The Snow Queen Page 6

  And he’ll abandon, soon enough, his already rather haphazard ambitions to be an actor. He’ll come to his senses—he lacks the reckless courage, the delusional optimism. He’ll begin to devise a new life for himself.

  Which he will do without Liz.

  In time, he’ll get an actual job (Andrew, it’s already later than you think). He’ll meet the girl, the one Liz will not, in fact, have to help him feel less guilty about but the girl who comes along after her (or the one after her). He’ll father the baby who’ll mean, along with the wonder of a blinking, murmuring creature produced out of nothing at all, that he won’t have the chance at a second reinvention. The money question won’t permit it. This, man-child, is your invention, this woman and child, love them as faithfully as you can, because there isn’t really anything else coming along, not at least for quite some time.

  Whereas Liz, if she has anything to say about it (and she has something to say about almost everything), will be a staunch and rather intimidating old woman in sunglasses, gray hair pulled back tight, still making money, all the money she needs; still seeing boys like Andrew, harmed (there’s no denying it) by her love for them, and so all the more bemused by their ephemeral conviction that they are the winners in the world, just as the farmer must discover, to his great surprise, that his heart will explode before he reaches seventy and that his wife will roll on for another thirty years or more, serene and majestic as the freight trains that have been sending their distant oboe moans across the dark fields for as long as anyone can remember.

  After Barrett has gone, Tyler sings quietly in the kitchen. Beth will awaken whenever she does (is all this sleep a healing sign, is her system re-marshalling its assaulted reserves, or is her body just … practicing for death?).

  This shard of hope …

  This knife of ice …

  Fucking song.

  Why, Tyler wonders, does it seem so obdurately, so perversely and needlessly, difficult? He has talent. He doesn’t aspire (not really, not deeply—well, maybe a little, at odd moments) to genius. He doesn’t need to be Mozart, or Jimi Hendrix. It’s not as if he’s trying to invent the flying buttress, or crack the time-space continuum.

  It’s a song. All Tyler requires of it, really, is that it be more than three and a half minutes’ worth of pleasantly occupied air.

  Or. Well, okay. All Tyler requires of it is that it be better—a little better, please, just a little—than what he’s technically capable of producing. It’s the apple he can almost but not quite reach. Maybe if he shinnied another quarter inch up the tree trunk, maybe if he stretched his arm just a little farther …

  There is, Tyler believes, a myth missing from the pantheon.

  It concerns a man who produces something. Say he’s a carpenter, a good carpenter; good enough. His work is solid and substantial, the wood well cured, the edges smooth, the joints all plumb and true. His chairs recognize the body; his tables never wobble.

  The carpenter, however, finds, over time (time is always the punch line, isn’t it?), that he wants to make something finer than a perfectly level table or a comfortable, welcoming chair. He wants to make something … marvelous, something miraculous; a table or chair that matters (he himself isn’t sure what he means by that); a table that’s not so exalted as to apologize for its modest object-life of load-bearing, a chair that doesn’t criticize those who sit in it, but, at the same time, a table and chair that rise up, revolutionize, because they … what? (What?)

  Because …

  … they shape-shift, and appear in different forms to everyone who uses them (Look, it’s the table from my grandmother’s farm! My god, it’s the chair my son was building for my wife’s birthday when he had the accident, it’s finished, it’s here, how is that possible?).

  Because …

  … the table is the reincarnation of the father you lost—patient and powerful, abiding—and the chair—gracious, consoling, undeluded—is the long-awaited mother, who never arrived at all.

  The carpenter can’t, of course, make furniture like that, but he can imagine it, and as time goes by he lives with growing unease in the region between what he can create and what he can envision.

  The story would end … who knows how?

  It would end when a ragged old peddler, selling worn-out oddments nobody wants, to whom the carpenter has been kind, grants him the power. But this way it ends badly, doesn’t it? The wish goes wrong. The people who sit in the chairs, who rest their forearms on the tabletops, are horrified by their own conjured memories, or furious at these manifestations of their perfected parents, because they’re so forcefully reminded of the parents actually given them.

  Or, once the carpenter’s wish has been granted, he finds himself imagining furniture imbued with still more powerful magic. Couldn’t it heal maladies, mightn’t it inspire profound and lasting love? He spends the rest of his days searching for the old peddler, hoping for a second spell that will render those tables and chairs not just comforting, but altering, transfiguring …

  There is, it seems, some law of myth-physics that requires tragic outcomes of granted wishes.

  Or it could end with the carpenter unenchanted. There’s no peddler in this version, no bestowing of a wish. Increasingly aware of the limits of the possible, but lost to his old satisfactions, the carpenter finds limits to his joy in sanding and measuring, because a table or chair devoid of supernatural qualities will not, cannot, satisfy him any longer; because he has too vividly imagined that which he can imagine, but can’t generate. It would end with the carpenter bitter and impoverished, cursing an empty wine bottle.

  Or (hey) it could end with the carpenter transformed into a tree (by that peddler, or a witch or a god), waiting for a new, younger carpenter to cut him down, wondering if he’ll be present, some essence of him, in the tables and chairs yet to be made.

  Tyler can’t seem to come up with an ending that satisfies him.

  Back to the song, then. Try it, one more time, from the beginning.

  To walk the frozen halls at night

  To find you on your throne of ice

  It’s not really all that bad. Is it? Or is it maudlin, is it melancholia masquerading as true feeling? How are you supposed to know?

  With a sense of guilty abandon, he turns on the radio. Time to get another voice into the room.

  Here’s the practiced sonorousness of a newscaster’s voice, the baritone that’s come to sound like truth, revealed.

  “… gathering momentum, it’s going to be close, it all gets down to Ohio and Pennsylvania …”

  Tyler turns the radio off again. It can’t happen. Bush has not only killed multitudes, and murdered the economy. He’s a manufactured person, the limited son of Protestant privilege, recast as a devout Texas rancher. It’s a scam, it’s all greed and mirrors, it’s Doctor Wonder’s caravan rolling into town with preposterous cures. How can anybody, how can one single person, be struggling to the polls (is it snowing in Ohio, in Pennsylvania?) thinking, Let’s have four more years of that?

  Is “throne of ice” just adolescent romanticism? Where, at what point, does passion bleed into naïveté?

  Tyler is thinking about the word “shard” when Beth comes into the kitchen. She’s like a Victorian sleepwalker, alabaster in her white nightgown. Tyler stands, goes to her as if she’s just returned from a journey.

  “Hey there,” he says, draping his arms over the fragile bones of her shoulders, gently pressing his forehead to hers.

  She murmurs happily. They stand, embracing, for a while. This has become a morning ritual. Beth may or may not be thinking what Tyler is thinking, but she seems to know that a period of sleepy morning no-speak is important. She’s never said anything as she stands in Tyler’s arms after awakening; she either knows or intuits that conversation will take them into a different day, they’ll be two lovers talking, which will happen soon enough but is not what these first-thing-in-the-morning clutches are meant to be; is not this interlude of shared re
pose, this utter quiet, when they can still hold and be held, when they can stand together without speaking, the two of them, alive, for now, in the ongoing silence.

  Barrett walks the snowblown street, trailing two feet of green plaid scarf (his one concession to color) that, released from the hunker of his heavy gray coat, twists and eddies behind him.

  It’s funny. When he ran through the storm an hour ago, wearing nothing but shoes and shorts, the cold felt enlivening, an ether that transformed him, like a man who falls overboard and discovers, to his astonishment, that he can breathe underwater. In boots and coat and scarf, however, Barrett just trudges along like anybody, a miniature Admiral Peary negotiating the ice field of Knickerbocker, no aspect of the fleet messenger about him, no wings threatening to burst from his ankles, just a guy leaning into the wind, putting one heavy boot in front of the other.

  The shop will be cozily unilluminated, free of trade, the merchandise orderly and promising. It will be a sanctuary, uncompromised until the doors are opened to the seekers of Japanese jeans or intentionally wonky hand-knitted scarves or an original Madonna T-shirt from the Like a Virgin tour.

  Twenty minutes later, Barrett emerges from the L train onto Bedford Avenue. The world is awake now. The corner deli glows fluorescent in the snow. People walk bundled, heads down. This early, Williamsburg is all commuters, men and women with regular jobs, wrapped in pricey down greatcoats, in Burton parkas, members of the nomadic New York tribe that colonizes the grim outer neighborhoods after the younger and more reckless citizens have opened coffeehouses and shops, as Liz and Beth did seven years ago, wondering how insane it was to try to sell their particular offerings in what had been a Polish travel agency, with a butcher shop on one side (now a stratospherically expensive children’s clothing boutique) and, on the other, a Goodwill store (which has, over the past decade, been a succession of failed restaurants, and is soon to re-open, at the hands of some new optimist, as what appears to be a perfect replica of a Parisian bistro, right up to its faux-nicotine-stained walls).

  Even in its waking state, Williamsburg is quieted by the snow, veiled and muffled, humbled, reminded that a megalopolis is still subject to nature; that this vast noisy city resides on the same earth that has, for millennia, inspired sacrifices and wars and the erecting of temples, in an effort to appease a deity who could, at any moment, wipe it all away with one flick of a titanic hand.

  A young mother, hooded, with a scarf pulled up to her nose, pushes a baby carriage, its small occupant obscured by a translucent plastic cover that zips up the front. A man in an orange anorak walks two fox terriers, both of which wear red booties.

  Barrett turns onto North Sixth. There, in the middle of the block, is the brown-brick sternness of St. Anne’s Armenian Church. He passes it every day. Ordinarily it’s closed up, its windows dark and its imitation-medieval doors locked. Barrett’s comings and goings don’t coincide with the schedule of services, and it hasn’t, until this morning, fully occurred to him that the church possesses an interior at all. It might as well have been solid brick, not a building but a monument, in the shape of a church, to centuries of Middle Eastern murmurings, to the recitation of prayers and the kissing of icons, to the imprecations and hopes, the baptizing of babies and the dispatch of the dead. It had not quite seemed plausible to Barrett that this stolidly deserted edifice might, at certain hours, have a life.

  This morning, though, eight o’clock mass is being celebrated. The heavy brown doors are open.

  Barrett walks up the short span of concrete steps that lead to the entrance, and stops at the threshold. There it is, strange in its way but also deeply familiar—the brackish semi-light with its small glintings of gold, the priest and the altar boys (hefty kids, placid and rote, neither grotesque nor heroic, just adolescent schlumps—his own pudgy descendants), administering the ritual before an altar upon which two vases full of white chrysanthemums wilt under an enormous crucifix suspended from the ceiling, this one bearing an unusually gaunt and tormented Christ, who bleeds garishly from the wound in his greenish-white rib cage.

  The scattering of parishioners, a dozen at most, and all, it appears, elderly women, kneel dutifully in the mocha-colored pews. The priest raises chalice and wafer. The faithful rise rather painfully to their feet (they must be subject to all manner of knee and hip complaints) and begin their trudge to the altar, to receive the host.

  Barrett stands at the threshold, studded with the falling snowflakes that linger for a moment on his coat before vanishing.

  Beth says, “I think I want to go to work today.”

  The rite of early morning silence has been observed. Beth sits at the table, nibbling an edge of the toast Tyler has made for her.

  “You think?” Tyler asks. He’s never sure, lately, whether to encourage her to do more, or less.

  “Mmm-hmm,” she says. “I feel pretty good.”

  Her tiny white teeth negotiate, without visible appetite, a morsel of crust. She can seem, sometimes, like a small wild animal, suspiciously but hopefully testing something unfamiliar that’s been left on the ground

  “It’s really seriously snowing out there,” Tyler says.

  “That’s part of why I want to go. I’d like to get snowed on.”

  Tyler understands. She’s been especially eager, these past weeks, for whatever strong sensation she might be able to manage.

  “Barrett’s already there,” he says.

  “So early?”

  “He said he wanted to be there alone for a while. He wanted a dose of total quiet.”

  “And I want to go out into the weather and the noise,” she says. “We always want something else, don’t we?”

  “Well, yeah. We always want something.”

  Beth frowns at her crumb of toast. Tyler reaches across the tabletop, puts his hand on her pale forearm. He didn’t expect to feel quite so incompetent at tending to Beth, quite so unsure about almost everything he says and does. The best he can manage, usually, is trying simply to accompany her as the changes occur.

  He says, “Let’s get you cleaned up, then.”

  He’ll run a bath for her. He’ll soap her shoulders, trickle warm water down her knobbly back.

  “And when you’re ready, maybe I’ll walk you to the subway. Would you like me to do that?”

  “Yes,” she says, with an illegible smile. “I’d like that.”

  She’s touchy about being ministered to. Treat her too delicately, and she bridles (“I can walk up a flight of stairs on my own, thank you,” “I’m talking to someone, I’m fine, I like this party, please don’t ask me if I want to lie down”); treat her too casually, and she becomes indignant (“I may need a little help with these last few steps,” “I’m exhausted by this party, I really need you to take me home now”).

  “Eat your toast,” he says.

  She takes a single, game bite, and puts it down again. “I can’t, really,” she says. “It’s very good toast, though.”

  “I’m widely known for my toast.”

  “I’m going to go get dressed.”

  “Okay.”

  She stands, comes to him, kisses him lightly on the forehead, and for a moment it seems as if she’s the one who’s comforting him. It’s not the first such moment.

  Tyler knows what Beth will do. She’ll drape the clothes she selects on the bed, gently, as if the fabric had nerves. Everything she wants to wear is white, these days. White connotes virginity in some cultures, mourning in others. For Beth, white connotes a form of semi-visibility, a neither-here-nor-there quality, a sense of pause, an un-color, which apparently feels right to her, as if the assertions implied by colors, or black, would be inappropriate, maybe even impolite.

  Barrett sits in the empty shop like a young raja, alone with his treasures. Treasure is of course a bit of a stretch—it’s merely what Liz refers to as “merch.”

  Retail. Not exactly high art, not exactly the search for the cure. But still …

  It isn’t trivia
l. It may not be profound but it isn’t trivial either, the little treasure hunt, the bodily satisfactions. The ongoing search, by Liz and Barrett and Beth (when she can manage it, though it’s been some time since she’s been able to manage it) for the genuine among the dross, for the small wonders—the paper-thin leathers and robust, ink-blue denims; the talismans on chains—that echo, in affordable (semi-affordable) form, the jewel-dusted scarves and talking books and articulated golden elephants that once were presented to sultans. The objects and garments that are made by people who might have been tailors or weavers in England two hundred years ago; swift-fingered, charmingly peculiar people who wake every morning eager to knit more caps or cast another silver amulet, people with something witchy about them, people who may in some inchoate way believe that they are producing not mere products but protective gear that just might keep the righteous warrior alive as he storms his way to the Grand Vizier’s tower.

  And, yes, we are creatures of the flesh. Who knows that better than Barrett? Who’s better acquainted with the invisible fibers that tie yearning to vestment; those solemn parades of gold-threaded chasuble and starched white whisper of alb under the suffering wooden eyes of the crucified Christ? Doesn’t the secular world want, need, to walk both proud and penitent, robed, for the benefit of some savior or saint? We worship numberless gods or idols, but we all need raiment, we need to be the grandest possible versions of ourselves, we need to walk across the face of the earth with as much grace and beauty as we can muster before we’re wrapped in our winding sheets, and returned.

  Barrett sits behind the counter, with his reading spread before him: the Times, the Post, and this tattered copy of Madame Bovary, which he is reading for the sixth time. He roves among all three.