Either Side of Winter (10 page)

When he got back from Annie’s place, Tomas had fallen asleep in front of the television: a loose hand pushed his shirt up to the first of his ribs. The heating pipes clanked, quickening, in the radiators. Such violence seemed surprisingly upsetting; a real invasion of the niceties. Howard was reluctant to wake his lover up: he didn’t want to have to talk. That
walk across the Park had chilled him to the bone; he couldn’t quite feel how cold he’d become. And now, by contrast, the close heat of the apartment left him breathless and rather worried; he sighed deeply, again and again, to take in more air. Tomas stirred and roused himself, and blinked, happy as always to find his sight filled with Howard: proof of an instinctive affection Howard instinctively wished to disappoint. ‘What was that all about? You left without your coat.’

‘I wanted to get some air.’

‘I would have come with you.’

‘Look at you. You’re not going anywhere.’

Tomas sat up, pressing his palms downwards against his brows, as if he wished to commit something to memory. Howard could smell the sleep coming off him; the shirt unrumpled again over the little puddle of his gut. Tomas closed his eyes and swung both arms from the elbow in towards his face – the gesture of someone inhaling a scent of broth from a hot pot. Only he said, ‘Come here come here come here come give me a kiss.’ Howard obeyed, hanging his head for shame, and closed his own eyes to blot the shame of it out, as Tomas pressed first one cold cheek and then another against the heat of his neck. ‘Don’t think I don’t know,’ Tomas said. That boy never needed to shave: he had the kind of snowy skin no blades of stubble ever broke through. Howard thought how young it made him seem, how boyish still – though by this time the gap in their ages had grown thoroughly respectable. Cradle-robber cradle-robber cradle-robber, he thought; then the word shifted, took on its new, more appropriate application; he felt the pinch of tears, then the sticky mess of them, bad as blood. It wasn’t fair what had happened; what she had done to him, the extent of life she had committed him to. ‘Don’t know what?’

‘Don’t think I don’t know you. I know you. I know you feel cold and bad lately; and then you think, I’m a cold bad man. I know better. Don’t think I don’t know better. I know what a pussy-kitten you are.’

Howard dried up: he was still capable of being surprised by Tomas, and surprised at the poverty of his own privacy, its transparency. Surprised at Tomas’s fine feeling. Only the boy always went too far; and Howard could not repress, even from this mark of real sympathy, a slight aesthetic recoil. And he guessed rightly what was coming, he had heard it before, and heard it now, warm with the breath of the boy in his ear: ‘The trouble with you is you don’t trust anybody; I know because you don’t even trust me. You have to give more to get more. I only want others to see what I see, how special you are, how much you have to give’, etc. And yet, it isn’t that Howard’s vanity didn’t tally with such an insistence on his rarity. Only the tone of it seemed low, common – it degraded him, to have fallen into such company; worse, to have chosen it, to have proved faithful to it. And behind Tomas’s frothy truisms lay the boy’s terrible, smug assurance, which he could never resist putting into words: ‘I know you better than you know yourself.’ A notion against which everything in Howard screamed revolt. In spite of the fact, which Howard helplessly admitted, that Tomas
did
see some things more clearly than he could himself; had guessed how close Howard had been to tears, had deliberately provoked them. He sat up now, awkwardly, pressing his hands against the boy’s broad chest to get a purchase on balance; then recomposed his face, till it looked bored or numb – till he thought it looked bored or numb, though he couldn’t be sure. It occurred to him, if he wanted to put a sting into that kid, he could tell him the news.

It did sting, of course, Howard’s involuntary betrayal, the roots he had planted, without knowing it, in another life. After the shock, Tomas recovered quickly, eagerly – wished to meet her at once, them, lover and daughter both. But Howard insisted, understandably perhaps, that a new father was enough for the girl to take in for the time being. Introducing her now to his young gay German lover might be
considered ‘gilding the lily’ – a phrase he guessed rightly Tomas did not understand, especially in its current ironic application. He hoped it would distract him from that curious mention of the kid’s ethnicity, which had little to do with the matter, after all; and Howard couldn’t say why he had included it, except to fill out a list. A long list is always more persuasive than a short one. But what exactly was he hoping to persuade him of?

In practical terms, however, his new daughter proved a great comfort to Howard. Whenever he wished for a minute’s peace, a minute’s respite from, among other things, his own dependence on the younger man’s enthusiasms, he said, simply, ‘I’m going to stop by the Rosenblums tonight.’ Then he might stop by, or he might not, depending. The mere fact of his new daughter gave him a trump card in all the little negotiations of love – those skirmishes over plans and priorities, jealousies, affections. ‘I’m going to stop by the Rosenblums’ became his coded way of saying, I need you less than you thought, I have a richer
outer
life than you imagined. Which was true, after all: Francesca involved him intimately, relentlessly in the world outside his own head. And Tomas had urged him again and again over the years to venture out of that elegant confinement.

And then Christmas came, and Tomas, a good and homesick German, insisted first plaintively, then tenderly, then angrily, that the Rosenblums come by on Christmas Eve for glühwein and carols. ‘They’re Jews,’ Howard said. ‘Well, they can be Jews as much as they like on Christmas Day like the rest of America. I want to meet her.’ The snow had fallen too early that year, drifted and cluttered the parks, where it survived, ugly and icy, in banked white streaks under benches, along the sides of cross-town roads, in the ripples of half-buried rock. Everywhere else pavement grit and crowded feet had browned it and ground it into puddles, which leaked and spread on to the doorsteps of the delis, the threadbare shag of the apartment lobbies, the floors of cabs. Winds bullied
up and down the avenues unchecked. Everyone had a cold in the nose, drips, streaked voices, unthawed feet. A dingy end to the year, till a warm front blew off the water the night before Christmas Eve. And deposited its white burden of cloud, covering the old in the new – a fresh coat of snow no better than the first but innocent still, still capable of the necessary illusion. ‘I want to come,’ Frannie had said. ‘Makes a change from Chinese food and a bad movie.’

Tomas drove Howard frantic all day getting ready. He woke early, shifted out of bed, and began vacuuming, in sleepy half-consciousness. ‘For God’s sake, turn it off,’ Howard shouted at regular intervals, lifting the duvet from his throat. At nine, Tomas came up with a cup of coffee, said nothing, set it by the bed. There was a kind of silence between them: they had both reached that stage of the invisible contest when questions don’t need to be answered, so intimate and sensitive have the lovers become. Howard guessed that he was losing; Tomas had grasped the possibilities at stake. There was the chance of a real future for them now, a growing and changing one, an expansion; even Tomas, greedy, constitutionally unimpressionable, had suffered under the steady retraction of their lives, presided over by Howard’s ‘honesty’ – his refusal to give in to the ‘necessary insincerities’, even for the sake of happiness. (Tomas had never before considered his enthusiasms to be
necessary insincerities
. The description had an infectious, a deadening persuasive power.) They lived in a large ground-floor studio. The bed lay on top of the kitchenette, reached by a ladder propped against the side of the fridge. And the rest of the room stretched away towards the bay window in long lines of dark wood, broken by couch, coffee table, armchair, and now the Christmas tree, blocking half of the white light from the street. There was a brick fireplace; and Tomas carefully laid a fire across the andirons. It was the awful quiet crackle of the balled-up newspapers that irked Howard most, a little light tickling across his nerves. So he roused himself at last, and
climbed down, if only to get himself in the way. Then Tomas began to cook a goose – a desperately messy, sweaty, speculative operation, which took up much of the day, and drew Howard, in spite of himself, in.

Annie and Frannie entered briskly to the smell of roasting bird. They brought enough of the cold in with them to make the shutting of the front door a sweet exclusion; dutifully stamped their caked feet, admired. They had worked each other into a pitch of curiosity through the course of the day. Sisterly by habit, they grew positively girlish. There was such gossipy excitement in the thought of meeting Howard’s boy lover. Their lives had been added to, and what was old had been renewed in the process. The sense of novelty included a spice of wickedness: how cheaply mother and daughter had acquired relations. They felt a touch guilty at the ease of it, how lightly the blood-intimacy had been picked up, and free of that heaviness time imbues it with; how easy it might be to lay aside again. And then it was all so strange and painlessly unlike: a studio apartment on the West Side, gay young lives, a real fire. ‘Isn’t it decadent,’ Annie said, with a certain theatrical escalation, not entirely unironic, that reminded Howard powerfully of their old irretrievable youth and friendship, ‘here in the middle of the city, a glass of glühwein, these burning logs?’ And he recalled what his father had said after he brought Annie home for a ‘country weekend’ – around Christmas, nineteen years ago. ‘I like your friend, son. But I must say, they’ve never been the kind to hide their light under a bushel, have they?’ A test of his sympathetic allegiances Howard refused to answer either way. This was the kind of remark his mother used to put a stop to. ‘That’s not nice, George; and what’s worse, it isn’t true.’ His father would answer, irritably, ‘Well, you know best, dear, you always do.’ He meant it too, though – grateful for a correcting influence, a loving margin to his bitterness. But Howard said nothing.

Tomas for once wore a collared shirt, twice unbuttoned,
over his faded jeans; an apron, well wrapped about, brought out the calf-like heft of his shoulders, the vanity in his narrowed waist. He was shy of them both, glad of his duties; and the girl was shy of him. A compound of associations turned Howard’s thoughts to his mother – who had been built up over time, in that lonely mythology of widower and son, into an icon of simplicity, sympathy, creaturely wisdom. She died when he was eight, of breast cancer; he remembered asking her, shortly before her death, but before he understood the thinning away that afflicted her, why they never gave him a baby brother? ‘I’m having too much fun just with you and Dad,’ she said with a complicitous wink. An answer that left him in a tangle of conflicting reflections: it had never occurred to him, for one thing, that she was
having fun
, that some part of her natural and unquestioned happiness was snatched, momentary, contingent – that it could end. He remembered feeling that she had somehow joined the pair of them, father and son, for the ride; they couldn’t help it,
she
could. Later, the other possibility struck him: that his father, never a natural family man, had baulked at having more children; one, indeed, may have been a source of some dispute. He wanted Howard’s mother to himself. George, like his son, found it difficult to expand; the Peasbodys drew tight circles, and protected the inside fiercely. At the time, of course, both father and son had failed at that, disastrously. How quickly, after all, his mother had died.

A strange thing happened in the course of the evening. Perhaps it was inevitable, at least, foreseeable. Annie and Howard took on the mantle of parents, exchanged looks, got slowly, quietly drunk. Tomas and Francesca, after an initial stiffness, an insistence on their right to equal and adult respectability, played like kids. Tore through their presents, leaving a papery nest behind the flown eggs (which Howard, with a kind of physical pedantry, carefully collected, and stored away from the fire): a fountain pen for Frannie, gold-nibbed, with a leather diary for her freshman year; a book for Tomas, on
film noir
. This brought on a slight relapse of mawkishness. ‘I’m sorry,’ Frannie explained, quick to bring awkwardness into the open, ‘we didn’t know what you wanted. Which was hardly our fault (glance at Father): we didn’t know
you.’

‘It is exactly what I like very much,’ Tomas said. Annie was touched by his unsuspected human grace – began to think she ‘understood’.

Later, they sat cross-legged together in front of the fire. Tomas wound and unwound a loose branch of pine from the skirts of the tree, till it snapped, and threw it on the flames. Frannie leaped back at the gritty crackle, the sparks and smoky gunshot of the needles. ‘Jesus,’ she said, ‘watch out.’ Another stiff minute. ‘I’m not one of those girls who sees anything funny in
trying out
stupid little dangers.’ Anne looked at Howard and smiled into her glass of red wine. Her daughter had no sense of occasion; no restraint. She always dressed up her annoyance, her fears, embarrassments, as matters of principle. Howard looked back at Anne, blankly, met her eyes. Perhaps he lifted his brow: as much as he would grant the conspiracy of their indulgence, of their
parenthood
. Then Tomas stood up, stretching, a long-armed yawn that lifted his shirt above his belly-button; and eased down a box of Monopoly from a stack of large photography books laid on their sides. Francesca sat down again, smoothing away her huff, her blouse across her glittering ‘party’ belt, the knees of her black jeans. ‘Everyone has to play,’ Tomas said, in deep Germanic frowning tones that made even Howard smile, but shake his head.

‘No, I’ll clear up. You kids have a game. I like to watch.’

‘Everyone has to play,’ Tomas repeated, louder, more childish.

Howard began stacking dishes. ‘The goose’, Howard said at last, to prove his good nature, his willingness to stand aside, ‘was a tremendous success. Except of course for the goose.’ A remark characteristic of his warmest ironies, of his best, most loving manner.