The Snow Garden

by Christopher Rice

  “They don’t sound like very good psychologists. But it must have been traumatic if you decided to see them in the first place.”

  A question without a question mark on the end, she thought. Resting one hand on the mantel, she kept her back to him, hoping to conceal all evidence of her anger. “How did I get like this?”

  “What do you mean?” Mitchell asked, his voice maddeningly even.

  She swung around. “Here I am, with you, trying to find out if you’re the least bit interested in me, and who do we end up talking about? Jono. And if not him, who else? Randall. When did I become reduced to nothing more than a product of other people’s fuck-ups?”

  “Betrayals.”

  “What?”

  “Randall betrayed you. He lied to you. And it sounds like Jono might have done the same.”

  His face was as calm as a monk’s, as if the truth of what he said Was as self-evident as snowfall. She gauged his sincerity, searching for a hint of condescension, but she found none.

  “If it’s worth anything,” he began carefully, “I don’t think you’re damaged goods.”

  “What do you think I am?”

  “I think you’re a young woman possessed of incredible convictions, and since you arrived here all your so-called friends have tried to convince you that your beliefs are wrong. As a result, you’ve learned how to laugh at yourself, set aside what you thought was true. Which might keep you relatively sane here at Atherton. But something happened with Jono, something that strikes you, a bright and articulate person, absolutely speechless: And the depth of that silence suggests that whatever you don’t want to discuss has made you who you are right now.”

  “Jono killed himself.” She took several seconds to summon her composure before lifting her glass as if to say, There you go. Mitchell’s gaze remained fixed on her. The next logical question passed like a current between them: Why?

  “Kathryn,” Mitchell began, and she turned her back, expecting him to ask what she couldn’t yet answer. “You may want a boyfriend. But I don’t want to be something that temporary to you. I’d like to be the one who can listen to all the things you’re afraid to say.”

  “He was sick.”

  No response came from behind her.

  “He was HIV positive. And he knew. And he wasn’t a drug dealer in the conventional sense. He never accepted cash.”

  “He knew. So you believe he was deliberately infecting ..

  “I know he was.” The words came out of her before she had time to realize it was the first time she had ever spoken them to anyone.

  Mitchell let several seconds pass. “But not you?”

  “I dodged the bullet.”

  Finally, she turned around, having fought back tears and found anger. Mitchell hadn’t moved from the couch. She met his eyes and he nodded slightly, as if a suspicion of his had been confirmed. “Is that what you wanted?” she asked.

  “It’s what you wanted. And you know it.” His voice was gentle.

  “It doesn’t feel like something I would want.”

  “There’s more, isn’t there?”

  “Mitchell, please.”

  “I’m not asking you to tell me now. I’m asking you to do something else.”

  She lifted her head from her wineglass.

  “Write it,” Mitchell told her.

  “What? Like an essay?”

  “Any way you like. Word it however you want. Just get it on paper. And get it out of you.”

  Stricken, she met his gaze and was frozen by its intensity.

  A car engine sounded just outside the house. Mitchell shot up from the couch. “Excuse me.”

  Kathryn watched him duck into the kitchen. She downed all her wine and set the glass on the table.

  In search of a bathroom, Kathryn mounted the stairs. She halted when she saw the giant harp leaning against the far wall of the landing. For a second she thought it might be a real instrument, but when she saw the giant mandolin—almost as tall as she was—leaning against the wall opposite, she realized they were some kind of sculptures. Even though they had been leaned against the wall, overhead tract lighting was positioned on them, suggesting that their placement was deliberate.

  She ran her fingers over the top of the harp. Both pieces had been carved out of wood and painted meticulously to resemble real instruments. But something had abraded the paint from the top of the harp, revealing several thick swaths of raw wood.

  No doubt both items had some sort of symbolic significance, but she hadn’t gone to the bathroom since Chicago, and she didn’t have time to ponder them. She looked around. The narrow hallway ran the length of the second floor. Three shut doors greeted her. She tried the knob on the one nearest her and it opened.

  A single bedside lamp threw pale light across six single beds all crammed into one bedroom. Each bed had a frame of unfinished wood, with a matching nightstand and gooseneck lamp. Between the footboards, there was barely enough space to move through. As in the living room, she saw no personal belongings. Nothing distinguished one sleeping area from another. She thought of Stockton Hall, where everyone marked off personal space with a profusion of posters and framed photographs. In contrast, this room was downright eerie. Here the sterility she had first noticed downstairs had advanced absolutely. Even nuns’ cells would at least have crucifixes and rosaries.

  Outside, a car door slammed, startling her out of the room.

  She shut the bedroom silently as she heard the sound of Mitchell’s voice outside. She spotted a window at the far end of the hallway and moved to it. The slats on the shutters had been drawn shut, and she pushed the window upward with a minimum of noise. Her fingers pried at the shutter’s clasp before she realized it had been painted shut. The best she could do was to pull the slats open. When she did, she saw the twin swaths of headlights in the house’s driveway below. The metal gate hadn’t been pulled shut behind the car.

  Mitchell stood in the headlight’s halos, speaking quietly to Maria, her arms folded over her chest in what had to be anger. Kathryn couldn’t hear a word they said. Lauren Raines was strapped into the car’s passenger seat. Maria turned from Mitchell, rounded the nose of the car, and bent forward through the open passenger window. Before she could finish whatever she was saying, Lauren unbuckled her seat belt and leaped from the car.

  “She’s here? Now?” Lauren cried. The words rose to her, sharp as smoke.

  There was obvious excitement in her voice, but no sooner had she stepped from the car than Mitchell had her by both shoulders. Kathryn could make out Lauren’s face as it fell—not only in disappointment, but in a sudden submission to authority. Mitchell’s authority.

  Maria took over the task of steering Lauren back into the passenger seat. That done, she rounded the nose of the car, whispering something fiercely to Mitchell as she went.

  Unsure of what this exchange had meant, she knew that one thing was clear. Mitchell didn’t live in this house alone, and when Lauren had told her she was “spending a lot of time off campus,” this had to be the place she had been referring to. But why wouldn’t Mitchell even mention his housemates in passing? Especially when she’d mentioned Maria and Lauren to him the night before break?

  The car was backing out of the driveway and Mitchell was gone. She managed to shut the window silently and race back down the stairs. She arrived in the living room just as she heard the back door creak open.

  By the time Mitchell returned, she was standing next to the mantel again.

  “Who was that?”

  “A housemate of mine.”

  “So you don’t live here alone?”

  “No.” He answered flatly. His stretch and yawn seemed forced.

  “Would you like me to drive you back to Stockton?”

  “We’re done?” she asked.

  “I’ve given you my thoughts. And you have my suggestion.”

  “An essay.”

  He nodded and dropped his arms to his sides. Part of her suspected that his s
uggestion was more for his sake than for hers. He obviously didn't have the stomach to listen to her discuss Jono at length.

  “Sure, I’m ready,” she said.

  She lifted her eyes to the mantel where she saw the candelabra. Six pearls, she thought.

  And six beds.

  Mitchell’s footsteps echoed in the foyer.

  Randall sat cross-legged on his bed, Lauren Raines’ essay on the comforter beside him, and The Duality of Hieronymus Bosch by Dr. Eric Eberman open before him to page 111, bookmarked with Lauren’s STD results. When he’d first purchased the book, Randall had underlined scores of passages, all of them potential conversation topics he could use during his initial seduction. He had to use only two.

  Even though Tim had dismissed Lauren’s essay as irrelevant to Lisa’s death, Lauren’s words haunted Randall. Repeatedly he had been compelled to return to them late at night.

  How can I embrace my sexuality when all it does is try to sink its teeth into me?

  Why the essay had been in Eric’s house was still beyond him, and now that Eric had all but banished him from his home, the only place he might find answers would be in his sole published work.

  He flipped pages until he came to a color plate of “Hell,” the right wing of The Garden of Earthly Delights triptych. Anyone who refused to call Bosch a surrealist was an idiot; this depiction of damnation proved it. A giant knife blade extended from two severed human ears, carried by or crushing—it was impossible to tell—an army of the writhing and naked. Below what looked like the ruins of a city bombed out by the Nazis, brick-walled cavities emanating... a naked woman was lassoed to the spine of what looked like a giant mandolin. A naked man was strung up on the strings of a giant harp.

  Randall found it all too absurd to be frightening, and it certainly didn’t compel him to obey the dictates of an organized religion, which, he believed, did little more than indulge its members’ fears. At the sight of the first bird-beaked man who arrived to deliver his punishment, outfitted in blue robes and wearing what looked like a mushroom on his head, Randall would laugh himself into oblivion before he could suffer for all eternity. He had glimpsed hell and this fanciful, fevered heretic’s dream didn’t even come close. Hell was the actual physical world you saw right in front of your eyes the minute you realized you no longer had a home, where every highway and street could swallow you up without delivering you anywhere. Hell was an open sky and flat plain. No monsters, and only a brief blast of fire now and then.

  Yet it wasn’t difficult to see why the images had such a hold on Eric. The man had nursed himself on such God-generated self-loathing there probably wasn’t a doubt in his mind that he would end up in hell if he acted on his bodily desires. Of course, he would want it to be spectacular and theatrical.

  Outside Stockton, Randall heard a car door slam, and got up to look out the window.

  When Kathryn emerged from Mitchell Seavers’ Tercel, jealousy and anger knotted his stomach. Was that prick his replacement? After she disappeared under the overhang of the entrance, Randall sat down on his bed, waiting endless minutes for the sound of her footsteps shuffling over the carpet in the hallway. To his surprise, he found himself staring longingly at Jesse’s dark, empty side of the room. When he knew she was right outside, he wished for the first time in months that Jesse was right across from him, because now more than ever, he needed some comrade against Kathryn’s iron judgment. But it was a futile wish and Randall found himself hoping that Jesse, wherever he was, was suffering.

  He heard the door to Kathryn’s room shut behind her; she didn’t even pause outside her door.

  After several long minutes, Randall got up, turned on his desk lamp, and returned his attention to Eric’s book.

  Twentieth-century viewers of Bosch's work have demonstrated a reluctance to view his Garden of Earthly Delights as a condemnation of human sexuality consonant with the established views of the medieval church. In particular, the central panel, with its deceptively beautiful depiction of a paradise earth, has been the subject of relentless speculation.

  Wilhelm Frangier put forth a highly questionable but nonetheless wildly popular theory that the entire altar piece was commissioned by a secret heretical cult known as the Brethren of the Free Spirit, and that the central panel is actually a depiction of the cult’s religious rites. Little is known about the Brethren of the Free Spirit beyond the fact that their practices included some form of ritual promiscuity, and that its members believed that unrestrained sexual activity was a method they could use to return themselves to the state of purity possessed by Adam before the fall. Consequently, its members were also known as Adamites.

  However, it is impossible to isolate the central panel from the altarpiece as a whole, and objective viewers must not forget that only several inches to the left, the same figures who take delight in the earth’s fleshly pleasures are punished in hell for their joy.

  As if Eric would ever forget, Randall thought.

  Given the preponderance of evidence that Bosch may have been a mitigated Cathar who held the belief that the physical world was Satan’s terrain, it is possible to speculate that the Brethren of the Free Spirit were not truly a sect of medieval “love children” reveling in the unbridled pleasures of the flesh, but rather a secret cult that used sexual promiscuity in a ritual fashion designed to help them escape the trappings of the flesh. The Garden of Earthly Delights might be a glorified depiction of one of their rites, which consisted of a single orgiastic burst of sensuality—in essence, an orgy designed to purge members of the day-to-day temptations of the flesh. Perhaps for the Brethren of the Free Spirit, freedom did not mean indulgence; it meant purging.

  He searched his memory for a clear recollection of the night when he had discovered Lauren’s essay. Eric and Mitchell had been arguing. But as he lurked in the driveway outside, Randall had barely been able to make out their words. He’d heard Eric as he stood at the sink in front of the kitchen window. Eric had asked to be kept in the dark.

  Randall slid the book off his lap and picked up Lauren’s essay.

  At first reading, her words had seemed desperate to him. There was little narrative in her essay; she opened with an overwrought paragraph about how her uncle had poisoned her, and didn’t reveal he had even molested her until the second page. Whoever she had been writing to—Mitchell, Eric—Lauren had worked to detail the effects of what had been done to her, not illuminate the events for an outside reader who was unaware of her past. As a result, the entire essay had almost a pleading tone to it.

  Pleading for what? Randall asked.

  After several minutes of staring out the window, an answer came to him, striking in its simplicity.

  Lauren Raines was asking for admission.

  Randall tried to let this hypothesis take firmer shape in his brain. But he was distracted by a clatter from across the hall, steady and constant. With growing certainty he opened the door and crossed the hall. Kathryn’s door was open and she was sitting intently at her desk, her coat still on, and her fingers flying as if she were playing music.

  Kathryn was typing.

  Ill

  The Garden of Earthly Delights

  Through shapes more sinuous than a sculptor’s thought,

  Tell of dull matter splendidly distraught,

  Whisper of mutinies divinely quelled—

  Weak indolence of flesh, that long rebelled,

  The spirit’s domination bravely taught.

  —Edward Cracroft Lefroy,

  “A Palaestral Study”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  “I'M STARTING TO WONDER ABOUT THIS MAN YOU LIVE WITH,” SAID Pamela Milford one afternoon, when winter was still lingering, but slanting sunlight lanced the branches knobbed with new buds.

  “What would you like to know?” Eric asked, unable to refer to him by name.

  “What does he do?” she asked.

  “He wants to be an architect. A great one.”

  “Will he? Be great, I m
ean.”

  Eric stopped walking, but Pamela did not release his hand. He stared off into space as if Michael’s career ambitions required the deepest of thought. Truthfully, he was hesitant to look at her because he was terrified that although he had been seeing this woman for only three weeks; she would be able to read anything from the slightest tic in his face. How much longer before Pamela figured out that every night, after trying to infuse their requisite good-night kiss with more passion, and performing the obligatory running of hands around her body, he made the long walk back to 231 Slope Street to slip into his bed and wait for Michael’s short knock on his bedroom door, praying that by the time Michael would have joined him beneath the covers his desire for the man’s desperate kisses would evaporate?

  “Eric?”

  Finally, he looked at her. Her blonde hair had been blow-dried straight, brushed to her shoulders from a part in the center. On another girl, her slanted, pale blue eyes might have seemed too close together, but they were in proportion with her oval face and her tiny nose. The unseasonable cold had brought color to her otherwise pale skin. She was a small girl, but she looked perfect walking beside him.

  She was his only escape, and he knew he had to chase this fixed and puzzled expression from her face.

  “He might be. He has the ego.”

  “And it’s just the two of you in that big house. How fun.”

  “We keep to ourselves.”

  “I’m sure he misses you. Since you’ve been spending so much time out of the house.” She gave him a devilish smile, which appeared ludicrous because they had done little more than paw at each other’s clothes in the shadow of the overhang above her dorm entrance. “We should all have dinner.” It was a gentle command and she was waiting for him to agree.

  But instead, he reached into his inside coat pocket. Now was as good a time as any to give it to her. He handed her the long gift box and she looked from it to him with a smile that indicated she had been successfully distracted.