Chris Bohjalian - Secrets of Eden

My mother appeared behind him in only her panties and blouse, barefoot, and her own hair-a great flaxen mane-was also in disarray. Her lipstick was smeared like a clown’s, and her mascara was dripping in rivulets down the right side of her face. (It’s possible, I imagine, that it was running from her left eye as well, but I recall noticing at the time that for some reason only her right cheek was streaked with makeup.) She was sobbing and she was furious and she threw herself at him, pounding her fists into his back and shoulders with such force that it looked for a split second as if he would hurtle over the side of the balustrade and fall either one flight into the living room or-worse-a full two flights if he tumbled over the section of balcony that was above the stairs that linked the living room with the finished basement.

“Stop it!” he yelled, grabbing her fists in his hands. “Settle the fuck down! You nearly fucking killed me!”

“You stop it, just stop everything!” she screamed back, a demand that, as unreasonable as it was, might have accomplished its intent if she hadn’t added, “You are pathetic. You are just the most pathetic loser.”

“Pathetic? I’m not so fucking drunk I-”

“‘Fucking’? Why don’t you swear some more in front of your children? Why don’t you tell them what you just called me? Heather, do you want to know what your father just called me?” I hadn’t any idea how to respond to this appeal, and so I murmured-not loud enough for them to hear over the din of the television and their own verbal pyrotechnics-“Don’t fight. Please. Don’t fight.” In my mind I see myself curled up on the couch in the red Christmas skirt from Saks Fifth Avenue and the turtleneck dotted with silver snowflakes I had worn that evening, a throw pillow clutched in my arms as if it were a stuffed animal. I’m sure I was crying, too.

“You’re a drunk, you know that?” my father told her, and he released her fingers as if they were a fish he was tossing with two hands into a lake, his arms upraised when the movement was done. “You’re a fucking drunk and the poorest fucking excuse for a mother I’ve ever seen. You’re a shrew and-”

He never finished the sentence, because my mother, her hands newly freed, slapped him, and the stinging thwap was so loud that his ears must have been ringing. He brought his palm to his cheek and held it there for a moment. And then he slapped her back, so hard that she toppled backward and landed on the carpet near the top step of the stairway, one of her legs beneath her and the other splayed out as if she were a dancer trying and failing to perform a split. Her panties, I saw, were soaked through with her blood, and for a second I was terrified she was badly hurt. But then I remembered: My older sister had just started menstruating and our mother had hoped to demystify the notion of a monthly cycle for both of her girls by telling us that she, too, was in the midst of her period. That night she was so profoundly inebriated that when she had removed her tampon when we’d gotten home, she had forgotten to put in a fresh one.

“You’re drunk,” my father scolded her.

“You’re drunk!” she shouted back. “And you’re a drunk, too! You’re a wretched and feeble excuse for a man! Your own father knows it, your mother knows it, your daughters know it. They know. They know.”

She pushed off against the wall and stood to face him. “They know,” she mocked him one more time, and she glanced down at me for the merest of seconds. And so my father smacked her again, but this time she was prepared for the blow and remained on her feet, though her body fell hard against the wall, her head bouncing like a basketball off the Sheetrock and causing the small framed print of a rosebush near her to quiver.

“They know their mother’s a shrew!” he yelled. “That’s what they know! She’s a fucking, bleeding, harpy shrew who can’t even keep her goddamn underwear clean!”

She dropped her hands to her sides in a posture of absolute submissiveness and hissed, “Hit me again, you drunken fool! Hit me again.”

And so he did.

Initially Stephen didn’t tell me why the deputy state’s attorney or those state troopers from Vermont seemed to suspect him of some involvement in that tragic murder and suicide in his community. He had shared with me a very great deal about Alice our first days together in Manhattan, but somehow he had missed that one small detail that they’d been lovers. He had had many opportunities when it would have made sense to tell me, beginning with the day we met right up until the day that we left Statler-especially when we reached the highway on our way back to New York City and he discovered that his cell phone had a series of messages from the Vermont State Police. Weeks later his defense would be that I would have misconstrued what had happened in those months and who he was as a person. Likewise, he said, I wouldn’t understand what had really occurred that July night in Haverill and why it had ended so horribly.

The reality is that had he told me at any point in those first days we were together, I wouldn’t have felt the need later on to withdraw. He could have told me in Haverill, and he could have told me in Manhattan. He could have told me in the hours and hours we spent in the car driving to and from the Adirondacks. He could have told me on our hikes in the mountains or after we had made love in the woods, in those moments of postcoital intimacy when we shared so much of our personal histories. We spoke of so many of our lovers, I wouldn’t have minded. I would have understood. I had felt that the angels were with us those days.

I was, quite obviously, mistaken. I had allowed my mortal judgment to cloud my celestial instincts.

FOR YEARS I had worn a small gold cross around my neck. It really wasn’t much bigger than a thumbnail. It was a gift I had been given by my aunt when I was born, with the assumption that I would grow into it. When my mother finally shared it with me, I must have been seven, and I had little regard for it. It sat in the bottom of my elementary-school jewelry box, along with plastic hoops and clip-on seashell earrings and pretend pearl necklaces. And this was fine with my mother. The cross wasn’t costly, and the church played virtually no role in our household (which, looking back, might have been precisely why my aunt gave me that piece of jewelry).

Years later, when my parents were dead and I was sifting through the rubble that remained of my childhood, I found the cross and brought it with me to college. But I only started wearing it after my angel saved me from death in the dormitory basement. It was never in my mind an amulet, but its aura was numinous and its presence was comforting. I have been told that I touch it on occasion when I seem to be lost in thought.

An indication of how quickly and how deeply I was beguiled by Stephen is this: Of all the gifts I have been given by lovers over the years, the only time I replaced that cross around my neck was when Stephen gave me a gold chain with a gold angel. He found it in the estate case of a jewelry store in the Village when he was walking alone on the day before we would leave for my sister’s in Statler. It was an art nouveau design and perhaps twice as large as the cross-which meant it was still rather delicate. The angel was female and typically eroticized for the period. Her hair was a long and luscious waterfall, her breasts were exposed, and her wings had been tapered more for seduction than flight. She was absolutely beautiful, and it was clear that when she moved, she moved like a ballerina. She was gazing up at a pigeon’s blood ruby balanced at the end of her fingers.

It was a striking piece with an aura that was as alluring as it was inspiriting, and as long as Stephen and I were together, I wore it and cherished it. I have it even now. The fact that it was given to me by Stephen affects the associations but not the aura that was a part of the angel before she came into my life and will be an element of the angel when she is a part of someone else’s. I keep it because it reminds me both of the wonder and the wistfulness of being bewitched. But I can’t bear to wear it.