14 Degrees Below Zero

by Quinton Skinner

  “Lewis, no,” Stephen said.

  “It’s all right. That part’s fine.” Lewis grinned, his lips tight.

  “I can hardly keep up with all these accusations, Lewis.”

  “Don’t you know that’s why she liked you?” Lewis asked. “That’s why she stuck up for you—because you looked at her like she was still attractive. I allowed her that. It’s a good feeling. Of course, you didn’t have to live with her for twenty years. You didn’t have to deal with her presence until it suffocated you.”

  The lecture room would be unused until twelve, which meant that there was no class session to save Stephen. He tried to stand as straight as he could, but Lewis was a few inches taller. Hostility radiated from the older man like heat, and Stephen sensed a fluttering in the center of his chest.

  “You didn’t see her begging to die,” Lewis said from the depths of his throat. “No, you made sure to cut out before then. And now all I have is Jay and Ramona, and you’re trying to get between us. It’s very simple, Stephen. You have to go.”

  “I have to—” Stephen let out a sharp laugh. “Let’s just stop this right now.”

  “You can’t be allowed to poison Jay against me,” Lewis said.

  “I want no such thing.”

  “I have to protect them from you,” Lewis said.

  Stephen reached up and rubbed his eyes. It was nearly incomprehensible, the things he was hearing from this man. He had dealt with his share of jealous fathers over the years, but Lewis occupied a category completely his own. The worst of it was that Stephen genuinely feared Lewis. A fight between them would lead only to a Pyrrhic victory for one of them, but Lewis was on the verge of rage. Stephen did not have access to rage, and he knew it.

  “Please leave me alone,” Stephen said. “If you continue to threaten me in this way, I will call the police.”

  Lewis blinked. “The police?” he said. “Oh, please, Stephen.”

  Lewis rubbed his chest and his eyes popped wide. He took a deep, ragged breath.

  “Lewis, is something wrong?” Stephen asked.

  “I’ve held life and death in these hands,” Lewis said, holding them up as evidence, a terrible look on his face that bridged bewilderment and certainty.

  “What do you mean?”

  “A year ago, I might have let you get away with this,” Lewis said. “I might have backed down. But not after Anna.”

  “After Anna?” Stephen repeated.

  “I’m a different person now,” Lewis said. “And I will not stand by while you try to destroy me, my daughter, and my granddaughter.”

  Stephen picked up his briefcase and coffee cup.

  “That’s it,” he said simply. “We’re done here.”

  When he tried to walk around Lewis, Lewis raised a stiff hand, karate-chop style, and pressed it against Stephen’s rib cage. His hands full, Stephen was obliged to stop.

  “Don’t touch me,” he said.

  Lewis moved his hand back, but left it in the air, blocking Stephen from leaving.

  “I trust I’ve made my point,” he said, cocking his head slightly, staring at Stephen.

  “You’ve made a number of points,” Stephen told him. “Most of them incoherent and alarmingly threatening. I think at this point I’m fully justified in telling you to go fuck yourself.”

  Lewis smiled, and Stephen realized that he had been waiting for just such a provocation. The hand returned to Stephen’s chest.

  “You have a big problem,” Lewis said.

  “The only one with the problem is you,” Stephen said, forcing his voice to remain firm. God, couldn’t someone come in here? Couldn’t he get away from this damned isolation with Lewis?

  “My days of having problems are behind me,” Lewis said. “Now I have only solutions.”

  “Enough, enough, enough,” Stephen said. He pushed easily through Lewis’s hand and made for the door.

  “I don’t want to see you anymore at Jay’s apartment,” Lewis called out after him.

  Stephen did not look back.

  “And I’ll be watching,” Lewis said. “Bet on it.”

  Stephen shoved open the door and let it close behind him. He turned the corner in the flyer-festooned hallway and leaned against the wall, breathing heavily.

  Now what, exactly, was he supposed to do?

  Lewis looked out the window in the empty, silent classroom, the stillness punctuated by the sound of his heels thudding softly against the thin carpet. Though Thanksgiving was more than a month away, he saw a crystalline trace of snow in the air, wept by the gray sky.

  He had come on stronger than he’d planned, that was for sure. There were indeed lines that shouldn’t be crossed—and they hadn’t all been invented by Stephen Grant. But Stephen’s smug self-assurance, the way he preened and pontificated in front of his students, filled Lewis with loathing. Stephen took the same tone when he spoke to Jay—brilliant, confused Jay, talked down to by her lover as though she were some adolescent imbecile. It was infuriating.

  So maybe he had lost his cool. So what?

  So he’d better talk to Jay before Stephen did, that’s what.

  He looked outside, half-expecting to see Anna again.

  Lewis had started out wanting to set things right between himself and Stephen, but Stephen had made it impossible with his recalcitrance and air of superiority. Lewis knew he didn’t want Ramona to continue to be exposed to such a man.

  It was all Lewis could do not to reach out and slap Stephen across the cheek, to grab that peacock’s plume of dark wavy hair and yank hard. Lewis did not conceive of himself as violent, but there were limits to what a man could take.

  He shuddered and had to grab the windowsill to right himself. His heart raced, and a deep wave of nausea overcame him. He fought it off. This was not a time to be weak. He felt himself on the verge of losing everything, and for once in his life he was going to fight. He had done enough acquiescing, enough witnessing his own life like an outsider.

  There were things a man could do to protect his own. He knew this better than anyone.

  11. HE WAS THE CENTER OF HIS OWN TRAGIC OPERA.

  Jay looked out the glass, barely able to believe spring and summer had gone, that they had come to nothing, and that—look, what a sight—a trace of snow was flaking off from the overcast sky. She stirred the steam in her latte with her breath and watched a parade of cars go past on Lake Street, jostling like farm animals let loose from their pen.

  “It’s chilly out,” said a pleasant voice behind her.

  Jay didn’t look; she didn’t have to. The presence of Andrea Watson was as familiar as the texture of her own childhood and youth. They hadn’t been close friends through elementary and junior high, but had cultivated an arm’s-length familiarity based on an uncanny tendency to end up in the same classes. The same age, they’d hung out in high school and then started the U. together. One essential difference was that Andrea had graduated. Living an entire life in a town like Minneapolis meant seeing it shrink steadily and annually—Jay could walk down the Nicollet Mall downtown and see a familiar face every block. In south Minneapolis, in Uptown, at the C.C. Club or Calhoun Square, she was required to become her own biographer, trying to relate people to the varied triumphs and humiliations of her past.

  “I wonder how bad it’s going to be,” Jay said softly.

  “The winter?” Andrea asked. It was a question people took seriously in Minnesota. Andrea looked through her black-rimmed glasses out the window, as though a lifetime in a harsh climate had made her able to discern the future based on a psychic appraisal of the breeze, the sky. “Hard to say. We’re due for a bad one.”

  “That’s what I think, too,” Jay replied.

  Andrea installed her tall frame on the stool next to Jay’s. They both had the morning off, and Andrea had called Jay and asked her to come to Weird Coffee, a new place that had just opened on the stretch of Lake Street connecting Uptown to the divide between Lake Calhoun and Lake of the Isles.
The coffee shops came and went with the same languorous rhythm as the restaurants, and this one was in its rosy infancy. It was nearly full at almost eleven in the morning, with a gallery of sleepy, irritable-looking people who might have been sleeping in the weeds in the alley, waiting for someone to open up a café so they could come inside.

  “I’m glad you could make it,” Andrea said.

  “It was lucky you called today,” Jay said. “I’m not working until later.”

  “How’s that going?” Andrea asked. Presumably she meant: How was Jay’s job serving food progressing? It was a polite question, but the fact was that food service did not progress. It was adamantly static.

  “OK,” Jay said. “How’s your thing?”

  “Slow,” Andrea said.

  Jay let it go at that. Andrea had been writing freelance articles for City Pages and doing some white-collar temp work on a PR project with a consulting company. Andrea was bright, cool, pretty, but she had always given off an air of almost—almost sexy, almost very smart, almost happy with herself. She had a boyfriend that Jay had met once or twice. The way he had looked at Jay had cemented her opinion of him before he ever said a word.

  “How’s Ramona?” Andrea asked.

  “She’s great,” Jay said. “She’s in day care today. She brought that stuffed cat—you know, the one you gave her.”

  Andrea rubbed her palms together with happiness. “Oh, really?”

  “Yeah, she really loves it,” Jay said. “She named it Fifi.”

  “Fifi,” Andrea repeated with delight.

  Andrea’s subtext in these conversations was her own burgeoning baby-fever—she never seemed to tire of telling Jay how lucky she was to have a child. Well, sure, Ramona was a blessing Jay couldn’t imagine living without. But motherhood had certainly changed Jay’s life in irrevocable ways that the relatively unfettered Andrea could scarcely imagine. Andrea would one day make a good mother. Just the sight of her evoked thoughts of fecundity; she was statuesque, with solid hips and nice legs and—her unavoidable visual trait—truly huge breasts that this morning strained against the wool of her green sweater. Those breasts had filled out in junior high and had always seemed out of place on a girl, then woman, who went through life with such tentative caution. Her breasts were like a lustful scream in a prim moment. Jay had seen them uncovered on occasion and felt flat-chested and boyish in comparison.

  “I was over in Northeast with Brad last night,” Andrea said. “We saw a band and had too much to drink.”

  “I put Ramona to bed at nine and passed out by ten,” Jay said with a laugh.

  “Don’t go getting old on me,” Andrea said.

  “It’s too late,” Jay told her friend. “The deed is done.”

  “Oh, come on.” Andrea took a slug from her triple mocha. Being born into Minnesota stock came with a Herculean tolerance for caffeine. “You’re seeing a great guy. You must have a lot of fun.”

  “Stephen’s a grown-up,” Jay said. “We go out to dinner and movies, but he isn’t really into getting wasted. And he hates smoke, so that eliminates the bars.”

  “Well, he’s good-looking enough to compensate,” Andrea said.

  “That is true,” Jay admitted. “And it’s different when you have a kid. I mean, she’s getting up at seven-thirty, whether I like it or not. She’s not real sympathetic to Mama’s hangover.”

  “I love the way she says hamburger. Remember when we took her to McDonald’s?” Andrea said. “She makes it sound like hangover.”

  Jay smiled. She would not be drawn into laughing over Ramona’s language difficulties.

  Outside the sun was nowhere to be seen. Jay luxuriated in the familiarity of her friend’s presence, the sight of Andrea’s eyes through the distorting lens of her glasses. This was the best part of her life, this feeling of belonging. It was also the most confining. Jay had never lived anyplace else. Lewis had, Stephen had. She wondered if she would ever wake up to the gray sky of another city she had made home.

  “Well, as usual I have a motive in wanting to see you,” Andrea said.

  “What do you mean, as usual?” asked Jay.

  “Oh, you know, I’m terrible.” Andrea shifted on her stool. “I always want to see Ramona because I wish I had a kid of my own.”

  “We’re young,” Jay said. “Don’t be in such a hurry.”

  “I know.” Andrea looked into her mocha. “I shouldn’t be in such a rush. It’s like with my work—I want something to happen for me. I want something better.”

  “Well, welcome to the human condition,” Jay told her.

  “You’re always able to say things like that.” Andrea adjusted her glasses. “I think I’m just not as strong as you are, Jay. Not as something, anyway. I wake up and I think, what am I going to do today? Anything that matters? What if I do nothing? Will anyone even notice?”

  “After a while they would,” Jay said. “They’d disconnect your electricity.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “Of course I do,” Jay said. “Look, I’m waiting tables, you know. At least you finished school.”

  Andrea frowned, wrinkling her usually flawless and translucent pale skin, which she set off by dyeing her hair red.

  “Maybe you could go back,” she said.

  “I don’t know, I was thinking about doing something easier. Maybe I’ll join the Scientologists and hook myself up to an electric jukebox to learn the secrets of the universe.”

  Andrea laughed, a little nervously.

  “Come on,” Jay said. “We were talking about you. Does this have something to do with Brad?”

  Brad was an unexceptional guy who happened to be in line to make partner at a downtown law firm. He had an arrogance and sense of being impressed with himself that came with his position. Jay, now that she thought about it, couldn’t stand him.

  Andrea looked sheepishly away. It was selfish, the way she engineered social interaction around her needs—and what was wrong with that? Jay didn’t mind at all. Andrea lived her life in connection to people she cared about, feeling out friends for opinions, investing herself in their affairs. Jay did the opposite, keeping people at arm’s length—except, of course, for Lewis, for whom the concept of arm’s length was unfathomable.

  “Well, yeah, it’s Brad,” said Andrea. “Or maybe Brad as stand-in for my own issues.”

  “Maybe you should cancel your subscription,” Jay said.

  “To what?”

  “Your issues,” Jay replied.

  Andrea pretended to be offended. “But, my dear, what would I have left to talk about?”

  “Well, what’s the problem?” Jay asked. “Is Brad still too sexy for his shirt?”

  “You think he’s stuck up,” Andrea said.

  “I think a lot of things,” Jay told her friend. “What do you think?”

  Outside, the wind whipped up the faint, tentative snow in the air and sent it flying in quasi-horizontal lines to the pavement, where it vanished. The murky sky was dotted with dark, low-lying clouds, like an inverted ocean.

  “You always seem to know what you want. Or at least you know what you think about things,” Andrea said.

  “Seeming is not always reality,” Jay replied.

  “Well, you know.” Andrea paused. “I guess what I’m wondering is whether it’s worthwhile to stay with Brad when I can tell he sees me as a temporary thing . . . you know, until something comes along, someone, I mean, who fits in with his image of who he wants to be.”

  “You’re sounding like a first wife,” Jay observed.

  “Yeah, without the marriage,” Andrea said. She folded her arms over her chest, with some effort.

  “Well, I don’t know,” Jay said. “Are you having fun with him?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “You’re always talking about marriage and having kids,” Jay said. “Didn’t you get the newsletter? People our age are supposed to live out their twenties in a state of suspended adolescence. We’re supposed to be ru
nning from responsibility, not towards it. Don’t you read Newsweek?”

  “I don’t want to fool around,” Andrea said. “We’re getting older. It’s not enough to be with someone because he’s fun sometimes.”

  “Well, you answered your own question,” Jay pointed out.

  “I know.” Andrea took a desultory slug of her mocha. “But what next? I can break up with Brad, but at least he gets me out of the house. I don’t want to end up depressed and bitter.”

  “No, you don’t.” Jay tasted her lukewarm latte.

  “It’s ridiculous,” Andrea said. “We have all these comforts—we can sit here on a Monday, sipping coffee, with me moaning about my life. But there’s no urgency, is there? I mean, maybe I’m just inventing problems for myself. You don’t do it, because it’s not in your nature. But if we’re not starving, or in danger, then what are we? I can take my life seriously, or not, it doesn’t seem to make any difference. I mean, you lost your mother, and now you have to listen to me complain about my boyfriend. It’s so unfair. I’m sorry.”

  “Andrea, don’t be sorry,” Jay said, putting a hand on her friend’s shoulder. Andrea all of a sudden seemed on the verge of tears.

  “No, I am.” She pushed on her glasses. “I mean, how vulgar, really. I broke the rules. We’re not supposed to talk about our worthlessness, are we? I mean, what if everyone talked this way? We’d probably all agree to stop being ourselves. It’s too much work, the payoff’s too small.”

  “Look at you getting all worked up,” Jay said.

  Andrea laughed, and Jay saw that she was crying, just a little. “This is why I have to stay friends with you,” Andrea said. “Because I can tell you my worst thoughts and you act like we’re talking about a new dress at the Gap or something.”

  “I have my limits,” Jay said. “Start talking about the Gap, and you’ll really freak me out.”

  Andrea shook her head. “When is it going to make sense?”

  Jay’s cell phone, perched on the counter, went off. Jay glanced down: it was Lewis.

  “Never, I suspect,” Jay said. “Maybe at the end.”

  “Is that what you think?” Andrea said, seeming awed.

  “Maybe.” Jay shrugged. “Sometimes I think we’re preparing ourselves for our last breath. Then we’ll realize it was all a matter of learning how to let go.”