Shine On, Bright & Dangerous Object

by Laurie Colwin

  We were quiet on the drive uptown. At the door of the Society for Stringed Instruments, Patrick took my coat, and when he had checked our coats, umbrella, and scarves, he took my arm and we walked down the hall together. He had gotten the tickets from one of the partners in his firm and we were the youngest couple there. We were poured cups of coffee, and while we passed the cream and sugar, the members of the Manhattan String Quartet came in and took their places on the stage. A printed card announced the program: Brahms Quartet in C Minor, the Haydn Quartet in A, and Beethoven’s harp quartet. It was the first music I had heard since Sam’s death, with the exception of the Harmony Piano Movers and fifteen minutes of Hal Bennett, but I wasn’t overwhelmed. He wasn’t there at all. You could have gotten Sam to a coffee concert as easily as you could have gotten a garter snake to eat a brick, and if by some massive coercion you did get him to go, you had to be afraid of what he might do once he was there.

  I sat back in my armchair, happy enough in that darkened room, wearing my chic and useful black dress. It was short-sleeved, and my bare arm touched the arm of my properly suited brother-in-law. It had been a long time since I had looked at him unfettered—as another person, not a part of Sam’s family. He looked a little like Sam, but his hair was darker, his eyes were pure hazel, and his features were less round. He didn’t sit like Sam. Sam sat on the edge of his chair. Patrick sat back deep with his legs stretched in front of him as if he were settling in for a leisurely julep or an afternoon nap. As I watched him, a feeling of deep camaraderie took me over, and by the time the harp quartet came around, I had a strong desire to hold his hand.

  On the way out, he took my arm, as a proper escort would. The streets were icy and we stood under a streetlight waiting for a taxi, watching the snow flurry. We sat close together in the cab and I leaned my head back to watch the snow. I was suddenly happy in my coat, happy from the music, happy with the coffee and pastry, and what part Patrick had in all this I didn’t know. I was glad he was there, with me, and in that taxicab that snowy night, with Patrick next to me, I passed through some point in my own mourning, or maybe I had outlasted one of grief’s metabolic cycles.

  Patrick said, “Did you call Henry’s friend yet?”

  “Was this concert a setup for that question?”

  “Only marginally,” he said.

  “I’m going to call him tomorrow. I haven’t felt like it, but I do now.” I leaned back, feeling as invalids do when they sense their strength returning.

  I said, “Patrick, I’ve been very self-centered since this happened.”

  “We all are,” he said.

  “But you aren’t.”

  “That’s what you think, because you’re stuck inside your own skin at the moment, so you only react. We’re both very prideful, so don’t worry about being a comfort, or getting comforted.”

  He walked me up the stairs, and while I made a pot of tea, he built a fire. I watched him from the doorway and on his face was a look I had never seen before. It was his equivalent of Sam’s blank stare, the stare he summoned up before he went out for a kill on the tennis court. Patrick looked ready to take the poker and wreck my wall. The hold he had on himself looked as if it were strangling him. You never saw that on Sam; he was so much himself there was never anything to fight. But Patrick looked about to break out of something, something very deep. It wasn’t frightening, but to see him made my knees buckle slightly.

  When I came in, he put the poker down and began to pace. Then he stopped, faced me, and put his hands on my shoulders.

  “I hope you know what you’re doing,” he said.

  “You mean now, or in my life?”

  “All the time,” he said. “All the time.”

  “I always know what I’m doing,” I said.

  He let go, and turned away. Whatever was on his mind, he had managed to create enough electricity to make me shake. It was pointless to ask him what process he was going through. You learned that Patrick always knew what he was about. When he wanted you to know, he would tell you. He and Sara, I imagined, had a dark, intuitive bond, something deep, indirect, and particular.

  There is a difference between privacy and dignity, but they look like the same thing. Living with Sam had made me pretty direct, and I was forthright to begin with. You had to be direct with Sam, and that’s all he had wanted me to be. When I realized what could be surmised about me just by my being a widow, I felt my privacy invaded, but it was only my sense of dignity. As soon. as I stopped putting myself at a remove, the world would move in, with all of its conceptions and misconceptions. In some way, with this undeniable label on me, I wasn’t free. I wanted to keep private except from what I chose. The difference between me and Patrick was that he wanted to keep private from everyone. My widowhood was my edge, the thing that set me off from other people, or so I felt. Patrick and Sara, for that matter, had no edge to offer. They didn’t even distinguish themselves as a couple.

  You couldn’t ask Patrick what he meant, in the same way you couldn’t ask Sam not to go sailing in a storm. That flint-headed stubbornness ran, in both of them, but in Patrick it had more purpose. Patrick was cautious. He was smart enough to know what he protected, while his younger, bat-headed brother squandered himself to death.

  When Patrick left, I straightened up. I washed the teacups, swept the hearth, and banked the embers. Without him the place seemed emptier, and I lay back on the sofa and lit myself a cigarette. I stuck two of Meridia’s needlepoint pillows in back of my head, kicked off my shoes, and put my feet up. I smoked and watched the snow come down. I didn’t think about Sam or Patrick. I thought about me, lying in my chic and useful black dress, stretched out on a long sofa smoking a cigarette. I was a twenty-seven-year-old widow, but as I watched the snow slant against the window, I thought: There’s more life. Grief is what the body goes through to get over grief. I needed my solitude to expend it, and I thought that if I had gone out in public with it, I would have gone into the world a fraud: it was too easy.

  But there was more life. The official part of my life with Sam was over, by horrible accident, and my months of getting used to it were upon me. I yawned and stretched, and it seemed to me that I had passed the end of what Patrick called my “remove.” I could feel the couch cushions under me and the pillows propping up my head. How delicious the cigarette tasted, and how eerie and quiet the street was in the snow. When I looked around my living room, I felt like someone writing the book of Genesis: I had created it and it was good. The remains of the fire blinked red from the grate. The hearth brush, the Cape Cod lighter, the two gilt angels on the fireplace, the rug on the floor gleamed too. I saw that without much effort I had made a place for myself without Sam, which Sam would never see, a cozy, comforting sort of a place, a place there would be more life in. The phrase “there’s more life” went through my head like the song your neighbor down the hall plays over and over. No one ever tells you that grief takes over your body, and as I lay there watching the light shine on my stockinged legs, I realized I was recovering. I was beginning to savor my own life.

  Or as I had savored Sam, The More Life Kid. I had been his admiring accomplice, his ardent sidekick, his loving appreciator. I appreciated him the way I appreciated everything, in an intense, lazy way. Somewhere along the line, Sam must have known that, the way he came to know anything useful to himself: he used it. You have to perform an ax murder to alienate a steadfast appreciator, and since Sam never did murder, anything went.

  When we met, we went off like a pair of sparklers. We did not connive for one another, but were casual as Lake Michigan fishermen when the smelt are running—we were that available. I did not spend time wondering if Sam would come through, since that wasn’t what I wanted him for. I wanted him for his presence, which in the end is more frightening than wanting something specific, like less horsing around on a 1500cc motorcycle with no insurance, more punctuality, or more self-appraisal. I wanted him to be, in one great gulp, and when he was around, I was a
happy human. Since the moment his death had been verified, not one day had passed without my wondering if I could have saved him if only I had wanted more, if I had made my claim and done some limit-setting, if I had not been so fixed in my belief that you cannot tamper with the one you love. It occurred to me that Sam had buffaloed me into a state in which I had no demands, since he was my only demand and that had been met. Sam wasn’t perfection, but he was good enough for me and whatever he did that drove Meridia and Leonard up the wall, that was okay too. Besides, I was his right-hand man.

  What you wanted to do with Sam was grab him and go dancing. That’s what he was good for. He was good for great bursts of unquestioned joy. The best thing about him was that he took things as he found them or as they came to him. It was the worst thing about him, too, since one of the things he took as he found was himself, and then me. I was his other half, the pensive wife who explained what he couldn’t see. He liked to have things explained to him in the bathtub, generally speaking. Things made more sense to him, he said, when he was submerged in warm water, and with their dry knees sticking out like islands amongst the bubbles, Sam Bax and the former Elizabeth Olive Marcus talked things over. But there were no complaints on either side, because I was just fine with him too. He really loved me, Sam did, in a way most people don’t get around to unless they are close to sainthood; he gave out a kind of disembodied, all-accepting love. In Sam’s case, it was probably the result of not caring very much. If you loved someone, you loved, and that was that. There was no reason to implement what was established fact.

  At twenty, and at twenty-seven, my heart was the heart of a teenager—overexcited, overstimulated, and very devout. The teenage heart teaches us that to alter one part of the one you love is to falsify love entirely. In college, I used to sit around with my roommate, a girl from Livermore, Ohio, named Rosie Stone, and pass the time in emotional speculation: if the one you loved loved someone else, would you aid and abet him in his love? If the one you loved wanted something you didn’t approve of, would you help him get it? If the one you loved sincerely wanted to go away, would you let him? Help him? To these questions Rosie and I, wide-eyed and moronic at eighteen, gave a solid, heartrending Yes. Love was the only thing we gave any credit to: the life of the emotions was what kept the body going. At eighteen, walking around and throbbing with these beliefs, I was what Thomas Hardy said Tess of the D’Urbervilles was: a vessel of emotion untinctured by experience. What did I know? I wore my mother’s old hacking jacket in the fall, and a shredding Chesterfield I held on to for sentimental reasons in the winter, and walked waiflike around the campus feeding my rich young heart. At twenty-seven, I had conducted several love affairs. I had, in the name of love, been ruthless and cruel to a perfectly acceptable wimp named Eddie Liebereu. I had married my own true love and lived by his side for five years, and now I was someone’s accomplished, widowed sister-in-law. But under my polished limbs, under my hair, I was a grubby little teener sitting in my room listening fervently to The Four Seasons singing “Big Girls Don’t Cry” when I was not sobbing to the music of Gustav Mahler. I kept a notebook full of adolescent compositions my father referred to as “that goddamned cubist music” and brooded about Lili Boulanger, who wrote a mass and died young. I was one short step away from the even grubbier eleven-year-old who thought the world ended when Donald Turnipseed ran down James Dean in California.

  I had spent my life refining what I felt, and Sam was the object I had chosen to reflect on, forever, I thought. I was not far away from me and Rosie Stone talking all night about our emotional instincts. We were in the process of refining, and once that starts, it never stops. What Sam did was just live.

  When I got off the sofa, I stretched my bones, drew the curtains, and went to bed. It was no accident that it was the first night I did not find myself in the grip of painful tears and it was no accident that the first thing I did in the morning, after a peaceful cup of coffee, was to call Max Price, the friend of Henry Jacobs, the professor of our Sam, our lovely boy.

  10

  Max Price met me for lunch at a tearoom near the Museum of Modern Art. When I asked him on the telephone how I would recognize him, he said: “You’ll know me. I look just like Henry except I’ll be wearing a loud green tie.”

  The tie in question was lurid emerald green—you could have seen it in a cave. The rest of him was perfectly sober, and he did look like Henry Jacobs, whom he had known all his life. They were the same general size and shape—small and leonine—and the lines in their faces came from thought and sorrow, not from tension and confusion. His wife taught Russian at a Sacred Heart college and was responsible for the lurid tie.

  “She started buying these horrors for me when we were young,” he said. “She said I was the oldest person in the world and that she had always wanted to be married to a visible eccentric. Last year, my son sent me a yellow tie with a hula girl embroidered on it.”

  He wore a gray suit and a watch chain, and he was not at all formal. We had Henry in common, and Henry believed that when two strangers meet through a third person whom they both love, nothing can go wrong. Over lunch, we discussed my job. What he wanted was a researcher for his book on American chamber music. He wanted reviews of first performances, letters to and from composers.

  “Does it sound dull?” he asked. “You’ll be sitting in libraries quite a lot, but Henry thought it might be something you’d find useful for a while.”

  I said, “Henry thinks I should have an interim.”

  “Do you think so?”

  “I’ve had my interim. I’ve been sitting around for four months.”

  He looked at me with a kind of apersonal tenderness.

  “Four months isn’t a very long time in these situations,” he said.

  “It’s a very long time, if you’re me. I’m beginning to feel slack and self-indulgent. I shouldn’t have sat around at all except that I get so tired.”

  Then he smiled. “You kids are so stupid. But, okay. I’m going to put you to work ransacking the Sprague Collection. That’s a fat bequest to Butler Library, so I’ll call Columbia today and get you a pass and stack privileges.”

  We shook hands on it, and then I went to have a ramble around the Museum of Modern Art. I ended up having coffee in the cafeteria, staring out the window. It had started to rain and the little patches of snow in the sculpture garden were dark gray and melting. There was a couple hanging around Henry Moore’s “Family,” a girl in a coat that seemed to be made out of a Navajo blanket and a boy with a hunting jacket. He gave a considered bang to the back of the statue, as if to get an idea of its heft. The girl sat on the base, and then they chased each other around. By this time it was raining hard, and both of them were hatless. The girl had red-blond hair in long braids, and when she spun around they stood out like wind socks. When they were fairly soaked, they locked arms and scampered up the steps. It was gray in the garden, the sky was gray, and the only two points of color had gone. From my seat at the window, they had looked so innocent, living out a moment in time without even knowing it. I wondered if they were lovers who went home to the same home, or a pair of high school students cutting class. It seemed unfair of them to lark away like that, leaving me with the memory of seeing them. They hadn’t seen me, but they were in my memory for life, and it occurred to me that, at a certain point, memory begins to be a burden.

  Two days later, Max gave me my pass to Butler Library and I started ransacking Mrs. Sprague’s bequest. I liked being around Columbia. My own college days had been spent in a bucolic well, the well in the fairy tale that the good sister falls into and then gets covered with gold coins in. Columbia wasn’t as enchanted as my college, but the Barnard dorms were probably filled with girls as innocent and mawkish as I once was. Sitting at my little table in the stacks with the desk lamp shining dimly on a bunch of yellowing letters, I thought of the square of the world I was sitting in and what it contained.

  In my senior year of high school I fell
in love, in an intense, brief, and painful way, with a Columbia boy called Teddy Meecham. He was on his way to becoming a drunk—he wanted to be a drunk when he grew up, like Dylan Thomas—and was probably a jerk, but I saved a memento of everything that ever happened to us. I kept a napkin he wrote a poem on, a parking sticker from the Bronx Zoo, a shoelace, or part of one, from the work shoes he affected, and an orange lollipop, which by the time I got around to throwing it out was smashed and matted and quite disgusting. There were probably dormitory rooms filled with junk like that, like Teddy Meecham’s name tape, and a warped copy of Garnet Mims and the Enchanters singing “A Little Bit of Soap.” I thought there must be thousands of letters, tied up with ribbons or rubber bands, hoarded all over campus. Those unknown lovers at Columbia were as remote to me as Teddy Meecham: it was the first time I had thought about him in years, but I suddenly remembered how I had felt about him, the way I brooded over those souvenirs of his being, cried over his incoherent letters, which I carried with me wherever I went, and the longing they dredged up in me. I wondered about him and about Sam, one gone and unknown, the other just gone. I wondered if the love I bore had been in vain, and how much vain loving was being generated as I sat in my dark corner of the stacks. As I thought about it, I made my notes on three-by-five cards. The light from the desk lamp was the shape of a cone and I was surrounded by a deep, dusty, leathery smell. It was a close, private place to think and I wondered if there might not be some overheated undergraduate sitting several stacks down writing heartfelt prose to his girlfriend at the University of Wisconsin.