The Snow Garden (38 page)

     She felt Mitchell move next to her.

     “It’s...”

     “Go ahead.”

     “It’s too much.”

     “It should be,” Mitchell answered, not offended.

     “What’s it supposed to be? Heaven?”

     “Not even close. Earth.”    

     “If you went to Woodstock, maybe.”

     Mitchell laughed. “Interesting you should say that. Hippies in the nineteen-sixties were all too eager to embrace the central panel as a glorification of their own beliefs about free love. Promiscuity. But of course, they conveniently forgot that this is only the central panel of a tripartite altar piece. Several inches to the left, Bosch punished these figures by piercing them with spears and feeding them to monsters.” Mitchell sounded matter of fact, playing the museum director in his own home, but in his tone she could detect a hint of disdain for the naive love children of the 1960s.

     Kathryn backed up several steps, taking in the huge, colorful canvas, then turned to Mitchell, bringing their faces inches apart without meaning to. “Hell has no place in the living room, right?”

     Mitchell met her gaze. “Not enough space.”

     “Well, it’s kind of a dated idea anyway.”

     Mitchell backed away from her before sliding one arm out of his coat. “Dated? What do you mean?”

     “The idea that we have to be shipped off someplace else to be punished for everything we’ve done. Aren’t there enough punishments here on earth?”

     Mitchell dropped his jacket on the sofa. “Exactly.” His smile lifted his features so completely she felt a swell of pride. He gestured back to the wall. “Some scholars have nicknamed this Satan’s garden. It’s all the pleasures and temptations of the physical world. The evil influence of the flesh at its most beautiful.”

     Kathryn looked back at the wall. Memory struck: Folberg Library the night before break, Maria bent over a color photocopy of a painting—which, she now realized, must have been a Bosch—a grid designed for accurate enlargement. “I don’t think it’s that beautiful,” she said.

     “Something to drink?” Mitchell asked, surveying her.

     “What do you have in the way of alcohol?” she asked with a grin.

     “Wine?”

     “White if you have it. Red will knock me on my ass.”

     “White’s all I have, actually. From a special vineyard outside of Santa Barbara.” Mitchell moved into the dining room, hitting the light switch as he went. Yet another chandelier threw light across a black wooden slab of a dining table fringed by six cream-colored upholstered chairs. Not the type of furniture you expected to find in a grad student’s house. What she was seeing was a minimalist showroom. The muted colors and freshly painted walls suggested not only renovation, but almost an antiseptic cleanliness. It gradually occurred to her that there wasn't a single personal effect in the room. No photographs. Nothing on the walls beyond a mural so extravagant you could almost walk into its wild dream of a landscape.

     She had picked up a candelabra from the mantel when Mitchell returned with her glass of wine. “These are nice,” she said, turning it over in her hand. The candelabra were an identical pair in polished silver, but to each of their three candleholders someone had affixed a white pearl. “Did you make these yourself?”

     “I did. Actually.”

     “Crafty,” she said. Gay was what she meant.

     Mitchell gently removed the candelabra from her hand and pointed her to the wall. “Bottom left. See the man bent over what looks like a giant fruit?” She did. The man's back was unnaturally, painfully arched as he bent over. The fruit—if you could call it that— opened like a blossom, spilling what looked like giant berries. “See the pearls?” Mitchell asked.

     “That’s what they are?” She asked, approaching the wall. Closer up they looked like marbles, but when she bent forward, she realized they had a sheen to them.

     Mitchell was right behind her. “According to Catharism, the pearls represent the fallen souls of angels that have become trapped in the mud of the material and the physical. They are the souls of people still trapped within their physical shell, but spiritually alive. Cathars called them The Living Ones.”

     “Why six?” she asked.

     “I’m sorry?”

     “Is six some sort of significant number?”

     Startled, he looked down at the candelabra in his hand and finally got the drift. “No. Three candleholders each. They had to match, didn’t they?” He shrugged and returned it to the mantel. She nervously slugged her wine. Mitchell settled onto the couch, but she was too nervous to sit and continued looking at the Bosch, less to look at it then to have a safe place to rest her eyes.

     “Are you renting this place?”

     “No. I own it.”

     “Wow.”

     “I had a good lead. And you saw what the neighborhood is like.”

     She nodded, noticing that he had brought himself water back from the kitchen. “You’re not going to join me?” she asked, lifting her glass.

     “I drink only on special occasions.”

     “So I guess I’m not special, then?”

     He smirked and met her eyes. “Annoying children are
special
.”

     Go for it, she told herself. “I think you know what I meant.” She crossed to the couch, easing down next to him before she took another swallow of the wine. He watched her, his face tight, his eyes distant. “Thanks,” she said softly.

     “For what?”

“Picking me up at the airport. It meant a lot.”

     “It wasn’t any trouble.”

     “Maybe not. But you were exactly who I wanted to see when I got off the plane.”

     His eyes narrowed and his wan smile tightened his jaw. At the sight of his discomfort, she downed the last of the glass and set it down on the coffee table with a hard click. “You’ve got to meet me halfway here, Mitchell.”

     “Maybe if I ask you how your trip went you could tell me the truth.”

     Kathryn felt abruptly abandoned. “Oh, I get it,” she groaned. This wasn’t Mitchell’s regular reticence—this was about
her.
She got up from the sofa fast enough to quicken the wine’s pulse in her temples. “Going on the way I did, at dinner. About Jono. You think I’m damaged goods.”

     Mitchell folded his arms across his chest and cocked his head to one side in an exaggerated display of attentiveness as she continued. “Admit it. I scared you off. And let me tell you, you got the
Reader’s
Digest
version, buddy.”

     “I don’t scare very easily,” he said, his voice almost hard. “And if I did, why would I be asking you for the whole story?”

     “Noblesse oblige. I learned that phrase from my roommate. Supposedly it means charity. But only if you’re rich. And you”—she gestured to the surroundings —“are obviously rich.”

     Mitchell picked up her empty wineglass.

     “Thank you. I’d love another.”

     He clucked his tongue against the roof of his mouth. Obviously, he’d intended to go and put her empty glass in the sink. But he got up from the sofa, bowed his head, and went to the kitchen. Part of her knew she might be blowing her chance with him, but another part thought his frigid response might be a sign of resistance going brittle and giving way. Yet another part of her already had a splitting headache, and behind all that churning lay the hard fact that if she didn’t end up in Mitchell’s bed, that meant going back to the dorm and encountering Randall.

     Mitchell returned and she was touched to see he’d filled the glass all the way. She reached out to take it, but he didn’t let go of the stem. “Go easy,” he said.

     “On what? You or the wine?”

     From his blank expression, it looked like the line was a bomb. She gave the stem a tug, fingers wrapped around his, and he released the glass gently. “You don’t want the whole story,” she muttered before taking a slug. “He’s dead anyway, so what does it matter?”

     “Why don’t you start by telling me how he died?”

     “Why don’t I start by moving on?” she snapped.

     Mitchell didn’t answer that and she let out a defeated breath. “Mitchell, I spent months listening to psychologists tell me how to make a chart of how angry I got and when. One of them told me that I might be able to deal with everything better if I cut caffeine out of my diet.”

     “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.