14 Degrees Below Zero (5 page)

5. HIS CONTINUED WILLINGNESS TO WEAR THE MASK OF LEWIS.

L
ewis took the bus downtown. He could have driven his Lexus, but it cost money to park it—he was already overextended on payments on the thing, bought a couple of years ago when he was living another life. His old job at American Express had come with a corner office and prepaid parking in a downtown ramp. His new job came with an employee discount.

It was still impossible to believe that Anna had left the world before him. He’d gone through his decades of on-and-off smoking, his mood problems, the negativity that had cast a pall over his adult life—hadn’t that been enough to finish
him
off early? Wasn’t that supposed to be the
design
—that he would die before her, that he would never be left alone?

He got off the bus at Seventh Ave. and winced as he was enveloped by the cloud of smoke the thing discharged pulling away from the curb. Despite himself, he still loved downtown in the morning. People were clenched up with the shock of being alive, and the low-angle sun poked from between the buildings like the eye of God. It was splendid.

He was still doing all the clichéd widower things. He woke most mornings and, just for a moment, was considerate of her side of the bed until he remembered that the bed was now all his. When he woke on the sofa downstairs, he searched his memory for whatever transgression had landed him there. He sought out her brand of cereal on the supermarket shelf. He wondered when she was coming home. Everything in his environment promulgated a sense of disbelief.

There, rising above the street, was the building where he used to work. Lewis imagined what was going on up there, on the twenty-second floor, where he once had an assistant and thirty-five people working under him. The company had offered him a leave of absence when Anna was close to death; it had been a chance to walk away and return when he was ready. But he never got ready, and after several months the offer was politely rescinded. Lewis’s old peers were incapable of understanding that the man who worked in the corner office no longer existed. He couldn’t understand the job anymore, the client services, the supervision, the meetings. Maybe he had never liked it. He certainly hadn’t been
happy
there. But now he sure as hell could have used the money.

The sidewalk beneath his feet, as he stood there with people passing, was as solid as anything got. The thing he couldn’t grasp was the dissolution of Anna’s physical form—the fine lines of cartilage that had formed her nose, the skin stretched over her shoulder blades, her upper lip, her toenails. They were all gone, burned to ashes and poured into Lake of the Isles at midnight, per her typically romantic request. Now, when he ran around the lake two or three times a week, he thought of her resting there. How
useful
all of those body parts had been to her, and for so long. Some of them had had their uses for Lewis, too. Now they were all gone.

All this was hard enough to take without considering all the times when he’d wished he was free, and rid of her, both before and during her sickness. Well, he got his wish. And he had hastened it along, in his usual well-meaning way.

Stop thinking about it.

In the third-floor employee lounge at the Marshall Field’s department store Lewis hung up his coat on the peg reserved for his use. He hugged his sides and tried to will away the chill that had descended upon him while walking Carew—and wasn’t that a kick in the ass? Done in by the cold already when it was going to be about forty degrees more frigid in a matter of weeks. Maybe it was the antidepressant. Lewis was unconvinced that anyone knew entirely what those pills did to people. True, Lewis was no longer explicitly suicidal, as he had been a couple of weeks before. The powdery little pills had taken care of that for him.

Maybe it was just aging. There was always
that
to contend with: shortness of breath that could not go unobserved, pains in the belly that could never again be dismissed as innocent.

“Lewis. Good morning,” said a voice behind him, a voice belonging to Guy Boyle.

“Guy,” Lewis said, his voice coming out hoarse.

“Whoa. You coming down with a cold there?” asked Guy.

“Let’s hope not,” Lewis said.

“Yeah, I hear that,” Guy countered. “My kids all have a case of the crud. Looks like maybe winter’s coming early.”

“Don’t say that,” Lewis replied. “We’ll all be cursed to six months of snowstorms and frozen heads.”

“Pardon?” said Guy.

“I meant frozen
pipes,
” Lewis said.

Guy laughed. “Ah, I’m not worried,” he said. “The winters here aren’t as cold as they used to be. You noticed that? We haven’t had a real serious cold snap in years.”

“I guess a lot of things are different now,” Lewis told him, feeling his grin tighten.

Guy’s expression froze into affable neutrality. Guy was a career man at the store, with a hearty and seemingly organic love of men’s apparel and the intricacies of selling it. He worked in the suit section, the high-end stuff. He was ostensibly Lewis’s superior but, because of their similarity in age, he generally treated Lewis as a peer. Guy had three kids, and he and Lewis related to each other as family men until, naturally, something would touch upon the subject of Anna. Lewis understood that he was a bit of a tragic figure in men’s wear. Word had spread quickly about his executive past, and the mysterious fall that had necessitated a career change in the early autumn of his years.

Lewis found out about the job from an ad in the Sunday paper. He had just been informed of the hiring of his replacement at AmEx, and so he had just stopped agonizing over calling the office to either resign or announce his comeback. He had gone downtown the next day, applied, met Guy. They hit it off right away. Lewis had confided in Guy about Anna, about how he needed a change. Guy thought that Lewis would fit in fine in men’s wear—a tight-knit fraternity of more than a dozen men of varied age. Lewis had started work the next morning. The job paid less than a quarter of what he had been earning previously.

“How’s that granddaughter?” Guy asked. “You have to bring her in again sometime. She’s a peach.”

A peach.
So far, Lewis had been remarkably successful at not resenting Guy’s bland, insipid optimism. Remarkably, commendably successful.

“She’s doing just fine,” Lewis told him.

Lewis had spent his boyhood in the suburbs of Chicago, moving to Minneapolis for college and meeting Anna there. She had been lithe, distant, always seeming as though she had just woken from a dream or was about to enter into one. She had been an art student, while Lewis was studying for his MBA. Her friends and rival suitors had thought him conventional, uninteresting. But he had landed her.

“Had coffee yet?” Guy asked him.

“I think I’m going to hold off,” replied Lewis. “Caffeine is starting to make me anxious these days.”

Guy gave Lewis a funny look which suggested that he had
heard
of this thing called anxiety—an exotic ailment that afflicted women and non-Minnesotans—but had never heard a grown man confessing to suffer from it.

Lewis’s heart gave a kick. His hands were cold, almost numb. His mind felt sharp enough, though, to realize that this was going to be one of those very long mornings in which instants stretched themselves into mini-eternities.

“Well, come on out with me,” Guy said, a hand on Lewis’s shoulder. They left the sterile comfort of the employee lounge for the brightly lit and empty sales floor. The store would open in ten minutes. A Latino man Lewis’s age was hurriedly buffing the floor with a machine that looked as though it was about to swallow its master. The sales crew was gathered around a table piled high with neatly folded and stacked neckties. Today the shift was manned by, in addition to Guy and Lewis, Leonard, Dan, Ken, and Vincent. They were all about two decades younger than Lewis, though they were no more energetic or motivated than Lewis on his better days. Lewis worked assiduously to avoid condescension in his dealings with them.

He used to buy a lot of clothes in this department. He remembered buying clothes from his new coworkers, though he couldn’t be sure—he’d never paid enough attention to remember their faces or names in the past.

“Ken’s going to the Vikings game Sunday,” said Vincent when the old men joined them. The younger guys were all drinking coffee from paper cups bearing the name of the store.

“Lucky bastard,” said Dan.

“Who’d you have to blow to get the tickets?” asked Leonard.

“Keep it clean, boys,” Guy said, glancing around to see if any of his superiors had heard.

“Seriously,” said Leonard. “Forty-yard-line tickets for the Packer game. Six rows back. Do you ever run out of luck?”

“Father-in-law,” Vincent said sagely. He blew a cloud of steam from the surface of his coffee.

“That right?” asked Dan, eyes narrowing behind his glasses.

Ken shrugged, his shirt rustling. Only about twenty-five, and getting fat.

Dan groaned. “In-laws. It’s like a fucking tax built into your life. And you never pay it off.”

“Boys,”
Guy said.

“At least yours live a half a mile away,” Vincent said. “You know what my wife did? Gave her mother a key to our house. I said, ‘It’s your problem if she comes in while I’m giving it to you in the living room.’”

“What’d she say to that?” Leonard asked, approvingly scandalized.

Vincent sipped his coffee. He had wolfish blue eyes. “What
could
she say?”

“Your wife lets you give it to her in the living room still?” Dan asked. “Man, mine’s gone all vanilla. Only at bedtime. Says it makes her sleepy.”

“I can see you having that effect,” Vincent told him.

“It’s not my fault,” said Dan. “It’s marriage. Best thing I ever did, worst thing I ever did.”

“We still do it in the living room,” Leonard offered. “Got me a blow job on the couch last weekend.”

“Bastard,” Dan said.

Lewis folded his arms. This was vulgar stuff, and he’d never been at home in the locker room. Still, it was more lively than the discourse in his house these days.

“All right. Enough.” Guy stiffened and held up his hands to restore order. The younger guys, one by one, tossed their coffee cups into the trash. The store would open in minutes, and this crew of sex-obsessed hoodlums would transform into helpful experts on silk, cotton weaves, and modern synthetic fabrics.

Lewis was trying hard not to think about numbers. Eight, for instance: there were eight years left on his mortgage. He and Anna had bought the house so long ago that it had nearly tripled in value, but still the payments were a considerable monthly expense. Then there were the taxes, and the utilities—God, it cost a fortune to heat the place, to say nothing of the sewer charges and electricity. The cable bill was up to a hundred bucks, but he couldn’t part with
that.
Then the car insurance, the monthly bus pass, the gifts for Ramona, the hundred bucks he slipped to Jay on a regular basis.

Adding it all up, Lewis was losing money working this job. He was, admittedly, losing less money than if he wasn’t working at all (already tried that), but his finances were slipping quickly into the abyss. He’d had good health insurance, but Anna’s sickness led them into a labyrinth of co-pays and elective treatments that gutted their savings while helping Anna not at all. Even when Anna had argued against it, saying it was no use and she felt death coming over her, Lewis had insisted they try everything. Anna had argued he should save the money for Jay and Ramona.

Anna had turned into a drain. She got sick and drained everything out of everyone around her, and then she was gone. Lewis recalled, for perhaps the thousandth time, the moment she died.

“What about you, Lewis?” Vincent asked amiably. “You a football fan? Never heard you talk about it.”

“No, that’s not for me. I’m not one of you conformist morons drooling every Sunday in front of your homoerotic corporate gladiator combat,” Lewis did not say, but wished to.

For hadn’t he earned—through the virtue of his years, the long slog through his days, his endurance and continued willingness to wear the mask of Lewis Ingraham—the right to resent these men younger than himself? He thought of Stephen, that interloper in his life, bedmate of his daughter, that arrogant pedant who wielded his intellectualism over Jay like a cudgel—Jay, who had showed so much promise, who had shone so brightly and so beautifully, who had been destined to provide a cosmic corrective to Lewis’s corporate sell-out and Anna’s spent talents. It had all gone so fucking wrong. Anna and Lewis had tried to get Jay to stay in college when she got pregnant; they had practically begged her to move back in their home, as well. Anna even offered to basically raise the baby after the father bailed out and fled to Oregon.

But would it have worked? Lewis never liked babies—too chaotic, too unrewarding. And Anna . . . she had good intentions, but she had been increasingly incapable of keeping her own boat afloat by then. She’d been putting on weight, getting scatterbrained and out of touch, letting the house go to holy hell. Lewis resented all of it, every day. He felt as though Anna had let him down. He may have even undermined the possibility of Jay coming home and staying in school, now that he thought about it.

“How can you propose to take care of a new baby,” he might have asked his wife one night, when they were alone and words had grown cheap and plentiful, “when you can’t keep house, and you can barely take care of yourself? Or me.”

That was how he remembered it. He might have been wrong.

Lewis looked up at Vincent, whose smile was frozen. Vincent was newly married, barely thirty, living in a new house. It was still all new for Vincent.

“Football, yeah. Well, not really,” Lewis said. “It’s all right, I suppose. It hasn’t been the same for me since the days of Tarkenton and Chuck Foreman.”

“You remember all that?” Vincent asked.

“Ahmad Rashad,” Dan muttered.

“He’s the guy who does those shitty shows,” Vincent scoffed. “Michael Jordan’s bitch, man.”