The Snow Garden (15 page)

     But he was already in the dining room. The last time he’d checked, there had a been a wedding portrait of Lisa and him on top of the liquor cabinet, but in its place he found a framed shot of Lisa that had been taken oh vacation in Florida. How had one replaced the other? He picked it up and returned to the living room to find Randall uneasy in the doorway, his coat still draped over one arm.

     “This is her,” he said, holding up the picture in front of him as he approached.

     Randall’s eyes held Eric’s stare and Eric shook the picture slightly. “Look!”

     Randall shut his eyes.

     “It’s just a question, Randall. I’m not judging you. I’m not
judging
either one of us. Just tell me if we went upstairs and had sex, would you — ”

     Randall grabbed the photograph and hurled it against the wall. It shattered and slid to the baseboard.

     Eric crossed to the picture frame, bent down, and picked it up. Lisa’s face was still held inside the frame, slivers of glass radiating from her wan smile. He shook the frame and they fell to the floor. Then he saw Randall had crumpled the note in one fist and crouched down in front of the fireplace.

     Some instinct, something not entirely blotted out by the wine and the exhaustion that follows grief, leaped inside of him, and Eric crossed the room in no time, seizing Randall’s wrist in one hand.

     “No!” Randall yelled. As he tried to twist his arm free, he lost his balance and pitched forward into the gas flame. Eric heard Randall’s cry, a wail blocked by clenched teeth before he thudded to the floor.

     He looked down to see Randall sitting at his feet, clutching one hand to his chest.
“Fucker!”
Randall growled, clamping one hand over the one held tight to his chest. Tears sprouted from his eyes “Fucker!” he groaned. His choice of curses was childish, and the way his lower lip quivered completed the image of a young man instantly reduced to a little boy. Eric felt a shard of Randall’s history stab him in the gut. Eric crouched next to him, half expecting Randall to crawl away from him, but Randall didn’t move as Eric gently pried his hand away from his chest.

     The blistered strips of skin looked like the imprints of fingers on Randall’s palm.

     “This needs ice.”

     “Say it’s over and I’ll leave.”

     Eric met Randall’s gaze, wary behind his tear-stained eyes. For an instant, he sought to dig deep and come up with an answer he knew he should give. But he couldn’t find it.

     “This needs ice,” he said again, releasing Randall’s burned hand and getting to his feet.

Randall blinked as he tried to focus on Eric rooting through kitchen drawers in search of some first-aid kit that Randall suspected he didn’t even own. The black spots that had crowded his vision the minute his hand hit the fireplace were finally dissipating, but Randall kept his lips sealed so Eric wouldn’t hear him struggle to regulate his breaths. He kept his burned hand resting on the kitchen table. It trembled slightly at the wrist. Only one thing would blunt the tensing of the fiery pinpricks across his palm, drown out the searing flash of memory the burn had sparked. Randall brought the flask to his mouth. He almost emptied it.

     Eric shot him a glance. He still looked chastised, convinced that he knew full well exactly what memory this accident had sparked. Rather than tell him otherwise, Randall drained the flask and shot a glance into the dining room.

     In the beginning, Randall had been skeptical of Eric’s stories of his wife’s alcoholism, and presumed that Eric embellished them in a warped attempt to justify his urge for Randall, which is what Randall had hoped for from the start. Then Randall had discovered the virtual warehouse of Chivas Regal in the liquor cabinet. That, and the fact that he had never seen Eric drink anything stronger than wine, convinced Randall that Lisa Eberman belonged to a special category of high-end drunk. Now, his palm still burning, he prayed that Eric hadn’t emptied out the liquor cabinet in some attempt to purge Lisa’s ghost from the house.

     “Here.” Eric took a seat across from him, setting a role of Ace bandages on the table. Eric cradled his hand. “I don’t have anything to treat it with.”

     “It’s not bad. Trust me. I know.”

     Eric met his eyes. “But this time you didn’t have the luxury of blacking out.”

     “Is that supposed to be funny?” Randall demanded.

     Eric’s gaze shot back to Randall’s burned hand. He wrapped the bandages around his palm so slowly and methodically that it was obvious he had no clue what he was doing. The intensity of the act left Randall strangely moved. He began to realize that Eric’s dogged, if drunken, attempt to get Randall to face his own guilt was the type of reaction he had been hoping for during the long walk from Stockton Hall that night. But he had expected to find Eric cocooning into his own guilt and despair, shutting Randall out. Instead, fully aware that he didn’t have the strength to end what they had started, Eric had been dead set on driving their mutual guilt to the surface, forcing the two of them to face it before they landed in bed together again.

     Eric rose, leaving the mess of bandages shrouding Randall’s hand. He pulled a roll of Scotch tape from a drawer and returned to the table, tore off a piece of tape, and took Randall’s hand in his own.

     “What are you doing, Eric?”

     “I have to tape it.. .”

     Randall shook his hand and the wad of bandages fell to the table. When he turned sideways in his chair, away from Eric, the scotch pulsed in his temples and he sucked in a breath to prevent dizziness. Groping for some thought to bring him back to more solid ground, Randall remembered the strange car ride he had received earlier that night.

     “Mitchell Seaver has a thing for you,” he said as gently as possible.

     When he glanced at Eric, he saw his face stitched with angry bewilderment. Too angry, Randall thought. The confusing jealousy, which he had only started to feel that day, returned as he wondered whether Mitchell’s feelings weren’t unrequited. Eric pushed himself up from the chair carefully, turning his back on Randall as he moved to the sink. “I wasn’t aware that you and Mitchell were friends,” he finally said.

     Randall turned forward again. “We aren’t.”

     “Then what would make you say something so preposterous?”

     “Why is it so preposterous that someone could have feelings for you?”

     Eric snorted and began arranging dirty dishes in the sink. “Not only is Mitchell not a homosexual, he’s barely even what you would call sexual.”

     “Right. Like all those elderly male choir teachers who return home to their cats and a case of child pornography.”

     Eric turned, abandoning his dish sculpture. “You’re off the mark, Randall.”

     “He’s strange,” Randall said, being deliberately coy and hoping to anger Eric further.

     “I guess you’re young enough to find academics like Mitchell to be
strange.”

     “That isn’t what I meant.”

     “What did you mean?”

    
New tactic
, Randall thought. “Forget I asked,” he said, drawing his burned hand to his lap and staring down at it as it suddenly held him in thrall. A brief silence passed before Eric spoke again, “Are you jealous of him?”

     “Excuse me?” Randall asked, stricken.

     “My relationship with Mitchell is a close one, but it’s purely ... academic. Maybe the fact that he and I don’t need to hide bothers you.”

     Eric’s words stung, and it must have been evident because Eric let out a fatigued breath. “I didn’t say you were fucking him,” Randall muttered. “I said maybe he was in love with you.”

     “And I asked you what gave you—”

     “He gave me a ride today,” Randall cut in. “Maria Klein ratted me out because I stopped going to discussion sections.”

     “And Mitchell wanted to talk to you about it?”

     “It seemed like an excuse to ... I don’t know. Belittle me.”

     “For what?” Eric asked.

     Randall surveyed the fear in Eric’s eyes before continuing. “I don’t know. You know him a lot better than I do.”    
_;

     Eric leaned against the edge of the sink, eyes wandering lazily past Randall as if in search of some subject to derail the topic. “The attention I’ve paid to Mitchell has never been sexual. But it might have been too much. His head has swollen. He fancies himself my colleague rather than my student and occasionally he steps over the line.”

     “Does he know about us?”

     Eric crossed to the table with renewed vigor and picked up the Scotch tape and Ace bandages. “Of course not,” he muttered under his breath.

     “So I’m the only student you’ve ever slept with?” Randall asked. Eric’s manic laugh was not the response Randall had hoped for. “Yes,” he answered when he caught his breath.

     “The first man?” Randall asked.

     Eric threw up both hands as if to shield himself from a blow, then brought them to his temples as he turned away from the sink. He let them fall to his sides before he responded, “Let’s see. What do I say to that? I could try pointing out that it’s none of your business, but I’m sure that will only encourage you to dig deeper. Or I could say that it was a very long time ago, but that would imply that you’re too young to understand, which I happen to know from experience is the equivalent of throwing ice water in your face and expecting you not to fight back.” “What was his name?”

     Eric shook his head as if in disbelief that Randall had the nerve to ask. “It was a very long time ago. Which is why you shouldn’t even care. How’s that?”

     “How did you go for so long?”

     “Appetite wanes as you grow older. You’ll see.”

     “Come on, Eric. If it was just
appetite
,
you could sign onto America Online and meet hundreds of eighteen-year-old boys all over New England who want nothing more than a forty-one-year-old to fulfill their daddy fantasy. But instead you’re here with me.”

     “Yes. Enduring questions you already know the answers to.”

     Some desperate urge that he had been so good at fighting up until that moment, that had been stirred and prodded by the events of the past few days, forced him to ask a question he had promised himself he wouldn’t. “Why me?”

     “I looked. You were the first one to look back.”

     Randall thought of Tim Mathis’ dinner invitation. Maybe the subject of Mitchell Seaver had pitched Eric into a state of evasiveness. “Wow,” he whispered. “I feel so special.”

     “Maybe you should. Trust me, everything about you is an exception.” Randall took a moment to gauge Eric’s sincerity and found it to be strong. “You and me, Eric. The two of us. I didn’t do any of this on my own.” He let this sit and then got up from the table. In the kitchen doorway, he turned to see Eric watching his every move. “Should I...” he gestured down the hall to the front door. “Or . .

     Eric’s face may have been a mask of resolve, but Randall could sense the collision of desire and dignity inside him.

     “I’ll be up in a minute,” Eric muttered, his eyes falling from Randall’s.

Next to him, Eric slept.

     Randall sat up in bed, knees drawn to his chest. The bathroom door yawned open and Randall stared at the rectangle of deeper darkness and tried to summon an image of Lisa Eberman staring back out at them. Nothing came.

     The clock on the nightstand read two forty-five.

     Randall rolled over onto one side and watched Eric sleeping. Strangely peaceful, given the events of the day. Watching Eric’s bare chest lifting the sheets in drawn-out breaths, Randall felt a swell of emotion that he easily could have mistaken for love if he didn’t know better; rather, he felt the intoxicating sensation of owning someone completely, a fulfillment so great that he would have trouble acknowledging it in daylight. But the elation left him quickly as he realized that the heart beating in Eric’s chest now belonged to a widower, no longer to an almost unattainable conquest. The game of seduction had begun to bleed to an unexpected death.

     He managed to dress without waking Eric, and then descended the stairs carefully with his empty flask in one hand. Once he was in front of the liquor cabinet, he stopped. In the darkness of the dining room, a vision of Lisa Eberman struck him with such force that he couldn’t suppress a bitter laugh.

     Look for her in the shadows and she’s nowhere to be found, he thought, but when I’m least expecting it, I’ll see every hair on her head, just the way the wind is blowing it in that goddamn photo.

     He told the vision to pass, and using the powers of imagination that had so often lifted him outside himself in the interest of getting through, he envisioned the note dissolving into the fireplace.

     He filled his flask without spilling a drop.

Whispering was permitted in the first-floor reading room of Folberg Library, which made it the most popular place for students to study and escape their books at the same time. But Kathryn arrived early enough to get a table all to herself. For the last twenty minutes, she had been trying to finish a poli sci reading, but in her mind she kept hearing the scrape of Randall’s door over the hallway carpet. Her concentration broken, she leaned back in her chair just in time to spot Jesse emerging from the periodical racks. He didn’t see her, and as she moved down the aisle toward the photocopying room, she spotted the hardcover book he was carrying under one arm.

     Jesse was the only one in the copy room. Unnoticed, she sidled up to his machine before he brought the lid down on the spread book. “Writing a paper on plane crashes?” she asked when she saw the title. •

     Startled, Jesse looked up, managed a polite smile, and then closed the lid over
Transportation Disasters Volume
IV. “Just a little project I’m working on,” he responded, feeding quarters into the machine.

     “Jesse, I was wondering ...”

     “Have you had lunch?”

     Kathryn narrowed her eyes. “I had breakfast.”