‘You’ll forgive me,’ Frannie said, standing up again, ‘if I don’t indulge in any emotional reunion. I can’t say I’ve missed you: I didn’t know you. But I gather that’s not your fault. Still, I must say, it’s good to have you on board: Mom was beginning to drive me nuts on her own.’
She strode towards him, her various swathes shifting and resettling, with a plump red hand outstretched. He almost shrank from touching her: she had moved too quickly into fact, with all the unimaginably banal particulars that transformation entailed: breath, warmth, smells, an accent more heavily soaked in Jewish New York than her mother’s. Annie grew restless beside her; excess of pride and worry had nowhere to express itself in her trimmed-back figure, and turned into nerves. ‘Can I make some coffee? Do you want anything, Howard? Something to eat?’
‘Why don’t you bring out those chocolates?’ Frannie suggested; and she turned to Howard. ‘I gave them to her for her birthday. Some have cream inside; some liqueur. You feel sick afterwards either way, but you can’t help wondering which you’ll get next time.’
‘Coffee is fine,’ Howard said; to his own surprise, he felt conscious of his daughter’s weight, and instinctively resisted her indulgence. He took the club chair for himself now; mother and daughter sat opposite on a delicate orange sofa propped up on one side by an old phone book. Annie had pulled off her boots, and sat on folded legs with her hands across her lap. Francesca lay awkwardly back against a heap of cushions: she struck him as the kind of girl uneasy in her shape, but unwilling to admit it. A door on his left opened on to another bedroom. No doubt his daughter’s. There were various boots lying bent-necked on the floor, among clothes, bedsheets, even a packet of tampons (it was very much girls-only in the flat). The mirror over the unmade bed revealed the corner of a desk, the textbooks on it (poor kids, he thought, not for the first time: what burdens we make them bear for their knowledge of the world), and a window, streaked with stickers peeling in the cold.
He looked round him. It was obvious the only thing Annie could keep tidy was herself. There were books everywhere: some caught in the act, as it were, suddenly neglected and frozen in their latest gesture like the citizens of a library in Pompeii – bunched open, or fluttering on their spines. Books being used: serving as coasters, paperweights, dessert plates (covered in orange peel), props. There were books embracing other books as bookmarks. On the shelves constructed out of bricks and boards against one wall, books stood two deep, or lay squeezed in sideways. On the orange sofa: half swallowed by the cracks between the cushions. On the armrest of his chair – Hamlet, Jane Eyre (Frannie’s school texts, of course) – sprawled, balancing on their open faces. On the glass coffee table: loosely barricading a vase of dead white roses, whose petals lay scattered across them. On the dining table pushed into the corner underneath the hatch to the kitchen: stacked like chimneys around an open laptop. On the wooden cover for the air-conditioning unit next to the couch. Annie now set her mug there, next to another mug, long cold no doubt and forgotten, ringing another book.
What wasn’t covered with books was covered with newspapers: Saturday’s Times, but the Post as well, the Wall Street Journal, a slipped heap of New Yorkers spreading across the kelim rug. A store of papers waist high stood in the corridor, waiting to be taken out. Her apartment looked like student digs, only older, richer, more spacious; and he thought: she hasn’t given up, she hasn’t become less curious about the world. She still had a few posters on the walls, framed now and hung on nails rather than stuck to the paint with blue tac. He noticed in particular, above the dining table, a playbill for the Stethoscopes, an a capella group formed by some of their medical school friends at NYU. The date was November 25th, 1979: it was their Thanksgiving concert, Howard had just turned twenty-three. Who could have guessed how little would happen in the next twenty years?
As they talked, he got the uncomfortable sense that he was watching an elaborate advertisement for a family. Though whether they were selling themselves to him, or simply preening, he couldn’t be sure. It occurred to him that he was only an occasion for their preening: they’d brought him in at last to prove how well they got along without him. Well, let them, he thought. And yet, there was something about the clutter of the apartment, about the density of life, that moved him, drew him inwards, by force of gravity. An unpleasant sensation: the way we give in, in spite of ourselves, to the simple mass of other people, their answering weight.
‘Mom dresses so corporate these days,’ Frannie declared, appealing to Howard, to start an argument. (Perhaps it was only his silence that spurred them on – to fill the terrible quiet of their ignorance of each other.)
‘I do not. It’s just that you get to a stage in life when you realize you’re only one cardigan or shawl away from looking like a bag lady.’
‘Thanks for that, she rejoins, heavily ironic.’
‘What? I wasn’t talking about you.’
‘If you can’t see the implicit criticism in that then you’re more deluded than I thought you were.’
Howard put her down as one of those girls, who, believing she’s come to terms with the mediocrity of her looks, thinks she can’t be fooled by anything any more. He got such girls from time to time in his classes.
‘You like to talk,’ he said at one point.
‘Oh God, please don’t tell me that I verbalize everything. If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s people telling me that I “verbalize”, as if that were the strangest thing in the world to do to your experiences. Everybody else just talks, somehow whatever I say is verbalizing.’
‘All I said was, that you like to talk.’
‘Don’t worry,’ she said, considerately, ‘it’s not your fault. It’s just something I get a lot, believe me.’
He wasn’t sure that he liked her. Growing up alone with his father, a distant and correct man, had spoiled him: he hadn’t needed to get along intimately with anyone. Something about the phrasing of his thought made him stop short. But then his daughter said, ‘Mom used to be more expansive, now all she does is retract. I’m expanding for both of us. I can’t bear the way she pinches herself every morning in front of the mirror: thinking, a little less of this, a little less of that. Some here, some there. All right, I’m only seventeen years old, but I’ve figured out that getting bigger with age is the least of our worries. Only expand, would be my motto. Let everybody else shrink around you if they want: more room for us. It’s not just the weight with her, it never is: it’s the way she dresses, the way she looks over a menu. The way she eyes me up and down when I pick out another chocolate. I can’t stand it: all it means is she has fewer and fewer choices. I know what it’s like, believe me: every time you eat you ask yourself, do I need this? Pretty soon you can get by without anything at all. Pretty soon you don’t want anything. I ask myself: do I want this? And pretty soon I need everything. I can’t tell, I’m too subjective: maybe we’re each as bad as the other. But you should know: she didn’t used to be like this.’
‘No,’ he said, warming to his daughter. ‘She didn’t. She used to be more like you.’ He couldn’t be sure he hadn’t offended. And he thought: now Annie’s more like me.
As he was going, Francesca said, ‘Peasbody. That’s a strange name.’
‘My,’ he began, then stopped himself and resumed without particular emphasis, ‘your great great grandfather, the story goes, was something of a drunkard, and came through Ellis Island a little the worse for wear. The “s” is what’s left of his slurring. The immigration officer wrote it down and the name stuck: Peasbody. That’s the story at least. My mother always thought we should get it changed, that three generations of Peasbodys were enough is enough. We were just the kind of people, she said, to stick by a mistake for a hundred years, too lazy or too loyal to correct it. She thought we needed a new start; and tried to take us in hand herself, but couldn’t see the job through. She’ll be sorry never to have met you. After she died, well, several years after, when I was your a
ge, I thought about changing my name, to please her. But I was always too lazy, or too loyal. So year by year goes by.’
He wasn’t used to confessing so much to strangers; it left an unpleasant taste in his mouth, like a lie. And in his confusion, he kissed first Annie and then his daughter on the cheek, and said, ‘I hope to see you both soon, very soon’, as he shut the front door behind him, and fled. In spite of the weather, he walked home across the Park. Specks of flakes, like tiny white distillations of the cold, fell around him and disappeared in the asphalt paths, in the dirt, in the grass. A second chance: he had been given a second chance to make something other than solitude out of his life. Here was proof: that he bulked so large, even in the corner of his own thoughts, that these could not contain him, that part of him was exposed to the world, and snagged on it. That he cast seeds about him all the time; and he wondered less at the fact of the fruit than at the seeds themselves. It occurred to him, of course it did, that such sophistries were only his way of seasoning the amazement, so he could stomach it. He had a daughter; God, there was work for him to do if he had the heart for it. The prospect appalled him, like the thought of moving house. He had lived so long and so deeply off his memories that he had begun to doubt the truth of them; and now who could say where his own life ended and where it would begin?
II
Tomas gave off an air of innocent greed; big-chested, he ran slightly to fat, regardless of the hours spent happily under a bench press. There was something that would not be trimmed about him, reduced to the needful, measured; the excess, the vitality of him sometimes struck Howard as rude and bludgeoning, a refusal of fineness and the shelter it demands. Pale faced, he wore his light-blond hair piled high and loose on his head, cropped round the sides; and was big in all joints, elbows and knees and hips, so that a kind of mechanical exuberance and imprecision often caused him to break dishes or catch old ladies by the shoulder with a strapped bag. His father was an American soldier stationed in Germany who had had an affair with a Czech-born nurse. She raised him alone in Hamburg, without bitterness, ran through boyfriends, never married – and regarded the accident of her son’s birth as the only thing that could have brought her such steady and equal male companionship, given a nature more inclined to spontaneity than duty. The misery he left behind, like unwanted clothes, surprised her into a sudden sense of her age (forty-three) when her son broke out of university to come to New York. But she kept her tongue, and he settled there on the strength of his American passport, and worked his way quickly through various menial jobs at a documentary-film company to his present status as production manager.
Tomas’s company often made films with what their various directors considered to be a scientific edge. Science, particularly genetics, was in the news; and Howard had some old college acquaintances working in production, who called him in when they needed someone to explain their prefabricated accounts of this or that evolutionary phenomenon. Howard was easy and fluent in front of camera, and didn’t much mind what the directors made him say. His doctorate, after all, concerned genetics; but, being only a school teacher, he had little stake in sticking by the complications of truth or an original and professional point of view. The fact of appearing on television flattered him; it made him seem less lonely to himself. Or rather, it made his loneliness take on a greater, more public significance: he knew things other people needed to know. Occasionally, he even suggested slight changes to the script, which tended to make his explanations not only truer but more interesting. And the directors learned to trust his interventions, and called him in on projects only distantly related to his expertise. These television appearances touched him faintly with a schoolyard celebrity, which did him no harm in the classroom, or the headmaster’s office, for that matter. Though his fellow teachers, especially in the Science department, occasionally sniped, with unembarrassed jealousy, that he had sold his soul to the television devil; and addressed him, with mocking humility, as ‘the geneticist, Dr Peasbody’ over their cafeteria lunches.
Tomas was working as a runner when they first met. Howard teased him by asking for ever more elaborate sandwiches from ever more distant and specialist sandwich shops. He liked to see the boy work up a sweat; Tomas at this point was still twenty-three, and breathless with the heartbreaking energy of youth. Wore shorts through the thick of winter; and high socks to keep the wind off his ankles when he biked. His skin always flickered between rose and pallor, depending on the animal heat expended in his last exertion. He finished off, unabashed, whatever sandwiches, potato chips, chocolate chip cookies were leftover from his lunchtime runs. And spoke in a rather innocent staccato, gently accented by the inevitable Teutonic suggestion of the military. Once, Howard even asked Tomas to flush a toilet he’d forgotten to attend to himself; he was busily going over the script with the assistant producer and didn’t like to think of the thing festering, etc. Tomas burned red at the shame of it, though when he got there the bowl was clean; perhaps the man was playing with him, and he dropped the lid and sat down head in hands, feeling the heat of his face; and trying to work out whether he was simply angry or also flattered (successfully teased, tested in some point) by the unusual mark of attention.
After they first made love, Howard insisted their relationship remain an ‘open’ one. Tomas was heartbroken, but said nothing. The one-year anniversary of his arrival in New York approached: he had a job, he had a lover; he had done well. Spring had come; the air had that washed, wrung-out feel of a cloth about to expand again and take on moisture. He remembered it from the previous April: it was his first answered memory, his first echoed season. It seemed he had to cut his nails every other day; and the trees, even in Harlem, on 154th Street where he lived (above a fire station – ‘Only security you’ll ever need,’ the agent told him) had broken into petalled green, tough fresh cuticles no bigger than fingertips. Even the dogshit smelt sweeter in the sun; baked slightly when the sunshine caught the angle between the apartment blocks just after noon. Newspapers blew lighter along the cross streets. Awnings opened out again on the avenues. After two weeks he said to Howard, when they lay in his broad bed at the edge of sleep, ‘You’re the only thing keeping me here’, but it wasn’t quite true even then. And by the summer, when Howard answered him at last – ‘You’re the only thing keeping me here’ – it was hardly true at all, though Tomas was deep in love. And he couldn’t work out why Howard had answered him in those terms, how much, what exactly he meant by it. ‘But you’ve always lived here; you’ve got nowhere else,’ Tomas said, a phrase that sounded narrower, more dependent than he intended. When what he really meant was, you don’t need me for this to be your home. Howard blinded himself on his lover’s pale back, in the dent between backbone and shoulderblade. ‘You’re the only thing keeping me here,’ he repeated. ‘You’re the only thing keeping me here.’ Conscious, of course, of being misunderstood; of intending a greater depth of misery than his buoyant young lover could plumb.
And it was Tomas who took other lovers, by that first fall. Howard raged at him, inconsolably, when he found out. Not that Tomas proved shy in confession; he had a natural, easy way with experience, and a faith in his love for Howard that couldn’t be shaken by events or decisions, his own included. By this point, indeed, their first passion (never very fiery on Howard’s part) had cooled in any case; and Tomas’s sense of their growing companionship delighted in the fact of having news to tell. And such news: he felt obscurely that he had done as he’d been told to do; his reward being that the task proved more pleasant than he’d anticipated. (It was a barman from a hole in the wall on Avenue A: a kid from Tennessee who wanted to design stage sets, and sidelined as a lighting assistant at a nearby bar/theatre called the Nuyorican Café. Both had had military fathers and suffered for it, a conversation, now painless from repetition, they approached with feigned tenderness, remembered soreness.) Tomas had been a good boy; he wanted Howard to know how good and loving he had been. And in spite of his anger Howard almost l
aughed at the way Tomas, like a dog with a bone, laid his little infidelity at the feet of his master. No doubt that insight stoked his fury further: it reassured him he could grow cruel as he liked and the boy wouldn’t turn away. Perhaps inconsolable isn’t the best word for Howard’s reactions. His vanity rather than his affection had been touched. He remembered this clearly, thinking, I can’t believe that ugly dumb kid has the balls to cheat on me, to think he can go one better. The thought made him sick at heart: to be reduced to such crudity.
He gave the boy one terrible night and then reconsidered: better policy by far would be to show how little he cared. It was only jealousy, the habit of jealousy. And he wasn’t a coward with respect to habits: there was nothing in his emotional life he couldn’t master, and bend to his own will, to express what he wished it to express. He had learned over time that emotions were only a means of expression, a means most of us handled clumsily. But if we took pains to determine just what it was we wanted our emotions to say, we could adjust the manner of expression to match the meaning – over which we exercised a strict control, lying as it did within our will. He simply adapted the old question, What exactly do you want to say? into What exactly do you want to feel? and corrected his emotions accordingly. He did not want to feel jealous of Tomas; he knew that if he concentrated, and applied suitable thought to the matter, he would no longer feel jealous of Tomas. He did not feel jealous of Tomas.
Either Side of Winter Page 8
