14 Degrees Below Zero (6 page)

“Dumb-ass!” Dan crowed, triumphant. “He used to be one of the best receivers in the league. Right, Lewis?”

“That’s right.”

“Gentlemen, we are now open,” Guy announced. Several customers had appeared on the floor, like guerrilla insurgents previously hidden but now emboldened to come out into the open. They wandered as though dazed, stunned and disoriented by the array of goods as well as the tall mirrors strategically placed to prevent shoppers from achieving a cohesive picture of the space.

Lewis wandered over to a big wooden cabinet filled with expensive folded dress shirts—he was wearing one of them, a cotton-blend Calvin Klein with a flat back and double stitching. He’d bought it full-price about eighteen months ago, back when he was at his old job and could afford such things.

He tried to breathe regularly as he allowed himself a moment’s contemplation of the depths of his financial pit. Many of his monthly bills were paid automatically on his credit cards, which kept the dogs at bay but also created a rising balance to which astronomical interest rates were regularly and sadistically applied. There were still medical bills left unpaid—thousands of dollars’ worth, in fact. It was not going well.

The house was his, and it was beautiful and replete with equity. He could sell it, but what then? An apartment, neighbors upstairs and down? A life diminishing by degree, until there was nothing left of him?

Pain stabbed his chest, right behind the sternum. Lewis rubbed the bone, trying to will it away. It hurt all the time. He could die at any moment.

“Excuse me,” said a woman his age. “Do you work here?”

Lewis turned and tried to stay calm. He had to be strong. He had to survive. Jay and Ramona would be bereft without him.

“Yes, of course,” Lewis said, pleased by the note of incredulity in her voice (could someone like
him
really be
working
there?). “What can I help you with?”

“I’m buying shirts for my husband,” the woman said. She wore sunglasses perched atop her blond head, and she had a pert, athletic figure. She was one of those well-preserved housewives who had haunted the ill-lit corners of his fantasies. “Your shirt is very nice. Did you buy it here?”

“Yes!” Lewis said, brightening and leading her to the display. “You have a good eye. This line of shirts is comfortable, elegant, and they wear well. And we have a very extensive selection of colors. Shall I select a dozen for you? Or two?”

The woman laughed. “So you work on a commission, I take it.”

Lewis clasped his hands. “Customer happiness is my greatest satisfaction, far more than any financial consideration.”

She laughed again, more genuinely this time. She looked Lewis in the eye for the first time and tucked her hair behind one ear. In fact, she was extremely pretty.

“What size does your husband wear?” Lewis asked.

“Oh, I’m not sure these days,” she said. “He’s not as tall as you, but he weighs a lot more.” She reached out and touched one of the shirts folded in its slot, her fingers lingering on the fabric.

“A bigger man,” Lewis said.

“Oh, well, he’s gotten fat, if that’s what you mean,” she said with a louder laugh.

“Happens to some of us,” Lewis said, and the woman looked up into Lewis’s eyes with a lingering flush of recognition.

“But not you,” she said.

“Nor you,” Lewis told her.

Lewis glanced over at the nearest cash register. Guy was watching, seemingly with a mix of uncertainty and approval. Lewis, it turned out, had a bit of a gift for the sale. After he’d rung up four shirts for the housewife she lingered at the sales counter for a moment, as though about to say something to Lewis. Then she seemed to remember who she was, and who Lewis was—a
salesman,
for God’s sake—and then she left with an uncomfortable half-wave. It was a slightly odd and discordant end to their interaction. It had all been in good fun, hadn’t it?

Lewis had lunch with Guy in the Sky Room upstairs: nine bucks for a sandwich and soda, a not-inconsiderable fraction of what he was earning that day. The two men noshed while making small talk about children and real estate. Guy was reasonably bright, in Lewis’s estimation, but had a scope of consciousness and awareness about as wide as a cricket’s antennae. But Lewis might have been unfair. Life seemed to be working out for Guy Boyle. His kids were apparently not homicidal drug maniacs, he had his home in an inner-ring suburb, a wife he spoke of in complimentary terms. Lewis couldn’t account for why he was sitting there stirring a pot of hostility for the man.

No. He knew why. Because there was, if he was honest, something increasingly wrong with him. He needed a pill to keep from falling into mental anguish and paralyzing fear and guilt. And he had begun to hate everyone, Jay and Ramona excepted.

“You know what I mean?” asked Guy.

“Beg pardon?”

“It’s not worth the money.” Guy masticated his salad. “I have the money to spend, it’s not that. But it’s a matter of not spending it on something we don’t need. The one we have is every bit as good. Why replace it just because it’s a few years old?”

“I’m sure you’re right,” Lewis said.

Did all of this start with Anna’s sickness, or did it predate those awful months? He could blame her; in fact, he
did.
But this feeling went farther back.

“I’m glad we’re having lunch today, by the way,” Guy said.

“Why?” Lewis asked. “Because you’re hungry?”

Guy shot Lewis a look, trying to tell if he was joking. Lewis let him hang there as Guy put down his fork—a sure sign he was serious.

All this responsibility Lewis felt . . . he wished it were possible to talk with someone. Guy was out of the question: too obtuse. There was his neighbor and ostensible friend Stan, but Stan’s solution to everything was of the buck-up, could-be-worse school of thought. How to explain this unraveling, this increasingly urgent need to make things right again?

“I don’t want to be a jerk, Lewis,” Guy was saying. “You know I respect you, and that I think you’re a good salesman. And, you know, since we’re about the same age, I feel like I can talk to you more directly than the younger guys.”

Lewis gripped the edge of the table and tried to breathe. His lungs felt stiff and unresponsive. A cigarette might help, but that would mean going outside and dealing with the chill.

“That woman you sold those shirts to this morning?” Guy asked. “You know the one I mean? The good-looking blonde?”

“There are plenty of good-looking women around here.”

“Now you’re just being cute,” Guy said. “You know the one I mean.”

“OK, sure,” Lewis said.

“I couldn’t help but notice you coming on to her,” said Guy.

“What?” Lewis laughed. “It was innocent. If anything, she was coming on to
me.
”

Guy probed the architecture of his teeth with his tongue. “So that’s how you saw it.”

“Of course!” Lewis said, astonished.

“She looked pretty uncomfortable by the end,” Guy said.

Lewis could not believe this conversation. That woman had been bored, obviously unfulfilled, enjoying a little harmless banter with a shirt salesman. There had been an obvious attraction between them, and Lewis had indulged in a little harmless flirting. But now, replaying it in his mind, there were blank spots. He couldn’t recall everything he had said. And he remembered touching her back at some point, down low by the tailbone. When exactly had that happened?

“She was uncomfortable,” Lewis said.

“She pretty much made a run for it,” Guy said. “At least she paid for the shirts first.”

“Because of me.”

Guy tugged at his tie. “There have been complaints,” he said.

“About
me
?”

“I want to keep you working for me.” Guy pushed his tray away. “I like you. I feel I can trust you.”

Lewis decided for the moment to say nothing. He had no rod with which to check the depths of this exchange.

“It’s just that, from time to time, you get a little inappropriate.”

“Inappropriate.”

“A little
intense
with the customers.” Guy leaned back, his expression pained. Guy had suggested they eat together. And, apparently, this had been the main item on the agenda.

“Am I about to get fired?” Lewis asked.

“Just be aware. I’ve been protecting you. But I only have so much sway.” With this, Guy evoked the heap-big powers of Norman and Gwendolyn, the store managers to whom Guy pledged fealty. Could it be they had been discussing Lewis, crazy old Lewis, and that Guy had had to
intercede
on his behalf?

What had he done? To his mind, he had behaved with impeccable normality on the job no matter what storms had been raging inside. He tended to
like
his customers. He was effectively being told that his social radar was ineffectively calibrated. Nothing felt right. It was as though his life had ended the night Anna died. The night he . . .

For Christ’s sake, that housewife had wanted
him.
Hadn’t she?

After his shift was ended, Lewis wandered down to the toy department before catching the bus home. He pledged to himself not to buy anything but within minutes found himself captivated by an electronic gadget. He began to play with it. It was a book of sorts, shiny and plastic, and it read aloud when you touched it with a stylus.

Ingenious.

This would help Ramona learn how to read, maybe by kindergarten—what an advantage for her. Lewis played with the thing for a good fifteen minutes, touching the pen to the page and listening to it read out words and sentences. There was a nature book, and one that taught geography. He had amassed a pile of the best ones just as a young female clerk came up to him.

“Those are great,” she said.

She was a redhead, about twenty-five, wearing one of those sweaters that showed off her breasts without making a big deal of it. She had bright green eyes and wore a long black skirt. Her eyes lingered on his employee name tag.

“They look good,” Lewis said. “I mean, I really think these are great.”

A little
intense,
Guy had said. Her name tag said Janine. She was just a couple of years older than Jay.

She fixed him with a plastic smile. “Do you already own the main unit?”

“What?” Lewis asked, alarmed. He looked into her eyes, then thought he was coming on too strong. For a horrible second he looked directly at her breasts (a hint of nipple, oh
Go
d
), then looked at the toys in his hands.

“These books,” she said. “They plug into a main unit. They don’t do anything on their own.”

“Oh.” Lewis was dumbfounded. “Do we sell that here?”

The girl laughed. “Of course we do.” She picked up a big plastic box and held it out. He took it.

“All right then,” Lewis said.

They piled all the crap on the counter. Before the girl was finished ringing it all up, Lewis grabbed a stuffed calico cat and put it on the counter. Then a black one. Ramona collected stuffed cats.

“OK, that’s a hundred and twelve dollars and sixty-two cents,” she said after she had scanned everything. “With your employee discount.”

Lewis handed over his credit card. His hands were shaking, and it was hard work to look everywhere but at the girl.

6. IT WAS ALL WELL AND GOOD FOR A DEAD BEARDED GUY.

I
t was getting colder with alarming speed. Jay dropped Ramona off at day care—enduring a minor emotional squall in the process, after which Ramona’s mood shifted with mercurial ease into resentful recalcitrance—and when she walked to her car she began to shiver. The temperature was down around freezing. It was an early frost, but not terribly unusual. About ten years back there had been a legendary Halloween ice storm; everything had been encased in inches of clear frozen rain, with power lines snapping and cars doors sealed shut. Jay had been just entering her teens then, riding out a late-onset puberty that in retrospect was the turning point at which life became impossibly complicated and difficult.

But that was her story—brilliant girl steers ship directly into iceberg of sex. This body she inhabited, which gave her pleasure but which also evoked too many echoes of her mother, had absorbed a single shot of semen and incubated an entirely new human life. Years of sunshine and snow she wouldn’t know—she’d become a mother too young.

Jay steered through the sluggish traffic toward work. She’d gotten a late start and was going to be tardy for her shift, which started at the end of brunch and ran through midday—terminating before the lucrative drinks-and-dinner hours. She’d learned that preserving her inner peace (such as it was) was best accomplished by avoiding paranoid speculation about being slighted and steered away from the best shifts. Of course, she suspected she was.

She gunned the engine and shot through a yellow light. A car coming from the other direction blared its horn and nearly ran into her. She had never been the best driver in the world—too many thoughts intruding, too many things to look at. She was more cautious when Ramona was in the backseat.

Ramona’s father was named Michael Carmelov, currently of Coos Bay, Oregon, living with his parents, a college dropout like Jay. Michael had come to Minnesota for college because of vague family connections that Jay had never been able to entirely sort out. They hadn’t gotten to know each other very well. Jay met Michael at a party early her sophomore year. Michael had been in premed, but his grades weren’t good enough to promise much in the way of a medical career, and it was obvious even then that he’d never have the endurance to navigate the years of sacrifice required to actually become a doctor. Jay had been a history major, earning mostly A’s. Michael was very good-looking, with wavy hair and delicate features that in repose fell into an approximation of perceptiveness and sensitivity. It was one of those accidents of genetics—the way a face could deceive without trying.

They never even became boyfriend and girlfriend. They went to a couple of all-ages indie-rock shows together at the Seventh Street Entry. They attended several parties that were indistinguishable from the one where they met. Michael wanted to have sex, so did Jay. They practiced the pull-out method, which had worked for Jay with the ten or so partners she had racked up through high school and one year of college. In fact, Jay had started to wonder about her fertility—envisioning a future when she was thirty-five and unable to bear a child. It became one of many amorphous anxieties that plagued her in those days.

It turned out she needn’t have worried. She had sex with Michael three or four times, and she got pregnant. What rankled still was that the sex wasn’t very good at all. She’d had a lover at sixteen, her second, who with a total lack of carnal training had been better in the sack than Michael. Rookie luck, she supposed. The memory of Michael made her bitter—the way he pawed at her breasts with no recognition of the subtle nerve topography there, the way he seemed not to have heard of the clitoris, the way he mounted her and heaved in a middling fashion that brought neither the satisfaction of the subtle stroke or the aggressive joy of the animal fuck.
He
was the man who had fathered her child.

The restaurant where Jay worked was on a stretch of Lyndale that featured a bike shop, a brewpub, a rug store, and two coffeehouses. Back when Jay was in high school, she used to smoke pot with her friends and walk around this neighborhood. One time they snorted some crystal meth (obtained from a connection to the rural wastes of the Iron Range) and walked miles and miles for hours and hours around Uptown and the Wedge, in widening circles until they were all the way downtown at the doors of the City Center. In the late-morning wind, Jay could taste the methamphetamine in the back of her mouth as, six years after the fact, she prepared for her shift at the Cogito.

She tried to remember what the building had been in earlier incarnations, during her childhood and teenage years. Nothing came to mind. Time passed. Lewis was always going on about the mutability of things and, though she had never really doubted him, she was now seeing for herself. The Cogito had existed less than a year, and would undoubtedly vanish in a few more. Restaurants had their own reality: you leased a place with kitchen facilities, you cooked food, customers showed up and told their friends about a new cutting-edge eatery they had discovered. Maybe a reporter from the newspaper came and did a story. Then, after a while, the restaurant’s familiar presence, its reliable solidity, became a perfect excuse for never visiting it. That was when you went out of business. If you weren’t totally ruined, you could take a chance and open another one.

Jay went in through the back, hung up her jacket, and said
Buenos días
to Jorge, who washed dishes and chopped food for eight hours a day. He was half of an enthusiastically acrimonious duo with Fowler, the cook, who was short and slight and had perpetually bloodshot eyes. Though Jorge was taller, and stouter, the two men were like a pair of dogs who had established a pecking order in inverse order to their respective sizes. The Cogito’s other cook was a middle-aged woman called Giselle, who was pleasant and much easier to deal with than Fowler. It was by virtue of this agreeable personality that she generally got the dinner shifts, though in fact Fowler was the better cook.

Jay paused in the kitchen and took in the smells of garlic and saffron, the sizzle of oil in the pan and the warm, close air.

And then in came Phil, her boss. He was about thirty and so good-looking as to be an improbable heterosexual—though these credentials were firmly established by his constant advances toward Jay, usually couched in nice-guy camaraderie but unmistakable nonetheless. Putting on her apron, she sensed Phil’s eyes on her. His attractiveness was no problem—Michael Carmelov had obligingly cured her forever of mistaking good looks for appealing inner qualities—but Phil’s look added to a feeling she was coming to hate. She wanted to become invisible, she wanted to be left alone. It was like the look Stephen gave her, and Ramona. These hungry eyes stripped her down. Most of all she resented the one-sidedness of all these looks—when did she get
her
visual feast?

“Morning, Jay,” Phil said. “You’re a little late.”

“I had to drop Ramona off,” Jay told him, fixing her hair in the mirror. “Plus I fell into a space-time vortex and had a bitch of a time climbing out.”

“Those are nasty,” Phil admitted. He gave a brunch order to Fowler—verbally, of course, because Phil took pride in never writing anything down. He had asked Jay to do the same, in the name of some amorphous sense of elegance, but it proved impossible. She’d inevitably forget the order, then be forced to return to the table to take it again. Sometimes when she came back, the customers couldn’t remember what they had ordered, and the whole process had to begin again.

“This fish isn’t good,” Fowler said, pointing with a wooden spoon at a ceramic dish of fillets on the counter.

“Dress it up,” Phil said. “Put lemon slices over it.”

“Where are we getting this shit?” Fowler’s mustache folded with distaste.

“I don’t even know,” Phil replied. “Talk to Bjorn or Jenny about it if you have a problem.”

“Just cook it,” Jorge muttered.

“Hey, go
fuck yourself,
Jorge,” Phil said over the divider that bisected the kitchen.

“You are bitching too much,” Jorge said.

Fowler put his nose close to the fillets. “Smell it,” he said to no one in particular. “Someone’s going to get sick. If no one else is,
I’m
going to, just from being around this trash. It smells like mercury.”

“No one’s going to get sick,” Phil pronounced, as though he willed it to be so. “Just make sure it’s cooked all the way through.”

“I know how to cook a fucking fish,” Fowler said. “I’m just saying it smells like a garbage barge.”

Phil threw up his hands. “Then prove it, Great One. Cook the fucking fish.”

“All he does is bitch,” said Jorge. “It’s making me insane.”

Jay had worked her share of crap jobs—clerking in a mall music store, scooping ice cream, ringing up orders in a fast-food joint—all through high school. Since leaving college she’d become a waitress. In her excursions into the service sector, she had come to sort her co-workers into two categories: those who belonged at their level of employment, and those who didn’t. Fowler was firmly in the former category—he cooked food, and would presumably do so as long as he was able. Jorge was among the latter—he was unskilled, his English wasn’t great, but he had a presence that belied the fact of his menial job. He was probably consigned permanently to such tasks, but there was a
Jorgeness
about him untouched by soap suds, cutting boards, and any future trash cans that would need to be emptied. Phil occupied a special place—he was one of the former who believed himself to be among the latter. He managed the day shift at a small restaurant in south Minneapolis. Within a few years he would have lived more than half his days.

The question, naturally: Of which type was Jay? The youthful-promise thing had worked fine so far. She could schlep pasta and uncork Chianti while polishing the gem of her yet-unlined face and destiny, which surely was to
get it together
and become a viable
adult
with a good job and a household in which Ramona could become one of those self-possessed little genius children rather than a life-scarred ragamuffin.

Right?
She wasn’t going to be waiting tables in ten years, was she?

Jay liked the first part of any shift best. The dining room looked fresh with its undersized tables, rough floor, and austere lighting. Later the room would seem tawdry and worn out, when she felt the same, and Jay would inevitably wonder when this unadorned decorating thing would go out of style—because, honestly, wasn’t rough and raw the same as
ugly,
and when had it become déclassé to want to sit in a comfortable chair or have art on the wall that
represented
something, or to play music with heart and emotion rather than merely a detached manipulation of . . .

Whoa.
That sounded exactly like Lewis.

She wore a path between the dining room and the kitchen, bringing forth garnished sandwiches, dressed-up hamburgers, and complicated salads. She got hungry and Fowler made her some scrambled eggs, which she ate standing up.

Not a day passed without Jay pondering her decision to quit college. It was a lot of work, college, despite all the good-times propaganda, but she would have been a graduate by now instead of chewing eggs in a drafty kitchen.

“Good eggs?” Fowler asked, looking up from a Mephistophelean fire that was making his forehead sweat.

“The best,” said Jay.

“People put too much spice in ’em,” Fowler said. “Fucks them up. Eggs taste good. They don’t need help.”

With the benefit of a few years’ experience in the world, Jay understood that her choice of a history major might have been quixotic. If she didn’t complete grad school, her degree would have guaranteed prospects little more appetizing than teaching school or, maybe, writing for some
organization.
She still had the option of returning to school to earn some kind of practical degree—business, or communications. But what then? Work for a corporation? Lewis had done that for decades, and made plenty of money, but he never claimed to like it. The Lewis that Jay saw going off to work Mondays barely resembled the laughing, subversive father of Saturday morning. He turned buttoned-up, stiff, and in some automatic mode in which he killed off part of himself. He seemed happier selling shirts. Well, not
happier
—how to use that word, with a man like Lewis—but at least more
authentic.

So what was she going to do? When she tried to talk to Stephen, he told her to read Marx. She’d
already
read Marx, back in high school. Sure, we were all alienated from our work—point granted. Capitalism sucks? Sure, why not. It was all well and good for a dead bearded guy. But what about her?

She wished her mother were alive.

At least Anna died at home, which was all she had asked for in her final days. Lewis had called in the morning while Jay was making Ramona her toast and juice, and told her that Anna had died an hour before in the first light of dawn. He waited until Jay came over before calling the paramedics to take the body away.

The way it worked was, you said good-bye to someone, and then you thought about them all the time. You knew they weren’t coming back, yet still you held each new event and possibility for them to examine, to comment upon. But they never did. Dead people were stupid, with their stubborn inability to keep up with current events.

Jay had an armload of dishes as she wove through the nearly full dining room. The Cogito was going through its growth phase, too innocent yet to look ahead to its decline. Everyone who came in was rubbing their hands together, blowing their noses, their eyes full of the unexpected cold. The street through the window had that browned-out colorless hue of winter before the snow.

She laid out the plates for a trio next to the window—a woman in black, and two bearded men wearing the earnest earth tones of Unitarians. Jay had pegged them as local theater types, or maybe small-time real-estate entrepreneurs. She knew they had her pegged as a waitress.