Eden Close (7 page)

 

T
HE MUSCLES
in Andrew's right shoulder are screaming when he sees a red Honda Prelude pull smartly into the gravel driveway. It can't, at that speed, he thinks, be another chocolate cake from the Ladies Guild. A man unfolds himself from the driver's seat and snaps the door to as neatly as a soldier. He wears a tan summer suit and a pair of dark aviator sunglasses. His hair, which Andrew last remembers seeing unwashed and wild behind his ears, is short and trim. The man puts his hands in his pants pockets and grins.

"Andy-boy."

"T.J."

Andrew begins to back down the ladder. Tom Jackson lowers the sunglasses along the bridge of his nose and peers at Andrew. "Nifty," he says.

Andrew looks down at the anachronistic bell-bottoms. "They were in the closet," he says, and shrugs.

"Hey, listen," says T.J., losing the smile and advancing toward Andrew with his hand outstretched. "I'm really sorry about your mother. I just heard this morning. A client said..."

The two men shake hands. "It was mercifully quick," Andrew says inanely, parroting the words of Dr. Ryder. He realizes suddenly that the job of the bereaved is to allay the embarrassment of those who come to offer solace.

"Yeah, quick, that's the way to go," says T.J. He takes the sunglasses off and hangs them by a stem from his jacket pocket. "You're looking good, Andy-boy," he says, lightly punching Andrew's arm. "You workin' out?"

Andrew has not been working out, but he knows from the way T.J. has said it and the square look of him that
he
has and that he devotes some time to it. When they were
boys, it was always T.J. who would arrive early for practice.

"No," says Andrew apologetically. "I was running for a while, but I moved and I lost it."

"You gotta have discipline," says T.J., the fastest skater Andrew has ever seen, a skater who seemed to hover effortlessly over the ice. "You gotta make it a habit. Every day, no matter what. You gotta stay in shape. Hey, man, forty's just around the corner."

Andrew has not thought of forty quite that way before, if, indeed, he has thought of it at all; but the soreness in his shoulders is telling him that he is not as young as he thought he was.

"Want a beer?" he asks. Andrew's memory of the landscape of his refrigerator is vague, but he thinks there may be the remnants of a six-pack he bought the day before at the mini-superette.

"Sure," says T.J. He turns with a flourish to let Andrew know that he is examining the black BMW in the driveway. He whistles appreciatively. "You must be doin' OK," he says. "Hey, I thought
I
was doing good, but a BMW. Whadda they go for now—twenty, thirty?"

Actually Andrew is embarrassed by his car and has been since arriving at the farmhouse. It sits in the drive looking as out of place as a woman in a mink at a garage sale. It also makes him anxious in a way he can't precisely define.

"To tell you the truth, I'd rather have your Prelude," says Andrew, lying graciously, since he would not for one minute own a bright red car. "The BMW's too temperamental," he adds, compounding the lie; the understated black vehicle runs as smoothly as a panther.

He leads the way up the back stoop and into the kitchen. With relief he sees that there are three Heinekens on the top shelf of the fridge. T.J. takes the tan jacket off and drapes it
carefully over the back of a white kitchen chair. He rolls his neck, squares his shoulders and leans against the sink. He pops open his beer. Despite his lack of interest in working out, Andrew is impressed by T.J.'s flat stomach.

"So what's it been? Ten years?" asks T.J., taking a long swallow.

Andrew, leaning against the fridge, calculates. "I think it's more like fifteen or sixteen," he says. "I think the last time we got together was seventy-one or seventy-two. We went to see Tom Rush over Christmas break. I think."

"Sixteen years!" says T.J., exclaiming. "Jesus H. Christ. It sounds like something my old man used to say." He shakes his head. "Holy shit."

He runs his fingers up and down the beer can, making patterns in the condensation. "So whadda you do now?" T.J. asks. "You in business or what?"

"I'm with a pharmaceutical firm in the city," Andrew says. "I'm vice-president in charge of marketing and advertising." In this farmhouse kitchen, his job description sounds absurdly pretentious, but T.J. nods his approval.

"You were gonna be a writer," T.J. says.

"And you were going to be a musician. Keyboards."

"Yeah."

"One thing leads to another," says Andrew, for something to add. He doesn't particularly want to go into the specifics, however, of how smoothly he was "led" into moving to New York and taking his first job with the pharmaceutical firm. Nor into the specifics of how quick Martha was to see, in that move, certain financial possibilities.

"Yeah," says T.J. "Right to the bank."

The two men laugh.

"To money," says T.J., raising what's left of his beer in Andrew's direction.

Andrew raises his can in response.

"You married?" asks T.J.

Andrew shakes his head, "I was. We were separated about a year ago. I have a son, Billy. He's seven."

"Hey, man, I'm sorry," says T.J. "About the split, I mean. That's rough. Your idea or hers?"

Andrew reflects that this is the second time in ten minutes T.J. has said he is sorry for Andrew—three if you count the scolding over not working out.

"I guess it was mutual, the way those things are," he answers evasively.

"Yeah, right," says T.J., draining the last of the beer. He puts the can on the counter.

"Have another," offers Andrew.

"No. Can't. Thanks anyway. I got a corporation this afternoon wants to see the Gunther farm. For condos. Could be a fantastic deal."

"You're in real estate," says Andrew.

"For now," says T.J. "But developing is where it's at. The old farts are selling their land—the kids don't want to farm anymore. So what else is new, right? It's condos now—working couples, retirees, they don't want to have to mow the lawn. I had a deal about a month ago—a developer who bought the Gorzynski place and is putting in a country club with condos, a golf course, a pool, the whole nine yards."

T.J. picks up the empty beer can. He puts it back on the counter. "You gonna be around awhile?" he asks. "I'd like to get you out to the house to meet the kids. I married Didi Hanson, by the way."

"My mother wrote me that," says Andrew. He has an image of Didi Hanson's perfect teeth, a blond flip, and matching sweaters and skirts, long after the girls he knew were wearing jeans. He also remembers that Didi was a cheerleader and that she took it seriously, like a course.

"We've got two boys ourselves. Tom junior's fourteen
now, a handful. Ellis, the little one, is nine going on two, if you know what I mean."

Andrew isn't sure he does, but he nods. "I'd planned to stay a week," he answers, "fixing up the place before I put it on the market."

As soon as he says the word
market,
an unwelcome suspicion enters his thoughts. Has T.J. sniffed a potential sale and come looking for a client? Do real estate salesmen routinely read death notices in the papers? Or, to give his friend the benefit of the doubt, did T.J. really hear of Andrew's mother's death only this morning from a client? He can imagine the conversation:
I'm sorry to hear that,
T.J. would have said, immediately calculating how to get the edge, the same quality that, in another era, had made him the best hockey player the county had ever seen.
Her son, Andy, and I used to be real close friends.

"You selling?" asks T.J., too casually, bending down and peering out the kitchen window, as if something out there had caught his attention.

"I guess," says Andrew.

"Really," T.J. says, standing up but not quite meeting Andrew's gaze. "Well, shit, you need a hand, I'd be glad to help out—for old times' sake, like. To be perfectly frank, I don't really handle such small layouts these days, but seeing as how we're old friends..." He looks around the kitchen as if eyeing it afresh, but Andrew has the sudden and distinct impression he's been taking inventory since he walked in the door.

"Whadda you want for it?" T.J. asks.

Andrew shrugs. "I've no idea. What do you think?"

"It's in pretty bad shape," says T.J., "and pretty isolated except for the Close house, and that's not an asset, if you follow me....I dunno, maybe a hundred. One twenty-five."

Andrew nods. He is certain that T.J. has made these
calculations earlier in the day. They fall from his tongue too quickly.

But since Andrew hasn't committed himself to any other real estate agent, and because he wants only to make the transaction as painless as possible, he begins to see the arrival of T.J. as remarkably fortuitous, if not entirely coincidental. He wonders if T.J. feels the same awkward distance from their friendship as he himself does—or if he even cares.

"Be my guest," he says.

T.J. shakes his hand. "Excellent," he says, smiling and giving himself away completely. "I'll be speaking to you later about the details, and as soon as I talk to Didi, we'll have you around. I'd pick a date now, but I have to ask Didi—you know how women are."

Andrew winces inwardly. He doesn't know how women are any more than he suspects T.J. does, but there is something in the use of the cliche that tells Andrew that his friend's marriage isn't good. The knowledge surprises him—and then he wonders if perhaps he's mistaken, if the marriage is only not good that day, that week, that morning. If T.J. had come by last week, he wonders, would Andrew have sensed a different marriage? One more intimate, more hopeful? He knows that for most of his own marriage, its character often changed from one day to the next, depending sometimes on circumstances, sometimes on whether or not he and Martha had made love that morning.

"So," says T.J., shifting his weight against the sink.

Now that business, in its own way, has been conducted, Andrew can smell T.J.'s need to be moving on. It's human nature. Andrew has done it countless times himself.

T.J. picks up his jacket and puts it on. Andrew notices that there are beads of perspiration On T.J.'s upper lip. They move toward the door, open it and stand together on the stoop. They are both looking out at the other house.

"You seen Eden yet?" asks T.J.

"No, I haven't."

"I don't think I've seen her six times in ten years," says T.J. "And each time she was in a car with her mother. Pretty isolated out here. Of course, she was away for so long in that place upstate.... Everybody kinda goes his own way, you know what I mean. Sometimes I feel bad I never just drove over and knocked on the door after she got back, but I never knew what I'd say really."

"Yes," says Andrew.

"She was one fantastic-looking girl. You remember?"

"I remember."

"A real knockout. She was—what, fourteen?"

"About."

"A mess, if you ask me."

T.J. squares his shoulders and looks down the drive toward the cornfields on the other side of the road. "I always figured he buried the gun in the cornfields somewhere, but I don't know," he says. "You'd think it woulda been plowed up by now."

"You would think so," says Andrew.

The sun glints sharply off a silver Mazda that speeds along the road, intercepting their view of the fields. Above the fields, a flock of crows makes a half-moon arc.

And as they had done for weeks after the shooting, silently, not wanting anyone to know of their preoccupation, Andrew realizes that once again they are drawing diagrams in their heads of how the unthinkable could have taken place: The father walking into the house, hearing the muffled sounds upstairs, opening the door to his daughter's room, the horror of what he sees there, the frenzied shouts. A hand, reaching for a gun. Eden with a sheet clutched to her breast, moving toward her father....The mother's footsteps on the stairs.

He remembers the terrible sound of the crying.

"You ever see Sean's parents?" asks Andrew.

T.J. makes a movement with his shoulders, as if to shake himself loose from his speculation. "His father's still got the TV repair shop in town, but he's usually pretty far gone by afternoon. The mother died a few years back. Cancer. Bad news, that story. About Sean, I mean."

"Yeah," says Andrew.

"So," says T.J. He grabs Andrew's hand. "So listen, take it easy," he says, moving away and sideways along the driveway, toward his car, reaching in his pocket for his keys.

Andrew watches him from the stoop. With the same economy of movement that made him the most fluid skater in the county, T.J. slips his long body into the Prelude. Andrew is about to wave, when T.J. sticks his head out of the window.

"And for Christ's sake, Andy-boy," he says, turning the key in the ignition, "go buy yourself a decent pair of jeans."

Andrew smiles and shrugs. He wonders how certain qualities in a boy can turn out so strangely in a man. And yet who is he to criticize? Has he not himself, in business, made the same dismal moves?

The beer on an empty stomach has left him light-headed. He goes back up the stairs into the kitchen.

As he opens the screen door, he has an image of Eden naked under a flower-print sheet—and the image startles him.

Why think of that now? He wonders if T.J. knows about this fact. Did he, years ago, tell that detail to his friend?

 

A
FTER
J
IM
had held the baby, there was no thought of ever letting her go. She was his before he even arrived at the farmhouse. Andy's mother was in the Closes' kitchen, waiting, with her neighbor, when Jim flung open the door and let his sample case fall from his hands. She watched the way he bent to the child—his eagerness for the child seeming to be a natural extension of his largesse—and how he held her
aloft as gracefully as a baby nurse, as if he'd been practicing in his dreams for years.

And she saw, even in the confusion, the face of Edith Close, who put herself forward to be kissed before giving over the child, but who was not kissed or touched until much later in the night and who sat watching numbly at the kitchen table as her husband danced with his warm bundle over the worn linoleum floor. And Andy's mother saw, too, her struggle to compose her face, to realign her features to match her husband's new expression, to feign a joy she knew she must display so as not to fall behind.