Free The Snow Queen by Michael Cunningham Page B

single, game bite, and puts it down again. “I can’t, really,” she says. “It’s very good toast, though.”
    “I’m widely known for my toast.”
    “I’m going to go get dressed.”
    “Okay.”
    She stands, comes to him, kisses him lightly on the forehead, and for a moment it seems as if she’s the one who’s comforting him. It’s not the first such moment.
    Tyler knows what Beth will do. She’ll drape the clothes she selects on the bed, gently, as if the fabric had nerves. Everything she wants to wear is white, these days. White connotes virginity in some cultures, mourning in others. For Beth, white connotes a form of semi-visibility, a neither-here-nor-there quality, a sense of pause, an un-color, which apparently feels right to her, as if the assertions implied by colors, or black, would be inappropriate, maybe even impolite.

B arrett sits in the empty shop like a young raja, alone with his treasures.
Treasure
is of course a bit of a stretch—it’s merely what Liz refers to as “merch.”
    Retail. Not exactly high art, not exactly the search for the cure. But still …
    It isn’t trivial. It may not be profound but it isn’t trivial either, the little treasure hunt, the bodily satisfactions. The ongoing search, by Liz and Barrett and Beth (when she can manage it, though it’s been some time since she’s been able to manage it) for the genuine among the dross, for the small wonders—the paper-thin leathers and robust, ink-blue denims; the talismans on chains—that echo, in affordable (semi-affordable) form, the jewel-dusted scarves and talking books and articulated golden elephants that once were presented to sultans. The objects and garments that are made by people who might have been tailors or weavers in England two hundred years ago; swift-fingered, charmingly peculiar people who wake every morning eager to knit more caps or cast another silver amulet, people with something witchy about them, people who may in some inchoate way believe that they are producing not mere products but protective gear that just might keep the righteous warrior alive as he storms his way to the Grand Vizier’s tower.
    And, yes, we are creatures of the flesh. Who knows that better than Barrett? Who’s better acquainted with the invisible fibers that tie yearning to vestment; those solemn parades of gold-threaded chasuble and starched white whisper of alb under the suffering wooden eyes of the crucified Christ? Doesn’t the secular world want, need, to walk both proud and penitent, robed, for the benefit of some savior or saint? We worship numberless gods or idols, but we all need raiment, we need to be the grandest possible versions of ourselves, we need to walk across the face of the earth with as much grace and beauty as we can muster before we’re wrapped in our winding sheets, and returned.
    Barrett sits behind the counter, with his reading spread before him: the
Times
, the
Post
, and this tattered copy of
Madame Bovary
, which he is reading for the sixth time. He roves among all three.
    There’s this, from Flaubert:
    At the bottom of her heart, however, she was waiting for something to happen. Like shipwrecked sailors, she turned despairing eyes upon the solitude of her life, seeking afar off some white sail in the mists of the horizon. She did not know what this chance would be, what wind would bring it her, towards what shore it would drive her, if it would be a shallop or a three-decker, laden with anguish or full of bliss to the portholes. But each morning, as she awoke, she hoped it would come that day; she listened to every sound, sprang up with a start, wondered that it did not come; then at sunset, always more saddened, she longed for the morrow.
    This, from the
Times
:
    Spammer Jeremy Jaynes, rated the world’s eighth most prolific spammer, was convicted today of three felony charges, after sending thousands of junk e-mails through several servers, all located in Virginia.
    Right. Searching for