14 Degrees Below Zero (4 page)

“That’s too much,” Jay said. She found a box of tissues on the dresser and blew her nose.

Her thoughts fell into a familiar downward cascade. Ramona, Stephen, her job, her father, her
life
—all of it blurred into a single insurmountable problem that made her fingers tingle and left her wanting to levitate and never come down again. Her room looked shabby and small, with its beat-up postcollege furniture and vomitous green color scheme. She smelled stale sex rising from the sheets. All of it,
all of it,
became a spongy fear that expanded inside her, which would grow and magnify throughout the day until Ramona’s bedtime, when she would be so tired from all the worry and uncertainty that her eyes and back would burn. How to argue with the dread when the dread might be right? Maybe things were going to keep slipping away from her. Maybe Stephen really just liked to fuck her, and would eventually get tired of it. Maybe she would still be wearing a Pavement T-shirt in ten years.

She was a single mother who waited tables.

“Mama?” said Ramona from the doorway, looking up sheepishly. “Can I have breakfast now?”

“Of course, sweetie,” Jay said. “Mama’s really sorry she yelled at you.”

Ramona turned on her heels and ran down the hallway with heavy steps. She never acknowledged Jay’s profuse apologies. Jay couldn’t tell whether it was because the offense was already forgiven and forgotten, or whether something deeper and dark was going on.

Jay ran her hands through her hair and shrugged at Stephen. It was so early in the day.

“Look, I’ll talk to him,” Stephen said. “I’ll be tactful. I know how to dance around with people like Lewis.”

“No. No, let me do it.”

“That won’t work,” he replied. “You go into these conversations with your father full of resolve. Then he batters you with his sarcasm, and all that loving manipulation he throws your way, and then you’re right back in it. You’re a little girl again.”

“Maybe,” Jay said, heading out into the hall.

“Maybe nothing,” Stephen called out from her room, though not without kindness.

Jay made for the kitchen and put on a Lifter Puller CD. There was toast to be made and milk to be dispensed. Ramona was going to be late for day care once again. There were so many things that needed to be done.

INTERLUDE. IN THE CAR, THERE WAS NO WIND.

R
amona had a lot of secrets. Some of the secrets were good, and others were bad. There were some secrets that she wasn’t sure were which, but in order to find out she’d have to reveal them to a grown-up, and then they wouldn’t be secrets anymore.

You could talk about some things to grown-ups. Other things you had to keep to yourself. Ramona’s mama was beautiful and smelled good and was really smart. She also got mad really fast. There were a lot of things that Ramona knew Mama wouldn’t understand.

Like the car seat. Ramona kind of liked it. It allowed her to sit up high, so she could see the trees going by. She liked to count the dogs on the way to day care.

“Three,” she said. It was a black dog on a leash. She held up her bear so that it could see, too.

“What, honey?” Mama asked, looking in the mirror.

“Nothing,” Ramona replied.

The thing about the car seat, actually, was that Ramona hated being strapped inside it. It reminded her of the electricity chair she saw one time on TV when she was watching a movie she wasn’t supposed to be watching. Someone had pushed a button, and the man inside it had died. Ramona sort of wondered whether her mama had a button like that someplace.

“Four,” Ramona whispered. That one looked like a nice doggy. She made sure that Bear could see it. Grampa Lewis had a very nice doggy named Carew. Bear loved Carew as much as Ramona did.

One time one of the fish in the tank in Ramona’s room died, and Ramona cried for a long time. She was still waiting for the fish to come back, but it hadn’t, not yet. Ramona wondered what was taking so long, but this was one of the secrets she didn’t want to talk about with Mama.

Because when you died you went away. Ramona wasn’t sure what had to happen for you to come back, but she figured she’d find out soon.

Mama was cussing at the car in front of her. Mama wasn’t supposed to cuss. No one was, but they did it anyway. One time Ramona said
goddammit
and Grampa Lewis got real mad and sort of yelled at Mama about it. Mama said that Ramona probably heard it from him. Ramona was supposed to never say that again.

It looked windy outside. It was getting colder. In the car, there was no wind. That made Ramona feel kind of sad, because she liked the wind even though it messed up her hair.

A lot of things made Ramona kind of sad. She didn’t know why. That was another secret. She wasn’t supposed to be sad, it bothered grown-ups. So she didn’t tell them when she felt that way.

Like now.

She liked Stephen but didn’t want him to know it. It wasn’t a big deal. She had been really surprised to see him in their house this morning. Ramona wondered what Stephen and Mama did when they closed the door. She suspected it had to do with butts, or Mama’s vagina. She wasn’t sure.

Stephen kind of wanted to pretend he was Ramona’s daddy. She didn’t like that. Ramona had a daddy, though she didn’t like him. She sort of didn’t like men. Some of her friends’ daddies were all right, in a way, but she wouldn’t want any of them to be her father.

She liked Grampa Lewis. A lot. He was tall, and handsome, and he gave Ramona candy and told her not to tell her Mama about it. He was really strong, and sometimes when she was with him she wished he would kick someone’s butt so she could see what it would look like. She knew he could kick pretty much anybody’s butt if he wanted to.

The sky had a lot of clouds. It was going to get colder, maybe tomorrow. Ramona remembered winter. It felt like hurting inside.

Grown-ups were hurting all the time. Their bones popped when they walked. Grampa Lewis cracked and popped all the time. It was funny.

“I’m craziest about that dog,” Ramona told Bear. It was a special dog, all black with white spots on its face.

“What did you say, honey?” Mama asked.

“Nothing,” Ramona told her.

You couldn’t tell grown-ups the whole truth. They wanted it, but you couldn’t give it to them. That was how it worked. Ramona didn’t make the rules. They were always asking questions, with their big faces and big eyes. You had to figure out what they wanted to hear. Otherwise they would get mad, and they might not give you treats and presents. Mama was hungry for Ramona all the time, hugging her, touching her, asking her how she felt. It was nice, but sometimes Ramona pretended not to hear Mama, and pretended not to notice her.

Because she was the Perfect Princess. Sometimes she was
both
Ramona and the Perfect Princess, but that was hard to explain and she was still working it out. The Perfect Princess talked to Mama sometimes, giving Ramona a place to hide and not deal with all the things that Mama wanted from her.

And if Ramona answered all of Mama’s questions, there would be none left. And then Mama might die like Grandma.

She wanted to ask Mama when Grandma was coming back. Grandma was Mama’s Mama. That was magic. The Perfect Princess thought dying was like going on a vacation. There were trees there, and water. Grandma was having a nice rest.

Sometimes Ramona wondered if Grampa was kind of a bad man. He was nice to her, but he wasn’t always nice to other people. Sometimes he was, but it was also weird how he acted.

Now they were at day care. It was time to visit with her royal subjects: the younger kids. She would pretend the older kids weren’t even there. Mama opened the car door and undid Ramona’s car seat. Ramona slid out.

“What are you thinking about?” Mama asked. “You’ve been so quiet this morning.”

“Nothing,” Ramona said.

“Oh, come on,” Mama said with a laugh. “You have to be thinking something. Everybody is thinking of something.”

“I love you, Mama,” said the Perfect Princess.

“Oh, honey,” Mama said. Her eyes got watery and she kissed the Perfect Princess on the forehead.

Ramona liked her mama. The Perfect Princess wasn’t sure. The Perfect Princess didn’t really like anybody.

4. A SINGLE MOTHER COLLEGE DROPOUT WITH RAVEN BLACK HAIR.

T
here were a number of things on Stephen Grant’s mind as he made his way to his late-model Volkswagen. There was a thin stratum of logistical fretting—the stop by his house, the things he needed to pick up there—then a layer of mental preparation for his classes that morning, which was not dissimilar in nature from the sort of all-around readiness evinced by an actor who was starring in a play later that day. Stephen liked thinking on this level, letting half-formed memories percolate in a stew of ephemera. It was probably why he had become a teacher—for, unlike many of his colleagues, he viewed himself as a teacher first, an educator even, and a theorist second.

He wished these were the only thoughts that preoccupied his consciousness as he started up the car and glanced back at the brick apartment building where Jay and Ramona lived. Stephen, it turned out—and it pained and embarrassed him on some level to admit it—was an actual
human being
who required companionship and suffered a deep primordial longing for the daily dramas his fellow
Homo sapiens sapiens
were so adept at creating. On a purely intellectual level, he wanted to be emotionally self-sufficient. He would even forgo his penis, that tyrant and benefactor, if the reward were to be total freedom from the weaknesses and caprice of
other people.

Stephen flipped on his heater. It wasn’t terribly cold yet, but he was from California and had yet to acclimate to the tundra. The U. of Minnesota was a fine enough school, and given the hiring climate in the humanities he was lucky to have landed a tenure-track job there, even given his standing as a complete badass and object of fear and envy from the silverbacks in the department. Still, the U. had the distinct misfortune of being situated at approximately the same latitude as Moscow. This meant vividly painful winters, sheets of slippery ice, Stephen’s black car coated in road salt and sliding through stop signs in a miasma of slush and snow. Winter was coming in a matter of weeks—Stephen’s third in Minneapolis. The dread was almost enough to distract him from his driving.

He had an ordered mind, and he doubted whether those who knew him earlier in life understood how psychically disciplined he had become since his dope-smoking, acid-dropping college days. Everyone back home remembered him as a stoner, a burnout, which kind of pissed him off. Now he went to the highest-level academic conferences, where people had heard of him and listened to his latest talk on Lacan or even Borges, for God’s sake, when he wanted to mix things up. When he went home he was cast as the bad boy. Shit, so he had acted like Syd Barrett for a few years. Now he was turning into Edmund Wilson. People couldn’t let go of the past—
their
problem, not his.

There was a prime parking spot right in front of his duplex. He jogged up the steps, snatching yesterday’s
New York Times
in its blue plastic wrapper and tossing it on the table inside. Jay lived in postcollege splendor—she had some decent furniture her parents had given her—but there was no denying her age, which was demonstrated by the presence of milk-carton bookshelves in her living room. Stephen was a full-fledged adult with money and a good job. He had polished wood floors, an antique built-in sideboard, chandeliers, glassed-in bookshelves . . . all this shit that made him feel really good about himself. He’d grown up with money—quite a bit of it, actually, some of it filtering down to him still—but his parents had basically been well-heeled hippies who preferred the reek of incense, dust, and cat litter. Now Stephen aspired to elegance, quiet, and dignity—three things his parents would have had trouble recognizing, much less epitomizing.

Papers, papers . . . notes. Stephen went through the things on his desk. He glanced up at the mirror and mussed his hair a little. He cultivated a slightly unkempt image. The girls he taught responded to it and, while he would most certainly never engage in any impropriety with any of them, at any time, on any occasion, he was not averse to being an object of attraction. To as many of them as possible. It was healthy in a sense; it fostered a patient-analyst sort of transient romantic attachment. At least, that was what
he
thought. He wasn’t going to share
that
particular theory with anyone soon. He started stuffing his briefcase. It was getting late.

When he got back in his car and was driving, other matters in Stephen’s life began to surface. Such as the aforementioned Jay and Ramona. And that fucking prick Lewis.

It could be said that taking up with a woman nine years younger was not the best way for Stephen to establish a conventionally respectable profile in his department. A woman not much older than his students, a single mother college dropout with raven black hair, toned, flawless skin, and unbelievable thighs. Well, anyone who would
say
such a thing would surely be motivated by their insane jealousy over their incapacity to duplicate Stephen’s achievement. Stephen, on more levels than one, was
the man.

His heart leapt in a giddy fashion as he hit the freeway for the short drive to campus, as he thought of last night and making love with Jay while the moonlight shone through the window, her breasts—God
damn,
those perfect breasts—pressed against his chest while she whispered to him to remember to be quiet. Jay was the most attractive woman Stephen had ever been with, bar none—and it was no small added bonus when he brought her to faculty dinners and watched his colleagues try to suck in their bellies and ingratiate themselves to her in a postmodern ironic fashion while their wives looked on in a decidedly nonironic mode of detachment and pity. Stephen had been with plenty of pretty girls. He was no slouch. But Jay’s physical essence was like sweet ambrosia. He had a hard-on now from thinking about the sight of her naked or, better yet, just in panties and a sheer tank top, lounging in her room, seemingly unaware of what an utter hydrogen bombshell she was.

This was not to say that Stephen was sexist, or didn’t value women for their intellect—
please.
He’d had all that nonsense drummed out of him aeons ago. He couldn’t have been with Jay if her physicality hadn’t been wedded to a powerful mind. She was young, a little callow yet, and educated largely in a haphazard, autodidact fashion. Still, she had a history of being regarded as intellectually extraordinary (and now Stephen’s heart gave a very different kind of lurch, as he entertained his insecurity over the possibility that she was smarter than him) that dated from her childhood, and it certainly wasn’t too late for her to accomplish things. That is, if she could somehow become motivated to raise herself from the semidepressive rut that currently constituted her days.

It was a rut that, he had to admit, was making her somewhat less attractive.
Somewhat.
He knew he shouldn’t be so hard on her. She had lost her mother just half a year ago—and what a mother, so knowing, so magnetic, so
hot
(and Stephen winced as he took the exit ramp off the freeway, knowing what an awful thought that was, no matter how profoundly true it was).

Stephen knew it couldn’t be easy being a single mother. Jay had the misfortune of getting knocked up early in her sophomore year, and had let her bad luck derail her academic career completely. The father was up in Oregon someplace, utterly useless, never visiting or sending money.
His
name was Michael, and he was working on his family’s organic farm—or, to hear Jay tell it, was probably smoking pot all day and goofing off like a post-hippie, Pacific Northwest Hud, eternally juvenile, of no use to either Jay or Ramona.

The real problem, as Stephen saw it—now he was driving into the comforting fantasyland of the university (God, the
girls
)—was Lewis. Stephen exhaled sharply. Lewis, what a creep. A manipulative narcissist of the highest order, an overbearing browbeater who—and here Stephen was entering into dangerous territory, but he had earned his right as a
thinker
to do so—had in a sense possibly caused Anna’s cancer. Stephen would not have been surprised to learn that her fatal illness had been some sort of mind-body self-sabotage ploy to escape her husband, the only means at her disposal since, for some reason, she seemed to be sincerely devoted to the man.

Lewis used to work at American Express, in a real high-level corporate management gig. He made piles of money, and Anna never had to work. He styled himself the benevolent upper-middle-class patriarch while scarring the women in his life with his constant needs for validation, collaboration, and approval. Lewis never left his wife and daughter alone, never gave them space to breathe. Stephen had seen it. Now Jay was alone, without the buffer of Anna to absorb Lewis’s poison.

If only it had been Lewis who had died.

And then, ten minutes later, Stephen was teaching his class. His mind moved on two tracks at once. He was talking about Kafka, and Musil, stuff he could do in his sleep and often did.

But he was also thinking about Lewis, about having a talk with the old boy. Maybe Stephen could cajole a little sense into him. It wasn’t impossible. Stephen could be forceful.

As forceful as Lewis? That remained to be determined.

And now Stephen opened up his book and read aloud to his class.

Someone must have been telling lies about Josef K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one morning.

“Someone tell me what that means,” Stephen said to his class with a tight smile.