Read Online Either Side of Winter by Benjamin Markovits - Free Book Online Page A

and went for a run through Riverside Park. He did not enjoy it, but suffered it rather in grudging concession to the demands of his ego, which was unwilling to live without a certain modest level of creature vanities. His stippled face, scarred by acne, had been somewhat smoothed over by age; his thin hair looked least bad loose on his head: a comb seemed to take twenty thousand dollars a year from his social status. Still, he was tall enough and ran to fat only around the hips. There was something of the gentleman in his manner; he had the kind of natural wit and fine feeling that turned every imperfection into an expression of subtler character – a refusal to join in. When he came back, consciously virtuous and sweating vaguely into the neck of his Harvard sweatshirt, he woke his lover for breakfast. This was the single morning of the working week Tomas sat up for him – still sweet with sleep, stretched out yawning in his loosely girdled bathrobe. He picked at the newspaper Howard brought up after his run; sniffed a cup of coffee. It was too early for him, almost a quarter to eight; but he endured the desultory chat for the sake of Howard’s company, for the plain fact of his presence: a something extra given once a week before the day drew them apart again and set them among strangers.
    Tomas flattered himself that it was mostly for his sake the ‘old guy’ did his bit to keep in shape. But Howard liked to feel the muscle in his limbs aching into growth – enjoyed the pleasant sense of something difficult done with. A cup ofblack tea with a half-spoon of sugar; a toasted bagel, buttered. He had a sweet tooth and usually starved it; the tea struck him as a guilty treat. That five-mile run exhausted, among other things, his power to be dissatisfied. And he never found the company of his lover more comfortable than on these late breakfasts. Our bodies, he thought, are easier to please than anything else. And they didn’t have to talk much. Tomas was usually fond of chatter, in which Howard occasionally heard the undertone of reproach: why aren’t we happy when I am or could be, but for you. But these early mornings kept him quiet. And Howard could peacefully enjoy the warm gravity of the younger man’s body; which seemed at times the only thing preventing something loose in him from drifting free.
    On Tuesdays Howard left late enough to check the mail on his way out; another habit that reinforced his sense of a leisured breakfast. He stooped in the lobby to peer down the brass-walled slot, took out a sheaf of envelopes and magazines, and sorted them quickly into the pleasurable and the professional. Returned the latter, and jammed the rest into the inside pocket of his teaching jacket: sometimes a letter from his widower father, a retired schoolmaster himself, living in Connecticut; maybe a note from a college friend (Howard had remained unseduced by the Internet and continued to correspond by the mail); occasionally, the boon of an early New Yorker . Then he bought a cup of coffee from the newsagent and walked to the subway at 86th street; settled onto the relatively empty uptown train and spread whatever he had across his lap and began to read, keeping his coffee between his knees. Most of the time of course there was nothing at all in the post and then he only drank his coffee and tried not to consider the upcoming day.
    On the Tuesday after Thanksgiving – a steadily miserable drizzly morning whose only chance at better things was to give way to a light fat snowfall in the evening – Howard got both a letter and the magazine. The letter surprised him: the return address in the top-left corner read ‘A. Rosenblum’, andoffered a phone number beneath the street reference, tacked on in a different pen at a different angle, as if she had forgotten to include it in the letter itself, or had suddenly worried that she had forgotten, after sealing the envelope. Or he had forgotten. But Howard, with a swiftness in