The River in Winter

by Matt Dean

  Over the disordered chuckle of the current, I hear a rhythmic slap-the sound of oars stroking, scooping water. Out in the channel there are two singles, two rowers side by side. Lifting their oars, turning, they make for the dock. The two men wear sweatshirts, gloves, and stocking caps. They face downstream, away from me, but I know at a glance who they are. The long black hair, the shoulder-length white-blond hair. Michael and James.

  I set my boat on the dock and wait. As he turns his boat-port forward, starboard back-Michael sees me. He grins. "Jonas!" he calls.

  "Michael Walton," I say. "You're out early."

  "Always."

  They pull to, James first, and then Michael. I crouch on the dock. I hold their boats fast against it as they climb out. We lift the boats out of the water-Michael's first, and then James's.

  They're handsome boats, matching Staempfli cedar shells, glossy, the color of cinnamon. Water streams off the hulls, darkening the dock. I feel the damp rising through the soles of my socks.

  Michael hugs me. James hugs me. James says, "How are you doing?"

  "Fantastic," I say.

  Michael frowns. "Still having the headaches?"

  "Don't have one now," I say. I smile.

  "And the nausea?"

  James pokes Michael's arm. "Hey. Doctor Walrath. Knock it off."

  Michael groans. "I'm not a doctor yet." The way he says it, I know that he's saying it for the four hundredth time.

  James laughs, showing straight white teeth. He hasn't shaved. Peach fuzz shimmers along his jaw line. "You don't have the degree, but you are most definitely a doctor."

  To me, Michael says, "Don't stop taking it again."

  The AZT. He means the AZT.

  * * *

  Three days. Seventy-two hours. One hell of a pregnant pause.

  I waited for three days, for seventy-two hours, knowing all along what the results would be, but hoping I was wrong, hoping I was just a hypochondriac, a paranoiac, a worrywart.

  No.

  No. I wasn't wrong. I wasn't just a worrywart.

  When the news came, when Michael sat with me in a small, dark room at the back of the Pink House and showed me a dot-matrix print-out and told me the news, I saw nothing, heard nothing. He pointed to some numbers on the page, explained what they meant. He spoke, but I couldn't hear, couldn't understand. He might have been speaking Swahili, Esperanto, Czech. Blood sang in my ears. I ran out.

  He followed.

  "Every day," he said. "Every day there are new breakthroughs." He'd said it before. Now he said it again. And then he said it again. "Come back tomorrow or the next day. There are things you need to start doing."

  I stood in the parking lot, staring at the grimy hubcaps of my car. Had I ever washed my car, in all the time that I'd owned it? On University, I remembered-not far from Eliot's, not far from Michael's-there was a car wash. What was the name of it? Squid? Anemone? Octopus? I should take my car there, I thought. I should get it washed.

  Michael stood next to me, so close that I could feel the heat of his body. It was a warm day-a gorgeous day, a plucked-and-shaved Playgirl centerfold of a day-but I felt cold. I shivered. Michael hugged me, tightly, as if he could still the quivering of my muscles.

  "Come back," he said again. "Come back tomorrow or the next day. There are things you need to start doing."

  Over and over Michael said the same few things. He held me fast, held me tight, smoothed and calmed my trembling limbs.

  "There are breakthroughs every day. New drugs. Come back tomorrow or the next day."

  I said nothing. I kept thinking that my car was in urgent need of a wash. When had I ever washed it, after all? It was filthy.

  * * *

  The next day, I went back to the Pink House. Michael wasn't there. I saw a doctor, a slim, entirely bald man in a white jacket. It was bad news, of course, the doctor said, but it was better to know. Every day, there were new breakthroughs, he told me-new drugs, new treatments. His name was Doctor Bell, but I couldn't make myself see that as a good sign.

  There were things I needed to start doing, he said. Diet, exercise, safe sex. AZT.

  "Safe sex?" I said. "But what if I'm with another guy who-?"

  "We believe there are multiple strains of the virus. There is the possibility of-."

  But by then my attention had faded. Spike hadn't been the only one, after all. Jose, the men in San Francisco. If there were multiple strains-.

  "We'll start you on AZT right away," Doctor Bell said. He took a pad from his pocket, wrote out a prescription. "AZT is a drug that's commonly prescribed-."

  My mind wandered again. I held the prescription in my hand. I stared at the three big letters-the only three letters that were legible. AZT.

  From the beginning, I hated it. The headaches were bad, the nausea was bad. After a few weeks, I stopped taking it. When Michael found out, he did everything he could think of to get me back on it, short of sitting on my chest and injecting the drug into my neck.

  * * *

  Michael says, "I know the side effects can be-."

  "I know, I know. I won't stop taking it." I try to show, by my tone, that I'm making him this promise for the four hundredth time.

  James says, "Have you found a place yet?"

  I glance out over the river. Curls of mist wave above its surface. "I'm going to stay with Tory and Christa. They don't mind-or at least they say they don't mind. I have the whole basement to myself. I have my own bathroom." A small and mildew-smelling bathroom, true, but I'm used to mildew-smelling bathrooms. "And there's a piano down there." An old out-of-tune spinet, it's true, but I've found that it's easier to compose on an out-of-tune piano than on no piano at all.

  * * *

  I moved into Tory's house even before he and Christa returned from Arizona. By chance, Christa called from Tory's parents' house, to check up on me, and I told her the story-what had happened to the OWT, what had happened with Eliot. She put Tory on the phone, and-by then I was weeping-I told him the story.

  "There's a key in the garage," he said.

  "What?"

  "In the garage," he said. "The shelves at the back. Under a clay pot. You'll find it. It's the only clay pot there. Stay at my house-at our house-till you find a place." He gave me the combination for the garage door opener. "There's a keypad on the door frame. Did you write down the combination? Do you have a pencil?" He reeled it off again, a series of four digits.

  "Tory," I said. "I-. Thank you, but I can't. I-."

  I thought it would be difficult to live with them, difficult to see them together. I thought I would moon over him, pine for him, that I would become the lovelorn heroine of one of Christa's romance novels.

  "I'm not going to argue," he said. "There's a key in the garage. The shelves at the back, under the clay pot. You'll see it. If you're not at the house when we get back, I'll never forgive you."

  * * *

  At first, it was difficult to live with them. Around the house Tory more often than not was-is-catch-as-catch-can about what he wears, especially in the morning, before he's had coffee. He owns a pair of tight and obscenely short shorts-red nylon gym shorts with an R above the hem of the left leg, shorts that he may, in fact, have worn in junior high school. In the morning, that's all he ever wears. At first, the sight of his bare chest and bare legs could make me tremble with longing.

  One Sunday morning in late spring, not long after he at last forgave me for burning Grieving Songs, Christa and Peanut were off visiting Alice in Hudson. Tory made pancakes. He flipped them onto matching plates. He poured coffee into matching mugs. He sat across from me at the table in the breakfast nook. Taking up our matching silverware, we ate in companionable silence. I watched a flock of silver-white birds dip into a hedge and crowd its leafy branches.

  "What are you going to do next?" he asked me. "For work, I mean."

  I'd been doing temp work-filing, reception-"light clerical," they called it. "Light clerical"-it was a nice way
of saying that I couldn't type for shit. When I didn't have an assignment from the temp agency, I volunteered at the Pink House. For a couple of weeks, I'd been answering phones at a law office in downtown Minneapolis.

  "I thought I was doing it," I said.

  I looked at him and saw that he was frowning at his pancakes. His fork lay in a pool of buttery amber syrup. "What if you went back to school? Got a master's? There are places that hire resident composers. Churches, maybe the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra. Or you could teach. Theory, history, composition."

  "I never thought-."

  "You're too good for this temp stuff," he said. "You deserve better. Think about it."

  He looked up. His eyes met mine. The set of his jaw was firm, resolute, as if he'd been planning to say this-had been rehearsing it-for some time.

  All at once something shifted. It was an almost physical sensation-the sensation of something moving, sliding, clicking into place. Tory would never be my lover. He could never be my lover. I didn't want him for a lover-not really. He was my brother. We were-we are-brothers.

  In the living room, the stereo had gone quiet. The record-one of those lush Ravel ballet pieces, full of harps and flutes-had ended. Without Peanut's constant stream of chatter and prattle and fussy tears, the house was as hushed as a library. We sat looking out the window.

  Tory said, "You know, it was my fault, too."

  "Your-. What?"

  "Grieving Songs. What happened to Grieving Songs. I should never have given up the only copy."

  By then I'd apologized countless times and in various ways for the loss of the poems. Of course I'd simply told him I was sorry. But I'd also written him notes and letters. I'd found some poems about loss and remorse, and had copied them out and had given them to him. I'd even bought him flowers-purple hyacinths, because a florist told me that, in the language of flowers, purple hyacinths say, "please forgive me."

  Eventually Tory had forgiven me. Now, I couldn't quite muster another apology.

  "I was just so eager to hear them set to music," he said. "I just couldn't wait to see what you'd do with them. I thought if you had to wait for me to make a copy-. I mean, I would have had to take them to the office the next day, or type them up again. It would have been days before you got the copy, and I thought-."

  "You thought I'd lose interest."

  "Yes."

  I made another apology after all, and then I said, "I can't explain what happened that night. I was-."

  "Don't take me wrong," he said. "I'm over it. I was mad, sure, but I'm over it. I'm grateful, in a way, now that I've had some time to think about it. I needed to let all that go."

  I set my hand on my knee and stroked the stiff linen of my napkin. I worried the hem with my thumbnail. "The new poems are certainly more-."

  He held up his hand to stop me. "They're getting there. I still struggle with the long lines. Too much room to move around. But what I was saying is that-. I didn't mean to open up a rehash of this whole thing. I forgave you for losing the poems. It took me longer to realize that I needed to forgive Adam for dying, and let go of the grief." He looked out the window. It was still early, maybe nine o'clock. Across the street, in a neighbor's yard, the dewy, silver-green leaves of a young Russian olive tree shimmered like jewels. "And I needed to forgive myself, too. It was partly my fault, and I needed to forgive myself."

  * * *

  "I'd better get out there," I say to Michael and James. "It's cold. I need to get warmed up."

  Michael nods gravely. "Call me or come by the clinic if-."

  I hold up my hands. "Okay, okay."

  He hugs me again. His sweatshirt is damp with sweat. His hair smells of apples and limes.

  James hugs me. As we part, he says, "I almost forgot. Did you apply yet?"

  Apply to the School of Music, he means, to the master's program. I shake my head, "Still studying for the GRE," I tell him. "Taking it next month. I'm taking some classes in the meantime. I'm weak in Form and Analysis, and I need to learn German." German, Italian, or French, actually, but since Tory speaks German, that's the language I've chosen.

  "German," Michael says, as if I've just said I've taken up neurosurgery as a hobby. "How's that working out?"

  "Nicht so schlecht," I say. "Nicht so gut."

  Michael crinkles his nose. "I don't know what that means."

  James lays his hand on Michael's shoulder. "Not so bad, not so good." To me, he says, "What are you doing for Thanksgiving? We're having some people over."

  I wince. "A lavish feast of tofurkey and vegan stuffing? I don't think so."

  Michael winces. He looks at James. "He's talked me into having an actual turkey." He touches his belly. He cuts his eyes at James. "A living creature with a face and a brain, butchered and plucked in some factory."

  James rolls his eyes. "It's one day out of the year. You can just deal with it, or eat your weight in green beans and yams." To me, he says, "So, what do you say? Join us?"

  "I'm going to San Francisco again this year. Visiting my mother. I'm flying out tomorrow morning."

  I'm looking forward to the trip. Barbara's taking a whole week off work. She's promised we won't set foot in a winery. There's been some intimation of a blind date with one of her neighbors, someone named Bryce Murray. "No relation," Barbara keeps saying with a hearty laugh, as if it's some great joke.

  "Don't do anything I wouldn't do," Michael says. It's the kind of thing people usually say light-heartedly, but Michael says it in all gravity.

  "Check," I say. "No fun whatsoever, I promise."

  With a deep sigh, Michael says, "I need to change my image."

  They lift their boats and trudge up the bank to the boathouse. As I slide Ruby into the water, I hear them talking, laughing, teasing each other.

  I push off the dock. I look back and see the two of them drying their boats.

  All around me the river prattles and blathers. I can no longer hear the men's voices, but I watch them come together in an embrace-a tight, full-body embrace. They kiss. It's a long, deep kiss, the kiss of two people much in love.

  * * *

  I spoke too soon. I feel a headache coming on, a black flower blooming at the base of my neck, rising at the back of my head.

  I stop pulling the oars. I float. The shell drifts westward, to starboard.

  I close my eyes. I hold both oars in my left hand, knead my shaven scalp with my right.

  Must it be? I think.

  The pain dulls, subsides. I open my eyes. The sky is blue now, a pale shade of blue, thin as gruel. On the west bank, leafless trees sway in the cool breeze. Bare branches-the trees' nude limbs-clatter and creak.

  It must be.

  Plainly, manifestly, unequivocally, it's too late in the season to be on the water. But I woke early this morning-from the AZT, perhaps, or from a dream I've since forgotten, or from simple worry. As I lay in my bed I discovered that I needed one more morning on the water before the river freezes. That was my excuse. As for Michael and James-. They must be-plainly, manifestly, unequivocally-out of their freaking minds.

  * * *

  I forgot-I am carrying the Walkman in the pocket of my sweatshirt. I feel it, now, the square bulk of it against my belly. Still holding the oars one-handed, in my left hand, I reach into my pocket and pull out the earphones. I stuff them into my ears. I feel around for the Walkman, for the play button. I find it, press it.

  Beethoven. The Seventh Symphony. The first movement, the end of the slow introduction, the Poco sostenuto.

  I've been listening to this symphony for weeks, immersing myself in it. I have a paper due next week in Form and Analysis. "The Use of Rhythm in Beethoven's Seventh," I'm calling it.

  The Seventh is built on rhythm. Rhythm is everything, it seems, in the Seventh. Rhythm is the ore, and the symphony is the glinting rapier Beethoven forged from it.

  The flutes break in with the main theme, their voices thin, tremulous. All at once the strings take up the melod
y. A dactylic rhythm thrums away in the horns and timpani.

  My blood races. Everything in the world is contained in this music. The rhythms are as old as the world-the rhythm of galloping horses' hooves, the stroke of oars, the beat of tribal drums, the cadences of ancient poetry. Everything in the world-work, play, dance. The thrust and recoil of tides, the rise and fall of sex and love, the cycle of death and renewal. The surge and subsidence of the earth itself, of the tectonic plates. The whole world is contained in this music.

  I pull the oars. They pull easily.

  There were other topics I might have considered-that I did consider-for the Form and Analysis paper. Tory suggested "Beethoven's Happy Endings," an idea he picked up from reading McNamara.

  In Beethoven-according to McNamara-there is always a happy ending. But for Beethoven joy never comes without sorrow. Before the establishment of order, there is chaos. Before the safe haven, there is peril. Before the ascent to heaven, a descent into hell. Before resurrection, death. Before light, darkness.

  Before the achievement of peace, of tranquility, in Beethoven, there is often a pause. It's as if you stand at a threshold, pausing, uncertain, before you pass through it-as if the entryway is also a barrier. A moment of stillness, of pondering, of uncertainty. To go forward may mean the attainment of paradise-or the loss of everything-or both.

  The sun is up. The river is quite still, as if the water is on the cusp of freezing. The water is a plain of glitter and glare, a prismatic dazzle of light.

  My face-my cheeks-feel colder, suddenly. My cheeks are wet. I am crying.

  On my left, the upward-sloping strand slides by, a brown blur of tall oaks and steep sandy banks. I row harder. This part of the beach makes me think of Tom, of humid air and pounding sunlight, of lustrous summer afternoons we spent here, driving the men crazy with our aloofness, our conspicuous togetherness.

  It takes less than this to remind me of Tom. I often think of him. I miss him. When we were happy, when things were good, he was the whole world. Maddening at times-anyone can be maddening at times-but loving and attentive and beautiful. The whole world. When we were happy-when things were good, when I knew that he loved me-nothing made me feel safer or luckier than the warmth of his body beside me.

  If only I could see him one more time, even at a distance, even if his ghost emerged, shady and incorporeal, from the thicket of willow saplings on the shore-.