Either Side of Winter (4 page)

This in fact became the pattern of their afternoon. Amy wanted to show them the roof garden at the Met, since the day was windy and sunny in equal measure while it lasted, and the Park looked wonderful in the quiet of being above it. But Jack said he couldn’t stand the crowds there, it was more of a supermarket than anything else, and what he used to do on a free afternoon in New York was get a bag of lunch at Zabar’s and take a book to Riverside Park. And so on. They spent much of the afternoon looking for places he’d been to thirty years before though he couldn’t quite remember the cross street, etc., if it was there at all any more. In any case, he said, there wasn’t a better way to see the Upper West Side than getting lost in it, a phrase he had every opportunity to repeat. Amy scarcely knew the neighbourhood at all. Charles Conway lived east of the Park, and she knew Manhattan mostly according to his habits and haunts. All she knew of the West Side was the cross-town bus at 86th Street, next to the subway stop. She pretended at first to a certain amount of local knowledge, and looked deliberately perplexed at any question she couldn’t answer. Then gave up, and tagged
along behind him with her mother. It was nearly four o’clock before they had lunch on a dirty bench in the flowerless gardens of Riverside Park. And then Jack had an idea for coffee and there was a bookshop he used to love.

In the end it was something like desperation that made her lure them round to Charles’s apartment. She hadn’t planned to introduce them till Thanksgiving itself – had made in fact a great fuss about wanting them all to herself for the first day and he shouldn’t mind if she didn’t call him. But as they were walking through Central Park, just at sunset, the light, cold and liquid, leaking around and soaking the few leaves and bare branches of the trees, her father got muddled about the east and west and they found themselves out at Fifth Avenue. Her mother, who had been complaining steadily of the cold and her feet for the past half-hour, said, ‘At this point and without any interest in arguing the matter, I need somewhere to sit down.’ Jack stared up and down the turning paths and muttered, ‘Hold on a bit, I just need to get my bearings.’ And, after a silent minute, ‘I can’t figure that at all. Always look south, they say, always look south.’ Her mother had begun to repeat herself – ‘As I said before, and without any interest in… ‘– when Amy interjected, ‘Let me just see if he’s in’, and walked off towards the glimmering street lights of the intersection.

God, I hope he’s in, she thought. Let him be in. And didn’t look round to see if they were following.

Something subtle had shifted, from the moment the doorman greeted her with, ‘Evening, Miss Bostick’ and ushered the three of them, footsore and cross-grained, into the mirrored splendour of the elevator. They stepped out into Charles’s flat, and he was at a little side-table by the window, writing letters it seemed. He wore a white shirt, open-necked, and as he strode across the room towards them the collar stood up around his ears exposing the clear firm lines of muscle sloping down either side towards his shoulders.

‘I expect you both could use a drink,’ he said, stooping to kiss Mrs Bostick on the cheek and taking Jack by the hand, ‘if you’ve been chasing after Amy all day trying to find her way in the city.’

‘He teases me for living in the Bronx,’ Amy said, conscious of playing a game in tandem – aware that he realized whatever it was that had worn them out wasn’t her fault but it might be easier for all to pretend that it was. ‘He says I can’t find my way in town without a taxi.’

‘I didn’t know you were a taxi-taker,’ Jack said, surprised to find his ill-humour lightening.

Charles stood at the little bar between the windows cutting lemons. ‘If anyone here is interested,’ he called over his shoulder, ‘the small room for private contemplation on diverse subjects runs off the bedroom. Amy, why don’t you show your mother the way.’

‘Charles!’ Amy protested.

‘He’s quite right,’ Mrs. Bostick said.

‘I have a mother myself,’ Charles explained, turning slightly round. ‘Gin and tonics all round, will that do?’ he continued, when it was only himself and Mr Bostick in the room.

‘You’ve got some fine things here,’ Jack said, staring at the walls with his hands clasped in front of him, not quite knowing where to sit down. Charles put a drink in his hand and sat down himself, at one of the two silk-cushioned couches facing each other under the chandelier. He set his sweating glass on the naked cherrywood of a side stand, and kicked his loafers off and crossed one leg underneath him. ‘Take a load off.’

Jack sat down opposite. ‘Mind if I do the same?’ he said, hoping the phrase sounded comfortable and easy in such quarters, dimly aware he was only imitating the younger man, his host. After stooping carefully to untie the laces, he wrinkled his toes in their socks and lay back. ‘God that feels good. I forgot how tiring the city could be.’

‘That’s right.’ Charles leaned forward. ‘Amy tells me you used to practise downtown.’

This set them off, and by the time the ‘girls’ came back, Jack could happily declare to his daughter, ‘Don’t worry about us, we’re already old friends.’ And Charles could leave it to his guest, to get to his tired feet and do the honours for the ladies, handing them each their drinks from the little bar.

That evening was perhaps the high point of their visit, as Amy at least considered it, looking back – before the shameful and rather embarrassing conclusion to her parents’ stay, which affected her far less than she might have imagined such things would. Even at the time she suspected a trajectory at work, whose progress could easily include a sharp downturn and temporary collapse. Everything was going well in a way she hadn’t envisioned; a portion of her life usually neglected had been included or acknowledged in the course of the day. And while she had expected to feel something along those lines when her folks came, a touch of heat from her old real life, the reverse, rather, had proved the case: her new life (and lover) had revived the old.

Charles said they could order in or go ‘out on the town’ (a phrase her father repeated), but that he hadn’t got the equipment to cook up anything in house. Jack, pink and refreshed, declared he had itchy feet and wanted to get out among the lights; but Mrs Bostick complained she couldn’t go any further without something inside her and they may as well stop where they were seeing everything was so nice and comfortable. ‘You can look at the lights from here.’

In the end, Charles offered a kind of compromise and assured Joanne, taking her by the arm, that they wouldn’t go far and hardly needed to put on coats. Nevertheless they brought what they had with them, stepped into the elevator again and out at the lobby. A brisk cold walk along 79th Street, the glow of the traffic running against them, the homeward bound. Amy thought of the overwhelming number of private errands and destinations required to produce such a large conjuncture at the cross-town road running into Fifth
Avenue: all those solitary purposes commingling, the inevitable coincidences. Obscurely saddening: everyone with some place to go to, such a mass of resignation and relief at the end of a day. The crowds themselves a symbol for the crowd of days ahead facing each of them: ‘one of many’ was the rule behind each thing.

They turned left on Madison and almost immediately turned again as an usher in black-tie held open a glass door for Charles, who led them into a low-lit restaurant, done up expensively in bland grey leather and pale wood. The maître d’ pointed them to their table, and pulled back the chairs of the ladies. There was no menu, no cash register; everyone called Mr Conway by name. The currents driving most public relations and transactions had been wrinkled away or got rid of altogether: money, anonymity, choice. Charles’s aristocratic affability often appeared implausible to her, too good to be true (and consequently neither good nor true). He seemed lost or lonely, suffering painlessly the drift of his life. But for once Charles looked not only at ease but at home. Amy remembered it later as an entirely happy dinner, and remembered little else. Wine was poured, drunk; food brought, eaten. The bright litter of a leftover meal stained the plates: saffron, pomegranate husks, fig rinds, fried flowers. Mrs Bostick, a woman both weak-minded and stubborn, for once tried everything on the table – never complained that ‘food was one part of her life she never felt the need to experiment in’ and drank two glasses of red wine, regardless of the fact that it ‘made her acid’. Amy, tipsily, repeatingly asked, ‘Doesn’t he look handsome, like a man in a magazine? Doesn’t he look just like a magazine?’ She felt full of love for Charles and her new life; and some reflected glory fell on her father, as she pinched Jack’s stomach to see how trim he’d got, and declared, ‘I’ve got all my boys about me.’

‘Except your brother,’ Mrs Bostick said.

‘Yeah, well.’ And added, as she thought of it, ‘You can’t
have everything’ in an offhand way that surprised her and which she didn’t much like.

When they were finished, Charles stood up and wished several good nights and asked the doorman to get a taxi for the Bosticks. Nobody paid and nothing was said about the bill. When Jack tried to get the wad of his wallet out of his back pocket, Charles touched him by the elbow, surprisingly womanish, and assured him obscurely, that it ‘got sent up’. They were in the cab before Jack could protest, or Amy could ask him to come back with them or stay behind or kiss him good night. She looked back at Charles waving and receding on the pavement of Madison Avenue suddenly heartsick at his absence and frightened at the return of an older order whose comforts she had for the first time in her life begun to doubt. Perhaps the Bosticks weren’t as happy as she thought they were – a reflection that should not have surprised a woman who had been miserable for months. Jack began to worry as soon as the cab door shut: first, that he should have insisted on giving Charles some money, and later that the meter wasn’t running, and he knew what that meant in New York City: they were being taken for a ride. The worries got mixed up in each other in contradictory ways: Charles should have let them get the subway; it wasn’t his business to push expenses on to them; he should have let them ‘give something towards the meal’; maybe they should get out now (on a dark cold night in Harlem) or have the cabbie drop them at the West Side where they could take the red line up. Jack even raised his arm to knock against the glass, getting his courage and his dander up, when Joanne, stubborn as she always was in her comforts, took him firmly by the soft inner elbow and told him ‘he didn’t dare’, a phrase Amy noticed but did not remark upon.

They crossed the Harlem River in rather magnificent silence, surrounded by warehouses and water, the glitter behind them, the dark rise of the Bronx in front. They got out at last against the slope of 246 ½ Street, climbing awkwardly
from tired haunches in the deep-set car. The taxi drove off before Jack could get his money out. ‘Charles must have paid already,’ Amy said.

‘He’s a good kid, but I should have insisted,’ her father began, his mood lightened in spite of himself by the free ride. And even Joanne’s rather cryptic remark, that he wasn’t ‘in a position now to insist on anything’ couldn’t bring Jack down again. Amy let it go a second time.

Andy flew in on Thanksgiving. He’d caught the red eye from California and showed up almost two hours late sweaty with travel and light-hearted as only the sleepless are, arriving. Joanne had been leaning out over the futon, looking down for a cab to pull up, for almost an hour. It drove Amy nuts. ‘He’ll come when he comes,’ she said, looking at her father. ‘What’s watching going to accomplish?’ But Jack for once only responded, ‘Let her look if she wants to’, and couldn’t sit still himself – stared out across Van Cortlandt Park feeling the cold outside in the window against his nose and brow. He was waiting, too; and Amy regretted her insistence that she could manage on her own, though the turkey was in the oven by noon, and a spread of vegetables lay cut across the counter-top and ready for the pot. Nobody had anything to do but worry about Andy; and when he rang at last Joanne clapped her hands together and kissed their tips, but refrained from getting to the buzzer herself, conscious in some way of offending.

‘What took you?’ Amy said, when Andy hauled self and duffel into the crowded sitting room, smoothing his long lank hair over his shoulders with a free hand. ‘Was the plane delayed?’ echoed Joanne.

‘No, not really,’ and he left it at that. The two missing hours remained unexplained, an irritating puzzle that ran through Amy’s head during the course of the day like a bad song.

Andy had changed, and had been changing some time; his sister could not put off acknowledging it any more. Skinny and pale as a teenager, he had grown, certainly not fit, or fat,
but weightier at twenty; an accumulation of mass at his shoulders, his cheeks, his neck, his belly, almost in spite of himself, signalled the gravity of manhood. Amy had only got skinnier and weaker since quitting softball; her breasts had diminished from hanging pears to nibs of loose skin pulled from her chest. She often wore T-shirts without a bra around the apartment on weekends, in a manner that rather tiresomely aroused Charles, since she had rarely felt sexually so unripe, so green. Another way boys had it better, their bodies announced their coming of age forcefully and unembarrassed – not the first eruptions of adolescence, but the second slower onset of manhood. She now looked her kid brother squarely in the chin, and could smell him too, the smell of a man’s body, creased, neglected, carelessly used. He hadn’t shaved, and rubbed the flat of his fingers against his resistant cheek.

But he’d grown in the essential, too. She had last known him well four years ago, in high school, where his obsessions with graphic art, anti-heroes, alternative worlds, cult subversions began. A not altogether unhappy boy, only rather friendless, earnest, confined to his imagination and the corners of school life. Which he shared with a diverse set of outcasts, who matched his indifference to strangers (indistinguishable from shyness), and, rather more worrying, a subtle suspicion of girls that approached distaste. College suited him; the corners were still corners, but belonged to grander halls. He encountered the like-minded, and learned the first most powerful lesson of success: that the world would serve his purposes, and he did not have to discredit its judgements – a habit he’d acquired in high school and quickly dropped. Success, of course, of a limited kind: the friendship of people he admired, the occasional publication of his art, a little money. Even a small following on the web. The renewed pride of his parents, the envy of his friends.