BR: A CHRISTMAS BLIZZARD (Chapters 1-2)

An Annual Reading

Chapter 1

JAMES SPARROW AWAKENS TOO EARLY AND IS BESIEGED BY THE MEAN CHRISTMAS BLUES

I was an old familiar nightmare, the one about screechy men in black hoods chasing him through tall razor grass toward the precipice overlooking jagged rocks and great bilious greenish waves rolling and crashing in the vast abyss where sharks with chainsaw teeth waited to chew him to ribbons and great black buzzards soared and screeched, and there he was running barefoot and his pajama bottoms falling down and heart pounding as if to burst and he unable to cry out for help and then Mr. Sparrow woke up in the dark- ness of his condo in south Minneapolis to a song emanating from somewhere close to the bed—

      When he plays his drum, pa-rum-pum-pum-pum,
      Let's break his thumbs

He thought maybe it was part of the dream, the Christmas     carol he loathed most of all, the loathsomest song of the dreadful Yuletide season, that godawful month (heck, two months! maybe three) of relentless, regimented joyless joy, and he lay waiting for the men to throw him over the cliff, but they had evaporated, and only the loathsome song remained:

        I played my drum for Him, pa-rum-pum-pum-pum
        He told me, Beat it, Jim, pa-rum-pum-pum-pum

It was dark except for a faint glow from the bathroom. Mrs. Sparrow lay asleep next to him in their double bed in the tiny bedroom of Unit F in the Middlesex Arms condominium complex. It was a former linseed oil factory that a dishonest developer had made into apartments and sold to gullible buyers. Dazzled by the ornate Art Deco lobby, they paid a fortune for rather cramped one-bedrooms with temperamental plumbing and tissue-paper walls and ill-fitted windows. In this December cold snap, the bedroom was freezing. He edged closer to Mrs. Sparrow, a good warm wife. It was December 22. In two days, the red-green monster of Christmas would descend.

The World's Longest and Unhappiest Holiday. Mrs. Sparrow adored Christmas, and Mr. Sparrow dreaded it. It gave him a bad case of the yips. The brass quintets tootling "God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen" on street corners and the sugarplum fairies twirling in the windows of Macy's, and inside between Cosmetics and Housewares, a Pianist plowing through the little town of Bethlehem like a backhoe digging a ditch. It was ubiquitous, Inescapable, the jingle-jangle, the ho-ho-ho, the smell of pine, the bullying ads, and the guilt —the nagging thought that you had not bought gifts for all the people you should have and the gifts you had bought were not nice enough and you were not joyful, as you should be, seeing as God had sent His Son to earth for your redemption—you, wretched sinner that you are, should be dancing for joy, and instead you feel crappy. You wish you could drive Christmas away, this whole dark fog of nostalgia and disappointment.

Why could they not use the money Mrs. Sparrow had inherited at the death of her dad to fly to Hawaii, pa-rumpum-pum-pum, and lounge on the beach at that lovely resort at Kuhikuhikapapa’u'maumau, where they had spent their honeymoon four years ago? Sometimes, when a man is in the depths of misery, a good vacation is a wise investment. Yes, he understood that they were in bad shape financially. The real estate market was in the toilet. The condo, heavily mortgaged, was worth about half of what they had paid for it, and they were pouring money into a rat hole. And Mr. Sparrow was very likely on the verge of losing his job. (He had not shared this information with his wife.) He was a communications specialist at Coyote Corp., which made an energy drink from ionized chlorophyll from coyote grass, and which was struggling in the wake of lawsuits by consumers who had suffered violent intestinal upsets. The owner of Coyote, Billy Jack Morosco, had retreated to his penthouse on the fifty-fifth floor of the Federated Mutual Tower to brood and conduct a séance with his advisors, and the axe was expected to fall soon after Christmas, and Mr. Sparrow expected to be handed his hat and pushed out the door.

Mr. Sparrow did not use Coyote himself, but he knew all about it. Coyote grass is a broad-stemmed plant devoured by coyotes during mating season, and the drink gives a person high energy and focus, inducing a manic state, enabling you to thrive on just three hours of sleep a night for months at a time. A greenish liquid, it was a word-of-mouth phenomenon in America's managerial ranks in the late 1990s. Millions of people knew about it—a few drops in your coffee and you were a monster of superhuman productivity and able to handle the avalanche of work that fell on middle managers beset by corporate cutbacks and mergers. Middle managers in their forties who felt antiquated by the hyperspeed of technological change and the new lingo that came with it. It was rocket fuel. You took home a briefcase bulging with work and labored late into the night and napped for a few hours and awoke before dawn feeling fresh and ambitious and showed up at the 7:00 a.m. meeting full of brilliance and you stunned the younger staff with a list of  Large New Ideas and you maintained a killer pace all day, skipping lunch, and all around you, people marveled at your productivity and top management said, What would we ever do without Perkins? and you never never never complained about the workload, though your spouse and children did, but you ignored their sullen resentment and mounted your great steed and galloped every day back into battle. All thanks to a grass that coyotes ate to give them stamina to flirt and howl at the moon. The Sioux warriors who ate Custer's lunch at the Little Big Horn were tanked up on coyote grass.

"Oh darling Joyce. Oh Joyce, my love, let's away to the warm Pacific and float in the star-spangled sea," he had said to his wife one week ago. "Darling, the condo— she said. He groaned. "Maybe you only need a sunlamp," she said. He groaned again. "Darling, we have to be reasonable," she said. She was the practical one who kept track of finances. Reasonableness was the aspect of her character that he found most annoying, and also her great love of Christmas. She had graduated from St. Olaf College and sung in the famous St. Olaf Choir, whose annual Christmas concert in the Skoglund fieldhouse was so popular that the college scheduled sixteen of them—sixteen! Sixteen Silent Nights, sixteen Det Kimer nu til Julefests, sixteen Harks, sixteen Midnights Clear. The fieldhouse was packed for each one, St. Olaf alumni jammed cheek by jowl and tears running down their cheeks as the famous choir sang "Beautiful Savior"—and of course Mrs. Sparrow insisted on taking him down to Northfield to attend a concert. “But we've done this before!" he said. It didn't matter. And then there was Christmas Eve among the pesky Episcopalians at St. Ansgar's.

Mrs. Sparrow grew up Lutheran in a little church in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin, whose congregation sang so beautifully a cappella—"As with Gladness Men of Old" and "Hark! the Herald Angels Sing" and "The First Noel" and "What Child Is This?"—that TV crews came to film them every year, which made them uneasy, worried about the sin of Pride, as Lutherans are wont to do, but then they hired a hearing-impaired organist to torture them and to put unfamiliar hymns in the service—"He of Whom the Nations Sing" and "Let Now Our Voices Gladly Rise" and 'That Which Doth Our Hearts Inspire" and "Come Yet Thou, of Heaven Inspir'd"—to prevent beautiful singing. And the congregation was reduced to murmurs, in keeping with the Lutheran beatitude, "Blessed are the meek and those who do not stand out from the others"—and that was what drove Mrs. Sparrow into the arms of the Episcopalians, the big 10:30 p.m. candlelit Christmas Eve service that ended with “Silent Night" sung a cappella, people kneeling in the pews, each with a slender lit taper, each weeping quietly for the memories of Christmases past and the dear departed and also for the Holy Infant, who came in sympathy for the sorrows of the suffering world. The service at St. Ansgar's was a high point in Mrs. Sparrow's year. Mr. Sparrow accompanied her, of course, and stood and knelt and sat and stood, as directed, and did the responsive readings, but with an eye on his wristwatch. And it irked him that they sang every last verse of "Silent Night" and then hummed a verse and then sang the first verse over, squeezing every last ounce of emotion from it. And then there was bad coffee afterward, in the undercroft, and a lot of chitchat with people he didn't know, who, like so many Episcos, had a burr up their butt about some good cause they wanted to enlist him in: the Drop-in Center for Troubled Teens, the Outreach to the Introspective, a well for a village in Uganda, an exchange program for vicars, or whatever. Pure misery.

Mr. Sparrow was a Republican, and the Episcopal Church was not, and Christmas seemed to him an occasion for hectoring sermons about the needs of the needy and ending war and achieving international understanding and so forth which was not, to put it mildly, his worldview. He felt that you pretty much get what you deserve in life—the weak fall apart, the strong prevail—and anything you do to change the rules will only confuse the matter. Before he went to work for Coyote, he taught high school math for two years, and it was a simple fact that two-thirds of the kids didn't grasp math and didn't care, and there wasn't much you could do for them except point them toward work that didn't require math, like sweeping floors or flipping burgers. The principal was a horse-faced liberal named Bettye Davenport, who believed that he should be more inspiring to the slow and the lame. His job, as he saw it, was to open doors for the ambitious and talented so they could see how high they could soar. Math is for the few. It's not something you take up suddenly in your late teens thanks to some government program. The high school wanted him to manage a summer program in math enrichment for marginal students, using $200,000 in federal funds, and Mr. Sparrow balked. The principal was of the If-we-can-help-just-one-sinking-soul school of thinking. He was not. She got up in his face about it, and he quit. End of story.

O the snow and the cold, the bleakness of light, and the sheer horror of "The Little Drummer Boy" coming at you when you least expected it, pa-rum-pum-pum-pum, and the obligatory trip to St. Olaf, plus the guilt, et cetera, et cetera but Mrs. Sparrow was a true devotee of Christmas. She attended The Nutcracker every year, one and maybe two Messiahs, and three A Christmas Carols. She never tired of Scrooge's redemption. She thrilled to the Sugar Plum Fairy, she made fruitcake at home, she went around whistling "Adeste Fideles.' Mr. Sparrow wished that the mice would carry Clara away and lock her in a dungeon and that the Hallelujah chorus could be embargoed for ten years and that Tiny Tim would learn a useful trade and quit blessing people. Mr. Charles Dickens had no idea of the juggernaut he launched. Back when he wrote about Scrooge and the nebbishy Cratchits, Christmas was a one-day event, like Valentine's Day or Memorial Day, and you did the thing on that day and it was over, but his little book touched off a prairie fire of Christmas, and it spread out of control, and now the good man would have been horrified to see the monster he created. The incessant dinging of bells. The godawful music seeping out of cracks in ceilings like liquid gas. The forced jollity of store clerks living in the hellish anguish of holiday merchandising, clerks so stressed out it was a wonder one of them didn't go berserk and kill somebody with a stapler. The disappointment of gifts. A gift represents the giver's perception of you, and when you unwrap the brown plaid shirt, white socks, and a bar of soap that smells like disinfectant they gave you rather than, say, black silk undershorts and a volume of Baudelaire, the message could not be clearer. And the dreadful parties. Especially the office parties, where people who don't like one another stand around getting glassy-eyed on Artillery punch and avoiding the big honchos trying too hard to be kindly and cheery, vice presidents and managers who for the rest of the year are professional killers.

The Coyote Corp. put on painful Christmas parties, where the 325 employees and their spouses gathered in a great hangar of a hotel ballroom to eat prime rib, and Mr. Morosco stood up and talked about the founding of the firm in 1974, when he met an old drunk in a bar in Livingston, Montana, who sold him the formula for a tonic for $250 and from that formula Mr. Morosco built a successful company. It was a story that most of them had heard many times before, and they sat through it and gave him a standing ovation, and then a gang of glittery Christmas elves pranced into the room and handed out bonus checks and everybody sang "We Wish You a Merry Christmas" and "For He's a Jolly Good Fellow" and rushed for the exits.

Mr. Sparrow's bonus this year was a measly four grand. A sign of trouble. He'd hoped for ten or fifteen grand.

He hoisted himself up on one elbow and gazed at her, his true love, in her cardigan sweater, soft purple pants, and red socks, her earbuds in place. He groped for the bedside lamp so he could find the radio that was playing the loathsome Christmas carol and knocked a book off the stack on the bedside table and also his eyedrops and he almost spilled a glass of juice. Mrs. Sparrow turned over but did not open her eyes. He put the glass to his lips and—pffffffeh!!!!!!!!!!—cranberry juice! Cranberry juice. The taste of cranberry brought back unpleasant memories, the boredom of breast of turkey, the big yawn of yams, the pointlessness of pumpkin.

     Said the shepherd to the little lamb,
     I have a gift to bring, pa-rum-pum-pum-pum
     A noose and scaffolding, pa-rum-pum-pum-pum.

It was the digital clock radio playing the song. An iClock. You could access your bank account, activate a coffeemaker, download a newspaper, open up e-mail and have it read to you in a pleasant female voice. A marvelous device, playing Christmas music that made him faintly ill, and he didn't know how to turn it off.

     I wish this song were done, pa-rum-pum-pum-pum 
     Go get my gun..

“So what do you want for Christmas?" she had asked him two days ago, having forgotten what he'd said about the Pacific.

"Hawaii," he said. "All I want for Christmas is warmth and sunshine. I am desperate for sunlight. The freedom of walking out the door in your shorts and T-shirt and into a warm and welcoming atmosphere. You feel the same way. Admit it. So let's go. Christmas is meant to be pleasurable. A time when we rise above petty materialism and do our best to make each other happy.”

“Oh darling, I'm tired of having this conversation, so let's not. You can have a perfectly lovely Christmas right here in Minneapolis if you put your mind to it."

Joyce was careful about money, having grown up frugal in Wauwatosa, with parents who saved plastic bags, glass jars, and jar lids, thousands of lids, perfectly clean, stored in plastic bags, a drawer full of used tinfoil carefully washed. Plus she was afflicted with liberal guilt: about the fuel consumption of jet airliners and the effect of the exhaust on the ozone layer and about the idea of vacations—should they not be taking disadvantaged children with them, underprivileged children with learning disabilities?

He did not care to have disadvantaged children with him in Hawaii. He had been disadvantaged at one time himself and now, as a recovering disadvantaged child, he had learned to enjoy pleasure, actually enjoy it, not merely tolerate it, but Mrs. Sparrow remembered their last vacation—to Mackinac Island, where they were waited on by old black men in starched white uniforms and she fretted about that and the fresh-cut flowers on the tables and how much they were paying for this Pinot Noir with elegant structure and an extended palate, complex and bright on a tannic frame, nicely oaked with a lingering finish of boysenberries, sheepskin, and pencil shavings, and what that money could do if you donated it to a relief organization for digging wells for African villages where people perished for want of clean water.

He clicked a switch on the radio and a different song came on:

       Woke up this morning like my heart would break
       Blues in my coffee, blues in my fruitcake,
       But I want to go down to the shopping mall
      And let the longest train I ever saw come and pacify my mind
      ‘Cause O got shackles on my feet and the water tastes like 
          turpentine
      And I’m rolling from side to side and can’t keep from
          cryin’
      Because my baby she treats me so unkind.

It was the Moondog show on AM77, which sometimes, in bouts of insomnia, he tuned in to for a fitful hour or two to hear the Moondog talk about Fanny May and how she tormented him with her loving words and then without warning she told him to go away and he wound up in Joey's Bar and Grill looking down into the whiskey in his glass and got good and drunk and went contrite and weeping to Fanny May's house and knocked on her door and she would not let him in. Other talk show hosts railed about pointyheaded liberals, but that was much less interesting than a beautiful woman who drives you crazy because you can't live without her.

       "We were fixing to go to Fanny May's family's for Christmas and then she accused me of not caring about her family, which isn't true, it just isn't true. It's just that her family talks all the time, and I can't get a word in edgewise, but she says I am sullen around her family. That's crazy!" said Moondog, strumming his old Gibson guitar named Mona. "So yesterday I spent all afternoon shopping for a Christmas gift for Fanny May, trying to make up with her. I looked at velveteen cocktail dresses and silk blouses and jewelry, and I'm thinking, 'Anything I like, she won't. My darling love and I do not agree in matters of taste. Guaranteed. I love sweet and she prefers sour. I choose white and she wants black. So why do I bother?' People, listen to me. I looked at a miniature Swiss village made of porcelain with clock tower and church steeple and people sliding down a hill on tiny toboggans and couples skating on a pond. Beautiful. I knew she'd think it was trashy. Looked at big picture books. Cézanne. Montana. Anne of Green Gables. Clark Gable. Lewis and Clark. Looked at digital cameras, telescopes on tripods, white Turkish bathrobes, cosmetics, a perfume that cost one hundred dollars an ounce. And everything I looked at, I could hear Fanny May say, You really thought I'd like that?"

Moondog was on a rant, and then—click. The radio switched over, of its own free will, to a choir outing for the faithful to come joyful and triumphant to Bethlehem, which brought back a painful memory of the high school Christmas choral recital in Looseleaf, North Dakota—standing in the baritone section in his blue robe, needing badly to pee, humming "Adeste Fideles" and processing out of the candlelit gymnasium, his bladder aching, marching under the watchful gaze of the town and down the stairs to the choir room and hurrying out of the robe and stepping on the hem and ripping it and dashing off to the toilet. Christmas was a sad time for the Sparrows. Their tree was a scrawny thing, and Mother lived in fear that it would burst into flames and they would die in their sleep of smoke inhalation. Daddy lived in fear that Mother would spend them into bankruptcy and they would have to go live in a public institution and wear orange jumpsuits and pick up trash along the highway.

       O come all ye faithful
       Fearful and deluded,
       Come ye, O come ye, to North Dakota. 

"Darling?" he said. "Darling?" She opened her eyes, the comforter pulled up to her chin, her dark hair splayed against the pillow. She pulled an earplug out.

“How do you get rid of this stupid music?" She looked up at him in wonderment. So he repeated the question.

“The radio is voice controlled," she said. "You just say OFF." And the music stopped.

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Chapter 2

UNPLEASANT MEMORIES OF THE JOYOUS SEASON

“What time is it?” she said.

“Almost six o’clock”

“Why”

“It just is. I’m sorry I woke you. Go back to sleep.”

“I can’t.”

She sat up. "God, I am so sick. Some horrible flu virus. I should have stayed home from work yesterday. This bozo came in and stood over my desk and he was sneezing all over me. No hanky, nothing—just leaned back and barked and let fly with thousands of tiny beads of infection flying in the air."

   “You'd feel better if we went to a warm place.”

   “Oh darling, I can't bear the thought of getting on a plane. I am sick to my stomach”

And with that she threw off the covers and leaped toward the bathroom in three bounds and slammed the door and he heard water running in the sink and other more visceral sounds and he was transported back to the terrible Christmas when the Dark Angel of Projectile Vomiting visited the Sparrows of Looseleaf. Oh my gosh, what a vivid memory it was. Twenty-five years ago and still he could feel the gorge rising in the pit of his stomach, the acid bubbling up, the sphincter straining. He was seventeen and that day in school he had suffered the most harrowing humiliation of his life, standing in front of twenty leering choir members as Miss Forsberg cried, "Tenors, open your mouths. You can't sing with your mouths shut. Basses, read the notes. They're right in front of you." And she nodded to him, and he started to sing, / Why do the nations so furiously rage together," and what came out was Wfmrghghghgh and the sopranos chortled like hyenas, and Miss Forsberg said, "Again!" and he screwed it up again. Choked. He slunk home from choir, running the gauntlet of snowballers—and in Looseleaf, the snowballs were hard and thrown sidearm with deadly accuracy—and he found Mother making the stuffing to put in the turkey and she was weeping over their imminent deaths, which she could see only too clearly:

                                   FAMILY OF FIVE DIES IN CHRISTMAS EVE FIRE;
                                         FAULTY WIRING FINGERED AS CAUSE;
                          CHRISTMAS TREE LIGHTS EXPLODED AROUND 2 A.M.;  
                          RESCUERS UNABLE TO FIGHT WAY THROUGH FLAMES;
                            PITIFUL SHRIEKS HEARD FROM UPSTAIRS BEDROOM;
                              NEIGHBORS PLACE MEMORIAL WREATHS AT SITE; 
                           "A NICE FAMILY," SAYS ONE, "KEPT TO THEMSELVES
                               BUT ALWAYS FRIENDLY AND WILLING TO HELP."

The moment Mother turned on the lights on the tree, she could smell smoke and hear sirens in her mind, hear the shouts of firemen. (Up here. On the roof!) So she checked the Christmas tree frequently for signs of combustion, and he tried to tell her that choir was twisting him into knots and he wanted to quit choir forever, otherwise he would go berserk and probably commit an act of senseless violence, but she stood there pouring freshwater into the tree stand and pruning the dry branches, not listening. Meanwhile, Daddy was ranting and raving about money. "I will never understand to the end of my born days," he said, "how someone can leave a room without turning off the lights. How much exertion does it take to reach up and snap off a light switch? You must think we are Hollywood stars made of money to see this house with lights blazing at night."

Mother heard the word "blazing" and shuddered at the thought. A Christmas tree blazing up and burning down your house. The irony of it: you bring a thing of beauty and magic into your home, and it turns around and kills you. The lights left on too long, the tree not properly watered, the family exhausted from the festivities, and in the wee hours–poof! Spontaneous combustion! A deadly conflagration. The family vaporized. Small, blackened corpses in little white coffins, weeping relatives carrying them into the cemetery.  She felt weak in the knees and had to sit down. And then felt sick to her stomach.

   Daddy looked at the stack of presents under the tree and cried out. “You’ve gone mad! You must think I am made of money! What possessed you, woman? I am only a municipal employee. I am not John D. Rockefeller!”

     That was the year she gave Daddy a pair of bedroom slippers with lights in the toes. He looked at her with narrowed eyes. “You’ve got to bend down to turn them off and on,” he said. “This is the dumbest damn thing I ever saw/” She said. “Well, you need to get up in the night a lot, so I thought these would help you see your way to the bathroom.” He said, “You ever hear of the flashlight? It’s a great invention. We’ve got five of them around the house. I think I’m all set.”

     Mother went off to the bedroom to cry, and Daddy looked at him and said, “Well, James, that’s Christmas for you. You don’t want it, you don’t need it, and you’ll pay for it the rest of the year.” 

     And that was the year she gave James a used book for Christmas.  Also, a Boy Scout telescope and a transistor radio and a pair of corduroys, but the main item was a copy of Foxx’s Book of Christian Martyrs,  inscribed faintly in pencil, “To Esther, from your brother Elwyn, Christmas 1951.” He showed It to Mother and she said 'Oh, well you can erase that." She said, “It was the only copy they had, and I thought vou might enjov it. I did, when I was your age." He read a few pages, all about French Protestants being burned at the stake, or crushed under rocks, or crucified, or drowned, or torn apart by teams of horses hitched to their arms, or whipped to ribbons. One horror after another.

And then the projectile vomiting got under way. His little sister, Elaine, and brother, Benny, lay in their beds upstairs, the smell of Lysol in the air, and moaned and complained of fever and nausea, a basin on the floor into which they yorked up their RyKrisp and ginger ale. James was sent up to empty the basin in the toilet and rinse it out.

“Is Santa here?" cried the little tykes.

“You expect Santa to come and breathe your germs and spread them to every other boy and girl on this planet so that there is a mass epidemic of puking and pooping all over the world? What sort of Christmas would that be? Millions of children waking up on Christmas morning in a pool of green poop? Of course Santa isn't going to come. Forget about it." They put their hot little faces into their pillows and sobbed heart-wrenching sobs, and he went downstairs and soon began to feel queasy himself.

And just then, as he heard Mother pour buttermilk into a bowl to make custard, the Dark Angel touched his shoulder and he had to dash to the bathroom—and the door was locked. He knocked four loud knocks. Daddy said, "Go away! Occupied!" So he dashed outdoors and there, In a snowdrift near the back door, it exploded out of him at both ends. Stomach and bowels. Chunks of many colors. He scooped up snow to hide his disgrace, but it soaked right in. He took off his pants and stuffed them into the garbage can, and turned and saw Mrs. Tippett's face at the kitchen window staring at him, and then she ducked away. She had seen. His shame was public. Soon the word would flash around Looseleaf that Jimmy Sparrow had shit his pants. He hid behind the garage and washed himself with snow, and snuck into the house full of Christmas lights and a radio choir and slunk up to his bed and spent a whole day of invalidism lying very quietly, not eating anything or thinking about eating or wanting to hear about anybody eating, feeling like the object of a cruel experiment.

Christmas was the emotional high-water mark of Lutheran life in Looseleaf, which, like the highest elevation in North Dakota, is not exactly high—not high high, but still, there was a sense of beauty and overwhelming feeling, and when the choir sang, "Jeg Er Så Glad Hver Julekveld,” about Jesus born under the bright stars as the angels sang so sweetly, people wept, people who you thought were incapable of tears, their eyes filled up and tears ran down their stone cheeks, a miracle. And so, when you wound up sick and stinky out in the snow with the neighbors looking out their windows at you, it was a long fall from a great height. Still painful after all these years.

     Mrs. Sparrow was very quiet in the bathroom, He knocked on the door. "Are you all right?" There was a groan from inside. 'Would you care for a ginger ale? Some toast and tea?”

“No," she said. She opened the door. She had washed her face and she looked up at him all beautiful and needy and he put his arms around her. "There's no need to suffer," he said. "How about I call a doctor?"

“No need to waste a doctor's time. It's the common flu, darling, or whatever that jerk was passing around. I guess I'll just stay in bed for Christmas."

He was going to say something about Hawaii and then didn't. He put on his black bathrobe and walked barefoot across the wood floor. A mirror hung on the wall and he ducked it. Didn't want to see his face just now. His bland face with the light green, almost yellowish eyes—"gecko eyes" Cousin Liz called them when they were kids. In the kitchen, overlooking Lake Calhoun, he poured water in the coffeemaker and filled the basket with ground coffee and his eye caught the woman in the white bathrobe walking through the snow on the wooden deck behind the big white house on the lake shore. Steam rose from a big hot tub, and she pulled off the cover and more steam boiled up into the cold night air. She stripped off her bathrobe and climbed in, one graceful motion, her pale nakedness visible for one brief moment, and then sat, water up to her chin, snow falling on her blond head, the darkness of the lake beyond. He had seen her at St. Ansgar's. A divorced woman, no kids, living on the fortune her lawyers had wrested from her car-dealer husband, who, after the divorce, had spiraled down and down through two girlfriends, several lawsuits, bankruptcy, and into a ten-year prison stay for mail fraud. He had grown tired of this pale, radiant goddess and left her for a life of shame and anguish. A good object lesson, this naked beauty in the snow. He wished she would climb out and perhaps comb her hair, but she did not.

Her beauty reminded him of Kuhikuhikapapa'u'maumau—the tranquility of the place in the evenings when they walked down the great lawn to the white beach and dropped their robes and plunged naked into the sea and swam out a hundred yards and floated there as the sun went down, to see the lights come on in the main lodge with the lanai and the portico around the pool, an ivory palace under the sheltering palms, as they floated in the arms of the everlasting sea, inhaling the salt air and the sweet, blossomy breeze, listening to the pianist play a Chopin etude, and the two of them transcended the Midwest and entered into a state of buoyant blessedness.

He poured a cup of coffee and looked down at the blond head and the pale shoulders in the steaming tub and wished he had that kind of money, to own a mansion overlooking the lake. Or that he knew someone who did. Such as Mrs. Blondie, for example. Mr. Sparrow was a faithful husband, but that didn't preclude a little daydreaming. He could imagine nestling in the hot tub next to the pale radiance, and her saying, 'When do we fly to Hawaii?" and him saying, "Whenever you like. The jet is waiting, I'll call the pilots whenever you like."

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