The Snow Queen

  As they make their way across the Great Lawn, Barrett asks Sam, “Why would you give money to Andrew?”

  “It sounds like he needs it,” Sam says. “And I’ve got money. A little, not a lot. But I’ve got enough to keep some foolish boy from getting whacked by a drug dealer.”

  “Do you really think somebody would whack Andrew?”

  “I have no idea. That’s not what matters, is it?”

  “What is it that matters?”

  “Someone needs a little money. You seem to have a little money. And so, maybe you could help.”

  “Even if it’s just a scam?” Barrett asks.

  “I think pretty much everybody who says he needs money really and truly needs money. Maybe not for the reasons he’s telling you. But still.”

  “That’s sort of Christian.”

  “It’s just human. Not that Christians aren’t welcome to it. But it’s not as if they own it.”

  “They own a lot,” Barrett says.

  “The real estate holdings alone are mind-boggling. Argh, I’m being pedantic again.”

  “And as we know, I like pedantic. I know pedantic. I live pedantic.”

  Impulsively, childishly, Barrett pinches the sleeve of Sam’s jacket between his fingers. Locating himself, as a child might.

  Is it possible that Sam is possessed of simple kindness and generosity—that those qualities are real, and enduring? Is it possible that that might matter, that it might sustain, that it might be a rope you could hold on to, going hand over hand, toward a destination still too distant to be visible?

  They traverse the Great Lawn. Ahead of them looms the vast limestone bulk of the Metropolitan Museum, its stern, familiar brightness. Barrett thinks, as he always does when he approaches the museum, of what lies within: a more-than-adequate sampling of every instance in which human beings were inspired to do more than human beings can technically do, whether it’s the summoning of life from the stubborn inanimacy of paint and canvas, or the hammering of gold into reliquary saints with ecstatic and tortured faces the size of dimes.

  Up ahead is the place where Barrett saw the light. Barrett and Sam may be about to walk more or less exactly across the spot on which Barrett stood when the light manifested itself.

  Maybe Liz is correct. Maybe the light was merely a hallucination, created from some confluence of constellation and airplane, invented by Barrett on a night when he so urgently needed to feel more accompanied in the world.

  Or maybe the light was actually looking at the museum, acknowledging its slumbering, nocturnal wonders, and Barrett assumed the light to be regarding him, the way one returns enthusiastically the smile and wave of a stranger who is in fact smiling and waving at someone standing behind you.

  Or maybe the light was just another of God’s jokes. Maybe Barrett should consider refusing to fall for this one.

  Sam says, “Do you want to tell me what all that was about a light?”

  “It’s a whole strange story,” Barrett tells him.

  “I like strange stories.”

  “You do, right?” he asks. “You do like strange stories.”

  “I can’t really think of a story that’d be too strange.”

  “That’s good,” Barrett says.

  This surprise: Barrett is, for the first time in memory, not the one who hopes, perhaps a bit too eagerly, to charm; who searches his mind for interesting stories (and then worries that the stories are too self-consciously “interesting”); who attempts, by various means, to explain his own life to another, while plucking a bouquet of roses from his sleeve. He is not only the one yearning to be kissed; he also inspires that yearning in another.

  Coke or Pepsi? The most banal of all possible mock-questions, asked of a stranger who did not seem, at the time, to matter much at all. Who could have imagined an answer this long, this complicated?

  Barrett waits a moment before he speaks. Sam glances over at him as they walk. Sam’s eyes are benign, intelligent, and, at the moment, more than a little impassive. Sam has, after all, been told he’s about to hear a strange story, and despite his assurances that he likes his stories strange (what else, exactly, was he going to say?), he must be feeling wary. Who knows what strange stories he’s been told by other men? Who can tell how fearful he is? How lurid is his own history of dismissals and vanishings; of stories that turn out to be just slightly too strange to bear?

  Barrett fixes his own eyes on Sam’s. A living silence passes between them; a brief interlude of quiet during which the very molecules of the air feel as if they’re more agitated than usual, more alive with some sort of invisible spark, some barely audible buzz. Barrett walks alongside Sam. Barrett feels charged, as if his on switch is on; as if he emanates heat and a cloudy but palpable, slightly feverish light.

  Stella’s phrase returns to him. You’re going to see something miraculous. Is it possible, could it be, that she actually is a little bit psychic; that she’s not a crook; that she sensed something actual; that she was referring to the future and not the past; that Barrett is in fact about to see something miraculous, though there’s no way to determine its nature?

  He gathers himself, re-collects himself, gets himself ready to give it, once again. The whole thing: the hopes designed to be trampled; the image of a new life that’s probably not much more than clownish optimism. He devotes his whole attention to the still largely unknown man who walks beside him, waiting. Barrett swears he sees, on Sam’s face, an expression of quizzical, nervously anticipated recognition; a premonition on Sam’s part that nothing about Barrett could be too much, or too little. Barrett does not look up at the sky.

  It’s just Tyler now, on the sofa in the otherwise-empty apartment (discounting the blind gleam of the TV screen) (in mere days, that glossy, glassy rectangle—let’s not kid ourselves—will show Sarah Palin, grinning in triumph, confetti caught in her hair). But here, for now, there’s the blank silence of the television; the velvet loveliness of the dark and the quiet (discounting the cars rumbling by outside, and the woman shouting—to whom?—“You never ever ever ever ever …”).

  The world is ending. McCain and Palin will see to that. Tyler feels (he admits it) a minor, queasy satisfaction, in the pit of his stomach: he has, at least, been right, all along.

  Even the coming collapse, however, feels remote, at present. Tyler has put himself back into floatation mode, thanks to his sidekick, the friend in the strangely sweet miniature paper envelope. Less than one song to go. And then Tyler will be … finished. He won’t be satisfied, he can’t summon the required sense of romance for that desperate hope, but he will have finished something, and it will exist in a world larger than the world of a living room wedding, or a few drinkers in a bar; it will be judged either harshly or generously, or ignored entirely, by people who do not know Tyler, who do not love Tyler, who don’t give a shit about Tyler’s past and present pains, who have no idea about taking him down, or rescuing him, or meeting him in California. It will go out into a crushing, cleansing indifference, but it will go out. It won’t merely vanish, as completely as if it had never existed at all.

  He’ll find Liz, after he’s finished. And he won’t insist on going to the goddamned artichoke festival in Castroville, which (thank you, Google) is still six months away, anyway. That was just ironic, coffee-shop suavity, an attempt at perverse wit. He’ll be happy, walking with Liz among redwood forests, watching eagles snatching fish from the deep-emerald surface of the Pacific. He’ll be happy enough. That hope strikes him as reasonable.

  Is that where the last song resides? Is it about a dream of redwoods and eagles; of a woman he could love ferociously, a woman with whom he could do erotic battle, a fantasy (who doesn’t prefer fantasies to outcomes?) of aging-warrior love?

  Or will that, too, be sentimental; will it be just another … song? Wishfulness about a woman walking among ancient trees, under a sky browsed by eagles. He can see, with dreadful clarity, how wrong it could go; how easily it might turn into another
sad and familiar flight, the one about the woman in the woods, the peace and purity that waits, right over there, in a candlelit room, in another borough, on another coast …

  But isn’t the song entering the room, even now? There’s a stir in the air. The trick, as Tyler has learned, is to act nonchalant, to lie in state on the sofa—his only earthly possession—like a sleeper waiting for the night’s dreams to make themselves manifest.

  Maybe—let’s not rule it out—this will be the song that cuts clean, the one that matters, the one that sheds standard-issue romance and reveals, under its old skin, a raw blood-red devotion deeper than comfort, a desire profounder than schoolboy satisfaction, a yearning cold and immaculate and unstoppable as snow. Maybe it will be a lovingly sadistic slash, in lieu of wistful praise. Maybe it will be the wound that does not want healing; the search that knows it will never find the treasure but continues anyway, looking with ever-increasing diligence for that which cannot be discovered; understanding that it’s the search that matters, not the first torch-lit glimpse of the buried chamber piled with gold and alabaster.

  The dead, if the dead retain some vestige of consciousness, might feel alone in just this way—solitary, interred, as the world goes on without them. Barrett is somewhere, with Sam, and Tyler knows (he’s been around long enough to know) that transubstantiation is occurring; that the inert consciouslessness of bread known, to Barrett, as Men has been summoned to life; that all those hours of ass-and-spine contact with the merciless wood of a pew were (surprise) leading somewhere, after all. Love, it would seem, has arrived. Or, maybe more accurately, Barrett has arrived at love. And he’s done so with a man who’ll carry him off; who will replace Tyler, as opposed to the series of hopeless affairs that (how long has Tyler known this?) were never meant to interfere—not in any serious or lasting way—with the brotherhood.

  It’s hardly ever the destination we’ve been anticipating, is it? Our hopes may seem unrealized, but we were in all likelihood hoping for the wrong thing. Where did we—the species, that is—pick up that strange and perverse habit?

  Blessings on you, Barrett. From your older brother in a fourth-floor apartment on Avenue C. Not exactly an eye in the sky. But hey, we can only offer what we’ve got, right? Blessings from your slightly strung-out brother, who can’t provide romance but can provide intimacy, and release. I know you. I’ve seen it. And, knowing all, I release you.

  Heaven winked at you, right? Maybe. Maybe it did. Or maybe it was just an airplane and a cloud. But if Heaven winks at anybody, it’s probably the less-than-conspicuous seekers; the ones who search among the discarded bits and pieces; the ones who choose the path over the avenue, the gap in the hedge over the trumpeted gates. That’s probably why there’s no verifiable evidence, right? The universe only winks at the ones no one will believe.

  That’s the joke? That’s the joke inside the joke. Revelation is offered only to those too poor and obscure to be considered candidates.

  From Tyler’s position on the sofa, one of the two living room windows is perfectly centered between his feet. He can see the sprinkling of city lights through the window and, it seems, a lone star, a star so bright it can penetrate the New York sky. Or maybe it’s an airplane. They take off from JFK and LaGuardia every ten minutes or so.

  Tyler can’t remember a time when he wasn’t drawn to windows; when he didn’t imagine he could take the leap, and not plummet but rise, until the constellations are closer than the streetlights.

  You try singing your way closer to the stars (or even just the airplanes that impersonate stars), and the strange beauty of it is all wrapped up in their impossible remoteness, which would be true even if you were able to fly. Who’d want a proximate star? Who’d wish upon something reachable?

  It’s the song and it’s the woman. It’s the song you can imagine, but can’t quite sing. Same goes for the woman.

  Or is that just more romantic crap?

  Liz herself is, or soon will be, a light in the sky, as she, along with a host of others, flies west from JFK. Is she, even now, right now, up there in the night sky, looking down at the lights of New York City? Is she thinking of Tyler (at ten thousand feet, and still climbing) as Tyler thinks of her?

  Thinking of Liz, thinking of stars and airplane lights in a nocturnal sky, Tyler is suddenly sure of it: Liz is looking down at him just as he’s looking up at her, through the ceiling, through the three other apartments piled on top of his, where other people, unknown to him, strive and hope and wonder; ask themselves how, exactly, they seem to have ended up here; debate about whether to mention the paucity of the larder, the extravagance of the bed linens (600-count Egyptian cotton, what even is that?), or just, you know, see what’s on TV tonight.

  There’s that speck in his eye again. He rubs at it, but it remains lodged against his retina.

  It occurs to him: he’s had something in his eye for quite a while now. He’s merely more aware of it at certain times than he is at others.

  An unbidden flash of recognition (wow, an old one): that ice crystal that blew into the bedroom—how long ago? When Beth was dying for the first time; when Tyler got out of bed and closed the window; when he was so sure he’d be able to take care of everything, of everyone …

  Has it been lodged in his eye since then?

  No. That’s crazy. Tyler is lost in a mist of suggestibility. Which is where he most wants to be.

  He has done what’s been asked of him. He’s loved others to the best of his ability. He’s seen his brother delivered; he’s made good on the vow he made, long ago, to the apparition that claimed to be his mother.

  What if that were enough? What if the last song needs to remain unfinished; what if Tyler, by continuing to strive, can only botch it? What if the window is telling him, by so perfectly positioning itself smack between his splayed feet, that it’s time to fly?

  Tyler can’t quite tell whether he’s getting up off the sofa, or merely speculating about it.

  Still—maybe it’s been summoned by the haunted sofa, by the window, by the short distance that lies between them—it seems that something—something—has entered the room; something that’s about to lay a note on Tyler’s forehead, soft as a good-night kiss. It’s about to give him this last song, this parting gift, this rose that will start wilting the moment it’s laid on his pillow. It’s going to be a lament for Beth, married to a love song for Liz. It’s going to insinuate itself into his tired brain (that circus monkey, insisting it can play a sonata on a miniature concertina), and then—because it’s the last and most glorious disappointment, the unreachable destination, the woman who will always leave—it’s going to set him free. After that, the stars might slip a wink to Tyler, too. Once he’s finished the song, and become invisible again. Then he can answer what the window asks, about staying in the room, or taking flight.

  He remains where he is, prone, supplicant, waiting. He thinks of Liz, the lights of her aircraft, high above him. Liz, it would seem, has joined the sky.

  He says, or imagines saying, Hey Goddess. Are you there?

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I can’t imagine my life as a writer without the twenty-five years of insight, input, and encouragement I’ve received from Ken Corbett.

  Gail Hochman, my agent; Jonathan Galassi, my editor; and I have been a virtual literary SWAT team for more years than I (or, I suspect, they) care to remember. I’m grateful as well to Marianne Merola, who takes such scrupulous care of any and all foreign editions.

  Part of this book was written at Beatrice von Rezzori’s Santa Maddalena Foundation. Beatrice’s generosity and friendship have been significant aspects of my life for over a decade.

  I’m particularly thankful to Marie Howe, who can spot an off-kilter phrase the way a hawk can spot a mouse from five hundred feet in the air. Other vital readers include Frances Coady, Jessie Gaynor, Daniel Kaizer, James Lecesne, Christian McCulloch, Adam Moss, Christopher Potter, Seth Pybas, Sal Randolph, and Derrick Smit.

  Jonat
han Parks-Ramage, Jessie Gaynor, and Fiona True kept me going, in various ways, throughout the writing of this book. Jochen Hartmann informed me about the Bushwick of the years 2004 through 2008.

  I was reminded weekly about readers’ capacities for thought, and their sensitivities to nuance, by Tim Berry, Jen Cabral, Billy Hough, Dan Minahan, Nina West, and Ann Wood. In addition, as I was trying to better understand the songwriting process, Billy actually came over to my house with an electric piano, to teach me about the differences between a major and a minor chord.

  David Hopson’s visual sense is inspiring.

  The copy editor, John McGhee, not only caught every grammatical lapse and inconsistency of usage, but noted certain phrases I had unwittingly used as many as eight or nine times.

  Miranda Popkey and Christopher Richards turned a stack of dog-eared, stained pages into a book.

  Thanks as well to Steven Barclay, Michael Warner, and Sally Wilcox.

  And, finally, this book would not exist (for reasons known to them) without Billy Hough, Tracy McPartland, and Nina West.

  ALSO BY MICHAEL CUNNINGHAM

  A Home at the End of the World

  Flesh and Blood

  The Hours

  Laws for Creations (editor)

  Specimen Days

  By Nightfall

  Copyright

  Fourth Estate

  An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

  77–85 Fulham Palace Road,

  Hammersmith, London W6 8JB

  www.4thestate.co.uk

  This eBook first published in Great Britain by Fourth Estate in 2014

  First published in the United States in 2014 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux

  Copyright © Mare Vaporum Corp 2014

  The right of Michael Cunningham to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library