The Snow Queen

  The song was lauded, as it would be. But the singer always knows.

  Tyler weeps for many reasons, among them his own failure, a failure of the worst kind, a secret failure, as others insist that with his love song to Beth he broke through, he conquered, he found the treasure he’d been seeking.

  “It’s okay,” Beth says again.

  Tyler has not wiped that speck out of his eye. The petty distractions of the flesh …

  From the living room: “Twenty, nineteen, eighteen …”

  •

  In the living room, a giddy nervousness. Where is everybody? It’s just Ping, Nina, and Foster.

  Foster, eyes on his pocket watch, says, “Seventeen, sixteen …”

  Where, he wonders, is Tyler?

  Ping asks, silently, Foster, is tonight the night?

  Nina says, to herself, I’m sorry, Stephen, I don’t know what I was thinking of, I’ll call you right after midnight.

  “Fifteen, fourteen, thirteen …”

  Andrew walks in, doing his shoulders-forward walk, that simian thing. Why is he still here? How can Liz stand it?

  There’s no denying that he’s hot. He’s helpless, and she likes running the show. She’s finally freaking out about her age. He must have an amazing dick. It’s a maternal thing, she should have had a child. She’s decided one of these guys is just like any other, why keep switching around? He’s hot, very hot. He must bore her to death. Does she know she looks ridiculous with him? She must be getting tired. Maybe he’s different when they’re alone.

  “Twelve, eleven, ten …”

  Ping says, “Where’s Liz?”

  “On her way,” Andrew answers.

  Foster is ready, he’s not a young thing anymore, I’ve loved him for so long. Why did I say that to Stephen, I’ve got to learn control. Tyler, where are you? Why did I say that, not young anymore, where are you?

  “Nine, eight, seven …”

  •

  In the bedroom, Liz says to Barrett, “We’re not happy, are we, about finding drugs in Tyler’s drawer.”

  “No. We’re not.”

  “You going to talk to him about it?”

  “Yeah, I guess. I mean, I have to, right?”

  “You’d be the one.” She huddles into herself, folds her arms over her chest.

  “We both saw a light,” Barrett says. “You and I.”

  “An airplane. A little puff of cosmic gas.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “What else could it have been?” she says.

  “Six, five, four …”

  “We should go in there,” she says.

  “I know.”

  They remain where they are.

  “Three, two …”

  Barrett gazes imploringly at Liz.

  “One.”

  •

  Tyler and Beth kiss, ravenously. As they kiss, Tyler breathes into her and, at the same time, inhales her. They exchange some kind of potency, he can’t tell whether he’s kissing his own health into her or drawing her miraculously restored health into himself. It doesn’t matter. He decides it doesn’t matter. She’s molded to him, they’re here, it’s 2006.

  •

  “Oops,” Liz says. “Midnight.”

  “Happy New Year.”

  She and Barrett lean forward and kiss, chastely.

  He says, “Do you understand that your first word of the New Year was ‘oops’?”

  “I guess it’s another portent,” she answers.

  •

  Ping and Foster and Nina kiss, rampant as children. Happy New Year! They embrace, as the sounds of shouts and firecrackers drift up from the streets. Andrew hangs back. Nina (why does it always have to be me, why does everyone let the woman do it?) beckons him over.

  “Happy New Year, Andrew,” she says.

  “Happy New Year,” he replies, with the bland unintelligent cordiality of an airline steward. He remains where he stands, close to the hallway entrance.

  Why is he still here?

  •

  Liz says, “I should go find Andrew.”

  “You should.”

  But less than a moment later Andrew is there, striding through the bedroom accumulations like Godzilla in Tokyo. He is not, however, angry; he doesn’t seem angry. He’s just moving in a straight, unwavering line.

  Liz stands. “Happy New Year, sweetheart,” she says. She opens her arms.

  “Happy New Year,” he says, entering her embrace. They kiss. Andrew’s hands cup Liz’s ass.

  “Happy New Year, you two,” Barrett says, as he departs.

  Andrew reaches over blindly, finds Barrett’s hand, gives it a squeeze. It would seem he has that grace, that kindness, to offer.

  It occurs to Barrett: Andrew waited, didn’t he? He knew, he figured, that Barrett and Liz needed a little time, even as midnight rolled in.

  People are more than you think they are. And they’re less, as well. The trick lies in negotiating your way between the two.

  •

  Barrett passes the kitchen on his way to the living room. Tyler and Beth are making out. Should he pass discreetly by? No, who cares, he’s family, he’s Beth’s backup husband, he has the rights of interruption.

  “Happy New Year,” he says.

  They disengage, slightly stunned, as if they were surprised to find themselves in this kitchen, in this world.

  “Happy New Year, baby,” Beth says. She comes to Barrett, wraps her thin arms around his shoulders, gives him a proper kiss.

  Tyler steps over as well, puts his arms around both of them, with Beth in the middle, pressed between Tyler and Barrett. Barrett is all the more aware of her tiny, creaturely aspect, the resilient small-bonedness of her. She is at the moment a white mouse, a cherished pet, held tenderly but held, nevertheless, by two men who could crush her if they chose to. Barrett could swear he feels her quivering, as a mouse might, held in one’s hands—that minute ongoing tremble that’s part of a mouse’s physical being; due to a perpetual state of guarded fearfulness (you are after all a prey animal) but also simply the manifestation of smallness, of a fast-beating heart the size of a blueberry.

  Barrett says to Tyler, “If you say ‘group hug,’ I’ll smack you.”

  Tyler reaches over, runs his fingers through Barrett’s hair. Beth stands quietly between them, rocking ever so slightly from side to side. She lifts her head, leans the back of her neck against Tyler’s chest. Her eyes are closed.

  Barrett can feel her, summoning something. It’s palpable. It prickles across her skin.

  She says, “I entered death.”

  “No,” Barrett says. “You didn’t.”

  Beth doesn’t open her eyes. There’s an aspect of recitation; of a speech long memorized that must now, finally, be delivered.

  “I don’t mean actually,” she says. “But something changed.”

  “Earth language, please,” Barrett says.

  “Mm. Okay. For a long time, I was a sick person. And then. There was some kind of shift.”

  For a moment, Tyler’s breathing is the loudest sound in the room.

  Beth says, “I sort of. Well. I started to die. I embarked on something. And it was different. I was still sick. I still felt awful. But. I’d felt like a healthy person who got sick. And then. I was a sick person, I couldn’t remember being anything else. It was like the lights started to go off. The way you turn off the lights in a house when everybody’s going to bed.”

  Nobody speaks. Shouldn’t someone ask a question?

  “What did it feel like?” Barrett asks.

  “Not good. But not really exactly bad, either. There was just this sort of. Dim nowhere. It didn’t really exactly matter if it was good or bad. That wasn’t really the question.”

  She continues to rest her head against Tyler’s chest. Her eyes remain closed.

  “A dim nowhere,” Barrett says, because Tyler, it seems, can’t be counted on just now.

  “Does that make sense?” she asks.
r />   “Kind of.”

  “I want you to know. That it wasn’t so terrible. I want you to know that.”

  “We do,” Tyler says.

  “Because,” she adds, “there isn’t all that much time.”

  “In life, you mean?” Barrett says. “For any of us?”

  She rolls her head slightly from side to side against the square fleshly plate of Tyler’s pectoral muscle.

  “Yes,” she says. “I guess that’s what I mean.”

  •

  At ten minutes past midnight they’re all in the living room, wondering what to do next.

  Foster shouts, “Predictions for 2006!”

  Which is, of course, a mistake. Everyone does not look at Beth.

  Beth says, without hesitation, “I predict a great night tonight.”

  They raise their glasses. There are whoops and cheers.

  Yes, Barrett thinks once again, this is why Tyler loves you so. It’s another of the old stories, replayed: the simple girl who ascends to some throne or other and becomes legendary, in part because she brings kindness and other ordinary human virtues to a realm more generally ruled by deviousness, by cruelties both petty and annihilating.

  A silence settles. Discomfort has not yet left the room.

  Foster rages through his own mind, wondering if he can offer something to counterbalance his clumsiness, or if speaking again will only make it worse. Tyler must consider him thoughtless and callous, now. Tyler will never permit that hour of abandon …

  Tyler says, “I predict that John Roberts will receive instructions from God Himself to be a better man. Human rights will flourish. Women and gays and people of color will stop worrying. Dances will be danced in streets across the nation.”

  There are more cheers and whoops, another raising of glasses.

  For the first and possibly last time in his life, Tyler has made a roomful of people grateful for his implied insistence that nobody but he takes things quite sufficiently seriously; for the habit that’s earned him the nickname Mister No Fun (by which he is rendered, every time he hears it, simultaneously embarrassed and proud).

  Barrett says, “I predict that black will still be the new black.”

  Liz adds, “And pink will always be the navy blue of India.”

  Barrett puts an arm over Liz’s shoulders. She plants a quick kiss on his cheek. They have not, thank God, lost their capacity for triviality.

  •

  The little party unfurls. Foster, Nina, and Ping all leave at the same time, as if there existed some clear if unspoken shared understanding that the moment of departure has arrived. The bell has been rung, the carriages called, and nobody wants to be the one who lingers overlong; who misses the cue; the one of whom it might be said, just after the door closes, I thought he’d never leave.

  Foster, Ping, and Nina say their goodbyes to one another, out on Knickerbocker. Happy New Year, darling, love you, this was such a lovely night, you win the prize for best hat, safe travels, I’ll call you tomorrow.

  Nina goes north, Ping and Foster south.

  Nina is going to Red Hook, to see if she can patch things up with her boyfriend (Baby, I panicked, I think I’m falling in love with you and it scares me, you know how I am about losing control), which will hold them together for another couple of months, until Nina falls in love with a surgeon she meets at Barneys (Nina, the bold and audacious: “Honey, I don’t mean to be nosy, but don’t buy that sweater, white people should never wear yellow”); a man who obeys her on the subject of the sweater but never obeys her again; a man so certain that Nina is beautiful, but unqualified in any realm of thought and action that does not involve apparel (that’s my Nina, she’s got seventy-one pairs of shoes, guess what she pays for that haircut), that she will retract most of her opinions when challenged (oh, well, I really don’t know all that much about it); she’ll grow her hair long (a woman with long hair is just sexier, okay?) and put on a few pounds (a woman should have an ass); she’ll drift away from her friends (that pack of losers); she’ll live with the surgeon in a doorman building on the Upper West Side.

  Ping will walk Foster to the L train, say goodbye to him there with a quick, French-style kiss on either cheek. As Foster descends the subway stairs, Ping will imagine him headed to a disco out of Kubla Khan: gently pulsing, grotto-like (for some reason, in Ping’s mind, the dance floor is circled by a clear blue moat, where beautiful boys float languidly in little silver boats). Once Foster is out of sight, Ping will call a car service (feeling ever so slightly guilty for the fact that he can afford it). The comeuppance he desires will, however, arrive quickly enough: the car will take almost forty-five minutes to arrive. The dispatcher has reminded him about the slow-down caused by New Year’s Eve, but still, forty-five minutes? As Ping waits on Morgan Avenue, which is as desolate as certain outlying neighborhoods in Kraków must be, even on this most celebratory of nights, he’ll think, with increasing fondness, as the car does not and does not arrive, of his small but comfortable rent-controlled apartment on Jane Street (Why would anyone live in Bushwick?) as, by way of holiday observation, a windblown plastic bag that says Merry Xmas scutters by; he’ll feel like the weary traveler he is, longing to be in bed (a sleigh bed from the late 1800s, bought for almost nothing at that little place in New Bedford); the gem-studded Arabian lamp lit; reading Jane Bowles. He’ll be grateful for the small fortune that’s been granted him. He’ll tell himself that he’s lucky, that he’s blessed.

  Foster will go to a club, an enormous black-walled room that does not in any way resemble Ping’s vision of ethereal fecundity; a dark room full of men dancing, with their shirts off, to house music. Foster, still cringing with embarrassment about having lost his chance with Tyler, will pick up an easy and inconsequential boy named Austin, a starved-looking, avid, fox-faced man-child, no one’s idea of a prize. It’s a punishment Foster visits upon himself. Which will render it all the more surprising when, the following morning, the boy mentions his last name—Mars. He’s an heir to a chocolate fortune. This will continue to surprise Foster, albeit with ever-diminishing force, when he finds himself, ten years later, living with Austin Mars on a horse farm in West Virginia.

  •

  Not long after Ping, Nina, and Foster have departed, Liz and Andrew go home as well. Barrett, Tyler, and Beth sit together on the couch, the big saggy matronly couch that is Tyler and Barrett’s sole remaining inheritance from their mother (their father took pretty much everything else, moved it all to Atlanta). The couch is covered with blankets and Indian tapestries (you don’t want to know about its nubbled, corpse-colored upholstery). The couch, in its decrepitude, receives you, holds you, gives under the weight of you, takes you in.

  Barrett says, “What do you think of 2006 so far?”

  “Seems all right,” Tyler answers.

  “Nothing terrible has happened yet.”

  “Not to us,” Tyler says. “Not to white people with an apartment and a fire crackling away on the TV …”

  Beth puts a finger to his lips.

  He stops talking.

  Barrett will understand, afterward, why that moment, that tiny gesture, feels revelatory. It will take him a while.

  The yet-to-come realization: Tyler is Beth’s, now. Now that Beth has been restored to health, they’re a couple in a way they were not, when Beth was dying. The Beth who was slipping away, the Beth who required more and more attentions and ministrations, had been both Tyler’s and Barrett’s: their flickering saint, their runaway princess who was being reclaimed, hour by hour and day by day, by the sorceress from whom she’d thought she’d escaped.

  Tyler and Barrett were her attendants. They were Team Beth.

  But now, tonight, New Year’s Eve 2006, Beth has declared herself to be Tyler’s wife, and has done so by the simplest and most economical of means: she’s put a finger to his lips, and shut him up.

  Which Tyler would not, could not, permit Barrett to do.

  Tyler has never been silenced by Ba
rrett. It’s not part of their brother pact. They are permitted endless discussion, which may or may not lead to argument. It’s fine if they talk over each other, if they vie and joust and jest and mull and corroborate, but Beth can put a stop to it, with one tiny finger, as easily as she’d switch off a lamp.

  And it’s Beth’s job, now, to talk to Tyler about his drug relapse. It’s become her province; it’s no longer a duty Barrett is compelled to perform. Barrett and Tyler aren’t married anymore.

  These ideas will arrive later. Now, on the sofa, a little less than an hour into the New Year, all Barrett knows is that he has to get up, kiss them both good night, and go to bed in his own room.

  “Good night, sweethearts.”

  “Good night, my love.”

  “Sweet dreams.”

  “See you in the newness of tomorrow.”

  “See you in hell, motherfucker.”

  “Good night, good night, good night.”

  •

  After Barrett has gone to bed, Tyler says to Beth, “This is our only New Year’s resolution. We’re moving out of this dump by 2007.”

  “It’d be nice to move,” Beth says. “I’m okay here, though. I like this place.”

  “Imagine something less dreary, though.”

  “Who doesn’t want less dreary?”

  “Imagine no more acoustic ceiling. No more shag carpet.”

  “It’d be nice, no denying it.”

  “Imagine a neighborhood where you could walk down the block and get actual produce. Fresh vegetables, baby. A mere block or two away.”

  “Would Barrett be moving, with us?” she asks.

  Tyler pauses. It would seem that the question hasn’t occurred to him. He gazes, briefly, into the televised fire.

  “I don’t know,” he says. “What do you think?”

  She says, “You’re going to do it to me, aren’t you?”

  “Uh, do what, exactly?”

  “You want me to be the wife who says, Your brother’s got to move out.”

  “Earth to Beth.”

  “I’m serious.”

  “Okay,” he says. “Do you want Barrett to move out?”