Either Side of Winter

by Benjamin Markovits

  No; somehow everyone was conspiring to push him out from the middle of his own life; and he was conspiring with them, helplessly. The days were getting longer; he had a half-hour, an hour, after school, of walking in the Park, while night grew up around him like a rising sea. He had begun to put off coming home. Snow still littered the grass; most of the lawns were fenced off; the footpaths strewn with grit. Once a streak of colour in the gloom caught his eye, some way ahead; one of those striped scarves that reminded Howard of peppermint candy. Tomas had one; Howard could just make out the bulk of a man pushing a bicycle, turning at a bend. Howard, relenting, almost called out; then he saw the two women, slighter, emerging to the side of him as the path straightened. Howard began to run after; the shock of each step seemed to chip away at his feet, they were so cold. The beat of his breath and heart filled the air; it was impossible nobody saw him, nobody turned. He stopped to catch his wind at the top of a bridge; whoever it was had gone, but he could make out dim figures climbing the twisted path of a hill. A mock castle stood against the side of it, overlooking a lake, half frozen – dark sheets of ice floating on lighter ripples. Bands in summer played at the amphitheatre against the shore. He was sure it was them; the longer figure walked in the slow unbroken gait of a man with a bike. Howard set off again, calling out, hey, hey, hey! He only wanted to make sure, to see how far these people would go to ignore him, what they got up to behind his back. They must have seen him coming, heard him, long before. But by the time he got to the top, sweating already into the neck of his tied collar, nobody was there, and the paths split darkly away below. He wanted to say, you’re nothing without me; you have no bonds. I’ll tell you one thing: don’t let him see you down; he won’t have a clue; he thinks you’re making it up; he thinks it’s just a matter of will. You’re welcome to him; you’ve got no idea. He’s brutal; you’ve seen what they’re like, of all people. The way out eventually fell into his lap. Some Friday nights Annie assisted the cantor at her local synagogue; she asked Howard if the two of them would like to come round and hear her sing. Maybe they could get some supper afterwards – at one of those kosher Italians dotting the Upper East Side. ‘Come on, Howard, play along with me.’ She meant – humour me, in my dressing up, in my religion. The girl he knew wanted nothing to do with any of that… scene. Strange, if not worse, how these convictions had a way of thinning over time. ‘I’d love to,’ he said, ‘but I don’t think Tomas is persuadable. He never feels quite comfortable in synagogues.’ True, in its way: Tomas could never sit still anywhere, and churches, mosques, temples struck him as desperately dated, out of fashion. Still, the shocked silence at the end of the line told him his remark had hit home. ‘Well, suit yourself,’ was all she said; an odd phrase, Howard thought later, given the circumstances.

  In the end, he came alone; got drunk on red wine, one of his binges. After Frannie went to bed, the two old friends shared another bottle, sitting together on the couch. Her singing had moved him; it seemed so fine and human, free of the ugliness habitual to most gestures, accents, explanations. The delight Annie took in her outgrown tradition conveyed a warmer irony than his own. Irony, in fact, was the wrong word for it: joy itself was a kind of honesty. (These people had always understood that.) It made his detachment seem stingy, if not worse, wilful and slightly mad: the attitude of a boy with his hands over his ears, refusing to listen. Her sharp little face was as small as his mother’s, as he remembered it, when she lay against the white of the hospital sheets, so thin. On good days they went for walks in the grounds; his father used to lift her in the air, with his hands on her hips, like a dancer – she was almost proud of how wonderfully light she had grown.

  They sat sloping together on the orange cushions, which needed restuffing. Annie had to look up to meet his eyes. Howard, in a concessional mood, wanted to kiss her; she was such a beautiful lonely woman, so brave. He wanted to do what she wanted; it’s what he thought she wanted, what he had always thought she had always wanted. He leaned and fell over and caught the corner of her lips; he wouldn’t let go. For once he was grasping at life, at straws. A certain clumsiness, the sodden weight of his body, left her intentions unclear for a minute. But he persisted beyond that minute, more forcefully, his hand pressed hard between her legs with what had become the unmistakable ardour of revenge. The grunt of her breathing deepened with the first pain of sexual pleasure; until she slipped out from under him and he came down sideways on the couch. The look of untouched, untempted, unsurprised pity in her – ‘no no please no Howard please’ – instantly sobered him. He sat up and knew she thought she’d taken the measure of him again, in that awful jealous contest of human intimacies. ‘This isn’t what you want,’ she repeated. ‘This isn’t what you want.’

  For once, however, he refused the obvious retreat. A thin line of ache had awoken in his breast, like the first sharp pain of a healing wound after the numbness of an anaesthetic. And he offered instead, as if rehearsing the argument, ‘We would never be happy together.’

  She said, ‘No. Of course, no.’

  He said, ‘We aren’t the kind of people to be happy with other people.’

  She hesitated, and then, almost apologetically, ‘I have Frannie.’

  ‘Yes.’ He nodded; that was true; it never for a minute occurred to him that he had Tomas. What he meant was the full equality of loving. ‘When you’, he began, ‘first – spent the night.’ Her face showed its unmistakable age. In the flush of wine, every blemish of her skin had reddened; these lay like thin paint over her cheek, rough to the touch. Physically now, she inspired in him nothing but the purest, most childish revulsion. She was nodding back at him, encouraging. ‘Were you willing?’ He feared her answer terribly. The failure of his memory, after their first night together, had shocked him more than he realized. The fact that she had called two or three times a day; that he hadn’t answered. That she had pushed letters under his door. It was as if she had walked across a field in the snow, and left no footprints. His memory stretched out white and cold in every direction. He thought, if you are capable of forgetting, you are capable of anything. All kinds of burial.

  She hid her mouth between her thumb and forefinger – another characteristic gesture. She treated everything as an intellectual proposition, with honest puzzling. ‘I can’t remember very well any more. Afterwards it seemed so much less important than what was happening to me. I admit I was selfish. But then again, you always got so low around that time of year, so needy. You were very drunk; much drunker than me. It wasn’t entirely without pity, I’ll say that much in my defence. Was I willing?’ she repeated, and ventured at last, smiling slightly, ‘I was definitely able; I would say, probably more than you.’ His old phrase for her came into his head: you always take me firmly by the hand. It seemed so comically short of the truth.

  Partly what he felt was relief. He was innocent, after all, as he’d always supposed; that was the main thing. What the snow covered up was only other people’s tracks. These crisscrossed him mercilessly. Everything, it turned out, had happened against his will. Every involvement. He knew that something about the whole business had angered or wounded him – violence had been done, bereavements inflicted, terrible entanglements – which he had not yet brought to the surface and might not need to now. He said to her at last, ‘I don’t think I want to see you any more, after all. Either one of you. You’ll understand.’ And then the beauty of the lie first struck him, his experiment in detachment, both lies acting in concert, and he added, ‘Tomas feels very uncomfortable’ – he gestured at the apartment, the mess of books, his daughter asleep behind a closed door – ‘about all this.’ To persuade her, he managed to confess, ‘he’s all I have, he’s the only thing keeping me here’, almost as if it were true. ‘I have to… hunker down.’

  ‘I don’t think – I don’t think Francesca will accept that, now. I don’t think I can ask her to.’

  He kissed her quickly on the cheek. She smelt of singing, very rich; the stench of
singing gone cold, in her armpits, in the fading heat of her breasts, rising along her throat. ‘We all learn to accept everything,’ he said.

  *

  Tomas wasn’t back when Howard got home. He showered, changed, brushed the stain of red wine from his teeth. Things hadn’t gone far enough; it was time to get the whole thing over with. No doubt that drunken kiss was only a way out. You’re better off on your own, advancing inward: that way you’re sure of being understood. He realized, of course, that depression is also the instrument of depression: a tool that serves in digging into itself, a deepening device. He might as well use it while he had the chance.

  In bed that night, under the low ceiling, he said to Tomas, ‘I thought you should know, Annie and I’ – it wasn’t like him to want to soften the blow, but he tried – ‘resumed our former intimacy.’ Tomas rolled over on his elbow and looked at him. He sensed already something wrong, but couldn’t tell what kind of wrong it was: something hurtful, or something untrue. Howard said, ‘We got drunk.’ The lie when it came seemed simpler than he’d supposed, more obvious. It had, after all, once been the truth. ‘We made love.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’ Howard lay on his back, looking up. Once, in the summer holidays, years before, they had borrowed a car and taken it up to Maine. Stayed at a friend’s house on the shore; a two-bedroom shack a hundred yards from the rollers. The makeshift beauty of seasides. They hung their bathing towels over the curtainless rods when they wanted to sleep late, and awoke with dry sand in their faces. A rotten boarded path ran to the water; Tomas spent the afternoons fixing it up. Howard read, tried his hand at keeping a journal, began a few poems, which untangled into sketches, loving cartoons: of Tomas, of the house, of the water, ships, gulls. In the early days, when Tomas was still jealously in love and Howard could still pretend to himself that he was only letting the kid tag along. They were both unhappy to be going; and fought childishly over breakfast, over the clear-up. The sour mood persisted on the long road home, only Howard didn’t seem to mind it much. He had the wheel, since Tomas couldn’t drive; and whatever was said, he kept half his mind on the straight lines running away from him, splitting the asphalt; the traffic coming against him, or overtaking. Tomas’s reproaches hardly touched him: you have to talk to me, you have to tell me what you feel, I can’t help you if you don’t tell me what you feel. Etc. Howard remembered vividly the quiet of his own detachment. It’s what he liked, there was no shame in that: the indifference of control.

  He said, absolutely free of passion or any semblance of subterfuge, ‘What you have to understand, Tomas, is the chance I have; the chance I can’t afford to miss. To be part of a family. My mother died, as you know, when I was very young – just at the age when I first knew what I had, I lost it.’ He often took this tone with Tomas, patient, pedantic. It was like a scar of his profession – the habit of instruction – the brutal repetitions of gesture, of condescension, in a life spent among children. ‘My father wasn’t very good at – warmth. He wasn’t very warm. There has always existed between us – between Annie and me – strong attractions. I’ve never known anything like it with another woman.’ More gently, more kindly still: ‘I’ve never known anything like it with another man. I don’t want to lose this chance, again.’ And then, a little sly dig at Tomas, mockingly sentimental, a wound too subtle for him to understand. ‘I know, more than anyone, how precious family life can be. When you get older, when you realize the way we lead our lives, what seems so free, so easy to us, so desirable, will come to appear – very poor, very empty, almost adolescent. Annie and I talked, openly, without illusion. She isn’t – she’s also – rather lonely. We decided we could come to some kind of an arrangement, something that looked very much like, that wasn’t far short of, loving. Something we could live with.’ Tomas hadn’t said a word; he was weeping, as he always did, both childishly and almost painlessly. Tears reddened his face, and left little sticky tracks across his heightened colour, which looked like blood. Howard turned towards him at last, and put his hand to the side of the young man’s cheek. ‘You’re better off without me. You’ve outgrown me.’ Afterwards, he dried his palm carefully on a corner of his bedsheet, so that Tomas couldn’t see. He couldn’t tell whether Tomas believed him or not, and didn’t, after all, much care. Two birds with one stone, he thought.

  *

  The Rosenblums stopped calling. Annie, at least, following her confession, had decided to give him a little breathing space; that was something of a relief. Tomas left shortly after; it had always been Howard’s apartment. They spent a silent, curiously peaceful week together, even shared a bed, as he packed up his things and found somewhere else to stay. He didn’t have much; the bike descended from the ceiling, departed. There was nowhere in that long studio to hide, except the bathroom; and the night before Tomas left, Howard found him sobbing heavily there, sitting on the pot with the lid down. ‘I talked to Annie,’ he said at last. ‘I called her; I had to talk to her. We had coffee; all three of us. She said it isn’t true; she said none of it’s true. You’re just trying to get rid of us.’ The sight of him was strangely moving; Howard reached out a hand and touched the top of his hair. ‘Poor kid,’ he said. ‘I’ll be all right.’ Tomas stood up suddenly and pushed him back against the opposite wall; the top of his head cracked against the bathroom mirror, which also cracked. More violence. He felt the danger of his weight on the sink. Something was bound to give. Tomas had him pinned by the hands; his puffed red face an inch away – the sheer ugly brutish bulk of him plain as day, looming up. ‘You need help,’ he said at last, and let go. The marks on Howard’s wrists never bled, but seemed to flake, scab none the less; these rubbed off finally only a week after Tomas had gone.

  He thought of taping the mirror, but it seemed unlucky, so he threw the shards away. Then he never got round to replacing them. Whenever he stood up after washing his face, for a second he thought that the image before him was his own: those dirty black medicine shelves, mostly empty, a few pillboxes, his blade, a bar of wrapped soap.

  SPRING

  A Girl as Fresh as Spring

  I

  Three years ago Roger Bathurst came into the English office with swollen red eyes. He squinted thickly through them; they lent an air of general discomfort to his narrow face, already scratchy with a beard. This was the old English office, before the renovations: a long broom cupboard lit at the end by a single high window, which displayed a patch of tree and sky no bigger than a dishcloth hung out to dry on a washing line and blowing in the wind. Desks lined either wall, and Stu Englander called over his shoulder, ‘take a fastball inside, hey?’ Stu liked to put on ordinary-Joe airs with Roger, who was an honest, intelligent, perpetually disgruntled Mets fan. ‘Leave it. I’m looking for a book. I’m blind.’ Roger had a student in tow, and the girl was meant to help him find it: a copy of Astrophel and Stella Bathurst liked to quote from, particularly the last lines of the first sonnet. Middle of third period on a late-fall Tuesday. Roger was teaching freshman English, creative writing, and concentrating, as usual, on telling them what not to do.

  The leaves had turned; one or two occasionally fell brightly across the compressed view and disappeared. Stu was enjoying a pleasant dose of restless longing. He never relished the weather so much when he was out in it: he liked the pinch of confinement, the way it suggested he had vaster ambitions than these narrow walls. Roger stood with his weight on one leg like he wanted to talk. ‘I was cooking, cutting chillies last night, and didn’t wash my hands after. Now this, even a day later. Go figure.’ The girl, standing on tiptoe, broke Stuart’s line of sight picking a book from Roger’s shelf; she had to stretch her longest finger to catch the top of the binding, and inch it by degrees till it tipped off the edge. Rather below the average height; curly brown hair, some of it caught inside the collar of her blouse; an oval face. Even with her lips closed in shy concentration he caught the faint full suggestion of braces. Stu leaned over to meet his colleague’s eye; they were n
ever intimate, but managed to keep up an everyday banter that seemed, to Stuart at least, a more satisfying language than that of friendship. Roger hung around in the doorway while the girl returned to class. ‘Honest to God, it’s like looking through dishwater.’ He put his weight on his shoulder against the door jamb; they often enjoyed these respites from the pressures of the day. It surprised Stuart how happy they made him, such pauses. An easy companionable minute, of whatever kind, he often reflected, is a great pleasure in itself.

  ‘Rather a winsome creature,’ he said at last. Stu had a pink, unlived-in face, slightly puffed outwards but otherwise untouched by time (a terrifying omission). Only his steel-grey hair, combed carefully back, suggested his age. This produced a disconcerting day-for-night effect, like a painting by Magritte; a false cheeriness.

  ‘What, Rachel? I never notice what they look like.’ Obscurely satisfied, Roger turned blindly into the hall. Why it gives men pleasure to get these things commented on, Stuart thought, I’ll never know. And yet, the rest of that long spring, Stu’s eyes sought out her oval face when the streams of kids passed him in the hallway. He supposed she was fashionable, in a clean-cut, rather virginal way: she wore her socks high, her blouses open at the neck, and her various skirts fell just above the knee. The knee, as it happens, always struck him chiefly as a structural joint, rather overrated in the literature, and not so much titillating as suggestive of the mechanical difficulties underlying our every function. To see the bone beneath her skin unshape and shape itself again at her every step moved him to a kind of pity. Her face, above it, was invariably compressed into a frown, and she tended to walk doubled over under a backpack square with books. She struck him as a conscientious girl struggling somewhat to keep up. Perhaps there was a sexual taint to the sweetness of his sympathy for her; but even so, the sight of her always warmed him slightly, like a mug in the hand on a cold day. He told himself he would have felt the same pity looking at the boy he was forty years before – though he suspected she would taste more richly those experiences which for the most part he had failed to suffer for.