straining to hear if she was moving, straining not to miss even a very faint tapping on the door. What he heard, instead, in his imagination, was Jessica telling him that he needed to be fair: that he owed his wife at least the courtesy of telling her to go away. And yet, after six years of silence, he felt that to speak even one word would be to take back everything—would undo all of his refusal and negate everything he’d meant by it.
At length, as if waking from some half-sleeping dream, he turned on a light and drank a glass of water and found himself drawn to his file cabinet by way of compromise; he could at least take a look at what the world had to say to him. He opened first the mailer from Jersey City. There was no note inside it, just a CD in impenetrable plastic wrapping. It appeared to be a small-label Richard Katz solo effort, with a boreal landscape on the front, superimposed with the title Songs for Walter.
He heard a sharp cry of pain, his own, as if it were someone else’s. The fucker, the fucker, it wasn’t fair. He turned over the CD with shaking hands and read the track list. The first song was called “Two Kids Good, No Kids Better.”
“God, what an asshole you are,” he said, smiling and weeping. “This is so unfair, you asshole.”
After he’d cried for a while at the unfairness, and at the possibility that Richard wasn’t wholly heartless, he put the CD back into the mailer and opened the envelope from Patty. It contained a manuscript that he read only one short paragraph of before running to the front door, pulling it open, and shaking the pages at her.
“I don’t want this!” he shouted at her. “I don’t want to read you! I want you to take this and get in your car and warm up, because it’s fucking freezing out here.”
She was, indeed, shuddering with chills, but she appeared to be locked in her huddled position and didn’t look up to see what he was holding. If anything, she lowered her head further, as if he were beating on it.
“Get in your car! Warm up! I didn’t ask you to come here!”
It may have just been an especially violent shudder, but she seemed to shake her head at this, a little bit.
“I promise I’ll call you,” he said. “I promise to have a conversation on the phone with you if you’ll go away now and get yourself warmed up.”
“No,” she said in a very small voice.
“Fine, then! Freeze!”
He slammed the door and ran through the house and out the back door, all the way down to the lake. He was determined to be cold himself if she was so intent on freezing. Somehow he was still clutching her manuscript. Across the lake were the blazing wasteful lights of Canterbridge Estates, the jumbo screens flashing with whatever the world believed was happening to it tonight. Everybody warm in their dens, the coal-fired Iron Range power plants pushing current through the grid, the Arctic still arctic enough to send frost down through the temperate October woods. However little he’d ever known how to live, he’d never known less than he knew now. But as the bite in the air became less bracing and more serious, more of a chill in his bones, he began to worry about Patty. Teeth chattering, he went back up the hill and around to the front step and found her tipped over, less tightly balled up, her head in the grass. She was, ominously, no longer shivering.
“Patty, OK,” he said, kneeling down. “This is not good, OK? I’ll bring you inside.”
She stirred a little, stiffly. Her muscles seemed inelastic, and no warmth was coming through the corduroy of her jacket. He tried to get her to stand up, but it didn’t work, and so he carried her inside and laid her on the sofa and piled blankets on her.
“This was so stupid,” he said, putting a teakettle on. “People die from doing these things. Patty? It doesn’t have to be below zero, you can die when it’s thirty degrees out. You’re just stupid to sit out there for so long. I mean, how many years did you live in Minnesota? Did you not learn anything? This is so fucking stupid of you.”
He turned up the furnace and brought her a mug of hot water and made her sit up to