The River in Winter

by Matt Dean

  I stood and went to the hearth. I shook my head. "You're making perfect sense." I held my hands out to the heat of the fire. "I still feel kind of untouched by it all, though," I said. "On an emotional level. I feel like I'm just going through all the arguments, intellectually, and I'm going in circles."

  He returned the poker to its place on the rack. His skin was golden in the light of the flames. "Maybe you're taking too much of an Old Testament view at the moment. For me, all the emotion is in the New Testament, in the Gospel." He paused, looked at the ceiling. "Well, there are the Psalms, of course. The Song of Songs. But never mind." He looked at me. "What I mean is, the Old Testament is all about the law. The emotion-the love-is in the Gospel. Jesus lived and died for us, out of love. The Old Testament is law. The Gospel is love. 'For the law was given by Moses, but grace and truth came by Jesus Christ.'"

  "'For God so loved the world,'" I said.

  "It's all about love. God's love for us. When it hits home, what Jesus did for us-for you-the passion will come to you." He laughed. "Passion," he said. "No pun intended."

  I must have looked puzzled. With a fond, forgiving smile he said, "One step at a time."

  I said, "Maybe I inherited all of my mother's opinions on the subject of religion, without really thinking through any of them."

  He nodded. "That's probably true."

  "Maybe I'm just considering all this as a kind of belated teenage rebellion."

  "You have to make your own way, one way or the other. Whether your parents are among the faithful or not, at some point you have to decide what's best for you."

  Again taking up the poker, he stoked the fire until it blazed. Sparks streamed into the flue. My forehead and my cheeks were hot, the skin tight. I turned away. My reflection in the gilt-framed mirror startled me. In the light of the fire behind me, my hair flared in a frowzy halo.

  "Whatever your mother told you," Eliot said, "whatever you were brought up to believe, you have to find your own way."

  * * *

  We talked for hours, until I began to feel incoherent. Eliot offered me food and drink, but I was neither hungry nor thirsty. "I think I just need some sleep," I told him.

  He walked me to the door.

  "Group is still on Thursday nights, here, just like before. Come this week. Seven o'clock."

  I said, "Thursday. Seven o'clock. Okay." Standing now on the porch, I took a step back from the welcome mat. "What does this say?"

  "'Welcome, friends,'" he said, "only in Kanji."

  "Kanji?"

  "Japanese. My grandmother was Japanese."

  I stared at the rush mat, at the ruined curves of the black calligraphy. The ink or dye had faded so badly that it might say anything, in any language.

  "Thursday's a long way off," Eliot said. "Will you be all right till then?"

  "I think so."

  "Pray. Start now, on the way back. If you want a relationship with God, you have to talk to him. Pray."

  "Pray. I will."

  * * *

  Pray.

  Yes. Pray.

  With the car idling at Fairview and University, I found that I simply didn't remember how to pray. I said "Hello?" to the air, hearing the tentativeness in my own voice, as though I expected-and perhaps feared-an answer.

  "Hello"? That didn't seem right. What was it? "Dear Lord"? "Dear God"? "Our Father who art in heaven"?

  The light changed. I drove on.

  "Dear Lord," I said, "if you're there-." No, that was a bad start. "Lord, you must know what I'm about to try to do. Lord knows-." Another misstep. "You know-. It certainly seems that you've been trying to tell me something. All those Sam Stinson bumper stickers. The Bible verses. Spike. That business with Spike and Jose."

  The skin at my temples tightened. At Snelling, as I entered the intersection, the light turned amber. Behind me there was a cacophony of horn-blowing. My heart skipped, but when I looked in the rearview mirror, the commotion seemed to have nothing to do with me.

  I stopped behind a row of cars waiting for the light at Pascal. The driver who'd towed my car-Jaime, wasn't it?-sat in the driver's seat of his tow truck. I ducked my head, thinking I might catch his eye, but he watched the light steadfastly, single-mindedly.

  How might things have been different if I'd taken him home? If I'd taken him home and made him supper and poured him a beer, would I now be trying to teach myself to pray? Or would we already be living together, smarting from my trip to San Francisco, from my recent week-long absence from our new life together?

  No. No. My original impulse had been correct. It would have been a one-time thing, an endorphin-drunk afternoon followed by a hangover of regret. If Jonah had swallowed Jaime, the whale would have swallowed Jonah.

  The light turned green. I pounded the accelerator.

  * * *

  16 - Saved

  I was listening to Beethoven's C-sharp minor quartet, reading through McNamara's analysis. The piece itself so outpaced McNamara's pleonastic description of it that I felt a little bewildered.

  In both the exposition and the concluding series of stretti the answers come in the subdominant. This along with the prominence of Neapolitan harmonies and the masterful handling of thematic and rhythmic coherence across movements creates a feeling of tension and suspense, of massive forces marshaled and controlled in a marvelous and unprecedented manner.

  The phone rang. I didn't feel like talking to anyone. I considered letting it ring, but then I remembered Greg and Rose Hill's claim that I avoided calls. Perhaps, occasionally, I avoided calls.

  I set aside the book. I lifted needle from the record and answered the phone.

  It was Tory. "How was San Francisco?" he asked me. His voice was strangely flat.

  "Good," I said. "Good visit." In the easy chair I shifted my weight. My left hip pained me. My calves ached.

  "I was thinking we might have brunch again. I've got stuff for a frittata-." He fell silent, for so long I thought the battery in my phone might have died, or the connection might have been broken. "What are you-? Are you free?"

  I looked down. The brown-streaked stray sock still lay on the floor, where I'd left it weeks ago. "I should probably do a little-."

  "I promise I won't burn the onions this time."

  "Where's Christa?"

  "Oh," he said. "You know Christa. Around somewhere."

  They must have fought. They'd been together for-what?-four weeks? Five? For Christa, that was some kind of record. Surely, they had fought.

  "I have something I'd like to give you," he said. "Can you come over?"

  "I was just-. I really should-."

  "Please," he said, in such a plaintive way that I couldn't bear to refuse him.

  * * *

  Tory greeted me at his front door. As before he wore his gray sweatpants, but this time with a blue T-shirt so pale and old and worn that I could see the skin of his belly through the fabric. He was unshaven, bedraggled. He wore grimy socks-there was a hole in the toe of the left one. On the top of his head his hair stood in a broad, greasy-looking cockscomb.

  The house smelled of frying bacon and onions and of pine. A tall spruce filled a corner in the living room. At the base of the tree he'd draped a skirt of red velvet, but the branches were bare of ornament.

  The stereo played some exquisite and sumptuous-almost luscious-piece. The orchestration was rich with overlapping melodies in the harp and woodwinds. "Debussy?"

  "Ravel," he said.

  "La Valse?"

  "Daphnis et Chlo?. Premi?re Partie, I believe. The first Danse generale maybe? Fairly early on."

  Of course. Of course he would know all of this-which composer, and which piece, and which part of the piece-and of course he would give the names in perfect French.

  I followed him into the kitchen. In a skillet on the stove, onions and bacon hissed and popped in a pool of fat. Beside the cooktop, on the butcher block, there were mounds of ham and bell peppers-crimson, orange, and gold. Beaten
eggs-a pool of creamy yellow foam-filled one of his ceramic bowls. A heap of shredded sand-colored cheese filled another, smaller bowl.

  "Coffee?" He nodded toward the coffee maker, which burbled on the counter. In the carafe, ebony liquid quivered and bubbled.

  I shook my head.

  "Tell me about your trip," he said. He scooped up the ham and dumped it into the skillet. The purple cubes danced and browned in the sizzling fat.

  I shrugged. "My mother took me wine tasting in the Santa Cruz Mountains."

  "I didn't know you drank wine."

  "I don't."

  "Not so much fun, then."

  With a snap of his wrist, he shook the pan. Grease splattered the cooktop and the floor. He jumped back; we both did. Tory dropped his hands and stared into the skillet. I thought he might weep.

  I fetched paper towels and handed them to him. He tried to wipe away the spilled grease, but the paper towels only smeared it across the stainless steel surface of the cooktop.

  "Are you okay?" I asked him.

  "Fine, fine," he said. Nodding toward a cupboard to my left, he said, "Could you see if there's a jar of fines herbes in there?"

  I opened the cupboard and searched through tidy rows of jars and bottles. I found a tiny corked crock with a hand-lettered label that read "FINES HERBES." I handed it to him.

  "You know what's funny?" I said. "There was all that stuff in those sections of Doktor Faustus-. Beethoven was incapable of writing a fugue, all that. But I was just reading this morning that he turned to fugue more and more in later life. Fugue in the finale, fugue in the first movement-."

  From the crock I'd given him, Tory tipped muddy-gray herbs into the palm of his hand. With the thumb of his other hand he ground them into powder. He sprinkled the powder into the skillet. "Have you talked to Christa lately?" If he'd meant the question to sound casual, he'd failed miserably.

  "Not since before I left."

  From a drawer he took a long-handled spatula. He rattled the skillet on the burner. With the blade of the spatula he stirred the herbs into the bacon and ham and onions.

  He said, "She won't return my calls. I don't know what I did, or what I said, or why-." He sighed. "Maybe it was that stupid movie."

  "What movie?"

  "On our last date we saw Reservoir Dogs. I hated it, and she didn't seem to love it, but maybe-."

  "My mother was telling me about that movie. It didn't sound like the kind of movie where nothing happens."

  "Not a lot happens, really. There's a lot of blood, a guy gets his ear cut off, everyone swears a lot and pulls a gun at the drop of a hat, but really it's all just-." He banged the spatula on the side of the pan. "Never mind. Never mind. We went out to dinner afterward and I guess I got carried away, complaining. She just sat there, watching me complain, not saying anything. I just talked and talked-God, I hated that movie-and she just sat there watching me." His shoulders slumped. "She hasn't talked to me since. Maybe she-. Maybe she loved the movie, and I offended her taste?"

  "I doubt it." I thought it over. I shook my head. I said, "No. That's not it. I suppose I should have warned you. She-. There hasn't been-. She's not-."

  With great care he set the spatula on the butcher block. He looked at me with red-rimmed eyes. "Don't say any more, please. Let's talk about something else."

  "Sure. Okay."

  "I have something for you," he said.

  He nodded toward the breakfast nook, where a slim notebook bound in black leather lay on the table. I sat and opened the notebook.

  "I've been reading a lot of Whitman lately," Tory said. "He's my all-time favorite poet. I love his long lines, the sheer crazy exuberant freedom of those insane long lines, though I can't quite manage to make anything of that kind of free verse myself, in my own poetry."

  The pages of the notebook were filled with a loose scrawl in violet ink. "Sullen and suffering hours!" I read. "(I am ashamed-but it is useless-I am what I am)."

  At the stove Tory raked the diced peppers into the palm of his hand. He chucked them into the pan. "Whitman was gay, as I'm sure you know," he said, "and in his writing he was pretty open about it. His early writing, at least. I copied down some stuff I thought you might like."

  I turned the page.

  Give me now libidinous joys only!

  Give me the drench of my passions! Give me life coarse and rank!

  To-day, I go consort with nature's darlings-to-night too,

  I am for those who believe in loose delights-I share the midnight orgies of young men

  That, I couldn't help thinking, was pretty open.

  "Thank you," I said. I closed the notebook.

  I stared out the window. Snow mottled the lawn. Delicate white palisades ridged the limbs of the oak tree. There was no sound but the skillet scraping the burner, the spatula scraping the skillet.

  "I made a start on setting one of your poems," I told him.

  "Which one?"

  "'Fuck.'"

  I looked up. He was smiling. He said, "I had a suspicion."

  It wasn't exactly true, that I'd made a start. I knew precisely how the song should sound-a wallow of dissonant chords, a line of rising augmented intervals, a triple-stopped violin obbligato moving in contrary motion-and I could even picture the score in my mind's eye. But I had yet to commit a single note to paper.

  "It's a little-. It's going to be a little cacophonous."

  He said, "I'm not surprised."

  He tipped the eggs into the skillet. The liquid hissed against the hot metal. He shook the pan.

  "Fuck," he said. "I forgot to preheat the oven. Fuck, fuck, fuck." Sighing, he dragged the spatula's blade across the bottom of the skillet. He said, "You might consider having it start quietly, and sort of ramp up."

  After a moment, I realized that he'd meant the setting of his poem, not the frittata. "I'll think about it," I said.

  "One other thing," he said. "Don't get too far ahead of yourself. I know 'fuck' has a special kind of resonance-."

  "True." All at once, I thought of the lines-fuck hospitals-one more fucking day-and felt the threat of tears. I looked out the window.

  In the living room, the stereo now burbled some empty-headed Baroque piece. A concerto, it must be. The orchestra dropped back, and an ornate solo violin part came through.

  "That's the-what?-third? fourth?-poem in the collection. I wouldn't get too far ahead in the sequence. You want there to be a progression, a sense of coherence. Descending, then rising."

  "I'll think about it," I said.

  A harpsichord clanked and jingled. The solo violin played an obsessive melody full of turns and mordents.

  "Can you do me a favor?" Tory said. He stirred the contents of the skillet. "Can you talk to Christa? I need to know what's going on." He looked at me. "I don't know what I did. It can't be about the movie, can it? It can't be."

  I went to the stove and stood near him. I put my hand in the small of his back. "I don't think you did anything. That's what I was trying to say. I-."

  He shook his head. "Just talk to her, please." With the spatula he prodded clots of cooked egg. "Please, just talk to her."

  * * *

  Christa sat at her desk, typing. A bearded vulture-that is to say, Martin-leaned over her shoulder. As I entered, at the sound of the door, she glanced up from her keyboard and nodded in greeting. Straightening, standing stiffly, Martin watched me to my cubicle. I hung my jacket over the back of my chair. I sat at my desk and waited.

  Soon, Martin appeared before me. He carried something behind his back. "Good morning," I said.

  "Did you have a good trip? I hope you caught up on your sleep."

  "Sleep?"

  He dropped a red folder onto my blotter. My Onslaught book report. "You seem to have written this while very, very tired."

  "That bad?"

  "There were entire pages that made virtually no sense. Actually, very little of it made any sense."

  "Sorry," I said. "I-."
r />   He held up his hand. "End of the day tomorrow," he said.

  Well after I heard his office door close, I said, "Yes, sir." I opened the folder. On the first few pages he'd made some notes in red ink-"More" and "What does this mean?" and "I'm not sure I follow." About halfway through, he'd taken to crossing out entire paragraphs. At the bottom of the last page, he'd written, "No! No! No!"

  Christa ducked her head around the corner. "Lunch?"

  I didn't look up from the report. "It's nine o'clock in the morning, Christa. A bit early for lunch."

  "Ha-freaking-ha," she said. "You know what I mean."

  At last I looked up, but not for long; her eyes were too soulful, the set of her mouth too anxious, to bear. In her hand she held a stack of pink Post-It Notes. She tweaked their edges.

  I said, "I'm not sure. This is ages from being finished. I have to redo the whole thing. I should probably stay and work." I nodded toward the stack of pink Post-It Notes. "What are those?"

  She dropped the stack onto my desk. "Phone messages. Michael Walton-."

  "Walrath. Michael Walrath."

  "Whatever. He's been calling about once a day. He needs your paperwork on your shell."

  I flipped through the stack of pink squares. Over and over she'd written, "Michael Walton," and "Boat Receipt," and a phone number. "Didn't you tell him I was out of the office all last week?"

  She stomped her foot. "Lunch?" she said again.

  "Okay, okay." I said. "Lunch. Where? Lagoon?"

  "Vietnamese?"

  "El Bravo?"

  "Mexican?" She said it as if I'd suggested a meal of spit-roasted kitten. She looked green. "Whatever. Whatever you want. It's not like I'm going to eat."

  "Let me get this straight. You're inviting me to lunch but not actually to-you know-eat lunch?"

  She bounced on the balls of her feet. "I need to tell you something."

  "Then tell me."

  Anxiously she glanced at Martin's door. She turned her head and squinted. I turned. There was a shadow along the doorjamb, so that though the door was closed, it appeared that it might be an inch or so ajar.

  She said, "Come out in the hall for a second."

  I set aside the phone messages and closed the report and followed her. "What's going on?"

  "I'm-. I need to ask you-." She took a breath. She wrung her hands.