Chance

The check and the frozen lake

It was a yes finally, with reservations, but who didn’t have those. And they would definitely pass on his apartment. “I’ll ask her today,” Chance told her.

“I’m sure you will,” she said, then added upon rising that as a general rule she was opposed to subterfuge.

“Aren’t we all?” Chance asked.

She left without saying more.

Chance made the call from his cell phone, still seated in the restaurant.

“This isn’t a good number,” Jaclyn Blackstone told him. “Give me five, I’ll call you back.” His phone rang in ten.

“Okay,” he said. “I think I’ve got something.” They’d spoken only briefly the night he’d called. He’d mentioned a plan but stopped short of details, asking that she give him a couple of days. “Is this a good time?”

“You mean now?”

“Now, later, whenever would be convenient for you.”

There was silence on the line, the clatter of something in the background, music from a distant radio. “I’m at work right now,” she said. The radio was turned off. “There’s a lecture tonight on the campus. I was planning to go. It’s in the math department. One of the graduate students is lecturing on ‘The Axiom of Choice.’ ” Another moment passed. “If you’d like to come?” she said without quite finishing.

Her quality of voice along with the way she’d formulated the invitation gave the impression that her doing so had not come without cost and he was reminded of her vulnerability, recalling at just that moment the delicate architecture of the hand that had opened and closed on the sky blue blanket as he’d sat by her side in the dismal room, the city draped in gloom upon a far horizon. “I’m afraid it would all be lost on me,” Chance said and not without some cost to himself. He had not counted on her asking to meet. She didn’t say anything right away and Chance waited, the phone to his ear. Traffic passed in the street. “There is a little Thai place on Shattuck not far from the campus,” he said suddenly. “Do you know it?” It was an oddly fractured moment in which he seemed to be both speaking and listening at the same time.

“We could meet there after.” Her voice had dropped to something scarcely above a whisper.

“We could.”

“At seven?”

“Seven it is.”

They hung up.

Chance paid his bill and headed down Market Street, elation at war with apprehension; nothing like a clandestine meeting to put a new slant on the day. He thought about her and he thought about the lecture she had invited him to, “The Axiom of Choice.” What could be more fitting than that? He imagined visiting his furniture as a way of calming his nerves.

He could hear Carl on the phone as he entered. The old man, in a dark brown suit and brilliant yellow scarf, was pacing between an armoire of the late French Modernists and a sculptural coffee table of Japanese design. The one-sided conversation was indistinct but animated, the still bandaged old man turning upon his toe in the manner of some brightly plumed fowl, his free hand in conduction of an invisible orchestra. Taking note of Chance’s presence, he paused just long enough and with such hand movements and facial gestures as might indicate to Chance that he was to proceed on his own to the rear of the building. Or so Chance was willing to interpret the elaborate combination of head feints, grins, and fluttering eyebrows. In passing, it seemed to him that the old man was just giddy enough with excitement to suggest a new leather boy had entered his life, this or the use of stimulants.

Chance went on through the store. He paused at D’s work window but was unable to lay eyes on his furniture. A noise from outside led him to the rear door and a view of the alley where D was wrestling what appeared to be a new radiator into a 1950 Studebaker, a Starlight coupe, to be exact.

“What’s with Carl?” Chance asked, moving outside. “New boyfriend?”

“How’d you guess?”

“The look of love, as they say.”

D nodded and heaved. The radiator dropped into place. He snatched up a rag, set about wiping his hands. “Ever heard of the Frozen Lake?”

“I’m not sure what you mean.”

“Then you haven’t heard of it. It’s the thing you want so badly you’ll go to the center of a frozen lake to reach it.”

“Where the ice is thinnest.”

“But you won’t think about that. Everyone else will, just not you. I learned it in the Teams. Let’s say I’m rolling with my guys and someone says to me, ‘You’re on your frozen lake, bro.’ What that means is… I need to stop and think, what ever it is that I’m doing… I need to stop ’cause he sees something I don’t. May even be we’re stateside, may be I’ve got eyes for my buddy’s wife and he picks up on it. Whatever. Everybody has his frozen lake. In conflict… you discover your opponent’s, you’re one up. The old man likes his leather boys.”

“You point that out to him, about the frozen lake?”

D’s sigh was one of resignation. “About a thousand times. What are you going to do? Fucker’s as old as the hills.”

Chance smiled but he was thinking about frozen lakes and not the old man’s. He studied the coupe, a brilliant lemon yellow. The vehicle was pointed fore and aft in the manner of a boat. “That’s a Starlight coupe,” Chance said. “My grandmother had one just like it.”

“No shit?” D was either interested or he was fucking with him a little. Chance suspected the latter but chose to indulge himself. The car was a time machine. “I was little, I thought they looked like flying saucers. What my grandmother and I did, we went to the army surplus and bought an old gas mask. Then she would prop the trunk open with a stick and drive around while I rode back there wearing the mask and shooting at things with a plastic gun.”

“Lucky she didn’t get rear-ended.”

“She was about four and a half feet high; barely see over the wheel. The car was covered in dents. It was like Destruction Derby.”

“And you got back there.”

“With great enthusiasm,” Chance said.

D had taken to tightening bolts on radiator mounts. “He’s no good either.” He nodded at the back of the store. “You’ve seen that bumper sticker: ‘I Brake for Hallucinations’?”

“This is his then?” He meant the Studebaker.

“Picked it up at some estate sale. I’m restoring it for him. Ought to be good for something.” The comment served to remind Chance about why he’d come, to inquire after his furniture.

“It’s gone,” D said.

Chance was not certain that he’d heard correctly. “Gone?” he asked.

“Yesterday. Figured that was why you were here.”

It was at just this moment that the old man appeared at the rear of the building. Bandages still peeked from beneath the brim of his hat although the swelling about his eyes had gone down. The yellow scarf draped about his neck was a dead-on match for the Starlight coupe.

“Young man!” Carl intoned. He was looking straight at Chance, a golden tooth prominent in his smile. “Would a check in the amount of eighty thousand dollars brighten your day?”