by Building Fires in the Snow- A Collection of Alaska LGBTQ Short Fiction
Thoughts of Jacques continued to nag me. Everywhere there were reminders: my French housekeeper, an Atom Egoyan DVD from Netflix, the Stanley Cup on television at the gym. My lack of spontaneity has been replaced by a thoroughness in my personal and professional lives, and I could not let Jacques rest.
One night—I’d had a bit too much Burgundy—I Googled him. Jacques Turcot. Three pages of hits. His companies out of Montreal and Vancouver: Jacques Turcot, LTD.; Turcot Frères Import-Export; Turcot Asia, a subsidiary out of Vietnam. (It seemed le père Turcot had taken the black sheep back into the fold.) And surprisingly, a Monsieur J. Turcot, candidat, Bloc Québécois, District électorale fédérale La Pointe-de-l’Île, Montréal. There was a campaign website, a LinkedIn page, but no personal contacts. Just official phone and email.
There were pictures, though—one of him chummy at a Montreal Fashion Week party with Jean Paul Gaultier; another at Le Festival des Films du Monde on the red carpet with Céline Dion draped from one arm; another of him looking dashing, cooing to a baby at a political event.
6.
At work the next morning, I thought to call Stephen at his hotel to relay these findings, but decided the better for it. Obsessed with Jacques as he now seemed to be, doubtless Stephen knew all this already and was preoccupied making inquiries of Jacques’ old friends.
Besides, I had to prepare for a trip to Seattle. The engineering firm of which I am a partner was in merger talks with a large international company. The countercyclical nature of our economy makes Alaska one of the few places where investing is profitable. Now, like me, Anchorage is grown up, responsible. Most of the bars and bookstores downtown from the boom days have been demolished, replaced by an upscale shopping mall and a palace for the performing arts.
Beginning my career, I dreamed of engineering structures like these, but my talents have led me elsewhere. I am an excellent negotiator, a tactician, and an amply capable project administrator. My creativity lies in my personal life: I possess a large set of friends, all interesting in their own way—engineers and contractors, mostly—women and men both, gay and straight. My family in Texas adores me, and we visit every second year. Though single, I do not lack for boyfriends, men who, at our age, consider reliability a desirable asset.
7.
I was staying at the W Hotel in downtown Seattle. After a long day of negotiations, I was tired and ready for bed. I switched off my cell and was about to slip between the hotel’s impossibly silky sheets when the landline rang. The receptionist at the front desk was apologetic, professional. Even so, I was about to be short with her when she said there appeared to be a matter of some urgency. A Jacques Turcot was on the house phone. Would I take the call?
My breath hitched. I thought for a moment it might be a joke. After Jacques proved his bona fides, we agreed to meet in the cocktail lounge downstairs. In the elevator as I descended, each floor my heart beat louder.
We settled into leather chairs in a dimly lit corner. He was thinner than I remembered, with a white streak down the front of his thick black coiffure, which gave him a decidedly patrician air.
Jacques explained his assistants had located me via the Internet. Two of them sat near us on a sectional, a boy and a girl in their twenties, baluster-thin, their oriental faces washed in the glow of their iPhones. Scheduling problems, Jacques said. He told me he frequently traveled on business to Seattle and considered our meeting fated when he found that particular weekend I would be there as well. Precisely how that was determined, he would not say. My office would not have given out the information.
The waitress delivered our drinks—martinis, for lost times, Jacques said to me and winked. I felt cowed and a little turned on.
He brought himself to the point. His people had made him aware his bad behavior toward Stephen Traynor was becoming the cause of a certain difficulty. Apart from that, he had shame, and because they once had loved, he would like to set things right. It had become messy, though; Stephen had made some little threats. For this, Jacques blamed himself. He wished to meet with Stephen, but evidently a complicated reencounter must not be. They had hired lawyers, of course, private detectives, but to take the scent from the hound, Jacques still felt the matter needed the personal touch. He understood at present Stephen was in Anchorage trying to sniff him out. He paused, then said sweetly that he knew he could count on me to do him une petite gentillesse.
8.
By mid-week, the merger negotiations were bogged down over our company’s evaluation—something for the number crunchers to resolve—so I headed back to Anchorage to attend to the favor Jacques had asked of me.
I was to pick up the money he owed Stephen (plus interest) at a Vietnamese restaurant on Spenard Road, an area that still retains a whiff of its original rough and tumble. There are bars on either side of the street where at night hookers roam like wildlife in its natural habitat.
On the day of the meeting, an assistant called to reschedule. That appointment also was broken. Finally, the time was set for Monday night, and though it contradicted Jacques’ wishes that I alone handle the transfer of funds, that morning on a whim I called Stephen. He was livid—jealous, I suppose that I had been selected for the duty—but excited for the money; excited, too, I think, at the prospect of any possible communication with Jacques. Whether for retribution or reconciliation, I couldn’t tell.
Because of the meeting, I cut short my dinner engagement at the home of a man who, I admit, really interests me. He’s that rare bird, an artist who doesn’t at all mind my fastidiousness. We ended the evening at his front door with a lingering kiss and made plans for the coming weekend. I then collected Stephen at his hotel, and as we drove the short distance to our assignation, we chatted amiably.
The restaurant was closed, but a bald, sallow-faced individual answered the door. We followed him through a corridor to a back office. He sat behind a desk and presented me with a sheet of paper, which Stephen snatched away. The man shrugged, drew the corners of his mouth down, then handed Stephen a pen.
Bursts of air from flared nostrils accompanied Stephen’s reading of the document.
The sallow-faced man took a manila envelope from a desk drawer, thumbed one corner, and after several minutes said, He sign, or no?
Whatever, Stephen said. With the pen, he quickly scrawled his name and slid the sheet of paper back across the desktop.
Wiggling his head slightly, the man looked at me, looked at Stephen, then handed him the manila envelope.
Out of it spilled onto the desk a glossy photo of the three of us at the Raven, young and trim, looking like lumberjacks in our tight jeans and plaid flannel shirts. Jacques stood smiling between Stephen and me, his arms flung over both of our shoulders.
Stephen flicked the photo away, which revealed a smaller envelope. This contained a cashier’s check and a short note. He rolled his eyes and thrust the note in my face. It read:
Cher, désolé. So sorry. Forgive me.
As I drove Stephen back to his hotel, he didn’t say a word. It seemed clear he nursed his disappointment: no billet-doux, no Jacques. A tiger cannot change his stripes. What did Stephen expect?
In the rearview mirror, Cook Inlet’s waters glimmered in the sun. Though late for a weeknight, traffic was heavy, others bound for appointments, too keyed up by the long day’s light to go home. I attempted some pleasantry. Stephen’s face soured. He turned away. It was as if, uninteresting as he had always seemed to find me, I wasn’t even there.
This stung, certainly. Angered me. But I reminded myself, I had my life. It didn’t matter, this old story.
Black Spruce
Something about our new condo puts me off. Maybe it’s this furniture. When Wilco accepted the deal at British Petroleum, I told him: let’s ditch that hodge-podge we’ve cobbled together in Houston and get new stuff.
Before escrow closed on this place, I ordered these new pieces, pared-down classics of modern design like I’d studied in art school. As I edge towar
d decrepitude, I crave the pristine line. It’s not about order but the lack of any sort of compromise.
Still, with the final piece, delivered just two weeks ago, Corbu’s famous lounger, I find its swoop isn’t as attractive as in the Bauhaus photographs, and the molded plywood Eames chairs appear smaller than they had in the Design Within Reach catalog, while Wilco’s leather armchair seems overscaled.
To really spoil the broth, in our one concession to the past, Wilco insisted I dust off some canvasses I’d painted in my twenties. A ghastly lot. To prod me on, he said. They hang reproachfully on one wall.
“Honey,” I say, “I want to rearrange the furniture.”
“David, again? I’ve just gotten used to the way you did it yesterday.”
Wilco slurps his coffee in his tall wingback. I can’t see him, only a hand and forearm that pounce now and then on the armrest. By disposition and because he used to lift weights every day, that forearm is solid, like the rest of him. I can almost see the seams of the chair pull apart under his weight, which is absurd, of course, given how tautly the Italians have stretched the white leather.
The armchair faces a set of glass doors that give out onto a deck, which in turn looks onto the jagged mountains at the easternmost edge of the town, a bright green wall in the early morning summer light.
“Complacency,” I say, “is the enemy of the good.”
“I thought it was perfection.”
“That, too.”
Wilco never holds out for long against my wishes. It’s his essential Scandinavian/Minnesotan go-along-to-get-along thing. Whatever, as my students used to say. Or as Wilco’s jolly father, a man with a nonetheless healthy sense of limits, might growl, just let me be to eat my lutefisk.
Boy, Wilco really puts his foot down this time: he insists the placement of his beloved wingback be left untouched by my interior desecrations.
“Fine,” I say. “We’ll make it the centerpiece—just like you, darling—the thing around which everything revolves.”
“You have to joke about everything.”
“J’accuse!” I say. “Really? And so early in the morning.”
“Everyone’s got to have a hobby. Mine’s golf, yours is hilarity, apparently.”
“Now who’s being funny?” I get off the red Ligne Roset couch and walk to the front of the living room to contemplate my first move. “Difference is,” I say, “I can practice my hobby all year. You can golf, what, two months in this godforsaken place?”
Snow on the ground all the way through April. Last February, Wilco took a promotion that required a transfer up here to the middle of nowhere (a.k.a. Anchorage, Alaska). I’d followed, dutifully, of course. Wither thou goest . . .
I tried then, as I do now, to look on the bright side. Wilco’s new salary is greater than our former incomes combined. He’s much too consumed by his new job to be interested in taking back on our, to me, onerous role as a civically minded gay couple always out and about for some cause. And I’m no longer required to work. I only had a couple years left to retirement anyway, and trying to cram a love of art down the throats of privileged youth had lost its allure. What remained was a workmanlike quality, a sense of accomplishment that I gave up.
In recompense, the plan was for me to return to painting, to pick up my glorious career where I’d left off. But since unpacking the brushes, I haven’t so much as picked one up. I find the habit of art has atrophied. Forty years is a long time. One backslides. One becomes someone else.
Now I mostly rearrange furniture. Also, like my mother, I watch daytime TV. I’ve become personal friends with any number of fictional characters on the soaps. Especial favs: Wyatt Spencer, and, even though he’s a devious shit, Victor Adam Newman Jr., who’s très gay and has the cutest set of boyfriends he abuses. I try not to yell at the bitch, but really, sometimes it’s not possible.
“Five months,” Wilco says, returning to the subject of golf. “A guy at the club told me you can play up here five months.”
“Four, I think. Unless you want to tee up with icicles.”
“At least it gets me out of the house.”
“I walk to the mailbox every day.”
“Except you drove the half block last winter.”
“It was minus twenty degrees!”
“Only for a couple weeks. Otherwise, the temp was around zero.”
“Are you listening to yourself?” Wilco’s attempts to prove himself right are so infantile. “We could have stayed in Houston where it’s warm, but no. Wilco has this thing for Alaska.”
I say this too pointedly. My humor has always bordered on the acid. Plus, though I’ve soured on this move, I’ve promised myself not to harp on it. What’s done is done.
“That’s okay, hon.” I slip into my old West Texas accent to soften the effect and speak to the back of Wilco’s big chair. “You sit there and look purdy while Momma fixes up the house. Admire your precious Great Land out that big ole winder.”
I move the Corbu lounger a foot to the left halfheartedly, pick up one of the molded plywood chairs and set it back down. I sigh theatrically. I collapse on the couch, bury my face between the cushions, and breathe in that new leather smell.
Immediately, I think of my father’s Cadillacs he bought every third year. He was a pious, self-important man who discouraged frivolity or release through the senses. Those cars were for his personal use or for important family occasions. When he allowed us to ride in them, we had to sit, hands folded, quietly in the back. We couldn’t eat or drink or chew bubblegum or our mother smoke her menthols or wear her fabulous Shalimar cologne. So that new car smell lasted longer than was natural. It always made me sad when I realized it was gone.
“I thought you were getting the place ready for Architectural Digest.”
“I was thinking of my father.”
“You know how that upsets you.”
“It’s my form of self-flagellation. In this, he and I are not so far apart.” I finger the corner of the book he’s been studying on local hiking trails. These hold no interest to me, but there’s a chapter in the back on arctic ecology I find intriguing. “Are your mountains pretty today, honey?”
“I’m doing a crossword puzzle.”
“Mind-rotting piffle.”
“It beats rummaging through your past and making yourself unhappy. You have to know things to fill out crosswords.”
“You have to know everything to make yourself unhappy about your past.”
Out the glass doors, shadows of fluffy summer clouds smudge the mountains. A sliver of lake sparkles in the gap between the houses on the opposite side of the road. A group of ravens persecutes a bald eagle in a midair ballet. Who would think we’d live in such a place? Wildlife out our window nearly every day! We might as well be camping out. I loved Houston. The only thing sauvage there was traffic and the lack of zoning regulations.
“Come on,” I say, resigned to the prospect of a little physical exertion. He’s bound to bring up the subject eventually. “We don’t get nice days like this often. How about a walk in your precious mountains?”
“Promise not to complain?”
I reach the book on hiking trails around the corner of the chair and drop it. “Pick something easy, please.”
The thunder’s repeated retort is muffled by the distance. From what I understand, there’s almost never lightning in Anchorage—too cool, too close to the water—but the big towers to the north loom and spark over flatlands wedged between rows of mountains.
“Don’t you love global warming?” I fan my face with my Astros baseball cap. “I’d be miserable in Alaska without it.”
“When all that carbon gets released from the tundra, there’ll be water way up here.”
We’re on a promontory off the trail, high above the only road between Anchorage and the communities to the south, on the Kenai Peninsula.
“Look on the bright side,” I say. “We could both get jobs as gondoliers.”
Voices of hiker
s on the trail grow louder. A man in his early twenties bounds through the gap in the trees to join us on the rock. A woman, also young, follows a minute behind him.
“Wow, look at that,” the young man says. “Awesome.”
After some initial chit-chat, I nail them. If nothing else, my years as a teacher trained my powers of observation with young people. And though I’m a cheechako, a tenderfoot in Alaska, this Sean from Ohio exhibits that soft, doe-eyed idealism I’ve been warned about, of people new to this place who make a religion out of the beneficence of nature. Already this summer, one of them has died not far from here, in sight of the road below, people speeding along the black line to their comfortable houses.
His girlfriend, Samantha, seems to practice a sharp-eyed idealism. Hers is a no-nonsense orientation, driven no doubt by a tedious need to be precise. With the two of them, Wilco and I find ourselves huffing up the trail, at her exhortation.
Immediately, I’m out of breath.
“We’ll put you up front,” Samantha says. “A group can only go as fast as its slowest member.”
“I used to be so fit,” I say.
“Sucks to be old.”
“Gee, thanks, Wilco. I needed to be reminded of that.”
“How old are you, anyway?” the young man asks me.
“Sixty-two, sixty-three.”
“That old, it’s hard to keep track,” Wilco says.
He steps on the back of my boots and I stumble. I’m starting to feel irked by his niggling. He’s ingratiating, over-eager around young people. I’ve given up pretending to have much in common with them, but Wilco hasn’t relinquished the attachment to his youth.
“Compared to them,” I bring him back down to earth, “even you’re practically ancient. He’s forty-six, by the way.”
“Wow!” Sean said. “Same age as my dad.”
“The cranky Luddite.”
“Sam likes to use big words. She thinks I don’t know what they mean. I got a 740 on my verbals, you know.” Sean’s deep voice assails us from behind. “Actually, my dad is kind of a drag. He thinks iPads mean the end of civilization. Wouldn’t let me play computer games until I was fifteen. Made me take up reading. Sort of stunted my growth, I think.”