The Wintering (11 page)

“Yes, it has formed a heart,” he said. “The edges are like that lacy paper they put around valentines. I wonder if there is any significance?”

Significance? Amy thought, trying to be totally mystified. “Look!” She drew his attention to the window. “See that barge. I've never been farther down the river than that. But I'd like to go down it to New Orleans. I'd like to go everywhere, I guess.”

“I do wonder what the future holds for you,” he said, in a way which surprised her; though what surprised her more was that he reached out and put a hand on her arm. Amy sat stone-still and embarrassed, wondering what the gesture meant. At her stillness, because of the resoluteness with which she kept her eyes ahead, he not only took back his hand but moved closer to the car door.

Partially to gloss over the incident, partially to break the silence, Amy ran over in her mind, frantically, topics of conversation and found them all lacking. Finally, she said, “Most people I know wouldn't care about coming here to sit. But I've done it a lot.” Only Quill would share such times; however, after considering, she decided not to mention his name. Then Almoner sat with a grave face, while Amy told him about walking around the block in the rain, once, and how everyone had reacted.

“You'll have to be tough, have a tough hide if you want to be a writer,” he said. “Believe in yourself, or no one will. You can't worry too much about what other people think.”

But did not worrying about what other people thought mean not to worry about hurting them? Amy wondered. Fearing that she ought to know, she was afraid to ask. She kept on roaming about in her mind for something else to say. Almoner, poking about in his pockets for matches to light the cigar he had stuck in his mouth, looked pensive. Amy considered that he was thinking merely about where he had put a light. However, he looked as thoughtful once he had pulled a packet of matches from his breast pocket, lit the cigar, and sent a spiralling roll of smoke to break open on the windshield. He sounded abrupt saying, “Miss Howard, your letter came at a time in my life when I needed it most. That day, I tried to think of something to compare it to. And I thought of wind through apple trees. I needed an image with great freshness, fineness, sweetness. Before your letter came, I had been going along feeling like a used-up—”

Urgently, Amy looked at him and said, “You're not used up!”

“—bloke,” he finished, looking grateful and smiling at her. “You brought back something of my own youth.”

“I was so scared about writing you,” she said, “I don't know what I said.”

“You told me,” he said, not daring to laugh, “a great deal. Even about a dog you had that got run over.”

“Oh no! I couldn't have.” She began to laugh. “I'm embarrassed.”

He laughed quietly. “Yes, yes,” he said, like a low quick murmur, “you did. But I hope you'll never be embarrassed with me.” He pinched the end of his cigar, looking down at it. “Assuming, that is, that you aren't finding this meeting too unsatisfactory and that you'll risk another.”

Who, Amy wondered, would pass up a chance to meet Almoner? She had been wondering whether she could risk telling her friends at school about seeing him. They would not consider, first, that he was married. Since she was no one and he was famous, she could not see why that mattered; still, not wanting to face that fact, she knew that it mattered. “Yes, of course, I want to meet again,” she said, not looking at him; she stretched restlessly beneath the steering wheel. “I am getting very tired of just sitting here, and I'm cold. Would you like to have lunch, or do something?”

“Lunch! I wasn't thinking. It's way past your lunchtime.” He had held close to his face, in a way which reminded Amy of her father looking at the phone book, an old-fashioned round watch. “At my age, I don't eat much in the middle of the day. But where can I take you that you can get what you want?”

“I don't know where we can go that you won't be recognized, or that I won't see somebody I know. Except there's a place near my old high school that has great cheeseburgers, and no one else will be there now since it's vacation. Unless you want something better than that?”

“Coffee will do me, Miss Howard,” he said. “Let's go where you want.”

As Amy started off, driving again back over the same slick wet streets, she wondered if his calling her “Miss” were a custom left over from his day of dating. He sounded entirely too quaint. She said, “Please call me Amy.”

“All right. But then you have to call me something else. Either Jeff or Jeffrey. Which do you prefer?”

She preferred to go on calling him Mr. Almoner, which seemed proper. She said, however, “Jeff.”

The air coming from the car's heater had grown too hot. Amy lowered the heat and the car became gradually too cold. She then kept alternating the temperature, which would never adjust correctly, and that gave her an unsettled feeling. The day was more dismal with sleet falling now, and slush in dreary little globs was flung about by the windshield wipers.

“Your fine letter deserves something better than this,” Almoner said quietly.

And “this,” Amy thought, must refer to the day and their wandering around in it so aimlessly and to being cold; shivering for some time, she had tried to hide it.

“It must have taken courage for you to write it,” Almoner said. He moved slightly toward the middle of the seat and again placed a hand on her arm. “It was fine, damn it.”

She sat stiff as a board, wondering that her letter could have been so meaningful. And glancing once at her stolid profile, he took his hand away. She said, with a slight rush, “Remember Quill, that boy who came down there with me to see you? He got an A on his thesis about you.”

“I'm very glad to hear that,” he said unconvincingly.

Amy pressed a little harder on the accelerator and turned them with a bump into the drive-in. She glanced at the rickety fence surrounding it, with the same signs she remembered. A carhop started toward them but Almoner signalled that they would be going inside. Though he got immediately from the car and started around it, Amy met him by the hood. He supposed young ladies in this day and time did not wait to have doors opened for them. He did take her elbow, going up the steps to the entrance. “And is he—if this is a term you use today—your boyfriend?” he said.

Without meaning to be rude, she drew her elbow away, having never liked anyone holding it when she was walking. “Quill?” she said. “No, he's just a friend. I don't have a boyfriend.” Sensing that Almoner wanted to know, whether he would have asked or not, she thought she might as well tell him.

They stood, a moment, adjusting to the dim interior before crossing the room toward a booth. The waiter who had started out, Amy was thinking, had been Sill, whom she remembered from high school. She was surprised that he looked no older. So much time seemed to have passed since she had come here as a high-school girl and yet it had been, really, only a few years. Had she not changed at all, either? Certainly, this place looked the same. Outside, in one corner of the fence had been the same Budweiser ad she had stared at while letting, for the first time, a boy unbutton her blouse; discreetly those nights back in high school when she had been brought here to neck, the waiters had come and gone, setting up or taking down trays. And now inside, the green booths had their same sticky look of being freshly painted, though they had not been. Many of the scratched initials, evident on the tables and the walls, she remembered, all of them still imbedded with dirt and food. Colors from the nickelodeon swirled about the room in the same pattern of lavenders and greens, coloring her face and Almoner's until they sat down. From the washrooms they had passed came the same odors of a pine-scented cleanser.

Once they had given their order, Amy stared thoughtfully at her folded hands, unable to think of anything to say. Having criticized Quill for wanting to ask Almoner questions about his books, she did not feel free to do so; only by the river had she asked a few tentative ones. Almoner stared up at a clock on the wall. While digging at food in one of the scratched initials on their table, Amy thought how she hated being shy. She conceived of her insides as crying out to end her loneliness, knowing she might sit here endlessly, silent.

As if it took effort on his part, Almoner said, “This fall, I almost came up to your school to see you.”

Then her mouth dropped open a little, and Amy looked up in astonishment. “You did!”

“Yes, and if I had, I was coming to call on a young woman. That's why I didn't come, because I didn't know whether you would want me to.”

“Everybody would have been thrilled,” she said, looking down at the initial again.

“I wasn't coming to play literary,” he said firmly. “I was coming to call on a young woman. You may even want me to stop writing you letters, not to complicate your life.”

“How is your writing me letters going to complicate my life?” She looked up.

“I might fall in love with you.”

“Oh. That would be complicated,” she said softly, looking in relief at the waiter approaching, his tray high above his head, recognizing their order by her pink soda. She bent immediately to the straw when her glass was set down.

“I may have to come to New York in the spring,” Almoner said, watching her drink. “Could you come down from your school to meet me? We could have good food and good talk in New York, and freedom we'll never have here.”

Amy, letting the straw go, looked at her lipstick mark on it, the same strawberry color as the soda. “I have a vacation at Easter. Would it be then?” she asked.

“Yes, I think it would be then.” He smiled. “Did I tell you I like very much what you have on?”

“I'm glad,” she said immediately. “For once, even my mother liked what I have on, and she never does.”

He said, “Your nails, too, I like those. Not all painted like so many women's, but natural. Your hands look older than you are. I don't mean that unflatteringly, but they have a strong honest look about them.”

“Good heavens,” she said. “My mother thinks they're the very worst thing about me, my nails all bitten.”

“And today your eyes are not violet at all. Look up a minute. No, they're greenish like your dress. Do they change with the color you have on?”

“I don't know.”

“No one's ever told you?” he said. “There seems to be so much you've never been told.”

“I feel I don't know anything, despite college,” she said.

“You don't need college to be a writer,” he said. “Why don't you give it up?”

She had bent toward her straw and stared at him instead, her lips open. Then she sat back and said, “I've almost gotten my degree. My parents would die if I quit. My mother went to a finishing school. She's horrified enough that I go someplace we can wear blue jeans to class. And my father's horrified because he thinks everybody there is a Communist and that I'm going to be one. Everybody's a Communist to him who's not as conservative as he is. I'm sure you'd be one.”

“Certainly. A writer is always suspect. Well, I suppose if you've put three and a half years into it, you might as well get the degree. But do you have time to write, with all your studies?”

She tied her straw into an intricate knot. “I suppose I do,” she said slowly. “But I never do write anything, except a diary. Or rather I write little things sometimes and throw them away because they always seem silly.”

“They might not seem silly to me,” he said gently. “Why don't you show me something you write. The same thing might come out of it that comes out of your letters. Something you're not aware of yet.”

“I'm really not,” she said. “It doesn't seem to me anything could come out of them.”

“When you're older, you'll know. I suppose I wish you'd never reach the point in your life of needing something, a new start, as I did. But since you are sensitive and intelligent, I'm afraid you will.”

That moment, a patron put money into the nickelodeon, and Almoner sighed apprehensively. Then, to his relief, the music was soft. They were quiet again, listening to a Negro man sing, rather sensually, “You Always Hurt the One You Love.” Looking at Amy intently, Almoner said, “That's for you.”

She had, unexpectedly, felt an emotion rise in her which she compared to jungle cats roaming restlessly around cages; the restaurant was near a zoo and frequently, on afternoon dates, she had wandered about there before being brought in here for something to eat. She was as distressed by Almoner's words as when he had touched her in the car. He was no longer looking at her but staring into his empty coffee cup. And, unable to think of anything but ending the moment, she said, “What time is your train?”

“At four,” he said quickly. “If that's too late, you can take me now.”

As quickly, she said, “Oh no. I wouldn't dream of letting you wait in the station alone that long. But I don't know anything else to do, do you?”

“No,” he said. “I'm afraid I'm not much help to you.”

“I guess we'll just have to drive again,” she said, beginning to slide out of the booth. Their hands met reaching for the check.

“Oh,” Almoner said, laughing. “Were you going to take me to lunch?”

She said, “I did suggest eating, and you only had coffee.”

“But don't you realize,” he said, standing beside her now, “that I'm a famous author. Therefore, I must be rich.”

“Well, good heavens then,” she said, laughing, “by all means, you pay.” But going along with him toward the cashier, she felt still worried, though the check was small, knowing that he made very little money from his books. That was one of the outrageous things she had somehow by her presence wanted to make up to him.