14 Degrees Below Zero (3 page)

It had to be harmful to Ramona. It pained Lewis to think it, but the girl wasn’t being given an optimal upbringing. Of course, raising concern of any kind would only serve to cleave a yawning chasm of enmity between himself and Jay. She was stubborn, proud. She might move away. She might disappear.

Lewis took a jagged breath and caressed his breastbone.
Not yet, can’t die yet.
His head swam with fear. He calculated his chances of surviving the morning at ninety-six, maybe ninety-seven percent. Very good odds, but he felt his world narrowing.

What made it all the more unbearable was Stephen himself. Stephen was a tenure-track professor at the university, in the graduate program that Jay herself might have been starting this fall—if she hadn’t gotten pregnant at nineteen and dropped out after her second year of college. Now Jay was twenty-three. Stephen was nine years older. Stephen: Mister Perfect, Mister Intellectual. He hadn’t fooled Lewis for an instant, not from the moment—the very
millisecond
—they first met.

“Dad?” Jay said. “You still there?”

“Yes, honey,” Lewis said, trying to remember how he talked when he sounded normal. “Can I please say good morning to Ramona?”

“She isn’t up, Dad,” Jay said again. “And there isn’t time. We’re going to have to hurry to get her to day care on time.”

So Lewis was to believe that Ramona wasn’t awake yet, although in the same breath Jay was talking about rushing her to day care—a day care that, not insignificantly, Lewis paid for. Precisely when had his discourse with his daughter devolved into worthless half-truths and arm’s-length parrying?

“When you were Ramona’s age, your mother and I always got you into bed by eight o’clock,” Lewis said. “That way, you were nice and rested in the morning. We didn’t have to drag you out of bed.”

Indistinct sounds on the phone.

“Jay, did you—”

“What did you say, Dad? Sorry.”

“Is someone there?” Lewis asked, the words escaping him despite his best intentions. “Did Stephen spend the night?”

Lewis briefly considered walking home, getting into his car, and driving the short distance to Jay’s apartment. Perhaps this was a conversation best conducted in person. Maybe he needed to have a word with Stephen.

“Dad, don’t take this the wrong way,” Jay said. “But it’s just not your business.”

Zing.
In a heartbeat, Jay had turned cold and disapproving—an elegant diversionary strategy, something else she had learned from her mother.

“I could consider it my business, since it pertains to the general welfare of my granddaughter.”

“I can’t talk to you when you’re like this,” said Jay. “I’ll call you later, Dad. I’m glad you’re enjoying the morning. I really am.”

“Don’t get offended. Please,” Lewis rushed to say. “You know I’m always thinking about Ramona. She’s only four years old.”

“I know how old my daughter is.”

“Then you also know that at her age—”

“Good-
bye,
Dad.”

“Jay?”

“What?”

“I love you, sweetheart.”

A big sigh, the biggest of the morning, then the longest gulf of silence.

“I know, Dad.”

Lewis’s daughter hung up on him.

Carew squeezed out a magnificent shit just then, three logs’ worth. Lewis leashed up the dog and pondered the crap as though it were an abstract sculpture at the Walker museum. He took a look around.

Fuck it.
If no one else cared, why should he? Let someone else clean it up—or, better still, step in it.

3. IT WAS KIND OF AN UGLY THING.

O
f
course
Jay loved her father. He was always able to overlook her transgressions, to absorb the impact of her mistakes, to point out for her where she was going wrong. He had always been unremittingly generous with her, never sparing of his time, or himself. When she was a little girl, other children had been jealous of her over her parents. The other kids in the neighborhood had shut-down materialistic disciplinarians to deal with—real white-bread Minnesota die-hard conformists, no matter what package they advertised in the form of Democratic politics and Unitarian activism. Jay’s parents were always different. Anna had been an artist once, and beautiful, with a sort of innate grace that Jay could never attain. Anna never gave a damn if Jay smoked pot or went out with boys, so long as Jay maintained her integrity. And Anna would even go so far as to give Jay a pretty coherent definition of what that integrity comprised.

As for Lewis, well, half of Jay’s adolescent friends had serious crushes on him. They talked about it right in front of Jay. And these were
real
crushes, the kind where they seriously thought about her dad as a sex object. It was gross, she had been obliged to act disgusted, but secretly the whole thing filled her with a transgressive pride. She knew she should probably spend some time on the couch one of these days and unravel all of that old shit. When she could afford it. When she wasn’t waiting tables for a living.

It was kind of an ugly thing, come to think of it, the way she had always felt
jealous
of her parents—the way they always seemed to have their lives together, the way they always seemed to be in love despite having been married for about a hundred years. Jay had felt small in comparison to them—not in the normal sense, but smaller as in
inferior.
They were hard to live up to. And Jay’s guilt had always been compounded by their unflagging support, their constant attempts to boost her up, their refusal to judge anything she did.

Today Jay woke up and ached with the absence of her mother. In his usual fashion, Lewis had somehow sensed this and tried to make it better. He liked to take charge. He always tried to make everything all right for those he loved.

God, he was always around.

“I take it Lewis deduced that I stayed over,” Stephen said. “And that he wasn’t particularly happy about it.”

“It’s none of his business,” Jay said, replacing the phone in its cradle.

She could see Stephen’s face in the mirror over the dresser. He slipped into his default expression, the one that guardedly revealed his general haughty disapproval for the small-mindedness that he was forced to deal with on a daily basis. Of course he never expressed outright contempt, or anger—those were implicit. That was the thing about Stephen. Jay thought she might be in love with him, but he was stronger than her, and more elusive. It was really quite hard to ever pin him down on anything.

Stephen knotted his silk tie and smoothed his wavy hair—it was a rich brown, like a nice suede coat. It curled around his ears and accentuated his long nose and high forehead. God, he was really nice to look at. Not that Jay was a frump—in fact, she had long enjoyed a reputation as a beauty, in opposition to her own opinion. She had an unpleasant sense that she wasn’t as attractive as Stephen, on the abstract level at which a man’s appearance contrasted with a woman’s.

But why exactly did she think that? Because Stephen did? Had he expressed that to her on some subliminal level, or was she simply being paranoid?

Jay had no clothes on, and as she sat up in bed her blanket slipped down and she saw herself in the mirror: her belly was flat, and she had small breasts with nipples that stood up in the cool morning. She had fine black hair, and a face that looked young enough for her to get carded when she bought American Spirits at the SuperAmerica on the corner.
Not bad.

There was a noise, and Jay looked to the doorway. Ramona was standing there in her Hello Kitty pajamas, rubbing one eye with a clenched fist.

“Good morning, Mama,” Ramona said.

Actually, she spoke in an accent that was virtually indecipherable to anyone outside a small circle composed of her mother, grandfather, and, with sporadic success, her day care providers. Ramona’s vocabulary comprised a galaxy of words and precocious expressions, but her pronunciation lagged behind other children her age. The “G” in Ramona’s greeting was little more than a hopeful fiction, beyond the skill of her struggling tongue. Her “D” sound was a glottal choking off. Her “ing,” on the other hand, brought joy to Jay’s ear. Ramona had mastered that sound, and it was like high-pitched bird music to her mother.

Stephen finished fussing over his tie and looked at Ramona with a self-conscious smile. Ramona’s speech troubles invariably made Jay feel protective. She hated it when people made Ramona repeat herself over and over—something that Stephen had only recently learned not to do.

Jay suddenly realized that her daughter was staring at her breasts. Or—it was amazing how early children developed these attitudes—she was staring because Stephen was in the room, with a sort of opprobrium over her mother’s nudity.

Jesus—did Ramona feel some sense of ownership over these breasts, more than two years after they ceased to be a source of nourishment for her? Stephen was certainly obsessed enough with them, always touching her nipples, always wrapping his lips around them in bed and grazing them with his teeth as though about to bite her.

Not for the first time, Jay had a sense of her body as existing largely as a vessel for the pleasure of others. Wasn’t that a hint of ownership gleaming in Ramona’s eyes as she stared at her mother’s nakedness?

A look of ageless wisdom passed over Ramona. She glanced at Stephen with a tired resignation.
Once mine, now his,
she seemed to be thinking, with her long legs planted in the doorway. Every now and then Jay got glimpses into Ramona’s inner life, all the minor triumphs and major heartbreaks.

Jay pulled her blanket up to cover herself. “Time to get ready, pumpkin,” she said. “Want me to make you some toast?”

“What are
you
doing here?” Ramona asked Stephen, her singsong delivery blunting the edge of her interrogation.

Stephen laughed. “Right now I’m getting ready for work,” he said. “What are
you
doing?”

“This is my house,” Ramona told him. “I don’t have to say.”

Stephen smiled bigger, flashing teeth. “Can you make a picture for me today at day care?” he asked her. “Something nice, like those boats on the lake we saw the other day?”

Ramona stared at Stephen, but Jay saw her daughter warm a few degrees. “Maybe,” she said.

“Fair enough.” Stephen bent at the waist to bring his face closer to hers. “That’s good—don’t make any promises. You’re a terrific artist. Don’t force your creativity. It’ll come on its own.”

“Sweetie, why don’t you wait for me in the kitchen?” Jay said.

“You have to put clothes on,” Ramona observed.

“That’s right, I do,” Jay replied.

Ramona padded off, elbows swaying, and Jay got up. She paused in front of the mirror and saw Stephen looking at her with a pleasingly intent expression. He came over and put his hands on her hips. Last night they’d had very gentle sex, careful not to wake Ramona. Jay wondered what it might do to a little girl’s mind, hearing her mother fucking away in the next room. People had always fucked, after all, it wasn’t as though Jay had invented it—and people might have been fucked up by fucking, and all that it entailed, but people weren’t walking around in psychotic fugues because they once heard some thumps and groans through a wall. Still, she imagined all sorts of Freudian scenarios playing out, writ large in the form of Ramona’s hopelessly neurotic adulthood. She didn’t want to say anything to Stephen about it, because he would come up with all sorts of theories—he
taught
Freud, after all, and Lacan, and Adorno, and a whole pack of crazy Germans and Italians Jay had never gotten to because she’d dropped out of college. Never mind that she’d tested off the charts in elementary school, forget the inordinate pride Lewis had taken when the authorities informed him that his daughter was a “genius.” Now she waited tables. That was reality in its most unadulterated form. She was ill equipped to talk psychoanalytic theory with Stephen—and unwilling to subject her daughter to his thinking, for the objects of his observations tended to be painted in stark and unflattering light.

“I have to stop at my place to get some notes.” His hand slipped down to cup Jay’s ass. He was a whole head taller than her, and possessed of a ropy musculature. Despite herself, knowing that Ramona was as likely as not spying from the hall, she pressed her bare stomach against the blue cotton of his shirt.

“You look nice,” she said.

“Thank you,” he said in a husky voice.

“You’re teaching a class this morning?” she asked, realizing she had to defuse the sexuality that was springing up between them.

“Two, actually.” He smiled. “Are you ever going to get my schedule straight?”

“Why bother? It’ll just change next semester.” She pulled away and slipped on panties, a pair of jeans, and a Pavement T-shirt she’d owned since she was a senior at Minneapolis South. She looked in the mirror and saw that she looked the same as she had then, with the addition of dark circles under her eyes and the removal of a few pounds of baby fat. “And what about my work schedule? Have you memorized that?”

“Well, actually, I have,” Stephen said, grinning. “You’re working dinner shifts Wednesdays, Fridays, and Sundays. Thursday and Saturday you work lunch—and every other Monday. Otherwise you have Mondays and Tuesdays off.”

“You suck,” she said.

Stephen put his arms around her and kissed her forehead. God, he could be such a prick. He was a tenure-track professor at thirty-two, a Young Gun in the Cultural Studies department and the author of an upcoming book. Jay had met him at a dinner party a year-and-a-half before, when she was still part of a circle of high-school and college friends. Then, as now, Jay was
sorting things out,
but she sensed that Stephen was only going to tolerate her stasis for so long. He treated Jay with undiluted respect, and he seemed to view Ramona as a real person rather than as a frightening hindrance, as other men did. Yet she sensed him growing impatient with her, more and more as time passed. She sniffed his hair, which smelled like her shampoo, and thought that often he regarded her more highly than she did herself.

It was impossible to imagine life without Ramona, without her incessant moods, her tornado of disorder, and the quasi-spiritual miracle of her very being. Jay was capable of contemplating in the abstract other courses her life could have taken. Each one was like a mini-life she hadn’t lived, but could faintly remember, like an echo from a dream.

Finishing college wouldn’t have hurt. At one time she had planned to pursue a Ph.D. and teach. Now she could get no traction on her life. She already felt too old and lived-in to sit in a classroom full of callow, self-absorbed adolescents—they’d be just a few years younger than her, yet separated by a gulf of experience.

Anna had “loved” Stephen—her words, a direct quote. She had also, in so many words, warned Jay not to surrender too much of her emotional sovereignty to him, not while she was so young.

“In ten years you’ll likely be someone else,” Anna had said. “He won’t. He’ll be the same person.”

“You were just thinking about your mother,” Stephen said, running a finger along her cheek.

She couldn’t speak.

“Do you want me to talk to Lewis?” he asked.

“And what would you say to him?”

Ramona called out from the kitchen, her voice so squeaky that Jay wondered: what, are the girl’s vocal cords a
millimeter
long? How could such a high-pitched sound come from a human? Ramona called for her again, louder now, in the tone of royalty demanding the attention of a servant.

“I’m
coming,
Ramona!” Jay yelled, and was startled to hear her mother’s voice coming from her mouth.

“First I’d tell him he needs to back away and lay off you a little bit,” Stephen said calmly, ignoring Jay’s exasperation. “I’d tell him he should stop calling you four or five times a day and bumming you out. He’s overbearing, negative, and profoundly depressed. I’m not sure if he knows all that, but I would bring it to his attention and suggest that he see a shrink or a therapist.”

“Stephen—”

“His mood is like a contagion—”

“Mama!”

“He swoops in on you, and by the time he’s finished he’s sucked all the joy right out of you.”

“Mama!”

“I’m
coming
! Stephen—”

“Let me finish. Every time he calls you, you go from well-adjusted to neurotically anxious in the span of about two minutes. God knows what Anna endured being married to him, but now that she’s gone Lewis is turning all his energy on you.”

“Stephen, that went too far.”

“I apologize,” said Stephen. “But it doesn’t mean I’m wrong. And part of the reason you haven’t been taking any positive action in your life lately—”

“Is because my mother
died,
Stephen. She died of cancer, and it took a while for her to die, and it was horrible, and it completely fucked me up—”

“Mama!”

“Ramona,
stop it
!” Jay screamed. Stephen flinched.

“I know, Jay,” he said quietly.

“And also because I’m a
mother,
and because I’ve been alone, and because it takes all my energy just to present myself as a functioning human being in front of my daughter.”

“Please, she shouldn’t hear this,” Stephen said, putting a hand on her shoulder.

“I
know it
!” Jay snapped. “But I can’t help fucking up all the time.”

“That’s not true. You don’t fuck up all the time. You’re one of the least fucked-up people I know,” Stephen said in a level voice. “That’s just the way your father makes you feel. You have a great mind. You’re very young. But Lewis will drag you down with him if you allow it.”