Either Side of Winter

by Benjamin Markovits

  *

  She never said a word in class. She looked attentive, she took notes, in a rounded, flowing hand, in bright blue ink, as Stu observed, standing over her shoulder as he talked. She was unfailingly punctual, tidy, smartly turned out, gracious. When he caught her eye, she smiled back happily, exposing a clean intersection of expensive white teeth. Once, he briefly imagined the free play of her tongue across the enamel after the braces came off; and shook his head, visibly, to banish the thought. One of his students even teased him, ‘You’re not allowed to disagree with us, Mr Englander, when we haven’t said anything.’ And he didn’t know what to answer; he felt quite helpless. She was an absolute cipher to him, an image of girlhood in its own carefully presented perfection. He blushed occasionally when he saw the top of her head approaching in a crowded hallway, and prepared a distant look to pass her by without having to greet her. As often as not, the brown hair belonged to someone else; and he suffered the brief collapse that follows the baffled expectation of small pleasures.

  In the mornings, for the first time in years, he woke with his hand on his crotch. Mary Louise, who slept in most days, began to notice. She lay heavily somnolent beside him, breathing warmly and softly, but opened her lids a crack to see him rise. She didn’t like to wake deserted, unconscious of his going. As he stood up, his penis dully lifted the front of his boxers; she smiled sleepily at him, and said, ‘It’s that time of year again, hon, isn’t it. When the sap rises.’ It shamed him, these displays; he wanted to say it had nothing to do with him, with her. And she looked strange to him in bed without her powders and paints: small-featured in spite of her fleshed-out countenance, flat. She made up heavily every day, deliberately painted on arched brows, dark lids, a full mouth; he didn’t like to see her without her prepared face. He viewed her always as a large construction of her own rich full tastes; the sight of her involuntary base materials appalled him. She seemed a different person entirely, utterly helpless, babyish, in need of his kindness.

  He left her to shower and came back still slightly damp to dress. ‘Honey,’ she said now, pushing herself a little up against the pillow, ‘why don’t you call in sick? Come back to bed. I miss you, sweetheart. The less I work the more I miss you, isn’t that awful. I think you’d feel it the same. I hope you’d feel it the same. Except you wouldn’t have to.’ Wooden, he heard her say, hafta. The girlishness of that big old woman his wife filled him with distaste (a particularly terrible word to invoke given the commerce of their relations). Her accent had retained the southern stickiness of licked fingers; her syllables ticked slightly as they let go of each other. She was still dull with sleep, easily heart-broken, dreamy. ‘Because you’d have me. We could take the bus down to Zabar’s and pick up a picnic for the Park. It’s almost warm enough to eat out, now. I’ll pack a thermos. We could watch the kids playing hookey, the homeless folk, the oldies. Sit up and drink tea at the roof garden. The wind gets softer every day. Catch a matinee later downtown. I don’t think there’s a word in the language I like better than matinee. Go on – call in sick.’

  She was talking into his back. He straightened his tie in the mirror, eased the tightness around his neck – an almost pleasant constriction, the way the world insisted on certain points of contact – and didn’t answer. A line of Milton unbidden came into his head: ‘Cyriack, whose grandsire, on the royal bench Of British Themis…’ And he shook it away: these echoes had begun to afflict him, nothing happened any more unreverberant. He saw her reflected over his own shoulder, with the featherbed tucked under her neck; her hair spread out thin and scattershot. Only her head exposed, laid out across the white pillow. They often played word games with each other, sometimes even interrupted an argument to praise a turn of phrase; alternately, to correct an infelicity. She loved all questions of rank. ‘Which view out the window do you like best?’ she might ask, when a span of silence bored her, simply to break it. And they would stand together, side by side, considering each of their four sitting-room windows in turn: two views of the traffic along Broadway (all those passing lives, their ‘urgent voluntary errands’); two views of the tree-lined street. Such quiet, dingy growth. ‘Which do you think I like best? Let me guess what you like best.’ Their marriage depended not only on shared tastes, but on their ability to guess the discrepancies. They tested their understanding of each other constantly according to such intuitions. Childlessness had kept them childish.

  He said now, sitting beside her in the stink of their bed, and prompted sidelong by thoughts of Roger Bathurst, ‘We could get pancakes at the coffee shop and drink coffee and read the papers. Then we could go round Ratner’s and look at books. Maybe even fall asleep in the leather chairs. Have a cocktail at Henry’s around three, and another bite, before heading across town to catch the 4-train up to Yankee Stadium. The crowds would carry us on from there. It’s opening day.’ She put her warm hand between his thighs and repeated, trying to twist some strangeness into the phrase, ‘It’s opening day, it’s opening day.’ He kissed her and stood up. ‘I have to go now,’ he said. ‘Go now,’ she echoed sadly, through colourless lips, and added, ‘I like mine more, I like mine more’ – before turning back to sleep, the featherbed bulking higher as she lay on her side.

  *

  He could still just about persuade himself that his interest in Rachel was largely paternal. He imagined indeed that even the thoughts of fathers strayed occasionally down the necklines of their pretty daughters. Or rather, not quite paternal, but more broadly human, more simply curious: he wanted to know what went on inside her head. He told himself that she represented to him only the puzzle of youth in general, of girls in particular – those strange creatures he had never known well even in his own boyhood. How easily, how consciously they wore their powers, especially as they leaned and gossiped together in little gangs – in the hallway between classes, in the lunchroom, on the baseball field after school, standing or lying in sunshine among their bags. Their cold sweet laughter, their sure sense of propriety; how lightly they could inflict shame.

  She never raised her hand in class, except to signal her presence. She answered if spoken to, somewhat flushed and quietly, but very clear. There seemed to be a sharp outline around everything she did; her edges were crisp and defined. Most of his other students suffered from background vagueness. He was always conscious of the space that held her, when it was broached; who touched a hand against her hair, or leaned upon her shoulder. Occasionally, in class, he asked her to read. She had a fine if rather uninflected voice, and sounded, at least, as if she understood what she said. At such times he could concentrate his gaze upon her unembarrassed. It occurred to him that perhaps her beauty suffered somewhat from a certain fullness around the cheekbone, a rounded edge, liable to fattening. Though charming in youth, the breadth of her countenance might suggest coarseness with age as her skin dried out and hung a little lower on the bone. By contrast, the angle formed by the line of her nose and the curve of her brow was almost too perfect, too doll-like; too fine a structure to bear the weight of real sensuality. Perhaps she was one of those graceful children doomed to a life lived in unremitting miniature, whose beauty and fine lines had been achieved at the expense of scale.

  Elaborately casual, he asked around about her in the lunchroom. ‘Got a girl in my class’, he said touching a napkin to his mouth, ‘won’t talk. Well-mannered, punctual. Can’t get her to say a thing.’ A few teachers offered suggestions. This or that strategy had worked for them, etc. But he broke in with, ‘It’s a senior seminar for Pete’s sake. By this point they should know how to speak their minds. Rachel Kranz’s her name’ – he felt he had taken his heart in his hands to utter it aloud – ‘Anybody have her?’ Yes; and Stu realized as they answered, that he hoped she spoke up in their classes, he hoped her silence had some particular cause centred in him. Her father, someone said, was sickeningly rich, a partner in a big midtown firm; not very well just now, as it happens: cancer? heart? Her parents divorced. Rachel lived wi
th her mother, a piece of work by all accounts. One of those jobless New York ex-wives whose antecedents you can read about in Jane Austen, in Dickens: nervy, hectoring, sentimentally tubercular, idle and ill done by. Part of the great tradition of well-to-do women prisoned in their own restlessness, their own narrow views. Not particularly bright, poor girl; not that she needs to be, given her inheritance. Tries, bless her. Here Miss Weintraub, the history teacher, cut in rather sharply. ‘I don’t know about that. The boys are terrified of her, you can see. Won’t touch her. And for a pretty little picture like Rachel, that takes some doing. She’s no fool.’

  He read her first essay, on Hamlet, without realizing who had written it. (A fact, which, for various reasons, he later managed to forget.) She had printed the text of it, and signed her name simply Kranz, a word that conjured up in Stuart’s mind the image of an old industrialist. By the first page he had realized that the essay would arouse in him that generosity of response which is the finest pleasure of his profession:

  The play is called Hamlet and not Ophelia because Ophelia really does go mad. Hamlet’s father has been killed and Ophelia’s father has been killed. So the lovers have a lot in common. But the play isn’t about the problem of action – if you look at him clearly Hamlet does a lot of acting from the beginning – but the problem of going mad. Going mad is the only honourable thing to do in those circumstances: that is, if your mother divorces your father and kills him. That’s why Hamlet insists ‘I have that within which passeth shew’, which is a pun on the word show, which can mean either something displayed on the outside or something demonstrated, something reasoned and proved. Hamlet really wants to say that he’s unreasonable, that he’s got what it takes to go mad. Really, he’s agreeing with Claudius, who says that it isn’t reasonable to grieve over what’s inevitable, ‘that father lost a father’ etc.; and Hamlet basically agrees, but he hopes to prove that he isn’t reasonable, that he’s capable of going mad over the things in life that you should go mad over, like the death of your father. But the trouble is, it’s not in your control if you go mad or not; it’s like falling in love. And he comes up short. That’s why he’s suspicious of Ophelia, because she goes mad, she’s capable of losing her reason, of escaping from it. And in the end, Hamlet can’t even kill himself; that’s the real tragedy of the play, that he doesn’t manage to commit suicide whereas Ophelia does. Ophelia isn’t really a tragic figure because she feels what she should feel and escapes reason; but Hamlet can’t escape reason and can’t kill himself. That’s why he has the play named after him. There is no tragedy if you feel what you should feel. Tragedy happens when you don’t….

  Of course, there were problems with the essay, and Stuart’s fine eye spotted them each in turn. Careless repetitions, run on sentences, unsupported statements; in general, a certain looseness, imprecision, a tendency to rest the argument on grand rather than particular supports. It wasn’t clear, for example, exactly what was meant by ‘reason’; and Gertrude had neither divorced Hamlet’s father nor caused him to be killed. And the thesis – concerning the incompatibility of madness in a hero – demanded at least some reference to Lear; fair enough, the old king was next on their reading list. But there was also a pervasive problem with the tone, which was too insistent and personal; though whoever wrote it proved herself capable of a more clinical line. That bit about the punning ‘shew’ was very good. Of course, it was written by a girl, their Ophelia-fixations were easy to spot (though this one seemed more occupied by the filial than the romantic); and that reflection tallied suddenly with the name under the title and he realized that Rachel herself was the author.

  He puffed up almost visibly at his desk, went pink. ‘I have a paper here,’ he declared to no one in particular, speaking loudly to let out air and rubbing his fingers back along the grain of his hair, ‘I have a paper here I could not have written myself. A paper that reminds me of exactly those considerations that led me to become a teacher in the first place; that led me to give up on my own work and devote myself to guiding younger hands.’ Nobody turned from their books, their papers; but he saw the little public confessions of a smile, here and there, as his colleagues continued reading. Of course, they were smiling at him, at his windy tone; but also, he thought, with some pleasure at the simple acknowledgement of that truth he had uttered. It only struck him after he said it that he meant it, that it might be true. Moments like this were his reward for giving up on his own ambitions.

  *

  Stu remembered chiefly about his own boyhood its pervasive hunger. He’d been a lean bony awkward kid, an only child, too tall, with badly cut hair and the bedroom pallor of loneliness. But never unhappy; or rarely unhappy, among his books. He dressed in chinos, sneakers, plaid shirts, regardless of the weather: sweated in summer sweats, froze his thin legs in the hurrying, windy Ohio cold. And never kissed a girl till he got to Penn, though he was certain even before then that wide stores of experience would be made available to him in life. His intellectual pleasures were only a foretaste of the real thing. And he had large ambitions, unembarrassed appetites: he wanted to see the world and he guessed even then that the best way to see it, in all its human particularity, was through sex. Nightly desires had begun to oppress him; he dreamt unpleasant things and did not shirk from facing up to them. It was clear, whatever else was true, that he had stumbled upon a great source of power. He decided, rather seriously, to give in to it; nonetheless thrilled by the fact that he had reached that stage in life when such conscious interior adjustments could bear large and enduring consequences.

  When he arrived in Philadelphia, he was only slightly surprised to find that his over-earnest manner and heavy touch proved attractions in themselves to a certain class of girl. He seemed like a nice boy, tall if not good-looking, spare in the face, sharp-boned, clever, parochial, rather intense; the kind of kid a sweet girl might take pleasure in drawing out. Of course, he fell too heavily in love; he overbalanced. It didn’t really matter in the end who the girl was: all that was needed was someone patient and social and sufficiently disaffected with her own class and kind – for the time at least, those heady first years of college – to take interest in an obvious outsider. Molly Hancock could trace her family line to the Revolution. She wore her black hair straight down her back, stood very still with her feet tucked together, and conducted herself in a manner Stuart later characterized as ‘the false demure’. In other words, she knew exactly what she wanted, and had discovered that the soft sexual air of vagueness and pliability she exuded was a good way of getting it. She had thought, once, of becoming a poet, but quickly decided her talents were far too conventional to justify such a career. She seduced Stuart just before she had reached this conclusion (though not, incidentally, before he had), and dropped him the summer after.

  That summer was the most painful, the most passionate, the loneliest of Stuart’s life. He returned home to Ohio after his freshman year and waited for the fall. In the meantime, he made a few bucks mowing lawns; put off continually his determination to ‘get back in touch’ with a number of high-school friends whose uncertainty obscured their scarcity; read Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet slowly in the original German and wrote long letters to Molly Hancock. He felt as if his skull had been slightly expanded, such spaces opened up within it, surprising him with sudden views, outward and in. For the first time in his life he had the sense of his brain as a chamber in which he could roam freely. Only he couldn’t get out; he could hardly speak.

  The family dinners became his sole source of human contact: roast chicken on Sunday and either mash potatoes or tater tots; followed by chicken soup on Monday and cold chicken sandwiches for lunch. Pizza once a week. His grandmother’s meatloaf on Friday nights. His father Edward (whom Stuart would resemble more and more) quit his job at the middle school when his son was born to make money. He sold new Toyotas. He did it honourably and well, managed his own lot, but felt the shame of the salesman in most relations other than the professional; se
cretly, he liked his job, the conversations among men. His private passion was Native American history; but he had a great appetite for information of all kinds. Read indiscriminately, fiction, non-fiction, whatever he picked up from the cardboard boxes of neighbourhood yard sales. Also, television; he had a wonderful memory for detective plots. Asked to comment on what he’d read or seen, he tended to recount the story in broad detail. He complained sometimes to his son of having no opinions, no small talk, no refinement of taste. As he grew older, Stuart admired more and more his father’s large silent appetite for news of the world. He took in all he could from his position on the couch; the hair over his ears standing on end, but his bald head very clean, his cheeks clean-shaven, his countenance ageless and well kept, the wrinkles fattened away.

  Stuart’s obvious unhappiness, his silence, his unhealthy summer complexion (spotty, flaccid, slightly swollen) was a great source of worry to his father. Stu was putting on weight. His lean features thickened somewhat without suggesting satisfaction: rather, physical complacence, indulged idleness. The new distance between self and son oppressed Edward. He didn’t understand what the boy was reading, a shameful admission. He said it himself, he lacked taste; a line of apology he often adopted that summer after pressing Stuart to explain those books he holed up in his room to pore over. ‘I tell you what it is, son,’ he interrupted, ‘I’ll read anything, I don’t care. I suppose most of it’s bad for me but I don’t know better. But this, this, I can’t make head or tail of.’ Edward realized of course what the kid was suffering from, but couldn’t bring himself to say it didn’t matter. All that worry about sex would soon go away; nobody could persuade you when you were young how little sex counted for in the running of the world, in keeping happy. It was useless trying. Instead, Edward talked about the work to be done on the reservations; there was a lot to be said, he said, for living in the open air.