Either Side of Winter (2 page)

‘Charles Conway is taking me out to dinner in Manhattan.’

He became something of a joke and a symbol – of all things gallant and rich and metropolitan, and well above them, unless you were young and pretty. In short, of the kind of people they taught every day, the kind of lives their students would lead, which they could not quite aspire to themselves.

When they woke up together the next morning, Charles surprised her by having nowhere to go. She got up first, plucking a towel from the top of the bathroom door and wrapping it round her. He propped her pillow behind him, stretched out elaborately, and clasped his hands behind his head sitting half up. He was sitting like that, looking cheerful and sleepy, when she came out of the shower: her thin brown hair grew wispy and pale in the wet, and she folded another towel round her head to hide and dry it.

‘I’ll get you a towel,’ she said, hoping he’d leave her to dress alone, but he answered, ‘Don’t bother, I’ll shower when I get home’, and didn’t move. There’d been rain overnight to wipe the slate clean, and the sun was up in a clear sky and streaming more and more fully through the window as noon approached. It caught his face, or rather specks of his face – his stubble, the grain of his eyes, his teeth – which glinted in the yellow band of light as he squinted against it. She gathered an armful of clothes and changed in the bathroom. It was
Tuesday morning, she had a bad head, and her first day of school was Wednesday. When she got out again, dressed except for her wet feet, he was flicking through her stack of magazines.

‘I wouldn’t mind writing for one of these outfits,’ he said. ‘They’re all the same: cosmetic compositions, in both senses. Like abstract art – composed of elements rather than figures.’

‘Are you hungry?’ she said.

‘What d’you got in the house?’

She considered for a minute. ‘How about we go out for breakfast?’

‘Sure, I don’t mind.’ And he got up naked in front of her and carefully put on his clothes from the night before: the black trousers, which he’d folded and hung over the back of her desk chair, white shirt (from a hanger in her closet), cuff links, laid next to his watch on the tin of tomatoes. Only he left the bow-tie untied and loose around his neck. ‘I know a little place around here’, he said, ‘I’d like to show you.’

That in fact became a characteristic of their relationship. Charles Conway showed Amy Bostick around town. Everywhere they went he knew ‘a little place’, and as often as not the proprietor there would greet him by name or by taking Charles’s paw in one hand and holding Charles’s elbow in the other and shaking both at once. The place he took her to that morning was a kind of Mexican greasy spoon, a ‘shortorder joint’ Charles called it, named Rosarita’s. At least that’s what someone had painted in pink and blue on the white board above the awning. They sat at one of the round unsteady tables on the pavement underneath it and when Amy complained about sitting out of the sunshine and getting cold – she wore only a plain white T-shirt, linen shorts and Birkenstocks, and goosepimpled lightly – Charles called out, with patrician good humour, for someone to roll up the awning. A narrow-shouldered, dark-skinned man with a heavy moustache promptly attended them. He moved in the jerky almost brittle fashion of a skinny man whose skinniness
has outlived his youth. As soon as he saw Charles he called out his name and put his hands around his neck, then bustled in and came out bearing two peach-coloured drinks in large wine glasses on a tray. Amy was more touched than she had any right to be and felt herself falling under the spell of the sandy young man in a dirty tuxedo whose stains showed up bright and dusty in the sunshine.

She was still somewhat drunk from the night before, and the peach-coloured liquid suggested at least that it was going to get better before it got worse. Charles it seems had decided to let her talk. He ordered some kind of huevos and ate them hungrily and without great dignity when they appeared; leaning forward to get low to the plate and looking up at her from under his thickening eyebrows to show he was listening from time to time. Amy said something about looking forward to the football season, that being the one thing about the start of the school year she always looked forward to: the leaves drying up on the trees, the first norther coming through to knock them off, and Notre Dame. She hadn’t decided yet who to root for now that she’d transplanted herself. Her alma mater, Amherst, was pretty much a wash-out as far as football went. And she figured she’d spent enough time on the East Coast now not to beat against the prevailing winds any more – she might try pulling for the Giants.

Charles said, ‘So you’re one of those girls who makes a point of liking football.’

She almost bridled at that: she had been trying to impress him. Charles didn’t seem to notice and, somewhat abashed, Amy made a confession she’d been hoping to get to at some stage in any case. ‘I guess I’ve always been something of a Daddy’s girl.’ That set her off, though she probably left as much out as she included – saving it for later, perhaps, when she needed something vulnerable to expose for the purposes of conversation. Her father, also named Charles as it happens, though he went mostly by his middle name Jack, treated her like a boy from the start. To the point where, when her
younger brother Andy came along, being that much younger and blooming later as a boy, he couldn’t hope to keep up and turned out something of a disappointment in that respect, and concentrated on what she wouldn’t compete with him at, like painting. Jack had a try-out for a minor-league ball club after college, which when he didn’t make it he ended up in law school. Played the hot-shot lawyer in New York for five years, till Mom came along and they went home to Indiana to raise kids. They were both from Indiana, that was part of the appeal: but Amy guessed he kind of took out his ambitions on her. Not that she minded at all: going to state in softball her senior year was probably the most etc. of her life. And so on.

But, as usual, she edited less than she had intended to. And certain phrases cropped up now and again: I guess I was always the lucky one, I totally see why he resented me. These indicated what she had wanted to indicate in any case – that she was a favourite child. However much she told herself that it was ungenerous, and worse, to bring these things into the open, that they should be the unacknowledged solace of her lonelier hours. Still, the truth insists on being told. She was blessed by the preferences of love. The natural choice of affections. The darling of hearts. The inheritor of her parents’ dreams. The one to bet on.

Though as for that, even Amy couldn’t be sure how much of it was true any more, if it was ever true. It’s always hardest to edit out what you have begun to doubt. Her brother, in his sophomore year at Pomona, had begun to get his cartoons – his graphic art – published in some San Francisco magazines. He won a sculpture prize, including a thousand-dollar cheque, on the strength of which he spent the summer backpacking through Mexico. Aunts, cousins, old college buddies, were always ringing up her parents to say they’d come across his work or his name on a website somewhere. You couldn’t go home without seeing some magazine page tacked on to the fridge or the living-room mirror, most of it too strange or horrible to look at. She had quit the softball team her freshman
year and the word she used for Amherst football was really the word that summed up how she had begun to think about the four years after high school: they had proved something of a wash-out. Nothing had changed, least of all her, except that everything she used to like about herself had gotten a little dusty.

Her relations with her mother Joanne had always been somewhat prickly, on her side at least. They just didn’t get each other for a start, besides which there was no way Amy wanted to end up like Joanne: sweet and condescended to, as Amy saw it. Not that her father seemed so happy these days. Another source of guilt. Arthritis in his knees meant he couldn’t even play softball any more, and he spent too much time in front of the couch watching the TV. Two years before he had had his teeth out (after Andy left for college): the thought of that plastic smile sitting in the glass on the shelf above the bathroom sink made her want to cry. He was forty-seven: already he had the artificial cheeriness of an old man to whom no one pays any real attention. Cheaply renovated, that’s what he looked, with the hair he had left brushed back along his neck in thin strands that reminded her of her own wispy scalp after a shower. She should have moved back home after graduation, for a year at least; only, for whatever reason, and the fact surprised her as much as her parents, she hadn’t. When she told her father she was moving to New York, he said, ‘That’s the right kind of thing for you to do. Though I can’t say I didn’t hope you’d come back home. But you always used to take things on head on.’ She puzzled over that ‘used’. Maybe he thought he didn’t know her so well after four years at college. Maybe something else. She got the sense he was sending out a delegate to live the rest of his life – the life he should have lived in New York, when he ran around with a ‘pretty fast crowd’ and didn’t have kids. (That hokum ‘pretty’ gave the game away when he said it.)

Amy knew herself well enough to realize this account of events was only partly right. She needed to think of her life as
important. It didn’t seem so any more. Charles, she already suspected, practised some editing of his own. ‘I guess I better push off,’ he said after breakfast, hopeful of contradiction perhaps; though when she asked him what he had planned for the day, he adopted a brisk tone. ‘Buddy of mine’s trying to set up a company,’ he began, and swallowed the last of her drink. ‘I won’t bore you with the details, but I’m lending him a hand.’ And then added, after signalling for the bill: ‘Financial and otherwise.’ As he had guessed, perhaps, that stopped Amy’s curiosity short. All she said was, ‘Do you get summers off?’

‘That’s not how I work,’ he said.

She watched him from her window after he saw her to the lobby. Kneeling on the futon and straining out, she admired the way he seemed to have somewhere to go but no hurry. His dinner jacket trailing off a thumb over his shoulder; the pleasant downhill swagger of a light hangover the morning after, his feet loose in his shoes. But the road dropped sharply and he disappeared behind a bend in it on the way back to the school where his car was parked. She didn’t get a look at his car. She thought, I hope I get a chance to before it ends.

Now that he was gone she didn’t seem to have so much to do, and her apartment didn’t have any answers. Not since high school had she fallen in love, and wasn’t sure how to go about it any more. It used to be easier – this wasn’t hard work, but she felt she could go either way and didn’t want to have to choose. Already the thought presented itself to her: I suppose it depends on how lonely I get teaching, what I decide to make of this whole thing. And then she wondered what about Charles Conway gave her such grounds for confidence the choice was hers; that’s when the first shadow of doubt fell across her, and an ache ran along a vein in her temple. Just like in college, she told herself: by the time you decide you are where you are where you are, it’s too late. And: I hope he calls; I’m not sure I have the guts to any more.

She hardly thought about him Wednesday, that’s how she put it to herself at night, aside from a single embarrassment. There seemed so much for her to worry about, running hot and cold all day. By the afternoon the combination of her intermittent sweat and the air-conditioning had taken its toll: she stank slightly, and wished she’d worn a cardigan over her T-shirt to hide the patches under her arms. The problem she thought would be to keep the children quiet. In fact, she couldn’t get them to talk: row upon row of fourteen-year-olds, asleep or terrified or sullenly resentful, appeared before her; and she guessed in retrospect that she should have waited them out. But at the time – how could it be otherwise, given the restless, eager, dissatisfied current to her nature – she buzzed and flitted around them, playing the fool or the prim miss as the occasion demanded, confusing them and herself, desiring alternately and with an instant passion that surprised her to be each of their best friends or never to see them again. By eleven thirty she was utterly beat. She sat in a stall in the teachers’ WC and cried. Then composed her face, and walked out across the baseball field on a bright clear September day whose sunshine it seemed couldn’t touch her as she shivered in it regardless, heading for the cafeteria. The sight of all those children talking at once and eating appalled her. Already she suffered from a kind of persistent stage fright, convinced she would be called upon to remember a name or chastise a delinquent. So she held her head up in a blind way, certain that everyone could see what a miserable fraud she was. Filled a tray with food she was too nervous to eat, and sat in the far corner at an empty table by a window overlooking the concrete balcony on which she had first kissed Charles Conway, the famous son, two nights before.

Other teachers joined her, muttering do you mind if we? as they sat down. Amy sipped a mug of black coffee while picking indiscriminately from a paper plate heaped with tuna-fish salad, cottage cheese, carrot sticks and chocolate doughnuts. A headache danced circles around her eyes, but she began to
talk in spite of it. ‘My throat’s so dry, I can’t spit enough to eat,’ she said.

‘After day one I always feel like I’ve been to a rock concert,’ declared a bulldog-faced man with his elbows on the table. And added, ‘I’m in computers.’

Mr Peasbody, stroking his tie, looked round elaborately and said, ‘At this point, my dear, you’re closer to their age than ours.’ They shared a table in the Biology office and had already been introduced. He had made a point of explaining that he was far too old for her, being gay besides, and that he intended to call her from the first what she clearly was: a dear, a darling, etc. If she didn’t mind. She couldn’t read him one bit, and at first she attributed this to the fact that she couldn’t read anybody in this strange new world, anybody at all. Add to that, his being gay, a Connecticut blue-blood, and so on. Most of her relations with older men were driven by the worries over whether or not they wanted to get her into bed. Later, she decided that he was odd; a deliberately closed book.