Shine On, Bright & Dangerous Object

by Laurie Colwin

  Lyle Crosby, he explained, was a sort of Harvard Square hangaround, and she had been hanging around for a number of years. Because his memory was short, he didn’t remember that he had pointed her out to me as one of the landmarks of town. They had been undergraduates at about the same time, Sam said, and she was the one girl everyone wanted to score with. She was a tall girl with dark-blond hair, the sort of girl fashion never touches. The day she was pointed out to me she was wearing an old, expensive raincoat and a pair of brown suede boots. Her hair was straight and cut into bangs, and she was a type I knew and admired. She was aloof and probably had always been. She smoked Camels or Lucky Strikes and had been to the Sorbonne. Her bones were prominent and when she walked you could see the knobs of her pelvic bones underneath her faded, pressed bluejeans. When it rained, her hair never curled and she could talk with a cigarette tucked into the corner of her mouth. Girls like her had exotic backgrounds. They had spent their childhoods in India or Chile or with the Basques in Montana, and they had special skills: they spoke Hindi, or studied plasma physics, or knew how to take apart a car or play court tennis. Or they had odd, offhand interests. You found them reading the Morning Telegraph or Worker’s World or the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

  Lyle Crosby looked and would always look like something out of a European movie—the girl in black stockings who appears in a long shot of the railroad station. She strode across Harvard Yard, imperiously scattering the undergraduates whom she probably suffered with existential condescension, knowing that to be seen with her was a badge for them. She had friends and lovers, but no one knew who they were—a strange, Olympian, invisible off-campus crew. Sam said she was in graduate school, but he didn’t know what field. It didn’t matter: I knew. She was someone’s most promising student in post-Hegelian philosophy or Chinese thought. When I thought about her, or girls like her, they seemed timeless and indomitable. You could imagine her conception, but not her birth. There had never been a red, squalling Lyle Crosby: there was only the finished product.

  Sam had come out of the library late on a Wednesday night and gone to have a few beers. Lyle Crosby was the only girl Sam had ever seen drinking alone at night, and no one ever bothered her. He had seen her around; they nodded to each other, they sat together, and Sam bought them a couple of rounds. He said he had a motorcycle, and that was their topic of conversation. Lyle Crosby knew about motorcycles. He drove her home and walked up the stairs with her. He told me this as we parked in front of the station, slumped over the wheel, staring straight ahead.

  I said, “What am I supposed to say?”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “Oh, Jesus, I’m sorry. It didn’t mean anything at all.”

  He walked me to the train hanging on to my hand with such intensity, it was red when I sat down. I don’t remember anything else we said, but on the train, watching the dark towns go by, I thought what it must be like to be Lyle Crosby and the thought of her made me feel young, timid, vulnerable, and about as interesting as a loaf of bread. Then I got angry, then hurt, and when I got off the train, I paused briefly to think what a jerk Sam was to tell me, and how he had used me as he might use Meridia—as heavy mother. Two days later I got the letter on graph paper, a not very long letter telling me how honestly he loved me. The letter was followed by a dozen roses and the roses were followed by Sam, who made it down the Thruway in record time. I sneaked him into my room, where we spent an illegal night, and that was the end of that. Sam knew the value of that hangdog penitence, and he knew that if he whipped himself enough in my presence, I would never have the heart to add to his misery. He immunized me with his own sense of guilt.

  The last day I spent in Cambridge was a hot, sullen Sunday. Everything had been arranged: the movers were coming in the morning and I was taking the more fragile baggage with me in the car. The Harmony Piano Movers of Brookline had taken the piano away and would deliver it to New York the next week. By evening everything was packed, and the apartment was so bare you could have skated across the floor.

  It was unusually hot for the end of October, and no one seemed to be around. My neighbors were away and the streets were empty. Before I went to bed, I took a sentimental journey. I walked past the Coop, past the bar Sam and I frequented, past a craft shop Sam had bought me a terra-cotta chicken in. I walked through the yard to the Fogg, and on the way back, I saw Lyle Crosby buying a paper at the newsstand in the Square. She was wearing her raincoat, standing with a gray-haired man who had a golf umbrella under his arm. It was startling to see her: a moment in my personal history was confronting me, and she, Lyle Crosby, was as mute as a monument—the building in which you were born or the abandoned house in which you once lived. She didn’t know what she meant to me, but there she was and there I was. I could have stood in front of her and told her that I was the recent widow of someone she had gone to bed with randomly six years before. She was Lyle Crosby still. It seemed to me that her life possessed a continuity that mine did not and that if I came back to Cambridge in fifty years I would find her unchanged buying her newspaper in Harvard Square with a gray-haired man. Time did nothing to her: she sailed through it disengaged and untouched. Her life contained no events that changed her or beat her down. How safe and comfortable it seemed to me to be Lyle Crosby, used to yourself, snug in that ageless trench coat, secure under that Dutch-boy bob.

  But I did not grab her arm and inform her that she was heavily entangled in someone else’s moment of personal history. I bought a copy of the paper and walked away.

  It was hot and breezeless when I got home and the apartment had the neutral, lunar aspect vacant apartments have. It was what the place had looked like when Sam and I had moved in. The boxes were tied up with slipknots, the knots Sam had taught me how to tie. It was devoid of anything. I sat on the bed, and for the first time since Sam’s death, I put on the radio. You don’t want music in a funeral house, and there are times when music is too eruptive to listen to. But it was my last night in Cambridge, so it didn’t matter what I heard.

  I wanted to hear Hal Bennett’s Greatest Hits. He came on at 11:30 in the evening and Sam swore that Hal and his Hits got him through law school. At one time he wanted to send a photostated copy of his degree to Hal in tribute. Life with Sam began in the morning with Hot Rod’s Breakfast in Space and ended with Hal Bennett, late at night. I switched him on. His voice was advertised as a cross between rolling fog and chocolate pudding.

  Darlings, this is Hal, your best pal. Your main man, with Hal Bennett’s Greatest Hits. I got the sounds to crack your hearts. I’m the man to put tears in your ears. For Shirl and Lester, for Flo and X-Ray, for little Ruthie Hill down at Hubies. For Pancho, from Grace and Floyd. I take requests, at your behests. Hal is sending this out for you, little Darlings. “Forty Nights Without You,” that all-time golden gasser by Nairobi Johnson.

  Sam could reel it off by heart. Forty nights without you.

  PART II

  7

  My first appearance in public as a widow came three weeks after I was settled in New York. The movers came on time, and within a week, when I looked at the rug on the floor, the quilt on the bed, the neatly hung pictures and the dishes stacked on the shelves, I saw that my apartment was mine alone and that I had created a space that bore no relation to any space I had shared with Sam. The objects were the same, but their arrangement was my arrangement, not a communal one. The trunk of his old clothes was in the back of a closet, since I couldn’t bear to throw it out. I also couldn’t bear to sell his motorcycle, which was locked in the garage at Little Crab—the same Vincent Black Shadow I had met him on. Danny Sanderson wanted it, I knew, and Patrick said I could have gotten a good price for it, but it was too full of Sam’s’ spirit to sell, and too sacred to give to a muddleheaded roughneck like Danny. It was fitting that it rot in a shed in Maine, sprouting cobwebs, rusting and dying of old age. It had been the seat of a lot of Sam’s good times and I didn’t want it in anyone else’s hands.

  The on
ly people who had been in my Bank Street apartment were Patrick and Sara Lazary, paying separate visits, and the Harmony Piano Movers of Brookline, who caused the only snag in my flawless move. They stalled and finally showed up on the afternoon of my first public appearance. The movers were two enormous Irish boys called Mick and Chuck, beefy, hamhanded, with huge chests and big smiles. They sat in the living room and killed a six-pack to cool out from the drive down.

  “I’m not looking forward to hauling that mother up three flights,” Mick said. “Me and Chuck here figured we might need a hoist, but you’ve got a nice wide stairway so we’ll just take the legs off.”

  In their huge hands, the piano looked as light as an empty picture frame and they set it down with astonishing gentleness.

  “We used to carry our own supplies,” Mick said. “A case on ice. Remember that time we took that pipe organ from Boston to that town upstate, Chuckie?”

  “Rhinebeck,” Chuck said.

  “Yeah, Rhinebeck. Treated her like a piece of glass, wrapped her in little blankets and mittens for Chrissake, and all we got was a Coke to split between us. Middle of July, for Chrissake.”

  “We were sweating buckets,” Chuck said. “But then we once moved a harpsichord from Cambridge to Newton and got a seven-course meal and enough Scotch to float a tanker.”

  I made them a plate of sandwiches and they drank more beer. I asked them if either of them played the piano, since pianos were their line of work.

  “Chuck over here plays chopsticks and I play the whorehouse piano, excuse the expression.”

  “Mick would play the drums off key,” said Chuck.

  Mick took from his pocket a red kerchief the size of a flag and mopped his head with it. Then he went into the kitchen to wash his hands. “You don’t want to crummy up the keys,” he said.

  He sat down, tied the kerchief around his head, and played “Slipping Around,” which he sang in a deep, off-key tenor. Then he drank the remains of his beer, set his glass on the floor, and played “You Win Again.” It went straight to my heart and I thought I might wail for the sheer hearing of it. It was strange to be on this street, in an apartment so clearly my own, filled with two great grinning boys horsing around the piano and singing out of tune with such gusto it would have wakened the deaf out of silence to hear them. They harmonized on the choruses and they had no idea how sweet it was. They couldn’t have harmonized to save their skins. The whole room smelled of beer, of boyish sweat, and that soapy, wet smell that beer-drinking men have. It was dizzying. They sang “They’ll Never Take Her Love from Me,” “Honky Tonk Girl,” and finished off with “What’s Made Milwaukee Famous Has Made a Loser Out of Me.”

  When that was over, they said it was time to leave and I gave them twenty dollars, which they refused.

  “The boss told us about you,” Mick said. “You lost your husband and we’re not taking any money.”

  “That has nothing to do with it.”

  “We’re not taking it,” Mick said.

  I said, “Look, I think you have the wrong idea. My husband died in a sailing accident. He wasn’t a hero. You moved my piano and you sang for me, so please take this.”

  “Nope,” Mick said. “It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t make any difference.” He walked down the stairs.

  I grabbed Chuck by the arm. “Please, Chuck, he’s being silly. Take this and go out and get drunk, will you?”

  “Okay,” Chuck said. “Micky lost his dad a while back, so he’s sensitive. Besides, this job was a real piece of cake.”

  “It would mean a lot to me if you went out and had a good time on this,” I said.

  “Okay,” said Chuck. “We’ll drink to you. Thanks a lot, and you keep your chin up.”

  I sat on the windowseat and watched them as they drove away. It was getting cooler, and the sun was going down. That lovely boyish scent was still in the room. I closed the lid to the piano since I knew I wouldn’t play it for a while. It was the last thing to come from Cambridge. I was all moved in.

  That night I met my parents—recently back from Europe—to go to a party in Westchester. They picked me up at the station and seemed mildly surprised that I had the wherewithal to take a train. I might have been returning from a perilous trek through Burma from the look of concern and relief they gave me. The party was being given by some old friends of my parents and my reason for being there was mostly to get me out of my apartment and into life. It was not a party I had looked forward to very much, but it pleased my parents to see me. It’s always a treat to see the bereft dressed up and looking normal. It turned out to be an extremely dull party, composed half of people my parents’ age whom I knew and half of people even older whom I didn’t know. I spent most of the evening talking to a lawyer called Ephraim Gottschalk whom my father had known for years. I had met him once or twice and remembered that he had a daughter at Bennington. He looked like a classic matinee idol of the forties, with real green eyes and silvery hair. His clothes looked as if he had bought them several hours earlier.

  At the end of the party, he offered to drive me back to New York, shook hands with my father, kissed my mother, and told them he would get me home as safe as a tick.

  The sky was crisp that night, crisp and frosty, and all the stars were out. We talked along quite happily about one of his cases. He was a nice, stagy man and he told me he was separated from his wife.

  I asked him in, quite innocently, for a drink. I thought it was the sort of thing you did for an old pal of your parents who has driven you home from a party. In the name of straight truth, it was not entirely innocent, but my motive was company, not flirtation. It was only ten thirty, so I made a fire in the fireplace and when at one point I stood up to poke a log, he stood up too and took the poker away from me.

  “You’re a lonely woman,” he said. “You’re a very brave girl.” He cupped my chin with his hand.

  “I’m not actually either of those things,” I said.

  “But you are,” he said. “You’re too young to bear all this tragedy.” Then he said, in a voice of truly shop-worn staginess: “I think I should take you to bed.”

  For a moment I thought he meant he might tuck me in, but then I saw that his face had gone soft and his eyes were like flints.

  “Oh,” I said dumbly. “That’s very flattering, but it can’t be.”

  “I know. I know,” he said. “I think you’re frightened by your recent loss. It’s a cold world, and I think you’ve been frostbitten.” I stared at him with incredulity: where had he learned to talk that way? And what was I displaying that summoned it up in him?

  He said huskily, “I think you’re very frightened of me.”

  At that point, I could have told him that he was old enough to be my father, or that he was a crashing bore, or given him a good old slap, the kind of slap you want to give to a dopey ticket agent at an airline counter. Or I could have taken advantage of what I was beginning to realize was a solid option and burst into tears, making sobbing references to the recent horrors in my life and the cruel hand fate had dealt me. It is not for nothing that boyish piano movers refuse a tip from girlish widows.

  But there was Ephraim Gottschalk holding my hands and I could see that he believed, because he wanted to believe, that I wouldn’t go to bed with him because he frightened me. You cannot tell a man who has his ego on the line that you don’t want him because he doesn’t appeal to you. In such instances, the truth is never kind or necessary. It was kinder to agree. He had such a pretty, dotted-Swiss notion of my fear and loss that I let him keep it and I hoped he went home happy with it. After he left I spent a bad half hour wondering if I had somehow been asking for a seduction, but he got what he deserved, and so did I.

  My youth and widowhood put me at a slight distance from the world, I realized. My situation gave the impression of virtues I did not feel I possessed, like bravery. I was a brave little girl, or a brave young woman. I felt, in fact, about as heroic as an eggshell, but I was game, and in this wo
rld, game looks brave down the line.

  I should have known what the world would allow in the way of options, but we primitives are slow to learn, and it was not until Ephraim Gottschalk delivered himself of his set piece that I realized what I could get away with if I wanted to.

  These options were useful in times of stress. It is probably easier, and more comprehensible to the world, to act as if your instincts were dictated to you from a greeting card than to know what your natural course is and set out on it. Sentimentality is a second-string emotion, along with jealousy, envy, and righteous indignation. You can assume the second string at will and the world sobs right along with you. It was convenient for the world to assume what I was, since my position should have marked it out, and those piano-moving boys refusing my money touched and angered me for quite a long time.

  How dear and innocent I might have been, how mournful and sad. I could have become slightly haggard and my voice gone plaintive. I didn’t want any of it. My reactions seemed to me so private that I began to feel there wasn’t a place for me in the world at all, and between the Harmony Piano Movers and Ephraim Gottschalk, I learned in one day how important it was to me not to be thought about at all, if I was going to be misunderstood. But I didn’t want to be left alone either, so I left myself alone with Patrick when I could, since he was in the same state that I was.

  My mother and Meridia, I felt, were waiting for The Big Crack, some identifiably odd piece of behavior, a great out-spilling, or Deep Weep. They worried about me, and their telephone bills were printed testaments to it. I worried about them. It was hard on everybody. Patrick didn’t seem to be waiting for some emotional tidal wave in me, but rather to see what form it would take.