Free 14 Degrees Below Zero by Quinton Skinner Page B

sure how much I want to be your nursemaid.”
    “How was work?” he asked.
    “Fantastic. Brilliant. I cured cancer and healed the Republic. Plus I brokered a peace between the Twin Cities.”
    “Something’s bothering you, then,” Stephen said.
    “Look, don’t start—”
    “Because whenever I hear this woe-is-me stuff—”
    “Didn’t I just say not to—”
    “You should listen to yourself,” he told her. “You sound like you’re under attack. And that can only mean one thing.”
    “Oh,
fuck,
Stephen.”
    “How long has it been since you talked to him?”
    “I hung up about a minute before you called,” Jay said. She was laughing.
    “They
do
call me doctor,” Stephen told her. “And I
do
love you, Jaybird. I don’t like hearing you in these moods.”
    The Urban Planning guy drove the lane and tossed in a smooth layup. Stephen hadn’t made such a graceful shot since his blacktop preteen days.
    “You know what?” Jay said, flashing back to her default mode of defensive hostility. “I don’t like
being
in a bad mood. But it doesn’t help to have it pointed out to me when I’m crabby.
They
call you doctor, Stephen, but I don’t.”
    “OK. Point taken. What did Lewis say?”
    “The usual. He nagged me about what school I’m going to try to get Ramona into. He insinuated that I’m wasting my time—which I may be. I certainly spend enough time thinking about the subject.”
    Jay kept talking, but Stephen was only half-listening. Lewis simply never let up. He probed his daughter’s weaknesses, projecting his own pain and uncertainty onto her—thus ensuring that she remained in a state of rattled defense. Lacan’s
jouissance
was defined as unbearable suffering that produced satisfaction to unconscious drives—perversity, as Stephen saw it, and Lewis had it in spades.
    Stephen pulled back from himself. Of course on some primal level he resented Lewis for being alive. That was the price Lewis had to pay for being the father of the girl Stephen felt illegitimate about fucking. Stephen knew it would serve him best to stay on high ground and not let himself get too drawn into the lunacy of this (go ahead, admit it) messed-up and semicrazy family.
    But his loyalties were solidly with Jay. There were higher regions of thought, and in them Stephen simply loved her. If they were going to have a future together, she was going to have to get her head together and escape Lewis’s suffocating
mishigas.
    “It’s the same old stuff,” Stephen said, watching the clumsy ballet on the basketball court. “You just need space from him.”
    “I know,” Jay replied. Stephen detected the exhaustion in her voice. This was the same conversation they’d had a dozen times. It was starting to become difficult to find new ways to formulate old sentiments. Stephen felt his mind begin to multitrack. He was due in a committee meeting in about thirty minutes, followed by office hours. That night he had to review a batch of papers graded by a scatterbrained T.A. whose frequently bleary eyes may or may not have been evidence of a pot habit. And then there was the book Stephen was supposed to be writing, which at the moment was little more than twenty pages of disparate notes and a half-assed outline on his hard drive.
    He asked Jay an innocuous question about Ramona, buying time while his mind worked. It took just a moment to shift his consciousness sideways and to utterly objectify his own motives. He occupied a unique position in these people’s lives—as a latecomer, he was unencumbered by any prevailing sentiment other than his love/lust for Jay (intertwined, as was healthy) and his affection for her daughter. He wasn’t caught up in things and now, thinking hard about it, he suspected that he was an ideal catalyst for positively affecting the family dynamic.
    But there was a blockage . . . a vague, diffuse fear: on some level he was frightened of Lewis. And so was Jay. Lewis was physically and mentally strong,