14 Degrees Below Zero (7 page)

“Miss?” said one of the men, kindly eyed through glasses. “Excuse me?”

Jay was halfway gone, and had to stop and turn. “Did I forget something?”

“No, it’s just that we didn’t order this.” His companions looked down at their plates as though they had arrived from another galaxy.

“We haven’t ordered anything,” said the woman in black. “Can we see some menus?”

Wrong table.
Jay picked up the plates again. She sensed everyone in the place looking at her. She wavered for a moment and then decided to brazen it out. The rightful owners of the three dishes looked at them warily, glancing over at the other table as though gauging how much they had contaminated the food during their brief ownership of it. Jay smiled as though nothing had happened.

Only a few more hours to go.

7. THE POINT OF FEAR, BEYOND ITS UTILITY AS A WARNING.

T
here comes a point at which the sweating man begins to feel a chill rather than the heat of his exertion. It’s a nauseating feeling, accompanied by a threat of loosening from the bowels and a general blurring of vision. The whole thing was downright ominous. It made a man think of how he might feel in the final moments before a catastrophic physical breakdown.

Stephen stood panting and dripping, watching a man almost ten years his junior line up for a free throw and, inevitably, miss it. These were, after all, graduate students in the humanities. They could toss around a little Kant and Hegel, but they were hopeless with a basketball in their hands.

The game resumed. Stephen had long since stopped caring about the score, his main ambition now being to keep moving without passing out, or dying, or suffering an involuntary explosion from his innards that would embarrassingly soil the court at the university gym. He jogged across half-court, his knees aching, one arm held up for the ball.

Of course he shouldn’t have done
that.
He was the sole faculty member on the court, and the students kept one eye on him at all times—in part to divine whether he favored any of them, also in sheer curiosity over whether he could keep his feet. As soon as he indicated an interest in the ball, it was duly passed to him. And here it was, orange and pimpled, requiring a dismaying amount of arm strength to keep it bouncing.

He was being guarded by Francis, a second-year kid from Brown who went to great pains to convince people how unguarded and guileless he was. Stephen bounced the ball and tried to keep his eyes in focus. Francis was giving him plenty of space, not poking at the ball, for which Stephen was both grateful and abstractly irritated. He took a couple of lateral steps, and Francis followed a step behind. Surely he wasn’t going to lay off so much—Stephen was only thirty-two, after all. Did they have him placed in another generation?

Looking around, trying to remember which players were on his team—Tim Rappel? King? That cipher from Urban Planning?—Stephen felt a spasm somewhere in his midsection and half-coughed, half-belched up something that tasted like . . . like . . .
last night’s three whiskey and sodas.
He kept the ball bouncing and tried not to think about it. From the waist down he was all pain. Above that was an entire mountain range of trouble, peaks of nausea and valleys of abdominal insubordination. Breaking into a run seemed out of the question.

But it appeared he had to do something. He had been dribbling the ball for a long time. Someone said something about Gary Payton that may or may not have been directed at him. He was too flustered and spent to try passing the ball, so he put his head down and stepped past Francis, who stared in surprise and made little attempt to stop him. A couple of opponents closed in on him now, but moving forward with perhaps the final reserves of his legs and heart, he burst to within about eight feet of the basket and let loose a one-handed floater.

Stephen’s momentum carried him into the Urban Planning guy, who shunted him aside torero-style. As he tumbled to the floor, already adoring the sweet relief of lying down, he watched the ball reach the altitude of the basket like a wounded bird.
God,
what an embarrassing shot—he had sort of pitched it up there, like an end-of-the-bench sub in a high-school girls’ game. Now, improbably, almost apologetically, it sort of
slid
into the net with barely enough force to make it through. It landed on the floor with an exhausted thud, right next to him.

“Nice one,” said Francis, who was going to be attending one of Stephen’s critical theory seminars next semester.

“That was George Gervin shit,” said the Urban Planning guy in the requisite pseudo-insulting manner in which they all felt compelled to communicate.

“Thank . . . you,” Stephen gasped. He glanced at his watch as he peeled himself off the floor, leaving a big sweat stain where he had fallen. They’d been playing for half an hour. But
full-court,
he reminded himself. “And now . . . that I’ve taken you all
to school
. . . ahg . . . so to speak . . . I have to make . . . a phone call.”

Stephen staggered across midcourt to the bench at the other end. There were protests about him leaving his team shorthanded, but finally the younger men allowed him to salvage some dignity. His chest burned and his guts growled, but he thought he might be able to ride it out. He fought off an overpowering urge to go outside and curl up in the grass, knowing it was too damn cold for that.

He had said something about making a call. To save face as the game resumed, he rooted around in his jacket for his phone. He dialed Jay’s apartment out of reflex. There really wasn’t anyone else for him to call, anyway. She answered with a tone of tired self-defense.

“Where are you?” she asked.

“At the gym,” he said in an approximation of his usual speaking voice. “Playing basketball with a bunch of students. Trying not to drop dead.”

Jay laughed. “Yeah, you’re such an old man.”

“All evidence points in that direction,” Stephen said. “I think I almost passed out.”

“Then we may have a problem. I’m not sure how much I want to be your nursemaid.”

“How was work?” he asked.

“Fantastic. Brilliant. I cured cancer and healed the Republic. Plus I brokered a peace between the Twin Cities.”

“Something’s bothering you, then,” Stephen said.

“Look, don’t start—”

“Because whenever I hear this woe-is-me stuff—”

“Didn’t I just say not to—”

“You should listen to yourself,” he told her. “You sound like you’re under attack. And that can only mean one thing.”

“Oh,
fuck,
Stephen.”

“How long has it been since you talked to him?”

“I hung up about a minute before you called,” Jay said. She was laughing.

“They
do
call me doctor,” Stephen told her. “And I
do
love you, Jaybird. I don’t like hearing you in these moods.”

The Urban Planning guy drove the lane and tossed in a smooth layup. Stephen hadn’t made such a graceful shot since his blacktop preteen days.

“You know what?” Jay said, flashing back to her default mode of defensive hostility. “I don’t like
being
in a bad mood. But it doesn’t help to have it pointed out to me when I’m crabby.
They
call you doctor, Stephen, but I don’t.”

“OK. Point taken. What did Lewis say?”

“The usual. He nagged me about what school I’m going to try to get Ramona into. He insinuated that I’m wasting my time—which I may be. I certainly spend enough time thinking about the subject.”

Jay kept talking, but Stephen was only half-listening. Lewis simply never let up. He probed his daughter’s weaknesses, projecting his own pain and uncertainty onto her—thus ensuring that she remained in a state of rattled defense. Lacan’s
jouissance
was defined as unbearable suffering that produced satisfaction to unconscious drives—perversity, as Stephen saw it, and Lewis had it in spades.

Stephen pulled back from himself. Of course on some primal level he resented Lewis for being alive. That was the price Lewis had to pay for being the father of the girl Stephen felt illegitimate about fucking. Stephen knew it would serve him best to stay on high ground and not let himself get too drawn into the lunacy of this (go ahead, admit it) messed-up and semicrazy family.

But his loyalties were solidly with Jay. There were higher regions of thought, and in them Stephen simply loved her. If they were going to have a future together, she was going to have to get her head together and escape Lewis’s suffocating
mishigas.

“It’s the same old stuff,” Stephen said, watching the clumsy ballet on the basketball court. “You just need space from him.”

“I know,” Jay replied. Stephen detected the exhaustion in her voice. This was the same conversation they’d had a dozen times. It was starting to become difficult to find new ways to formulate old sentiments. Stephen felt his mind begin to multitrack. He was due in a committee meeting in about thirty minutes, followed by office hours. That night he had to review a batch of papers graded by a scatterbrained T.A. whose frequently bleary eyes may or may not have been evidence of a pot habit. And then there was the book Stephen was supposed to be writing, which at the moment was little more than twenty pages of disparate notes and a half-assed outline on his hard drive.

He asked Jay an innocuous question about Ramona, buying time while his mind worked. It took just a moment to shift his consciousness sideways and to utterly objectify his own motives. He occupied a unique position in these people’s lives—as a latecomer, he was unencumbered by any prevailing sentiment other than his love/lust for Jay (intertwined, as was healthy) and his affection for her daughter. He wasn’t caught up in things and now, thinking hard about it, he suspected that he was an ideal catalyst for positively affecting the family dynamic.

But there was a blockage . . . a vague, diffuse fear: on some level he was frightened of Lewis. And so was Jay. Lewis was physically and mentally strong, and he was utterly self-absorbed even by contemporary standards. Lewis was creepy and a little scary. Well, the point of fear, beyond its utility as a warning system, was that overcoming it was educational.

Which meant that Stephen was going to finally deal with his girlfriend’s crazy dad.

“Stephen?” Jay said. “Still there?”

The game was breaking up. Another group was waiting by the side of the court to begin their allotted sign-up period. If there were two things students and professors knew how to do, it was signing forms and waiting for things to begin.

“I’m still here,” Stephen replied. “Sorry, I was watching the game. It makes me wonder—have I always been so feeble, or am I really getting old?”

“My old man,” Jay said in that husky tone she took, the one that always surprised him. “Experience has been good for you. I’m glad I got the older Stephen. It saved me all the fumbling around.”

“Oh, and I did some fumbling.”

“You all do,” Jay told him. “Believe me. I’ve been fumbled plenty.”

“Hopefully I’m not fumbling anymore.”

“You are not fumbling, Dr. Grant.”

“That is so gratifying,” he said.

“It is for me, too,” said Jay.

A part of Stephen empathized with Lewis. Any father would be entranced to the point of obsession by such a daughter.

“I’m going to go,” Jay said. “We’ve wasted enough time.”

“Right.” He started getting his things together. He was going to have to hurry to get showered and dressed.

“And don’t worry so much about Lewis,” Jay added with uncharacteristic seriousness.

“I’m worried about
you,
” he replied.

“Just let it be,” she said. “All of this is like ripples in a pond. It’ll settle down before too long.”

“OK,” he said, unconvinced. “I’ll let you work it out.”

He knew he was lying to her. He was going to get involved.

“Dad needs me,” Jay said. “He thinks he has to protect me. It gives him something to think about other than . . . you know, his loneliness.”

Stephen wiped the sweat from his forehead and thought about what she had said.

“Take care of that soul of yours, Jaybird,” he said by way of good-bye.

INTERLUDE. SHE WOULD MAKE HERSELF DUMB AND SLEEPY FOREVER.

R
amona listened from around the corner. She stared for a long time at the white paint on Mama’s bedroom doorway, loving the way it had chipped and been painted overagain, making little valleys and craters in slightly different colors. She put her face to the surface and dared a lick, just a little one, before pulling her face away. Some paint had stuff in it that would make you dumb and sleepy forever. Ramona regretted what she had just done. She blinked, thinking she felt sleepy. Maybe it was starting.

“And don’t worry so much about Lewis,” Mama said on the phone. Mama was sitting on her bed and looking out the window.

Ramona knew she was talking to Stephen by the way she was laughing, a quiet but constant sound, as though everything he said was funny. A lot of the time Mama acted like
nothing
was funny, except now sometimes she laughed when Ramona said something that wasn’t meant to be funny—and now that she thought about it, that made Ramona feel kind of mad.

She licked the doorway again. Maybe she would make herself dumb and sleepy forever. Would everyone like her then? They could laugh all they wanted to, while Ramona would sit in the hospital and watch TV and get treats all day. It didn’t sound too bad.

Mama was talking about Grampa. His name was
Lewis.
When Mama and Stephen talked about him, they always sounded worried, or like they were arguing.

One time Ramona had called Mama “Jay,” just to see what it was like. Mama had gotten mad and told Ramona never to do it again.

The rules were always changing.

“Dad needs me,” Mama said. “He thinks he has to protect me.”

Ramona stuck her head around the doorway. Mama was sitting on the edge of the bed in her underpants and a T-shirt. Mama was twirling her hair in her fingers. She didn’t know Ramona was there.

Grampa thought he needed to protect Mama—well, that
was
true. Mama needed protecting. A lot of the time, Mama acted like she didn’t know what to do. That worried Ramona, because Mama was perfect and it didn’t make sense for Mama not to know it. Not perfect like God—that was different. Ramona knew God was perfect, but she didn’t talk about it much because Mama didn’t believe in God. Grampa didn’t, either. But someone had to be keeping the sun in the sky, and making sure the birds came back in the spring.

Grampa made Ramona worry. He came to the apartment the day before with some nice new presents, but when Ramona played with them she felt Grampa watching her. She felt his . . .
stress.
Grampa wanted something from her, and from Mama, that they couldn’t possibly give him. Maybe when God made Grandma Anna come back, she would tell them all what happened when she died and make everything better.