The River in Winter

by Matt Dean

  The whisk had fallen silent. Tory stood watching me. "Are you okay?" he said.

  "I'm not okay," I said. I set the canister on the counter. "I'm as far from okay as-." I stopped.

  "What's going on?"

  He stood with his back to the window, his face partly in shadow. I had never noticed that his eyes were nearly black. I could not make out where the irises ended and the pupils began.

  That first night at the Gay Nineties-could it be, really, less than a week ago?-I'd thought he was young and handsome, then old and sad. In the space of a minute I'd dismissed him, and I'd never bothered to look at him after that. He was not a bad-looking fellow-sturdy square jaw, symmetrical features, well-formed mouth and nose, good bones. And those eyes, gleaming like polished black onyx.

  His ash-brown hair, usually neatly parted, was now in handsome disarray. A swirl of brown whiskers filled the hollow of each cheek. I realized that I hadn't shaved in days. I stroked the down on my cheek. By now I must look as if I'd glued scrapings of carrot flesh to my face.

  Tears came all too easily to me these days; I fought them back. I straightened. I waved away his question. "It's nothing," I said. "A couple of late nights. I'm just tired."

  But his dark eyes did not leave mine. "I know about Tom," he said. "I'm not supposed to say so, but I do. Christa told me."

  "She told-?" I felt behind me for the counter. Coffee beans crunched underfoot.

  He shrugged, glanced away. "You know how it is," he said. "When you're together with someone, you tell each other things."

  "You're together?"

  His face broke into a grin. He sighed. "I can pretend we are, if we're not. I-. Christa is something else, I'll say that."

  "Does she-? That is to say-."

  "You're changing the subject. Let me show you something." He nodded toward the living room, where a jazzy flugelhorn solo skittered above a rollicking boogie-woogie accompaniment.

  Out of the kitchen, through the living room, down a carpeted hall, up a flight of red oak stairs, and then another flight, he led me. Every couple of steps he glanced back, as if I might at any moment bolt for the front door.

  The entire third floor was an open space, a master suite. A majestic platform bed floated in the center, facing a row of floor-to-ceiling windows and a set of French doors that opened onto a three-sided balcony. Snow had begun to fall. Clusters of down drowned themselves in the churning green waters of the lake.

  Here as below, shelves filled an entire wall. He led me to them. German novels filled one shelf-Mann, Remarque, Hesse, Grass. On the shelf below, poetry. Baudelaire and Verlaine in red cloth, Whitman in green buckram, Crane in tooled leather. I ran my hand along the spines. My fingers tingled.

  "Were you an English major?" I asked him.

  He shook his head. "Just an enthusiast."

  On the bottom shelf at the far end of the room there was a wooden box. He sat on the floor, opened the box. From it he took a sheaf of onion-skin paper and a stack of photographs. He tossed the photos back into the box. Cradling the pages against his belly, he flipped through them. I sat beside him.

  He handed me a thin stack of yellowed paper. The first page bore a title in hard-struck majuscules.

  GRIEVING SONGS

  BY TORSTEN SCHMITT

  Torsten? "Tory is short for Torsten?" I said.

  "If your name were Torsten, wouldn't you shorten it to Tory?"

  "Point taken."

  "My dad was going through some kind of genealogical craze when I was born. I was named after some ancestor back in Hamburg. Read."

  I turned the page. Another title.

  CRIMSON, ORANGE, AND GOLD

  The commas had bored holes in the paper.

  Beneath the title, a poem.

  We walk along the river side by side.

  The light is failing. He is failing too,

  Although he has some strength yet to concede.

  The autumn air is warm but growing cool.

  Along the path the leaves are crimson, orange, and gold,

  Like crackling fire beneath our feet.

  I looked up. Tory watched me with brimming eyes.

  "What is this?" I asked him.

  "I wrote it after Adam died. My brother. My older brother. He was-. I worshiped him, but-." A tear streamed down his cheek. With the back of his hand he wiped it away. "Read."

  I read. The poem described a walk along the river-the river? my river? the Mississippi? The narrator's companion-Adam, presumably-explained how autumn was his favorite time of year. Crisp weather, football games, dances, leaves turning crimson, orange, and gold. For the sake of appearances, to live up to expectation, it seemed, Adam had taken girls to the dances. But then, afterward, after a quick peck on the cheek and a courteous farewell, he had gone to the beach-Bare Ass Beach, obviously, though the poem didn't give it that name.

  My face was hot. "Your brother was gay?" I said.

  Tory nodded. "He hid it for as long as he could. He was the captain of the football team, everyone's idea of the red-blooded American male." He reached into the box, handed me a photo.

  In the photo, a much younger Tory stood arm in arm with a slightly older, somewhat blonder, much handsomer version of himself-Adam. In the photo, Tory looked like a German club president, a drama club geek, a band fag. In the photo, Adam looked like a soap opera star, a matinee idol, a presidential hopeful, a prince. In the photo, I could not help noticing, Adam-not Tory-wore a red letterman jacket.

  I looked at Tory. I tipped the picture toward him, tapping Adam's jacket. "That jacket you wear all the time? It's his?" He nodded. I felt like shit. I stared at the photo.

  "As soon as he graduated, he was gone, off to San Francisco."

  I glanced down at the poem. Words jumped out at me: night sweats, wasting, lesions. I swallowed hard. "I can guess the rest."

  "He died in nineteen-eighty-eight. He was thirty years old."

  "Tory, I'm so sorry."

  "I wanted to show you this because I wanted you to know-." He kept his eyes, and his hands, in his lap. "I wanted you to know that I know about loss." Now he looked at me. "I would never be the kind of person who would say, 'I know how you feel,' but I know something about loss."

  From our place on the floor, the windows were narrow rectangles of pearl-gray light. Snowflakes dashed themselves against the glass, melted, dribbled down in rivulets and meanders. A cardinal darted toward the French doors, lighted on the balcony railing. The bird darted away, a red stain on the vellum sky. I turned back to Tory.

  "Lately," I said, "I've been thinking I need to reexamine all of my interpersonal connections."

  "Where does that leave me?"

  "Your stock is rising."

  His smile was broad, toothy-heart-breaking. If he put so much stock in my opinion-. Well, wasn't that just sad?

  "Were you on good terms when he died? You and Adam?"

  Tory cleared his throat. "We were closer than ever. He and my parents were estranged, but we-he and I-were very close. He lived with me, here, until-. I was with him-." He blinked and sniffled. "It's all in the poems. It's probably easier if you read the poems."

  The pages crinkled, slipped to the floor. I caught them and straightened the stack. "Tom and I fought a lot," I told him. "Thinking back on it now, I guess we-. We were probably together just because in college, we didn't really know any other gay people. We were both just there."

  I looked up. Tory bit his lip. He nodded. "I've had a few relationships like that."

  "I did love him. Don't get me wrong. But maybe-. Maybe it was all one-sided. Or maybe we were just too different. I don't know."

  Tory said, "I guess it makes the grief even harder. There are mixed feelings. It's hard to know what to feel."

  "I know he wanted out, but didn't exactly know how to tell me. Maybe he-. Maybe it wasn't an accident, the alcohol poisoning."

  He flinched as if I'd slapped him. "You don't really think he would have-."

  "I
don't know. Maybe I was so hard to live with that-."

  "That's crazy, Jonah." He glared at me as if he were extremely angry with me. His eyes were fierce. "Absolutely insane."

  "I guess you're right." I shifted my weight. The carpet was lush, but it hurt to sit on the floor.

  All at once Tory turned away, sniffing the air. "Motherfucker," he said. "The bacon's burning."

  * * *

  The bacon was black. No longer gems, the cubes of onion were tiny charcoal briquettes. The char lay in a scum of stinking black grease.

  Tory switched on the range fan and opened the windows in the breakfast nook. Cold, clean-smelling air flooded the kitchen.

  From a cabinet under the stove Tory fetched a new skillet. He scrambled the eggs with shredded cheddar. I made coffee. It took me many long minutes to figure it out, but as the carafe slowly filled, the brew looked more or less like coffee.

  At the same moment, Tory and I both noticed that the stereo had gone silent, that the record had ended. We stood facing each other, our heads cocked, listening to a faint hiss from the other room. Somewhere in the depths of the house a boiler or furnace thrummed.

  "I'll go," he said. After a time, a factory whistle ushered in a lively syncopated piano riff. The riff halted briefly, and Billy Joel sang something about living in Allentown. Maybe people in Allentown listened to Billy Joel.

  Tory closed the windows, and he and I sat in the breakfast nook at a round table barely larger than our stoneware plates. Tory set out a jug of cream and a bowl of sugar cubes. The creamer and sugar bowl matched the plates. Our forks matched each other. The napkins matched the tablecloth. In Tory's kitchen, apparently, everything matched.

  I was more willing, now, to tell Tory the whole tale. Even so, I wasn't sure where to start. I began with Eliot's invitation to group, and got somehow sidetracked with a detailed description of Charlie's tasseled loafers.

  "Chaussure," Tory said.

  "Chaussure?" I pronounced the word carefully, mimicking him as closely as I could manage.

  "Footwear. I always think of tasseled loafers as the chaussure of the pompous. They can hardly be called shoes. They are chaussure."

  I squinted at him, unsure what to make of this.

  "Never mind," Tory said. "Go on."

  I told him about the members of the group, describing each man and the tenor of the group's conversation.

  In the living room, the music had gone silent. I half-turned, thinking I would volunteer, this time, to change the record, but then there were wind chimes, a helicopter, chords on piano, climbing, climbing.

  Licking a string of cheddar from his fork, Tory said, "Adam used to call them Kinsey queers."

  "Kinsey queers?"

  "Have you ever read the Kinsey report?" I shook my head. "I'm not sure why it was-probably something to do with the era-but when Kinsey set out to explore human sexuality, he found that gay men tended to be rather effeminate and campy. He depicted them sitting around talking in double entendre and quotes from Broadway shows."

  I blushed. "I think I may have been the only one quoting show tunes, but the rest of them definitely were fond of the double entendre. The single entendre, too, for that matter."

  "So you didn't feel particularly comfortable."

  "It turned out not to be such a kick, but not just because of that. It turned out-the chaussure guy told me-they all think of themselves as formerly gay."

  "Ah. An ex-gay ministry."

  "Ex-gay?" I said.

  "That's what they call it."

  "Ex-gay. Ridiculous. I don't understand how you can become ex-gay, any more than you can become ex-straight."

  "People like that take over the word 'Christian,' you know, and 'morality,' as though they're the only ones who can say what those words mean. Why was it again you ended up spending an evening with these formerly homosexual men?"

  "Believe me, I wouldn't have seen the show if I'd read the Playbill."

  "Deception as a means of bringing someone to reality. Excellent."

  I thought about that for a moment. Something in me, some warm place in the center of my heart, refused to connect the Eliot whose hand on my shoulder had comforted me with the passive-aggressive Eliot who'd hid in the kitchen while his "ex-gay" minions plied me with off-color banter. "I think it was just a horrible misunderstanding," I said.

  "That's some misunderstanding," Tory said.

  I told him how it had happened, how Eliot had rescued me from Dr. Bell's office, and how he'd made me easy on a hard day. "It all has to do with Tom, I guess. I guess I was-. I was crazy with grief."

  Tory sipped his coffee. He grimaced. "A little strong," he said.

  "My first time. Sorry."

  He lifted the white jug and spilled cream into his cup until the coffee turned pale. "Grief can make you do crazy things, especially in a case like yours. The shame of it is that this Eliot person offered you the right remedy, but with some unpleasant strings attached."

  "I expected this group to be gay men who were struggling to get back some sort of spiritual life."

  "I think the ex-gay stuff is all bullshit. God is for everyone. That's what the pastor of my church says more or less every Sunday. In God there is neither Jew nor gentile, neither slave nor free, neither male nor female, and if Paul were writing today he'd add, neither gay nor straight. Do you think it might do you some good to talk to him?"

  As he spoke, I felt a familiar closing-in, the accustomed wish to run. I suppressed it, deflected it with a joke. "Hasn't Paul been dead for a couple thousand years?" Tory gave me a grave look. I cleared my throat. "I've never really been a church kind of person."

  "Of course. I understand."

  "That is to say, I haven't been to church in ages. I might get more from some one-on-one time, rather than just diving in. What denomination is it?" I said.

  "Lutheran"

  "Not Missouri Synod, I take it."

  "Not Missouri Synod."

  "What do you get out of it?" I said. "From church, I mean. When I was four, it was all Kool-Aid and cartoon pictures of Noah's Ark."

  "First, there are all the social things, the friends you make, and the support structure you grow into. Everyone around you is on the same journey you are. There are people all around you trying to learn from the same mistakes, trying to navigate the same dark waters. And then, like I said, when Adam died, I got a lot of comfort from being among sympathetic people."

  I had barely touched my eggs. Tory pointed at my plate. "No good?" he said.

  "It's delicious. I'm not all that hungry." The sizzling onions had whetted my appetite, but then the burnt bacon had dulled it. In the air, still, there was a whiff of charred flesh.

  He stacked my plate on top of his. Standing, he took them both to the sink. I had left his poems on the counter, near the coffee maker. He picked them up and, riffling the pages, brought them back with him to the table. He set the stack between us.

  "Do you pray?" he asked me.

  "Isn't it a kind of crutch?" I said. These were Barbara's words; I heard them in her voice. "Isn't it a way of abdicating thought and responsibility? A way of going all Scarlett O'Hara? As if to say, 'I'll think about it tomorrow-let God think about it today'?"

  Tory laughed, a low long chuckle in his throat. "For me it's a kind of meditation. I came to it out of grief, sort of a cry to the heavens. I made demands, demanded answers. A 'who the fuck do you think you are?' kind of thing. Now it's a way to keep me sane. I'm a lawyer, you know."

  I hadn't known. I fell silent, thinking how I might factor his profession into my increasingly complex view of him. I flipped through the pages he had set on the table. The final poem, "The River in Winter," began:

  The river, in winter, is not a river at all,

  But a white plain of glitter and glare,

  The prismatic dazzle of light and ice.

  I read a few more lines. The river was a symbol of something-life, death, I couldn't quite make out what.

&
nbsp; Far beneath in the earth's deep flesh,

  In the flanks, in the cavities and bones,

  As some say Eve was hidden in Adam's rib,

  The spring is hidden. The promise of summer's

  green lies beneath the winter's white.

  The words sang in my head, composing their own melody. It was a halting kind of tune, rising, falling, rising again.

  "Have you ever thought of setting this to music?"

  Tory nodded. "That was the idea," he said. "A song cycle, sort of Schubertian. Like Winterreise or Die sch?ne M?llerin. That's why I used the word 'songs.' I tried to add music, but I don't have any talent for it."

  In college, for Dr. Benton's composition class, I'd set a group of Emily Dickinson poems as art songs. All of them I'd set as waltzes. I'd been thinking of Brahms's Liebeslieder Walzer. I'd never enjoyed a composition assignment more. "I'd like to take a shot at it. Is this your only copy? Can I take it with me?"

  "I have copies." He waved toward the pages. "Take it."

  He wrapped his hands around his coffee cup, cradled it to his chest, as if he needed to warm himself. He stared out the window into the side yard. I looked, too. The hedges and mulched flower beds were freaked with snow. A pair of squirrels romped across the grass and scampered up an oak tree.

  He said, "It helps me to know that there might be-that there is-some being greater than myself watching me, yes, to see if I do the right thing, but also watching over me to help pick up the pieces when I do the wrong thing."

  "Right and wrong. No two people can seem to agree about this business of right and wrong."

  "Say again?" Tory said. He set his cup on the table and leaned toward me.

  "You and your pastor believe that God is for everyone. Sam Stinson doesn't. Anders Thorstensen doesn't." I snorted. "I had just this conversation with Eliot."

  "What did he say?"

  "That the important thing-." This took some thought. My head had been all in a jumble at the time. "That the important thing was my relationship with God, what I needed it to be, not what other people said it should be."