The Snow Garden (4 page)

     Eric stared up at the painting that had once so shaped his worldview. The cluster of wild academic theories it opened up had seemed to speak directly to his own inhibitions and fears. Still fresh with Randall’s sweat, he couldn’t fight the feeling that the Cathars were wrong. The body wasn’t a trap, but a door to sensations he had denied himself for far too long.

     Halfway to the kitchen, something hard banged his knee and he stepped back. He had walked into the liquor cabinet door, which Lisa had left standing open. Angrily, he kicked it shut, then had to admit to himself that he was hardly in any position to curse his wife’s forgetfulness. Never mind that Lisa had spent the last three years of her life establishing scotch and painkillers as staples of her diet; he could still taste Randall in his mouth. .

     In the kitchen, he flicked on the overhead light, glancing at the phone. Lisa had left one of her usual notes, cursory and by now unnecessary. “Went to Paula’s,” they usually said. Or, “Paula had a bad week. Be back Mon. Prob Late.” They were as terse and bloodless as their marriage had been almost since its beginning. What more could be expected of a bond Eric had sought as if it were a Ph.D., another credential meant to tether him to a world with established rules? But in the beginning, Lisa hadn’t seemed to want much more either. Only too late had Eric realized that his wife required more than a companion, or a weight beside her in the bed. Now, Eric was sure that a part of Lisa was relieved by her sister’s cancer, for she could escape Eric every weekend for someone who truly needed her.

     When the phone rang, he was propping open the refrigerator with one hip. Startled, he turned and crossed to the phone, the fridge door making a soft thud as it glided shut behind him. His hand almost to the receiver, his eyes landed on the note written on the banana-shaped stationery usually reserved for grocery lists.

     I SAW. I KNOW

     His breath didn’t catch; it simply stopped, and then a painful stab in his chest reminded him to breathe. He realized the phone still summoned him.

     “Hello?”

     “Is this Eric Eberman?” An unfamiliar female voice, its tone clipped and professional. “Sir, is this. ..”

     “Who is this?”

     “My name is Pat Kellerman, sir. I’m afraid I have some bad news.”

     “Lisa?”

     “Your wife’s been in an accident.”

     He looked down at the note he held in one hand. The urge to tear it in two struck him with such sudden force that he almost dropped the phone. Instead, he opened the nearest drawer with one hand and slid it inside, shutting it slowly so as not to be heard on the other end. By the time the woman was explaining that a patrol car was on its way to pick him up, Eric remembered the wail of sirens that had stopped only twenty minutes earlier.

Behind them, Burton House still shook. Tim rested his head in both open palms as Kathryn fished a cigarette for him out of her jacket pocket. Guests were beginning to depart, their shadows vanishing into the darkness of Fraternity Green. Some of them bravely turned left into the Elms, Kathryn noticed, as she handed Tim the cigarette and he took it with a weak smile.

     “What was in those goddamn Jell-0 shots anyway?” Tim asked with a groan.

     “You don’t want to know.”

     Tim exhaled his first drag. “Smoking kills, you know.”

     “Shit. Why didn’t anyone tell me?”

     They smoked.

     “Sorry about earlier,” Tim muttered.

     Kathryn feigned ignorance by staying quiet.

     “I just wanted to know what’s going on with him.”

     “Jesse?” Kathryn asked.

     “No. Randall.”

     So April was right, and there was someone else at Atherton who had Randall on the brain. The realization made her feel at once less alone and less privileged. She had assumed that Randall’s fling with the guy he had referred to as Bob Woodward in spandex was doomed from the start. The guy rarely shut up, and she knew from experience that you had to allow Randall his silences. And he seemed run through by that journalistic belief that a right to privacy was only a cover for a dire secret that required exposure. Randall had many secrets. The only thing that made that truth tolerable was her faith that she would learn most of them in due time.

     “Rich parents?”

     “I don’t know,” Kathryn lied. She knew they were loaded.

     “Only child, right?” Tim pressed.

     “Yeah. I guess that explains a lot,” Kathryn said with a note of finality.

     “No, the ‘rich parents’ thing explains a lot more. Makes sense. I kind of have this image of him browsing the racks at Saks, or power lunching with the Kennedys back when the rest of us were hitting the mall on weekends.”

     “He’s never mentioned the Kennedys.”

     Tim heard the sharpness in her tone and responded with a weak laugh. “Sorry, I just realized we’ve been out on a few dates and I don’t know anything about him.”
_t
.

     “I didn’t think you guys actually went out on dates.”

     Tim smiled wryly. “He tells you everything, doesn’t he?”

     “I don’t ask for all the details.”

     “Aren’t you guys best friends?”

     Kathryn felt her eyebrows arch and her mouth curl. When she saw Tim’s reaction to her evident anger, she wished she had thought twice before letting it get the best of her. The guy was just still smarting from the sting of rejection, but he’d just crossed a line she didn’t know she had. However, Randall had moved on because of ,a lack of interest—unlike Jesse, whose pathological promiscuity left behind a constant string of the confused and spurned.

     Behind them, the door to the house popped open and April emerged, tailed by Sigrid and three other lesbians who looked like they were about to go logging. “We’re going to the Hole!”

     “Gross. Be sure to shower,” Tim commented.

     “You coming?” April asked her, eyes on Kathryn as she punched her fists into her gloves.

     “Some of us don’t have fake IDs.”

     “I can get you in,” one of the lesbians offered, Kathryn attempted a grateful smile and shook her head.

     “No sign of the Ice Queen?” April asked.

     “Looks like my nickname stuck!” Tim said proudly.

     April shot Kathryn one last disapproving look before turning to her entourage. “Let’s head out, girls!”

     They shuffled down the steps past Kathryn.

     “We might meet you!” Kathryn called after them, and April waved at her over one shoulder.    «

     She stared after them before noticing a shadow striding down the path toward Burton House, its gait familiar. Kathryn rose and descended the front steps of the house. When Randall’s eyes left the walkway before his feet, they lit up and met hers. She had almost closed the distance between them, grinning. Lifting her slightly off her feet, he pulled her body into his. They did a half spin and almost lost their footing, but he didn’t relinquish his hold on her. His long limbs didn’t suggest strength, but they enfolded her tightly.

     “You were waiting. I’m an asshole,” he whispered into her ear before he kissed her cheek gently.

     “No. It’s cool.”

     She heard Tim rise to his feet behind them and turned to see him brushing off the seat of his pants. He gave Randall an acidic smile and Kathryn felt a current of tension pass between both men before Randall returned the smile with a stiff and formal one of his own. “Tim,” he said.

     “Randall,”
Tim responded mockingly, descending the steps. “All right, Bobbsey Twins. I’ll see you guys later.” He passed them and Kathryn heard him add, “Maybe,” under his breath.

     Once he was gone, Randall gave her a sheepish look. “He bugged you, didn’t he?”

     “You’re a heartbreaker.”

     “I should tell him to leave you alone.”

     “I think when it comes to him, you’ve done quite enough. Or nothing at all.”

     “He’ll live. And the only reason he’d say otherwise is to try to get me to sleep with him again.” He glanced at the path Tim had taken into the shadows, then returned his attention to her. “What did I miss?”

     “Tainted Jell-O shots. A Swedish princess. But you still be might able to watch Jesse reel in tonight’s catch.”

     “I’m sure I’ll run into her later.”

     Randall tugged his silver flask from his inside jacket pocket, uncapped it, and handed it to Kathryn. She took a slug and winced. “Christ, Randall, can’t you add soda or something?”

     “Lightweight. Come on.” He took one of her hands and began leading her off the sidewalk and onto the lawn.

     His hand was warm, as if he had been inside all night, but his body was hot, as if he ran on high octane . “Mind if I ask where we’re going?” she ventured.

     “Madeline’s.”

     Kathryn yanked her hand free. “No, Randall. I hate that place.”

     “I’ll let you change. They'll only card you if you’re dressed like you are right now.”

     His grin told her he was only half serious, but when she hung back he stuck out his lower lip. “Don’t even start,” Kathryn said, already starting to giggle. Randall furrowed his brow, jutting his lip out farther. His expression had transformed from baby-faced pleading into a monkey scowl; when he went to push his ears forward to complete the effect, Kathryn grabbed one of his wrists. “Fine!” she barked, to choke off her laughter. “Stupid of me to think you could hang out with anyone who doesn’t wear Prada.”

     “I’m wearing Gucci,” Randall said in a small voice.

     “Don’t push it!” Kathryn made a sharp turn, leading them back toward the sidewalk.

     “Where are you going?” Randall called after her. She turned and saw Randall gesture toward the Elms. “Oh, you’re kidding,” she moaned.

     “Come on. I’ll protect you.” He put an arm around her shoulders. Kathryn let out a defeated groan and allowed herself to be led into the dark woods.

     To her surprise, the Elms were easily navigated. There was no underbrush and the only obstructions were shoulder-height branches that were hard to make out in the darkness. Randall kept tight against the left side of her chest, pressing her head down and pushing branches out of their way as they went.

     “You don’t even want to know what I saw your roommate doing tonight.”

     “Now I do.”

     Randall came to a sudden halt. Kathryn thudded into him and saw they were standing at the edge of a five-foot drop down into a stream swollen with melting snow.

     “Pamela Milford,” she muttered.

     “What?” Randall asked.

     She looked up and saw she had his full attention. “Nothing. April was telling me the story earlier. The woman who drowned.”

     Randall nodded and his eyes returned to the flow of water below.

     “Maybe she drowned,” he whispered.

     “You know something else?”

     “No one really knows what happened. Why do you think everyone here still talks about it like it’s some urban legend?”

     “Well, she was
real,
wasn’t she? That means it’s not an urban legend.”

     His eyes still on the five-foot drop, he curled his mouth into a weak smile, then took her hand and held it tight. “I didn’t know it was so wide down here. Come on.”

     As they traveled up the bank, the trees thinned out, revealing houses beyond. “So? What happened?” Randall asked, seeming to have recovered from the fact that they had come within inches of falling five feet into near-freezing water.

     “Your roommate and this girl were on the dance floor. You would have thought he was her ob-gyn.”

     “Is there any reason you can’t refer to him by his first name? He’s always your roommate’ or ‘that asshole.’ ”

     “He’s both,” Kathryn said. They came to a sidewalk with a stone banister, which crossed over the top of a large drainage pipe emitting crystalline black water amid ice extending from the bottom lip of the opening like white teeth. Kathryn’s breaths were more steady now that they were on the solid ground of the sidewalk. The halos of Brookline Avenue’s streetlights beckoned them.

     “I think it’s interesting how some people make concessions for the beautiful, but you hold them to a higher standard,” Randall remarked.

     “He’s not beautiful, Randall. He’s hot. There’s a big difference,” Kathryn said, thinking of the magazine ads of shirtless, buff male models Randall used to bridge the gaps between posters on the cinderblock wall of his room. Did all gay men worship perfectly proportioned men who wore inscrutable, distant, facial expressions that suggested they were not just inaccessible but physically indestructible? Men who bore a striking resemblance to Jesse Lowry? She didn’t know enough homosexuals to be sure.

     “You might want to sleep with him. Just once,” Randall said.

     “I’m going to pretend you didn’t say that.”

     “Why, Kathryn? It might take away his mystique.”

     “He doesn’t have any mystique.”

     “That must be why we’re talking about him, then.”

     They had arrived at the stoplight across the street from Madeline’s. Brookline Avenue’s only hip restaurant had already accomplished its ten o’clock transformation into a nightclub. Its front door trailed a long and impatient line of the university’s best dressed, shivering in the cold as they waited to pretend they were in Manhattan.

     Randall had turned to face her, still holding one of her hands in his.

     “What’s next?” he asked gently. “Campuswide outreaches for one-night stands gone wrong? Are you going to go around campus handing out pamphlets listing the names of guys who
don’t call back?”
He lifted his hands and fluttered his fingers at the mock horror of it all. 

     “You’ve played me his voice mail, Randall.”

     “For fun, Kathryn. I didn’t know you were going to run to the Women’s Center with it.”

     “Every time it’s a different one. Half of them end up
begging.
And maybe it wouldn’t bother me so much if I didn’t think that Jesse probably gets off on those messages more than sleeping with them.”