn’t a lot I haven’t preached on.”

  “If you could make amends—”

  “But I can’t make amends,” I said, cutting her off. Quickly I softened my voice, because I feared in that instant that I had hurt her feelings with my abruptness. “That’s the problem. I can’t bring Alice back. There is simply no way to make this sort of horror right.”

  She fell back on the pillow and lay on her side, resting her head on her hand. I was still flat on my back. Her T-shirt was black with a pair of pink ballet shoes on it, and I liked looking up at her. Her hair was still a little wild with sleep. “You told me you never believed in angels in a literal sense,” she said after a moment.

  “That’s right. Not ever.”

  “‘For he shall give his angels charge over thee, to keep thee in all thy ways,’” she said, quoting the ninety-first psalm. “‘They shall bear thee up in their hands, lest thou dash thy foot against a stone. Thou shalt tread upon the lion and adder: the young lion and the dragon shalt thou trample under feet.’” I recognized that the three verses were from the King James Version.

  “Can you do that with every angel reference in the Bible?” I asked.

  “No way. But some.”

  “Still, I’m impressed.”

  “Don’t be. I’m sure you know considerably more passages by heart than I do.”

  “You’d be surprised at how little I know—about anything.”

  “And you’ve never, ever believed in angels. Really?” I could have given her any number of glib responses, but she deserved better than that. “For a time,” I confessed, “I believed in angelic presence: God’s light in the people around us. People behaving angelically. And sometimes I met people whose demeanor seemed angelic to me. There was a fellow in the congregation when I arrived, an old farmer. A deacon. He was seventy-seven when I got there, and I was a twenty-five-year-old pastoral novice. He was frail, but very kind, very wise. He took me under his wing and taught me all about Haverill, about the history of the church. About the ministers who had come before me. He made sure that the transition was smooth. And—and this is no small and—he taught me how to use most power tools. That deck where we sat the day we met? He and I built it together. But no, I’ve never believed in a genus or species of creature you might call an angel.”

  “Nothing with halos?”

  “No. Nothing with halos—or wings.”

  “‘Hope is the thing with feathers,’” she said.

  “Emily Dickinson?”

  “That’s right.”

  “She was referring to birds.”

  “I’ve always found some voices angelic,” Heather said.

  I thought about this. “I had one parishioner who told me he heard the voice of God in his daughter’s singing voice,” I admitted. “And there were certainly some Sunday mornings when I hated to have to follow the choir’s anthem with a sermon.”

  “I didn’t actually mean singing—though I know what you’re talking about.”

  “Ah, you meant a plain speaking voice.”

  “I did. Some voices are more angelic than others,” she said, and for a moment I tried to recall that elderly deacon’s voice. He’d been dead seven years by then, and so it took me a moment to recapture the euphonious fusion of words that marked his speech—that marked so many of my most rural neighbors. His voice was gravelly and soft, and he laughed lightly but often. Supposedly a toddler laughs four hundred times every day and an adult barely fourteen. That deacon was an exception. Once I even preached a sermon on that—on laughter as a gift from God.

  “I guess I can recall voices that were saintly and beatific,” I agreed.

  “I had a feeling you could.”

  “Of course, I can also recall voices that, by comparison, were downright evil.”

  “You are in a dark place.”

  “Apparently.”

  “I suppose you’re thinking of George Hayward’s voice?”

  “Actually, I was just being ornery.”

  “George Hayward’s voice wasn’t demonic?”

  “It wasn’t around me. But before he would hurt Alice, she said he would grow condescending. He would start talking like a law-school professor. Old-school. Socratic. He’d start asking her questions, and whatever answer she gave was going to get her in trouble. Do you think it behooves Katie’s mother to dress like a whore? Did you think you were being helpful doing a load of darks without checking with me to see if I had something—a turtleneck, maybe, a pair of jeans—I might want laundered? How did you expect me to respond when you chose to be with Ginny O’Brien instead of your husband? Are you a lesbian? He never raised his voice before he would hit her, and even when he was drunk as a sailor, he spoke like Henry Higgins. Alice always knew she was in trouble when he began doing his My Fair Lady thing.”

  When George Hayward died, his entrepreneurial metabolism may have finally begun to slow. He was, according to Alice, spending increasing amounts of time at his desk and in meetings, rather than on his feet in either of his stores or his restaurant, and I wondered what effect those changes had had on his temper. Moreover, the bigger and more diverse his retail kingdom had become, the more difficult it must have been to manage. To rule. To control. He had three very different enterprises. And so, perhaps, over the years he had grown more determined to have absolute sway over Alice. I tried to hear in my head what sort of voice he had used with his employees and how it might have differed in tone from when he was alone with his wife. Publicly he had always seemed rather likable. But in point of fact he was—and even ministers have these sorts of thoughts, though we seldom verbalize them—petty and cruel and thoroughly nasty. I am honestly not sure in whose image he was made.

  “And Alice’s voice? What do you recall about hers?” Heather asked.

  There is much that I could have told her about Alice Hayward’s voice. I could have described how silky and low it would become in a murmur in bed, or the vibrato it took on when she cried. One of the times when she was in my office—this was before I had crossed the Rubicon into her bed—her voice grew eerily even, almost clinical, when she was explaining to me the source of the chiaroscuro of yellow and hyacinth on her cheek. Most of the congregation accepted her claim that she had walked into an open medicine-cabinet door in the bathroom in the night. She had a swimmer’s body, and sometimes, when we were alone, she would sound to me like she had a swimmer’s voice: a bit throaty, occasionally hoarse, always a little more fragile than her lovely physique. Remind me who I am, she said to me one of our first mornings together in her and her husband’s bed. Sometimes I can’t believe I’m the sort of woman who gets to have a lover. I found the word gets powerfully endearing, as if I were a prize and adultery a privilege. She was blossoming, and I soaked in her every word.

  With Heather, however, I shared none of that. I wasn’t yet prepared to reveal the secrets I knew of my most recent lover. Instead I answered with an evasiveness that people later would say marked so much of my behavior that summer and was emblematic of a dangerous character flaw. A desiccated soul, an arctic heart. In hindsight, I should have told Heather something. Anything. I would have been better off that moment and, I imagine, i
n the months that followed. But I said nothing.

  And when I look back on that Sunday, I should have seen the parallels between that elderly deacon and Heather Laurent—or, for that matter, between Heather and any of the people I had met in my life who had had about them the penumbra of an angel. But on that morning, a week to the day since the Haywards had died, I was far more focused on the dark of the world than I was on the light. I knew what had occurred seven days earlier in the Cape on the hill, and it seemed to me that if there was an otherworldly element residing somewhere deep inside each of our spirits or cores, it was far more likely to be demonic.

  THE IDEA THAT I was fleeing was ridiculous. It was absurd in that I answered my cell phone each and every time it rang—at least when I had it with me—and it was absurd in that I was traveling with a reasonably recognizable woman. (Yes, I know a writer is seldom as famous as a movie star: If Angelina Jolie wanders into a library, the fans and the media will swarm; if Margaret Atwood wanders into a cineplex, the lines for the popcorn barely will waver.)

  I hadn’t told my mother where I was going, because I honestly hadn’t known myself when I left Bronxville. The same is true in regard to the Pastoral-Relations Committee and the deacons at the church in Haverill. Likewise, Heather hadn’t known at the time that she would go visit her sister in upstate New York, bringing with her in tow a minister who wasn’t sure what he should be doing with his life or what it had meant that he had baptized a woman a half day before she would be strangled. I was quite content in Heather’s bed in her loft. She was, too, I believe, after all the traveling she had done in the preceding months. But whatever need she had to cocoon and replenish her (and I will use one of her words here) aura, it was subsumed by her worry about Amanda and her concern for that basket case of a pastor from Vermont. And so we disappeared into the Adirondacks.

  And while it is tempting to express some understanding for the appalling ways that Catherine Benincasa or reporters or bloggers would misinterpret my movements—to begin a sentence with Still or Nevertheless—that would be disingenuous. The truth is, I don’t understand it. And though many people believe I am anything but forthright, in the end I was more candid than I wanted to be or expected to be or was even obliged to be. I know my crimes and I know my mistakes. I live with them.