Either Side of Winter (16 page)

Stuart, with his chin on his arms on his knees, could smell his own warmth; his body still had reserves of animal ardours. His face, he thought, always pink, must look properly mottled now; his hair, run back from his forehead in strong grey lines, glistened no doubt. That girl wouldn’t stay unpregnant long; Roger’s beard always suggested the fertility of the goat to Stuart. He had a strong, versatile nature, equally passionate about disparate things; and never acknowledged the conflicts from which Stuart suffered. Spring in Santa Fe could run into the nineties; you hardly needed sheets as you lay in bed; you hardly needed clothes.

Strange, he mused, how his thoughts of children, of childlessness, blened with his sexual longings. He had slept with only two women in his life, Molly Hancock and Mary Louise. Two women in those first two years away from home and never another again. For all his appetites – and he was an ambitious, hungry man – he had discovered, to his relief and regret both, that he was also very easily, very lightly satisfied. His desires grew, readily prompted, while another insistent voice urged: enough, enough. Always enough. This was the central contradiction in his character. The fat on his bones swelling his clothes like a light wind, filling his cheeks, testified to the gentle ascendance of contentment in his life. A squat middle-aged woman, probably Chinese, probably a housekeeper, walked by, towing a small dog, pushing a shopping trolley. Briefly he imagined his knee between her thighs;
and shook his head again to dismiss the thought. This time there were no students near to upbraid him.

His relations with his wife had hardly been sexual in years, she had got so fat and winded easily. Even in college, when she was only plump and opinionated, rich in tastes and arguments, she never ran high in sexual fevers. What bound them instead were strong intellectual affinities. It had thrilled him at first – after the heartbreak of Molly Hancock, after the exhaustion of his emotional and sexual forces – to spend his afternoons with a girl as clever, as curious, as he. Privately, even in the heat of passion, he had never thought highly of Molly’s intellect or originality; she offered other, more immediate compensations, satisfied simpler appetites. He could not honestly claim to be surprised, however, that his marriage had yielded no child; there was something dry about his friendship with Mary Louise. It showed a wanton disregard for certain natural virtues to let yourself get so heavy: to confine your physical interest in the world to questions of taste, the pleasures of the connoisseur: to restaurants, theatres, galleries, views of all kinds.

The maid had turned into a side street and faded in and out between trees; she kept up a steady, unhappy pace. He remembered that Molly had never come except under his hand, under his knee. They had always promised themselves a day spent entirely in bed; but somehow he grew bored or restless after the first bout, and she sensed it and gave up. Appetites, even such appetites, were never as simple as they appeared; they were themselves an expression of another kind of desire. He wanted to want more from the world. She spent that summer with a cousin in Paris; never answered his letters. Such letters! He lay at home in Ohio, in his stinking room on his unmade bed and wrote, in a small hand on large sheets of yellow paper. Every day he sent another one off. She told him later, that fall, after she’d broken off from him, at their first reunion – almost tender with the aftermath of spent sentiments – how much they terrified her. They arrived
unevenly, in clumps and bursts, sometimes three in a day; she couldn’t get through them. She thought they had nothing to do with her. He described his empty days, his house, his father, carefully went over certain memories of their spring together. How they slept side by side in a narrow dorm-room bed for a week before he summoned the nerve to kiss her; that slow wonderful build-up of frustration. His growing sense that something would happen, the inevitability of it, which persuaded him at last that the world would not pass him by without event. Until he acted on that faith and they kissed; his lips and eyes were red in the morning, sore as sunburn.

Later, as Molly’s silence grew more ominous, he experimented with certain thoughts, especially towards the end of longer letters. He wrote, ‘Sometimes I’m not sure I even like you. I don’t think we have much in common. You have too many unimportant ideas.’ He blushed now to think of it, forty years on, as he sat on the stoop of Roger Bathurst’s old house. ‘You have too many unimportant ideas.’ What an awful young man he must have been; and he thought of Rachel, her wonderful essay, how generously he warmed to her. Yes, perhaps he had changed for the better. And he laid his face gently against the thought of her stomach. She shivered slightly, cold with fear and expectation; he daren’t undress her yet. But she put her small hands in his hair, around his ears. My child, he thought, my daughter. She was almost eighteen; he thought, she can’t help but live through more than I have. It’s like having money, being young and pretty; you can buy life with it.

That fall, when they got back to Philadelphia, Molly told him how much his remarks had upset her. She wept at the recollection, as they sat on her sophomore dorm bed side by side untouching; but then she always wept lightly. He asked her if she would return his letters to him; they might prove useful to him, later. (In fact, he never wrote as much again, composed so passionately.) That summer ambition had hardened within him. She had sent him an answer at last, late in
August. He took the envelope unopened up to his bedroom, weighed it carefully in his hand, noted the French postmark. Outside his window, the suburban street curved thick with Midwestern summer, those unmowed lawns. Cars stood parked in the moving shade, their windows rolled down to slow the build-up of heat. His heart raced; in spite of himself, he was conscious of a kind of excitement. Something was about to happen in his life, break the monotony of those quiet days. Decisions had been struck regarding his fate. She wrote that she had fallen in love with a Frenchman and was very unhappy at the thought of leaving Paris. ‘Can we talk when we come back in September?’ she said. ‘Can we say goodbye properly?’ He was heartbroken but instantly dismissive. It was clear to him what difficult life lay ahead: he would be a writer.

He showed the essay to his wife. Mary Louise sat over their finished dinner and took out her glasses; black-rimmed with wide sharp lines, glamorous and exaggerated. She dressed always like a much prettier woman, unrepentant; Stu occasionally admired her large shamelessness, occasionally grew embarrassed by it. She looked over the paper with a narrowing eye, drew in her lips. ‘I’ll tell you something for nothing,’ she said at last. ‘That child’s got unhappiness at home.’

‘That’s too easy an answer. I admit she gets in a tangle over the question of divorce; a suggestive misreading. But all these kids have divorce on the brain. It’s the word they’re taught to use for tragedy.’

They often argued, obliquely, over such matters. Stuart liked to think that people’s lives could have nothing to do with their work, that something was left over, private. Though the privacy he treasured lay rather in the head than in the home: he hoped the mind could move free of the sordid dissatisfactions of the life. Brains can play games. Mary Louise believed that in the end everything came back to biography. Her father had been a failed writer and a not much better lawyer in Savannah. From an old Georgia family, a generation removed from being rich. As she liked to say, not without affection, ‘He drank like a writer; unfortunately, he wrote like a drinker.’ And never finished anything. Only fragments of novels, first and last lines, character sketches, situations, occasional snatches of dialogue. Not without interest to a sympathetic eye, patient enough to piece together their several dimensions, but he lacked the talent for connecting threads. ‘There are two kinds of things that happen in the world, the things you can’t do anything about and the things
you can. The first writers call description; the second, plot. According to my sense of life, there ain’t much plot,’ he once told Stuart, a young man then. What that means, Mary Louise commented afterwards, is that he can’t get his own act together. And yet for thirty years on Saturday afternoons, all she sculpted of people were their parts: their hands around bottles, their knees on bathroom tiles.

He asked to see Rachel after class. This was also an act of some slight courage on his part; the syllables of her name were too heavy; to utter them in an ordinary tone taxed his strenuous tongue. Another teacher had the room next period, so he led her, gesturing loosely with his arm around her shoulder, untouching, towards the Winter Palace. It occurred to him as they walked, silently – his chin above the top of her head – that he might never know who she was. There is always a danger in these relations of projection. She would simply play the part of his own insinuations and desires; he might never scratch her surface, scratch her surface. He did not see her concentrated face as she skipped a little to keep up at his elbow.

The room, thank God, was empty. Half the kids were at lunch, he could see some of them lying on the baseball field with their heads on their backpacks. He thought, youth looks very happy from a distance; nothing could repay him, not even such moments, for the forfeit of his own. He should have spent it better; at each stage in his life he promised himself to live more fully, more widely, outside his own head, his books; and yet, almost without exception, when experiences, of one kind or another, presented themselves to him, he turned them down. Of course, there was Molly Hancock. Not that he didn’t resist her, as well, at first. Sometimes he thought that he had never recovered from the initial shock of her sexual power over him; the way she overrode his reluctance. He felt helpless in front of her, beneath the insistence of her wide experience; there was another word for what she did to him.

‘I wanted to talk to you,’ he said, ‘about your essay.’

She sat with her hands pressed into her plaid skirt, between her knees. She wore high white socks and leaned forward slightly. ‘I’m sorry, Mr Englander,’ she began, ‘I know –’

‘But first I wanted to talk to you about your manner in class. I’ve waited a month for you to say a word. It isn’t just a question of the grade, though there is that, too.’ It amused him how easily he could adopt such a tone. He saw, between her skirt and her socks, a few folded lines of her knees. ‘One of the great pleasures in teaching literature, I’ve discovered over the years, is that it is one of the few subjects pursued at the high-school level in which I, the teacher, have a real chance of learning from you, my students. I like to make the most of that chance.’

‘I know. It isn’t that I’m shy, really. Only I never know what to say on the spot. I like to make –’

‘Everyone’s shy. There’s no shame in that. Once you get started you’ll find it much easier, I promise.’ Her face, perhaps, had taken on a slightly heightened colour; she was always pink and brown, but now her pink faintly predominated. She opened her blue eyes very wide – he recognized the gesture, designed to show willingness, attention – but pressed her lips together, involuntarily, the sign of someone refusing to be bullied into talking. Her top lip was overheavy, and hung down in the middle across her lower lip. It’s true, the closer you looked at her countenance, the more you saw the slight excesses to which it inclined, that breadth of cheek.

‘No, the real shame’, he continued, ‘only struck me when I read your essay. And I found what a brilliant’ – he almost said ‘little girl’ but stopped himself in time – ‘writer you are. This by a long chalk is the best paper I’ve come across this year, the wisest, the sharpest. I won’t say it doesn’t need work, because it does.’ She was all pink now, the blood rushing to her face in swift concentrations. It touched him wonderfully to see the power he had of giving pleasure. ‘I won’t say it doesn’t need work,’ he repeated, ‘but, what’s rarer still,
it deserves more work, and I’m more than happy to help you with that. There’s a senior essay competition I have in mind. But, more importantly, I want to tell you such thoughts are too good to keep to yourself, young lady, and I only wondered –’

‘I read. All the time.’ She broke in at last, defensively. ‘I read on the schoolbus. I read myself to sleep. None of the other girls –’

‘I only wondered how I could persuade you to talk up in class. What it would take.’

She sat
stumm
now; her hands had moved on top of her knees and clasped them, sweating slightly. It occurred to him, with sudden insight (such insight, which, even though it may serve vanity, has stepped clear of it at last), that this was a moment of great significance to her;
she had been recognized
. The uncertain wealth of her inner world had been laid out for him to see, and rated, highly at that.

He remembered the first time he showed Mary Louise a story. They had fallen in together, naturally, after arguing violently in a seminar on the Italian novel. He had a strong corrective habit, and she had baulked against his insistent pedantries. Secretly, she liked being ‘called out’, as she put it. Roused by the heat of debate, he finally mustered the courage to ask this big-chested, voluble Southern creature to coffee. Look!, he thought wryly, I have come through! In the last heats of fall, they walked; acorns pulled down leaves after them, clicked underfoot. She was wearing, rather remarkably, a kind of cape. When she sat down at the coffee shop the hem of it caught under the leg of her chair and gathered dust. But the shadow of Molly Hancock had been lifted; he felt he could breathe again. He didn’t have to stoop in any way to talk to this kid, she was larger, louder than he, more widely read. For months, and he blushed to think of it now, he referred to her only as de Staël, and she played along.

Well, he had turned one of his letters into a kind of story,
and decided at last to show it to Mary Louise. For a week, whenever he saw her, he wondered if she had read it. She never mentioned it either way; then, one night after the library closed, she asked him up to her room. The heating vented dirty jets of steam; she kept the room hot, the windows shut. Condensation speckled the dark green ficus in the corner by the door. The wiring was shot, she explained, all the lamp could take was a thirty-watt bulb, and under its dim sunset they talked. He had never noted before how poor light can rob the world of colour, of life. The only place to sit was her bed; he took off his jacket and saw pages of his handwriting lightly scattered on the floor. She wore a spaghetti-stringed satin top that exposed the fleshy sides around her armpit; he could just trace the first swelling of her heavy breasts. He smelt her, very sweet and warm, thicker than air. Molly never wore scent.

His story was about a young man who falls in love with a beautiful woman; nevertheless, he suspects her intelligence, even her virtue. Her chief attraction for him is sexual; though her wide experience also repels him. He writes her long and ornate love letters, believing that this is what she expects from him; after all, he isn’t good-looking or charming. The best he can hope for is to play the part of the shy poet. To test her, he encodes in these letters an account of how much he dislikes her, how little he respects her. If she understands him, it proves she is worthy of his higher nature; if she doesn’t, she isn’t. The problem with such a proceeding is obvious even to him: she will only reward his epistles with loving warmth if she is too stupid to see his hidden meaning. Any attempt to test her character will also, if she passes it, expose his doubts to her. The story ends, however, much more simply; she thanks him sweetly for his letters, but explains that she has fallen in love with someone else. His subtlety has been entirely lost on her, wasted.

Mary Louise knew and disliked Molly Hancock; she thought the girl was a ‘cold fish posing as a warm one’. That
was her line. She read Stu’s story the night he gave it to her; it hurt her deeply. A boy who could have written
that
wouldn’t give her a second look. She had come up before against the problem of suitable young men who think they deserve better than intellectual companionship in their loves; who think they deserve beauty. She had wondered all week what to say to him, and decided, at last, that her only honest response would be to say how much she disliked it. Of course, her feelings were more complicated than that; but it was true, the character in the story did not reflect Stuart’s best nature. It exposed his narrow sexual greed, his high-minded arrogance. And she had had enough of the writer’s pettiness in her father, his enduring disappointments, his persistent sniping. ‘I think’, she said, putting her strong hand on his thigh, ‘you’re better at correcting than creating.’

Of course he was disappointed, almost heartbroken. But even she had not guessed it would leave him so open to her charms, so desperate for warmth. She comforted him against her broad breasts; he proved more experienced in bed, more sure of himself, than she’d expected.

‘Well,’ Stuart said at last, after Rachel did not answer. ‘Maybe we should talk about what you need to work on.’ He discussed at length now the problems of tone; her need for stricter textual supports; her occasional grammatical infelicities; the lack of structure. He sat beside her now, her papers spread loose across his knee. The foam couch sank somewhat beneath his heavy weight, pressing his hip against hers. She shifted slightly over; he could smell the soap in her hair. Whenever he praised her she blushed, and he remembered the power that giving pleasure accorded. This reflection awoke other, unhappier memories. After a week of nothing but kisses, Molly had begun to get bored of his innocence; they slept tightly bound in a single bed, and she let her hand stray between his thighs. His sense of pleasure was wonderfully acute, he felt helpless before it. He said, no, no, not yet.
A minute passed; he noted that his hand was on her knee, on one of the pages on her knee. ‘I suppose you’d better get to lunch,’ he said at last. ‘We can go over this later.’ She looked up at him, and sniffed slightly; the face of a girl willing to make a decision, conscious that such decisions were becoming possible to her, even necessary. Unwilling to put off any longer the next stage of her life they would usher in. ‘Even if I don’t speak,’ she said finally, standing in the doorway and bent slightly under her bag, ‘I want you to know that I read. I read everything we’re supposed to read. My mother will tell you. She says the same thing, she says you have to talk if you want them to count it, otherwise it doesn’t count. But it counts anyway, doesn’t it? I read all the time.’

After she left, he didn’t stir for a minute, recounting slowly the movement of Molly’s hand. For whatever reason, this, his first sexual act, had never lost the power to arouse him. He had been an unwilling participant; the force of his own pleasure, his own capacity for pleasure, left him trembling. She, on the other hand, had scarcely allowed herself a sigh; he lay very still, saying, please, not yet, please, while she let his body’s involuntary answer provide a sufficient yes. She had gathered herself at the foot of the bed and taken his boxers in hand and drawn them slowly down his legs. He felt his penis gathering weight as he sat in the office; he didn’t have to touch it. Then she kissed it, wearing only a white undershirt; he could see the hanging slope of her breasts through the low neck. Still, he didn’t move. After a minute, she crawled along the length of his body till her face stuck wetly in the soft skin under his chin. She reached her hand back, and with a mechanical fumbling that surprised him, pulled his penis into her. He felt the scratch of her hair; her tightness. Only then did she open her mouth, expelling air. He came quickly, gently; even now he had to hold back the thought of its sweetness, the press of his trousers against him was proving almost irresistible. For weeks he worried she was pregnant, he was syphilitic; at the same time, he felt helplessly dependent on
her. Angry, too; she had no right any more to withdraw such possibilities of pleasure.

‘You’re very distant,’ Mary Louise said to him one night. They were reading in bed side by side, propped up on squashed pillows against the wall; she held her book at arm’s length below her breasts against the heap of her belly. Now she took off her glasses to consider him. ‘I feel you get up in the night and sit in the dark. For a while I thought you might be entertaining yourself on that damn computer.’ She laughed. ‘This morning I checked the machine; but there was nothing on it. I want you to know I wouldn’t mind.’