Ambientes: New Queer Latino Writing

Six Days in St. Paul

178 Six Days in St. Paul   When we awoke Saturday morning it had snowed. Snow, in fact, was still falling, and as layer settled upon layer, it seemed another complication , or at least another possible complication, to my six days in St. Paul. Now, in addition to making decisions with Sil and Gerry, a process in which I was the third wheel, each diversion we had planned would have to be reconsidered, each undertaking taken with extra caution. Sil and Gerry would have to take turns driving Sil’s four-wheel drive while Gerry’s sporty new hatchback—purchased with only front-wheel drive—would have to sit out back, weighed down and snow blind, sleeping its way through my visit. Sil and Gerry’s front yard, despite the fact that it fronts their twostory Victorian home, is not a picturesque lot. It slopes dramatically, and descending the cement steps that bisect the yard, a visitor has to slow himself down—he has to resist gravity—or risk finding himself flat on his face smack in the middle of a two-way road. In the snow, however, that same front yard looked deceivingly peaceful, lovely even. Bruiser, one of Sil and Gerry’s two full-grown mastiffs, sauntered up, sniffed at one of my legs, then the other, periodically looking up at me with watery black eyes. “No need to pack warm provisions,” Sil had said to me on the phone the day before. 179 “Really?” I’d responded. Sitting at my desk, I was stuffing another edition of the New York Times into my already brimming drawer. “I thought it was always cold in St. Paul at Christmastime.” “Usually it is,” Sil said, “but this year it’s unusually warm—like it is in New York.” And Sil was right. Or at least the online forecast confirmed his predictions. During my six days in St. Paul, the temperature was to remain mild, mid-thirties, mid-forties. No snow. No snowstorms. No freezing weather. “It’s a conspiracy,” I said to Bruiser as I squinted at the glare glancing off the snow. I turned and crossed the ground-floor bedroom, which had been converted into a gymnasium since my last visit. I made my way around the living room couch, around a large leather ottoman, and stood looking out the window. From there, I could see the back yard. Bruiser parked his rump on my foot, and Sil entered from the kitchen, handing me a cup of coffee. “It’s a conspiracy,” I continued my thought, “between the airlines, the FAA, and the National Weather Service. They want to keep travelers traveling this holiday season.” “There’ll be a layer of ice beneath that snow soon,” Gerry said, joining us at the window. “And it’ll stay there until March, the way it does every year.” Bruno made his lumbering appearance, panting his way to the window and making it so our little group consisted of three men in sleep-crumpled pajamas framed by two dogs, each dog weighing nearly two hundred pounds. All around us, throughout the house, fish swam in their respective tanks, ornate clocks ticked, and the small, brightly colored birds Sil likes to breed twittered in their cages. Down in the basement, in a hall that connects the guest room to the laundry room, Sil’s pet snakes hibernated. But there were no tenants upstairs, not this visit. Sil and Gerry said they’d reached a point where they could forego the extra income, said they liked the house all to themselves—all to themselves and, for the duration of my visit, me. My previous visits to St. Paul had been made during the spring, that small window of opportunity in which a visitor can enjoy a city that freezes through much of the long winter and is humid and mosquitoridden through much of the short summer. But not to worry. Sipping at their cups of coffee that first morning, Sil and Gerry reassured me that Six Days in St. Paul 180 the inhabitants of St. Paul have to venture out in extreme weather. They underlined that, to avoid cabin fever, we’d go to the Walker again, this time to see the Frida Kahlo exhibition. They insisted we’d still see the new wing of the Minneapolis Museum of Art, that we’d still visit the Russian. The Russian Museum of...