Either Side of Winter (15 page)

Elaborately casual, he asked around about her in the lunchroom. ‘Got a girl in my class’, he said touching a napkin to his mouth, ‘won’t talk. Well-mannered, punctual. Can’t get her to say a thing.’ A few teachers offered suggestions. This or that strategy had worked for them, etc. But he broke in with, ‘It’s a senior seminar for Pete’s sake. By this point they should know how to speak their minds. Rachel Kranz’s her name’ – he felt he had taken his heart in his hands to utter it aloud – ‘Anybody have her?’ Yes; and Stu realized as they answered, that he hoped she spoke up in their classes, he hoped her silence had some particular cause centred in him. Her father, someone said, was sickeningly rich, a partner in a big midtown firm; not very well just now, as it happens: cancer? heart? Her parents divorced. Rachel lived with her mother, a piece of work by all accounts. One of those jobless New York ex-wives whose antecedents you can read about in Jane Austen, in Dickens: nervy, hectoring, sentimentally tubercular, idle and ill done by. Part of the great tradition of well-to-do women prisoned in their own restlessness, their own narrow views. Not particularly bright, poor girl; not that she needs to be, given her inheritance. Tries, bless her. Here Miss Weintraub, the history teacher, cut in rather sharply. ‘I don’t know about that. The boys are terrified of her, you can see. Won’t touch her. And for a pretty little picture like Rachel, that takes some doing. She’s no fool.’

He read her first essay, on
Hamlet
, without realizing who had written it. (A fact, which, for various reasons, he later managed to forget.) She had printed the text of it, and signed her name simply Kranz, a word that conjured up in Stuart’s mind the image of an old industrialist. By the first page he had realized that the essay would arouse in him that generosity of response which is the finest pleasure of his profession:

Of course, there were problems with the essay, and Stuart’s fine eye spotted them each in turn. Careless repetitions, run on sentences, unsupported statements; in general, a certain looseness, imprecision, a tendency to rest the argument on grand rather than particular supports. It wasn’t clear, for example, exactly what was meant by ‘reason’; and Gertrude had neither divorced Hamlet’s father nor caused him to be
killed. And the thesis – concerning the incompatibility of madness in a hero – demanded at least some reference to Lear; fair enough, the old king was next on their reading list. But there was also a pervasive problem with the tone, which was too insistent and personal; though whoever wrote it proved herself capable of a more clinical line. That bit about the punning ‘shew’ was very good. Of course, it was written by a girl, their Ophelia-fixations were easy to spot (though this one seemed more occupied by the filial than the romantic); and that reflection tallied suddenly with the name under the title and he realized that Rachel herself was the author.

He puffed up almost visibly at his desk, went pink. ‘I have a paper here,’ he declared to no one in particular, speaking loudly to let out air and rubbing his fingers back along the grain of his hair, ‘I have a paper here I could not have written myself. A paper that reminds me of exactly those considerations that led me to become a teacher in the first place; that led me to give up on my own work and devote myself to guiding younger hands.’ Nobody turned from their books, their papers; but he saw the little public confessions of a smile, here and there, as his colleagues continued reading. Of course, they were smiling at him, at his windy tone; but also, he thought, with some pleasure at the simple acknowledgement of that truth he had uttered. It only struck him after he said it that he meant it, that it might be true. Moments like this were his reward for giving up on his own ambitions.

Stu remembered chiefly about his own boyhood its pervasive hunger. He’d been a lean bony awkward kid, an only child, too tall, with badly cut hair and the bedroom pallor of loneliness. But never unhappy; or rarely unhappy, among his books. He dressed in chinos, sneakers, plaid shirts, regardless of the weather: sweated in summer sweats, froze his thin legs in the hurrying, windy Ohio cold. And never kissed a girl till he got to Penn, though he was certain even before then that wide stores of experience would be made available to him in
life. His intellectual pleasures were only a foretaste of the real thing. And he had large ambitions, unembarrassed appetites: he wanted to see the world and he guessed even then that the best way to see it, in all its human particularity, was through sex. Nightly desires had begun to oppress him; he dreamt unpleasant things and did not shirk from facing up to them. It was clear, whatever else was true, that he had stumbled upon a great source of power. He decided, rather seriously, to give in to it; nonetheless thrilled by the fact that he had reached that stage in life when such conscious interior adjustments could bear large and enduring consequences.

When he arrived in Philadelphia, he was only slightly surprised to find that his over-earnest manner and heavy touch proved attractions in themselves to a certain class of girl. He seemed like a nice boy, tall if not good-looking, spare in the face, sharp-boned, clever, parochial, rather intense; the kind of kid a sweet girl might take pleasure in drawing out. Of course, he fell too heavily in love; he overbalanced. It didn’t really matter in the end who the girl was: all that was needed was someone patient and social and sufficiently disaffected with her own class and kind – for the time at least, those heady first years of college – to take interest in an obvious outsider. Molly Hancock could trace her family line to the Revolution. She wore her black hair straight down her back, stood very still with her feet tucked together, and conducted herself in a manner Stuart later characterized as ‘the false demure’. In other words, she knew exactly what she wanted, and had discovered that the soft sexual air of vagueness and pliability she exuded was a good way of getting it. She had thought, once, of becoming a poet, but quickly decided her talents were far too conventional to justify such a career. She seduced Stuart just before she had reached this conclusion (though not, incidentally, before
he
had), and dropped him the summer after.

That summer was the most painful, the most passionate, the loneliest of Stuart’s life. He returned home to Ohio after
his freshman year and waited for the fall. In the meantime, he made a few bucks mowing lawns; put off continually his determination to ‘get back in touch’ with a number of high-school friends whose uncertainty obscured their scarcity; read Rilke’s
Letters to a Young Poet
slowly in the original German and wrote long letters to Molly Hancock. He felt as if his skull had been slightly expanded, such spaces opened up within it, surprising him with sudden views, outward and in. For the first time in his life he had the sense of his brain as a chamber in which he could roam freely. Only he couldn’t get out; he could hardly speak.

The family dinners became his sole source of human contact: roast chicken on Sunday and either mash potatoes or tater tots; followed by chicken soup on Monday and cold chicken sandwiches for lunch. Pizza once a week. His grandmother’s meatloaf on Friday nights. His father Edward (whom Stuart would resemble more and more) quit his job at the middle school when his son was born to make money. He sold new Toyotas. He did it honourably and well, managed his own lot, but felt the shame of the salesman in most relations other than the professional; secretly, he liked his job, the conversations among men. His private passion was Native American history; but he had a great appetite for information of all kinds. Read indiscriminately, fiction, non-fiction, whatever he picked up from the cardboard boxes of neighbourhood yard sales. Also, television; he had a wonderful memory for detective plots. Asked to comment on what he’d read or seen, he tended to recount the story in broad detail. He complained sometimes to his son of having no opinions, no small talk, no refinement of taste. As he grew older, Stuart admired more and more his father’s large silent appetite for news of the world. He took in all he could from his position on the couch; the hair over his ears standing on end, but his bald head very clean, his cheeks clean-shaven, his countenance ageless and well kept, the wrinkles fattened away.

Stuart’s obvious unhappiness, his silence, his unhealthy
summer complexion (spotty, flaccid, slightly swollen) was a great source of worry to his father. Stu was putting on weight. His lean features thickened somewhat without suggesting satisfaction: rather, physical complacence, indulged idleness. The new distance between self and son oppressed Edward. He didn’t understand what the boy was reading, a shameful admission. He said it himself, he lacked taste; a line of apology he often adopted that summer after pressing Stuart to explain those books he holed up in his room to pore over. ‘I tell you what it is, son,’ he interrupted, ‘I’ll read anything, I don’t care. I suppose most of it’s bad for me but I don’t know better. But this, this, I can’t make head or tail of.’ Edward realized of course what the kid was suffering from, but couldn’t bring himself to say it didn’t matter. All that worry about sex would soon go away; nobody could persuade you when you were young how little sex counted for in the running of the world, in keeping happy. It was useless trying. Instead, Edward talked about the work to be done on the reservations; there was a lot to be said, he said, for living in the open air.

During this time, Stuart’s sexual memories of Molly became exceedingly painful. He believed it had to do with the powers of scent and touch, senses that offered only a vague approximation of scale, and which, consequently, were impossible to keep in proportion. Nothing could compensate him for Molly’s smell or feel. He recalled once discovering a pair of her underpants at the foot of his bed; a white excrescence crusted them. So she was unclean. He had always been an unusually finicky eater. But the insistence of her physical nature, impossible to dam or staunch, only aroused him now. The pallor of her belly was wonderful, suggestive, the colour of moonlight on concrete. Rachel, he reflected now, going over these memories, no doubt possessed the same white underbelly. It would give way to his face easily, depress under his chin, and slowly, as he lifted up, resume its former fullness.

Such thoughts occupied him more and more – as he rode
the subway downtown after work, or caught the school bus uphill in the morning. On the john, during his lunchbreak. One day he got a letter from Roger, delivered to the school. He opened it after a morning class, sitting at his desk in the emptied room. ‘At last I’ve taken Sidney’s advice; I’ve been meaning to write for a while.’ Roger was working towards a Ph.D. and commuting twice a week to Albuquerque (‘so late in life’, he wrote, ‘renewed ambitions!’); his wife had finished high school, and was closing out her sophomore year at St John’s. She had taken a year out to have the baby, now almost three: little Emily. He enclosed another photo, this time a city scene: baked sidewalks, dusty trees, a square one-storey house in town, the family lined up on the front stoop. (Closer inspection revealed it was a pizza parlour, a day out.) Roger had grown out his beard again; he looked unchanged, fretful, happy, as he always had. Mrs Bathurst had put on weight, wore glasses, tied her blond hair behind. Nevertheless, her skin had grown wonderfully brown, the colour of summer; she wore a tie-dyed T-shirt, a corduroy skirt. Her heavy long thighs sloped outwards like a Henry Moore, suggestive of warmth, fertility, and pressed the skirt wide and tight before her thin calves cut back straight to the ground. Emily, with braided hair, stood exceptionally small and primly. Stuart began to weep, silently, red in the face; his tears left a tacky film on his cheeks which cooled like sweat; he touched the salt to his fingertips, to his lips. If you reduced him, he thought curiously, what was left was this mineral bitterness.

He skipped lunch and walked off campus into the neighbourhood. Calmer already, he enjoyed the shadowy preserved richness of the mansion houses, the quiet of the broad asphalt, the grassy neglected yards in which children play – their deflated plastic balls, their rusting tricycles. The weather had turned for the last time, entered the home stretch towards summer. Blue and white skies passed rapidly overhead, exchanging place. Floaters of pollen, of seed, hung in the sunshine in the air. He sweated lightly into his collar as he
walked now and loosened the tie around his neck; the touch of his own moisture in his chest hairs on his fingertips aroused him slightly. He remembered his wife’s words: his sap was rising, his sap was rising. He sat on the stoop of Roger Bathurst’s old house, trusting that no one would come to disturb him. ‘Come out and see us,’ Roger had written. ‘My wife’s friends are twenty; mine for the most part aren’t much older, twenty-five, thirty. Trust me; there’s a difference. I get tired of telling them they’ll learn.’ Later he repeated his request. ‘We’re happy but lonely.’