Anne Rosenblum was one of those Vermont Jews he used to know plenty of in college, arty and conventional both, well read, and handsome enough in a broad-shouldered way, unless it was only the shawls and cardigan collars banked around her neck. A countrified complexion, good-natured brown eyes, dry curly hair mostly twisted into a bun. He had always liked her: a straightforward girl underneath the rather self-conscious Bohemian wrappings, with a sharp mind and an affable gossipy manner that required none of the delicate insinuating condescension with which Howard habitually addressed most women. (And, he had to admit, most men as well as he got older.) Indeed, something about her struck him as manly – a certain bluntness, or intellectual vigour – and he remembered a phrase he used at the time (to her, in fact) to describe the effect of her company: ‘You always take me firmly by the hand.’ The analogy upset her, perhaps he intended it to: it suggested the rather hail-fellow-well-met manner of a woman unsure of her sexual charms. He suspected she was cleverer than he (a painful admission), but consoled himself with the thought that she lacked his reserves of discipline, of disinterest, of abstemiousness. Qualities by which he had hoped to prune himself over time into a simpler, more functional shape.
And in fact she dropped out of the Ph.D. programme in her second year to become a writer; a betrayal of her parents’ expectations she had spent much of their brief acquaintance worrying over and planning. But she never told him when she packed her bags – he remembered being surprised at the time. Occasionally, and more and more recently, he came across her name in the Science section of the New York Times. She wrote mostly about matters relating to genetic engineering (the subject of her aborted dissertation). And though these articles signalled success after a fashion, he remembered her well enough, he supposed, to know that such work fell short of her ambitions. She wanted to write plays – and to spend her literary life trading off neglected studies must have effected a painful coming down in her own estimation. The phrase pleased Howard as he thought of it, suggested to him the careful way we back down an unsteady ladder.
By the time, however, he found his seat in the train, it occurred to him that he must have taught any number of Rosenblums in the past ten years, even an Aaron, an Amy. A few Hasids at Columbia stepped on with their dirty locks and ashy black coats, heading for Washington Heights. It was far more likely that some student, lately gone to college, or indeed the mother of some student, had written to thank him; or rather, to mention some recent success. A number of his kids had gone on to become doctors or professors, and liked to credit him for inspiring them, etc., to go one better than he had. The week after Thanksgiving was just the time you might expect to get such letters: two months into freshman year, or med school, after the first decent holiday, the first chance to reflect. It rarely pleased him, to be honest, such self-promoting gratitude; and it wouldn’t, to be blunt, surprise him to hear it coming from a Rosenblum. They tended to possess a rather odious sense of the honour of the teaching profession – not uninfluenced by the fact that teachers stood at the gateway of their parental heaven, an Ivy League education for their children. Besides, he knew he was an excellent teacher, that wasn’t one of his self-doubts. He did not trick anyone into his subject; he didn’t set out to charm. (These phrases often ran through his head, word for word, at the end of a bad class perhaps, or at some slight from the administration; and sometimes spilt over into unrelated dissatisfactions, as he sat on the pot in his lunch hour and remembered a spat with Tomas: ‘I don’t trick anyone, I don’t set out to charm…’ Not quite true, of course: charm was the one attraction he could command. His air of patient irony often seduced others into climbing up to share his view, the thin cold atmosphere of his perch.)
He trusted his own passion for his subject; dry but steady and sustaining. The view opened out at Dyckman Street, as the train ran up the elevated tracks. Broadway looked grim at the top, nothing but discount stores and bad cafés; truant and jobless boys hanging around outside the doughnut shop. Then he rattled past the warehouses – watched a couple of late students slouch on – and over the concrete flat of the river. You need a few people to drum into kids that curiosity is the hardest and not the easiest instinct to satisfy. You need a teacher who doesn’t play to the gallery for laughs, who lets the kids come to him and not the other way around. A familiar litany that brought out his least ironic inner voice, the voice of his father’s son. ‘Honest enough to fail them, to make them win their praise so they know what praise is, the kind of thing you can only earn when you reach the point it doesn’t matter any more, it doesn’t please you.’
The letter lay in his lap unopened as the train scraped in to 242nd Street. He looked at his watch, just gone nine, and let the kids get off first – he didn’t like to hurry in front of his students. The envelope had caught the wet of his walk; the ink had run a little and dried again, and the paper bubbled slightly and crackled under his thumb. He slipped it inside his jacket pocket, surprised that he had already registered its opening as a pleasure deferred. A value assigned without conscious intent. It could only reflect some dormant curiosity about his former friend, who belonged to a very different phase in his life – when he had other prospects, and spent his privacy on other thoughts. The thing would happily trouble him in the course of the day, until he opened it on the subway downtown, when it would surely disappoint. Either way, that is, even if it was from Anne Rosenblum. Only when a woman in an orange plastic jersey pushed open the door with a mop and bucket, did he press himself up on his knees and walk out. ‘Last stop,’ she said, ‘we’re cleaning up.’ Something he had to watch in himself: he had begun to let his reluctance to do certain things express itself in his manner and his actions.
*
Most of the teachers were teaching, as he strolled into the biology office, took off his jacket, and spread it over the back of his chair. Another minute’s relative peace. The letter caught slightly against the seat, so he lifted it from the inside pocket and dropped it on his desk. Amy Bostick, one of those kids they had started hiring fresh from college, said to him – another administrative decision he didn’t see eye to eye with, by the way, a poke in the eye is what it was and other teachers felt the same, part of that misguided tilting of the scales towards youth, always towards youth – sidled up to him and said, ‘What you got there, Mr Peasbody?’, laying a childish hand against his shoulder.
It left him rather queasy, those hands, long-fingered, given to little sweats. She was always rubbing them dry against each other – a terrible sound, like corduroy between hurrying thighs. Miss Bostick was a nervy creature, a real girl, dependent and plaintive. She picked at him steadily all day, to remove a piece of lint from his tweed, adjust a loose button, straighten his tie. Once, giggling softly, she even tucked in his shirt behind. Out of loneliness, of course; that much was plain to him; he had been the object of a girl’s father-fancy before, and didn’t much like it. This one was rather breathless and inarticulate on the whole; he had determined from the first elaborately to patronize her. Mostly they couldn’t tell the difference between charm and kindness: few people could.
‘Good thanksgiving?’ he said, to put her off. Her hand rubbed the bristle of his neck, absent-mindedly, against the grain of shaving. ‘Ach, families,’ she said, in a new voice, mimicking. ‘Who needs them.’
‘Not all of us have the luxury of choosing.’ That was a little cruel, perhaps. So that when she persisted, ‘What is it?’, he answered rather stupidly, ‘A letter, my dear,’ and added, to make amends, ‘from an old lover, as it happens.’ Surprised at himself, at his willingness to titillate curiosity with a piece of his own flesh.
‘Who was he, Mr Peasbody?’ She called him Mr Peasbody, pretending to be one of his ‘adoring girls’ – ‘You have all these adoring girls, Mr Peasbody, mooning over you because they know they can’t have you, they can’t even dream of having you’ – but the name had become a habit with her, and she used it even when she had forgotten to flirt.
‘
She, as a matter of fact.’
Amy withdrew her hand from his neck, and looked at him squarely. ‘Well, well,’ she said at last, ‘aren’t you a bit of a dark horse.’ It was a tone she hadn’t used with him before; it had the slightly colder air of appraisal.
*
That phrase ran through his head the rest of the day. Dark horse, dark horse – it didn’t seem a very happy thing to be. Yet the image captured something he had always suspected, not without pride, about himself: a sense of veiled powers, of force restrained, obscured. Yes, he withheld a great deal. By necessity, it seemed, in his youth, when he was still unsure of his place in the world, of his rank within it. A hesitation, a slowness to judge which soon turned into an unwillingness to admire, and hardened into habit. His father, George, had always puzzled over that quality in his son: that refusal to mix in. Not that Howard was ever shy. Even in his somewhat spotty adolescence, he wore his looks well, carried himself comfortably, had the wit in reserve to nudge himself a head above his friends. There were always friends, only they seemed to see more of each other than they saw of Howard, and for some reason Howard never minded. Partly, George wondered why the kid never brought girls home: he could have had plenty of girls. He had that way with him, an amiable, insinuating manner, that nevertheless demanded nothing, needed nothing, indeed seemed to want nothing from anyone – which always charmed the girls, George knew. And then it became clear why Howard never brought the girls home, after his freshman year at Harvard, when he brought a boy. An unimportant boy, as it happens, insisted on mostly for the show of it, for the point to prove, and never seen from or heard of again. A flesh-and-blood instantiation of the ‘confidential chat’ they never had, which spared the need for it. Not that George minded much, after the initial shock, in spite of a constitutional repulsion from the fact of it, from the acts, no sea of love could wash away. At least his mother would never know: she had died of cancer when her son was still a fair-faced, blond-haired, plump-cheeked boy. George was rather relieved, all in all. It seemed a sensible, a specific explanation for a more general failing that had begun to worry him about his son, an otherwise charming and accomplished young man, and particularly pleasant companionship for an old-fashioned and, through force of occupation if nothing else, rather pedantic father. And George began to suspect that his son had always had a much busier private life than he let on, thank God. Though he never saw any further evidence of it.
Howard liked to give off an air of mystery: he found it let him get away with a great deal of little else. He was ‘humanly lazy’. That was his own phrase for it, and Tomas had, in the course of their long cohabitation, worked hard to turn the phrase into something worse than an excuse: not entirely without success. Howard had begun to feel the self-reproach in it; and instinctively relied-on little dramatizations, even occasional fibs, to dress up the monotony of his inner life. But he hadn’t been lying to Amy about the letter, though perhaps he had painted up the facts a little. One night Anne and he had gotten each other drunk and gone to bed together. A dull day towards the end of January had given way to a drippy snow in the evening, and they caught the cold of it coming home from class across Washington Square. They stopped off at a bar on Minetta Lane to warm up, started with beer and finished with whiskey sours; then picked up a bottle of Bourbon on the way out to get them through the night. Maybe there was some other occasion for it, he couldn’t remember. His mother had died shortly after New Year; he was always looking for an excuse, during those short days, to cheer up. Perhaps Annie had sold a story, come into an inheritance; whatever it was didn’t seem important afterwards, at least to him. Howard had never been a big drinker, but was given to binges: this was one of them, and he dragged poor Annie along. Both were lonely: they had begun to form one of those deep unsexual attachments that drive out the possibility of more frivolous, physical good times – because of the pretend, the dolled-up fakery sex required, and which their soberer, disinterested friendship put to shame. Then they fumbled at each other, with his back against the wall-heater, on her dorm-room bed prickly with the spines of opened textbooks.
It wasn’t long after that she quit school. But something in their friendship had given way in any case, and Howard couldn’t say that he minded much. Still it surprised him, over the course of the school day, how much his thoughts turned towards her. She bore grudges he knew, a quality he used to tease her about. It charmed him; she was such a rational, sensible girl in other respects, he smiled to see the imperious, casual way she could cut somebody: an old-fashioned term, which she adopted herself, and which exactly met the case. Annie was perfectly capable of blanking you in an empty hallway if you’d displeased her. Howard put it down to a kind of sexual paranoia: she was a pleasant-looking girl, healthy and quaintly voguish, but lacked that lime’s twist of tarter appeal to sharpen the appetite of boys. It seemed a great if commonplace shame, for a stylish girl, that she was born no beauty. And she clearly minded the dearth of it, suspected, often rightly, the honourably pure intentions of her male friends. ‘You’re just like the rest of them,’ she used to complain to Howard. ‘Everyone’s gay when it comes to me. Don’t think you’re anything special.’
And yet, in the event, he wasn’t quite like the rest of them, was he? Even before that drunken night, she had roused in him a feeling of – well, he shouldn’t dress it up as something sexual, because it wasn’t simply. It was broader than that, an acknowledgement of human equality, a term diluted by centuries of liberal platitudinizing into a universal truth, when in fact it should designate only a most rare and particular phenomenon, a meeting. He had the sense that she matched him in human force, in vital mass, in powers held in reserve. ‘You always take me firmly by the hand,’ he used to say to her: and she felt the sting of the phrase, the mockery implied by its masculine challenge, but he meant it kindly, if not more, if not lovingly. With Annie, he did not have to restrain or deflect, or soften with irony. That phrase he used with Tomas, by way of excuse: for staying in, or keeping quiet, or leaving early – that he was ‘humanly lazy’, had seemed at least at first, in his youth, a gentler way of saying that he was tired of holding back, that there was no one around him who could bear his natural weight. That was what he meant at first; but it was true, as he grew older, that he suspected his own strength, its slackening, he suspected that ‘laziness’ was no longer a kind way of describing something else, but an unkind way of hitting upon the fact of his flaccidity, his spreading weakness. He hoped it was Annie who had written; he very much hoped that slight pleasure awaited him, on the downtown train after work, of tearing the envelope open with his thumb, and discovering news of her in his lap, after eighteen years. It surprised him, indeed, the weight of pleasure promised, growing at each deferral. Of course he’d be disappointed, there was no question of that; but the curiosity kept him a little warmer through the day, a hot stone in his pocket that would soon grow cold in the open air.
He knew it had come to the point he could no longer hide from himself the fact of his unhappiness, the depth of it. As if he had turned a corner in the road, and come suddenly upon the view, falling away from his feet: miles upon miles upon miles of unhappiness wherever he looked.
*
The rain in fact had softened to snow as he walked down the hill at five o’clock on a winter afternoon. He could see fat flakes of it dissolving in the heat of the lamp lights and dripping away again; but in the colder dark they only touched his brown wool overcoat and stuck, or printed his bent face with hot red spots. It struck him he had not written anything but letters and school reports in years: this was the kind of solitary moment he used to turn into verse, harmless and not quite happy. His father had been Head of English at Groton, and in his youth, Howard had wasted hours on poetry in the way other boys play around with rock bands, only rather more friendlessly of course: there was still a chest full of scribbled yellow notepads in his childhood bedroom in Greenwich. George had little cause to sort things through or throw them away; with an
empty house and a dead wife, time and clutter (the two not unlike in their irregular excess) were things he had plenty of room for. Now Howard came to think of it, their literary ambition was another subject that used to occupy his conversations with Annie. Her plays would be performed on Broadway; his poems would appear in the New Yorker. ‘I know what’s going to happen,’ she used to say. ‘All us writer types. I’m going to make a break for it, and everyone else will stick to real jobs and settle down.’ And he remembered some lines he’d read, which he used to quote to her (in his reciting days), about the difference between poetry and prose:
Sparrows were feeding in a freezing drizzle
That while you watched turned into pieces of snow
Riding a gradient invisible
From silver aslant to random, white, and slow.
There came a moment that you couldn’t tell.
And then they clearly flew instead of fell.
Either Side of Winter Page 6
