The Snow Queen (11 page)

Foster returns his attention. Ping is a good teacher, and there’s much to learn.

•

Set free, Barrett finds himself without an immediate direction. Beth is talking to Tyler and Nina, and Barrett lacks the energy, just now, to enter an ongoing conversation. Andrew sits one-ass-cheeked on a windowsill, looking out at the night (or at his own reflection in the glass) as he chugs another beer (he consumes freely, the way an animal does, taking all the nourishment that’s offered, as unconflicted as any creature whose earthly career depends on maximum intake balanced against minimal output). Apart from Barrett’s veneration of Andrew—because of his veneration of Andrew—they are friendly, but in no way intimate. It would be impossible for Barrett simply to walk up to Andrew and say … something about hopes for the coming year. Or anything, about anything.

Barrett decides to slip into his room and lie down for a few minutes. It strikes him suddenly as the most wonderful of all possibilities: the chance to lie quietly, alone, on his mattress, with the party playing, soft as a radio, in the next room.

When he enters his room, he leaves it in darkness, “darkness” being relative, without the blinds drawn—Knickerbocker Avenue sheds its mild orange radiance all night long. Barrett settles down on his mattress with a certain caution, as if he suffers an affliction of the joints.

His room, being white, absorbs the street glow, suffused by the lightly pulsing orange, a hint of the noir. The room is not unpleasant. But staying here, Barrett feels, more and more acutely, like an immigrant, come to a foreign country that is neither bleak nor verdant. It’s the country that would have him, since he lacked the necessary papers for more promising places, and could no longer remain where he once thought he belonged; where his skills (the adroit skinning of an antelope, the ability to leach acorns into flour) have no currency or value.

The problem that marked his earlier years: almost everything is interesting. Books, in particular, to Barrett; and learning other languages, cracking their codes, beginning to see their patterns and their mutations; and history—the scraping away of all that accumulated time to find, still living, in its own continuum, a day in the market in Mesopotamia, where a woman ponders mangoes; a night on the verges of Moscow, the black air so cold it impedes your breathing, Napoleon somewhere up there under the same frozen sky, the gray Moscow darkness with its icy stars, which have never looked so brilliant, or so remote …

But there is, as well, the world of simpler aims, the fatigue at the end of a working day, whether you’ve been flipping burgers or shingling a roof; the love you can feel for the waitresses and the cooks, the carpenters and electricians, there’s no other devotion quite like it (maybe it’s a miniature version of what men feel after they’ve been at war together); the pure boisterous teasing mayhem of going out for beers once you’ve been released from your labors,
Willy has a crazy girlfriend and Esther really should get back to her kids and Little Ed has almost saved enough to buy that secondhand Ducati …

Barrett, in his working life, was for so long the debutante who could not choose, who found every potential husband to be either more or less promising but never quite … never quite someone she could imagine seeing every day for the rest of her life, and so she waited. She wasn’t all that proud, it wasn’t as if she imagined herself too fine for any mere mortal; she simply found that her own body of inclinations and eccentricities didn’t match up quite closely enough with the local prospects. It would be unfair, wouldn’t it, to marry someone about whom she wasn’t sure; and so she waited for conviction to arrive. She was still young, still young enough, and then—it felt sudden, how could that be?—she was no longer young enough, she seemed to be living in her parents’ house, reading and sewing …

It’s satisfying, in an odd and bittersweet way, that Barrett has found a career after all, and (strange, but true) all the more so that his career, as it turns out, is secret, has no worldly purpose, brings with it no possibility of wealth.

On the ceiling directly over Barrett’s head, a Y-shaped crack has begun, every now and then, to shed a pinch of plaster dust, a sporadic drift of artificial snow, which means of course an argument with the landlord, but means as well that the building is dissolving (there are other signs—beams going powdery, an increasing aspect of ineradicable dankness), a view held only by Barrett, who’s convinced that the building is losing faith in itself; that it can just barely manage the effort required of load-bearing walls and uncompromised ceilings; that one day it will simply emit a low creak of a sigh, and collapse entirely.

Beth, however, has been healed, her own crumbling reversed, and Barrett has yet to permit himself to imagine that the celestial manifestation, which occurred a full year and a half ago, could possibly be connected.

He can’t bear the oddness of it. He can’t bear the grandiosity. It’s good to lie alone on his bed in his quiet room, with the party sounds and the street sounds drifting in, all those worlds going on without him. He floats on his bed like Ophelia, blissfully drowned (or so he likes to picture her): lost to life, yes, but lost as well to accusation and betrayal, more beautiful in death, afloat with her calm pale face and her white, empty hands turned to the sky, surrounded by the current-borne flowers she’d bent too far to pick; a once-troubled woman gone tranquilly to the natural world, given over to the bright movement of water, at one with the earth, as only the dead can be.

“Hey.”

Barrett lifts his head, turns to face his open doorway.

It’s Andrew. It can’t be Andrew. Why would Andrew come and stand in Barrett’s doorway?

But here he is. Here’s his shape, the vee of his torso, the compact, shaven helmet of his head, the casual grace with which he stands, as if standing were part of a dance for which most of the population has somehow failed to learn the steps.

“Hey, there,” Barrett replies.

“Are you holding?” Andrew asks.

Holding what? Oh, of course.

“No. Sorry.”

Andrew shifts his weight against the doorframe, agile and authoritative as Gene Kelly. Of whom, of course, Andrew has surely never heard.

Part of it: the piratical uncaringness, that marvelous youthful conviction that if it were important, Andrew would know about it.

“Oh,” Andrew says. “I thought you were sneaking off to get high.”

Barrett forces himself through a dazzled moment—Andrew registered his leave-taking. But no. Don’t linger there. Keep talking.

Barrett says, “You know, there’s a remote possibility. Come with me.”

He rises off his bed, takes the steps toward Andrew. Barrett has no dancer’s walk to command. He puts one foot in front of the other. He hopes the word “hulking” does not apply.

Barrett enters Andrew’s penumbra of scent—bottled, it could only be called Boy. There’s the strangely unsour emanation of sweat (Andrew exudes nothing fetid, his sweat has no correlate or comparison, it is simply clean, and carnal, with perhaps the faintest hint of oceanic salt). No cologne of course, no deodorant, but a citrus something, a hint of juice and tartness; soap or lotion, maybe just lip balm, a lurking fragrance that’s been purchased and applied.

Barrett exhorts himself, silently, to calm down, and experiences a brief, irrational fear that he has somehow said it out loud—that he has walked up to Andrew and said, out of nowhere,
Calm down
.

Is it a general quality of the besotted to believe that their thoughts can be read? Probably. How, after all, can such a turmoil of hope and fear and lust be inaudible? How do our skulls hold it in?

Andrew says, “I don’t want to interrupt.”

“No,” Barrett answers. “I was just … I was taking a little break. Before midnight.”

Andrew nods. He doesn’t understand the need to take a break before midnight, but he acknowledges, he honors, the minor peculiarities of others. This, too, is part of his allure—his butch version of Alice’s schoolgirl calm as she moved through a Wonderland in which nothing at all was familiar and everything was curious but only curious, never frightening or appalling.

“Come with me,” Barrett says.

He leads Andrew down the hall, to Tyler and Beth’s room.

The room is dark and empty. Without Beth lying in state, the room has transformed itself from treasure trove—filled with offerings to the sleeping princess—to junk haven. The objects have increased, but not substantially changed. There are more books, precariously stacked. The hula-girl lamp, still awaiting its rewiring, has acquired a sister, with a base shaped like a lighthouse and a shade emblazoned with sailboats. The skeletal duchesses of the twin chairs have been joined by a modest bamboo end table—a small, abashed-looking object, cheaply made, servant to the chairs.

When Beth recovered, when she left her life in the bedroom and rejoined the larger world, she took with her the room’s languid, Edwardian enchantment. It is now just a bedroom, cluttered with books and castoffs, the den of hoarders, charming in its way but a little nutty, too. Beth’s dying, the idea that she might do so in this room, cast a spell, and now the room’s silent denizens, its chairs and lamps and scaling leather suitcases, are objects, only that, finished with their brief period of transfiguration, returned to the realm of the extraneous, waiting patiently for the world to end.

The bed, however, behind its barricade of bric-a-brac, is blank and white, almost luminous. The bed is Sleeping Beauty, the junk a thicket of brambles and thorns grown up to protect her.

Barrett wends his way among the accumulations. The room may be an object-purgatory, but it is not subject to the junk-store odors of dust and old varnish mixed with that mournful not-quite-clean essence that seems to attach itself to anything that has gone too long unwanted. Beth burns lavender-scented candles now, in every room, the way an aging woman uses perfume, to banish any detectable essence of degeneration.

Barrett opens the drawer of the nightstand on Tyler’s side of the bed. The drawer is full of Tylerish stuff: condoms and lube of course (Magnums, really?); a tube of some Japanese ointment; a small pad of Rhodia paper and a Sharpie; an old photograph of their mother (Barrett is still surprised, sometimes, by the reminder that she was buxom and heavy-browed, with the skeptical, close-set eyes of a woman who’s never been overcharged by the village butcher; a handsome woman, as they say, formidable, but not a great beauty, as Barrett insists on remembering her); a few loose Contac capsules; a scattering of guitar picks; and …

The vial, protruding halfway from under one of the guitar picks. It occupies no position of honor. It is simply one more object in Tyler’s drawer.

Barrett had hoped to find Tyler’s cocaine stash. And hoped not to.

Of course Tyler hasn’t quit. Barrett must have known. Right? Or not. He’s been so long wedded to the habit of believing Tyler.

A strange phenomenon: there seems (though it’s not possible—is it?) to be a confluence of secrets, suddenly revealed: a twinning. If Barrett is keeping the story of the light from Tyler, Tyler would naturally be keeping something from Barrett, as well. Balance must be maintained.

Which is insane. And which strikes Barrett as possible.

Another strange phenomenon: Barrett is pinned between his sense of betrayal (he performs a quick memory scan—how many times did Tyler actually
say
he’d stopped using drugs?—which matters because there is, it seems, a difference, for Barrett, between actual lies and acts that merely go unmentioned); his worry (coke isn’t good for Tyler, it is not of course good for anyone, but Tyler, in particular, goes too edgily ecstatic on it, believes too utterly in his own hallucinated version of himself); and Barrett’s own relief (of which he’s suitably ashamed) at finding something that will delight Andrew—the pleasure Barrett derives from this minor criminal ability to provide; to be, for Andrew, someone other than a man without resources who’s merely been lying alone on his bed.

Barrett takes out the vial. It’s a small clear plastic jar with a black plastic lid. He raises it for Andrew to see. Andrew nods sagely, as if agreeing with a widely accepted wisdom that’s been repeated, with no diminishment of its fundamental truth, for centuries. Barrett gives him the vial.

Barrett has done coke twice, at parties, years ago, and harbors no affection for it. It struck him, on both occasions, as little more than a self-imposed headache, accompanied by a greater-than-usual sense of anxiety and unease, both of which he possesses already, in abundance.

Andrew unscrews the top of the vial. He takes a ring of keys from his pocket (why would he have so many keys, there are at least a dozen of them), dips one into the vial, and extends the key to Barrett. On the key’s tip, a neat little white mound.

Oh. Barrett had meant it as a New Year’s Eve gift for Andrew. He hadn’t imagined doing any himself.

What, though, was he thinking? From what train did he recently emerge, all gawk and polyester, into the glare of the city? Of course, Andrew assumed they’d do bumps together. That’s what people do.

Barrett hesitates.
No thanks
is the simple and obvious response. And yet—eager little lapdog—he can’t bring himself to refuse. He can’t permit himself to be so … not-Andrew.

Barrett leans over, allows Andrew to push the key partway into his right nostril. He inhales.

“Harder,” Andrew says. Barrett inhales harder. The coke is harsh and slightly numbing; medical.

“Now the other,” Andrew says. He dips the key back into the vial, inserts it gently into Barrett’s left nostril. Barrett inhales, harder.

Andrew scoops out two little mounds of coke for himself, one and then the other. He breathes deeply. “Nice,” he says.

He sits down on the edge of Tyler and Beth’s bed, like a swimmer who’s made his way to a raft. Barrett sits beside him, careful not to brush Andrew’s knee with his own.

Andrew says, “I needed that.”

“Me, too,” Barrett answers. Will he tell any lie, impersonate anyone, for the sake of mindless desire?