Eileen (20 page)

When I sat back down at the kitchen table, Rebecca was busy looking through the cabinets again. “Aha!” she exclaimed, turning around with a corkscrew. “Too late, I'm sorry. Please, have more wine.” She poured out the last of it. “Thank you for bringing it,” she said again.

“I guess it's a kind of housewarming party, too, isn't it? Since you've just moved here?” I tried to sound chipper.

“I love that. A housewarming, yes. Thank you,” Rebecca answered. “That's very appropriate. The house needs some warming. Drafty old place.” She pulled up the collar of her robe and opened her mouth as though to say more, but stopped herself, folded her arms across her chest.

“How long have you lived here?” I asked. “If you don't mind my asking.”

“I got to town just a few weeks ago,” she replied, adjusting her robe. “I must say I was expecting the cold, but nothing like this. This is pretty brutal cold you have here. Worse than Cambridge. But the snow is pretty. Don't you think?”

The conversation went on like that, perfunctorily. The magic was gone. It was as if we'd broken the ice but the frigid waters had made us slow and phony with hypothermia. I'd missed my chance, I reckoned, to be her real friend. Rebecca had opened the door to me and I'd shut it in her face. I was boring. I had nothing to contribute. I tried, pathetically now, to make up for my flatness with self-pity. “I don't get out much,” I told her. “There isn't much to do here in winter. Or in any season.”

“Do you ice-skate?” Rebecca asked with false enthusiasm, I sensed.

I shook my head no, smiled, then corrected myself. “But I'd go if you wanted to.”

“Oh, that's all right,” said Rebecca. It was terribly uncomfortable. The chair was so stiff, the house was so cold. Still, I sipped my wine, nodding and grinning as best I could. I knew
what I was hiding—my disappointment, my foiled fantasies, my longing. What Rebecca was hiding, and why, was utterly mysterious to me. She talked at length about how sunburnt she'd gotten over the summer, how her hands cramped while driving, her favorite painters—all abstract expressionists, as I recall. We agreed to take a trip to Boston together in the spring, to the art museums, but she seemed to have retreated to some far-off place in her mind, leaving just the surface of herself to be with me. Perhaps all I deserved was to look at her from afar, I thought. Who was I to think that a woman like Rebecca—beautiful, independent, professional—could ever really care to get to know me? And what did I have to say for myself, anyway? I was a nobody, a nerd. I should be grateful she's doing all the talking. “Do you swim? Do you ski? Where did you buy that fur hat?” I got the feeling she was just humoring me, pitying me, even making fun of me and my dull life, trying to put me at ease with her asinine questions.

Finally I said, “I should be going.” There would be other nights, I told myself. Real friendship isn't forged in one evening, anyway. And better to leave on a note of dullness than of discord. I got up out of my chair and began to pull my gloves back on. That was when Rebecca got up from the stool she was sitting on.

“Eileen,” she said, coming toward me, her voice suddenly low and stern and sober. “Before you go, I need your help with something.” I thought she might ask me to take out the garbage or help her lift a piece of heavy furniture, but she merely said, “Stay. Talk with me a little while longer.”

She looked worried. Maybe she's sick, I thought, or expecting a visit from a jealous lover. I would stay, of course. I was desperate for more wine. And I was hungry. As though she'd read my mind, Rebecca got up and opened the old refrigerator. She pulled out a hunk of cheese, a bottle of pickled onions, some ham.

“I'll make us sandwiches,” she said. “I really am a bad hostess, I know.” I watched her wash two plates, pat them dry with the edge of her bathrobe. “We'll feel better if we eat something.”

“I feel fine,” I said defensively. It just came out of me, and rang out in that cold kitchen as cutting, rude and untrue. I began to excuse myself, babbling a bit, but Rebecca interrupted me.

“You know as well as I do that there's a bit of tension in the air,” she said. “You feel it and I feel it. It's there, so why deny it?” She shook her head, shrugged her shoulders, gave a half smile, then turned her back to me and piled up the sliced bread on the counter.

I let out a high neurotic giggle. I couldn't tell if Rebecca was angry or entertained. “I'm sorry,” I mumbled. But she ignored me. Laying aside the awkwardness hanging between us, she turned back to the subject of Moorehead as she worked at the counter. I watched as with unsteady hands she composed our sandwiches. I picked at my chapped lips, fingered the gun inside my purse, listened as she talked. She seemed to relax a bit, her voice now wafting down into its lower registers. With her back turned, she paused now and then, punctuating the air with her knife as she spoke.

“They've hired me to develop some sort of blanket curriculum for the boys, a daily plan for the lot of them, as though they're all the same age and at the same level. As if we could just repeat lessons over and over again. It's a ridiculous idea on its own. I'm not some nineteenth-century farm schoolteacher. And these boys can learn. Most of them are already literate. Of course there will have to be testing, trial and error on my part, to know what works, and then the big questions—what are the goals, what's the point? I'm not here to teach them how to repair car engines, after all. They need to learn literature, history, philosophy, the hard sciences. That's what I think. It's a job big enough for a dozen people. Robert doesn't understand that the boys have minds, that they're even conscious. To him they're just cattle.”

“Robert?” I asked. “You mean the warden?”

“The warden,” she shook her head. “All he does is punish boys for jerking off.” I had a good idea of what that meant. “You knew that, didn't you?” Rebecca turned slightly, showing me the seriousness of her profile. “That guy is really something. His ridiculous Christian rhetoric is completely inappropriate. Then I find out that Leonard Polk got stuck in the cave for ‘inappropriate touching.'” She shook her head. “If I were those boys I'd be touching myself all the time. It's about the only fun that can be had in a place like Moorehead, don't you think?” She turned to me then, nose crinkled, eyes shining, suddenly full of sprightly and conniving joy.

“Oh, of course,” I said, twisting my hands around in the air to indicate that I was flexible, open-minded, that I had no qualms.

“I swear,” Rebecca went on. “I just don't understand what the big deal is.” She shook her head. I tried to imagine Rebecca touching herself, what sort of touching she did and how it was different from my sort, as it seemed—given what I knew about her—that she had no shame. I wondered what sort of ecstasy there was to be had without shame to incite it. I couldn't imagine. I was a bit stunned sitting there then, and was grateful that she kept rattling on. She told me how happy she was to be working at the prison, how relieved she was to have finished her degree. She said she was sure she could have a great effect, and how much she cared for the boys already. “Like they're my own brothers,” is a phrase I recall clearly. She handed me a plate, plunked a sandwich on it. We sat and ate in silence.

“As you've probably figured out by now, Eileen,” she said after a while, “I live a little differently from most people.”

“Oh, not at all,” I insisted. “Your house is really nice.”

“Please, don't be so polite,” she said. “I don't mean the house.” She looked at me as she stood, munching an onion. “I mean I have my own ideas. I'm not like those women you work with.” That was obvious. “Or like your teachers at school, or your mother.” She slid her plate back into the sink. “I can tell you have your own ideas, too. Maybe you and I even share some of the same ideas.”

Now I felt she was testing me—was I a follower like “most people,” or was I “different” like her. I could barely eat the sandwich she'd given me. The bread was stale, the ham was gummy. Still, like a good girl, I chewed and nodded.

“I've realized some things over the years,” she said, licking
her fingers. “I don't believe in good and bad.” She offered me a cigarette. I took it, grateful for an excuse to put down the sandwich. “Those boys at Moorehead, they don't belong there. I don't care what they've done. No child deserves that kind of punishment.”

I'd barely drunk two cups of wine, and since it was not in my nature to argue when I wasn't drunk, what I said next surprised me. Perhaps it was the spirit of my father moving in me, because I really didn't care much about the issue. “But those boys are all criminals. They need to be punished somehow,” I said. Rebecca was silent. I finished the wine. A few moments passed in which my head grew heavy and spun with regret. It seemed clear that I had offended her. I felt sick to my stomach.

“I should go,” I said. “You must be tired.” By then, I believe, I'd been in that house less than an hour. My skin felt greasy and hot. The air in the room seemed to be spinning with dust and smoke and the smell of rotting food. I put out my cigarette. Rebecca looked deep in thought—I assumed her thoughts revolved around me, my lack of vision or compassion. What a square I was. What a pig. I worried I might vomit. It seemed imperative that I go home immediately. But Rebecca had other ideas.

“May I confide in you?” she asked, her voice suddenly soft, but urgent. She squatted down toward me, leaning one arm on the table.

Nobody had ever confided in me before. I looked at her squarely in the face, held my breath. She really was beautiful. Suddenly clear-eyed and still and vulnerable, like a scared child
in the forest. She held my hand absentmindedly, her fingers cool and soft against my rough skin. I tried to relax, to show that I was open, accepting, available. But I felt my death mask creep up again. I nodded with my eyes closed, thinking that would be a somber and reliable gesture of fidelity. If she had tried to kiss me then, I think I would have gone along.

“It's about Lee Polk,” she said.

I really thought that I would vomit at that moment. I began to stand, reaching for my purse, hoping she'd lose her nerve before she could tell me that they'd kissed, or worse. She gripped my hand again, though, and I sat back down.

How relieved I was when she said not, “I'm in love with him,” but rather, “He spoke to me.” Still there was a kind of perverse look of pride and pleasure on her face. I was reminded of Joanie's self-satisfaction when she'd told me, so many years ago at that point, “He likes to taste me.” Rebecca squeezed my fingers, swallowed hard. “He told me everything. What happened and what he did and how he ended up in Moorehead. Look at this.” She pulled an old photograph from her robe pocket. It was a photo of the crime scene. Lee Polk's father lay on the blood-darkened carpet, wrapped partly in a tangled sheet, a disheveled bed beside him.

“That's the father,” Rebecca went on. “People always think it's Oedipal. Kill the father, marry the mother. That's what I'd assumed.”

“Gross,” I said. I looked at the photo again. The man's eyes were partly open, as though he were surreptitiously glancing downward, shifty. His arms were held over his head, fingers
jammed and piled up against the bedside table. I'd seen pictures of dead people before in various books and magazines, mostly important figures lying in mausoleums or photos from wars—soldiers slumped on the battlefield, starved corpses. Then of course there was Jesus dead on the cross everywhere I looked. There had been a few such crime scene photos in the files of other inmates at Moorehead, but none of them had captured the essence of death quite like that photo of Mr. Polk. Not even my own mother's dead body struck me as powerfully. She'd just faded away, really, a little bit every day until there was nothing left. Life had been ripped out of Mr. Polk, however. The death was there, alive in the photo. I twisted my hand away from Rebecca and got up and flung myself toward the sink, vomiting that terrible sandwich, all that wine.

“I'm sorry,” I said.

Rebecca came up behind me and rubbed my back. “Don't be sorry,” she replied. She handed me a cold, wet and mildewed dishrag. “The picture
should
make you sick.” I turned on the faucet, rinsed my vomit off the plates. “Don't bother,” Rebecca said.

“I'm sorry,” I repeated. I don't know how sorry I really was. Getting sick like that had excited me. I can't think of any other time just looking at something has made me vomit. I wanted to look at the photo again. There was something in it that I couldn't fully make out. Between the crumpled bedsheets, the thinly striped sleeping shirt, the black stain puddled on the rug, Mr. Polk, face sagging and limp, had something to say. Another kind of life lay behind the blank expression captured in that photo.
I wished I could get inside of it, examine the throat where it was gashed, touch the blood, investigate the wound as though a secret were embedded there, but the throat wasn't visible in the photo. What did those eyes know? What was the last thing Mr. Polk saw? Lee, the knife, the darkness, his wife, his own spirit rising up out of his body? I liked the look of those still, sneaky eyes. Mr. Polk, I knew, held a secret I'd been wanting to understand. He knew death, I suppose. Maybe it was that simple.

“Where did you get that?” I asked Rebecca.

“Lee's file,” she said. “Scary, huh?”

I sat back down in the chair, sobered, calm. “Not really,” I lied, purposelessly.

“Lee snuck into his parents' bedroom with a kitchen knife and hacked through his father's throat. His mother claims she went into shock. She didn't phone the police right away. She said she woke up and found her husband dead, assumed there'd been a break-in. How do you sleep through something like that, I wonder? Can you imagine? They found the knife in the kitchen sink, and Lee in his bed, holding his teddy bear.”