The Snow Queen

  Barrett and Sam started talking about the merits of Coke versus Pepsi.

  One Tuesday you’re headed home, and you think, I’m going to stop in this deli to which I’ve never gone before, and get a Coke. One Tuesday, at six thirty-two. There’s this big guy standing at the cooler, you don’t think much of him one way or another, so it’s natural, it requires no courage or effort, to ask, “Are you Coke, or Pepsi?” It is not surprising that the guy turns to look at you, that he offers a contemplative little smile, as if it had been an actual, serious question, and says, “Pepsi. No question. Coke is the Beatles, Pepsi is the Rolling Stones.”

  And then it’s only semi-surprising that you see kindly gray depths in his eyes, that you see a resigned weariness in them, that you imagine—thinking nothing will come of it—that you imagine for some reason how you might sit with his head in your lap, stroking his gunmetal hair (defiantly unwashed) and telling him, Rest, just rest for a minute.

  Sam is not Barrett’s type (although Barrett would, until they met, have insisted that he had no “type” at all). Sam is neither young nor briskly, foolishly optimistic; he is not a broad-shouldered pugilist; he is not anyone Eakins would have wanted to paint.

  Love, it seems, arrives not only unannounced, but so accidentally, so randomly, as to make you wonder why you, why anyone, believes even fleetingly in laws of cause and effect.

  Barrett remains a little longer at the balustrade, watching Sam. When will this one, Barrett wonders, send him off with an e-mail or a text? Or will this one simply stop returning calls entirely? It is, after all, a tradition, for Barrett. It keeps refusing not to happen.

  Barrett thinks—he thinks, briefly—of turning around and leaving the park; of being, this time, the vanisher, the man who leaves you wondering, who offers no explanation, not even the sour satisfaction of a real fight; who simply drifts away, because (it seems) there’s affection and there’s sex but there’s no urgency, no little hooks clasping little eyes; no bindings, no dogged devotions, no prayers for mercy, not when mercy can be so easily self-administered. What would it be like, Barrett wonders, to be the other, the man who’s had the modest portion he thinks of as enough, who slips away before the mess sets in, before he’s available to accusation and recrimination, before the authorities start demanding of him When, and Why, and With Whom?

  Beth had just over five months. Out of nowhere. She was granted three months and four days until it came raging back, and among Barrett’s regrets (he cultivates what he likes to consider an appropriate number of them) is the fact that she got so sick again, so quickly, there was never a moment, never a proper moment, in which to ask her whether she’d been grateful for the reprieve.

  She must have been grateful. Barrett insists that she was. Didn’t she say so, more or less, on New Year’s Eve? If not in actual words, didn’t she let him, him and Tyler, know that she was glad to be held between them at a party but that she knew (it does seem, in retrospect, that she knew) she was a species of ghost, permitted by some fluke in the system to haunt in corporeal form, which must—mustn’t it?—have been a pleasure for her. Unless it wasn’t; unless, when the cancer came back, she felt doubly betrayed, mistreated, fucked with.

  Sam will, in all likelihood, leave, either sooner or later. No one yet has failed to. But there is, in fact, so little time. Barrett straightens up, starts toward the stairs that lead down to the little plaza in which the angel stands with her endless bronze patience, where Sam is waiting.

  After she’s closed the shop, Liz can’t seem to go home. It’s too corny, it’s too old-ladyish, to think of herself as dreading her empty apartment—who’d want to entertain that visitation of pathos?—but still, after she’s closed up, she wanders through Williamsburg on one of the last warm evenings in November. The bars and restaurants on Driggs put out their golden glows (these places all know about lighting), packed with celebrants, their entrances crowded with loiterers whose names are on the list, who wait, laughing and smoking, on the sidewalk. Everyone is twenty-four years old.

  It’s a land of the young, which could of course be depressing to Liz, though as she walks unnoticed along Driggs, she’s aware—tonight, more than ever—of how temporarily young these denizens are; how ephemeral is this night of theirs; how soon they’ll be reminiscing, as toddlers tumble around their living room floors, about those nights in Williamsburg. Maybe it’s their youthful promise and prosperity, the clear abundance of their gifts that will … not undo them, not that exactly, but tame them, urge them homeward, bring them to their senses. They are not (not, at least, most of them, as far as Liz can tell) prone to the extraordinary—they have moved so eagerly to Williamsburg, so willingly worn its clothes. It would be silly, it would be churlish, for Liz to disparage as she walks invisibly among them; it would be mean-spirited not to convey to them, telepathically, her hope that they survive as gracefully as possible the day the cord starts tightening (we need a bigger place, now that the baby is almost two), the year they understand that they’re charming eccentrics now, still working in computer graphics or as sound technicians, not by any means unrecognizable to themselves but members (surprise) of the rest of the aging population, the latest version (hipster version) of the forty-year-olds who still sport a few vestiges of punk, the fifty-year-olds (that’s you, Liz) who still work, in a modified way, that thrift-store cowgirl-hooker thing.

  She can’t go home, not yet. But she can’t wander through Williamsburg either, not much longer.

  She turns down Fifth Street, and walks toward the Williamsburg Bridge.

  She knows, of course she knows, where she’s going. What’s strange is she hasn’t decided on it. She’s simply going, as if it were inevitable, as if there were nowhere else.

  •

  Avenue C, in the early evening, is the slightly more foolish cousin of Driggs. Here, too, are crowded, prospering bars and cafés, though fewer of them—Liz walks an entire block and passes only a fluorescent deli, a Chinese take-out joint, a Laundromat (LAST WASH 9 P.M.), a tattoo parlor (no customers, at the moment), a bicycle repair place already shuttered for the night, and the vacant remains of what had been a pet shop (its window still bearing, in silver letters, the words CANARIES AND OTHER SONGBIRDS), but the young people in these bars and cafés (most of them undergraduates, out for the evening in what they consider an edgy neighborhood) are more like the daughters and sons of minor aristocrats—charming, lazy, well-fed children who dress stylishly but are not in costume; who neither expect nor court surprise. A boy in a faux-ratty blazer (Ralph Lauren, Liz can always spot it) leans out of a tavern doorway and shouts, to his cigarette-smoking friends, “They just scored another one.”

  Liz reaches the building, its blank, cordovan-colored brick facade, and rings 4B. No answer. She rings one more time.

  It’s just as well. She’s been spared the indignity. It’s time for her to hail a cab and go home.

  As she’s turning to leave, though—Tyler’s voice, from above.

  “Hey.”

  Liz passes through a moment of impossibility. Tyler is speaking to her from the sky; Tyler has died, he’s hovering above the earthly plane …

  She looks up. Tyler is standing on the fourth-floor windowsill, semi-visible above the light-layer put out by the streetlamps, like a carving in a niche on the high wall of a church.

  Liz shouts, “What in the fuck are you doing?”

  Tyler doesn’t answer. He looks down with benign patience at her, looks past her at the sparse traffic on Avenue C.

  “Get down from there,” Liz shouts.

  After a moment’s hesitation—a barely agitated pause, as if he were reluctant to reveal a confidence—Tyler says, “I’m not going to jump.”

  “You’d fucking better not. Get down from there and buzz me in.”

  Tyler looks at her again, with an expression of regretful compassion Liz remembers from a particular angel—it must have been a sculpture from the church of her childhood.

  “Do it now,”
Liz says.

  Slowly, with lazy resignation, Tyler withdraws from the window. Soon after, the buzzer sounds, and Liz hurries inside.

  The door to the apartment is unlocked. The apartment is dark. Liz finds Tyler returned to where she left him, hours and hours ago. He’s lying on the sofa in an attitude of ordinary recumbency. Liz suppresses an urge to stride over and slap him, as hard as she’s able to, across the face.

  “What was that about?” she asks.

  “I’m sorry if I scared you,” he answers.

  “What were you doing?”

  “I’m not really sure. I wanted to get out of the apartment but not go down to the street.”

  “You really weren’t going to jump?”

  “No. I mean, I thought about it. I was thinking about jumping, I wasn’t going to. There’s a difference, right?”

  “I suppose there is.”

  How is it possible that this makes sense to her?

  He says, “We’ve been having sex for years.”

  “I know.”

  “And we’ve never said anything about it. Not anything at all.”

  “I know that, too.”

  “Does that seem odd to you?”

  “I don’t know,” she says. “Yeah, I guess.”

  “We were sneaking around on Beth. And Andrew.”

  “Did it really feel like sneaking around, to you?”

  “I don’t know,” he says. “Would Andrew have minded?”

  “No. Well. If he’d minded, he couldn’t have let himself. Minding would have been too … Not who Andrew wanted to be.”

  “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.”

  The 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 on
es 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.