14 Degrees Below Zero by Quinton Skinner Page B

assured him that “almost definitely” his symptoms had psychological origins.
    Almost
definitely.
    The day of Anna’s diagnosis had coincided with the nadir of their marriage, from Lewis’s point of view. What Anna thought, Lewis couldn’t have said. She seemed content, but she had let herself get chubby, which had dulled Lewis’s desire for her as his own sexual powers continued their gradual slide. While he thought of sex continually, morning erections had become sporadic, and his ability to get it up wasn’t helped by the sight of Anna’s white cellulite-laden thighs and expanding waistline. Anna seemed content with whatever carnal attention Lewis could manage, however infrequent, and spent her days out on the sunporch painting—canvases of their garden, nothing else. Her painting was very good. Several of her oils were still propped against the walls of the sunporch. When Lewis looked at them, he saw flowers. He stared at them for long periods of time, as though the blurry images would give him some clue of what she thought, or felt.
    For his part, Lewis had been seething with anger nearly all the time. He had mastered his job at American Express, and his daily life amounted to little more than tedious nuisance. When he came home, the place was always a mess—newspapers scattered everywhere, dishes in the sink, unwashed clothes stacked in the bathroom hamper. Anna would be on her daily walk around the lake when Lewis unlocked the door and let himself inside. There were times when Lewis hated her, for confining him and blithely consenting to make him what he had become—a man of routine, of moral timidity, of grasping uncertainty.
    He even hated her for his affairs, such as they were.
    She hadn’t felt well for some time. She had sharp pains in her abdomen. She finally started to lose weight, though not in an attractive way. Her eyes settled in caverns of darkness, and she slept twelve hours a night. After a while she started inexplicably vomiting after meals. Lewis suggested she get to the doctor.
    The news came fast, all in one day. Anna went to the doctor in the morning, and by afternoon she was on the phone with Lewis.
    “I think you’d better come home,” she told him.
    “What’s wrong?” Lewis asked. He had a four o’clock meeting, he remembered, one that seemed very important.
    “I’m . . .
sick,
” she said.
    “How sick?” Lewis asked. He remembered looking out his corner-office window, peering down at the Foshay Tower and the Metrodome.
    “Sick,” Anna said. “Sick for real.”
    “Oh, Christ,” Lewis had said.
    On the way home that day, Lewis steeled himself for the months to come. Driving down LaSalle through the Phillips neighborhood (brick apartment buildings giving way to run-down multitenant houses in the direction he wasn’t going) he realized he had known all along that this was going to happen. Anna had tethered him to a life he had never wanted, and now she was leaving him. The torpor, the lassitude, had been harbingers of her death. He thought he had hated her for what had become of him, but now he realized that he had hated her for her death.
    He stopped hating her. By the time he pulled into the driveway he had been desperate to make amends. She met him at the door. They sat down and she described what the tests had revealed: a big, necrotic tumor right in the middle of her. They cried, they said all sorts of things. Lewis apologized for the way he had treated her, all the while trying to make peace with all the hateful thoughts. Anna told him she wanted to fight the cancer, but she knew she would lose. The doctor hadn’t wanted to say so, but she had seen it in his face.
    When they pulled out of their tearful embrace, Lewis looked at her. In telescoping time, he saw all the ages of Anna at once—sexy young aesthete, devoted mother, detached middle-aged enigma. He was not in love with her, the years had taken care of that. But he understood the sheer weight of all they