Eden

by Andrea Kleine

  Jenna must have looked up my address on the tax form I had filled out for Jamie’s gig, because she sent Noreen a letter detailing our affair. “Wow, she’s a kid, Hope,” Noreen said. “What’s that about? Just easy pickings? Where did you think it was going to go? I hope you got off. I hope she had a nice ass because she doesn’t sound terribly smart.” Noreen insisted on our staying together. On doing the work. “We’ve been together for a long time. We both have a lot of trauma from our childhoods. It was bound to happen. People get through this sort of thing. It was something you did without thinking. I understand.” She refused to accept that the affair had any meaning, refused to get angry or feel much of anything, because it wasn’t the story she wanted. She would patch it up until she figured out her next move.

  Noreen demanded we go to couples counseling. It was expensive. Noreen said, “You always use money as an excuse. I’ll fucking pay for it.” I relayed that to the shrink and Noreen got upset with me. The shrink asked me what I felt about it. I was quiet for a long time. Noreen said, “It’s just how she operates.” I screamed at her that she never gave me a choice, that there was never any space for me, that she didn’t have a clue how I felt or how I operated. She was quiet for a while after that. She said, “It’s so difficult to be with someone who doesn’t admit their pain.”

  I stayed at Zara’s, house-sitting for a week while she was in Europe at an art fair. She called me from Switzerland and said that she was petrified to leave her hotel room. Her gallerist had given her a prescription for sedatives. Or something—​Zara couldn’t read the German printed on the bottle. She was crying so much she sounded like she was drowning. I told her to toss the pills into the toilet. “Do it, Zara,” I said sternly, worried that she would try to choke them all down. I heard her drop the phone. “Z?” I asked. I heard the toilet flush. “Yeah, okay,” she said. “I need to get out of here.” I told her she should go to the airport and fly standby. I had to stay on the phone with her while she rushed through the hotel lobby and into a cab to the airport. I stayed on the phone with her until she went through security.

  Noreen called me later that day, the day I was supposed to come home. “If you want to break up, we can,” she said. “You can break up with me. It’s fine. I can’t stop you. I can let you go. You’re not really here with me anyway. I’m not sure you ever were.”

  23

  Eden and I sat on connected plastic chairs in the emergency room waiting area. The policeman who had brought us in had given each of us a blanket and sat beside us. We hunkered there under our blankets like we were immigrants who had swum across a river. There was a TV bolted to the ceiling, but it was switched off. There were no other people in the waiting area and I thought it odd that we had to wait at all. But I didn’t mind waiting because I didn’t want to go around the corner and down the hall and into a space that was separated from someone else’s bed by a thin curtain.

  A guy and a girl came through the sliding glass entrance door. The girl was clutching her arm to her stomach. She was shaking. The guy talked to the emergency room nurse in the booth and then he and the girl sat down. The girl kept saying, “Oh, it hurts. Oh, it hurts,” in a weird voice, like she was cooing, like she was faking it or acting in a play. But she kept doing it, so I thought it must be real.

  Eden stared at her. “Somebody fucking help her,” she muttered and leaned her head against the wall.

  The policeman who was sitting with us had been fiddling with his pad and pencil. I thought he was making notes because later he would have to write a report about us and hand it in, but when I looked over at his pad I saw he was doodling, drawing patterns of interlocking triangles and coloring some of them in.

  The nurse called my name. The policeman got up and I started to stand, but Eden held the corner of my blanket and said, “We’re not going anywhere until you take care of that woman.” She didn’t say it loud enough for the nurse to hear, so the nurse called my name again. The cop turned to us and used a sweet and friendly voice and said, “The doctors have a system.” “Obviously their system isn’t working,” Eden said, “because that person is screaming in pain and we are not. Or should I start screaming? Because maybe that’s what it takes to not get attention around here.”

  Our cop went over and talked to the nurse. We couldn’t hear what he said, but the nurse shuffled her clipboards and walked over to the girl who was clutching her arm and rocking back and forth.

  Eden said in a low voice, “They’re going to ask us questions.” I said, “I know.” I said, “I feel bad for Dad. It was his friend.” Eden said, “He’s not friends with Dad. He just said that.” I said, “I thought you met him when you were little.” Eden said, “No.” She said, “Or if I did, I don’t remember. I don’t remember my fourth birthday party, but everyone always talks about it, about how I cried through the whole thing. I don’t know what I remember and what I don’t. That’s what this is going to be like.” “This?” I asked.

  Eden didn’t say anything for a minute. She looked bad. She looked sick. I probably did too. Eden had scratches on her face from running through the woods. I probably did too. I touched my cheek. The cops had given me an ice pack for my face, for where I got punched, but I didn’t want to be cold anymore so I had left it in the police car. I looked down at my feet, which were all cut up. I thought I shouldn’t be walking on this floor, barefoot and bleeding, where there were lots of germs. My feet should probably hurt but they didn’t. Everything should probably hurt but it didn’t. I didn’t feel anything except itchy because the blanket the police gave me was wool, and wool always itched me. But I couldn’t get rid of the blanket because the only other thing I was wearing was underwear and a bra and they didn’t match. I never understood how you were supposed to wear underwear and a bra that matched because that meant you had to have as many bras as you did pairs of underwear and I didn’t have that many bras. I didn’t know anyone who did, but then maybe people did and I didn’t know because I didn’t see their bras every day.

  “Don’t tell them I said I knew him,” Eden said. “I won’t,” I said.

  The sliding doors opened and a policewoman came in. Our cop went over to her right away. He looked relieved she was there. They talked for a bit and the policewoman nodded. They walked over to us. “This is my associate, Officer Moore,” our cop said. Officer Moore smiled at us. “You girls can call me Jess,” she said. She took off her police cap. She had freckles and brown hair pulled back in a French braid. She was short. She knelt down in front of us and looked up at our cop, who said, “Okay,” and wandered off to the other end of the waiting room, near the nurses’ station.

  “We’re going to get you a doctor right away,” she said. “We’re going to get you a woman doctor or specialty nurse, okay?”

  Eden didn’t say anything so I didn’t say anything either. “I’m going to stay with you,” Jess said. “I’m here for you.” Eden leaned her head back against the wall. She rolled her eyes toward the dead TV.

  “Have your parents been contacted yet?” Jess asked. Eden didn’t look at her. I wasn’t sure what to say so I didn’t say anything. Jess looked at each of us, inviting us to speak. She said, “I need to check on something. I’ll be right over there.” She went over to the other cop and started talking to him. She sounded angry. “Where are the parents?” I heard her ask him. I couldn’t hear what the other cop said back. He said something into his walkie-talkie. Jess came back to us, quickly, like she was marching. She stopped halfway across the room, closed her eyes, and took a deep breath. When she got to us she said, “We’re not sure if they’ve gotten in touch with your parents yet. Let’s try calling them again from here. They’re probably worried about you.”

  I turned to Eden. I said, “Should we try Mom or Dad?” Jess said, “We can call them both. And if they’re not at home, we can call anyone who might know where they are.” I looked at Eden but she wasn’t paying attention. She was watching an imaginary television show on the black screen. S
he was trying to turn the TV on with her mind. I knew that when Eden did this, when she did her I’m-not-talking-to-you-anymore routine, she was pretty good at it. I said, “We live with my mom, but our dad lives closer.” I recited our dad’s number. Jess wrote it down on her pad. “Hey, Bill,” she said over her shoulder. She ripped off the paper and handed it to the other cop.

  The nurse came out again. We were the only ones in the waiting area so she walked over to us. Jess was in front of us. She put one hand on my shoulder and one hand on Eden’s shoulder, like we were in a three-person hug. She helped us to our feet. We were in a huddle. I closed my eyes. I started crying. Jess wrapped us closer, held us tight. She put her head against ours. “You will get through this,” Jess said.

  24

  I didn’t drive far. I was still hungover and tired. I took the exit to Ocean City in Maryland. My aunt used to have a condo there when she was alive. We used to visit her every summer when my parents were married. Mostly Eden and I would play by ourselves because we didn’t relate to our sporty cousins, who were teenage boys when we were kids and they weren’t interested in us anyway. My aunt’s condo building had gray wood siding and looked like it had been built in the seventies. If you lived there you could park in the front, and if you were a guest you had to park in the back. She had a balcony, and our cousins would stand out there and spit down on us when Eden and I got back from the beach, so we always made a point of leaving the beach before they did. Also, if one of us took a shower, the other one had to guard the door because it didn’t lock and the cousins knew it but pretended they didn’t and never knocked. My aunt got divorced right after my parents got divorced and she sold the condo. It was a relief that we didn’t have to go there anymore.

  I had no idea where to find the old condo building. I pulled into the parking lot of an apartment complex called The Easy Breezy. The lot was almost empty since it was off-season. I turned off the engine, closed up all the curtains, and anesthetized myself by staring at bullshit on my phone until it ran out of juice. I slept the rest of the day and most of the night. I woke up the next morning and peed into a paper Starbucks cup and poured it out the window.

  I walked to a coffee shop by the beach so I could charge my phone. I ordered a large coffee and a blueberry muffin, which tasted like cake and I couldn’t eat it. I went back to the counter and paid a dollar for a banana that was still a little green, then took a seat by the window and stared across the boardwalk and out to the cold gray sea. It was windy. I couldn’t tell if I saw snow flurries or just sand kicking up from the beach.

  When my phone came back to life, I had an email from my dad. Hope. I’m sorry. I don’t know where she is. I’m not keeping anything from you. Just wanted you to know that. Let me know if you find anything. Love, Dad.

  I walked back along the boardwalk. Most places had their metal shutters down. The wooden walkway had drifts of sand and debris blown over it. It felt deserted, as if the denizens let nature take over for the winter and do whatever it wanted.

  I climbed into the way-back of The Camper and under the sleeping bag for warmth. I wondered if this was how people slowly became homeless. First they live in their car, then under increasingly squalid conditions, and then their friends and family just let them disappear.

  I have friends, I thought.

  I called Zara. She didn’t answer. I called Jamie.

  “What car?” he asked. “You have a car now?” I said it wasn’t a car, it was a van, a camper, and I had borrowed it from my dad, sort of on perma-loan for the foreseeable future. “So you’ve inherited it? Are you bringing it back to New York?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “At the moment I’m kind of living in it.”

  “Zara said you lost your apartment, and I meant to call you about it. I worry about you, Hope. But maybe this van could be a good investment. Maybe you could live in it and shower at the gym. I had a friend who did that.” Jamie asked if he could borrow The Camper for a future project. “If I go on tour,” he said. “You know, Merce Cunningham and John Cage went on tour in a bus like that. Cage would drive the bus and forage for mushrooms and wild herbs, and that’s what the dancers would eat when they camped for the night. Maybe they even roasted a squirrel or two. But what is this vision quest all about, Hope? Is this for a play? I really hope so, because you haven’t produced anything for so long.”

  “Sort of,” I said. I wondered if he had talked to Noreen, if she had called him after she found me drunk on her doorstep. “I’m doing research for something.”

  “Oh, that’s good,” Jamie said. “Just don’t get trapped by it,” he said. “Sometimes you can do so much research it becomes about that and you forget why you set out on the road in the first place.”

  “Right,” I said. It started to rain and drops pattered the roof of The Camper. I slunk down deeper into my sleeping bag. My phone was under the covers and the edge of the sleeping bag brushed my face. I inhaled, wondering if the odor would remind me of being a kid, but it just smelled musty.

  “Did I tell you I was in a film?” Jamie asked. “A feature. It was an ensemble piece, but I was one of the main characters. It’s already been accepted at Sundance. It’s an independent film and they’re hoping it gets picked up for distribution, which it will. They have an agent already. I’m heading out there next week to do talk-backs, parties, that sort of thing. I’ve got to pay my own way and the hotel, but it’s worth it. I should definitely go. It’s important to invest in yourself. It’s just the money. I’m getting too old to grab a quick go-go job. Or even a cheap trick. I’m sort of out of that business, if you know what I mean.”

  I started to laugh and then stopped myself. Jamie said, “It’s okay. It was a joke.

  “I’m really happy,” he said. “Things could finally be turning around for me. I’ve lived the whore’s life for so long, I forget that people actually do have breakthroughs. Things can change. And not slip back. Look at us, for instance,” he said. “We haven’t really changed since we were in college. And how long ago is that now? I sometimes get really depressed and feel that this hard-luck life is all there is. This is how it is and how it’s going to be. And that only one person, once in a blue moon, gets a big boost, and it’s totally random and it’s not a meritocracy. The rest of us suffer and toil away. Looking for something beautiful. Never finding it for more than a second. But I guess we choose that. We set ourselves up for it. And if we had known that all these years later it would be like this, would we have still chosen to be artists?”

  I pulled the sleeping bag away from my face. My breath made little clouds when I exhaled. “Who knows?” I said.

  “I think we would have,” he said. “You would have, for sure. You’re the real thing. I’m just stuck here now. What else can I do, really? At this point in my life, what else is there for me?” He sighed grandly. “And don’t tell me to become a Pilates teacher or a massage therapist. As if that is remotely related to dance. Oh, because it uses the body. Is that all I have, really? This mortal corporeal coil?” Jamie sighed again. “Shit,” he said. “Fuck, I’ve got to take this call. I’ll talk to you later, Hope.”

  I couldn’t think of any reason to protest ending our conversation. Jamie hung up.

  I sat up and peeked through the rear window curtains. It was still raining and cold. I couldn’t see much out the window. I thought about putting the key in the ignition and turning on the wipers. I thought the rhythmic wiping would calm me. But I knew it would be a drain on the battery, which undoubtedly had little life left. I rewrapped myself in the sleeping bag and looked at the beads of rain. They were mixed with tiny snowflakes that melted as soon as they hit the window.

  I called Zara again. She picked up right away.

  “I’m at an impasse,” I said. “What if being a disgusting artist gets you nowhere? What if your savage use of raw material doesn’t amount to anything? What if cannibalizing your childhood trauma just causes more trauma?”

  “Art is like a bad love
r who doesn’t reciprocate,” Zara said. “Yet we stay in the relationship and we jerk off when no one is looking so we can at least get through the day.”

  “But what’s the goal?” I asked. “What are we in it for?”

  “I’m not sure,” Zara said. “I think we’re in it because we don’t know why we are in it.” Zara paused. “That’s kind of a dodge, I admit it,” she said.

  “So we’re in it because we’re lost?” I asked.

  “It’s as good a reason as any. It’s not like you’re in it for the money, although you can be. But I don’t know,” Zara said. “If you think too much about why you’re doing it, you’ll start to be really disgusted with yourself and talk yourself out of it all. It’s like sex. It’s walking a fine line between repulsion and love.”

  “I’ve spent the last day living in my dad’s van and peeing in an old Starbucks cup,” I said.

  “See, that’s gross, but I love you for peeing in an old Starbucks cup. I think it makes you lovable.”

  “I’m such a fucking failure,” I said.

  “I’m a fucking failure too. We’re all failures.”

  I heard footsteps and panicked that someone was going to tap on The Camper door, ask me for my parking permit, and tell me to move along when I failed to produce it. But whoever it was hurried by and faded away.

  “Can you look something up for me?” I asked Zara to look up Eric and see if she could find a phone number or an email or something. She asked who it was, and I said it was Eden’s teacher whom I think she had an affair with or was involved with. It didn’t take Zara long to find me some numbers. “It’s interesting,” she said. “You asked me to look up the boyfriend, but not Eden. You always approach things indirectly. You never knock on the front door.” I told Zara that there was a certain thing called anxiety, and she said, “Yeah, I know.”