The Blizzard Party

by Jack Livings

  The snow-crusted yard. The driveway, a gray cicatrice that disappeared into the woods. Jane there, pushing a wheelbarrow on the driveway, and when she saw me at the window she set it down on its skids and waved two work-gloved hands. I waved back. Jane mimed digging with a shovel, waved again, and lifted the wheelbarrow handles. I liked Jane.

  The sun had found a gap in the trees and transformed the seamless white yard into a ragged moonscape, pockmarked and cratered, and arcing through it, evidence of Mrs. Feeney’s journey from the kitchen door to the property line the night before. I looked for a long time at the footprints, not knowing or caring, of course, whose they were, and I watched the trees swaying in the wind. The chuffing scrape of Jane’s shovel was far off, a rhythm, and I observed with a clarity of vision sought by poets, discovered by those few for whom the physical world can become, with great concentration, nothing but itself, free of the influence of art and metaphor, those palimpsests we lay atop the chaos of existence in the name of order and explanation. The trees were trees and the snow snow, and the footprints footprints, and I did not question the meaning of these things.

  10.

  The lone adult in the house was upstairs, still asleep, dreaming of a marathon. My mother had reached the final leg and the course had led the runners into an office building. She was out ahead, alone, her shoes thumping down the carpeted hall. She made the right-hand turn onto the straightaway, saw the banner draped from the acoustical tiles, cheering fans lining the walls, and then another runner blew past her, blond hair streaming, tan legs striding with equine grace, that familiar narrow ass flexing in her blue nylon shorts. It was Jane, and she crossed the line first, arms aloft.

  My mother woke up and thought, Well, that’s a little on the nose.

  She extended a foot from under the blankets to test the air before stretching out one arm to retrieve her nightclothes, a pair of long johns and an old blue T-shirt and a pair of wool socks, which were draped variously over the bedside table and a wicker-seat chair that she now looked at with some suspicion, after my father’s fireside assessment of the house.

  Had he jumped on her in the night? She didn’t remember getting in bed naked, but she’d been bombed. No, they hadn’t. You don’t sleep through that, but she checked for crust between her legs, just to be sure. The air in the room was frigid, but the vent was blowing, which meant that Jane was up and had turned on the heat, a concession to the weaker constitutions of her guests. It annoyed the hell out of my mother, this insistence that they sleep in subfreezing temperatures. She loved Jane, but good god, she was from California and had conjured this New England puritanism out of thin air. She talked as if the landscape commanded it of her.

  Thrift and responsibility. Tight straps, she thought, that Jane was using to keep herself from flying apart. When they’d met nearly thirty years earlier, Jane was the girl from Modesto who as a joke had kept a framed photo of her prize 4-H pig in their dorm room, who had ached through the long northeastern winters, fleeing campus at the end of every May for bright Capitola, three months in a swimsuit, bonfires, reading Rilke on the beach, screwing around with surfers under the pier.

  She’d had no fascination for the seafaring life, no lobster pot at the foot of her bed. She hadn’t been the sort that went around promoting Moby-Dick as the cure for twentieth-century ills. What, my mother wondered, did it matter? No one was the sum of her parts. It all went askew. So what was it that was so annoying about Jane’s manufactured fidelity to this house and the grim ghosts who haunted its rafters? She was a grown woman and she could do as she pleased. She could do as she pleased, but Erwin had been right. It grated, all of it.

  Through the window my mother watched Jane in her big Wellingtons slopping around in the driveway with the wheelbarrow full of gravel, her Kreeger & Sons coat open and flapping in the wind, like Hepburn out there with her hair piled atop her head, a crown awarded for her inexhaustible dedication to ending the scourge of potholes. Did Jane take adulthood more seriously, was that it? Had she simply done it better, with more foresight and more alacrity? They’d both left girlhood far behind. Their futures were as predictable as anyone else’s. At least they were neck and neck on that one. They’d crossed the dividing line. When you stopped believing yourself to be beyond the grasp of death, you became an adult. And if that didn’t make you want to pretend to be someone else, what would?

  Yet Jane never mentioned suffering any of the questions that ate my mother up, the nightmare-inducing inadequacies, the fear of fraudulence and certain failure that riddled her existence. Jane was, after all, a doctor. Perhaps, having taken her dose of medical-grade confidence, there wasn’t much room left for questions. But that wasn’t it. For god’s sake, she’d been one of only two women in her class at med school. She’d been confident at eighteen and she was confident now, and really, my mother thought, that was the momentous accomplishment; plenty of fools were confident simply because they didn’t know any better, but Jane was capable of introspection. She was well equipped to delve into the dark questions that haunted her existence. The question was, when had she ever found need to? Perhaps Jane was some sort of statistical anomaly, a person who never bet wrong and had avoided all the corrosive mistakes that had caused my mother to question her own ability to navigate the world, much less pass along any useful information to me. But wasn’t that the definition of a safe life, the avoidance of failure? Weren’t we to believe that failure shapes character? Well, so does success.

  Maybe this could all be part of the pitch.

  Erwin said they were pseuds. Usually my mother didn’t bother arguing with him. The standard low-grade sniping she had to put up with in order to get him out of the house. And it’s not like she disagreed, not entirely, but weren’t she and Erwin huge pseuds, too? Wasn’t everyone? My father, by his own admission, was just playing at being a writer all day; who was she but a woman playing painter? The difference was, he’d been rewarded financially and she hadn’t.

  You didn’t do it yourself. It wasn’t all your own fault. It was the people who surrounded you who truly made the playacting possible. The older she got, the less convincing she found her own performance, yet every year her students became more reverent. If they were buying it, maybe she should, too. So she kept showing up in a turtleneck and suede boots, waving her glasses around like she knew what the hell she was talking about, and they kept packing into the studio three days a week. Inexplicable. It seemed possible that they were getting younger, too, as if they were trapped together in a time-space continuum anomaly, infinitely receding from each other. Before she knew it she’d be a hundred years old, waving her cane at a roomful of crying babies.

  She wondered, though, wriggling to get her socks on underneath the covers, what it was all about, my father’s, and her own, aversion to cracks in the façade. Why did they expect so much of their friends? Life was flux, a swirl of cellular degradation and regeneration. To demand consistency of a person’s character, then, contradicted our most basic biological state. Why did it grate so when Jane and Bo smiled beatifically across their faux-wormwood table at their guests? Was it because their feelings were fake? No! They believed. They ratified their feelings by believing they felt them. They believed every word they spoke, they believed every fish they pulled out of the sea, every nail they hammered, every vegetable they harvested, every fire they built. Yes, it was a stage play, and they were playing characters. But it worked backward. Jane and Bo were constructing outer lives that might confer some meaning upon their inner lives. They had made themselves into exactly who they wanted to be. And wasn’t that commendable?

  Wasn’t it? Why did it make her sick?

  And who are you, she asked herself, optima, the all-knowing judge of what is fake and real? Nah, just a casual observer, uncommitted, unspoiled. Pretty much perfect.

  Are you going to do this or not?

  Socks on, long johns hitched up, she stretched in the light. The blanket fell away from her torso and she drew a sharp
breath when the cold hit her bare skin. She pulled the shirt on and swung her legs out of the bed. There’s something about the light here that cleans you out, doesn’t it? It’s the refection off the snow, the gonging whiteness pouring in through the windows like an awkward teenage boy who’s everywhere at once, thrashing around the room in search of something important he’s lost—a guitar pick or a condom that’s slipped between the wall and the dresser. It’s assertive, this light, she thought, insistent and irritating, but you still want it all over you.

  Goddamn, she said out loud in greeting to the day, a solvent to break down the noise in her head and start fresh.

  Shivering bathroom ablutions, freezing toilet seat, robe, downstairs for coffee. Is she going to do it dressed like this? Yes. While the men are out.

  She’d shown Jane and Bo the new series of paintings for the first time a month earlier. Jane had been back to look again, alone, a good sign, and my mother hadn’t mentioned it to either of them since. These things took patience and delicacy. But sometimes a push. Just a nudge. My father’s rant might have helped—by insulting their taste, he might have rattled Jane just a little, just enough to give her something to think about, and if either she or Bo had been suspicious about my mother’s motivations for dragging him out to Montauk for the weekend, he’d taken care of that. She had something to apologize about now, a way into Jane’s inner sanctum.

  11.

  After emptying his guts over the side of the Boston Whaler, my father found his attitude greatly improved, his body cleansed. The air on his face was rejuvenative. It was almost as if he’d expelled the sense of dread along with the rest of the contents of his stomach. He sat up and slowly got to his feet. Without any commentary, Bo put a rod in his hand, baited the hooks, and pointed at the water. My father took a moment to get the heft of the rod before whipping the tackle in a soaring arc, hitting the water about fifty yards away, prompting Feeney to utter a grunt of approval. It was a nice rod, responsive at the tip, solid against his hip, the fiberglass transmitting the pull of the current, the pull of the weights. He had tugged the rod tip upward to get a feel for the weight of the leader and for the water itself, and the water had pulled back once, more sharply a second time. He hauled back on the rod, and the line went taut, vibrating as it sliced the water.

  You’re goddamn kidding me, Feeney said.

  My father’s fingers dropped to the reel, and he leaned back to take in some line, dipped the tip, spun the crank a couple of revolutions. Nothing huge on the other end, he thought. Then it dove with furious strength, and he thought for a moment the line might not hold, but he got to the drag in time, let it sprint. When the tension eased, he hauled back, watched the tip bow down against the fish’s next powerful run for the deep, and his frozen fingers fumbled for the drag. He let more line spin out. The tension in the rod relented and he held steady, waiting to see how far the fish could go. The fish had only paused, and now it ran hard, plowing deeper into the cold waters, diving for the seafloor, it seemed, and my father waited. Neither Bo nor Feeney spoke, though they were both watching. The line was fizzing off the reel, and just when he thought he would have to take a chance and lock down the drag, the fish relented. My father pulled, both hands anchored high. He got the rod vertical, dropped the tip, reeled like mad, pulled again.

  There you go, Bo said quietly.

  He dragged the fish up from the black depths that way, heaving, reeling, heaving, reeling, until it emerged into a depth where the striated sunlight broke across its big yellow eye and something activated within its brain and it went on another run, this time not straight down but at an angle before turning directly at them and shooting beneath the boat, the line going slack, then emitting a twang as it tightened against the hull. My father opened up the drag just in time, surrendering a hundred yards of line in the time it took to stumble over the center console to the starboard side, Bo ducking as the rod came whistling over his head.

  Get him up close and I’ll stick the son of a bitch, Feeney said.

  My father was weakening, his arms cramping. He hadn’t been at it very long, maybe three minutes, and the fish was on a wild tear now, heading back out, the line trailing out directly behind it, and it was pulling like a tractor. My father once again locked down the drag, trying to break the fish’s will, and he leaned back against the console to rest. There would be no relief for his arms, though, short of releasing the rod and letting it skate across the water. He held on, his fingers frozen, sweat stinging his eyes, the muscles in his forearms searing, until the fish had given up. Life and life and, just like that, death. He reeled a couple of times, tentatively, and wasn’t even sure there was still anything on the other end of the line, so easily did the line glide back through the eyelets and onto the spool. A little jolt confirmed that the fish was there, but it had depleted its stores, and all he had to do was drag the carcass back through the water. He continued to pull back line and just as he felt the fish should be rising through the surface, another convulsion stabbed his arms, and the fish went banging away, a final desperate surge as it fought to loose the hook from its jaw, before breaking the surface of the water with a wild thrashing animosity that my father felt in every fiber of his body. The fish was big, a single flexing muscle, a raw, elegant distillation of strength.

  My father was a little mesmerized by the sight of the animal, until then nothing but a dark force beneath the water, in a sense nothing more than an exertion of his imagination, and he recoiled when the single steel tooth of the gaff swung down and pierced the fish’s flank. Feeney gathered the fish on board, its blood running pink onto the deck, and Bo leaned over and cracked it on the head twice with a wooden mallet, and the fight was over.

  Nice fish, Bo said.

  Big son of a bitch, Feeney said.

  They can pull, can’t they? Bo said.

  A little bit, my father said.

  The fish was sleek, robust, its porcelain belly darkening to virescent gray on the sides, and across its back, mottled greenish yellow. It had a perfect mermaid’s tail. The mouth was rimmed with wicked-looking teeth, and its dorsal fin was an elegant fan that receded in an arc like a schooner sail. It lay there, freezing to the waffle pattern on the deck, while the men stood looking down with their hands on their hips.

  That one had only been the start. He’d pulled out another one as big as the first, then an even larger one, while Bo and Feeney had plashed their bait into the water with not even a single strike between them. My father’s recovery had a warming effect on all three of them, and Feeney’s verbal jabs landed differently afterward. He was less solicitous of my father, throwing harder, sharper. Bo was pleased—that he’d caught nothing himself didn’t matter. He was like a grandmother presiding over a groaning Thanksgiving table, delighted by her own cooking and her family’s appetite. For Bo, stoned and focused, it had been a righteous experience to watch the man battle those fish. It relieved him of his embarrassment for my father, whose success as a writer meant nothing to him, and though the next day he wouldn’t be able to quite recall exactly why, the feeling of warmth didn’t entirely disappear, and he was thankful for it. This was the way men won other men over: not by defeating them but by making them witnesses to the triumph of inner resources. My father had risen above his limitations to become, for a moment, a hero.

  * * *

  Those were the fillets my father had dropped without ceremony into the frying pan on the night of the blizzard, my mother and I upstairs at the party, my father’s choice of prep quite intentionally in direct contravention of Bo’s solemn instructions to marinate each in a four-hour milk bath before grilling them. Or you could do it right and smoke them, Bo had said. You can just bring them up to me and I’ll do them for you. I have this Finnish smoker—no one else has one. Just bring them up to me.

  My father had grimaced and nodded amicably. There is nothing as unmovable as the opinion of the amateur authority, and nothing so irritating as the inevitable condescension with which he de
livers it.

  My father’s revenge: He had lit the stove burner, dropped some butter into the iron skillet, and tossed the fish in fresh from the fridge. As an afterthought, he dug a Pyrex lid out of the drawer and clamped it on top to contain the splatter. He wandered back into his office to turn off the lamp, but sat down, just for a moment, to read the last thing he’d written, and that had been the end of the fish. When the acrid smoke reached his nostrils, he was penciling in some anatomical details in his description of the Buddha’s first sexual experience. Wouldn’t the low-hanging earlobes play some role? Aren’t they inherently erotic, those loose, tender flaps of flesh, just hanging there, scrotiform? How could Yashodara’s virginal lips not close around them in a suckling embrace? Or perhaps they were but normal earlobes until Sid met Yash and all the pulling …

  He hated that book, incidentally, his comedy about the life of Buddha. He was packing it with choice hippie bait like, Only by looking away shall you see what is before you, and Trust not the eye alone, for it is but a single instrument with which to navigate the world. It was a way out, this dive he was taking, a book not merely dumb but offensively stupid. And so far, so good. In a way, he reveled in its stagnant reek, page after page of sewage.

  He had already written three painfully intellectual novels, books full of linguistic backflips and sly tricks that did a decent job of papering over his failure to locate the truth. They were smart and soulless. Fortunately for him, no one was watching. Then his fourth, Slingshot, inexplicably made the bestseller lists. Somehow, without intending to, he’d written a story with universal appeal, a gripping thriller about a mild-mannered Polish man’s daring escape from the Nazis. Reviews appeared lauding his paradigm-shifting approach to the genre. A studio optioned the film rights. His back catalogue started selling. My father’s life was thrown into chaos. On the downtown M11 he’d seen people reading the book, apparently enjoying it, and twice on the uptown he’d been approached and asked if he was the writer Saltwater. (Who? he’d replied.) He’d gone on Dick Cavett’s show and lied as much as possible, and had enjoyed seeing up close Cavett’s superhuman ability to feign interest in whatever pabulum he coughed up. Profile writers showed up and he lied about everything that couldn’t be fact-checked—his process, his inspiration, his intentions as an author. He’d attended an endless stream of parties. When he had tried to avoid them, his publisher threatened him by saying that if he didn’t feel up to taking a cab across town, maybe he’d prefer a European tour. So he went to the parties, and it was there that he honed his imitation of the author of Slingshot, a Saltwater as fictional as any of the characters in the book, a haughty, irascible bastard, rough to reporters, an inveterate drunk. There was no sign of his paranoia, none of the convulsive terror that consumed him upon entering an elevator car or at the sight of an airplane, none of his towering fear of other people.