Either Side of Winter (9 page)

As they talked, he got the uncomfortable sense that he was
watching an elaborate advertisement for a family. Though whether they were selling themselves to him, or simply preening, he couldn’t be sure. It occurred to him that he was only an occasion for their preening: they’d brought him in at last to prove how well they got along without him. Well, let them, he thought. And yet, there was something about the clutter of the apartment, about the density of life, that moved him, drew him inwards, by force of gravity. An unpleasant sensation: the way we give in, in spite of ourselves, to the simple mass of other people, their answering weight.

‘Mom dresses so corporate these days,’ Frannie declared, appealing to Howard, to start an argument. (Perhaps it was only his silence that spurred them on – to fill the terrible quiet of their ignorance of each other.)

‘I do not. It’s just that you get to a stage in life when you realize you’re only one cardigan or shawl away from looking like a bag lady.’

‘Thanks for that, she rejoins, heavily ironic.’

‘What? I wasn’t talking about you.’

‘If you can’t see the implicit criticism in that then you’re more deluded than I thought you were.’

Howard put her down as one of those girls, who, believing she’s come to terms with the mediocrity of her looks, thinks she can’t be fooled by anything any more. He got such girls from time to time in his classes.

‘You like to talk,’ he said at one point.

‘Oh God, please don’t tell me that I verbalize everything. If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s people telling me that I “verbalize”, as if that were the strangest thing in the world to do to your experiences. Everybody else just talks, somehow whatever I say is
verbalizing.’

‘All I said was, that you like to talk.’

‘Don’t worry,’ she said, considerately, ‘it’s not your fault. It’s just something I get a lot, believe me.’

He wasn’t sure that he liked her. Growing up alone with his father, a distant and correct man, had spoiled him: he hadn’t
needed to get along intimately with anyone. Something about the phrasing of his thought made him stop short. But then his daughter said, ‘Mom used to be more expansive, now all she does is retract. I’m expanding for both of us. I can’t bear the way she pinches herself every morning in front of the mirror: thinking, a little less of this, a little less of that. Some here, some there. All right, I’m only seventeen years old, but I’ve figured out that getting bigger with age is the least of our worries. Only expand, would be my motto. Let everybody else shrink around you if they want: more room for us. It’s not just the weight with her, it never is: it’s the way she dresses, the way she looks over a menu. The way she eyes me up and down when I pick out another chocolate. I can’t stand it: all it means is she has fewer and fewer choices. I know what it’s like, believe me: every time you eat you ask yourself, do I need this? Pretty soon you can get by without anything at all. Pretty soon you don’t
want
anything. I ask myself: do I want this? And pretty soon I
need
everything. I can’t tell, I’m too subjective: maybe we’re each as bad as the other. But you should know: she didn’t used to be like this.’

‘No,’ he said, warming to his daughter. ‘She didn’t. She used to be more like you.’ He couldn’t be sure he hadn’t offended. And he thought: now Annie’s more like me.

As he was going, Francesca said, ‘Peasbody. That’s a strange name.’

‘My,’ he began, then stopped himself and resumed without particular emphasis, ‘your great great grandfather, the story goes, was something of a drunkard, and came through Ellis Island a little the worse for wear. The “s” is what’s left of his slurring. The immigration officer wrote it down and the name stuck: Peasbody. That’s the story at least. My mother always thought we should get it changed, that three generations of Peasbodys were enough is enough. We were just the kind of people, she said, to stick by a mistake for a hundred years, too lazy or too loyal to correct it. She thought we needed a new start; and tried to take us in hand herself, but couldn’t see the
job through. She’ll be sorry never to have met you. After she died, well, several years after, when I was your age, I thought about changing my name, to please her. But I was always too lazy, or too loyal. So year by year goes by.’

He wasn’t used to confessing so much to strangers; it left an unpleasant taste in his mouth, like a lie. And in his confusion, he kissed first Annie and then his daughter on the cheek, and said, ‘I hope to see you both soon, very soon’, as he shut the front door behind him, and fled. In spite of the weather, he walked home across the Park. Specks of flakes, like tiny white distillations of the cold, fell around him and disappeared in the asphalt paths, in the dirt, in the grass. A second chance: he had been given a second chance to make something other than solitude out of his life. Here was proof: that he bulked so large, even in the corner of his own thoughts, that these could not contain him, that part of him was exposed to the world, and snagged on it. That he cast seeds about him all the time; and he wondered less at the fact of the fruit than at the seeds themselves. It occurred to him, of course it did, that such sophistries were only his way of seasoning the amazement, so he could stomach it. He had a daughter; God, there was work for him to do if he had the heart for it. The prospect appalled him, like the thought of moving house. He had lived so long and so deeply off his memories that he had begun to doubt the truth of them; and now who could say where his own life ended and where it would begin?

Tomas gave off an air of innocent greed; big-chested, he ran slightly to fat, regardless of the hours spent happily under a bench press. There was something that would not be trimmed about him, reduced to the needful, measured; the excess, the vitality of him sometimes struck Howard as rude and bludgeoning, a refusal of fineness and the shelter it demands. Pale faced, he wore his light-blond hair piled high and loose on his head, cropped round the sides; and was big in all joints, elbows and knees and hips, so that a kind of mechanical exuberance and imprecision often caused him to break dishes or catch old ladies by the shoulder with a strapped bag. His father was an American soldier stationed in Germany who had had an affair with a Czech-born nurse. She raised him alone in Hamburg, without bitterness, ran through boyfriends, never married – and regarded the accident of her son’s birth as the only thing that could have brought her such steady and equal male companionship, given a nature more inclined to spontaneity than duty. The misery he left behind, like unwanted clothes, surprised her into a sudden sense of her age (forty-three) when her son broke out of university to come to New York. But she kept her tongue, and he settled there on the strength of his American passport, and worked his way quickly through various menial jobs at a documentary-film company to his present status as production manager.

Tomas’s company often made films with what their various directors considered to be a scientific edge. Science, particularly genetics, was in the news; and Howard had some old college acquaintances working in production, who called him in when they needed someone to explain their prefabricated
accounts of this or that evolutionary phenomenon. Howard was easy and fluent in front of camera, and didn’t much mind what the directors made him say. His doctorate, after all, concerned genetics; but, being only a school teacher, he had little stake in sticking by the complications of truth or an original and professional point of view. The fact of appearing on television flattered him; it made him seem less lonely to himself. Or rather, it made his loneliness take on a greater, more public significance: he knew things other people needed to know. Occasionally, he even suggested slight changes to the script, which tended to make his explanations not only truer but more interesting. And the directors learned to trust his interventions, and called him in on projects only distantly related to his expertise. These television appearances touched him faintly with a schoolyard celebrity, which did him no harm in the classroom, or the headmaster’s office, for that matter. Though his fellow teachers, especially in the Science department, occasionally sniped, with unembarrassed jealousy, that he had sold his soul to the television devil; and addressed him, with mocking humility, as ‘the geneticist, Dr Peasbody’ over their cafeteria lunches.

Tomas was working as a runner when they first met. Howard teased him by asking for ever more elaborate sandwiches from ever more distant and specialist sandwich shops. He liked to see the boy work up a sweat; Tomas at this point was still twenty-three, and breathless with the heartbreaking energy of youth. Wore shorts through the thick of winter; and high socks to keep the wind off his ankles when he biked. His skin always flickered between rose and pallor, depending on the animal heat expended in his last exertion. He finished off, unabashed, whatever sandwiches, potato chips, chocolate chip cookies were leftover from his lunchtime runs. And spoke in a rather innocent staccato, gently accented by the inevitable Teutonic suggestion of the military. Once, Howard even asked Tomas to flush a toilet he’d forgotten to attend to himself; he was busily going over the
script with the assistant producer and didn’t like to think of the thing festering, etc. Tomas burned red at the shame of it, though when he got there the bowl was clean; perhaps the man was playing with him, and he dropped the lid and sat down head in hands, feeling the heat of his face; and trying to work out whether he was simply angry or also flattered (successfully teased, tested in some point) by the unusual mark of attention.

After they first made love, Howard insisted their relationship remain an ‘open’ one. Tomas was heartbroken, but said nothing. The one-year anniversary of his arrival in New York approached: he had a job, he had a lover; he had done well. Spring had come; the air had that washed, wrung-out feel of a cloth about to expand again and take on moisture. He remembered it from the previous April: it was his first answered memory, his first echoed season. It seemed he had to cut his nails every other day; and the trees, even in Harlem, on 154th Street where he lived (above a fire station – ‘Only security you’ll ever need,’ the agent told him) had broken into petalled green, tough fresh cuticles no bigger than fingertips. Even the dogshit smelt sweeter in the sun; baked slightly when the sunshine caught the angle between the apartment blocks just after noon. Newspapers blew lighter along the cross streets. Awnings opened out again on the avenues. After two weeks he said to Howard, when they lay in his broad bed at the edge of sleep, ‘You’re the only thing keeping me here’, but it wasn’t quite true even then. And by the summer, when Howard answered him at last – ‘You’re the only thing keeping me here’ – it was hardly true at all, though Tomas was deep in love. And he couldn’t work out why Howard had answered him in those terms, how much, what exactly he meant by it. ‘But you’ve always lived here; you’ve got nowhere else,’ Tomas said, a phrase that sounded narrower, more dependent than he intended. When what he really meant was, you don’t need me for this to be your home. Howard blinded himself on his lover’s pale back, in the dent
between backbone and shoulderblade. ‘You’re the only thing keeping me here,’ he repeated. ‘You’re the only thing keeping me here.’ Conscious, of course, of being misunderstood; of intending a greater depth of misery than his buoyant young lover could plumb.

And it was Tomas who took other lovers, by that first fall. Howard raged at him, inconsolably, when he found out. Not that Tomas proved shy in confession; he had a natural, easy way with experience, and a faith in his love for Howard that couldn’t be shaken by events or decisions, his own included. By this point, indeed, their first passion (never very fiery on Howard’s part) had cooled in any case; and Tomas’s sense of their growing companionship delighted in the fact of having news to tell. And such news: he felt obscurely that he had done as he’d been told to do; his reward being that the task proved more pleasant than he’d anticipated. (It was a barman from a hole in the wall on Avenue A: a kid from Tennessee who wanted to design stage sets, and sidelined as a lighting assistant at a nearby bar/theatre called the Nuyorican Café. Both had had military fathers and suffered for it, a conversation, now painless from repetition, they approached with feigned tenderness, remembered soreness.) Tomas had been a good boy; he wanted Howard to know how good and loving he had been. And in spite of his anger Howard almost laughed at the way Tomas, like a dog with a bone, laid his little infidelity at the feet of his master. No doubt that insight stoked his fury further: it reassured him he could grow cruel as he liked and the boy wouldn’t turn away. Perhaps inconsolable isn’t the best word for Howard’s reactions. His vanity rather than his affection had been touched. He remembered this clearly, thinking, I can’t believe that ugly dumb kid has the balls to cheat on me, to think he can go one better. The thought made him sick at heart: to be reduced to such crudity.

He gave the boy one terrible night and then reconsidered: better policy by far would be to show how little he cared. It was only jealousy, the habit of jealousy. And he wasn’t a coward
with respect to habits: there was nothing in his emotional life he couldn’t master, and bend to his own will, to express what he wished it to express. He had learned over time that emotions were only a means of expression, a means most of us handled clumsily. But if we took pains to determine just what it was we wanted our emotions to
say
, we could adjust the manner of expression to match the meaning – over which we exercised a strict control, lying as it did within our will. He simply adapted the old question, What exactly do you want to say? into What exactly do you want to feel? and corrected his emotions accordingly. He did not want to feel jealous of Tomas; he knew that if he concentrated, and applied suitable thought to the matter, he would no longer feel jealous of Tomas. He did not feel jealous of Tomas.

In fact, for several months that fall, as the leaves banked against the railings of Tompkins Square, they used to go to the Nuyorican Café, even on a school night, to take in a reading, or a show – dreadful performances, mostly, and to be honest, both of them were more or less grateful when Tomas decided to drop his recent acquaintance. Apart from anything else, the journey home across town and up proved to be a greater nuisance than the thing was worth. But Howard congratulated himself on the precedent set: Tomas had no reason now not to confide his little flings to his real lover. And he made a point of taking lovers of his own: casual, mostly uncomfortable one-off affairs, which he never told Tomas about. Howard knew he couldn’t have kept the ugly, preening boastfulness out of his lips and voice, which would have been particularly unpleasant, for both of them. Tomas, for his part, managed with remarkable innocence and charm to gossip about his lovers like any other news. A strange but somehow undeniable testament to his good character, his generosity. In any case, Howard rather enjoyed the secret knowledge of his own few affairs; the mystery bulked them out, if nothing else. And they were something to turn to, if he ever felt so jealous again, so compromised and dependent.
Even so, long after the words had become nothing but a habit for Tomas, Howard used to answer his good-night pledge with his own more passionate assurance: you’re the only thing keeping me here. You’re the only thing keeping me here.

But all that was years ago, and Howard’s sense of dependence had grown more and more irksome to him; he wished to shrug it off if he could, and stretched himself various ways, testing the strength of the attachment. In part, he was merely bored. His life had little enough variation in it. He needed little variation, but sharing such a meagre ration of vicissitudes with another soul seemed to rob him of his austerity, his purity. By this point, for all his native unwillingness to be disappointed, Tomas had got the measure of his man – such a steady reckoning was hard to miss. Howard, in short, could no longer flatter himself by the image in his lover’s eyes: there was no flicker left in it. Nothing to satisfy Howard’s innate sense that his life was unusually grand, in substance if not in scope; that he was noble, that his very nobility doomed him to the terribly ordinary course of his days. If pressed (and to be fair, he often pressed himself), he conceded that his distinguishing virtue was hard to put a finger on; honesty, perhaps, came nearest the mark, but he wasn’t exactly honest. Simple truth telling certainly fell more easily to Tomas’s lips than his own. By honesty, he meant rather an undistorted sense of the value of life, of its illusions: he possessed a clear vision of the neutral, loveless landscape in which he found himself. Nothing flowered around him or underfoot; so he walked without hesitation in straight lines. And trampled on phantoms in a fashion that often seemed cruel to others. It seemed to him a worthy tragedy, that just those natural gifts – his wit, his subtlety – which might have allowed him to make a name for himself in the world, had in fact dictated the terms of his deliberate and rather joyless mediocrity: nothing, he saw, was worth putting your name to. The fact that he’d stuck by his lover for over seven years seemed to him a kind of lapse
in discipline: he’d let himself fall into bad habits and hadn’t the heart or the courage to break free of them. Fear of his own nature, left entirely to itself, unbuffered by the necessary decencies of shared life, played its part. With each passing year, he grew more and more terrified of what he would do to himself if left alone, the logical conclusions he would reach.

Shortly before the letter from Annie Rosenblum arrived, he stopped for a drink at the Irish bar outside the subway station below the school. Tuesday before Thanksgiving, and even he felt the gentle relief of absent duties, cleared space. Night had fallen already across the broad parkland at the foot of the hill; star and moon grew stronger between the bluster of the clouds. Tomas wouldn’t get home for another hour or two; in any case, Howard realized, nothing in his mild celebratory mood inclined him to see his lover. He wished rather to draw out the hours of their separation. Let him worry a little when Howard came home late. Carved wooden booths ran along one side of the bar; generations of drinkers had cut names or mere lines, depending on their patience and sobriety, into the dry-fleshed wood. As Howard waited for the barman to pull a pint of Guinness, someone called his name, and he turned to find Benny Kahn, a colleague from the middle school, a short, pillow-chested man, with rimless specs pushed up against the bald patch in his curly hair. Howard joined him for the first beer, and offered him another. He could feel the tension mounting in his colleague – hear it in the little stutter of his voice, the clipped phrases, the slickness in the man’s small fingers as they ran through the back of his semitic curls. Howard recalled certain rumours that Benny used to ‘take a
shabattical’
from his wife from time to time, with some boy or other he picked up downtown; the wife and he had, apparently, come to a kind of understanding. Howard never paid much attention: he didn’t believe most of the gossip he heard in the cafeteria. The teachers were just as bad as the kids; worse. Howard, for his part, felt very little nerves, only the
slow softening of drunkenness, moving down his face, his hands, his feet.

After two more beers they took it in turns to hit the john. Benny was waiting when Howard pushed into the booth. It didn’t last long and then Benny came out first and Howard waited a while on the toilet seat, happy to have a minute alone before flushing. Quite sober now, and being sober, sick of himself. He hadn’t done that kind of thing in a year; he wondered why he bothered, it seemed so unlike him, just another habit he’d picked up from other people, and would really rather do without. He thought, if nobody told you you needed it, you might never find out. Perhaps he’d forgotten what it was like to be fifteen; the enormous nights, the way solitude expanded around you as intimately as the space around lovers, the sense of accompaniment one’s body offered, the dialogues possible. He had known all of these things at the time, and suffered too, but suspected even then that they tended to be exaggerated. Flues and fevers produce similar distortions, but people forget them as soon as health returns. And the sentiments of lovers obscure many unpalatable acts that nobody in their sober selves would admit to. His desire for such things seemed slowly to have separated from the rest of his desires, such as they were; he might now discard it without fuss or pain. The bald fact of the unpleasantness had struck him particularly in this last encounter, for a number of reasons. Thank God that awkward nervous little man had gone by the time Howard came out of the john. Nevertheless, he stored up the memory of it, on the slow train home; another dirty little secret to keep from Tomas.