She said, “I was asking someone about India and they said this was the best time to go.”
She spoke in a casual way but there was something in her tone that was anything but casual. It was vibrant enthusiasm and relief that the matter seemed settled. She was planning on this, she had been counting on me. When I was away I often forgot her intensity, and I had to be this near her to be reminded of how her life was connected to mine. But which of my lives was she depending on, and who had she told about India?
“Wait till you see it — the temples, the ruins, the rice fields, and the black trains chugging for days under huge hot skies.”
Eden sniffed and said almost tearfully, “I’m so happy — you’ve made me so happy.”
I kissed her and smiled in the dark, and I watched the tipsy stars, their streaks of light as they sprawled trying to move.
“I have something to show you,” Eden said. She got up quickly and left the room.
She returned saying, “Can you see me?”
A match flared in her hand and she lit the candle and brought it nearer.
She was wearing a short black slip that reached to the top of her long white legs. Her lips looked black — she had put on lipstick, and in the starlight and the leaping candleflame her skin shimmered. She was like a night bloom, and when she knelt to put the candlestick onto the floor her pale white buttocks protruded as her slip tightened. Then she stood up and the candlelight shone through the silk showing her slender naked body. She approached me and stroked my outstretched leg and locked my knee between her thighs.
“Am I a bad girl?”
She squatted like a child playing horsey, chafing herself on my knee.
“Yes,” I said eagerly.
She sighed and crept forward and sat on my lap, holding me and crushing her breasts against me. Her thick hair was in my mouth, her saliva on my lips, and my hands full of the black silk that had been warmed by her skin.
“If I’m bad you’ll have to put me to bed,” she said.
We went upstairs, clumsily holding each other. We made love blindly at first, and then we grew very sure of each other, and with that confidence in each other’s flesh it was like seeing in the dark.
I came awake in the dark and the glowing clock showed that it was just after five. Eden lay asleep beside me, sleeping compactly, her body drawn up against mine, and her shoulders seeming to enclose her head. I slid out of bed and went downstairs in the woolly darkness and dialed London on the phone in the library.
“Jenny — is that you?”
“Darling,” she said — she was surprised and pleased. “I didn’t think I’d hear from you so soon. What time is it there? It must be the crack of dawn.”
“Five-fifteen. I couldn’t sleep.”
“Is anything the matter?”
“No. Just jet lag.”
“Your voice sounds so strange.”
“I’m tired, I guess.”
“You poor thing — get some rest. You’ll be all right in a few days. You must be very excited about India.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’ve got so many other things to think about.”
“Anything I can help you with?”
“Not really — no,” I said quickly and then, “I have the guidebook I used ten years ago. I’m taking the same route.”
“Wouldn’t it be amazing if it were just the same?”
“It won’t be,” I said. “It can’t be.”
“Jack misses you, too. He’s nagging me skinny about buying him a computer.”
“Buy him one,” I said.
It seemed so innocent to want something that could be bought with money. I was going to tell Jenny that when she spoke up.
“I wish I were going to India with you,” she said. “But I’d just get in your way. And I know you have your heart set on going alone.”
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.
2
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.”