Either Side of Winter (14 page)

And again sat down to wait. It seemed to him then that the answer to broader questions than the whereabouts of his colleague was being deferred. It consoled him greatly that he still had recourse to these pleasant moments; he lived, as he put it to himself, more and more for the minutes offstage. He thought of De Quincey on discovering his sister’s death. How he stared out their bedroom window across the broad English fields of summer, and imagined himself briefly, in the sunshine, running through it – indifferent to his present loss, the girl dead in the bed beside him. Or perhaps Stuart misremembered the passage; occasionally his own experiences entangled themselves with the books he had read, grew inextricably together. And the line ‘welcome summer with thy sunne soft’ ran through his thoughts. Yes, he was ready for the fullness of the year. He repeated it now, under his breath, ‘welcome summer with thy sunne soft’. These echoes wakened in his thoughts throughout the day, like leaves briefly roused by the passage of wind. He had lived a very plain life, yet very rich in literary additions. Well, Roger wasn’t home.
Stu stood up now and walked slowly down the neighbourhood street, in and out of shadows, letting go his loneliness bit by bit, till the clamouring schoolhouse rose before him.

By the next day, everyone knew what had happened to Roger Bathurst. He’d run off with a girl, one of his students, just turned eighteen. God, the little spice of envy in the air in the faculty lounge, how it sharpened these recriminations. The women, of course, took the matter solely as an affront; only the men harboured mixed feelings. Stuart himself said at one point, ‘Well, he’s gone over to the other side’ – hoping, by such subtle vagaries, to say what he wanted to say about his old friend without getting caught. People nodded; yes, it was a sick thing to do, there was no turning back. Though what Stuart meant, of course, was that Roger had gone over to the side of youth – to the hungry unruly majority, who had their long wide lives before them, who swelled the hallways and the cafeteria and the baseball field and had their way everywhere but the quiet classrooms where age presided. Only the Biology teacher, Howard Peasbody, had caught his meaning, and gave him a sharp look. He’d been particularly disgusted by the affair. ‘I taught the girl,’ he said. ‘Clumsy, too tall, not particularly bright. Always breaking Petri dishes. It required every ounce of such scholarly mercy as I possess to give her a C – for effort, as they say. I don’t suppose he’ll find her company enlightening.’

Stuart didn’t answer at first. There’d been a time he thought they might deepen their acquaintance into friendship. His own father had taught Science in middle school; Stuart naturally admired the clinical mind. And Howard Peasbody possessed a wide frame of reference, exact tastes. Once, during a faculty seminar, Howard had quoted Ashbery at him. Dr Holroyd, the new head, wanted to say a few words to some of the older staff, on what she called the Challenge of the Younger Generation – the new crop of teachers, some of them hired fresh out of college. A source, occasionally, of envy, of irritation. ‘Sure,’ she said, ‘they make mistakes, they
learn, and it’s your job to give them a hand. But don’t forget they have something to teach you, too.’ She was appealing to them for renewed commitment, replenished passion. ‘Ask yourself,’ she said, ‘am I running on fumes? Do I really care any more?’ This was just the kind of talk Stuart hated; he muttered, yes, and no, to himself, in answer. And Howard, sensing a kindred spirit, had leaned over and whispered: ‘A look of glass stops you and you walk on shaken: was I the perceived? Did they notice me, this time, as I am, or is it postponed again?’ Stuart smiled: very apt, this is just what he liked, the way art lent style to the boorishness of life. But somehow nothing came of such comradely intimations. Perhaps, he was too competitive; Stuart feared being outdone; but he heard, in his wife’s voice, a kinder judgement given: Howard was a cold fish; he was a warm one. The younger man’s remark on Roger’s ‘defection’ seemed to confirm this intuition; and amidst his heavier regret, Stuart acknowledged, with an internal gesture as slight as a nod, the forfeit of their chance at friendship. His allegiance was clear; and he answered Howard coldly at last, ‘We all find our enlightenment where we can.’

Stuart remembered talking to Bathurst about Dickens earlier that year, after a department meeting. The English faculty had just decided to keep
Great Expectations
on the junior syllabus, preferring it once more to the longer, heavier
David
Copperfield
. Roger had collared Stuart afterwards; he wanted to unload, and he put his arm around Stu’s shoulder, a rare gesture of fraternity, and led him to the Winter Palace. Roger was furious, in mid-rant; and Stu stood up to watch the end of baseball practice, leaning against the cold of the shut window. The coach was knocking flyballs back, with a runner on third waiting for the catch, and the outfield shallow preparing for the throw home. An early-spring day, a little brisk. Clouds came and went overhead, interrupting the sunshine with pearly shadows. Only the coach and the base runner had worked up a sweat and removed their warm-up tops. It
always delighted Stuart to see the elaborate patience of the ball descending; the unhurried pace of gravity bringing it down, and then the instant human fury after the catch. Roger began to declaim passages from
David Copperfield
, bending the book beneath his heavy thumb. He had the gift of reading without changing tone; he simply used the stuff of his ordinary speech: his thick New York accent, his full-tongued mouth, his exasperated insistence. Stuart hardly listened; it seemed to him that Roger’s indignation was only an excuse for a subtle form of boasting. They amused him, such high pedagogical passions, such vain opinions.

Well, and now Roger had disappeared. To his own surprise, Stuart felt a little lonelier because of it. At the end of the fraught, mostly wasted day (spent in hastily convened assemblies, in faculty meetings, in fruitless and emotional discussions of the affair with his several classes), Stuart repaired to the little English office, grateful to have a minute to himself. He pulled the copy of
David Copperfield
from the shelf and sat back heavily on the foam couch and began to read. Cloud cover darkened the windows – in that grey light, Stuart could see the fine grain in the old glass – and eventually gave way to rain. The first spit of water on the panes made him blink. ‘You must think of me at my best, old boy,’ Roger had read. ‘Come! Let us make that bargain.’ Stuart guessed now that Roger had been trying to tell him something; Roger had wanted to talk. Secret lives exert great outward pressure; he had wanted at least to make himself known, in some fashion, he had wanted at least to utter certain relevant sentiments. Of course, in the end Steerforth ran off with Emily; and Roger Bathurst himself eloped with one of his students. Surely, Stuart thought, we live our lives in books; though he, for his part, had been content to stop short at their pages.

A month later, he got a letter from Roger, postmarked in Santa Fe. It included a photograph. He had shaved off his beard, and, in the bright glare of red hills, almost looked the part of a prematurely balding, disreputable young hippy: in
cut-off jeans shorts and high-strapped sandals, with his hairy arm around the sun-burnt shoulders of an otherwise pale, rather big young woman, trying hard not to smile too broadly. ‘I tell you something,’ the letter read, ‘if I weren’t so damn happy I’d be a miserable bastard, wouldn’t I?’ The girl had her palm on the head of a black dog, keeping it still. Stuart hadn’t taught her himself; and over time the image of her faded in his mind, replaced by that of Rachel Kranz leaning across their line of vision to pick a book from the shelf. That was the moment, as he remembered it, when things started to go wrong.

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.