The Snow Queen (21 page)

It’s delusional. It’s probably delusional. But since Barrett helped to scatter Beth’s ashes, he keeps returning to the harbor as if it were his true and heartless, inhuman parent, a parent that has no motives or ambitions on its children’s behalf; that is neither proud nor disappointed. He can’t shake the conviction that there’s an eye in the water, never visible but always present, neither glad nor sorry to see him but alert somehow to the fact that he’s come again.

Tyler found a mother for them, didn’t he? This is a thought Barrett can contemplate only when he’s riding the ferry. It might be true; it might not be. It has a ring of bullshit about it. But Beth was so different from Tyler’s other girls. Tyler started up with her around the time Barrett’s own life began to …
fall apart
is too melodramatic (Barrett, don’t confuse yourself with a character in a B movie—or, for that matter, with someone out of Dostoyevsky) … to slide a little, to fail to coalesce, enough so that he had no choice but to move in with Tyler.

To move in with Tyler, and with Beth. Beth who was mild and kind, who was the same person every day. Beth who said, that night in the kitchen on New Year’s Eve, that Barrett and Tyler should know about the dimming of the house lights, they should know that there comes a time when the question of good versus bad ceases to matter.

Is it possible, even remotely so, that Barrett’s true ambition in life turns out to have been insisting on himself as Tyler’s little brother?

Boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. Fuck you, F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Say it, then. Say it to yourself. When Beth recovered, you believed you knew—you suspected you knew—what the light had meant to tell you: that you’ve reproduced your childhood with Tyler, and that this woman, this time, will not attract the attention of the jokester god.

Which would imply that the light had lied. And that the water is telling the truth.

•

An hour later, after Barrett has made the round-trip to Staten Island, Sam is waiting for him, just as he said he would, uptown, in the park, at Bethesda Fountain. Barrett sees him from the balustrade that hovers thirty feet or so above the fountain’s plaza. Sam sits on the fountain’s lip, under the angel—the peasant-girl angel, sturdy and strapping, looking not ecstatically skyward but gravely down, earth-entranced, from her platter of bronze, skeins of water spilling out around her as she extends one arm and holds, with the other, her spear of lilies.

Barrett stands for a while on the balustrade above the fountain. He can see Sam, but Sam can’t see him. He can observe an interlude of private Sam-ness, the Sam who doesn’t know Barrett is there; the Sam who exists privately, who doesn’t alter his demeanor (if he does so at all) for Barrett’s sake.

Sam sits solidly, feet planted on the bricks, hands on kneecaps, as if he were resting briefly from some strenuous labor that will continue after this short, union-mandated rest period. He’s like a guy taking a break. He’s wearing the carpenter’s jeans to which he’s so devoted, and the gray corduroy Carhartt jacket Barrett gave him for his birthday last week, a jacket Sam likes better than Barrett does (it’s a love sign, isn’t it, the ability to give a gift the receiver wants more than you do?); Sam harboring, as he does, this particular devotion to workingman’s modesty, this obscure desire to be mistakable for a construction worker, when in fact he teaches nineteenth-century English and American literature at Princeton.

Sam comports himself as if he’s visiting from another planet, where the standards are different, and where he’s considered a prize. On Sam’s planet, the coveted features include an overly large head, with gray eyes set disconcertingly far apart; a mere parenthesis of a nose (which enhances the enormous-head effect); and a wide, equine mouth above a chin so broad and horsey that it’s possible to imagine holding a lump of sugar out in your hand for him to nuzzle curiously and then, with a gentle scrape of whiskers against your palm, accept.

Sam walks through the world with such unapologetic certainty that, although no one has ever called him handsome, almost everyone who knows him has called him, in one way or another, surprisingly sexy.

He and Barrett met, just five months ago, in a Korean deli on lower Broadway. They were browsing the cooler, which was curtained, in that slightly upsetting way, by those vertical bands of clear plastic that imply some remote and impoverished clinic, short on medicine, able to keep flies away from the mortally ill, but not much beyond that.

Barrett and Sam started talking about the merits of Coke versus Pepsi.

One Tuesday you’re headed home, and you think, I’m going to stop in this deli to which I’ve never gone before, and get a Coke. One Tuesday, at six thirty-two. There’s this big guy standing at the cooler, you don’t think much of him one way or another, so it’s natural, it requires no courage or effort, to ask, “Are you Coke, or Pepsi?” It is not surprising that the guy turns to look at you, that he offers a contemplative little smile, as if it had been an actual, serious question, and says, “Pepsi. No question. Coke is the Beatles, Pepsi is the Rolling Stones.”

And then it’s only semi-surprising that you see kindly gray depths in his eyes, that you see a resigned weariness in them, that you imagine—thinking nothing will come of it—that you imagine for some reason how you might sit with his head in your lap, stroking his gunmetal hair (defiantly unwashed) and telling him, Rest, just rest for a minute.

Sam is not Barrett’s type (although Barrett would, until they met, have insisted that he had no “type” at all). Sam is neither young nor briskly, foolishly optimistic; he is not a broad-shouldered pugilist; he is not anyone Eakins would have wanted to paint.

Love, it seems, arrives not only unannounced, but so accidentally, so randomly, as to make you wonder why you, why anyone, believes even fleetingly in laws of cause and effect.

Barrett remains a little longer at the balustrade, watching Sam. When will this one, Barrett wonders, send him off with an e-mail or a text? Or will this one simply stop returning calls entirely? It is, after all, a tradition, for Barrett. It keeps refusing not to happen.

Barrett thinks—he thinks, briefly—of turning around and leaving the park; of being, this time, the vanisher, the man who leaves you wondering, who offers no explanation, not even the sour satisfaction of a real fight; who simply drifts away, because (it seems) there’s affection and there’s sex but there’s no urgency, no little hooks clasping little eyes; no bindings, no dogged devotions, no prayers for mercy, not when mercy can be so easily self-administered. What would it be like, Barrett wonders, to be the other, the man who’s had the modest portion he thinks of as enough, who slips away before the mess sets in, before he’s available to accusation and recrimination, before the authorities start demanding of him When, and Why, and With Whom?

Beth had just over five months. Out of nowhere. She was granted three months and four days until it came raging back, and among Barrett’s regrets (he cultivates what he likes to consider an appropriate number of them) is the fact that she got so sick again, so quickly, there was never a moment, never a proper moment, in which to ask her whether she’d been grateful for the reprieve.

She must have been grateful. Barrett insists that she was. Didn’t she say so, more or less, on New Year’s Eve? If not in actual words, didn’t she let him, him and Tyler, know that she was glad to be held between them at a party but that she knew (it does seem, in retrospect, that she knew) she was a species of ghost, permitted by some fluke in the system to haunt in corporeal form, which must—mustn’t it?—have been a pleasure for her. Unless it wasn’t; unless, when the cancer came back, she felt doubly betrayed, mistreated, fucked with.

Sam will, in all likelihood, leave, either sooner or later. No one yet has failed to. But there is, in fact, so little time. Barrett straightens up, starts toward the stairs that lead down to the little plaza in which the angel stands with her endless bronze patience, where Sam is waiting.

A
fter she’s closed the shop, Liz can’t seem to go home. It’s too corny, it’s too old-ladyish, to think of herself as dreading her empty apartment—who’d want to entertain that visitation of pathos?—but still, after she’s closed up, she wanders through Williamsburg on one of the last warm evenings in November. The bars and restaurants on Driggs put out their golden glows (these places all know about lighting), packed with celebrants, their entrances crowded with loiterers whose names are on the list, who wait, laughing and smoking, on the sidewalk. Everyone is twenty-four years old.

It’s a land of the young, which could of course be depressing to Liz, though as she walks unnoticed along Driggs, she’s aware—tonight, more than ever—of how temporarily young these denizens are; how ephemeral is this night of theirs; how soon they’ll be reminiscing, as toddlers tumble around their living room floors, about
those nights in Williamsburg
. Maybe it’s their youthful promise and prosperity, the clear abundance of their gifts that will … not undo them, not that exactly, but tame them, urge them homeward, bring them to their senses. They are not (not, at least, most of them, as far as Liz can tell) prone to the extraordinary—they have moved so eagerly to Williamsburg, so willingly worn its clothes. It would be silly, it would be churlish, for Liz to disparage as she walks invisibly among them; it would be mean-spirited not to convey to them, telepathically, her hope that they survive as gracefully as possible the day the cord starts tightening (we need a bigger place, now that the baby is almost two), the year they understand that they’re charming eccentrics now, still working in computer graphics or as sound technicians, not by any means unrecognizable to themselves but members (surprise) of the rest of the aging population, the latest version (hipster version) of the forty-year-olds who still sport a few vestiges of punk, the fifty-year-olds (that’s you, Liz) who still work, in a modified way, that thrift-store cowgirl-hooker thing.

She can’t go home, not yet. But she can’t wander through Williamsburg either, not much longer.

She turns down Fifth Street, and walks toward the Williamsburg Bridge.

She knows, of course she knows, where she’s going. What’s strange is she hasn’t decided on it. She’s simply going, as if it were inevitable, as if there were nowhere else.

•

Avenue C, in the early evening, is the slightly more foolish cousin of Driggs. Here, too, are crowded, prospering bars and cafés, though fewer of them—Liz walks an entire block and passes only a fluorescent deli, a Chinese take-out joint, a Laundromat (
LAST WASH 9 P.M.
), a tattoo parlor (no customers, at the moment), a bicycle repair place already shuttered for the night, and the vacant remains of what had been a pet shop (its window still bearing, in silver letters, the words
CANARIES AND OTHER SONGBIRDS
), but the young people in these bars and cafés (most of them undergraduates, out for the evening in what they consider an edgy neighborhood) are more like the daughters and sons of minor aristocrats—charming, lazy, well-fed children who dress stylishly but are not in costume; who neither expect nor court surprise. A boy in a faux-ratty blazer (Ralph Lauren, Liz can always spot it) leans out of a tavern doorway and shouts, to his cigarette-smoking friends, “They just scored another one.”

Liz reaches the building, its blank, cordovan-colored brick facade, and rings 4B. No answer. She rings one more time.

It’s just as well. She’s been spared the indignity. It’s time for her to hail a cab and go home.

As she’s turning to leave, though—Tyler’s voice, from above.

“Hey.”

Liz passes through a moment of impossibility. Tyler is speaking to her from the sky; Tyler has died, he’s hovering above the earthly plane …

She looks up. Tyler is standing on the fourth-floor windowsill, semi-visible above the light-layer put out by the streetlamps, like a carving in a niche on the high wall of a church.

Liz shouts, “What in the fuck are you doing?”

Tyler doesn’t answer. He looks down with benign patience at her, looks past her at the sparse traffic on Avenue C.

“Get down from there,” Liz shouts.

After a moment’s hesitation—a barely agitated pause, as if he were reluctant to reveal a confidence—Tyler says, “I’m not going to jump.”

“You’d fucking better not. Get down from there and buzz me in.”

Tyler looks at her again, with an expression of regretful compassion Liz remembers from a particular angel—it must have been a sculpture from the church of her childhood.

“Do it now,” Liz says.

Slowly, with lazy resignation, Tyler withdraws from the window. Soon after, the buzzer sounds, and Liz hurries inside.

The door to the apartment is unlocked. The apartment is dark. Liz finds Tyler returned to where she left him, hours and hours ago. He’s lying on the sofa in an attitude of ordinary recumbency. Liz suppresses an urge to stride over and slap him, as hard as she’s able to, across the face.

“What was
that
about?” she asks.

“I’m sorry if I scared you,” he answers.

“What were you
doing
?”

“I’m not really sure. I wanted to get out of the apartment but not go down to the street.”

“You really weren’t going to jump?”

“No. I mean, I thought about it. I was
thinking
about jumping, I wasn’t
going
to. There’s a difference, right?”

“I suppose there is.”

How is it possible that this makes sense to her?

He says, “We’ve been having sex for years.”

“I know.”

“And we’ve never said anything about it. Not anything at all.”

“I know that, too.”

“Does that seem odd to you?”

“I don’t know,” she says. “Yeah, I guess.”

“We were sneaking around on Beth. And Andrew.”

“Did it really feel like sneaking around, to you?”

“I don’t know,” he says. “Would Andrew have minded?”

“No. Well. If he’d minded, he couldn’t have let himself. Minding would have been too … Not who Andrew wanted to be.”