Chapter 36
Ron was sound asleep in bed when the phone rang. He heard it as if in a dream and then it grew louder and her sat up in bed and fumbled for it. His voice was thick with sleep. “Hello.”
“Good morning Ron,” said the crisply starched voice of Sister Irene Emanuel. “The school is closed today because of the snow. Enjoy your holiday.”
“Thank you, Sister.”
He put the phone back into its cradle and looked around the dark room. He rolled on his side and stretched up to look out the window. He could see nothing but a white sheet of snowy ice that stuck to the plane of glass in the darkness. He heard the muffled whisper of wind. He threw the covers off and got out of bed naked. He walked into the living room of his three room apartment and went to the bay windows that looked out onto Glenwood Avenue. The sight stopped him. Everything was buried under a blanket of snow and the wind was blowing the small flakes down in a slant that made everything look askew.
He smiled and padded back to his warm empty bed and crawled under the covers and pulled them up to his chin and closed his eyes.
Two hours later he woke up again and saw that there was light outside. The telephone was ringing again and Ron rubbed his face and reached for it. “Hello.”
He could hear breathing on the other end of the line but there was no answer. He repeated, “Hello.” Still there was no answer and he knew why. “Zoe, it’s ok. You can talk to me. It’s ok.”
Still there was nothing but silence and the breathing. He waited several minutes and then said, “If you aren’t going to speak, I’ll just hang up.”
He heard the receiver click and lay back down staring up at the ceiling. It had been this way since she left and went to Boston. Once a week, sometimes more, the phone calls. Sometimes, she actually was able to speak, but then she just began to cry and tell him how much she missed him and before he could answer, there would be that click.
They had been living together for months before he really figured out about her eating disorder. He didn’t even know what bulimia was then. But he took the approach of trying to understand and being careful not to have any food in the house. He took her out to eat every single night and stayed with her after they came home, sometimes following her trips to the bath room with his own and looking for the tell-tale smells of either vomit or air freshener. It came to a head the night that he had forgotten about a half-gallon of ice cream that Quimpy had brought over and woke up in the middle of the night to find her frying it and then pouring it into a bottle and gulping it down until she could make herself sick.
Ron closed his eyes. It was then that he told her that he would never consider having a baby with her while she was like this. After that, she talked about art school more and more. Her father had convinced her that she could not get student loans because of his income. Ron had showed her how to get around that, and then she left him to go to an art school.
Ron opened his eyes again. He didn’t want to think about her anymore. He knew that if he kept thinking about her, it would come back to him how she had fucked Quimpy, and he would get angry and feel betrayed all over again.
Ron got out of bed and dressed in warm layers. He really didn’t own a winter coat so he made up for it with two sweaters and his warmest jacket. He did have boots and wore two pairs of socks under them. His feet felt huge as he trudged through the snow to the corner luncheonette.
He never kept coffee in the house, or that much food at all. No one had been out to shovel their sidewalks and the one black walk required him to lift his feet high and feel a bit off balance.
The sidewalk in front of the luncheonette had been cleared and the lights from inside pulsed out through the windows. The snow blew into his face and melted on his lips and found its way into his mouth.
He stamped his feet when he entered. The counter man looked up and recognized him and nodded. “What a fuckin’ mess this is,” he said.
Ron nodded. “Half expected you guys to be closed.”
The guy pointed up the ceiling. “It’s an easy commute.”
Ron got two containers of coffee and a buttered roll. He bought a quarter of a pound of chicken roll and a quarter of Swiss, figuring that he wouldn’t be going out again anytime soon with the way that this storm looked. He trudged back out into the snow, holding one container in each hand, the roll stuffed into his shirt with the deli food tucked under his belt. The walk back was precipitous and Ron was sure that he was either going to fall or drop one of the containers. About half way back he felt the deli food slide down below his belt. “Fuck,” he growled as he felt it inch lower with each step that he took. Still more than a half-block away and already feeling the package slip down to his upper thigh. Trying to bend his body forward gripping the coffee containers in each hand and feeling it slip lower and lower; the deli meat now just above his knee.
Ron stopped and looked around and saw no place to set the containers down so that he could adjust. He bent lower and tried to press his elbow against the escaping package. Finally trying to cradle the second container against his chest, Ron reached down and grabbed the package through his pants. The pressure of his arm was too much and the lid popped off and the coffee spilled out against his jacket. Ron watched with dismay as it gurgled out over his glove, at first very hot and then swiftly cooling. Finally he just let it drop into the snow. He watched the brown circle spread out. He clutched the package and trudged the rest of the way back to his apartment feeling defeated.
Ron ate his roll and drank his remaining coffee sitting in front of his bay windows watching the snow come down. He liked watching the spectacle. His eyes watched the cars coming slowly down the street, some carrying absurd roofs filled with mounting snow and some completely cleared. He heard the click of chains as a bus rolled passed his windows. He felt like this was time in a bubble. His work was done for his next class. His papers were all graded. He knew what he wanted to do for the next couple of weeks.
It was then that a thought flashed in his mind. “Suppose I wrote the truth.” The idea stunned him for a moment, but it didn’t go away. Suppose he did write the truth? What difference would it make? He stared over at his typewriter and the pile of paper that rested, well stacked and empty, next to it. It was then that he saw the plow truck push the snow against his car and the other cars that were on that side of the street. The snow was icy and caked and dirty when it slid against his car and all but obliterated the sight of his wheels and parts of the front and rear fenders. “Shit!” he said aloud.
Wrapped in a scarf and with more layers of clothing on and slogging in his boots, Ron reached the car. His shovel was in the trunk so he held his arm against the top of trunk and tried to sweep the snow off. He got about halfway when the weight of it stopped his progress and ice made its way under his glove and up under his sleeve. He lifted his arm and shook it to get the ice out and this motion sent his glove into the snow. Ron looked down at the glove with a helpless feeling. Snow was already working its way into the fingers. He bent over and picked it up with his bare hand. His fingers were already turning red. The glove was wet and cold on his hand. This time he used his other hand to sweep and made it to the end before the ice and snow went up his other sleeve. “Motherfucker!” he said under his breath. Then he reached with his trembling and now bare fingers for his keys. He got them out and tried to insert the key into the lock. It was frozen solid. He made a fist and slapped the lock. Then he put his gloves back on and tried to punch the ice off. Both of his hands were cold and stinging and going numb and the lock wasn’t budging.
Sullenly, Ron trudged back across the street and up the stairs into the kitchen. When the ice on the underside of his boots contacted the linoleum of his lichen floor, his feet went up into the air and he came down flat on the floor. He lay there a moment in panic and checked his knees. They were ok. He exhaled a long sigh of relief and slowly got up, clinging to the side of the sink as his boots began to slide again. He bent down and took them off and hurled them at his door.
Ron ran the water until it was very hot and then filled an aluminum pot. He knocked the ice off of his boots in the tub. He put them back on and carried the pot of hot water down the stairs but he had forgotten to use a lid and the water sloshed out over his gloved hands and down his pants leg. It burned and he opened his mouth into an oval of pain. By the time he got across the street, almost a third of the water was wasted but he thought he still had enough. He poured it on the lock and watched it steam the ice away. They key went in easily now.
Ron liked to dig and he was good at it. He bent his back into it and found a rhythm and then he was able to open the car door and get inside and start it up. The exhaust made a black circle of soot by the tail pipe as Ron dug and listened to the car engine hum. An hour or so later, he was ready to give it a try.
He felt exaltation when the car nosed its way out onto the street. And then he backed it in again. He gathered his now very cold aluminum pot and put the shovel in the back seat and went back up to his warm apartment, feeling a sense of accomplishment. Ron piled his wet icy clothes in a corner of the kitchen, put on clean, warm, dry clothes. He sat down at his desk and rubbed his hands together and looked back out admiringly at his work, just as the snow plow came back down the street and pushed a fresh load against the side of his newly re-encased transportation.
He laughed to himself. It really was absurd. Then he sat down at his typewriter and began to write. Where to start was easy. Lashly’s class. What class? It just came out in a stream. Ron felt his hands flying over the keys and then he looked up and it was dark. How long had he been doing that? He was hungry. It was still snowing.
Ron went into the kitchen and took out the lunchmeat. He had no bread, but he did have some mayo. He rolled the chicken breast and the cheese into cylinders after coating the insides with mayo and went back into the front room to read what he had written. He was appalled. The truth was that he could not write a sentence without having at least three typos and two misspelled words. He wanted to take out his red pen and put an F on every page, but set about to correcting the errors with a dictionary opened up beside the stack of fifteen pages that he has written. When he was finished he felt sick to his stomach. Whatever made him think that he could write anything? What was the matter with him? Of course his poetry was shit. Because he didn’t know the language!
Ron ate silently and sulked, staring at the red marks that he had made like they were accusations. Then he heard a feint tapping at his door. He walked through the rooms and opened the door. No one was there, but on his mat was a small plate of macaroni and sauce. He looked down at it, both wincing and smiling at the same time. It was the old woman who lived next door to him. She was forever leaving him scraps like he was a pet. But Ron chose to see them as gifts. He never told her what he ate and what he flushed down the toilet. He always washed her dish and knocked politely on her door the next day and thanked her for being so kind to him and told her that she didn’t have to do that. She never really answered and when Ron looked at her face, he saw someone who did not understand what he had been saying. He was unsure if she was hard of hearing or did not understand English.
But this time he was hungry and without thinking about it he just ate the food. It tasted good. It was cold but tasted good.
He was just finishing when his phone began to ring.
“Ron the school will be closed until Monday. Enjoy your weekend and stay warm.”
“Thank you Sister Irene. I’ll see you on Monday.”
It was Thursday night and his bubble had just gotten much bigger. He felt a rush of freedom surge through him as he walked back through the rooms. He turned on his stereo and Bob Dylan’s voice sang “Changing of the Guard.” He cranked it up and rolled a joint. He filled a large glass with water and sat back down at the typewriter. The music was distracting him. He tuned the volume down, but still the power of Dylan’s words broke through and he found himself thinking about them as he tried to write. It was no good. He got up and found one of his Bill Evan albums and slipped it on. No voice, no words and now the piano was helping. It could give him a rhythm that he could write to. It was like his soundtrack. It kept the thoughts arranged in his head. The side was long finished before he realized that it wasn’t playing anymore.
Ron turned the record over and then watered his plants. They were healthy and wild and they loved him back when he loved them. The music drew him back to the desk. It was Zoe’s desk. She had wanted it back. He had said that he would give it to her when she made some effort to pay back some of the money that she had borrowed from him. He had felt like an asshole doing that, but enough was enough. It’s not like she ever used the desk and of all the dozens and dozens of drawings that she had made of him, she had given him none. He wondered why she had done that. She would just have destroyed them anyway. He loved the way that he looked through her eyes. What had Julian called her? A boardwalk portrait painter. Julian was an ass. Yeah, maybe he was, but he hadn’t stolen her desk.