The Snow Queen by Michael Cunningham Page A

the Moroccan woman she was in love with.”
    “I
know
,” Ping answers, with fluttering, gossipy urgency. “Isn’t it
amazing
? The woman was, by the way, an ugly old thing who went around in a black burka, and sunglasses. You should see the pictures. Here’s Jane, lovely in an alabaster upper-crust sort of way, walking the streets of Morocco with a woman who might just as well have been one of the witches in
Macbeth
.”
    Foster’s face—still spectacular in its pairing of carved-limestone Irish jaw with broad curl of lower lip, topped by that improbable, patrician, English schoolboy nose—goes slack with what might be amazement but which, Barrett suspects, is simply incomprehension.
    “That’s crazy,” Foster says.
    “Jane was crazy,” Ping answers, with an expression of sated, feline satisfaction. He believes all great artists are, must be, if not deranged, eccentric, at the very least. Is that, Barrett wonders, connected to the sentimental little landscapes and still lifes Ping paints on the weekends? Does that explain his hats, his collections: the Victorian bird dioramas, the jewel-toned Arabian lamps, the first editions?
    Foster says, “I guess I’ll have to read her book,” in a tone that manages to convey his genuine intention, and the fact that, for him, actually reading the book is an admirable but impossible ambition—he might as well have said,
I guess I’ll have to learn particle physics
.
    “It’s not all gloom and doom,” Ping tells him. “It’s surprisingly funny. The lives great artists live and the books they write are two very different things.”
    Ping has his momentum back. He says, “You have to remember, she lived a very strange existence. She was an expat. She’d married that big fag, Paul Bowles, who ignored her, never sent her a dime, she was always broke. I suppose she lived in a world in which she thought anything could happen.”
    Beth administers a reassuring squeeze to the back of Barrett’s neck, gets up off the chair arm in search of Tyler. As she goes she says, “Twenty-nine minutes to midnight, everybody.”
    Beth’s departure gives Barrett permission, too. He sneaks a glance at Liz, but she’s gone genially blank. She has the ability to cancel expression, to sit in groups as if she were waiting patiently, with neither irritation nor doubt, for the hired car to arrive, to take her somewhere lovely and serene.
    Barrett says, “Only twenty-nine minutes to contemplate my sins.”
    For Barrett, Ping’s one true rival, wit is the only acceptable method for taking leave of Ping in mid-aria.
    Ping puts his hand to his chest, in elaborately feigned horror. “Darling,” he says, “you’d need twenty-nine
days
.”
    Barrett rises from his chair. Ping returns his attention to Foster.
    “And really,” Ping says, “if you’re a deranged genius, why not go to pieces in a place where monkeys dart along city streets and vendors sell fruits you’ve never seen before?”
    Foster glances, surreptitiously (Ping doesn’t like wandering eyes), at Tyler, who extends an arm to Beth, wraps it over her shoulders, and pulls her in, shelters her against his sternum. Tyler. His handsome, lion-eyed ravagement. His capacity for devotion. Which is so sexy. Why do so many gay men lack that? Why are they so distracted, so in love with the idea of more and more and then more, again?
    For a moment: Tyler removing Foster’s clothes, tenderly, ardently, marveling at Foster’s revealed chest, his furrows of abdomen; Tyler taking in the trail of darkish hair that leads downward from Foster’s navel, as if Foster had grown the hair especially for him; Tyler hot for Foster but for Foster only, Foster’s the exception, Tyler’s not into men, he’s into
Foster
, and he lowers Foster’s jeans, paternal but sexual, ready to fuck Foster with the savage kindliness of a father, a fabulously perverse father, no taboos here, he’s doing right by his boy, taking care of him, doting, knowing in