The Snow Queen, Page 8

  He says, “Happy 2006.”

  Beth says, “Happy 2006.” They click their glasses together.

  Tyler swallows his urge to say Happy 2006? Do the names John Roberts and Samuel Alito ring a bell? Did the hey-that’s-too-bad approach to Katrina make an impression? Does it bother you, even a little bit, that we’re living through the SECOND TERM of the worst president in history?

  Tyler just smiles, sips his champagne.

  What’s wrong with him? Beth has been healed. He repeats the phrase, to himself. Beth has been healed. How can he expend even one brain cell on the new, right-wing Supreme Court?

  Does Tyler really intend to grow into an old, righteous crank?

  Barrett gives him the look. Barrett always knows. Tyler is thankful.

  Barrett says to Beth, “Could I have you for a few minutes?”

  “You can have me for as long as you like,” she answers.

  Tyler releases Beth. Barrett offers his arm, a gesture that’s both parody of formality and not.

  He says, “I promised Ping I was just going to check on people’s champagne, and get back to this diatribe he’s delivering about Jane Bowles.”

  Beth speaks softly, close to his ear. “Ping means well,” she says. “Do you think he could be cured of the diatribes?”

  “Tricky. They’re not regular diatribes …”

  “What exactly would a regular diatribe be?”

  “They’re not the hundredth rehashing of something he knows, they’re not professorial, he just has these enthusiasms.”

  “He does.”

  “He makes some remarkable discovery, and he has to tell you about it. All about it.”

  “He’s curious. He’s the most curious person I know.”

  “Which is charming,” Barrett says.

  “Yes.”

  “And irritating.”

  “That, too.”

  Ping calls from the sofa. “Hey, you two, is it a private conspiracy, or can anybody join?”

  Barrett and Beth hurry to the sofa, where Ping, seated majestically, holds forth to Foster and Liz, who sit like acolytes on either side of him. Barrett sits in the green armchair across from the sofa; Beth perches on one of the chair’s arms.

  Ping is declaring Jane Bowles the Patron Saint of Crazy Ladies, a conversation Barrett is eager to escape. He’s long known everything about Bowles that’s so revelatory to Ping, but Ping would be wounded if Barrett broke in—Jane Bowles is, for the purposes of Ping’s immediate audience, his own discovery, a wild woman brought back from a dark continent, a marvel, found by Ping and now conjured for the wonderment of others.

  In the interest of New Year’s Eve, in the interest of a more general seeking-out of the kindness in himself, Barrett does his best to stifle a thought: God save us from people who think they’re smarter than they actually are.

  Foster, on Ping’s left, listens raptly. Foster is looking for someone to be. He’s spent his twenties and early thirties getting paid (both legitimately and otherwise) for the powerful Texas symmetry of his face and the genetic gift of his body; he’s trying to decide what, exactly, to do, now that his features are growing a little too worn (always, the workings of mortality) to be marketable …

  Barrett’s worry: Foster is, at the age of thirty-seven, running around picking up anything that looks promising, with no ruling passion or overriding principle. He wants a new future, but is so disorganized in his pursuit of it that Barrett worries he’ll still be figuring it out at fifty, still waiting tables, hiring out as a daddy on the Internet (Are you looking for a real man? I know what you want. I know what you need.) as he plots his course.

  Some people probably assume that Foster’s aimless search is true of Barrett as well.

  Those people are wrong. Barrett is surprised to find that he has no strong or abiding interest in correcting the mistaken impressions of those who simply don’t know.

  Barrett is a humble shopboy. He moves the merch. And in private, for his own benefit, he’s compiling his Unified Field Theory of Everything, which, like so many projects worth undertaking, is doomed, and at least semi-delusional.

  Start from this: the laws of physics that govern solar systems turn out to differ profoundly from those that govern the movements of subatomic particles. They should, of course, be the same laws—a planet should orbit its sun in more or less the way an electron orbits a nucleus. Nope. Surprise!

  Barrett is not, however, to his regret, a physicist. He lacks that particular gift.

  And so, he starts from this, instead:

  At the end of Madame Bovary, Homais—the village pharmacist, the epitome of pompous mediocrity, a man whose “cures” only worsen his patients’ conditions—is given the Legion of Honor medal.

  Homais is of course an invented person. However. Among the medal’s actual recipients: Borges, Cocteau, Jane Goodall, Jerry Lewis (it’s true), David Lynch, Charlotte Rampling, Rodin, Desmond Tutu, Jules Verne, Edith Wharton, and Shirley Bassey, who sang the theme song in Goldfinger.

  Among our American heroes—the women and men who’d be likely to receive an American version of the Legion of Honor medal—are surely Walt Whitman, Thomas Jefferson, Sojourner Truth, John Adams, Gertrude Stein, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Edison, Susan B. Anthony, John Coltrane, Moms Mabley, and Jasper Johns.

  But there’s this, as well: Ronald Reagan is already being remembered as one of the great American presidents. Paris Hilton is one of the most famous people alive.

  Barrett is trying, as best he can, to fit it all together. Starting with Madame Bovary and moving outward.

  And he has seen a celestial light. Which has returned his gaze.

  It’s enough, for Barrett, to pursue the little way; to seek knowledge for its own sake. This, it seems, is the answer; it’s the answer for him. He’s a citizen of the middle realm. He is no longer tending bar at a failing Italian restaurant in Portland, nor is he scrabbling for tenure at some remote university. He sells objects to people, who are delighted by the objects he sells them. He studies in solitude and secrecy.

  It’s enough. It’s just not what was expected of him, by way of a life’s work. But really, what could be more depressing than delivering to one’s audience the anticipated outcome?

  And maybe—maybe—love will arrive, and remain. That could happen. There’s no obvious reason for love’s skittishness (though there is as well no obvious reason for the behavior of neutrons). It’s all about patience. Isn’t it? Patience, and the refusal to abandon hope. The refusal to be daunted by, say, a five-line farewell text.

  I wish you happiness and luck in the future. xxx.

  That from a man with whom Barrett had imagined, had allowed himself to imagine, the buzz of soul-contact, once or twice at least (that rainy afternoon in the bathtub, when he whispered the O’Hara poem into the man’s ear, which was edged with fine blond down; that night in the Adirondacks, with tree branches fingering the window, when the man had said, as if sharing a secret, “That’s an acacia tree”).

  You continue, right? You see an impossible light, which goes out again. You believe that a bathtub in the West Village, on a Tuesday afternoon, has presented itself as an actual destination, not just another stop along the way.

  This, Barrett Meeks, is your work. You witness, and compile. You persevere. You have, after all, made a significant discovery: The conjuring of a big splash, the building of a high-profile career, is not required, not even of those gifted with greater-than-average powers of mind. It’s nowhere in the contract. God (whoever She is) does not need you, does not need anyone, to arrive, at the end, in the cloud field, with its remote golden spires, bearing an armload of earthly accomplishments.

  Barrett sits with his arm draped lightly around Beth’s tiny waist. Ping is saying, “… wait, this is the best line of all, Frieda, she’s the respectable one in the novel, says, ‘I have gone to pieces, which is a thing I’ve wanted to do for years.’ How great is that?”

  Foster says, “I’m getting it
tattooed on my chest.”

  Barrett says, “‘To set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the spirit is life and peace.’”

  A pause ensues. Ping looks at Barrett as if Barrett has suddenly told a knock-knock joke.

  “I’m sure that’s true,” Ping says with elaborate graciousness, as if helping Barrett cover up a faux pas.

  Beth gently caresses his neck. She is married to Barrett as well as Tyler—the proof resides in a gesture like this.

  “Sorry,” Barrett says. “Go on.”

  But Ping’s momentum has been broken, his riff undone. He smiles with the cordiality that must have been common among courtiers to French kings.

  “Where exactly did that come from, angel?” he asks.

  Barrett, glancing around, wishing he could liquefy, drip away through the floorboards like spilled dishwater, or, barring that, explain himself, spots Andrew, standing idly nearby with a beer and a fistful of peanuts, behind the sofa, out of Ping’s sight.

  Andrew, placid and sure; Andrew, who, in the way of certain gods, couldn’t care less about human squabblings; who literally fails to understand them. There are all these fruits, there’s water and sky, there’s enough for everyone, what could you possibly have to argue about?

  Liz has kept him around for longer than usual, hasn’t she?

  “It’s from Romans,” Barrett says.

  “As in, the Bible?”

  “Yeah. The Bible.”

  “You’re a marvel,” Ping says. He’s a diva but not a diva of the most vicious kind; he’s a diva in the spirit of the grande dame, free with signs of his displeasure (witnesses must never imagine he’s easily defeated, must not mistake his charms for panderings) but cordial, if coldly so. Nor is he is a pedant. He is merely a zealot, possessed of a fierce and singular loyalty to that which he’s been given to understand as revelatory. Before Jane Bowles there was Henry Darger; before Darger the social career of Barbara Hutton. When Ping is in the grip, he’s surprised, genuinely surprised, that anyone could be interested in anything else.

  Barrett says, “Jane Bowles was probably being poisoned by the Moroccan woman she was in love with.”

  “I know,” Ping answers, with fluttering, gossipy urgency. “Isn’t it amazing? The woman was, by the way, an ugly old thing who went around in a black burka, and sunglasses. You should see the pictures. Here’s Jane, lovely in an alabaster upper-crust sort of way, walking the streets of Morocco with a woman who might just as well have been one of the witches in Macbeth.”

  Foster’s face—still spectacular in its pairing of carved-limestone Irish jaw with broad curl of lower lip, topped by that improbable, patrician, English schoolboy nose—goes slack with what might be amazement but which, Barrett suspects, is simply incomprehension.

  “That’s crazy,” Foster says.

  “Jane was crazy,” Ping answers, with an expression of sated, feline satisfaction. He believes all great artists are, must be, if not deranged, eccentric, at the very least. Is that, Barrett wonders, connected to the sentimental little landscapes and still lifes Ping paints on the weekends? Does that explain his hats, his collections: the Victorian bird dioramas, the jewel-toned Arabian lamps, the first editions?

  Foster says, “I guess I’ll have to read her book,” in a tone that manages to convey his genuine intention, and the fact that, for him, actually reading the book is an admirable but impossible ambition—he might as well have said, I guess I’ll have to learn particle physics.

  “It’s not all gloom and doom,” Ping tells him. “It’s surprisingly funny. The lives great artists live and the books they write are two very different things.”

  Ping has his momentum back. He says, “You have to remember, she lived a very strange existence. She was an expat. She’d married that big fag, Paul Bowles, who ignored her, never sent her a dime, she was always broke. I suppose she lived in a world in which she thought anything could happen.”

  Beth administers a reassuring squeeze to the back of Barrett’s neck, gets up off the chair arm in search of Tyler. As she goes she says, “Twenty-nine minutes to midnight, everybody.”

  Beth’s departure gives Barrett permission, too. He sneaks a glance at Liz, but she’s gone genially blank. She has the ability to cancel expression, to sit in groups as if she were waiting patiently, with neither irritation nor doubt, for the hired car to arrive, to take her somewhere lovely and serene.

  Barrett says, “Only twenty-nine minutes to contemplate my sins.”

  For Barrett, Ping’s one true rival, wit is the only acceptable method for taking leave of Ping in mid-aria.

  Ping puts his hand to his chest, in elaborately feigned horror. “Darling,” he says, “you’d need twenty-nine days.”

  Barrett rises from his chair. Ping returns his attention to Foster.

  “And really,” Ping says, “if you’re a deranged genius, why not go to pieces in a place where monkeys dart along city streets and vendors sell fruits you’ve never seen before?”

  Foster glances, surreptitiously (Ping doesn’t like wandering eyes), at Tyler, who extends an arm to Beth, wraps it over her shoulders, and pulls her in, shelters her against his sternum. Tyler. His handsome, lion-eyed ravagement. His capacity for devotion. Which is so sexy. Why do so many gay men lack that? Why are they so distracted, so in love with the idea of more and more and then more, again?

  For a moment: Tyler removing Foster’s clothes, tenderly, ardently, marveling at Foster’s revealed chest, his furrows of abdomen; Tyler taking in the trail of darkish hair that leads downward from Foster’s navel, as if Foster had grown the hair especially for him; Tyler hot for Foster but for Foster only, Foster’s the exception, Tyler’s not into men, he’s into Foster, and he lowers Foster’s jeans, paternal but sexual, ready to fuck Foster with the savage kindliness of a father, a fabulously perverse father, no taboos here, he’s doing right by his boy, taking care of him, doting, knowing in the way of blood kin what it is his boy needs.

  But Ping has continued. “It’s better, really, to go out in a blaze. That’s why we love Marilyn, and James Dean. We love the ones who walk right into the fire. I mean, Jane Bowles was hardly Marilyn or James Dean, to most people, but to me …”

  Foster returns his attention. Ping is a good teacher, and there’s much to learn.

  •

  Set free, Barrett finds himself without an immediate direction. Beth is talking to Tyler and Nina, and Barrett lacks the energy, just now, to enter an ongoing conversation. Andrew sits one-ass-cheeked on a windowsill, looking out at the night (or at his own reflection in the glass) as he chugs another beer (he consumes freely, the way an animal does, taking all the nourishment that’s offered, as unconflicted as any creature whose earthly career depends on maximum intake balanced against minimal output). Apart from Barrett’s veneration of Andrew—because of his veneration of Andrew—they are friendly, but in no way intimate. It would be impossible for Barrett simply to walk up to Andrew and say … something about hopes for the coming year. Or anything, about anything.

  Barrett decides to slip into his room and lie down for a few minutes. It strikes him suddenly as the most wonderful of all possibilities: the chance to lie quietly, alone, on his mattress, with the party playing, soft as a radio, in the next room.

  When he enters his room, he leaves it in darkness, “darkness” being relative, without the blinds drawn—Knickerbocker Avenue sheds its mild orange radiance all night long. Barrett settles down on his mattress with a certain caution, as if he suffers an affliction of the joints.

  His room, being white, absorbs the street glow, suffused by the lightly pulsing orange, a hint of the noir. The room is not unpleasant. But staying here, Barrett feels, more and more acutely, like an immigrant, come to a foreign country that is neither bleak nor verdant. It’s the country that would have him, since he lacked the necessary papers for more promising places, and could no longer remain where he once thought he belonged; where his skills (the adroit skinning of an ant
elope, the ability to leach acorns into flour) have no currency or value.

  The problem that marked his earlier years: almost everything is interesting. Books, in particular, to Barrett; and learning other languages, cracking their codes, beginning to see their patterns and their mutations; and history—the scraping away of all that accumulated time to find, still living, in its own continuum, a day in the market in Mesopotamia, where a woman ponders mangoes; a night on the verges of Moscow, the black air so cold it impedes your breathing, Napoleon somewhere up there under the same frozen sky, the gray Moscow darkness with its icy stars, which have never looked so brilliant, or so remote …

  But there is, as well, the world of simpler aims, the fatigue at the end of a working day, whether you’ve been flipping burgers or shingling a roof; the love you can feel for the waitresses and the cooks, the carpenters and electricians, there’s no other devotion quite like it (maybe it’s a miniature version of what men feel after they’ve been at war together); the pure boisterous teasing mayhem of going out for beers once you’ve been released from your labors, Willy has a crazy girlfriend and Esther really should get back to her kids and Little Ed has almost saved enough to buy that secondhand Ducati …

  Barrett, in his working life, was for so long the debutante who could not choose, who found every potential husband to be either more or less promising but never quite … never quite someone she could imagine seeing every day for the rest of her life, and so she waited. She wasn’t all that proud, it wasn’t as if she imagined herself too fine for any mere mortal; she simply found that her own body of inclinations and eccentricities didn’t match up quite closely enough with the local prospects. It would be unfair, wouldn’t it, to marry someone about whom she wasn’t sure; and so she waited for conviction to arrive. She was still young, still young enough, and then—it felt sudden, how could that be?—she was no longer young enough, she seemed to be living in her parents’ house, reading and sewing …

  It’s satisfying, in an odd and bittersweet way, that Barrett has found a career after all, and (strange, but true) all the more so that his career, as it turns out, is secret, has no worldly purpose, brings with it no possibility of wealth.