14 Degrees Below Zero (12 page)

“Anyway, I wanted to speak with him about the . . . his grievances. I thought it was appropriate. He came to my place of work. Didn’t that give me the right to do the same?”

“Dad, I don’t know.” Jay sighed. “I don’t know.”

“I have to say that he reacted badly.”

“How?” Jay asked.

“Stephen refuses to treat me with any respect,” Lewis said. “All I got for trying to reach out was hostility. What have I done to make him dislike me so much?”

Jay shifted the phone to her other ear.

“I don’t think it’s a matter of him disliking you, Dad,” she said.

“You know me—I want to get along,” Lewis said. “But he makes it impossible. He’s the one who started this. When I tried to bridge the gap, I just got more flak. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do now.”

Andrea returned to their place by the window. Her red hair was tucked back behind her ears, and she studied her napkin while pretending not to listen to what Jay was saying.

“You don’t have to
do
anything, Dad,” Jay told him.

“Look, honey, you know the last thing I want to do is cause problems for you,” Lewis said through a hiss of static.

“I know that, Dad,” Jay told him.

“I don’t want to be the stereotypical father who rejects all his daughter’s suitors,” Lewis said. “I know you’re a grown woman. I kept my opinions to myself until Stephen opened up this can of worms.”

Stereotypical father
—like the time Lewis threatened to drive by himself to Oregon and extract some vaguely defined restitution from Michael Carmelov? That scene had ended with both Jay and Anna in tears, shocked by the depths of Lewis’s rage. Only a threat to call the police had kept Lewis in Minneapolis, seething, affronted, and (once or twice) repulsed by the sight of Jay’s swelling belly.

“Stephen is a very rational person,” Jay said. Andrea glanced her way. “I have a hard time believing he was so confrontational.”

“What are you saying?” Lewis asked. “Are you saying I started it?”

“No, but I also know how hard it is for you to back down,” Jay said.

“Why should I back down?”

“Dad, don’t yell—”

“All I am trying to do is to protect you and Ramona.”

“Dad, listen to yourself,” Jay said. “Stephen isn’t someone we need protection from.”

“Maybe you don’t think so,” Lewis sniffed. “But you didn’t see him today. I didn’t want to bring this up, but there are aspects of his attitude toward you that are disturbing.”

“Dad, I don’t—”

“I guess it’s occurred to you that you’re a very attractive young woman,” Lewis added. “And that Stephen is significantly older than you. I see how much he likes how you reflect on him.”

“Dad, this is not a conversation—”

“I know, I shouldn’t have said that.” Lewis paused. “It’s just that I’m
worried,
honey. I think all the time about what’s best for you. And for Ramona.”

“I’m aware of that.”

“I’d do anything to protect you and make things right for you.”

God, why did he have to
be
like this? All this intensity, all this consuming need to get a reaction from her . . . and now this insistence that she be on
his
side.

When she was alone with Stephen, she could imagine standing up to Lewis. In those moments, full of lucidity and purpose, she could even imagine the sort of person she wanted to become. And yes, she had imagined herself as a professor’s wife, wrapped in Stephen’s benevolent distraction.

But like a whisper in her ear, she knew that Lewis had given voice to thoughts of her own. Men tired of women, and one day Jay’s toned thighs and upturned breasts would lose their allure for Stephen. One day Jay would be thirty, then forty, while Stephen’s students would retain their evergreen youth. Could she be sure her appeal to him was based on more than his constantly expressed lust and the magnetism of physical attraction? And could she be certain that Stephen might not be deceiving himself, in addition to her?

“Dad, I’ll talk to Stephen,” she said.

“Well, all right, you have your own decisions to make,” Lewis said. “I just pulled up in the driveway.”

“Let’s not make too big a deal of this,” Jay said.

“It’s hard for me to know what to say,” Lewis replied. “Stephen is interfering with what means the most to me. It’s impossible not to take offense.”

“I’ll
talk
to him.”

“I wish that were enough,” Lewis said.

Jay heard the sound of her father getting out of his car. “What does that mean?” she asked.

“Nothing.” The front door opened. “I love you, honey. I’ll call you later. Have a good day at work.”

“I love you, too,” Jay said, and hung up the phone.

“What was
that
?” Andrea said, snapping Jay out of the one-second reverie of impossibility into which she had fallen.

“My dad,” Jay said. Andrea knew Lewis from elementary-school days. She had once referred to Lewis as
sexy,
a moment that never failed to make Jay feel utterly revolted with every aspect of existence.

“I know it was your dad,” Andrea said impatiently. “But that sounded like a really weird conversation. Is there some problem with Stephen?”

“I didn’t think there was,” Jay said.

“You don’t sound so sure,” Andrea observed.

“Break up with him,” Jay said.

Andrea’s round eyes widened behind her angular glasses.

“Excuse me?” she said.

“Brad,” Jay blurted out. “You asked me what I thought. Break up with him. That’s what I think you should do.”

“Wow,” Andrea said, sliding her hand over Jay’s forearm. “That conversation with your dad really freaked you out.”

“Life’s too short,” Jay said. “Look outside. It’s getting colder. The freeze is setting in. What more evidence do you need?”

INTERLUDE. NO ONE GOES AWAY, SHE SAID.

R
amona was not having a good morning. First she had not been given toast for breakfast when, as everyone knew, Monday was the day for toast and sugar. Then she had gotten scolded for moving the littler kids out of the big chair in the front room—and hadn’t been able to defend herself, because doing so would have meant exposing the identity of the Perfect Princess, which was simply not done.

She had so many worries. In the morning Mama had been crabby and thinking of all the grown-up things that Ramona wasn’t supposed to know about. Like being angry, and being in love, and dying.

It would be a really good time for Grandma to come back. Ramona couldn’t understand what was taking her so long.

Grampa Lewis was acting weird, and that made Ramona worried. Sure, he had bought her a big ice cream the other day—strawberry, her new favorite—but before that he had been saying weird things to Mama in the kitchen. Things about Stephen.

Ramona liked Stephen, and she didn’t like Stephen. Stephen was nice. Stephen was yucky. It was yucky how he kissed Mama, and how they slept in bed together. Ramona used to sleep in bed with Mama, but now she figured she was no longer welcome.

“Ramona?” asked Teresa, one of the day care ladies. “Are you going to be ready for lunch in a few minutes?”

“Sure,” Ramona said quietly.

She looked at her hand. It had a new freckle on it that Ramona wasn’t sure she liked. Mama said there was nothing to do about it, that she’d get even more freckles as she got older, and that they’d never go away.

It was hard to get used to the idea of things never going away. Because the weird part was that some things
did
go away. Like Grandma. Who was coming back any time.

“Play with me?” said Vanessa, one of the Twins. Ramona knew it was Vanessa, rather than Elaine, because Vanessa always wore a ribbon in her hair. Ramona was jealous of the ribbon because it was very beautiful. The Twins were two years younger than Ramona, and as such occupied a sort of mascot role for the Perfect Princess.

“Not now,” said the Perfect Princess. “Later.”

“Aww,” said Vanessa.

Grampa Lewis was acting really weird. There was nothing wrong with Stephen. Stephen was actually really nice. Ramona didn’t like him all the time, but he liked her, and that was a pretty nice way for things to be. Ramona wouldn’t like it if Stephen went away.

Ramona wondered if Grampa Lewis was going to make Stephen die, or if Stephen was going to make Grampa Lewis die. It would be good, as long as one of them died and went to get Grandma and brought her back. But what if one of them died and made Ramona wait, the way Grandma did?

Ramona didn’t want any more people leaving. She twitched her hand in the air, the one with the freckle, the way she did when she was making magic.
No one goes away,
she said without making a sound.

Grampa Lewis and Stephen were going to have a fight. Ramona just knew it. She didn’t understand why, but it had something to do with both of them wanting Mama. The way Ramona had her Bear, and her lamb, and all the other animals who lived in her bed and who she had to tell stories to before they could go to sleep.

“OK, Ramona, come on in,” said Teresa from the doorway to the kitchen. “Your lunch is ready. Hey, what are you thinking about? You look so serious.”

“Nothing,” said the Perfect Princess, ready for her royal meal, moving through the room with the carriage of undying royalty.

12. THEY HAD LEARNED TO PROTECT THEMSELVES FROM DISAPPOINTMENT.

“Y
ou’re putting a wall around yourself,” Stephen said, the phone cradled against his shoulder, both elbows planted on his office desk.

“I’m not, I’m really not,” Jay said. “When can you come over?”

“My office hours are over at four, then I have a quick meeting,” he replied. “Can I take you out to dinner?”

“I don’t feel like going out,” Jay said. She spoke to him on a break from her shift at the Cogito. Stephen imagined her standing there in that depressing kitchen. She would be wearing those black pants and one of those classy tight tops that drove him crazy and more than once had compelled him to make her late for work.

“OK, I understand,” Stephen replied. “I’ll get some takeout and come over. I’ll get Vietnamese—dumplings for Ramona.”

“I don’t know, Stephen,” Jay said. “I think maybe I need a night or two to get my head together.”

Stephen’s pulse sped up. Jay had never before used the conditional language of the distant lover.

“All right,” he said uncertainly. “What did Lewis tell you about what happened today? Because it was really—”

“I can’t get into it,” Jay said in a tone that encompassed the environs from which she spoke. Stephen thought of that preening peacock of a manager there, the guy who was always so chummy with Jay while sizing her up like a piece of exotic pastry.

“I haven’t done anything
wrong,
Jay,” he pleaded.

“I know.”

“I love you, darling.”

“I love you, too,” Jay said. Thank God she gave him that.

“I don’t want to lose you over this.” Stephen glanced up. Standing in the doorway was Katrina Mason, the girl from his class he’d been trying so assiduously not to undress with his eyes during that morning’s lecture.

“Is this a bad time?” Katrina said.

Oh, she was so perfect. Stephen shifted the phone to his other ear and motioned to the empty chair diagonal to his.

“No, no,” he said. “I’ll just be a moment.”

“Who’s that?” Jay asked.

“A student,” Stephen replied, looking away from Katrina.

“You have quite a following over there,” Jay observed. “Is she pretty?”

“Not at all,” Stephen said. “Listen, you have to know I mean every word of what I’m saying.”

Stephen spoke in a hushed voice, all too conscious of Katrina’s inquisitive presence not five feet from him. From the corner of his eye he caught a glimpse of bare knee as she crossed her legs. Healthy, healthy, he told himself. Pretending not to notice would be the real disorder.

“I . . . I believe you,” Jay said. “Look, my break is almost over. I’m going outside for a smoke.”

“A smoke?” Stephen said. “You don’t smoke anymore.”

“I guess things are changing,” Jay said. “I bummed one off Fowler.”

“I don’t like to hear you talk like this,” said Stephen.

“Call me tomorrow,” Jay said. “We’ll try to work all this out.”

“Work it out?” Stephen said. “What is there to work out? I won’t talk to your father anymore. It’s
his
problem.”

“I need to think,” Jay said quietly. She had no idea, but even her voice was a thing of beauty—husky yet feminine, infused with the wisdom of a woman twice her age.

He couldn’t be
losing
her, could he?

He looked up at Katrina, whose innocent features were framed by close-cropped dyed-red hair. She regarded Stephen as though he were a specimen of an extremely rare beast.

I can go,
Katrina mouthed.

Stephen shook his head. “Give Ramona a kiss for me, and we’ll talk in the morning. OK?”

“Fine,” Jay said, with a noticeable lack of enthusiasm.

“I love you,” Stephen said.

“I love you, too,” Jay said, with a tone Stephen had heard other women use before. She did not particularly mean it. Then she hung up.

“Are you all right?” Katrina asked.

It took a fair amount of self-control not to immediately unburden himself upon his student, whose solicitous body language made clear that she had affixed upon Stephen any number of romantic delusions. But part of his job entailed understanding that attaching herself to him was part of Katrina’s intellectual development. Any indulgence of her attraction was tantamount to the abuse always potential in an analyst/patient relationship. He put his fist to his cheek and allowed himself the pleasure of looking at her.

“I’m fine, thanks for asking,” Stephen replied while his mind reeled. His attachment to Jay, he admitted to himself, was founded upon a tacit trade-off between her intrinsic qualities of beauty and smarts against his own status and experience. In other words, he had assumed that if anyone was going to tire and seek escape from the relationship, it was going to be him. Now, imagining life without Jay was enough to induce panic. He had more rivals than allies, and no real friends. Being with Jay enabled him to define himself in a way that he liked, and made it possible to get through the day.

“Maybe I should come back another time,” Katrina said uncertainly, showing a hint of affront once she realized she was not the center of Stephen’s attention.

“No, I’m sorry,” Stephen told her. “Please.”

“Was that your girlfriend on the phone?” Katrina asked, smiling as though pleasantly scandalized.

“Let’s hope so,” Stephen said, trying to smile in return.

Lewis unbolted his front door that night while trying to fight off a full-blown shiver induced by the deepening chill and the chemical tang of the pharmaceutical stew coursing through his veins. Carew undulated at his feet, the sound of the lock throwing him into rapture.

Yeah yeah yeah Lewis,
Carew said with his eyes and tongue.
Yeah yeah yeah fuckin’ yeah.

“Go on,” Lewis told Carew. “Get inside.”

The dog had passed the twilight with his shitting and sniffing at the park, off his leash and reveling in his freedom while Lewis smoked a cigarette and shivered. Dogshit Park had once been the place where, a full two decades ago, Lewis had brought the toddler Jay to stagger and reel in the sand while he and Anna marveled over her every utterance and physical breakthrough. Now the slides and climbing apparatus were occupied with other people’s children, their squeals and preverbal utterances filling the void of time with memories to sweeten bitter futures.

“What, are you hungry or something?” Lewis said to Carew in the kitchen. Carew sniffed at his empty bowl with anticipation—Lewis realized the dog was trying to condition Lewis, to plant the idea to feed him, which filled Lewis with unexpected appreciation for the beast.

Hungry hungry,
Carew said.
Food? Food, Lewis?

Lewis lived in a big house, though the kitchen was old-fashioned and disproportionately small. Anna had always talked about remodeling it, though they had settled ten years ago on the stopgap measure of installing new cabinetry and painting the walls. Now there was no money for making any improvements, nor was there much motivation. The kitchen would stay as it was, for the foreseeable future.

He had seen her. He looked around at all the familiar places still haunted by her presence. It was as though, if he focused his eyes just right, he would see her again.

But no, nothing.

When Lewis reached under the sink for the bag of dog food, his chest gave a serious lurch. He steadied himself against the counter and tried to keep breathing. The chill filled him like a block of ice in the center of his hollowed-out carcass—it shook his shoulders and made his hands clench against his sternum. What a terrible feeling, he thought. Death pervaded his consciousness like a low-lying cloud—here, predictably, came the tightening in his chest, like a band cinched true.

Lewis, Lewis?
Carew said, at his feet.
All right there? Food?

“I’m getting to it,” Lewis muttered as he opened up the bag and willed himself to go on.

With the sound of the dog crunching his meal echoing in the silence, Lewis moved into the dining room and switched on the light. The big table was piled with newspapers and coffee cups. It was low-level bachelor squalor, though the house was cleaner now than when Anna was alive. She had started letting things go long before she ever got sick. She might have been depressed, Lewis couldn’t say. Part of his long-term armistice with Anna had been the unspoken agreement that neither was responsible for the other’s moods or happiness, either transitory or long-term. It had been an OK arrangement. Gradually they had lost the vocabulary of emotional need when speaking to each other, and they had learned to protect themselves from disappointment. When Lewis wasn’t consumed with his petty resentments—and these times admittedly grew fewer and fewer as the years passed—he would enter into a state of bland contentment, if not happiness.

Immediately after she died, he had entertained a fear that her ghost would come back to haunt him, fully aware of all the treacherous thoughts he had harbored over the years.

He had seen her, but she didn’t see him. She had been staring straight ahead. But it
had
been her, just for an instant. Her presence was someplace in the house, in the sunporch, the bedrooms, or between the slanted walls of the third story.

Lewis picked up the portable phone and took the creaky stairs to the second floor. His chest felt a little better, enough for him to believe that his rush of sickness was psychosomatic. He got a thick wool sweater out of the closet and pulled it over the fleece he was already wearing. In the mirror he corrected his posture—
don’t stoop, old man
—and stuck out his chest. He basically liked what he saw. He wondered if he would ever be with another woman.

“Are you here?” he said to the empty room.

The first time had been on a business trip to San Francisco. She was a colleague he had met that day and, after too many drinks at his hotel bar, they had gone upstairs together. Lewis could remember the pink silk of her underwear and the smell of cigarettes on her breath. He was reasonably certain she didn’t come. Lewis couldn’t remember her face, save for a sort of sensual curve to her mouth. He managed to avoid any further trips to that city, and after a couple of phone calls to his office managed to extricate himself from any emotional debt.

Jay was in elementary school at the time. Lewis remembered coming home, playing a game of Candyland with her and thinking,
her father is an adulterer.
There had been the crushing guilt and the terrible anxiety, of course, there was no getting around it. But, at the same time, Lewis had also felt an oddly exhilarating sense of accomplishment, as though he had proven that none of the strictures mattered, that the foundations of his good life were a matter of spirit rather than form, and that if indeed nothing mattered, then he had done nothing wrong.

The second time had been with a mutual friend. It happened twice, and then Lewis had to endure both the guilt and Anna’s suspicion when the friend stopped coming around. The third woman, like the first, came from his work world. The fourth, and last, infidelity had happened two years ago, with a friend’s wife. It was enough to stop his heart, just thinking about it.

The wind pushed against the storm windows. Lewis looked out at the bare trees, the worn carpet of the backyard. The coming winter was announcing itself in earnest. He turned on the phone and dialed it without looking.

“Hello?” Jay said.

“It’s me.” Lewis turned on the light in his study. “How are you?”

“Fine, Dad,” Jay said. “Me and Ramona just finished dinner.”

“Oh. What did you have?”

“Macaroni and cheese with hot dogs.” Jay laughed.

“Ah, the gourmet specialty of your youth,” Lewis said. “You know, that’s all you would eat for about a year.”

“And then it was tuna melts,” Jay replied.

“The tuna melts, I almost forgot the tuna melts,” Lewis said. “You had your mother making them twice a day.”

“She was so nice about it,” Jay said.

“She was, wasn’t she?” Lewis said, surprised by the force of the recollection—Anna at the stove, Jay waiting with an empty plate, her earnest face composed in a child’s version of thoughtful anticipation. Lewis settled into his leather chair, surrounded by shelves of books.

“So, listen, I talked to Stephen,” Jay said.

“You did.”

“I really don’t have the energy to broker a truce between you two,” Jay said with a note of exhaustion that touched Lewis to the core. There it was again, that hypersensitivity. It felt as though his borders had been opened.

“You don’t have to do any such thing,” Lewis responded. “This is between Stephen and me.”

“But, Dad, you have to understand—I’m caught in the middle. Just a minute, honey.”

“Excuse me?” Lewis said.

“It’s Ramona.” Jay paused. “Do you want to talk to Grandpa, sweetie?”

Lewis heard Ramona’s muffled negative reply and his heart sank. Was this strife with Stephen filtering down to the child? Apparently it wasn’t enough for Stephen to drive a wedge between Lewis and his daughter—now his painting of Lewis as a villain was filtering through to Ramona’s delicate perceptions.

“It’s all right,” Lewis said. “She doesn’t like the phone.”

“She was getting better,” Jay said uncertainly. “Look, honey, go play in your room. I’ll be off in a minute.”

“Has Stephen been talking to her?” Lewis asked.

“Who? Ramona?” Jay said. “Well, sure, they talk all the time. But not the way you think. Dad, don’t get paranoid.”

Lewis settled into his chair. Night had come, and outside the window his back porch light spread shadows under the canopy of the big elm.

“It’s not paranoid to notice an outsider making trouble in my family,” Lewis said quietly.

“Dad, don’t,” Jay said. “I don’t even know where things stand between me and Stephen right now.”

“Has he—”

“It’s not him, it’s me,” Jay interrupted. “I don’t know where my life is going. I’m not sure whether or not I want to spend it with him. Maybe I do, I’m not sure. It’s hard to think straight with all this—”

“Mama!” Lewis heard Ramona saying.

“What?”
Jay said, not hiding her exasperation. Lewis wished he could describe to her the time in her life when she would move the world to hear the plaintive need of her child again.