The Wintering (28 page)

“That's the most interesting news I've heard recently.”

“Of course, it's not interesting to you. But it surprised me so. I don't feel old enough to have a baby. I don't know anything myself.”

“Listen, girlie. I've really got to run.”

When a bell rang distantly, Amy thought of making some snide remark about an ivory tower. “Run then,” she said only.

Tony swung around his newel post like a child about a pole, one arm and leg extended wide. As if on alert, his freckles appeared when he grinned. He seemed not surprised to see Amy, standing in the entranceway.

“I was just passing by.”

“I came by your place once,” he said. “You had moved.”

“Oh.” She could not hide looking pleased. “No one told you where I had gone?”

“No one knew you. Some people thought they remembered a blond girl, moving.”

“I gave the super five dollars. It looks like he could have remembered after that!” She ended on a wail.

“I thought maybe you'd gone back to Kansas City.”

“Delton,” Amy said firmly. “I've never laid eyes on Kansas City and never hope to.”

Tony's look indicated he thought all such places were the same. However, he saw the difference in her and whistled appreciatively. “So, look at you. You look almost as if you belong here, not fresh off the ooold plantation.”

Amy squashed down a thought, that to look like everybody one place was the same as looking like everybody someplace else. She only thanked Tony for his approval. Her arches in the flat sandals ached even during the time of his appraisal. She was slightly breathless, the faddish wide leather belt tight at her waist.

“Were you on your way somewhere?”

“Just out,” Tony said.

“Oh.”

“Why, you want someplace to go?”

“It doesn't make any difference to me.”

“I've got an idea you'd like. Want to go to the lesbian bar around the corner? That'll be a new experience for you. I want to see a girl there, who'll help me get a show.”

“Tony, great!”

“You want to go?”

“If it's all right.”

“It's all right. Damn, though, my blankety sister didn't get off her duff and send me any money this month.”

Amy was silent.

Tony said, glancing sidewise, “Well, it's an experience. Maybe some other time.”

She took the bait knowingly. “I have enough for a few beers.”

She wondered, ushered by Tony to the street, why he expected his sister to send him money. Married to a fireman, she wheedled five dollars now and then from her grocery budget, Tony had said. There was a difference, but she accepted money, and so Amy was silent.

Hesitating at the top of steep stairs leading from the street, she peered down toward the bar, as dank and damp as the basement the room once had been. Sawdust on the floor, wet from spilled drinks, never dried. The little damp sprinkles clung messily and uncomfortably inside her sandals. How she hated the shoes. Going along the street with Tony, she had noticed the duet they made, her slapping heels having the same insolent lazy sound as his. As a cigarette machine loomed ahead, she paused just before Tony asked if she had any change. She pinched it from her coin purse reluctantly.

She was ashamed and remonstrated with herself about being stingy, crossing to the self-service bar with Tony. If he turned out to be a famous artist, then how small she would feel. Still, she was haunted by conventions and her past would not let go. She was embarrassed paying the bartender. He paid her no attention; she might have been faceless, a voice asking for two beers. Undoubtedly Irish, with thick eyebrows and a ruddy complexion, he had a fatherly air. He seemed a judge, too, looking down from a platform where the bar was built. Saying, “Two beers,” he set them down with authority.

Why try, her mute eyes straining, to signal she did not belong in this subterranean world any more than he? Her money lay, as if trying to survive, in foamy puddles left by the two overflowed beers. Each carrying one, she and Tony searched for a table.

They were hailed by Anila, a dark heavy girl with a slight accent, who gave Amy a hard handshake, introduced. She then talked animatedly to Tony about his show. Amy noticed how she stared around the room, and having some qualms, she drank her beer and was silent. Though girls danced together, few appeared any different from her, to Amy's surprise.

She wished, a little, someone would notice her. With nothing else to do, she listened to the conversation at the table and was sorry to hear that Tony's prospective show was to be held in the YMCA and that the director was a friend of Anila's. Was the show being held as a favor for her, and not because Tony's work merited one? Having persistently drunk her beer, and now wanting another, Amy did not want to cross the room to the bar. She feared being watched anywhere, uncertain what should not be observed. She admired girls here, with courage to be as they wanted, though it was not a life she could understand. Her own situation, however, was not understandable to many, even to Jeff. Had she cut herself off too thoroughly from everything she had ever known? Any thought of pain, at night, set her eyes open in panic. Ambulances in New York, she had been told, did not respond to a random caller's voice, and suppose she lay alone, some night, and died?

There was sadness here, too, and even Anila's brusqueness might be a cover-up. Some of these girls Amy had met other places and knew several had been married. Many had a wan quality; akin to hers, she supposed. Here in the dim light in the off-on rosiness of a blinking neon beer sign, faces had an uncertain look. With suddenness, Amy crossed the room and bought three beers. This basement room had seemed a retreat. Amy determined to keep struggling to find out what ordinary and everyday living meant.

“Why,” Anila said after thanking Amy for the beer, “don't you cut your hair?”

To Amy's disgust, no answer would come. She had opened her mouth ineffectually and without sound. She was grateful to Tony for rescuing her. “She doesn't have to,” he said, which she longed to have said for herself. “Anyway, she's straight.”

Anila agreeably turned back to her business with Tony, leaving Amy to her own devices, sipping beer. Eventually, when Anila stood up, jarring the table, she looked from one to another. Then her attention focused on Amy. “Now,” she said, “I'm coming very early to see his paintings. Is he ever up by nine?”

Amy had not time to collect her thoughts. A voice seemed to answer for her, which she found to be her own. “Why, I have no idea,” she said.

With an impatient look, Anila turned to go, her final words lingering like stabs in Amy's heart. How sweet, how innocent, she had muttered. Amy, watching her walk away, realized she had wanted the girl to like her; and what had she put out to gain friendship but a little money for a beer. She went up the stairs hastily, toward the safer openness of the street, and waited for Tony, who had stopped to talk. Nearby, the doors of a Spanish café stood open, throwing out high-pitched conversations, rapid as castanets. Music inside was lavish and quick-tempered. Amy thought of some badly tinted old travelog, where beautiful, long-waisted Spanish women danced in ruffled dresses, their arms above their heads, bougainvillea tucked behind one ear. Her visions spread outward to any foreign country. And perhaps that was her answer, that she had not travelled far enough.

In the café's doorway stood a man, dark and foreign and treacherous-looking. And was she alone? he seemed to be asking, until Tony emerged, elflike in the dim light. Never before had she noticed how squashed to his head Tony's ears were, or how pointed. But she turned toward him in a sort of desperation. In the doorway, the man seemed to be giving her one more chance. He stared on at her, invitingly. His glance toward Tony had been insignificant, the way grownups acknowledge freedom to gossip before an uncomprehending child. As Amy clutched Tony's arm, a gutteral laugh escaped the man. If only she knew what she was missing! He gave another uncomprehending and flickering glance toward Tony. He then looked at her with pity. She had rushed Tony into the street, where they stood combating traffic, having stupidly gone against the light.

Turning over in midmorning sunlight, Amy avoided the sight of Tony sleeping with his mouth open. Two green flies buzzed in a bothered way against the screen. Getting up, she thrust further open a torn place and freed them to the city. Cautious eyes on Tony, she dressed, not wanting to be seen. She particularly could not imagine being revealed naked in this strong morning sunlight. One of his hands lay limply on his stomach, with a look as useless as a single glove. At the window, clad in her slip, Amy imagined herself as the cover of a cheap true-confessions magazine. Midday in her rumpled underclothes, her hair mussed, she felt slatternly.

Today, even Tony's gigantic colorful canvases added nothing to the plainness of his other room. Dressed and coming into it, she felt disgust at ants, Indian-file along the table going toward dabs of peanut butter and jelly. No longer did it seem to add up to experience to live in squalor. It was not even worth relating to anyone that the plates off which they ate always had to be washed in the bathtub at the end of the hall. Tony's sink was too small to hold them, though it held cups. When Amy moved a stack of dirty ones, circumspect brown bugs darted for the open drain. Tony last night had asked for an appraisal of his pictures. Thrusting out her chin, Amy had said that some looked merely like slashes of paint, or paint thrown, on canvas.

In a fit, Tony had said she was still a hick from wherever she had come from. She liked probably only paintings that looked like photographs and had not a single idea in her head. Had she read Freud or Marx or anything besides Jeffrey Almoner! What a fool, always defending this country. She ought to go back where she belonged. He then expounded lengthily on the meanings of his paintings and so windily that Amy reassured him, hastily, that she knew nothing about painting. But now that he told how he thought them out, she understood much better. But this morning, she came into the room and thought the pictures seemed merely slashes and dashes of paint on canvas.

Evidence of mice was everywhere in the room. In the night, she had sat bolt upright, thinking something had run across her feet. Nothing had confronted her but the darkness, that boldly. Wondering what had made her wake, she had decided it was simply apprehensiveness, constantly with her.

Moonlight had seemed not to penetrate the apartment. She had been glad for daylight when it came, at last. Tony's lax hand, his total surrender to sleep, had given Amy an opposite feeling, that she must do something energetic. After washing cups and straightening the apartment, she gathered a laundry pile by picking up clothes off the floor.

To be outside with something to do made the streets themselves seemed more functional. She was passing quickly a building with a doorman, usually suspicious and rough. Today, he called in a friendly way, “A big load for a little lady!” Courteously, he drew a baby carriage out of her way.

In the laundromat, ladies with flabby thighs, in curlers, turned their heads at the same instant toward her. They mistook her for a bride, as Amy blushed profusely, having dropped some of Tony's underwear. Several women swarmed toward her, like a welcoming committee. She was ceremoniously provided with correct change and informed how to operate the machines. And bring her own soap the next time, she was cautioned. To buy it in miniature boxes from a machine was too expensive. The clothes sloshing in suds gave Amy a comfortable feeling. Lounging in a chair, with a coverless old magazine, she watched the washing cycle hypnotically. To transfer clothes to the dryer was also a satisfactory feeling. They came out with buttons and zippers too hot to touch, warm and smelling good. She then copied heavy-armed housewives, busily smoothing their clothes until they seemed ironed. Carrying her completed stack like an offering, on extended arms, she went back happily into the street.

Tony, having just waked, blinked owlishly. He accepted his cleaner apartment and his clean clothes as his due. That was what girls did, wasn't it?

“Not usually, unless they're your wife or your mother—or something,” Amy said, at a loss as to what she meant to Tony.

Seizing the opportunity, he said bitingly, “You'll make a good little suburban housewife. That's how you'll end up, with a husband on Wall Street.” He kept on feeling irked, as usual, that she always had money.

You want to bet? Amy's angry look said. Lavish with green cleanser, she bit her lip, scrubbing his filthy sink. On hands and knees, she had spread poisonous pellets for mice, while he watched with folded arms, his pale face soft and runny-looking, like the margarine left out and gone rancid.

With arms wet to her elbows, Amy rung out the sponge capably. She wanted to rush to her room and accomplish cleaning it. Sitting back on her haunches after spreading pellets, she had come up with an enviable idea about giving life impetus: get one thing done in order to get on to something else. She went huffily and hurriedly from Tony's apartment.

Mornings afterward, when she woke in her own, she would circumspectly watch the women in the loft opposite; always, the wheel on the tailor's machine would already be spinning. She had for these people more compassion. With something akin to joy, she would hurry through dressing to go out for breakfast. She would come from that still with her sense of eagerness, but suddenly all her energy would lag. Back in her room, she lay on her bed to summon up strength, for something.

She heard no more from Tony, and lonesomeness took her finally to him. He yanked open the door angrily and said he was painting. Anila had said he did not have enough finished work for her to take to the YMCA director.

“Are you painting alone?” Amy asked.

Apparently with a memory lapse, which Amy envied, he yelled, “Of course!” and slammed the door.