Shine On, Bright & Dangerous Object

by Laurie Colwin

  “Where do you want to stay?”

  “I can stay with Danny Sanderson,” Patrick said, “but I thought I might put up on your couch. You’re my sister-in-law, aren’t you?”

  I said, “I’m not their daughter-in-law anymore.”

  “Oh, don’t let them bother you. Meridia’s very limited in her range of feeling and Leonard is a well-intentioned stick. You see the wonderful job they did on their lovely boys, after all.”

  He was looking straight ahead at the road. With such enigmatic one-liners Patrick interpreted his family to me, but they were only one-liners. The look that went with them seemed dangerous to me. I did not ask for further explanation. I parked the car in front of my apartment house and killed the motor.

  I said, “Patrick, will I see you in New York?”

  He stared at me abstractly for a moment, wearing on his face the most complicated look I had ever seen: a mixture of scorn, tenderness, impatience, and anger.

  “That’s not a question that deserves an answer,” he said. “No matter how bereft you’re feeling.”

  When I think back on those days, they seem unfocused, as if all the fine edges had been washed out. Grief had put a film over everything—a comfortable blur, it is called.

  Patrick and I took the eight o’clock shuttle. It had been decided that I would fly down to New York with him because Sara Lazary had a friend who was getting married and giving up an apartment. I was supposed to meet Sara, but when Patrick called her from La Guardia, she had canceled out, and it was Patrick who took me to the apartment of her departing friend.

  Sara’s pal was Susie Espinoza, and she lived in a brownstone on Bank Street. The apartment was on the top floor; the living room looked over the street and the bedroom looked over a garden in which two dogwood trees flanked an enormous Chinese urn. The floors were straight pine board, the walls were white. In the living room were bookshelves, a window-seat, and room for the piano. Susie was a tall, suntanned blonde. Her cottony hair curled at the ends, and was kept off her face by two rhinestone barrettes in the shape of stars. In two weeks she was getting married and going to Chile on her honeymoon. She smiled a large, goofy, disorganized smile and took us to the landlady and her husband, who lived in an airy duplex that took up the garden and first floor. Patrick was a witness as I signed the lease. It was a neat transaction. Susie Espinoza was getting married and getting out and I was widowed and was getting in. I took a taxi to the airport and was back in Cambridge in time for dinner.

  The plane flew into the beginnings of a sunset, through pink and gray clouds, past formations that looked like stalagmites. In my handbag I had a copy of a lease, the keys to a New York apartment, estimates from the moving company, and a cordial letter from the Harmony Piano Movers of Brookline, Mass. I had two weeks in which to pack, see Henry Jacobs, sit stiffly in the Baxes’ living room describing my new view. It was all fixed now. I knew it would be fixed when Patrick and I got out of the taxi on that tree-lined street: it was a proper bijou residence for a proper young person. A sunny kitchen. A bedroom big enough for a bed and a dresser. A bathroom trim enough for a woman with a few cosmetics. A clean dwelling with a certain amount of charm. Taking that apartment was as easy as going to sleep. It fit me somehow, but the whole thing went too fast to leave time to reflect on what part of me it fit. What did the landlady look like? Her name was Mrs. Guinness, and she had given me and Patrick a cup of tea in tall, gritty ironstone mugs. She had said, “If you give a party, give us a couple of days’ notice so we can adjust to impending noise.” Wide smile, slightly crooked teeth. “Isn’t it wonderful to come down from Boston and get an apartment in less than half an hour?” she said. “It only happens to out-of-towners.”

  It was mine now, and trying to remember what Mrs. Guinness looked like, I fell asleep in my windowseat.

  Henry Jacobs lived in an apartment near the Radcliffe dorms. He was in his late sixties and had been a widower for ten years. Both Patrick and Sam had been his students, and he and Leonard had a couple of legal societies in common, so he had become, marginally, close to the family. Leonard respected him and Meridia treated him with the deference she would have given to a dignitary from a remote republic.

  His apartment had the deep, faded air of Leonard’s club but it was cozy. His taste ran to the baronial and he managed to be neat and cluttered at the same time. There was no shelf that was not dense with books, no wall without gilt-framed etchings, drawings, letters from famous justices, degrees. He liked bronzes and cigars, and his ashtrays were as big as dessert plates—alabaster, marble, and granite, affixed to which were bronze panthers, lions, bears, and lizards. A bronze stag the size of a live rabbit sat on his mantelpiece, and one of his students had rested a cigar across its antlers. He seemed to subscribe to every known periodical, and these were stacked in tidy piles on radiator tops, on benches, and on his long hall table. He had once confessed to me that even the Police Gazette had a slot in his reading time. The furniture he liked was small but overstuffed, and his couch was a leather one from the office of a molasses broker of the 1850’s. He kept mementos. The students who loved him gave him toys. Between the ashtrays and the magazines were little tin cars and wooden animals whose heads moved if you turned their tails, a pencil sharpener in the shape of a whale, a tiny steam iron, and a plastic clipper ship. Queen Victoria’s sitting room had nothing on Henry Jacobs’ apartment. Of his cleaning lady he said, “Working for me has given her curatorial training. In my will, I’m leaving her to the Fogg Museum.

  “I’m quite happy in my lair,” he went on, and I expected to see an owl perched on his curtain rod.

  He was a small, stocky man with a massive head of gray hair and a leonine face. He had perfect vision, and when he smiled a light of true impishness came into his direct gray eyes. We had tea in his study. I sat in a striped armchair next to some library steps on rollers. On the table at my elbow was an ashtray with a bronze snake curled on its rim, a Sabbath cup filled with stale cigarettes, and three plastic ducks glued to a round mirror. Henry had fixed a tray—a formal tea, with buttered bread, tea cake, and a tiny vase containing three bachelor buttons.

  “I don’t often have beautiful girls to tea,” he said. “So I like to fuss it up.”

  We sat back, sipping our tea in silence, and it didn’t seem odd to be so mute. Like most encounters I was having these days, I didn’t know where to begin and neither did anyone else. I was getting used to a kind of formality that set my teeth on edge. But Henry wasn’t everyone else. He was happy to sit there enjoying the afternoon. Finally, he poured me out a second cup of tea and asked me if I had made any plans for myself. I told him that I was going to New York.

  “Do you have any reason to go besides the impulse not to stay here?” Henry said.

  “It’s the right thing to do. It’s the next step. I don’t want to be in school anymore, anyway. I should get a job, so that’s what I’ll do.”

  “You know, Olly, this is a time in your life when you can think about yourself. You have a course to follow. One of my delights in having dinner with you and Sam was getting to hear you play the piano. I never thought you took your music seriously enough.”

  “I’ve gone as far as I can go,” I said. “I’m a talented amateur. That’s what all my teachers said. I’m fit to play for cultivated professors of constitutional law, but only good enough for that.”

  “That’s an insult to my cultivated ear,” Henry said.

  “What I want is a job, but I’m not sure what kind. I’ve got some money from Sam that I don’t want. Patrick won’t take it and I can’t bear to live on it. I don’t want to be set apart by it. If I had my way, I’d set up a scholarship for the most deserving law student with a good backhand.”

  “Sam would love that,” said Henry. “But Sam’s dead, and now there’s you. I loved Sam, you know. I didn’t approve of him, but I affirmed him. I love both of those boys. I’ve always had my eye on Patrick. He’s a serious boy. And I’ve always had my eye
on you. You listen to me and stick with that money for a while and let it help you. When you don’t need it anymore, I’ll help you set up a law school scholarship or anything else you like. When you get to New York, I want you to look up an old friend of mine named Max Price. He teaches at the New York Chamber Music Institute and he’s writing a book on chamber music in America. He told me months ago that he needs a researcher. So I’ve presumed and given him your name and I said you’d call him.” He reached into his breast pocket and pulled out an index card on which was written Max Price’s home and work addresses, and both telephone numbers. I put it in my pocket and burst into tears I could not explain. Henry handed me a Kleenex as if girls wept daily in his apartment.

  When I apologized, he said, “Never be sorry for the way you feel. Old people like me have used up our share of tears, and I’m selfish.”

  I said, “Everything seems like a formal goodbye at a railroad station.”

  “My dear girl,” said Henry. “We haven’t said goodbye. I’m going to watch over your life like a spy, and get weekly reports from my friend Max. Hundreds of students walk through my classes, but I never let go of Sam or Pat, and I won’t let go of you. When I come to New York, I’ll take you out to Rumpelmayer’s. Grandfather Henry speaks! I want a letter every so often and I want you to look after Patrick. He needs you. And you—you just be you.”

  He kissed me on the forehead when I left.

  6

  The days went by negatively, like a countdown. Meridia and Leonard went to Bermuda as they had intended to do before Sam died, to pack some golf into their year. Henry Jacobs began the term. My parents worried because my father had business in Switzerland around which he and my mother had planned a holiday. They didn’t want to abandon me, they said. But after a weekend with them in Connecticut, they observed that I did not behave in an odd or fevered manner or slump over my plate in anguish. Several hours of earnest conversation convinced them, and they booked their tickets. Patrick’s trips to Boston became less frequent and, finally, he stayed in New York.

  The plans and packing, the discussions of costs with the movers and the Harmony Piano Movers, the debris carefully stacked and left for the garbage collector, the letters answered, the thank you notes for flowers and cards of sympathy—these were as weighty as the ripples a light breeze makes on a pond. I came to realize, and I realized things one by one, the way you tell off a rosary, what I was not: I was about not to be a resident of Cambridge. I was not a daughter-in-law. I was not a wife to anyone—I was a widow, a negation in itself. I did not know how widows of twenty-seven behaved, and it seemed to me that the old ritualized mourning period—widow’s weeds and no colors for a year—must have been a comfort. But it didn’t matter. There was no one to behave for, so I was left to feel for myself. Our friends, Sam’s and mine, were so numb and tongue-tied it wouldn’t have done much good if I had stopped by for a drink, or if they stopped by for a drink. The life of the party was gone, for one thing. And, for another, if I was chipper it would look forced; if I was quiet I would seem mournful. I did not want my feelings misjudged or misappropriated, and I wanted them not to get in the way; I wanted my feelings to myself. So for the time I had left in Cambridge, I carried myself with the same stiff, awkward brand of dignity drunks have—drunks of the sort who know the meaning and impulse behind their condition and stand by it, realizing that to the rest of the world they are only drunks.

  These friends were a nice bunch, but among my negations was the fact that I was disconnecting from them, too. Sam liked to have a pack to run with and his pals were all like him: fleet and filled with energy—all in all, a good set to run with, and that was pretty much what we did. Sam had socialized me, in a way. He took me up on the bouncier side of my nature. The other side, what Sam called my reflective side, my brooding side, he took me up on only when he needed it: Sam was one of the most unconscious people I had ever known. Living with him was like living with a horse. So when he suffered at Meridia’s hands and didn’t know it but stayed up night after night, puzzled and insomniac, his reflective wife offered her analysis. Sam was a good cure for an overly analytic spirit, and so were his friends. He never reflected on the fact of himself: he simply was.

  As I packed and sorted and catalogued, I shifted into a kind of overdrive and assembled my baggage the way a factory worker sorts bolts on an assembly line. It left me free to think, and I thought, with astonishment and bitterness, that I was going to go through the rest of my life without Sam. Sam would not know me when I was thirty-five, or fifty. I might have children he would never know, and they would not be his. Sam, who was the first major decision of my life, would never know what decisions followed.

  I thought about the way I did things, and the way Sam did things. Sam liked experiences and he liked them exactly for what they were. He liked going through them, and coming out unscathed. To this end, he had formed a brief alliance with a weekend junkie from Boston University for the sheer thrill of whipping down to New York to see how his pal scored heroin. Sam was horrified by injections, so the offer of bliss his friend made him was never taken up, but he had made the scene. He had prowled through Harlem and the Lower East Side; he had watched the ritual—the belt, the spoon, the dirty candle end. He knew how things were done. He had gone to Nepal for a summer and spent the entire time alone in a country about which he knew next to nothing and whose language he neither spoke nor understood. In a particularly ratty mountain inn, he had been seduced by a milkmaid and later in the day fought off the advances of a Sikh who was trekking in the Himalayas. In Rome, a second-rate film star had picked him up and offered to take him to a black mass, but he had gotten pneumonia and ended up in the American Hospital. He had committed the act of rapture in Widener Library as a sophomore with a girl whose name he no longer remembered. He liked to hang around truckers’ bars, and he liked hill climbs, drag races, and weekends during which he got two hours of sleep. That energy looked like passion, like daring, but it was only a tame form of rebellion trying to burn itself out. In my bones I knew how difficult he was. I knew without thinking that nothing much mattered to Sam. He was a lawyer. He was a sportsman. I was around. And that added up to life, no questions asked. Sam was not interested in why things worked the way they did.

  We were the kind of lovers described in books as healthy young animals. Our mutual delights were swimming, fishing, the Top Forty, and screwing, which was our all-purpose cure for everything—boredom, headache, fatigue, and sadness. We left parties early to nip home to bed. Our television collected dust in a corner. We were great nap addicts, and we liked the comfort of pressed sheets and quilts, although Sam’s idea of fantasy heaven was to go at it in a chair lift, and he claimed to have figured out a way to do it. In the country, he liked the thrill of the open air. The cop and flashlight of his adolescent necking days put the proper edge on this thrill, but we were never caught. But there was too much sand on the beach, and too many twigs in the forest, we both agreed; so, basically, we hit the sack.

  Our pulses were even, our legs were strong, we had shiny hair and healthy teeth, and years of good food coursing through us. That was as deep as we went at the time, and for all our abounding lust, I have come to think that there was not a scrap of true passion between us. We were too young, too available. We had what we wanted and there was nothing to fight for. You can’t miss what you don’t know about, so we were happy, natural romantics, and our desires were deep enough, but experience had never put any sharp facets on us.

  Under all the grief, I thought of Sam in the way I might have thought of someone I had broken up with in high school. The fact that he was dead caused me quite a lot of internal melodrama, but finality displaces that sort of soppiness, so I thought of Sam as if he were just a terminated relationship, and, as I did, I could see Patrick leaning against the stove the morning after Sam’s funeral. He was wearing his white shirt, now rumpled from having spent its night across a chair, and the trousers to his pin-striped suit. He looked
like a banker caught at a cheap hotel. His hair flopped over his forehead and he had dark hollows in his face. That was the morning he casually informed me that Sam’s death spared me the misery of eventual divorce. Patrick had a real taste for oracular utterance, at least where I was concerned, and I was in the habit of taking him seriously. I thought about the misery of eventual divorce. I thought what a hedonist I had been, grabbing Sam up like an ice-cream soda, how I had enjoyed him without judgment, and how, when he had pained me, I let it slip by because the fact of him contained all present delight. Was that blind love?

  I had two letters from Sam or, rather, one letter and one note. He was not much of a writer and we both preferred to rack up enormous telephone bills when we were apart. We did not save the notes we taped to the refrigerator door, or at least Sam didn’t, because he never kept letters, not even the letters from his grandfather. I never kept his notes because I had him, an inexhaustible source of one-line notes. The one I found was in the box I kept my letters in, saved in deference to the rush of love it must have caused me:

  Fishface. I went to get my racket restrung and to buy the shrimp. You get the wine. Sam the man.

  The one letter was written in pencil on graph paper, the result of the only one of Sam’s infidelities I ever knew about, although it occurred before we were married. There was no reason for me to know—I was still commuting—except that Sam did so love to stew in his own guilt. When I arrived in Cambridge, the week after it happened, Sam looked like a dog that has been severely kicked. He couldn’t eat. He was touchy, tired, and oversolicitous. When I asked what was wrong he lied and said he had been studying too hard, and I knew he was lying. For a day I was racked with the fear that he had decided he didn’t love me anymore, and I resembled a dog that has been beaten and put out on a strange road alone. Sam when he was guilty avoided your eyes the way a child does. He indulged in this form of silent repentance all weekend, causing me alarm, and when he drove me to the station, he told me that he had slept with a girl called Lyle Crosby, whom he had picked up in a bar.