Either Side of Winter (21 page)

Afterwards, he bought her a slice of pizza from the hole in the wall under the elevated tracks. Brian ate nothing – never hungry after a workout – drank a Diet Coke and smoked one cigarette. Rachel made a show of disapproval. He sweated lightly, in spite of a cold shower, and pressed his palm to his forehead. Apart from the smoke his other smells were perfectly clean. She wanted to touch his arm again but didn’t dare. Maybe he had fallen out of love; maybe it was only a joke from the first. In fact, he thought how fresh she seemed; her scent was girlish, unspoilt. Most sexual thoughts oppressed him by their uncleanliness; but he could imagine her naked with her legs wide and odourless, the inside of her thighs cool and pale, no different from the skin on her cheek, her neck. They caught the train downtown, and she leant against his shoulder, very still, sleepless, with her eyes closed; they had run out of talk. It was Rachel who insisted Frannie come out to the movies with them. Standing under the awning after, on 86th Street, Frannie bummed a smoke off him; she stooped and he lit it with the smoulder of his own cigarette. Rachel wanted to scream. So much was forbidden her; and she had such poor desires. She walked home early and left them to it.

Lately, books had been her consolation. She had discovered a passion for reading; and wondered if it, like Brian’s weightlifting, could effect a change in mass, in personal gravity. For the first time in her life she felt she had inward alleys to explore. Her teacher, Mr Englander – a tall sloping man with a pinned-back countenance, full in the cheeks, somewhat pink, also humorous, reserved – had a habit of catching her eye. She realized that her answering look satisfied him; and like her mother, she couldn’t resist giving pleasure. But she lacked the nerve to speak her mind; whatever she said sounded so much tawdrier than what she thought. Mr Englander was famous, especially among the girls, for kindly
pedantry; they sometimes teased him by provoking his corrective habit. Rachel rather feared it; she disliked being caught out in imperfections.

Inevitably, of course, sex talk came up in class; but his manner was cool and proper. Rachel rather admired him for it, and envied the attainment of an age, a position in life, when such thoughts lacked heat, and could be clearly, fully discussed. She remembered her own insistence: ‘I’m the girl I always was.’ Well, nobody expected her to be; they wouldn’t let her alone. Whatever she said or did was burdened by heavy interpretations; people had such dirty minds. These seemed almost a literary requirement: her classmates found sex at the bottom of every metaphor. Mr Englander, to be fair, usually discouraged them. They had been discussing Shakespeare’s influences. He had assigned them a packet of contemporary verse: a black-ringed binder with thick uneven paper that took in the sweat of your thumb. That afternoon she lay in bed, the bars of her bed against her back, and read, quietly unsticking her lips at each line:

But her ear baulked at the word
chopcherry
, though it pleased her, and she couldn’t connect the thoughts: whose
chin
, what
time
, why
maid
? Was a girl or a boy speaking? She had a very particular brain, like her father’s, a stubborn streak. He praised her for it once, saying her best intellectual gift was the refusal to understand. She would have to read it over again later.

Around eight, she walked to her father’s for supper. Tasha was napping; Rachel looked in on the sitting room and found
her on the carpet in front of the television, her mouth open, lengthening her face. The television left on, its pixilated talking heads almost as large as her mother’s sleeping one. Beside her, a space heater blew thick vents of air; Tasha chilled easily, and loved the almost human touch of warmth of any kind. Rachel tiptoed to turn it off, conscious, quietly guilty, that she didn’t want to wake her mother for selfish reasons.

The cloud cover kept the heat of the city, such as it was, in for the evening, low to the ground; one of those cool nights you sweat into your woollens. ‘Your father has something to tell you.’ Yes, Rachel had been uneasy for months; Reuben had been working Saturdays since Christmas, which is why she spent her weekend afternoons with Tasha, shopping. He looked hassled, out of sorts. At seventy-five, seventy-six, it seemed undignified to keep up such a pace. Sometimes her mother was right: never to waste time is sinful, immodest. ‘Who are we we have to do so much? The world will turn. Leave it be.’ For a time, Rachel thought he worked only to keep away from an unhappy home. And, in fact, after he moved out two years before, those first weekends, months, he was very solicitous, dependent on his daughter. Greatly softened; too much almost, she didn’t like to see such sweetness in him, like the juice of an old apple, a sign of rottenness. ‘Come here, let me put my hands to your face. I need a
menschliche
touch.’ His lips, when they pressed her forehead, wet, uncertain. Later, his manner was more correct; perhaps he had found another woman. This was his announcement; no wonder Tasha’s tears lay so close to the surface. At his stage of life, there seemed something wonderfully ambitious, wilfully blind, in these fresh starts. As if he said, ‘I begin again as often as I want. Don’t tell me there isn’t time to see things through.’ He had been losing hair.

She crossed the quiet two-way traffic of York Avenue, the corner deli, the laundrette. She had enough to think about: Brian Bobek, standing on the street with Frannie, considering options, sharing a smoke. Rachel sensed their shyness as she
‘left them to it’: her own phrase, quietly repeated, suggestive rather than conclusive. These cigarettes: her father had a morbid horror of them. Occasionally, Tasha bought a pack and smoked it out in the course of a month or two; just for the feel of it in her hand, she said. When she was a girl young men used to fall over themselves to reach her with a match. Another source of argument. As Reuben once declared, ‘One thing I’m thankful for, we’ll never run out of arguments.’

‘Me, I don’t want to live for ever,’ was Tasha’s line. ‘I’d use up all of my love and couldn’t bear it. But your father gets along very well without. He can keep going for years.’

Rachel regretted dragging Frannie along. Saw her stoop to the cigarette in Brian’s lips. Their dirty intimacy demanded a reluctant respectfulness; shared sins were binding. Rachel’s innocence, carefully preserved, left her lonely, but she wasn’t willing to spoil it simply for company’s sake. Recently, around the pair of them, she’d become conscious of her diminishing rights. Brian had always protested his love for Rachel openly and cheerfully, but people’s high opinions of you also made certain claims. The opinions changed if you didn’t satisfy them. Rachel wasn’t sure her inside materials could ever live up to anyone’s expectations; apart from her own, possibly her father’s. Even so, such food for reflection offered a kind of nourishment; she was in no hurry. And the way was familiar, the six-block journey west from Tasha to Reuben: out of the rich quiet neighbourhood by Gracie Mansions, and through the dirtier blocks around Second Avenue, where the Rosenblums lived.

On the side streets, she passed dingy apartment lobbies, the brown-tinted fronts of cobblers’, tailors’ shops. Repetition of trees at even intervals, black heaps of garbage sacks, thrown-out ovens, yellow fridges. She wore a cream skirt, loosely pleated, printed with a few red roses, each on its cut inch of green stem. A pale green top heavily flounced at the neck, and a long brown woolly cardigan, knit large, with a single button just below her breasts. Slate-grey tights, little
blue shoes. Her father always praised her turn-out, and she liked to please him. Tasha used to satisfy his sensibility; he had a fine eye for womanly qualities, and Rachel guessed that in this respect at least she had supplanted her mother. Tasha’s style, in any case, ran to excess as she grew older; she hoped to hide behind vividness. Rachel was conscious of the subtler interior regulations demanded by her attention to appearances; she stepped prettily along the pavement, waited with still feet at the traffic lights. And enjoyed, in spite of her worries, the sense of a well-ordered personality, arranged in the best of taste.

Townhouses began to appear between Second and Third and then the apartment blocks grew taller, grander, after Lexington. She glanced down the long central section of Park Avenue towards the heart of midtown where her father worked. The lines of planted daffodils, in the mild February weather, had just begun to lift their heads, suggesting both method and profusion. Yellow cabs rivalled the flowers, clustering at the lights. A stately, humourless avenue,
sans
shopfronts and pavement stalls. The doorman, a wide-hipped Italian, stepped on his cigarette under the awning, and offered to take her shopping up in the lift. Mr Toretti. One of the buttons above his belt had come undone; he shyly occupied a corner in the elevator, leaving room for her, conscious of grossness. She smelt the grey smell of his Marlboros, his lived-in uniform. Two years ago, he might have pushed along a conversation with Miss Kranz. But she had grown in that time and begun to occupy her surrounding spaces, in which men fell silent. She felt the static uneasy pleasure produced by her presence, and looked at her shoes. Thinking of Mr Englander. Once she saw him with a hand in his pocket, adjusting.

The lift opened into her father’s sitting room, and the doorman left her there, among her bags. ‘Daddy,’ she called out, ‘Daddy’; she always called her mother Tasha. Her father had done little to furnish his apartment since moving in; its high
ceilings, wide halls, still echoed slightly, offered clear perspectives. Tall windows looked over the Avenue and the rows of daffodils, taxis. There was a long deep couch in the sitting room, bright red, with square arm rests and a low back. A coffee table constructed of glass and steel. On the mantle, above the fireplace, a picture of Rachel at her grandfather’s funeral, in a short black dress of wispy chiffon. Her colouring pink, eager, concentrated, her eyes wet with dutiful tears – producing a vivid effect not unlike joy. A woven rug, of braided blues and reds, hung against one wall. Other than that, only a poster under clear glass broke the white expanses: an architectural design of the Pont Neuf from an exhibition at the Met. Pencilled elms along the pavement had been wrapped in heavy white cloth and bound tightly: a picture in which the muffling also suggested flame, brought out the torch-like quality in the procession of still trees. One of Christo’s jokes. In a high-backed wooden armchair her father sat, reading the newspaper; only he had fallen asleep, and a corner of newsprint lay dipped in the cup of cold coffee at his feet. Rachel had a sudden image of her mother, the television murmuring to her dreams, her open mouth. She stood quietly a minute, pitying herself for her ageing parents, before she removed cup and paper and set them on the coffee table; touched his elbow, and woke him by a kiss on the cheek.

Reuben Kranz was a delicate-boned man with a handsome narrow face; his countenance sharp, small-eyed, brown, finely wrinkled. It suggested the prolonged action of vinegar upon it, sour humour, cleanliness, preservation. He wore thin corduroy, a grey wool jumper, open at the neck, a tweed jacket; silver cufflinks in the shape of golfballs, a lonely eccentricity. The clothes bulked larger than the man as he got older, but he needed to keep warm. His hair was usually cut short, a grizzled grey; but as he lost it he let it grow. Thin strands waved in the air like weeds under water, and upset Rachel: she remembered him always as carefully groomed. Tasha was taller than he; they had made an odd couple at the best of
times. Rachel recalled a photo from one of the shoeboxes in the storage room. The pair of them posed on the black and white squares of the tiled parlour: Tasha glittering in sepia, her low-necked dress and the slant each way of her breasts suggesting an open heart, recklessness; Reuben, elegant in evening wear, his hand at her full hip, steadying her. About to go out to a party. He widened his eyes at his daughter, very grey. ‘Oh god Rachel you shouldn’t have waked me. I didn’t sleep well in the night.’ Then he composed himself. ‘I’m glad you’re here: I have something to tell you. Let’s get a bite to eat.’ His mild displeasure, chastening habits were seductive. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, consoling herself with the thought that his authority remained intact.

She dropped her bags in the bedroom; undecorated, aside from a white pot of lilies in the fireplace, blooming against the bricks – the housekeeper’s kindness, Mrs Fuentes’s – and a gilt mirror over the mantle. Rachel looked steadily at her reflection: she wanted to see if she was happy. Stray hairs along her temples, very fine, suggested worry, disorder. Perhaps he intended to talk to her about sex; nobody could believe that she hadn’t changed. An old argument she was growing tired of hashing out in her thoughts, so she gave up on it. The way his clothes bulked around his shoulders, his neck, dismayed her; Brian, in his youth, enlarged himself, acquired mass, but her father was shrinking. Her window looked over a courtyard, a fountain among low trees, stuffed garbage bins lined up against a wall. When she laid her cheek against Brian’s shoulder on the subway downtown, she felt him stiffen and begin to regulate his breathing. A little nervous, but perfectly controlled. Afterwards, combing out her hair before bed, she smelt his cigarettes.

Reuben waited for her in the hall, umbrella in hand. She said it wasn’t raining, it’s the kind of low cloud that never rains. He shook his head, a peevish gesture, and called up the elevator. ‘How’s your mother?’ he asked.

‘Asleep when I left. She took me shopping.’

‘So I see.’ They stepped into the lift, brightly lit; the mirrors, however, had been covered with brown pads.

‘She thinks you’re having an affair with Mrs Fuentes.’

‘No she doesn’t,’ he answered very final, sure. He propped himself with two hands on the umbrella; a whimsical posture, Rachel imagined him breaking into dance, he must be light on his feet, so thin, his puffed-out clothes seemed to hold him in the air.