14 Degrees Below Zero

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14 Degrees Below Zero Page 5

by Quinton Skinner


  “We still do it in the living room,” Leonard offered. “Got me a blow job on the couch last weekend.”

  “Bastard,” Dan said.

  Lewis folded his arms. This was vulgar stuff, and he’d never been at home in the locker room. Still, it was more lively than the discourse in his house these days.

  “All right. Enough.” Guy stiffened and held up his hands to restore order. The younger guys, one by one, tossed their coffee cups into the trash. The store would open in minutes, and this crew of sex-obsessed hoodlums would transform into helpful experts on silk, cotton weaves, and modern synthetic fabrics.

  Lewis was trying hard not to think about numbers. Eight, for instance: there were eight years left on his mortgage. He and Anna had bought the house so long ago that it had nearly tripled in value, but still the payments were a considerable monthly expense. Then there were the taxes, and the utilities—God, it cost a fortune to heat the place, to say nothing of the sewer charges and electricity. The cable bill was up to a hundred bucks, but he couldn’t part with that. Then the car insurance, the monthly bus pass, the gifts for Ramona, the hundred bucks he slipped to Jay on a regular basis.

  Adding it all up, Lewis was losing money working this job. He was, admittedly, losing less money than if he wasn’t working at all (already tried that), but his finances were slipping quickly into the abyss. He’d had good health insurance, but Anna’s sickness led them into a labyrinth of co-pays and elective treatments that gutted their savings while helping Anna not at all. Even when Anna had argued against it, saying it was no use and she felt death coming over her, Lewis had insisted they try everything. Anna had argued he should save the money for Jay and Ramona.

  Anna had turned into a drain. She got sick and drained everything out of everyone around her, and then she was gone. Lewis recalled, for perhaps the thousandth time, the moment she died.

  “What about you, Lewis?” Vincent asked amiably. “You a football fan? Never heard you talk about it.”

  “No, that’s not for me. I’m not one of you conformist morons drooling every Sunday in front of your homoerotic corporate gladiator combat,” Lewis did not say, but wished to.

  For hadn’t he earned—through the virtue of his years, the long slog through his days, his endurance and continued willingness to wear the mask of Lewis Ingraham—the right to resent these men younger than himself? He thought of Stephen, that interloper in his life, bedmate of his daughter, that arrogant pedant who wielded his intellectualism over Jay like a cudgel—Jay, who had showed so much promise, who had shone so brightly and so beautifully, who had been destined to provide a cosmic corrective to Lewis’s corporate sell-out and Anna’s spent talents. It had all gone so fucking wrong. Anna and Lewis had tried to get Jay to stay in college when she got pregnant; they had practically begged her to move back in their home, as well. Anna even offered to basically raise the baby after the father bailed out and fled to Oregon.

  But would it have worked? Lewis never liked babies—too chaotic, too unrewarding. And Anna . . . she had good intentions, but she had been increasingly incapable of keeping her own boat afloat by then. She’d been putting on weight, getting scatterbrained and out of touch, letting the house go to holy hell. Lewis resented all of it, every day. He felt as though Anna had let him down. He may have even undermined the possibility of Jay coming home and staying in school, now that he thought about it.

  “How can you propose to take care of a new baby,” he might have asked his wife one night, when they were alone and words had grown cheap and plentiful, “when you can’t keep house, and you can barely take care of yourself? Or me.”

  That was how he remembered it. He might have been wrong.

  Lewis looked up at Vincent, whose smile was frozen. Vincent was newly married, barely thirty, living in a new house. It was still all new for Vincent.

  “Football, yeah. Well, not really,” Lewis said. “It’s all right, I suppose. It hasn’t been the same for me since the days of Tarkenton and Chuck Foreman.”

  “You remember all that?” Vincent asked.

  “Ahmad Rashad,” Dan muttered.

  “He’s the guy who does those shitty shows,” Vincent scoffed. “Michael Jordan’s bitch, man.”

  “Dumb-ass!” Dan crowed, triumphant. “He used to be one of the best receivers in the league. Right, Lewis?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Gentlemen, we are now open,” Guy announced. Several customers had appeared on the floor, like guerrilla insurgents previously hidden but now emboldened to come out into the open. They wandered as though dazed, stunned and disoriented by the array of goods as well as the tall mirrors strategically placed to prevent shoppers from achieving a cohesive picture of the space.

  Lewis wandered over to a big wooden cabinet filled with expensive folded dress shirts—he was wearing one of them, a cotton-blend Calvin Klein with a flat back and double stitching. He’d bought it full-price about eighteen months ago, back when he was at his old job and could afford such things.

  He tried to breathe regularly as he allowed himself a moment’s contemplation of the depths of his financial pit. Many of his monthly bills were paid automatically on his credit cards, which kept the dogs at bay but also created a rising balance to which astronomical interest rates were regularly and sadistically applied. There were still medical bills left unpaid—thousands of dollars’ worth, in fact. It was not going well.

  The house was his, and it was beautiful and replete with equity. He could sell it, but what then? An apartment, neighbors upstairs and down? A life diminishing by degree, until there was nothing left of him?

  Pain stabbed his chest, right behind the sternum. Lewis rubbed the bone, trying to will it away. It hurt all the time. He could die at any moment.

  “Excuse me,” said a woman his age. “Do you work here?”

  Lewis turned and tried to stay calm. He had to be strong. He had to survive. Jay and Ramona would be bereft without him.

  “Yes, of course,” Lewis said, pleased by the note of incredulity in her voice (could someone like him really be working there?). “What can I help you with?”

  “I’m buying shirts for my husband,” the woman said. She wore sunglasses perched atop her blond head, and she had a pert, athletic figure. She was one of those well-preserved housewives who had haunted the ill-lit corners of his fantasies. “Your shirt is very nice. Did you buy it here?”

  “Yes!” Lewis said, brightening and leading her to the display. “You have a good eye. This line of shirts is comfortable, elegant, and they wear well. And we have a very extensive selection of colors. Shall I select a dozen for you? Or two?”

  The woman laughed. “So you work on a commission, I take it.”

  Lewis clasped his hands. “Customer happiness is my greatest satisfaction, far more than any financial consideration.”

  She laughed again, more genuinely this time. She looked Lewis in the eye for the first time and tucked her hair behind one ear. In fact, she was extremely pretty.

  “What size does your husband wear?” Lewis asked.

  “Oh, I’m not sure these days,” she said. “He’s not as tall as you, but he weighs a lot more.” She reached out and touched one of the shirts folded in its slot, her fingers lingering on the fabric.

  “A bigger man,” Lewis said.

  “Oh, well, he’s gotten fat, if that’s what you mean,” she said with a louder laugh.

  “Happens to some of us,” Lewis said, and the woman looked up into Lewis’s eyes with a lingering flush of recognition.

  “But not you,” she said.

  “Nor you,” Lewis told her.

  Lewis glanced over at the nearest cash register. Guy was watching, seemingly with a mix of uncertainty and approval. Lewis, it turned out, had a bit of a gift for the sale. After he’d rung up four shirts for the housewife she lingered at the sales counter for a moment, as though about to say something to Lewis. Then she seemed to remember who she was, and who Lewis was—a salesma
n, for God’s sake—and then she left with an uncomfortable half-wave. It was a slightly odd and discordant end to their interaction. It had all been in good fun, hadn’t it?

  Lewis had lunch with Guy in the Sky Room upstairs: nine bucks for a sandwich and soda, a not-inconsiderable fraction of what he was earning that day. The two men noshed while making small talk about children and real estate. Guy was reasonably bright, in Lewis’s estimation, but had a scope of consciousness and awareness about as wide as a cricket’s antennae. But Lewis might have been unfair. Life seemed to be working out for Guy Boyle. His kids were apparently not homicidal drug maniacs, he had his home in an inner-ring suburb, a wife he spoke of in complimentary terms. Lewis couldn’t account for why he was sitting there stirring a pot of hostility for the man.

  No. He knew why. Because there was, if he was honest, something increasingly wrong with him. He needed a pill to keep from falling into mental anguish and paralyzing fear and guilt. And he had begun to hate everyone, Jay and Ramona excepted.

  “You know what I mean?” asked Guy.

  “Beg pardon?”

  “It’s not worth the money.” Guy masticated his salad. “I have the money to spend, it’s not that. But it’s a matter of not spending it on something we don’t need. The one we have is every bit as good. Why replace it just because it’s a few years old?”

  “I’m sure you’re right,” Lewis said.

  Did all of this start with Anna’s sickness, or did it predate those awful months? He could blame her; in fact, he did. But this feeling went farther back.

  “I’m glad we’re having lunch today, by the way,” Guy said.

  “Why?” Lewis asked. “Because you’re hungry?”

  Guy shot Lewis a look, trying to tell if he was joking. Lewis let him hang there as Guy put down his fork—a sure sign he was serious.

  All this responsibility Lewis felt . . . he wished it were possible to talk with someone. Guy was out of the question: too obtuse. There was his neighbor and ostensible friend Stan, but Stan’s solution to everything was of the buck-up, could-be-worse school of thought. How to explain this unraveling, this increasingly urgent need to make things right again?

  “I don’t want to be a jerk, Lewis,” Guy was saying. “You know I respect you, and that I think you’re a good salesman. And, you know, since we’re about the same age, I feel like I can talk to you more directly than the younger guys.”

  Lewis gripped the edge of the table and tried to breathe. His lungs felt stiff and unresponsive. A cigarette might help, but that would mean going outside and dealing with the chill.

  “That woman you sold those shirts to this morning?” Guy asked. “You know the one I mean? The good-looking blonde?”

  “There are plenty of good-looking women around here.”

  “Now you’re just being cute,” Guy said. “You know the one I mean.”

  “OK, sure,” Lewis said.

  “I couldn’t help but notice you coming on to her,” said Guy.

  “What?” Lewis laughed. “It was innocent. If anything, she was coming on to me.”

  Guy probed the architecture of his teeth with his tongue. “So that’s how you saw it.”

  “Of course!” Lewis said, astonished.

  “She looked pretty uncomfortable by the end,” Guy said.

  Lewis could not believe this conversation. That woman had been bored, obviously unfulfilled, enjoying a little harmless banter with a shirt salesman. There had been an obvious attraction between them, and Lewis had indulged in a little harmless flirting. But now, replaying it in his mind, there were blank spots. He couldn’t recall everything he had said. And he remembered touching her back at some point, down low by the tailbone. When exactly had that happened?

  “She was uncomfortable,” Lewis said.

  “She pretty much made a run for it,” Guy said. “At least she paid for the shirts first.”

  “Because of me.”

  Guy tugged at his tie. “There have been complaints,” he said.

  “About me?”

  “I want to keep you working for me.” Guy pushed his tray away. “I like you. I feel I can trust you.”

  Lewis decided for the moment to say nothing. He had no rod with which to check the depths of this exchange.

  “It’s just that, from time to time, you get a little inappropriate.”

  “Inappropriate.”

  “A little intense with the customers.” Guy leaned back, his expression pained. Guy had suggested they eat together. And, apparently, this had been the main item on the agenda.

  “Am I about to get fired?” Lewis asked.

  “Just be aware. I’ve been protecting you. But I only have so much sway.” With this, Guy evoked the heap-big powers of Norman and Gwendolyn, the store managers to whom Guy pledged fealty. Could it be they had been discussing Lewis, crazy old Lewis, and that Guy had had to intercede on his behalf?

  What had he done? To his mind, he had behaved with impeccable normality on the job no matter what storms had been raging inside. He tended to like his customers. He was effectively being told that his social radar was ineffectively calibrated. Nothing felt right. It was as though his life had ended the night Anna died. The night he . . .

  For Christ’s sake, that housewife had wanted him. Hadn’t she?

  After his shift was ended, Lewis wandered down to the toy department before catching the bus home. He pledged to himself not to buy anything but within minutes found himself captivated by an electronic gadget. He began to play with it. It was a book of sorts, shiny and plastic, and it read aloud when you touched it with a stylus.

  Ingenious.

  This would help Ramona learn how to read, maybe by kindergarten—what an advantage for her. Lewis played with the thing for a good fifteen minutes, touching the pen to the page and listening to it read out words and sentences. There was a nature book, and one that taught geography. He had amassed a pile of the best ones just as a young female clerk came up to him.

  “Those are great,” she said.

  She was a redhead, about twenty-five, wearing one of those sweaters that showed off her breasts without making a big deal of it. She had bright green eyes and wore a long black skirt. Her eyes lingered on his employee name tag.

  “They look good,” Lewis said. “I mean, I really think these are great.”

  A little intense, Guy had said. Her name tag said Janine. She was just a couple of years older than Jay.

  She fixed him with a plastic smile. “Do you already own the main unit?”

  “What?” Lewis asked, alarmed. He looked into her eyes, then thought he was coming on too strong. For a horrible second he looked directly at her breasts (a hint of nipple, oh God), then looked at the toys in his hands.

  “These books,” she said. “They plug into a main unit. They don’t do anything on their own.”

  “Oh.” Lewis was dumbfounded. “Do we sell that here?”

  The girl laughed. “Of course we do.” She picked up a big plastic box and held it out. He took it.

  “All right then,” Lewis said.

  They piled all the crap on the counter. Before the girl was finished ringing it all up, Lewis grabbed a stuffed calico cat and put it on the counter. Then a black one. Ramona collected stuffed cats.

  “OK, that’s a hundred and twelve dollars and sixty-two cents,” she said after she had scanned everything. “With your employee discount.”

  Lewis handed over his credit card. His hands were shaking, and it was hard work to look everywhere but at the girl.

  6. IT WAS ALL WELL AND GOOD FOR A DEAD BEARDED GUY.

  It was getting colder with alarming speed. Jay dropped Ramona off at day care—enduring a minor emotional squall in the process, after which Ramona’s mood shifted with mercurial ease into resentful recalcitrance—and when she walked to her car she began to shiver. The temperature was down around freezing. It was an early frost, but not terribly unusual. About ten years back there had been a legendary Halloween ice s
torm; everything had been encased in inches of clear frozen rain, with power lines snapping and cars doors sealed shut. Jay had been just entering her teens then, riding out a late-onset puberty that in retrospect was the turning point at which life became impossibly complicated and difficult.

  But that was her story—brilliant girl steers ship directly into iceberg of sex. This body she inhabited, which gave her pleasure but which also evoked too many echoes of her mother, had absorbed a single shot of semen and incubated an entirely new human life. Years of sunshine and snow she wouldn’t know—she’d become a mother too young.

  Jay steered through the sluggish traffic toward work. She’d gotten a late start and was going to be tardy for her shift, which started at the end of brunch and ran through midday—terminating before the lucrative drinks-and-dinner hours. She’d learned that preserving her inner peace (such as it was) was best accomplished by avoiding paranoid speculation about being slighted and steered away from the best shifts. Of course, she suspected she was.

  She gunned the engine and shot through a yellow light. A car coming from the other direction blared its horn and nearly ran into her. She had never been the best driver in the world—too many thoughts intruding, too many things to look at. She was more cautious when Ramona was in the backseat.

  Ramona’s father was named Michael Carmelov, currently of Coos Bay, Oregon, living with his parents, a college dropout like Jay. Michael had come to Minnesota for college because of vague family connections that Jay had never been able to entirely sort out. They hadn’t gotten to know each other very well. Jay met Michael at a party early her sophomore year. Michael had been in premed, but his grades weren’t good enough to promise much in the way of a medical career, and it was obvious even then that he’d never have the endurance to navigate the years of sacrifice required to actually become a doctor. Jay had been a history major, earning mostly A’s. Michael was very good-looking, with wavy hair and delicate features that in repose fell into an approximation of perceptiveness and sensitivity. It was one of those accidents of genetics—the way a face could deceive without trying.

 

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