Hungry hungry, Carew said. Food? Food, Lewis?
Lewis lived in a big house, though the kitchen was old-fashioned and disproportionately small. Anna had always talked about remodeling it, though they had settled ten years ago on the stopgap measure of installing new cabinetry and painting the walls. Now there was no money for making any improvements, nor was there much motivation. The kitchen would stay as it was, for the foreseeable future.
He had seen her. He looked around at all the familiar places still haunted by her presence. It was as though, if he focused his eyes just right, he would see her again.
But no, nothing.
When Lewis reached under the sink for the bag of dog food, his chest gave a serious lurch. He steadied himself against the counter and tried to keep breathing. The chill filled him like a block of ice in the center of his hollowed-out carcass—it shook his shoulders and made his hands clench against his sternum. What a terrible feeling, he thought. Death pervaded his consciousness like a low-lying cloud—here, predictably, came the tightening in his chest, like a band cinched true.
Lewis, Lewis? Carew said, at his feet. All right there? Food?
“I’m getting to it,” Lewis muttered as he opened up the bag and willed himself to go on.
With the sound of the dog crunching his meal echoing in the silence, Lewis moved into the dining room and switched on the light. The big table was piled with newspapers and coffee cups. It was low-level bachelor squalor, though the house was cleaner now than when Anna was alive. She had started letting things go long before she ever got sick. She might have been depressed, Lewis couldn’t say. Part of his long-term armistice with Anna had been the unspoken agreement that neither was responsible for the other’s moods or happiness, either transitory or long-term. It had been an OK arrangement. Gradually they had lost the vocabulary of emotional need when speaking to each other, and they had learned to protect themselves from disappointment. When Lewis wasn’t consumed with his petty resentments—and these times admittedly grew fewer and fewer as the years passed—he would enter into a state of bland contentment, if not happiness.
Immediately after she died, he had entertained a fear that her ghost would come back to haunt him, fully aware of all the treacherous thoughts he had harbored over the years.
He had seen her, but she didn’t see him. She had been staring straight ahead. But it had been her, just for an instant. Her presence was someplace in the house, in the sunporch, the bedrooms, or between the slanted walls of the third story.
Lewis picked up the portable phone and took the creaky stairs to the second floor. His chest felt a little better, enough for him to believe that his rush of sickness was psychosomatic. He got a thick wool sweater out of the closet and pulled it over the fleece he was already wearing. In the mirror he corrected his posture—don’t stoop, old man—and stuck out his chest. He basically liked what he saw. He wondered if he would ever be with another woman.
“Are you here?” he said to the empty room.
The first time had been on a business trip to San Francisco. She was a colleague he had met that day and, after too many drinks at his hotel bar, they had gone upstairs together. Lewis could remember the pink silk of her underwear and the smell of cigarettes on her breath. He was reasonably certain she didn’t come. Lewis couldn’t remember her face, save for a sort of sensual curve to her mouth. He managed to avoid any further trips to that city, and after a couple of phone calls to his office managed to extricate himself from any emotional debt.
Jay was in elementary school at the time. Lewis remembered coming home, playing a game of Candyland with her and thinking, her father is an adulterer. There had been the crushing guilt and the terrible anxiety, of course, there was no getting around it. But, at the same time, Lewis had also felt an oddly exhilarating sense of accomplishment, as though he had proven that none of the strictures mattered, that the foundations of his good life were a matter of spirit rather than form, and that if indeed nothing mattered, then he had done nothing wrong.
The second time had been with a mutual friend. It happened twice, and then Lewis had to endure both the guilt and Anna’s suspicion when the friend stopped coming around. The third woman, like the first, came from his work world. The fourth, and last, infidelity had happened two years ago, with a friend’s wife. It was enough to stop his heart, just thinking about it.
The wind pushed against the storm windows. Lewis looked out at the bare trees, the worn carpet of the backyard. The coming winter was announcing itself in earnest. He turned on the phone and dialed it without looking.
“Hello?” Jay said.
“It’s me.” Lewis turned on the light in his study. “How are you?”
“Fine, Dad,” Jay said. “Me and Ramona just finished dinner.”
“Oh. What did you have?”
“Macaroni and cheese with hot dogs.” Jay laughed.
“Ah, the gourmet specialty of your youth,” Lewis said. “You know, that’s all you would eat for about a year.”
“And then it was tuna melts,” Jay replied.
“The tuna melts, I almost forgot the tuna melts,” Lewis said. “You had your mother making them twice a day.”
“She was so nice about it,” Jay said.
“She was, wasn’t she?” Lewis said, surprised by the force of the recollection—Anna at the stove, Jay waiting with an empty plate, her earnest face composed in a child’s version of thoughtful anticipation. Lewis settled into his leather chair, surrounded by shelves of books.
“So, listen, I talked to Stephen,” Jay said.
“You did.”
“I really don’t have the energy to broker a truce between you two,” Jay said with a note of exhaustion that touched Lewis to the core. There it was again, that hypersensitivity. It felt as though his borders had been opened.
“You don’t have to do any such thing,” Lewis responded. “This is between Stephen and me.”
“But, Dad, you have to understand—I’m caught in the middle. Just a minute, honey.”
“Excuse me?” Lewis said.
“It’s Ramona.” Jay paused. “Do you want to talk to Grandpa, sweetie?”
Lewis heard Ramona’s muffled negative reply and his heart sank. Was this strife with Stephen filtering down to the child? Apparently it wasn’t enough for Stephen to drive a wedge between Lewis and his daughter—now his painting of Lewis as a villain was filtering through to Ramona’s delicate perceptions.
“It’s all right,” Lewis said. “She doesn’t like the phone.”
“She was getting better,” Jay said uncertainly. “Look, honey, go play in your room. I’ll be off in a minute.”
“Has Stephen been talking to her?” Lewis asked.
“Who? Ramona?” Jay said. “Well, sure, they talk all the time. But not the way you think. Dad, don’t get paranoid.”
Lewis settled into his chair. Night had come, and outside the window his back porch light spread shadows under the canopy of the big elm.
“It’s not paranoid to notice an outsider making trouble in my family,” Lewis said quietly.
“Dad, don’t,” Jay said. “I don’t even know where things stand between me and Stephen right now.”
“Has he—”
“It’s not him, it’s me,” Jay interrupted. “I don’t know where my life is going. I’m not sure whether or not I want to spend it with him. Maybe I do, I’m not sure. It’s hard to think straight with all this—”
“Mama!” Lewis heard Ramona saying.
“What?” Jay said, not hiding her exasperation. Lewis wished he could describe to her the time in her life when she would move the world to hear the plaintive need of her child again.
Ramona said something Lewis couldn’t understand. “OK, honey, OK,” Jay said. “Just let me talk.”
“What is it?” Lewis asked.
“She wants to take a bath,” Jay said.
“She does?” Lewis said in amazement. “You know, most kids fight to stay out of
the tub. You used to cry when it was bath time.”
“Well, get this—Ramona has started running her own water,” Jay said with a tired laugh.
“Amazing.” And Ramona was. But in the cascading sadness of Lewis’s thoughts, that painful tumble all of his ideas entered into, Ramona’s resiliency and self-reliance seemed unspeakably sad. In the sickly light, Ramona’s strength seemed imposed on her by her lack of a father, by Jay’s taxed resources, by Anna’s early death. The added pressure of Stephen’s divisiveness was too much, a supplemental burden that was too great for a little girl to bear.
“Lewis,” Anna said.
Lewis stiffened in his chair, then shot out of it. He looked around. He was alone.
“Anyway, Dad—”
The shadows in the room betrayed nothing.
“Dad, are you still there?”
“Jay, honey, don’t worry yourself about it,” Lewis said, speaking very fast. “You and Ramona are my treasures, and I don’t want you to spend another second worrying about anything.”
Silence on the line. He looked around. So now he was hearing things—though he didn’t even believe that.
“Jay?”
“Dad—”
What was that note in her voice? Was Jay on the verge of tears?
“You know, Dad, it’s been really hard since Mom died,” Jay whispered. “I know it’s been hard for you, too. But sometimes . . . sometimes . . .”
“What is it, Jay?” Lewis asked. “Please. Talk to me.”
“Sometimes it feels like . . . I don’t know, you have so many expectations of me.” Jay coughed. “Look, Dad, I don’t want you to take this the wrong way. It’s just that sometimes I feel like I don’t have enough space in my life. I’m not blaming you. It’s like you need so much, and I can never give you enough.”
“You’re a single mother,” Lewis said, keeping his voice delicate, unable to deal with the sobbing note in his daughter’s voice. “The demands on you are incredible.”
Had he really heard Anna’s voice saying his name?
“I know that, Dad. It’s just that—”
“What, honey? Tell me.”
“I’m trying to, Dad.” Jay exhaled sharply. “Dad, can you just let me talk?”
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Lewis said.
“I just need space,” Jay said in a defeated voice. “That’s all I can say. I feel like I don’t have any space.”
“Mama!” Ramona called out.
“What?” Jay yelled.
“Nothing,” Lewis heard Ramona say, in a voice of heartbreaking quietness.
Enough, Lewis thought. This had gone too far. Yes, Jay had burdens and pressures, but Lewis had always tried to make things better. Every scraped knee, every bad test score and blow to her ego, even her disastrous pregnancy—hadn’t Lewis been there for all of them? Didn’t he specialize in being the custodian of Jay Ingraham?
“Dad? Are you there?”
And now Stephen, the master propagandist, had constructed a fairly tale in which Lewis was the big bad wolf. So he could use Jay up, and move on when he became bored. Well, it wasn’t going to work.
Right? he asked the empty room.
“Dad?” Jay repeated.
“Yes, honey, I’m here,” Lewis said. “Whatever you need, I’m here.”
“Dad, don’t talk to Stephen anymore.”
“I don’t know if I can promise that.”
“Dad.”
“All right, I won’t speak to him.”
“Good. Thank you.”
After they hung up, Lewis went through every room in the house, looked in every closet. He went twice around the backyard and then searched the basement and the third floor, where the detritus of his married life was stacked in unruly piles of boxes. Carew followed his every step, strangely calm and reverential.
Lewis couldn’t shake the feeling that Anna was there. It was as though he sensed her around every corner, but as soon as he arrived there she vanished.
“I’m sorry for what I did,” he said. “I was trying to help you.”
He felt on the verge of finding her, but didn’t. Not that night.
Later, lying on the downstairs sofa in the dark of night, he thought about Stephen. He had problems to solve, and he was going to fix things before it was too late. Perhaps only then would he truly find her.
13. THEY HAD RIDDEN THE SWEET WAVE OF LUST; NOW IT WAS OVER.
When Jay got up in the morning she found that her practice of sleeping with the window cracked open had backfired: the first sight of the new day was her breath condensing in a cloud before her eyes. She shivered, got up from under her thick down comforter, and crossed the room. What she saw outside made her gasp.
It had snowed during the night, about four or five inches’ worth. Yesterday’s dull gray landscape, the color of a sparrow’s wings, had turned into a sedate canvas of white. Old forms reduced themselves to vague outlines and gentle curves. Jay shut the window.
Strange, it hadn’t been in the forecast, such as it was—weather predictions in Minneapolis resembled the speculative fancies of hardcore paranoiacs. More than once Jay had thought about forecasting the weather herself, off the top of her head, then comparing the results against what really happened. She abandoned the idea as too Lewis-like.
Ramona was ensconced in a cocoon of blankets in her kid-sized bed. Jay paused a moment before turning on the light to admire her daughter. Kids, Jay had learned, went through phases of plumping up before elongating—that was how they grew. Ramona was definitely in a lengthening period; the leg that was thrust out from the bedding was long, lithe, a working model of a woman’s.
Five years, ten. Fifteen, and then she would be gone—and hopefully not having babies of her own.
“OK, kiddo, time to wake up,” Jay said, switching on the light.
Jay went into the kitchen and started grinding coffee. She was wearing only leggings and a Super Furry Animals T-shirt, and she rubbed her hands together to warm them. She liked being sleepy, and enjoyed the half-dumb state of impairment that came with morning. It was almost as good as being drunk.
Stephen would want to see her today. And she wanted to see him, she supposed. But she had no idea what to tell him.
Jay’s memory came back to her; it felt like a scene in some foreign city, where shopkeepers turned on the lights in a row along the lane, and babushkas emerged to sweep the sidewalk with laced-straw brooms. Business was starting in this new day, albeit in a language scarcely comprehensible.
She thought of the night her mother died. It had been so strange. When she remembered it, it was as a series of images, like paintings. There was Lewis opening the door for her and Ramona. There was Ramona going to the porch with Lewis, the little girl unaware (or so she thought at the time, but surely Ramona suspected) of what weighed on the adults. There was Anna Ingraham in her bed, dressed in a robe, flat on her back, her eyes closed and her mouth slightly open. She had been cold, her skin darkening. The room had smelled of air freshener that Lewis must have sprayed.
It was her time, Lewis said at the door. She barely suffered. I was there. I made sure of it.
Jay kissed her mother’s cold cheek, held her cold hand, illogically adjusted her pillows as though to make her more comfortable.
“Mama?” said Ramona from behind her.
Ramona stood barefoot in her Spongebob Squarepants nightshirt—a gift from Anna last Christmas. Ramona’s fine dark hair stuck out at absurd angles from her oversized head, and she rubbed her eyes with her fist.
“Look outside,” Jay said. “It snowed.”
“Really?” Ramona squealed, pad-padding to the living room, where she gazed at the street with hushed and reverential appreciation.
Jay realized, all at once and with surprise, that she was seriously entertaining breaking up with Stephen. That was the feeling she was having—anticipatory loss. It wasn’t going to work out, was it? It was out of her control. Their age gap, the different phases of thei
r lives—they had ridden the sweet wave of lust, but now the forces aligned against them were simply too much.
One time Anna had warned Jay against going down this emotional road. She said that Stephen was a good person, someone who could be counted on. Anna said that initial attraction always waned and it was what was left over afterward that mattered. Yet Anna’s marriage to Lewis, and the form it took as it endured, was at best a mystery to Jay. As a girl Jay worshiped Anna in the way one adores her creator, a being endowed with untouchable depths and endless aspects. Later Jay had seen Anna as a person who had not realized her potential, a woman whose talents ended up producing little more than plain, bland landscapes of her own backyard.
“You told me not to leave him,” Jay said quietly to her mother. “But maybe you were just talking to yourself.”
“What, Mama?” said Ramona, who was pulling on a T-shirt.
“Oh, nothing, honey,” Jay replied.
“You were talking to Grandma, weren’t you?” Ramona said with a gleam. “I do that, too. I can’t wait until she comes back and we can talk all the time like we used to.”
Jay was certain that Ramona had no idea whatsoever why her mother suddenly went to her and enveloped her in a stifling embrace, nor why Jay wept silent tears into her daughter’s hair—tears that would not dry, but would freeze into tiny ice crystals when they went together into the cold of the snowy morning.
When Jay drove to Stephen’s apartment building, tucked into a little residential enclave a short walk from the wooded circle of Lake Harriet, she immediately spotted his car parked on the street. It had been a tricky drive, with cars skidding and spinning erratically in the first measurable snow of the season—Lewis always said it amazed him, how people who had lived in Minnesota their entire lives would drive as though they had never seen the white stuff before. This first blanket was always disorienting; familiar landmarks turned into abstract representations of themselves, and the color white suddenly dominated everything in sight. Black was usually assigned as the hue for the void, but its yin-yang opposite sufficed as well—white was a blank, a confounding nothing, like Melville’s white whale a screen onto which to project all manner of rage and frustration.
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