Fiction: She Likes It Cold(a short story)

By Pat Hamilton

Even long before the wedding, Paula knew they were doomed.
    She liked it cold. Windows-open-in-winter cold. Air conditioners from the 1970s set on 8 in November. Running barefoot in the snow and freezing sleet to retrieve the mail. She’d bring the old-lady neighbors their mail, too. Barefoot in snow.
    Billy never noticed matters like this before the wedding, too thrilled just to be allowed to care for Aunt Margie and Uncle John’s pre-Civil-War log cabin and animals while the old relatives attended a funeral over in Pigeon Forge. He’d feed the two collies and the two peacocks, and he didn’t even try to hide that his new gal would join him, if they’d allow it. They gladly would. They knew he loved that old cabin even more than his mother had.
    It had two bedrooms upstairs: one, freezing, reserved for guests. It took up half the upper level, and its back wall hosted two air conditioners, window units, more than enough to cool the room.
    Next door to it, Margie and John’s bedroom. As a child, Billy never even went in there, but during the week of the funeral/vacation, he simply had to sleep in their bed, and he learned of the absence of A/C in that bedroom.
    Downstairs, the front door opened into a kind of den, with a huge bed and a fireplace that roared blazing year round. From thence, one passed into a living room, never used, featuring another fireplace, cold and still, but guarded by two lifelike Siamese cats.

Two spiraling staircases of ancient golden wood

    Billy’s favorite part of the house, though, by far, were the two spiraling staircases of ancient golden wood, creaking with every footstep, one ascending from the den to the freezing guestroom, the other leading from the cold living room up to the mysterious great-avuncular bedroom, with its one 19^th-Century painting of some scary-faced ancestor and two boxes of their only son’s books and comics. Doors pulled closed behind each set of stairs ensured a climb of dark gloom, but redolent, young Bill imagined, of both new-fallen 1830 timber and modern lemon furniture polish. He always wondered, but never asked, if two sets of stairs were not superfluous. He liked it that way, and always knew he’d come to live here someday.
    Of course, Paula and Billy launched their weekend by draining John’s bourbon and making their first love in the room with both air conditioners roaring louder than their combined heartbeats and blowing the blanket and sheet off Bill’s ass and off the bed, which the pair found hilarious, and then Bill went on one of those forty-sneeze jags, nary a hanky or a tissue anywhere.
    “Remember, we have to wash these sheets, now. But I want us to sleep in the blue room over there,” Billy said.
    “What?” Paula fairly shrieked.
    “Yeah! This room is way too cold for me. It’s the end of November, for fuck’s sake.”
    “I will sleep here. You can sleep wherever you want to. Billy, darling.”
    “Our feet and our asses are gonna hang out in the wind!”
    “You say that like it’s a bad thing. From now on, we just tuck in the sheets and the blankets.”
    “But tucking prevents sex!”
    “Tucking prevents fucking?”
    “Good one! Yeah, I thought of it just as soon as I’d said—oh, come on! You have to admit this is a cool place. Before the Civil War! I’ll show you the graveyard tomorrow.”
    “Graveyard? We have a graveyard?”
    “Yes! A buncha black slithery snakes undisturbed for months and years at a time.”
    Thus it happened that they slept in separate beds in separate rooms on their first night alone together, happily on that night, and so, happily on sporadic subsequent nights spanning four decades and many buildings.

Billy had learned to capitulate to her will

    Billy had learned, in those earliest days, to capitulate to her will, for the sake of peace and harmony, and for most of the next forty years, he managed to tolerate cold. Not always, though.
    He loved making love under a ceiling fan in summer, but the forced gales from old-fashioned window units like the ones set to high in Margie’s bedroom when he first ravished his future bride, he came to loathe. In the early years, their lovemaking always sent the blankets swirling floorward first and the top sheet to trap their limbs in a tangle of sweaty percale, so that, after they’d surrendered to sleep, the black wee hours found Billy fumbling around, cursing, feeling blindly for the blanket on the floor whilst Paula snored content and thunderous, smiling, pushing her haunch back into him.

“Did this ever happen to you?” he asked, one early morning. “It’s the end of summer, the change of seasons. It’s hot, so the A/C is on, but you’re in a deep, deep sleep of a nap, and when you wake up, it’s already night, and it’s cold. So you tell yourself you gotta get up, shut off the air conditioner, but—”
    “But you’re so comfy and so still sleepy that you can’t get up. Yes, I know!”
    “But you keep saying, ‘I gotta get up. I gotta get up. I’m freezing!’”
    “And you just can’t move!”
    “You can’t! And the sleep felt so good, you just wanna get right back to it. It’s just right there, holding out that promise of the same ecstasy you just felt.”
    “But you can’t get back there, because your ass is freezing, and now you’re aware the joy is gone, and you’re all bitterly awake. Yes,” Paula averred, “I’ve been there!”
    “That’s the same feeling Frost’s narrator feels at the end of ‘Stopping by Woods.’”
    “Now I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
    “Sure you do! ‘And miles to go before I sleep.’ He says it twice.”

“Frost’s?”

    “Frost’s?”
    “Well, his narrator, technically. ‘Whose woods these are, I think I know.’ Come on! ‘Miles to go before I sleep.
    “‘And miles to go before I sleep.’”
    “Are you having a stroke right now? I’m gonna call 911. First, I’m gonna grab a beer. You want a beer, baby?”
    Billy laughed. “You’re messing with me! No one can get out of college without reading that one. He’s dying, face down in the snow, trying to talk himself into getting up. He’s got stuff to do. Important stuff. He’s gotta turn the A/C off, or he’ll freeze to death. Because you kicked his blankets off.”
    “Face down in the snow,” Paula shouts, “while his little horse thinks he’s queer! Hahahaha!”
    “Somebody did graduate you from college, right, Babe?”

Margie had a big chest freezer in her laundry room. Paula and Billy enjoyed lifting its lid, looking around, wondering how long the chicken pot pies had lain frostily there, and removing two on which to dine, back in the days when the chicken was the only pot pie in the supermarket.
    Their cabin stood far from every grocery store, and a heavy rain commenced. Paula slipped Margie’s pills from the bathroom-mirror cabinet into her pocket.
    “Take me to bed, now!” she commanded.
    They awoke to ice and snow.
    Twenty-five years later, they celebrated their anniversary by skiing in the snow-covered hills above Taos. Paula skied. Billy, at a small table by the great room’s fireside, swirled cognac in a snifter for a good twenty minutes to let the perfume dissipate sufficiently to allow his first civilized sip, and crept into bed at night under a thin gray-green woolen blanket that had likely come from an Army-surplus store. Paula left the windows closed, even calling down to the desk to ask if more blankets were available.
    “No, Señora, no. Let me see what I can find.”
    “Muchas gracias. I appreciate it.”
    “And a doob, please, if you can find one,” she chuckled, after she’d hung up.
    Then came a day their combined incomes told them to take that dream vacation for which they’d always waited.

“Alaska!”

    “Alaska!” Paula shrieked.
    “Santorini.” Billy said he’d never spend even a dime going to Alaska.
    “But whales!” enthused Paula.
    “They care nothing for you. They will whack your ass into the freezing Bering Whatsit. I’m freezing just thinking about it. We’re going to Santorini. You’ll love it.”
    “That’s where I wanted to go. Ha! Ever since you were seventeen, you’ve been so predictable!”
    “Harpy slut!”
    “So easily manipulable!”
    “That’s not even a word!”
    “Oh, poor Billy, but it is!”
    “Nightcrawler!”
    In the tiny blue pool that came with their cozy white suite under its blue dome in Santorini, just like they’d always seen in photographs and in daydreams, he turned her over and kissed her booty, pausing but to declare some areas warm, and those cooler, as he strove toward the summit. Neither had imagined ever actually being here. He wanted to bite, actually bite, a chunk from the soft pale meat; there was plenty enough there for everybody. Instead, he asked her if she wanted to make a baby. Paula gazed dreamily down at the Mediterranean sparkling below.
    She didn’t need to think it over, as she had done so over and over before. “If only you could make some money, ever, in some way.”

“I had to stay strong, but I fell apart”

    He said nothing. She continued: “No. I had to stay strong for my Dad, and then for Mom when he died. I fell apart just after they both died.”
    “You were only, what, fifteen? Sixteen?”
    “But I had been incredibly strong. I didn’t even know it at the time. Coz what could I compare it to? I just thought it was normal to feel the way I did, that everybody was like that. And I didn’t even feel, especially, all that close to Mom, so it surprised me when I fell apart. I fell all apart, Billy, and I thought I’d get back whole again, eventually, but I never did.”
    “You seem hardy and unflappable, to me.”
    “But no kids! I just won’t do that to anybody, when you or I die.”
    “Well, you win, then.” He didn’t feel even a slight need to state his own case or to object to her position.
    Santorini was a paradise in the afternoon, even more glorious under a full, bright moon, heartstoppingly magical when one was more than a bit tipsy in an infinity pool with one’s own baby.
    “Hang on a sec,” he said, and came back out with a bottle of ouzo and two tumblers.
    “That is disgusting!” she wailed. “I hate licorice!”
    “A puppy, then.”
    “No! A cat.”
    “But a Siamese, like the twin sculpted guardians of Margie’s fireplace? Remember?”
    “I am starting to fall in love with you. I think.”

Copyright © 2023 by Pat Hamilton Pat Hamilton has written three novels, hundreds of songs, and a handful of book reviews for the papers. He taught College English for 30 years, which helps him blend popular and classic literature in his writing. As an Army brat, he traveled the USA and Europe before settling into the beauty of Tennessee, but the rock star he used to be still lives on inside him.