14 Degrees Below Zero (16 page)

16. BECAUSE SHE WAS A LOT LIKE HER FATHER.

B
y rough count, Jay served forty-five people food, drinks, and desserts in a thirty-six-hour period—not counting Ramona, who consumed her usual ration of macaroni, snack chips, whole milk, and sliced fruit. It was routine, it was monotony, it wasn’t all bad. Jay felt infinitely thankful to Ramona for being who she was: the one person whom Jay would never think badly of, and who (hopefully) would never think badly of her.

Now the day’s work was done, and an unusual silence reigned over her apartment. Ramona was in her room playing a game on the machine Lewis had bought for her—weird tinny song snippets and demented voices burbled steadily into the hall. And, strangely enough, the phone was not ringing. She was a little surprised that Stephen hadn’t called since she’d broken up with him, although prideful silence wasn’t an unfathomable reaction on his part. What was odder was Lewis’s sudden lack of communication. Jay hadn’t heard from him since early the day before, which meant he was about six or eight phone calls behind. It surprised her to feel the omission of hearing about Carew’s latest transgression against dignity, or the most recent bout of fear and loathing Lewis had experienced at Marshall Field’s.

It occurred to Jay to call Lewis, but she decided to enjoy the respite—one that was bound to be temporary. If this was to be the feel of life without the pressures imposed by Lewis and Stephen, well, so be it. She mixed herself a weak gin and tonic in the kitchen, looking out over the snow and the fading light of day. It was going to be a terrible winter. Thanksgiving was still a long stone’s throw away, and already it felt as though the cold had locked in, the feedback loop of frigidity set and immutable. Steam vented from the smokestack on top of the apartment building across the way, and through the storm windows she could hear the lonely scrape of a snow shovel against the pavement.

The harsh rhythms of winter had shaped Jay’s temperament since she was a little girl. Lewis always tried to soften the terrifying reality of the natural world dying off and frozen stasis setting in—he would extol the bright blue skies, and make sport of the very coldest days by performing physics stunts such as tossing pots of warm water into the yard to make weird abstract ice sculptures. But even in her most innocent childhood she knew this was Lewis’s equivalent of whistling past the graveyard—in fact, she understood how much of Lewis’s behavior was a variation on this theme.

She took a sip of her drink and was glad she’d taken the time to slice a lime. In the next room a computer cat was singing a song about being a real cat. The windows gave a little rattle to commemorate a gust of wind.

Jay knew she couldn’t complain—not without being churlish, nor without failing to recognize the incredible good luck she enjoyed to be who she was. There were people being bombed and blasted, people starving. Yes, she knew all this. But she knew her nature—several senses, a mind and memory, a hunger for evaluation. It might have been rational to keep on serving food and paying the rent and reading the occasional book, and calling that a good life—though, among other ironies, those who knew her would regard her as a defeated failure. But there were worse things than self-determined resignation. Maybe it was simply a matter of
deciding
to be content. She still had the bulk of her twenties ahead of her; maybe the key was simply to quit worrying so much.

But that wasn’t going to happen, was it? Maybe she had too much Lewis in her, too much of an impulse to hold everything up to the light, too strong an impulse to ask what was wrong. Her mother hadn’t been like that, but then Anna was in many ways a mystery to her daughter—she was a source of comfort, a calm voice of compassionate reason, yet Jay could never claim to understand her. A mother could never know herself the way her daughter knows her, Jay thought, but if she was unable to define Anna, how then did Anna define herself?

In the weeks before she died, when everyone including Anna knew that her time was drawing short, she began saying strange things. In a half-lucid state, her face bathed in sweat and her eyes filmy, she talked of planes and trains. She talked about looking down from the peak of Mount Kilimanjaro, and walking the streets of Rome. She described going to Detroit and looking in on her brother’s family.

Don’t be ridiculous,
Anna said when Jay questioned her about these journeys after Anna had come fully awake.
I never said anything like that. If I did, I’m even crazier than I thought.

“Hey, Peanut,” Jay said, looking into Ramona’s room. Ramona was partly perched on the chair in front of her desk, one foot on the floor, the other leg folded beneath her.

“Hi, Mama,” Ramona said without looking up from the toy screen. Her hand twitched with mouse-clicks.

“You want something to eat?” Jay asked.

Ramona blinked. “Maybe,” she said. “Can I have some of those cheesy things?”

“Um, you mean Cheetos?”

“Yeah,” Ramona said with a glimmer of enthusiasm. “Those.”

“Well, you can have the ones that are left,” Jay said, never enthusiastic about feeding Ramona processed snack food, but also willing to admit that small pleasures were not to be underestimated. “But there’s no way I’m going to let you eat them in your room. All that cheese dust would clog up that keyboard.”

“Oh.” Ramona sagged a little.

“Wait until you’re done,” Jay suggested, taking a sip of her drink.

“All right.” Ramona stared ahead for another moment, then looked up. “Oh. Mama.”

“Yes?”

“I saw Grandma Anna the other day,” she said, raising her arms in one of her favorite gestures of happy triumph.

Jay felt a chill. “What do you mean, Peanut?” she asked. “Do you mean like in a dream or something?”

“Kind of like a dream,” Ramona said in a far-off voice. “Kind of like real.”

Jay leaned against the doorway. She took a deep breath and let it go. “You know Grandma Anna is gone, right?”

“Well, she’s not here,” Ramona said, looking up from the machine. “Is that what you mean?”

Jay didn’t know what to say. Ramona had seen Anna’s dead body after Jay’s final time alone with her. Ramona had kissed Anna’s forehead and burst into tears. Later that day, when Ramona asked what happened to things when they died, Jay had told her the truth. She had said that she didn’t know. No one did.

“Kind of not here,” Ramona said. “Kind of like here. Sometimes.”

Ramona’s voice trailed off into uncertainty. She looked up at Jay in that new, guarded way she had—totally open to her mother’s appraisal and judgment, yet now only recently holding something back, some apprehension entirely her own.

“You’re not worried, are you, Peanut?” Jay asked.

“What?” Ramona replied, as though the concept was entirely foreign to her.

“Nothing,” Jay said. “You go on and play your game.”

“Mama?”

“Yes, Ramona?”

“Are
you
worried?”

Ramona absentmindedly chewed on a long strand of hair that fell to one side of her face. Her arm holding the mouse was long, pale, unblemished—its supple forearm elongated and no longer showing the rounded curves that harkened back to her babyhood.

“About what?” Jay asked.

“I don’t know.” Ramona adjusted the stuffed animals in her lap. “About Grandma?”

“Peanut, I’m not worried,” Jay said. “I mean, I’m a grown-up, so there are some things I worry about. But nothing big. Nothing
you
need to be worried about.”

“But I’m not worried,” Ramona said.

“Well, good.”

Ramona turned her face back to the computer screen. “And I
did
see Grandma the other day. She smiled at me.”

Jay lingered awhile in the doorway, waiting for some other clue to understand what her daughter was talking about. But none came. Ramona was starting to learn to seal off her secret world. Probably, in the end, it was healthy for her.

Jay stretched out on the sofa in the living room, vaguely taking in the clutter all around her but too tired, really, to even consider dealing with any of it. It would wait until tomorrow. Tomorrow: the time when all problems would be solved.

It had been such a short time since she broke up with Stephen, and though she felt his absence like the ghost of a severed limb, she didn’t regret what she had done. She realized all at once that she had broken up with Stephen because she could not break up with Lewis. It wasn’t Stephen’s fault that he was older, that he wanted his love to make her better. She simply needed to make her way through the thickets of these days alone.

Poor Stephen.

Still no call from Lewis. A remote sector of her consciousness sent up a flare indicating that she should be worried about him. He seemed completely healthy, physically. Jay had of course noticed his nervous tic of rubbing his chest, and the pallor of his complexion, but he was on medication and probably, now that she thought about it, suffering from hypochondriac anxiety after months spent with the dying Anna. Lewis never took anything easy. For someone like him, a big rupture in his life was an event of monstrous proportions. And how did Jay know all this? Because she was a lot like her father.

Stephen had said so. Of course Stephen rarely spoke to his parents, so Jay had never enjoyed the luxury of meeting them and pointing out his flaws by dissecting their failings. Her life had been lived all in one place. She was easy to read. She could barely walk down the street without being flooded with memories.

And maybe that was the problem. Jay rested her drink between her breasts, enjoying the cold through her long-underwear top. She pushed out her heels, stretching her hamstrings. There was something to this train of thought—she had long felt constrained and ill served by being locked into this body of hers. But it was possible that her body wasn’t the problem at all. Maybe it was the city. It could be that she was at such an impasse because she had exhausted the possibilities of Uptown, of the windy streets below the downtown skyline, of the motley architecture of South Minneapolis.

Granted, she wouldn’t be the first to run away from her problems. But why should that stop her? A new city, she thought, a place where no one knew her, and where she could define herself any way she saw fit.

Ramona might have a hard time. She would miss Lewis. But she hadn’t started school yet, and when she did there would be a new cast of characters in which to immerse herself. It would be better for Ramona if Jay were happy. It was a source of unending guilt to Jay to think that Ramona might be growing up with an unhappy and unfulfilled mother.

But where? Chicago, maybe, though that city’s vastness had always been daunting. Madison? No, too small, worse than Minneapolis and with the same weather. Milwaukee?
Please.

Jay surprised herself by laughing, alone in the fading light, at herself for devising a way out of her maze—and for having the temerity to dismiss a city she’d never even seen, all its inhabitants and secret corners rejected as though she was some sort of princess.

“Hey, Mama,” Ramona said, coming into the room rubbing her eyes. “I’m done playing.”

“Come here,” Jay said, holding out an arm but not get-ting up.

“What are you doing?”

“Just thinking,” Jay said.

“About what?”

“You know, you’re talking so well these days,” Jay said. “I don’t think you’re going to need to see that speech therapist they were talking about when I brought you in to get tested.”

Ramona pondered this. She sort of shrugged. She was not particularly adept at accepting praise.

“Mama,” Ramona chirped. “Where’s Grampa? And Stephen?”

Jay ran her hand over her daughter’s fine brown hair. Ramona was standing over her, and unconsciously pressed the side of her body against her mother’s.

“Honey, I don’t think we’ll be seeing Stephen anymore.”

Ramona’s thumb thrust up into her mouth, and she turned away while pressing harder into Jay.

“Honey, are you all right?” Jay asked, startled.

And here came the tears. Ramona cried these days as though she was ashamed of herself for doing it. But this was unexpected. Ramona’s standoffishness to Stephen had been unremitting. Jay realized now that she had underestimated the depth of Ramona’s feelings. She sat up, put her drink on the table, and took Ramona in her arms.

“Oh, sweetie, I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I love Stephen, too. It’s just that it wasn’t going to work out with me and him. It’s messy grown-up stuff, honey. I’m so sorry.”

“Can I see him sometime?” Ramona blurted out, holding her wet thumb in front of her tear-streaked face.

“Of course, honey,” Jay said. “I promise. Stephen really loves you. We’ll wait a little while, and then I’ll call him. I’ll bet he’d love to take you to a movie or something.”

“With popcorn and soda pop?” Ramona said, calming down.

“All you want,” Jay said.

“OK,” Ramona allowed, slumping as though absorbing another in a long series of defeats.

“Hey, honey, what would you think about living someplace else?” Jay said, keeping her voice as soothing as she could.

“Like where?” Ramona asked, the thumb shooting back into her mouth.

“I don’t know for sure,” Jay said. “Maybe another city.”

Ramona’s eyes widened. “What about Grampa Lewis?”

“I’m not sure,” said Jay. “I’m just thinking.”

“He’d be OK,” Ramona said.

Jay rubbed Ramona’s shoulder. Another surprise—how easily the idea of being away from Lewis passed through Ramona’s mind.

“But would Grandma Anna be able to find us?” Ramona asked gravely.

“What do you mean?” Jay asked.

“She would,” Ramona said confidently. She rubbed at her eyes. “Grandma Anna will find us wherever we are.”

17. THE VOID WAS REACHING OUT AND CREATING A MONUMENT.

I
n the morning it was snowing again. By rights, it was the time of year in which a big fluffy snow like that of the days before might be expected to melt before the prolonged freeze set in. But this wasn’t going to be one of those years. Stephen hadn’t been in Minnesota long, but he recognized the beginnings of an epochal winter when he saw one.

He had completed his morning office hours without doing anything stupid—such as arguing with one of his male challengers or reaching out and caressing the hair of one of his young would-be suitors. To his students he was a blank slate onto which they projected their first tentative outpourings of independence. He had a knack for being taken as an appropriate post-Daddy figure—and he was the age most of their daddies were when they were children and beginning to compile all the tendencies of their particular personalities. Their responses were so transparent: fight, fuck, destroy, captivate, curry favor. The problem was that he wanted to do all those things as well, and if he became weak he was going to fall in love with some brilliant, fresh-faced girl one of these days. He knew he wasn’t immune to doing something precisely because it was a very bad idea.

But he had gotten through, stayed cool and untouchable even though he had woken in the morning feeling as though he rose from the ashes of a smoking ruin. The woman he loved had cut off his prick—metaphor, metaphor—and he’d had to get drunk by himself in front of the television. He’d scoured his brain and could think of no one with whom to telephone and share his misery. He’d never been close with his father, who despite the accident of having a family only wanted to be left to his pot pipe and basement wood shop. Stephen hadn’t talked to his brother in more than five years. The few friends who might be candidates for commiseration were scattered around the country, mostly with families, and he knew from experience that the unfamiliar sound of their voices on the phone line would preclude any hope of intimacy.

Face it—intimacy is vastly overrated. Stephen could have found
someone
to listen to his tale of woe, even a friendly bartender. But was it even worth telling? Man gets girl, girl loses heart. Girl’s father pulls gun. Man files for restraining order.

Stephen closed his office door and stripped off his clothes. He folded his slacks and laid them over the chair along with his shirt and tie. He began pulling on his black running tights, a laborious exercise made worse by the close confines of the room.

The restraining order had been a spur-of-the-moment thing—Stephen had actually been downtown at the Government Center renewing the tags on his car when it occurred to him that he could legally order Lewis to lay off. He briefly considered finding a police desk and asking about filing charges, but that seemed too vindictive. When Lewis had silently approached and flashed the gun, he had seemed pretty lost and befuddled—a man unraveling, if Stephen was any judge. So Stephen found the right office, filled out the paperwork, and had Lewis served with papers. Hopefully it had been enough to shock Lewis out of his funk of weirdness. While it was of course impossible for Stephen and Lewis to reach any sort of accord, Stephen had a sort of residual fondness for the old boy, and a muted respect. Now that he never had to deal with him again, Stephen realized that he sort of
liked
Lewis, and would miss him.

“That might be going too far,” Stephen muttered to his own Greek chorus, bent over the laces of his running shoes. He slipped on his reflective tunic, a hat and gloves, and opened the door to his office.

He stopped in the hallway to view himself in the mirror. He looked preposterous. His hat made his hair flare out around his ears like a pair of wings, and his ridiculous getup combined the worst elements of a football uniform with a ballet outfit. But damn it, he was going on a
run.
He had to defy the snow, and Jay, and Lewis, and English Literature, and the crushing reality of his own incarnation. He wasn’t going to recoil from the snow and the cold like every molecule of his California-reared body demanded. No, he would go out and
enjoy
the weather, and his life.

“You are not dressed like that,” said Sonia Wiley, walking down the hall with a pile of folders under her arm.

“Your eyes do not lie,” Stephen replied.

Sonia was a secretary in the department, a few years older than Stephen and married with two small children. She was compact and wiry and, though she seemed perfectly content with her family life, Stephen found her extraordinarily attractive. Not least among her many virtues were a pair of perspicacious brown eyes set in the flawless skin of her face, eyes that bespoke a radiant nuance of perception that made her sarcasm and casual ribbing all the more provocative.

“Well, your legs sort of look good in those tights,” Sonia said.

“My God,” Stephen said. “The first compliment I’ve heard in ages.”

“Yeah, like I believe
that,
” Sonia said, brushing her dark hair from her forehead.

Students were passing by—thankfully, none of them Stephen’s. He didn’t want
this
interrupted.

“No, I mean it,” he said. “Your small kindness is going to buoy me for the rest of the day.”

“Oh, you are so full of shit.” Sonia adjusted her load of folders. “But really, come on—you’re going out running? Today? Have you noticed the weather?”

“Clear and sunny,” said Stephen. He tapped his forehead. “The weather’s all a state of mind.”

“Your state of mind is
crazy.
” Sonia laughed. “No kidding, Stephen. Where do you think you’re going?”

“I run on the path by the river,” he said, feeling his confidence in his endeavor begin to wane. It
was
snowing like hell—he could see that through a window at the far end of the hall. But what was he to do? He was already wearing his silly costume.

“Stephen,”
Sonia said, with a tone she must have reserved for her children. “Seriously. You could slip and hurt yourself.”

“Oh, I’m too nimble for that.” He laughed. “See, you don’t know that about me. I have many talents.”

Sonia smiled an enigmatic smile. “So you say.”

“Well, anyway.” Stephen scuffed his shoes against the floor, feeling very intimidated by the depths and confidence he sensed in Sonia’s sexuality. That was the thing about flirting—he wasn’t particularly good at it. Sonia, if she chose, could probably turn Stephen into an intemperate lunatic. She was the kind of woman who understood this and found it amusing. She was far more sensible than Stephen, and at the end of the day would go home to her husband and children—the life
she
had chosen, the one that suited her. Stephen, like most men, was a penis on legs careening from one opportunity to the next. Some men, he supposed, had the skill and audacity to go around choosing partners, but he was not one of them. He was always the one who got
chosen.
And Sonia, if she wanted, could choose him.

But she wasn’t going to.

“Don’t do it,” she said in a stern voice. “Change back into your regular clothes. Have a cup of coffee. If you have to run, there are treadmills at the fitness center.”

“I want to be outside,” Stephen said. “I have things to work through.”

“Your girlfriend,” Sonia said, flashing a galaxy of comprehension.

“
Ex
-girlfriend,” Stephen corrected.

Sonia nodded, a little sadly, as though in pity for those who hadn’t sorted their lives out.

“Just be careful,” she said. “It’s cold. It’s snowing hard. There’s a lot of ice out there.”

“I’ll be back in about half an hour,” Stephen said.

“It’s your funeral,” Sonia said over her shoulder, making her way back to her office.

My funeral.
The great dream—attending one’s own memorial. The way things were going, there wouldn’t be too much trouble arranging a sufficient number of chairs.

When he got out of the department and started jogging down the path toward the river, Stephen labored to breathe until he felt his lungs reach an uneasy accord with the cold, dense air. The sky was gray and glowing with the sun’s radiance diffused through the clouds, and the snow, which was falling quite heavily. There were far fewer cars than usual on the road, and the campus had an about-to-shut-down quality. But Stephen knew better. It was going to take more than a foot of snow to close down an institution in Minnesota. Soon the plows would be at work, the shovels would be scraping, it would be as though nothing had happened.

Quickly the campus began to thin out and the path branched off. The snow fell in heavy clumps and his breath condensed in a fog around his head. Stephen followed a fork over a rise into a patch of woods. His legs ached—it had been more than a week since his last run—and his eyes watered in the cold and his nose began to fill up.

But then he took a bend in the road and everything changed. He was alone on a pathway that threaded along the Mississippi—the actual river was far below, at the bottom of a small canyon it had carved out over the millennia. Here, in the heavy snowfall, in some of the coldest air he had ever sensed, Stephen had lucked onto perfection.

There was next to no sound save for the cushioned impact of his running shoes. The snow was falling hard enough to create a shimmering curtain over all things, and the sky was shining with that strange diffuse luminosity—it made Stephen think of the long adagio in Rachmaninoff’s Second Symphony.

“Good lord,” Stephen whispered to himself as he ran. And this was no appeal to a Christian God, or to secular reason, but to the view itself. If it was possible to pray to the force he was witnessing, that was what he wanted to do.

The landscape wound in gentle curves. The tree-lined edge of the land gave way to a slope; below was the river, silent and white. On the other side the land rose again in birches and elms. All was white. It fell from the sky, it accumulated at his feet, and it covered every branch and shrub. It was as though the void was reaching out and creating a monument to itself, a crystalline, bleached, padded, silent cathedral in which Stephen was the sole worshiper. His pulse rose, and he no longer even felt the cold as anything other than refreshing ambience. He could see not a single other person.
Fools.
They were inside? Missing this?

He ran down a small depression, feet skidding a little, the weight of all the snow in the air overwhelming him. Problems? He had no problems. This experience, he felt without irony, would be enough to get him by for weeks. It was snowing so heavily that it looked as if the flakes were
rising
up from the ground and ascending into the sky.

It was enough to make him laugh out loud. It was snowing so heavily that Stephen wanted to walk upon it, to rise in its midst, to take it like a staircase into the sky. And the sky was so close, close enough that he could almost jump up and touch it.

Then he was no longer alone. The figure that stepped from the trees was tall, wearing a hat and scarf, and it moved from the woods into the center of the path, on an interception course.

Lewis?

Lewis stood blinking snowflakes out of his eyes, looking shocked and surprised as though it was Stephen who had appeared out of nowhere like an apparition.

Stephen stopped running as he neared Lewis, slowing to a jog then halting. He stood panting, reaching down to rub his hamstrings.

“What is this?” he asked, his voice sounding odd as he panted to catch his breath.

“We can’t go on the way we have been,” Lewis said, his voice thick and cold as the air. His strong features were composed into a visage of decision.

“What are you—” Stephen paused, moving around Lewis in a half-circle. “Didn’t you hear? Jay broke up with me. She
walked out.
You got what you wanted, all right? Just fuck off and leave me alone.”

“Nothing’s right,” Lewis said, reaching up to caress his chest through his coat. “Can’t you feel it?”

“Lewis, I filed a restraining order against you,” Stephen said. “What you’re doing is
illegal.
”

“None of this is right,” Lewis said.

Stephen understood that the man had actually gone off the rails. Lewis was distracted, as though taking in more than one level of reality at the same time. He was talking to Stephen in the oddest fashion, with a complete absence of social inference or any of the little habits and markers that people utilize in their efforts to be understood. It was as though Lewis was talking to himself in a dream.

“No, no,” Lewis said. “You’ve created far too many problems. You’re behind this.”

“I’m going to complete my run,” Stephen said. “You’re going to go home. And I’m never going to see you again. Do you follow me?”

Lewis looked up at Stephen with a chilling emptiness in his eyes.

“It’s all coming to an end,” he declared. “But it isn’t over yet. I’m going to fight this. I’m going to find her.”

He closed the distance between himself and Stephen, and before Stephen could begin to comprehend what was happening, they began to struggle. Lewis was alarmingly strong, and Stephen’s sneakers slipped and skidded on the icy pavement. Lewis was working his hands up toward Stephen’s throat, and Stephen managed to hack them away and plant a decent open-handed slap onto the thick wool of Lewis’s hat. Stephen stumbled a couple of steps, and considered whether it would be a humiliation to run for it.

He glanced up and down the path.
No one.
There was no one to witness what was happening.

In that instant, when he looked away from Lewis, the old boy decided to change his tactic. He lowered his shoulder and drove himself into Stephen—how strange it was to be lifted off his feet.

Lewis propelled Stephen off the path and over the snow that separated it from the drop to the river. Stephen felt as though he was flying through the snow with the sky close enough to touch. He almost enjoyed the experience until he realized what was happening.

He grabbed at Lewis as balance totally left him, desperate to cling to the earth, terrified of leaving it—but then the fight was lost. He tumbled over the edge. He fell and fell, and could not stop himself.