The Snow Queen

There’s this, from Flaubert:

  At the bottom of her heart, however, she was waiting for something to happen. Like shipwrecked sailors, she turned despairing eyes upon the solitude of her life, seeking afar off some white sail in the mists of the horizon. She did not know what this chance would be, what wind would bring it her, towards what shore it would drive her, if it would be a shallop or a three-decker, laden with anguish or full of bliss to the portholes. But each morning, as she awoke, she hoped it would come that day; she listened to every sound, sprang up with a start, wondered that it did not come; then at sunset, always more saddened, she longed for the morrow.

  This, from the Times:

  Spammer Jeremy Jaynes, rated the world’s eighth most prolific spammer, was convicted today of three felony charges, after sending thousands of junk e-mails through several servers, all located in Virginia.

  Right. Searching for sails in the mist, waiting for the ship that might—might—arrive; scanning your computer screen for … the off chance, the insider tip, the gold that’s been buried, all this time, right there, in the backyard …

  And this, from the Post:

  STONE COLD!

  Two Nigerian women were stoned to death on charges of adultery, which is a capital crime under Islamic law.

  Didn’t Flaubert execute Emma for her crime? Yes, but then again, no. Flaubert wasn’t moralistic … or, rather, he wouldn’t have shaken his plump pink finger at Emma for committing adultery. He was a moralist in a larger sense. He was, if anything, writing about a French bourgeois world so stifling, so enamored of respectable mediocrity …

  Emma was getting spammed, right? Adultery wasn’t her undoing. It was her capacity for foolish belief.

  This is Barrett’s pleasure; his ongoing pursuit. Project Crackpot Synthesis. It’s a mental scrapbook; an imaginary family tree, not of ancestors but of events and circumstances and states of desire.

  He’s starting from Madame Bovary simply because it’s his favorite novel. Because you’ve got to start somewhere.

  It does not, of course, lead anywhere. It accomplishes nothing. Still, he is, he thinks (he hopes), with this simple job and these un-sought-after, unpublishable projects, making progress. He’s a shopboy, he moves the merch, and that’s enough, it’s exactly enough, to support and counterbalance studies that have no known destination, no future readership; that anticipate no scholarly discourse or rebuttal. It helps, too, that his job and his projects overlap. When it’s time to open the shop (only twenty minutes to go), he’ll wonder which Emma Bovary is bestowing ruin upon herself and her family by buying those three-hundred-dollar jeans, that vintage biker jacket priced at nine-fifty (even Liz is appalled by that one, though she’s canny about what the market will bear; she understands the credibility imparted by stratospheric prices). It is, Barrett knows, a romance, and a perverse one at that, the whole notion of a house brought down by pettiness and greed. It’s nineteenth-century. Citizens of the twenty-first century can max out their credit cards, they can extend their limits, but actual destruction, death by extravagance, is no longer possible. You work something out with the credit card company. You can always, if it comes to that, declare bankruptcy, and start over. No one is going to swallow a fistful of cyanide over a pair of ill-purchased motorcycle boots.

  It’s comforting, of course it is, but it’s also, somehow, discouraging to live within a system that won’t permit you to self-destruct.

  Nevertheless. There’s something about the courting of disaster, in shopping terms, that fascinates Barrett, that holds his attention, helps render him satisfied with his current stature. It’s the technically extinct but somehow still plausible hint of calamity implied by the impulse purchase—the impoverished dowager or disinherited young earl who says, “I’m going to walk the earth in this perfectly faded Freddie Mercury T-shirt (two-fifty), I’m going to the party tonight in this vintage McQueen minidress (eight hundred), because the moment matters more than the future. The present—today, tonight; the sensation of walking into a room, and creating a real if fleeting hush—is what I care about, it’s all right with me if I leave nothing behind.”

  It seems, to Barrett, like a harmless form of sadism, given that anybody who leaves the shop bearing that which they cannot afford is not walking out into the path of an oncoming train. And so he can enjoy, without guilt (without too much guilt) the suggestion that Madame Bovary and Buddenbrooks and The House of Mirth live on.

  Barrett has lit only the modest lamp that stands sentry beside the cash register, shedding its modest amber puddle of illumination. Outside, dim figures negotiate their slow pilgrimages up and down Sixth Street.

  Eighteen minutes to opening.

  He is surprised, he is slightly mortified, when Beth turns her key in the lock, and enters.

  She stands for a moment in the doorway’s rectangle of snowy light. She appears to wonder, briefly, at the fact that she’s there at all.

  Barrett wonders briefly, as well. Isn’t she still adrift in her ongoing dream? Isn’t she supposed to be fading, gently and quietly, without a surfeit of fuss, back at home?

  “Hi,” she says.

  Barrett needs a moment to say “Hi” in return. He needs a moment to receive Beth, once again, as a member of the living.

  She’s wearing what she wears, these days. The white do-rag (nothing so elderly as a turban) wrapped with exquisite carelessness around her hairless head; the white sweater over white ski pants; the white stilettos (in a snowstorm, thank you.)

  Barrett returns to himself, sheds his aspect of the scholar interrupted, goes to her. She’s shaking the snow from her wincingly fragile shoulders.

  He says, “Hey, what are you doing here?”

  She smiles bravely.

  A dreadful admission: Barrett is growing weary of her courage, her efforts. They demand too much of him.

  “I felt up to it, today,” she says.

  Barrett needs less than an instant to return to his ordinary, presentable form. He briefly embraces her, helps brush stray snowflakes from her shoulders and arms.

  “In this weather?” he says. “There’ll be, like, maybe three customers today.”

  “I felt up to it,” she replies, and turns upon him a fiercely cogent, embattled gaze, like that of the half-starved child waving a banner over the barricades, the plucky girl detective who insists that the crime has not yet been solved, an expression he can only describe as the tyranny of the mortally ill: I live now in a world beyond consequence or logic, I no longer do what’s needed, I do what I’m able to do, and on these occasions, congratulations are always called for.

  “That’s great,” Barrett says.

  Beth looks, with skeptical proprietorship (she and Liz started the shop together, it was Liz’s money but Beth’s aesthetic, her all-but-unerring ability to know what customers will and will not want), at the impeccably ordered, about-to-be-opened store.

  “It looks good,” she says.

  And pauses. She was last here … Three weeks ago? Longer?

  “Ready for business,” Barrett offers.

  Beth, dusted of snow, advances. She says, “You moved the jeans.”

  “Huh? Oh, yeah, they’re over there now.”

  “They should be closer to the front,” she says.

  “Yeah, well. I sort of moved them. More, like, toward the back.”

  “The jeans are the building blocks,” Beth tells him. “What’s the most fundamental human urge?”

  Barrett recites for her. “To find the perfect pair of jeans. To find the jeans that fit and flatter you so ideally that everybody, every cognizant being on the planet, will want to fuck you.”

  She frowns at his embellishment. The actual edict goes more like this: Everybody’s looking for the perfect jeans. Everybody’s convinced that the perfect jeans will change their lives. Once they’ve got the jeans, they start thinking of accessories.

  Barrett volunteers. “We can move them back to the front, if you like.”

  “I
think it’d be a good idea,” she answers.

  As it turns out, the mortally ill can be rendered more, rather than less, irritating by the authority impending demise confers upon them. Who knew?

  After Tyler has walked Beth to the subway, when he’s back in the comforting ordinariness of the kitchen, comfortingly alone, he lays out two—no, make it four—lines, and sucks them up. There’s the tingling rise again, there are the neurons igniting, the ice-hot clarity.

  Another droplet pings into the soaking saucepan. It is, it seems, an annunciation.

  Tyler knows, he abruptly and entirely knows, that Beth will recover. The doctors still say there’s a chance, and they don’t as a matter of principle offer false hope, do they?

  Beth will recover. Tyler will finish his song, and this one, finally, will be the one he’s been reaching for, all these years.

  He can feel the song, suspended over his head. He can almost hear it, not the tune itself but the buzz of its wings. He’s about to jump up and grab it, pull it down, hold it to his chest. Never mind about feathers battering his face; who cares about pecking and clawing? He’s nimble, he’s ready. He’s not afraid.

  He’ll be successful, finally, this coming Sunday, at the modest ceremony to be held in the living room. It’s all so clear. Tyler will write a beautiful, meaningful song. Barrett will find a love that abides, and work that matters. And Liz. Liz will tire of boys, tire of her resolution to grow into a tough, colorful old woman who lives defiantly alone. She’ll be willing to meet someone who can hold her interest for more than a few months, and that man will teach her about domestic deepenings, the modest reliable thrill of the familiar, which as almost everyone but Liz knows has been the way of human happiness since humanity was born.

  After Tyler and Beth are married, after he’s put out an album with a small scrupulous indie house, an album that attracts a modest but ardent body of fans (let’s not get grandiose), he’ll find them a better apartment in a less baleful neighborhood. Light will tumble in through casement windows, the floorboards will be smooth and level. And the American people (how could he have been so doubtful?) will not reelect the worst president in American history.

  NEW YEAR’S EVE, 2006

  It’s gone. It can’t be gone.

  It’s gone, though. It has been, for months.

  It will, in all likelihood, come back. It almost always comes back. Once a body has demonstrated its inexplicable weakness for lunatic replication, its hunger for annihilating growth, the habit tends to endure. The yearning for overproduction seems, even if forestalled, to fix itself in the body’s memory, and what the body remembers most vividly, over time, is not cessation but rampancy, some ecstatic abandon (only the lizard brain understands about death), and so to that rampancy, that relinquishment of resistance, it will, usually, sooner or later, return.

  But, for now, Beth’s cancer is gone.

  It’s not just in remission. It’s disappeared. Over the course of five months, starting a year ago November, the tumors began to shrink. It seemed at first like natural fluctuation, which had grown familiar. But then the tumors shrank a little more. And it seemed that the lesions on Beth’s liver were healing, as well. Slowly. For a while it looked as if they merely weren’t getting worse. But finally Big Betty, sitting in her office (the same office—the one in which the arctic whiteness was rendered all the icier by a framed Tuscan landscape print—where, three years earlier, the words “stage four” first entered Tyler and Beth’s shared vocabulary), said cautiously, one lead-skied day in early April, her voice low and measured, that the lesions appeared not only to have stopped progressing, but also to be (Big Betty glanced briefly down at her desktop, as if the word she wanted were written there) healing. She quickly reminded Beth and Tyler that changes occurred, it was early to buy champagne. She ran through the litany of cautions and modest hopes and reversals, in the monotone of an old priest.

  However, the tumors kept shrinking. The lesions healed. Even Scary Steve, the chemo guy, used the word “miracle,” and he was clearly not the sort of man who maintained an inner vocabulary of magic or mystery.

  Here they are, then, Beth and Tyler, on New Year’s Eve, still in the Bushwick apartment (they’ll move soon, Tyler is sure they will, but he hasn’t broken through yet, the money’s still not there). The living room is strung with colored Christmas lights. On the television, a DVD of a crackling fire in a fireplace. Dangling here and there, small green tangles of mistletoe, crisply unfresh by now, but they have to stay up until New Year’s Day, it’s a tradition, and the Meeks family (was it joyful rebellion, or just a general death of ambition?) has long been short on traditions. There was, always, a sense of improvisation, of cheerful underpreparedness, that Tyler would happily perpetuate, but which Barrett has put an end to. The Christmas tree in the Bushwick apartment was not purchased at the last minute, the gifts not hastily gathered the day before (which always resulted in strange choices, made because time had run out, and so, golf clubs for Barrett on his twelfth Christmas, in case he ever demonstrated an interest in golf; a blue-and-red ski sweater for Tyler at fifteen, when he’d been wearing nothing but black or gray for the past two years). For New Year’s Eve, here in Bushwick, there are decorations, there are cheeses and meats and bread, there are candles, and a collection of tin trumpets, acquired by Barrett at flea markets, for the stroke of midnight.

  With forty-seven minutes to go, Tyler and Barrett, Liz and Andrew are gathered together with Foster and Nina and Ping, all in finery: Barrett sporting the gold-embroidered vest he purchased at the Barneys after-Christmas sale (still, at 60 percent off, an extravagance); Liz in a short dress that glitters like zinc and shows, at the neckline, her collarbone tattoo garland of roses and vines; Andrew in combat boots, cut-off long johns, the 1972 Dark Side of the Moon T-shirt, sleeveless, that Liz gave him for Christmas; Ping arrayed on the sofa like the caterpillar in Alice in Wonderland, talking eagerly to Barrett and Foster and Liz from under the brim of a raven-plumed stovepipe hat only slightly smaller than the Mad Hatter’s. Barrett and Liz pay polite attention. Foster (in velvet tuxedo jacket and rhinestone brooch) leans in, all avid-eyed attention. Ping, to him, is an elder who lives in a hall of wisdom.

  Standing aside, talking to Nina, is Beth.

  Beth has regained her luminous pinkness of face; she’s gained twenty-three pounds (“Look,” she said happily, last month, “I’m zaftig!”). Her hair is growing back to its full, former length. It seems, however, that Beth’s hair, alone, bears the mark of her journey to the realm from which travelers rarely return. Her hair, once sable, once prone to languid curls, has grown back straight and lusterless, not gray, but not its former bright mocha, either. Its patina is gone. Beth’s hair is acceptable, but it no longer curls or shines. It drapes. It looks neither alive nor dead. If Beth were a girl in a fairy tale (a fairy tale of a certain kind), her hair would be the mark of her battle with the witch, a battle she won but from which she did not return unaltered. Liz keeps urging her to have it colored, which Beth says she’ll do, soon, but weeks pass, months pass, and Beth does nothing with her worn-out hair beyond rolling it into a tight little cylinder at the back of her head. She wants, it seems, a reminder, though she’s never said as much. She seems to place some value on the mark left by the witch.

  She stands in the middle of the room, one arm wrapped around the small of Nina’s much-remarked-upon gymnast’s back. Nina is stunning tonight, her strong rippling body draped in an antique ivory-colored slip-dress, her powerful neck hung with strands of pearls. Beth laughs at something Nina has whispered into her ear.

  Tyler comes out of the kitchen (just a couple of quick, private bumps) and goes to Beth, who releases herself from Nina as gracefully as she’d change partners in a dance. Beth, coming as she does from lost Grosse Pointe money, has been schooled, she knows about dogs and boating, sends thank-you notes.

  She kisses Tyler. Her breath is sweet again, no more trace of chemicals or lurking rot.

  T
yler says, “So. Here comes 2006.”

  “You’re going to be absolutely sure to kiss me first, at midnight, aren’t you?” she whispers.

  “Duh.”

  “I know. I just want to be extra sure that Foster doesn’t cock-block me again.”

  “He wouldn’t. You’re a married woman now.”

  “And you’re a married man. Which is the only thing you could possibly have done to make yourself even more attractive to Foster.”

  “Foster’s interest,” Tyler says, “in an unavailable middle-aged straight guy with no money will remain a mystery.”

  “Didn’t Flannery O’Connor write something about how one of her swans was in love with a birdbath?”

  “It was in her letters. She called it a typical Southern sense of reality.”

  Beth says, “That’s Foster, isn’t it? He’s just visiting reality.”

  Tyler looks into Beth’s bright, unmalicious face. There’s no bitterness in what she’s said, she doesn’t mind that Foster is hot for Tyler; she insists, has always insisted, on living in the most generous and abundant possible world.

  Tyler holds her. There’s too much for him to say. She leans her head against his chest.

  And, just that quickly, fear arrives.

  Should they be celebrating like this? Of course they should. How could they do anything else?

  But how can they celebrate tonight without anticipating some future memory; without wondering whether, on New Year’s Eve of 2008, or 2012, or whenever, they’ll be gathered around the recollection of 2006, when they, foolish children, partied as if Beth were truly healed? How might they remember this evening—these wild gratitudes, this soaring hope?

  Still. Scary Steve, the chemo guy, used the word “miracle.” What about that?

  •

  Barrett disengages from Ping and the others, picks up a champagne bottle from the coffee table and brings it over to Tyler and Beth. Barrett fills their glasses, raises his.