The Snow Queen

  A moment later he stands, abruptly, as if somebody had called his name. He almost stumbles backward over the fact that Beth is being taken out so early, and that her absence will be felt by a small body of people, but will otherwise go unnoticed. It’s not a surprise. But it strikes him now with particular force. Is it more tragic, or is it less, to slip so quietly and briefly into and out of the world? To have added, and altered, so little.

  An unwelcome thought: Beth’s primary accomplishment may be to have loved and been loved by Tyler. Tyler, who sees something invisible even to everyone else who loves her. She is widely loved. But Tyler adores her, Tyler is fascinated by her, Tyler finds her extraordinary.

  As does Barrett, though he does so because Tyler does. Still. Beth will have been loved ardently by a main man and a backup man. She will have been, in a certain sense, doubly married.

  How exactly will Tyler live on after she’s departed? Barrett adores Beth, and (as far as he knows) she adores him in return, but it’s Tyler, and Tyler alone, who delivers the daily ministrations. How will he live not only with the loss of her but also the loss of the purpose she’s created, these past two years? Caring for Beth has been his career. He’s played and composed his music on the side, whenever he’s not too urgently needed.

  Somehow, Barrett has failed to fully apprehend it until now: Tyler is worried, Tyler is aggrieved, but also, since Beth’s diagnosis, he’s been more content than Barrett has seen him in years. Tyler would never admit it, not even to himself, but seeing to Beth—comforting her, feeding her, keeping track of her medication, arguing with her doctors—has made him successful. Here is something he can do, and can do well, as the music flicks teasingly around him, just out of reach. And there is, probably, isn’t there, something dreadful but calming about the certainty of failure, in the end. Hardly anyone becomes a great musician. No one can reach into the body of a loved one, and scrape the cancer away. One blames oneself for the former. One has nothing to say about the latter.

  Barrett places his hand, gently, onto Beth’s forehead, though he hadn’t exactly intended to. He feels as if he’s watching his hand perform an act he didn’t ask of it. Beth murmurs, but doesn’t awaken.

  Barrett does his best to transmit some kind of healing force, through the palm of his hand. Then he walks back out of the sickroom, returns to the comforting normalcy of the hall, and heads for the kitchen, where Tyler is awake, where coffee has been made, where the rampancy of life, even in its most rudimentary form, plays like an enchanted piper; where Tyler, suitor and swain, ferocious of brow, thin but athletically tendoned legs protruding from boxer shorts, does what he can to prepare for his forthcoming marriage.

  The marriage thing is very weird,” Liz says to Andrew. They’re standing on her roof, with snow billowing around them. They’ve come up to the roof for the shock of it, after a night that just rolled off the time-spool (my god, Andrew, it’s four in the morning; shit, Andrew, how’d it suddenly get to be five thirty, we’ve got to get some sleep). They’ve been too high to have sex, but there were moments, there were moments, during the night, when it seemed to Liz that she was explaining herself entirely; that she was able to hold her very being in her outstretched palms and say, here I am, here’s the golden box all tricked open, every hidden drawer and false bottom released; here is my honor and my generosity, here are my wounds and my fears, the real as well as the imaginary; here is what I see and think and feel; here is my acuity and my hope and my way of turning a phrase; here is the … me-ness of me, the tangible but inchoate entity that shifts and buzzes within the flesh, the central part that simply is, the part that finds it wonderful and appalling and strange to be a woman named Liz who lives in Brooklyn and owns a shop; the unnamed and unnameable; that which God would recognize after the flesh has fallen away.

  Really, who needed to have sex?

  Now she is quieting, returning, reconnecting (with both sorrow and gratitude) to her more corporeal self, the self that still blazes with its own light and heat but is tethered by all the sinewy little strings—the self that’s capable of pettiness and irritation, skepticism and needless anxiety. She is no longer aloft, no longer spreading a star-studded cloak over the nocturnal woods; she is still full of mingled magic but she is also a woman standing on a roof with her much-younger boyfriend, pelted by blowing snow, a denizen of the ordinary world, someone who might say, The marriage thing is very weird.

  “I don’t know,” Andrew says. “Do you really think so?”

  He is uncannily lovely in the snowblown dawn, luminously pale as a Giotto saint, snowflakes caught in his cropped red hair. Liz passes through a queasy little thrill of astonishment—this boy is interested in her. They’ll both move on, she knows that, they have no choice, given the fact that he’s twenty-eight (imagine being twenty-eight!). Fifty-two-year-old Liz Compton will figure in his still-forming life for as long as she does. She doesn’t mind, she doesn’t really mind, and besides, he’s here now, glassy-eyed from the night, wrapped in one of her blankets, porcelain in the early light, hers until he isn’t anymore.

  She says, “Oh, well, I get it, but I don’t think they’d be getting married if she wasn’t … if she were well. I guess, really, I wonder if it might be embarrassing for her. Like taking a sick child to Disney World.”

  Too cynical, Liz. Too harsh. Stay with the night world, speak to this boy in the language of earnest kindness that he speaks, himself.

  He says, “Um, I know what you mean. But I think, you know, if I was really sick, I wouldn’t mind. If, like, somebody wanted to declare his love like that.”

  “I suppose I wonder how much Tyler is doing this for Beth and how much he’s doing it for himself.”

  Andrew looks at her uncomprehendingly. His drugged-out eyes are bright but depthless.

  Is she talking too much? Is it possible that in their nightlong orgy of conversation, she’s been boring him? Was the bestowed treasure really just a woman of a certain age, going on and on and on?

  The bonds of the flesh are back. Here again are the doubts and the little self-mutilations, nasty but oddly comforting as well, so familiar are they.

  “Maybe,” he says. “I mean, I don’t know them all that well.”

  He is shutting down. She’s exhausted him. Still, she’s not quite ready to let it go—the ragged ends of the glorious night, the conviction that everything can be understood.

  “Let’s go back inside,” she says. She’s losing something precious, up here in the snowy dawn. It’s almost as if the wind is blowing her expansiveness away and leaving only the pebbles of her skepticism, her little rosary of complaints.

  “No, wait a minute,” Andrew says. “I think …”

  She waits. He’s working something out. He stands snow-sparked, berobed, deciding what it is he thinks.

  He says, “I think people worry too much. I think we should go ahead and make mistakes. Like, we should get married. We should have babies. Even if, you know, our reasons may not be all that noble and pure. I think maybe you could be noble and pure all your life and end up, well, pretty much alone.”

  “Maybe,” she answers. “That might very well be true.”

  “Shit gets messy. It should get messy.”

  “Up to a point,” she says. “Hey, are you shivering?”

  “Um, a little.”

  “Let’s go back down, then,” she says.

  She kisses his cold lips.

  In the kitchen, Barrett pours himself a half-cup of coffee, his morning allowance. Tyler, gone to Tyler world, hums a song and beats time, softly, with a fingertip on the table.

  It’s rare for Barrett to wonder what to say to Tyler. Barrett holds his coffee mug, as if that were his singular purpose. Inevitably, it takes Tyler a moment to return from his parallel dimension. In the kitchen, in the mornings, Barrett always speaks first.

  Tyler says, “Do you really want to go to the shop three hours before it opens?”

  Tyler can speak normally, normally enough,
but he isn’t quite back from the realm. Although he’s stopped humming, the music still blares in his head. Barrett suspects Tyler must feel, at times, especially in the mornings, when he’s most fervent and hopeful about his music, that conducting an ordinary conversation is like shouting to be heard on a construction site.

  Barrett doesn’t answer. He’d like to answer. He expects to answer. At the moment, however, he’s struggling to remember what he says in these kitchen conversations—these daily, brotherly launchings into the day ahead (safe travels, pilgrim)—and how, exactly, he says it.

  He has a secret, now. He’s keeping something from Tyler.

  A surprise: It throws him off.

  A subsequent surprise: There is, it seems, an act, a quality of impersonation, involved in being Barrett.

  Tyler says, “Hello?”

  Which is funny. They have, for the first time in Barrett’s memory, reversed positions. Barrett has, since childhood, been the one who reels Tyler back in from his finger-tapping contemplations.

  Barrett snaps to.

  “I do,” he says. “It’ll be nice, being alone in there. It’ll be good for reading.”

  He sounds very much like himself, doesn’t he? He hopes he does. At least, Tyler doesn’t seem to be looking at him strangely.

  “You can read here. You can be alone here.”

  “Now you sound like Mom.”

  “We’re both like Mom,” Tyler says.

  “Do you think that means we can’t get struck by lightning?”

  “Explain.”

  “It’s like, a woman gets struck by lightning on a golf course and then, years later, one of her sons gets struck by lightning too. How plausible is that?”

  “The odds are exactly the same.”

  “I sometimes wonder how you live with such a modest sense of romance,” Barrett says.

  “Superstition and romance are not the same thing.”

  “But don’t you ever wonder where Mom is?”

  Tyler looks at him as if he’s made a rude and tasteless remark. “Of course I do.”

  “Do you think she’s just … gone?”

  “I don’t like to think that.”

  A droplet, long accumulating, falls from the rim of the faucet into a soaking saucepan, makes a tiny ping. The fluorescent ring on the ceiling, covered by Beth with a red silk scarf which filters and pinkens the light, emits its low buzz.

  “Do you ever wonder if the Catholics are right?” Barrett asks.

  “They’re not. Next question.”

  “Somebody’s got to be right. Why not the Catholics?”

  “You’re sounding a little crazy.”

  The rim of the kitchen table, ridged aluminum, is nicked at the near corner, a small vee, at the base of which a bread crumb stolidly resides.

  “We should be open to all possibilities, shouldn’t we?”

  “I don’t go for that one.”

  “I’ve just been … thinking about it.”

  “You were a better Catholic than I was,” Tyler says.

  “I was more cooperative, is all. And, you know, none of the priests ever molested me.”

  “Why exactly do you mention that?”

  The smell of coffee suffuses the air, a mix of new coffee and the re-summoned burnt coffee on the metal disk that keeps the pot heated. There’s a faint underlayer of last night’s salmon. There’s the kitchen’s essential smell, which has shifted with the worsening of Beth’s illness, though it hasn’t changed entirely. When Beth was more able, it was piecrust (somehow the smell of piecrust dominated all the other cooking smells) and burnt sugar. Those ghosts remain. Under them, though, rising through like pentimento, is a hint of fried pork (a true ghost smell, they never fry pork) and the suggestion of male sweat.

  “Now that it’s all over the news,” Barrett says, “I find myself wondering why no one ever messed with me, I mean it makes me feel like the fat kid I was. That’s fucked up, I know.”

  “As long as you know.”

  “Some things can be bullshit and true at the same time.”

  “That, as you and I both understand, is ridiculous.”

  “Probably. But really. What exactly do you gain by being nobody’s fool, ever? Do you actually benefit from the policy of absolute, no-holds-barred nay-saying?”

  “I’m not sure I can have this conversation much longer. Not this early.”

  “Right. I’m off to work.”

  “Ciao.”

  “See you tonight.”

  “See you tonight.”

  Do you really like a mess?” Liz says to Andrew.

  She’s making breakfast for him, like a farm wife. It’s a little sexy. It isn’t unsexy. She could be a substantial woman, firm-featured, stirring the eggs in the iron skillet, living in a house fastened to a chirruping green vastness; a woman too ample, too sure-footed, for the winds to worry; smarter than her man, cagier, lacking perhaps his garrulous, two-stepping charm but possessed of a profound sureness, the depths of which he can barely imagine.

  Andrew reclines on a kitchen chair, smoking, in briefs and woolen socks. If he knew how sexy he was, it would ruin it. Or does he know? Is he smarter than he seems to be?

  “Huh?” he says.

  “What you were saying on the roof. Sometimes a mess is part of it.”

  “Oh. Yeah, you know, I don’t like to fight, but I don’t back down from fights.”

  “Mm. I guess I mean, do you like a little skirmish every now and then, is it stimulating?”

  Andrew, pay attention. I’m asking if I’m too maternal, too offhandedly kind, to hold your interest. Would you prefer someone rougher, someone more punishing, someone who disregards your feelings because she knows she’s a treasure, someone who offers no apologies, ever?

  “I got into a lot of fights when I was a kid,” he says. “You know, when you move around a lot …”

  They’ve gotten there already.

  She plunks Andrew’s breakfast down in front of him. He exhales a plume of smoke through his nostrils, drapes a muscled arm around her hips.

  “You’ve always got to prove yourself,” he says.

  They’ve gotten there. With Andrew, any conversation leads eventually to reminiscence, though it usually takes longer than this. He’s the most nostalgic twenty-eight-year-old in history. His past is his holy book, his seat of wisdom, and when a question presents itself, if the question is even slightly difficult, he consults the Book of When We Moved to Phoenix or the Book of When I Spent a Whole Year in the Hospital or the Book of When I Started Doing Drugs.

  Liz plucks the cigarette from his fingertips and takes a drag, just for the sexy-momma-ness of it. Expertly, she flicks the butt into the sink.

  “Eat, child,” she says.

  “You’re not having any?”

  “I’m still too high.”

  That’s not exactly true. But now, right now, coming down, she prefers to be a hallucination she and Andrew are having together. Any demonstration of appetite would quell it.

  He chows down, doggishly pleased by food. Snow taps on the windowpanes.

  Before he can go on with the Saga of My Childhood Fights, Liz says, “When I was a little girl, I beat up everybody.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Nope. I was the terror of the third grade.”

  “I can’t picture you as that.”

  Picture it, sweetheart.

  She strokes his cropped red hair, fingers the line of silver hoops in his ear, which inspires in her a minor spasm of fondness and pity. She knows where he’s headed. She feels guilty, a little guilty, about knowing it, but what can she do? Warn him? Tell him how his blunt-faced beauty will erode; how the whole thug-saint thing works at twenty-eight, but …

  She says, “You should never be the poorest person in the neighborhood. It’s funny. My parents were so proud of our little house out on the fringes.”

  “Right …”

  “Which, as it turns out, meant sending their kids to the good scho
ol, because they’d managed to buy a house that was within the district by about ten feet.”

  “And that’s a bad thing?”

  “No. I mean, suddenly I had teachers who weren’t drunk or psychotic. But suddenly there were all these kids who hated me for being a shabby, scrawny little thing. Suddenly I showed up wearing shoes that Dora Mason actually recognized …”

  “Huh?”

  “I went to school in shoes a girl in my class had just given to the church thrift store. Which was a surprise to me. I liked the shoes a lot, they were purple, with these little buckles, I can still see them … Anyway, I guess I’d assumed that my mother would by some magic make sure she hadn’t bought me a pair of shoes that might have been the castoffs of the meanest girl in the third grade.”

  “Drag,” Andrew says.

  “A big drag. Dora naturally announces the truth about my shoes to the whole class. So I beat her up.”

  “You go.”

  “I figured, if I couldn’t be popular, the next best thing was to be scary. Which actually worked pretty well.”

  Andrew grins up at her, showing bits of breakfast caught between his teeth. How is he not grotesque? It has to do with his innocence, his cluelessness, as fate forms around him, as the future arrives in such subtle increments it’s as unremarkable as the daily mail.

  “Don’t beat me up, okay?” he says.

  “I won’t.”

  And, credible as a child, he returns avidly to his breakfast.

  She leans over and places a chaste, kindly kiss on the top of his head. Here is the smell of his scalp, the … rampancy of it, its crisp, unperfumed vitality. There’s a hint of product, some gel he uses (Duane Reade, an obscure pomade he must grab off the shelf because it’s the least expensive one), but there is also that underlayer, the smell Liz can only think of as growth, no more preening or conscious than grass, and every bit as common, every bit as sturdily unquestioning. The smell of Andrew’s hair, like that of grass, resembles only itself.

  Eventually, he’ll meet someone younger. Men do. He’ll be tormented about it, there’s not a trace of cruelty in him, which means she’ll have to nurse him through his betrayal of her, bolster him, assure him that his happiness matters more to her than anything, which will, of course, be a lie.