Eden

by Andrea Kleine

  She poured me some coffee. She had the most perfect kitchen, with a wooden farmhouse table. There was a perfect bowl of seasonal fruit and shelves of turquoise glass jars filled with different kinds of rice and legumes. There were colorful alphabet magnets on the refrigerator. A vintage chalkboard hung on the wall. Noreen and I had bought it together at a tag sale upstate. I let her keep it when we broke up. It was strange to see it here. In a different place. In a different city.

  Noreen sat down across from me. I held on to my coffee mug. My fingers looked bony. “I just got in a little over my head,” I said. “Doing what?” she asked. I said, “I’m working on a new play.” “About what?” she asked. “I’m not entirely sure yet,” I said. “Sort of about me and Eden. Mostly about Eden. Trying to figure out what happened to her and where she is.”

  My throat clenched up when I said this. My voice felt strained, as if each word was painfully extracted from my neck. I was worried I would cry, and that if I did, it would be mostly out of exhaustion and confusion, but Noreen would read it as something to do with her. Of me wanting something from her. Or being lost without her. Or needing her. And I couldn’t say that none of those things were true or not true.

  Noreen studied me. “Does anyone else know you’re doing this?” “My dad knows,” I said. “Not about the play. He loaned me his van.” “Is that how you got here?” Noreen asked. “Not exactly,” I said.

  We didn’t say anything for several minutes. I knew Noreen was torn between getting involved and knowing she shouldn’t get involved. And knowing she should not want to get involved. That she no longer had to get involved with me and my projects that never pan out. When we were breaking up she said, “I invested too much in you, Hope.”

  It was paining Noreen to have me here, sitting at her expensive, beautiful kitchen table, invading her perfectly renovated new life. I wondered what she had ever wanted to do with me. I felt so out of place here. It was the type of house I only visited. It was the type of place that hosted parties that were good to crash because there was fancy food that could substitute for dinner. Their cheap party wine bought by the case would be more expensive than I could ever afford by the bottle. I had never lived in a place like this. This nice. I’m not sure if I ever could. I was never good with money and could never hang on to it. One time I was well paid to ghostwrite a lawyer’s horrible screenplay, but I used the money to self-produce one of my plays. I didn’t have anything left over in the end. It was the same with Noreen. I let her have everything. All I owned now were a few boxes stored in Zara’s studio.

  She could never know me, I thought. I felt my throat tighten again. I stared into my mug, at the creamy surface of my half-drunk coffee, the little muddy skating pond that only I could see.

  I said I was sorry again. I stood up and said I would go. “Where did you park?” Noreen asked. She looked down at her lap, cursing herself in her head, probably, for asking me that. You don’t need to get involved, she was telling herself. “I took the Metro,” I said. “From the suburbs somewhere. I’ll figure it out.” “Just let me drive you,” she said as she got up and grabbed her coat and bag. “It’s pouring out,” I said. “I can go in late,” she said.

  We drove silently against morning rush-hour traffic. “My office was thinking of relocating out this way,” she said. “It would be farther, but it would take the same amount of time as driving downtown and it would save us so much on our annual operating budget, even if we had to rent space in town for events.” She ran through the list of my friends in New York and asked how they were. I said Jamie was working on a project with Julianne Moore. “Really?” She was impressed. “That’s great,” she said. “He needed a break like that.” I thought, Maybe I’m getting better at this, this giving-people-what-they-want thing. Telling them what they want to hear.

  I saw the Mexican restaurant and Noreen turned into the parking lot. It was closed. The Camper was the only car there. It looked naked sitting in the lot all by itself. Noreen shifted into park. She didn’t turn off the engine. The wipers kept working against the windshield. “What are you running from, Hope?” she asked. I didn’t answer. I studied the rivulets of rain trying to make their way down the windshield before getting swept up by the wipers. Each of them trying to make it to the bottom where they might have a chance. I didn’t answer because Noreen knew I didn’t have an answer. I didn’t want to say that my entire life had been fucked up by Larry. Maybe I’d be the same fucked-up person I was if nothing like that had ever happened to me. I’ll never know. So maybe it’s true. Somewhere in my head I thought surviving Larry gave me a certain kind of strength, an invincibility. No one could destroy me. Although, at the moment, I appeared to be doing a good job of destroying myself. What is anyone running from? Where are any of us trying to get to? Couldn’t there be things in life that we don’t know and we don’t get? I couldn’t tell you why I first fell for Noreen, I just did. I didn’t know why I wanted to find Eden, I just did. I thought about saying those things out loud to Noreen, but my inarticulateness would be too familiar to her. If there was one reason why we broke up, it would be that. I loved Noreen deeply, but I couldn’t give her what she wanted. I couldn’t give her myself.

  “Go back to New York,” she said. “Go back to your real life. To your real family. You’re chasing old ghosts who only want to hurt you.” I couldn’t say anything. I just sort of bobbed my head, assenting so I wouldn’t have to open my mouth. It would be too much for me to get into a long-drawn-out emotional thing that would surely end with me breaking down and sobbing. I managed to say “Thanks,” and Noreen reached over to give me an awkward hug, restrained by her seat belt.

  I had to run when I left her car. By the time I made it to The Camper my borrowed pants from Layla were soaked through and my hair was plastered to my forehead. I could change, but my stuff was in the back and Noreen would wonder what was wrong, why I wasn’t leaving. I pulled up the bottom of my shirt to wipe my face. I would’ve stayed sitting there for a few minutes in the white noise of the pattering rain and tried to think things out, but I had a feeling Noreen was waiting to make sure The Camper started up. In fact, I was positive of it. I started the engine and turned on the lights. And for good measure I backed out of the parking space and turned The Camper toward the exit of the lot. I didn’t see Noreen’s car. That had been enough to get her going. On her way to work. Back to her regular life. The kind of life she always wanted.

  22

  Two months before Noreen and I broke up, Jamie called me for a gig.

  “Hope, you’re broke,” Jamie said resolutely. “This is an opportunity for you to earn five hundred dollars in three hours and all you have to do is set your alarm for six a.m. Some people have to do that every day.”

  “Some people earn a lot more than five hundred dollars every day.”

  “And do you know what? They get up pretty early to do it.”

  Someone must have dropped out, because Jamie was still mad at me for not including him in the London play and he rarely called me anymore. I think he was secretly smug that my career didn’t magically take off after Nico’s production. It got only tepid reviews and no one seemed to take much notice. A French theater producer talked my ear off after the show one night but never returned any of my follow-up emails.

  Jamie worked for an agency that contracted dancers to work at corporate parties as low-end celebrity spokespeople who didn’t speak. They would dress as sprites and toss giant balloons, dash through the crowd with long ribbon streamers doing jetés or pirouettes or cartwheels. The less desirable gigs were for bar mitzvahs where they encouraged people to get on the dance floor. Jamie had inherited this gig from another dancer, and he held on to it for so long he was now the dance captain, or whatever you wanted to call it.

  I did need the money. I always needed the money. And if Noreen had known about it, she would have insisted I go. Noreen thought I never worked hard enough at things that would make money. And it was true, I didn’t.
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  I met Jamie at seven the next morning in the lobby of a midtown office building. The dancers were huddled in a corner, most of them looking disheveled and as unhappy as I was about the time of day. They looked like a group of homeless people or anarchist gutter punks begging you to drop change into their wilted paper cup. Jamie towered over them with his tall thin frame, looking like a court-appointed caseworker in his neat clothes. “We’re just waiting for someone from upstairs to sign us in,” he said.

  I leaned against the glass wall and watched the office workers arrive for the day. They walked with such purpose. They had their ID cards out, ready to swipe through turnstiles, as if taking the time to pull the card out of their pocket would slow them down and somehow jeopardize their careers.

  Finally, a perky young woman carrying a bunch of keys came up to us. She led us to the security desk and sweet-talked the guard by explaining that we were “guest dancers and circus performers.” The guard didn’t want to bother filling out visitor badges for all of us. He buzzed us through, saying to the perky girl, “You’re responsible for them,” as if we were a group of schoolchildren or pets.

  The perky girl’s name was Jenna. She was barely five feet tall and wore her hair blown out and long, almost to her waist, as if to make up for her lack of height, although it produced the opposite effect, making her seem even shorter than she was. She wore a nondescript gray suit with pitifully tight-fitting pants and her eyes were unnaturally bright for so early in the morning. I wondered if she was on cocaine or some doctor-prescribed upper to help with her residual childhood whatever. She led us to an elevator, holding down the DOORS OPEN button and flipping her hair over her shoulder. She wedged herself tightly into the corner and said, “I think we can all squish.”

  We were on an express elevator that bypassed everything below the twentieth floor, headed someplace in the thirties. When we got to wherever it was we were going, Jenna slinked out of the elevator first and led the way down a hall, through double glass doors emblazoned with some corporate inscription I didn’t bother to read. Jenna skirted the main cube farm and herded us through a lesser-used part of the office, then down a dead-end hallway where she triumphantly turned around to face us. “So I guess you can change in here,” she said, indicating the bathrooms.

  Jamie was intolerant of any form of disrespect because he was a dancer. He strode ahead of the group, looked left and right at the gender-binary bathrooms, most likely filled with cramped stalls and urinals, and turned to face our escort. “This is unacceptable, Jenna,” he said. “We need a dressing room. We’re not preparing in a public toilet.” Jamie always made a point of remembering people’s names off the bat. And in this situation, using her name made her seem like his student, like she worked for him, as opposed to the other way around.

  Jenna’s big bright eyes searched the hallway with worry. To her credit, she had led us to rarely used bathrooms and was prepared to stand guard and ward off passersby with a shushed and friendly “There’s somebody changing in there!” She was only thinking of us, but she wasn’t thinking of us in the way Jamie wanted her to think of us.

  Jenna opened her mouth, perhaps to say something in her employer’s defense, that these were well-maintained private toilets and that she was certain we would find them comfortable and well stocked. Or perhaps to apologize to us, that these toilets were the best she could do. Or to say that her boss was really the one in charge, but she was on maternity leave and Jenna just had so much on her plate these days.

  But Jenna didn’t do any of those things. She bit her bottom lip and put her thinking cap on. Then she smiled and said, “Okay, follow me.” We picked up our bags and threaded through the office warren.

  Jenna unlocked a conference room and stood aside to let Jamie assess the new quarters. “This will do,” he said, “if you can find us a mirror.” Jenna grinned and skipped out. Jamie took charge. “Sorry about that,” he said to the group. “Some people have no idea.”

  We sloughed off our bags and street shoes and each claimed a chair around the conference table as our station. Jamie knelt down and opened the costume suitcase. He passed around unitards. They were orange and blue, which I noticed were the brand colors of this establishment.

  We undressed and were pulling on our costumes when Jenna returned with a cheap full-length mirror she had pried off a coat closet to fulfill her duty. “Whoops!” she said when she entered. She tried to back out. “You can come in,” Jamie said. “None of us are shy.” “Sorry,” she said, now not sure of what she was apologizing for, walking in on us or being shy herself.

  I had brought the wrong kind of sports bra. The straps didn’t line up with the scoop neck of my costume. I decided to go without it, since the unitard was made of a thick spandex and felt more like I was wearing a wet suit. I peeled off my bra over my head and caught Jenna staring at me when I was topless. She smiled and blushed and tried to cover it up by pulling her hair over one shoulder and obsessively petting it. I smiled back at her. Jamie saw the whole thing and rolled his eyes.

  Jenna was now on our side. We were her ticket out of her daily job drudgery. If it weren’t for us, she would be stuck behind a computer all day doing data entry. Our assignment was to run and flit through the offices and do cartwheels and flips (those of us who could), and there was one dancer who could walk on his hands. We were to toss around inflated silver beach balls and remind people that the company picnic was tomorrow. “Everything should have an exclamation mark to it,” Jamie said. We proceeded before our ungrateful audience, Jenna following us with her phone hooked up to a portable speaker. The corporation was spread over three floors, and we started on the top floor and descended with Jenna down the fire stairwell for each new act. As Jamie danced by a desk, the guy sitting there said, “I’m sure your mother is proud.” Jamie batted a silver beach ball over his head and pretended not to hear him.

  When we were finished Jenna guided us back to our dressing room. “That was so great,” Jenna gushed. “It was like Cirque du Soleil!” Jenna loved us. She said she’d try to get us to come back for other events, definitely for the holiday party. She offered to get us passes to the picnic, which was being held at a private beach club in the Hamptons. “There’s a free shuttle bus,” she said. “And there’ll be lots of free food.” Everyone declined politely. “Thanks, but we have a show,” everyone said. Even though we didn’t.

  Jenna’s normalcy intrigued me. “Sorry I can’t go to the picnic thing,” I said as I waited for the elevator. “But maybe we can hang out sometime.” It felt terrible. Like a line. It was a line. And Jenna picked up on it and responded with a perky “Sure. That’d be great!”

  I invited Jenna to a performance Jamie was dancing in. Jamie gave me two comps. Jenna was impressed, or she acted like it. She glowed with the same sort of excitement you’d have if you were given the best table at a fancy restaurant because you were friends with the chef. Instead, I got her free tickets to a dance concert in a semiconverted warehouse in Bushwick with indoor air polluted with asbestos and other unidentified particulates. She was overdressed in a skirt and high heels and I could see the shimmer of makeup dusted across her cheekbones, designed to catch the light just so. She smelled of designer perfume. She clung to my arm and grinned at the scowling scenesters. The performance was pretty boring and I was glad Jamie had gotten us in for free instead of guilting us into paying. But Jenna said afterward, “I thought it was really interesting. It gave me a lot to think about. And they were such good dancers.” I scooted her out of there before Jamie emerged from the dressing room, because I hadn’t told him about Jenna and didn’t want it getting back to Noreen, who was out of town at a conference. Noreen would be instantly suspicious. “Why did you invite her,” she would ask, “when you have so many other dancy friends?”

  Jenna and I had an affair. Mostly at Jenna’s apartment, which she shared with two roommates whom she delighted in shocking with her new lesbian romance. Her bedroom was separated from the living
room by flimsy French doors with glass covered by sheer curtains. If a light was on, you could see right through them. So everything Jenna and I did was in the dark.

  I wasn’t that attracted to Jenna, but it was refreshing to be with someone who knew nothing about me, who wasn’t constantly scrutinizing my motives and putting them in a psychotherapeutic context, who thought it was great that I wasn’t bogged down with a regular job, and who really wanted to read something I wrote. Everything I did sexually was a thrill for Jenna. That was the part that turned me on.

  It was when Jenna said something like “I don’t know, maybe you and I could get an apartment together,” that I knew it had come to an end. I had to break up with her. Jenna didn’t take it well. She demanded to know why. She thought we had a perfect relationship. “But we have so much fun,” she said, “and we’re so compatible.” I said, “Because I already have a girlfriend. I live with her and I’ve been with her for years. I’m sorry, I should’ve told you, but I didn’t know how.” Jenna asked if I was breaking up with my girlfriend. I said, “No, I don’t think so.” She asked if I was still in love with my girlfriend, and if I was, then why did I sleep with her, and if I wasn’t, then why didn’t Noreen and I break up. I said it wasn’t that simple. And Jenna said, “Yes, it is.”

  Jenna sobbed for a long time and I held her as we sat on the edge of her bed with her billowy down comforter underneath us. She ran out of tissues and I shook a pillowcase off a pillow and passed it to her as a handkerchief. “That’s so gross,” she said and slapped it away. I eventually got out of there by promising to meet her after work the next day and giving her a long hug and kissing her when I left. But I canceled on her at the last minute. I texted her and said I couldn’t meet. She texted back, I thought you were different, but I’m not surprised.