The River in Winter

by Matt Dean

  When I returned to our place by the door, Spike had gone. Standing on tiptoe by the wall, I looked for him. Far across the dance floor, facing away, wasn't that his sheepskin jacket? Balancing the beers, keeping my eyes fixed on the sheepskin jacket, I worked my way through the crowd.

  Halfway across the room, an arm blocked my path. I stopped short, spilled a little of one beer onto my own feet, barely avoided spilling the other. The arm was Spike's. A tall, bone-skinny man with red hair stood very close to him. The redhead leaned toward Spike, his head turned so that his ear was near Spike's mouth. I handed Spike his beer. He took it, but otherwise ignored me.

  To the redhead he said, "We're just around the corner. A block and a half, two blocks."

  We? I thought. I gulped my beer.

  They turned slightly away from me, and I could hear only random words of their conversation. More than once, I thought I heard Spike say, "red on red," but I couldn't be sure.

  The redhead wore jeans and pointy-toed cowboy boots and some kind of taupe mechanic's shirt with the unlikeliest of names-Jose-stitched in blue above the breast pocket. His face was smooth, shiny, unlined, as pink as sunburn. His orange hair was thin on top, swept back from his high forehead in parallel waves, cascading in damp-looking curls at the back of his head. A brambly strawberry-blond goatee surrounded his wide mouth. With a start, with a catch in my throat, I realized that, though he was undeniably one of the ugliest men I had ever seen, he was nevertheless oddly sexy.

  I'd drunk barely a quarter of my beer, and Spike had not touched his, and yet suddenly it seemed we were leaving. With a hand in the small of my back, Spike guided me toward the door. I stumbled over his booted feet and spilled beer on Jose's arm.

  "Oh my God," I said, "I'm so sorry."

  Brushing droplets of gold from his sleeve, Jose looked at me. He said nothing. He grinned and licked his lips. With pale eyes, pinkish in the neon lights, he looked at me as if I were some kind of crackling-skinned roast, just drawn from the oven, that he could not wait to devour.

  Out on the street, Spike and Jose walked a couple of steps ahead of me. At Pascal they stopped, conferred. I thought I heard Spike say something about "growlers."

  I felt hazy, sluggish, as if somewhere in my brain a few random plugs had been yanked from their sockets. The traffic light changed. Belatedly I realized that Spike and Jose were crossing Pascal. I hurried after them.

  On the far corner, Spike stopped so abruptly that I nearly collided with him. "Are there any brew pubs around here?" he asked me.

  "Brew pubs? Here? Whaddya talk?"

  He sighed and looked around. He turned back to me. "How much cash have you got?"

  I dug out my wallet. I flipped through the bills it contained-twenty, five, five, one, one, one. "Thirty-eight dollars," I said. I opened my wallet again, squinted at the bills. I recounted. "Thirty-three dollars."

  He sighed again. He held out his hand. "Let me have it."

  Balling up the money in his fist, he strode down University. He and Jose laughed and knocked shoulders. At that hour, anyone who might be out on the street had some sort of debauchery or villainy in mind, surely, but even so, as people turned to watch us pass, I felt unclean. I thought I must reek of sex, pot, and beer. It was breezy out on the street-a cold wind blew, smelling of mud and car exhaust-and I hoped it was enough to hide or dissipate whatever stench clung to me. I scampered behind Spike and Jose, feeling like some kind of criminal, like a fugitive from respectability.

  We passed the Spin Cycle, an abandoned warehouse, the Ragstock. We stopped. Spike disappeared into the Trend Bar, a dive I'd never had the nerve to enter. Jose stood at the curb, staring at his tiny, distorted reflection in the wavy mirrored windows of a bank across the street. I slumped against the brick fa?ade of the Trend Bar. I felt weary and out of sorts. Whatever Spike had in mind-whatever it was, who knew what it was?-I couldn't help thinking that a few hours' sleep might be more in line with what I needed.

  Spike emerged from the Trend Bar with a case of Budweiser. Jose looked sore impressed. To Jose, Spike said, "You just have to know the magic words. I told him I had a pretty little girl all lined up to go down on me, if I could just her get drunk enough."

  Jose laughed.

  Spike said, "Told him it was her first blow job, and she was nervous. A little shy, don't you know."

  I looked at Spike, at Jose, at Spike again. So, then, this made me the pretty little girl?

  Spike hefted the cardboard box, and I saw, with alarm, that he intended to hand it to me. I held out my arms just in time to catch it.

  * * *

  As I led Jose up the front walk, Spike stopped at his car. Carrying a box of cassettes under his arm, he followed us into the house. I spun the thermostat to seventy-five degrees. Spike popped in a cassette and cranked the stereo. With one finger he slid all of the equalizer levers to the tops of their tracks. A crazy bass-heavy dance beat rattled the windows. The equalizer's LED lights shimmered in the dark.

  Jose found some candles, set them around the room in bowls and mugs, lit them. In surprise I watched him; I didn't even know I owned candles. I couldn't imagine where or how he had found them.

  Spike lit a joint. We smoked.

  With the base of a Bic lighter, Jose popped the caps off three beers. He passed them around. We drank.

  The music was as different from a Beethoven string quartet as music could be, and yet it was, even so, just another kind of goblin march, so dense with overlapping bass and drum lines that it sounded viscous, nearly tangible. My mind was hazy. My body moved to the music. I danced for them as they sat on the couch, side by side, watching me, hands in each other's laps. Without exactly knowing what I was doing or why I was doing it, I took off my clothes. Under my breath, so that they couldn't hear, I sang, "Oh, you're gonna see a Sheba shimmy shake."

  For the first time, Jose spoke to me, only to say, "Aye, it's a wee little thing." Whether he meant all of me or only a part, and whether the thick Scottish burr of his consonants was genuine or the engine of some obscure joke at my expense, I didn't know. And why, with all of the possibilities equally likely-with, indeed, the possibility that all were true at once-why my dick began to harden, I couldn't have begun to explain.

  Jose stood and joined me in the shimmy shake. His clothes dropped to the carpet around us. And then, in the middle of the floor, he and I wove our limbs together. Red on red.

  Spike watched us. Candlelight flickered across his face. The cherry of his joint glowed crimson.

  * * *

  Early the next afternoon, I woke alone in the stained wreckage my bed. Spike had gone. Jose had gone.

  I searched the house for a note, for evidence of theft. The Ziploc bag in which Spike had brought his pot, yes. The cereal bowl we'd used as an ashtray, filled with crumpled and twisted and black-edged hanks of rolling papers, yes. Bowls and mugs filled with ossified puddles of white wax, yes. Two dozen empty brown Budweiser bottles, yes. A piss-colored, vaguely heart-shaped stain where Jose had spilled most of a bottle of beer, yes. A stray athletic sock, alarmingly streaked with something brown, yes. The taste of both Spike and Jose in my mouth, the smell of them both on my skin, yes. Evidence of theft, thankfully, no. A note from either of them, a phone number from Jose, no. Anything showing Jose's true name-for it could hardly be Jose-no.

  What had I done? What in the hell had I been thinking?

  In the small hours, in the hissing heat of the overburdened radiators, it had all seemed so natural, one thing flowing from another. There had been three of us-Spike, Jose, Jonah. The possibilities had seemed endless.

  In the light of day, there was only Jonah, naked, achy, cold.

  * * *

  12 - Grieving Songs

  Hours stretched before me. Hours more to get through before sleep, and I could not imagine how I would make it. If I stood, I wanted to sit. If I sat, I wanted to stand. My heart shimmied in my chest. Nothing was right. Everything was wrong.

  Exc
ept for the knocking radiators, the house was silent. Humidity and silence weighed on me like physical burdens. I felt my back hunching and couldn't seem to straighten myself.

  I lowered the thermostat and turned on the stereo. I needed noise, music, something to calm and distract me. I couldn't face the Great Fugue. It was the soundtrack of my shame. For the rest of my days, I was sure, the goblin march would make me feel the mix of disgust and remorse I felt now.

  Something else, perhaps. Karen Holmes. Julie Andrews. Something wholesome. A spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down.

  As I'd suspected, Beethoven's C-sharp minor quartet, side seventeen, lay on the turntable. I set the needle at the beginning of the first track.

  Almost as soon as the music started-yet another fugue, sober and mournful-I craved silence again. I stopped the record.

  I called Barbara. While the phone trilled in my ear, I leaned over and picked up the stray sock. It was not my sock. Gingerly and from the distance of a couple of inches, I sniffed it and caught the iron tang of blood. Not what I'd expected, but not exactly a relief. I let the phone ring twenty times. No answer. Of course. Barbara was asleep, possibly with the phone unplugged.

  I called Luther. No answer. Just as well. What would I say to Luther? What would I say to Erma?

  I called Christa, hoping that Tory wouldn't answer. Tory answered. Of course. Of course, Tory would answer.

  I asked for Christa. He said, "She's in Hudson, visiting her mother."

  "How did that happen?" I asked. Christa's relationship with her mother was, if nothing else, fraught. Almost since the day I'd met Christa, she'd been vowing to cut all ties. Routinely she referred to her mother as "the shrewish harpy" or "the raging bitch."

  "Beats me," Tory said.

  Something occurred to me. "Are you-? Tory, are you living there now?" He emitted a long sigh, but he didn't answer. "I didn't mean to-. You don't have to define your-."

  "No, no, it's nothing like that. I still have my place, but I'm here most of the time. It smells a hell of a lot better over here." He laughed.

  "Do you know when she'll be back?"

  "Ages. Sometime tonight, or possibly tomorrow." He paused, cleared his throat. "Hey," he said. "You know, Christa told me you called in sick yesterday. And you don't sound so hot. Are you okay?"

  "To tell the truth, not so great." I closed my eyes, squeezed them tight, braced myself. Tory might be the last person on earth I wanted to spend an afternoon with, but I couldn't face the long empty day on my own. I just couldn't. "Have you had lunch?"

  "I was about to make an omelet. Come on over. It's easier to cook for two than one."

  "That would be-." What? Awkward? Tense? Hellish? Ah, fuck. What did it matter? "That'd be nice. I'll be over in-." Shit. My car. What the hell was going on with my car? "Wait, sorry, my car's in the shop."

  "Fuck the omelet. We can go somewhere. Keys or the Egg and I or somewhere. I'll come get you. Simpson and Sherburne, right?"

  "Exactly."

  "By the way, did Christa give you that translation from Doktor Faustus?" He pronounced the title as a native German speaker would-as Petra would-with the syllables clotted at the back of his throat.

  "She did, but then she had a kind of fit, and scattered the pages everywhere, and I couldn't get them back in order. You didn't number them."

  "Didn't number-?" He was silent for a moment. "Shit. That was the rough version. I wonder what I did with-." He trailed off. I heard papers rattling.

  "It did seem a little-."

  He sighed. "Awkward. I know. I was just trying to get the sense of it, and then I made a polished version I was going to give you." Again, the crinkle of paper. "I wonder what-."

  "It's okay. I appreciate that you thought-."

  "Yeah," he said, and then again, "Yeah. Not a big deal." He cleared his throat. "Anyway. Okay. Whatever. I'll be there as soon as I can."

  * * *

  Forty minutes later, he showed up in a silver Mercedes sedan and, yes, his damned letterman jacket. He also wore a rumpled madras shirt, pink and green plaid, tucked into gray sweatpants.

  As I climbed into the passenger's seat, he said, "After we talked, I realized I haven't been home in a while. Okay if we go to my place? I picked up some stuff, brunch stuff."

  "Sure," I said. "Whatever you want."

  He drove to Snelling, to I-94, to Hennepin. The interior of the Mercedes was sumptuous, the suspension smooth as cream. We might have been riding in someone's living room. All around us, speakers twittered something orchestral, Baroque-sounding, jangling with harpsichord continuo.

  "Is this the radio?" I asked him. He nodded. "Any idea what piece?"

  "Sounds like the Mozart harp and flute concerto."

  Mozart? I would have thought Handel or Bach. I said nothing.

  At Twenty-Seventh he veered right. After a couple of blocks, just before Lake of the Isles Parkway, he again turned right, into a driveway, a square of cracked concrete barely large enough to accommodate two cars. He eased the car to a stop so that its nose barely touched the door of a miniscule garage, not much bigger than a potting shed. Or perhaps it was a potting shed. There was no way the Mercedes would fit through the door.

  "Did you forget to measure the garage door before you picked this car?" I asked him.

  Laughing, Tory shook his head. "Everyone says that. I saw it in the window, and I had to have it." He waved his hand to show that he meant the car, not the garage. "I knew I was sentencing myself to years of scraping ice off the windows, but I figured-you know-beauty is pain."

  He turned the key and pulled it from the ignition. The sound of the engine not running was identical to the sound of the engine running.

  Beyond and above the garage, a clapboard house-two and a half stories high, shallow of roof, broad of eave-sat at the top of a gentle slope. The windows were narrow but many. The clapboards were a greenish shade of taupe. The window frames and soffits were cream and burgundy. Cedar shakes, weathered to a silvery gray, covered the roof.

  From the driveway up to the house an evergreen hedge swept in a long fluent curve. Bare mounds of mulch filled beds where, in summer, flowers must grow. On a flagstone patio a grove of potted arborvitae surrounded wrought-iron patio furniture.

  This was his "place"? I'd pictured a squalid two-room apartment full of dirty socks and old issues of Penthouse. I had, in fact, a pictured a "place" much like my own. I wondered just how bad his "place" could possibly smell, if he preferred Christa's tiny apartment to this.

  * * *

  It turned out that the house smelled of nothing-not of decay, not of grime, not of disuse, not of old carpet or of new, not even of cleanser or furniture polish. Perhaps that was exactly what he'd meant. It didn't smell like a home.

  In the living room, the Mission-style furniture sat in two groups. A sofa and loveseat faced a row of windows with a view of the lake. A trio of chairs and another loveseat faced a fireplace. On either side of the fireplace, two vast expanses of built-in shelves contained artful clusters of books and LP's, a turntable and cassette deck and tiny speakers, and a few framed photos. When I saw the LP's, a tiny thrill of kinship hummed in my chest.

  As we passed through the living room on the way to the kitchen, Tory shifted his grocery bag from one arm to the other. He waved toward the shelves. "Put on some music if you want," he said. "Anything you like."

  He had a lot of Beethoven, including the Guarneri Complete String Quartets. He had a lot of everything, really-Bach, Handel, Vivaldi, Haydn, Mozart, Schubert, Brahms, Mendelssohn, Tchaikovsky, Smetana, Debussy, Ravel, D'Indy, Delius, Stravinsky, Britten, Barber, Shostakovich. I didn't recognize all the names. Who was Witold Lutos?awski? Who was Carlos Ch?vez? Who was Maria de Alvear?

  Tory kept the popular music on the other side of the fireplace, well apart from the classical. He had a lot of Broadway, most of it from the 'twenties, 'thirties, and 'forties. On another shelf, Carole King, Janis Joplin, Bob Dylan, and then a whole row of
Billy Joel albums. Did people really listen to Billy Joel? I chose an album at random. 52nd Street. On the cover, the piano man leaned against a grimy white brick wall. He wore a ridiculous checked sport coat and a more ridiculous frizzy hairstyle. He held, of all things, a trumpet-or was it a cornet?-or a Flugelhorn? I supposed he couldn't very well have held a grand piano, out there in some blighted alleyway in midtown Manhattan.

  The first song-"Big Shot," according to the track listing-began with a cacophonous series of chords on crunch guitar. Just as I reached to lift the tone arm from the record, Tory shouted from the kitchen. "Damn," he said. "Good choice. I haven't heard this in a while."

  I sighed. Best to leave it.

  I fled to the kitchen, where at least the noise would be muffled by intervening walls.

  Tory was chopping a red bell pepper on a monumental butcher block. In one corner of the block lay tidy piles of diced onion and minced garlic, mounds of tiny gems. On the range, in a steep-sided cast-iron skillet, plump cubes of bacon browned in their own bubbling juices.

  "I thought I'd do a frittata," he said. "Kind of like an omelet, but more forgiving."

  He flicked bits of pepper off the blade of his knife. With the sharp edge he scooped the onion into his palm and chucked it into the skillet. The perfect squares of onion flesh jigged and sizzled in the bacon fat. The kitchen smelled of salt and smoke. Instantly, I was ravenous.

  The cabinets were red oak, polished to a high gloss. Tory opened a cupboard to the left of the sink. He lifted a green ceramic bowl down to the countertop, and in the same motion knocked the door with the back of his hand. The door swung closed smoothly, noiselessly.

  "Do you want coffee?" he asked me.

  I shrugged. "Sure."

  He nodded toward the coffee maker and a stout white canister with a stainless steel lid. "Do you mind making it? The filters are in that drawer underneath."

  While he cracked eggs into the green bowl and whisked them to froth, I set about making coffee. When I made coffee at home-something I rarely did-I usually poured hot tap water over a spoonful of Taster's Choice granules. In Tory's kitchen, coffee was apparently a more elaborate affair.

  I opened the white canister. I tipped it, stared into its open white mouth. In Tory's kitchen, coffee apparently started with whole beans. The beans slid and crawled toward the lower corner. I stared, and did not know where to begin. A spoon nestled into the beans rattled against the pottery. I flinched. I nearly dropped the canister, but caught it against my belly. Somehow, a handful of beans spilled onto the counter and onto the floor.