Either Side of Winter

by Benjamin Markovits

  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.

  *

  When he got back from Annie’s place, Tomas had fallen asleep in front of the television: a loose hand pushed his shirt up to the first of his ribs. The heating pipes clanked, quickening, in the radiators. Such violence seemed surprisingly upsetting; a real invasion of the niceties. Howard was reluctant to wake his lover up: he didn’t want to have to talk. That walk across the Park had chilled him to the bone; he couldn’t quite feel how cold he’d become. And now, by contrast, the close heat of the apartment left him breathless and rather worried; he sighed deeply, again and again, to take in more air. Tomas stirred and roused himself, and blinked, happy as always to find his sight filled with Howard: proof of an instinctive affection Howard instinctively wished to disappoint. ‘What was that all about? You left without your coat.’

  ‘I wanted to get some air.’

  ‘I would have come with you.’

  ‘Look at you. You’re not going anywhere.’

  Tomas sat up, pressing his palms downwards against his brows, as if he wished to commit something to memory. Howard could smell the sleep coming off him; the shirt unrumpled again over the little puddle of his gut. Tomas closed his eyes and swung both arms from the elbow in towards his face – the gesture of someone inhaling a scent of broth from a hot pot. Only he said, ‘Come here come here come here come give me a kiss.’ Howard obeyed, hanging his head for shame, and closed his own eyes to blot the shame of it out, as Tomas pressed firs
t one cold cheek and then another against the heat of his neck. ‘Don’t think I don’t know,’ Tomas said. That boy never needed to shave: he had the kind of snowy skin no blades of stubble ever broke through. Howard thought how young it made him seem, how boyish still – though by this time the gap in their ages had grown thoroughly respectable. Cradle-robber cradle-robber cradle-robber, he thought; then the word shifted, took on its new, more appropriate application; he felt the pinch of tears, then the sticky mess of them, bad as blood. It wasn’t fair what had happened; what she had done to him, the extent of life she had committed him to. ‘Don’t know what?’

  ‘Don’t think I don’t know you. I know you. I know you feel cold and bad lately; and then you think, I’m a cold bad man. I know better. Don’t think I don’t know better. I know what a pussy-kitten you are.’

  Howard dried up: he was still capable of being surprised by Tomas, and surprised at the poverty of his own privacy, its transparency. Surprised at Tomas’s fine feeling. Only the boy always went too far; and Howard could not repress, even from this mark of real sympathy, a slight aesthetic recoil. And he guessed rightly what was coming, he had heard it before, and heard it now, warm with the breath of the boy in his ear: ‘The trouble with you is you don’t trust anybody; I know because you don’t even trust me. You have to give more to get more. I only want others to see what I see, how special you are, how much you have to give’, etc. And yet, it isn’t that Howard’s vanity didn’t tally with such an insistence on his rarity. Only the tone of it seemed low, common – it degraded him, to have fallen into such company; worse, to have chosen it, to have proved faithful to it. And behind Tomas’s frothy truisms lay the boy’s terrible, smug assurance, which he could never resist putting into words: ‘I know you better than you know yourself.’ A notion against which everything in Howard screamed revolt. In spite of the fact, which Howard helplessly admitted, that Tomas did see some things more clearly than he could himself; had guessed how close Howard had been to tears, had deliberately provoked them. He sat up now, awkwardly, pressing his hands against the boy’s broad chest to get a purchase on balance; then recomposed his face, till it looked bored or numb – till he thought it looked bored or numb, though he couldn’t be sure. It occurred to him, if he wanted to put a sting into that kid, he could tell him the news.

  *

  It did sting, of course, Howard’s involuntary betrayal, the roots he had planted, without knowing it, in another life. After the shock, Tomas recovered quickly, eagerly – wished to meet her at once, them, lover and daughter both. But Howard insisted, understandably perhaps, that a new father was enough for the girl to take in for the time being. Introducing her now to his young gay German lover might be considered ‘gilding the lily’ – a phrase he guessed rightly Tomas did not understand, especially in its current ironic application. He hoped it would distract him from that curious mention of the kid’s ethnicity, which had little to do with the matter, after all; and Howard couldn’t say why he had included it, except to fill out a list. A long list is always more persuasive than a short one. But what exactly was he hoping to persuade him of?

  In practical terms, however, his new daughter proved a great comfort to Howard. Whenever he wished for a minute’s peace, a minute’s respite from, among other things, his own dependence on the younger man’s enthusiasms, he said, simply, ‘I’m going to stop by the Rosenblums tonight.’ Then he might stop by, or he might not, depending. The mere fact of his new daughter gave him a trump card in all the little negotiations of love – those skirmishes over plans and priorities, jealousies, affections. ‘I’m going to stop by the Rosenblums’ became his coded way of saying, I need you less than you thought, I have a richer outer life than you imagined. Which was true, after all: Francesca involved him intimately, relentlessly in the world outside his own head. And Tomas had urged him again and again over the years to venture out of that elegant confinement.

  And then Christmas came, and Tomas, a good and homesick German, insisted first plaintively, then tenderly, then angrily, that the Rosenblums come by on Christmas Eve for glühwein and carols. ‘They’re Jews,’ Howard said. ‘Well, they can be Jews as much as they like on Christmas Day like the rest of America. I want to meet her.’ The snow had fallen too early that year, drifted and cluttered the parks, where it survived, ugly and icy, in banked white streaks under benches, along the sides of cross-town roads, in the ripples of half-buried rock. Everywhere else pavement grit and crowded feet had browned it and ground it into puddles, which leaked and spread on to the doorsteps of the delis, the threadbare shag of the apartment lobbies, the floors of cabs. Winds bullied up and down the avenues unchecked. Everyone had a cold in the nose, drips, streaked voices, unthawed feet. A dingy end to the year, till a warm front blew off the water the night before Christmas Eve. And deposited its white burden of cloud, covering the old in the new – a fresh coat of snow no better than the first but innocent still, still capable of the necessary illusion. ‘I want to come,’ Frannie had said. ‘Makes a change from Chinese food and a bad movie.’

  Tomas drove Howard frantic all day getting ready. He woke early, shifted out of bed, and began vacuuming, in sleepy half-consciousness. ‘For God’s sake, turn it off,’ Howard shouted at regular intervals, lifting the duvet from his throat. At nine, Tomas came up with a cup of coffee, said nothing, set it by the bed. There was a kind of silence between them: they had both reached that stage of the invisible contest when questions don’t need to be answered, so intimate and sensitive have the lovers become. Howard guessed that he was losing; Tomas had grasped the possibilities at stake. There was the chance of a real future for them now, a growing and changing one, an expansion; even Tomas, greedy, constitutionally unimpressionable, had suffered under the steady retraction of their lives, presided over by Howard’s ‘honesty’ – his refusal to give in to the ‘necessary insincerities’, even for the sake of happiness. (Tomas had never before considered his enthusiasms to be necessary insincerities. The description had an infectious, a deadening persuasive power.) They lived in a large ground-floor studio. The bed lay on top of the kitchenette, reached by a ladder propped against the side of the fridge. And the rest of the room stretched away towards the bay window in long lines of dark wood, broken by couch, coffee table, armchair, and now the Christmas tree, blocking half of the white light from the street. There was a brick fireplace; and Tomas carefully laid a fire across the andirons. It was the awful quiet crackle of the balled-up newspapers that irked Howard most, a little light tickling across his nerves. So he roused himself at last, and climbed down, if only to get himself in the way. Then Tomas began to cook a goose – a desperately messy, sweaty, speculative operation, which took up much of the day, and drew Howard, in spite of himself, in.

  Annie and Frannie entered briskly to the smell of roasting bird. They brought enough of the cold in with them to make the shutting of the front door a sweet exclusion; dutifully stamped their caked feet, admired. They had worked each other into a pitch of curiosity through the course of the day. Sisterly by habit, they grew positively girlish. There was such gossipy excitement in the thought of meeting Howard’s boy lover. Their lives had been added to, and what was old had been renewed in the process. The sense of novelty included a spice of wickedness: how cheaply mother and daughter had acquired relations. They felt a touch guilty at the ease of it, how lightly the blood-intimacy had been picked up, and free of that heaviness time imbues it with; how easy it might be to lay aside again. And then it was all so strange and painlessly unlike: a studio apartment on the West Side, gay young lives, a real fire. ‘Isn’t it decadent,’ Annie said, with a certain theatrical escalation, not entirely unironic, that reminded Howard powerfully of their old irretrievable youth and friendship, ‘here in the middle of the city, a glass of glühwein, these burning logs?’ And he recalled what his father had said after he brought Annie home for a ‘country weekend’ – around Christmas, nineteen years ago. ‘I like your friend, son. But I must say, they�
�ve never been the kind to hide their light under a bushel, have they?’ A test of his sympathetic allegiances Howard refused to answer either way. This was the kind of remark his mother used to put a stop to. ‘That’s not nice, George; and what’s worse, it isn’t true.’ His father would answer, irritably, ‘Well, you know best, dear, you always do.’ He meant it too, though – grateful for a correcting influence, a loving margin to his bitterness. But Howard said nothing.

  Tomas for once wore a collared shirt, twice unbuttoned, over his faded jeans; an apron, well wrapped about, brought out the calf-like heft of his shoulders, the vanity in his narrowed waist. He was shy of them both, glad of his duties; and the girl was shy of him. A compound of associations turned Howard’s thoughts to his mother – who had been built up over time, in that lonely mythology of widower and son, into an icon of simplicity, sympathy, creaturely wisdom. She died when he was eight, of breast cancer; he remembered asking her, shortly before her death, but before he understood the thinning away that afflicted her, why they never gave him a baby brother? ‘I’m having too much fun just with you and Dad,’ she said with a complicitous wink. An answer that left him in a tangle of conflicting reflections: it had never occurred to him, for one thing, that she was having fun, that some part of her natural and unquestioned happiness was snatched, momentary, contingent – that it could end. He remembered feeling that she had somehow joined the pair of them, father and son, for the ride; they couldn’t help it, she could. Later, the other possibility struck him: that his father, never a natural family man, had baulked at having more children; one, indeed, may have been a source of some dispute. He wanted Howard’s mother to himself. George, like his son, found it difficult to expand; the Peasbodys drew tight circles, and protected the inside fiercely. At the time, of course, both father and son had failed at that, disastrously. How quickly, after all, his mother had died.