14 Degrees Below Zero

by Quinton Skinner

  Stephen flipped on his heater. It wasn’t terribly cold yet, but he was from California and had yet to acclimate to the tundra. The U. of Minnesota was a fine enough school, and given the hiring climate in the humanities he was lucky to have landed a tenure-track job there, even given his standing as a complete badass and object of fear and envy from the silverbacks in the department. Still, the U. had the distinct misfortune of being situated at approximately the same latitude as Moscow. This meant vividly painful winters, sheets of slippery ice, Stephen’s black car coated in road salt and sliding through stop signs in a miasma of slush and snow. Winter was coming in a matter of weeks—Stephen’s third in Minneapolis. The dread was almost enough to distract him from his driving.

  He had an ordered mind, and he doubted whether those who knew him earlier in life understood how psychically disciplined he had become since his dope-smoking, acid-dropping college days. Everyone back home remembered him as a stoner, a burnout, which kind of pissed him off. Now he went to the highest-level academic conferences, where people had heard of him and listened to his latest talk on Lacan or even Borges, for God’s sake, when he wanted to mix things up. When he went home he was cast as the bad boy. Shit, so he had acted like Syd Barrett for a few years. Now he was turning into Edmund Wilson. People couldn’t let go of the past—their problem, not his.

  There was a prime parking spot right in front of his duplex. He jogged up the steps, snatching yesterday’s New York Times in its blue plastic wrapper and tossing it on the table inside. Jay lived in postcollege splendor—she had some decent furniture her parents had given her—but there was no denying her age, which was demonstrated by the presence of milk-carton bookshelves in her living room. Stephen was a full-fledged adult with money and a good job. He had polished wood floors, an antique built-in sideboard, chandeliers, glassed-in bookshelves . . . all this shit that made him feel really good about himself. He’d grown up with money—quite a bit of it, actually, some of it filtering down to him still—but his parents had basically been well-heeled hippies who preferred the reek of incense, dust, and cat litter. Now Stephen aspired to elegance, quiet, and dignity—three things his parents would have had trouble recognizing, much less epitomizing.

  Papers, papers . . . notes. Stephen went through the things on his desk. He glanced up at the mirror and mussed his hair a little. He cultivated a slightly unkempt image. The girls he taught responded to it and, while he would most certainly never engage in any impropriety with any of them, at any time, on any occasion, he was not averse to being an object of attraction. To as many of them as possible. It was healthy in a sense; it fostered a patient-analyst sort of transient romantic attachment. At least, that was what he thought. He wasn’t going to share that particular theory with anyone soon. He started stuffing his briefcase. It was getting late.

  When he got back in his car and was driving, other matters in Stephen’s life began to surface. Such as the aforementioned Jay and Ramona. And that fucking prick Lewis.

  It could be said that taking up with a woman nine years younger was not the best way for Stephen to establish a conventionally respectable profile in his department. A woman not much older than his students, a single mother college dropout with raven black hair, toned, flawless skin, and unbelievable thighs. Well, anyone who would say such a thing would surely be motivated by their insane jealousy over their incapacity to duplicate Stephen’s achievement. Stephen, on more levels than one, was the man.

  His heart leapt in a giddy fashion as he hit the freeway for the short drive to campus, as he thought of last night and making love with Jay while the moonlight shone through the window, her breasts—God damn, those perfect breasts—pressed against his chest while she whispered to him to remember to be quiet. Jay was the most attractive woman Stephen had ever been with, bar none—and it was no small added bonus when he brought her to faculty dinners and watched his colleagues try to suck in their bellies and ingratiate themselves to her in a postmodern ironic fashion while their wives looked on in a decidedly nonironic mode of detachment and pity. Stephen had been with plenty of pretty girls. He was no slouch. But Jay’s physical essence was like sweet ambrosia. He had a hard-on now from thinking about the sight of her naked or, better yet, just in panties and a sheer tank top, lounging in her room, seemingly unaware of what an utter hydrogen bombshell she was.

  This was not to say that Stephen was sexist, or didn’t value women for their intellect—please. He’d had all that nonsense drummed out of him aeons ago. He couldn’t have been with Jay if her physicality hadn’t been wedded to a powerful mind. She was young, a little callow yet, and educated largely in a haphazard, autodidact fashion. Still, she had a history of being regarded as intellectually extraordinary (and now Stephen’s heart gave a very different kind of lurch, as he entertained his insecurity over the possibility that she was smarter than him) that dated from her childhood, and it certainly wasn’t too late for her to accomplish things. That is, if she could somehow become motivated to raise herself from the semidepressive rut that currently constituted her days.

  It was a rut that, he had to admit, was making her somewhat less attractive. Somewhat. He knew he shouldn’t be so hard on her. She had lost her mother just half a year ago—and what a mother, so knowing, so magnetic, so hot (and Stephen winced as he took the exit ramp off the freeway, knowing what an awful thought that was, no matter how profoundly true it was).

  Stephen knew it couldn’t be easy being a single mother. Jay had the misfortune of getting knocked up early in her sophomore year, and had let her bad luck derail her academic career completely. The father was up in Oregon someplace, utterly useless, never visiting or sending money. His name was Michael, and he was working on his family’s organic farm—or, to hear Jay tell it, was probably smoking pot all day and goofing off like a post-hippie, Pacific Northwest Hud, eternally juvenile, of no use to either Jay or Ramona.

  The real problem, as Stephen saw it—now he was driving into the comforting fantasyland of the university (God, the girls)—was Lewis. Stephen exhaled sharply. Lewis, what a creep. A manipulative narcissist of the highest order, an overbearing browbeater who—and here Stephen was entering into dangerous territory, but he had earned his right as a thinker to do so—had in a sense possibly caused Anna’s cancer. Stephen would not have been surprised to learn that her fatal illness had been some sort of mind-body self-sabotage ploy to escape her husband, the only means at her disposal since, for some reason, she seemed to be sincerely devoted to the man.

  Lewis used to work at American Express, in a real high-level corporate management gig. He made piles of money, and Anna never had to work. He styled himself the benevolent upper-middle-class patriarch while scarring the women in his life with his constant needs for validation, collaboration, and approval. Lewis never left his wife and daughter alone, never gave them space to breathe. Stephen had seen it. Now Jay was alone, without the buffer of Anna to absorb Lewis’s poison.

  If only it had been Lewis who had died.

  And then, ten minutes later, Stephen was teaching his class. His mind moved on two tracks at once. He was talking about Kafka, and Musil, stuff he could do in his sleep and often did.

  But he was also thinking about Lewis, about having a talk with the old boy. Maybe Stephen could cajole a little sense into him. It wasn’t impossible. Stephen could be forceful.

  As forceful as Lewis? That remained to be determined.

  And now Stephen opened up his book and read aloud to his class.

  Someone must have been telling lies about Josef K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one morning.

  “Someone tell me what that means,” Stephen said to his class with a tight smile.

  5. HIS CONTINUED WILLINGNESS TO WEAR THE MASK OF LEWIS.

  Lewis took the bus downtown. He could have driven his Lexus, but it cost money to park it—he was already overextended on payments on the thing, bought a couple of years ago when he was living another life. His old jo
b at American Express had come with a corner office and prepaid parking in a downtown ramp. His new job came with an employee discount.

  It was still impossible to believe that Anna had left the world before him. He’d gone through his decades of on-and-off smoking, his mood problems, the negativity that had cast a pall over his adult life—hadn’t that been enough to finish him off early? Wasn’t that supposed to be the design—that he would die before her, that he would never be left alone?

  He got off the bus at Seventh Ave. and winced as he was enveloped by the cloud of smoke the thing discharged pulling away from the curb. Despite himself, he still loved downtown in the morning. People were clenched up with the shock of being alive, and the low-angle sun poked from between the buildings like the eye of God. It was splendid.

  He was still doing all the clichéd widower things. He woke most mornings and, just for a moment, was considerate of her side of the bed until he remembered that the bed was now all his. When he woke on the sofa downstairs, he searched his memory for whatever transgression had landed him there. He sought out her brand of cereal on the supermarket shelf. He wondered when she was coming home. Everything in his environment promulgated a sense of disbelief.

  There, rising above the street, was the building where he used to work. Lewis imagined what was going on up there, on the twenty-second floor, where he once had an assistant and thirty-five people working under him. The company had offered him a leave of absence when Anna was close to death; it had been a chance to walk away and return when he was ready. But he never got ready, and after several months the offer was politely rescinded. Lewis’s old peers were incapable of understanding that the man who worked in the corner office no longer existed. He couldn’t understand the job anymore, the client services, the supervision, the meetings. Maybe he had never liked it. He certainly hadn’t been happy there. But now he sure as hell could have used the money.

  The sidewalk beneath his feet, as he stood there with people passing, was as solid as anything got. The thing he couldn’t grasp was the dissolution of Anna’s physical form—the fine lines of cartilage that had formed her nose, the skin stretched over her shoulder blades, her upper lip, her toenails. They were all gone, burned to ashes and poured into Lake of the Isles at midnight, per her typically romantic request. Now, when he ran around the lake two or three times a week, he thought of her resting there. How useful all of those body parts had been to her, and for so long. Some of them had had their uses for Lewis, too. Now they were all gone.

  All this was hard enough to take without considering all the times when he’d wished he was free, and rid of her, both before and during her sickness. Well, he got his wish. And he had hastened it along, in his usual well-meaning way.

  Stop thinking about it.

  In the third-floor employee lounge at the Marshall Field’s department store Lewis hung up his coat on the peg reserved for his use. He hugged his sides and tried to will away the chill that had descended upon him while walking Carew—and wasn’t that a kick in the ass? Done in by the cold already when it was going to be about forty degrees more frigid in a matter of weeks. Maybe it was the antidepressant. Lewis was unconvinced that anyone knew entirely what those pills did to people. True, Lewis was no longer explicitly suicidal, as he had been a couple of weeks before. The powdery little pills had taken care of that for him.

  Maybe it was just aging. There was always that to contend with: shortness of breath that could not go unobserved, pains in the belly that could never again be dismissed as innocent.

  “Lewis. Good morning,” said a voice behind him, a voice belonging to Guy Boyle.

  “Guy,” Lewis said, his voice coming out hoarse.

  “Whoa. You coming down with a cold there?” asked Guy.

  “Let’s hope not,” Lewis said.

  “Yeah, I hear that,” Guy countered. “My kids all have a case of the crud. Looks like maybe winter’s coming early.”

  “Don’t say that,” Lewis replied. “We’ll all be cursed to six months of snowstorms and frozen heads.”

  “Pardon?” said Guy.

  “I meant frozen pipes,” Lewis said.

  Guy laughed. “Ah, I’m not worried,” he said. “The winters here aren’t as cold as they used to be. You noticed that? We haven’t had a real serious cold snap in years.”

  “I guess a lot of things are different now,” Lewis told him, feeling his grin tighten.

  Guy’s expression froze into affable neutrality. Guy was a career man at the store, with a hearty and seemingly organic love of men’s apparel and the intricacies of selling it. He worked in the suit section, the high-end stuff. He was ostensibly Lewis’s superior but, because of their similarity in age, he generally treated Lewis as a peer. Guy had three kids, and he and Lewis related to each other as family men until, naturally, something would touch upon the subject of Anna. Lewis understood that he was a bit of a tragic figure in men’s wear. Word had spread quickly about his executive past, and the mysterious fall that had necessitated a career change in the early autumn of his years.

  Lewis found out about the job from an ad in the Sunday paper. He had just been informed of the hiring of his replacement at AmEx, and so he had just stopped agonizing over calling the office to either resign or announce his comeback. He had gone downtown the next day, applied, met Guy. They hit it off right away. Lewis had confided in Guy about Anna, about how he needed a change. Guy thought that Lewis would fit in fine in men’s wear—a tight-knit fraternity of more than a dozen men of varied age. Lewis had started work the next morning. The job paid less than a quarter of what he had been earning previously.

  “How’s that granddaughter?” Guy asked. “You have to bring her in again sometime. She’s a peach.”

  A peach. So far, Lewis had been remarkably successful at not resenting Guy’s bland, insipid optimism. Remarkably, commendably successful.

  “She’s doing just fine,” Lewis told him.

  Lewis had spent his boyhood in the suburbs of Chicago, moving to Minneapolis for college and meeting Anna there. She had been lithe, distant, always seeming as though she had just woken from a dream or was about to enter into one. She had been an art student, while Lewis was studying for his MBA. Her friends and rival suitors had thought him conventional, uninteresting. But he had landed her.

  “Had coffee yet?” Guy asked him.

  “I think I’m going to hold off,” replied Lewis. “Caffeine is starting to make me anxious these days.”

  Guy gave Lewis a funny look which suggested that he had heard of this thing called anxiety—an exotic ailment that afflicted women and non-Minnesotans—but had never heard a grown man confessing to suffer from it.

  Lewis’s heart gave a kick. His hands were cold, almost numb. His mind felt sharp enough, though, to realize that this was going to be one of those very long mornings in which instants stretched themselves into mini-eternities.

  “Well, come on out with me,” Guy said, a hand on Lewis’s shoulder. They left the sterile comfort of the employee lounge for the brightly lit and empty sales floor. The store would open in ten minutes. A Latino man Lewis’s age was hurriedly buffing the floor with a machine that looked as though it was about to swallow its master. The sales crew was gathered around a table piled high with neatly folded and stacked neckties. Today the shift was manned by, in addition to Guy and Lewis, Leonard, Dan, Ken, and Vincent. They were all about two decades younger than Lewis, though they were no more energetic or motivated than Lewis on his better days. Lewis worked assiduously to avoid condescension in his dealings with them.

  He used to buy a lot of clothes in this department. He remembered buying clothes from his new coworkers, though he couldn’t be sure—he’d never paid enough attention to remember their faces or names in the past.

  “Ken’s going to the Vikings game Sunday,” said Vincent when the old men joined them. The younger guys were all drinking coffee from paper cups bearing the name of the store.

  “Lucky bastard,�
� said Dan.

  “Who’d you have to blow to get the tickets?” asked Leonard.

  “Keep it clean, boys,” Guy said, glancing around to see if any of his superiors had heard.

  “Seriously,” said Leonard. “Forty-yard-line tickets for the Packer game. Six rows back. Do you ever run out of luck?”

  “Father-in-law,” Vincent said sagely. He blew a cloud of steam from the surface of his coffee.

  “That right?” asked Dan, eyes narrowing behind his glasses.

  Ken shrugged, his shirt rustling. Only about twenty-five, and getting fat.

  Dan groaned. “In-laws. It’s like a fucking tax built into your life. And you never pay it off.”

  “Boys,” Guy said.

  “At least yours live a half a mile away,” Vincent said. “You know what my wife did? Gave her mother a key to our house. I said, ‘It’s your problem if she comes in while I’m giving it to you in the living room.’”

  “What’d she say to that?” Leonard asked, approvingly scandalized.

  Vincent sipped his coffee. He had wolfish blue eyes. “What could she say?”

  “Your wife lets you give it to her in the living room still?” Dan asked. “Man, mine’s gone all vanilla. Only at bedtime. Says it makes her sleepy.”

  “I can see you having that effect,” Vincent told him.

  “It’s not my fault,” said Dan. “It’s marriage. Best thing I ever did, worst thing I ever did.”