The Wintering (33 page)

He said, “You are so quiet that I look at you to see if you're still breathing when you're asleep.”

“Don't you ever sleep?” Her voice was a little defensive. She had put up a guard, at once.

“Yes, I sleep, too,” he said reassuringly. “Don't worry. That capacity you have for privacy and silence is intact. I can't take it away, even knowing you as I do.” The sheet settled over them both, as she relaxed beneath it. He said, “I've learned something about my life recently, too.” Immediately she was listening. “Everything I've done was for you, Amy, even when you were still in darkness. I know that now.”

“Before I was born, you mean?”

“Yes,” he said. “Yes, even before you were born. It was all for you. I know that, now.”

A call came urgently the next morning from the publisher's. When could Jeff come in to see the copy editor? Amy thought he was too shaky to go; everyone would gossip about what was the matter. They went to a newsreel and roamed about that day, ending with a large dinner in an expensive restaurant. Amy did not quibble about the price since he needed to eat. She slept in the apartment again. After washing stockings, she hung them to dry over the shower rod. He came later from the bathroom and said, “I like seeing your things there, washed out. It makes living here together almost as if we were married.” She was surprised not only at how happy he looked, the incident seemed so small, but at the implied lack of intimacy in his life; and she must struggle not to freeze it out of hers.

Reluctantly on the following morning, she said he ought to go, that a publisher could get mad even at Almoner. Jeff agreed a certain amount might be put up with from him but it was time for him to face up to working. She hid feeling peeved and left out and that her day was pointless. She combed and recombed her hair ruthlessly. Sticking in bobby pins, she pulled them out, moaning that she looked too terrible to go anywhere. Already with his hat on, Jeff sat down again. Patiently, he said that, as always, she looked beautiful to him. Why was he so patient! It annoyed her when he was the one who had to hurry. Knowing she had been trying to delay them, jamming the comb into her purse, Amy kept her annoyed look and urged him out. He was keeping people waiting.

The publishing house was a gleaming new one with sepia windows in monotonous rows. On the site formerly had been an old and cherished building. Amy remembered the outcry when it had been torn down. She remarked snidely that such a building was helping to take away New York's character. In the entranceway, when they faced a solid wall of aluminum elevator doors, she shuddered.

Jeff said, somewhat shyly, “I like my going off to work this way, and you to do whatever it is women spend their days doing. And we are to meet again for the evening.”

Amy was spared an answer, for people rushing toward the elevators separated them. A swarm of bees might have passed by. The buzzing subsided. “I may start a story today,” Amy said.

“That's good news,” he said. “And, listen, if you get hot on the typewriter you may not want to come back up here. Call me, and I'll come down there.”

“I doubt that'll happen to me.” She managed to look worried. “I do have a lot of other things to do, too.”

“Of course you do,” he said.

“I have to—” but what was lost. A young man passing seemed to jam on brakes and whirled around. He introduced himself as Alex's assistant, but scarcely acknowledged being introduced to Amy in return. He rushed immediately into telling Jeff how marvellous that he was in town. She had stared at him with interest, he was so handsome. He gave a brief apologetic nod before hurrying Jeff into an elevator. And there, Jeff turned his head attentively to the assistant's conversation, his mind gone ahead to business in which Amy had no part. One instant, he looked back before the doors closed, making intact the solid sheenless aluminum wall. Even looking at her, Jeff's eyes had reflected interest in what that snobby man was saying, and Amy had felt also a look of being sorry in them, as if she had been rushing toward the elevator, and he regretted not being able to keep the door open. And so she stood, as if she had missed it, watching the indicator rise. She was not going to just stand there watching it come down! The lobby seemed a tomb, deserted. Whoever ran the magazine stand was busy someplace else, missing anyway. She stood to buy gum, but no one came to wait on her. She went fruitlessly out to the street and with a twinge of envy and jealousy wondered what a copy editor did.

Along Fifth Avenue, the stores seemed monumentally old and grotesque and grey and bulging. She could pretend no reason for going to her room. There the day would pass as if she had a fogged memory, with nothing to recall later. Apart from the crowd, she stood beneath a canopied window and apparently looked strange, for several people looked back at her. She had seen too much of New York to go sightseeing. Then she remembered, happily, that she had never sent the pigskin gloves her mother had wanted. Much as Edith would, Amy wandered between counters, looking, touching merchandise for no reason. The right gloves were found after a thorough search. She had waited until the rush hour for lunch and had to stand an inordinate amount of time in line at a luncheonette; the afternoon had almost passed. Then, after eating, she thought of not having started the story, as she had told Jeff she might. Beside the restaurant's uninteresting front window—some lackadaisical hand had jammed a bunch of paper flowers into a pot as an adornment, once a spring collection, now bleached colorless by the sun—Amy thought life worked this way, that if fate had meant her to start a story, she would have had an inspiration. It was some indeterminate late-afternoon hour when lethargy settled over the city. A typist looked down, sleepily, from an office across the way. About to sweep, a man bolted the luncheonette's door behind Amy. The lucrative hours of the day were over. Buses went by, actually empty. A pigeon ventured to a curb. At Alex's, she would have nothing to do but wait for Jeff. It seemed pointless to go downtown and come back up for dinner. The man stood behind the door, his hand on the bolt and the other clutching his broom, and stared at her, puzzled. She darted toward the pallid pigeon in a vengeful manner, but so that no one else noticed, and sent it purposefully skyward.

Squatly above the subway entrance, a sign gave directions uptown or down. Ducking her head not to notice how arrows pointed, Amy intended to let fate determine her way. Only when the train glided noisily through the tunnel did she look out a window to see the dreamlike sequence of platforms passing. People stared back as she headed toward the Village. After even a brief absence, she felt it more than ever like a carnival. From the top of the subway steps, streets spoked in many directions. Each would take her home. Again, she let an outside factor decide. Halfway down a block, she saw Tony playing handball against a building, jogging this way and that after an old tennis ball. Missing a bounce and waving as she came toward him, he gave her a hard look.

“I had to go uptown to see some friends from home,” she said, only half-apologetically. “I had to get dressed up.”

“Not your buddy Almoner?” Tony said quickly. “I saw in somebody's column he was in town.”

She refused to look surprised and shook her head. “Are you going to see him?” Tony said.

“I don't know.”

“If you called him, he'd take the call? You know him that well?”

“I guess.”

He grinned and called, “Catch!”

Taken by surprise, Amy received the ball against her stomach, but then threw it skillfully through the extended hoop of Tony's arms. “Hey, good!” he cried.

“I was the star on my high-school basketball team,” she said happily.

They went dancelike along the sidewalk, tossing and retossing the ball. People watched. At her windowsill, an old lady watering a single geranium called shaky encouragement. Amy saw people she wanted to know, to whom Tony talked easily. A shabby wino, wearing pants split open wide along his rear, called her “Beautiful” out of a toothless mouth. Despite his stench, Amy touched him as they exchanged the ball. He went off after returning it. And except that he wore green undershorts, which were showing through his split, what else did she know about him? Their lives had not in any real way touched. That life could be repetitious and dull was evident in the faces she saw along these streets. Long ago, Jeff had said places made no difference. Anywhere, she was faced with fighting or accepting those two things. Here, colored lights and unusual clothes were only outward differences.

Tony smelled of peppermint candy as he came closer. “Come on and go with me to a party, beautiful,” he said, close to her ear. “I haven't seen you in a long time.”

“I have to go back uptown for dinner,” she said.

“Oh no. You're backsliding, Kansas City. I know, it's Delton.”

“It was important to go,” she said, instead.

“Why'd you come down, if you're going right back?”

“I don't know,” she said.

“Come on. Go with me,” he said. “It'll be a blast.” He circled her waist and pressed it winningly, drawing her close. Little girls across the street stopped their game to line the curb, balanced like little birds on a telephone wire. One screamed, “Tony's got a girl!”

“See. Out of the mouth of babes. You're my girl,” he said, and unexpectedly moistened her ear with the tip of his tongue. Amy shivered. She gazed down toward the end of the street to pretend indifference; there, blood red as a peach stone, the sun was going down. Tony had felt that shiver, and tried again. Amy gazed fixedly at the reflective streaks of sun along the pavement, her ear being touched, before abruptly closing her eyes. Tony quickly began to urge her along the street, past the treachery of objects in the way, a shopping cart, a scooter, a baby carriage.

Another couple flaunting courtship called encouragingly as Tony, still circling Amy's waist, leaned around to kiss her. She let herself be pressed against a building. He leaned against her full length and kissed her harder. She resisted opening her mouth. But he knew enough to ask for sympathy and wiggled closer. He was not going to have his show at the YMCA. He was so unhappy! And she, being a writer, could understand. She was not easily enough swayed. Suddenly then, he simply told Amy she was going to the party and yanked her by the wrist. Caveman-like, he might have been yanking her by the hair on her head. Hooting and calling, the little girls suddenly came after them. The sun spilled along the way in pink tatters. Glimpsing herself in a store window, unable to see her feet, Amy felt fleet and buoyant, that she was flying. Heedlessly past outraged people, hand in hand, she and Tony ran away from the persistent children, who continued to follow, screaming gleefully. As a bus stopped at a corner, Tony suggested they get on. Amy agreed, for she was breathless. And not much longer could she elude anything, she had thought, by running.

Telephoning, she gazed about the apartment of Tony's friends, thinking it was a room like this she had wanted living with Nancy. A hand to one ear and trying to hear above the noise, she saw, tiny as a pinpoint, the girl she had been, struggling upstairs with her suitcases and fraught with worry over paying a cab driver. Ebony African statues stood starkly against white walls. A shiny zebra-skin rug was splayed on the hall floor. Sling chairs were dabs of color, obvious like spots of rouge on a pale face. Since it had nothing to do with her, she wondered why she had longed for this room. She imagined only because it had been different from what she had known, a reason that seemed silly now. Tony stood riffling through slick art magazines. With an aloof look, he kept his back to clusters of people. He was feeling inadequate, Amy thought, therefore looking defiant. She suddenly decided he deliberately put splotches of paint on his jeans. And why had he worn them when everyone else was dressed in usual street clothes? She had not been the odd-looking one, walking in.

Enormous flurry had accompanied Almoner's receiving a personal call. Shifting the receiver to her other ear, Amy continued to wait, while the call was transferred from place to place in the publishing house.

Lucky she had caught him, Jeff said when he was found. He had been about to leave for Alex's. His voice was tender when he talked to her, but took on a harder note when she had spoken. It dropped a tone. Of course, he could understand she had forgotten having another engagement this evening. He had taken up too much of her time. “It's natural,” he concluded, “for you to want to see someone your own age.”

“That's not it, at all,” she said. “I'd just forgotten about promising to go to this party.” She held the receiver from her ear. He would hear the noise. She had considered it better to lie than to hurt him by telling the truth. But the truth was, she thought, staring at Tony, who looked as if he had wandered in off the street, the truth was, she thought again, that she might have made a mistake. She shrank against the wall, out of the way of someone passing a tray. It was held a moment as if for shelter over her head. “Jeff, we'll get together tomorrow. Won't we?” she said.

“If you want,” he said. “But I'll wait for you to call me.”

She hung up reluctantly, as he had spoken. And she remained there, hesitantly, at the edge of the room. This time she had meant to fit directly into the crowd. But the conversationalists had formed circles, their faces turned toward one another. They seemed to shut her out, like doors. Tony seemed skittering as a leaf, coming toward her.

She accepted a drink. “This is a lousy bunch,” Tony said. “I don't know why I thought it'd be a good party. I'm sorry we came.”

“Maybe it's us,” Amy said.

He shook his head. “Let's get out as soon as possible.”

“But, maybe it is us,” she said.

“This guy's had a little success,” Tony said angrily, nodding toward the host's paintings on one wall. “It's gone to his head. He used to be a nice guy.”