She was still somewhat drunk from the night before, and the peach-coloured liquid suggested at least that it was going to get better before it got worse. Charles it seems had decided to let her talk. He ordered some kind of huevos and ate them hungrily and without great dignity when they appeared; leaning forward to get low to the plate and looking up at her from under his thickening eyebrows to show he was listening from time to time. Amy said something about looking forward to the football season, that being the one thing about the start of the school year she always looked forward to: the leaves drying up on the trees, the first norther coming through to knock them off, and Notre Dame. She hadn’t decided yet who to root for now that she’d transplanted herself. Her alma mater, Amherst, was pretty much a wash-out as far as football went. And she figured she’d spent enough time on the East Coast now not to beat against the prevailing winds any more – she might try pulling for the Giants.
Charles said, ‘So you’re one of those girls who makes a point of liking football.’
She almost bridled at that: she had been trying to impress him. Charles didn’t seem to notice and, somewhat abashed, Amy made a confession she’d been hoping to get to at some stage in any case. ‘I guess I’ve always been something of a Daddy’s girl.’ That set her off, though she probably left as much out as she included – saving it for later, perhaps, when she needed something vulnerable to expose for the purposes of conversation. Her father, also named Charles as it happens, though he went mostly by his middle name Jack, treated her like a boy from the start. To the point where, when her younger brother Andy came along, being that much younger and blooming later as a boy, he couldn’t hope to keep up and turned out something of a disappointment in that respect, and concentrated on what she wouldn’t compete with him at, like painting. Jack had a try-out for a minor-league ball club after college, which when he didn’t make it he ended up in law school. Played the hot-shot lawyer in New York for five years, till Mom came along and they went home to Indiana to raise kids. They were both from Indiana, that was part of the appeal: but Amy guessed he kind of took out his ambitions on her. Not that she minded at all: going to state in softball her senior year was probably the most etc. of her life. And so on.
But, as usual, she edited less than she had intended to. And certain phrases cropped up now and again: I guess I was always the lucky one, I totally see why he resented me. These indicated what she had wanted to indicate in any case – that she was a favourite child. However much she told herself that it was ungenerous, and worse, to bring these things into the open, that they should be the unacknowledged solace of her lonelier hours. Still, the truth insists on being told. She was blessed by the preferences of love. The natural choice of affections. The darling of hearts. The inheritor of her parents’ dreams. The one to bet on.
Though as for that, even Amy couldn’t be sure how much of it was true any more, if it was ever true. It’s always hardest to edit out what you have begun to doubt. Her brother, in his sophomore year at Pomona, had begun to get his cartoons – his graphic art – published in some San Francisco magazines. He won a sculpture prize, including a thousand-dollar cheque, on the strength of which he spent the summer backpacking through Mexico. Aunts, cousins, old college buddies, were always ringing up her parents to say they’d come across his work or his name on a website somewhere. You couldn’t go home without seeing some magazine page tacked on to the fridge or the living-room mirror, most of it too strange or horrible to look at. She had quit the softball team her freshman year and the word she used for Amherst football was really the word that summed up how she had begun to think about the four years after high school: they had proved something of a wash-out. Nothing had changed, least of all her, except that everything she used to like about herself had gotten a little dusty.
Her relations with her mother Joanne had always been somewhat prickly, on her side at least. They just didn’t get each other for a start, besides which there was no way Amy wanted to end up like Joanne: sweet and condescended to, as Amy saw it. Not that her father seemed so happy these days. Another source of guilt. Arthritis in his knees meant he couldn’t even play softball any more, and he spent too much time in front of the couch watching the TV. Two years before he had had his teeth out (after Andy left for college): the thought of that plastic smile sitting in the glass on the shelf above the bathroom sink made her want to cry. He was forty-seven: already he had the artificial cheeriness of an old man to whom no one pays any real attention. Cheaply renovated, that’s what he looked, with the hair he had left brushed back along his neck in thin strands that reminded her of her own wispy scalp after a shower. She should have moved back home after graduation, for a year at least; only, for whatever reason, and the fact surprised her as much as her parents, she hadn’t. When she told her father she was moving to New York, he said, ‘That’s the right kind of thing for you to do. Though I can’t say I didn’t hope you’d come back home. But you always used to take things on head on.’ She puzzled over that ‘used’. Maybe he thought he didn’t know her so well after four years at college. Maybe something else. She got the sense he was sending out a delegate to live the rest of his life – the life he should have lived in New York, when he ran around with a ‘pretty fast crowd’ and didn’t have kids. (That hokum ‘pretty’ gave the game away when he said it.)
Amy knew herself well enough to realize this account of events was only partly right. She needed to think of her life as important. It didn’t seem so any more. Charles, she already suspected, practised some editing of his own. ‘I guess I better push off,’ he said after breakfast, hopeful of contradiction perhaps; though when she asked him what he had planned for the day, he adopted a brisk tone. ‘Buddy of mine’s trying to set up a company,’ he began, and swallowed the last of her drink. ‘I won’t bore you with the details, but I’m lending him a hand.’ And then added, after signalling for the bill: ‘Financial and otherwise.’ As he had guessed, perhaps, that stopped Amy’s curiosity short. All she said was, ‘Do you get summers off?’
‘That’s not how I work,’ he said.
She watched him from her window after he saw her to the lobby. Kneeling on the futon and straining out, she admired the way he seemed to have somewhere to go but no hurry. His dinner jacket trailing off a thumb over his shoulder; the pleasant downhill swagger of a light hangover the morning after, his feet loose in his shoes. But the road dropped sharply and he disappeared behind a bend in it on the way back to the school where his car was parked. She didn’t get a look at his car. She thought, I hope I get a chance to before it ends.
Now that he was gone she didn’t seem to have so much to do, and her apartment didn’t have any answers. Not since high school had she fallen in love, and wasn’t sure how to go about it any more. It used to be easier – this wasn’t hard work, but she felt she could go either way and didn’t want to have to choose. Already the thought presented itself to her: I suppose it depends on how lonely I get teaching, what I decide to make of this whole thing. And then she wondered what about Charles Conway gave her such grounds for confidence the choice was hers; that’s when the first shadow of doubt fell across her, and an ache ran along a vein in her temple. Just like in college, she told herself: by the time you decide you are where you are where you are, it’s too late. And: I hope he calls; I’m not sure I have the guts to any more.
*
She hardly thought about him Wednesday, that’s how she put it to herself at night, aside from a single embarrassment. There seemed so much for her to worry about, running hot and cold all day. By the afternoon the combination of her intermittent sweat and the air-conditioning had taken its toll: she stank slightly, and wished she’d worn a cardigan over her T-shirt to hide the patches under her arms. The problem she thought would be to keep the children quiet. In fact, she couldn’t get them to talk: row upon row of fourteen-year-olds, asleep or terrified or sullenly resentful, appeared before her; and she guessed in retrospect that she should have waited them o
ut. But at the time – how could it be otherwise, given the restless, eager, dissatisfied current to her nature – she buzzed and flitted around them, playing the fool or the prim miss as the occasion demanded, confusing them and herself, desiring alternately and with an instant passion that surprised her to be each of their best friends or never to see them again. By eleven thirty she was utterly beat. She sat in a stall in the teachers’ WC and cried. Then composed her face, and walked out across the baseball field on a bright clear September day whose sunshine it seemed couldn’t touch her as she shivered in it regardless, heading for the cafeteria. The sight of all those children talking at once and eating appalled her. Already she suffered from a kind of persistent stage fright, convinced she would be called upon to remember a name or chastise a delinquent. So she held her head up in a blind way, certain that everyone could see what a miserable fraud she was. Filled a tray with food she was too nervous to eat, and sat in the far corner at an empty table by a window overlooking the concrete balcony on which she had first kissed Charles Conway, the famous son, two nights before.
Other teachers joined her, muttering do you mind if we? as they sat down. Amy sipped a mug of black coffee while picking indiscriminately from a paper plate heaped with tuna-fish salad, cottage cheese, carrot sticks and chocolate doughnuts. A headache danced circles around her eyes, but she began to talk in spite of it. ‘My throat’s so dry, I can’t spit enough to eat,’ she said.
‘After day one I always feel like I’ve been to a rock concert,’ declared a bulldog-faced man with his elbows on the table. And added, ‘I’m in computers.’
Mr Peasbody, stroking his tie, looked round elaborately and said, ‘At this point, my dear, you’re closer to their age than ours.’ They shared a table in the Biology office and had already been introduced. He had made a point of explaining that he was far too old for her, being gay besides, and that he intended to call her from the first what she clearly was: a dear, a darling, etc. If she didn’t mind. She couldn’t read him one bit, and at first she attributed this to the fact that she couldn’t read anybody in this strange new world, anybody at all. Add to that, his being gay, a Connecticut blue-blood, and so on. Most of her relations with older men were driven by the worries over whether or not they wanted to get her into bed. Later, she decided that he was odd; a deliberately closed book.
‘It doesn’t feel that way,’ she said.
‘Not to you, perhaps. Not yet. They’ll grow on you. They are not as strange as they first appear.’
‘Look at them. Eating.’ She gestured at the children through the glass partition between the students’ hall and the faculty dining room. The teachers were outnumbered and some basic quality of that fact could not be ignored: the mass of vital energy was on the other side of the glass wall, and against them.
‘Growing, I often think, brings out terrible manners.’ This from a gentleman in a bow-tie, a pleasantly filled-out figure, with silky cheeks. ‘Stuart Englander.’ She had seen him in the hallways outside the English department; a stack of leather books between elbow and rib, a couple of girls in tow. He had a reputation for being particularly patient with girls. Amy was young enough to feel his charm: the charm of an old man’s contented curiosity, directed at you. Just a half-smile suggesting that not much changes over time, after all. He took her hand.
‘I’m Charles,’ she replied; blushed and added, ‘but you can call me Amy.’
So the thought of him hovered over her first day, but rarely alighted: a slip of the tongue waiting to happen. She had decided over the summer to finish her grading and her preps in the office before going home; but when the last bell rang she filed out with the rest of the students into the baseball field and walked along the row of yellow buses towards her apartment. A backpack hanging off her shoulder, sandals over her feet: a figure indistinguishable from the students pushing their way past, apart from her loneliness and silence, and the slight respect they accorded her, making way, for being one of those people who had already gone through what they were going through and couldn’t do so again.
She ate supper kneeling on the floor with papers spread out across the futon. When she awoke with her head by the plate, she got up, leaving the dish there and her cup on the floor, and took off her clothes on the way to bed. As soon as the lights were off, she began to cry but it wasn’t long after that she fell asleep.
II
Amy’s father called, some Saturday afternoon in October, to say that why didn’t the whole family come to hers for Thanksgiving, if she didn’t mind. From that moment she stopped at least two or three times a day in the middle of whatever she was doing to look forward to it. And after that there was Christmas and after that she could always stay in bed and refuse to go back East when the New Year came. The thought of Charles Conway, of never seeing him again, barely troubled her at all from this imagined retreat; nevertheless, she phoned him at once to tell him the good news, and turned off the Saturday cartoons, and let her dad’s old army blanket slip off her pyjamaed legs and when Charles said, why don’t you come downtown and we can make a real day of it, she answered repeatingly, ‘I want to see you. I just want to see you.’
Charles had already heard a great deal about the charms of Jack Bostick, but he was, among other things, one of those talkers who had so many afternoons to draw out that there was nothing he couldn’t hear twice or three times and with interest too. They sat together against the hedge of the roof garden at the Met, sharing a cup of tea, and twisting from time to time to get a look at the Park behind them: the wind laying a flat hand over the trees; autumn’s untidiness, the seams picked at and ravelling, litter and leaves scattered against the green. ‘I’d very much like to meet your old man,’ he said. ‘I have a feeling the two of us have a lot to say to each other.’
Amy noted a slight resistance in her to such an assertion, the bristle of the trees against the wind, contrary, but felt too much carrying her forward, forward, to pull up short. The tea got cold in her hand as she explained herself: a familiar explanation she had almost grown tired of repeating by the end of college, the words worn out; but she ventured upon it fresh now, with a new listener, and a rising and irresistible sense that whatever view of herself had been true before could be true again, regardless of the disappointments and disillusions of her college life. These were simply an interruption. She was, had always been, Daddy’s girl: a bruiser, healthy and virulent, blunt with happiness and a confidence in her own talents that the frailty and uncertainties of the girls around her had justified all too often. Her father being the root and source of everything she believed in and acted upon and excelled at. From the beginning she had belonged to him, a daughter to rival any son, star of softball and debate teams, both of which her father had coached in his brief spare time, the object of every adolescent crush. ‘You know,’ she said, ‘how there’s always one dad the girls get stuck on.’
‘I had hoped and imagined that to be the case,’ Charles replied.
‘That was my dad. Even after he had his teeth out, he was the kind of man who could bring it off. Make a joke of it, you know, but not look like an old-timer. He had a good body, too, wasn’t anything to be ashamed of with his shirt off. So when he took the girls rafting over the summer and took us out on the water bare-chested – hairy enough to set him apart from the boys we knew but nothing gross – I always caught my friends checking him out.’
She added, conscious of using the past tense, to make up for it, ‘He could have played baseball, too, maybe, if he wanted.’ And again, drinking the cold tea, ‘It’s not like he drove us, either; so when I quit the softball team after freshman year, he was right behind me.’ And roused herself, aware of tailing off, ending lamely: she had suspected before that everything began to go wrong then and that her father’s tame acceptance of the fact had included a more general acknowledgement of her family’s failure to be anything out of the ordinary. ‘My friends at college used to say’ – this coyly, sidelong – ‘I was too in love with my
dad to fall in love with anybody else.’
Whether or not it was true, she had already guessed that it was one of those insights into ourselves that, kept clean by constant repetition, takes our eyes off other dirtier revelations. Though even Amy couldn’t quite forget the misery of her first two months in New York by repeating, ‘I am happy, and loved, and the all-American girl.’
‘I can’t wait’, Charles said, ‘to take him on the town when he comes.’
Again, that slight bristle of resistance; the tree bent forward under the wind, ready to snap back.
*
Charles had a place on Fifth Avenue, a rather grand one-bedroom looking down on 79th Street, and, at an angle, south along the Park. Prints of hunting dogs ranged along one wall, papered deep maroon. A mini-bar lay between two windows, tall as doors, which opened on to narrow fretwork iron balconies. Flowers in terracotta pots banked high against the black paint of the rails. Amy always had the sense when she came in of stepping into an expensive dirty secret, and refused to sleep over, even on Saturday nights. It looked like the flat an older man might keep for a high-class mistress, and she didn’t want to be a part of the son’s inheritance – a pretty young thing to play with at home on weekends, a part of the idleness and the languorous curiosity and the great unacted ambitions of Charles’s world. It seemed an easy way to be happy, and she did not want to be happy easily. And she guessed, rightly perhaps, that Charles quickly grew bored of anyone or thing that gave in to him.
Either Side of Winter Page 2
