The Snow Queen (17 page)

Barrett struggles to bring himself around. Maybe it’s only possible for them to have this fight in public; maybe it would feel too dangerous if strangers couldn’t see and hear them. It helps, of course (does it?), that, on the sidewalk, they’re surrounded by all their familiar, private things, which are for the moment neither theirs nor not theirs; that they briefly inhabit a halfway zone, between location and dispersal.

Barrett answers, “How long have you been back on drugs?”

Tyler’s expression is not the one Barrett was expecting. There’s nothing of the apprehended child about it. Tyler drags deeply on his cigarette, looks at Barrett in a way Barrett can only think of as provoked, as if Barrett had waited until some catastrophic interlude to accuse Tyler of neglecting a minor domestic chore.

Tyler says, “Did you think the bit about the light was going to
console
me?”

“I was afraid …”

Tyler waits, sucking so hard on his cigarette that the ash goes from its regular orange to fiery tangerine.

“I was afraid,” Barrett continues, “it would seem like I was trying to horn in.”

“English. Earth-speak.”

“Like I was trying to … I don’t know. Take over Beth’s illness. Claim some sort of extra importance for myself.”

“Keep going.”

“Well. I suppose I supposed … it would seem like, Yeah, Tyler’s writing a love song for her, Tyler’s
marrying
her, that’s all well and good, but guess what? I, Barrett, the gay little brother, have seen a
light
. In the
sky.
”

“So you didn’t want to tell me about the most amazing thing that’s ever happened to you because you were afraid you might make the wrong impression.”

“I started to wonder …”

“Uh-huh.”

“I started to wonder if I really
had
seen anything, or if I’d just … made it up.”

“And why would you make something like that up?” Tyler flings his cigarette away, lights another.

“Uh, like, maybe to feel like
somebody
? I wasn’t doing anything to help Beth get better …”

“Nobody was, nobody could …”

“I couldn’t write a song for her, I couldn’t marry her.”

“So you cooked yourself up a hallucination.”

Barrett says, “I didn’t know. It seemed so undeniable, at first. But over time, I started wondering. I kept waiting for, I don’t know. Vision number two.”

“You think they come in pairs?”

“I think I’ve been trying too hard for too long.”

“Come again?”

“I’ve given up the need to be important. Trying to matter. In that mover-and-shaker kind of way.”

“I can’t say I’ve observed a lot of moving,” Tyler says. “Or shaking, come to think of it.”

“But there’s a difference between not pursuing worldly ambitions and no longer feeling like a failure for not pursuing them. I’ve been wondering if that’s what the light meant. Like, you’re watched, you’re accounted for, you don’t have to be important, you don’t have to have your picture in a magazine.”

“Didn’t we just decide the light was some kind of mirage?”

“That’s the thing,” Barrett says. “It doesn’t matter if it was real, or if I just imagined it. It adds up, either way.”

Tyler’s face changes in a way it never has before. His face resembles their mother’s. Has he known, all these years, how to summon her joke’s-on-you smile, her cynical arch of brow? Has he been saving this trick for a crucial moment?

Tyler says, “You want something of your own, don’t you?”

Barrett can’t seem to answer that.

“You want something that has nothing to do with me,” Tyler says. “Am I right?”

Barrett says, “I want to make sure about something. You think we’re going to kind of barrel-jump over you doing coke in secret. Right?”

“I’m not,” Tyler answers.

“I found a coke vial in your nightstand drawer.”

“
Old
one. I’d
forgotten
about it. How many times have we talked about this?”

“But, really?”

“This is like some kind of Asian justice system, isn’t it? Like, once you’ve been proven guilty, you can never be not guilty again.”

“You think that’s how Asian justice systems work?”

“I have no idea. I guess it’s racist, huh?”

Tyler sits down on the chair beside Barrett’s, the innocent-looking but fiendishly uncomfortable wing-back chair, upholstered in faded red silk, which Barrett has placed, in relation to the green Naugahyde, exactly where it stood in the apartment.

Barrett says, “I’ve started going to church again.”

“Have you?”

“Having a crisis about God after Beth died seemed too … lame, I guess.”

“How’s that working for you? Church, I mean.”

“I couldn’t say, exactly. I just go.”

“But nothing happens?” Tyler says.

“I wouldn’t say nothing.”

“You don’t pray. You don’t sing the hymns.”

“No. I sit in a pew at the back.”

“You must
feel
something.”

“Peaceful. Semi-peaceful. That’s about it.”

This is not, Tyler decides, the time or place for a detailed metaphysical discussion. He says, “I’m going to go over and check out the new place.”

“I’ll come by after work. Okay if I bring Sam along?”

“Sure.”

“Really sure?”

“What exactly is this thing of yours about me not liking Sam?” Tyler pulls another cigarette from his pack, fumbles in his jeans pocket for his lighter.

“Uh, because he’s coming between us?”

“Beth didn’t come between us.”

Barrett says, “I was married to Beth too.”

Tyler tries to light his cigarette with a pack of Life Savers, puts the Life Savers back into his pocket, finds the actual lighter.

“Then I can be married to Sam, along with you, right?” he says. He lights his cigarette, takes a deep drag. Here, once again, is that delicious, slightly noxious flow into his lungs, the sour-sweetness of it. As he exhales, he watches the smoke disappear.

“I don’t think so. I can’t see it. I’m sorry.”

Tyler takes another drag, watches the smokestream.

Barrett says, “I’m kind of excited about getting all new furniture.”

“I am too.”

“You’re sure about this? We can still reclaim some of it. Oh, look, there goes the kitchen table.”

A young couple, tattooed and spike-haired, is carrying off the kitchen table. The boy cries, over his shoulder, “Thanks, guys.”

Tyler offers a jaunty wave of acknowledgment. He says to Barrett, “I’m exactly haunted enough, without the furniture.”

Both watch the kitchen table make its way west. Barrett sings the opening phrase of the theme song from
The Jeffersons
. “
We’re movin’ on up
…”

“That’s all I can remember,” he adds.

Tyler says, “From a total shithole to a semi-shithole.”

The kitchen table, borne by its new owners, turns the corner and is gone.

“I’ve been thinking about an old French farm table,” Barrett says. “You know the kind I mean? They’re about a hundred years old. They’re really long, and they have these great nicks and scars on them.”

“Remember, we’re still on a budget.”

“I know. But, hey, we’ve got a hit album …”

“We’ve got a not-quite-finished album that’ll probably sell about three dozen copies.”

Barrett says, “You know, if you’re hopeful, if you’re even a little bit happy about something that might happen, it doesn’t affect the outcome. You could still give yourself a period of optimism, even if it all falls apart. This, coming from the superstitious one.”

Tyler doesn’t reply. He tosses his half-smoked cigarette to the pavement, crushes it out with his boot-heel. He gets up, for the last time, from the world’s least user-friendly chair.

“I guess that’s all of it,” he says.

“I think so,” Barrett answers. “I’ll go back upstairs in a minute, and check.”

“So. I’ll see you later. At our
new home.
”

“See you later.”

Tyler does not, however, leave; not right away. A sense of what could only be called awkwardness sets in.

“This is strange,” Tyler says.

“Moving is always strange, right?”

“Yes. Absolutely.”

They do the eye thing. They pass the recognition back and forth.

Still, there’s a sense of leave-taking; a remote hint—a whisper, barely—of farewell. Which is silly. Right? They’ll see each other tonight. In their new home.

“Later,” Tyler says. He heads down Knickbocker, to Morgan.

Barrett lingers awhile. He’s not eager to relinquish the strange pleasure of sitting in the green chair, surrounded by the ever-diminishing offerings that had, just yesterday, been daily articles, watching the apartment disappear, piece by piece. There goes the hula-girl lamp, in the arms of a henna-haired girl. Surprising it lasted as long as it did. Barrett briefly imagines himself remaining in the chair until everything else is gone and it’s just him, alone, sitting in front of the mustard-colored, aluminum-clad building like a deposed Russian aristocrat, contemplating with wonder his new life as an ordinary, unprivileged citizen. The dacha has fallen into deep decline. Its interior dampness resists the effects of every stove and fireplace; the damask that remains on its walls is mere scraps of faded scarlet; the ceilings sag and the servants have grown so decrepit they no longer provide help, but need help themselves. Still, life has been lived there, and the future, even if it reveals itself as improvement, smells of incipient snow, and the stodgy, steely scent of windswept railway platforms.

T
yler calls Liz on his way to the L. She answers. Now that she’s single again, she answers her phone sometimes. She’d been one of those people who always let calls go to voice mail.

Does this imply some nameless anticipation, a wished-for intercession of chance or fortune? Tyler hopes not.

“Hey,” he says.

“Are you all moved out?” she asks.

“Every stick of it. Well, Barrett’s doing the final check. I’m on my way to the new place.”

He strides along Morgan Street. Goodbye, chain-link fence topped with razor wire. Goodbye, old lady’s window, with the glass squirrel family frozen forever in mid-cavort on the windowsill.

“Is it strange?” Liz asks.

“A little. It’s strange to be doing it without Beth.”

“That’s what I meant.”

“She didn’t hate Bushwick, though. I mean, there’s that.”

“She was funny that way. She didn’t really hate it anywhere.”

Tyler says, “Do you think you could meet me at the new place?”

“I have to open the store in forty-five minutes.”

“Barrett can open.”

“Do you want me to come?”

“Kind of. I don’t really exactly feel like walking in there alone.”

“I’ll come, then.”

“Thank you.”

“I can be there in about twenty-five minutes.”

“Thank you,” Tyler says again.

•

Tyler waits for Liz on the stoop of the new building, smoking a cigarette. Hello, Avenue C. Hello, new café next door to a skeevy deli, shelves half stocked, that’s got to be a front for drug dealing. Hello, red-jacketed young buck, nice faux-hawk, good luck getting around the three ancient women trading complaints in a foreign language (Polish, Ukrainian?), who’ve spread themselves across the sidewalk, a human blockade, all carrying plastic bags from Key Food, moving at the pace of a Labor Day parade.

When Liz turns the corner, at the far end of the block, Tyler experiences a moment of non-recognition, sees Liz as he’d see her if she were just another stranger, turning off Ninth Street onto Avenue C.

Briefly he sees a tall, serious woman, something of the ranch hand about her—the booted stride, the squared shoulders. Liz walks like a man. There’s the chocolate-colored leather jacket as well, and the gray hair pulled carelessly back. She’s been called in to break that bronco, the one no one else can ride …

And then she’s Liz again.

“Hello,” Tyler says. He throws his cigarette to the curb, stands up. They embrace quickly, semi-formally, as if a gesture of cheerful courage is required. Tyler thinks of mourners, at a wake.

“Have you been waiting long?” she asks.

“Naw. A few minutes. Checking out the new nabe.”

“And?”

“More people. Fewer of them desperate and insane.”

“The desperate and insane are everywhere. You’ve only been here a few minutes.”

Tyler holds open the door for her, and they walk into the lobby. It’s arid and crepuscular, semi-lit by a flickering fluorescent circle. It smells of ammonia and, more faintly, of wood smoke.

It is, however, a notable improvement over the pasty yellow, violently bright vestibule in Bushwick.

They take the elevator (there’s an elevator!) to the fourth floor. Tyler tries his new key in the lock of the door marked 4B. It works. The door sighs open, a sound of exhausted yet unremitting patience.

Tyler and Liz stand in the small foyer.

“This is so much better,” she says.

“Hard to deny.” He steps loudly (his boots seem to make an unnatural clatter in this shadowy silence) across the coffee-colored floorboards, into the living room. Liz follows.

The living room is empty, in more than the literal way. Whoever lived here previously left no traces, not even ghostly ones. The place in Bushwick had had such history of inhabitation; it had been so assiduously “improved” by generations of tenants. This apartment has, it seems, merely aged, its walls a dingy pancake-batter color that was once white, dotted here and there with a nail hole where a picture hung. Its dark floorboards are scratched in places, but appear to have remained essentially unaltered over the course of eighty years or more. No one has stripped or painted them, no one has covered them in varnish.

In the middle of the room, like a proud and silent queen, stands the sofa, delivered yesterday by Two Guys with a Van.

“There she is,” Liz says.

“I’ve told Barrett I want to die on this couch. Remind him, okay?”

Tyler sits on the sofa. He is, briefly, like a dog, returning gratefully to its bed, its basket, piled with hair-specked blankets, in a corner of the kitchen.

“Have you decided about paint yet?” Liz asks.