The River in Winter

by Matt Dean

  "Sorry I'm late," he said. The tails of his trench coat whipped his calves. Under his arm he carried a hardcover book dressed in a cadmium-yellow dust jacket. "I got stuck at work. Be right back." When he returned he'd removed his coat and boots; underneath he wore houndstooth trousers and a white dress shirt. He handed the book to Eliot. "I finished this, finally," he said. He fetched one of the ladder-backed chairs from the far end of the room and set it next to Mason's armchair.

  Flashing the title-Hope and Healing-in my direction, Eliot said, "Jonah? You're the only one who hasn't had it."

  I returned to the hearth and sat next to Eliot. I took the book. All around the edges, the dust jacket showed the nicks and creases of much handling. Fingerprints blackened the edges of the pages. Opening the book across my knees, flipping through, I read the chapter titles: "The Cardinal Virtues," "Justice: Purity of Heart," "Prudence: Integrity of Mind," "Temperance: Sanctity of Body," and Tigger's chapter, "Fortitude: Tenacity of Purpose."

  Eliot said, "Jonah was just telling us about his visit to San Francisco over Thanksgiving."

  Dear Lord in heaven, would I have to say it all over again? I looked at Charlie. The oak chair creaked under his weight. His grin had not flagged. Could he really be that happy to see me?

  Again I weighed words, tried to fit my mouth around a confession. But Eliot said, "I asked you if you're angry with yourself."

  "It's not as though I've ever been any kind of stickler for safe sex. Tom and I-." I stopped myself. Eliot would be the only one here who'd heard me mention Tom. "My boyfriend and I-." Again, I stopped.

  Eliot said, "You and Tom were monogamous. At least as far as you knew."

  I nodded. "I suppose I never really got in the habit of thinking about protection, planning ahead. But still-. Still, it seems I should have taken better care of myself. Like I should have protected myself. I didn't-. There was this guy, a few weeks ago-. He had this sort of influence on me. A kind of draw-." I looked at Eliot. "I told you about him, but I didn't mention that-. Well, the condom broke."

  "I see," Eliot said.

  I looked around. Heads nodded. Perhaps it was a common excuse, the condom broke. I said to Eliot, "After the last group-. After the last group he showed up again, and then there was another guy. It was a crazy night. Some things happened that I-." I waved my hand. "I'm not going into details. It's embarrassing."

  "Death by a thousand cuts."

  It was Mason. I looked at him. He stared at the coffee table.

  "Death by a thousand cuts." Except for the logs cracking in the fire and Mason's susurrous voice, the room was quiet. "It was a traditional Chinese punishment for treason or murder. A slow, humiliating, painful way to die. You're punishing yourself, self-destructing, killing yourself inch by inch."

  I stared at Mason. He was motionless in his chair, his eyes cast down. He rarely spoke, it seemed, but when he did, his words were a stiletto slowly and gently piercing the gut.

  "I-. I don't know what to say to that."

  Now Mason looked at me. His eyes were wide and strange, the same eldritch blue as Spike's. "Say it's true."

  For many minutes, it seemed, I looked at Mason, impaled on his weird blue gaze. I said nothing. I could not move my head, even to nod.

  And did I want to nod? Did I want to say-or to show-that it was true, what he'd said? It felt true. More than that-it felt like a truth I'd been avoiding, hiding from myself.

  Whether by accident or intention, Tom had killed himself. Long before his parents had written their accusations into a small claims complaint, I'd blamed myself, though only in some vague, inchoate way. I'd been punishing myself, obliterating myself, but-since, like everyone else, I feared death-I'd been doing it little by little.

  It felt true.

  I said, "I don't know. Maybe-. Like anyone else, I guess I-. I'm not in any hurry to-to get to the end of my life, or-or make it come sooner. I had-. Something Eliot said-. I had sort of been thinking that I was-like a lot of people-trying to hang on-. No, not hang on. Trying to feel alive by doing crazy things. Trying to fill a spiritual gap with physical distractions. There's a crazy kind of-of aliveness in doing things you know you shouldn't, right? Isn't there?"

  For a long moment, no one spoke. Mason said, "There's physical death, and there's spiritual death. Sin is death. That's the worrisome one. You don't have a choice on the other, but you can choose eternal life over eternal death."

  Eternal death? I swallowed hard.

  "Sin separates us from God." Mason said. "Eternal separation from God, that is spiritual death."

  Eliot set his hand on my knee. His touch startled me. He said, "I think the thing to remember is that what's done is done. The important thing is that you're forgiven of what you've done in the past, and you have the whole future ahead of you to prove that you've learned from your mistakes."

  I took a breath. It seemed I had not taken a breath in thirty minutes. "Forgiven?" I said. "How do I know I'm forgiven?"

  Charlie answered. "You've prayed for it, haven't you?"

  My skin prickled. "I-I guess not."

  "Haven't you been praying?" Eliot asked.

  All eyes were on me. I blushed. "I have, but I haven't known what to pray for."

  "Are you saved?" Fred asked.

  "Have you at least prayed for Jesus to come into your life?" This was Jeremy. He plucked at the gabardine of his trousers.

  "Not in so many words."

  A buzz filled the room. Eliot raised his hands, and everyone fell silent. Eliot turned to me. He said, "We usually end each group session with a prayer. Sometimes, when it's useful-when someone has a particularly pressing need or needs some comfort-we pause for our prayer in the middle, and then end with just a short prayer. I think this would be a good time to do that." He looked around the room. "All right with everyone?"

  Heads bobbed.

  Charlie said, his voice tender, "Eliot will go first, so you don't feel put on the spot. Just thank him for being there, then ask forgiveness, then invite him into your life to be your savior."

  After a moment, I understood that he meant God, not Eliot. I should thank God. I should invite God into my life. I swallowed. I nodded.

  As we bowed our heads, the air in the room seemed rarefied and hushed.

  Eliot spoke. "Dear Lord our God, dearest Jesus, thank you for bringing us all together for the purpose of serving you and battering our lives."

  Battering? Had I heard him correctly? Had he said battering our lives?

  My stomach grew tight. I couldn't seem to keep my eyes closed. I watched Eliot. He sat hunched over his knees, his hands clasped between them.

  No, not battering. Bettering. That's what he'd said. Bettering our lives.

  "Lord," he said, "we are especially happy to have Jonah as a new member in our group. Thank you for the set of circumstances that brought him to us-and to you, however awful and painful those circumstances might have been. We understand that through pain sometimes we learn to feel joy. Lord, guide us in the rest of our work here tonight, and as we go our separate ways. Amen."

  Amen. That was my cue. "Hello," I said, and earned a titter from Jeremy and Fred. "By now you must be wondering who I am and why I've been prattling on to you lately. Seems I missed a step." I peeked at the men around me. Charlie watched me; when our eyes met, I closed mine. "But I want to thank you for being there, and as Eliot said for bringing me here. Please forgive me for all of my sins. There are many, I'm sure, some greater than others. Forgive me for Spike-."

  I paused, realizing that I'd mentioned Spike, but not by name, and that no one would know who he was. It was possible I hadn't mentioned Spike's name even to Eliot. But then, I was speaking to God, not to the men in the room, wasn't I?

  I went on with my prayer. "Forgive me for Spike and for the others. For not taking care of myself when I was with Spike and Jose and when I was in San Francisco. Please forgive me for-for all of it." Now, how had Jeremy phrased that last bit? "Please come into
my life and be my savior."

  After I'd finished, Charlie said a few words, and then Rob and the rest-all but Mason. The voices droned on, at some point blending into a kind of chant that surpassed my understanding.

  My heart filled unto bursting. All I could hear was a single word, over and over: Forgiven. Forgiven. Forgiven.

  * * *

  18 - Pro and Con

  Forgiven.

  Snowy drizzle dashed against my windshield. I drove down Seymour to the light at Franklin. Rain-blackened trees inclined toward me. The windshield wipers pulsed in the rhythm of a heartbeat. I saw, at the bottom of the hill, the pedestrian bridge over the highway, the handrails and fence glowing white.

  I turned right. In the space of a few seconds I found myself near the river, near the University campus. All those weeks ago, after my first disastrous group session, when the way had seemed so unclear, I could have made a right turn, and in minutes I would have found myself at the river. Now, I took a detour through the campus; I needed buildings, lights, human activity around me, to hem me in.

  Forgiven.

  The word lightened me-forgiven. Forgiven.

  It had disappeared, all of it-Spike, Jose, the guy in the USC sweatshirt, the Latino kid from the Embarcadero Center, the dungeon master. More: pot, beer, gossip, anger, sloth. It was as if none of it had existed, as if I'd never done anything worthy of regret.

  Forgiven.

  The rain and snow had driven all but a drenched few inside. All along Washington, the windows of empty shops and restaurants blazed with white and blue light. Turn the Page, my favorite used book store, was dark except for a single desk lamp on the counter. The tattered spines of books shelved behind it glowed in shades of ochre and russet.

  Inside the door of an Arby's, half a dozen people stood looking out at the rain. The shining curve of a young man's shaved head, the ruffle of an old woman's hat, were all I could see as I drove by. Did they know this feeling? Had any of them known this unbearable liberty?

  Liberty, I thought, because now all of time lay ahead of me. My future was brilliant white. My future and my past were no longer foxed like the pages of an old book, no longer marred and muddied by scratches and dust like the grooves of a ruined old record.

  Yet it was unbearable, because it was so undeserved. What had I done for it, but ask? How could it be that I should care so little for myself for so long and yet have all of that washed away with a single sentence spoken on Eliot Moon's hearth?

  Please forgive me.

  Forgiven.

  I pulled to the curb to make way for a fire engine. Its sirens were quiet, but its flashing red lights, reflected in the windows of nearby buildings, transformed the street into a brassy carnival. A firefighter rode clinging to the back of the truck, his coat wet and shimmering, his hat angled low to cover the nape of his neck.

  Did he know? The firefighter-did he know what it was to be forgiven?

  And what of my vandal? Did the hand that had written "GAF" in soap on my windshield, that had plastered bumper stickers on my front walkway, that had nailed Bible passages to my door-did that hand belong to someone who knew what it was to be forgiven? I could not fathom how anyone who had ever felt this gratitude-this freedom, this consciousness of absolution, this sense of radiant weightlessness-could possibly bear to accuse a stranger of wrongdoing.

  But my vandal, too, deserved forgiveness-God's and mine. He, the vandal, was no more or less deserving than I was. And I was incandescent with forgiveness, brimful with forgiveness, bursting with forgiveness. Having received it, I longed to give it. Everything and everyone was forgiven.

  For a long while I sat at the curb, watching the fire engine's lights recede. I felt as if I might float away, so much mist leaking out of the cracks and crevices of the Chevette, ascending into the sky.

  * * *

  Forgiven or not, absolved or not, my vandal had visited again. My house again shouted my sins to the world. Block capitals-"GOD HATES FAGS"-contorted themselves around the windows and bushes, so that the message could be seen clearly from the street.

  It was recent, this graffiti. Of course, it was recent. I'd stopped at home after work, and the house had been clean, its own bare, unadorned self.

  Up close, I could see and smell that the paint had not yet dried completely. Rainwater and snowmelt had spotted the graffiti, had pockmarked the words. Serifs bulged at the top and bottom of each letter, where the flow of paint had started and ended.

  At the side of the house, the garden hose hung coiled over a curved shelf. With numb, wet hands I lifted the hose to the ground. The stiff nylon loops fell to the brown lawn, crackled stiffly, scattered themselves in three directions. I tugged the nozzle free.

  Returning to the spigot, I twisted it. It balked, then turned. The cold steel burned my bare fingers. Pipes inside the house squealed. At the hose's business end, the water came in a trickle. With my thumb, I reduced the opening to a crescent moon and aimed the flat stream at the house. To reach the word I most wanted to expunge, I sidled between the house and a holly bush. Glistening leaves dumped chilly water down my back, more water in a second than the hose had produced in all these minutes. Red paint rolled like clotting blood down the stucco, making the lettering more ominous, but no less legible.

  I tightened the squealing spigot. Soaked now to the skin, I gladly went inside. I called Luther.

  In twenty minutes-time enough for me to put on dry clothes and hang my damp jacket over a radiator-Luther emerged from the rain wearing a puffy down parka and carrying an unmarked plastic jug.

  "It doesn't look good," he said. "You spread it around without really making it less readable."

  "I'm sorry. I didn't know what else to do."

  Shaking his head, he said, "Music majors." He lifted the jug a few inches. "I brought something that might take the paint off. It's probably too wet and cold out there now, though."

  Reaching to take the jug from him, I said, "Leave it with me. I'll clean it up tomorrow."

  "Wear rubber gloves or you'll burn your skin off." He let go of the jug. "It's damn cold out there, tenant."

  I set the cleanser in the corner by the door. "How about some hot chocolate?"

  "Erma never makes me hot chocolate. Is it the kind with the little marshmallows?"

  "I only have the big ones." It occurred to me that I hadn't looked for or needed marshmallows in quite a long time. Tom had had a habit of eating them right out of the bag. He might have eaten them all.

  Grinning, Luther pulled off his boots. "Even better."

  In the kitchen I hunted the marshmallows. I found them-to my relief-in a corner cupboard. A few remained in the bottom of a tightly wrapped bag. I sniffed a carton of milk. It seemed okay. I filled a saucepan. "It's skim milk," I hollered. "I hope that's all right."

  Luther appeared in the doorway, two or three audiocassettes in each hand. He'd removed his boots. His socks showed bluish circles of damp at the toes. He wore a white tank top tucked into blue jeans. The deep brown of his skin colored the shirt's thin fabric. A few gray hairs mingled with the black curls on his chest. "Milk? There's milk in hot chocolate?"

  I fished a wooden spoon from the drawer. "How exactly do you think hot chocolate is made, landlord?"

  "You pour powder out of a jar and add hot water. If you're really patient, you heat the water first in the microwave."

  "That's how you make coffee, not hot chocolate. Let me just warn you well in advance." From the smallest burner, I coaxed a high flame. "Hot fudge sauce will make an appearance." I settled the saucepan in the center of the burner. I poured milk, stirred it with a wooden spoon.

  "Do you really listen to all this dance shit?" He shuffled the cassettes.

  I shook my head. "Tom did."

  "Sorry, tenant."

  I spanked milk from the wooden spoon and set it aside. From the refrigerator, I fetched the fudge sauce, Tom's favorite, premium gold-label stuff in a Mason jar. I opened the jar. Tracks and dit
ches marked the surface of the thick brown sludge. With the wooden spoon I scooped out a dollop and stirred it into the milk.

  "Pro and con," he said.

  "Pro and con?"

  "Real hot chocolate, big marshmallows-pro. No accidental pregnancies-

  pro. Disco music-definite con."

  How many more cons there were, he could never know. Skulking around in dark and smelly places or among cold dripping bushes, looking for "action"-con. Graffiti on the front of the house-con. Lifestyle, or life, causing you pain-con. Death by a thousand cuts-con.

  Eking out a smile, I said, "So you think the disco music offsets everything else?"

  "All by itself."

  While I stirred and stirred, watching the fudge melt into the milk, he poked around some more in the living room. I heard things rattling. The television warbled.

  I dipped a finger into the purplish-brown liquid. It was plenty hot. I turned off the heat. Two mugs from the cupboard above. Pour carefully. Plop in marshmallows, three for Luther, two for me. Add the crumpled bag to the overflowing trash.

  In the living room, Luther stood before the television set, the VCR remote in his hand. I'd left one of Spike's videos in the machine. Go Down on It, it was called. It must have been the pinnacle of Spike's early career; he was in every scene. I'd left it at-or Luther had cued it to-the group scene at the end. Spike knelt, surrounded by erect penises, hub of a many-spoked wheel. Drunk or high or besotted with pleasure, his eyes heavy and hooded, he looked up at the men's out-of-shot faces. His lips curled in a sleepy smile.

  Turning away, I handed Luther his mug. He sipped. Tipping the mug toward me he said, "Pro." He sipped again.

  "And this?" I nodded toward the screen. "Would that be pro or con, landlord?"

  "I haven't decided yet." He winked at me. Something seemed to snag his attention. Cocking his head, he listened. He raised the television's volume a couple of notches. "Isn't that a blatant rip-off of a Springsteen song?" He hummed along. "Down, down, down," he sang, "down, down." He laughed. "They just put it on a synthesizer and added a couple of extra downs. Not the words, of course, but notes where extra downs would go."

  I set my mug on the eye-level shelf of a bookcase. Tom's porn, that was surely something I should not have around-especially Spike's videos. And the disco music was surely too bound up with the club scene, too much connected with the writhing of half-clothed male bodies. Too gay.