Either Side of Winter

by Benjamin Markovits

  His story was about a young man who falls in love with a beautiful woman; nevertheless, he suspects her intelligence, even her virtue. Her chief attraction for him is sexual; though her wide experience also repels him. He writes her long and ornate love letters, believing that this is what she expects from him; after all, he isn’t good-looking or charming. The best he can hope for is to play the part of the shy poet. To test her, he encodes in these letters an account of how much he dislikes her, how little he respects her. If she understands him, it proves she is worthy of his higher nature; if she doesn’t, she isn’t. The problem with such a proceeding is obvious even to him: she will only reward his epistles with loving warmth if she is too stupid to see his hidden meaning. Any attempt to test her character will also, if she passes it, expose his doubts to her. The story ends, however, much more simply; she thanks him sweetly for his letters, but explains that she has fallen in love with someone else. His subtlety has been entirely lost on her, wasted.

  Mary Louise knew and disliked Molly Hancock; she thought the girl was a ‘cold fish posing as a warm one’. That was her line. She read Stu’s story the night he gave it to her; it hurt her deeply. A boy who could have written that wouldn’t give her a second look. She had come up before against the problem of suitable young men who think they deserve better than intellectual companionship in their loves; who think they deserve beauty. She had wondered all week what to say to him, and decided, at last, that her only honest response would be to say how much she disliked it. Of course, her feelings were more complicated than that; but it was true, the character in the story did not reflect Stuart’s best nature. It exposed his narrow sexual greed, his high-minded arrogance. And she had had enough of the writer’s pettiness in her father, his enduring disappointments, his persistent sniping. ‘I think’, she said, putting her strong hand on his thigh, ‘you’re better at correcting than creating.’

  Of course he was disappointed, almost heartbroken. But even she had not guessed it would leave him so open to her charms, so desperate for warmth. She comforted him against her broad breasts; he proved more experienced in bed, more sure of himself, than she’d expected.

  *

  ‘Well,’ Stuart said at last, after Rachel did not answer. ‘Maybe we should talk about what you need to work on.’ He discussed at length now the problems of tone; her need for stricter textual supports; her occasional grammatical infelicities; the lack of structure. He sat beside her now, her papers spread loose across his knee. The foam couch sank somewhat beneath his heavy weight, pressing his hip against hers. She shifted slightly over; he could smell the soap in her hair. Whenever he praised her she blushed, and he remembered the power that giving pleasure accorded. This reflection awoke other, unhappier memories. After a week of nothing but kisses, Molly had begun to get bored of his innocence; they slept tightly bound in a single bed, and she let her hand stray between his thighs. His sense of pleasure was wonderfully acute, he felt helpless before it. He said, no, no, not yet. A minute passed; he noted that his hand was on her knee, on one of the pages on her knee. ‘I suppose you’d better get to lunch,’ he said at last. ‘We can go over this later.’ She looked up at him, and sniffed slightly; the face of a girl willing to make a decision, conscious that such decisions were becoming possible to her, even necessary. Unwilling to put off any longer the next stage of her life they would usher in. ‘Even if I don’t speak,’ she said finally, standing in the doorway and bent slightly under her bag, ‘I want you to know that I read. I read everything we’re supposed to read. My mother will tell you. She says the same thing, she says you have to talk if you want them to count it, otherwise it doesn’t count. But it counts anyway, doesn’t it? I read all the time.’

  After she left, he didn’t stir for a minute, recounting slowly the movement of Molly’s hand. For whatever reason, this, his first sexual act, had never lost the power to arouse him. He had been an unwilling participant; the force of his own pleasure, his own capacity for pleasure, left him trembling. She, on the other hand, had scarcely allowed herself a sigh; he lay very still, saying, please, not yet, please, while she let his body’s involuntary answer provide a sufficient yes. She had gathered herself at the foot of the bed and taken his boxers in hand and drawn them slowly down his legs. He felt his penis gathering weight as he sat in the office; he didn’t have to touch it. Then she kissed it, wearing only a white undershirt; he could see the hanging slope of her breasts through the low neck. Still, he didn’t move. After a minute, she crawled along the length of his body till her face stuck wetly in the soft skin under his chin. She reached her hand back, and with a mechanical fumbling that surprised him, pulled his penis into her. He felt the scratch of her hair; her tightness. Only then did she open her mouth, expelling air. He came quickly, gently; even now he had to hold back the thought of its sweetness, the press of his trousers against him was proving almost irresistible. For weeks he worried she was pregnant, he was syphilitic; at the same time, he felt helplessly dependent on her. Angry, too; she had no right any more to withdraw such possibilities of pleasure.

  *

  ‘You’re very distant,’ Mary Louise said to him one night. They were reading in bed side by side, propped up on squashed pillows against the wall; she held her book at arm’s length below her breasts against the heap of her belly. Now she took off her glasses to consider him. ‘I feel you get up in the night and sit in the dark. For a while I thought you might be entertaining yourself on that damn computer.’ She laughed. ‘This morning I checked the machine; but there was nothing on it. I want you to know I wouldn’t mind.’

  ‘I have been going over old memories,’ he said, staring ahead. It amazed him sometimes how openly they talked; he knew he had her courage to thank for the fact. And was grateful for it, too. She never shrank from unpleasant reflections, or allowed any personal soreness to deflect their probing. She was very sure of him. He looked down at his book and widened his eyes suddenly, as if it had surprised him. ‘I can’t take in any words. I try but I can’t.’

  He felt it was necessary to preserve some corner of himself from the gaze of her large understanding. So he added, ‘I got another letter from Roger Bathurst, do you remember him. He said why don’t we come down to see him this summer; they have a little house out in Santa Fe. A child, too, Emily, just turned three; he sent a picture, a very proper little girl. I thought we could use some real sun.’

  It was a subtle subterfuge, because it also put her in the way of his real reflections. But he hoped that the account of Emily would catch her eye. Some years ago, Mary Louise had fainted coming up the narrow stairs to their apartment. He had supported her slow weight the rest of the way and put her to bed with a glass of water. One of those New York summers; the air-conditioners dripping on to the street and sucking in only hot air rising off the asphalt. But she admitted at last it wasn’t the first time; she’d been getting flashes for months. The news unexpectedly left him in despair. He refused to touch her; her new infertility appalled him, her decaying mass. He realized that something about her wide human warmth, her large-heartedness, had deceived him from the first; she was sterile, dry. Her broad cool air of understanding masked the absence of deeper passions; she suffered greatly from a dearth of blood-lust, she had grown fat from the absence not the excess of real appetites. She knew, of course she knew, how greatly Stuart had wanted children; it was the one dispute on which she kept mum because she realized that in time it would resolve itself in her favour. Her own family had left her with no desire to reproduce its passionate mistakes. Stuart, she knew, was fonder of his father, felt guiltier about him. But she was quite happy to let the world get on without them after their deaths.

  He hoped his reference to Emily would lead her thoughts down these reflections. But she said at last, ‘I’ve been thinking about that girl’s essay. I wanted you to know that I don’t mind if you have strange thoughts sometimes. It’s natural; I don’t think a man can think anything that isn’t natural.’


  *

  Over the next few months Rachel Kranz began to send him unmistakable signals. She caught his eye at the beginning of class and would not let it go; her blue gaze, wide as innocence, followed him everywhere. Much as it roused him he found he lacked the courage to meet it. Two or three times a week she came by the English office, or looked for him in the Winter Palace – where he sometimes graded papers during a free period, sometimes picked an old book from the shelf and read for pleasure. She nudged her head shyly round the door; whenever it opened, his heart began to race. ‘Mr Englander, Mr Englander,’ she said, in her faint clear voice. She wanted to talk to him about her next essay. She was going to write on Lear, how the play was really about greed, the greed of inheritors, and that Cordelia was the greediest of them all. Only Cordelia realized that money was a symbol for love, and that love mattered more than money: a simple truth, but her sisters got mixed up the other way around, and wanted to use love to get money.

  ‘One of the things my father once told me’, she said, ‘is that when you fight about money, you’re never fighting about money.’ Her voice adapted slightly to her father’s tongue; she sounded older, larger; like many pretty girls, Stu thought, pliable to influence. He could make something of her, this girl. She wanted to argue that the play was really about the cunning of Cordelia, her triumph: the way she got her father to herself. ‘That’s why she says,’ Rachel spent a minute growing redder, looking for her page, ‘she says, Sure I shall never marry like my sisters, To love my father all. Read the line straight, without sarcasm, and that’s what happens.’ The pair had to die because they couldn’t make love, she was his daughter, after all; death brought them as close to sexual ecstasy as they could go. It amounted to the same thing. Stuart could see such revelations were dear to her; she exposed herself widely when she read aloud.

  But she could also keep silent, sit primly on the foam couch and let him speak – occasionally displaying a slight discomfort by scratching her pink knee or shifting in her seat to hitch her skirt up. It amazed him always, how easily he could talk to her; how easily he could adopt a professorial manner. Most of what she said was rather obvious, but he granted her, there might be a seed of an idea there, worth planting. And she would frown, with heavy consternation, nodding her head at each slow word, ‘I know I need to improve my tone.’ She had begun to touch him; she touched his elbow when he looked over her work; she licked her finger and rubbed a stain from his tie. It amazed him how small and sharp her tongue appeared between her teeth. Once Amy Bostick, the new Biology teacher, said to him at lunch, ‘I think you’ve got an admirer, Stu. Better be careful.’ A skinny creature who had seemed rather miserable at the beginning of the year; he used, expressly, to sit down to lunch with her. Amy would heap her plate with cold broccoli, cottage cheese, sliced carrots – with good intentions – and pick at them and never finish anything except a chocolate doughnut. She’d had the tearful, earnest pallor of a girl looking for, as Howard Peasbody put it, ‘her next object of gratitude’. Now Amy’s thinness seemed rather a sign of self-possession. It’s awful, Stu remembered thinking, how experience makes everyone the same; all salted meat tastes alike. ‘I’ve seen,’ she added, ‘personally, what father-fixations can do.’ Well, perhaps she had the measure of him too, now; he blushed so heavily he had to cough.

  *

  But as the term continued, Rachel’s working habits only got worse. She was still punctual in person, tidy, neatly turned out. Her homework and in-class essays were written in a girlish impeccable hand, flowing, rounded lines: order it seemed spooled forth from her on an endless thread. It is what she produced. But she still refused to speak in class, and had begun to miss assignments. Even what she turned in on time was hopelessly abbreviated, perfunctory; she seemed to be daring him to chastise her. Once he caught her kissing by the bins behind the cafeteria; a stocky, smooth-faced boy, not especially bright, though rather apologetic and polite. Her face was mottled from his lips and the outside heat, particularly glaring over the concrete footway; the width of her cheeks had become very suggestive. She flushed quickly red; he saw the moistness around her neck, and imagined himself, to his guilty amusement, drying it off with toilet paper. ‘Mr Englander, Mr Englander,’ she called, running after him. When he stopped and turned she almost ran into his waist. ‘I’m so ashamed, I’m so unhappy.’ He was certain she had timed her performance especially to arouse him. He said, in the heat of the moment, ‘I don’t think I’d like my daughter spending her schooldays necking, do you?’

  Still, he couldn’t get the image of her sweet disorder out of his head. The rest of Herrick’s line ran on in his thoughts. Yes, wantonness is exactly the word. And he finally allowed himself to undress her that afternoon, after school, when he had the office to himself. The first heavy day of the year; a foretaste of the summer. When he ran his hand back along his hair he felt the slickness left over from a long afternoon. His armpits stank; he was rich in sexual heat. A fly flew loosely around the room, missing the opened window, again and again. His nerves had been stripped down to the fresh wood; nothing in the office, in the outside world, could move or sound without inflicting a corresponding shift in him. He imagined her lying naked on a white sheet, lying in the grass perhaps, or on the floor at his feet. The fly buzzed to a stop at last, composing its restless legs on her scratchy unripe pudenda. Gently, in his mind, he brushed it off; it interrupted his contemplations. But he found his thoughts had already strayed. There was of course the famous verse by Donne; which he’d often taught, always careful in seminar, for obvious reasons, to keep the tone strictly analytical. There was a danger in these times in permitting any free discussion from experience. And Tennyson’s wonderful pendant cooling the pink depression between his wife’s breasts. Rachel’s, he supposed, were rather less developed; paler, possessing an almost green coolness, thinly veined. He doubted she’d ever exposed them to the sun. Larkin, too, did something clever with Donne’s flea, transformed it into a city, Oxford, which Stu himself had visited one summer many years ago in what he liked to call his ‘far different youth’. These thoughts provided him with necessary nourishment; they left him highly agitated, almost eager – an upset very much like hopefulness.

  That night he refused to come to bed. Mary Louise had guessed his overheated state. The air had softened in the growing dark; she wore black silk and waited for him with the duvet at her feet. But he did not want to translate these fresh sensations into an old dead language. He did not want to accept her comfort, give in to her solace, which extended to his sexual frustrations. He sat up watching television. She woke briefly when he snuck in and said, ‘I don’t mind who you think of, darling. I want you to be happy.’ He pretended not to have heard: these were difficult admissions, he wasn’t sure how much explanation their marriage could stand. He lacked her faith.

  More and more it struck him as cowardly not to act on these longings. They had begun to overgrow the background of his thoughts, like seeding grasses, gaining weight and colour in neglect. ‘Sooner murder an infant in its cradle,’ he remembered his Blake, ‘than nurse unacted desires’; an unhappy image, strange how everything led him back to his books, his childlessness. He began to obsess about Rachel’s period; he looked at her legs, her cheeks, to see if they bore the weight of her waters. Once, she asked to ‘use the bathroom’ next door; while she was gone, no more than a minute, he couldn’t keep his mind on their set text, Much Ado About Nothing. He called on one of his students to read aloud. He imagined he heard the cool trickle of her pee, not the more silent searching adjustment of a tampon. Her fertility itself infected him with desire.

  Besides her backpack, she carried a small candy-cane-striped handbag to class. She left it on her desk one day. He saw it and picked it up, felt the loose assortment inside, a comb, a tube of lipstick, through the fine leather in his hands. Some change. Quietly, with trembling fingers, he unzipped the top; and pressed the opening wide. A cool small plug in white wrapping lay inside; as he was p
robing Rachel came back in the class. She said, ‘I forgot my purse’ – stopping short, and blushing.

  Molly Hancock, as it happens, had had an affair in high school with her English teacher, a much older man – married, too; his wife taught in the same school. At the time it rather titillated Stu; he kept asking her, how did he summon up the nerve? What did he say? ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘I knew what was going on, believe me. I had the situation very much in hand. One day he simply let me know, he said, I want you to know this, Molly, if you ever want to sleep with me I can make arrangements. I want you to know that offer stands. I don’t care when you feel like you need it; believe me, at my age we’re much less unsure of what we want. We can afford to wait.’

  The memory was suddenly strong and Molly was getting dressed at the time, putting on dirty underwear after a night in his room, already late for class. He was playing hooky, lying up in bed in his boxers, still skinny, still young. He hadn’t done the reading anyway. He almost said to Rachel, ‘If you ever want to sleep with me I can make arrangements.’ He said, ‘I wanted to see whose purse it was. Is it yours?’ He held it out, still open; his fingers were sweating, and when she took it from him, she touched his hands.

  The rest of the day he heard laughter. Whenever he saw Rachel, she was standing in a group of girls; they were laughing, leaning together, carelessly in contact. The shame was unbearable. I can’t go on any longer this way, he thought. I have to do something.

  *

  He kept thinking of Molly’s offhand remark, ‘believe me, I had the situation very much in hand.’ He knew, of course, that Rachel could see through him; part of her attraction lay in that fact, in how large and obvious he must appear to her, how crudely exposed. ‘I still don’t see how you started up with him,’ Stu had answered, feeling green, prudish, Midwestern, young. ‘Oh, that wasn’t hard.’ Molly was dressed now, and he had tried to restrain her, pulling her back towards his bed by her hands, pushing his cheek to her breasts. ‘Stop it, stop it, stop it,’ she repeated half-heartedly; the fact was, she wanted to tell the end of the story. She could see his boxers slowly tenting outwards, and laid her palm against his belly. ‘I sat in his office and burst into tears; it’s true, by the way, I was unhappy. One of my boys had been cheating on me; I took it personally. It’s no hardship to a girl like me, by the way, crying, that is; I always have enough reasons. I’ve never thought of myself as a happy person; mostly, I just keep up appearances. Anyway, he closed the door. That’s the first thing he did, I remember thinking it was very calculated, very mature; and came over to comfort me. He put his arm around me; I could smell his excitement and my face was already wet; it slipped a little against his beard till I found his lips. Once that was over, he could take the initiative; all he needed was a go-ahead. It was quite a relief to me, after those high-school boys. Anyway, we worked together on the literary magazine; he drove me home one night and we stopped off at a motel. I’d been thinking about it for days, but it didn’t take long. I cried afterwards, he was brusque. But by the time summer came I was ready for it to end; after a while everything I did made him unhappy. He was totally dependent.’ She left him then, running late for class. Stuart spent the rest of the day in bed, surprisingly low-spirited, sympathetic. Feeling utterly helpless in the face of her cool assurance, his strong desires.