14 Degrees Below Zero (9 page)

“You had better watch yourself,” Lewis said.

Stephen visibly blanched. “Lewis, calm down.”

“I am calm. Right now I am calm.”

Stephen turned away from Lewis and crossed his legs. He glanced back for a moment with an odd gleam in his eyes. Was he actually frightened? Well, good.

“Lewis, honestly,” Stephen said. “I think that the amount of time I have spent with Jay and the commitment I’ve demonstrated to her gives me at least the right to have a frank conversation with you without things devolving into threats.”

“I’m not threatening you,” Lewis said.

“I think you don’t have a full understanding of your impact on Jay,” Stephen said.

“OK. Tell me.”

“Despite herself, she isn’t able to regard you as a fallible human being,” Stephen said slowly. “Yes, she puts up resistance, but that’s just for show, to keep her self-respect. In fact, she takes everything you tell her with extreme gravity. Each of your phone calls is a major event for her. And since Anna’s death, you’ve been calling several times a day.”

There was an unpleasant buzzing in Lewis’s ears. He wanted to mess with them, try to rearrange them, but he knew his actions would be mistaken as a sign of mental instability.

“I like to talk to my daughter,” Lewis said. “Surely you don’t have a problem with that.”

“Lewis, please, drop your defenses just for a moment.” Stephen sipped at his coffee and looked outside, as though seeking support. “The point I’m making is that you have an inordinate impact on Jay. Her life has been in a state of turmoil since she got pregnant, and I assume yours has, too, to some extent. But as someone who knows your family very well, I’ve observed that your influence on Jay tends to be disruptive and disturbing a great deal of the time. I don’t doubt your love, Lewis, or your good intentions. I’d be a fool to do that, and wrong. But there are times when the weight of your judgments, and your questioning of her, is pressing down and making things far more difficult for her than they need to be. She’s brilliant, Lewis. It’s absurd for her to be spending her time waiting tables. Yet she’s convinced herself that’s all she’s capable of. And, Lewis, there are times when I worry that she’s going to start believing that it’s a permanent condition. As soon as she believes that she’s a case of lost potential, then she will have crossed a line that I’m not sure I can pull her back from. Does any of this ring true to you, Lewis?”

Lewis sat back in his chair and dropped his chin close to his chest. He could not remember anyone ever speaking to him in this fashion.
Lecturing.

“What was it you said earlier, that I create stories out of people’s lives?” Lewis asked. “Well, if that’s not what you’re doing, tell me what the fuck it is.”

Stephen’s mouth puckered. “Sometimes it takes Jay an hour to recover from one of your phone calls. And then, as often as not, you call again.”

“And this is your business?” Lewis asked. “Educate me. Give me another sermon. Tell me how many times a day I should be allowed to call my own daughter.”

“I wouldn’t presume to do that,” Stephen said. He touched the knot of his tie, and Lewis imagined grabbing that tie, pulling it up, cutting off Steven’s wind and watching him gasp for air.

“Don’t look at me like that,” Stephen said suddenly.

“Like what?” Lewis asked.

“I’m not going to play your games, Lewis,” Stephen replied.

“I don’t want you to,” Lewis said. “You’re not invited.”

“You need help.”

“Oh, but I’m getting so much help from you,” Lewis said. “Stephen, you’ve dated my daughter for a little while. You’ve been fairly nice to her. If you hadn’t, we would have had a problem long before now. But for you to come to my place of
work
and—”

“I’m worried about Jay,” Stephen said.

And he seemed, as far as Lewis could tell, to be speaking the truth. It was tempting to let it all wash into him, to take Stephen’s hypothesis at face value and respond to it on its own terms. But, really, what the fuck did Stephen know? Stephen had never slogged through the trenches of twenty-plus years of marriage, had never lived through decades of feeling his very self erode into a clutching little core of emptiness. Stephen had never played nurse to a dying woman who, just months before, he had silently and daily judged as the criminal behind all that besieged him. Stephen had never gone to the doctor and subjected himself to the humiliation of revealing a small fraction of his loneliness, fear, and grief, and been given a small pill to take every morning in the hopes that he could pull himself together enough to care for the two fragile souls who would probably come to a bad end without him.

Hating himself even as it happened, Lewis shivered.

“What’s wrong?” Stephen asked.

“Nothing, not a thing,” Lewis said. “It’s the air-conditioning in this place.”

Curiosity passed over Stephen’s face, but he said nothing.

“Are you done?” Lewis asked.

“It’s not a matter of being
done.
” Stephen picked up his latte and looked at it as though it had disappointed him. “I just hoped we could have a civilized conversation about Jay, that’s all. I love her, you love her. You’re her father. She cares about what you think more than anything else, and I wonder whether that’s healthy.”

“Speaking of healthy, you never answered my question.”

“Which one?” Stephen said warily.

“Whether it’s
healthy
for you to be spending the night at Jay’s apartment,” Lewis said. “Whether or not it’s good for Ramona to see you in bed with her mother.”

“Lewis—” Stephen paused, giving the impression of a man trying very hard to check his words. “I
did
answer that question. I said that’s up to Jay to judge. And believe me, we have the same concerns. We try very hard to be discreet.”

“Discreet?”

“For crying out loud, Lewis,
calm down.
”

Lewis looked around. There were about ten people in the place, including the girls behind the counter, and they were all looking at him. Had he been shouting or something? He couldn’t be sure. He took the lid off his coffee and watched the vapors of steam curl off its cooling surface.

“I am calm,” he said quietly.

“I don’t know how I thought this was going to go, but it’s gone badly.” Stephen picked up his briefcase off the floor. “If I’ve been presumptuous, I apologize. I don’t want to antagonize you, Lewis. I don’t see any reason why we shouldn’t be friendly. But there are unhealthy things happening between you and Jay, and I felt a duty to try to do something about it. It’s the same thing you would do in my place.”

“In my place,” Lewis mused. “What about my place? What would you
really
do if you were in my place?”

Stephen grimaced. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“I don’t really know, either,” Lewis said, and then, surprising himself, he let out a bark of a laugh.

Stephen’s sour expression deepened. “I don’t find any of this very amusing, Lewis.”

“Stick around,” Lewis said. “It’s going to get hilarious.”

“Is that another threat?” Stephen asked, sitting straighter in his chair and holding his briefcase to his chest like a shield.

“Now why would I threaten you?” Lewis asked. “We have so much in common. Hey, we’re both runners. Maybe we should go for a
jog
sometime.”

“I mean it when I say you need help.” Stephen started to get up. “You’ve changed in the time I’ve known you.”

It was shocking, to hear it put like that. Lewis got up as well and stopped short, his mounting anger defused.

Lewis looked back at the table in the corner of the coffee shop, tucked back behind a planter. Anna was sitting there.

She didn’t see him.

Then she was gone. He didn’t see her get up and leave, and he didn’t witness her vanishing. It was simply that she had been there, and she no longer was.

Lewis put out his hand and grasped the back of a chair. He realized that he had nearly fallen over.

“Lewis, are you all right?” Stephen asked.

“Yes, I’m fine,” Lewis replied. He looked back at the table in the corner. No one was sitting there.

“Did something just happen?” Stephen asked.

“I’ve seen things,” Lewis said.

“I don’t doubt it,” Stephen told him.

“I’ve done things,” Lewis added.

“What do you mean?” Stephen said, his forehead wrinkling.

“Nothing.” Lewis chucked his half-finished coffee into a trash can. “Nothing at all. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go sell some shirts. They don’t sell themselves, apparently.”

And, with the consolation of a dramatic exit, Lewis returned to his job. He didn’t look back to see Stephen’s reaction, and he didn’t look back to the table where he had seen his late wife sitting, staring ahead of her, looking for all the world as though she was waiting for something.

9. THE DENUDED TREES, THE BARREN FLOWER BEDS, THE STILLNESS.

I
n the morning it felt as though some irreversible shift had occurred. Jay had lived in Minneapolis her entire life, and seasonal change had been ingrained in her from her infancy—the moment when the scale tipped, when life became a matter of gradations of cold. There was no question now that the windows would remain sealed until spring, and that spring was a theoretical hope akin to the promise of life after death. She looked out the window at the denuded trees, the barren flower beds, the eerie stillness in things natural and man-made, and decided to put on a sweatshirt and take solace in the music of the Magnetic Fields.

Ramona was in the next room dressing Barbies, luxuriating in an aimless Saturday. Jay had spent the night alone, tucking herself in with a second scotch-and-soda after playing back a couple of voice-mail messages from Stephen, who sounded tense and distant. She supposed she could have invited him over—it would have been the usual thing—but she was exhausted, and didn’t want to deal with whatever drama lay behind Stephen’s cryptic unease. She loved Stephen, and would follow that love wherever it happened to take her in the drift of time. But a quiet evening with Ramona was too good to pass up. Jay glanced through the doorway at Ramona playing, saw the way her arms had grown slender, her legs lengthening, her face shedding all its babyishness. It was no longer impossible to imagine the day when Ramona would say good-bye to her mother and hide herself in the world.

“What?” Ramona asked, looking up from the complicated task of getting a plastic Barbie shoe to stay on an impossibly small and pointed Barbie foot.

“Nothing,” Jay said. “I’m just watching you.”

“Well, cut it out,” Ramona said with an enigmatic smile.

“All right,” Jay told her daughter. “Fair enough.”

Jay had never been alone in her entire life. She had been a child, then had a roommate in college, and then Ramona had come. The great paradox, of course, was the crushing loneliness that comprised her emotional terrain. She assiduously tried to protect Ramona from her own despair, having vowed long ago not to become one of those single mothers who treated her child like a sort of surrogate spouse. And she had done a pretty good job. So far.

We are nothing without love,
sang the baritone from the CD player. And it made Jay wonder where love had gotten her, and whether she had ever felt it, whether what she took for love was the same for those who claimed to love her.

The door buzzer rang. Ramona screamed at the noise and ran out of the room (strange child) as Jay went to the electric box and pushed the button.

“It’s me,” said Lewis.

“Come on up,” Jay said, pressing the button that unlocked the front door of the building.

Lewis came through the creaking door radiating warmth and relaxation. Jay enjoyed a wave of familiarity—this was weekend Lewis, the indulgent and indulged Dad whose sense of expansive fun almost compensated for his tight and sullen manner when he used to come home from work.

“Sweetpea,” Lewis said, kissing Jay on the cheek.

Ramona emerged from her room in a flurry of elbows and knees, running in that way of hers that was essentially a parade of off-kilter hops and lurches, giving a squeal of delight as she leapt up into her grandfather’s arms.

“Good to see you, little girl,” Lewis said, his face half-buried in Ramona’s hair.

“Grampa, you know what? You know what?”

“What, sweetie?”

“When I’m five, Mama said I can get a hamster,” Ramona exclaimed. “Or a guinea pig. One of those.”

“Well, that’s really nice of your mama,” Lewis said.

Ramona nestled into Lewis’s arms. “Did you bring me a present?” she asked with exaggerated coquettishness.

Lewis laughed. Jay noticed how Lewis strained a little to hold Ramona, adjusting his grip and bunching up his shoulders. Ramona was getting bigger. Lewis was getting older.

“I must have forgot,” Lewis said, letting Ramona slide to the floor. “But let me see. Are you still saving money?”

Jay watched Ramona perk up, standing on tiptoe and bringing her fingers together in a cartoon enactment of guileless greed.

“Yesss,” she said. Ramona had lately been getting an allowance of fifty cents a week for clearing her place at the table and getting her own drinking water with the assistance of a kitchen step stool. She’d saved five dollars at one point in her Hello Kitty bank and used the money to buy a stuffed animal from the Borders in Calhoun Square. Her cash reserves, as far as Jay knew, now hovered at around a buck-fifty.

Lewis pulled a wad of bills out of his pocket and stared at it for a moment making a little growling sound in the back of his throat that he had made for as long as Jay could remember. Then he peeled off a five and handed it to a stunned Ramona.

“Dad!”
Jay said.

Lewis chewed on his lip and looked up at his daughter with a flash of apology. “I am the spirit of indulgence,” he said.

“Mama, look, look,” Ramona sputtered. “What is it? Is it a million dollars?”

“No, sweetie,” Jay said. “It’s a five-dollar bill.”

“Five dollars?” Ramona said. She tugged at her shirt to cover up her little-girl belly. “That’s how much my lion cost! That means I can buy another one. Not another lion, but maybe a . . . a . . .”

“You can think about it,” Jay said. “Why don’t you go put it in your bank.”

“Thank you,” Ramona whispered to Lewis in a tone of reverential awe.

“You’re welcome, honey,” Lewis said. He bent lower to put his face close to hers. “Look, that’s a lot of money. Maybe I gave you too much. I know you’re really good at saving, so you think about a toy you really want and save up your allowance to get it. OK?”

Ramona looked up at her grandfather, puzzled by his seriousness but aware that something very advantageous had just transpired. Jay had been ready to argue with Lewis over the way he’d shattered the humble frugality of her allowance scheme, but she knew she wouldn’t. Lewis and Ramona had just made each other very happy, and there was no good reason for Jay to ruin it.

“Have you had coffee yet?” she asked her father instead.

“Yes, I have,” Lewis replied. “But it’s so damned cold out there that I’ll have another cup, if you’re making. Anything to warm me up.”

They went into the kitchen together. While she was grinding beans and unfolding the filter, she saw that her father looked pale and delicate.

“What is it?” she asked him.

Lewis leaned back against the counter. “Me?” he said, surprised. “Oh, well, nothing. It’s colder than I thought it was going to be. Should have worn a warmer sweater. I was shivering in the car and couldn’t stop. I guess, you know, these pills I’m taking make me susceptible to chills.”

“You mean the antidepressant?” Jay asked, with the smallest measure of malice. Lewis talked about his SSRIs like they were aspirin. Jay was suspicious of any drug that purported to magically alter brain chemistry and make a person better adjusted. Yes, Lewis had been depressed and withdrawn for quite a while—since before Jay’s mother was diagnosed with cancer—but he was a moody man by nature and it might have been best for him to work out his problems on his own.

But didn’t the problem lie elsewhere? Something about the notion of Lewis absorbing a pill to help him cope was offensive—the idea that Lewis needed help made Jay feel panicky and anxious, and the reality of a doctor invading his brain with pharmaceuticals made her feel protective and helpless. Glancing at Lewis, Jay realized he was diminished in her eyes, and that was not a comfortable feeling.

“Yes,” Lewis said quietly. “The antidepressant.”

“I wonder why that is?” Jay rushed to deflect the glancing blow she’d just struck by making Lewis say the name of his helper. “You know, that it would give you a chill.”

“Maybe it’s just cold outside. Beats me,” Lewis said with a laugh.

“Grampa Lewis,” Ramona said from the doorway, startling Lewis and Jay, who hadn’t realized she was absorbing the arcane substance of their conversation. “I just saw a robin outside.”

“What’s that?” Lewis said, his forehead wrinkling. Ramona’s garbled syntax had made her proclamation a mess of
W
’s and elongated vowels. She would soon grow into her tongue, Jay hoped, but seeing her daughter struggle to be understood always opened a fresh wound.

“A robin,” Ramona slurred. “A robin.”

“Oh, a
robin
!” Lewis enthused. “You saw a robin! Jeez, kiddo, that little birdie had better gather up his things and head south. Doesn’t he know it’s about to get real cold?”

“I guess not,” Ramona said seriously. “I wish I could tell him. It was a boy, you know.”

“How can you tell?” Lewis asked.

“Because of his colors,” Ramona said. “The girls are less pretty.”

“Now why is it the opposite for people?” Lewis said. “Guys like me are all wrinkly and ugly, while you and your mother are as beautiful as you can be.”

“And Grandma,” Ramona added.

Lewis gave Ramona a look of surprise.

“And Grandma,” Lewis repeated.

Ramona looked up at Lewis with transparent inquisitiveness. The coffeemaker burped and farted.

“Hey, Ramona, would you make me a picture?” Lewis said gently. “I want to talk to your mama about something.”

Jay, reaching for coffee cups in the cupboard, stiffened. Lewis’s tone contained a warning. Lewis’s attention remained fixated on Ramona, who reacted with equanimity at this familiar shunting aside of her concerns in favor of adult matters.

“A picture of what?” she asked.

“A sky, and grass, and butterflies,” Lewis said.

“And a cat?” Ramona asked.

“And a cat,” Lewis agreed. Ramona strode down the hall with her usual intensity of purpose. Jay poured out the coffee and handed Lewis his cup.

“What is it?” she asked.

Lewis moved closer to the window, away from the hall and Ramona’s eavesdropping stratagems. He stared out at the drab stillness between the apartment buildings, the cold breeze stirring up trash that would soon be buried in snow until the thaw. When he spoke, it was in a throaty whisper of confidentiality.

“Stephen came to see me at work yesterday,” he said.

“At work?” Jay repeated, somewhat dumbly. Lewis had fallen into a manner she knew well—his saintly forbearance in the face of an offense, with Jay left to guess the precise nature of her role in the wrong that had been committed.

“He wanted to have a talk,” Lewis said. “A confidential talk, I suppose. But I’m not going to keep secrets for him.”

“Secrets?” Jay said. “What do you—”

“He said that there’s a problem between you and me,” Lewis said tightly. “Somehow I’m creating problems in your life.”

To hear Lewis tell it, Stephen had ambushed him with an absurd supposition and slur on Lewis’s character. Jay knew what Stephen had attempted—a clumsy stab at making things right. Probably that was how things were done in Stephen’s family: grievances were brought out into the light and promises were made to behave better in the future. But the flip side of Lewis’s certainty was a horrible vulnerability, which he had exhibited in flashes for as long as Jay could remember—he tantalized her with horrible glimpses into the abyss that awaited her if she forced Lewis to drop his mask of solidity. It wasn’t intentional on his part. But now she looked into her father’s eyes and saw the entreaty there:
Agree with me, tell me I’m right. I can’t be what he said I am.

“Stephen thought he was helping,” Jay told him, her voice unfamiliar to her. “He means well. He must have thought it was necessary to get involved.”

And where was this voice coming from? It had evolved from the little girl’s voice she had addressed Lewis with long ago, when he was an overbearing specimen of superiority, such a powerful combination of need and demand. Jay wished Anna were there to help the way she always had—until those final years when Jay got pregnant and Anna receded to the murky sanctuary of her sunroom, painting the same pictures over and over again, engaged in a slow dissolve.

“Well, I don’t know,” Lewis said. He folded his arms and Jay saw the outlines of a cigarette pack in his shirt pocket.

“You’re carrying them around now?” she asked, pointing.

Lewis glanced down. “Well, I can’t very well smoke them all day if I don’t carry them on me,” he said.

“Very funny.”

“Look, that was a joke.” Lewis put down his coffee cup. “I smoke maybe three a day. Don’t worry. Your domineering psychotic dad is going to be around for quite a while yet.”

Lewis laughed, but it was a hollow sound. Jay had made the coffee too strong, and it filled her mouth with a dry, acidic taste. She noticed that Lewis hadn’t finished his.

“Well, what did Stephen say to you?” she asked.

“He went on with his professor bullshit,” Lewis said. “Something about me making a story about your life and keeping you from making your own.”

“Dad, you can’t get away with playing dumb,” Jay said.

Lewis grinned. “Well, darling, he’s a big old professor and I’m just a shirt salesman. You can’t expect me to follow everything he says. I think it would have made him more happy if I’d have taken notes.”

Jay said nothing, not willing to take the bait and adopt a conspiratorial alliance with Lewis.

“Look, Dad—”

“Mama?”

“It doesn’t sound like you had the most constructive—”

“Mama?”

“Yes, Ramona?” Jay said.

“How is it my responsibility to—”

“Do you know where my spongy things are?”

“Just a second, Dad,” Jay said. She didn’t know how long Ramona had been there, or how much she had heard. She supposed it didn’t matter. Ramona was growing up with Jay as a mother, so she was going to see and hear all kinds of things. In another home, she would grow up seeing and hearing all sorts of different things. It was the essential compact between parent and child—the parent pretends certain realities don’t exist, and the child plays along. But both are human and understand the unspoken realities.

“What, sweetie?” Jay said.

“My spongy things.”