14 Degrees Below Zero (13 page)

Ramona said something Lewis couldn’t understand. “OK, honey, OK,” Jay said. “Just let me talk.”

“What is it?” Lewis asked.

“She wants to take a bath,” Jay said.

“She
does
?” Lewis said in amazement. “You know, most kids fight to stay out of the tub. You used to
cry
when it was bath time.”

“Well, get this—Ramona has started running her own water,” Jay said with a tired laugh.

“Amazing.”
And Ramona was. But in the cascading sadness of Lewis’s thoughts, that painful tumble all of his ideas entered into, Ramona’s resiliency and self-reliance seemed unspeakably sad. In the sickly light, Ramona’s strength seemed imposed on her by her lack of a father, by Jay’s taxed resources, by Anna’s early death. The added pressure of Stephen’s divisiveness was too much, a supplemental burden that was too great for a little girl to bear.

“Lewis,” Anna said.

Lewis stiffened in his chair, then shot out of it. He looked around. He was alone.

“Anyway, Dad—”

The shadows in the room betrayed nothing.

“Dad, are you still there?”

“Jay, honey, don’t worry yourself about it,” Lewis said, speaking very fast. “You and Ramona are my treasures, and I don’t want you to spend another second worrying about anything.”

Silence on the line. He looked around. So now he was hearing things—though he didn’t even believe
that.

“Jay?”

“Dad—”

What was that note in her voice? Was Jay on the verge of
tears
?

“You know, Dad, it’s been really hard since Mom died,” Jay whispered. “I know it’s been hard for you, too. But sometimes . . . sometimes . . .”

“What is it, Jay?” Lewis asked. “Please. Talk to me.”

“Sometimes it feels like . . . I don’t know, you have so many
expectations
of me.” Jay coughed. “Look, Dad, I don’t want you to take this the wrong way. It’s just that sometimes I feel like I don’t have enough
space
in my life. I’m not blaming you. It’s like you
need
so much, and I can never give you enough.”

“You’re a single mother,” Lewis said, keeping his voice delicate, unable to deal with the sobbing note in his daughter’s voice. “The demands on you are incredible.”

Had he
really
heard Anna’s voice saying his name?

“I know that, Dad. It’s just that—”

“What, honey? Tell me.”

“I’m
trying
to, Dad.” Jay exhaled sharply. “Dad, can you just let me
talk
?”

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Lewis said.

“I just need space,” Jay said in a defeated voice. “That’s all I can say. I feel like I don’t have any space.”

“Mama!” Ramona called out.

“What?”
Jay yelled.

“Nothing,” Lewis heard Ramona say, in a voice of heartbreaking quietness.

Enough, Lewis thought. This had gone too far. Yes, Jay had burdens and pressures, but Lewis had always tried to make things better. Every scraped knee, every bad test score and blow to her ego, even her disastrous pregnancy—hadn’t Lewis been there for all of them? Didn’t he specialize in being the custodian of Jay Ingraham?

“Dad? Are you there?”

And now Stephen, the master propagandist, had constructed a fairly tale in which Lewis was the big bad wolf. So he could use Jay up, and move on when he became bored. Well, it wasn’t going to work.

Right?
he asked the empty room.

“Dad?” Jay repeated.

“Yes, honey, I’m here,” Lewis said. “Whatever you need, I’m here.”

“Dad, don’t talk to Stephen anymore.”

“I don’t know if I can promise that.”

“Dad.”

“All right, I won’t speak to him.”

“
Good.
Thank you.”

After they hung up, Lewis went through every room in the house, looked in every closet. He went twice around the backyard and then searched the basement and the third floor, where the detritus of his married life was stacked in unruly piles of boxes. Carew followed his every step, strangely calm and reverential.

Lewis couldn’t shake the feeling that Anna was there. It was as though he sensed her around every corner, but as soon as he arrived there she vanished.

“I’m sorry for what I did,” he said. “I was trying to help you.”

He felt on the verge of finding her, but didn’t. Not that night.

Later, lying on the downstairs sofa in the dark of night, he thought about Stephen. He had problems to solve, and he was going to fix things before it was too late. Perhaps only then would he truly find her.

13. THEY HAD RIDDEN THE SWEET WAVE OF LUST; NOW IT WAS OVER.

W
hen Jay got up in the morning she found that her practice of sleeping with the window cracked open had backfired: the first sight of the new day was her breath condensing in a cloud before her eyes. She shivered, got up from under her thick down comforter, and crossed the room. What she saw outside made her gasp.

It had snowed during the night, about four or five inches’ worth. Yesterday’s dull gray landscape, the color of a sparrow’s wings, had turned into a sedate canvas of white. Old forms reduced themselves to vague outlines and gentle curves. Jay shut the window.

Strange, it hadn’t been in the forecast, such as it was—weather predictions in Minneapolis resembled the speculative fancies of hardcore paranoiacs. More than once Jay had thought about forecasting the weather herself, off the top of her head, then comparing the results against what really happened. She abandoned the idea as too Lewis-like.

Ramona was ensconced in a cocoon of blankets in her kid-sized bed. Jay paused a moment before turning on the light to admire her daughter. Kids, Jay had learned, went through phases of plumping up before elongating—that was how they grew. Ramona was definitely in a lengthening period; the leg that was thrust out from the bedding was long, lithe, a working model of a woman’s.

Five years, ten. Fifteen, and then she would be gone—and hopefully not having babies of her own.

“OK, kiddo, time to wake up,” Jay said, switching on the light.

Jay went into the kitchen and started grinding coffee. She was wearing only leggings and a Super Furry Animals T-shirt, and she rubbed her hands together to warm them. She liked being sleepy, and enjoyed the half-dumb state of impairment that came with morning. It was almost as good as being drunk.

Stephen would want to see her today. And she wanted to see him, she supposed. But she had no idea what to tell him.

Jay’s memory came back to her; it felt like a scene in some foreign city, where shopkeepers turned on the lights in a row along the lane, and babushkas emerged to sweep the sidewalk with laced-straw brooms. Business was starting in this new day, albeit in a language scarcely comprehensible.

She thought of the night her mother died. It had been so strange. When she remembered it, it was as a series of images, like paintings. There was Lewis opening the door for her and Ramona. There was Ramona going to the porch with Lewis, the little girl unaware (or so she thought at the time, but surely Ramona suspected) of what weighed on the adults. There was Anna Ingraham in her bed, dressed in a robe, flat on her back, her eyes closed and her mouth slightly open. She had been cold, her skin darkening. The room had smelled of air freshener that Lewis must have sprayed.

It was her time,
Lewis said at the door.
She barely suffered. I was there. I made sure of it.

Jay kissed her mother’s cold cheek, held her cold hand, illogically adjusted her pillows as though to make her more comfortable.

“Mama?” said Ramona from behind her.

Ramona stood barefoot in her Spongebob Squarepants nightshirt—a gift from Anna last Christmas. Ramona’s fine dark hair stuck out at absurd angles from her oversized head, and she rubbed her eyes with her fist.

“Look outside,” Jay said. “It snowed.”

“Really?” Ramona squealed, pad-padding to the living room, where she gazed at the street with hushed and reverential appreciation.

Jay realized, all at once and with surprise, that she was seriously entertaining breaking up with Stephen.
That
was the feeling she was having—anticipatory loss. It wasn’t going to work out, was it? It was out of her control. Their age gap, the different phases of their lives—they had ridden the sweet wave of lust, but now the forces aligned against them were simply too much.

One time Anna had warned Jay against going down this emotional road. She said that Stephen was a good person, someone who could be counted on. Anna said that initial attraction always waned and it was what was left over afterward that mattered. Yet Anna’s marriage to Lewis, and the form it took as it endured, was at best a mystery to Jay. As a girl Jay worshiped Anna in the way one adores her creator, a being endowed with untouchable depths and endless aspects. Later Jay had seen Anna as a person who had not realized her potential, a woman whose talents ended up producing little more than plain, bland landscapes of her own backyard.

“You told me not to leave him,” Jay said quietly to her mother. “But maybe you were just talking to yourself.”

“What, Mama?” said Ramona, who was pulling on a T-shirt.

“Oh, nothing, honey,” Jay replied.

“You were talking to Grandma, weren’t you?” Ramona said with a gleam. “I do that, too. I can’t wait until she comes back and we can talk all the time like we used to.”

Jay was certain that Ramona had no idea whatsoever why her mother suddenly went to her and enveloped her in a stifling embrace, nor why Jay wept silent tears into her daughter’s hair—tears that would not dry, but would freeze into tiny ice crystals when they went together into the cold of the snowy morning.

When Jay drove to Stephen’s apartment building, tucked into a little residential enclave a short walk from the wooded circle of Lake Harriet, she immediately spotted his car parked on the street. It had been a tricky drive, with cars skidding and spinning erratically in the first measurable snow of the season—Lewis always said it amazed him, how people who had lived in Minnesota their entire lives would drive as though they had never seen the white stuff before. This first blanket was always disorienting; familiar landmarks turned into abstract representations of themselves, and the color white suddenly dominated everything in sight. Black was usually assigned as the hue for the void, but its yin-yang opposite sufficed as well—white was a blank, a confounding nothing, like Melville’s white whale a screen onto which to project all manner of rage and frustration.

The snow was like that, among other things. But Jay was not angry with Stephen. She was simply resolved that things had to change.

She parked in front of a house whose lone evergreen had been wedding-caked with big clumps of snow with little patches of deep green showing through the thickening white. Jay looked up; the sky was overcast, and more was coming down. The quiet of the morning made her feel as though she were on a stage set, in a dream or a tableau in someone’s sleeping imagination. It was not a feeling she liked.

“Come on,” she said to herself. “Go talk to him.”

Stephen’s building was a four-stacker like hers, but it was in a more upscale neighborhood. While he enjoyed the same square footage that Jay was compelled to share with Ramona, his own patch was considerably better maintained—and he was much less likely to have to endure a horde of ballistic punk rockers living downstairs, as had been the case for Jay two years ago.

Jay rang the buzzer. The place was shuttered and shingled, the windows all tidy and immaculate—it was in the small details that class differences emerged. Well, and admittedly some large details as well, such as the hanging gutter that decorated the back of Jay’s building and cluttered the view from her bathroom window.

“Yes?” Stephen said through the distortions of the wire.

“It’s me. Jay.”

“Jay?” Stephen said, somewhat excitedly. “I didn’t—”

“I know. I’m sorry I didn’t call first.”

“Don’t apologize. Come on up.”

The door clicked open and Jay went inside. She climbed the stairs and Stephen was waiting halfway out in the hall holding the door open. He was dressed in slacks, shoes, and an unbuttoned shirt, and his thick hair fell nicely over his forehead and ears. He
was
a sight that she had enjoyed getting used to seeing.

“This is a nice surprise,” he said, putting his arm around her and leading her into his apartment. When he kissed her, she responded out of habit, but she pulled away the moment his hands started to wander. He looked hurt before he managed to raise his defenses behind a smile and folded arms.

“I’m afraid I don’t have much time, anyway,” he said. “I have to teach a class in forty-five minutes.”

“I know,” she told him. “I wasn’t even sure you were going to be here.”

“Why didn’t you call, then?” he asked. “It looks pretty treacherous out there.”

“You forget—I’m an old hand at the snow,” she said.

“Well, give me time,” Stephen said with a laugh. “We’ll buy a house together, get a snowblower—the works. You can see me into my old age turning into one of those guys wearing a hat with earflaps and those big old boots I won’t even bother to lace up.”

Jay had to smile at the image. Stephen was so composed, so adept at inhabiting his self, that it was funny to imagine him as a disheveled old man. She slipped off her shoes and wandered across the ornate rug, skirting the sofa and making for the window.

“OK, my not-so-subtle allusion to our future domesticity didn’t get the response I was fishing for,” he said.

“Stephen, don’t,” she said, unable to look at him.

“It doesn’t have to be a house,” he said. “If that’s too close to bourgeois splendor, then we’ll buy a plot of land in the country and live in a yurt. You know what a yurt is? It’s a—”

“I
know
what a yurt is,” Jay said.

Stephen’s face fell. “Well, anyway, we’ll live in one of
those.
We’ll have to section it off so Ramona can have some privacy, but it’ll be a fortifying experience for her.”

She checked out the stack of CDs next to Stephen’s stereo: Mahler symphonies, Mozart piano concertos, the most recent Bob Dylan album, Thelonious Monk. On top was a Pink Floyd compilation, a nod to the stoner past Stephen sought to hide from everyone.

“Jay?” He moved behind her, not touching.

“This isn’t easy,” she said, looking out the window. The snow was falling harder now.

“What isn’t . . . no, we’re not going to have that conversation, are we? We can’t.”

She tried to withstand his handsomeness hovering over her, the comforting lines of his face. It would be so easy to back down from what she’d decided, and to fall into his arms and let him lead her to the bedroom. For it was always in the bedroom that their differences fell away and everything seemed possible—no, probable—and all
good
things seemed a sure bet.

“I’m sorry, Stephen,” she said.

He rested his fingers on her elbow. “Jay, you can’t let this business with Lewis come between us like this.”

“I’m not.” Jay moved away. “You have to understand, it’s not the stuff with Dad. Maybe it sparked something, I don’t know, but—”

“Jay, in one breath you’re saying Lewis isn’t breaking us up, and in the next you’re admitting he is.”

“It’s not something I want to debate,” Jay said. She exhaled hard and leaned back against the sill.

“I agree,” Stephen said. He brushed his hair back from his forehead in a fussy, nervous manner. “We shouldn’t be debating
anything.
We should be
together.
Jay, please, don’t do this.”

“I’ve been thinking. Which, admittedly, is a dangerous thing.” Jay laughed, but Stephen remained grave. “Look, we have too many differences. I just don’t feel like it’s . . . like
we’re
going to work out.”

Stephen began buttoning up his shirt, looking down at his fingers, shielding his face from her.

“What?” Jay asked. “What are you thinking?”

When he looked up, his eyes were blurry. Jay was startled to see him this way. He looked years younger.

“It’s just that—” he paused. “Jay, it’s just that, since we’ve been together, you’ve been acting on this paradigm—”

“Stephen,”
Jay interrupted. “Just talk normally.”

He looked as though she’d struck him.

“I didn’t know you resented me speaking in analytical terms,” he said.

“I don’t.” Jay touched him lightly on the shoulder. “Don’t look so beaten down. It’s just little old me.”

“But that’s just it,” Stephen said, showing a flash of anger. “There’s no ‘little old Jay.’ That’s precisely what I was talking about. You’ve set things up so that I’m the high-and-mighty professor with you as the naïve little waitress. But it doesn’t hold water. You’re a formidable person, Jay—you get it from your father. But you’ve had this attitude that you’re lucky to be with me, that all our differences work in my favor. But Jay, you know, I don’t want to be without you.”

“Stephen—”

“No, let me finish.” He folded his arms around himself, his voice strained. “I’m older than you, yes, I can’t change that. But I . . . I
love
you, Jay. I want us to build our lives together.”

“Oh, shit, Stephen.” She had warned herself against this. His emotions were peaking, her own were like water coming to a boil. She didn’t want a crying scene. She couldn’t take it. How to communicate to him that she had simply
made up her mind
?

“Don’t do this,” Stephen said. “Come back to me.”

“I’m not going to do that,” she said.

“Why not?”
he asked in a high-pitched, unfamiliar voice, the intonation of a little boy denied the thing he wanted most.

Why not? Because she had made up her mind. Of course Stephen was paying for the sins of Michael Carmelov, and Lewis Ingraham, and Jay Ingraham, as well. It wasn’t fair, but it didn’t need to be. Stephen knew what was going on—hadn’t they once discussed how it was the female human’s rightful responsibility to break up, that it was her role to manage the primal core of mate selection behind the confused jumble of what was called a “relationship”?

The sun was up, a blurred suggestion of itself through the thick pack of overcast. It looked like it was going to snow all day.

Jay looked up at Stephen, suddenly aware that she hadn’t answered his desperate question.

“I’ve always been honest with you,” she said.

“I know you think that,” Stephen said in a low voice.

“What’s that mean?” she asked.

“Nothing.” Stephen folded his arms and cupped his chin in one hand. “I’m upset. I’m probably going to start saying stupid things. I have to go talk to a bunch of uninterested undergraduates about Walter Benjamin, and it’s going to be hard to do because you’ve just hurled a load of plastic explosives into my life.”