Chris Bohjalian: Secrets of Eden

“I haven’t a clue. Really and truly. I’m just giving them voice as they come to me.”

“In that case, I’m going to get some more iced coffee-though it’s been sitting out so long by now it will merely be watered-down tepid coffee. Still, you are welcome to have some. In my current state of mind, this is an act of courtesy that has demanded a herculean resiliency. If I rise to that occasion, will you tell me why you’ve come to see me?”

“I drink tea.”

“Then you’re out of luck. I don’t drink tea.”

“Have I come at a bad time?”

I leaned forward in my chair and looked deep into her face. The edges of her lips, adorned with a lipstick so lustrous and red that I thought of the vestments I wore when I’d preach on Pentecost or Palm Sunday, were curled into a smile, and I realized that she had meant this as a joke. She understood there had been few worse times in my life.

“I think this counts as one, yes.”

“Pour yourself that coffee,” she said. “I don’t need any. But I would like to stay and visit. May I?”

I rarely saw lipstick like that in Haverill. I rarely saw a silk blouse.

“I have nowhere to go,” I answered.

“No meetings? No parishioners?”

“There are always meetings. There are always parishioners.”

“But you have some time.”

I nodded as I stood up and listened to her as I opened the screen door and retrieved the pitcher.

“I have nothing at all on my calendar this afternoon or evening,” she said. “And I have a sense you can appreciate how liberating that sensation is. I just finished one of the world’s longest book tours.” Then she rose, too, and followed me inside.

“What’s your book about?”

“My new one?”

“Yes. Your… new one.”

“The world’s aura and the way we are degrading it environmentally and ecologically.”

“I suppose aura , in this case, isn’t simply another word for icecap. Or rain forest.”

“No, it’s not. But certainly there’s a connection.”

“And your other books?”

“Other book. Singular. I’ve only written two.”

“And it’s about?”

She smiled as if she knew I couldn’t possibly take seriously what she was about to tell me. “Angels. Auras. The quality of vibrations we emit and how they affect our relationship with the divine.”

“I’m sure those vibrations really matter.”

“You’re not sure at all, but that’s okay.”

“Let me guess. You were at the bookstore in Manchester last night?”

“This morning, actually. Then I gave a talk at that beautiful arts center up on the hill. Yesterday I was at Bennington College and the NPR station in Albany.”

“And now you’re finishing your day with an appearance in scenic little Haverill.”

“You’re having a real hard time with that, aren’t you?”

“Well, do you visit every village that achieves our sort of notoriety?”

“Nope.”

“Just ours.”

She nodded and then turned her gaze toward the open shelves and kitchen counters that were filled with the detritus of a single man’s-a single pastor’s-life. There were the odd, mismatched knickknacks given to me by dotty parishioners over the years: porcelain cookie jars (originally filled, of course, with freshly baked cookies with ridiculous names like snickerdoodles and choc-a-roos), one shaped like a potbellied elf and one like a plump, sitting beagle (that had, alas, lost an ear over the years); an earthenware butter dish I never used that resembled a submarine, a gift from a couple in the congregation after I gave a sermon with references to a 1960s television program I had seen that week on TV Land called Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea ; a tin container for straws, empty, that was crafted from a Coca-Cola can; and a plastic paper-napkin holder that was shaped like a rather flat, two-dimensional log cabin. And then there were the pots and pans that once had belonged to my mother but now dangled-a little tarnished, a little dinged-like old meat from hooks above the stove, as well as the juice and water glasses from her bridal registry, not old enough yet to be interesting but still discolored with age. (When my father died, she had chosen to sell the house and move to a condominium apartment in a brick building in the village, and in her downsizing my sister and I had wound up with a sizable percentage of the contents from the pantry, the hutch, and the kitchen cabinets.) There were coffee mugs, two rows of them, many stained brown and some visibly cracked. And there were the four matching tins for flour and sugar and coffee and rice that were meant to look like miniatures of the sort of antique barrels one might have found once in a country store-or, at any rate, in a country store on a movie set-but each of them now looked only bulbous and bloated and tired. I was always a little embarrassed when a woman saw my kitchen for the first time. It wasn’t often, but invariably I was left with the sensation that I had either remarkably bad taste or an awful lot to explain.

Moreover, I rarely cooked, since so much food came to me from parishioners and friends and since I was expected to attend so many meetings at night. Besides, I lived alone, and relatively few people actually like to cook for themselves. As a result there was an antiseptic odorlessness to the room, an aura of benign disuse. In a typical year, I must have prepared no more than two dozen dinners for myself in that kitchen.

Had she looked through the open door into the den, she would have seen an ironing board strategically placed before my television set and the pile of my shirts and pants that seemed always to be the size of a beanbag chair. I ironed just enough to keep up, but not frequently enough ever to shrink the mound. She would have seen the DVDs more appropriate in the bedroom of a fifth-grade boy than a minister flirting with middle age: an account of a Red Sox World Series championship, two-thirds of the Star Wars saga. She might have noticed the books I was reading, some on the floor and some on the coffee table and some on the television itself. There were books of inspiration and biblical interpretation, as well as the novels set in courtrooms and police stations and law offices-the mysteries that I savor the way some people appreciate science fiction.

It struck me, as it did always when a person saw the inside of my house, as rather pathetic. And while the homes of most single men are rather pathetic-testimonies in some cases to a stunted childhood, sad little museums of loneliness-mine seemed more so. I was, after all, a minister. It seemed to me that I should have transcended the pitiable curiosities of the single life. Usually I took comfort that at least my house wasn’t rife with porn and NASCAR magazines, but that seemed like a small consolation that afternoon.

“How did you learn about us?” I asked. “The newspaper?”

“Initially. And then the television news. And then the Internet.”

“Ah, Haverill’s fifteen minutes of fame. Our chance to bask in the glow of the press. Lovely.”

She picked up the butter dish in the shape of a science-fiction submarine. It looked vaguely like a stingray with a school bus behind it. “You sound so angry about the media,” she murmured, her eyes scanning the vessel. “From the newspaper I would have guessed it was something else.”

“And that was?”

She looked up at me, her mouth open the tiniest bit. “I’m really not that presumptuous,” she answered. “And I hope not that arrogant.”

“No, you can tell me. I’m interested.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

“I thought you blamed yourself for Alice and George Hayward’s deaths.”

“I do.”

“And I thought you blamed your God.”