Either Side of Winter (18 page)

Rachel’s work went from perfunctory to non-existent. The only thing she did was show up. He had another look at her
Hamlet
essay; really, he was almost surprised at himself, there was nothing but mistakes. And she had done little to correct them. He remembered Mary Louise’s sly comment: that kid has unhappiness at home. Yes, it was probably true; her instinct about such matters was surer than his own. Occasionally her certainty oppressed him; it seemed rather cold always to be right in these small ways. But he also found great comfort in her judgement; nothing could happen to him, he could do nothing, outside the scope of her large sympathies.

He called Rachel to his office. ‘I’m worried about you,’ he said. ‘Your grades are slipping; I won’t be able to pass you. You won’t graduate.’

‘Yes,’ she answered, frowning sweetly, ‘I’m worried about me, too.’ But her turn-out never faltered; she wore her prettiness like it was cut in stone. The next time he called her in, she
changed the subject. ‘You know Mr Englander, I think I should warn you, somebody’s stalking you. One of the girls. They know where you live. They know what you buy from the pharmacy.’

He remembered her laughter in the hallways. It sounded like a threat, a sly revenge for his own inquisitiveness. Unless she only ‘had the situation very much in hand’. The thought that her experience in such matters might already be far wider, far greater than his own, appalled him. What have you done with your life, he thought. These kids. He suspected that if she gave him the least hint he would fall at her feet. He would be unable to resist her command. This quickly turned into another source of worry. He began to imagine detailed scenarios, her various attempts at seduction; his own responses. More often than not he failed such tests; but they gave him tremendous pleasure, compressed and intensified by the force of their secrecy, their guilt. He hardly ate any more; he had begun to lose weight. He often thought about Roger Bathurst, the months leading up to that Easter weekend. What powerful, remembered days; a source of great nourishment to him, of self-renewal, in moments of dejection. While he sat on that man’s sunny stoop, Roger was changing his life.

It was clear to him that he had long ceased thinking clearly. Nothing in the world bore its own natural weight any more. Wherever he looked he found grotesque additions and omissions; a kind of cancer, working both ways, growing and retracting carelessly everywhere and out of all proportion. And yet he hadn’t felt so vividly at the mercy of things since the summer after his freshman year. It was true; madness was the only appropriate response. The world was enormous, it couldn’t be measured by such slight scales as human sentiments. The idea was ridiculous. At the root of it all was the problem of sex (the blood-lust, the making of children); he never minded any of this so much when he stuck to the cool of his thoughts.

The Friday the senior essays were due, Rachel didn’t show up for class. End of April; he opened a row of heavy windows as the kids settled. Outside, the view sloped down towards the warehouses on either bank of the Harlem River. He could make out their grey roofs and stacks over the sketchy green tops of spring trees. Hot rain fell in strong lines. Also, the heaters ran full and couldn’t be shut off, and he felt the contrast in warm air as he stood in the windows: the pregnant outside blow, the stale wet heat rising dully from the radiators. He ordered a kid to put a bin in front of the door; it kept breathing open then drawing the rain in on the back gust, and slamming. ‘Still,’ he said, ‘I think the fresh hot air is better than the stale hot air.’

The other students sat at the seminar table arranging their papers; someone had a stapler, passed it round. Occasionally one heard the heavy percussion and release of a hand banging down on the head of it. Stuart always liked due dates; the kids were restless but interested, still carried the weight of their enthusiasms. Curiosity, Stuart liked to say, picks up momentum; ideas, especially one’s own, become addictive. On such days, he let the kids blow off steam, talk about their papers, the problems they ran into. They all wanted to talk. It touched him to see the unashamed delight they took in self-expression, what wide possibilities of meaning they read into their slightest thoughts. Their little wagers on the dark horses of wisdom. He remembered it well from his own youth; the way he hoped words, their suggestiveness, their inaccuracy, would trick him into profundities beyond his meagre intentions. That someone else would make sense of what he wrote but did not yet understand himself.

‘Has anyone seen Rachel?’ he asked at one point. He sat on the sill and felt the wind at his back, the wet. ‘Is she in school today?’

‘I – think I saw her,’ a girl said, looking round. ‘I’m not sure. She – I think she’s having a hard time at home.’

After class he returned, surprised at himself, how heavy
and slack he felt, to the second English office, for a little quiet. She was waiting for him on the couch, patiently. Neatly turned out: a white blouse, especially white against her skin. In the rainy half-light, she looked as dark as stained wood, her face, her neck, her arms bare from the shoulder. A hair band drew the hair up from her eyes, left blank her forehead.

‘Well, what am I supposed to do about this?’ he said, almost angrily. ‘I give up on you. I give up.’

‘Don’t say that, Mr Englander.’ Softly reproachful. It touched him greatly, the tone she took: as if she knew the forgiveness he was capable of, the mercy. As if she needed from him only what she knew he could give her. But he hardened his heart.

‘I don’t have a choice. I’ve given you every chance, every encouragement. It isn’t up to me; there are rules I can’t bend. This isn’t the kind of behaviour I can let pass.’

‘I tried to write. You have no idea. I’ve given up on everything else. But I wanted to write for you.’ She began to cry, soft gasps broken now and then by a babyish clucking, like the swish of a loose bicycle wheel against the fender, followed by the clank of the chain. She didn’t lift her hands to her face, but leant forward slightly; her countenance was extraordinarily clear. Sharply defined, the line of her cheek, her chin, a little too wide and full perhaps, but still fresh, smooth. The pink of her colouring warming and rising to her wide blue eyes. Her tears left a shine of wrapping on her skin. He was right from the first, she suffered somewhat from the indignity of scale, the delicacy of miniature. But even where he sat he could smell her, on that hot thick day, the strong animal odour of her grief.

He moved to sit beside her, and she rather quickly turned her face against his armpit. ‘Hey, hey, hey,’ he said. ‘Rachel.’ He felt very tender speaking her name. He had never held a girl so slight before, so easily shifted. The pressure of her breast against his ribs roused him a little; he pulled his arm tighter across her shoulders. His blood began to thicken, and
he leaned and kissed the top of her head, the tight, smoothed hair: an act of gentleness both sexual and fatherly. Molly had said, ‘Believe me, I had the situation very much in hand.’ The thought that Rachel knew what she was doing to him almost overwhelmed him; he wanted to expose himself to her, and let her youth, her experience in these matters, guide him. ‘All he needed was a go-ahead.’ He could put a chair in front of the door; and come back to her. If only he’d shaved. His lips were too large for hers; he felt the roughness of his face against her throat, against her belly, and winced.
Whenas the
rye reach to the chin
ran through his head like a nursery rhyme. He could carry her with his right arm between her legs supporting her back and his left holding her neck, her shoulder – carry her like a baby, she was so light, and kiss her stomach.

When Molly let him into her room, that long-ago fall, for what she called a proper goodbye, he asked to kiss her. She looked at him unhappily, sideways along the bed where they sat, and put her hand behind his head and kissed him gently, leaning forward. He pushed back the other way and spread her on to the bed beneath him; her sexual touch was too strong for him, left him helpless. She said, no, no, please not, as he put his hand between her legs and began to press the butt of his palm against her. The thought of what she once offered to him blinded him briefly; what a world it was to take pleasure in. What she had withdrawn. Also, he was touched by a soberer anger, and felt like saying: now you know what it feels like, lady. Now you know what it feels like. But there was something human, something
just
about that thought that held him back. (This almost in spite of himself was the note he gave when struck, the fine faint vibration of his character.) He lay breathing heavily and sobbing with his face against her sheets for a moment; she couldn’t stir beneath his weight and waited. And he let her go at last.

Rachel at last stopped crying and looked up, her face no more than a foot away from his own. She could not feel the thickening of his penis where she sat; but he wanted very
much to reveal it to her. If he shifted a little and turned on his hip she would feel it and press against it; if he pulled her towards his lap she would feel it too. Roger Bathurst had had the courage to risk such shame. Stuart knew it was sinful, corrupt; sin however seemed necessary to him. He remembered the uncleanness of Molly Hancock’s undergarments; these were fertile stains. And Roger looked happy, had a girl, a young wife. It seemed to him a real possibility that if he kissed Rachel now and locked the door and let come what may come, in five or ten years’ time, if all went well, he might be happier than he was today. If all went well. A real possibility.

Rachel said, ‘Mr Englander, please. Mr Englander, please.’

He almost bent down then, to open his mouth into hers and taste her lips, her tongue, soft no doubt and sweet with youth, and small. ‘Mr Englander, please,’ she repeated, more urgently; when it occurred to him that he was only pressing too hard, that this was the first time she guessed at the part she played in his thoughts. She looked terribly scared; sobered from grief, swiftly adjusting; he could see her pupils shrink into the blue, her breath slow consciously. He thought of wiping her wet blubbered mouth with his shirt sleeve. Perhaps a minute had passed since she began crying into his armpit. The fact that she might have recognized him for what he was helped him also to see her more clearly. A girl, seventeen, rather pretty, polite, and rich; not particularly clever. Terrified now and unsure of herself, unhappy. No, he couldn’t hide it from himself any more: not particularly clever. The whole business suddenly wearied him enormously; the sexual restlessness, the waste of head space. All that necessary intellectual condescension; what a way to spend the rest of your life.

He got up and went to the door; opened it briefly. A janitor walked slowly ahead of his spread mop along the empty corridor, shiny with tiles. Stu looked down the length of the hallway, regular and institutional, interrupted to right and left by a series of classroom doors. A window at the end of the long
hall gave a faint grey light. He hooked the door back against the wall and returned to his desk.

‘It’s better,’ he said, ‘for various reasons, we leave that open. Some of them legal, I’m afraid; such are the times we live in. Our powers of comforting are greatly circumscribed. Tell me what’s wrong.’

She didn’t answer, and sat very still, leaning forward. He realized now this was a defensive posture: it shrank the space exposed between her head and her crotch. Her tears had dried and left dirty tracks across her cheeks. He thought of Prior, dear Chloe, how blubbered is that pretty face. Yes, he knew the word had come to mind from somewhere. Rain fell in heavy blows against the window behind him, as though some resistance had slackened, letting their full weight through. He wondered if he would feed later on that touch of her shoulder, her strong smell. ‘I hear you’re having troubles at home,’ he said at last.

‘I’m fine, thank you.’ In spite of everything she sat quiet, waiting to be dismissed; a very proper child. Her prettiness, her careful order, even a little tarnished now, concealed great interior adjustments. He saw what subterfuge she was capable of; why, she was almost frozen with distrust. The tragedy struck him from her point of view: the end of a brief thaw. Though he doubted now his ability to read her at all. These kids led lives he could never begin to fathom.

He felt tired and shabby. The blood eased off in him, seemed to let go. ‘I can give you another week, that’s all. Of course, I have to mark you down for it. I don’t know what’s happened; I had great hopes for you. I can’t say how much you’ve disappointed me.’

She took a folder from the back of her heavy bag. ‘I tried to write; I couldn’t. There was too much I wanted to say; I couldn’t stop or start.’ She gave him what she had, a few pages of notes. Then shouldering her heavy pack, made her way to the door. ‘I’m sorry, Mr Englander,’ she said, slowly, carefully. ‘I know you tried with me.’

Still, he didn’t want to let her go. ‘My father-in-law once gave me a piece of advice; at least I think it was advice.’ Just to keep her in his view a minute longer; her knees held the weight of her wonderfully. He could almost feel the tension, like a pulled kite string, in her calves. ‘A rich character, my father-in-law. A Georgia gentleman, a drunk. He grew fat as he grew sober. He said, I always thought I wanted to be a writer, because I liked books. I carried one with me everywhere, in my back pocket. I dipped in it every quiet moment. In line at the A&P. Waiting for buses, doctors. Between innings. Very comforting, but it also drove me wild. They made me want to see the world, try everything. Now I’ve realized it wasn’t ever true, he said. I had misread my ambition from the first. What I wanted all along was to be a reader.’

After she left, he looked over her notes. Rather incoherent; but if you made sense of them, you found she had nothing unusual to say. No wonder she stopped short; as soon as she explained herself in plain terms, she turned into a very ordinary young woman. To clear his head he opened the window and leaned out. The warm rain fell against his face, so he closed his eyes to it. It tasted sour as leaves, as water from a tin cup.