The Snow Queen by Michael Cunningham Read Free Book Online

throne of ice
    Maybe it’s not as bad as it sounds this early in the morning. That’s a possibility.
    But still. If Tyler were the real thing, if he were meant to do this
,
wouldn’t he have more confidence? Wouldn’t he feel …
guided,
somehow?
    Never mind that he’s forty-three, and still playing in a bar.
    He will not come to his senses. That’s the siren song of advancing age. He can’t, he won’t, deny the snag in his heart (there’s that
word
again). He can feel it, an undercurrent in his bloodstream, this urge that’s utterly his own. No one ever said to him, why don’t you use your degree in political science to write songs, why don’t you blow the modest inheritance your mother left by sitting in ever-smaller rooms, strumming a guitar. It’s his open secret, the self inside the self, secret because he believes he knows within himself a brilliance, or at least a penetrating clarity, that hasn’t come out yet. He’s still producing approximations, and it vexes him that most people (not Beth, not Barrett, just everybody else) see him as a sad case, a middle-aged bar singer (no, make that a middle-aged bar
tender
, who’s permitted by the owner to sing on Friday and Saturday nights), when he knows (he knows) that he’s still nascent, no prodigy of course, but the music and poetry move slowly in him, great songs hover over his head, and there are moments, real moments, when he feels so certain he can reach them, he can almost literally pull them out of the air, and he tries, lord how he tries, but what he grabs hold of is never quite it.
    Fail. Try again. Fail better. Right?
    He sings the first two lines again, softly, to himself. He hopes they’ll open into … something. Something magical, and obscurely on target, and …
good
.
    To walk the frozen halls at night
    To find you on your throne of ice
    He sings quietly in the kitchen, with its faint gassy smell and its pale blue walls (they must, once, have been aquamarine), its tacked-up photographs of Burroughs and Bowie and Dylan, and (Beth’s) Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor. If he can write a beautiful song for Beth, if he can sing it to her at their wedding and know that it’s a proper testament—a true gift, not just another near miss, another nice try, but a song that lands, that lances, that’s gentle but faceted, gleaming, gem-hard …
    Give it one more go, then.
    He starts singing again, as Beth dreams in the next room. He sings quietly to his lover, his bride to be, his dying girl, the girl for whom this song and, probably, really, all the songs are meant. He sings into the brightening air of the room.

B arrett has gotten dressed. The tight (too tight? fuck it—if you present yourself as a beauty, people tend to believe you) wool pants, the Clash T-shirt (worn down to pearl-gray translucence), the ostentatiously ragged sweater that drapes limp and indolent almost to his knees.
    Here he is, bathed, hair-gelled, dressed for the day. Here’s his reflection in his bedroom mirror, here’s the room in which he currently resides: Shinto-inspired, just a mattress and a low table, the walls and floor painted white, Barrett’s private sanctuary from the funky-junk museum that is the rest of Tyler and Beth’s apartment.
    He takes out his cell phone. Liz’s phone will be turned off, of course, but he should tell her he’s going to open the shop this morning.
    “Hey, it’s Liz, leave a message.”
    He’s still surprised, sometimes, by the clipped force of her voice, when it transmits unaccompanied by her animated, rather off-kilter face (she’s one of those women who insists, successfully, on her own beauty—Barrett has learned from her; on the assertion that a hooked jut of nose and a wide, thin-lipped mouth is, must be, added to the list of desirable features), the careless gray tangle of her hair.
    Barrett speaks into (onto?) her voice mail.
    “Hi. I’m going in early, just to lurk around, so if you and Andrew want to stay snuggled