The Snow Garden

by Christopher Rice

  “Here to see Tim?”

  Randall nodded, hoping that Sharif wouldn’t point out that it had been almost a month since he last stopped by Tim’s room. "Is he here?” Randall asked as he squeezed through the open door past Sharif.

  “Should be. He’s been bitching all morning about the flack he’s been getting for that article in the Herald. Did you read it?”

  “What kind of flack?”

  They ascended the stairs to the second floor. “You know Tim. If there’s shit within a mile he’s gotta stir it.”

  Sharif opened the door to the suite: three single bedrooms centered around a common room occupied by a tattered sofa and a suggestion of a kitchenette. The door to Tim’s bedroom was closed and Randall could hear Tim’s high-pitched, intermittently animated voice on the other side. ‘You want something from the fridge?” Sharif asked, startling him.

  Randall shook his head no, and Sharif nodded. Sharif, like Tim’s other two suitemates, was straight, but he was the Only one who made a show of being “okay with it” by treating every guy Tim brought back to the dorm as if he were the man Tim would marry. Tim was never that for Randall, but he was older, wiser and safe—and now Eric was at most only two of those things.

  Randall knocked lightly on Tim’s door.

  “John, I’m not testifying in front of the housing board. Go away!” Tim shouted back.

  Randall noticed that the door was unlatched, so he gave it a gentle shove. It opened halfway to reveal Tim standing next to his desk, phone pressed to his ear, his bleached hair disheveled. He was dressed in only boxers and a T-shirt and his laptop glowed on his desk. Next to it, an ashtray overflowed with stubbed-out butts. “Whatever,” Tim said into the phone. He adjusted his glasses, his eyes landing on Randall’s and never leaving as he continued. “All right. Fine. This afternoon.” He hung up without another word and turned to face Randall, crossing his arms over his chest, a slight smirk lifting his cheeks.

  “The housing board?” Randall asked.

  “Don’t ask.”

  “I want to know,” Randall said with a playful smile, taking his first step across the threshold.

  “Last night John was in the bathroom, so . Sharif pissed in one of those Nantucket Nectar bottles. He was on his way to put it in the trash when he ran into John in the hallway and he wanted to know why Sharif was throwing away a full bottle of lemonade. So Sharif let him drink it.” .

  Randall shivered. “Tell me you’re kidding.”

  “No. John’s trying to petition for a change of residence. But if he doesn’t get it, he's going to take a dump in Sharif s bed. This is what I get for living with a bunch of straight guys.”

  Randall smiled. Tim just looked at him.

  “You’re working,” Randall said. It wasn’t a question, but rather an attempt to imply a familiarity that Randall feared might have been lost over the past few weeks of phone calls that he had been too preoccupied, and disinterested, to return. He knew that Tim always wrote in a frenzy, usually dressed in underwear, one cigarette burning in the ashtray and another dangling from his lip.

  Randall pushed the door open all the way, then kicked it lightly closed. He took a seat on the bed, then rolled over onto his back with a stretch and an exaggerated yawn. Tim’s eyes followed him the whole way, his tongue making a lump in his upper lip.

  “You’re quite the celebrity today, aren’t you?” Randall asked.

  “You read my article.”

  Randall nodded.

  “Well, the article you didn’t read was a lot more interesting.” Tim tore a Camel Light from his pack and lit it.

  “I thought you were the news editor.”

  “I’m one news editor,” Tim practically snapped, exhaling his drag through his nostrils. “And I’ve got an editor-in-chief over me with a major stick up her ass. She says I turned a professor’s personal loss into a tabloid spectacle.”

  Randall nodded, as if the description might be apt. Tim’s eyes narrowed on him. “To what do I owe the honor?” he asked.

  “Your article. I thought it was a great piece.” Randall knew the best way to pry more information from Tim was to stroke his ego. The guy could bash the Herald as much as he wanted; he still considered it The Washington Post and had secretly crowned himself its Bob Woodward.

  Tim realized his match was still lit and he shook it out with several flicks of his wrist before dropping it into his ashtray. “I didn’t know you were a Herald reader.”

  “Only when I see your name in the byline.”

  Randall sat up, slid his arms out of his jacket, and dropped it onto the floor. He stretched out on Tim’s bed again, rolling over onto one side to face him. “What’s the matter, Randall?” Tim asked. “Not getting enough action from your roommate?”

  “Please,” Randall said with a snort.

  “When you stopped calling, I thought maybe you were saving it all for him.”

  “You think too much.”

  Tim sucked a drag off his cigarette, expression grave. “What else is there to do here?”

  Randall smiled to suggest that there was a lot else they could do, right there, right now. He was satisfied to see the same flicker of attraction in Tim’s eyes that he noticed when they’d met at the year’s first Gay and Lesbian Alliance Dance.

  “I have a question for you, Bob Woodward.”

  Tim said nothing as Randall reached down and pulled the Herald out of his satchel. “Now you have to forgive me, because I’m kind of a babe in the woods when it comes to journalism, but why include this claim by her sister when Lisa Eberman’s toxicology proves she was driving drunk?”

  “That’s what happens when an article gets butchered.”

  “What do you mean?” Randall asked, trying to maintain a tone of mild interest, and fighting the urge to demand Tim just hand over his unedited piece so he could take his first deep breath in several days and get the hell out of Tim’s room.

  “I conducted a forty-minute interview with Paula Willis and they cut it right before we went to press.”

  “You talked to her?” Randall asked, dropping the paper to his lap, his tone sharp, with a spike of outrage he hadn’t done his best to conceal.

  “I called her the day after the accident. I expected her to hang up when I told her who I was, but I had been instructed to write a memorial article and that’s what I was planning to do. No one on this whole campus knew a goddamn thing about Lisa Eberman, so I had to get some bio from someone. She was listed in the phone book. Well, her doctor must have her on some serious meds because she just went off.”

  “I’m not surprised,” Randall said. “Her sister just died and she’s really sick.”

  “She doesn’t sound like it. And she didn’t go off on me. She went off on Eric Eberman.”

  Randall widened his eyes in curiosity, as he fought down the cold knot of fear that had formed inside his chest. “What did she say?”

  “She admitted Lisa drank. Often. But she wasn’t nearly the lush Eric Eberman made her out to be in front of the police. She basically defended Lisa’s honor, implying that if she was driving drunk, then Eric had probably given her a pretty good reason to.”

  Gooseflesh tickled Randall’s arms and he sat up, feigning a posture of attentiveness so he could cross his arms over his chest.

  “You came all the way across campus to talk about Lisa Eberman?” Tim asked archly. He’d propped one bare foot on the edge of his desk, pushing his chair onto its hind legs.

  Randall brushed the paper in his lap. “I just got out of lecture. Technically, I wasn’t all the way across campus.”

  Tim shook his head, eyes moving to the window and its view of dorm-room windows alight like segments in a honeycomb. Randall pushed his back up against the wall. “You want to know the truth?” Randall asked. “I’ve never read anything you’ve written before. I was impressed. Every time you used to spout off about bringing real journalism to the student newspaper... well, I thought it was a little starry-eyed o
f you.”

  “Starry-eyed?” Tim snorted, letting the chair down onto all four legs. He rose and moved to the window. “Try sleepless and driven.”

  “Why this story, Tim?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You really went the full mile here. Toxicology reports. Calling her sister.”

  Tim’s expression hardened as he stared out the window. Randall went silent, sensing he had touched a nerve.

  “I had Eberman last year. The guy’s a total closet case.” Tim popped his cigarette into his mouth and began picking at the frayed edge of a thumbnail. Randall kept his mouth shut, drawing his knees to his chest and wrapping his arms around them. But Tim seemed to shake free of whatever memory he had lapsed into, and he turned and met Randall head-on. “You know, Randall, I have other boys to jerk me around. In every sense of the word.”

  “Are you trying to make me jealous?” Randall asked, with a smile that said he wasn’t the jealous type.

  “Christ.” Tim let out a short laugh and stubbed out his smoldering butt in the ashtray. “You’re a freshman, for Christ’s sake. I should know better. My freshman year here, I was like a kid in a candy store.”

  “You lost me.”

  “I wish,” Tim mumbled under his breath.

  “I’m here right now, Tim. What does that say?”

  Tim slumped against the window. It looked like his fight might be leaving him. “It says you’ve always got me to fall back on.”

  Randall raised the paper in one hand. “Well, now that I’ve been given a glimpse of your genius, maybe I’ll start falling back on you more often.”

  Tim’s face went lax as his last shred of resistance left him. Randall dropped the paper and curled his index finger twice. Tim complied and crossed to the bed. Randall hooked his belt buckle with the same finger he had beckoned with and Tim fell, knees first, to the mattress in front of him.

  “You’re too damn cute and I don’t know any better,” Tim whispered.

  'You’re half right,” Randall said, grazing Tim’s lips with his first teasing kiss. 'You don’t know anyone better than me.”

  Tim groaned in weak protest before Randall pulled him down onto the bed.

  “That was vocal,” Tim said. Next door, Sharif had responded to Randall’s groans by cranking up Shaggy to almost full volume. “Have you been taking voice lessons or something?”

  “Don’t flatter yourself,” Randall said, even though that was precisely what his overenthusiastic display had been intended to do. As much as Tim seemed to demand intimacy from his sexual partners in daily life, in bed he was all porn-star curses that delayed the execution of the titillating things he so throatily promised to do. After being enveloped by the honest power of Eric’s long unrequited passion, Randall felt that sex with Tim seemed no different from the men back in New York, who showed no apparent interest in how Randall’s body worked, holding him down so they could do little more than take in the sight of who they were penetrating. Randall draped himself over Tim’s legs as he reached down and removed his silver flask from his jacket pocket.

  Tim continued packing his bowl with his thumb, cursing the dryness of the weed under his breath. “I assume you don’t want any of this.”

  Randall fell back against his pillow and took a slug from the flask.

  “You and that flask. It’s very weird.”

  “Scotch is a gentleman’s drink.”

  “So it’s going to turn you into a gentleman?”

  “Cute,” Randall responded, but he was distracted by how light the flask felt in his hand. He needed a refill, and for that he needed access to Lisa’s storehouse of Chivas Regal. The prospect of stealing scotch from a dead woman washed the warm post-sex flush from his veins, proving it had only been a distraction and exposing the silt of dread that still clung to his thoughts.

  Tim drew the sheet up over their naked bodies with a single, uncomfortable glance at the burns on Randall’s legs. Also no different from the men in New York, Randall thought. Eric had been the first man to ever touch them without fear or disgusted fascination. “How do you know Eberman’s a closet case?” he asked.

  Tim rolled his eyes and lifted the bowl in one hand, indicating he needed a hit before he got into it. The lighter’s flame disappeared into the bowl and then reappeared magically. Tim sank back against his pillow before letting the smoke escape in a drawn-out breath. Randall hated the smell of pot. Once, it had transported him to alleys behind bars in Manhattan’s Meat-Packing District; now it seemed to embody the inherent dirtiness and messiness of college life; it conjured up images of stoners he had met who babbled on about burning down Babylon when they were too high to do anything other than shovel peanut butter into their mouths, let alone set fire to the world’s major cities.

  “I took one of his two hundred courses last year.” “Two hundred” indicated a course open only to grad students. “I talked my way into it. Well, flirted my way into it, basically,” Tim began. “You know Eberman wrote a book? About the works of Hieronymus Bosch? Well, I had read it and I think Bosch is a genius, so I thought I would be perfect for it. I went into his office one day and made this big impassioned speech. That didn’t seem to work. So I poured on the charm.”

  “Charm?” Randall asked, taking a slug.

  "That didn’t seem to work either. Or so I thought. About a week later, I got this E-mail from him explaining that I had demonstrated a keen and emphatic interest in his area of study. . . . Something like that. I thought it was all code because the guy looked at my ass like it was carved out of gold.”

  “There’s your headline,” Randall cut in. “Professor Beholds Boy’s Gold Ass. Wife Dies!” He kept his voice steady and hearty.

  “Can I finish, please? Anyway, I signed up for the course, which was basically a tutorial of his book. Turns out the whole class is a bunch of grad students holding a circle jerk in his honor. But he’s paying special attention to me. Stopping discussions that are soaring over my head to explain things like the difference between Catharism and the established views of the Medieval church. And the other students are getting totally pissed off and I can tell. Especially this one guy . . .”

  “Mitchell Seaver.”

  “Yeah. How did you know?”

  “I guessed. I’m in Foundations One. Mitchell’s lecturing while Er ... Eberman’s out of town at the funeral.” Randall said, cursing his near slip. “Mitchell’s a total prick.”

  “Tell me about it. You would have thought this loser was teaching the course too. Anyway, Eberman’s paying a lot of attention to me. And I’m not going to lie, he’s hot.”

  “If you like older men,” Randall mumbled.

  “Whatever. Young. Old. He’s a good-looking guy.”

  “If you like older men.” Randall repeated.

  “All right. Fine. I like older men. Sometimes.”

  Randall laughed. “Go on.”

  “So I asked him out to dinner.”

  Randall lifted his eyebrows in disbelief. Tim reached for his bowl again as he continued. “Okay, I had no clue he was married. None. I’d had like ten conversations with him outside of class and he never mentioned his wife. Not once. And then when I asked him after class if he wanted to get something to eat. . . Christ, I’ve never seen someone freeze up like that.”

  Tim took another hit as Randall waited, confused by the strange stab of jealousy he felt upon hearing about all the “attention” Eric had paid to him, realizing how much he had come to love the idea of being Eric’s only one. And why had he let the conversation veer away from Lisa? “And?” Randall asked, impatiently.

  “He sent me another E-mail. This one said that he thought it would no longer be wise for me to stay on in the course. That I was too far behind the rest of the class, and that if I wanted to I could audit it. I was like, fuck that. I’m not auditing an art history course my sophomore year when I’ve got, like, a hundred requirements I haven’t filled for my own major. I responded much more eloquently than that
. He didn’t.”

  “What did he say?”

  Tim exhaled. Randall winced at the return of the smoke.

  “I’m married. That’s all he wrote. Talk about jumping to conclusions.”

  “But he wasn’t.”

  “Whatever. He sent out the signals. Strong signals. And then he panicked when I picked up on them.”

  Randall weighed this for several seconds as Tim let his eyes flutter shut, fast on his way to being stoned. He felt anything but high. His blood was heavy as lead, as if it were trying to slow itself, depriving his brain of the oxygen it needed to give voice to his next question. “You think this guy killed his wife, don’t you?”

  Tim squinted slightly and rolled his head against the pillow to face Randall. “No. But I think Paula Willis might be right. He might have given her plenty of reasons to get drunk and go for a drive.”

  “How far are you willing to take this?” Randall asked, as casually as he could. '

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s an ethical question, I guess.” Randall continued carefully. “It’s one thing to lie here and tell me what you really think about Lisa’s death, but—and no offense—it all sounds like speculation. Would you be willing to pick up your pen and play with this man’s reputation just because you think he’s gay?” He prayed that his delivery was unlit by the fear burning under his words, and when Tim rolled his head back against the pillow, searching for an answer on the ceiling, Randall felt relief as he watched his bare chest rise and fall.

  “I didn’t go through half the shit I did coming out to my family and friends—when I was sixteen, I might add —just so I could end up being an ass that gets stared at by some pretentious fuck twice my age who thinks he’s somehow superior to me even though he’s too much of a fucking coward to face the thing I did when I was in high school.” Tim met Randall’s eyes. “If I have a mortal enemy, it’s men like Eric Eberman. Because the more men there are like him that try to keep what they want a dirty little secret, the more you and I get turned into dirty little secrets.” Tim jabbed one finger just above Randall’s left nipple to bring home his point. Randall clasped the offending hand in his own and used it to pull himself into a straddle across Tim’s chest. He kissed his fingers and then lowered his mouth inches from Tim.