The image cheered him somewhat, suggesting as it did the ease and completeness of transformations. But he raised his collar against the flakes, to keep them from trickling down his neck; and mounted the iron steps to the elevated platform of the downtown train.
It was from Annie, the letter. Just as well, he thought, that he didn’t open it at once: the shock of time passed would have been greater. By this stage he had sloughed, at least in his thoughts, some of the years gone, some of the skins worn, since he had seen her. She wrote with a black-inked fountain pen, not a scratchy, stingy one, but full-flowing; and some of the lines had smudged and gone blue at their washed edges from the wet. The words seemed fresher on that account, unset, capable of revision; and he could tell at even a first reading that she had tried hard to say as little as possible, breaking out, briefly, into detail, as if something had to be given away, conceded, however insignificant.
Dear Howard,
I thought of writing before, many times, but lacked the occasion. I don’t have one now, only the chance to find one seems to be getting smaller rather than the reverse, so I thought, I’ll simply begin. I want to see you, I have something to say.
I have seen you, twice as it happens, in the past twenty years: once in the Park, walking two steps ahead of a fair young man; once, shopping, on the West Side. I thought, if you had seen me, I would have come up to you, but you didn’t.
There’s a coffee shop not far from my apartment, on 85th Street, just east of Second. Called Rohr’s. If you don’t want to call, meet me there, Saturday? at noon.
Annie
Just like her, he thought, that mix of the sensible and the clandestine. Also, something careful about the choice of words, those offhand repetitions: see you, seen you, seen me. Exactly like her: she couldn’t write a shopping list without making the ordinary and slipshod into an artificial style. One of the things he found tiring about her. Even so, he thought, I’ll have a cup of coffee with her, Saturday; and it struck him that no consciousness of altered lives could make that seem anything but natural: a cosy drink with Annie on the weekend. Time didn’t matter very much: it always looked small next to something human. The snow had stuck and frosted, at least on the cold tops of parked cars, as he stepped out of the subway and walked down Broadway, tacky and bright with Christmas, towards home.
*
He never mentioned the letter to Tomas, but then, he often kept things quiet till they had to come out. Another habit: it seemed best to him on the whole to keep what you knew in reserve until it was needed. Things said or done had a way of snagging on the world, of taking on more than was meant, becoming hard to untangle. Of course he also knew that anything stored in the icebox had a way of changing colour and losing smell, of denaturing in some way; but generally, he preferred that risk. Even on Saturday he said only, ‘I’m going out for a breath of air.’ Tomas lay on the sofa shirtless in sweat pants; a little heater blew away at his feet, a steady thrumming white noise. He was running through the TV channels with flickering eyes.
‘You know it’s snowing.’
‘Yes, I thought I’d have a look.’
‘There won’t be anything to see. Too fat and wet.’ Tomas, being German, set himself up as an authority on cold weather. Also, when he was feeling lazy, he couldn’t bear it for anyone to do anything, especially Howard.
‘Well.’
‘Maybe I come with you.’ Tomas swung upright, one of his sudden movements, and slapped his hands against his knees.
‘No, I’m only going round the block,’ Howard said, leaning on the opened door, and gently letting it close him out. In his casual hurry he hadn’t thought to grab his overcoat. Instead, he lifted the collar of his tweed jacket, and felt the bulk of his wallet in the inside pocket. A blue turtleneck underneath kept his Adam’s apple warm, still a little pink from the morning’s shave. Even so, having planned to walk across the Park, he caught a cab instead on Amsterdam. He was late anyway, and somehow arriving by taxi lifted the sense of occasion, suggested a rendezvous. Tomas was right; nothing stuck, except the traffic on the cross streets; but the pavements and roads looked dirty and dark under the crushed wet. He felt a little raw all round, scraped, as if for once he might feel the sting of what touched him: a pleasant sensitivity. He had smoothed a handful of cologne across his face after shaving, and could smell it now, in spite of the cold of the cab, the sweet intimate odour of his own skin.
Rohr’s stank of coffee and wet wool when he walked in, stamping his feet. Nothing more than a hole in the wall, with an old-fashioned glass front, and jars of beans stacked above the counter. She wasn’t there. He bought a cup of regular from a girl still wearing her woolly hat (the red bobble swung side to side around her neck), and added just a shake of sugar from a sticky pot. The littlest sugar rush was how he thought of the coming reunion, a light squirt of quickly used-up pleasure. A bookshelf held a jumble of travel books and detective stories, with an aquarium perched unsteadily on top: a goldfish flicked his tail through green gloom. Other than that, there were rugs laid over each other on a linoleum floor, and wicker chairs lined up against a bar, looking over the street. Someone had spilt coffee on his newspaper, the Post, and left it behind. Howard unstuck it to read the front page, and sat down. He hated waiting, an impatience he also disliked in himself; it disappointed him. Only, a sense of his own importance clashed with his conviction of being on his own anyway, of always biding time – and trumped it. He tried to concentrate his attention entirely on the front-page stories, about a killing in Queens, about the Knicks, but kept looking up.
And then when she came he didn’t recognize her. A short-legged swaggering young man pushing his way out the door, coffee in hand, shouted something at someone coming up the street from Howard’s left. He turned his head, and saw a dark-skinned guy wearing a yellow tie and a baseball cap and sunglasses against the low winter half-sun break into a kind of dance step with his arms held stiffly out. The pair embraced. ‘Man, look at you, Tariq,’ the first said, taking a burnt sip of the coffee. He ran his words into each other, and let them stick together, like something chocolatey. Howard could hear him through the glass. ‘You look like the most guido Pakistani I ever met.’ Then someone tapped him on the shoulder, and Howard turned and said, ‘Yes?’, taking her in in a stranger’s glance, before he recognized her. ‘Annie, Annie,’ he said. She bent down and kissed him on the cheek, then reached over to hug him awkwardly across his shoulders. He swung an arm around her waist, but a sense of falling short, of not having done their greeting justice, lingered for the first few minutes of their conversation. ‘Let me just get a cup of coffee,’ she said and turned away.
He had expected expansion of some kind, plumpening of feature, loosening of hair, perhaps even another layering of shirts, cardigans, shawls; also, the mark of added burdens, twin weights at the hips, shortness of breath. He thought by this point in life she’d be well and truly frazzled, she always had so many seams coming undone even when he knew her. In fact, the reverse had happened; she had if not retracted then at least pruned herself into more manageable quantities. She had never been fat, he had never thought of her as fat, but she had in her youth a sort of breadth, a physical generosity; and now even the bones of what he had considered her essential shape had proved to be pliable to time and, no doubt, her own will. Her hair, cut short, had straightened into a bob. He saw this when she hung her coat, brown knitted wool lined and hooded with fur, on the hat stand; and she was wearing only a black T-shirt underneath, a charcoal skirt, stockings and leather boots. Half as tall is what she seemed, and narrower too, as if caught in the corner of a wide-angled lens. Her chin came to a point; her cheekbones, it seemed, had drawn closer to her eyes, making a pink triangle, frosted and chapped slightly, by the cold. Even the hook of her nose had sharpened a little – she had a sharp face, prettier, more boyish, than he remembered. She seemed to move with tiny, tidy deliberations: ordered a cup of French roast, black; waited without shifting or turning for he
r mug; snapped open her purse and counted out the change; thanked the girl in the red hat. It struck him how small she was; how much smaller than he; that he doubled her, that she could not have resisted him that night, if he chose.
‘Thank you,’ she said, sitting down. Their stools both faced the street, but she had space to prop her feet on the crossbar and turn entirely round to face him. He could only turn his head. ‘My guess is you don’t often venture east; but I have to get back to the apartment soon. I’ve only just come round the corner and can’t stay long. The fact is, there is someone I left at home who’s dying to meet you.’
‘I can’t think why.’
‘I’ll get to that in a minute. First, I just wanted to say: hello, how ya been.’
She had caught him off guard: she had such directed purpose; he expected to lead the reminiscences. ‘Much as you see me. I don’t change,’ and added, with a laugh, ‘if I can help it.’ She cocked her head at him, in a way he used to hate. She used to knock on his forehead with a knuckle and say, ‘come out, come out, wherever you are’ – a piece of foolishness that always left him stumm, like he’d been set up. How can you expect anything but silence at such questions? ‘I’ve seen your name, now and then,’ he said, ‘in the Science Times. Anne Rosenblum. Old Annie Rosenblum.’
‘You must have laughed,’ she said. ‘Who would have thought that stuff would get me my breakthrough.’ Again, not quite what he’d expected; he’d almost been hoping for a confession of failure, of blunted purpose. She seemed to guess something of that, and went on, ‘Well, I do all right. I hear you’re teaching?’ Just the sort of question he had feared: what you’d ask any acquaintance. There was a little more of that, on both sides. He didn’t mention Tomas. She didn’t mention whoever it was she had to get back to. A delicacy, he supposed, they both employed in case the answer was only loneliness on the other side; and yet, they’d always been jealous friends, and the habit of it had a strange persistence, in spite of everything.
‘You know, Annie,’ he said suddenly, ‘it was a month before I found out you’d quit. I forget who told me: certainly not you. Nobody knew what the hurry was. We had a few guesses –’
‘What did you guess?’
‘That you found some sugar daddy in the city; that you sold a script to MGM; that you got pregnant, married. Well, it’s…’
‘What did you guess?’
‘… twenty years ago. I don’t know what I guessed. I suppose I missed you, mostly. I felt –’
‘I called you every day for a week. I knocked on your room. I left –’ He preferred her like this, unsmiling, insistent. Her nose had a red streak on the tip, like the mark a bandage would make, pulled off at a stroke. She used to get cold sores there, and whenever she was hot, or ill, or insistent, a faint red stripe appeared where the blood burned through. This was a thing he remembered, something preserved.
‘Fairly wretched about that night, and more than a little confused, on several counts. You never called.’
‘Two or three times a day. I left notes under your door.’
‘You never called. I never saw any notes.’
‘Howard, of course I did. Of course you did.’
Perhaps she had. It had occurred to him before that he might be capable of suppressing certain facts, for the sake of his balance, his steady course. He considered the possibility, in a detached way: That, while he thought the great trouble of his inner life was his need to exaggerate, to puff himself up for even the faintest of emotions to register and give off a little heat to the world, the reverse might be true. That only the carefullest containment prevented all kinds of passionate outbursts, that he had a great store of emotional fuel, burning inwards and building up warmth. That the least thing could upset him, spill him; that he lived in fear of that chance. It didn’t seem very likely; and only a certain pressure to conform internally to the accepted view of these things, of repression, suggested the idea to him at all – apart, of course, from moments like these, when someone gave him reason to believe that his own view of the world might have consistently misled him, even to the point of inventing facts.
Then she said, ‘I was pregnant. That’s why I left. I wanted to have the child – I got what I wanted. She’s at home now, my daughter, waiting for us. Drink up: I said we wouldn’t be long.’ Then she continued, as though reciting a difficult declension, learned by rote: ‘Our daughter. Your daughter. About to turn eighteen, and I thought –’
‘Good lord,’ he said, surprising even himself, by his lightheartedness, his casual astonishment. He might have said ‘good lord’ the same way if she’d told him she had sold a book for a million dollars. It occurred to him, suddenly – in regard to that little scene he had witnessed, between the young swaggering Italian and the ‘guido Pakistani’ – that it was the greeting itself that delighted them, the form of it. Those wide comical steps and the heavy embrace proved to be the purpose of their encounter, rather than its introduction – proved to be the proper occasion for joy, rather than the no doubt desultory conversation that followed it.
‘Oh, Howard, don’t look so peevish. I could never bear that pursed look you get when you’re trying to sound pleased.’ He almost bristled at the injustice of her remark: he thought he’d never felt so easy in himself, so well feathered, so buoyant and dry. But it occurred to him once more that he might be looking through a distorted lens: himself. And then Annie apologized.
‘I can’t expect you to take it in at one sitting; especially when I sprung it on you like that. The fact is I feel guilty, at my silence, in the first place. Which wasn’t all my fault, as I said. You were a difficult man back then to spring bad news on. But if I’m honest I have to confess I got what I wanted, and one thing I didn’t want was to share. But more than guilty, I feel –’ and here she cocked her head up and sideways and looked out the window. Anyone passing by would have thought she was unhappy, or that they were strangers, or, even worse, lovers who had nothing left to say to each other. But she was only searching for the right word; a characteristic gesture. It surprised him how well he remembered it, how fresh the irritation was – at the ridiculous purity she aspired to in expression, the exactitude: a selfish virtue it seemed when she let the rest of the world run happily to waste and imprecision. Or perhaps he was only envious, conscious of being outdone. ‘Tremulous,’ she continued, ‘unsure, but eager, at the thought of adding you to us. Of being filled out, as a family. I can’t say how good it is to see you. I don’t mean to be sharp; don’t listen to me, you never used to. It just seemed to be – I won’t delude myself by saying “the right moment”, because we both missed that moment years ago – a chance, that’s all. Her last year at home; God knows where she’ll end up next year, that’s another thing I wanted to talk to you about. She never tells me anything about her college applications; and I had heard, from a friend of a friend, that you were teaching, and thought, maybe you could advise her. And then, you know, she seemed ready to me – ready to meet you, without making too much of it or too little. I’m running on. You always had a way of making me talk. But we should go back now; it isn’t far. Francesca’s a tough kid but she’s human, in spite of her parents, right?, and I’ll bet she won’t say it, but she must be on pins and needles.’
They stood up, and he took her coat from the hook and helped her into the arms; and with her back to him, she said, ‘The fact is, of course, I was losing her anyway. There isn’t anything left for me to lose; she’s going away. So I don’t mind sharing now.’ She kissed him quickly on the cheek. ‘You’re being very good, but you haven’t said anything. Do you mind? Is it very terrible, having a brand-new daughter?’
‘No, no, of course not. I don’t know what I think yet. It seems so’, he laughed lightly, ‘unlikely, all things considered. Wouldn’t you say?’ Perhaps that offended her a little; perhaps the laugh was a little too much, too casual; perhaps he meant to offend her a little. After all, he’d suffered greatly, it seemed to him, at her hands: or rather, t
here was a possibility he had suffered; he couldn’t be sure yet, how much he had lost. Even so, as they walked down Second Avenue, into the cold wind blowing up from midtown against the traffic, he felt easy, elaborately leisured, as if he’d been asked back only for another cup of coffee, and to look over some holiday snaps she’d forgotten to bring. Francesca, a pretty name. He felt very well feathered indeed against wind and world; buoyant; dry. And there was still plenty of time for him to work out a line to take about the whole thing.
Annie led him through two glass doors into the lobby of her apartment block, done up in the shabbiest manner of the Upper East Side: threadbare pink carpets ravelled over rubber steps, scalloped lighting softened against cream walls, tall mirrors bookending the elevator. Each suggesting a faded gentility that never was. And it didn’t surprise him, after all, to discover that Annie had sacrificed comfort and style, in the end, to what her kind liked to call ‘a good address’. The elevator clanked to a halt in front of them and shuddered open, a half-foot out of place. ‘Mind your step,’ she said; they’d fallen mostly quiet, and continued so, as the lift ascended by imperceptible increments to an indeterminable floor: the fifth, he noted, stepping into the corridor. ‘Penthouse suite,’ Annie muttered, making a wry face; a little embarrassed, he thought. No doubt at dusting off an old line mostly reserved for strangers, at treating him like a stranger and falling back on ‘conversation’. Turned out to be true, though, he noticed on his way home: the fifth was the top floor, and she may have reddened a little at her slight but irrepressible pride in that fact.
Frannie, as her mother called her, was sitting down as they came in. The bathroom door stood open in front of them – revealing dirty grey tiles and a dripping bath tap, and Annie moved quickly to close it. That was her bedroom, he supposed, to his left; then a corridor ran the length of the flat to his right, and Howard could see his daughter sitting in a club chair against the back window, reading the newspapers. Francesca turned and saw them, stood up and sat down again: just giving him time to note her dumpy figure and bright bohemian layers, a shawl, a cardigan, two heavy bunches of beads falling loosely across her spread breasts. Less pretty than her mother was and had been: less susceptible to refinement. Something spoilt about her, overfed; she had the look of a girl who hadn’t often been refused, and wasn’t accustomed to denying herself. He had a wide experience of such girls, particularly prevalent among the only children of the shabby genteel, and, dare he add, among Jews. Disappointment shamed him; if he’d had a choice he wouldn’t have chosen her. So this is the stuff he was made of.
Either Side of Winter Page 7
