Chris Bohjalian - Secrets of Eden

“Can you tell me why?” Heather was asking. “A minister must have a reason to stop praying.”

“I was no longer confident that anyone was listening.”

“In that case you sure put on one hell of a good show on Thursday morning.”

“At the funeral service?”

“Yup.”

“Thank you.”

She shook her head-bemused, incredulous, I couldn’t say for sure-and a lock of her hair fell over one of her eyes. It was, perhaps, the most arousing thing I had seen since the last time I’d been alone with Alice Hayward and I’d allowed myself to savor the sight of the small of her back when she rose from the bed to get dressed. The sense that no one was listening-no one was watching, no one cared-had begun to feel unexpectedly liberating since I had climbed into my car and left Vermont. Originally I had felt only loneliness and despair at the realization that there might be nobody out there. No more.

“Did you always know that your faith was so weak?” she asked.

“No. I actually thought it was rather strong for most of the last two decades. Trust me, it withstood plenty of sickness. Plenty of death. I have prayed with parents who have lost children, I have knelt before the very old in the moments before they would die. I’ve done funerals for teenagers and young mothers. I know the inside of the hospice as well as anyone who works there.”

“But your faith couldn’t withstand the deaths of the Haywards.” It was a statement, not a question.

“Apparently not.”

“What made their deaths so different?”

“Guilt. Anger.”

“I understand the guilt. What is the anger?”

“Isn’t it obvious?”

“No.”

“It’s George. It’s the fact that he killed her. It seems that faith-at least my faith-is perfectly comfortable with benign disgust but absolutely no match for rage.”

“Come with me,” she said, and she stood and brought her glass of iced tea to the kitchen island with the black marble countertop. “We’re going out.”

“Okay.”

“You need to do something completely different. You need a change of pace.”

“We’re going dancing?” I asked playfully.

“Oh, I doubt you could dance with me. I used to be a pretty serious dancer.”

“So I read in Angels ,” I said. “And you’re right, I couldn’t keep up with you. I would embarrass myself rather badly.”

“Stephen, I was kidding,” she said patiently. “You wouldn’t embarrass yourself at all.”

“I would. Trust me. It wouldn’t be pretty.”

She was already slipping into a pair of black lace ballet flats and motioning for me to leave my iced tea on the table beside the daybed. “I want to show you something,” she said.

“Nearby?”

“In the city.”

“Are you going to tell me what it is, or am I supposed to be surprised?”

She shrugged. “Nothing mysterious. I’m going to show you an angel.”

“I thought you were my angel,” I said. It was the first optimistic remark that had occurred to me in nearly a week, and I found myself smiling.

“I am,” she said. Then she took me by surprise and stood on her toes and kissed me softly on the lips.

LATER THAT DAY a colossal thunderstorm would rumble over Manhattan and raindrops the size of dimes would dance upon the sidewalk. The air was electric and the sky the color of slate. We stood in nothing but T-shirts before the windows of her loft and watched the pedestrians below us race across Greene Street, leaping like long jumpers across the rivers that suddenly lapped at the side of each curb while trying to avoid the spray from the yellow cabs and delivery trucks. Earlier that afternoon, however, the clouds had been far to the west, and we had gone to Central Park, where she had showed me an angel: a tall, confident bronze woman with wings who, Heather told me, had looked out upon the terrace since the nineteenth century. She was striding purposefully atop a fountain, the water cascading from her feet into a bluestone basin below her, the sheets a precursor to the soaking rains that would fall from the heavens in hours.

The bronze statue was Heather’s favorite angel in Manhattan, but I would learn that there were others she liked a good deal in Brooklyn and the Bronx. Though angels were easy to find in cemeteries, she said that she didn’t especially care for funereal angels and tombstone cherubs-she wanted her angels among the living, not watching over the already dead-and thus she scoured parks and gardens for the angels with whom, on some level, she seemed to want to commune.

At the park we ate ice-cream sandwiches on a bench just beyond the shade, and we ate quickly because we were hungry and the ice cream was melting fast in the sun. We were surrounded by softball players and sunbathers and people picnicking on the grass who, I imagined, were falling in love, and I felt at once a part of them all, a select member of a club of people who were happy-unencumbered with doubt and despair-and completely separate from them. I never forgot that Alice was dead and Katie was an orphan and there was a congregation in Vermont that I had deserted. That afternoon, on the bench in the park and then in the bed in the loft above her writing desk, Heather told me more about her parents’ marriage and deaths, and we talked about our siblings-including her sister, Amanda, and the strange ways that the girl had responded to their mother’s death at the hands of their father. Some of this I knew from Heather’s books, but some she had kept from the world as a courtesy to Amanda.

“It’s why I wanted to meet Katie,” she said as we stood in her window frame and watched the rain fall with a Polynesian intensity. “It’s why I worry about that girl.” Amanda was living in a moldy log cabin in the woods in upstate New York with a circumspect-possibly agoraphobic-bird carver, and the two of them went weeks without so much as venturing even to the general store in some dot on the map called Statler. She was an alcoholic who no longer drank, but she no longer attended AA meetings, either. And once she stopped drinking, she shed weight the way a snake sheds its skin. She wasn’t strictly speaking an anorexic in Heather’s opinion, but the woman was five-four and couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred pounds when they had seen each other just after Memorial Day. She smoked relentlessly, and her skin looked as fragile as papyrus. And yet, Heather said, her sister was still wise and funny and capable of parlaying her badly socialized lover into an artist of some cachet among curators and collectors. She was, despite her outwardly brittle façade, a formidable business presence. She was appealing and charismatic when she needed to turn it on for a well-heeled dealer at a Spring Street gallery.

And as Saturday night turned to Sunday morning, we talked of the lovers we had had in the past, though I did leave one name conspicuously absent from my short but deeply personal inventory, and, like so much else that I did and said that week, this would come back to haunt me.

I found it interesting that just as I had asked one woman to marry me and she had declined, Heather had been asked once to get married and she had said no. She had loved this fellow, she said, but she hadn’t wanted the life that would have come from marrying a bookish religion professor at a small college in Pennsylvania. The fact that this was precisely the path I almost had taken was an irony that was not lost on either of us, since by then she knew this part of my history. I realized as we chatted and dozed and made love that I was not merely a reclamation project for Heather-a notion that had crossed my mind the first time I entered her, though it had not diminished my ardor at all-but was more precisely a much-needed respite. She did, as I had suspected, need to be needed, though it would be a while before I would begin to realize how literally she had meant it when she had agreed that she was my angel. But she also saw in me someone who hadn’t had the slightest idea who she was when we first met and then hadn’t given a damn when she’d told him.