With great effort, Lewis focused on what Stephen was saying—more accusations, more recrimination.
“What do you want, man?” Stephen barked. “Are you stalking me or something?”
Well, maybe he was. It was a question that merited some sort of reply, wasn’t it?
Lewis pulled his right hand from out of his coat pocket. In it he held the gun.
Stephen, for an instant, tried to assume a look of sardonic disapproval and mockery. But it couldn’t last. There was only so long you could sneer at a firearm, no matter how much academic theory you were armed with. The gun was heavy and cold in Lewis’s ungloved hand. Without giving much thought to what he was doing, he switched the safety off.
“Lewis, come on,” Stephen said, reaching out for his car to hold him up as his knees started to buckle. “Don’t be foolish.”
Allegations of foolishness were perhaps not the optimal strategy for a man in Stephen’s position. Lewis sensed the precipice at which he now stood, and he intuited the manifold paths that his reality could now take—and so many of them were unfavorable.
It was going to be very hard to go back to selling shirts, wasn’t it? Lewis thought he wasn’t going to be returning to the department store. That stopgap attempt at normality was closed and sealed.
“Please,” Stephen was saying as he looked around the empty street. “Haven’t you done enough?”
Lewis flipped the cold metal safety back on the gun and returned it to his pocket. He took out a cigarette and lit it, shielding his lighter from the light breeze and the snow. Stephen suddenly seemed quite irrelevant.
“I can’t believe you did that,” Stephen said.
After marshaling such restraint, it would be pointless to engage Stephen in any kind of debate at this point—and, Lewis reminded himself, he had managed not to break his pledge to Jay. He puffed on his cigarette as though it was his first, or his last, then closed the distance between himself and Stephen and clapped the younger man lightly on the shoulder. He turned and started walking back to his car.
Though he couldn’t remember feeling worse, physically, his spirit enjoyed a strange and unfamiliar ebullience. He played his little game and pretended that Anna was at home waiting for him. She would nag him about shoveling the walk, and he would pretend to be irritated. They would act out their little patterns, so secure in the roles they had defined for each other: you be you, and I’ll be me. It was such a comfort to imagine, just for a little while, that it was still possible.
Stephen watched Lewis’s Lexus disappear into the fogged morning. He leaned against his car. There were a couple of kids walking to school, a neighbor across the street preparing to fire up his snowblower. Where were they a few minutes ago, when Lewis Ingraham drew a gun on him in the stark light of day?
Once inside the car, with the engine running, Stephen tuned in to the motor’s rhythm and realized that his own heart was beating extraordinarily fast. His hands were cold and numb. He gripped the steering wheel and stared through the windshield.
It was going to be hard to get to class on time. Of course he had a perfectly acceptable explanation: Sorry I’m late, students, but I had to get my heart ripped out by my lover and receive a silent death threat from her father before I could make my way over to campus.
It was true that Stephen had a tendency to view the events of his life in literary and analytic terms—every neck ache was a manifestation of unresolved conflict, each sin of omission was a veiled statement of intent, yes, yes, guilty as charged. He saw the unfolding of life’s events as interconnected nodes in a great pattern that he could understand if only he thought about it hard enough. Jay used to laugh at him in their early days together, when they were still in the initial process of unveiling themselves to each other. She was positively tickled that Stephen found it impossible to admit that some things just happened; she had claimed that, in his way, Stephen was every bit as superstitious and portent-seeking as a medieval villager hiding inside his hut at the sight of a shooting star.
No one understood him the way Jay did. Stephen steered his car through the slow-moving herd, feeling the wheels slide under him as he made a turn. He pulled his earmuffs down around his neck—they were a concession to the cold that didn’t require matting down his hair under a hat. The snow was engulfing everything, daubing big blots of white silence over the city. He would never get used to it.
He had to slam on his brakes at the final stoplight before the Lyndale entrance to 94. His car slid out and its nose protruded rudely into the crosswalk. People gave him dirty looks as they walked around him.
This was the first drive to work in the post-Jay era. He would come home alone that night, eat alone, grade papers alone. There would be no one there in the morning. He would most likely never again see the supple curve of her back, the perfect spheres of her breasts, or her eyes closed in transport as he lost himself within her. Jay was, for all her aimlessness, extraordinarily sure once she actually got down to the business of deciding on something.
So that was that. Stephen merged onto the freeway, checked the clock on the dashboard and saw that he was going to be late for his own lecture. He’d gone and fallen in love—after years of trying to perfect an impenetrable core that couldn’t be budged by hurt or dependence—and now she’d left him. He felt, strangely enough, as though nothing at all was happening.
And now the memory of the gun. Stephen had stared down the barrel, the way detective novels described it, and seen down into a black void of darkness. He wondered how close Lewis had been to pulling the trigger. It looked like a big gun, and it might have killed him—Stephen had read once that the impact alone from a bullet is often enough to disrupt the heart’s rhythm and induce death. He imagined the red of his blood on the white snow, the cloud of scorched gunpowder in the crisp morning air.
He supposed something had to be done about Lewis, but he wasn’t sure what. Stephen wasn’t inclined to respond to violence in kind, and Lewis hadn’t actually done anything. He suspected the old boy had engaged in a little old-fashioned angry-father terrorism.
Which brought him back to Jay. He had lost her.
Stephen pulled his car into one of the last spaces in the ramp nearest the lecture hall. He switched off the motor and looked at himself in the mirror under the sun visor, trying to get into character for his students. He worked harder than usual to locate his inner professor that morning, because it surely wasn’t much fun at the moment being plain old Stephen Grant.
INTERLUDE. FEEDING THE PENGUINS AND MAKING SURE THEIR BABIES WERE SAFE.
In Antarctica it was cold all the time. Sometimes you couldn’t even go outside because your nose and your toes and your fingers would freeze and fall off. And the doctors wouldn’t be able to put them back on again. You’d lose them forever.
The Perfect Princess had left her throne unoccupied for a time (always a dangerous prospect—there were would-be usurpers everywhere) in order to mount an expedition to Antarctica to look for her Grandma Anna. She had with her a team of royal assistants who helped her in her terrible struggle, and who lived to tend to her every terrible whim.
“Bring me some hot tea,” the Princess said to Milo.
“Got a ball!” Milo said, tossing a basketball into the snow, then running after it and falling down.
A princess had to understand that, at times, her royal retainers might not understand her requests. She took a step into the deep snow of Antarctica, enjoying the crunch of her boots on the frozen soil and the feel of her furry hood on her cheeks.
Grandma Anna (and how she loved just saying the name) was out there somewhere, maybe feeding the penguins and making sure their babies were safe and warm. Grandma Anna was like that. She liked taking care of things, especially people.
Mama had been sad in the morning, and Ramona knew it had something to do with Stephen. And Grampa Lewis. Ramona’s grampa had a weird look in his eyes sometimes these days. She knew he loved her, and that he would never hurt her. But he
might hurt someone else, maybe without meaning to. He was that strong.
“Want to come with me?” said Ashleigh, the only girl at day care older than Ramona; she gestured into the wilds of the backyard, over by the swing set.
“No, thank you,” Ramona said quietly. She preferred the company of the younger kids, who played compliant parts in her make-believe and who never made fun of the way she talked. Ashleigh was wild, and brave, a runner and a climber.
“Time to come inside!” called Janet from the doorway. Janet was a grown-up. Janet was always trying to help Ramona talk better, which was nice in a way, but Ramona hadn’t figured out yet how to tell Janet that she would rather be left alone.
“Ashleigh! Milo! Danny! Ramona!” Janet said. “Come on in! It’s getting colder!”
Slowly, one by one, the children broke off from their exploration and started the long trudge to the door—and quite a slog it was, weighted down with boots, coats, mittens, scarves. Ramona thought about the hot chocolate and the warm chair that waited for her inside. With any luck it would soon be TV time. And then everything would be perfect.
The snow swirled in a gust of wind, and Ramona was the last child standing in the wilderness of the yard. The Perfect Princess prepared to warm herself in her Antarctic camp, with her faithful and loyal servants all around.
But then she saw a figure through the mist of heavy snow, a small adult dressed in regular clothes, with no coat or hat. That wasn’t right. There weren’t supposed to be any grown-ups in the yard.
“Ramona!” Janet called out, her voice sounding very far away.
The Perfect Princess took a step toward the person, who was clearly a woman. Ramona was a little scared, but she had a feeling that this was the right thing to do.
“Ramona!” Janet said. “Where are you going? Come inside.”
Ramona took a few more steps through the snow and there, over by the basketball hoop, was the face she had been waiting to see.
It was Grandma Anna.
“You came back,” Ramona whispered to her.
Grandma Anna looked the way she used to before she got sick. She was wearing old jeans, a man’s shirt, and sandals. She smiled at Ramona, and Ramona felt a shiver that was both happy and sad.
“Are you staying?” Ramona asked.
“Ramona!” Janet called.
Grandma Anna nodded and smiled. She put a finger over her lips the way she used to, when she thought something was so special that she and Ramona would keep it between them like a secret treasure.
“Mama really wants to see you,” Ramona told her.
Grandma Anna nodded, one hand resting on her cheek, and she looked at Ramona in the way that always made Ramona feel extra-special, like there was something about Ramona that made her grandma happier than anything else in the world.
“Will you come with me?” Ramona asked.
“Ramona! Now!” yelled Janet through the veil of snow.
Now Grandma Anna pointed to the door, as though to say that Ramona should be a good girl and do as Janet said. And that was true. Grandma Anna always knew the right thing to do.
“OK, but come back,” Ramona said.
I love you, Grandma Anna mouthed silently, and when Ramona turned away and looked back again, she was gone.
15. EITHER EMBRACE HIM OR THROW HIM OUT IN THE SNOW.
Lewis went to work after all. It turned out to be easier than he thought to threaten a man at gunpoint, then put in a shift on the sales floor. If anything, he felt better than usual. His inexplicable (to him) actions had made him feel years younger. While he still felt a sick vibration inside, his knees and hip were free of aches, and after he got home he treated himself to a pain-free run in the snow around Lake of the Isles, where he passed the small lagoon where he once deposited the ashes of his late wife.
By the next afternoon he gave little thought at all to the loaded pistol that rested on the sideboard in the dining room, next to that day’s Star Tribune. He did a round of push-ups in his underwear and drank two cups of coffee. The snow had stopped falling for the moment but the temperature was plunging, making it necessary for him to crank the thermostat. The hell with the gas bill. He wasn’t going to freeze in his own house. He put on a Frank Zappa record and padded around tidying, suddenly inspired with ideas of order.
When the doorbell rang Lewis took it at first as a sound effect on the record, which was percolating with a lewd, dense quasi-funk. But then he spotted the shadow on the other side of the front door, and jogged into the dining room to toss the newspaper over the gun. When the bell kept ringing he made for the door, cursing under his breath. It was probably the mailman hand-delivering the latest stack of bills.
It wasn’t the mailman. When Lewis threw open the door he felt a flash of warmth at the sight of his neighbor and friend Stan Garabaldi. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d had a visitor other than Ramona and Jay.
“What the hell do you want?” Lewis barked.
“I came over to see if you’re holding,” Stan said, stone-faced. “I’m jonesing, Louie.”
“If I was, I wouldn’t share it with you,” Lewis told him. “I’d lock the doors and get wasted, man.”
“You gonna have me in,” Stan said, “or am I gonna stand here with icicles hanging off my dick?”
Lewis chuckled and held the door open for Stan. He’d known the older man since Jay was a baby. In that time, Stan had gone to fat and lost his hair, divorced one wife and married another, and now had a son in high school. He’d also developed a heart condition and retired early from his marriage-counseling practice, letting his younger wife deal with the working world while he occasionally took odd jobs.
Stan wheezed and complained as he undertook the Minnesota visitor’s ritual—divesting himself of his outerwear and heavy boots, depositing thick clumps of icy detritus all over and around the thick wooly mat in the entryway. When he was done he stood, a head shorter than Lewis, flushed and red in his zipped-up fleece jacket.
“So what’re you up to?” he asked in his gravelly baritone. “Didn’t even know if I was going to catch you home.”
“I don’t work today,” Lewis told him. “The sales of silk ties and mid-price shirts have fallen on lesser lights for the moment.”
Stan padded across the living room in his socks. “Listen to this shit,” he said, motioning at the stereo. “Don’t you even have a CD player?”
“I have become a dinosaur,” Lewis admitted.
“No shit.” Stan picked up the record cover and looked at it with begrudging approval. “I remember this one. It’s got that song about it hurting when you pee. I’ve been there.”
“Two-plus decades of monogamy had their drawbacks,” Lewis said. “But at least I never got the clap.”
Stan laughed loudly. “There’s still time,” he said.
Lewis smiled ruefully. He had to give Stan credit—he never pussyfooted around the topic of Anna. He was one of the few people who managed not to treat Lewis as though he had some terrible disease.
“You want something?” Lewis asked. “Coffee? Bourbon?”
“No, no.” Stan glanced around the place, resting his big hairy hand on the back of a chair. “I’m just checking in on you. Checking up on you, I guess I should say.”
“Checking up?” Lewis said. “Fuck, Stan. You know I’m fine. You’re not going to be like everyone else, worrying about how I’m doing, are you?”
“Well, Lewis, I know you have about ten layers of crust on you—”
“More like twenty,” Lewis interrupted.
“I saw Jay yesterday,” Stan said, more serious now. “Actually I took a client to that restaurant she works at. I forgot she was even working there until she came to take my order.”
“The Cogito?” Lewis said.
“Yeah. The Cogito.”
Lewis glanced into the dining room and saw he hadn’t done a good enough job of covering the gun—a little flash of metal was visible from where he stood. He moved his b
ody to block Stan’s view. Stan glanced over Lewis’s shoulder, too perceptive not to notice Lewis’s sudden unrest.
“Anyway, she looked kind of stressed out,” Stan said. “She’s such a good kid. Smart. When I asked her how you were doing, she got kind of weird with me. So I decided to come see what was up.”
“Stressed out?” Lewis said. “How do you mean?”
“Come on, Lewis. Don’t get cute with me.” Stan frowned, which entailed a reorganization of his bushy eyebrows and a shortening of his bulldog neck. “Stressed. Unhappy. Showing outward signs of strain. You and her have always been the same in some ways—neither of you are real chipper-sunshine types. But I was a little worried about her, and I got the feeling it was something to do with you.”
“Aside from the obvious shit,” Lewis said, “I’m doing fine.”
Stan shrugged. He knew this was how it was going to go.
“Seriously, Stan,” Lewis said. “I’m glad you stopped by. I appreciate your concern. But I’m as well as I can be.”
“Yeah, well,” Stan’s voice trailed off, and he rubbed his big belly. He’d put on about fifty pounds since Lewis had known him, slow and steady, and now looked to be about fifteen years older than Lewis rather than five.
“I’m a little nervous,” Lewis admitted.
“Yeah?” Stan gave him a look of commiseration. “They got you on pills?”
“They do,” Lewis said.
“They working?” Stan asked.
“A little bit,” Lewis said.
Lewis considered telling Stan about Anna, about his growing conviction that her piecemeal revealing of herself was leading up to something big. But he knew how that would sound.
“Well, it’s a start,” Stan said. He folded his arms and leveled Lewis with a look of warm frustration. “You know, it wouldn’t be the biggest failure in the history of the human race for you to admit that you’ve gone through some major setbacks and that you need people.”
“I admit that freely,” Lewis said, throwing open his arms.
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