The Snow Queen (22 page)

“Do you miss him?” Tyler asks.

“No.”

“Does
that
seem odd, to you?”

“Oh, well, sure, there are things. There are things I miss. Mostly the nasty stuff, to be perfectly frank. A twenty-eight-year-old, in bed … Oh, never mind. But really, the drug business got to be a little much.”

“He did like his drugs, didn’t he? But you did, too.”

“Oh, I liked a coked-out night every now and then. Andrew was a lot more … urgent about it.”

“As people sometimes are.”

“And who,” she says, “those last months, do you think was
paying
for them?”

“I guess I must have assumed.”

“It wasn’t the money, really. It just started to make me feel. Well … Peeling off twenties for your much-younger lover’s dealer. That’s an experience you can skip. Trust me.”

“I do,” he says. “Trust you.”

“Beth wouldn’t have minded, either. If I’d thought she would, I’d never have gone near you.”

“But still. You never told her.”

“It wasn’t because of you,” she says.

“And so, it was because …”

“It was because I didn’t think she needed another reminder that she was dying, and somebody had to take over for her. In certain ways.”

Tyler changes, though he doesn’t move.

“Is that what you were doing?” he asks. “Taking over one of Beth’s duties for her?”

“Honestly? Yes. At first.”

“You were pinch-hitting for a girlfriend.”

“That was at first. It got different, after a while.”

“I’m forty-seven. I look it.”

Liz says, “I’m fifty-six. You’re actually a little young for me.”

“I was kind of a pretty kid. That’s how I came into the world. It’s a little off-putting, actually. I mean, being this guy people don’t really look at anymore.”

“I look at you.”

“I don’t mean you. I mean strangers. People for whom looking at you is optional.”

“It matters to me,” she says, “that you took such good care of Beth.”

“I only did what anyone would.”

“You haven’t been around much, have you?”

“I feel like I’ve been around.”

“You didn’t recoil from her. I saw it. You watched death eat her up, not just once but twice, and you didn’t lose your hold on her. You didn’t stop recognizing her.”

“It was just … I mean, who wouldn’t have?”

“A lot of people. I walked here, by the way.”

“From Williamsburg?”

“Yep. I walked across the bridge.”

“Why?”

“Why were you standing on the window ledge?”

“Answer the question, please.”

“I am,” she says. “I had this urge to walk all the way to your place. You had an urge to be outside, but not on the street. Both of us, at the same time. Do you see the connection?”

“Sort of. Actually, no. Not really.”

“Should I go?”

“No,” he says. “Would you come and lie here with me for a while? I’m not putting a move on.”

“It would be okay if you were.”

“It’s just so dark in here.”

“You don’t have any
lights.
Did you and Barrett really get rid of
everything
?”

“Not the sofa. Not the TV.”

“The only two objects in the world that mean anything to you.”

“It’d just be nice to lie here for a while, could we do that?”

“Yes,” she says. “We could.”

T
he streetlamps in the park emit wan circles, skirts of light, with a thin, agitated darkness between them. Sam says to Barrett, “It’s not for the whole evening, right?”

Barrett has been checking the sky as they walk. He can’t seem to help it; not when he’s in Central Park. It is, as usual, the usual sky.

“No,” he says. “I wouldn’t inflict an entire evening of Andrew and Stella on you. It’s just that, you know. He called.”

Sam says, “Central Park was always meant for the rich. Did you know that?”

“I think I’ve heard it, somewhere.”

“In the mid–eighteen hundreds, they laid out the future New York. This was all just woods and farms then, up here.”

“I know. I do know that.”

“There were those who favored the London model. Lots of little parks, everywhere. They lost. The guys who won pushed through this gigantic park that was miles away from where poor people lived. And they told Frederick Law Olmsted, nothing that poor people like. No parade grounds, no ball fields.”

“Really?” Barrett says.

“As you can imagine, real estate values soared. The poor were downtown, the rich were uptown. And here we are.”

“Here we are.”

“I’m being pedantic, aren’t I?” Sam says. “Am I boring you?”

“No,” Barrett answers. “I’m kind of pedantic, too.”

Barrett permits himself a good, long look at Sam, as they walk. Sam’s face, in profile, is more stern and conventionally handsome than is his face seen frontally. Viewed from the side, his nose has more consequence; the dome of his forehead meets, with a more powerful, architectural curve, the wild rags of his hair. In profile he looks, ever so slightly, like Beethoven.

Don’t the Japanese have a word for this? Is it
ma
? It means (does it actually exist in Japanese, or is it merely something Barrett has invented, and tried to dignify by way of an Asian aesthetic?) that which can’t be seen in any fixed or singular way; that which changes as you move through it. Buildings have
ma
. Gardens have it. Sam has it.

Sam says, “What is it?”

“Nothing.”

Sam laughs. He comes equipped with a deep, musical laugh—the woodwind section, tuning up before the concert begins.

•

Andrew and Stella are waiting for them in Strawberry Fields. They sit together, huddled close, on a bench near the lip of the Imagine disk. They are like penniless young travelers, neither desperate nor defeated (not yet), but growing tired, by now, of their wanderings; passing through that youthful moment in which fecklessness starts, ever so slightly, to curdle; not yet possessed of a destination but beginning to want one, which is surprising to them—they’d believed they were the ones who’d slip through, who’d be vagabonds forever, who’d be happy with panhandled change, Dumpster diving, the occasional night spent sleeping, as best they could, in the waiting room of a bus depot somewhere. Andrew and Stella are like young lovers who are just now realizing—to their sad astonishment—that their mothers’ calls (
Baby, it’s late, it’s time to come home now
) are no longer the vexations they’d always been; that those imprecations are turning—the last thing either of them wants—into kindness; that their mothers’ voices and their mothers’ concern for safety and comfort are taking on a gravitational pull.

Andrew and Stella have been talking to each other with sufficient, soft-voiced intensity that they seem to be surprised when Barrett and Sam stride up.

“Hey,” Barrett calls.

Andrew turns, grins mightily at Barrett. “Hey, man,” he says.

Is it possible that Andrew has aged? It’s not possible. Barrett saw him mere months ago. His face is still that of a marble in a museum. But something is changing. Is it? Is some ravishment starting to fester under his skin, not yet visible on the surface, but about to be? Is some aspect of early, gaunt ruin preparing to arrive? Or is it just the dimness of the light?

Stella smiles knowingly at Barrett, as if she’s just barely suppressing laughter. Stella could be the daughter of a dreamy young goddess who managed, somehow, to mate with a falcon. She’s birdlike, but sharply and fiercely so. Her tiny frame—her milkily skinny arms, the long white stem of her neck—conveys a raptor’s deft acuity. She is small but not, in any way, fragile.

Andrew leaps up from the bench, offers Barrett his customary victor’s handshake, the shoulder-height presentation of open palm, which Barrett returns. Andrew administers the same shake to Sam, whom he has met once, briefly, accidentally, on Orchard Street.

Sam says, “Hey there, Andrew.”

Stella does not rise from the bench. Barrett goes to her, as he is clearly expected to.

“Hello, Stella,” he says.

She trains her falcon eyes on him. Her eyes aren’t menacing, not exactly menacing—Barrett is not her prey. She does, however, make it clear that she sees him, sees everything, from a considerable height, that she can spot a rabbit’s shadow as clearly as most people see the lights of an approaching train.

“Hi, Barrett,” she says. Her voice, high-pitched, girlishly offhand, does not match the rest of her. A softer, simpler girl speaks from the raptor’s face and body. Who knows which is the truer?

Andrew, the host of this small, mysterious party, says, “Thanks for coming, you guys.”

“Hey, it’s a nice night,” Barrett says. “It’s one of the last ones. I mean, that low rumble you hear? It’s winter. It’s only about a mile away.”

“Yeah, totally,” Andrew says.

Barrett is aware of Sam, standing quietly, wondering, in all likelihood, what exactly he’s doing here; how this has happened to him.

“So,” Barrett says. “Should we go somewhere for a drink, maybe?”

“We don’t really go to bars,” Stella says.

“Well, then,” Barrett says. “What if Sam and I go get us a bottle of wine or something, and bring it back?”

“We don’t drink,” Stella says.

Barrett says, “Oh, well, that’s good. Drink is bad for you. I myself drink, I admit it, and just look at my life.”

Stella stares with predator’s attention at him, as if he has made a literal statement. It would seem that she, like Andrew, does not speak irony or wit—it’s a dialect unknown in their region.

Barrett glances over at Sam, promises him, with his eyes, that he’ll get them out of here as soon as it’s humanly possible.

Stella says softly, more in Barrett’s direction than to Barrett himself, “You’re going to see something miraculous.”

Barrett turns back to her. He’s aware of her physical insubstantiality, a quality that’s not delicate or frail but ever so slightly translucent, as if her flesh itself were made of a substance more pliable, more prone to bruises and scars, than that of most people. It’s as if she has not quite thoroughly, physically imagined herself.

Barrett asks, “What do you mean?”

Stella’s expression of vague semi-attention does not change, nor does the low, incantatory aspect of her voice.

She says, “You’re going to see something miraculous. Soon.”

“What do you think it is?” Barrett asks.

She shakes her head. “I have no idea,” she says. “I’m just a little bit psychic.”

With that, she returns from what had been … not a trance, nothing nearly that dramatic; she returns from her stoner’s aspect of fixation on the empty air that hovers before her eyes.

They’re high, aren’t they, she and Andrew. How could Barrett have failed to notice it? He’s had, God knows, enough practice with Tyler.

“That’ll be nice,” he says. “I look forward to that.”

Andrew breaks in. He might be a bored husband at a dinner party, some guy who’s finally had his fill of girlish banter and decides, with a certain glad-handing force, to bring up the question of asphalt versus wood shingles, or the superior virtues of his sound system.

He says to Barrett, “Man, okay. There’s something I want to tell you. And, you know, I didn’t want to say it over the phone.”

“What is it?” Barrett asks.

“And I thought, hey, what better place to tell you than Central Park.”

“Great. Let’s hear it.”

Andrew glances at Stella and Sam, tentatively but conspiratorially—
Don’t worry, these people are okay, these people can be trusted.

He says to Barrett, “I saw the light. I mean, the one you told me about.”

Barrett has nothing to offer by way of an answer. He looks again in Sam’s direction. Sam has no idea about the light. Sam seems to find himself among foreigners, who speak a language he doesn’t understand, and so his only option is to stand, cordially half-smiling, wearing an expression of benign semi-comprehension.

“Last night,” Andrew says. “I was coming home. I was just, you know, walking along Utica. We live in Crown Heights now.”

Stella says, with proud defiance, “We live in this humongous apartment. With a whole bunch of people. Nice people.” She might be defending the virtues—the simple customs, the deeper humanity—of a small, internationally negligible, country.

“Right.”

“I looked up,” Andrew says. “It was like, something told me to look up. And there it was.”

“The light,” Barrett says.

“It was kind of … twinkly,” Andrew says. “It was right there. Like this little handful of stars. But lower than stars. Green. Closer to, you know, the earth. Than stars are.”

“You really saw it,” Barrett says.

“He did,” Stella says.
Do not doubt the word of my mate.

“I wanted to tell you that,” Andrew says to Barrett. “I saw it too, man. And hey, what better place to tell you than here in the park?”

“That’s … amazing.”

“It was totally beautiful.”

“Yeah.”

Barrett is surprised to realize that he’s trembling. Is it possible? Yes, it is. It might be possible. Wasn’t Andrew the first person he told? Didn’t some instinct compel him? He’d thought it was lust, and cocaine. But maybe, maybe, he knew, he somehow knew, that Andrew, simple beautiful Andrew, was the only person of his acquaintance who might be … innocent enough to believe him. Who might, as it now seems, be innocent enough to see the light, himself.

There was Liz, too, of course, but Liz insisted then, and insists today, that it was imaginary.

A new, improved reality begins, tentatively, to assert itself. There exists, on earth, a small cohort of ordinary citizens (hasn’t God always favored the ordinary citizens?) who are prone to visions.

What if Barrett (and Andrew, and maybe even cynical Liz) are on the brink of revelation; what if they’re among the first to know that their maker is coming back for them?

It’s possible. It does not, at the moment, seem impossible.

Barrett manages to keep his voice steady. He says to Andrew, “So. A little handful of stars.”

“Yeah. Kind of turquoise.”

“And did you …
feel
something?”

“I felt the eye of God, man. Just kind of checking me out.”