Country of Cold (6 page)

“Awake till dawn again.”

With a laugh and a leap in register, she says, “Us too.” Gabriella’s eyes make a slow, lazy loop-the-loop. The fashion magazine stays where it is. Peter’s chin tilts toward his chest. He’s wishing he were elsewhere.

“The week started off with a dinner dance?” I say to Peter.

“As far as I remember,” he says, grinning widely, shrugging. He’s not a bad guy, you can tell.

For Gabriella every expression of Felicinada’s sexuality is a betrayal of their relationship. Gabriella’s sense of self-denial is so strongly developed as to extend even to those around her. Peter clearly has no inkling of the titanic struggle being waged over him. I am not without pity, or envy.

Peter is talking about his job, which he is certain he has lost by now. Something to do with bondage. Or bonds, maybe he was making a joke.

“What are you going to do now?” I ask.

Felicinada is silent and pretends to be listening to Peter.

“Watch music videos until my attention span is the same duration as a sneeze,” he says.

Gabriella. Reads. Her. Magazine.

From across the hall the sounds of Charlie warming up his horn drift through the walls. Afternoon practice. He starts up on “My Funny Valentine.” “What in God’s name is that?” asks Peter.

“Frustrated ambition,” I say.

“A frustrated cock,” Gabriella says, through her magazine.

“Is everyone crazy here?” Peter asks. And Charlie wails some more. A quiet knock on the door. I get up and open it, Dorothy’s there, smiling. Come in, Dorothy, are you sure, sorry to be bothering, no bother, want some coffee, a croissant? It’s just that it was getting a little loud and I could feel one of my headaches coming on. Jam or marmalade? You’re such a dear.

Dorothy is in her early fifties and maintains her hair in a state of complete subjugation. She is always pleasant and wears aprons that she embroiders herself. I have no idea why she stays with Charlie. Gabriella thinks it has something to do with that hair.

“Good afternoon, my name is Peter and I’m from New York,” Peter says.

“And what do you do in New York, Peter?”

“I am newly unemployed.”

“Sorry to hear it, what are your plans?”

“I’ve just been thinking about that and I figure my severance pay would get me as far as Mexico City anyway.”

“I hear Mexico City is lovely this time of year,” Dorothy replies. Peter is looking at Felicinada, who is looking at the floor.

“Dorothy, you have to do something about Charlie—this is ridiculous,” Gabriella snaps. With that, Charlie
leaps into the break and the music fills the room, pure pathos and heartbreak.

“I know, dear, I tried to talk to him earlier today.”

Felicinada, to Peter: “How long would you be going for?”

Gabriella, to me: “I don’t know why we stand it, we pay rent here after all.”

“I dunno. A couple months?”

Dorothy, to Felicinada: “Would you pass the creamer please, dear?”

Charlie launches into “A Night in Tunisia” and oh my God, I’ve never heard him play like this before, even through two doors and the hallway, no drunk plays like this. I look over at Dorothy, who is stirring her coffee. “Is this jam homemade?” she asks, pointing to her croissant. “I’d die for the recipe.”

Felicinada says, “How would you be going?”

Peter says, “I have a VW Microbus that I keep out at my parents’ in Yonkers. I was thinking I could drive it down.”

Gabriella, facing me: “You can’t ever make someone else responsible for your happiness. That’s the first rule of sanity.”

“Boy, that sounds like fun.”

“Because the second you do that, and they see it, they have no choice but to let you down.”

“Want some company?”

“Sure.”

I listen to this music now and I am gooseflesh. Why haven’t I heard him like this before? “Dorothy,” I say, “what’s with Charlie today?”

“I’m sorry, I know he must get on your nerves.”

“No, not that, why is he playing like that?”

“Like what, dear?”

“All I need is about twenty minutes to pack.”

“Are you sure?”

“Is this tea Earl Grey?”

“Sure I’m sure, c’mon, all I need is a raincoat and my toothbrush.”

“He used to play like that all the time,” she said, picking up Gabriella’s magazine and looking at the front cover. “You think he’s hard to take
now.”

“You can’t count on him.”

And the door squeaks open. Peter lifts his eyebrows and smiles as he is pulled upstairs. And then the door clicks shut.

Dorothy looks down at her magazine and Gabriella stares straight ahead at the wall but the only thing you can hear is Charlie’s cornet weeping. And then Dorothy sets down the magazine and takes a deep breath and says, “Well, I’ve been imposing on you folks long enough, thank you for the hospitality.” And she thanks me for the tea as well and walks out the door.

Gabriella is still sitting on the couch, drinking her coffee and chewing slowly on a pear, when I look down from the window and see Dorothy, in a camel coat and
carrying two large suitcases, get into a taxi. I don’t say anything. And then Peter and Felicinada stumble out into the street, tripping and laughing all over one another. I watch them until they disappear behind a row of parked cars. I can still hear them laughing. Gabriella bites into her pear and chews loudly. It seems to go on for hours.

What she said was: “You are com-pletely insane.” This, as I was shaving, peering myopically into the mirror, grateful for the excuse to avert my eyes. She was sitting on the toilet with her legs crossed, looking at my reflection in the mirror. I couldn’t meet even her reflected gaze.

I leaned closer and pulled against the side of my face to draw it taut over my jaw. I swiped at my chin with my razor, a Bic disposable. “Scrrch scrrch.” It was a new razor and I liked how it pulled my whiskers evenly as it went. I pushed some shaving cream over to a spot I had just shaved and went over it again. Smooth as a baby’s bottom. Up and around the lips, this can be tricky but you just have to take your time, be precise and be ready to back off if you think you’re digging into skin.

“Are you listening to me?” she asked. The especially difficult part is the throat. I have this extra-prominent Adam’s apple and so there’s always this little outcrop of
skin that just won’t shave without being cut. My dad used a blade too. I guess the first razor I used, if you can count it, was his. My mother still describes how I emerged from the bathroom, five years old, tears welling up, shaving cream haphazardly spread across much of my upper thorax, blood everywhere, crying apologetically, “Something came happen to my lip.” That’s how she describes it anyway. He had one of those safety razors, with the knob on the handle that opened it up like a missile silo, to admit a new razor blade. “Safety razor”—I can only guess at what they could have meant, the things are a menace. Wilkinson Sword was my dad’s brand. Generalizing from the cereal box experience, I was always under the impression that after you bought enough razor blades, you got one of those swords on the cover of the package. “Think of the pirate games that we could have with that thing,” I thought, having learned nothing from my first bloodying.

“Yeah, I’m listening to you.”

“Well, what the hell did you mean by what you just said?”

Despite my every precaution I felt the peninsula of skin carried off even as the shaving cream began to pinken. The effect was striking: crimson welling up through snow white. The ticket is to keep the skin as taut as possible; I cranked my chin around to the side as far as I could. I caught myself in the mirror, eyes way over to the side like a horse in fast water.

“Look, forget it,” I said. Sccrrrch, sccrrrch, sccrrrch. “I’m still waking up here and,” sccrrrch, “I was just mumbling away.” I sneaked a peak at her. She was staring at the back of my neck without blinking, looking flummoxed. I looked away.

In the army there was this guy named Rainer in the same platoon as me in basic training. He was a Hutterite, or had been once. He used to use this straight razor that had been given to him by his grandfather. This thing had been sharpened so many times it was only about a half inch wide, although you could tell from the handle that it had originally been twice that. Rainer used to get up fifteen minutes before the rest of us to strop his razor against his belt. I still remember that singing sound it made as he slapped it back and forth and I’d know that in another half hour I’d be doing push-ups in the rain and I’d shudder. Rainer was bigger and stronger than any of us city kids and no one gave him any grief about anything even though he got drunk on two glasses of beer and couldn’t speak to girls. And when he’d stand before the mirror with that razor, slow and contemplative, it looked to us like an unspeakably evil thing, and when he ran it down his face and no blood appeared, his stature grew tenfold. Within a month we had all gone out and bought one for ourselves to learn individually the compelling reasons behind the Gillette revolution. Some mornings we looked like we had fought all night with small delicate
switchblades. When Rainer quit a week before the basic training was finished we were all astonished.

“Why do you think I spend so much time down here with you?” Sccrrrch, sccrrrch.

“I’ll tell you why,” she said. “It’s because with you and me things are comfortable. There’s no competition between us. We do not posture for one another and this is a very rare thing—lovers almost never have it, despite what they think sometimes. Let’s please not mess this up.”

Sccrrcch, sccrrcch.

Rainer quit, he said, because he figured out that this wasn’t where he belonged. The rule was that if you finished basic training you had to finish out your four years but if you failed or quit basic training you could just walk away. Rainer said that it took him twenty-two years to walk away from the colony and only thirteen weeks to walk away from his promising career in the armed forces, so he figured that he was making progress.

After our final parade and after we had all got our postings, the platoon got together to drink together one last time. Someone asked if anyone knew where Rainer had gone. Someone asked why he had quit, did Sarge know? Sergeant Grabowski, eight years older than the rest of us, shook his head and said that Rainer was one of these guys who won’t ever really belong anywhere, he knew the type, he said. The army is full of them.

“It’s already messed up though, isn’t it? I mean, from here on in I have to think about anything you say and anything I say … ah, shit.” She stood up behind me. She looked like maybe she was going to start crying.

I remember watching him pack his little suitcase after he had turned in all his uniforms and everything. All he owned was a change of clothes and a Bible and his razor. He said he was going to look for construction work out west. I asked him if he knew anyone out there, he said he’d meet people. I gave him my parents’ phone number in Dunsmuir but I knew I wouldn’t see him again.

This was in 1989.

When his American wife had asked him to leave after the birth of their daughter, Leonard had been astonished and had had no reply available. To her, this looked like acquiescence to a reasonable request, but he could barely breathe over the pain in his belly, and for some reason, his jaw joints. He moved out in the space of a few hours, and the whole time he was afraid he was going to collapse.

This trivial boy his wife had taken up with disgusted him; her affection for the boy made Leonard question his own affection for his wife. Briefly. Optimistically. But she had long ago taken possession of him and there was no solution to this problem.

One year after the young Canadian had gone back to North America, he found himself in an airport lounge in Frankfurt, waiting for a connection. Giselle
was there, with her father, and she recognized him. He was reading a novel, but became aware that he was being stared at. She looked different than she had and he did not recognize her. Leonard’s face was behind a newspaper. Giselle waved. He waved back.

When she and her father returned to Paris, Giselle caught her mother alone and told her about seeing the boy, about his not recognizing her. Her mother breathed deeply and then stood straight and light for what seemed to her daughter to be the first time. Giselle wanted to say more, to enhance this effect, but she was older now, and knew enough to stop.

The year my twin brother, Albert, and I turned sixteen we each grew four and a half inches and nearly bankrupted our parents, our mother claims, so frequently were we thrusting our gaping maws into the refrigerator and chewing and swallowing. We both worked after school and weekends at the Red River Esso service station, and for our meal breaks we went across the street to the Dairy Queen. On any individual day we usually spent the bulk of our earnings there. It makes me queasy even now to think of it: triple burgers with chili and cheese, Peanut Buster Parfaits, Dilly Bars, onion rings, Super Dawgs, and on and on. We would phone ahead to avoid wasting eating time, pay wordlessly, sit down across a table from each other,
and work our arms in synchrony, our mandibles a blur of insectoid frenzy. I’m sure we paid for the best part of the Dairy Queen’s heating bill that winter. The girls behind the counter, who we knew from school, regarded us with the same pitying affection they might have had for a deformed baby pig. We didn’t even notice them unless they got something wrong with the food. Like, broken glass in the ice cream might have got our attention.

The Dairy Queen was owned by a man named Terry, who was in his early forties and struck our father as something of an operator. Terry quickly got to know Albert and me, of course, and affected a friendliness that seemed genuine.

The thing about the Dunsmuir Dairy Queen was that it did far worse in summer than in winter—“the only one in the district!” Terry would wail, head in hands—the summer ice cream market having been wrapped up since the Eisenhower era by the Snak Shak and its Marshmallow Monsters. Terry had to do something about this and decided to sponsor a banana-split-eating contest.