Alice Hoffman - The Ice Queen

I called, “Come in.” I said it the way I usually did, like I wanted him, no matter who he was or what he was hiding. By now we had sex perfected, at least for us. Hot but not burning, or burning just enough. I knew to put vinegar on my fever blisters, knew how cold the water had to be for me to take him in my mouth without a scalding, knew him in the dark, the pieces that fit together, the whole man who’d walked with death and had come back to me, for me, with all his secrets.

This is what I knew about him: the cage of his ribs, the rope of his veins, the hardness of his stomach, the hardness of him inside me, the way our mouths fit together, the burn­ing, the heat of the words he said, the rhythm of the sex we had, watery, overflowing, don’t ever stop, it’s not enough and then it’s everything. Was there more to know? I faltered for a moment. I thought of all those women who had sex with monsters in the dark. Men without names who were bears or ogres, men who were enchanted or enslaved. Men covered with sealskin or deerskin, men with claws, men who could not tell a lie, men who could tell nothing but the truth, though it might damn them. Angels disguised, angels exposed; men who had been dead and came back forever changed, forever altered, hiding what they knew. Who they were. The deep inside. The ever of the after .

He came in the room, already naked. I couldn’t see him; I could feel his presence. His flesh, burning. His step on the floor. I was standing with my back against the tile wall. Ready. I suppose he trusted me, as a mole trusts a cat, seeing what awaits only as a shadow, not as a predator who wants what she wants, needs what she needs, has to have it. He got into the tub. I could hear the water; I could hear him settle against the porcelain. Cool against his burning back. Sooth­ing him, probably, like rain on the night when it happened, pouring soaking rain.

The water around him sloshed back and forth. The tiles under my bare feet were cold. So dark I had to feel my way.

Wasn’t that part of the story? It is not what you feel or see but what you know in your heart? But my heart was abnor­mal, the rhythm was off. It thumped against me like a rock against bone. Cold thing, stone thing, thing that would not be red if I ripped it out of my own chest. A piece of ice. Clear. See-through.

I took the candle and put it on the ledge, where there were shampoo bottles, soap. I could feel the bottles with my long clumsy fingers. My bitten nails. The bottles knocked against one another. Time was slow. It was the before that I was in, that I was leaving. I could feel myself making my own fu­ture, a spider at work on her web. There was a finished woven pattern, one I thought I knew.

When I lit the match, the gleam was so bright I couldn’t see anything for a moment. I thought it would be easier this way, less harsh than switching on the light, but I was wrong. I lit the candle and it flared. Blue. Yellow. I was nearly blinded. “What are you doing?”

I could hear his panic before my eyes adjusted to the light. He was angry. He was shocked. I knew I had to look. Wasn’t that the plan? I saw him as he stood, dripping water, lunging forward to grab the candle. Wax fell onto his chest; he didn’t seem to notice. He grabbed at the flame, extin­guishing it between his fingers. I could smell him burning.

“Well,” he said. “This is how it is.”

The burning man, cold now. I heard the betrayal. There it was. What had I expected? What had I done?

Now that I had seen what he’d been hiding, I continued to see it through the dark. Branded, is that what they say?

Memory that is stronger than the present, that stays im­printed behind your eyes, layering itself over everything you see in the present, in the here and now. I still saw it in the dark.

Lazarus was marked by the moment of his strike, covered by what were called lightning figures. I’d read about them in a book my brother gave me. Usually they were treelike images imprinted on the body of someone struck by light­ning. No one was certain if the images were actually trees or if instead they were some interior path of the veins and ar­teries. Some experts felt that these designs were shadows caused by extreme bright light; similar images could be pro­duced on glass by large charges of electricity. Handprints appeared on trees, or the perfect shadow of a horse might be captured on the side of a barn; the last image a person had seen as he’d been struck by lightning was cast onto his skin, his soul. All that remained.

“Want a better look? You wanted to see. Look! Go on!”

He was out of the tub, dripping water. He flipped on the light. I blinked, a cold, untrustworthy fish. I could see my­self as well. My reflection in the mirror, a pale woman who was quite capable of repeatedly destroying her own life. I grabbed a towel, covered myself. I felt like crying. You do something and you can’t go back, can’t rewind. I knew that, didn’t I? Ice on the porch, tires on the road, make a wish, light a candle, ruin your life.

There were the marks of trees, shadow branches up and down Lazarus’s arms. The arms I knew. The rope of veins.

On one arm there was a blackbird, startled, ready to take flight. And all over there were the wheeling branches, as though Lazarus was part human and partly made of bark and leaves.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

Barely enough. Barely anything. Disloyal, untrustworthy bitch, shivering now, shuddering with the very thought of what I’d done to us. I could never get anything right.

“No, really. Finish it! Look at me.”

He grabbed me then. But that wasn’t the worst of it, the angry grasp, the hot hands. Far worse was a tone of voice that I hadn’t heard before, except in our darkest, deepest moments. No bullshit, no pleasing me, for himself. Just for himself. Whoever that was. Whoever he was.

“Look at it all.”

It sounded like a threat. It sounded like the end. And something more. Maybe it was a relief to show someone at last. To turn around and let me see. I did the worst thing when he showed me his back, I made a sound, a gasping, de­spite my vow to myself to have no reaction. His deepest self, isn’t that what I wanted? True self, real self, self you’re hid­ing from the rest of the world.

There was a shadowgraph of a face on his back. Gray and black, the impression of an older man, mouth half open, eyes frightened.

I knew it for what it was right away, expert that I was. There were a hundred ways, and this was one of them. The shadowgraph was of the moment of a man’s death.

“Happy?” Lazarus asked me.

I had been — how much so, I had no idea. The before, of course. The time I didn’t know was the before, when I’d had something worthwhile, something I had wanted, something that could be turned to cinders with a single match. How many fairy tales had warned me of this? Keep the light out, have faith, trust in what you feel, not in what you see. Leave the matches at home. Leave it be.

I thought how the meteorologists would love to get their hands on Lazarus. How thrilled they’d be to pose him up against their white screen and photograph him, right, left, naked, one of a kind, piece of art, piece of work, shadow man, death man, my Lazarus, or the Lazarus who had been mine. Terrible time to know the truth, not the truth of him, oh no. The truth of me. But here it was. On the floor. A splash of cold water, a leftover, a strand of red thread that was invisible to me: I didn’t know it was love until the mo­ment of bright light. I didn’t know what I felt until I went one step beyond it.

“There you have it,” Lazarus said. “The real me.”

He walked out of the bathroom, slammed the door. I heard the water in the tub, the wind outside. I heard the sound of my own raspy breathing.