Adverbs (8 page)

“That sounds terrible,” Andrea said, “but I guess it might be good.”

“It’s delicious,” Gladys said. “If I were you I’d order one.”

“We don’t have those party drinks,” Andy said, breaking someone’s heart every day. “This is a diner.”

“I know what it is,” Gladys said and drank her half coffee in one gulp. “As you well know, Andrea, the Gene Ahern Gloom Chaser was invented by Gene Ahern, the author of the comic strip—”

“I don’t know it,” Andrea said, with a shrug and an empty carafe. “Why do you say that, as you well know?”

“As you well know,” Gladys said. “It’s an affectation of mine.”

“What is the comic strip?” Mike asked. Even Mike had recognized Gladys but maybe could not believe it, that something so interesting would happen after all this jukebox, after waiting for that guy to show up who never did, and the detectives. He had given up the day for lousy, and now, the woman they were looking for?
Now?

“The comic strip,” Gladys said, moving her coffee cup to Andy like a chess piece, “was called
Room and Board
, and as you well know it was not funny at all. There was one I remember, a man in a clown suit, big red nose, big long beard, big tall hat with a tassel like they do. He is looking in the mirror and the speech bubble says, ‘I can’t go to the masked ball like this! I need a shave’—something like that. Not funny, as you well know, but for a while there was talk of a movie, and I was going to be the ingenue.”

“What’s the ingenue,
Nancy
?” Mike asked. He got the code, the Nancy strategy, even though it would not work.

“An ingenue,” Gladys said, “is an innocent woman. It doesn’t surprise me that a boy your age hasn’t seen one, and I’m
Gladys
, dear. Comic strips is about the only place you see them, comic strips and private homes.”

“I agree with a man I know,” said the detective suddenly.

“Beg pardon?” Gladys said.

“Man says innocence is the rarest of commodities in the known world,” the detective said. Gladys’s face changed, and it was a shame to see.

“Could you repeat yourself, please?” Gladys said. “Sir?”

The detective took his lazy time. “My partner and I,” he said, and his sweeping palm said
and our hats
, “we know a man, says innocence is the rarest of commodities in the known world. Says when you find it, grab it, no matter who you have to hire.”

“And how do you know this man?” Gladys said sadly. “Sitting next to you, maybe?”

“I know him the same way I know that you drink your coffee
in half cups,” the detective said, and his partner lifted the place mat from the table. Gladys looked down for the first time and saw a picture of herself, and then the message in ink: “Gladys comes here all the time.” It was true.

“Gladys, pay no attention to these guys,” Andy said. “These bad guys are dumb. They think South America is crawling with birds, and I’m going to call the police.”

The partner put the place mat down and spread his hands on it like he was healing the sick, which he was not doing. He began to speak. “If someone pours you a full cup,” he said, “
Gladys
, the bottom half is freezing cold before you can drink it, on account of your deadly breath of ice. Isn’t that right, Your Highness?”

“Kaatu,” Gladys said in a mysterious howl, and here we could skip ahead if you know what I mean. It is always tempting to skip past words we do not understand, the parts of a relationship which confuse us, and arrive at a nice clear sentence—“They clearly weren’t in love anymore,” or “The yellow-billed magpie can be found exclusively in the coastal valleys south of San Francisco Bay, and there are three common words beginning with the letter A that describe it,” or “She was wearing some sort of cape,” all of which appeared in the report filed by the surviving and more talkative detective. But we cannot skip to that or it wouldn’t be a love story. We cannot skip the way we look in photographs, or our own affectations, or the way we like our coffee, or the way the people we love like their coffee, even though they like it some bad, bad way. We must suffer through all of it, without skipping any tiny thing, and anyway it was a shawl she was wearing. She spread it out high so it drooped down her arms
and kept saying things we cannot understand. “Kaatu maka, ebbery ebbery fingersauce!”

She stood up from her place, her shawl like bat’s wings, and stared down the detective’s partner with an elegant disgust we’ve all unfortunately seen. “I don’t love you anymore,” she howled, “kaatu kaatu maka!” and she spun out of Andy’s diner. When the doors opened the rush sound of the rain came through, like those doors had been soundproof all this time. A blast of cold air gave everyone its fierce attention. It felt colder than it had been outside, but none of the people in the diner had been outside for a while and it had grown dark. It could have been anything, so cold. It could have been the rain maybe. Or—

“Your Highness!” the partner shouted. He put his hat on and left the premises after her in a hurry.

“Oh my god maybe,” Andy said. “It couldn’t be but maybe.”

“The Snow Queen?” Andrea said, so loudly that the carafe wobbled. “The Snow Queen the Snow Queen?”

But now the door had shut, and through the rain and the paintings on the windows they stared. Andrea stared and Andy stared, everyone stared, except the bickering couple so busy wading through the words they wished they could skip that they only had a dim picture of some old woman shouting and leaving, and the cook in his magnificent disinterest, mapping out the world on the griddle where he worked, secure in the very wrong knowledge that he had seen everything before. Nobody had seen this thing, as Gladys faced this man in a hat, and howled something inaudible as he froze in his steps, and finally beheld her.

“Do you think?” Andy said, and put down the coffee.

“That everything in the entire world,” Andrea said, “that anyone ever told us, is wrong?” and maybe this is why Mike stared the hardest. It is bad news when the world tells you the bad news that you are wrong, unless you are ten and this happens every five minutes and the only difficulty is that adults spend most of their time pretending nothing much has gone amiss. Mike stared hardest as Gladys raised her shawl again and began the thing no one had seen before.

It was not the rain. It was not the wine. It was not the painted window, which was not blocking the view. Gladys howled and from the folds of her shawl came a spiral something. It was made of flurries, it looked like, white and gray in the diminished light. The spiral spun out wider, wider until it hit the detective’s partner and covered him instantly with what had to be snow. It hurt. It hurt him. He was covered and could not move and then the Snow Queen stepped back and was no longer framed in the window.

“What was that, the hell?” Andy said. “What was that outside my diner?”

The detective turned out to be standing flat against the far wall. “That was the Cone of Frost,” he said. “I never thought I’d see that in my whole damn life.”

Nobody realized that Mike was out the door, although Andrea was staring after him and hoping it was the wine, all she saw. She could not move from her place, this woman who had been drinking, and just so you have some background, everyone in this story is sad. Let’s get it straight: everyone here has lost a
child, a burden given to so many characters as they walk through a small pinch of paper with the dignified literary weight of grief. It’s a gratuitous punch in the stomach, is what it feels like. When Andy learned the news of the car which had not just spun but flipped over on the ice, and so the seat belts, the car-seat, the special traction of the tires had not been nearly enough to save him, he sank to the mat like a prizefighter and howled on the floor until his friends pulled him up.
Such good friends
. With Andrea the child died in the crib, downed suddenly like a cheap drink. Mike’s little brother died when he fell down the stairs in just the right way and the ambulance arrived too late on a cold, cold night, and his father hardly spoke or opened the mail ever again. The bickering couple would never know their babies, and the frozen partner on the sidewalk could still hear, even through the ice, those last wet and desperate coughs of his tiny daughter as she flailed in the strong hands of her sobbing mother who ran away as soon as it was done, and even the cook did not know that even at this sad moment his girlfriend could not stop screaming from what she heard in that numb whitewalled clinic, and the detective was buttoning his coat and still thinking of himself as the father of a little figure-skating girl who was no good at it. She would stumble around the ice until her ankles made her cry, all the while imagining the perfect 8’s, the twirls and flurries of grace, and this detective would stand and imagine it too on the sidelines, as he threw down money for the waffles and buttoned his coat to leave. In the diner these people had frozen in their tracks from being treated so cruelly. Not only their ankles ached, but they were in
pain in their feet, and in their mouths with each bite of lousy food, and in their ears. The pop songs they heard slayed them every time. Some radio would only have to play, for old time’s sake, that song that goes “yes yes yes, oh baby yes,” and everyone in the diner would be in tears. They could not love anymore, they thought, just drink and pour coffee and track people down in the rain. They were living frigidly, as if in a Cone of Frost. It was apparently necessary for their babies to abandon them so they could see what I mean, if you know what I mean. But couldn’t they get something back, or something else? Love—is this something we can learn to do again, and if so, when will that time arrive, even on a bad day? When do you know when something is becoming something that changes you? That’s what Andrea was thinking of, and a Ramos Gin Fizz, as she watched the snowcapped figure of the detective’s partner topple to the sidewalk and the swift shadow of Mike dodge down the street. When do you learn that the world, like any diner worth its salt, is open twenty-four hours a day?

Now.
Mike ran after her through the drips and drabs of snow on the ground. It never snowed in San Francisco. Never never never. Okay, once when I was in kindergarten, and I think some other times, but it doesn’t stick. This is love, an impossible thing that will change your frigid life, and Mike believed it was happening and ran after her into the night. But by the time the detective got outside there was nothing he could see, and so he went back inside.

“Which way did she go?” he said, and remembered his hat. “Which way did the Snow Queen go?”

“I don’t know,” Andy said. “If I were you I wouldn’t go out there and I wouldn’t want to know. Not you.”

“I can’t believe what I saw,” Andrea said. “The therapy I’ll need or something. Or, I should sober up, and drive a cab for a living now. You meet people in a cab. A miracle could happen and I would see the Snow Queen again.”

The detective peered out of the painted window and banged his head on the glass, hard. It rattled and rattled people.

“Don’t do that!” cried the cook. “Watch what you’re doing! Pay attention to what’s going on!”

“She’s gone southside,” the detective moaned. “I don’t know which direction to go,” and this is love, too. If you miss your Snow Queen you might not appear in the love story anymore. “Men grow cold as girls grow old,” a song says. “Men grow cold as girls grow old, and we all lose our charms in the end.” This is a love story, which must be grabbed in time. Mike knew it, and he ran in the rain on the snow. He had been wearing a sweatshirt this whole time and it was getting heavy and wet. He had the chills as he chased after her, and that’s part of love, too. You get the chills when you get close to her, and you run until you slip in a puddle, “Ouch,” and the Snow Queen turns around.

“Oh dear,” she said. “You’re the boy from the diner and you slipped in a puddle. You’ll catch cold. You’d better come inside.”

“Okay,” Mike said, and she pulled him to his feet. “I saw what you did and it was amazing.”

“You’re wet,” she said. “Your sweatshirt is soaked and heavy. I’m worried sick about you.”

Where does the Snow Queen live? As it turns out, in a small, cramped apartment on the third floor of a nearby building on the corner of Seventeenth and Church. When love appears it’s a supernatural thing like the songs say, but eventually you have to get out of bed, even on the coldest of days, and pay the rent. She held the door open for him.

“Do you have to invite me in?” Mike asked. “Is it like vampires?”

“I should have known,” the Snow Queen said, “that a boy your age would have a thing for vampires. As you well know, that’s what made my fortune, my boy.”

They walked in and saw what she was talking about. The place was little more than some walls and a kitchenette, and everywhere were very large stacks of magazines, and photographs taped to the walls every which way. I told you it was cramped. Mike walked quietly and took it in while the Snow Queen took off her shawl and boiled water for tea. “You should take off your sweatshirt, dear.”

“Mike,” Mike said, and took off his sweatshirt. “Look, you really were an actress. These pictures are you in old monster movies.”

“That was me,” the Snow Queen said. “Dracula’s daughter. A girl who comes across a terrible secret at her uncle’s castle. Look, in this one a ghost falls in love with me and we go to a restaurant. It’s a comedy. Here I’m going mad when they’re reading the hypnotist’s last will and testament, and in the corner a terrible creature is taking me away.”

Mike’s shirt was soaked too, and he took it off and handed it
to her without thinking. “Here you are something else,” he said. She found a towel and touched his bare back as she drooped it around his shoulders like a shawl, and he shivered. “You have white makeup and a cape and a cardboard crown.”

“The Snow Queen,” the Snow Queen said.

“Are you really?” Mike asked.

“How did my lines sound?” she asked back.

“At one point,” Mike said, “one time it sounded like you said
fingersauce
.”

“Hardly the words of the netherworld of Kata,” the Snow Queen said, and unlaced his shoes, sneaker by sneaker.