The Snow Garden

by Christopher Rice

  “I didn't say that.”

  “Maria’s what I need right now. No one’s lying to anyone.”

  Those words hit home for Kathryn, and she was reminded of their previous friendship, in spite of Lauren’s transformation. The two had met during orientation, and Lauren had been the first engineering major Kathryn encountered who didn’t have a social disorder. She hadn’t struck Kathryn as a frightened little girl waiting to emerge from her shell or come out of the closet. Now, it seemed as if the contours of her body bothered her. Everything about her new appearance smacked not of metamorphosis into true self, but of self-abasement. The twenty-first century version of covering yourself in sackcloth and ashes.

  “I was just worried,” Kathryn began again, carefully. “You used to hang out on our floor almost every night. Then you and Jesse hooked up, and it was like you wouldn’t come within ten feet of his room.”

  Lauren slowed her steps until they were both standing in the middle of the sidewalk. Students weaved around them. Lauren met Kathryn’s stare with a stony glare of her own. “He didn’t rape me, if that’s what you’re implying.”

  It was Kathryn’s turn to be offended. “I wasn’t.”

  “How is that motherfucker, anyway?”

  “The same. He manages to land on his feet no matter who he’s just rolled off of.” It was a deliberately insensitive attempt to strike at Lauren’s composure, and Kathryn regretted it, but when Lauren’s eyes shot to her feet, she realized it had worked.

  “I told Maria about him,” she began quietly. “She’s helping me.”

  “With what?”

  “At first I wanted to take every memory of him and rip it out of my brain. But it doesn’t work like that. The best I can do is cleanse myself slowly. Lock the memories away in a secret part of my brain and purge the rest of myself.”

  Kathryn took a second to digest this dizzying stream of... she really didn’t know what. “Were you two that involved?”

  “Is anyone ever really involved with Jesse Lowry? Of course not. It only took two weeks.” She shrugged, then rasped and let out a laugh.

  “I feel like I should have warned you about him.”

  “I’m a big girl, Kathryn. I could have handled a one-night stand.”

  “Then what was it, Lauren?” Kathryn asked, her confusion sharpening her tone.

  “Have you slept with him?”

  “Um, no. I think I’ve made it pretty clear that he shouldn’t keep me in his sights.”

  Lauren glanced down at her watch. “Yeah, well, I doubt he would want to piss too close to home. Look, Kathryn, the guy’s an—”

  “What does that mean?” Kathryn cut her off.

  Lauren cocked her head, meeting Kathryn’s glare only briefly before shaking her head slowly back and forth. “It’s not just sex with him,” she finally said, her tone distant but less guarded.

  “You want to talk about it?” Kathryn asked. She tried to sound gentle.

  “I have,” Lauren responded, with a renewed, but faint smile. “To the right people,”

  Kathryn nodded, trying to indicate that she got the drift. “I’m sorry for...”

  “Don’t be,” Lauren said. Kathryn was surprised to feel Lauren’s hand on her wrist. “I didn’t mean it like that.”

  Kathryn just nodded and returned her eyes to Lauren’s. They were glazed, staring through her. “You should come by some time. Meet Maria. She has a knack for putting things in perspective.” Lauren released Kathryn’s wrist and looked back to her watch. “Gotta run.”

  And she was off. Kathryn watched her go. Several feet away, she stopped. “Tell Randall I said hi. I’d love to know what he’s been up to.” She waved, turned, and disappeared into the crowd.

  Nice of her to invite me to meet Maria, Kathryn thought, and not bother to tell me where she lives.

  "Oh come on!” April barked.

  Kathryn lifted one hand to quiet her. “She didn’t say she was a lesbian.”

  “No. But you did.”

  “It was weird, all right. You remember her, don’t you?”

  “Jesse might be a total prick. I’ll give you that. But he’s not capable of turning a woman into a lesbian.” April returned to sawing her piece of overcooked chicken. Kathryn slumped back into her chair, her appetite gone. She should have known better than to tell April, the queen of skeptics, about Lauren, her whacked-out psychology, and her maybe-lesbianism.

  Starnes Dining Hall was deluged by the lunch rush. The surrounding tables were packed, but the clatter of dishes wouldn’t be loud enough to distract other people if she and April decided to really get into it. She noticed April staring at her across the table and realized she was pouting. “Lauren Raines is going through some sort of freshman identity crisis, and I pity this Maria woman who’s going to have to weather it with her. A good dyke would know better.”

  “Why are you so hellbent on defending him?”

  “Honestly? Because I think the fact that you’re so dead set on slandering him is a little weird.” Having finished only half her chicken, April pushed back her tray. “Kathryn, don’t turn into one of those women here who thinks you can’t have sex without at least one person being a victim. They’re boring. No one wants to hang out with them.

  Kathryn felt coldness arrowing into her chest. “I’m not allowed to dislike Jesse as a matter of principle?”

  “Jesse sleeps with the first person who falls at his feet. And you’re obviously waiting for the perfect guy to bump into you at a party and slide a ring on your finger. Neither of those approaches can be qualified as principles.”

  Kathryn glared at April. “All Jesse Lowry has done since he got here is hurt people. I don’t like that. That’s principle.”

  April seemed chastened by the ice in Kathryn’s voice, but if Kathryn knew her own roommate, she wouldn’t give up that easily. “Fine,” April said softly. “But if Jesse were someone else’s roommate, would you really care what he did in bed?”

  “Stop trying to convert her, April. We’re getting noise complaints!” Randall dropped his tray at the head of the table, slid his Prada bag off one shoulder, and flounced down into the chair. He brushed gelled spikes back from his forehead with one hand as he looked from one glowering girl to the other. “Alrighty, then,” he mumbled.

  April rose from her chair, scooping her book bag up off the floor by one strap. “I’ve got a lab,” she mumbled, already several feet away from the table by the time she slid the straps over both shoulders.

  Randall was respectfully silent as she departed.

  “She treats me like I’m her baby sister,” Kathryn finally said.

  “She’s got a chip on her shoulder the size of the Korean peninsula. Don’t let yourself be her whipping girl.”

  “What’s she so pissed about?” Kathryn asked.

  Randall chewed a bit of salad slowly in thought.

  “Maybe she is trying to convert you.”

  “I’ll be sure not to tell anyone at the GLA that you said that.”

  “Please. Why do you think their latest campaign is against Atherton’s . heterosexist housing policy?”

  “Because all gay people end up being attracted to their roommates?” Kathryn retorted.

  Randall looked up from his plate. “Well, if their roommate is as fine as you are, how can they help themselves?” He grinned, revealing even, white teeth, remarkable, Kathryn thought, for such a heavy smoker.

  Kathryn managed a weak smile, noting the ease and speed with which Randall had ducked the obvious implication of her question. How attracted are you to the studly walking dick you sleep five feet away from every night? she wanted to demand. “Did you talk to your parents?” she asked instead. .

  “About what?”

  “Thanksgiving,” Kathryn said. Randall looked up, fork halfway to his mouth. “Boston,” she added.

  He shook his head. “Not yet. My dad’s in Japan right now and whenever he leaves the country my mom kind of. . He lifted one cupped ha
nd as if chugging from a bottle.

  Kathryn tried a sympathetic grunt. “It’s not that big a deal,” Randall cut in quickly, as if embarrassed he had laid his drama on her. “It’s only when Dad’s gone. When he’s home he’s like .. . her anchor.”

  “It still kind of sucks,” Kathryn said sympathetically, but trying to prod him for more.

  Randall’s face went blank, his eyes on his plate as he shoveled another forkful of salad into his mouth. Kathryn decided to let it go. Still, she wondered if maybe it was Randall’s parents who didn’t want him home for Thanksgiving. A style victim of a gay son who disdained them might not be their idea of someone to be thankful for. New York was three hours away and they had never visited, and Kathryn couldn’t recall ever coming into Randall’s room when he was on the phone with them. She searched for a new conversation topic. Given her spat with April, she thought Lauren Raines’ shift in sexuality was taboo, so she dislodged her sliver-thin copy of the Atherton Herald from under one corner of her tray and slid it across the table to Randall.

  “Check this out,” she said. Randall’s eyes alighted on the black-and-white photograph of Lisa Eberman. “Friday night Tim was bitching about how he hated writing for the Herald, and today he’s page one. He even got the headline.”

  Randall picked up the paper, chewing slowly as he read it. She watched his face go grave. The grim photo of Lisa Eberman had struck her as well, but not as completely as it did Randall; her thought was that they could have at least shown some respect for the woman by running a picture of her smiling. But the candid shot showed a dour-looking woman, disturbed by the camera’s intrusion. A barrette held her black hair back on her head in a flat pleat. Crow’s-feet framed slanted, dark eyes above pinched lips.

  “Are they kidding with this?” Randall asked suddenly.

  “What?” Kathryn asked, alarmed, but eager to know what had struck him.

  “She’s holding a drink!” There was outrage in his voice. He turned the paper for her to see.

  Yeah, she was holding a drink, Kathryn thought. So what?

  “Did you read the article?” Randall persisted.

  “I skimmed it.”

  “She was a drunk,” Randall said darkly, turning the paper.

  Kathryn remembered Randall’s mother hitting the sauce while his father was out of town on business, and fell silent.

  “Shit,” he whispered. “I’ve got a lecture.”

  “Bye,” Kathryn said, startled.

  He patted the top of her head absently as he departed. She would have made fun of this small gesture if she thought he would have heard her call after him.

  Throughout the lecture hall, conversations among the two hundred students in Foundations of Western Art. I were hushed. Randall guessed that most of them were showing respect for their grief-stricken professor, who might come striding down the aisle at any moment. If any of them had managed to catch the local news, they would have learned Eric had flown to Philadelphia, where Lisa would be laid to rest in her family’s plot. He sat in his usual seat in the second row, from which he had first stared up at Eric’s fine-boned face, watching Mitchell Seaver and Maria Klein whispering at the foot of the steps leading up to the stage. No doubt they were debating who should give the lecture in Eric’s absence. Randall knew them both to be the unspoken leaders of the course’s cadre of teaching assistants, and the rest of the group looked bored, slouched in their chairs, regarding the two prima donnas vying for the microphone.

  Finally, at fifteen minutes past the starting time of lecture, Mitchell mounted the steps to the podium, and Maria returned to her seat. Randall held a quiet dislike for both graduate students. Maria was the leader of his discussion section (which he had only attended twice). Her coffee-colored hair, parted down the center, and the contrast of her gentle facial features with an olive complexion suggested a mixed ethnicity also represented by her first and last names. She had looked dressed for winter back in September, rarely appearing in class without a tweed jacket or a scarf. On the first day of discussion, Maria had exalted the Venus of Willendorf, with its bloated proportions, to be the true ideal of female physicality, before she went on to dissect the oppressive body ideals forced on women by the fashion magazines of the current era. Rather than hear great works of art periodically dumbed down by campus politics, Randall stopped attending.

  Mitchell Seaver adjusted the microphone deliberately, and the metallic squelch brought about instant silence. Randall thought that underneath Mitchell’s shaggy pile of sandy hair, and behind the wire-rimmed spectacles he probably didn’t need, there was a reasonably attractive guy being lost to academic anemia. Generous brown eyes and a slightly pug nose gave him a boyish attractiveness, but his appeal disappeared as soon as he began speaking in his lightly nasal, flat, affectless voice, which occasionally rose to a shrill pitch as if he were being forced to talk over people only he could hear.

  “I’m sure we’re all aware of the loss Dr. Eberman suffered this past weekend, and it should come as no surprise that he’s decided to take some time off to sort through personal matters,” Mitchell announced. “He has requested that in his absence we do our best to follow the syllabus. With the patience and cooperation of all of you, I hope we can do just that.”

  Mitchell paused. Randall shot a glance at Maria, who had turned slightly in her seat as if expecting students to pop up from their chairs at the prospect of being lectured by TAs. The lecture hall was stone still. Maria turned forward again, gave Mitchell a nod, and it was clear that nothing else would be said about the weekend’s events.

  As Mitchell began a general introduction of the Byzantine empire, Randall felt an odd sense of injustice, as if a moment of sanctioned silence should have been held. Maybe no one in the class had known Lisa Eberman, but this was, after all, the academic temple her husband dominated three times a week. He tried to distract himself from this feeling of injustice by sliding the Atherton Herald out from under his notebook. As he read by the pale light thrown off a screen filled by a succession of emperors laid out in glittering tessarae, his growing sense of pity for Lisa Eberman was only compounded by the fact that Tim Mathis’ article made it clear she had died an unknown on a campus that held her husband in high esteem.

  Tim began with a pathetic excuse for an obituary, which said little beyond the fact that she was a native of Philadelphia and had met her husband while they were both pursuing doctorate degrees at Duke University. (Tim probably had no way of finding out that when Eric was offered a faculty position at Atherton, his alma mater, he had all but strong-armed Lisa out of finishing her degree. Randall only knew because it had come up in one of Eric’s post-sex, too-many-glasses-of-wine-beforehand confessions.)

  Randall struggled to read the article patiently, desperate to get to the raw facts of last Friday night in hopes of answering the question plaguing him ever since Eric had slammed the door to his house. What time did the accident occur on Friday night? Before or after Eric had taken Randall to his bed?

  According to a source close to the Eberman family, Paula Willis, Lisa Eberman’s sister, is suspicious of rumors that Eberman was intoxicated at the time of the accident. Willis, 31, suffers from cancer, and authorities believe that Eberman was on her way to visit her in Worcester when the accident occurred. While toxicology reports confirm that Eberman was driving with a blood alcohol level of .09, the autopsy has left lingering questions that Atherton police have yet to answer. The coroner’s report makes it clear that the official cause of death was drowning, but also specifies that due to the amount of time Lisa Eberman’s body spent submerged in the near freezing waters of the Atherton River, her exact time of death can only be approximated.

  Further complicating matters, according to official sources, is the anonymous 911 call reporting the accident from a downtown phone booth. Police attempts to track down the caller have been unsuccessful. However, suspicions that the caller might have been involved in the accident have been dispelled by preliminary forensic
work performed on the victim’s Volvo. The station wagon didn’t show any signs of collision with anything other than the bridge guardrail.

  Randall slid the newspaper back under his notebook, balling his hands into fists on top. He couldn’t help shooting a few glances around to see if anyone had noted the frightened intensity with which he’d read the article three times.

  Where the hell was Tim Mathis getting such vital information? The guy worked for a campus newspaper, for Christ’s sake. And while Tim was almost obsessively persistent in just about everything he did, he seemed to have taken to this story with a particular ferocity; it left Randall frightened, wondering just what it was about Lisa’s death had gotten under Tim’s skin. Worse, if Tim had gone this far already in one article, how much further would he have to go before he found out what the real dark secret in Eric and Lisa’s marriage was, a secret that maybe Lisa Eberman didn’t even know?

  Maybe Lisa Eberman didn’t know.

  Randall’s row had emptied out by the time he realized the lecture was over.

  Atherton’s West Campus looked like what outsiders pictured when they thought of campus life—what Randall himself had imagined years before, yearning for escape so badly that his chest ached, conjuring up fantasies of a manicured, perfectly tended miniature city lying placidly between ivory towers. The reality was that Atherton was not completely beautiful —Michael Price had seen to that—but it was a more cloistered and protected environment than Randall had ever known, and West Campus remained a reminder of childhood dreams. Walking to Tim Mathis’ dorm, Randall recalled how his late-night visits in September had been a welcome reprieve from the sterility of Stockton Hall. Tim lived in Braddock Hall, one of the smaller and more desirable colonial-style dorms. Cold had already withered the ivy covering its walls into mud-colored tapestries of dead leaves. As Randall approached the entrance, he spotted Sharif, one of Tim’s suite-mates. Sharif gave him a slight nod, and held the door open for him with one hand, brushing his dreads back off his forehead with the other.