The Snow Queen

  “No. I don’t know. What I want is for you not to expect me to bring it up.”

  “This is silly.”

  “Not to me.”

  “I mean, it’s New Year’s Eve, we had a great party, we’re going to argue about a new apartment we don’t have yet?”

  Beth gets up off the sofa. “I’d like to go out for a little. Just for a walk.”

  Tyler stands too. “You’re mad?”

  “Not really. I’m just going for a walk, okay?”

  He puts his arms around her shoulders, draws her in. She does not resist, but neither does she yield.

  He says, “I want to make you happy. That’s all.”

  “Maybe you should stop. Trying to make me happy, all the time.”

  “That’s an unusual request.”

  She pulls out of his embrace. “It’s nothing. It’s no big deal. I’ll go for a little walk, and I’ll be fine again. All right?”

  “I’m not crazy about the idea of you going out there alone, at this hour.”

  “It’s New Year’s Eve. There’ll be people.”

  “Drunk people. Aggressive and dangerous people.”

  “I’ll be back in, like, twenty minutes.”

  “Wear your fleece coat, it’s cold out.”

  “I know it’s cold. I’m going to wear my fleece coat.”

  “This is a little strange. What seems to be happening, here.”

  “We’re having a fight. That’s all it is. We’re going to have fights, sometimes.”

  “I know.”

  “Do you?”

  “Go for a walk.”

  “I am.”

  And yet, she doesn’t move, not right away. She and Tyler stand quietly together for a moment, as if they were waiting. For something. For someone. For an announcement. For news.

  •

  After Beth has left the apartment, Tyler sits alone on the sofa (the sofa is, by now, as much dog as furniture). The Christmas lights are still lit (there is no red quite as beautiful to Tyler as the particular red of an illuminated Christmas-tree bulb). The DVD of the fireplace still crackles on the TV screen.

  This surprise: Beth, restored to health, is his wife. They’re married, in the same way any two people are married. There are bickerings. There are irritations.

  What, Tyler asks himself, did he expect?

  Transcendence, maybe. An endless loving innocence, after the beast has been slain; a future polished to a brilliant, perfect shine because it’s been so unexpectedly granted.

  Don’t something like half the people who win the lottery end up killing themselves? Something like that.

  Tyler’s knowledge that he’s being absurd doesn’t seem to help as much as it should.

  Alone, he’s more alert to the noises that sift in from the street. The shouts, the crowings of Happy New Year, the joyful bleating of horns and the occasional furious blast (how can a car horn, which makes one sound only, be so identifiably either rageful or glad?), the distant booms of fireworks, which Tyler can hear but not see.

  Two thousand six. The world is fucked.

  Semi-fucked. Pre-fucked.

  Tyler has admitted to himself (he tries to submit to his own thoughts and deeds the same scrutiny he brings to the larger world) that while he is of course relieved, he’s also ever so slightly disappointed that more shit isn’t hitting more fans, more immediately. We (the lucky few, remember) still live comfortably, two years into the second term. We have not come home to find our apartments ransacked; we have not been taken into underground rooms and had our heads shaven.

  Still. Tyler wants to have been more right. He persists in a particular fantasy: he and Barrett (he can’t bring himself to include Beth) are in an endless line of people, being taken … somewhere. Barrett apologizes for the mildness of his passion, that November in 2004, and Tyler consoles him, forgives him, assures him that he could not possibly have known, for which Barrett is touchingly grateful.

  Ahead of them in line is an older couple, still wearing what’s left of their jewels and Armani. They whisper to each other that there’s clearly been a mistake; they reassure each other that it will soon be rectified, and Tyler finally, finally gets to let somebody have it; he gets to do more than rage at the Times (thanks for the apology on the editorial page, New York Fucking Times, about having been perhaps ever so slightly hasty when you slanted the news to help promote the war); more than call in to that radio program—which he did exactly once, having realized that, instead of a voice of calm severity, of heroic and profound humanness, he’d sounded like just another one of the nut jobs who rant on radio call-in programs. He’s free of the restraint he practices with his brother and his wife and his friends, who have always been on his side, who agree with him on every subject, who can only be chastised for failing to do … what, exactly? Organize? Get petitions signed? Be as vitriolic as he?

  That’s it. That’s really it. He wants everyone he knows to be as upset and vitriolic as he is. He’s tired of feeling so alone.

  But here, now, in Tyler’s fantasy, are the culprits themselves: the ones who prospered, who thought of no one and nothing beyond themselves, who pulled the lever on Election Day thinking, Yes, this is working,

  Here they are, this once-prosperous couple, shocked, altered, dragged before the seat of the conqueror who’d promised it was only the servants and petty thieves who’d suffer. Here they are, faced with the consequences, and finally, Tyler can lay into them.

  The fantasy, however, always ends there, with the eye contact, the shared realization, the abashment on those well-fed faces. Tyler doesn’t think about his actual screed. If this were one of his sexual fantasies, the moment of righteous revelation would be the moment at which he came. In his sex dreams, the moment she spreads her tits over his face or rolls her own panties onto him or hikes her legs up over his shoulders is the moment he always lets it go.

  He is, it seems, all about anticipation. That’s something to think about.

  Not now, though. Now he’s in his living room, in his own skin, drifty on champagne and coke, too comfortable (forgive him) to dwell on the fact that his white skin has bought it all.

  He permits himself to drift …

  And drifts, unexpectedly, onto a slick of gratitude for these minutes alone, because (stop this) he’s occasionally nostalgic for the days when Beth was ill, when his purpose was as compact and unwavering as a surface-to-air missile.

  It seems that this would be a good time for another bump or two. He’s cut down, he’s cut way down, but a bump (or two) would be good right now; it would help him with his shame at the fact that he harbors even a wisp of nostalgia for the days of Beth’s illness; for the singularity and purpose they conferred; and yes, even for the stern granite face of mortality itself, against which he could rage. How fucked up is that? How fucked up is it that his songwriting feels even more swampily amorphous now; that without the race against time, without the need to have something miraculous to give his lover while she was still present to receive it … his sense of purpose has gone shifty on him?

  Enough. He can give himself a break. A short break, tonight. He gets up to go to the bedroom for his vial. After all, it’s New Year’s Eve.

  •

  Beth walks out onto Knickerbocker. A bright, crystalline snow has started falling, fine enough to be all but invisible save for the orange nimbuses shed by the streetlights, little movies that show themselves, one per block—gentle flurries of orange-gold sparkle, a special effect, projected onto the streetlights’ small circles of shine.

  There are people on the street, a few people, which qualifies as a crowd on Knickerbocker, which, every other night, is disquietingly empty. People are coming home from whatever other neighborhood offers more in the way of lights and music. Up ahead, at the end of the block, three Hispanic girls walk unsteadily, arm in arm, spike-heeled, happy-looking but depleted, having reached the far end of a night that started hours ago, when they tried dress after dress, did one another
’s makeup, composed one another’s hair, imagined (or refused to imagine) that tonight might be the night he turns up at a club or party, the night he sees her as ravishing as she has it in her to be; that tonight could take her eventually to a house somewhere, her little boy asking to be allowed one more dish of ice cream, her baby girl asleep in her arms as she tells someone, Yeah, we met on New Year’s Eve, how corny is that?

  It’s remarkable, being alive. Being, once again, someone walking through a dust of blowing snow, passing the window of the liquor store, which offers an array of bottles surrounded by tiny blinking lights; seeing her own reflection skim across the glass; being, once again, able to receive the ordinary pleasures, boots on pavement, hands in the pockets of her jacket, feeling in the right-hand pocket what must be an old Tic-Tac, fingering it, walking along.

  She walks, without much purpose, for a couple of blocks, as far as Flushing Avenue, feeling the sting of the cold in her lungs and the feathery touch of barely visible snowflakes on her face. She doesn’t really want to go far, she just wants the solitude, the public solitude, of the street; the un-company of passing strangers, no one embracing her, no one looking with compassion and wonder into her eyes, no one marveling at her.

  She can grow tired, a little tired, of being marveled at.

  She turns back at Flushing. A young man and woman walk toward her. He’s white, she’s black. They’re in their early twenties. He’s clearly one of the young artists who, like Tyler, live here because everywhere else is too expensive. He’s wearing a neon-blue suit, a big black overcoat, and work boots. She (harder to identify, in terms of inclination and work) wears a tight white dress under a rabbit-fur jacket. They’re laughing quietly, holding hands. As they draw nearer, Beth can see that he has a pinched and narrow face, large quizzical eyes unsettlingly answered by a paucity of jaw. She’s scrawny and small-headed, showing as she laughs a set of big square teeth in a mouth that seems barely able to contain them. But they’re beautiful to each other. They might be childhood friends who fell in love. They carry with them that sense of shared conspiracy, of sneaky eroticized intimacy, the joy of the forbidden, the pure giggling release of it.

  As they pass Beth they say, in unison, “Happy New Year.”

  “Happy New Year,” she replies.

  They walk on, in the opposite direction.

  The young couple is, it suddenly seems, what Beth came outside to see. She can’t of course know what troubles may beset them, or what troubles await, but she’s satisfied by the fleeting apparition of two young people who are doing fine, right now; who have each other to laugh with, to hold hands with; who can thoughtlessly pass between them the simplicity of youth, of love, of a night that must, for them, promise an endless strand of nights, a world that offers even more than they’d hoped for; that’s given them this snowblown street and the promise of home, soon, as if love and shelter were the simplest things in the world.

  Beth lost her simplicity when she got her life back.

  There’s the burden of gratitude. She hadn’t expected that. There’s the feeling that, having been granted this impossible gift, she ought to do something with it. Before her diagnosis, it was enough to be in love with Tyler, to manage Liz’s shop, to bake on the weekends, to make love and send e-mails and beat Barrett at Scrabble (he’s never won, not once, what about that, Mister Yale?). There’s no reason for her to do anything more, there’s no rule, but now her days and nights feel too small. Something more must be expected; something more must be owed.

  What, though, would it be?

  She can’t devote herself to a life of good works. She has a job, she and Tyler need the money. She volunteers, Saturday afternoons, at a convalescent home, reading to the old and infirm, which is satisfying but does not strike her as an adequate offering, given what she’s received.

  The surprise: this sense of insufficiency.

  She’s never told anyone about it. She’s loath to admit it, even to herself.

  There are times—not often, but still, there are times—when she feels ever so slightly … displaced, being restored to life. She had been afraid of dying but she’d been dying for quite some time, she was learning how to do it, she was getting good at it; it had become so inevitable as to feel like a home of sorts, a homeland, an obscure but stalwart nation, ancient and reliable, untroubled; a place where the well-swept streets lead to fountained squares, where the shops and cafés are orderly and clean, where the threats of disaster and the hope of ecstatic, life-altering joy are equally out of the question.

  Did Persephone sometimes find the summer sun too hot, the flowers more gaudy than beautiful? Did she ever, even briefly, think fondly of the dim silence of Hades, the cool and barren nowhere of it? Did she yearn, occasionally, for her winter release from abundance, from a world that demanded happiness of her, a world so rife with wonders that the garland and the dance were all but mandatory?

  Beth reaches her building. She stands on the sidewalk, looking up. There, on the second floor, are the two living room windows, softly lit, with three Christmas lights—a red, a green, and a blue—visible, suspended from the ceiling on their thin green strand.

  She stands there for longer than she’d expected to, thinking of nothing in particular, simply looking up at the windows of the place in which she lives.

  A NIGHT

  None of them had imagined that the canister would be hard to open. It looks like a quart-size paint can, made of brushed aluminum, but unlike a paint can, its lid is clearly meant to be screwed off. No one had suggested trying it out before they got onto the ferry.

  Tyler, Barrett, and Liz huddle together at the stern, leaning against the traffic-cone-orange iron railing (the harsh orange that signals emergency); huddled together in part because it’s windier and colder than they’d expected it to be, out in the harbor at night, even in April, but mainly because they don’t want to attract the attention of the blue-uniformed crew members (are they called crew members?), who are surely not looking out to see if anyone is illegally scattering ashes off the boat, but would just as surely intervene if they caught three passengers in the act.

  Tyler struggles, as unobtrusively as possible, with the intractable lid.

  Spread around them is the black, light-speckled toss of the harbor, with the ferry’s wake—gray-white, alive as smoke—furling out below. It is the most trafficked body of water imaginable. Barges lumber along, dark and silent, enormous, hectored by smaller boats, buzzing little lit-up toys. The ferry has just passed the turreted, slumbering silhouette of Ellis Island, and is approaching the Statue of Liberty, bright verdigris, remote, offering her little light to the charcoal-colored sky.

  “Fuck,” Tyler says. “Fuckity fuck fuck.”

  Barrett puts a calming hand on his shoulder. This is not mere inconvenience. It renders the ceremony—what there is of ceremony—comic, which is not what any of them had in mind.

  Liz says, “Let me try.”

  She had at first declined to come, insisted it should be Tyler and Barrett alone (they couldn’t possibly have brought a crowd), but Tyler and Barrett talked her into it. Liz loved Beth, Liz knew Beth before Tyler and Barrett did. And, more important, if difficult to explain—it seemed there should be a woman present.

  Tyler is reluctant to give up the canister. Liz, who is particularly irritated by this particular man-fixation, reaches out impatiently. For a moment, they tussle over it, but Tyler, in the hope of remaining as uncomic as possible, lets it go.

  “Mm,” Liz says, twisting the lid. “Yeah, it doesn’t want to unscrew, does it?”

  “No,” Tyler says. “It doesn’t.” This is not the time for any remark along the lines of, What do you think I am, an idiot? Yeah, right, it doesn’t want to unscrew.

  Liz reaches into her bag. “I have a knife,” she says.

  Liz would of course have a knife. She’d have the very knife she produces, a Swiss Army Knife, with a dozen different blades, a nail file, scissors, and who knows what else.
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  “Goddess of utility,” Barrett says.

  Liz extracts the nail file, slips it under the canister’s lid.

  “Careful,” Tyler says.

  At first, the nail file just scrapes ineffectively against the lid’s lipless rim. Then, a little more pressure, and …

  It releases. Liz unscrews it slightly, doesn’t open it. She hands it back to Tyler.

  He accepts it reluctantly. Barrett keeps his hand on his brother’s shoulder.

  Tyler squeezes his eyes shut, breathes heavily. He asks, “Do you think we should look inside?”

  “I’ve seen ashes before,” Liz answers. “You don’t need to look inside.”

  Another barge rolls by, this one piled high with boxcar-size steel containers, enormous stacked boxes that couldn’t possibly be painted black, but look black, from this distance. The barge is unlit. There’s no sign of a pilot, or of where a pilot would be housed.

  Tyler nods at the titanic black hulk, which offers no lights, which moves soundlessly, faster than the ferry. He says, “Let’s wait until that thing goes by.”

  No one needs to comment on the world’s propensity for producing these odd signs of morbidity, these memento mori, that have a way of appearing at precisely the wrong time.

  They stand quietly, waiting for the black pilotless barge to pass. Manhattan blazes behind, all monolith and ziggurat. To the left, the lazy and tranquil arcs of the light-strings along the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, answered by a modest speckling of stars.

  Behind them, on the ferry: the commuters, all of whom have sensibly elected to remain in the cabin, where they sit stolidly in the green-tinged light, neither more nor less than tired wage slaves, going home.

  “Okay,” Barrett says, after the barge has passed. “Are we ready?”

  Tyler nods. He unscrews the lid.

  He does want to look inside. But he decides to obey Liz. Whatever he might see (are there bone chips, or is it merely dust; what color would the dust be?), he’d rather not see it as the contents of a can.

  Is he capable of imagining that Beth’s relapse is connected, somehow, to the argument they had on New Year’s Eve; that he captured the attention of some terrible diety by admitting to himself that his life, freed of mortal emergency, was slightly … unsustaining? He is.