14 Degrees Below Zero (10 page)

“If I’m ambushed at work and presented with a catalogue of my failings,” Lewis said, “I don’t understand how I’m supposed to react.”

“Just a
second,
Dad,” Jay said. “What spongy things, honey? You mean those dinosaurs we got at Target?”

“Yeah,” Ramona chirped, her voice the highest note plucked on a celestial harp.

“I actually know the answer to this one,” Jay said, kneeling slightly. She did a quick memory scan of the confines of their apartment, from the little carpeted entryway down the hall to the living room, the kitchen, the bathroom, their twin bedrooms. “Your bath toys. The spongy dinosaurs are with your bath toys. You were playing with them the other night.”

Ramona cooed with appreciation over her mother’s command of their small universe. She hopped out of the room without a look back.

“God, she’s so happy,” Lewis said.

“I hope she stays that way,” Jay replied.

“You were just like her,” said Lewis.

And it was true—Lewis remembered when Jay was Ramona’s age, with Lewis in his late twenties, when they had just bought the house (what a bargain
that
was) and Jay would play for hours in the garden in her imaginary universe. Jay had been a precocious child, diligent and serious. Lewis had adored her more than anything from the very moment of her birth—a moment that had shocked Lewis with its intensity, when he was overcome with sheer emotion stronger than any he had felt before or since, a rent in reality with the enormity that he had fostered a life. And now, more than two decades later, she stood in a sweatshirt in her apartment on Emerson Ave. and helped her own daughter locate missing toys. If only he had a way out of this maze of self, if only he could unzip his skin and step out, embrace his daughter, make her feel the raw purity of his love for her. She had once been such a happy little girl. He had once loved his wife. It took all his powers of optimism to avoid succumbing to the apprehension that they were living in the ashes of those days. For a second he considered telling Jay about seeing Anna, but it didn’t seem right. He would share everything when the time came.

“Anyway, Stephen told me I was a negative force in your life, in so many words,” Lewis added. “I call you too much on the phone. I’m too judgmental.”

“Dad,” Jay said, seeing a flash of strong emotion flare up in her father’s features before he could suppress it.

“Look, maybe he has a point,” Lewis said. “Christ, I know I’m not the easiest person in the world to get along with.”

“Mama?”

“But to have an outsider just come along and tell me that I’m some sort of awful presence—”

“Mama?”

“Dad, I doubt that’s what Stephen was trying to—”

“You should have been there,” Lewis said. “I mean, this guy takes me out of work and lays into me—”

“Grampa?”

“Yes, sweet thing, what is it?”

“What’s different about a goat and a sheep?” Ramona held up a pair of plastic animals.

“Why do you ask?” Lewis said.

“I’m making animal lines in my room,” Ramona replied.

“Oh.” Lewis looked up at Jay.

“She asked
you,
” Jay said with a laugh, enjoying her father’s perplexity.

“You mean what are their differences?” Lewis asked. Ramona nodded. “Well, it’s easier to say what they have in common. They both have hooves, I suppose. And long heads with sort of pointed chins.”

“And wool,” Ramona said.

“No, not that.” Lewis knelt down to Ramona’s level. “Goats don’t have wool. They have hair.”

“Hair?”

“Yeah, sort of thick sparse stuff,” Lewis said, oblivious, Jay saw, to the fact that he was exceeding the limits of Ramona’s vocabulary. “And you can milk a goat. Some cheese is made of goat’s milk—it’s really good. I don’t know about milking a sheep. I’ve never heard of it done.”

Jay watched Ramona raptly absorb Lewis’s every utterance, a sight providing her with pleasing associations. She would have hated for her father to learn how little she remembered of him as a younger man, and how the vague impressions she carried were of him being tense and brittle, his voice raised in irritation.

“Thank you,” Ramona said, and was gone again.

“I’m going to have to go back to school and study zoology to pull off this grandfather trip,” Lewis said.

“More coffee?”

Lewis looked into his half-full cup. “Better not,” he said, absentmindedly massaging his breastbone.

“What, are you having palpitations or something?” Jay asked.

“Only the metaphysical kind,” Lewis replied.

Jay let it slide. Ever since her mother took ill, Lewis had the look of a man haunted by mortality—specifically, his own. Jay suspected it was part of the reason he started taking those pills, but there were areas of her father’s life upon which it wouldn’t be proper for her to comment.

“Anyway, this Stephen thing doesn’t sound like something to get upset about,” Jay said.

“Do I look upset?” Lewis asked, his massaging hand splayed open.

“Sort of.”

“I don’t know what to feel,” Lewis said. “I mean, what does Stephen expect me to do? Curl up in a ball and die so that everyone can have a better life without me?”

“Dad,
don’t.
Ramona might hear.”

“I’ve reserved comment on some matters surrounding Stephen.”

“Really.”

Jay leaned back against the sink. It would be preferable if Lewis didn’t call her up to five or six times a day. Couldn’t she summon the courage to tell her father
that much
?

“I suppose you know I have my reservations about him spending the night with Ramona around,” Lewis said.

In the tentative morning light of season’s change, Lewis’s broad, handsome features and tucked-in carriage looked like some artist’s conception of aging masculinity. At times such as these he was like a wall impervious to eroding waters.

“Dad,” Jay said delicately. “You know what I’m going to say.”

“Mind my own business.” Lewis tried to smile at her.

“That’s part of it,” Jay said. “Here’s the rest:
trust me.
I know it’s delicate, having a boyfriend and a little girl at the same time. I’m managing to pull it off. You know, Dad, I have to balance my own interests with Ramona’s. I am
conscious
of that. What you don’t seem to acknowledge is that I
love
Stephen, and that he’s a good man. He’s good to me, and he’s good to Ramona. He stimulates me intellectually, and he makes me feel loved. I’m a
woman
now, Dad. I’m an adult. I’m dealing with aging and death and disappointment, the same as you.”

Lewis hid behind a mask of bland benevolence, nodding slightly as Jay spoke. Where was this coming from, this flow of hidden defiance? It felt
good.
Jay felt in control, capable of restraining the inchoate outbursts of adolescence in which she’d railed and railed against Lewis, once or twice, before dissolving in tears and apology.

“Look, Dad, I wish Stephen hadn’t done what he did,” she added. “Surprising you at work and critiquing you wasn’t the most political thing he could have done. But at least recognize that he was trying, in his clumsy way, to make things better. Because he loves me. And, presumably, because he wants there to be some line of connection between you two,
mano a mano.
”

“What about what he said,” Lewis asked. “Am I really that bad?”

“Much worse,” Jay said. “You are a fiend of monumental proportions.”

“I’m a
baaaaad man
!” Lewis bellowed, raising his fists in his age-old Ali impersonation.

“Just don’t hold anything against Stephen,” Jay said.

Lewis smiled a strange smile. “I have my own opinions about Stephen,” he said.

“Dad.”

“And they will go unsaid,” he said. “Because this is a beautiful cold bastard of a day in Minnesota, and I want to buy ice cream for my daughter and granddaughter.”

“Ice cream!” Ramona bleated from beneath them. She had been there for how long? How much had she heard? What would she make of it?
Shit,
Jay thought. She tried to control what her daughter knew about her, but as a censor she was a dismal failure.

Lewis walked out to the car while Jay got Ramona ready to face the chill of the day. The forecast had been for highs in the forties but the temperature hovered around freezing. Lewis zipped his coat up to his chin after sneaking out a cigarette from his shirt pocket and lighting it against the breeze.

A few unraked leaves fluttered at his feet. Jay’s building was nothing special, one of a line of brick four-stacks a block from the clogged artery of Hennepin Ave. Jay lived upstairs, on the left. The apartment beneath hers had a hand-lettered “Peace Now” sign stuck in the window. That sounded acceptable to Lewis.

But there was a time for peace and a time for war, as Ecclesiastes said. Lewis was no biblical scholar, but if he were to believe in a God it would be of the Old Testament stripe—wrathful, righteous, protective. Because, really, wasn’t that what it took?

A time to be born and a time to die. Like Anna, moaning in her bed that late night, in the hours before he called Jay to come over and visit what had once been her mother for the last time.

Lewis took a deep drag on his cigarette and looked up at the gray sky. A time to die.
Her
time to die.

He felt the most unbearable fucking grief for what he had done.

It seemed perfectly apparent,
in the cold light of day,
that Stephen was trying to drive a wedge between Lewis and Jay. All that talk of constructing harmful narratives—and no, Lewis couldn’t play dumb, he knew exactly what Stephen meant by that—was just a roundabout way of saying that Stephen resented the closeness between Lewis and his daughter. He wanted to be the man in Jay’s life. Maybe he even harbored daddy fantasies directed at Ramona.

Well, honestly,
fuck that.

Another drag on the cigarette, so good, the taste of life and death all rolled into one.

Lewis played the game, the one he indulged in only rarely, his guilty secret: he pretended Anna was still alive. She might be painting on the sunporch, or on a walk with a friend, or languorously making lunch—which sometimes took her hours. Lewis would go home, and they would talk about the garden, or whether the roof needed work, or about their child.

He remembered seeing her the day before in Starbucks. There, then gone. He wasn’t interested in whether she had really been there or not. Of
course
she hadn’t. But she
had.

Stephen intruded on Lewis’s thoughts. Stephen, who dared to confront Lewis and criticize him. Stephen was little more than a latecomer and an interloper who screwed his daughter and rose from her bed armed with arrows of condemnation aimed right at him.

Well, he could aim back, couldn’t he?

He stubbed out the cigarette butt on the sidewalk when he saw Jay and Ramona coming out the front door. Ramona looked bundled up and tiny, her coat shiny pink.

“What are you thinking?” Jay asked. “You have a funny look on your face.”

“Ice cream,” Lewis lied. “I’m thinking about ice cream.”

10. HE HAD DEALT WITH HIS SHARE OF JEALOUS FATHERS.

M
ost of the masks were reasonably comfortable to wear. Older lover to Jay Ingraham—now
that
was one Stephen liked, aside from the difficulty with Lewis, which surely could be resolved through diplomacy. Granted, Jay had avoided him last weekend, claiming she was tired and making a glancing allusion to his encounter with her father, but he knew she loved him. The mask of quasi-father to Ramona—he even liked that one, despite himself. She was a jewel. The mask of son to his parents? More problematic, rife with loyalty tests and coded entreaties. Best to leave California where it was, on the edge of the world, a territory reverting gradually to the wilds of anonymity.

But the best mask of all for Stephen was that of teacher, and now he looked out from behind its comfortable eyeholes at his class rising up in tiered seating above his podium.

“The paradigm of the internal life of the individual in the West is integration of identity. This is the gold standard of mental health,” Stephen told his class.

In front was a girl who had started the morning in a big, bulky sweater, then taken it off to reveal a tight, sleeveless Lycra top that exposed in astonishing detail the outlines of her nipples.

“The ideal under which we live, rarely articulated, is that integration of emotions, motives, and perception are the norm of our existence, and anything outside of that model is a deviation,” Stephen added. “But experience proves otherwise, as we all know, on a simple experiential basis of living our lives in modernity.”

Two rows back was Stephen’s challenger—there was one in every class, usually a male. He didn’t take notes, and he affected a skeptical expression, often opening his mouth a fraction as though about to offer a rebuttal. This personality type took the lecture as a reflection on him, with narcissism so deep that he believed he represented all of the students in a state of constant semirevolt against the teacher. He thought he was an intellectual, but in fact he was a natural politician.

“If there even
is
a self, quantifiable and real, it may be that it is very limited and doesn’t have much to say. This is one of the core messages we might extract from our reading so far this semester,” Stephen said. “As the text of a book is a form of performance by the writer,
for
the reader—the writer
impersonates
a writer during the time of the text’s creation—so our lives have the form of drama. The Buddhists explicitly teach this, although they recommend shedding the drama in favor of cosmic authenticity of a very impersonal variety. Here in the West, we tend to
dig
the drama, although it is instructive to recognize the drama for what it is. In our development, we have learned that there isn’t much
to
us, just a series of roles we enjoy playing.”

This was the best part of teaching: when the subject of his lecture ran smack into the very real matters he was thinking about in his own private life. This was what was great, actually
teaching
about what he had learned.

The girl in the tight top leaned forward and looked into Stephen’s eyes. She was more than a pair of breasts—Stephen remembered her name, and the fact that her midterm essay had been among the top ten percent of her class. But the breasts, compressed, young and perfect, brought Stephen in touch with his animal self, preverbal and grasping, and he enjoyed it very much.

“In our relationships, we are afforded infinite possibility and freedom, but it is our nature to settle upon roles and continually play them for each other,” Stephen said. “We settle upon the dramas and scenes we like, and continually reenact them. And it may be that those people who are most at home inside their skins, seemingly the least affected, the most genuine, are in fact the most skilled
actors.
Like the novelist who can suspend disbelief, or the moviemaker who can lead an audience happily into the most engrossing cinematic reality. They lead the way for the rest of us.”

Stephen looked out over his students. He suffered vertiginous disorientation if he looked upward in these tiered lecture halls so, like a performer on the stage, he had trained himself to focus only on those students immediately in front of him. There were a few decent minds out there, and some kids were actually trying to absorb what he was saying. It bothered him that some were taking notes on this part of the lecture. This wasn’t something that could be
written down;
this had to be lived and experienced. For many of them, at best they might recall some fragmentary impression of his words at a later date, hopefully adding perspective to their own disjointed, incomprehensible experience of being alive.

“That’s that,” Stephen said. It was nearly eleven in the morning, and he had gotten through another lecture. He felt burning in his eyes and an ache in his knees. Outside the window the landscaped terrain was flat, all browns and grays as this northern latitude settled into the long dormancy ahead. A couple of students walked past, their young bodies clenching with a sudden burst of wind.

“Make sure you read your Wordsworth before you come back on Wednesday,” Stephen added. “Read the poems aloud, try to figure out what they really mean. Remember, you’re not doing it to please me. You’re doing it for yourself. The text is not a
code
to figure out to pass a
test.
It is part of your life here on earth.”

A hand went up. It was Jason Miller, his would-be rival wearing an ironic gas-station jacket bearing another man’s name—a relic of a stranger’s monotony.

“Yes, Jason?” Stephen said.

“Well, I’ve listened to what you were saying,” Jason said, leaning sideways in his seat, very aware of the attention he was getting. “And it seems . . . well, it’s easy to just throw this stuff out, isn’t it? But am I supposed to take your word for it? I mean, I feel
real.
You’re telling me I’m not. But how can you speak for me?”

Stephen smiled. Most of the students were packing their things, eager to move on.

“When Freud used the workings of his own mind to make a point, he observed that it was reasonable to assume that his own subjective experience was indicative of his species as a whole,” Stephen said. “My observations on modernity are based on my own experience, what I’ve seen in others, and what is manifested in the assumptions that underpin the books we’ve been reading together.”

“Yes, I know,” Jason said, a little irritated. “But I feel
real.
I’m convinced I’m real. I don’t want to believe I’m just a bit player in some larger drama.”

“Well, you’re the
star
of your own drama, Jason,” Stephen said. “I’m playing a small role in it—the obtuse and self-important professor.”

“Well, I guess I can agree with
that,
” Jason said with a cockeyed smile.

Stephen grinned back. “Out of here, all of you,” he said. “Come back and ambush me on Wednesday with your revolutionary take on our old friend Wordsworth.”

Stephen stuffed his lecture notes into a manila folder and started fussing with his briefcase. There was a relieved flutter of activity as his students assembled their backpacks, notebooks, jackets, and, in a few cases, laptop computers. Stephen glanced up at a couple of girls who had transferred their intellectual excitement into attraction to Stephen, then a few boys who eyed him like baby wolves just starting to sense the Oedipal possibilities of taking him down. It was enough to make him love them all, at least the ones who cared enough to want to fuck or kill him. He imagined a girl’s dormitory room, soft and warm, relics from a safe adolescence mingled with the great works of culture, maybe an ashtray and a box of condoms on the dresser. The
small talk
they would make.

The room had cleared out save for a couple of stragglers engaged in conversation and oblivious to Stephen. Stephen latched his briefcase and picked up his empty coffee cup, ready to head to his office. Something caught his eye then, a patch of color up in the remotest outpost of the lecture hall.

“Lewis?” Stephen said, the name coming out like a cough.

Lewis Ingraham sat unsmiling in the back of the hall, his heavy winter coat folded under his arm as he unfolded his tall, lean frame from his chair. He clapped his hands together once, twice, three times, in a jarring mockery of applause. The few remaining students glanced up at him, then at Stephen, but quickly lost interest—this was something going on between individuals of advanced age, something that didn’t concern them.

“I didn’t see you up there,” Stephen said from behind his lectern as Lewis moved down the aisle toward him.

“No, you didn’t,” Lewis said heavily, his features set in an unreadable masculine solidity. Not for the first time Stephen thought he would like to age as well as Lewis.

“I suppose I should be honored,” Stephen said, trying to strike a note of congeniality. “I’ve managed to coerce an old alum back into auditing a course.”

“I was interested in what you had to say,” Lewis said, laying his coat over the rail. “After your lecture to me the other day, I thought I’d have a listen to what you’re telling your students.”

Stephen could not fail to note the acridity in Lewis’s tone. His mind flashed over the Jay-free weekend he’d just endured—and it
had
been lonely, and alarming, not to have her near—and deduced that Lewis had played a part in creating it. He had gotten to Jay and made his case without giving Stephen a chance at rebuttal. He had done his divisive thing, and painted Stephen in the most unflattering tones possible. Damn it, Stephen should have known.

“First of all, I didn’t
lecture
to you,” Stephen said. “I tried to bring some important issues into the open. You turned it into a confrontation.”

Lewis put his hands on the lectern. The difference in floor levels put his head at about the height of Stephen’s sternum.

“Did you really mean any of that horseshit?” Lewis asked.

“What horseshit, specifically?” asked Stephen.

“Well, there’s so much to choose from,” Lewis barked, his voice echoing in the artificial acoustics of the room. “You are the
master
of horseshit, Stephen.”

“Unlike you, Lewis.”

“Oh, no doubt,” Lewis said. “But let’s stay on the topic of you. Because you’re so
interesting.
There is no self, you say. We’re just playing roles. We impersonate ourselves. This is what you teach?”

“I don’t expect my observations to be easy to take,” Stephen said. “Nor do I set myself up as the avatar of truth. You just heard one lecture among many. I’ve been developing these ideas in lectures all semester.”

Lewis slapped the lectern and Stephen, to his shame, actually flinched.

“I’ve heard more than one lecture from you,” Lewis said. “Remember last week? Now
that
was a good one. ‘You make up damaging narratives for your daughter, Lewis. You’re a bad man, Lewis.’ You’ve got me all figured out, right?”

Lewis’s deadpan expression had suddenly become dynamic, with a simpering tone when he was mouthing Stephen’s supposed words. Stephen would have been offended, but this display was too shocking to take on any reasonable level. Lewis, who that morning looked extremely buttoned-down and conservative in shirt and slacks, had a totally spooky gleam in his eye. It was the look he had, on some level, been waiting to see, the uncensored Lewis that he wanted to warn Jay about.

“You’ve talked to Jay,” Stephen said. “That’s why she hasn’t wanted to see me.”

Lewis moved along the railing, toward the steps to the lectern.

“I talked to my daughter, yes,” he said, very cool. “I told her about our conversation. I think she agrees with my interpretation of things.”

“You mean you browbeat her into not facing what I brought up.”

Lewis smiled, his hand on the railing as he took the first step.

“You have a very nasty way of characterizing my relationship with my daughter, Stephen,” he said.

Stephen put down his coffee cup and let go of his briefcase. Lewis was still moving toward him, his face again locked into a mask that betrayed no emotion.

“What are you doing?” Stephen asked.

“Maybe someday you’ll have a family,” Lewis said. “And then you’ll understand something about the responsibilities that life places upon a father and a husband.”

“Stop it,” Stephen said. “I won’t be intimidated.”

“The responsibilities of life and death,” Lewis said, moving closer. “Giving and taking life. I’m talking about life in an uncertain world. I’m talking about protection, easing pain, cancer and perversion and meddlesome
boy
friends who think they can insinuate themselves into a
man’s
business.”

“Stop right there,” Stephen said. “I don’t think we should be talking with you in this—”

“This is a
great
time to talk,” Lewis said. He was less than ten feet away now, sliding along the rail in shuffling steps, his eyes locked onto Stephen’s. “The perfect time. Things are so clear. You obviously like younger girls, Stephen. Why don’t you fuck one of your students and leave Jay alone? She’s better off without you.
We’re
better off without you. Or, what, is Jay getting too old for you? Do you like getting so close so you can see her little daughter in the morning?”

“Lewis!” So far he had been able to rebut the lunacy of Lewis’s assertions, but this was too much. He felt guilty and dirtied to have even heard such a thing.

Lewis paused. “Maybe that’s it,” he said softly to himself.

“Jesus, that you would even
think
—”

“There’s all kinds of things I can think, Stephen,” Lewis said softly. He took a step closer. Stephen struggled not to back away.

“This is ridiculous, Lewis,” he said.

“If we’re all just playing roles, what roles do you like playing?” Lewis asked. “Divider of families? Incestuous stepfather? Are our lives just a game to you? Are you some kind of
God,
Stephen?”

“Lewis, this is crossing the line—”

“So now we have
lines
that we can’t cross? Because you say so?” Lewis took another step. He was now close enough to reach Stephen. “You’re not the only one who has theories, Stephen. Do you want to hear mine?”