The River in Winter

by Matt Dean

  The cook approached, a tablet clutched to her breast. She smiled but said nothing. Barbara ordered for both of us. She ordered by number, and the cook whisked away our menus.

  "How's your show going, now that the election is over? Will you have anything to talk about, without Bush to kick around?"

  "There's plenty to talk about," Barbara said. "I'll miss Dan Quayle, of course. I've seen some wretched vice presidents in my day-Spiro Agnew comes to mind-but Quayle is something else again." She brushed hair away from her forehead. "In any case, there's plenty to talk about. The anti-gay thing in Colorado, the ordination of women in the Anglican church."

  Imperial rolls arrived, two of them, each cut into quarters. Their skins were shining and golden. I tried a piece. Crispy on the outside, melting and savory on the inside. Delicious. I popped another piece into my mouth.

  Barbara narrowed her eyes at the imperial rolls, as if they were slightly suspect or possibly repellent. "Also, get this. It turns out the State Department investigated Bush's rivals in the election, looking for politically damaging muck to rake. Shades of Watergate, methinks, but no one's talking about it. I suppose because the election's over with???"

  I'd devoured an entire imperial roll. I had my eye on the other. I nudged the plate toward Barbara. "Aren't you going to-?"

  She plucked a segment of imperial roll from the plate and nibbled away its skin. She moaned with pleasure. "And of course, we do movies on Fridays, still. Friday movie nights are my favorite."

  I turned in my chair so that I faced sideways. I glanced at the gray-haired man at the end of the counter. A plate of imperial rolls-a dozen or more of them, stacked like cordwood-sat before him. Nibbling one, he watched us with a contented smile.

  "I would have thought Friday movie night would go dark in between Woody Allen releases."

  She crinkled her nose. "It was a bad year for him personally, but a good year for his movies. He released two this year."

  "What happened to him personally?"

  She peered at me askance, as if she'd suddenly realized we'd never met, that she'd fetched the wrong person from the airport. "That thing with Soon-Yi and Mia???"

  Soon-Yi? Who or what or where was Soon-Yi? I said, "Oh, that."

  "I'm afraid, around the time that Husbands and Wives came out, Friday movie night got a little .?? gossipy."

  "The last Woody Allen movie I saw was that one you dragged me to. The one with the e. e. cummings poem in it. Someone had an affair with Michael Caine, I think?"

  She made a noise like a radiator blowing steam. "I so wish I liked Michael Caine more. He's not bad with a director who can keep him kind of tamped down. But when he does that shouting, baring-the-teeth thing he does???"

  The front door squeaked again. A man and a woman in matching Burberry raincoats came in and sat at the counter. The cook was ready with menus. The woman tucked herself under the man's arm. They giggled and murmured happy sounds at each other.

  "Speaking of movies," Barbara said, "there's the NEA debacle."

  "NEA? Nebraska .?? Endocrinologists' .?? Archive?"

  "Oh, stop. There are these gay and lesbian film festivals, three of them. The NEA has gone back and forth on funding them umpteen times. Just today, the acting director announced that these film festivals aren't going to get any money after all. Mind you-."

  My attention wandered. The cook stood before the vast grill, flipping hunks of meat. Flames leapt at the sizzling flesh. On a tiny gas range at the cook's elbow, pots bubbled and steamed.

  Barbara rummaged in her purse. She'd fallen silent. Guiltily I wondered how much of her political talk I'd missed.

  "I know it's simply ages until Christmas, but I can't wait a second longer."

  From the depths of her bag she pulled two boxes, each wrapped in bright red foil. One was smaller than a pack of cigarettes. The other was larger, the size of a cigar box. She set the packages on the counter and twiddled her fingers in their direction.

  "Open, open," she said. "The big one first."

  I tore the paper. It was a cigar box. It contained, in a nest of shredded newspaper, a Walkman cassette player, one of the bright yellow sports models. The smaller package was a Karen Holmes album on cassette, Command Performance. On the cover, instead of a photograph, there was a caricature of Karen. Her hair, lips, and breasts were enormous, as if the caricaturist had thought he was doing Dolly Parton.

  "I'm sure you have that on vinyl already," Barbara said, tapping the cassette case with a red-lacquered fingernail. "It's brand new, only out for a couple of weeks or so, but I know how you are about Karen Holmes. I just wanted you to have something to listen to right away."

  I didn't actually own the album. I hadn't even known it existed. Barely a month ago I'd been listening to Karen Holmes with obsessive single-mindedness. Some nights I'd played all of her albums in chronological order, and then again in reverse chronological order. Now, somehow, I'd completely missed a new release.

  I turned the cassette case and squinted at the track listing on the back. All of the songs came from previous albums. "This Is Love" and "Take It Uptown" from This Is Love. "Easy to Love" and "Well Did You Evah?" from The Cole Porter Songbook. "I'm a Fool to Want You" and "Stormy Weather" from The Very Thought of You. I turned the case over again and looked at the cover. There, at the bottom, beneath the caricature, miniscule black letters: "Recorded Live, March 15, 1992, Algonquin Oak Room, New York, NY."

  The cook set before me half a chicken, its glistening skin the color of rust. It smelled of pepper and anise. A pool of pinkish gruel oozed into a mound of rice.

  "This is the meat sauce?"

  Barbara leaned back as the cook set a plate of pork chops in front of her. "I hope you like it. The Walkman, I mean. I didn't think you had one."

  "I don't." I stared at the yellow case and gray buttons of the cassette player. I didn't feel certain I would be able to work it. "I didn't."

  Again I glanced at the gray-haired man. Still munching his imperial rolls, still smiling, he watched me.

  Barbara reached for a piece of my chicken. "Do you mind the white meat?" Giggling, she said, "Of course you don't." She took the thigh and leg.

  I looked at her. Her eyes darted from me to the gray-haired man and back again. I blushed. "I was kind of thinking the pork would be good," I said.

  She stabbed a pork chop and dropped it on to my plate. Meat sauce sloshed off the side of the plate and dripped onto the counter.

  I picked up the Walkman. I pressed a button and it snapped open with a satisfying clunk. I slid the cassette into the tray and closed it. I pressed the play button. Nothing happened.

  "Oops," Barbara said, chewing. "Forgot batteries. Sorry."

  There was a squeak at the end of the counter. The gray-haired man had stood. He dropped a ten-dollar bill on the counter and, without a backward glance, left the restaurant.

  Barbara sighed. "Gay romances are so brief."

  Suddenly I felt unutterably weary. I returned the machine to its nest of shredded paper. I closed the box.

  "You're not eating," she said. "What's going on?"

  I picked at the pork chop she'd given me. A few strands of meat came free. The pork looked delicious and succulent, but my appetite had deserted me.

  "I guess I filled up on imperial rolls," I said. "And it's been a long day."

  Barbara set her fork across her plate. "It's probably my fault," she said. "All that political talk. You always ask about the show-you're a dear to ask-but I should know by now, all that political, religious, current-events stuff just makes you morose."

  I separated grains of rice and coaxed them into a row around the rim of my plate. Onward, starchy soldiers. "Do you ever miss God?" I asked her.

  "I beg your pardon?" She squinted at me, as if viewing me at a great distance.

  "We were church folk when I was growing up. You must have believed in God then. You must have prayed. You must have felt that he was there, listening, ready to help
if you needed him."

  "I'm not in the habit of pining for all the imaginary friends I had in childhood," she said.

  "Imaginary-?"

  "People invented God to explain the world. No, that's not quite right. People invented gods-little-g gods. Men invented God-capital-G God. Now that science explains the world, they still hang onto him because they fear death." Her enunciation was frighteningly precise. "And although they have God and heaven to coddle them in the face of death, they're still so terrified of death that they have to shove all that crap about abortion and euthanasia down our throats, as if-."

  She spoke distinctly, not loudly, but the man and woman turned and stared at her as if she had shouted a series of obscenities.

  She went on. "All this nonsense about the inspired word of God. Bullshit." At the counter the couple sat stiffly, no longer huddled together. I sensed that they were holding very still, the better to eavesdrop. "The Bible was all politics," Barbara said, "not inspiration. A bunch of men got together and decided to put in all the stuff that kept women down. Not to mention"-here she paused-"homosexuals." She let the final word drop hard, as if it settled everything.

  "I'm not talking about the Bible. I don't know anything about the Bible, except that 'for God so loved the world' bit. And that's-. That's what I'm talking about. God and love and-." And what else, I wasn't exactly sure.

  She sat ramrod straight, her hands in her lap. She crumpled her napkin and dropped it on her plate. "I'm not hungry any more," she said. "Let's go."

  She slapped down a couple of twenty-dollar bills and stood. The cook gave her a quizzical look, reached for a Styrofoam box. Barbara shook her head. "No need for that," she half-said, half-sang. To me, she said, quite sharply, "Don't roll your eyes at me. Neither one of us is eating anyway. We might as well go someplace more private."

  In a whirlwind she collected her purse and bustled out of the restaurant. I struggled into my jacket and rushed to catch up. Halfway to the door I realized I'd forgotten the cigar box.

  * * *

  Out on the street, over the roof of the car, I said, "I'm sorry. I guess I hit a nerve?"

  She whirled her purse over her shoulder and landed it on the car's soft top. Gear spilled across the black canvas. Trident chewing gum, the gold lam? case, half a dozen emery boards, a bottle of red nail polish, a patent-leather checkbook, a petite silver lighter. A Bic pen, the end chewed flat. A pink compact coated in bronze dust.

  Reaching across the car's roof, I picked up the lighter. I rolled it across my palm. It was a handsome thing, slim but weighty. Its surface was mirror-bright, though scratched in places from rattling around in her purse. At the touch of a button a tall flame flickered briefly, then died in the wind. "Why do you have-?"

  "Where is all this coming from?" she asked me. She dug in her purse. "Does this have something to do with that wacky phone call a couple of weeks ago?"

  She turned her purse upside down. Keys on a springy orange band tumbled out on top of the pile. She picked them up, unlocked her door. Wrapping the orange band around her wrist, she stuffed things back into her purse.

  "What kind of Jesus freak 'counselor'"-she made quotes in the air with her fingers-"have you gotten yourself mixed up with?" she asked. "Sam Stinson? Don't get me started on Stinson."

  "You brought him up, not me."

  She opened her door and slumped in her seat. I knocked on the passenger's-side window. For a moment she didn't move, and I thought she might drive off and leave me on the sidewalk. But then she leaned over and shoved the door open.

  "Thankfully he doesn't play well here," she was saying.

  One foot in the car, one foot out, I said, "What? Stinson? What is it about Stinson?"

  She looked at me. Her purse was a round leather bundle in her lap. She looked down at it, then tossed it into the back seat.

  "Can we go home now?" she said. "Would that be all right?"

  * * *

  Through Nob Hill streets clogged with honking traffic, past trees and brownstones strung with white lights, Barbara drove in silence. Past Grace Cathedral, dark and plain. Past the Masonic Auditorium, white, square, shining. Past a crowd of windswept tourists waiting at Powell Street for the cable car. Past the glittering Fairmont. One more block, and we came to Barbara's building, slate blue, trimmed in mauve, corniced in white.

  She turned left, down a narrow alley. Soon it opened into a rectangular courtyard bounded on one side by the back of the building, on three sides by carports. Barbara steered into a parking spot. She cut the engine, and we sat in quiet, oil-smelling dark.

  She smiled at me, a sideways simulacrum of a smile. "I'm hungry again now," she said. "Isn't that perfect?"

  Bag in hand, she stepped from the car and strode toward the building. Halfway there she turned back. She slipped the key into the trunk, twisted, and popped it open.

  I pulled my bags and jacket from the trunk. I tucked the cigar box into the tote bag. Slinging my duffel bag over my shoulder, I followed her. She had left the back door of the building standing open. I bumped it shut with my hip.

  The hallway was never as wide as I remembered it. Passing through it now, passing the mauve doors of the first-floor apartments, my bags scraped the dimpled plaster on either side of me. After a few awkward paces I came to the high-ceilinged lobby, lit by a single dim chandelier. Light coming through the etched glass of the front door cast lacy shadows at the foot of the stair. At the top of the first flight, Barbara's black skirt flitted across the landing and disappeared. I followed.

  Her door was at the top of the last flight of stairs. When I reached it, it stood open. A dim light in the entry hall guided me as far as the living room. I dropped my tote bag and duffel on the living room floor, at the foot of a console table crowded with silver-framed photographs.

  At the far end of the room, another short hallway led to the two bedrooms-one on each side-and to the bathroom. A light in Barbara's bedroom cast a cockeyed yellow square on the mahogany floor.

  She sat on the floor with her back against the side of her bed, an open box across her skirt-straitened legs.

  "How ladylike this pose," I said.

  "I've been keeping this shit in the closet for years," she said. The closet door stood open. She glanced toward it. "In the closet. I never thought about the significance of that until now. Here, look at this."

  I sat on the floor beside her. Setting the box aside, she spread a photo album across our laps. It was one of the old breed-black pages interleaved with vellum, brass corners, fat brass hinges.

  The first page contained, at its center, a five-by-seven of a young man in Navy crackerjacks. His crew-cut hair shone as burnished gold. He was posed to show red stripes on his black sleeve-and for that matter the robust girth of his shoulder. His smile was devilish, his bright blue eyes clear and happy. John Thomas Murray. My father.

  "He was a handsome one," Barbara said. "I was in love with him for years before we met. I spent hours gazing at his photo in the high school yearbook."

  She turned the page to deckle-edged black and white snapshots of a chubby blonde toddler with a tricycle. In one she stood beside the trike, her back straight, her head high. Pride of possession added inches to her height. Behind her, the clapboards of a house or garage-seemingly on the verge of rotting into squashy splinters-overlapped at crazy angles.

  "You?" I said.

  "None other," she said.

  In another photo, she sat astride the tricycle and bawled, mouth open, head thrown back.

  "What happened?" I asked her.

  "I don't remember. Maybe I fell off it and they put me back on."

  Wedding photos came next, black and whites on creamy paper, hand-tinted to show the bride's blushing cheeks and the groom's piercing eyes. "You have his eyes," she said. "The color's not the same, but the shape, the size. They're his eyes. Sometimes I almost can't look at you because of that." She touched his wedding portrait-the same pose as his Navy portrait, but now he wore a b
lack suit. "Now for instance."

  "Are you crying?"

  "Don't be ridiculous."

  Next, a fading gallery of our Polaroid years. I was a newborn in a receiving blanket, an infant in a jumper, a toddler in a baggy blue three-piece suit. My parents' waistlines spread inexorably. His hair thinned and grew sandy rather than gold. Hers got longer, darker, flatter. Everything took place, it seemed, on grass-green carpet with black paneling in the background, sucking up light.

  The last photo was a family portrait. My father wore a pale green leisure suit with yellow stitching on the lapels. His crew cut hadn't changed, had never changed. Barbara's flat mouse-brown hair spilled over the shoulders of some black nautical dress or suit that recalled the crackerjacks of John's Navy picture. Fat and dimpled, carrot-orange hair neatly parted and pomaded, I wore a green leisure suit that matched my father's and a yellow shirt that matched the stitching.

  Barbara cocked her head to one side, looking at the photo. She brushed her hand over it as if to whisk away a patina of dust. She said, "I suppose this is all my fault. We put you in Sunday School when you were practically an infant. We sent you to Vacation Bible School every summer. They drummed all that shit into your head before you could put a sentence together."

  "I'm not some helpless pawn, you know," I said. My face grew hot. "I'm no longer practically an infant. I am capable of thinking these things through."

  "Of course, of course."

  She said this airily, lightly, as if she meant exactly the opposite, or as if it couldn't possibly matter either way. I twisted the hem of my sweater in my hands. I stared at the ceiling, my eyes crossing, my vision blurring. I did not quite know what to say next-not without profanity.

  But perhaps she'd meant something completely different, or perhaps she'd been participating in the conversation without listening to either side of it; when she spoke next, her voice was slow, dreamy, distracted. "In the past, when I've not wanted to talk about this, about this part of our lives, it's not because anything so very traumatic happened."

  She was silent for a long time. At last, I asked, "What did happen?"

  "I settled. I married the first man who asked, and I lived where he wanted to live, and I did the things that he loved without loving them myself. Look at this hair. Look at this hair as brown as a mouse. I look like Karen Carpenter. Well, a fat Karen Carpenter. A version of Karen Carpenter that was never anorexic."