Either Side of Winter (5 page)

He pulled his hair into a ponytail, and fixed it with a rubber band kept around his wrist. ‘Can I get anyone else a glass of water?’ he said, and when no one answered he filled one himself,
clouded and top-heavy from the tap, and drank long and loudly. An expectant air surrounded his silence and his arrival. He took off his oversized denim jacket and laid it carefully on the duffel bag by the door. Amy guessed the pleasure of the prodigal returned; typical, that Andy show up late on the day. ‘I was once an all-American girl,’ she thought – before she began to doubt the place she would make in the world, and, stranger still, the place she would make for herself in her own personality. ‘I was telling Harry Edwards about you,’ Joanne was saying, ‘and I was saying I didn’t know anything about…’

‘You remember Harry Edwards?’ Jack cut in. ‘Our friend at the Indy Record?’

‘Anyway, I showed him one of your pieces and explained that it takes some getting used to. At least it did for me but once you do…’

‘He said you should send some of your work to the arts desk there. He said it’s a long shot but you’ve got quality and they might take a second look at a local kid. He said…’

Amy stopped listening, and Andy glanced at her, raising an eyebrow. She was dropping cut potatoes in a pot of cold water, one by one, watching them drop and noting the splash of each, absorbed in the rhythm of the repeated act. Andy came through the arch of the kitchen and took her by the neck and side of her face with his large long-fingered hand. She felt a ring at her cheek as he said, ‘I got you a present, big sis. I don’t know if you’ll like it. Something for a windowsill maybe. A little odd.’

He turned to root through his duffel and brought out a strange wooden figure, often handled and well oiled, as tall perhaps as the bone between his elbow and wrist. ‘Artists use them, but I found this at a market.’ He spoke in short sentences; had the slightly unnerving controlled air of a boy who has decided to refrain from excess, and with the enthusiasm of youth, extended the dictum to all, even the least, parts of his life. ‘From the twenties, they say. I’ve got one myself. I just
like the look of them, so light.’ How brown you’ve gotten, she thought, in California – not quite healthy, he’d always been so pale, but unwashed-looking and slightly moly. The kind of boy who doesn’t mind where he sleeps. His vanity lies elsewhere. ‘For putting up with us this weekend. For putting us up.’

She noted that ‘us’ as she set her gift under the window by the oven. It stood superimposed against the brick of the apartment opposite and the thinning trees above, the brown and green of the leaves losing way against the brown and green of the park coming through behind them. The figure was composed of segmented limbs, jointed at ankle, elbow, knee, wrist, each adjustable, so that it could assume and hold any variety of pose. A thin steel rod rising from the centre of a wooden base supported it from the bottom, so his feet (and the shape suggested a man), didn’t need to touch ground, but could perch as they pleased on air. His legs, for example, were now spread wide in a bow-legged swagger; one arm hung back by his side, and the left reached out in front as if leading a charge. His face was a blank, a knob; his torso, split into three unequal caterpillar segments, could be twisted as required. ‘We use it to get the proportions right. Only it’s got no gravity, so things come out a little light-footed. I think they’re pretty.’

‘We met Charles,’ Joanne said archly, folding her hands between her knees where she sat. ‘A very nice young man.’

Jack stood up, warming up. ‘The thing about class is that it is what it is. There’s no point pretending that it isn’t.’

‘A looker, I would say, if that’s a word the girls still use nowadays. A real looker.’

Amy for once didn’t mind their teasing. I’ve nudged them a little bit more my way, she thought; a little way in my direction again.

Charles couldn’t make it to Thanksgiving dinner. He had an ‘engagement in town’; but that dinner passed as it always
does, in a great sweat and hurry at first, and a slow sweat and languor afterwards. They teased Andy about his girls. ‘Every girl I know wears boots,’ he said, ‘up to here’, and struck his fist halfway up his shinbone. ‘And rubber belts. It’s like they’re preparing for the Day After.’ No one had met these girls, and Amy explored at some length the possibility that Andy made them up. ‘Who would make girls like that up?’ Andy felt peevish, flattered at once. ‘Why would you want to?’ Just embarrassed enough to make it matter; sometimes it’s a kindness to blush. ‘Believe me, I can make up better.’

‘Yes, I know,’ Joanne declared, rather archly. ‘I’ve seen them. Rather too much of them, dear.’

‘Besides, there isn’t anyone… specific,’ stopping short at the word he meant to use, subtly twisting its tail end, and suggesting a more general complaint. No, it’s true, there isn’t anyone specific. Each of them considered the strange phrase, weighed it up, examined their friends in its light. ‘That’s not really what I mean,’ he said at last. ‘You know.’

Amy had slipped into an old habit: her family. What she needed was not to think about everything. What she needed was to do
this
without worrying too much if everyone was happy; she never used to care if they were happy. What mattered, what counted for the family, what held it together, ran infinitely deeper than happiness – seemed grander and pettier at once, bore the same relation to happiness as a place to weather. Constantly affected by it, of course, but enduring in spite of, regardless of, its vagaries, its surface troubles. It was only recently that being happy counted for much in their conversations, in their thoughts about each other. As far as that went, it was only Andy who seemed happy; certainly not she herself. Maybe Jack now, he might have come through to the other side again, after whatever it was the two of them went through when Andy left for college. Joanne was always Joanne and only Joanne; in any case, nobody ever asked how she was doing. After dinner she put on an apron and ‘made a start’ on the dishes; and the rest sat down to watch football.

Charles called that night around nine o’clock. Amy answered and immediately switched the phone to her other hand and ear when she heard who it was, drew her knees up, spoke softly. ‘Happy Thanksgiving,’ she said, attempting to convey in that phrase a world in which they always said such things to each other, the holiday greetings, the casual meaningless repetitions of shared life. ‘I miss you,’ she said.

‘I’d like to stand your folks some drinks at the Yale Club tomorrow night if they’d care to come. Bring along your brother. I’d like to meet the famous brother. What shall we say, around six o’clock? And we can take it from there.’

‘I miss you,’ she repeated, and added quickly, to break the silence, ‘have you had a good day?’

‘Yes, I’ve enjoyed myself. I look forward to seeing your lot tomorrow night.’

When he hung up, she felt a line had been let loose, and it was only the tension of that line, holding her against the winds, which had kept her in place. Without it she felt nothing, she moved with every gust or flaw, and offered no resistance, which might have bruised her, fighting the currents.

She shared the futon that night with Andy. They had often split beds before on family holidays, though not in years: they hadn’t been on a family holiday in years. The bulk of him moved her to reach out and pull him back at the shoulder towards her, as she might with Charles – if only to feel the gravity of flesh, its satisfying weight and traction, its concentrating force. She lay on her back and waited for him to say something, his long back running against her side. He didn’t; perhaps he was shyer than he seemed these days, more alike and unlike his old awkward self: that’s often the case, the changes in us awaken outgrown uncertainties. Amy guessed he had a girl in California, or had had girls, and knew what it was like to lie in bed beside them now, and forbore from turning over as he might have done before because he had new habits to repress. Back in high school, they might have stroked each other by the back or arm and talked; so she
broke the silence at last.

‘Dad looks good.’

Andy grunted – perhaps he’d only been asleep – and rolled over. ‘What?’

‘I said, Dad looks good.’

‘I bet he does; he got fired.’ His voice heavy, certain, rehearsing familiar facts, not only facts, but conclusions: attitudes reached after some consideration.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Made redundant, whatever you want to call it. What do you think the deal is with all that golf.’

He raised himself on an elbow and looked at her – his long face, thickening with age at the cheekbones, around the eyes, not handsome in the least, but attractive to some perhaps, intent, more and more assured of other virtues: something had happened to him that had been delayed in her. He knew his mind; had no one left to please but himself.

‘Why didn’t they tell me?’ The thought, which had been threatening all day, formed at last. She felt the words in her throat like the warning of a cold: why do they treat me like his kid sister? Why do I feel like his kid sister?

‘I don’t know. They didn’t think you were happy. And you know what you’re like with Dad. I guess he didn’t want you to find out – I don’t count as much. And he hoped to take care of it all before we came.’

‘Did he?’

‘They couldn’t pay for me to fly out. But I sold something the week before, and managed to hitch a ride to the airport. You know, bus to Penn Station. Subway up.’

‘Is that why you were so late?’

‘Partly.’

‘When were they going to tell me? Should I bring it up?’

He looked at her in the half-light leaking in from the city sky. ‘I don’t know, Sis,’ he said at last. ‘Do what you want to do. If it were up to me –’

‘What?’

‘Why not? I mean, does it really affect how you live any more, one way or another. Honestly?’

‘Andy Bostick. When did you get to be so cold?’ She pressed her knuckle into his forehead, slowly, but with growing force and twisting a little this way and that. He didn’t budge, still looked at her. And she gave up in the end, rolling her back towards him.

She didn’t mention it. Not even Saturday night when she might have done harmlessly enough; but by that point, somehow, there seemed to be a general assumption that she knew. And Friday turned out to be a wonderful day, quick and light, cloud and clear air sharing the field of the sky, exchanging sallies. Autumn bluster among the trees lining Fifth Avenue, the drifted piles in the Park. Colour and shape picked out, lifted, almost too real; threads of sunshine unravelled from them. Drinks at the Yale Club turned into supper at Jean Georges. Jack and Charles arm and arm, making plans. Even Joanne somewhat drunk, hailing a cab to take them back to the Conway pad, where she wanted the WC. Jack discovered a box of LPs, and began to go through them recklessly. Music jumped out of the speakers hidden in the bookshelves. Horns turning slow corners, the traffic whistle of trumpets, pedestrian drums. Charles and Andy mixed cocktails, experimenting. Amy didn’t know what to think any more. All that was over. What was left was terrible excesses of love. She would wake with a sore head and heartache.

Charles had invited Jack to get in a game of golf with him Saturday afternoon; he had a regular three ball with some fellas from his father’s firm, and why not make it a foursome. Amy protested, coyly: she wanted Dad to herself. Secretly glad to watch him go. Everything would turn out OK; her life in New York seemed less foreign to her by the hour. She didn’t have to choose, one or the other; a phrase she repeated to herself all day unexplained: she didn’t have to choose, father or lover. And whatever Andy said, Dad looked tip-top. He
hadn’t been so skinny in years, so ready to laugh, so happy to lie and talk big, and make plans. From this moment on I will be happy, she thought, high spirits growing and rising in her like the butterflies she suffered every morning before teaching class. Conscious that everything the past few days had been building towards that revelation, and also vaguely aware that it wasn’t the kind of insight likely to be true if ushered in by such a fanfare of feeling. Nevertheless, she repeated it silently to herself, that Saturday afternoon: From this moment on I will be happy – as the three of them went shopping at the second-hand stores around St Mark’s Place. And waited for Jack and Charles to meet up with them for supper in town when they finished their round of golf.

‘I can’t believe it’s already your last night,’ she said, holding her mother around the waist, and stepping awkwardly to keep stride behind her.

Joanne turned round and took her daughter’s face in her hands. She gave Amy a hard look. ‘You won’t miss us. I know you girls. And such a nice young man.’

‘It means so much to me to hear you say that. I don’t trust anything I think when you’re not here.’

‘I know you girls,’ Joanne repeated. ‘You’ve got a real nice set-up here, if you don’t mind my saying.’

It wasn’t quite what Amy expected to hear, but close enough that she could ignore the difference.

It was pretty clear from the start something had gone wrong. First of all, Jack and Charles were almost an hour late to the restaurant, a small French bistro somewhere by Gramercy Park. Andy had drunk two glasses already from the bottle they ordered, and seemed quietly detached. Amy finished the basket of bread and asked for another. They came in at last looking worn out, though Charles put on a better show and kissed Joanne before sitting down. Perhaps, Amy thought, they’ve had a fight over something, or one of them lost badly, embarrassing both. But if anything, they seemed rather complicitous
than otherwise. The mad notion ran through Amy’s head that they’d gone to a whore house together, but it didn’t strike her as the kind of thing Charles would get up to. She realized then, with a shock, that she could be led to believe almost anything about her father at that point. She had been cut off from the family secrets, and now everything seemed possible.

It surprised her they weren’t more apologetic. Charles said something about catching rush hour coming through the tunnel, and they wanted to drop off his clubs and freshen up before going downtown. Still, he looked tired. There was a drift of pink in the corners of his eyes, and the evening stubble, which usually suited him so well, had grown too long, and curled lightly around the line of his jaw. It gave him a traveller’s appearance: the air of a man indifferent to present circumstances. Yet he made an effort. His eyes were bright, and the skin across his cheeks had the taut sheen of a forced expression or a fever. He chattered more than anyone at dinner, often amusingly, humbly recounting the misfortunes of his play. He had had the yips, he said, and explained, that the yips was what you got when you thought you could play a game and you couldn’t, and were trying to account for the discrepancy. The yips was a way of getting from A to Z without ever getting close to B. But that wasn’t all he had: and listed, in the manner of physical ailments, slices, hooks, fliers, and, by way of symptoms, roughs, sandtraps, water hazards, and a variety of lesser known birds. Handicaps didn’t come into it. There were some things you couldn’t put a number on.