The Wintering (43 page)

“You know I'm not religious. Though a long time, I believed heaven was a place with God and Jesus walking around. A Sunday-school teacher told me Jesus was a man who went around telling stories and had tuberculosis. Billy Walter, what a comedown! I do like idealizing things.”

Guffawing, repeating “tuberculosis,” Billy Walter got out of the car and ambled to the motel office. There, he leaned charmingly toward the woman behind the register. Within a moment, her hennaed head thrown back, she was howling with laughter. Watching, Amy could not help her own lips twitching. Billy Walter was, as her mother said, an overgrown puppy. Seldom did Amy think Billy Walter's jokes really funny, but enjoyed watching him tell them for he enjoyed his own hugely and life with him would be a continuing series of practical jokes. Recently, agreeable as always, he had gone with her to a show of modern art, held in a medieval-looking building which lent an air of solemnity. Rightly, he had not pretended to be impressed by a square within a square as a picture, and neither was she. Like Billy Walter, she had soon found the whole collection a bore, but kept sheepishly trailing from picture to picture. After following her for some time, like a dutiful consort, only his hands behind his back were restive, Billy Walter left the room. Looking around, Amy found that, not surprisingly, he was gone. He reported later having seen a good buddy—a really good old boy—whom he had not seen in a long time. That boy, foresightedly, had a fifth of vodka in his car. With it, they had spiked not only their own punch but cups they thoughtfully carried to the elderly hatcheck lady. At the afternoon's slow end, she was handing out coats in vague directions and usually to the wrong owner. Taking Amy by the hand, howling and at a gallop, Billy Walter raced with her down the museum's steps.

The woman behind the desk now gave him a paper cup, and raised one to touch it. Cheers! they would be saying, Amy thought impatiently. Right then, being cold, she would have gotten out of the car, except that a car full of Negroes came swervingly from behind the motel; tailpipe dragging, it went off down Quill Boulevard. The screeching sound drew Billy Walter to the front window, where he seemed to remember Amy. He made an obvious farewell to the woman and headed for the door. But she went on talking, her mouth widening and closing like a snapping turtle's, persistently, as if never would she get through telling Billy Walter all she had to tell him. He always, from the merest encounters, came away knowing more about people, Amy felt, than if she had spent the day with them. He chided her when she said that. Wasn't she, after all, the one who wanted to have experiences and know about people? She shouldn't waste time, then, being shy. However, she knew she went on being dependent on Billy Walter for information. He very shortly forgot details, often could not recall them a second time, while Amy vicariously lived these lives. People seemed to endure such sad small ones, without malice. She was fretful, often, wanting something in return for living.

Standing in the motel's doorway, Billy Walter was calling, “The little woman's going to give me hell!” He came along, followed by the woman's shooing motions and laughter and gave Amy a paper cup. After drinking from it, making a face, she said, “What's that?”

“Rye, I think. Isn't it terrible? But the woman inside gave it to me for you. ‘Happy life,' she said.” Amy took the cup back and drank its contents obligingly.

With the Christmas season past, its decorations gave everything a leftover quality. On the door to which Billy Walter fitted the key, with difficulty, were strung lopsided letters reading Merry Christmas. In the motel's office window, the pointed and blush-colored bulbs of an artificial candle had gone out. “Go on in, sugar.” Billy Walter stood aside, the door thrust open. Closing it, he said, “I told that woman about getting that old lady at the art show drunk, and I thought she'd split a gusset!” The room was filled up with his size and his own laughter.

“What's her story?” Amy said, a little jealously.

He was roaming the room inspectingly, and said, “Oh hell, there's some rumpus in the kitchen. The help's all drunk and fighting. Her husband's gone home to get his pistol.”

If asked to close his eyes and relate what he had seen roaming the room, Billy Walter would have remembered little. While apparently watching him, Amy could have said that there were cigarette burns the size of dimes in the green chenille spread, faded by bleach. Glasses had left white rings on the top of the tilty bureau, and its lamp had little for a shade but a wire frame. The shower curtain, having lost holders, hung limp as a scarecrow. Amy pranced from the bathroom wearing a diaphanous and frilly slip, naturally enticing to Billy Walter. Taking her by the wrist, he drew her toward the bed, down on top of him. There, Amy faltered. She, in her mind's eye, kept thinking of the square within a square, the picture at the art show that had been incomprehensible. Why had she pretended to like it? And why had she not come now glumly, as she felt, from the bathroom to be enticing?

No longer than he lingered over her many questions did Billy Walter linger after making love. He heaved himself from the bed, restless and ready for some other activity. He considered himself practical, that he faced life head-on. But Amy, watching him from the bed, wondered if he were not actually trying to escape things, rushing about and always busy. He told her she was morbid and obsessed by death, and she had answered that she was not afraid of being sad. Now he was hurrying toward the shower. She impulsively reached out for his hand, but with an occupied air, he barely brushed hers and went on, by-passing her attempt to make them closer. He seemed to know there was no such thing as being inseparable.

She sat up to disappear from the bureau mirror, with steam coming from the shower obscuring it. Lavishly soaping, Billy Walter sent a sweet warm scent into the room. Lighthearted and complicated as a bird's chirping, he whistled above the shower's noise. As against the stall's tin sides the spray lessened, Amy quickly read a letter, taken from her purse.

Jeff
:

I've wondered so much what's happened to you?? I've hesitated to call or write you at home. I'm dying to know when your book is coming out??? Will you let me know? I had to come home on short notice for the opening of my father's dancing school
—
eek!!! You can imagine! Otherwise, I would have phoned you. He's not well. All the same things here; how 'bout there?? I am doing some social work with crippled children and like that. I have written little things in bits and pieces, not much. But remember how warm it was once in the woods in December, or was it November??? Anyway, want to meet again
?????

Love, Amy

The top sheet held a mercuric and disinfectant smell, not at all pleasing, as Amy read the letter hidden beneath it. Though the water still ran, she felt fearful of Billy Walter suddenly coming in and asking what she was doing. More clearly, she saw how shabby the letter was, with all its inane flip question marks. And it reeked with the confidence that, summoned, Jeff would come. He had not thought it worthy even of a fresh reply and had merely scrawled an answer on the bottom.

This letter is the only stupid thing you've ever done, Amy. That's because you wrote it out of your head and not from your heart. And this one is the one I never meant to write. I never intended to fall in love with you when all this began. I took you in only to shape you into what you wanted to be. But yours is the girl-woman face and figure I see when I close my eyes. No, I won't meet you again, for a ghost would be between us, as now I think when you are with him a ghost is between you, whether he knows it or not
.

Billy Walter, roughly toweling his head, came out flinging water drops like a dog shaking rain. “You look like a mouse burrowing in your purse. What's always in them so important to women?”

“Things to hide behind mainly,” she said, smiling. “The face you see isn't really me. It's made up. I don't think you realize that.”

“It's good-looking. That's what counts,” he said.

“And I carry mad money. I'm always afraid someone will go off and leave me.”

“I'm going to now, to get ice,” he said. “I need a little hair of last night's dog.”

With his usual alacrity, Billy Walter was dressed. He seemed never hampered by buttons or zippers as other people were. Things went smoothly for him, and Amy looked at him in faint surprise. With a cardboard container, he started for the door. “If you go out without a coat and your hair wet, you'll get a cold,” she said unexpectedly.

He came back with a thoughtful air, his eyes on her. He gave his head one more swipe with a towel before putting on his coat. “Nice to be taken care of in more ways than one,” he said.

She felt shyer under his look and said, “Well, you would.”

The door banged behind him. His matter-of-fact footsteps disappeared with a crunching sound on the cold pavement outside. The bathroom looked as if a child had been there bathing. Only toys left behind were missing. All the towels but a small one had been used and left in damp huddles on the floor. He might have attempted to mop up water with them. Spray was left running down one wall, the shower curtain hung out, dripping. Amy went about instinctively, and happy to do it, cleaning up. Cold water splashed repeatedly onto her face left her, momentarily, while bent over the basin, with blank thoughts. If she was thinking anything, she thought fondly of Billy Walter. In his way, he needed someone after all, she had considered.

She lifted her face and searched for the one dry towel, at the moment of a terrific impact against the side of the building. Immediately, Amy's thoughts raced around between earthquakes and explosions and fallen airplanes. The Sheetrock wall had bent inward, the blow enough to give the shower stall's tin sides a slight ringing. Struck still, she might have been holding the towel to her mouth to silence her own terror. Once the impact was over, the area's normal silence seemed ominous. Standing on the closed toilet cover, Amy could see out the tiny window, set close toward the ceiling.

“Man,” a voice had said beneath the window, then repeated the word. “Man.”

Behind the motel was a courtyard of cinders, and its dim outlines, its contents, were revealed by light flooding out from the kitchen. There, the door was open, with a stocky white man filling it. In the courtyard, three other men tussling had disarranged the even rows of garbage cans. Now, a lid clattered and rolled off like a tire. She could see they were Negroes. Evidently, they had fallen, as one body, against the side of the building by her room. Bending and swaying and groaning now, they seemed engaged in some tortuous form of calisthenics.

Two of the men had pinned back the arms of the third. He was straining back toward the kitchen, where the white man still silently observed. Behind him, visible as a shoulder, part of a face, the rest of the kitchen help watched, awed and quiet. The Negro, with his arms held back, was shepherded past Amy's window, toward the end of the building.

“He going to kill you,” a voice whispered by Amy's window.

At the end of the building, having shoved the smaller man around it, they seemed figuratively to dust their hands before lightly running back to the kitchen. In the light from her window, Amy had seen that the pinioned man had blood streaming down his face. When the two men entered the kitchen, the white man closed the door and the courtyard was left to bleak darkness. Indecisively, but then with more determination, Amy grabbed the one half-dry towel off the rack. While she had stood there, almost clinging to the window ledge by her fingertips, the sound of their feet on the cinders had been haunting. A whiff of something remembered and not immediately placed was insistent. As she came into the next room and dressed, the sound, like a reprise in music, returned at intervals—while she fastened her stockings, stepped inside her skirt, considered there was not time for her sweater and only put on her coat. Behind the house where they had lived when she was small had been a great trellis of roses and a narrow cindered alley. In it, wild sunflowers had grown, enormously beyond her head. And there, in rooms attached to or atop garages, Negroes had lived. On hot Sunday afternoons and evenings, they sat outside for air. Amy had become gradually aware that their conversations or laughter ceased whenever white children, who cut through or played in the alley, passed by. She had realized finally that the alley was the entranceway to their houses and was their only yard, and that she had been a trespasser on these, even though the city owned the land. All her sympathy had gone toward the Negroes and yet alone and meeting a colored man, she had fled in terror. The exact reason had been nameless, but feeling received from white grownups had made her instinct sure. Her feet running, the slow steps of the alleyway's occupants going to and from home, had come to her again, looking out the motel window.

Determined to curb her fear, she went out the front door to find the hurt man. On closer inspection, he was about her age. Groping along the strung-out row of rooms, he might have been blind, and sensing something blocking him, lifted his head. He moved to avoid the encounter by stepping off the walkway. He stopped when Amy called, though making no move toward the towel she held out. Slightly suspicious, he stared at her, his head cocked in order to see her more closely. Blood overhung one eye, like a great clot, half closing it. The eye's swelling dropped the lid, making his face have even a sadder quality. She kept the towel thrust at him without saying anything; her face longed to offer more than something for his cut. Her urgent feeling made her hand tremble, and noticing that, he took the towel. He said, “Thanks,” in almost a whisper. Then he clapped the towel, a great white lump, to one temple.

“You need to go to a doctor.”

About to shake his head, he stopped it, aware any motion would cause it to hurt. Unaware Amy had further interest, he started away, his profile dazzled a moment by lights from the boulevard, revealing a puzzled and lost look. She went quickly after him then.