An element of family pride prompted her resistance, a puritanical unwillingness to live on borrowed riches and glamour. Something of the same had persuaded her father to leave Manhattan behind, his life at the firm; some urgency original to her mother to forswear baubles, an argument won before Amy’s birth, repeated from time to time in her parent’s marriage, and won again and again by Joanne. ‘Your mother’s right,’ her father used to say, about a boat for the lake or a swimming pool in the backyard or a new car. ‘This isn’t a thing we need.’ One of the few prejudices she had inherited from her mother: a sense of the honour in making do, as a matter of taste. She had been taught living within her means, and over time the phrase had come to include cutting back on what you could let yourself hope for, out of propriety.
Besides, she wished to cut short any jokes about ‘Mrs Charles Conway’ in the teachers’ lounge, any eager, envious curiosity into the life they led. ‘Not much’ was how she answered questions about the things she got up to on her nights and weekends; though this was hardly true. There were restaurants and bars she couldn’t afford, private parties in lofts and roof gardens, once a helicopter ride and a weekend in the Hamptons. But Amy refused to have her head turned, and clung to a kind of middle-class faith not unlike the religious, part of an argument about what was real and what wasn’t real, what mattered and didn’t. Almost to her surprise, Charles followed her tamely back (when she let him) to her place on 246 ½ Street after a night on the town. She would sleep against him in the subway car; they would stagger out together at the last stop and sweat off any leftover drunkenness climbing the hill to her apartment block; then the next morning she would send him home. Amy suspected from time to time that the root of his ‘patience’ with her (that’s the word she used, some of Charles’s friends talked of forbearance) lay in a groundwater of unhappiness not unlike her own; but this insight into her lover required the same insight into herself, and for the most part she was willing to attribute his attentions to gallantry and affection.
Even so, it made plain good sense when her family came at Thanksgiving to give them her flat and stay over at Charles’s place. But she wanted to make a point about families, and mucking in – to flaunt her own inheritance in front of him. ‘This is what I’m really like, around these people,’ she hoped to show him: this is who I am. Not simply to prove her independence, but to preen herself, confident of looking at her best in their affection, at her most desirable, playing the role of golden girl she thought was hers in the family play. In their three months together, Amy had never met Conway père, and made a point of not insisting on it. She met his older brother Robert only once, at an alumni function at the Yale Club. He was a lawyer downtown, and rather charmingly spent the evening getting drunk in a corner with her, complaining about the party and disparaging Charles – who was flitting through the crowds and could be seen from time to time, when they parted, emerging from an embrace, or pushing his way through the packed hall, a drink in each hand spilling over.
*
She spent the afternoon of their arrival, the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, growing increasingly anxious. Charles had slept over the night before, since her holidays began that morning. His life was all holiday, to an extent he left purposefully vague, but he had rather charmingly caught an enthusiasm for Amy’s that outran her own. He brought her eggs in bed, cooked in a way she disliked, along with the papers, which he read, elaborately at his ease beside her, picking at her plate of unfinished food, and fresh squeezed juice, somewhat watery, with the pips in, and only a cup of coffee for himself. Occasionally uttering, in an offhand way, such things as, ‘I once thought I wouldn’t mind taking a run at politics, but then there’s the plain fact of living in DC or God help us Virginia.’ And, ‘I might turn my hand to the greenhouse question, before I’m through. If only to annoy my father.’
Amy eventually grew fed up with his laziness, what she sometimes called his timelessness, the way nothing pricked him to move on; and she kicked him out of bed at last, and out of her door, claiming the hundreds of things she had to do to prepare for Thanksgiving, and including, in the rush of her scolding, ‘I don’t know why you stick around here you get on just fine on your own and never miss me once’, when he complained that he wanted to hang back to meet her folks, etc. The sentiment snagged in her thoughts, she hadn’t meant to go so far, and even the recollection of her saying it and his heeding it later surprised in her a thrill of fear. She watched him loping beside the current of leftover rain running along the kerb. Rags of blue sky were torn from the clouds. She didn’t want him to go; such an ordinary and pleasant afternoon might have stretched before them if it weren’t for her insistence on spoiling everything; and the corollary of these thoughts struck her for the first time: she didn’t want her family to come.
Most of the morning was spent in a hurry that took her mind off the main event. But when the turkey had been got, and everything else in the fridge left on the counter to make space for it, and the cans of candied yams stacked neatly on top of the shelf. When the bags of stuffing, two kinds, had been stuck behind the cereal boxes, and the sack of potatoes, despaired of, pushed to a corner of the floor. When she had bought not only a blend of fresh coffee for her dad from the toniest deli in her neighbourhood but a coffee-maker to brew it in from a warehouse appliance store in Inwood across the Harlem River; and hauled two six-packs of beer up the walk-up and slid two bottles in the freezer to ice them for his arrival. When she had stripped her bed and laid on fresh sheets and a duvet for her parents, and piled a tidy heap of covers beside the futon for herself and her brother. When she had got in a real sweat, in spite of the rain overnight and the opened windows, which turned into a temper; and begun to be overwhelmed by a sense of consumption outstripping the heartiest appetite, of the leftovers to linger week-long in her fridge, kept under saran-wrap on a fatty platter as token and evidence of her family visit, then discarded at last, with a heart as cold as the turkey.
Then she sat down and waited for them to come.
*
She had fallen asleep in front of the television when the bell rang, some hours late, and she thought, not yet, not yet, before waking up and buzzing them in. A trip to the sink to wash the sleep from her eyes, and even so she had time to look round her quiet apartment and count the seconds, before she heard heavy steps coming at last up the stairs, the shuffling gait of a man with bags. Amy had left the door open a crack, and her father pushed his way in and set down two pieces of matching initialled luggage she had never seen before, and said, ‘where’s the bathroom?’ before her mother, pale with lank hair, came and gave her a hug that smelt of the airplane. ‘I’m sorry we’re late but let me tell you, you wouldn’t believe…’ she began and sat down on the futon. ‘I need a drink of water,’ she said with her hands on her lap.
Already Amy felt a slight constriction around her throat at the clutter, not only of bags but of people. Her mother had set a handbag at her feet on the floor, between the futon and the chest from home serving as a coffee table, which Amy stepped over to sit beside her and give her a glass, slightly clouded from the tap. Her mother looked at it once, and said nothing, and drank. Her dad came out and laid his coat, a greasy Burberry, over the two bags in the hall. ‘Look at this, look at this, look at this,’ he said, rubbing his hands in a complimentary fashion. He had lost weight and looked well on it, in spite of the long haul and the early start. There was an animal satisfaction to his movements, a directness, pleasurable in itself like a clear style. His hair, thin and dull the last time she saw him, had been cut short, and bristled slightly where it stood – and now purringly resisted the rub of his hand across his scalp. ‘I’m going to make myself at home,’ he said, looking in the fridge, and her heart went out to him, gratefully, in answered faith. Her mother looked fretfully across at him and called out, ‘I wouldn’t mind some juice if there is any’, holding out her glass for him to fetch. The resentment, Amy thought, a woman feels that her body ages more shame
fully than a man’s.
Her mother wanted a nap but Jack was eager to ‘hit the town’ as he said, and since she didn’t like to be left out of anything, she thought for a minute and decided to come along. Amy felt already she had been muted slightly, turned down almost imperceptibly in volume. She hung back, as the day wore on, more and more with her mother – they both laboured somewhat under the awkward burden of the man’s vitality. Amy had suggested they walk to the school grounds and there was a coffee shop where she often… but Jack cut in that he’d like to ‘get out of the sticks’ and when her mother chided him, Amy, reddening slightly, insisted she ‘didn’t mind at all what they did she was so happy to see them both’ to gloss over any suspicion of injured vanity, not entirely successfully. But it was still at that point in the day when she felt closer to her father than her mother, and she didn’t want to let him down in front of her.
This in fact became the pattern of their afternoon. Amy wanted to show them the roof garden at the Met, since the day was windy and sunny in equal measure while it lasted, and the Park looked wonderful in the quiet of being above it. But Jack said he couldn’t stand the crowds there, it was more of a supermarket than anything else, and what he used to do on a free afternoon in New York was get a bag of lunch at Zabar’s and take a book to Riverside Park. And so on. They spent much of the afternoon looking for places he’d been to thirty years before though he couldn’t quite remember the cross street, etc., if it was there at all any more. In any case, he said, there wasn’t a better way to see the Upper West Side than getting lost in it, a phrase he had every opportunity to repeat. Amy scarcely knew the neighbourhood at all. Charles Conway lived east of the Park, and she knew Manhattan mostly according to his habits and haunts. All she knew of the West Side was the cross-town bus at 86th Street, next to the subway stop. She pretended at first to a certain amount of local knowledge, and looked deliberately perplexed at any question she couldn’t answer. Then gave up, and tagged along behind him with her mother. It was nearly four o’clock before they had lunch on a dirty bench in the flowerless gardens of Riverside Park. And then Jack had an idea for coffee and there was a bookshop he used to love.
In the end it was something like desperation that made her lure them round to Charles’s apartment. She hadn’t planned to introduce them till Thanksgiving itself – had made in fact a great fuss about wanting them all to herself for the first day and he shouldn’t mind if she didn’t call him. But as they were walking through Central Park, just at sunset, the light, cold and liquid, leaking around and soaking the few leaves and bare branches of the trees, her father got muddled about the east and west and they found themselves out at Fifth Avenue. Her mother, who had been complaining steadily of the cold and her feet for the past half-hour, said, ‘At this point and without any interest in arguing the matter, I need somewhere to sit down.’ Jack stared up and down the turning paths and muttered, ‘Hold on a bit, I just need to get my bearings.’ And, after a silent minute, ‘I can’t figure that at all. Always look south, they say, always look south.’ Her mother had begun to repeat herself – ‘As I said before, and without any interest in… ‘– when Amy interjected, ‘Let me just see if he’s in’, and walked off towards the glimmering street lights of the intersection.
God, I hope he’s in, she thought. Let him be in. And didn’t look round to see if they were following.
*
Something subtle had shifted, from the moment the doorman greeted her with, ‘Evening, Miss Bostick’ and ushered the three of them, footsore and cross-grained, into the mirrored splendour of the elevator. They stepped out into Charles’s flat, and he was at a little side-table by the window, writing letters it seemed. He wore a white shirt, open-necked, and as he strode across the room towards them the collar stood up around his ears exposing the clear firm lines of muscle sloping down either side towards his shoulders.
‘I expect you both could use a drink,’ he said, stooping to kiss Mrs Bostick on the cheek and taking Jack by the hand, ‘if you’ve been chasing after Amy all day trying to find her way in the city.’
‘He teases me for living in the Bronx,’ Amy said, conscious of playing a game in tandem – aware that he realized whatever it was that had worn them out wasn’t her fault but it might be easier for all to pretend that it was. ‘He says I can’t find my way in town without a taxi.’
‘I didn’t know you were a taxi-taker,’ Jack said, surprised to find his ill-humour lightening.
Charles stood at the little bar between the windows cutting lemons. ‘If anyone here is interested,’ he called over his shoulder, ‘the small room for private contemplation on diverse subjects runs off the bedroom. Amy, why don’t you show your mother the way.’
‘Charles!’ Amy protested.
‘He’s quite right,’ Mrs. Bostick said.
‘I have a mother myself,’ Charles explained, turning slightly round. ‘Gin and tonics all round, will that do?’ he continued, when it was only himself and Mr Bostick in the room.
‘You’ve got some fine things here,’ Jack said, staring at the walls with his hands clasped in front of him, not quite knowing where to sit down. Charles put a drink in his hand and sat down himself, at one of the two silk-cushioned couches facing each other under the chandelier. He set his sweating glass on the naked cherrywood of a side stand, and kicked his loafers off and crossed one leg underneath him. ‘Take a load off.’
Jack sat down opposite. ‘Mind if I do the same?’ he said, hoping the phrase sounded comfortable and easy in such quarters, dimly aware he was only imitating the younger man, his host. After stooping carefully to untie the laces, he wrinkled his toes in their socks and lay back. ‘God that feels good. I forgot how tiring the city could be.’
‘That’s right.’ Charles leaned forward. ‘Amy tells me you used to practise downtown.’
This set them off, and by the time the ‘girls’ came back, Jack could happily declare to his daughter, ‘Don’t worry about us, we’re already old friends.’ And Charles could leave it to his guest, to get to his tired feet and do the honours for the ladies, handing them each their drinks from the little bar.
*
That evening was perhaps the high point of their visit, as Amy at least considered it, looking back – before the shameful and rather embarrassing conclusion to her parents’ stay, which affected her far less than she might have imagined such things would. Even at the time she suspected a trajectory at work, whose progress could easily include a sharp downturn and temporary collapse. Everything was going well in a way she hadn’t envisioned; a portion of her life usually neglected had been included or acknowledged in the course of the day. And while she had expected to feel something along those lines when her folks came, a touch of heat from her old real life, the reverse, rather, had proved the case: her new life (and lover) had revived the old.
Charles said they could order in or go ‘out on the town’ (a phrase her father repeated), but that he hadn’t got the equipment to cook up anything in house. Jack, pink and refreshed, declared he had itchy feet and wanted to get out among the lights; but Mrs Bostick complained she couldn’t go any further without something inside her and they may as well stop where they were seeing everything was so nice and comfortable. ‘You can look at the lights from here.’
In the end, Charles offered a kind of compromise and assured Joanne, taking her by the arm, that they wouldn’t go far and hardly needed to put on coats. Nevertheless they brought what they had with them, stepped into the elevator again and out at the lobby. A brisk cold walk along 79th Street, the glow of the traffic running against them, the homeward bound. Amy thought of the overwhelming number of private errands and destinations required to produce such a large conjuncture at the cross-town road running into Fifth Avenue: all those solitary purposes commingling, the inevitable coincidences. Obscurely saddening: everyone with some place to go to, such a mass of resignation and relief at the end of a day. The crowds themselves a symbol for the crowd of days ahead f
acing each of them: ‘one of many’ was the rule behind each thing.
They turned left on Madison and almost immediately turned again as an usher in black-tie held open a glass door for Charles, who led them into a low-lit restaurant, done up expensively in bland grey leather and pale wood. The maître d’ pointed them to their table, and pulled back the chairs of the ladies. There was no menu, no cash register; everyone called Mr Conway by name. The currents driving most public relations and transactions had been wrinkled away or got rid of altogether: money, anonymity, choice. Charles’s aristocratic affability often appeared implausible to her, too good to be true (and consequently neither good nor true). He seemed lost or lonely, suffering painlessly the drift of his life. But for once Charles looked not only at ease but at home. Amy remembered it later as an entirely happy dinner, and remembered little else. Wine was poured, drunk; food brought, eaten. The bright litter of a leftover meal stained the plates: saffron, pomegranate husks, fig rinds, fried flowers. Mrs Bostick, a woman both weak-minded and stubborn, for once tried everything on the table – never complained that ‘food was one part of her life she never felt the need to experiment in’ and drank two glasses of red wine, regardless of the fact that it ‘made her acid’. Amy, tipsily, repeatingly asked, ‘Doesn’t he look handsome, like a man in a magazine? Doesn’t he look just like a magazine?’ She felt full of love for Charles and her new life; and some reflected glory fell on her father, as she pinched Jack’s stomach to see how trim he’d got, and declared, ‘I’ve got all my boys about me.’
‘Except your brother,’ Mrs Bostick said.
‘Yeah, well.’ And added, as she thought of it, ‘You can’t have everything’ in an offhand way that surprised her and which she didn’t much like.
Either Side of Winter Page 3
