The snow was like that, among other things. But Jay was not angry with Stephen. She was simply resolved that things had to change.
She parked in front of a house whose lone evergreen had been wedding-caked with big clumps of snow with little patches of deep green showing through the thickening white. Jay looked up; the sky was overcast, and more was coming down. The quiet of the morning made her feel as though she were on a stage set, in a dream or a tableau in someone’s sleeping imagination. It was not a feeling she liked.
“Come on,” she said to herself. “Go talk to him.”
Stephen’s building was a four-stacker like hers, but it was in a more upscale neighborhood. While he enjoyed the same square footage that Jay was compelled to share with Ramona, his own patch was considerably better maintained—and he was much less likely to have to endure a horde of ballistic punk rockers living downstairs, as had been the case for Jay two years ago.
Jay rang the buzzer. The place was shuttered and shingled, the windows all tidy and immaculate—it was in the small details that class differences emerged. Well, and admittedly some large details as well, such as the hanging gutter that decorated the back of Jay’s building and cluttered the view from her bathroom window.
“Yes?” Stephen said through the distortions of the wire.
“It’s me. Jay.”
“Jay?” Stephen said, somewhat excitedly. “I didn’t—”
“I know. I’m sorry I didn’t call first.”
“Don’t apologize. Come on up.”
The door clicked open and Jay went inside. She climbed the stairs and Stephen was waiting halfway out in the hall holding the door open. He was dressed in slacks, shoes, and an unbuttoned shirt, and his thick hair fell nicely over his forehead and ears. He was a sight that she had enjoyed getting used to seeing.
“This is a nice surprise,” he said, putting his arm around her and leading her into his apartment. When he kissed her, she responded out of habit, but she pulled away the moment his hands started to wander. He looked hurt before he managed to raise his defenses behind a smile and folded arms.
“I’m afraid I don’t have much time, anyway,” he said. “I have to teach a class in forty-five minutes.”
“I know,” she told him. “I wasn’t even sure you were going to be here.”
“Why didn’t you call, then?” he asked. “It looks pretty treacherous out there.”
“You forget—I’m an old hand at the snow,” she said.
“Well, give me time,” Stephen said with a laugh. “We’ll buy a house together, get a snowblower—the works. You can see me into my old age turning into one of those guys wearing a hat with earflaps and those big old boots I won’t even bother to lace up.”
Jay had to smile at the image. Stephen was so composed, so adept at inhabiting his self, that it was funny to imagine him as a disheveled old man. She slipped off her shoes and wandered across the ornate rug, skirting the sofa and making for the window.
“OK, my not-so-subtle allusion to our future domesticity didn’t get the response I was fishing for,” he said.
“Stephen, don’t,” she said, unable to look at him.
“It doesn’t have to be a house,” he said. “If that’s too close to bourgeois splendor, then we’ll buy a plot of land in the country and live in a yurt. You know what a yurt is? It’s a—”
“I know what a yurt is,” Jay said.
Stephen’s face fell. “Well, anyway, we’ll live in one of those. We’ll have to section it off so Ramona can have some privacy, but it’ll be a fortifying experience for her.”
She checked out the stack of CDs next to Stephen’s stereo: Mahler symphonies, Mozart piano concertos, the most recent Bob Dylan album, Thelonious Monk. On top was a Pink Floyd compilation, a nod to the stoner past Stephen sought to hide from everyone.
“Jay?” He moved behind her, not touching.
“This isn’t easy,” she said, looking out the window. The snow was falling harder now.
“What isn’t . . . no, we’re not going to have that conversation, are we? We can’t.”
She tried to withstand his handsomeness hovering over her, the comforting lines of his face. It would be so easy to back down from what she’d decided, and to fall into his arms and let him lead her to the bedroom. For it was always in the bedroom that their differences fell away and everything seemed possible—no, probable—and all good things seemed a sure bet.
“I’m sorry, Stephen,” she said.
He rested his fingers on her elbow. “Jay, you can’t let this business with Lewis come between us like this.”
“I’m not.” Jay moved away. “You have to understand, it’s not the stuff with Dad. Maybe it sparked something, I don’t know, but—”
“Jay, in one breath you’re saying Lewis isn’t breaking us up, and in the next you’re admitting he is.”
“It’s not something I want to debate,” Jay said. She exhaled hard and leaned back against the sill.
“I agree,” Stephen said. He brushed his hair back from his forehead in a fussy, nervous manner. “We shouldn’t be debating anything. We should be together. Jay, please, don’t do this.”
“I’ve been thinking. Which, admittedly, is a dangerous thing.” Jay laughed, but Stephen remained grave. “Look, we have too many differences. I just don’t feel like it’s . . . like we’re going to work out.”
Stephen began buttoning up his shirt, looking down at his fingers, shielding his face from her.
“What?” Jay asked. “What are you thinking?”
When he looked up, his eyes were blurry. Jay was startled to see him this way. He looked years younger.
“It’s just that—” he paused. “Jay, it’s just that, since we’ve been together, you’ve been acting on this paradigm—”
“Stephen,” Jay interrupted. “Just talk normally.”
He looked as though she’d struck him.
“I didn’t know you resented me speaking in analytical terms,” he said.
“I don’t.” Jay touched him lightly on the shoulder. “Don’t look so beaten down. It’s just little old me.”
“But that’s just it,” Stephen said, showing a flash of anger. “There’s no ‘little old Jay.’ That’s precisely what I was talking about. You’ve set things up so that I’m the high-and-mighty professor with you as the naïve little waitress. But it doesn’t hold water. You’re a formidable person, Jay—you get it from your father. But you’ve had this attitude that you’re lucky to be with me, that all our differences work in my favor. But Jay, you know, I don’t want to be without you.”
“Stephen—”
“No, let me finish.” He folded his arms around himself, his voice strained. “I’m older than you, yes, I can’t change that. But I . . . I love you, Jay. I want us to build our lives together.”
“Oh, shit, Stephen.” She had warned herself against this. His emotions were peaking, her own were like water coming to a boil. She didn’t want a crying scene. She couldn’t take it. How to communicate to him that she had simply made up her mind?
“Don’t do this,” Stephen said. “Come back to me.”
“I’m not going to do that,” she said.
“Why not?” he asked in a high-pitched, unfamiliar voice, the intonation of a little boy denied the thing he wanted most.
Why not? Because she had made up her mind. Of course Stephen was paying for the sins of Michael Carmelov, and Lewis Ingraham, and Jay Ingraham, as well. It wasn’t fair, but it didn’t need to be. Stephen knew what was going on—hadn’t they once discussed how it was the female human’s rightful responsibility to break up, that it was her role to manage the primal core of mate selection behind the confused jumble of what was called a “relationship”?
The sun was up, a blurred suggestion of itself through the thick pack of overcast. It looked like it was going to snow all day.
Jay looked up at Stephen, suddenly aware that she hadn’t answered his desperate question.
“I’ve always been honest with you,” she said.
“I know you think that,” Stephen said in a low voice.
“What’s that mean?” she asked.
“Nothing.” Stephen folded his arms and cupped his chin in one hand. “I’m upset. I’m probably going to start saying stupid things. I have to go talk to a bunch of uninterested undergraduates about Walter Benjamin, and it’s going to be hard to do because you’ve just hurled a load of plastic explosives into my life.”
“Don’t be melodramatic,” Jay said.
“I’m not,” Stephen replied. “All right, I am. But you don’t seem to understand what I’m trying to tell you. I need you, Jaybird. I’m all alone. I’m not sure how much I’m enjoying this life I’ve chosen. You are the bright spot that gets me through.”
“Stephen—”
“I mean these things I’m saying to you,” he said.
Stephen’s tide of emotion evoked a complex reaction within her, as nuanced as a wash of tastes, or smells. First an ephemeral tang of regret and sympathy for him, then a powerful tug of wishing to make him feel better. Which would mean . . . doing what he asked, transforming her reality to match the dictates of his needs. Being with him, being his. And this felt like the basis of almost all her interactions, from the unquenchable thirst of Lewis for attention and reaction to the feckless adolescent sexual needs of Michael Carmelov that had left her with . . . and now a blind alley, a place best untouched, but there were the childish demands of Ramona, so hard to meet. The only person who hadn’t made Jay feel burdened had been Anna, whose airy presence had always, if nothing else, enveloped Jay in comfort and acceptance.
“I don’t want to be with anyone right now,” she told Stephen.
“But we can make each other’s lives so much better,” he said, holding his hands out as though begging.
“Of course I’ve believed that from the beginning,” Jay told him. “But I don’t now. Maybe it’s bad timing. I’m so sorry to hurt you, Stephen. This is hurting me, too. And it will hurt Ramona. But I’m doing what I think is best for me.”
“And there’s no room for discussion,” Stephen said.
“No, there really isn’t.”
“Then get out.”
“Yes, I understand.”
“Please get out of here right now,” Stephen said, turning away. He worked at tucking in his shirt and moved to his desk, where notes and books were piled beside his briefcase.
“We can talk later if you want,” Jay offered, suddenly feeling a landslide of panic over the suddenness of what had happened.
“Maybe, I don’t know,” Stephen said, occupied with his things. “Just get out. Leave me alone.”
“All right, I’m—”
“Can you just do what I’m fucking asking?” he shouted, still looking away. “Get out, Jay! Leave!”
“Yes, all right,” she whispered, suddenly frightened of him.
She went out to the hall and gently closed the door behind her. Just as she started to walk down the stairs, she heard a crash from somewhere inside Stephen’s apartment.
What had she just done?
The snow was falling on the street outside, filling the dead flower beds, piling on window ledges, flicked in clumps from monotonous windshield wipers. Jay walked to her car quickly, almost furtively, for reasons she couldn’t quite define. She had gotten what she wanted. She was a degree more free.
14. HIDEBOUND, EARTH-LADEN, AND FINALLY FREE.
It had been appallingly apparent to Lewis from the moment of waking that something was wrong. It was an embarrassment to feel stable consciousness so out of reach, to sense the pull of memory as strong as perceptions of the present moment.
But that’s the way it was.
He saw Anna in her last night alive on planet Earth, on her back in bed, out of her mind on drugs and muttering things that made no sense. Her sick smell pervaded the room, her once-beautiful face had transformed into a gaunt, unrecognizable mask. One moment she seemed to notice him there, in the next she was half-gone, struggling to project herself into wherever it was that she was going. He had played Pablo Casals on the stereo, her favorite, the strings of the cello luring her into a sweet and welcome nothingness of sleep.
Sleep. It was like she was trying to go to sleep, but couldn’t. She had lived two months longer than the doctors said she would.
Lewis had tried to assist her in making a world in which she could enjoy living. The house she loved, their daughter, the garden—he had made them possible. And though she had traded the ephemeral promise of her youth for these things—and it was undeniably true that of this husband and wife, she was the only one who possessed any talent or contact with the transcendent—she had long seemed content to have made the trade, to have accepted the morning light through the kitchen windows and the idle hours on the sunporch. She had made herself content, sometimes happy, in the world that Lewis had made for her. He loved her for it, if it had taken her dying for him to realize it.
Snap back.
Oh, what a shitty morning—Carew French-kissing him was his first waking perception. Then the pills, and the shakes, in the bathroom. The front door was stubborn and didn’t want to open, and when Lewis nearly performed a pratfall onto his porch, it was to the sight of inches of powdery snow up and down the quiet street. Bundled up like an Eskimo, Lewis took Carew to Dogshit Park, which had overnight turned itself into an Arctic Refuge. Lewis looked up and saw a squirrel perched on a power line, shivering, staring out at the world with a stunned expression. It had all changed, things were fucked up. Carew, with his indefatigable good humor, sniffed and dug and danced as though it was Christmas morning.
And now he sat in the driver’s seat of his car, watching his daughter leave Stephen Grant’s apartment building. He was parked down the block, where there was little chance of her spotting him. He didn’t know what he would say if she did—because he had little idea why he had come to Stephen’s. He simply had. And he had parked and waited when he saw Jay’s little blue sedan parked in front.
He looked around for Anna. She would come back again, if he were vigilant. And he sensed that whatever he was doing would speed the process of bringing her back to him.
Lewis owned a gun. It was funny how he had managed to hide that fact even from his own wife. It hadn’t been too hard—early in their marriage they had established that looking through each other’s things was bad form. Lewis had voted for Jimmy Carter, for Bill Clinton twice, he had opposed both Iraq wars and had made sport many times of Charlton Heston’s Moses-at-the-firing-range posturing. Yet one day, about ten years ago, Lewis had gone to a gun shop and bought a .38, then snuck off to a firing range and learned how to fire it. He hadn’t seen Moses there, or the Omega Man, but it sure felt good to make explosions come out of his hand and to watch paper targets fall into shreds.
Now he had the .38 in his pocket. Who would expect old Lewis Ingraham to be packing a gun? He had a permit for it. The state had given him permission to arm himself. What a great country.
Jay was unlocking her car. She looked upset. What had Stephen said, to make her look up with such obvious distress at his upstairs window, to struggle with her keys, to pull out so quickly?
Nothing was right. Everything looked ugly, as though trying to tell Lewis something. The tightness in his chest, the foreboding of death, had set in early. He also had a pain in his guts that had started up just before sleep. And the sleep—it was an unwarranted courtesy to call it anything resembling rest. He had woken almost every hour, thinking that someone was in the room with him (Anna?), plunging in and out of a series of dreams that drew upon the worst of his life for source material: deadline anxieties from school days, humiliations at the office, even an evocation of childhood terror, a memory of feeling that he was to blame for the strife between his parents.
He cleared his windshield and watched Jay’s taillights flash as she turned the corner. The wipers beat out a rudimentary 2/4 beat, an idiot thud to match th
e monotonous rhythm in his aching chest.
Stephen’s door opened again. From it, toting his briefcase, came the man of the hour. Stephen had on a long black wool coat and, Lewis could hardly believe it, earmuffs.
Lewis got out of his car.
Stephen opened up the door of his prim little Volkswagen and tossed his briefcase inside. His breath condensed around his face. Lewis started toward him, staying to the street rather than the sidewalk, his shoes crunching in the trenches carved out by cars through the snow.
He felt dizzy, he felt not right. He felt as if he were about to fall. As he walked, he sensed himself about to flinch from real or imagined dangers. His entire nervous system was overtuned and irritated. He had no idea what he was about to do.
“Lewis?” Stephen said, looking up from his car. “What in the world?”
Lewis pulled his coat tight around his neck and tried to will away the chill that threatened to take possession of his fragile form. His hand in his pocket, he felt the metal of the gun grow colder with exposure to the elements.
“Lewis,” Stephen said. “What’s wrong?”
There was an urgent manner that required addressing. Lewis had promised Jay he wouldn’t talk to Stephen. But he hadn’t yet, had he?
“Aren’t you going to say anything?” Stephen asked.
Stephen looked red-eyed and haunted, which was a surprise. Apparently he had some sort of conscience.
The snow fell in big fluffy clumps.
Lewis was aware that there was once a time when he felt differently, when the vivid discomfort of existence did not press upon him with such force. But events and the particular bent of his nature had led him to this point—hidebound, earth-laden, finally free and entirely lacking any idea what to do next.
Would shooting Stephen bring Anna back? Was that what she wanted?
“If it makes you happy,” Stephen was saying from across a great distance, “your daughter just terminated our relationship. You have been successful. You won.”
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