Eden Close

by Anita Shreve

  The hymn he has heard before is quieter here. She fingers the: long crimson petals in her lap.

  "You're going swimming," she says.

  "Oh, I don't know," he says, picking up a stone in his hand. He looks at the water. He would like a swim. The surface of the pond is glassy, undisturbed but for the arcs of water bugs.

  "You could come too," he says. "You could swim in your dress. It would dry in the sun on the walk back, and you could change before she got home."

  She shakes her head. "I don't need to swim. I am just all right here."

  He tosses the stone from one palm to the other. She leans her head against the bark of the tree, and he can't tell if her eyes are open or closed behind the dark glasses. Her hands are in her lap, with the flower, wilting now in the heat. Even in the shade, the heat is enervating.

  He throws the stone into the water. He stands up and unbuckles his belt. The clink of the metal sounds too loud in the silence. He slips off his clothes and his watch, lets them fall in a pile on the bank. He walks to the edge of the water.

  The water at his ankles is cool but not cold. He wades out up to his waist, then lets his body drift slowly forward until he is floating. He raises his arm to begin a crawl, a lazy crawl to the other side. The distance seems longer to him than it did when he was a boy, but he attributes this to being out of shape.

  He plunges his head under the water, feels the coolness drive the heat from his brain. He tries a breast stroke on the return lap, sees her through the rivulets of water that cascade off his head each time he comes up for air.

  He turns and makes his way to the other side again, thinking that the rhythmic strokes feel good. But after four laps, his arms begin to tire. He reaches the shore closest to her, turns and thinks to make another lap, but stops instead to stand when the water is chest high. He looks across to the other bank, paddles idly in the water, feels the pebbles when he puts his feet down, then the claylike soil of the bottom. Lifting his feet off the bottom, he lets his weight take him slowly up and down beneath the water, blowing bubbles as he does so. The water closes over his head and then breaks again when he comes up for air.

  He lies flat on his back, the water sloshing over his belly. With the smallest of efforts, he can bring his toes above the surface. He sculls quietly with his wrists. Squinting, he can just make out a corona in the whitest, most painful, part of the sky. It reminds him of something, but he can't quite seize the memory. He shuts his eyes, lets his head float too, his brow and eyes sinking below the surface, keeping just his nose and mouth free to breathe. The sensation is delicious: the hot sun on the exposed parts of his body, the coolness beneath.

  Behind his eyes, images scintillate, shine, disappear. A leaf, translucent with the sun behind it, fluttering ... Eden turning her head and smiling ... The sun glinting off T.J.'s sunglasses ... A sunburst sparkling in the fender of his car ... Billy with pennies in his palm ... A window somewhere throwing off the shimmer of a rusty sunset...

  A fish slithers under his left shoulder, startling him. He tries to stand quickly, is thrown off balance, is blinded by the water in his eyes. His toes scrape a rock on the bottom. It's not a fish; it's her hand. She is standing in the water up to her chest in front of him. She is wearing her dress. Her arms are outstretched for balance, but it seems to him she is reaching for him.

  He grasps her hand, pulls her off her feet so that she is floating. The skirt of her dress billows up and around her waist like a parachute. He leads her, as if executing a formal dance, until his feet leave the water and he must swim. He swims on his side, holding her elbow, letting her paddle with his support. He doesn't know what has brought her to the water—the heat, a desire not to be left alone—but he is glad to be beside her, to watch the concentration on her face as she makes her way in the unfamiliar water. He wonders if she has even once been swimming in nineteen years.

  A third of the way across the pond, she breaks free of his hand, raises her shoulders and slices through the water with a knifelike crawl. She puts her face in the water, turns to the side for air, repeats the movements in perfect synchrony. Left behind, he swims ungracefully to catch up to her. Years ago, she was an excellent and tireless swimmer, making up in speed what she lacked in power.

  "Make the turn now," he says, when they are near the other side.

  She makes the turn but rolls onto her back, executing a smooth backstroke. He watches as each white arm rises from the brassy water with mathematical precision. Her hair swims around her, and her legs flutter, keeping her easily afloat.

  "You can stand now," he says when they are near the shore.

  Instead she makes a swimmer's turn and once again heads across the pond. He watches her for a moment, thinking to stay by her side in case she tires, panics; but so easy are her strokes that he is mesmerized, rooted to the spot. He lets her go.

  She swims back and forth a dozen times. He is content just to watch her. When she is finished, she stands and pushes the hair away from her face. She is breathing hard. She rubs the water out of her eyes.

  "You're still the best," he says.

  She smiles, a real smile.

  She has stopped twenty feet from him. He tries to make his way to her side, but the water slows him down. She turns and walks unhurriedly toward the shore. He watches as she squeezes the water out of her hair, then moves around the grass near the water's edge until she finds a patch of sun with her feet. She lies down with her dress on.

  He pulls himself out of the pond and stands at her feet, looking down at her.

  "I don't think you want to do that," he says.

  He means get the dress dirty. It is wet, and the dirt will stick to it. But there is something else he means. Her face is smooth, in repose. The little knots of tension he has seen there earlier are gone.

  She doesn't answer him. He studies her. He is looking at a painting in a museum, a painting of a woman with alabaster skin in a blue dress on dried grasses—a masterpiece no one but himself will ever see. Her hair, in a twisted rope, lies to one side of her. He sees the softened knobs of her collarbone, the nipples of her breasts under the wet fabric. He sees the hollow space under the dress where the crease of her breast must be.

  He crouches down beside her. Does she know he's there? he wonders. Can she "see" his awkward pose, awkward because of" his nakedness?

  He touches the rope of damp hair, her brow. She doesn't flinch or pull away, and he takes this as a sign that she is waiting, He touches the knob of her collarbone above the top button of her dress. He hears a sound like a small sigh escape her, and she seems to arch her back slightly.

  He takes his hand away. A voice cautions him, tells him that if he does this, there is no turning back. It is not a casual act; she is virtually a child. He sees her as a child, feels again the secret dread in himself, about to touch something he should not. Images come to him from his childhood: Eden sashaying to the bus; teasing him at the pond; pressed against a brick wall.

  He undoes the first button, kisses the skin underneath. It seems to him her legs slide together under her dress. She raises a hand, then drops it. The wet cloth is tight across her breasts. He undoes the second button, knows he will not stop now, and peels the cloth back. He kneels, bends his head to kiss her, and as he does so, he feels her hand at the small of his back.

  She moves away from him and rolls over. She rises to her knees, stands, then slips off her dress and her underwear. She is smooth, carved but not muscled. Her breasts hang heavier than he has remembered from his dreams, and this is somehow reassuring. Her shoulders are thin, and there is a hollow place where her upper arm meets her body. Her pelvic bones are defined. Around him, the sun glints brilliantly off the water and through the foliage, causing in him a momentary dizziness. His mouth is inches from her flat belly, and he lets himself kiss her there. He lets his mouth slide along her as she drops to her knees in front of him.

  He encircles her with his arms, pulling her face into his neck. He calls her nam
e, an urgent summons, as if he were calling to her across the pond, or back across the years. Her name, spoken in that way, makes her shiver, and her poise deserts her then. He feels her break. It is a subtle movement in her shoulders, a letting go, so that he must bear her weight. She begins to cry. He presses her more tightly to him. He is glad that she is crying. There is too much that she is crying for, but he is glad, and he cannot stop himself from saying her name. He kisses her. He makes her open her mouth. He puts his knee between her thighs. She pulls her mouth away once, for air. He feels no hesitation now, no sense of caution. This is where his dreams have led him.

  She knew it before I did, he thinks. She knew it years ago, when I was still a boy.

  She seems unafraid now, though she has said the walk to the pond would be dangerous, and he misunderstood her. His balance lost, he takes her with him to the grass. Her thigh slides like silk over his, and her hair hides their faces like a cool tent. There is heat around them and the dampness of the grass, and a crow cawing irritably from the top of a tree. She clings to him, and he feels the sad frenzy of her nineteen lost years, but she is too shy to guide him or doesn't know how, and so he makes his own way, trying to be gentle, trying not to think of her as a child.

  Later he will remember how a shiver rose from her belly and rippled out to her fists against his back. But he will remember, too, her unexpected delicacy. She doesn't make a sound, a silence he finds entrancing.

  AFTERWARD she lies in the crook of his arm. He strokes the down on her upper arm. They both smell like the pond. She might be asleep; he cannot tell. He doesn't want to speak. In his mind he borrows a phrase from her, one that he has liked. I am just all right, he says to himself.

  His body is tired, and he thinks it possible he might fall asleep with her—something he must guard against. He doesn't know the time but guesses there can't be more than an hour left, if that. He wonders if she can tell time here, where she hasn't been in years, where the sounds would be different from those at the houses.

  He hears a rustling in the bushes. a small animal, he supposes, until he sees the boy. The boy is eleven, twelve. He comes near to the edge of the clearing, stops short when he sees Andrew and Eden. He has brown hair and glasses and freckles beneath a summer tan. He has a towel around his neck. His chest is bare. He stares at Andrew. Andrew returns his gaze but doesn't move. Then the boy turns and darts though the underbrush the way he has come.

  Andrew smiles and wishes to himself that the boy will remember this scene all his life.

  AFTER A TIME, he puts her head on the grass and unwinds himself from her. His watch is over by his clothes, and when he consults it, he is somewhat alarmed to see that they have only forty minutes left.

  "Eden," he says, waking her. "We have to go now. Quickly."

  She leans up on one arm. She seems dazed, disoriented. He helps her to her feet and retrieves the still wet dress from the grass. The dress is dirty and wrinkled. She raises the dress over her head and slips her arms through it, and it is then that he has his first doubts. The dress hangs on her, making her look suddenly very vulnerable. She slips on her underpants. Her hair is damp and tangled, with bits of grass and dirt in it. Her face is wrinkled with sleep. For a minute she seems like someone he had no right to touch, to expose.

  "I don't know where the tree is, or where my shoes are," she says.

  He finds the sneakers and the sunglasses in the place where they first sat down, but he hands them to her rather than putting them on her himself. The easy confidence he had before, or rather the trumped-up confidence—bordering at times, he has feared, on condescension—has left him. She is again a thing apart from him.

  "When we get back," he says, trying again for a tone of authority he does not feel, "I'll take the dress and launder it and give it back to you tomorrow. Your hair should dry completely on the walk back. All you need to do is give it a good brushing and put something else on, but we have to be quick about it."

  She nods once and lets him take her hand. He squeezes her hand tightly to recapture the intimacy just left. At the cornfields she goes before him, making her way with a more practiced ease and with more speed. He watches her outstretched arms, her fingers flicking gently against the cornstalks. On the other side of the fields, he takes her hand again and nearly runs with her to her back stoop. By his reckoning, they have only five minutes left. She can tell the time, too, here, on familiar ground, for he sees it in her face.

  Once inside the kitchen, she begins to unbutton her dress. She slips the bodice to her waist and then steps out of both the dress and her underwear in one movement. She hands the bundle to Andrew like a child giving her clothes to a parent before she enters the bath. He takes them, moved by the ease with which she has done this, by the way she does not shield her nakedness with her arms. He is moved, too, though differently and more deeply, by her beauty, her beauty incongruous in this desolate kitchen, her feet in her blue sneakers so firmly planted on the worn linoleum floor. He aches to linger, to touch her again. He kisses her on the shoulder, slides a hand down her back. He can think of nothing right to say.

  "Jim was my father," she says quietly.

  He steps back, still touching her shoulder. "I know."

  "No. You don't understand," she says. "I'm giving you something."

  He is silent. "What are you saying?" he asks after a minute.

  "I was his."

  "He was your real father?"

  "It's why she hates me."

  Her meaning is clear, but his mind balks, unable to take it in.

  "How is that possible?" he asks. "I remember the day. I was there when she brought you to the garden...."

  "The girl who left me was someone ... he had been with."

  "Girl?"

  "She was sixteen."

  "How do you know this? Did you know all those years?"

  She tilts her head to one side, listens. "That's all," she says. She wrests herself from his touch, and he watches her disappear through the doorway to the darkened part of the house. Galvanized, he moves out the back door, down the steps and across the yard to his own back door. He is just inside with his bundle when he sees the Plymouth turn into the gravel drive.

  HE DROPS the dress into the washing machine. The cellar is cooler than the rest of the house. He hopes she realizes in time that she still has the sneakers. He looks at the machine, tries to decide on the water temperature and the cycle. He cannot decide. He pushes buttons. The machine bucks once into life, then begins to throb rhythmically under his hand.

  Upstairs, in the kitchen, the air is close, too thick to breathe. Two-twenty. The hottest part of the day. He sits at the kitchen table, brings a hand to his forehead, looks across to her house. He sees Jim sitting on the steps, waiting for Eden to come home. Jim's face, with its long flat planes, comes briefly into focus, then fades. Andrew would have said, indeed people did say, Eden resembled Edith, not Jim, but now he'd like to see the face to search for any likeness. All that comes is an image of height, ranginess, a loose charm when he wasn't drunk. All those years and no one knew. Or did they? Did his mother guess? Did Edith tell her? He sees his mother's back at the sink, slightly stooped, her hands in a stream of water from the faucet. An ache for his mother he is not familiar with knots his stomach. He walks to the fridge, thinking he should have some food, selects a beer instead, the closest thing at hand. Still standing by the fridge, he drinks it down like a Coke, immediately gets another.

  Already his memories of Jim are shifting, changing shape to accommodate this new piece of information. He thinks of a scene he remembers from his childhood—Jim coming home from a business trip with presents for Eden, who is playing on a swing—but it means something different now. Indeed, everything about Jim is different now, moving slightly, giving way to something else.

  The heat and his empty stomach and the beer, drunk too fast, leave him light-headed. He begins to move about the kitchen floor, pacing from the counter to the table, a slow pace in the heat.
He takes his shirt off, drops it over a chair. He can still smell the pond on his skin. He imagines that he can still smell Eden on his skin too. He lets her come into his mind, his head dizzy with images of her. He tastes her skin, remembers how her shoulders felt when she broke. Her hair was dense, shading him. And then she was on her back, arching as if they might merge. She was easy, so easy, and so quiet. Nothing to show how she felt but the quivering.

  He leans against the sink, puts his head in his hands. His head hurts badly at the back of his neck, up the sides toward the temple.

  You remind her of the past, Edith said. You'll raise her hopes, her expectations.

  He thinks of Billy, waiting for him, needing him. He thinks of Jayne in his office, of the job he must return to. He sees his mother, turning now to look at him, to ask him what he is still doing here. From the cellar, he can hear the washing machine switching into the rinse cycle.

  He thinks, knows, he should not have made love to her. He feels dry and hollow. He has done the thing that Edith feared, was right to fear. He glances up. For the first time, the room looks to him exactly as it is: no longer a repository of memories—only a faded, shabby, lifeless kitchen.

  He cannot tolerate the silence. He turns on the radio nearly as loud as it will go and takes the stairs two at a time. In his room, his changes into a dress shirt and khaki slacks. He empties the drawers, stuffs his underwear and socks into his leather satchel. Slipping on a throw rug in the hallway, he grabs a carton of mementoes on his mother's bed. His arms loaded, he makes his way downstairs and out the back door, letting it slam. He puts the suitcase and the carton in the trunk of the BMW. Back inside the kitchen, he allows the door to slam again. There is another carton in his mother's room, one in the living room. He takes them out to the car. Impatiently, he forces the cartons into the trunk. He is sweating heavily. The cloth along his spine is wet. Returning to the kitchen, he opens the fridge, thinking to throw away any food that might spoil. Instead, he takes another beer, quickly shuts the door. He lifts the phone out of its cradle, starts to dial T.J.'s number, replaces the receiver. He will call T.J. from the city tomorrow.