Either Side of Winter (19 page)

Fridays he and his wife dined out, mostly at Pablo’s, a cheap Mexican restaurant across the road. Abstemious as a rule, Stuart was nevertheless partial to margaritas. He said to Mary Louise, ‘The school is doing another round of early retirements. Cutting away the dead wood. I’ve been thinking: I might take them up on it this time.’ She couldn’t help herself, she clapped her hands and held them against her lips, a rather extravagant gesture for such a large woman, very girlish. ‘Well,’ he said, a little drunk, wanting to withhold pleasure, ‘it’s only something I’ve been thinking about.’ Regardless, Mary Louise began making plans; they hadn’t travelled in years. They only took a couple of rooms on Fire
Island in August to get out of the city heat; but now she had her summers free as well, there was nothing to keep them from going further afield, spending some real time together. She had a cousin in England. At one point he interrupted her. ‘That girl I mentioned to you. I showed you her work; I think you were right. An unhappy home. She came to my office today: she’s completely gone to pieces. There’s only so much I can do. She began crying; I had to open the door. I even said to her, my powers of comforting are strictly circumscribed. It’s a ridiculous position.’

Mary Louise seemed to ignore him. She was trying to get the attention of the woman at the next-door table: a heavy-faced dark-skinned lady, who had seen too much sun in her day. Excuse me, she said, excuse me. She often talked to people dining alone; she had no respect for solitude, or, more to the point perhaps, no respect for what Stuart thought of as the ‘caste difference’ of people eating out on their own. More than once, he’d complained to her, ‘These aren’t people you want to know. They’re on their own for a reason.’ And his wife had said, ‘It wouldn’t be so hard for me to be one of them. Or you for that matter. If we weren’t so lucky.’ Lucky, he sighed, echoing her – his father’s habit, repeating words. It meant disagreement, but sometimes Stuart applied it in curious affirmation: yes, we should be so lucky. Now Mary Louise wanted to know where the woman had picked up the string of cornelian folded in the lines of her neck. Mexico, was the answer. ‘We never go anywhere,’ Mary Louise explained. ‘Mostly my fault. When you’re big like me I’ll tell you, an afternoon in an airplane seat is the last thing you need. But that’s no excuse for Mexico, is it? We could drive there, if we had a car. But who has a car in New York, right? I’d like to go on a cruise.’

But afterwards, over coffee, she said to Stuart, ‘I know you’ve had things on your mind. I’ve been very unhappy for you. But there was nothing I could do. There are some regrets you can’t talk your way out of.’

He realized that she’d answered a question he hadn’t asked, but he accepted the fact. As usual: he lacked the persistence to bluff against her. ‘No,’ was all he said, ‘I see that.’

After supper they took a turn round the block, arm in arm. The rain had cleared and taken the sweats with it; it was a fine night, rather cold than otherwise. Restaurants had begun to spill out on to Broadway, setting their tables and chairs on the pavement. The candles kept blowing out; and the smokers lit them again with their cigarette lighters. Couples held hands to keep them warm across the tables before their food arrived. ‘Life here is very rich in other people,’ Mary Louise remarked. Stuart said, ‘When I think of how far I’ve come from the kid I was. Without having to change too much. That’s the main thing.’ He was unusually drunk. ‘I’ve stayed true to myself.’ Later, as they mounted the narrow stairs of their apartment, he said to her, ‘You have great power over me. You should know that.’

That night he dreamed of Rachel for the first time. They were in class, busy with a test. She raised her hand, and he followed the curve of the seminar table to the corner where she sat. It was clear from her demeanour that she had seen through him, his excitement. He could barely contain himself; and she had accepted that fact and taken pity. When he reached her she touched her small hand to his crotch and began to press. His shame was terrible, burning; he felt himself go red. All of the other students looked up in silence. Rachel continued to hold him in her palm, patiently; he was very close to coming, his pleasure had spread to his hands, his feet, his heart. He couldn’t tear himself away from her. He was completely exposed; and imagined what would happen if she didn’t let go that minute, that second, but she did, in time. Not that it mattered any more, he had nothing left to hide. He felt himself waking unsatisfied, and began to push desperately against her neck, her hair, her face as she turned, then her chair, when she ducked to evade him. At last he lay on his belly on the table, blind at least to the children surrounding
him now, highly amused, waiting for him to finish. But it was useless, the moment had passed. His heart was racing when he opened his eyes, the broken light of spring dawn fell in straight lines through the window blinds across their comforter – grey and white slats of light shifted in the wind. Birdsong, irregular, expectant, entered the room from the dirty city trees outside; it was almost summer.

His shame was terrible, but gratitude filled him when he woke to the solitude of his bed, his head – his secret intact. His innocence preserved; his whole life he had done nothing to be ashamed of, that was something. There were only his thoughts. Who knows, if he’d had a daughter, what his temptations might have been. Something else to be grateful for: the gentle protection of uneventfulness. He turned on his side to kiss the neck of his wife. He wanted to take in her smell, some proof of her body, warm and sweet with the creams she applied before sleep. She stirred a little, waking. ‘What’s this, what’s this,’ she said and looked at him. ‘I’ve been very unhappy for you,’ she murmured again. She felt his frustration against her leg and smiled, blindly, through thick lips. ‘You’ve been dreaming, haven’t you?’ It is true, he thought, her sympathies are large, consoling. She reached a warm hand under the bedclothes and began to relieve him.

Rachel’s mother took her down Madison Avenue on Saturday afternoon. Mild milky February weather, weeks after the latest snowfall. Only the grit remained. This is what Tasha loved best, the bright clothes and elegant shoppers, the costliness of everything, the fellow feeling among the rich. She often said, holding a garment by the hook at arm’s length, observing the hang of it, ‘I couldn’t carry it off any more. But you, so petite. It isn’t right the way the clothes make love to you. Me, any old sack will do.’ It wasn’t true of course and Rachel said so. In fact Tasha made herself up with a high hand. After her hair went grey she dyed it blond, wore it short in a bob, to show off her long neck, only a little mottled. Her wide swollen cheeks remained sensual, even at fifty, though her chin had begun to work free of the face, stand out. She had worrying eyes. Rachel could see the pale film on them and imagined lifting one by the finger from a corner of her whites. They were flat, too, like an insect’s, bright and large and vivid, but shallow behind. Tasha knew this herself and wore wide shades. Her lips were heavier, richer, the top drooped over the bottom; she had a lazy mouth. Rachel had seen photographs of her mother in her youth: long-legged with long thin arms, hanging awkwardly, touching her thighs. Excessively beautiful; she had the sleepy nervy look of a satisfied addiction.

She’d been working, more off than on, as a model when she met Reuben, Rachel’s father. An older man, a lawyer. One of his clients was Grace Kupchak, the designer. Occasionally, he came along to an after-show party, and the girls, set free by his age, his propriety, made a fuss over him. They found him attentive, bemused, uninterested. Tasha was part of that
crowd; really she tagged along with a cousin, hoping to get snapped up. She was twenty-six, twenty-seven, already past the age when anything seemed possible, getting tougher. And then the lawyer, a small-boned man, a little dry in his humour, nevertheless strong and sweet in manly odour with his top button undone beneath the loose tie, teased her for her accent. Tasha’s family were German, French, Canadian, Polish, Jewish. These influences still clung to her breast; raised in America, she suffered her ancestry palpably; she lived among long shadows. A beautiful daughter often bears these burdens, heavy racial memories. She grew up well preserved, untouched, perhaps over-loyal to the family love, its lavish attentions. No doubt there was also a taint of affectation. Reuben discovered she came from his home town: Port Jervis, a land-locked stopover on the way to Syracuse in upstate New York. She felt younger in his company, more naive, richer in illusions.

Mother and daughter had a late lunch at Pimento’s on 62nd Street. A shuttered kosher Italian with overgrowing window boxes whose green hair fell over the glass of the shopfront below. A leather-goods store; Rachel could smell it, like a man’s hand in her face, as she stepped up the narrow stairs. They sat in the window looking up and down Madison, eating breadsticks and drinking Pelegrino. ‘Why don’t you have a glass of wine with me?’ Tasha said. ‘They’re very European here. They’d understand.’ Rachel said no. Tasha got a bottle in any case, though she never finished it. She had less appetite for decadence now than for the show of it. Still, after one glass, she began to question Rachel about her father. ‘I bet the food rots in the fridge. That man lets nothing go to waste. Do you know while he was staying we couldn’t get rid of the mice? Him with his doggy-bags, his leftovers.’ ‘While he was staying’ meant before the divorce. ‘For one thing, he can’t control the help. You have to keep after them. All he does is watch and pay the bills. He thinks he can pay his way out of anything; but I told him, you have to take real human interest
in life, or else everything goes to pot.’ This choice of word surprised Rachel; her mother was beginning to delight in common touches. They always came out wrong. ‘Is the maid in his bed by the way? You don’t have to answer. I know.’ In fact, as far as Rachel knew, Tasha was the one who had had affairs. Perhaps it pleased her perversely to think he was still active in these matters. This made the affront of their quiet sex life more personal, direct, a subject for blame rather than commiseration; and Tasha’s life was short on personal implications. She said to Rachel, not for the first time, ‘He never wanted me, he wanted you.’

The girl never knew what to answer. She understood quite well what was meant, and secretly thought it likely; perhaps she hoped it was. Even so, Rachel protested, in condescending pedantry that also shamed her, ‘don’t be silly. I didn’t even exist. You were a beautiful young woman, a model. He was almost an old man.’

‘If you think I was after his money, you’re not as smart as you think. I had plenty other offers. I wanted a life.’

No, no, that’s not what she meant. She felt the pressures on her mother’s heart strongly; these were painful sympathies she’d rather shirk.

After lunch they walked uptown again and bought what they’d been considering: a pearl-buttoned shirt with a floppy collar; a high-necked red dress, demure across the bosoms, and short below the hips; blue jeans with small square pockets at the top of her thighs, too tight to warm anything but fingers. Her mother usually bought two sets of everything for her, one for each house. This Rachel hated, it spooked her. For once Tasha almost forgot, and Rachel teased her, ‘Just one?’, instantly regretting it. Of course, her mother insisted. ‘You’re as bad as your father. It’s only money; it isn’t anything. The only way to live with it is waste it. And I won’t have you choosing, here or there. I know I’d lose.’ Rachel said nothing. It scared her slightly, these alternate, almost identical lives laid out for her.

They dropped one set of purchases at the doorman on Park and 82nd Street. Then he waved down a cab to take them five blocks east. It was always a production fitting the glossy rectangular and pleated bags in the cramped backseat. Tasha liked to have her hand around all the string handles at once, and they bunched up in awkward array in the middle. She wouldn’t let go; Rachel squeezed to one side. The cab pulled in just short of East End Avenue by the fire hydrant. It was easy to spot their house, with the red front door, painted thickly; you could see the finger-like marks of the broad brush. It looked still wet. And Rachel always imagined flecks of red on her palm on her clothes when she held the door open for her mother. Her menstrual blood, when it stained, reminded her of this brightness. The parlour was dark and narrow, flagged in black and white tiles that clicked under heel. The fact was, Tasha was the untidy one; a box of clothes for charity lay open in the hall, and her mother had been rooting through it to find something she didn’t want to throw out. She had pushed, on her own, in an unhappy fury, the exercise machine into the corner, scratching the checkered tiles. Provoking one of her rare moments of humour. ‘The only exercise I get from that
verkackte
machine is lugging it here and there out of the way. Look at how fat your mother has got.’ And she pinched her hip under the gold cashmere; her skin, in spite of the sun bed installed in the guest room, paled as she held it in her fist. Rachel for once didn’t correct her; stood rather on tiptoes to kiss her cheek.

At this, Tasha began to weep; she had seemed overwrought, humid, under great pressure all day. And now this animal reaction to a kind touch. As if her eyes had been lanced and these salt humours released. She didn’t have to screw herself up to it, or suffer for it. ‘Don’t worry, don’t worry, don’t worry,’ she said. ‘It’s only my pills. This is what they do to me.’ Tasha had had a breast-cancer scare the year before; at the time she hoped it might bring Reuben back to her. She was never shy of speaking her mind. ‘What do you
think, if it was the other way around? How long could I keep away from his bedside? If he called to me. A minute? Fifteen seconds before I broke down the doors?’ Rachel frequently suffered for such displays: what could a daughter do? Tasha sighed thickly and touched her eyes and upper lip with a handkerchief. Later, she went to the bathroom to blow her nose privately on toilet paper. ‘Are you staying with your father tonight?’ she called up the stairs. Rachel had begun to take her bags up. She stopped on the steps and turned round. ‘If you’ll be all right,’ the girl said.

‘I am what I am,’ Tasha answered. Adding, ‘I think your father has something to tell you.’

Perhaps he’s marrying again, Rachel thought, unsure of her possible jealousies, probing inward, attentive to self.

The rest of the afternoon passed quietly; the place was heavy with time idly spent. Rachel once calculated: just for the three of them, counting her mother’s home, her father’s apartment, they had two kitchens, three sitting rooms, a dining room, five bathrooms, seven bedrooms. But she loved, almost in spite of herself, her mother’s house. (Really, her loyalties lay with her father, her father’s life.) Tasha had expensive but disorderly tastes. Among other things she collected painting and sculpture, even when the space to put them in ran out. She had invitations to every Armory show, and for a night, in her pearls, in her Vivienne Westwood gown, felt the love of salesmen, rather refined. They touched her elbow, her hands. They kissed her cheeks three times. A week later the goodies arrived, and sat in the front hall till she found a place for them. A narrow wooden dining room ran along the parlour and looked out over 82nd Street: the peeling fire hydrant; a silver birch, planted among ornamental cabbages; the gleam of parked cars in the deep neighbourhood shade, broken only at noon by vertical sunshine. At Sunday lunch in winter, for company, the maid lit a fire on the bricks of the fireplace; its glow was much richer than the daylight reflected in. On the
far side, a kitchen opened through wide sliding doors on to the garden. They had an apple tree dropping green leaves and rotten fruit into a pond. In February, its bare lines were reproduced clearly in the still black water. No grass, but flagstones, uneven, dirty in the cracks; puddles sprang up like broad grey flowers at the slightest rainfall. A rotting wooden bench, sticky in fall with wasted fruit, was only very wet the rest of the year.

Rachel’s bedroom was the tidiest room in the house and looked over the garden. (She once said to her father, ‘I think I’m going to write a book. About my life. I am going to call it:
Unfurnished
.’ He answered,
‘Unfinished
. Clutter will come. You’ll see.’ But he appreciated this sort of conversation; it satisfied his sense of style. She said, ‘Look at the way you live. There isn’t anything.’) A single high window framed the still life below. Sunshine fell plentifully in, and dappled on its way through the old glass; it cast irregular lines like rain shadows on her wall. An alcove set into the wooden panelling held her books. She had an armchair pushed up against the window, and a small kelim laid out over the floorboards. Her bed she made as soon as she woke up; laced pillows, a quilt in which colours, red and pale blue squares, proved the exception rather than the rule. Trying to sleep, she rubbed the wrought-iron poles of the headboard between finger and thumb. Now the paint flaked, and dull grey shone through. On the wall beside her she tacked postcards and photographs, scattered unevenly from a central concentration: Jimmy Stewart, Keaton, Corot. Her tastes were old-fashioned; she disliked contemporary passions, they seemed shortsighted. The rest of the room was bare. Her clothes were kept neatly in a walk-in cupboard, where she had also squeezed a chest of drawers to store what she referred to, conscious of quaint flirtation, as her
delicates
. She hung up her mother’s gifts, and imagined herself performing the same task at her father’s apartment that night.

The rest of the house bore the mark of her mother’s accumulating
habits, her wide tastes, her loneliness. Televisions in every room; Tasha spent a great deal of time at home and couldn’t bear quiet; it made her talk to herself. Conversations, real and imagined, their attendant emotions, often specific, painful, came into her head – simply to fill space. She positioned large expensive sets, guarded by black speakers, on every floor. Rachel often heard several shows going at once all over the house; and in bare feet or thin socks she could sometimes feel the threadbare staccato of the bass line running along the old floorboards. Tasha’s appetite for art was catholic; she admired, among other qualities, scale, but mounted her purchases indiscriminately. Modern and monotone oil-paintings, heavily framed, leaned creaking off the panelled walls. Beside them, she blue tacked posters picked up on her holidays. She couldn’t pass a thrift shop without going in: cancer charities, MS societies, Christian aid, all benefited from her curiosity, her idleness. She liked spending money, she liked grandeur of all kinds, but she also had an appetite for variety, for cheap thrills. She bought a print of Salisbury Cathedral framed in brown plastic because she had the right change in her pocket and a gap on the wall to hang it in. Rachel’s father said to her once, ‘We didn’t get divorced, we ran out of room.’ But Rachel understood him: he wanted to live in greater modesty, more elegantly.

Then there were Tasha’s plants; creepers hung from baskets off hooks in the ceiling. Spiders lived in them, flies drank from the rich soil: patience and restlessness at war. Thick-leaved ficuses sprouted between the windows, outgrew their pots, leaned and twisted to the light. You could smell them everywhere, wet, dark, flourishing, inhuman, the smell of a greenhouse on a cold day. But she had an equal passion for mechanical oddities: a hairdresser’s helmet sat on a Fifties mannequin, her legs crossed, her nails red, in the sitting-room window, on a barbershop chair. Once a week it still caught Rachel by surprise; she thought she saw her mother naked, youthful. Rugs lay unevenly across the boards, overlapping.
Tasha bought several new ones a year with nowhere to put them. One of the bedrooms had been turned into storage, and Tasha spent much of her time inside, perched at awkward angles, going over old purchases, looking for something.

Rachel, too, found it oddly comforting there. Chairs and tables stacked upside down, cracked vases nested in each other; loose canvases rolled into one, the frames in pieces and kept in a box like firewood. Also, family papers, school reports, old
Vogues
. Dusty tasselled lampshades, mustard yellow. A leather armchair losing its stuffing. A sculpture, picked up from an art-school sale: fat clay fingers nursing a real shot glass, which rested uncertainly on the pinkie. The layered slates of a billiard table, heavy and lustrous, unbudgeable. Somewhere, in a wooden box, the balls. Family photographs; black-and-white studio portraits in card frames. More recent holiday snaps, their reds and greens particularly rich and deep, unnatural; everything else fading to tan.