Eden Close

by Anita Shreve

  Not that he didn't love her. He did, or thought he might, though she, with the admirable bristles and spikes of her anger, was not always easy to love. They were married by then, living in a one-bedroom third-floor walk-up on Fayette Street in Cambridge. The tub was in the kitchen. Martha studied on the bed. He took a table by a window in the living room. At night, when he was finished studying, he'd go into the bedroom. She would be asleep, sitting up, with a book on her lap. Gently, so as not to wake her, he would carefully remove all the papers and books to a table beside the bed and would ease her down under the covers.

  And sometimes, having done that, he would watch her, beginning to formulate the calculus problem that would be their marriage. For even by then her anger was starting to become unfocused, more diffuse. The war had ended; it was harder now to find a cause. She was often dissatisfied, discontent. He thought then it was courageous of her, her willingness always to live at the edge, but later he came reluctantly to see that she was this way not by choice but because the anger was herself.

  He thinks now how slow he was to understand this, and how often he was impatient with this thing in her she had not wished upon herself, could not control. When they were in New York and living on the East Side, he thought her anger the result of having been uprooted from her home territory and of not being able to find a better job than teaching English in a private school. But by the time Billy had arrived and they had moved to Saddle River, the anger had focused on himself, or, more specifically, on the marriage, or, more specifically still, on the state of being married at that particular place and time. And by then the anger had become contagious, so that he had developed in her presence bristles and spikes, though he would never be as concise or as articulate in an argument as she, and so more often than not lost the verbal battles.

  He used to think it was the move that had destroyed them. It had happened coincidental^: a door had opened just when he had wished it to, and so he had walked through it. It was on an afternoon in their last year of graduate school—both of them waiting to hear of jobs for the next year—when he had had an epiphany of sorts following a stultifying session of a freshman course he had taught. He had seen, that day, standing in the classroom after the students had left, a future stretch before him of endless similar afternoons, of dusty books and chalk-filled rooms and freshman themes, and he had realized that this was not what he'd had in mind at all. Yet it wasn't until Geoffrey called, some weeks later, asking Andrew to come and work for him at the pharmaceutical firm, that a plan had taken shape. Geoffrey had been his professor in an American Studies seminar; Andrew had been his favorite pupil—indeed, the two had often finished the seminar with beers at a local bar. It needn't be forever, Geoffrey had said on the phone, knowing Andrew would be reluctant after so long an investment to turn his back on academia. Just come down and give it a try. And so he had, and the company had offered him so much money that even Martha had been, for once, speechless.

  When he tries to think of himself and Martha in Saddle River before they separated, he remembers too much and not enough. The memories flood in upon him like rain, but like rain, they fall through his fingers before he can grasp them. He used to think he could not remember because his memory was failing him, but now he thinks the forgetting is a trick of his mind to protect him. His mind protects him from the good memories, which are painful now to contemplate, and from the bad memories, which make him embarrassed for them both.

  When their nights were very bad, he was incapable of remembering the good ones. Or if he did, they were like childhood stories that no longer had meaning or resonance. Yet when there were good times, sparse though they were near the end, he could absolutely not remember the silences or the bitterness or the emptiness that had followed their fights just a week earlier. Or the fear—a persistent image—that the tiny family he had made was coming apart at the roots. He would sometimes not even be able to remember any of the words of a fight they had had just the day before.

  They were growing out of love, as if the love itself had always had a finite and predictable life, like childhood. And if they'd been told of this in the beginning, they might have chosen not to marry and have a child, though Andrew could not conceive of ever having made a decision that would lead to a world without Billy. And so they stayed together well past the time when the love had ended, pretending and hoping the hiatus was only temporary, fearful of the future. Until one day when the gulf between them had grown so deep that Martha, having more courage than he and fearing less that she would lose Billy, went to stay with her mother until Andrew was able to move out. He found that night, when he returned home from work, a sad note that, though it offered him a certain kind of relief, nearly drove him mad to read.

  And yet weren't those the best years of all—with Billy as an infant, a toddler, a little boy standing up in his crib with his arms wide to greet his father who had come home late from work? A tiny boy with a glove two sizes too big for him cheerfully missing each ball thrown to him, happy simply to be playing with his father, as indeed the father was happy simply to be playing with him.

  Andrew marvels at this conundrum, and he wonders often if this happened only to him, or if it happens all the time, to everyone who marries.

  AND HOW MUCH, through all this, did he think of Eden? Did she not rise and bubble to the surface in his dreams?

  In the beginning, when he was first at school, he felt uneasy when he met a girl. Pursuing pleasure, when Eden was so damaged, felt to him like an act of disloyalty. On visits home the first few years, he'd pester his mother with questions, but she was oddly reticent, changing the subject, as though she wished to protect him from the facts of the sordid and tragic business next door, perhaps believing the facts might distract him from what she thought was a more important matter—his education. When Martha began making the journey north with him, he found it awkward to ask of Eder, except in the most casual way. And by the time they'd moved to New York (and the journeys north had become even more infrequent), he had news of Eden only when he had a letter from home—in that era of ten-hour days at the office and of Billy's birth.

  And yet it seems to him now that Eden was always there, a presence hovering at the edge of his dreams, a fragment of a life not entirely left behind. He would think of her at odd moments, at a hockey game with his son, or when he saw a girl with a head of blond curls on a street corner. Sometimes, when he thought of Eden and himself, the image that came to mind was of two trains on parallel tracks hurtling forward with abandon, until one had stopped short, derailed, while the other, his own, had gone on and on.

  AND DID HE NOT, through all this, think often of Sean as well?

  The afternoon after the shooting, Sean left town—whether from grief or guilt no one ever was able accurately to say. Nor did anyone know where he had gone, for he had left no note. But T.J., realizing by evening that Sean was missing, told Andy in confidence over the phone that he thought Sean had gone south, toward New York City.

  As it happened, this was a shrewd guess, confirmed on the second day after the shooting when a state trooper called at the apartment over the TV repair shop a little after supper to inform Sean's parents that their son had been killed in a hit-and-run accident as he was attempting to cross 178th Street in Washington Heights. The boy had had too much to drink in an Irish bar on the corner, said the trooper, and had, according to witnesses, walked across the street as though blind. It was never known what Sean was doing on the periphery of Manhattan—whether he had got off the bus at the George Washington Bridge by mistake (not realizing there was another leg down into the center of the city, with a stop at Forty-second Street), or whether he had met someone on the bus who had enticed him into the neighborhood. But if there was someone, he or she never came forward. Indeed, none of the witnesses had ever seen Sean before.

  After that day and later, Andrew was to think often about that ill-fated bus ride, to imagine what Sean had been thinking on the thruway south to the city and to
wonder where it was that Sean had slept that night and why. Even today, when driving north on the Henry Hudson, he catches sight of the George Washington Bridge, or when he crosses the bridge from New Jersey, he never fails to think of Sean—blind drunk and lost in Washington Heights.

  The town reeled from the news of the two events (there hadn't been a murder in the village in forty-two years; never a report of a hit-and-run) and waited for Eden to wake up, hoping she would put the pieces of the puzzle into place. And so it was that when Eden came out of the coma that had kept her a silent sleeping prisoner in her hospital bed for ten days and said (her mother vigilant beside her) the single name—one time, never again to confirm or deny it—no one was surprised.

  IN THE MORNING, he surveys the gutter. It has come away from the house at one end and sags, as if at any minute the entire trough will break loose. It must be put right, though he has no certain idea how to do it. Walking back and forth along the southern face of the house, he tries to think about the problem logically. He will inspect the supports that are still holding, see how they're fastened, then reproduce that system along the length of the gutter. It isn't as though he has never done repair work before. He has, and still retains a vestigial memory of fixing things with his father in his boyhood. It's that he is, for reasons he can't bring into focus, edgy this morning, his nearly bucolic calm of yesterday morning badly ruffled.

  He assumes it is because he slept so fitfully during the night. When he awoke at 5 A.M., having nearly asphyxiated himself with the loose top sheet and wanting, inexplicably, to drink a beer, he had been dreaming of a blue dress in a window. He looks over at the other house. The window, with its four vertical rectangular panes, is bare and lifeless, as if what he saw there had been only a dream and not a tangible image.

  He gets the ladder and lays it against the house, careful not to dislodge the gutter further. When he climbs up, he sees to his dismay that it is nearly impacted with gunk—a mix of caked silt and petrified leaves. Now is when he could use his father to tell him which task to do first: clear the gutter or refasten it? He may not be able to fasten the trough to the house with the added weight and detritus; on the other hand, any pressure in cleaning it could rip away the entire structure.

  The work is irritating and annoying, unlike the pleasure of mowing the lawn yesterday. The payoff is not as immediate, not as showy. No one but him will even know the gutter has been fixed. The wood is rotted out where the nails should go; one entire board should be replaced, but he thinks that if he moves the supports, he may just be able to get away with using the wood that's there. It's not the way his father would have done it, he knows; not the way he himself was taught. But his patience is thin today. Especially thin when the only trowel he can find to clean the gutter (after nearly fifteen minutes of searching for any trowel at all) is too wide to fit into the trough.

  He is returning from the garage with a chisel when he sees her open the door of the Plymouth and slip in. She pretends not to have seen him, and he doesn't wave. He wonders how she got herself past the now broken step; he must definitely fix that today. He stops to watch her. She puts the Plymouth in reverse, angles out the drive. It will be quarter to ten; he doesn't need to check his watch. He looks again up at the window in the corner. He waits for a blur of blue to come and disappear, but there is no movement at all, no sign of life anywhere inside that house.

  By noon, he has got the gutter three quarters clean. His fingers are scraped raw, and the heat, shimmering up from the tar shingles, has given him a ferocious headache. Periodically, he puts his forehead against the lip of the gutter to rest his eyes, but he doesn't leave it there long. He's nearly done now and is impatient to be finished.

  He moves the ladder another two feet along the side of the house. He climbs up the rungs, inclining his head in such a way as to stop the throbbing. Perhaps he should eat something, take a couple of aspirin. What does she do all day? he wonders, unable to rid himself of the vision in the window, He examines his memory closely to see if there are details he has missed, details that might tell him something important—though what details he cannot imagine, since he sees nothing beyond an indefinite shape and an afterimage of color. He tastes the beer he had for breakfast, a beer he suspects is the real reason for the headache, exacerbated by the relentlessly bright sun overhead.

  He digs the chisel into the gunk, barking his knuckles again. Wincing, he digs it in again and gets an unexpected purchase. Six inches of gunk comes away effortlessly, throwing him off balance. Panicky, he reaches for the roof, but his hand scrapes and slides to the gutter. He grabs for the gutter, which stops his fall but in doing so comes loose from its supports; and pulls away from the house, taking the downspout with it. In the mishap, Andrew has slipped two rungs on the ladder.

  He curses and throws the chisel to the ground, where it lands straight up as if he had aimed it. Shaking, he descends the ladder and gives the wrenched downspout a kick. He puts his hands on his hips and breathes deeply. He feels an urge to move fast in his car, to get away, for an hour or two, from the houses.

  He'll have lunch in town, he decides, at the luncheonette.

  ANOTHER SCREEN DOOR, slapping faintly behind him, and he has never left. The same orange Formica counter with the pencil-line pattern of white and blue boomerangs, the same tall metal revolving stools with their red vinyl seats, stools he and Sean and T.J. spun on endlessly, thinking, talking, cooling down after practice—the kind of soda fountain stool Billy would die for now. The same white Buffalo china mugs, the Kellogg's cereal boxes next to the coffee, the bubble gum machine—providing his first tedious lessons in the fickleness of inanimate objects, mysteriously gobbling nickels and refusing to release the five hard round colored gum balls he'd paid for. Remarkable, he thinks, but it is the same machine, still five for a nickel, perhaps the last uninflated buy in America. If Billy were with him now, they'd give it a try.

  But, of course, it's not the same place at all. The Vietnamese woman behind the counter nods politely but without recognition. When he came here as a boy, the luncheonette was Bud's, they called it that, See you at Bud's, and through the years it has evolved from Bud's to Bill's to other names and now, enigmatically, to Al's—though that cannot be a real Vietnamese name, he is thinking. The place is cleaner than he remembers it ever being—a feeling more than a valid comparison, for it wasn't anything he paid attention to as a boy. But even the old ceiling fan, he sees, has been polished shiny.

  The specials are on the blackboard: Beefeater Sandwich Served With Fries / Turkey Health Club With Sprouts And Avocado—this last the only real clue, besides the new owners, to the passage of time. He slides onto a stool near one end of the counter. The Vietnamese woman nods, and he nods back. He orders the Turkey Health Club and a Pepsi.

  There is a rustle at the other end of the counter. An older man in a gray jogging suit picks up his sandwich and his glass of milk, walks to the stool next to Andrew and lays his lunch on the counter.

  "Andy?"

  Andrew begins to rise. He shakes the man's outstretched hand. "Chief DeSalvo."

  "Not anymore. Retired six years. Art. Call me Art. Mind if I join you? I'm here every day. Same time, same station. I get bored of my own company."

  "Not at all. Please."

  The Vietnamese woman brings Andrew a tall glass of Pepsi filled to within a millimeter of the rim. There is no ice in the glass. Andrew and DeSalvo look at the Pepsi.

  "Some things just don't translate," says DeSalvo, and Andrew laughs.

  "Sorry about your mother," says DeSalvo. "A lot of memories."

  "Thank you."

  "You in town long?"

  "No. A few more days. Just to pack away some things. Fix up the house."

  "You sellin'?"

  Andrew nods. DeSalvo's hair is steely gray, clipped short, like a Roman's. A fine gray stubble covers his cheeks, hiding some of the pockmarks on his jowls, but his eyebrows are still thick and unruly and black. Beneath the jogging suit,
his body is round and shapeless, what they used to call a barrel chest gone to fat. There's a wheeze in DeSalvo's voice, though the eyes are still a surprising blue and hard.

  "My boy was ahead of you—what, three, four years?"

  Andrew nods. "Nicky. How's he doing?"

  "I dunno," DeSalvo says wearily. "Kids. They're a heartache. You got kids?"

  "I have a son. Billy. He's seven."

  "Great age. Terrific age. It's later they break your balls. Nicky, he's had a bitch of a time with drugs. Lost his job. His wife and kids left him. Hey, I don't blame her one bit. He's clean now, but big fucking deal. The ball game's over, and he didn't even get to suit up."

  "People can change their lives," Andrew says cautiously.

  "Yeah, tell me about it. My wife, she cries herself to sleep every night: her grandchildren are in California. Your boy skate?"

  "Not really," says Andrew. "He lives in New Jersey. The ponds don't freeze for very long in the winter. Hockey's not the passion there it is up here."