Eden Close

  Andrew visits all of the shoe stores and the shoe departments of Sears and Caldor's. He visits some of the stores twice. He lingers over the selections, unable to come to a decision, unable to settle upon what he thinks is the perfect shoe. For he wants the shoes to be right, and he examines each display with the kind of scrutiny hitherto reserved for forays into toy stores in order to buy birthday presents for Billy. He fingers canvas shoes that have no ties, deliberates as to whether they might be a more sensible choice. He thinks of boat shoes as perhaps being more practical. He realizes, in Caldor's, throwing his head back in a gesture of disbelief at his own stupidity, that color is irrelevant. He is, for a time, seduced, despite his natural antipathy, by the endless shelves of sixty-dollar running shoes and lets himself be taught the intricacies of arch support. He passes several times by the first shoe store he entered, hoping the salesgirl there will have gone on a break. Finally, after an undetermined amount of time has passed, and after he has eaten a hamburger and a vanilla shake at Burger King, he walks purposefully into the first shoe store and makes for the rack of plain canvas sneakers. He allows the ambitious salesgirl no time to intercept him, picks out a pair of blue sneakers and says, Size six and a half please, in a voice normally reserved for giving taxi drivers directions. He suspects she will outwit him by coming out of the storeroom with a smile to say they are out of stock, but perhaps she is less interested in him than he thought, for she returns in a minute with a box. He checks to see if they are indeed blue and size 6½, which they are. He pays for the sneakers and walks out with the box under his arm.

  Then he begins on the sunglasses.

  The quest for the sunglasses takes not quite as long, but standing in line at the register, listening to one teenage girl tell another, enigmatically, that she has burned her blue silk blouse, he looks at his watch and sees that it is already quarter to seven. He is due at T.J.'s at seven. He doesn't even have the wine. He will have to bolt, buy the wine, drop by the house, throw on a clean shirt. No time for a shower and a shave. And even so, he will be late.

  He pays for the sunglasses and heads for the exit door. As soon as he opens it, the heat hits him like a thick wall. Nearly seven o'clock, and it still feels like a hundred.

  He walks unhurriedly to his car. He is humming a song heard overhead in a store. He has the sneakers and the sunglasses, and tomorrow he will give them to her.

  HE RINGS the bell beside T.J.'s front door, turns and glances down the street. Each house is, in its construction, identical to the one beside it. Any individuality, to the extent that characteristic exists at all, is created only by the paint or the trim or the false panes in this window or that. The sign at the entrance to the subdivision reads: "Water's Edge—Center-Hall Colonials," but the houses have little in common with the colonials Andrew knew in Massachusetts years ago. Even the driveways and the lawns and the redwood decks at the backs are clones of each other. What is to prevent a man, he wonders idly, from coming home drunk late one night, swerving into the wrong driveway and fumbling at the wrong door with his keys? Or opening an unlocked door and slipping into the wrong bed beside the wrong wife?

  "Andy-boy. Pal," says T.J., opening the door and letting out clouds of frigid air. "Come in quick, before the heat gets in."

  T.J. has on a white cotton sweater with the sleeves pushed' up to the elbows and a pair of khaki pants with a profusion of pockets. The pants look as though they are meant to be worn on safari. Andrew proffers the bottle of wine wrapped in a paper bag. He has thrown on a clean dress shirt over his sweat-stained back. His fingernails are still black, and he has not shaved. T.J. raises an eyebrow but says nothing. The icebox sting of the air-conditioning, an air-conditioning that makes the interior of the house feel like late November, creates along Andrew's spine an instant and deep shiver.

  He is too disoriented, however, to focus immediately on the cold. The two side walls of the hallway into which T.J. has ushered him are mirrored. Andrew feels as though he were floating, not anchored to firm ground. Two black stairways (or is it only one reflected in a mirror?) appear to rise without supports to an upper floor. A chandelier, in black and gold, repeats itself dizzyingly hundreds of times in the play of mirrors reflecting mirrors. A highly polished black chair is the sole item of furniture in the hallway, and even though it, too, has many copies, Andrew edges toward it for support.

  "Andy-boy," says T.J.

  "T.J.," says Andrew.

  "So what'll you have to drink?" asks T.J. before they have even moved from the hallway.

  "Drink?"

  T.J. frowns. "Yeah, you know, a cocktail, a beer. You all right, pal? You look a little scruffy around the edges."

  "I'm fine," says Andrew, reaching for the back of the chair. "Fine. I got waylaid, didn't have time for a shower. I didn't want to be any later than I am ... was." The sentence trails off as he catches sight of himself and T.J. in the opposite wall. He himself looks dazed, like a prisoner brought from a darkened cell to a room where the lights are too bright.

  T.J. eyes him warily. "A strawberry daiquiri OK, Andy-boy? Didi's made up a batch."

  "Fine," says Andrew. "Fine."

  "OK. Well. Lemme show you around, and we'll make our way into the kitchen."

  T.J. reaches for a black handle in the glass and passes through a mirrored wall into what appears to be a living room. Andrew follows and is relieved to see that only one wall is mirrored here. His orientation is momentary, however, as he realizes that the floor on which he is standing is black marble, or some material that resembles marble, and that most of the furniture in the room is also black, a black-on-black effect that causes him to miss a small end table, on which he barks his shin.

  The unmirrored walls are covered with a gold-flecked wallpaper. On a solid-black coffee table is an outsized gold ashtray and a gold vase. On the wall opposite is a massive console with an enormous TV screen not unlike the one in the screening room at work, and below it, like the darkened cockpit of an L-1011, an array of instruments and digital readouts.

  "State of the art," says T.J., following Andrew's glance. "We got two VCRs just in here. The kids have their own, and we got one in the bedroom. Have to, really, to keep up with all the good movies on. Fantastic picture on the tube. Wanna see?"

  T.J. picks up one of three remote-control channel switchers on the coffee table and presses a button. Nothing happens.

  "Hold on a minute. Must be the other one."

  He picks up the second remote control and presses a button on it. Nothing happens.

  "Kids musta been screwing around with these," says T.J., looking mildly flustered as he picks up the third. He presses a button. A life-size image of an evening game-show host appears on the screen.

  "Great, huh?" says T.J.

  "Great," says Andrew. He ponders for a lucid moment the effort, technology and expense it has taken to bring a life-size image of an evening game-show host into T.J.'s living room.

  T.J. passes through an open doorway in one of the gold-speckled walls, and when Andrew follows he finds himself inside a dining room, he guesses, touching the long black-lacquered table in the center. He cannot help but see his reflection again in yet another mirrored wall on the other side. A black and gold chandelier, like the one in the hallway, hangs from the ceiling.

  "We're into black and gold," says T.J.

  The statement seems to call for some reply. "And mirrors," says Andrew.

  "Yeah, well, mirrors are great. Make the place look so much bigger."

  "Absolutely," says Andrew.

  T.J. opens yet another hidden door. "Here he is!" he announces to the other side.

  Andrew hears the female voice even before he sees its owner.

  "Andy!"

  He steps into a room of black and stainless steel, a room he takes, owing to the especially large amount of stainless steel, to be the kitchen. Didi Hanson, now Jackson, embraces him. He is aware of a white cotton sweater identical to T.J.'s and a strong scent of perfume enveloping
him. She stands back and holds him at arms' length.

  "Look at you!" she says.

  Andrew is momentarily at a loss for words. "It's great to see you," he stammers. "Your house is ... I think your house..."

  "Isn't it?" she says, and whisks a frothy pink drink off a stainless-steel counter and hands it to him. He looks at the stainless-steel refrigerator in front of which Didi is standing. He, too, he thinks, once owned a refrigerator like that.

  Didi's hair is still curled in a blond flip, a hairstyle he hasn't seen on a woman in years. Enormous gold earrings dangle from her earlobes. She, too, is wearing safari pants. A gold bracelet clinks when she puts her hand near the counter. He takes a sip of the strawberry froth. The deep shiver that began in the hallway takes over his body in earnest when the icy cold drink hits his stomach.

  Too swiftly, before he can brace himself, Didi again envelops him, her head nuzzling under his chin. The gesture rattles Andrew's arm, and he tries to steady his drink over her back. A drop of pink froth falls on her white sweater.

  "I'm so sorry about your mother," she mumbles into his shirt. They stand motionless for what feels like an uncomfortably long time. She gives a little squeeze and then lets him go.

  Andrew can think of no reply. Did she even know his mother?

  "So, pal," says T.J., slapping Andrew on the shoulder. "Let's go talk about your house while Didi here fixes us up a gourmet dinner."

  "Well, we're just barbecuing," says Didi, smiling apologetically in Andrew's direction. The smile is identical to the smile of her youth—a dazzling display that always seemed to him part of a too vigorous performance.

  "Come see where I live," says T.J., steering Andrew's shoulder to yet another doorway.

  As remarkable as the black and mirrored interiors of the other rooms have been, nothing is as surprising to Andrew as the room into which T.J. leads him. It is as if, passing through the door, they had entered another era, another aesthetic, another house entirely. The room is what Andrew's mother would have called a den, a pine-paneled room with a maple "early American" sofa covered in plaid fabric. Beside the sofa are two matching reclining easy chairs. A rust-colored shaggy carpet is on the floor, and a small TV is in a corner on a wire pedestal. In another corner is a glass cabinet filled with guns.

  "This is the family room," says T.J. "We hang out here."

  Through a sliding glass door, Andrew can see the redwood deck on which is a gas grill, not unlike the one he and Martha had in Saddle River. Andrew wonders when, if ever, the other rooms are used.

  T.J. sits on a chair, makes it recline. He takes a long sip of his drink.

  "We'll go for one thirty. The furniture gone?"

  Andrew stares at T.J. After a blank second, he realizes T.J. is talking about Andrew's own house.

  "Nearly," he says, sitting in the other chair. "It's all arranged."

  "Can you get someone in to do a good cleaning? I can recommend some people if you want."

  "Sure. Whatever you say."

  "I'll want to move on this by the middle of next week. You'll be gone by then, right?"

  "I may," Andrew hedges. "I hope to be."

  "I'd like to open it up. Get some people in quick. Think we can do a fast sale. Certainly we should get some action by early September. Come by the office Monday, we'll sort some things out."

  "Sounds fine," says Andrew.

  "You're fixing it up, right?"

  "I'm (doing some things. This heat is slowing me down." Andrew has an intense longing for the heat, looks covetously at the redwood deck. "Where are your boys?" he asks.

  "They're at a friend's pool. Maybe they'll be back before you go."

  "Do your boys hunt?" asks Andrew. Behind T.J.'s head is the glass gun cabinet. "I didn't know you had so many guns."

  T.J. cranes his head to look at the cabinet. "Always had 'em," he says. "You remember. We used to hunt when we were kids."

  "I recall only the rifle then. I don't ever remember you with shotguns."

  "They were my dad's. He kept his gun cabinet in the basement. Locked. I take Tom junior hunting now and then, but he doesn't have a taste for it like I did. You never really did either, come to think of it, did you?"

  "No. I guess not. I liked the skill involved, but I never liked finding the animals after we'd hit them."

  "Yeah, my kid's like that. Tends toward the wimp once in a while—no offense."

  Andrew is not offended. He thinks he would probably like T.J.'s son.

  "You've done well for yourself," Andrew says in the silence, changing the subject.

  "Can't complain. Can't complain. Course I'm mortgaged to the hilt, but aren't we all? Got a good deal on the house. Knew the developer, got in on the ground floor, so to speak. Didi's really the one with the eye, though. Made this a showplace. Fabulous taste, don't you think?"

  "Remarkable," says Andrew.

  "She coulda been an interior decorator easy, with her eye, but we decided she should stay home with the kids. Your wife work?"

  "Martha? No, not really. But she will now. She's got a teaching job at a private school in New Jersey starting in the fall."

  "Your son's how old?"

  "Seven."

  T.J. nods. "Right," he says. "Great age. You must miss him."

  "I do."

  Andrew and T.J. take simultaneous sips of their drinks. T.J. drains his glass. He leans forward as if to get up.

  "Get you another?"

  Andrew cradles his glass, looks into its center.

  "When we were kids...," he says.

  There is something he wants to ask T.J., a question he must ask when Didi is not in the room. It is a question that has been hovering at the back of his mind since yesterday, but now, In T.J.'s den (or family room), the question seems too bold, too intrusive.

  "When we were kids what?" says T.J.

  "When Eden was ... was in that phase of hers before Sean ... Did you and she...? I mean, did you and she ever have anything...?"

  T.J. looks at Andrew with a stare as blank as Andrew's was moments ago. Then he shakes his head.

  "Hey..." T.J. stretches out the word so that it lasts four syllables. "Wasn't everybody?" he says with a grin.

  "You never said."

  "You never asked me."

  "That's no answer."

  "Hey, what is this, the inquisition?"

  "Sorry," says Andrew. "Really, it's none of my business anyway."

  "Oh, that's OK," says T.J., gesturing expansively with his glass. "You probably don't remember this, but you were pretty touchy about Eden in those days. Like an older brother. I mean, you don't go around telling some girl's older brother you're screwing his sister, even if he is your best friend. Not that we ever screwed."

  "Then you didn't?"

  "Well, not technically," says T.J. "And I'll tell you something else. I don't want to burst your bubble, but I wasn't the only one, Not by a long shot..."

  T.J. leans back in the chair, brings his glass to his forehead. "The way things turned out for her, I guess it's just as well she had what she had then. Though I'll tell you something. I never really knew it then, because I was too inexperienced to know this and too—how shall I put it?—busy to ruminate on her state of mind, but now as I look back on it, she never really liked it. I wouldn't say she was doing it because she was horny, you follow me. It was more a kind of act. Or more like she was driven. That's the feeling I got—like she was driven, trying to burn something out of her. Course, when you're sixteen, seventeen, who cares what the chick is into, as long as she's putting out, right? But like I say, now, when I think back on it..."

  Andrew looks at T.J. Didi, on the deck, knocks on the glass doors. She is carrying a platter of small steaks to the gas grill. She mouths the words "You watch the steaks" to T.J., puts them on the grill and disappears into the kitchen.

  "Well, you remember what she was like then," says T.J., getting up. "You seen her yet?"

  "No," says Andrew, lying.

  An image
of Eden as she is now, in her blue dress with the white buttons, her hair washed and neatly parted, fills the space between himself and T.J. He feels his glass being lifted from his hand.

  "I'll freshen these up," says T.J. evenly, looking hard at Andrew.

  THEY EAT dinner on trays in the family room. Andrew wonders how important one has to be to rate dinner in the mirrored dining room. He is just as happy, however, to be eating here; at least from here he can see and imagine the warmth outside. Even so, he is so cold the utensils tremble in his fingers.

  Didi serves a bottle of sweet pink bubbly wine with the steaks. Andrew wonders what happened to the serviceable red he brought. Didi, he discovers, has a gift for small talk, a gift Andrew begins to cherish as the evening wears on and his own conversational skills falter. She chats amiably, in response 10 Andrew's polite questions, about her two sons, about the summer camp they have just finished, about the boom in new houses in the town. She volleys some polite questions of her own. What kind of a place does he have now? What's it like living in New York City? What's his job all about? T.J. embarrasses him by repeating to Didi Andrew's title and managing to make it sound more grandiose than it actually is. T.J. also manages to suggest that Andrew makes a lot of money, which appears to titillate Didi. She glances at him with what feels to him like new respect. She asks about the old house, inquires as to what he's doing with it, asks if he's seen Eden. He lies easily.

  No, he says again. No, he hasn't.

  "We used to call her—God, isn't this awful—we used to call her Goldilicks."

  "What?"

  "You know. Goldi licks." Didi blushes.

  "Oh," says Andrew.

  "I hear she's real deformed," says Didi with an expression on her lips that Andrew takes to be disdain.

  T.J. shoots a glance at his wife. Andrew starts to speak, closes his mouth. He puts down his plate. He takes a sip of pink wine, puts the glass on the floor.

  "I'm just going outside to stand on the deck for a minute," he says. "To tell you the truth, I'm freezing."