Eden Close

  Even though he could go now, he waits a bit behind the door. A thick peaceful hush settles over the two houses—or does he merely imagine that it does? He hears a buzzing; in the summer there is always a buzzing in the cornfields off in the distance and, closer, the continual hum and whine of insects in the weedy perennials, but this is part of the hush, the hush of two lonely houses set apart from town with only the whiz of a car or, seldom now, a human voice to rattle the quiet. He shuts his eyes and inclines his head toward the screen, listening intently, as Eden might do, this her only world, as cacophonous and distracting as the noise of the city if only he could hear as she does, if only he could tease out the differing sounds and their meanings.

  Edith Close will not come back for a sweater or a forgotten purse, he decides. She hasn't done so once this week, so why today? He lets the door slam, to announce his intentions, and walks across the spongy wet grass, soaking his old sneakers. Unlike yesterday, his walk is slow and deliberate, and when he reaches the rotting stoop, he picks his way up over it with care.

  He raps once lightly on the door and almost simultaneously opens it. He enters the kitchen, unhurried, again nearly blinded by the gloom. Then he sees her, an image in a photographer's tray, emerging into focus.

  Later that night, lying in bed, unable to sleep, or bending to the fridge for a beer, Andrew will recall again the swift surprise of her presence, her back resting against the sink, her arms folded across her chest. It wasn't that he hadn't expected her; he had known she would be waiting for him. It was that her proximity, after all these years, was deeply unsettling, as if a fragment of a dream, a dream he'd thought he lost years ago, had indeed turned out to be real.

  "HELLO," she says.

  She is holding herself still, her gaze seemingly directed toward a window beside him.

  "I wanted to see you," he says. He shakes his head. "To speak with you, I mean." He stands in the center of the linoleum floor, uncertain as to whether he should sit at the table, make himself at home, or not. She has not invited him to. Perhaps, he thinks, she has no sense now, as he does, of the awkwardness of a conversation conducted standing stiffly face to face. Though she cannot see him, he feels uneasy in front of her. His arms and hands are appendages that seem no longer to belong to him. He folds them across his chest in unconscious parody of her stance.

  "I thought. Yes," she says elliptically.

  A quick intake of air she cannot fail to hear betrays his nervousness. "So how are you?" he asks. It is an inane question, and instantly he regrets it.

  She gives the faintest of shrugs. "I am always all right," she says evenly.

  He searches for the next sentence as if hunting for a trail that will lead him out of an unfamiliar wood. All his choices seem lame.

  "It's been a long time," he says.

  She doesn't answer him. Instead she turns her head so that she is looking at him so acutely he wonders fleetingly if perhaps he has got it wrong—and she can see after all. Her stare is uncompromising. He tries to imagine what it is that she "sees": his presence must be to her a voice in a vast inky sea.

  "Your mother is dead," she says.

  Her words startle him. The sentence is bald, unadorned. Almost unfeeling. But he realizes that he likes the frank statement. Likes not hearing an expression of sympathy, likes not hearing the words I'm sorry for the hundredth time. The fact is a simple one: His mother is dead, and she has said only that.

  "Yes. We had the funeral. Your mother came. Did she tell you?"

  "She tells me ... some things. But you always did that."

  "What?"

  "Call her my mother."

  "Well, she's..."

  "Not."

  He nods. He realizes she cannot see the nod. "Right," he says.

  It will take some time to learn how to speak to her, he thinks. Everything must be in the voice.

  "Jim died here," she says.

  Another bald sentence, one that takes him by surprise. During his three brief visits to this house, Andrew has not thought of this fact, but, of course, he knows it is true. Jim died in this house, on the floor upstairs, and Andrew's father found him. He has a sudden, too vivid image of Edith Close being pressed to the ground by the ambulance attendants, of Eden with a bloodstained towel at her head, of his father with the rifle limp beside his leg.

  "You have a wife and child," she says, her gaze sliding a few degrees off his face.

  Perhaps it is having been alone for so long that reduces her sentences to this simplicity, he thinks. She has lost the etiquette of conversation, having had, he supposes, no experience with small talk. If it were T.J., or anyone else, the sentence would have been looser: "So I hear you're married"—something with a tone of familiarity.

  "No," he explains, trying to answer her with equally honest sentences. "I have a son but no wife. We're separated. I live alone, and I see Billy, my son, on weekends."

  "I won't have a son," she says.

  She says it quickly, without emotion, though it brings him up short. He wants to say, too glibly, Of course you will, as he might to almost anyone else, but her statement rings so true he cannot form a reply.

  He shifts his weight. He glances down at his feet, then looks at her again. He tries to take it in. All the years spent here. All the days inside this house while he was away; all the years, while he was in college, in the city, at his home in Saddle River. He thinks of what he has had—the grown-up toys and trinkets, the days filled with color and people and work, while she has had only this. Who can calculate, he thinks, even the accumulated weight of one single day: a hundred colors seen in a glance out a kitchen window; a dozen lives witnessed in one brisk walk through an office; the complex wealth of a meal with a wife and child. While her days seem to him, appear to him, impoverished by contrast—weightless, undistinguishable one from the other. Or is he wrong? Is there in her slow universe a life as rich as, even richer than, his own?

  Yet for all his advantages, he has the distinct feeling of being at a disadvantage. There is a reality here that he is unprepared for—one seeming to have little to do with the minutiae of the life he has left behind. It is in keeping, he thinks, with the way he has been feeling lately, the way he sometimes does on vacation, the workaday world he has left on hold receding hour by hour so that it seems like something from another period of his life, so that he is no longer sure which is his real life, that or this. His world now, circumscribed by the two houses, far from the screening room and the noise of telephones, far from the Thai restaurant where he usually lunches and from the banter of men in offices, is this tiny piece of geography and the three women who have inhabited it for all of the nineteen years he has been gone.

  He examines her. He is a voyeur, seeing what she cannot see. She is taller, he observes, but not very tall at all—perhaps five feet four or five feet five. Her arms and legs are slender, her abdomen nonexistent, like a girl's. Meeting her on the street, one would find it impossible to guess her age.

  With her hair tangled behind her, her arms folded across her chest, she might be a young housewife, he thinks, barefoot, in old clothes, turning from the dishes in the sink to confront a husband across the room, her children playing in the backyard, seen through the window. He notices again the gray substance on her hands. She is, in some ways, astonishingly ordinary. What had he expected? Someone retarded? Deformed? A character in a dream? Rapunzel in a tower?

  And yet she is not ordinary at all. It is in her speech, in the way she tilts her head as if to catch a clue in the silence. Her speech is off—too direct and then too enigmatic, as if rehearsed but never spoken. He thinks of the way he sometimes rehearses in his mind whole dialogues he never actually has.

  "What do you look like now?" she asks.

  He lets out a small laugh, more a release of tension than because the question is amusing. He puts his hands on his hips.

  "Well," he says, "pretty much the same, though older and more decrepit." He smiles. Can she remember what he used
to look like, after all these years of darkness, of nothingness? Can she remember what any human face looks like?

  "Wrinkled here and there," he continues. "A few gray hairs. T.J. says I'm out of shape, and doubtless he's right."

  When he says T.J.'s name, she flinches almost imperceptibly, but he is certain he is not mistaken.

  "Are you looking at me?" she asks.

  "Yes," he says.

  "What do I look like now?"

  "Oh," he says. Is it possible she does not know? Of course it's possible, he thinks. Unless she can see herself by touch, or unless Edith has patiently described her features. But he cannot imagine Edith doing this. And would Edith tell the truth?

  "You've grown some," he begins, "but you look younger than most women your age. You're slender. Your face is much as I remember it, except for the, ah, eye and the color of your face, which is pale. Your skin is very white. Uncommonly white."

  It is this whiteness that makes him cautious, he realizes, that reminds him he is an intruder—as if he'd dived too deeply toward the ocean floor and found in a sea cave a creature not meant to see the light or to be seen. He takes a step closer to her—he wants to see her face more clearly—and a floorboard under the linoleum creaks under his weight.

  "Tell me about the eye," she says.

  "It's..." He swallows. "It's somewhat elongated, shaped more like an almond than your other. And beside it there is a bit of skin that is smoother than the rest. And there seems to be a small patch of very slight depressions. It looks ... OK," he says, stammering. "I mean that. It looks not exactly normal, but it's not ... unattractive either. I am trying to be accurate."

  "Thank you," she says.

  "Does that seem like how you see yourself? Think of yourself, I mean?"

  "I didn't know my skin was white," she says. "I can't really imagine that."

  "No," he says.

  She moves her weight against the sink. She crosses her ankles. Her bones are small and delicate. It surprises him to think of her as delicate: in his mind she was always tough and sturdy, though he supposes she created this impression by her demeanor.

  "Perhaps I didn't say exactly what I meant," he says. "You're really very beautiful."

  He thinks he sees a smile skimming across her lips, and when it is quickly gone, he finds himself disappointed. He wants, he realizes, a real smile.

  The possibility, however, seems remote. The visit is proving more difficult than he had imagined. Reunions are always fraught with awkward tensions—the necessity to account for oneself; the attempt to find, through memories, an ember of the old emotions—but this one has no rules. What memory could he dredge up now without fear of hurting her? Memories from the past upset her, Edith said. Is this true?

  "So what do you do all day?" he blurts out, unable for a moment to endure the silence, her poise.

  "What do you do all day?" she retorts quickly.

  "Right," he says, and nods. He smiles again. This is better.

  He brings his hand up, rubs his cheek with his palm. He has an idea. "Do you ever...?" he asks. "I've heard, or read, about it and was wondering ... Would you like, would it help, to touch my face?"

  He is thankful she cannot see him just now. It is one of a thousand deceits the sighted can practice on the blind. Or do they, he wonders, have ways of deceiving the sighted? Hearing things we did not know we said? He wonders if she will be able to feel the heat in his face.

  She shrugs.

  The silence in the kitchen is so complete he can hear the refrigerator whining.

  He walks to the sink, pauses a moment, and then reaches for her hand. Her fingers are cool, and when he touches her, the touch is so private he feels he might lose his balance, and he nearly withdraws his own hand. But instead he pulls her hand from where it is wrapped tightly around her elbow. She doesn't resist. He brings her hand to his face, to his cheek, in an unnatural gesture. He has the weight of her hand in his, but when he lets his own go, she leaves her fingers on his skin.

  At first she seems paralyzed, and he is about to reach up, when she moves her fingers slowly across his cheekbone to the bridge of his nose. He closes his eyes. He feels her touch move toward his brow. The touch is very slow, very light, very tentative. She traces his hairline down one side, pauses, moves up again to the brow and down the other side. She seems about to pull away then, but doesn't. She moves her hand up toward the eyebrows, and delicately she brushes her fingers against his eyelids. Her touch is cool air moving across his face. She skims down along the bones of his nose to his mouth. She outlines his lips, smooths her fingers across them, then dips under his chin to his throat, causing in him a deep internal shiver. He knows that she must feel his shiver, but she gives no sign of recognition. She fingers the collar of his shirt, trails her hand along the bridge of his shoulders and lets it drift away.

  When he opens his eyes, she has her head turned from him, her arms again crossed in front of her.

  He takes a long slow breath.

  "Do I look the way you imagined me?" he asks.

  "No," she says.

  He puts his hand at the side of her head and turns her so that she is facing him.

  "What?" she says.

  "Don't move," he says.

  He shuts his eyes. He begins on the cheek, as she did, and traces the exact journey she has taken. It is a map he will always remember perfectly, one he knows he will be able to recall in all its detail years from now. Her skin is smooth and dry. He feels the tightness of the almond eyelid, the silky skin directly beside it, with its tiny dots. Her mouth is warm and moist, and when he touches it, she bites her lower lip. He tries to "see" her face in this way, to form a picture with clues only from his hands. The image is different, he thinks, than the one his eyes see. Her skin feels fuller, her lips plumper. He lets his hand trail under her chin to her throat, lets his fingers rest in the hollow there. He traces the line of her shoulders.

  He turns and walks toward the table. He sits down and runs his hand along the sticky oilcloth surface.

  "What can I get for you?" he asks, changing the subject, knowing the question is condescending, even as he asks it. "There must be something that you need."

  "Don't," she says.

  "Don't what?"

  "Don't bring me anything."

  "Why?"

  "She'll know you've come, then," she says.

  "And if she knew?"

  She shrugs again, not answering him. "What do you want?" she asks.

  He looks at her. "I want nothing at all, except to talk to you," he says.

  "T.J. and Sean and others, many others, they always want something. But not you?"

  "Sean is dead," he says. "And T.J.?" He shakes his head. If she is talking about what he thinks she is talking about, she cannot mean T.J., surely. Andrew is positive of this.

  "There are lies In T.J.'s voice," she says. "I can hear them when he laughs."

  He is confused. Her leapfrogging from present to past makes him light-headed with the effort of trying to understand her. It is as if, deprived of time, past, present and future intermingle without context, a day twenty years ago as vivid and as all-consuming as the worries of the morning, or of tomorrow morning.

  "What do you mean, T.J. lies? Lies about what?" he asks.

  "He lies about himself," she says.

  He studies her. "When you asked me how you looked now...," he says.

  "Yes?"

  "There is something else I meant to say and didn't." She lifts her head slightly but says nothing.

  "Your hair is very tangled."

  She turns away, resting her hands on the sink.

  He walks to where she is standing. He touches the back of her hair. "I could brush it for you. Now, I mean."

  She shakes her head.

  But that's all right, because he has another idea.

  FILLED WITH PURPOSE, he is competent, the kitchen no longer strange to him, merely a mirror image of his own.

  She comes into the kitche
n with two towels, a comb, a washcloth and the shampoo, as he has told her to. She puts them on the table. When he asked her to fetch them, she protested, and when she left the room, she was gone so long he thought she might not be coming back. She stands at the table, as if she were examining him. His hands are not steady—from false bravado? feigned confidence?—and he is again glad she cannot see him. To still his hands, he lifts the dishes out of the sink and scrubs it with Ajax until it is gleaming. He lays one of the towels over the lip, making a soft cushion, and puts the shampoo and the washcloth on the drainboard. He tests the water. When he has it as he wants it, he walks to where she is.

  "I'm good at this," he says. It is, of course, an untested statement. He has never washed anyone's hair but Billy's, a boy's short crop. He leads her to a chair that he has turned sideways against the sink and guides her into a sitting position. Slowly, against her resistance, he pushes her shoulders back, so that her neck is resting on the towel at the lip of the old porcelain sink. He can feel the tension in her shoulders, a tension that invades his fingers, his palms.

  "Relax," he says. "Just try to relax."

  Her neck is arched, and he follows with his eye the long white curve of her throat to where her blouse is buttoned. He puts an arm under her shoulders, brushing her forehead with his chin as he does so, and lifts her up for a moment as he brings her hair over the edge. Her hair is a wild mass that fills the sink. He is at first nearly paralyzed by the sight of the tangled weave of brass and gold; it seems to him that it is something he has no right to touch. He turns on the water, lets it run through his fingers and into the hair. He sees that he cannot wet the entire head with the tap, so he hunts in the cupboards for a pitcher. He finds one and fills it with the warm water. When he pours it over her head, she winces, as though she were expecting it to be too hot or too cold. He tests it again. "Is that all right?" he asks.

  She murmurs something he takes to be assent.

  He pours the water slowly until her head is entirely soaked. He lifts up her hair with both hands, feels its weight. He opens the bottle of shampoo and squeezes it liberally over the crown of her head. Plunging his fingers in her hair—so thick his fingers are lost—he massages the soap into her scalp, gently at first so as not to frighten or hurt her, and, when she doesn't protest, more firmly. A faint sigh escapes her, and it is, he thinks—he hopes—a sigh of pleasure. Relieved, he sees her face begin to soften, the muscles letting go, so that, with her eyes closed, she looks nearly asleep. He lingers over the massage, not wanting to disturb her look of repose. A curl of soapsuds edges across her cheekbone, and he wipes it away with his finger. He remembers bathing Billy in the sink, cradling the infant's head with one hand while he soaped his skin with a washcloth. He remembers, later, getting into the tub with Billy when he was two and three, his own long, hairy legs stretched the length of the tub, with Billy nestled between them. Billy would squirt him with a water pistol, and the two of them would make up songs while Martha watched them from the doorway. It was always his job, bathing Billy.