Chris Bohjalian - Secrets of Eden

When George Hayward died, his entrepreneurial metabolism may have finally begun to slow. He was, according to Alice, spending increasing amounts of time at his desk and in meetings, rather than on his feet in either of his stores or his restaurant, and I wondered what effect those changes had had on his temper. Moreover, the bigger and more diverse his retail kingdom had become, the more difficult it must have been to manage. To rule. To control. He had three very different enterprises. And so, perhaps, over the years he had grown more determined to have absolute sway over Alice. I tried to hear in my head what sort of voice he had used with his employees and how it might have differed in tone from when he was alone with his wife. Publicly he had always seemed rather likable. But in point of fact he was-and even ministers have these sorts of thoughts, though we seldom verbalize them-petty and cruel and thoroughly nasty. I am honestly not sure in whose image he was made.

“And Alice’s voice? What do you recall about hers?” Heather asked.

There is much that I could have told her about Alice Hayward’s voice. I could have described how silky and low it would become in a murmur in bed, or the vibrato it took on when she cried. One of the times when she was in my office-this was before I had crossed the Rubicon into her bed-her voice grew eerily even, almost clinical, when she was explaining to me the source of the chiaroscuro of yellow and hyacinth on her cheek. Most of the congregation accepted her claim that she had walked into an open medicine-cabinet door in the bathroom in the night. She had a swimmer’s body, and sometimes, when we were alone, she would sound to me like she had a swimmer’s voice: a bit throaty, occasionally hoarse, always a little more fragile than her lovely physique. Remind me who I am , she said to me one of our first mornings together in her and her husband’s bed. Sometimes I can’t believe I’m the sort of woman who gets to have a lover . I found the word gets powerfully endearing, as if I were a prize and adultery a privilege. She was blossoming, and I soaked in her every word.

With Heather, however, I shared none of that. I wasn’t yet prepared to reveal the secrets I knew of my most recent lover. Instead I answered with an evasiveness that people later would say marked so much of my behavior that summer and was emblematic of a dangerous character flaw. A desiccated soul, an arctic heart. In hindsight, I should have told Heather something. Anything. I would have been better off that moment and, I imagine, in the months that followed. But I said nothing.

And when I look back on that Sunday, I should have seen the parallels between that elderly deacon and Heather Laurent-or, for that matter, between Heather and any of the people I had met in my life who had had about them the penumbra of an angel. But on that morning, a week to the day since the Haywards had died, I was far more focused on the dark of the world than I was on the light. I knew what had occurred seven days earlier in the Cape on the hill, and it seemed to me that if there was an otherworldly element residing somewhere deep inside each of our spirits or cores, it was far more likely to be demonic.

THE IDEA THAT I was fleeing was ridiculous. It was absurd in that I answered my cell phone each and every time it rang-at least when I had it with me-and it was absurd in that I was traveling with a reasonably recognizable woman. (Yes, I know a writer is seldom as famous as a movie star: If Angelina Jolie wanders into a library, the fans and the media will swarm; if Margaret Atwood wanders into a cineplex, the lines for the popcorn barely will waver.)

I hadn’t told my mother where I was going, because I honestly hadn’t known myself when I left Bronxville. The same is true in regard to the Pastoral-Relations Committee and the deacons at the church in Haverill. Likewise, Heather hadn’t known at the time that she would go visit her sister in upstate New York, bringing with her in tow a minister who wasn’t sure what he should be doing with his life or what it had meant that he had baptized a woman a half day before she would be strangled. I was quite content in Heather’s bed in her loft. She was, too, I believe, after all the traveling she had done in the preceding months. But whatever need she had to cocoon and replenish her (and I will use one of her words here) aura, it was subsumed by her worry about Amanda and her concern for that basket case of a pastor from Vermont. And so we disappeared into the Adirondacks.

And while it is tempting to express some understanding for the appalling ways that Catherine Benincasa or reporters or bloggers would misinterpret my movements-to begin a sentence with Still or Nevertheless -that would be disingenuous. The truth is, I don’t understand it. And though many people believe I am anything but forthright, in the end I was more candid than I wanted to be or expected to be or was even obliged to be. I know my crimes and I know my mistakes. I live with them.

But I also know that whatever else I may have done (or, worse, failed to do), I positively did not flee. It honestly hadn’t crossed my mind that there might be a need.

Of course, none of us ever knows as much as we think we do. None of us. If there is a lesson to be learned from my fall-notice I did not say my rise and fall, because it’s not as if the ascent to the pulpit of a country church represents an especially glorious accomplishment-it is this: Believe no one. Trust no one. Assume no one really knows anything that matters at all. Because, alas, we don’t. All of our stories are suspect.

My husband is a great guy. It doesn’t take a dirtball like George Hayward or Stephen Drew for me to see that. I think those two have a lot more in common than the reverend ever would be willing to admit.

But that’s the thing about men like that. Total denial. Everyone talks about how a battered woman has a complete unwillingness to admit to herself what’s really going on in her life, and I can tell you that the river Denial is indeed pretty freaking wide in the minds of a lot of those victims. The worst, for me, are those cases where some boyfriend or stepfather is abusing the woman’s daughters, and when we finally charge the bastard-when the daughter finally comes forward-the woman defends the guy! Takes his side! Insists her own kid must be making this up or exaggerating. Trust me: No twelve-year-old girl exaggerates when Mom’s boyfriend makes her do things to him with her mouth.

And, clearly, Alice Hayward was no stranger to denial herself. When I returned to my office that Monday after viewing the mess up in Haverill, I learned that Alice had gotten a temporary relief-from-abuse order that winter. Had managed to kick her husband’s ornery ass out of the house and-somehow-gotten him to go live for a couple of months at their place on Lake Bomoseen. And then, like so many battered women, had taken him back. Hadn’t even shown up for the hearing a week after the papers were served.

But the men’s rationalizations are even worse. They’ll curl your hair.

Now, Stephen Drew wasn’t using some poor woman’s face as a floor sander, and he wasn’t inflicting himself on some defenseless middle-school girl. (Note I am not being catty and adding “as far as we know.” Because, in my opinion, we do know: He wasn’t.) But he certainly abused his place and his power, and he sure as hell took advantage of women in his congregation. For a minister, the guy had ice in his veins. Lived completely alone, didn’t even have a dog or a cat. He really creeped me out once when he went off on this riff about the Crucifixion as a form of execution. Very scholarly, but later it was clear that even his lawyer had wished he’d dialed down the serial-killer vibe.