The Snow Garden

by Christopher Rice

  Randall held Jesse’s eyes because it prevented his eyes from wandering down to where the leg of Jesse’s boxers yawned open. “I’ve never heard such a noble excuse for being horny,” Randall said. He turned back to the computer.

  “Who are you kidding, Randall? Maybe you respect her, but I know you couldn’t be her if you tried every day.”

  Randall rose from the chair and moved to his bed. He had to step over several piles of his books in the process before he sank down onto his mattress and began unlacing his boots. “You need some friends, Jesse. Someone you keep around for a little longer than it takes to get them into bed. Then I might be able to take you seriously when you lecture me on my friends.”

  He managed to keep his tone steady, but when he shot a glance Jesse’s way, he saw that Jesse wore a wry, disbelieving smirk. “What are you talking about, Randall? I have you.”

  Randall kicked one boot to the floor and then started pushing the other one off with his heel.

  “Yeah, well, I think I’ve figured you two out,” Jesse said blithely, his bare feet padding to the fridge. He opened a carton of orange juice and slugged it right from the opening. Randall stared at his back, waiting for him to continue but unwilling to urge him on. “For her, you’re the phantom boyfriend she doesn’t have the courage to go out and get, and for you . .. well, my guess is you don’t really feel alive until that Tim guy or whoever has you flat on your back, but then, in the morning, when you start to feel a little dirty, you’ve got Kathryn and the pedestal she’s put you on.”

  Jesse turned back, grinning slightly as if this were little more than locker-room banter. Randall surveyed him, trying to hide his anger and confusion. Why had Jesse picked tonight of all nights to share his pop-psychology insights? “Who says I ever feel dirty?” Randall asked icily.

  Jesse arched his eyebrows and returned the orange juice to the fridge. Randall began removing his socks before he noticed that Jesse had wandered almost to the invisible line dividing their sides of the room, leaning one hip against the edge of the desk. Randall looked up, startled, as Jesse crossed his arms over his bare chest, waiting.

  “What?”

  “Go ahead.”

  Randall furrowed his brow.

  “You’re not going to, are you?” Jesse finally asked.

  Now Randall knew what Jesse was waiting for. The next step of his bedtime routine was to slide beneath the comforter and remove his jeans down to his ankles before dropping them in a ball at the foot of the bed.

  “Two months of living together and you still can’t take your pants off in front of me.”

  “You never answered my question.”

  “What question?”

  “Who was on the phone?”

  Jesse was silent.

  “Your father?” Randall asked.

  Randall found a petty triumph in the color that rose to Jesse’s cheek and the sudden tension in his jaw. “What drug was it this time?” Randall asked.

  “Pride,” Jesse answered, turning down the comforter. Randall was about to slide under his own when Jesse spoke again. “You know I got home in time for the repeat of the local news. That’s some fucked-up shit. The car accident?”

  Randall tensed, groping for any memory of what he might have said to Jesse. He had sworn to keep his pursuit of Eric secret. That was vital. But their room had become a private comfort zone, with Jesse giving details of his sexual conquests that Randall guessed he didn’t share with anyone else, and which Randall loved hearing because they afforded him a private, intimate glimpse of the guy everyone else on the floor regarded as either an asshole or an enigma, a man he refused to desire. Sometimes he even considered Jesse to be a version of himself, but without the apologies and the secrets.

  “Eberman? Isn’t that the guy you have a hard-on for?”

  Jesse slid under his comforter and reached for the switch on the gooseneck lamp affixed to his headboard. “Maybe now’s your chance,” Jesse said, before he killed the lamp and rolled over onto one side.

  Any hope that he might get the last word was dashed. Randall stood frozen for several seconds. He hadn’t told Jesse anything concrete, but he had confessed his attraction for Eric during those first weeks of school as they traded their evaluations of hot students and sexy professors. But there was a good chance that somewhere amid all the freshman psych that formed Jesse’s worldview, there might be some pretty good intuition.

  He heard Jesse’s sheets rustle, and through the shadows on his side of the room, Randall could see Jesse had turned his head to find Randall still staring at him. “Good night, Randall.”

  Kathryn emerged from her room to see Randall coming out of his. She saw his eyes widen and then he gave a slight laugh at her outfit. She’d pulled on unlaced duck boots with a pair of sweat pants, and thrown her heaviest Columbia-brand snow jacket on over her nightshirt. She must have looked like, a bag lady who’d gone on a shoplifting spree at the mall.

  She held up her pack of Marlboro Lights. “It’s cold in the fire stairway,” she said, pointing to the exit door to their right. Randall shook his head no and gestured to the boys’ communal bathroom down the hall.

  “Great,” Kathryn said, as she followed him. “All dressed up for nothing.”

  Private shower stalls with soap scum-stained curtains lined one wall of the bathroom. A window at the far end was propped open, emitting cold gusts of wind that chilled the tiled floor. Whereas the girls on their floor never left their toiletry baskets behind, the boys had no qualms about it, and Kathryn chuckled when she saw Randall’s Aveda-stocked basket on the window ledge alongside more plebeian toiletry kits featuring labels like Gillette and Pert Plus. Contact lens solution was wedged between a bottle of Issey Miyake cologne and matching body wash. She was taken aback. Randall wore contacts? So there were some limits on the small life details they had shared, (And even more limits on the larger dramas she had kept from him.)

  Kathryn exhaled her first drag with her head tilted back, watching the cloud of smoke crawl toward the fluorescent light. She offered him one, but he held up his toothbrush in response. ‘You’d think someone would have done some work to make this place look less like a hospital.”

  Randall was brushing his teeth hard enough to bring white froth to the corners of his mouth. He bent at the waist and spat into the sink. “Try Princeton,” he said as he disappeared into a bathroom stall. He emerged, dabbing at his mouth with a compulsively folded triangle of toilet paper. “I hear they have fireplaces in the lounges there.”

  “Wait-listed,” Kathryn responded. Randall was flossing hard enough to draw blood, and she realized for the first time that he seemed on edge. “You?” she asked.

  Randall rolled his eyes. “This again?” He was bouncing on his heels.

  “I'm just curious,” she said, smiling solicitously.

  “Let’s not play this game.”

  “Why? You always win.”

  “Kathryn, you’re at the eleventh-ranked school in the country. Why do you need to keep mulling over your rejection letters?"

  “Thirteenth,” Kathryn corrected. “And who are you to talk? You were five minutes away from going to NYU to be near . .. what’s his name? Adolph!”

  “Alex,” Randall corrected, staring at his reflection, his blue eyes darkening at the mention of the ex-boyfriend Kathryn had heard so much about that he seemed practically mythical. “But I like how you can never remember his name. I’m trying to forget it too.”

  “You never told me the whole story.”

  “What’s to tell?”

  “Here!” she said, handing him a cigarette. He furrowed his brow. “It’ll chill you out.”

  “I don’t need to chill out.”

  Kathryn shoved the cigarette back into the pack. “Come on, Randall. You have a mad, passionate love affair with a marine five years older than you and he leaves you to go guard an embassy! I can see you running down the pier waving a hankie in the air as his ship pulls out of port."

&
nbsp; “Actually, I dropped him off at JFK and asked him not to write.”

  Randall reached over and removed the cigarette she had offered him only moments ago. “Careful. They’re not imported,” she said. He popped it into his mouth. “You turned me into a smoker, you know,” she added.

  “Liar,” Randall said.

  “It’s true,” Kathryn protested. “Before I met you, I would smoke maybe one or two when I was drinking. But then you made it look so ... sexy!” She squeezed his side and he leaped back, twisting her offending wrist. Kathryn held her grip and Randall, giggling, continued to try to pry it free. They had almost two-stepped into one of the stalls when the bathroom door swung open. Their laughter abruptly ended when they saw Tran staring back at them, a six-foot-two former Atherton Eagle defensive lineman and their resident advisor, who would clearly rather be crushing the skulls of quarterbacks then watching over freshmen. He did it for the free dorm room.

  “Are those cigarettes?” Tran asked.

  Randall tossed his into the nearest sink.

  “They better just be cigarettes,” Tran added.

  “Sorry. You got us. It’s crack," Kathryn told him.

  “Put it out,” Tran ordered.

  “Just kidding. It’s not crack.”

  “Out!” Tran barked.

  Kathryn nodded and made no move to extinguish the cigarette. “Kathryn!”

  “I don’t want to clog up the sink.”

  Randall couldn’t contain his laughter. Tran let out a defeated groan and let the bathroom door bang shut behind him.

  “Behold the power of steroids,” Kathryn muttered, popping the cigarette back into her mouth.

  “Has anyone ever told you that you have a problem with authority?”

  “Just my parents,” Kathryn responded, sucking one last drag and moving to a stall. And look what happened the last time I kept a secret from them? she thought, and then tossed the cigarette into the toilet, flushing it with one foot on the handle before she could answer herself. “Speaking of which, have you talked to yours lately?” Kathryn asked.

  “No. Why?”

  “I got an E-mail from my father. About Thanksgiving.”

  Randall groaned, a little theatrically, Kathryn thought. “I think I managed to wiggle my way out of that one,” he said.

  “It’s only two weeks away. God, it’s like a cruel trick, making us go home this soon.”

  “Why don’t we go to Boston?” Randall asked.

  Kathryn turned, surprised. “Are you serious?”

  “Yeah,” Randall turned from his reflection to face her. “It’s only an hour by train.”

  “Where will we stay?”

  “I’ll ask Mummy and Daddy to get us a hotel room.”

  Kathryn furrowed her brow. “Will they?”

  “Of course,” Randall said defensively. “If I point out how many hours of my childhood were spent in the care of a nanny who didn’t speak my language.”

  Kathryn laughed. The idea was appealing. Thanksgiving had been a vague concern in the back of her mind for several weeks, but after receiving the E-mail from her father it had turned into a nagging worry. The ease with which Randall had offered her a way out made her slightly giddy. “I’ve only driven through Boston on the way here. What will we do?”

  “Whatever we want,” Randall said casually.

  Kathryn met his gaze. “Poor little rich boy.”

  Something flickered in Randall’s eyes and his smile weakened. “Sorry, I didn’t mean it like that... . It’s just like, well, hey, let’s go to Boston! I wish everything could be so easy.”

  “It isn’t," Randall said, tone clipped. “Ever.”

  Brittle silence settled and Kathryn felt a strange mixture of defensiveness tinged with guilt. She knew that Randall’s parents and their money was a touchy subject. Randall told tales of being locked in his parents' Park Avenue apartment, shuffled between stuffy private schools and after-school clubs his parents had enrolled him in without his consent and tended to by an endless succession of indifferent nannies and incompetent baby-sitters, but throughout his war stories he employed just enough self-conscious sarcasm so as not to seem arrogant, while painting a picture of his parents’ wealth as oppressive, as his mother and father’s best tool for keeping him at arm’s length. But whenever she made reference to it, the result was an awkward stop in the conversation.

  “Do you want to go?” Randall asked, turning from the sink.

  “Yeah. Randall, look, I really didn’t mean anything.”

  “Kathryn, forget about it.”

  Randall was almost to the bathroom door when he realized she wasn’t following. He turned.

  “I mean, who am I to talk. It’s not exactly like I’m on financial aid.” “You don’t need to apologize, Kathryn.”

  The abruptness of his tone belied his statement, and Kathryn found herself staring at him with growing bewilderment. He let out a defeated sigh and slumped back against the door. “I came here to get away from them. And I had to work really hard to do it. Money didn’t help me. Not once. You have to have more than money to get away from a man who’s so used to getting what he wants that there isn’t any room for his son ... or his wife ... to want anything.”

  His eyes had wandered away from hers and she stared at his face for several seconds; his expression was plaintive. Obviously he was visualizing the parents he rarely talked about, but whom Kathryn had formed a mental picture of down to the last detail. Mrs. Stone (Randall had never said her first name) was a fading debutante and the beneficiary of several well-performed plastic surgeries, as well as the unwilling recipient of Randall’s sharp wit. Her picture of Mr. Stone was more vague, but Randall’s description had just augmented it: a taciturn corporate something or other, in sharp contrast to her own father, whose warmth and openness had become more obtrusive as Kathryn had become an increasingly private teenager. She had trouble imagining how this stern, silver-haired caricature reacted as his son began to wear tight, designer clothing that advertised the curves of his ass, outfits that played leather against metal.

  “I know it sounds so stupid,” Kathryn said falteringly. “But a lot of us here have things ... and people ... we would rather leave behind.”

  His eyes met hers again, and his smile was warm. “Isn’t that called ‘running’?”

  The idea of returning home for Thanksgiving once again stabbed her stomach, and she shook her head, “No” she said. “It’s growing up.”

  Randall had gone from gazing into space to staring at her so intently it disarmed her. “You’re so pure, Kathryn.”

  “Oh, shut up!”

  “I’m serious.” His face wore a faint but appreciative smile. “I envy it.”

  The naked compliment made her uncomfortable and she furrowed her brow as she met his stare again. “No one else here has what we have,” Randall said softly. “At least that’s what I think.”

  Part of her was stricken by the suddenness of the statement, but another part of her yearned to believe it was true. After only two months of friendship, she couldn’t imagine a night at Atherton without at least several hours in his company, and during those hours they had become experts at completing each other’s sentences. They had become the pair that went everywhere together, knew more than anyone together. Meeting Randall had suggested that maybe all men her age didn’t use their seemingly God-given self-confidence to erect a facade that hid the frightened and careless little boys they really were. Randall may have had confidence that bordered on stupidity, but at least he sometimes used it to show her the little boy he hadn’t outgrown yet.

  Without thinking, she crossed the tiled floor and rested her head against his chest. He held her. After several seconds, she found herself taking stock of all she hadn’t told him, all he had to intuit. Someday, just not today, she would tell him why she needed to know him, because the last man she had cared this deeply for had taken everything she had to offer, and almost given her death in return.

 
; He kissed her on the top of her head. “Time to sleep,” he said in a baby voice.

  She grunted. “My dreams have been screwed up lately.”

  “Nightmares?” he asked.

  She nodded, one ear rubbing against his T-shirt.

  “I’ll tuck you in,” he said, grabbing her hand and leading her out of the bathroom.

  She was grateful he didn’t ask her what the nightmares were about, but she remembered her last one by the time they were at the door to her room. “Hey,” she whispered. “I read your story.”

  “And?”

  “I loved it.”

  He nodded as if that were the answer he was expecting. This bothered her. “But it’s kind of cruel to leave your reader hanging like that.”

  “What do you mean?” he asked, his jaw tightening.

  “Well, so the boy derails the train. Destroys the entire town. Then what?”

  Randall’s eyes glazed over slightly, and she guessed she had mildly offended him.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “It would be another story.”

  She kissed him on the cheek. “You should write it,” she whispered.

  “Maybe I will,” he said with a flickering smile, before heading across the hall to this room.

  Randall lay awake listening to the steady rattle of the heating vent and to Jesse’s breaths lengthening into snores. Condensation blurred the window panes. Stockton Hall was eerily quiet, and Randall fought the urge to look at the digital clock as night turned into a sleepless early morning. In darkness, the cinderblock cell in which he lived seemed to expand slightly, shadow gave more distance to the space between the foot of his bed and the glimpse of Jesse’s naked back above the sheet.

  He shut his eyes and imagined Kathryn fast asleep across the hall. But for some reason she was suffering from nightmares, so he guessed his image of her sleeping soundly, her mouth hanging slightly open against the pillow like a little girl’s, was a little too envious.

  He opened his eyes just in time, before the image of Kathryn asleep in her bed could be replaced by the photo of Lisa Eberman he had seen on the desk of Eric’s office and memorized. She was standing on the bow of a sailboat, looking back at the camera as if she were annoyed by the lens and drawing her wind-whipped black hair out of her face with one hand, blue water stretching out behind her.