The Snow Garden (11 page)

     Mitchell Seaver adjusted the microphone deliberately, and the metallic squelch brought about instant silence. Randall thought that underneath Mitchell’s shaggy pile of sandy hair, and behind the wire-rimmed spectacles he probably didn’t need, there was a reasonably attractive guy being lost to academic anemia. Generous brown eyes and a slightly pug nose gave him a boyish attractiveness, but his appeal disappeared as soon as he began speaking in his lightly nasal, flat, affectless voice, which occasionally rose to a shrill pitch as if he were being forced to talk over people only he could hear.

     “I’m sure we’re all aware of the loss Dr. Eberman suffered this past weekend, and it should come as no surprise that he’s decided to take some time off to sort through personal matters,” Mitchell announced. “He has requested that in his absence we do our best to follow the syllabus. With the patience and cooperation of all of you, I hope we can do just that.”

     Mitchell paused. Randall shot a glance at Maria, who had turned slightly in her seat as if expecting students to pop up from their chairs at the prospect of being lectured by TAs. The lecture hall was stone still. Maria turned forward again, gave Mitchell a nod, and it was clear that nothing else would be said about the weekend’s events.

     As Mitchell began a general introduction of the Byzantine empire, Randall felt an odd sense of injustice, as if a moment of sanctioned silence should have been held. Maybe no one in the class had known Lisa Eberman, but this was, after all, the academic temple her husband dominated three times a week. He tried to distract himself from this feeling of injustice by sliding the
Atherton Herald
out from under his notebook. As he read by the pale light thrown off a screen filled by a succession of emperors laid out in glittering tessarae, his growing sense of pity for Lisa Eberman was only compounded by the fact that Tim Mathis’ article made it clear she had died an unknown on a campus that held her husband in high esteem.

     Tim began with a pathetic excuse for an obituary, which said little beyond the fact that she was a native of Philadelphia and had met her husband while they were both pursuing doctorate degrees at Duke University.
 
(Tim probably had no way of finding out that when Eric was offered a faculty position at Atherton, his alma mater, he had all but strong-armed Lisa out of finishing her degree. Randall only knew because it had come up in one of Eric’s post-sex, too-many-glasses-of-wine-beforehand confessions.)

     Randall struggled to read the article patiently, desperate to get to the raw facts of last Friday night in hopes of answering the question plaguing him ever since Eric had slammed the door to his house. What time did the accident occur on Friday night? Before or after Eric had taken Randall to his bed?

          According to a source close to the Eberman family, Paula Willis, Lisa Eberman’s sister, is                 suspicious of rumors that Eberman was intoxicated at the time of the accident. Willis, 31, suffers from cancer, and authorities believe that Eberman was on her way to visit her in Worcester when the accident occurred. While toxicology reports confirm that Eberman was driving with a blood alcohol level of .09, the autopsy has left lingering questions that Atherton police have yet to answer. The coroner’s report makes it clear that the official cause of death was drowning, but also specifies that due to the amount of time Lisa Eberman’s body spent submerged in the near freezing waters of the Atherton River, her exact time of death can only be approximated.

          Further complicating matters, according to official sources, is the anonymous 911 call reporting the accident from a downtown phone booth. Police attempts to track down the caller have been unsuccessful. However, suspicions that the caller might have been involved in the accident have been dispelled by preliminary forensic work performed on the victim’s Volvo. The station wagon didn’t show any signs of collision with anything other than the bridge guardrail.

     Randall slid the newspaper back under his notebook, balling his hands into fists on top. He couldn’t help shooting a few glances around to see if anyone had noted the frightened intensity with which he’d read the article three times.

     Where the hell was Tim Mathis getting such vital information? The guy worked for a campus newspaper, for Christ’s sake. And while Tim was almost obsessively persistent in just about everything he did, he seemed to have taken to this story with a particular ferocity; it left Randall frightened, wondering just what it was about Lisa’s death had gotten under Tim’s skin. Worse, if Tim had gone this far already in one article, how much further would he have to go before he found out what the real dark secret in Eric and Lisa’s marriage was, a secret that maybe Lisa Eberman didn’t even know?     

    
Maybe
Lisa Eberman didn’t know.

     Randall’s row had emptied out by the time he realized the lecture was over.

Atherton’s West Campus looked like what outsiders pictured when they thought of campus life—what Randall himself had imagined years before, yearning for escape so badly that his chest ached, conjuring up fantasies of a manicured, perfectly tended miniature city lying placidly between ivory towers. The reality was that Atherton was not completely beautiful —Michael Price had seen to that—but it was a more cloistered and protected environment than Randall had ever known, and West Campus remained a reminder of childhood dreams. Walking to Tim Mathis’ dorm, Randall recalled how his late-night visits in September had been a welcome reprieve from the sterility of Stockton Hall. Tim lived in Braddock Hall, one of the smaller and more desirable colonial-style dorms. Cold had already withered the ivy covering its walls into mud-colored tapestries of dead leaves. As Randall approached the entrance, he spotted Sharif, one of Tim’s suite-mates. Sharif gave him a slight nod, and held the door open for him with one hand, brushing his dreads back off his forehead with the other.

     “Here to see Tim?”

     Randall nodded, hoping that Sharif wouldn’t point out that it had been almost a month since he last stopped by Tim’s room. "Is he here?” Randall asked as he squeezed through the open door past Sharif.

     “Should be. He’s been bitching all morning about the flack he’s been getting for that article in the
Herald.
Did you read it?”

     “What kind of flack?”

     They ascended the stairs to the second floor. “You know Tim. If there’s shit within a mile he’s gotta stir it.”

     Sharif opened the door to the suite: three single bedrooms centered around a common room occupied by a tattered sofa and a suggestion of a kitchenette. The door to Tim’s bedroom was closed and Randall could hear Tim’s high-pitched, intermittently animated voice on the other side. ‘You want something from the fridge?” Sharif asked, startling him.

     Randall shook his head no, and Sharif nodded. Sharif, like Tim’s other two suitemates, was straight, but he was the Only one who made a show of being “okay with it” by treating every guy Tim brought back to the dorm as if he were the man Tim would marry. Tim was never that for Randall, but he was older, wiser and safe—and now Eric was at most only two of those things.

     Randall knocked lightly on Tim’s door.

     “John, I’m not testifying in front of the housing board. Go away!” Tim shouted back.

     Randall noticed that the door was unlatched, so he gave it a gentle shove. It opened halfway to reveal Tim standing next to his desk, phone pressed to his ear, his bleached hair disheveled. He was dressed in only boxers and a T-shirt and his laptop glowed on his desk. Next to it, an ashtray overflowed with stubbed-out butts. “Whatever,” Tim said into the phone. He adjusted his glasses, his eyes landing on Randall’s and never leaving as he continued. “All right. Fine. This afternoon.” He hung up without another word and turned to face Randall, crossing his arms over his chest, a slight smirk lifting his cheeks.

     “The housing board?” Randall asked.

     “Don’t ask.”

     “I want to know,” Randall said with a playful smile, taking his first step across the threshold.

     “Last night John was in the bathroom, so . Sharif pissed in one of those Nantucket Nectar bottles. He was on his way to put it in the trash when he ran into John in the hallway and he wanted to know why Sharif was throwing away a full bottle of lemonade. So Sharif let him drink it.” .

     Randall shivered. “Tell me you’re kidding.”

     “No. John’s trying to petition for a change of residence. But if he doesn’t get it, he's going to take a dump in Sharif s bed. This is what I get for living with a bunch of straight guys.”

     Randall smiled. Tim just looked at him.

     “You’re working,” Randall said. It wasn’t a question, but rather an attempt to imply a familiarity that Randall feared might have been lost over the past few weeks of phone calls that he had been too preoccupied, and disinterested, to return. He knew that Tim always wrote in a frenzy, usually dressed in underwear, one cigarette burning in the ashtray and another dangling from his lip.

     Randall pushed the door open all the way, then kicked it lightly closed. He took a seat on the bed, then rolled over onto his back with a stretch and an exaggerated yawn. Tim’s eyes followed him the whole way, his tongue making a lump in his upper lip.

     “You’re quite the celebrity today, aren’t you?” Randall asked.

     “You read my article.”

     Randall nodded.

     “Well, the article you didn’t read was a lot more interesting.” Tim tore a Camel Light from his pack and lit it.

     “I thought you were the news editor.”

     “I’m
one
news editor,” Tim practically snapped, exhaling his drag through his nostrils. “And I’ve got an editor-in-chief over me with a major stick up her ass. She says I turned a professor’s personal loss into a tabloid spectacle.”

     Randall nodded, as if the description might be apt. Tim’s eyes narrowed on him. “To what do I owe the honor?” he asked.

     “Your article. I thought it was a great piece.” Randall knew the best way to pry more information from Tim was to stroke his ego. The guy could bash the
Herald
as much as he wanted; he still considered it
The Washington Post
and had secretly crowned himself its Bob Woodward.

     Tim realized his match was still lit and he shook it out with several flicks of his wrist before dropping it into his ashtray. “I didn’t know you were a
Herald
reader.”

     “Only when I see your name in the byline.”

     Randall sat up, slid his arms out of his jacket, and dropped it onto the floor. He stretched out on Tim’s bed again, rolling over onto one side to face him. “What’s the matter, Randall?” Tim asked. “Not getting enough action from your roommate?”

     “Please,” Randall said with a snort.

     “When you stopped calling, I thought maybe you were saving it all for him.”

     “You think too much.”

     Tim sucked a drag off his cigarette, expression grave. “What else is there to do here?”

     Randall smiled to suggest that there was a lot else they could do, right there, right now. He was satisfied to see the same flicker of attraction in Tim’s eyes that he noticed when they’d met at the year’s first Gay and Lesbian Alliance Dance.

     “I have a question for you, Bob Woodward.”

     Tim said nothing as Randall reached down and pulled the
Herald
out of his satchel. “Now you have to forgive me, because I’m kind of a babe in the woods when it comes to journalism, but why include this claim by her sister when Lisa Eberman’s toxicology proves she was driving drunk?”

     “That’s what happens when an article gets butchered.”

     “What do you mean?” Randall asked, trying to maintain a tone of mild interest, and fighting the urge to demand Tim just hand over his unedited piece so he could take his first deep breath in several days and get the hell out of Tim’s room.

     “I conducted a forty-minute interview with Paula Willis and they cut it right before we went to press.”

     “You talked to her?” Randall asked, dropping the paper to his lap, his tone sharp, with a spike of outrage he hadn’t done his best to conceal.

     “I called her the day after the accident. I expected her to hang up when I told her who I was, but I had been instructed to write a memorial article and that’s what I was planning to do. No one on this whole campus knew a goddamn thing about Lisa Eberman, so I had to get some bio from someone. She was listed in the phone book. Well, her doctor must have her on some serious meds because she just went off.” 

     “I’m not surprised,” Randall said. “Her sister just died and she’s really sick.”

     “She doesn’t sound like it. And she didn’t go off on me. She went off on Eric Eberman.”

     Randall widened his eyes in curiosity, as he fought down the cold knot of fear that had formed inside his chest. “What did she say?”

     “She admitted Lisa drank. Often. But she wasn’t nearly the lush Eric Eberman made her out to be in front of the police. She basically defended Lisa’s honor, implying that if she was driving drunk, then Eric had probably given her a pretty good reason to.”

     Gooseflesh tickled Randall’s arms and he sat up, feigning a posture of attentiveness so he could cross his arms over his chest.

     “You came all the way across campus to talk about Lisa Eberman?” Tim asked archly. He’d propped one bare foot on the edge of his desk, pushing his chair onto its hind legs.

     Randall brushed the paper in his lap. “I just got out of lecture. Technically, I wasn’t all the way across campus.”

     Tim shook his head, eyes moving to the window and its view of dorm-room windows alight like segments in a honeycomb. Randall pushed his back up against the wall. “You want to know the truth?” Randall asked. “I’ve never read anything you’ve written before. I was impressed. Every time you used to spout off about bringing real journalism to the student newspaper... well, I thought it was a little starry-eyed of you.”