Either Side of Winter Read Free

answered, ‘Don’t bother, I’ll shower when I get home’, and didn’t move. There’d been rain overnight to wipe the slate clean, and the sun was up in a clear sky and streaming more and more fully through the window as noon approached. It caught his face, or rather specks of his face – his stubble, the grain of his eyes, his teeth – which glinted in the yellow band of light as he squinted against it. She gathered an armful of clothes and changed in the bathroom. It wasTuesday morning, she had a bad head, and her first day of school was Wednesday. When she got out again, dressed except for her wet feet, he was flicking through her stack of magazines.
    ‘I wouldn’t mind writing for one of these outfits,’ he said. ‘They’re all the same: cosmetic compositions, in both senses. Like abstract art – composed of elements rather than figures.’
    ‘Are you hungry?’ she said.
    ‘What d’you got in the house?’
    She considered for a minute. ‘How about we go out for breakfast?’
    ‘Sure, I don’t mind.’ And he got up naked in front of her and carefully put on his clothes from the night before: the black trousers, which he’d folded and hung over the back of her desk chair, white shirt (from a hanger in her closet), cuff links, laid next to his watch on the tin of tomatoes. Only he left the bow-tie untied and loose around his neck. ‘I know a little place around here’, he said, ‘I’d like to show you.’
    That in fact became a characteristic of their relationship. Charles Conway showed Amy Bostick around town. Everywhere they went he knew ‘a little place’, and as often as not the proprietor there would greet him by name or by taking Charles’s paw in one hand and holding Charles’s elbow in the other and shaking both at once. The place he took her to that morning was a kind of Mexican greasy spoon, a ‘shortorder joint’ Charles called it, named Rosarita’s. At least that’s what someone had painted in pink and blue on the white board above the awning. They sat at one of the round unsteady tables on the pavement underneath it and when Amy complained about sitting out of the sunshine and getting cold – she wore only a plain white T-shirt, linen shorts and Birkenstocks, and goosepimpled lightly – Charles called out, with patrician good humour, for someone to roll up the awning. A narrow-shouldered, dark-skinned man with a heavy moustache promptly attended them. He moved in the jerky almost brittle fashion of a skinny man whose skinninesshas outlived his youth. As soon as he saw Charles he called out his name and put his hands around his neck, then bustled in and came out bearing two peach-coloured drinks in large wine glasses on a tray. Amy was more touched than she had any right to be and felt herself falling under the spell of the sandy young man in a dirty tuxedo whose stains showed up bright and dusty in the sunshine.
    She was still somewhat drunk from the night before, and the peach-coloured liquid suggested at least that it was going to get better before it got worse. Charles it seems had decided to let her talk. He ordered some kind of huevos and ate them hungrily and without great dignity when they appeared; leaning forward to get low to the plate and looking up at her from under his thickening eyebrows to show he was listening from time to time. Amy said something about looking forward to the football season, that being the one thing about the start of the school year she always looked forward to: the leaves drying up on the trees, the first norther coming through to knock them off, and Notre Dame. She hadn’t decided yet who to root for now that she’d transplanted herself. Her alma mater, Amherst, was pretty much a wash-out as far as football went. And she figured she’d spent enough time on the East Coast now not to beat against the prevailing winds any more – she might try pulling for the Giants.
    Charles said, ‘So you’re one of those girls who makes a point of