14 Degrees Below Zero (14 page)

“Don’t be melodramatic,” Jay said.

“I’m not,” Stephen replied. “All right, I am. But you don’t seem to understand what I’m trying to tell you. I
need
you, Jaybird. I’m all alone. I’m not sure how much I’m enjoying this life I’ve chosen. You are the bright spot that gets me through.”

“Stephen—”

“I mean these things I’m saying to you,” he said.

Stephen’s tide of emotion evoked a complex reaction within her, as nuanced as a wash of tastes, or smells. First an ephemeral tang of regret and sympathy for him, then a powerful tug of wishing to make him feel better. Which would mean . . . doing what he asked, transforming her reality to match the dictates of his needs. Being with him, being
his.
And this felt like the basis of almost all her interactions, from the unquenchable thirst of Lewis for attention and reaction to the feckless adolescent sexual needs of Michael Carmelov that had left her with . . . and now a blind alley, a place best untouched, but there were the childish demands of Ramona, so hard to meet. The only person who hadn’t made Jay feel burdened had been Anna, whose airy presence had always, if nothing else, enveloped Jay in comfort and acceptance.

“I don’t want to be with anyone right now,” she told Stephen.

“But we can make each other’s lives so much better,” he said, holding his hands out as though begging.

“Of course I’ve believed that from the beginning,” Jay told him. “But I don’t now. Maybe it’s bad timing. I’m so sorry to hurt you, Stephen. This is hurting me, too. And it will hurt Ramona. But I’m doing what I think is best for me.”

“And there’s no room for discussion,” Stephen said.

“No, there really isn’t.”

“Then get out.”

“Yes, I understand.”

“Please get out of here right now,” Stephen said, turning away. He worked at tucking in his shirt and moved to his desk, where notes and books were piled beside his briefcase.

“We can talk later if you want,” Jay offered, suddenly feeling a landslide of panic over the suddenness of what had happened.

“Maybe, I don’t know,” Stephen said, occupied with his things. “Just get out. Leave me alone.”

“All right, I’m—”

“Can you just do what I’m fucking asking?” he shouted, still looking away. “Get out, Jay!
Leave!
”

“Yes, all right,” she whispered, suddenly frightened of him.

She went out to the hall and gently closed the door behind her. Just as she started to walk down the stairs, she heard a crash from somewhere inside Stephen’s apartment.

What had she just done?

The snow was falling on the street outside, filling the dead flower beds, piling on window ledges, flicked in clumps from monotonous windshield wipers. Jay walked to her car quickly, almost furtively, for reasons she couldn’t quite define. She had gotten what she wanted. She was a degree more free.

14. HIDEBOUND, EARTH-LADEN, AND FINALLY FREE.

I
t had been appallingly apparent to Lewis from the moment of waking that something was wrong. It was an embarrassment to feel stable consciousness so out of reach, to sense the pull of memory as strong as perceptions of the present moment.

But that’s the way it was.

He saw Anna in her last night alive on planet Earth, on her back in bed, out of her mind on drugs and muttering things that made no sense. Her sick smell pervaded the room, her once-beautiful face had transformed into a gaunt, unrecognizable mask. One moment she seemed to notice him there, in the next she was half-gone, struggling to project herself into wherever it was that she was going. He had played Pablo Casals on the stereo, her favorite, the strings of the cello luring her into a sweet and welcome nothingness of sleep.

Sleep. It was like she was trying to go to sleep, but couldn’t. She had lived two months longer than the doctors said she would.

Lewis had tried to assist her in making a world in which she could enjoy living. The house she loved, their daughter, the garden—he had made them possible. And though she had traded the ephemeral promise of her youth for these things—and it was undeniably true that of this husband and wife, she was the only one who possessed any talent or contact with the transcendent—she had long seemed content to have made the trade, to have accepted the morning light through the kitchen windows and the idle hours on the sunporch. She had made herself content, sometimes happy, in the world that Lewis had made for her. He loved her for it, if it had taken her dying for him to realize it.

Snap back.

Oh, what a shitty morning—Carew French-kissing him was his first waking perception. Then the pills, and the shakes, in the bathroom. The front door was stubborn and didn’t want to open, and when Lewis nearly performed a pratfall onto his porch, it was to the sight of inches of powdery snow up and down the quiet street. Bundled up like an Eskimo, Lewis took Carew to Dogshit Park, which had overnight turned itself into an Arctic Refuge. Lewis looked up and saw a squirrel perched on a power line, shivering, staring out at the world with a stunned expression. It had all changed, things were fucked up. Carew, with his indefatigable good humor, sniffed and dug and danced as though it was Christmas morning.

And now he sat in the driver’s seat of his car, watching his daughter leave Stephen Grant’s apartment building. He was parked down the block, where there was little chance of her spotting him. He didn’t know what he would say if she did—because he had little idea why he had come to Stephen’s. He simply had. And he had parked and waited when he saw Jay’s little blue sedan parked in front.

He looked around for Anna. She
would
come back again, if he were vigilant. And he sensed that whatever he was doing would speed the process of bringing her back to him.

Lewis owned a gun. It was funny how he had managed to hide that fact even from his own wife. It hadn’t been too hard—early in their marriage they had established that looking through each other’s things was bad form. Lewis had voted for Jimmy Carter, for Bill Clinton twice, he had opposed both Iraq wars and had made sport many times of Charlton Heston’s Moses-at-the-firing-range posturing. Yet one day, about ten years ago, Lewis had gone to a gun shop and bought a .38, then snuck off to a firing range and learned how to fire it. He hadn’t seen Moses there, or the Omega Man, but it sure felt good to make explosions come out of his hand and to watch paper targets fall into shreds.

Now he had the .38 in his pocket. Who would expect old Lewis Ingraham to be packing a gun? He had a permit for it. The state had given him permission to arm himself. What a great country.

Jay was unlocking her car. She looked upset. What had Stephen said, to make her look up with such obvious distress at his upstairs window, to struggle with her keys, to pull out so quickly?

Nothing was right. Everything looked ugly, as though trying to tell Lewis something. The tightness in his chest, the foreboding of death, had set in early. He also had a pain in his guts that had started up just before sleep. And the sleep—it was an unwarranted courtesy to call it anything resembling rest. He had woken almost every hour, thinking that someone was in the room with him (Anna?), plunging in and out of a series of dreams that drew upon the worst of his life for source material: deadline anxieties from school days, humiliations at the office, even an evocation of childhood terror, a memory of feeling that he was to blame for the strife between his parents.

He cleared his windshield and watched Jay’s taillights flash as she turned the corner. The wipers beat out a rudimentary 2/4 beat, an idiot thud to match the monotonous rhythm in his aching chest.

Stephen’s door opened again. From it, toting his briefcase, came the man of the hour. Stephen had on a long black wool coat and, Lewis could hardly believe it,
earmuffs.

Lewis got out of his car.

Stephen opened up the door of his prim little Volkswagen and tossed his briefcase inside. His breath condensed around his face. Lewis started toward him, staying to the street rather than the sidewalk, his shoes crunching in the trenches carved out by cars through the snow.

He felt dizzy, he felt not right. He felt as if he were about to fall. As he walked, he sensed himself about to flinch from real or imagined dangers. His entire nervous system was overtuned and irritated. He had no idea what he was about to do.

“Lewis?” Stephen said, looking up from his car. “What in the world?”

Lewis pulled his coat tight around his neck and tried to will away the chill that threatened to take possession of his fragile form. His hand in his pocket, he felt the metal of the gun grow colder with exposure to the elements.

“Lewis,” Stephen said. “What’s wrong?”

There was an urgent manner that required addressing. Lewis had promised Jay he wouldn’t talk to Stephen. But he hadn’t yet, had he?

“Aren’t you going to say anything?” Stephen asked.

Stephen looked red-eyed and haunted, which was a surprise. Apparently he had some sort of conscience.

The snow fell in big fluffy clumps.

Lewis was aware that there was once a time when he felt differently, when the vivid discomfort of existence did not press upon him with such force. But events and the particular bent of his nature had led him to this point—hidebound, earth-laden, finally free and entirely lacking any idea what to do next.

Would shooting Stephen bring Anna back? Was that what she wanted?

“If it makes you happy,” Stephen was saying from across a great distance, “your daughter just terminated our relationship. You have been successful. You won.”

With great effort, Lewis focused on what Stephen was saying—more accusations, more recrimination.

“What do you
want,
man?” Stephen barked. “Are you stalking me or something?”

Well, maybe he was. It was a question that merited some sort of reply, wasn’t it?

Lewis pulled his right hand from out of his coat pocket. In it he held the gun.

Stephen, for an instant, tried to assume a look of sardonic disapproval and mockery. But it couldn’t last. There was only so long you could sneer at a firearm, no matter how much academic theory you were armed with. The gun was heavy and cold in Lewis’s ungloved hand. Without giving much thought to what he was doing, he switched the safety off.

“Lewis, come on,” Stephen said, reaching out for his car to hold him up as his knees started to buckle. “Don’t be foolish.”

Allegations of foolishness were perhaps not the optimal strategy for a man in Stephen’s position. Lewis sensed the precipice at which he now stood, and he intuited the manifold paths that his reality could now take—and so many of them were unfavorable.

It was going to be very hard to go back to selling shirts, wasn’t it? Lewis thought he wasn’t going to be returning to the department store. That stopgap attempt at normality was closed and sealed.

“Please,” Stephen was saying as he looked around the empty street. “Haven’t you done enough?”

Lewis flipped the cold metal safety back on the gun and returned it to his pocket. He took out a cigarette and lit it, shielding his lighter from the light breeze and the snow. Stephen suddenly seemed quite irrelevant.

“I can’t believe you did that,” Stephen said.

After marshaling such restraint, it would be pointless to engage Stephen in any kind of debate at this point—and, Lewis reminded himself, he had managed not to break his pledge to Jay. He puffed on his cigarette as though it was his first, or his last, then closed the distance between himself and Stephen and clapped the younger man lightly on the shoulder. He turned and started walking back to his car.

Though he couldn’t remember feeling worse, physically, his spirit enjoyed a strange and unfamiliar ebullience. He played his little game and pretended that Anna was at home waiting for him. She would nag him about shoveling the walk, and he would pretend to be irritated. They would act out their little patterns, so secure in the roles they had defined for each other:
you be you, and I’ll be me.
It was such a comfort to imagine, just for a little while, that it was still possible.

Stephen watched Lewis’s Lexus disappear into the fogged morning. He leaned against his car. There were a couple of kids walking to school, a neighbor across the street preparing to fire up his snowblower. Where were they a few minutes ago, when Lewis Ingraham drew a gun on him in the stark light of day?

Once inside the car, with the engine running, Stephen tuned in to the motor’s rhythm and realized that his own heart was beating extraordinarily fast. His hands were cold and numb. He gripped the steering wheel and stared through the windshield.

It was going to be hard to get to class on time. Of course he had a perfectly acceptable explanation:
Sorry I’m late, students, but I had to get my heart ripped out by my lover and receive a silent death threat from her father before I could make my way over to campus.

It was true that Stephen had a tendency to view the events of his life in literary and analytic terms—every neck ache was a manifestation of unresolved conflict, each sin of omission was a veiled statement of intent, yes, yes, guilty as charged. He saw the unfolding of life’s events as interconnected nodes in a great pattern that he could understand if only he
thought
about it hard enough. Jay used to laugh at him in their early days together, when they were still in the initial process of unveiling themselves to each other. She was positively tickled that Stephen found it impossible to admit that some things just
happened;
she had claimed that, in his way, Stephen was every bit as superstitious and portent-seeking as a medieval villager hiding inside his hut at the sight of a shooting star.

No one understood him the way Jay did. Stephen steered his car through the slow-moving herd, feeling the wheels slide under him as he made a turn. He pulled his earmuffs down around his neck—they were a concession to the cold that didn’t require matting down his hair under a hat. The snow was engulfing everything, daubing big blots of white silence over the city. He would never get used to it.

He had to slam on his brakes at the final stoplight before the Lyndale entrance to 94. His car slid out and its nose protruded rudely into the crosswalk. People gave him dirty looks as they walked around him.

This was the first drive to work in the post-Jay era. He would come home alone that night, eat alone, grade papers alone. There would be no one there in the morning. He would most likely never again see the supple curve of her back, the perfect spheres of her breasts, or her eyes closed in transport as he lost himself within her. Jay was, for all her aimlessness, extraordinarily sure once she actually got down to the business of deciding on something.

So that was that. Stephen merged onto the freeway, checked the clock on the dashboard and saw that he was going to be late for his own lecture. He’d gone and fallen in love—after years of trying to perfect an impenetrable core that couldn’t be budged by hurt or dependence—and now she’d left him. He felt, strangely enough, as though nothing at all was happening.

And now the memory of the gun. Stephen had stared down the barrel, the way detective novels described it, and seen down into a black void of darkness. He wondered how close Lewis had been to pulling the trigger. It looked like a big gun, and it might have killed him—Stephen had read once that the impact alone from a bullet is often enough to disrupt the heart’s rhythm and induce death. He imagined the red of his blood on the white snow, the cloud of scorched gunpowder in the crisp morning air.

He supposed something had to be done about Lewis, but he wasn’t sure what. Stephen wasn’t inclined to respond to violence in kind, and Lewis hadn’t actually
done
anything. He suspected the old boy had engaged in a little old-fashioned angry-father terrorism.

Which brought him back to Jay. He had lost her.

Stephen pulled his car into one of the last spaces in the ramp nearest the lecture hall. He switched off the motor and looked at himself in the mirror under the sun visor, trying to get into character for his students. He worked harder than usual to locate his inner professor that morning, because it surely wasn’t much fun at the moment being plain old Stephen Grant.

INTERLUDE. FEEDING THE PENGUINS AND MAKING SURE THEIR BABIES WERE SAFE.

I
n Antarctica it was cold
all
the time. Sometimes you couldn’t even go outside because your nose and your toes and your fingers would freeze and fall off. And the doctors wouldn’t be able to put them back on again. You’d lose them
forever.

The Perfect Princess had left her throne unoccupied for a time (always a dangerous prospect—there were would-be usurpers everywhere) in order to mount an expedition to Antarctica to look for her Grandma Anna. She had with her a team of royal assistants who helped her in her terrible struggle, and who lived to tend to her every terrible whim.