Either Side of Winter (3 page)

‘It doesn’t feel that way,’ she said.

‘Not to you, perhaps. Not yet. They’ll grow on you. They are not as strange as they first appear.’

‘Look at them. Eating.’ She gestured at the children through the glass partition between the students’ hall and the faculty dining room. The teachers were outnumbered and some basic quality of that fact could not be ignored: the mass of vital energy was on the other side of the glass wall, and against them.

‘Growing,
I often think, brings out terrible manners.’ This from a gentleman in a bow-tie, a pleasantly filled-out figure, with silky cheeks. ‘Stuart Englander.’ She had seen him in the hallways outside the English department; a stack of leather books between elbow and rib, a couple of girls in tow. He had a reputation for being particularly patient with girls. Amy was young enough to feel his charm: the charm of an old man’s contented curiosity, directed at you. Just a half-smile
suggesting that not much changes over time, after all. He took her hand.

‘I’m Charles,’ she replied; blushed and added, ‘but you can call me Amy.’

So the thought of him hovered over her first day, but rarely alighted: a slip of the tongue waiting to happen. She had decided over the summer to finish her grading and her preps in the office before going home; but when the last bell rang she filed out with the rest of the students into the baseball field and walked along the row of yellow buses towards her apartment. A backpack hanging off her shoulder, sandals over her feet: a figure indistinguishable from the students pushing their way past, apart from her loneliness and silence, and the slight respect they accorded her, making way, for being one of those people who had already gone through what they were going through and couldn’t do so again.

She ate supper kneeling on the floor with papers spread out across the futon. When she awoke with her head by the plate, she got up, leaving the dish there and her cup on the floor, and took off her clothes on the way to bed. As soon as the lights were off, she began to cry but it wasn’t long after that she fell asleep.

Amy’s father called, some Saturday afternoon in October, to say that why didn’t the whole family come to hers for Thanksgiving, if she didn’t mind. From that moment she stopped at least two or three times a day in the middle of whatever she was doing to look forward to it. And after that there was Christmas and after that she could always stay in bed and refuse to go back East when the New Year came. The thought of Charles Conway, of never seeing him again, barely troubled her at all from this imagined retreat; nevertheless, she phoned him at once to tell him the good news, and turned off the Saturday cartoons, and let her dad’s old army blanket slip off her pyjamaed legs and when Charles said, why don’t you come downtown and we can make a real day of it, she answered repeatingly, ‘I want to see you. I just want to see you.’

Charles had already heard a great deal about the charms of Jack Bostick, but he was, among other things, one of those talkers who had so many afternoons to draw out that there was nothing he couldn’t hear twice or three times and with interest too. They sat together against the hedge of the roof garden at the Met, sharing a cup of tea, and twisting from time to time to get a look at the Park behind them: the wind laying a flat hand over the trees; autumn’s untidiness, the seams picked at and ravelling, litter and leaves scattered against the green. ‘I’d very much like to meet your old man,’ he said. ‘I have a feeling the two of us have a lot to say to each other.’

Amy noted a slight resistance in her to such an assertion, the bristle of the trees against the wind, contrary, but felt too much carrying her forward, forward, to pull up short. The tea
got cold in her hand as she explained herself: a familiar explanation she had almost grown tired of repeating by the end of college, the words worn out; but she ventured upon it fresh now, with a new listener, and a rising and irresistible sense that whatever view of herself had been true before could be true again, regardless of the disappointments and disillusions of her college life. These were simply an interruption. She was, had always been, Daddy’s girl: a bruiser, healthy and virulent, blunt with happiness and a confidence in her own talents that the frailty and uncertainties of the girls around her had justified all too often. Her father being the root and source of everything she believed in and acted upon and excelled at. From the beginning she had belonged to him, a daughter to rival any son, star of softball and debate teams, both of which her father had coached in his brief spare time, the object of every adolescent crush. ‘You know,’ she said, ‘how there’s always one dad the girls get stuck on.’

‘I had hoped and imagined that to be the case,’ Charles replied.

‘That was my dad. Even after he had his teeth out, he was the kind of man who could bring it off. Make a joke of it, you know, but not look like an old-timer. He had a good body, too, wasn’t anything to be ashamed of with his shirt off. So when he took the girls rafting over the summer and took us out on the water bare-chested – hairy enough to set him apart from the boys we knew but nothing gross – I always caught my friends checking him out.’

She added, conscious of using the past tense, to make up for it, ‘He could have played baseball, too, maybe, if he wanted.’ And again, drinking the cold tea, ‘It’s not like he drove us, either; so when I quit the softball team after freshman year, he was right behind me.’ And roused herself, aware of tailing off, ending lamely: she had suspected before that everything began to go wrong then and that her father’s tame acceptance of the fact had included a more general acknowledgement of her family’s failure to be anything out of the
ordinary. ‘My friends at college used to say’ – this coyly, sidelong – ‘I was too in love with my dad to fall in love with anybody else.’

Whether or not it was true, she had already guessed that it was one of those insights into ourselves that, kept clean by constant repetition, takes our eyes off other dirtier revelations. Though even Amy couldn’t quite forget the misery of her first two months in New York by repeating, ‘I am happy, and loved, and the all-American girl.’

‘I can’t wait’, Charles said, ‘to take him on the town when he comes.’

Again, that slight bristle of resistance; the tree bent forward under the wind, ready to snap back.

Charles had a place on Fifth Avenue, a rather grand one-bedroom looking down on 79th Street, and, at an angle, south along the Park. Prints of hunting dogs ranged along one wall, papered deep maroon. A mini-bar lay between two windows, tall as doors, which opened on to narrow fretwork iron balconies. Flowers in terracotta pots banked high against the black paint of the rails. Amy always had the sense when she came in of stepping into an expensive dirty secret, and refused to sleep over, even on Saturday nights. It looked like the flat an older man might keep for a high-class mistress, and she didn’t want to be a part of the son’s inheritance – a pretty young thing to play with at home on weekends, a part of the idleness and the languorous curiosity and the great unacted ambitions of Charles’s world. It seemed an easy way to be happy, and she did not want to be happy easily. And she guessed, rightly perhaps, that Charles quickly grew bored of anyone or thing that gave in to him.

An element of family pride prompted her resistance, a puritanical unwillingness to live on borrowed riches and glamour. Something of the same had persuaded her father to leave Manhattan behind, his life at the firm; some urgency original to her mother to forswear baubles, an argument won
before Amy’s birth, repeated from time to time in her parent’s marriage, and won again and again by Joanne. ‘Your mother’s right,’ her father used to say, about a boat for the lake or a swimming pool in the backyard or a new car. ‘This isn’t a thing we need.’ One of the few prejudices she had inherited from her mother: a sense of the honour in making do, as a matter of taste. She had been taught living within her means, and over time the phrase had come to include cutting back on what you could let yourself hope for, out of propriety.

Besides, she wished to cut short any jokes about ‘Mrs Charles Conway’ in the teachers’ lounge, any eager, envious curiosity into the life they led. ‘Not much’ was how she answered questions about the things she got up to on her nights and weekends; though this was hardly true. There were restaurants and bars she couldn’t afford, private parties in lofts and roof gardens, once a helicopter ride and a weekend in the Hamptons. But Amy refused to have her head turned, and clung to a kind of middle-class faith not unlike the religious, part of an argument about what was real and what wasn’t real, what mattered and didn’t. Almost to her surprise, Charles followed her tamely back (when she let him) to her place on 246 ½ Street after a night on the town. She would sleep against him in the subway car; they would stagger out together at the last stop and sweat off any leftover drunkenness climbing the hill to her apartment block; then the next morning she would send him home. Amy suspected from time to time that the root of his ‘patience’ with her (that’s the word she used, some of Charles’s friends talked of forbearance) lay in a groundwater of unhappiness not unlike her own; but this insight into her lover required the same insight into herself, and for the most part she was willing to attribute his attentions to gallantry and affection.

Even so, it made plain good sense when her family came at Thanksgiving to give them her flat and stay over at Charles’s place. But she wanted to make a point about families, and mucking in – to flaunt her own inheritance in front of him.
‘This is what I’m really like, around these people,’ she hoped to show him: this is who I am. Not simply to prove her independence, but to preen herself, confident of looking at her best in their affection, at her most desirable, playing the role of golden girl she thought was hers in the family play. In their three months together, Amy had never met Conway
père
, and made a point of not insisting on it. She met his older brother Robert only once, at an alumni function at the Yale Club. He was a lawyer downtown, and rather charmingly spent the evening getting drunk in a corner with her, complaining about the party and disparaging Charles – who was flitting through the crowds and could be seen from time to time, when they parted, emerging from an embrace, or pushing his way through the packed hall, a drink in each hand spilling over.

She spent the afternoon of their arrival, the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, growing increasingly anxious. Charles had slept over the night before, since her holidays began that morning. His life was all holiday, to an extent he left purposefully vague, but he had rather charmingly caught an enthusiasm for Amy’s that outran her own. He brought her eggs in bed, cooked in a way she disliked, along with the papers, which he read, elaborately at his ease beside her, picking at her plate of unfinished food, and fresh squeezed juice, somewhat watery, with the pips in, and only a cup of coffee for himself. Occasionally uttering, in an offhand way, such things as, ‘I once thought I wouldn’t mind taking a run at politics, but then there’s the plain fact of living in DC or God help us Virginia.’ And, ‘I might turn my hand to the greenhouse question, before I’m through. If only to annoy my father.’

Amy eventually grew fed up with his laziness, what she sometimes called his timelessness, the way nothing pricked him to move on; and she kicked him out of bed at last, and out of her door, claiming the hundreds of things she had to do to
prepare for Thanksgiving, and including, in the rush of her scolding, ‘I don’t know why you stick around here you get on just fine on your own and never miss me once’, when he complained that he wanted to hang back to meet her folks, etc. The sentiment snagged in her thoughts, she hadn’t meant to go so far, and even the recollection of her saying it and his heeding it later surprised in her a thrill of fear. She watched him loping beside the current of leftover rain running along the kerb. Rags of blue sky were torn from the clouds. She didn’t want him to go; such an ordinary and pleasant afternoon might have stretched before them if it weren’t for her insistence on spoiling everything; and the corollary of these thoughts struck her for the first time: she didn’t want her family to come.

Most of the morning was spent in a hurry that took her mind off the main event. But when the turkey had been got, and everything else in the fridge left on the counter to make space for it, and the cans of candied yams stacked neatly on top of the shelf. When the bags of stuffing, two kinds, had been stuck behind the cereal boxes, and the sack of potatoes, despaired of, pushed to a corner of the floor. When she had bought not only a blend of fresh coffee for her dad from the toniest deli in her neighbourhood but a coffee-maker to brew it in from a warehouse appliance store in Inwood across the Harlem River; and hauled two six-packs of beer up the walk-up and slid two bottles in the freezer to ice them for his arrival. When she had stripped her bed and laid on fresh sheets and a duvet for her parents, and piled a tidy heap of covers beside the futon for herself and her brother. When she had got in a real sweat, in spite of the rain overnight and the opened windows, which turned into a temper; and begun to be overwhelmed by a sense of consumption outstripping the heartiest appetite, of the leftovers to linger week-long in her fridge, kept under saran-wrap on a fatty platter as token and evidence of her family visit, then discarded at last, with a heart as cold as the turkey.

Then she sat down and waited for them to come.

She had fallen asleep in front of the television when the bell rang, some hours late, and she thought, not yet, not yet, before waking up and buzzing them in. A trip to the sink to wash the sleep from her eyes, and even so she had time to look round her quiet apartment and count the seconds, before she heard heavy steps coming at last up the stairs, the shuffling gait of a man with bags. Amy had left the door open a crack, and her father pushed his way in and set down two pieces of matching initialled luggage she had never seen before, and said, ‘where’s the bathroom?’ before her mother, pale with lank hair, came and gave her a hug that smelt of the airplane. ‘I’m sorry we’re late but let me tell you, you wouldn’t believe…’ she began and sat down on the futon. ‘I need a drink of water,’ she said with her hands on her lap.

Already Amy felt a slight constriction around her throat at the clutter, not only of bags but of people. Her mother had set a handbag at her feet on the floor, between the futon and the chest from home serving as a coffee table, which Amy stepped over to sit beside her and give her a glass, slightly clouded from the tap. Her mother looked at it once, and said nothing, and drank. Her dad came out and laid his coat, a greasy Burberry, over the two bags in the hall. ‘Look at this, look at this, look at this,’ he said, rubbing his hands in a complimentary fashion. He had lost weight and looked well on it, in spite of the long haul and the early start. There was an animal satisfaction to his movements, a directness, pleasurable in itself like a clear style. His hair, thin and dull the last time she saw him, had been cut short, and bristled slightly where it stood – and now purringly resisted the rub of his hand across his scalp. ‘I’m going to make myself at home,’ he said, looking in the fridge, and her heart went out to him, gratefully, in answered faith. Her mother looked fretfully across at him and called out, ‘I wouldn’t mind some juice if there is any’, holding out her glass for him to fetch. The resentment, Amy thought, a woman feels that her body ages more shamefully than a man’s.

Her mother wanted a nap but Jack was eager to ‘hit the town’ as he said, and since she didn’t like to be left out of anything, she thought for a minute and decided to come along. Amy felt already she had been muted slightly, turned down almost imperceptibly in volume. She hung back, as the day wore on, more and more with her mother – they both laboured somewhat under the awkward burden of the man’s vitality. Amy had suggested they walk to the school grounds and there was a coffee shop where she often… but Jack cut in that he’d like to ‘get out of the sticks’ and when her mother chided him, Amy, reddening slightly, insisted she ‘didn’t mind at all what they did she was so happy to see them both’ to gloss over any suspicion of injured vanity, not entirely successfully. But it was still at that point in the day when she felt closer to her father than her mother, and she didn’t want to let him down in front of her.