The Snow Garden (12 page)

     “
Starry-eyed
?” Tim snorted, letting the chair down onto all four legs. He rose and moved to the window. “Try sleepless and driven.” 

     “Why this story, Tim?”

     “What do you mean?”

     “You really went the full mile here. Toxicology reports. Calling her sister.”

     Tim’s expression hardened as he stared out the window. Randall went silent, sensing he had touched a nerve.

     “I had Eberman last year. The guy’s a total closet case.” Tim popped his cigarette into his mouth and began picking at the frayed edge of a thumbnail. Randall kept his mouth shut, drawing his knees to his chest and wrapping his arms around them. But Tim seemed to shake free of whatever memory he had lapsed into, and he turned and met Randall head-on. “You know, Randall, I have other boys to jerk me around. In every sense of the word.”

     “Are you trying to make me jealous?” Randall asked, with a smile that said he wasn’t the jealous type.

     “Christ.” Tim let out a short laugh and stubbed out his smoldering butt in the ashtray. “You’re a freshman, for Christ’s sake. I should know better. My freshman year here, I was like a kid in a candy store.” 

     “You lost me.”

     “I wish,” Tim mumbled under his breath.

     “I’m here right now, Tim. What does that say?”

     Tim slumped against the window. It looked like his fight might be leaving him. “It says you’ve always got me to fall back on.”

     Randall raised the paper in one hand. “Well, now that I’ve been given a glimpse of your genius, maybe I’ll start falling back on you more often.”

     Tim’s face went lax as his last shred of resistance left him. Randall dropped the paper and curled his index finger twice. Tim complied and crossed to the bed. Randall hooked his belt buckle with the same finger he had beckoned with and Tim fell, knees first, to the mattress in front of him.

     “You’re too damn cute and I don’t know any better,” Tim whispered.

     'You’re half right,” Randall said, grazing Tim’s lips with his first teasing kiss. 'You don’t know anyone better than me.”

     Tim groaned in weak protest before Randall pulled him down onto the bed.

“That was vocal,” Tim said. Next door, Sharif had responded to Randall’s groans by cranking up Shaggy to almost full volume. “Have you been taking voice lessons or something?”

     “Don’t flatter yourself,” Randall said, even though that was precisely what his overenthusiastic display had been intended to do. As much as Tim seemed to demand intimacy from his sexual partners in daily life, in bed he was all porn-star curses that delayed the execution of the titillating things he so throatily promised to do. After being enveloped by the honest power of Eric’s long unrequited passion, Randall felt that sex with Tim seemed no different from the men back in New York, who showed no apparent interest in how Randall’s body worked, holding him down so they could do little more than take in the sight of who they were penetrating. Randall draped himself over Tim’s legs as he reached down and removed his silver flask from his jacket pocket.

     Tim continued packing his bowl with his thumb, cursing the dryness of the weed under his breath. “I assume you don’t want any of this.”

     Randall fell back against his pillow and took a slug from the flask. 

     “You and that flask. It’s very weird.”

     “Scotch is a gentleman’s drink.”

     “So it’s going to turn you into a gentleman?”

     “Cute,” Randall responded, but he was distracted by how light the flask felt in his hand. He needed a refill, and for that he needed access to Lisa’s storehouse of Chivas Regal. The prospect of stealing scotch from a dead woman washed the warm post-sex flush from his veins, proving it had only been a distraction and exposing the silt of dread that still clung to his thoughts.

     Tim drew the sheet up over their naked bodies with a single, uncomfortable glance at the burns on Randall’s legs. Also no different from the men in New York, Randall thought. Eric had been the first man to ever touch them without fear or disgusted fascination. “How do you know Eberman’s a closet case?” he asked.

     Tim rolled his eyes and lifted the bowl in one hand, indicating he needed a hit before he got into it. The lighter’s flame disappeared into the bowl and then reappeared magically. Tim sank back against his pillow before letting the smoke escape in a drawn-out breath. Randall hated the smell of pot. Once, it had transported him to alleys behind bars in Manhattan’s Meat-Packing District; now it seemed to embody the inherent dirtiness and messiness of college life; it conjured up images of stoners he had met who babbled on about burning down Babylon when they were too high to do anything other than shovel peanut butter into their mouths, let alone set fire to the world’s major cities.

     “I took one of his two hundred courses last year.” “Two hundred” indicated a course open only to grad students. “I talked my way into it. Well, flirted my way into it, basically,” Tim began. “You know Eberman wrote a book? About the works of Hieronymus Bosch? Well, I had read it and I think Bosch is a genius, so I thought I would be perfect for it. I went into his office one day and made this big impassioned speech. That didn’t seem to work. So I poured on the charm.” 

     “Charm?” Randall asked, taking a slug.

     "That didn’t seem to work either. Or so I thought. About a week later, I got this E-mail from him explaining that I had demonstrated a keen and emphatic interest in his area of study. . . . Something like that. I thought it was all code because the guy looked at my ass like it was carved out of gold.”

     “There’s your headline,” Randall cut in. “Professor Beholds Boy’s Gold Ass. Wife Dies!” He kept his voice steady and hearty.

     “Can I finish, please? Anyway, I signed up for the course, which was basically a tutorial of his book. Turns out the whole class is a bunch of grad students holding a circle jerk in his honor. But he’s paying special attention to me. Stopping discussions that are soaring over my head to explain things like the difference between Catharism and the established views of the Medieval church. And the other students are getting totally pissed off and I can tell. Especially this one guy . . .”

     “Mitchell Seaver.”

     “Yeah. How did you know?”

     “I guessed. I’m in Foundations One. Mitchell’s lecturing while Er ... Eberman’s out of town at the funeral.” Randall said, cursing his near slip. “Mitchell’s a total prick.”

     “Tell me about it. You would have thought this loser was teaching the course too. Anyway, Eberman’s paying a lot of attention to me. And I’m not going to lie, he’s hot.”

     “If you like older men,” Randall mumbled.

     “Whatever. Young. Old. He’s a good-looking guy.”

     “If you like older men.” Randall repeated.

     “All right. Fine. I like older men. Sometimes.”

     Randall laughed. “Go on.”

     “So I asked him out to dinner.”

     Randall lifted his eyebrows in disbelief. Tim reached for his bowl again as he continued. “Okay, I had no clue he was married. None. I’d had like ten conversations with him outside of class and he never mentioned his wife. Not once. And then when I asked him after class if he wanted to get something to eat. . . Christ, I’ve never seen someone freeze up like that.”

     Tim took another hit as Randall waited, confused by the strange stab of jealousy he felt upon hearing about all the “attention” Eric had paid to him, realizing how much he had come to love the idea of being Eric’s only one. And why had he let the conversation veer away from Lisa? “And?” Randall asked, impatiently.

     “He sent me another E-mail. This one said that he thought it would no longer be wise for me to stay on in the course. That I was too far behind the rest of the class, and that if I wanted to I could audit it. I was like, fuck that. I’m not auditing an art history course my sophomore year when I’ve got, like, a hundred requirements I haven’t filled for my own major. I responded much more eloquently than that. He didn’t.”

     “What did he say?”

     Tim exhaled. Randall winced at the return of the smoke.

     “I’m married. That’s all he wrote. Talk about jumping to conclusions.”

     “But he wasn’t.”

     “Whatever. He sent out the signals.
Strong
signals. And then he panicked when I picked up on them.”

     Randall weighed this for several seconds as Tim let his eyes flutter shut, fast on his way to being stoned. He felt anything but high. His blood was heavy as lead, as if it were trying to slow itself, depriving his brain of the oxygen it needed to give voice to his next question. “You think this guy killed his wife, don’t you?”

     Tim squinted slightly and rolled his head against the pillow to face Randall. “No. But I think Paula Willis might be right. He might have given her plenty of reasons to get drunk and go for a drive.”

     “How far are you willing to take this?” Randall asked, as casually as he could.    '

     “What do you mean?”

     “It’s an ethical question, I guess.” Randall continued carefully. “It’s one thing to lie here and tell me what you really think about Lisa’s death, but—and no offense—it all sounds like speculation. Would you be willing to pick up your pen and play with this man’s reputation just because you think he’s gay?” He prayed that his delivery was unlit by the fear burning under his words, and when Tim rolled his head back against the pillow, searching for an answer on the ceiling, Randall felt relief as he watched his bare chest rise and fall.

     “I didn’t go through half the shit I did coming out to my family and friends—when I was sixteen, I might add —just so I could end up being an ass that gets stared at by some pretentious fuck twice my age who thinks he’s somehow superior to me even though he’s too much of a fucking coward to face the thing I did when I was in high school.” Tim met Randall’s eyes. “If I have a mortal enemy, it’s men like Eric Eberman. Because the more men there are like him that try to keep what they want a dirty little secret, the more you and I get turned into dirty little secrets.” Tim jabbed one finger just above Randall’s left nipple to bring home his point. Randall clasped the offending hand in his own and used it to pull himself into a straddle across Tim’s chest. He kissed his fingers and then lowered his mouth inches from Tim.

     “Thank you for that Queer Nation moment, Timothy.” He patted Tim’s head.

     “I told you not to call me that.” He kissed him lightly on the lips before moving off the bed. “No one takes me seriously at this goddamn school,” Tim muttered, sluggish and stoned.

     Randall dressed hurriedly, eager to get out of a room now crowded > with a suffocating mixture of fact and suspicion. “You’re a fine journalist, Tim. I take that very seriously.” He picked up his copy of the
Herald
off the floor. “One other thing, though. You wrote this article last night, right?”

     “Uh-huh.”

     Randall turned. “Channel 2 said toxicology was released this morning.”

     Tim grinned at him devilishly. “Contacts, my friend.”

     “Really?” Randall asked, all innocence.

     “Guy’s name is Richard Miller. He’s been with the
Atherton Daily Journal
for like twenty years. I think he kind of likes me.”

     “How’d you meet him?”

     “The Catch House. Where else?”

     The Catch House was one of the city’s two gay bars and was housed in an abandoned warehouse on the bay front. On a good night, it drew a crowd of about ten fifty-year-old men in suits and ties who huddled around the bar, never daring to set foot on its scrap of dance floor, and shooting furtive glances at one another as if it were still 1970. “Interesting,” Randall mumbled. So that’s how Tim got all of his vital information, flirting with a crotchety reporter. It made Randall feel a little less guilty for moaning and groaning his way to the information he wanted.

“Want to know something else interesting?” Tim asked. He was obviously trying to keep Randall from leaving. Randall stopped on his way to the door. “Richard’s contact with the Atherton PD said that Eric told the detectives that Lisa was addicted to Vicodin. Supposedly she got it for a leg injury. Paula claims Lisa never took a single pill.” 

     Randall tried to make his voice gently parental. “Drug addicts are never very eager to tell their family members about their addictions.” 

     “Lisa Eberman was staying with her sister every weekend. Cooking her meals, driving her to chemo. You really think she was dropping pills?”

     “What do I know, Tim? It’s your story.”

     “See you in a month?” Tim called after him.

     Randall didn’t answer.
You’ll see me a lot sooner than that,
he thought.

“April. Please. Answer it!”

     The phone rang again. Kathryn’s hand halted over the keyboard. She turned just in time to see April pluck the portable from its cradle without lifting her gaze from the frighteningly voluminous textbook open on her lap.

     “I know it’s her,” Kathryn pleaded.

     “Not unless you can tell me anything about the loop of Henley.” 

     “It’s in the kidney.”

     “Nice try,” April muttered, and continued reading text sandwiched between stomach-churning color photos as the phone rang again in her hand. “This is the third time she’s called today, Kathryn.”

     Kathryn rose from her desk, abandoning her half-written paper on viable methods of regulating hate speech. She tried not to whip the phone from April’s hand before she answered it. Her mother didn’t bother with a greeting. “This conversation takes five minutes and you don’t have time to think of an excuse not to have it—”

     “Mom!”

     “There’s one direct flight between Boston and SFO and it’s booked. I went on-line last night and found some others. On one you would have to connect through Cincinnati. I’ve never been there, but it sounds just awful —”

     “Mom. Wait.”

     “For how much longer, Kathryn? In case you’ve forgotten, Thanksgiving is a family holiday. For
everyone
.”
Kathryn heard muffled laughter in the background. Since arriving at Atherton, she couldn’t remember a single conversation with her mother during which paralegals weren’t present.