My Secret History (58 page)

All this time the dawn was breaking, like a tide turning, and as it ebbed rinsing the darkness out of the sky. I put the phone down in the whitened room and heard Eden call my name.

*   *   *

Three weeks later I rolled up the carpets, disconnected the battery, put the statues away, shut off the water, took down the pictures, and all the rest of it. I locked the house, and we left.

Eden was tall and slender, with thick black hair that hung straight down, and pale skin that gave her a gaunt indoor look. And yet she was athletic. She had been a dancer—and she still practiced her steps for exercise and still stuck to her dancer’s diet. It was only late at night, when she was hungry or amorous that she pouted and became a little girl. The rest of the time she was an elegant and intimidating woman with jangling bracelets and gray-green eyes like a fox.

I told her she was perfect. I described her carefully, praising her hair and eyes, to show her I noticed everything.

“I dye my hair. It’s a color called ‘Night-shine.’ I use makeup, I use lip gloss. My contact lenses are tinted.” She smiled. Was she taunting me? “I saved the first money I made to have my teeth capped. I have huge feet—haven’t you noticed?”

This unexpected honesty only made her more appealing to me.

“I’m impossible,” she said. “I’d drive you crazy.”

Only women used those expressions, and I had always felt that when they did they must be believed—that they knew best.

But Eden made herself comic by exaggerating her faults, and she was happy to let me disprove her self-criticism. I loved her vitality, the way she always said yes, her willingness, her energy—she could spend a whole day swimming or hiking and the rest of the night making love. She took pleasure in cooking—clipped recipes out of gourmet magazines and we made the
dishes. We shopped at the big supermarket in Hyannis and bought fresh fish and vegetables and went back to my house and prepared it. I associated her with fresh air and good food and rowdy sex, and I never felt healthier than when I was with her.

There was often a slight suggestion of
What now?
or
What next?
in her face or voice. She was thirty-four. She had never been married.

Some months after I had met her she became depressed. I asked her what was wrong. At first she said nothing, but her mood did not lift.

“I just wonder where all this is leading,” she said.

I felt oddly ensnared by the sentence, yet wasn’t the answer to that always
Nowhere
. Most women I had known had needed to look ahead—the future was always on their mind, the sense of time passing was strong in them; if I listened closely to any woman she seemed to tick like a clock, and even the silliest of them made plans. Eden thought about growing old.

In that same mood of depression she said, “What would you say if I told you I’ve been seeing someone?”

I’ve been seeing someone
was inevitably an oblique sexual admission. It meant everything.

I couldn’t speak or answer her—my mouth was too dry.

She said, “I was just joking. I wanted to find out whether you cared.”

“I do care.” It came out as a pathetic croak.

She became very serious. She could see that she had shocked me.

“You really do, don’t you?” And she kissed me. “I’m sorry, darling. I shouldn’t have said that. I’m a very bad girl.” Her voice changed and softened to that of a small girl. “You should put me straight to bed. You should punish me.”

That day she was naked underneath her short skirt and green cashmere sweater. She came alive when I touched her, and so did I.

She sometimes wore knee socks when we made love, or a lace collar—nothing else—or a ribbon in her hair. She always wore something—a silk sash, a leather belt, a pair of high-heeled shoes. “I feel more naked that way.” Once she wore a mask. She was never completely dressed, nor completely undressed.

If she was vain about anything it was her stylishness, her flair,
the way she presented herself—and this look was reflected in the way she wrapped presents, always so beautifully, with glossy paper and multiple bows. She took a pride in such things, as she did in styling her hair or wearing the right color contact lenses; but as with the gift-wrapping I had the impression she was calling attention to something that she happened to be good at. That was why it was vanity—because it didn’t need emphasis. And also I suspected that she faintly despised the sloppy way I dressed or my casual gift-giving—I seldom wrapped anything. I felt like a buffoon putting a ribbon around anything except her neck when we made love. But we got along: she allowed me to be a brute and I encouraged her in her stylishness.

That awareness of the look of people and things probably came from her job. She was assistant editor of a Boston magazine that specialized in antiques and decoration, and she lived not far from me, in Marstons Mills, in an old house that she had restored. She had the skills of someone who had become self-sufficient by living alone. She had a vegetable garden, a good one full of healthy plants; she preserved fruit and froze vegetables; she made jam, she stewed tomatoes and kept them in mason jars. She had painted her whole house alone, wallpapered it, sanded the floors and varnished the planks. She had hooked her own rugs, sewn her own curtains, made her matching cushion covers. She was a painstaking cook, and like a lot of brilliant cooks was not a great eater—she loved watching other people eat her food, her sculptured vegetables.

Why hadn’t she gotten married? If she had married she probably would not have mastered all these skills, but there was also another answer. She did not like children much. She was frequently childlike herself—a characteristic of some people who don’t have kids. And she told herself—she told me—that she still had time to choose whether or not to have any.

We were on the plane out of Logan, flying east in the darkness, the pilot giving us details of our flight path over Newfoundland.

Eden wasn’t listening. She tore a page of out a magazine.

“Doesn’t that look delicious?”

A good cook looking at a recipe is like a musician looking at a music score—the simplest notation suggests everything they need to know, and just glancing at a line their senses are aroused.

I read
Chef Bernard’s Lobster Bisque
. It was a three or four hour operation; it contained wine and cream and several items I had never heard of; and it was made in about ten separate stages. Step seven, I noticed, was pulverizing the lobster shells to give it the right pinky color.

Eden rested her head against my shoulder and took my hand in hers. She said, “We’ll make it on the Cape when we get back from India. We’ll bake some bread. We’ll have profiteroles for dessert.”

She was expert at making the lightest puffballs of choux pastry—she knew that, too. It was another part of her vanity, but forgivable because she took such pleasure in cooking for other people and working hard to please them.

But why, I wondered, were antique fanciers and restorers nearly always lovers of gourmet food? Was it part of an ingenious attempt to live well, or was it all conspicuous and self-boosting pretension and the narrowest, most intolerant snobbery?

Yet Eden would have been the first to admit that she was like one of the objects she meticulously restored, or something she went to great trouble to prepare. The difficulty was that she had the gourmet cook’s fastidious pedantry. That could be inconvenient.

As we talked about this great meal we were going to cook when we got back from India we were served a tasteless, overcooked airline meal that had the faint stink of baked plastic, and only surface color—when you scattered the peas they were no longer green. The chicken was wet and fibrous and coated with wallpaper paste, and surrounding it were sodden rice grains, brown-flecked salad, cold bread, and a cube of dry cake.

“Garbage,” Eden said, and ate an apple from her handbag.

The food was terrible, but hunger gave me patience. Nevertheless, I felt so self-conscious eating a meal she had rejected I could not finish it. I resented her severity—the fact that she couldn’t joke about this stuff. She was so certain that she made me doubtful, and I could not understand why.

A moment later she said, “We’ve never been on a plane together—we’ve never really traveled, have we?”

That was it—that was the reason. We had only known each other on the Cape, not in the world.

The movie
Trading Places
came on after the meal but I fell asleep in the middle of it, and just before dawn we flew low over London. I looked down at the pattern of yellow lamps on the city’s irregular streets. I kept my face at the window, picked out the river, and then the larger parks, and finally as we dropped lower I could spot York Road and check our progress through southwest London, over Wandsworth and Putney and Richmond. We arrived at Heathrow in light brown morning light as rain plinked in puddles on the runway.

“Now that we’re here I can ask you why we came this way,” Eden said. “Wouldn’t it have been simpler to go to India via the West Coast?”

“This is more direct,” I said, and when she looked doubtful I added, “Because you don’t cross the International Date Line.”

She seemed to accept this. Well, it was six o’clock in the morning—not an hour that encouraged lucid discussions.

She said, “But isn’t it strange being in London with me?”

“We’re not in London,” I said, evading the real question. “Didn’t you know the airport’s in Middlesex?”

We sat in the Transit Lounge for a while, and then she excused herself. She was away for about twenty minutes, but when she returned she had a newly painted face. She was fragrant and looked refreshed. She had the knack—it was makeup, and clothes, and something about her hairstyle—of being able to renew herself throughout the day.

Our Air India flight was not leaving until noon, and so I bought the London newspapers and read them over breakfast. I enjoyed eating and reading, and not saying much. But Eden was restless and more talkative than usual.

“It’s all grease,” she was saying of the eggs and bacon. “And what’s this supposed to be?”

“Fried bread,” I said, glancing up. “It’s a big English thing.”

“Yuck.”

She ate dry toast and an orange which she peeled with her own knife, and she drank Earl Grey tea—which she asked for by name.

“Tea bags,” she said contemptuously, because she always made tea in a pot with loose leaves. “What is this country coming to?”

That was another thing about antique fanciers—besides being
gourmets they were usually anglophiles, and like the worst anglophiles they weren’t just lovers of England but they were very critical and class-conscious, too. It seemed a characteristic of such people that no matter where they had come from in America they always included themselves with the English upper-middle class.

“What’s wrong?”

I was frowning—disgusted with myself for noticing these characteristics in her.

“Nothing,” I said. “I’m sorry you’re disappointed in England. But remember this is just the airport. All airports are identical. We might as well be in Tokyo. Even cities are getting similar—the big capitals resemble each other more and more.”

“All countries have a different smell,” she said.

Had she read that somewhere? She had not traveled much, only to vacation places like the Caribbean and Mexico and Florida. I guessed that she was rather intimidated by foreign parts. She wanted to know more than she knew, she wanted to be expert. In her way she was a perfectionist, or tried to be, which was why she was such an energetic self-improver. She was good at tricky things, but she was self-conscious, and so she seemed amateurish no matter how skillful she was. I felt that at Heathrow she was noticing everything and would mention it all later—the peculiar telephones, ashtrays, carpets, signs, spellings; the shoes people wore, their hats, the way they smoked and ate.

We dozed in the chairs of the Transit Lounge and when we woke I showed Eden the Duty Free Shop.

“Please buy something for yourself,” I said.

“You look so serious!”

“Because I want you to buy something.”

“I don’t want anything in the Duty Free Shop,” she said. “I just want you.”

She did not leave my side, nor would she let me buy her a bottle of perfume.

“Shall we get some vodka? In India it’s—”

She clutched me and kissed me and said how happy she was to be with me, and I was all she would need in India.

“And all Jumbo jets have a different smell,” she said, as the Air India flight filled with passengers—skinny parents with fat children and more hand luggage than I had ever seen on a plane.

It was nine hours to Delhi—two meals, another movie, and what they called “high tea.” Eden found the meals acceptable—she chose the vegetarian menu, when she saw the other high-caste orthodox Hindus doing the same. She snuggled up to me and slept for part of the flight with her head on my shoulder. She said she felt very cozy. I did not tell her that she was preventing me from sleeping, because I was glad to see her so serene. Besides, it fascinated me to see this tall person folded up and fast asleep.

We arrived in the middle of the night at Delhi Airport, were jostled by the other passengers and pestered by porters, and eventually found our way through the grubby terminal. Then we were driven through the darkness and the empty streets to our hotel. The night was cool, but the battered taxi smelled of dust. And there was at the window the mingled smells of dirt and vegetation, cowshit, rotting fruit, woodsmoke, and diesel fumes.

Eden took a deep breath and gagged.

I said, “You’d know you were in the Third World even if you were blindfolded.”

She seemed either angry or unhappy—she said nothing, only frowned.

“Poverty always has a bad smell,” I said. “But India looks better in daylight.”

The long drive into the city made her uneasy, and I could tell she was spooked by what she glimpsed from the window, and the odors, and the chattering and whine of the cicadas. Her nervousness made her sharp with the taxi driver.