Either Side of Winter (13 page)

The Rosenblums stopped calling. Annie, at least, following her confession, had decided to give him a little breathing space; that was something of a relief. Tomas left shortly after; it had always been Howard’s apartment. They spent a silent, curiously peaceful week together, even shared a bed, as he packed up his things and found somewhere else to stay. He didn’t have much; the bike descended from the ceiling, departed. There was nowhere in that long studio to hide, except the bathroom; and the night before Tomas left, Howard found him sobbing heavily there, sitting on the pot with the lid down. ‘I talked to Annie,’ he said at last. ‘I called her; I had to talk to her. We had coffee; all three of us. She said it isn’t true; she said none of it’s true. You’re just trying to get rid of us.’ The sight of him was strangely moving; Howard reached out a hand and touched the top of his hair. ‘Poor kid,’ he said. ‘I’ll be all right.’ Tomas stood up suddenly and pushed him back against the opposite wall; the top of his head cracked against the bathroom mirror, which also cracked. More violence. He felt the danger of his weight on the sink. Something was bound to give. Tomas had him
pinned by the hands; his puffed red face an inch away – the sheer ugly brutish bulk of him plain as day, looming up. ‘You need help,’ he said at last, and let go. The marks on Howard’s wrists never bled, but seemed to flake, scab none the less; these rubbed off finally only a week after Tomas had gone.

He thought of taping the mirror, but it seemed unlucky, so he threw the shards away. Then he never got round to replacing them. Whenever he stood up after washing his face, for a second he thought that the image before him was his own: those dirty black medicine shelves, mostly empty, a few pillboxes, his blade, a bar of wrapped soap.

Three years ago Roger Bathurst came into the English office with swollen red eyes. He squinted thickly through them; they lent an air of general discomfort to his narrow face, already scratchy with a beard. This was the old English office, before the renovations: a long broom cupboard lit at the end by a single high window, which displayed a patch of tree and sky no bigger than a dishcloth hung out to dry on a washing line and blowing in the wind. Desks lined either wall, and Stu Englander called over his shoulder, ‘take a fastball inside, hey?’ Stu liked to put on ordinary-Joe airs with Roger, who was an honest, intelligent, perpetually disgruntled Mets fan. ‘Leave it. I’m looking for a book. I’m blind.’ Roger had a student in tow, and the girl was meant to help him find it: a copy of
Astrophel and Stella
Bathurst liked to quote from, particularly the last lines of the first sonnet. Middle of third period on a late-fall Tuesday. Roger was teaching freshman English, creative writing, and concentrating, as usual, on telling them what not to do.

The leaves had turned; one or two occasionally fell brightly across the compressed view and disappeared. Stu was enjoying a pleasant dose of restless longing. He never relished the weather so much when he was out in it: he liked the pinch of confinement, the way it suggested he had vaster ambitions than these narrow walls. Roger stood with his weight on one leg like he wanted to talk. ‘I was cooking, cutting chillies last night, and didn’t wash my hands after. Now this, even a day later. Go figure.’ The girl, standing on tiptoe, broke Stuart’s line of sight picking a book from Roger’s shelf; she had to stretch her longest finger to catch the top of the binding, and inch it by degrees till it tipped off the edge. Rather below the
average height; curly brown hair, some of it caught inside the collar of her blouse; an oval face. Even with her lips closed in shy concentration he caught the faint full suggestion of braces. Stu leaned over to meet his colleague’s eye; they were never intimate, but managed to keep up an everyday banter that seemed, to Stuart at least, a more satisfying language than that of friendship. Roger hung around in the doorway while the girl returned to class. ‘Honest to God, it’s like looking through dishwater.’ He put his weight on his shoulder against the door jamb; they often enjoyed these respites from the pressures of the day. It surprised Stuart how happy they made him, such pauses. An easy companionable minute, of whatever kind, he often reflected, is a great pleasure in itself.

‘Rather a winsome creature,’ he said at last. Stu had a pink, unlived-in face, slightly puffed outwards but otherwise untouched by time (a terrifying omission). Only his steel-grey hair, combed carefully back, suggested his age. This produced a disconcerting day-for-night effect, like a painting by Magritte; a false cheeriness.

‘What, Rachel? I never notice what they look like.’ Obscurely satisfied, Roger turned blindly into the hall. Why it gives men pleasure to get these things commented on, Stuart thought, I’ll never know. And yet, the rest of that long spring, Stu’s eyes sought out her oval face when the streams of kids passed him in the hallway. He supposed she was fashionable, in a clean-cut, rather virginal way: she wore her socks high, her blouses open at the neck, and her various skirts fell just above the knee. The knee, as it happens, always struck him chiefly as a structural joint, rather overrated in the literature, and not so much titillating as suggestive of the mechanical difficulties underlying our every function. To see the bone beneath her skin unshape and shape itself again at her every step moved him to a kind of pity. Her face, above it, was invariably compressed into a frown, and she tended to walk doubled over under a backpack square with books. She struck him as a conscientious girl struggling somewhat to
keep up. Perhaps there was a sexual taint to the sweetness of his sympathy for her; but even so, the sight of her always warmed him slightly, like a mug in the hand on a cold day. He told himself he would have felt the same pity looking at the boy he was forty years before – though he suspected she would taste more richly those experiences which for the most part he had failed to suffer for.

At first he didn’t recognize her, when, three years later, Rachel Kranz signed up to his senior seminar on Shakespeare. The school had recently changed heads. The old guy, Hugo Bantling, also a baseball man, had been generally despised: he was not only a bully, but a drunk and a lech. His saving grace, in the opinion of men like Stu Englander, was, that in addition to all these things, he was lazy, and pretty much left his teachers to do their own work. Though it was true the females suffered under him, whether they were pretty or not, in different ways for either condition. Hugo’s single preoccupation was the baseball field. It was the only part of school life he took seriously, and kept in meticulous order: that diamond green, cut out in grassy chalk and surrounded by fresh earth, sweet with loose dust almost the colour of ripe peach.

There was a second English office on the eastern end of Bertelmeyer Hall, a small room heavily carpeted and lined with books, and mockingly referred to as the Winter Palace. Teachers occasionally used the deep foam couch for a nap in an off period; or sat back in the armchair by the window – to read, or pretend to read, or to remember the days when nothing seemed sweeter to them than the combination of a book and a chair and a window. You could see the baseball field stretched out below; and, after school, the boys looping the ball along the lines gravity sketched out across the green spaces. Sometimes, you heard the gunshot of leather on wood, or the duller percussion of leather on leather; or the unmistakable public disturbance of a base hit, a stolen second,
a play at the plate. During fire drills, Bantling hated to see the diamond trampled on by hundreds of no-good slouchy kids, and used to parade along the third base line to keep them off the green – while the bells rang and the traffic of students jammed against the (supposedly) burning walls. Maybe it was just as well the guy was retired, though now the grass grew ragged round the basepaths, and on warms days kids lay together wherever they liked over the patchy infield, or threw those frisbees long and slow across the pitch.

Dr Betty Holroyd, the new head, a forty-something woman with tough dyed-blond hair, had decided to overhaul the place from scratch. Radical renovations were under way, architectural and human: a number of the older teachers had been asked to consider an early retirement. Luckily, Stu Englander had a passionate following among the higher-minded kids – one of the perks of teaching poetry; and so far, at the age of fifty-nine, he’d been spared. Which didn’t mean he wasn’t looking over his shoulder. The thought of retirement terrified him. His wife, Mary Louise, two years older, had already gone part time at the arts foundation that she helped to administer. Stu feared that he had lost the ability, the gift of youth, to fill days on his own; and his relations with his wife no longer prompted and sustained his interest in the world. Sometimes he felt their marriage had reached a kind of intellectual dryness so pervasive it felt like burning.

Mary Louise was a very fat woman with a certain formidable elegance, the shapeliness of a filled vase: one of those Southerners who, in the course of her adult lifetime in the city, without changing her accent or manner one jot, has become a real New Yorker. They shared a one-bedroom apartment high on the Upper West Side, not far from Columbia. Mary Louise maintained an impressive unflagging interest in the lives and enthusiasms of the young. Now she spent her idle afternoons sitting in coffee shops and getting into arguments with strangers, mostly students, who, Stu was amazed to note, rarely seemed to mind. They didn’t have
a kitchen to speak of, and their bedroom seemed to have been bricked up around the double bed, but the sitting room stretched long and square with windows on two sides. These overlooked the traffic of Broadway on the one hand, and a few dirty trees on 117th Street. The room itself possessed what Stu liked to describe, among their rare guests, as ‘a carefully distressed appearance of order’. Aside from the books lining one wall, there was the clutter of Mary Louise’s sculpture collection. Mostly her own pieces – a rather disconcerting assortment of isolated limbs, heads, segments of all kinds – mixed with the work of some of her friends.

Mary Louise was a member of the Art Students League and had been for thirty years, almost since they first moved to New York together after college. She had majored in Fine Arts, and had asked around for a space to work in – they didn’t have much money – and somebody had mentioned the League. Free for amateurs and professionals alike; Stu couldn’t say a word against it. The studios were in a Gothic marble-faced building squeezed between high-rise office blocks south of the Park. ‘Unless I paid for it,’ Stu sometimes said, ‘I don’t think I’d get up the get up and go to make it but twice a year.’ Partly exasperated; not without admiration. It was the kind of venture Stuart quickly grew out of: useless and improving at once. Something would come up, and he’d let the ease of not going persuade him that not going was what he wanted to do. But Mary Louise went every Saturday morning, ‘come hell or high water’: she was strict about attendance. In life, in general, she liked to say, she was strict about attendance. Attendance never struck Stu as such great shakes. He winced a little when she said it, one of his wife’s less refined nuggets of wisdom; and from time to time, when they might have made other plans, he tried to unpersuade her. Sometimes they had nothing else to do and he didn’t want her ‘honourable busyness’, which is what he acknowledged it was, to make him feel slack. Even so, on the odd sunny morning, Stuart used to wander down through Central Park to
meet his wife for lunch. Both her persistence and the way she ‘hung on to her artiness after college, unlike some’ (as she put it) were sources of pleasure to him.

But the sculptures themselves occasionally oppressed Stu. Their careful, frozen disarray seemed a poor compensation for childlessness. They had never decided to be childless; at least, Stu hadn’t. (Another instance, perhaps, in which his wife had proved stronger, more persistent, less liable to let things drift.) It seemed to have happened in spite of them, with the inevitability of time’s progression. They had ‘gotten’ childless in the same way they had gotten old, by imperceptible degrees. As Mary Louise had often declared, in her bright unflappable drawl, ‘We’ll have a new baby when we have a new bedroom.’ They had a life in which it was impossible to put a child.

When Rachel Kranz lifted her white and dutiful hand to signal attendance, Stu marked her ‘present’ without a second thought. He was particular in these matters, and carried his green-bound attendance book, tucked under one arm, to every class. He spent the first minute of instruction calling out names, sharply and clearly and without distinguishing among favourites, and lightly recording the answers on soft paper with a thin-nibbed pen. Of course, she had grown up a little; her top lip no longer swelled with the irregular pressure of steel tracks. But she still wore her hair lightly curled down to her shoulders, and she had retained that stillness, that old-fashioned prettifaction, the air of someone gently preserved, which had struck Stuart so forcibly three years before. He noted her at last at the end of class, as she filed her way unhurried to the door – not afraid to catch his eye, and ready to smile, however briefly, at him. She might have been a girl from any age, he thought; it wouldn’t surprise him to unclasp a locket and see her oval face in it, dimly photographed, smiling back. To see her picture, etched in thin lines, on the wafer-thin frontispiece of a novel by Walter Scott, in some marbled
and heavily bound Victorian edition. But he did not answer her look; it surprised him too quickly into melancholy.

In the seven-minute breathing space between that class and the next, he tried to puzzle out the source of it. For one thing, he suspected that her careful preservation came at a price; no doubt she laboured under the rather heavy burden of someone else’s sense of her virtue. What he read as her willingness to please struck him as an unhappy gift. He’d be curious to meet her father. That reflection led him easily to the next, and he remembered his old friend Roger Bathurst. Shortly after the little incident in the English office – with the girl and the book and his swollen red eyes – Roger had failed to show up for work. It was the Tuesday following the long Easter weekend. They asked Stu to call him at home, and when he didn’t answer the phone, or show up again the day after, he took it on himself to stop by Roger’s flat. (Not, of course, that they had been particularly close; only no one else on the faculty seemed to know Bathurst any better.) Roger lived near the school grounds, in a two-bedroom apartment carved out of one of the neighbourhood’s Victorian gabled cottages. Roger used to walk his two black labs early in the morning before school along the kerbless roads, smoking a cigar and pretending the day didn’t have to happen. Occasionally, coming uphill from the subway station, Stu ran into him. They would stop and talk; Stu liked to feel the carelessness of the dogs in his hands before heading into the office.

The way to Roger’s place was just unfamiliar enough that Stu had to check the road signs sticking out of the grass in the corner yards. Heavy oaks cut off most of the bright spring sunshine; nothing but dusty drifts of it fell through the fingers of the trees. Stu felt the sharpness in his stomach; he was supposed to be eating lunch. Schooldays left you vulnerable to the power of routines. He rang Roger’s bell and while he waited, sat down among the leaves and twigs on his stoop, and looked out on the road. He thought, if Roger were dead, I’d be hearing the dogs now. He listened. Only the intricate
movements of a spring breeze; a car turning slowly in the lane ahead. From where he sat he could just make out the broken wire fence of the school football field, a dirty square of grass on raised grounds just outside campus. Mr Arbus, the Computer teacher who doubled as the Lacrosse coach, was leading his boys through drills. Where Stu grew up in small town Ohio, nobody played lacrosse; the only thing that really mattered was football. Not that Stu played football either. It astonished him how little he had changed. His patience, his delight in outward views, in wasted minutes; in this powerful spring loneliness and flowering silence. Unless it was only perceptions, very particular, that refused to change, being too pure, while everything else aged around them. Including the people perceiving. Stu used to be such a lean and hungry youth; now he’d got fat, fat as Mr Arbus with the whistle round his neck, though not as fat as his wife. He stood up painfully to ring the bell again.