Permafrost

by Peter Robertson

  She put her head on my shoulder.

  “Is it all right if I do this for a little while?” she asked.

  I stroked the end of her hair and said nothing, enjoying her closeness and tricking myself into believing that it somehow mattered who I was. We sat like that for a long time, until it had grown dark outside.

  She got up and lit the small lamp on the desk beside the computer. I would have to leave her soon. I had noticed a motel on the road out of town and I had planned to stay there for the night. There was the sudden ugly thought that if I pushed I could stay here, with her, and render up more insubstantial lust disguised as tender compassion, as she took hold of my shoulder, an anonymous source of marginal comfort.

  She asked me then, “Did you know that Keith has a child?”

  I said I didn’t.

  “It happened,” she said, “about a year ago. He has a baby girl named Lilly. And like the great soft romantic he is, he even offered to marry the poor mother. She wisely turned him down. Clearly a sensible girl. Oh, Keith had . . . has a good heart behind a dazed mind and a dilapidated body. The girl’s family naturally wasn’t terribly amused. They threatened to bring the law down on poor Keith. So, as seems often to be the case, he was swiftly given his marching orders. Another nail in the coffin of the psyche, I’m very much afraid.”

  “I saw his passport picture. He looks like death warmed over.”

  “Yes,” she said. “That’s quite accurate. I gather he’s lived rough for a good while. He’s not in the greatest of health. His teeth could use some work. There’s some kind of rot working on his feet. He limps a little, and he badly needs glasses. His skin is a weathered shade of red. As if he’s been sandpapered.” She paused. Then her voice grew a shade softer. “And mentally. I’m afraid he’s starting to lose the place . . . to slowly unravel. And this,” her voice rose theatrically, “this is the person I chose to sleep with. Hardly a conquest.”

  “You had other reasons.”

  She nodded slowly. “Perhaps.”

  “Is he dangerous?” I asked. “To himself, or to others, do you think?”

  She smiled as if my suggestion was the most foolish thing she had ever heard.

  “Don’t be silly. He’s the softest soul I’ve ever met.”

  There was another silence as I finished my beer.

  “I wonder why he turned out this way,” I asked, not really expecting an answer.

  It was as if she were waiting for just that question.

  “I’m of the opinion that love screwed him stupid. It tends to do that, you know.”

  It was in truth a decent enough theory.

  I got up to leave.

  It took a while longer. I stood foolishly. She sat.

  The mist still lingered and the night promised to be an unseasonably chill one. She began to light the fire and I watched her as she knelt and lit the bundle of dry twigs and newspaper she was using as kindling. I sensed that I was, for all intents and purposes, no longer there.

  It would be harmless and fun to imagine the havoc she could wreak on my stupid excuse for a life. Would the plight of a missing man be the unwitting impetus for me to fall in love with a woman a decade older than I was? The emotional flow would be all one way. But perhaps I would have my passion.

  Was I really and truly thinking all this?

  I had the sense that my real life was ticking over, marking time, in an orderly limbo several states away.

  Against all my impulses I did leave her house a half hour later. We stood on her porch and said our goodbyes.

  “I was nervous about meeting you,” I said, “about upsetting you somehow.“ I held out my hand against the side of her face. She turned her head so that her lips brushed against my fingers for a split-second.

  “Why was that?” She spoke very softly, her words dampened by the mist.

  “I spoke to his father this morning,” I said. “On the telephone. It wasn’t easy.”

  She nodded. “And you thought I would be another distraught relative?”

  “Yes.”

  She smiled. “My loss is . . .” she searched for the word, “different. Did James Pringle love his son, do you think?” she asked me.

  “I don’t think he quite understood him. But I think perhaps he did.”

  She thought for a moment. “The failure to understand must have made him love him all the more.”

  I was sure she was right. Her street was quiet except for a plaintive dog far away, clearly anxious to either eat or walk.

  “So where do I go from here?” I asked her. The question was addressed as much to myself as it was to her.

  “When Keith left me, he headed north,” she said, “and he took the rural route that winds through the forest preserve, then curves around the edge of Paddle Lake. When I left him at the edge of town, he was riding off on a green bicycle.”

  I smiled. “A bike?” It seemed an odd notion.

  “Yes, a bike,” she grinned back.” A green one. An old wreck of mine. I made him a present of it. It’s metallic green. An old Schwinn ladies number. No gears. Nothing fancy. A handy basket on the front for messages and whatnot. It’s a solid enough machine. He was amazingly grateful. I thought he would cry. But then, that’s what he tends to do doesn’t he? He cries. If you thank him for washing the dishes, he cries. If you ask him to close the bedroom door, he bloody well cries. The walls in the house are paper-thin. At night I heard him, as he cried himself to sleep a few times. Yet on other occasions he stayed up late and laughed fit to burst at nothing at all. He’s strange. He was strange. Whatever. His emotions aren’t really functioning on normal levels. He’s either euphoric or else downright bloody miserable.”

  “Does he have a plan?”

  “Of course not,” she said, “he’s drifted halfway across Europe and now he’s doing the same thing here.”

  I was curious. “But why did he come here? Why did he come to see you?”

  “I’m not altogether sure.” She thought for a moment. “He tends to do things impulsively. America may have simply caught his fancy. But coming to see me. Well, he had to fly to this part of the country because the authorities are under the impression that he’s staying here with me for a time. And I think he maybe just got lonely and afraid and needed a safe place to hide out for a while. Have you ever lived rough?”

  “No.”

  “Neither have I,” she said. “It must be terrifying.”

  And I suddenly thought of the men I had met in the soup kitchen each week. And the fear that never lets them go.

  There was something else I was curious about. “Why is it that the police aren’t looking very hard for him?”

  “Oh they are. I think. Not especially vigorously mind you. But they did show up here a while ago. And I . . . well . . .” She faltered.

  “You what?”

  “I sent them on a wild goose chase of sorts. I told them Keith had mentioned going to Detroit to look up an old friend.”

  “And he never actually mentioned Detroit.”

  “Not once.”

  I asked. “So why did you lie?”

  She looked rueful. “This was early on. Very soon after he left. I wasn’t especially worried about him then. I just thought that he’d naturally want the police kept at a safe distance. He’s had very little luck with authority in the past. He’s a chronic paranoid, but perhaps he’s justified in this instance. Anyway, that was what I told them. And they went away quite satisfied.”

  “You could tell them the truth now?”

  “Yes. I suppose I could. And maybe they’ll find him in a ditch somewhere with his throat cut. But I still like to think that he’s safe somewhere. And if he is, then he still may not want to be found. He has vanished for long spells before.” She thought for a moment. “I’ll tell you what. If you don’t have any luck finding him I�
��ll go to the coppers like a good little girl and tell them the truth.”

  I smiled at her.

  So I was searching for him alone. The thought managed to both scare and excite me.

  “Do you think he might be suicidal?” I spoke my thought quietly.

  She spoke quickly. “No, of course not!” Then she pondered the question some more. “I mean, I really rather doubt it. He loves life far too much. It’s just that life tends to get the better of him on occasion.”

  I wanted to tell Bridget that life gets the better of us all on occasion, but I thought at that moment that she was looking to me for strength, and I didn’t want to become less in her eyes. And anyway I didn’t want to tell her something of which she was already well aware.

  Before I left she kissed me on the cheek. It was light, tentative, a kiss between friends. I spoke of coming back to see her, whatever happened. And she nodded absently and said yes, it would be very nice if I did.

  * * *

  I walked reluctantly back to my car. The beach was dark and empty and the mist lay like a gentle shroud on the mirror-smooth water. A car pulled away from the parking lot with its headlights turned off and the engine sound muffled, as if wrapped tightly in gauze.

  The windows of my car were wet from the mist.

  I started the engine and let the fan run. When the windshield was clear I drove slowly through Harmony. By now, the mist had taken the whole town hostage, and when I turned on the radio, Pam Tillis was singing about a woman losing her man, gaining a horse, and feeling reckless and young.

  I turned the volume up and peered uncertainly through the mist for the motel lights, welcoming the chance to concentrate on something other than Bridget Cassidy.

  The Getaway Inn was the kind of motel where your car is always parked close to your room, and they write your license number at the top of the form they run your credit card over when you first register.

  I sat on the overly soft queen size bed and looked at a vague painting of Mount Fuji on the wall. I powered up the laptop, logged onto CompuServe, and checked my mail. There was none. I stared for a while at share prices and contemplated a bold financial strategy. I found a weather forecast for Michigan for tomorrow, and I scanned a “Conference Room” for bored people supposedly in their early thirties. There were six people in the electronic room, and a woman named Cheryl was lamenting the lack of good babysitters in the Denver metropolitan area. She had four young children and a husband to mourn, recently killed in a motorcycle crash. The other people in the “room” were superficially sympathetic to her plight, but they were doubtless just teenage interlopers from some sci-fi role-playing forum, and were clearly anxious to trade crude witticisms and talk longingly about good sex instead.

  There were too many lonely travelers on the information highway, and with a self-righteous click or two I logged off.

  The room was cold and much too bright from a streetlight that lit up the parking lot and shot a harsh yellow light through the gaps in the curtains. When I had taken all my clothes off, I got into bed and pulled the white cotton-blend sheets free from under the spongy mattress.

  As I fell asleep, my last conscious thoughts were of Bridget Cassidy holding a skinny blubbering boy in her strong, tanned arms, walking through thick celluloid mist, barefoot and bold.

  The thought became a hope-dream and I became the boy in her arms. The dream ended there, unfulfilling, as all good dreams do, and I was awake again.

  When I fell asleep again it lasted till the morning, and I dreamed instead of Ben Wise, the late father of my increasingly indifferent wife.

  * * *

  I only knew Ben for three short years, from the day I first met him, to the day he died. From the first, he struck me as the all-American businessman, tough and pragmatic. I would never waver from that view, although the man did manage to deeply shock me on several occasions.

  He always claimed that he took instantly to me on our very first meeting. It wasn’t evident, as his affection was displayed in a less than effusive manner. That first meeting was at a suitably tense family dinner, where I was brusquely shanghaied into his study afterward, and subjected to a ruthless interrogation punctuated by stiff drinks that I dared not refuse. What were my views? And what were my prospects? Did I think college was to be a springboard to business success? I wasn’t at all sure how to answer as my financial views and prospects were a nebulous, ethereal concern at that point, and I truthfully was far from decided on the vexing question of academic worth. He listened to me as I wallowed pitifully for a few long minutes, then he pulled his chair closer, fixed his eyes on mine, and told me my life plan in a handful of short unequivocal sentences.

  I never did return to my hometown or to my university. I never finished my studies. Instead I married his daughter, and exactly half of his artist’s supply company, which comprised three retail stores and a highly lucrative mail-order business, became mine, after I had apprenticed myself to his philosophy, and after his large and contrary heart had suddenly hemorrhaged in an out-of-the-way bar one very strange winter night.

  Patricia and I would subsequently sell the three store properties to a video chain, a bookstore chain, and an auto parts chain, respectively. A small part of the money would go to an abandoned northside warehouse, where I chose to locate ArtWorks, my framing store.

  The ArtWorks site, I reasoned, was close to perfect, as the young and well-heeled were making the trek northward, gobbling up overpriced loft space, creating a vacuum to be filled by frozen yogurt stores, art galleries, health food markets, and gourmet coffee outlets. It was the gallery migration that first alerted me. The upscale clientele would need new frames for their hastily bought overpriced artifacts, and I would be on hand. The galleries would need their works mounted and framed and once again I would be happy to oblige. ArtWorks did a steady business thank you, right from the start.

  But the mail order business was the crown jewel in the Ben Wise empire and we prudently hung on to it. He serviced schools and artists and libraries and talentless housewives enrolled in art classes all across the Midwest. He seldom advertised. He produced four cheaply manufactured catalogs a year and leased inexpensive storage space near the airport. And he made a killing as his three retail stores ticked over at best, languishing in their prime locations, selling the occasional box of ten drafting pencils to a woolly-haired art student.

  We were wise to sell the stores. We even gave the woolly students and the other regular store customers a nice discount on their very first catalog order.

  Although Patricia’s mother was initially reluctant to see the stores go, she softened her position some when we paid off the mortgage on the large house Ben always claimed not to be able to afford.

  But all this happened later. After Ben Wise died.

  The fourth time I met Ben we sat on the outdoor patio of his large house in the northern suburbs of the city, the house he told me cheerfully he could ill afford. He said that wasn’t important, the high price he paid. As a businessman his image was his most prized asset. He had to inspire confidence. In his workers. In his investors. In his customers. I told him that sounded like good advice. I thought he was right then. I truthfully still do. Although I do sometimes wonder about the price he paid.

  After we had eaten the choice, well-done cuts of beef that Ben insisted on grilling himself, he told Patricia and her mother that he and I were going out for the rest of the evening. There was no audible argument from the women.

  We drove east and south for a long time, into Chicago, to a part of the city with which I was unfamiliar. He said nothing as he drove his steel-gray Volvo, always within the speed limit, coming to a complete halt at every four-way stop sign, always slowing for an amber light.

  Eventually he parked the car on a dimly lit side street and entered a bar with no name visible above the door.

  In the near darkness, I saw other me
n sitting at small round tables lit by white candles placed inside smoked glass jars. They were older, all close to Ben’s age, drinking and talking together quietly. The tables were waited on by four young men, twenty-two- or twenty-three-years-old perhaps, in puffy white shirts, skin tight jeans, cowboy boots with heels and short carefully styled hair. As the young men served drinks they were touched often by the men at the tables, their thick hair stroked, their hard thighs grasped. Hands seemed to follow then, tangling them like webs, but they smiled at the attention and the tips.

  The realization that I was sitting in a bar that catered exclusively to older gay gentlemen slowly dawned on me. Ben sat in silence and studied my candlelit face. Then he spoke, his words escaping slowly, a long-rehearsed speech, or else one he had given before.

  I thought then that it couldn’t have been easy for him. But Ben Wise was above all an honest man, as prepared to admit his failings as he was to proclaim his successes.

  Occasionally, he told me, he found himself subject to attacks of homosexuality. This was the phrase he chose. Attacks of homosexuality. Was I supposed to imagine something like a virus, a bug, a cold, or perhaps a case of the flu? They came. These attacks. He continued. Without any warning. He indulged them. His word again. Indulged. Then they subsided. And left him alone.

  He paused there to ask if I, too, suffered from the same malady.

  I told him I strongly doubted it. He seemed visibly relieved. I thought at the time that was a strange reaction, that he would want the sympathy of a fellow sufferer. But I was wrong. He considered himself in the grip of an occasional illness, a curse, one that he could have clearly done without.

  He told me he was discreet. That he didn’t indulge in teenage boys. Underage boys. He sadly acknowledged that a few men in the bar did on occasion. That was wrong, he thought. They were weak men. He had no patience for weakness.

  He professed to have no interest in propagating his illness. He would endure it, in the company of his fellow sufferers. He liked to hope that it would someday pass. But he had begun to doubt that it would because, if anything, he told me sadly, his attacks were occurring more and more frequently.