Either Side of Winter (7 page)

Howard liked to give off an air of mystery: he found it let him get away with a great deal of little else. He was ‘humanly lazy’. That was his own phrase for it, and Tomas had, in the course of their long cohabitation, worked hard to turn the phrase into something worse than an excuse: not entirely without success. Howard had begun to feel the self-reproach
in it; and instinctively relied-on little dramatizations, even occasional fibs, to dress up the monotony of his inner life. But he hadn’t been lying to Amy about the letter, though perhaps he had painted up the facts a little. One night Anne and he had gotten each other drunk and gone to bed together. A dull day towards the end of January had given way to a drippy snow in the evening, and they caught the cold of it coming home from class across Washington Square. They stopped off at a bar on Minetta Lane to warm up, started with beer and finished with whiskey sours; then picked up a bottle of Bourbon on the way out to get them through the night. Maybe there was some other occasion for it, he couldn’t remember. His mother had died shortly after New Year; he was always looking for an excuse, during those short days, to cheer up. Perhaps Annie had sold a story, come into an inheritance; whatever it was didn’t seem important afterwards, at least to him. Howard had never been a big drinker, but was given to binges: this was one of them, and he dragged poor Annie along. Both were lonely: they had begun to form one of those deep unsexual attachments that drive out the possibility of more frivolous, physical good times – because of the pretend, the dolled-up fakery sex required, and which their soberer, disinterested friendship put to shame. Then they fumbled at each other, with his back against the wall-heater, on her dorm-room bed prickly with the spines of opened textbooks.

It wasn’t long after that she quit school. But something in their friendship had given way in any case, and Howard couldn’t say that he minded much. Still it surprised him, over the course of the school day, how much his thoughts turned towards her. She bore grudges he knew, a quality he used to tease her about. It charmed him; she was such a rational, sensible girl in other respects, he smiled to see the imperious, casual way she could cut somebody: an old-fashioned term, which she adopted herself, and which exactly met the case. Annie was perfectly capable of blanking you in an empty
hallway if you’d displeased her. Howard put it down to a kind of sexual paranoia: she was a pleasant-looking girl, healthy and quaintly voguish, but lacked that lime’s twist of tarter appeal to sharpen the appetite of boys. It seemed a great if commonplace shame, for a stylish girl, that she was born no beauty. And she clearly minded the dearth of it, suspected, often rightly, the honourably pure intentions of her male friends. ‘You’re just like the rest of them,’ she used to complain to Howard. ‘Everyone’s gay when it comes to me. Don’t think you’re anything special.’

And yet, in the event, he wasn’t quite like the rest of them, was he? Even before that drunken night, she had roused in him a feeling of – well, he shouldn’t dress it up as something sexual, because it wasn’t simply. It was broader than that, an acknowledgement of human equality, a term diluted by centuries of liberal platitudinizing into a universal truth, when in fact it should designate only a most rare and particular phenomenon, a meeting. He had the sense that she matched him in human force, in vital mass, in powers held in reserve. ‘You always take me firmly by the hand,’ he used to say to her: and she felt the sting of the phrase, the mockery implied by its masculine challenge, but he meant it kindly, if not more, if not lovingly. With Annie, he did not have to restrain or deflect, or soften with irony. That phrase he used with Tomas, by way of excuse: for staying in, or keeping quiet, or leaving early – that he was ‘humanly lazy’, had seemed at least at first, in his youth, a gentler way of saying that he was tired of holding back, that there was no one around him who could bear his natural weight. That was what he meant at first; but it was true, as he grew older, that he suspected his own strength, its slackening, he suspected that ‘laziness’ was no longer a kind way of describing something else, but an unkind way of hitting upon the fact of his flaccidity, his spreading weakness. He hoped it was Annie who had written; he very much hoped that slight pleasure awaited him, on the downtown train after work, of tearing
the envelope open with his thumb, and discovering news of her in his lap, after eighteen years. It surprised him, indeed, the weight of pleasure promised, growing at each deferral. Of course he’d be disappointed, there was no question of that; but the curiosity kept him a little warmer through the day, a hot stone in his pocket that would soon grow cold in the open air.

He knew it had come to the point he could no longer hide from himself the fact of his unhappiness, the depth of it. As if he had turned a corner in the road, and come suddenly upon the view, falling away from his feet: miles upon miles upon miles of unhappiness wherever he looked.

The rain in fact
had
softened to snow as he walked down the hill at five o’clock on a winter afternoon. He could see fat flakes of it dissolving in the heat of the lamp lights and dripping away again; but in the colder dark they only touched his brown wool overcoat and stuck, or printed his bent face with hot red spots. It struck him he had not written anything but letters and school reports in years: this was the kind of solitary moment he used to turn into verse, harmless and not quite happy. His father had been Head of English at Groton, and in his youth, Howard had wasted hours on poetry in the way other boys play around with rock bands, only rather more friendlessly of course: there was still a chest full of scribbled yellow notepads in his childhood bedroom in Greenwich. George had little cause to sort things through or throw them away; with an empty house and a dead wife, time and clutter (the two not unlike in their irregular excess) were things he had plenty of room for. Now Howard came to think of it, their literary ambition was another subject that used to occupy his conversations with Annie. Her plays would be performed on Broadway; his poems would appear in the
New Yorker
. ‘I know what’s going to happen,’ she used to say. ‘All us writer types. I’m going to make a break for it, and everyone else will stick to real jobs and settle down.’ And
he remembered some lines he’d read, which he used to quote to her (in his reciting days), about the difference between poetry and prose:

The image cheered him somewhat, suggesting as it did the ease and completeness of transformations. But he raised his collar against the flakes, to keep them from trickling down his neck; and mounted the iron steps to the elevated platform of the downtown train.

It
was
from Annie, the letter. Just as well, he thought, that he didn’t open it at once: the shock of time passed would have been greater. By this stage he had sloughed, at least in his thoughts, some of the years gone, some of the skins worn, since he had seen her. She wrote with a black-inked fountain pen, not a scratchy, stingy one, but full-flowing; and some of the lines had smudged and gone blue at their washed edges from the wet. The words seemed fresher on that account, unset, capable of revision; and he could tell at even a first reading that she had tried hard to say as little as possible, breaking out, briefly, into detail, as if something
had
to be given away, conceded, however insignificant.

Dear Howard,

I thought of writing before, many times, but lacked the occasion.
I don’t have one now, only the chance to find one seems to be getting
smaller rather than the reverse, so I thought, I’ll simply begin. I
want to see you, I have something to say.

I have seen you, twice as it happens, in the past twenty years:
once in the Park, walking two steps ahead of a fair young man; once,
shopping, on the West Side. I thought, if you had seen me, I would
have come up to you, but you didn’t.

There’s a coffee shop not far from my apartment, on 85th Street,
just east of Second. Called Rohr’s. If you don’t want to call, meet me
there, Saturday? at noon.

Annie

Just like her, he thought, that mix of the sensible and the clandestine. Also, something careful about the choice of words, those offhand repetitions: see you, seen you, seen me.
Exactly
like her: she couldn’t write a shopping list without making the ordinary and slipshod into an artificial style. One of the things he found tiring about her. Even so, he thought, I’ll have a cup of coffee with her, Saturday; and it struck him that no consciousness of altered lives could make that seem anything but natural: a cosy drink with Annie on the weekend. Time didn’t matter very much: it always looked small next to something human. The snow had stuck and frosted, at least on the cold tops of parked cars, as he stepped out of the subway and walked down Broadway, tacky and bright with Christmas, towards home.

He never mentioned the letter to Tomas, but then, he often kept things quiet till they had to come out. Another habit: it seemed best to him on the whole to keep what you knew in reserve until it was needed. Things said or done had a way of snagging on the world, of taking on more than was meant, becoming hard to untangle. Of course he also knew that anything stored in the icebox had a way of changing colour and losing smell, of denaturing in some way; but generally, he preferred that risk. Even on Saturday he said only, ‘I’m going out for a breath of air.’ Tomas lay on the sofa shirtless in sweat pants; a little heater blew away at his feet, a steady thrumming white noise. He was running through the TV channels with flickering eyes.

‘You know it’s snowing.’

‘Yes, I thought I’d have a look.’

‘There won’t be anything to see. Too fat and wet.’ Tomas, being German, set himself up as an authority on cold weather. Also, when he was feeling lazy, he couldn’t bear it for anyone to do anything, especially Howard.

‘Well.’

‘Maybe I come with you.’ Tomas swung upright, one of his sudden movements, and slapped his hands against his knees.

‘No, I’m only going round the block,’ Howard said, leaning on the opened door, and gently letting it close him out. In his casual hurry he hadn’t thought to grab his overcoat. Instead, he lifted the collar of his tweed jacket, and felt the bulk of his wallet in the inside pocket. A blue turtleneck underneath kept his Adam’s apple warm, still a little pink from the morning’s shave. Even so, having planned to walk across the Park, he caught a cab instead on Amsterdam. He was late anyway, and somehow arriving by taxi lifted the sense of occasion, suggested a rendezvous. Tomas was right; nothing stuck, except the traffic on the cross streets; but the pavements and roads looked dirty and dark under the crushed wet. He felt a little raw all round, scraped, as if for once he might feel the sting of what touched him: a pleasant sensitivity. He had smoothed a handful of cologne across his face after shaving, and could smell it now, in spite of the cold of the cab, the sweet intimate odour of his own skin.

Rohr’s stank of coffee and wet wool when he walked in, stamping his feet. Nothing more than a hole in the wall, with an old-fashioned glass front, and jars of beans stacked above the counter. She wasn’t there. He bought a cup of regular from a girl still wearing her woolly hat (the red bobble swung side to side around her neck), and added just a shake of sugar from a sticky pot. The littlest sugar rush was how he thought of the coming reunion, a light squirt of quickly used-up pleasure. A bookshelf held a jumble of travel books and detective stories, with an aquarium perched unsteadily on top: a goldfish
flicked his tail through green gloom. Other than that, there were rugs laid over each other on a linoleum floor, and wicker chairs lined up against a bar, looking over the street. Someone had spilt coffee on his newspaper, the
Post
, and left it behind. Howard unstuck it to read the front page, and sat down. He hated waiting, an impatience he also disliked in himself; it disappointed him. Only, a sense of his own importance clashed with his conviction of being on his own anyway, of always biding time – and trumped it. He tried to concentrate his attention entirely on the front-page stories, about a killing in Queens, about the Knicks, but kept looking up.

And then when she came he didn’t recognize her. A short-legged swaggering young man pushing his way out the door, coffee in hand, shouted something at someone coming up the street from Howard’s left. He turned his head, and saw a dark-skinned guy wearing a yellow tie and a baseball cap and sunglasses against the low winter half-sun break into a kind of dance step with his arms held stiffly out. The pair embraced. ‘Man, look at you, Tariq,’ the first said, taking a burnt sip of the coffee. He ran his words into each other, and let them stick together, like something chocolatey. Howard could hear him through the glass. ‘You look like the most guido Pakistani I ever met.’ Then someone tapped him on the shoulder, and Howard turned and said, ‘Yes?’, taking her in in a stranger’s glance, before he recognized her. ‘Annie, Annie,’ he said. She bent down and kissed him on the cheek, then reached over to hug him awkwardly across his shoulders. He swung an arm around her waist, but a sense of falling short, of not having done their greeting justice, lingered for the first few minutes of their conversation. ‘Let me just get a cup of coffee,’ she said and turned away.

He had expected expansion of some kind, plumpening of feature, loosening of hair, perhaps even another layering of shirts, cardigans, shawls; also, the mark of added burdens, twin weights at the hips, shortness of breath. He thought by this point in life she’d be well and truly frazzled, she always
had so many seams coming undone even when he knew her. In fact, the reverse had happened; she had if not retracted then at least pruned herself into more manageable quantities. She had never been fat, he had never thought of her as fat, but she had in her youth a sort of breadth, a physical generosity; and now even the bones of what he had considered her essential shape had proved to be pliable to time and, no doubt, her own will. Her hair, cut short, had straightened into a bob. He saw this when she hung her coat, brown knitted wool lined and hooded with fur, on the hat stand; and she was wearing only a black T-shirt underneath, a charcoal skirt, stockings and leather boots. Half as tall is what she seemed, and narrower too, as if caught in the corner of a wide-angled lens. Her chin came to a point; her cheekbones, it seemed, had drawn closer to her eyes, making a pink triangle, frosted and chapped slightly, by the cold. Even the hook of her nose had sharpened a little – she had a sharp face, prettier, more boyish, than he remembered. She seemed to move with tiny, tidy deliberations: ordered a cup of French roast, black; waited without shifting or turning for her mug; snapped open her purse and counted out the change; thanked the girl in the red hat. It struck him how small she was; how much smaller than he; that he doubled her, that she could not have resisted him that night, if he chose.