Either Side of Winter (8 page)

‘Thank you,’ she said, sitting down. Their stools both faced the street, but she had space to prop her feet on the crossbar and turn entirely round to face him. He could only turn his head. ‘My guess is you don’t often venture east; but I have to get back to the apartment soon. I’ve only just come round the corner and can’t stay long. The fact is, there is someone I left at home who’s dying to meet you.’

‘I can’t think why.’

‘I’ll get to that in a minute. First, I just wanted to say: hello, how ya been.’

She had caught him off guard: she had such directed purpose; he expected to lead the reminiscences. ‘Much as you see
me. I don’t change,’ and added, with a laugh, ‘if I can help it.’ She cocked her head at him, in a way he used to hate. She used to knock on his forehead with a knuckle and say, ‘come out, come out, wherever you are’ – a piece of foolishness that always left him
stumm
, like he’d been set up. How can you expect anything but silence at such questions? ‘I’ve seen your name, now and then,’ he said, ‘in the
Science Times
. Anne Rosenblum. Old Annie Rosenblum.’

‘You must have laughed,’ she said. ‘Who would have thought that stuff would get me my breakthrough.’ Again, not quite what he’d expected; he’d almost been hoping for a confession of failure, of blunted purpose. She seemed to guess something of that, and went on, ‘Well, I do all right. I hear you’re teaching?’ Just the sort of question he had feared: what you’d ask any acquaintance. There was a little more of that, on both sides. He didn’t mention Tomas. She didn’t mention whoever it was she had to get back to. A delicacy, he supposed, they both employed in case the answer was only loneliness on the other side; and yet, they’d always been jealous friends, and the habit of it had a strange persistence, in spite of everything.

‘You know, Annie,’ he said suddenly, ‘it was a month before I found out you’d quit. I forget who told me: certainly not you. Nobody knew what the hurry was. We had a few guesses –’

‘What did you guess?’

‘That you found some sugar daddy in the city; that you sold a script to MGM; that you got pregnant, married. Well, it’s…’

‘What did
you
guess?’

‘… twenty years ago. I don’t know what I guessed. I suppose I missed you, mostly. I felt –’

‘I called you every day for a week. I knocked on your room. I left –’ He preferred her like this, unsmiling, insistent. Her nose had a red streak on the tip, like the mark a bandage would make, pulled off at a stroke. She used to get cold sores
there, and whenever she was hot, or ill, or insistent, a faint red stripe appeared where the blood burned through. This was a thing he remembered, something preserved.

‘Fairly wretched about that night, and more than a little confused, on several counts. You never called.’

‘Two or three times a day. I left notes under your door.’

‘You never called. I never saw any notes.’

‘Howard, of course I did. Of course you did.’

Perhaps she had. It had occurred to him before that he might be capable of suppressing certain facts, for the sake of his balance, his steady course. He considered the possibility, in a detached way: That, while he thought the great trouble of his inner life was his need to exaggerate, to puff himself up for even the faintest of emotions to register and give off a little heat to the world, the reverse might be true. That only the carefullest containment prevented all kinds of passionate outbursts, that he had a great store of emotional fuel, burning inwards and building up warmth. That the least thing could upset him, spill him; that he lived in fear of that chance. It didn’t seem very likely; and only a certain pressure to conform internally to the accepted view of these things, of repression, suggested the idea to him at all – apart, of course, from moments like these, when someone gave him reason to believe that his own view of the world might have consistently misled him, even to the point of inventing facts.

Then she said, ‘I was pregnant. That’s why I left. I wanted to have the child – I got what I wanted. She’s at home now, my daughter, waiting for us. Drink up: I said we wouldn’t be long.’ Then she continued, as though reciting a difficult declension, learned by rote: ‘Our daughter. Your daughter. About to turn eighteen, and I thought –’

‘Good lord,’ he said, surprising even himself, by his lightheartedness, his casual astonishment. He might have said ‘good lord’ the same way if she’d told him she had sold a book for a million dollars. It occurred to him, suddenly – in regard to that little scene he had witnessed, between the
young swaggering Italian and the ‘guido Pakistani’ – that it was the greeting itself that delighted them, the form of it. Those wide comical steps and the heavy embrace proved to be the purpose of their encounter, rather than its introduction – proved to be the proper occasion for joy, rather than the no doubt desultory conversation that followed it.

‘Oh, Howard, don’t look so peevish. I could never bear that pursed look you get when you’re trying to sound pleased.’ He almost bristled at the injustice of her remark: he thought he’d never felt so easy in himself, so well feathered, so buoyant and dry. But it occurred to him once more that he might be looking through a distorted lens: himself. And then Annie apologized.

‘I can’t expect you to take it in at one sitting; especially when I sprung it on you like that. The fact is I feel guilty, at my silence, in the first place. Which wasn’t all my fault, as I said. You were a difficult man back then to spring bad news on. But if I’m honest I have to confess I got what I wanted, and one thing I didn’t want was to share. But more than guilty, I feel –’ and here she cocked her head up and sideways and looked out the window. Anyone passing by would have thought she was unhappy, or that they were strangers, or, even worse, lovers who had nothing left to say to each other. But she was only searching for the right word; a characteristic gesture. It surprised him how well he remembered it, how fresh the irritation was – at the ridiculous purity she aspired to in expression, the exactitude: a selfish virtue it seemed when she let the rest of the world run happily to waste and imprecision. Or perhaps he was only envious, conscious of being outdone. ‘Tremulous,’ she continued, ‘unsure, but eager, at the thought of adding you to us. Of being filled out, as a family. I can’t say how good it is to see you. I don’t mean to be sharp; don’t listen to me, you never used to. It just seemed to be – I won’t delude myself by saying “the right moment”, because we both missed that moment years ago – a chance, that’s all. Her last year at home; God knows where
she’ll end up next year, that’s another thing I wanted to talk to you about. She never tells me anything about her college applications; and I had heard, from a friend of a friend, that you were teaching, and thought, maybe you could advise her. And then, you know, she seemed ready to me – ready to meet you, without making too much of it or too little. I’m running on. You always had a way of making me talk. But we should go back now; it isn’t far. Francesca’s a tough kid but she’s human, in spite of her parents, right?, and I’ll bet she won’t say it, but she must be on pins and needles.’

They stood up, and he took her coat from the hook and helped her into the arms; and with her back to him, she said, ‘The fact is, of course, I was losing her anyway. There isn’t anything left for me to lose; she’s going away. So I don’t mind sharing now.’ She kissed him quickly on the cheek. ‘You’re being very good, but you haven’t said anything. Do you mind? Is it very terrible, having a brand-new daughter?’

‘No, no, of course not. I don’t know what I think yet. It seems so’, he laughed lightly, ‘unlikely, all things considered. Wouldn’t you say?’ Perhaps that offended her a little; perhaps the laugh was a little too much, too casual; perhaps he meant to offend her a little. After all, he’d suffered greatly, it seemed to him, at her hands: or rather, there was a possibility he had suffered; he couldn’t be sure yet, how much he had lost. Even so, as they walked down Second Avenue, into the cold wind blowing up from midtown against the traffic, he felt easy, elaborately leisured, as if he’d been asked back only for another cup of coffee, and to look over some holiday snaps she’d forgotten to bring. Francesca, a pretty name. He felt very well feathered indeed against wind and world; buoyant; dry. And there was still plenty of time for him to work out a line to take about the whole thing.

Annie led him through two glass doors into the lobby of her apartment block, done up in the shabbiest manner of the Upper East Side: threadbare pink carpets ravelled over rubber steps, scalloped lighting softened against cream walls, tall
mirrors bookending the elevator. Each suggesting a faded gentility that never was. And it didn’t surprise him, after all, to discover that Annie had sacrificed comfort and style, in the end, to what her kind liked to call ‘a good address’. The elevator clanked to a halt in front of them and shuddered open, a half-foot out of place. ‘Mind your step,’ she said; they’d fallen mostly quiet, and continued so, as the lift ascended by imperceptible increments to an indeterminable floor: the fifth, he noted, stepping into the corridor. ‘Penthouse suite,’ Annie muttered, making a wry face; a little embarrassed, he thought. No doubt at dusting off an old line mostly reserved for strangers, at treating
him
like a stranger and falling back on ‘conversation’. Turned out to be true, though, he noticed on his way home: the fifth was the top floor, and she may have reddened a little at her slight but irrepressible pride in that fact.

Frannie, as her mother called her, was sitting down as they came in. The bathroom door stood open in front of them – revealing dirty grey tiles and a dripping bath tap, and Annie moved quickly to close it. That was her bedroom, he supposed, to his left; then a corridor ran the length of the flat to his right, and Howard could see his daughter sitting in a club chair against the back window, reading the newspapers. Francesca turned and saw them, stood up and sat down again: just giving him time to note her dumpy figure and bright bohemian layers, a shawl, a cardigan, two heavy bunches of beads falling loosely across her spread breasts. Less pretty than her mother was and had been: less susceptible to refinement. Something spoilt about her, overfed; she had the look of a girl who hadn’t often been refused, and wasn’t accustomed to denying herself. He had a wide experience of such girls, particularly prevalent among the only children of the shabby genteel, and, dare he add, among Jews. Disappointment shamed him; if he’d had a choice he wouldn’t have chosen her. So this is the stuff he was made of.

‘You’ll forgive me,’ Frannie said, standing up again, ‘if I
don’t indulge in any emotional reunion. I can’t say I’ve missed you: I didn’t know you. But I gather that’s not your fault. Still, I must say, it’s good to have you on board: Mom was beginning to drive me nuts on her own.’

She strode towards him, her various swathes shifting and resettling, with a plump red hand outstretched. He almost shrank from touching her: she had moved too quickly into fact, with all the unimaginably banal particulars that transformation entailed: breath, warmth, smells, an accent more heavily soaked in Jewish New York than her mother’s. Annie grew restless beside her; excess of pride and worry had nowhere to express itself in her trimmed-back figure, and turned into nerves. ‘Can I make some coffee? Do you want anything, Howard? Something to eat?’

‘Why don’t you bring out those chocolates?’ Frannie suggested; and she turned to Howard. ‘I gave them to her for her birthday. Some have cream inside; some liqueur. You feel sick afterwards either way, but you can’t help wondering which you’ll get next time.’

‘Coffee is fine,’ Howard said; to his own surprise, he felt conscious of his daughter’s weight, and instinctively resisted her indulgence. He took the club chair for himself now; mother and daughter sat opposite on a delicate orange sofa propped up on one side by an old phone book. Annie had pulled off her boots, and sat on folded legs with her hands across her lap. Francesca lay awkwardly back against a heap of cushions: she struck him as the kind of girl uneasy in her shape, but unwilling to admit it. A door on his left opened on to another bedroom. No doubt his daughter’s. There were various boots lying bent-necked on the floor, among clothes, bedsheets, even a packet of tampons (it was very much
girls
-
only
in the flat). The mirror over the unmade bed revealed the corner of a desk, the textbooks on it (poor kids, he thought, not for the first time: what
burdens
we make them bear for their
knowledge of the world
), and a window, streaked with stickers peeling in the cold.

He looked round him. It was obvious the only thing Annie could keep tidy was herself. There were books everywhere: some caught in the act, as it were, suddenly neglected and frozen in their latest gesture like the citizens of a library in Pompeii – bunched open, or fluttering on their spines. Books being used: serving as coasters, paperweights, dessert plates (covered in orange peel), props. There were books embracing other books as bookmarks. On the shelves constructed out of bricks and boards against one wall, books stood two deep, or lay squeezed in sideways. On the orange sofa: half swallowed by the cracks between the cushions. On the armrest of his chair –
Hamlet, Jane Eyre
(Frannie’s school texts, of course) – sprawled, balancing on their open faces. On the glass coffee table: loosely barricading a vase of dead white roses, whose petals lay scattered across them. On the dining table pushed into the corner underneath the hatch to the kitchen: stacked like chimneys around an open laptop. On the wooden cover for the air-conditioning unit next to the couch. Annie now set her mug there, next to another mug, long cold no doubt and forgotten, ringing another book.

What wasn’t covered with books was covered with newspapers: Saturday’s
Times
, but the
Post
as well, the
Wall Street
Journal
, a slipped heap of
New Yorkers
spreading across the kelim rug. A store of papers waist high stood in the corridor, waiting to be taken out. Her apartment looked like student digs, only older, richer, more spacious; and he thought: she hasn’t given up, she hasn’t become less curious about the world. She still had a few posters on the walls, framed now and hung on nails rather than stuck to the paint with blue tac. He noticed in particular, above the dining table, a playbill for the Stethoscopes, an a capella group formed by some of their medical school friends at NYU. The date was November 25th, 1979: it was their Thanksgiving concert, Howard had just turned twenty-three. Who could have guessed how little would happen in the next twenty years?