Chris Bohjalian - Secrets of Eden

Yes, I did ask her, despite my misgivings about whether her constitution was right for the role that would be demanded of her if she agreed. She declined, and it was the first time in my life that a woman ended our relationship before I did.

But the only member of the Haverill United Church I ever slept with was Alice Hayward, and that was mostly (though, in truth, not always) in the period when George had moved to the cottage on the lake, where he would reside for a little more than one hundred days: An adult man separated from his wife and his daughter, but living alone in a second house alive with their detritus and scent. I did not, as one newspaper later would put it, pounce upon Alice the moment her husband was gone. But it is an inarguable fact that I took advantage of her precarious emotional health. I massaged the lower back that had been left contused-stripes that changed like the leaves from scarlet to sulfur-with a leather belt. I brought my lips to the stomach that once had carried her husband’s child and then would be beaten by that very man’s fists, at least twice to the point that she was left retching into the toilet.

And yes, the illicit nature of our activities-the way one moment we might be sitting fully clothed, chatting languorously on the rug in her living room, but in the next we would be naked on that floor and my tongue would be buried between her legs with a hunger I had never before experienced-energized my otherwise distressingly placid life.

But it is also a fact that I had never planned to take advantage of Alice Hayward. For a time I had even thought we were in love.

IT IS A Monday afternoon in March, and Alice and I are lying in her bed as the snow blows fiercely against the western window and the howl of the wind is cut only by the occasional rumble of the town plow and sand truck. This storm is arriving a little earlier than any of us expected.

In another hour Katie will be coming home, and so in a moment Alice and I will rouse ourselves, shower together, and get dressed. I plan to be gone long before her daughter’s bus will coast to a stop at the end of the Haywards’ driveway.

“You know,” Alice murmurs, her head resting on my chest, “he has his hurts, too.”

I know who she means, but for a brief second I nonetheless have to spool back in my head the discussion we were having, because on afternoons like this we tend to allow ourselves long, sumptuous pauses in our conversations. Sometimes we will doze and pick up the strand of an exchange a full five or ten minutes later.

“George,” I respond.

“His life was no picnic when he was growing up. All those brothers. My father-in-law can be horrible.”

“Well, he hasn’t made your life a picnic.”

“No. But it wasn’t always so… so troubled. And now… ”

“Go on.”

“I’ve taken away his daughter. He aches for her.”

I want to say that he brought that loss upon himself. But instead I merely listen. I think I have an idea where this is going, but I want to be sure.

“You know I don’t feel good about that,” she continues. “But I didn’t have a choice, did I?”

My arm is asleep, but still I am able to pull her against me. “No,” I reassure her, “you had absolutely no choice.” But as I had suspected-as I had feared-once more she is going to punish herself and recount things she feels she has done wrong in her marriage and the innumerable ways she drove her husband to hurt her. And this litany will end, as it does often, with her flagellating herself for being unfaithful. She will remind herself-and me-that George may have done some terrible things in this world, but he always, as far as she knows, was faithful.

I WENT TO visit my mother in Bronxville the Thursday night after the funeral, though she was sound asleep by the time I arrived. It was after midnight. But she had known I was coming, and so, as if I were nineteen rather than thirty-nine-a student returning home from college-she had stocked the refrigerator with beer and milk and Hostess cupcakes, which as a boy I had always preferred cold. Over breakfast on Friday morning, she asked me all the right questions about my future and whether (and here she was delicate) the deaths of two of my congregants were more of a personal or a pastoral crisis. I answered evasively by explaining that only one was a congregant and that I tended not to use that term in any event. On Friday the sky was a cerulean blue, and I walked alone for hours around the streets on which I had lived as a child and a teenage boy, loitering for a few moments before the slightly imposing Tudor in which I had grown up-a house not far from the swim and tennis club where my older sister would spend long summer days with her friends but that I always found less inviting and tended to avoid. I passed the school, an elegant, lengthy Georgian structure that looked like it belonged on a college campus, then the ball field and the library. That library and ball field and the village itself were far more likely to be my summer haunts than was the swim and tennis club. The town was a collection of hills, the roads laid out chaotically along the cow paths from the nineteenth century, the trees now tall and thick and statuesque, the houses substantial. Most of my neighbors, I would realize in high school, had money and advantages, but as a boy I had been largely oblivious to both. I was more aware of Mike Ferris’s humongous baseball-card collection, for example, and how content and secure I would feel trading cards and arguing baseball with him in his family’s screened porch as a thunderstorm would rumble in from the west.

That Friday as I walked along the sidewalk in the village, I detoured into the bookstore and bought Angels and Aurascapes and A Sacred While .

I had brought my laptop with me, and in the afternoon, as if I were consciously trying to give the investigation that soon would be launched interesting fodder, once again I surfed the Web for information about Alice Hayward (there was nothing I didn’t already know) and about domestic abuse and death by strangulation and gunshot. Some of those sites would come back to haunt me during the investigation, but it was all very innocent. While online I read reviews of Heather’s books and visited her website, and I found myself spending far more time with her blog than I would have anticipated. In the evening, after I took my mother to dinner at a French bistro in town that she had always enjoyed, I read from both of Heather’s books.

And then on Saturday morning, I awoke and pondered my next destination. I had options other than Heather Laurent, including acquaintances who had remained in Westchester County. And there were my friends from seminary-one in Illinois, another in upstate New York, and a third in Pennsylvania. There was my friend in Texas. Instead, however, I found myself drawn toward lower Manhattan: I veered on to the Saw Mill River Parkway, then the Henry Hudson, and then the West Side Highway. I exited at Canal Street and turned on to Greene. I honestly wasn’t sure whether I would ring the bell at Heather Laurent’s building or just glance around her neighborhood for a few moments. There are fine lines between interest and obsession and stalking, but I think I was still well within the bounds of mere intellectual curiosity. And I may also have been experimenting on some level with a flirtatious quid pro quo: She had dropped in unexpectedly on me that Tuesday; now I was returning the favor on Saturday. I hadn’t decided what I would do if she weren’t home. Wait or leave a note or simply depart. For a few moments, they were all equal in my mind.

But I did press the call button, and she was home, and I felt a little rush of pleasure at the sound of her voice over the crackling intercom. She invited me up and said there would be doors to four lofts when the elevator doors parted, and hers would be the one farthest to the left. It turned out to be more information than I needed, because when the elevator reached her floor, she was there with her front door open, the loft behind her illuminated by the sun that was cascading in from the western-facing windows.