The Snow Queen

  “Yes. Absolutely.”

  They do the eye thing. They pass the recognition back and forth.

  Still, there’s a sense of leave-taking; a remote hint—a whisper, barely—of farewell. Which is silly. Right? They’ll see each other tonight. In their new home.

  “Later,” Tyler says. He heads down Knickbocker, to Morgan.

  Barrett lingers awhile. He’s not eager to relinquish the strange pleasure of sitting in the green chair, surrounded by the ever-diminishing offerings that had, just yesterday, been daily articles, watching the apartment disappear, piece by piece. There goes the hula-girl lamp, in the arms of a henna-haired girl. Surprising it lasted as long as it did. Barrett briefly imagines himself remaining in the chair until everything else is gone and it’s just him, alone, sitting in front of the mustard-colored, aluminum-clad building like a deposed Russian aristocrat, contemplating with wonder his new life as an ordinary, unprivileged citizen. The dacha has fallen into deep decline. Its interior dampness resists the effects of every stove and fireplace; the damask that remains on its walls is mere scraps of faded scarlet; the ceilings sag and the servants have grown so decrepit they no longer provide help, but need help themselves. Still, life has been lived there, and the future, even if it reveals itself as improvement, smells of incipient snow, and the stodgy, steely scent of windswept railway platforms.

  Tyler calls Liz on his way to the L. She answers. Now that she’s single again, she answers her phone sometimes. She’d been one of those people who always let calls go to voice mail.

  Does this imply some nameless anticipation, a wished-for intercession of chance or fortune? Tyler hopes not.

  “Hey,” he says.

  “Are you all moved out?” she asks.

  “Every stick of it. Well, Barrett’s doing the final check. I’m on my way to the new place.”

  He strides along Morgan Street. Goodbye, chain-link fence topped with razor wire. Goodbye, old lady’s window, with the glass squirrel family frozen forever in mid-cavort on the windowsill.

  “Is it strange?” Liz asks.

  “A little. It’s strange to be doing it without Beth.”

  “That’s what I meant.”

  “She didn’t hate Bushwick, though. I mean, there’s that.”

  “She was funny that way. She didn’t really hate it anywhere.”

  Tyler says, “Do you think you could meet me at the new place?”

  “I have to open the store in forty-five minutes.”

  “Barrett can open.”

  “Do you want me to come?”

  “Kind of. I don’t really exactly feel like walking in there alone.”

  “I’ll come, then.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I can be there in about twenty-five minutes.”

  “Thank you,” Tyler says again.

  •

  Tyler waits for Liz on the stoop of the new building, smoking a cigarette. Hello, Avenue C. Hello, new café next door to a skeevy deli, shelves half stocked, that’s got to be a front for drug dealing. Hello, red-jacketed young buck, nice faux-hawk, good luck getting around the three ancient women trading complaints in a foreign language (Polish, Ukrainian?), who’ve spread themselves across the sidewalk, a human blockade, all carrying plastic bags from Key Food, moving at the pace of a Labor Day parade.

  When Liz turns the corner, at the far end of the block, Tyler experiences a moment of non-recognition, sees Liz as he’d see her if she were just another stranger, turning off Ninth Street onto Avenue C.

  Briefly he sees a tall, serious woman, something of the ranch hand about her—the booted stride, the squared shoulders. Liz walks like a man. There’s the chocolate-colored leather jacket as well, and the gray hair pulled carelessly back. She’s been called in to break that bronco, the one no one else can ride …

  And then she’s Liz again.

  “Hello,” Tyler says. He throws his cigarette to the curb, stands up. They embrace quickly, semi-formally, as if a gesture of cheerful courage is required. Tyler thinks of mourners, at a wake.

  “Have you been waiting long?” she asks.

  “Naw. A few minutes. Checking out the new nabe.”

  “And?”

  “More people. Fewer of them desperate and insane.”

  “The desperate and insane are everywhere. You’ve only been here a few minutes.”

  Tyler holds open the door for her, and they walk into the lobby. It’s arid and crepuscular, semi-lit by a flickering fluorescent circle. It smells of ammonia and, more faintly, of wood smoke.

  It is, however, a notable improvement over the pasty yellow, violently bright vestibule in Bushwick.

  They take the elevator (there’s an elevator!) to the fourth floor. Tyler tries his new key in the lock of the door marked 4B. It works. The door sighs open, a sound of exhausted yet unremitting patience.

  Tyler and Liz stand in the small foyer.

  “This is so much better,” she says.

  “Hard to deny.” He steps loudly (his boots seem to make an unnatural clatter in this shadowy silence) across the coffee-colored floorboards, into the living room. Liz follows.

  The living room is empty, in more than the literal way. Whoever lived here previously left no traces, not even ghostly ones. The place in Bushwick had had such history of inhabitation; it had been so assiduously “improved” by generations of tenants. This apartment has, it seems, merely aged, its walls a dingy pancake-batter color that was once white, dotted here and there with a nail hole where a picture hung. Its dark floorboards are scratched in places, but appear to have remained essentially unaltered over the course of eighty years or more. No one has stripped or painted them, no one has covered them in varnish.

  In the middle of the room, like a proud and silent queen, stands the sofa, delivered yesterday by Two Guys with a Van.

  “There she is,” Liz says.

  “I’ve told Barrett I want to die on this couch. Remind him, okay?”

  Tyler sits on the sofa. He is, briefly, like a dog, returning gratefully to its bed, its basket, piled with hair-specked blankets, in a corner of the kitchen.

  “Have you decided about paint yet?” Liz asks.

  “Barrett’s still holding out for all white.”

  “You can compromise.”

  “He’s being funny about this. It’s like, if there’s a single wall in the whole place that isn’t white, he won’t be able to sleep at night.”

  Liz takes off her jacket, drops it onto the floor (there’s nowhere else to put it), comes and sits beside Tyler on the sofa.

  “And so,” Tyler says. “We live here, now.” He sings the snatch of The Jeffersons’ theme song. “We’re movin’ on up …”

  “How’s the new song coming?” she asks.

  “Okay. No. I don’t know. It feels … salvageable. Maybe.”

  Liz leans forward, gives him a long and penetrating look.

  “It’s good, what’s happening,” she says.

  “I know. I know that.”

  “And I know it’s weird.”

  “I’m sorry she didn’t get to see me have a little bit of success.”

  “She knew you’d be successful, eventually.”

  “You know the really nutty thing about Beth? She didn’t care about that.”

  “Not for herself. For you.”

  “Yeah. Well. True. Let’s say I’d like for her to see me be happier, then. I’d like to be happier.”

  “You will be,” Liz says.

  “I used to write those songs for Beth.”

  “I know.”

  “Now I’m just writing them … because, hey, what else am I going to do?”

  And then, to his surprise, Tyler can’t seem to catch his breath. He leans forward, plants his elbows on his knees, sucks at the unyielding air.

  “Are you okay?” Liz asks.

  It is, it seems, difficult for Tyler to speak. Liz waits. She has the good sense to wait. Tyler pulls in a draught of oxygen, which doesn’t qu
ite fill his lungs but will do, it’ll have to do, it’s the best he can manage.

  He finds that he’s able to say, “I just … It’s just that … Beth died. And my music got better.”

  “Your music got a wider audience. After you’ve been at it for years.”

  “No, it got better. And therefore” (breathe, breathe) “reached a wider audience.”

  “Well. I suppose, when you’ve gone through something like that …”

  Tyler struggles, again, for breath. Panic attack, he says to himself. This is a panic attack.

  Breathe. Do your best.

  Liz says, “It’s not like you made a deal with the devil.”

  Tyler manages another breath. A three-quarters breath. His head is tingling dizzily.

  “No,” he says. “I didn’t.”

  Liz strokes his shoulder with the flat of her hand, as if she were calming a horse.

  “The thing is,” Tyler manages to say. “The thing is. If I’d been offered a deal like that. I think I might have taken it.”

  “No. You wouldn’t have.”

  “What I mean is. I think I might have cared more about writing that song for Beth than I did about Beth herself.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “It might be. It might be true.”

  Liz nods. She is, without question, the only person Tyler knows who could let an assertion like that pass unremarked, not because she doesn’t believe it, but because she knows the story of human desire, in all its squeamish particulars.

  Tyler finally catches a breath. It’s like a sail, filling with wind. The world is flying away, he’s no one he recognizes. His song—his lament, his long howl, his first work with synthesizers because he didn’t trust his own voice, his voice was suddenly too personal—that song, with the slowed-down, full-octave-deeper voice, a voice that resembles Tyler’s in the general, DNA-pool way of second cousins; that Captain Ahab voice, cold and obsessed and—what did that blogger say?—calmly and rationally deranged—got just fewer than three hundred thousand hits on YouTube (YouTube was Barrett’s idea), and, after the second posted song (even more sonorous, more operatically inconsolable—had it been his attempt to undo the implausible success of the first?) got almost four hundred thousand hits and was touted by a flotilla of bloggers (who are those people?), landed him a deal, a mini-deal, granted, but with one of the truly no-bullshit indies, which means enough money up front to rent this better apartment; which means the possibility of a future, a life that’s no longer invisible. Obscure (probably) but not wholly invisible (he’s surprised by the difference between “obscure” and “invisible”). He’s finally attained obscurity. Beth’s ashes have been swallowed by the harbor and yes, he adored her, and yes, he feels as well a terrible, unspeakable freedom without her; without his desire to console her, to offer her something worth having, to move her and please her, the girl who rolled out crusts and collected playing cards she found on the street (claiming it was her lifelong ambition to assemble a full deck); the girl who was glad to be just about anywhere; who asked for, and possessed, so little.

  They argued, on New Year’s Eve. They didn’t make love, after Beth came back from her walk. And then, less than a week later, the symptoms came rampaging back.

  Tyler looks imploringly at Liz. His eyes are wet, his breath still iffy.

  He moves in on her. It happens more quickly than usual; there’s no gesture of seduction, however brief. He is at one moment looking into her face, helpless and imploring, and, at the next, he’s pressing his lips to hers, as if her mouth were an oxygen mask. She holds the kiss, returns it, neither hungry nor maidenly. Her lips are pliant but forceful, there’s will behind her kiss, she’s not desperate but she’s not accommodating. Her mouth is clean in an herbal way, no herb in particular but that sense of green rampancy. Tyler presses himself to her, pushes her down onto her back. He can breathe now, it seems. He can breathe again. He takes one of her breasts in his hand, first over her shirt, then under it. He unbuttons her shirt, cups one of her breasts. It fits entirely within his hand. Liz’s breasts are so small they haven’t sagged, there’s nothing to sag. With Tyler’s touch, her nipple (biggish for her tiny breasts, raspberry-colored) stiffens. She makes a sound that’s more sigh than moan. She buries her hands in his hair.

  Tyler gets up onto his knees, pulls his jeans and boxers down. His hard-on pops. Liz kicks off her boots, pulls her own jeans and thong off, shimmies them down to her ankles and thrashes them away, spreads her legs around Tyler’s hips. Tyler gets only the briefest look at her crotch—the trimmed line of her dark pubic hair, the robust pink of her labia—before pushing back down onto her.

  They both know they have to do this quickly. He slides his dick into her. She sighs more loudly, but it’s still a sigh, not a sex moan, though this time there’s a soft gasp at the end. Tyler is inside her, here’s the heat, the powerful wet hold, and fuck, he’s about to come already. He holds off, lets his cock rest in her, lies on top, his face pressed to her cheek (he can’t seem to look directly at her), until she says, “Don’t wait.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I’m sure.”

  He thrusts once, cautiously. He thrusts again, and he’s gone, he’s off into the careening nowhere. He lives for seconds in that soaring agonizing perfection. It’s this, only this, he’s lost to himself, he’s no one, he’s obliterated, there’s no Tyler at all, there’s only … He hears himself gasp in wonder. He falls into an ecstatic burning harmedness, losing, lost, unmade.

  And is finished.

  He nestles his head against her neck. She kisses him, chastely, on the temple, then makes it clear that she wants to be released. He doesn’t argue. He rolls off her, wedges himself against the back of the sofa.

  She stands, gets quickly into her thong and jeans, bends to put her boots back on. Neither of them speaks. Liz picks up her jacket from the floor, shrugs into it. Tyler remains lying on the sofa, regarding her with an expression of cowed and wondering helplessness. When she’s fully dressed she stands over him, strums her fingertips across his face, and leaves the apartment. Tyler hears her close the door softly behind herself, hears the muffled thump of her boots as she descends the stairs.

  The girl has been deciding about a necklace for almost half an hour. She leans over the modest glass-topped jewelry case, attentive as a surgeon.

  While she’s been deciding, two women have bought a pair of studded black Converse high-tops and a vintage Courtney Love T-shirt (which Barrett will miss). A teenage boy has been denied, by his mother, one of the airbrushed skateboards. A man (not young) in cut-off shorts and a bomber jacket has expressed his bemused outrage over the fact that the sunglasses start at two hundred dollars.

  Barrett leaves the girl alone with her decision about the necklace. They don’t hover, in Liz’s shop. Liz is firm about that. You greet people when they come in, assure them that you’ll help them if they need help, and, after that, you leave them alone. If they try on clothes and ask how they look, you are polite but truthful. No one leaves the shop with a pair of jeans that are unflatteringly tight around an ass that doesn’t merit that degree of scrutiny, no one leaves in a T-shirt that emphasizes a sallow complexion. People will either buy something or they won’t. Wynne, who’s taken over Beth’s job, had to be encouraged, when she started, to be less helpful with the customers.

  At the moment it’s just Barrett and the necklace-examining girl. Barrett is folding T-shirts. A surprise about retail: it’s essentially an ongoing act of folding, and re-folding, and re-re-folding, interrupted by the greeting of customers, and periodic transactions. Barrett has discovered in it a certain Zen calm, and even a pride of expertise. He can fold a T-shirt into a perfect square, every time, in less than ten seconds.

  The girl says, “Sorry for taking so long.”

  “Take all the time you need,” Barrett answers.

  She says, “Could you come here and take a look?”

  “Of course.”

&nbs
p; Barrett tucks another precisely folded T-shirt onto its shelf. The girl, early twenties, is tall and frail-looking, not sickly but possessed of a pale, hesitant aspect. Her dark red hair hangs loosely, just below her shoulder blades. Her face, scattered with pinpoint freckles, has the small-featured, reverent aspect of a Fra Angelico angel. She was, Barrett thinks, ignored when she was younger—one of the girls who is neither tortured nor sought after—and she’s still unaccustomed to the attention paid her by an adult world more amenable to beauty in its less usual forms.

  Barrett steps behind the jewelry counter. The girl has placed, carefully, two necklaces onto the black velvet square Barrett set out for her when she came into the shop.

  “I’ve gotten it down to two,” she says.

  Arrayed on the velvet are one of the fetish necklaces—a silver Buddha, a tourmaline, a tiny gold horseshoe—and a strand of black silk cord, from which hangs an uncut diamond, slightly larger than a pea, with its dim, ice-gray shine.

  “I know it won’t help if I tell you they’re both beautiful,” Barrett says.

  She laughs, then stops suddenly, as if Barrett might take laughter as an insult.

  “I’m being ridiculous,” she says. “It’s just a necklace.”

  “No, you’re going to wear it, you should feel sure.”

  She nods abstractedly, scrutinizing the necklaces.

  Barrett says, “If you pick one and it doesn’t feel right, you can come back and exchange it for the other.”

  She nods again. She says, “I’m getting married.”

  She looks up at him. Her eyes darken slightly, take on moister depths.

  Barrett asks, “Are you looking for a necklace to wear to your wedding?”

  “Oh, no. The wedding. I mean, it’ll be a white dress, and his mother’s pearls.”

  She pauses. “His family is Italian,” she adds.

  She’s unsure, then, about what will happen when she permits the man’s family to claim her, as if she were a shy village girl with a modest dowry, married to the son of an embattled ruling family as part of an uneasy truce. She imagines herself at clattering, cantankerous dinners, where the boys throw scraps to the mastiffs and the mother expresses, by way of pointed glances, her doubts about the heartiness of the heirs to come.