Steve Kistulentz - Panorama

THE WINTER prayers of schoolchildren are limited in their ambitions, invested only in the idea of school closings, unconcerned with the consequences of squalls that lock in traffic for days, the historic conflation of a pair of Atlantic low-pressure systems stalling over the eastern seaboard, the kind that bring blizzard conditions and a record three inches of snow per hour. The local eleven o’clock news reported tomorrow’s cancellations—banks, libraries, recreation centers, shopping malls, all closed—as the lead stories. The city obligingly ground to a halt.

The solitary light from a news camera illuminated the intersection where Richard and Cadence walked. The cameraman was a freelancer who sometimes worked for FBN, and he knew Richard by sight, waved and shouted his last name. He turned the attached external light on Richard and shot a few seconds of footage, Richard taking a quartet of short and choppy steps before sliding across the packed snow in the middle of the street. He kept the camera on as Richard and Cadence tossed small, puffy snowballs at each other, Cadence’s first throw striking Richard in the upper chest, the cameraman catching the powdery explosion on tape, lit by the battery-fueled spotlight and by the yellowish sulfur of a decades-old streetlamp, the two competing lights giving the evening an almost buttery glow—followed by Richard’s sudden lurch sideways to avoid Cadence’s second missile, then his laugh, the openmouthed and uninhibited roar of it.

Nearly midnight now, a Metrobus eased down the hill, riding its brakes and knifing gently sideways, barely in control. At the bottom of the hill, it slid in front of Richard, blocking the cameraman’s view. The bus was trailed south by a cabal of young Salvadoran kids on foot, some of whom were seeing snow for the first time. A handful of unsupervised rogues strolled up and down the nightclub-and-restaurant district of Eighteenth Street, testing the packing abilities of the newfound blanket of snow, compressing projectiles from the moister slush at curbside, scraping grapefruit-size balls off the trunk lids of parked cars, test-firing them against No Parking signs. The kids took the opportunity to belt the bus with a fusillade of iceball artillery, the impacts sounding out like snare drums across the quiet nightscape. The bus, displaying its Out of Service sign, slowed to a halt, and its driver stepped out to gather up snowballs for a retaliatory strike. He was outnumbered six to one, and Cadence and Richard quickly came to his aid, Richard fanning out to the left and lobbing snowballs up in the air as far as he could, baiting the kids to watch, and, each time they looked up, firing a fastball on a straight line right at the ringleader, who retreated after being struck twice in the chest, once in the leg (the driver). As the kid withdrew, he got truly smoked by a snowball thrown on a perfect straight line by Cadence, a hollow-sounding thump hitting against his wool hat. The teenagers threw back a few more half-hearted volleys and began a full-fledged retreat.

A four-lane midcity street, the bus driver laughing and brushing himself off before tipping his imaginary hat at Cadence, reboarding the bus, the light of the camera going dark. The safety gates of every storefront had been pulled down hours ago, all except a small French bistro where the waiters and kitchen staff appeared to be singing a karaoke version of “La Marseillaise,” the familiar overture audible due to the entirely absent traffic. Enough snow in four hours to close the bars, empty the buses and the parking lots. As Richard and Cadence walked through the intersection, the lights blinked red in all four directions. In the middle of the street, Richard pulled Cadence to him.

What is every kiss but a prelude, an invitation? The composer Schumann, himself no stranger to the disorders of the mind, described Chopin’s preludes as “ruins, individual eagle pinions, all disorder and wild confusions.” The Chopin analogy here was a direct parallel, the preludes twenty-four individual pieces, intended to be at once separate and unified. What better description for these kisses, those short pressures that added up to a constant state? Richard kissed Cadence, and Cadence returned the kisses, her hands in the pockets of his overcoat, his scarf flying backward over his left shoulder; the cameraman, had he been more of a voyeur, could not have resisted circling the two lovers, but instead he recognized the moment as both beautiful and private, and set about packing up his gear. In the snow-packed middle of a quiet Eighteenth Street, the moon occluded by a low blanket of clouds and the scene scrimmed by a curtain of snow falling to the ground in large, featherweight clumps, Richard and Cadence kissed, and then kissed again.

It was impossible for him to shake his desire to speed up the events of the next few days, to see how everything would turn out. He wanted some confidence that he could take care of the boy. He wanted to know he could do this ridiculous new job he’d accepted on a whim. He wanted to know if the faith and confidence that Cadence claimed to see in him were real qualities, the kind that made him appear a trustworthy presence on the news at 5:00, 6:00, and 11:00. He wanted to know whether the things he viewed as the possibilities of a better life actually were. He wanted to know if he should buy or rent. Could he afford a house with a few dozen acres, the kind of large and inviting kitchen that he could fill with new friends and their children? He wanted to know what Gabriel liked to eat, what color he’d want his new bedroom to be, whether or not he’d ever dreamed of having a dog. But mostly he wanted Cadence; definitions could come later. She always resisted him when he tried to put labels on things, and in between pressing his lips to hers, he told himself he did not need a name for it; he just desired her presence, its calming influence, the possibility that when they did define it, it could be something permanent.

Cadence took a second armload of snow and shoveled it at Richard. He stepped toward her, halving the distance between their bodies, and as the powdery snow fluttered down, it left its momentary traces on his overcoat. He lifted one foot in the air, pointed to his wingtips, standard-issue Washington wear, and said, “I don’t exactly have foul-weather gear on.” The cuffs of his pants were starched with ice. The wet pom-pom on the top of Cadence’s hat fell limply to one side, and Richard stepped in, brushed the snow off her shoulders while she did the same for him, then used her scarf as leverage to pull her in for another kiss before they headed back to her building.

INSOMNIA. The middle-of-the-night city noise conspicuously absent. No deliveries, no garbage trucks in the alley, the only sound the mechanical grind of the snowplows as they cleared the streets, burying the cars parked streetside under decaying mountains of gray-brown slush. When Richard looked at the clock again, it was nearly four o’clock, though he did not remember slipping into the maw of sleep. His view out the window was of a city covered in the cold, dull film of rain.

Beside him, Cadence breathed at a steady pace, one Richard assumed to mean she was deeply asleep. That sonorous breathing he associated with the sound of his own childhood, summer nights when his father broke out the transistor radio and together they listened to Chuck Thompson broadcast the Orioles games on WBAL. Richard had grown up in the no-baseball-in-DC era, between the city’s second and third major-league teams, and hadn’t even seen a game in person until he was twenty. He made the drive up to Baltimore on a Sunday afternoon to sit in the upper bowl of the old Memorial Stadium, section 9, eat three hot dogs and drink four National Bohemian beers. A foul ball from light-hitting shortstop Mark Belanger sailed over his head, into the lap of a kid who looked like nothing so much as the five-year-old version of himself. He’d not thought of that afternoon in years, but he knew he was really thinking about Gabriel, how to teach a boy the unspoken things—about baseball, about…He tended to forget how he’d learned these things himself, listening to the Motorola transistor from Lew’s workbench, his father arranging two nylon-webbed folding chairs in the backyard.