Dry Ice Read Free Page A

was feeling—increasingly common moods those days—the more oldies and ballads and jazz and classical reflections tended to accompany our family routines.
        I used the music as a barometer—if I knew the aural pressure variants, I liked to delude myself into believing I could forecast which way the winds were blowing.
        Maritally, it had been an inclement winter. It was looking like an inclement spring.
        When the tunes were downers those days I considered myself to blame.

    I tried to decipher the meaning of Lauren's recent playlists and their melancholic homage to whatever part of the past they represented. Even if I ignored Patsy Cline, Johnny Cash, Keith Jarrett, and John Coltrane I remained mystified by the Morrisons—Jim and Van—and Leonard Cohen. I was completely confounded trying to fit the loop of Satie and Gustavsen into any category. Upbeat they were not.
    I feared something was up, maybe something more than her
    growing intolerance for an increasingly distant husband who stayed up nights alone drinking vodka.
        "How are things at work?" I'd asked. "You feeling okay?"
        Her answers told me nothing. I waited with trepidation. I was coveting routine those days, holding on to it with the kind of denial that a nine-year-old uses to keep bedtime at bay as he grips the last light of a summer evening.

    That night in bed Lauren mumbled something into the still air. Her breathing had been regular and shallow, her body so tranquil below the thick comforter that I suspected she was vocalizing unintentional color commentary on the progression of a dream. But I hadn't understood her words, if words they were, and I decided not to risk waking her by intruding with a vocalized "What?"
        Then she sighed. I opened my eyes. People don't often sigh in their dreams.
        "Music hurts," she said ten seconds later as part of a rushed exhale.
        The was-my-wife-awake-or-was-she-asleep conundrum wasn't totally resolved. "Music hurts" was a vague enough pronouncement that I couldn't fit it into either level of consciousness. The earlier sigh remained unexplained.
        I was beat up. I was tired physically and in just about every other way. I flirted with pretending she hadn't spoken. I wanted to close my eyes and pray for sleep that wouldn't come. But when she sighed a second time I asked, "You awake?"
        My question was reluctant. My words weren't generous. A rote performance of concern was the best I could do.
         I don't need this. My mantra those days. Om.
        "Yes," she said. Although her reply was whispered, it shouted "defeat" as clearly as a white flag on a stick and a throaty yell of "I surrender, sir."
        I considered waiting for her to go on, but I said, " 'Music hurts'? Did I hear that right?"My impulse was to add, "If that's the case, Leonard Cohen must be excruciating." Instead I rolled closer to her onto the chilled cotton that marked the middle-ofthe-night no-man's land in our bed. My hand found her warm, smooth abdomen, the tip of my pinky sinking into the shallows of her navel.
        "Remember the brain mud? When we left Diane's party?"
        "Sure." I thwarted a deep sigh of my own. No, no. Please, no.
        For at least a year Lauren and I had been discussing having a second child. Despite her looming biological finish line I was more eager than she to get on with it. Her health was the stated reason for her reticence. She wanted to be sure she was stable for the stresses of pregnancy and infancy. Brain mud meant that she wasn't stable enough.

    A fortnight or so before, Lauren and I had been at a birthday party at Diane and her husband Raoul's foothills home up Lee Hill Road above North Boulder. Raoul was a handsome, rich, charming Catalan-born tech entrepreneur. The celebration was for his anys . Long before the party started to ebb Lauren searched me out on the deck where I was sitting in front of a roaring fire pit trapped