To Paradise

But she couldn’t. And so she would have stood outside, just across the street from the house, leaning against the cold iron fence surrounding the Square, watching the waiters present the soup, and then the meat, and then the salad, and wine being poured, and, although she wouldn’t have been able to hear, jokes being told and everyone laughing. And it was only when all the guests had stood that she, by now so chilled she could barely move, her feet numb in her old combat boots that she’d mended with electrical tape, would see one of the waiters duck onto Fifth Avenue for a smoke and then disappear into the back of the house and realize that there was a service entrance, and she would go there, leaning on the buzzer, announcing David’s name, refusing to enter that golden house.

He knew, looking at her, that part of her would never forgive him, would never forgive the fact that he had—even unintentionally—made her feel so uncomfortable, like such a nothing. He stood on the other side of the door, in the sweater and pants Charles had bought him, the softest clothes he had ever worn, and looked at her in what she called her fancy outfit—a frayed wool herringbone man’s coat, so long it brushed the ground; a brown thrift-store suit worn shiny from use; an old rep tie in stripes of orange and black; a fedora pushed back from her round, plain face; the thin mustache she drew with eyeliner above her upper lip for special occasions—and understood that inviting her here, having her witness his life here, had taken from her the joy of wearing those clothes, of being who she was. She was dear to him, she was his closest friend, she was the only one he had told the real story of what happened to his father. “I’ll cut anyone who messes with you,” she would say to him as they walked through a dangerous part of Alphabet City or the Lower East Side, and he would try not to smile, because she was more than a foot shorter than he was, and so plump and ticklish that just the thought of her barreling toward an assailant, knife in hand, made him grin, but he also knew she meant it: She would protect him, always, against anyone. But by inviting her here, he had failed to protect her. In their world, among their friends, she was Eden, brilliant and witty and singular. In Charles’s world, though, she would be whom everyone else saw: a mannish, overweight, short Chinese American woman, unfeminine and unattractive, charmless and loud, in cheap secondhand clothes and a mustache made of makeup, someone whom people ignored or laughed at, as Charles’s friends surely would have, despite their efforts not to. And now Charles’s world had become his world as well, and for the first time in their friendship there was a trench, and there was no way for her to come to him, and no way that he could return to her.

He opened the door and went to her. She looked up, and saw him, and they stared at each other in silence. Eden, he said. Come in. You’re freezing.

But she shook her head. “No way,” she said.

Please. There’s tea, or wine, or coffee, or cider, or—

“I can’t stay,” she said. Then why have you come? he wanted to say, but didn’t. “I have places to be,” she continued. “I just came to give you this,” and handed him a lumpy little package wrapped in newsprint. “Open it later,” she instructed, and he slipped it into his coat pocket. “I’d better go,” she said.

Wait, he said, and hurried back inside, where the staff was wrapping up the last of the leftovers, shrouding the chocolate mountain in tinfoil. He grabbed it—Adams raising his eyebrows but saying nothing—and staggered back downstairs, both of his arms wrapped around it.

Here, he said to Eden, handing it over to her. It’s the chocolate mountain.

She was surprised, he could tell, and adjusted it in her arms, listing a little beneath its weight. “What the fuck, David?” she said. “What’m I going to do with this?”

He had shrugged. I don’t know, he said. But it’s yours.

“How’m I going to get it home?”

A cab?

“I don’t have money for a cab. And I don’t,” she said, as David reached into his pocket, “I don’t want your money, David.”

I don’t know what you want me to say, Eden, he said, and then, when she said nothing, I love him. I’m sorry, but I do. I love him.

For a while they had stood there, quiet, in the cold night. From inside, he could hear the thump-thump-thump of house music begin to play. “Then fuck you, David,” said Eden, quietly, and she had turned and left, still lugging the chocolate mountain, the hem of her coat dusting the ground behind her in a way that made her appear, for a moment, grand. He had watched her round the corner. Then he went back into the house and returned to Charles’s side.

“Everything okay?” Charles asked, and David nodded.

They did the best they could, afterward. The next day he called Eden at home, and spoke into the answering machine—the message still in his voice—but she didn’t pick up, and she didn’t call him back. For a whole month, they didn’t speak, and every afternoon David would stare at his phone at Larsson, Wesley, willing that it would ring and he would hear Eden’s dry, throaty croak on the other end. And then, finally, she did call, one afternoon in late January.