The Snow Queen

  He and Liz not only never spoke about it to anyone, they never spoke about it to each other. It was something they did, but it was not a topic, ever.

  He didn’t even tell Barrett.

  The funny thing: it’s Barrett, most likely, who’d have minded. Barrett who’d have felt shut out. Barrett is after all the one who considers himself deposed; who was, it seems (to Barrett), at one moment the hero of the story, crackling with possibility, bastard child of Hamlet and Oscar Wilde; Barrett who walked the high school halls trailing his invisible cloak of silver lamé chain mail, graciously ascending to realms beyond his older brother’s spliffs and folk guitar, his football-team regularhood; Barrett who, at the next moment (or so it seems, to Barrett), was searching the sofa cushions for lost coins, asking himself whether those leftovers were still safe to eat, wondering if love might arrive on the next train, or the next, alert to the whistle of its approach.

  Beth wouldn’t have minded that Tyler was fucking her best friend. She’d have known exactly what it did and did not mean.

  And here, unbidden … worse than unbidden, fucking revealing … is a renegade memory, sharp and strange as snow falling into the bedroom …

  His mother (his and Barrett’s, do try to remember that) is perched in the bleachers, front row, wearing eccentric eyeglasses and an elaborate scarf. Their father must be off getting Cokes, or the lap robe she’d insisted she didn’t need. Tyler, having made the game’s first first down (by inches, but still), knows he has to go and stand before her (his triumphs are rare), offering the gladiator’s lowered sword, the matador’s severed bull’s-ear. He is helmeted and padded, costumed, potently impersonal, with black grease streaks under his eyes.

  “Hey, Mom.”

  He likes, he momentarily likes, his unrecognizability, in football gear—thus armored, he could be any woman’s son. He has chosen this mother: her enormous hoop earrings, her cropped black cap of hair, the powerful magnolia waft of her eau de whatever. He feels as if he’s committing not a filial duty, but an act of gallantry.

  She, of course, is costumed too. Tyler’s job is to resemble. Hers is to (as she herself would say) “Put her best foot forward.”

  She looks down the bleachers, ten feet above Tyler’s upturned face (so little of it revealed: eyes dimmed to pond water by the black grease swatches, modest jut of nose over the guard behind which his mouth is concealed). She wraps her cashmere-sleeved arms coquettishly around the dull gray of the railing (does she know how obvious she is, how posed and done up, I mean the whole Countess von Hoopendorf thing, she must know, she’s too smart not to, she must have some hidden purpose …). She leans forward and down, putting her face (grainy with the powder that shows lividly in the stadium lights, the dark pink, just-been-slapped shade she uses), and says, “Nice play.”

  “Thanks.”

  She looks around stagily, an amateur actress in a second-rate play, searching with elaborate hopefulness for someone the audience knows to be lost, or vanished, or dead. She says (she must speak loudly, to be heard at all), “Where’s your brother tonight?”

  For emphasis, she looks again, searching the crowd, as if she expected to see Barrett, a more recognizable Barrett, come with a few friends to watch his brother play ball.

  Tyler shakes his helmeted head. His mother exhales a hostess’s sigh, a dinner-party, the-soup-is-off sigh, which is audible even through the crowd noise. For Tyler, there is always this question: Why does she so baldly and winkingly impersonate somebody else? When will her deeper, subtler ambition be revealed?

  Tyler says, “He never comes to the games.”

  “He never does, does he?”

  “He’s got other interests.”

  “He’s a funny one, isn’t he?” she answers.

  It’s difficult to imagine a less appropriate time for her to say something like that. Is she really announcing it to the parents of Harrisburg, to the cheerleaders and band members?

  Tyler answers, “Yeah, kind of.”

  “Keep an eye on him, will you?”

  “Uh, sure.”

  “I mean, I’d hate to see him get into trouble.”

  “What kind of trouble?”

  She pauses, as if this particular question hasn’t occurred to her until now.

  “He shouldn’t be some sort of oddity. He shouldn’t be somebody who stays in his room all day, reading.”

  “He’s okay,” Tyler says. “I mean, he’ll be okay.”

  “I hope you’re right,” she answers, and, with a regretful half-smile, settles back again into the chill October discomfort of her bleacher seat.

  The pronouncement, it seems, has been made, and it apparently needs to have been made in an arena. Barrett is odd. Barrett is prone to defeat, and must be attended to.

  Tyler trots back onto the field. He knows he has agreed to something. He can’t quite figure out what. He suspects already, though, that he’s offered more than he’ll prove capable of delivering.

  Now, more than twenty years later, this question: Has Tyler looked after Barrett too ardently? Has he disarmed Barrett by being the endlessly understanding big brother, the guy who never questions or criticizes?

  Tyler pulls the tiny envelope out of his pocket.

  Whoops, well, there’s this secret too, isn’t there?

  It’s for now, it’s for this last song, and he can’t really expect anyone, not anyone, to go along with it, not after he imploded (shoeless, muttering imprecations on Cornelia Street), not after the long and painfully serious talks with the hospital psychiatrist (who’d expected a woman with a bad dye job, and the hint of a limp?), not after rehab (at Barrett’s and Liz’s insistence), not now that his story has been so thoroughly reimagined.

  And really, it’s not a relapse. Not an actual relapse. He doesn’t like this stuff, not all that much. He’d liked coke enormously, but coke was the wrong idea. With coke, he just kept trying to slap himself awake. Why didn’t it occur to him that music comes from the land of nod? Music is the familiar strangeness of night visions—the half-feral boy cavorting on the path that winds through ancient trees, singing in what you understand to be a high and clear and not-quite-human voice, inaudible from the distance at which he performs his coltish, cloven-hoofed dance. The trick is to keep dreaming long enough to get within earshot.

  Tyler has realized, he’s come to understand, that he was mistaken about the writing of songs. It’s one of those errors that lodges itself so deeply in your brain you can only think of how to get around it, without ever imagining that the idea itself might be wrong. Why didn’t he figure this one out, years ago? You don’t reach for music, you let music in. It’s been a macho thing, all this time. He’s been trying to wrestle the songs down, like some ridiculous, weaponless hunter who insists on catching birds in flight, with his bare hands, when what you do, lacking arrows, lacking a spear, is wait quietly, patiently, for the bird to alight.

  Heroin is a better answer. Heroin lets more in. With heroin, Tyler can hear the sounds: Beth’s last sick-animal moans; the low hum of his sorrows and self-recriminations; the even-lower hum of Earth itself, turning; the unshouted shout caught forever in Tyler’s (in everybody’s?) throat, that loud keening sound that has no actual meaning beyond the desire for more, the desire for less, the impossible foreignness of everything.

  Never mind about the coming era. Get ready for it. Get ready for a heartless and shifty old president, for a vice president who thinks Africa is a country rather than a continent, who shoots wolves from helicopters.

  With the heroin, Tyler can let that in. He can think about setting it to music.

  The trick: to nip it at the lip of oblivion, without going over. To let the dark, gleaming entity into the room but keep it standing over there, on the other side, against the far wall; to insist that it wait, with all that sleep in its pockets, with those calm and compassionate eyes; to do just enough heroin to be able to see the figure, cloaked and kindly, but still hold it back, stave off the darkness it wants
to bestow, so that the unwelcome sounds, the hospital moans, the distant shouts of brutal triumph, can still leak in and infect the air, without driving you insane. Without sending you barefoot onto Cornelia Street.

  Tyler snorts two good ones (no needles, he’s not a needles kind of guy), and seems, a moment later, to have stood up. It’s funny. A little funny. He was lying on the sofa, and now he’s standing up. He’s standing in this empty room, where, it seems, he lives. There’s music in his head, faint music, something of the bassoon about it; more throb than melody, but he could lay a melody on top of it; or no, not a melody (silly word) … a chant, Gregorian (kind of), he can hear that, too, a rumble of low voices, urgently contemplative, like rosary beads being read quickly but with infinite and practiced care; and then … something silvery, something soaring, a voice like a clarinet, singing in an unknown language; singing (it makes sense—somehow, it does) of hope and devastation, as if they were the same thing; as if, in the vocabulary of this language, there were only one word to convey the two conditions; as if hope implied destruction and destruction implied hope, so inevitably that they require only one name.

  And then, it seems, he has opened one of the windows, and is sitting on the ledge.

  Down there, between his dangling feet, is Avenue C, four stories below. There’s a woman in a flowered dress, dragging an ancient schnauzer on a leash. There’s another woman, in a purple dress (sisters?), rummaging through a garbage can. There’s the sidewalk itself, the color of elephant hide, dotted with dark circles of long-discarded chewing gum. There’s a hint of wind, bright wind, caressing the cuffs of his jeans.

  He could slide off the sill. Couldn’t he? It feels, at the moment, like he’d be slipping into a pool of water. There’d be that moment of impending relinquishment, threaded with hesitancy—will the water be cold? And then there’d be immersion.

  He sits on the windowsill, looking down, with music playing in his head. He seems to be getting closer to the wild boy in the forest; close enough to be able to hear a hint of the boy’s voice on the quickened air; close enough to begin to realize that it’s not a boy after all, it’s not exactly human, and there’s something wrong with its face.

  The water in the harbor is going opaque with the nearly vanished sun, splashed here and there by the day’s last orange-gold light, a light no longer brilliant; a light that feels old, as if it were beaming in from a past brighter than memory will allow it to have been but, nevertheless, dimmed slightly, inevitably, by the passing of decades. An enormous barge, the great brown-black floating platform of it (you could land a twin-engine plane on this one), has been turned copper by the last of the sun. The barge might be made of some semi-precious metal; a metal Barrett, standing at the stern of the ferry, can only think of as prosaically precious, sought after and coveted by industrialists, as opposed to kings.

  Their mother was struck by lightning on a golf course. Why a comic tragedy? Barrett and Tyler have talked and talked about it. Why would a woman who’d been stern and intelligent; who’d been unpredictably generous or remote, depending on the hour (it’s still hard to imagine anyone else as able to make so much sense to herself, and so little to others); who’d believed in good tailoring, worn coral lipstick, flirted imperiously with delivery boys, and been forthcoming (a little more so than Barrett might have liked) about her regrets (the house too far from town, the strand of inherited pearls stolen by a hotel maid—who else could it have been?), the decision to drop out of Bryn Mawr to marry their father (how could she have known, at the time, that New York would lead to Philadelphia, and Philadelphia to Harrisburg?); who’d been prone to get so absorbed in a book that she forgot to start dinner … Why that particular end, for her? Why an accident that could only be told as a sick joke? How is it possible that Betty Ferguson, her golf partner—Betty whom she had not particularly liked (“Betty is one of those women who believes her shoes and bag should match,” “Betty is one of those women who looks more and more like a man as she ages”)—was permitted to stand up at the memorial and announce that their mother had been three under par on that fateful day?

  Barrett and Tyler aren’t merely orphans, they’re part of some horrible jest, have been since they were kids; they’re the subjects of a god who seems to prefer jokes to the cleansing shock of wrath.

  And here, now, spread before Barrett, is the rippling body of darkening water that so placidly received Beth’s ashes.

  There’s an eye in the water. It’s why Barrett keeps taking these ferry rides.

  What’s different about the eye in the water, what distinguishes it from that perceiving nocturnal roil of illumination, is the fact that Barrett has never seen it. He knows it’s there, though. He knows that on these solitary rides, back and forth to Staten Island, he’s being …?apprehended. “Watched” isn’t the right word. “Watched” implies a para-human intention Barrett does not feel from the restless and heavily trafficked harbor. But he felt it that first night, when Beth’s ashes were consigned there. Beth joined the water, not in some fucked-up her ghost is out there way (screw that), but it seems that she, her mortal remains (which a vacuum cleaner could have sucked up in ten seconds), has joined an enormous cognizant unintelligence, and Barrett knows (is he going crazy, or is he going sane?), he knows it now and he knew it that night, that the world is inanimate but not unaware; that Beth is now part of something too majestic and vast to have thoughts or responses but is still, in its way, sentient.

  It’s delusional. It’s probably delusional. But since Barrett helped to scatter Beth’s ashes, he keeps returning to the harbor as if it were his true and heartless, inhuman parent, a parent that has no motives or ambitions on its children’s behalf; that is neither proud nor disappointed. He can’t shake the conviction that there’s an eye in the water, never visible but always present, neither glad nor sorry to see him but alert somehow to the fact that he’s come again.

  Tyler found a mother for them, didn’t he? This is a thought Barrett can contemplate only when he’s riding the ferry. It might be true; it might not be. It has a ring of bullshit about it. But Beth was so different from Tyler’s other girls. Tyler started up with her around the time Barrett’s own life began to … fall apart is too melodramatic (Barrett, don’t confuse yourself with a character in a B movie—or, for that matter, with someone out of Dostoyevsky) … to slide a little, to fail to coalesce, enough so that he had no choice but to move in with Tyler.

  To move in with Tyler, and with Beth. Beth who was mild and kind, who was the same person every day. Beth who said, that night in the kitchen on New Year’s Eve, that Barrett and Tyler should know about the dimming of the house lights, they should know that there comes a time when the question of good versus bad ceases to matter.

  Is it possible, even remotely so, that Barrett’s true ambition in life turns out to have been insisting on himself as Tyler’s little brother?

  Boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. Fuck you, F. Scott Fitzgerald.

  Say it, then. Say it to yourself. When Beth recovered, you believed you knew—you suspected you knew—what the light had meant to tell you: that you’ve reproduced your childhood with Tyler, and that this woman, this time, will not attract the attention of the jokester god.

  Which would imply that the light had lied. And that the water is telling the truth.

  •

  An hour later, after Barrett has made the round-trip to Staten Island, Sam is waiting for him, just as he said he would, uptown, in the park, at Bethesda Fountain. Barrett sees him from the balustrade that hovers thirty feet or so above the fountain’s plaza. Sam sits on the fountain’s lip, under the angel—the peasant-girl angel, sturdy and strapping, looking not ecstatically skyward but gravely down, earth-entranced, from her platter of bronze, skeins of water spilling out around her as she extends one arm and holds, with the other, her spear of lilies.

  Barrett stands for a while on the balustrade above the fountain. He can see Sam, but Sam can’t se
e him. He can observe an interlude of private Sam-ness, the Sam who doesn’t know Barrett is there; the Sam who exists privately, who doesn’t alter his demeanor (if he does so at all) for Barrett’s sake.

  Sam sits solidly, feet planted on the bricks, hands on kneecaps, as if he were resting briefly from some strenuous labor that will continue after this short, union-mandated rest period. He’s like a guy taking a break. He’s wearing the carpenter’s jeans to which he’s so devoted, and the gray corduroy Carhartt jacket Barrett gave him for his birthday last week, a jacket Sam likes better than Barrett does (it’s a love sign, isn’t it, the ability to give a gift the receiver wants more than you do?); Sam harboring, as he does, this particular devotion to workingman’s modesty, this obscure desire to be mistakable for a construction worker, when in fact he teaches nineteenth-century English and American literature at Princeton.

  Sam comports himself as if he’s visiting from another planet, where the standards are different, and where he’s considered a prize. On Sam’s planet, the coveted features include an overly large head, with gray eyes set disconcertingly far apart; a mere parenthesis of a nose (which enhances the enormous-head effect); and a wide, equine mouth above a chin so broad and horsey that it’s possible to imagine holding a lump of sugar out in your hand for him to nuzzle curiously and then, with a gentle scrape of whiskers against your palm, accept.

  Sam walks through the world with such unapologetic certainty that, although no one has ever called him handsome, almost everyone who knows him has called him, in one way or another, surprisingly sexy.

  He and Barrett met, just five months ago, in a Korean deli on lower Broadway. They were browsing the cooler, which was curtained, in that slightly upsetting way, by those vertical bands of clear plastic that imply some remote and impoverished clinic, short on medicine, able to keep flies away from the mortally ill, but not much beyond that.