Shine On, Bright & Dangerous Object

by Laurie Colwin

  I worked up a real affection for my spot in the stacks and a comfortable affection for Butler Library. When you walked up one staircase, you came face to face with an oversized portrait of Nicholas Murray Butler; you walked up another and got Dwight David Eisenhower, and you also got a large painting of King George and the Queen Mother being handed diplomas. The lady in the coatcheck room and I had a running conversation about the proper way to store wet umbrellas. It was nice work, too. I read about music all day.

  On a very cold Monday, I came out of the stacks and saw at the reference table an old friend of Sam’s named Johnny Porter. He was tall and skinny, and had bright-orange hair. He had been in Sam’s class at college and had put in a little time at graduate school, so we used to see him from time to time. Last seen three years before, he had married a girl called Maria, a big girl with wide shoulders, given to wearing capes. I saw him, and my heart failed. I didn’t want to see him at all. If he didn’t know that Sam was dead, I didn’t want to tell him. If he did know, I didn’t want to hear whatever he would come up with to say about it. But he saw me, and gave me a smile so shy and tentative, a smile that would have allowed me to smile back and disappear, that I walked over to him.

  “Gee, Olly,” he said. “I haven’t seen you in so long. I just don’t know what to say. I thought about writing to you, but I just didn’t know how.”

  I said it was okay, and asked him what he was doing in the library. He took me to the local bar, and over lunch he told me that he was working for a magazine and was checking some references for an article. I asked after Maria, and he said, “We’ve separated, for the time being.” He told me how much Sam had meant to him and asked about Patrick and Danny Sanderson. He asked me if I wanted company, and when I said I did, he put my telephone number and address in a leather book. We parted, and I went back to the stacks.

  But instead of researching for Max Price, I found a biography of Sir Thomas Wyatt and browsed it under the insufficient light. I wasn’t reading it very hard until I found a passage about Sir Henry Wyatt, Thomas’ father, who was having a fight over his allegiance to Henry Tudor after being tortured by Richard III.

  “Wyatt,” said the Tyrant. “Why art thou such a fool? Thou servest for moonshine in the water. Thy master is a beggarly fugitive. Forsake him and become mine. I can reward thee, and I swear unto thee I will.”

  “Sir,” was his answer, “if I had first chosen you for my master, thus faithful would I have been to you if you had needed it, but the Earl, poor and unhappy though he be, is my master. No discouragement or allurement shall ever drive or draw me from him, by God’s grace.”

  I read it over and over, and wrote it down on one of my three-by-five cards. I didn’t know why it struck me until I was out in the sullen winter air, walking to the subway. I thought about Johnny Porter telling me that he and Maria were apart. “Dislocation of affection” was the term he used. Sir Henry Wyatt knew that loyalty loved above judgment, and it was loyalty that was your master, not the man. Johnny Porter wore a striped shirt, a blue tie, and a tweed jacket, but he had the kind of body clothes look like they are about to slide off of. In fact, he looked very tenuous. I wondered what it was like to undergo a dislocation of affection, and thought how easily some connections are broken in the world of love.

  A week later he called me from a bar near my apartment and asked me if I would come and have a drink with him and a journalist called Carlos Warren. It was late in the afternoon, and it occurred to me to say no, but I said yes, put on my coat, and walked three blocks to a local bar, Natty’s, which was a hangout for people Johnny described as “Greenwich Village intellectual thugs,” but there were only a middle-aged woman who sat at the bar with her Chihuahua on her lap, a man in work clothes chatting with the bartender, and a youthful couple, clearly students, their spiral notebooks stacked in front of them. And Johnny Porter and Carlos Warren.

  Natty’s was an old bar. The wood paneling was stained black with age and the old-fashioned tin ceiling was black too. The lights were bar lights: beer signs that blinked blue and red and green, a Mr. Peanut lamp, a big illuminated clock that bore the name of a distillery; but the place looked blue in general, and Johnny and his comrade looked as if they had spent the better part of the afternoon getting coated by the atmosphere.

  Johnny Porter gave meaning to the term “boiled.” He looked as if he had been floating in hot water and then dried. His shirtsleeves were wrinkled from being rolled and unrolled. His jacket sagged limply off the back of his chair and his tie looked soft in the way of wilted vegetables. While I sat there and he got even drunker, his clothes seemed to disintegrate but his jaw tightened, until everything he said came out in a terse, clipped whisper.

  But when I arrived, he was only moderately drunk, and he introduced me formally to Carlos Warren, who he said was a war correspondent, just back from the Middle East. Carlos Warren appeared to be sober, but you learned that excessive drunkenness didn’t change him at all. He wore a sharp blue blazer, gray flannels, and a French silk tie printed with water lilies. His hair was as sleek and rich as fur, and he wore horn-rimmed glasses. He was immaculate and unruffled, and he was killingly good-looking. He was a magazine ad for a war correspondent. As he got drunker, he became more immaculate. I discovered hours later that it was his affliction to drink himself into a state of rigid, glacial sobriety.

  I didn’t have much to say for myself, but the two of them took care of that by having a conversation around me. Carlos was talking about Prague, where he had put in a little time.

  He said, “You don’t understand human scale until you see an unarmed student standing next to a tank. People think New York is inhumane because of all the skyscrapers, but that’s not one to one. When you’re up against a tank, you know what’s fucking what. The most obscene and violent thing I ever saw was this big Czech kid standing next to a Russian tank. It was just parked on the street. You couldn’t tell if anyone was in it, but the sight of a tank is truly gut-crunching. First it looks like an abandoned building, then it looks completely lethal and unstoppable. The kid was looking at it in awe. Not anger, not fear, just complete fucking awe.”

  Then he took a sip of his drink with the same controlled gestures cats have when licking their paws. Johnny looked about to melt. A lot of hero worship was emanating from his side of the table, and Carlos Warren was not catlike for nothing. He knew who the center of the universe was, and he divided his attention equitably, half his gaze to Johnny, half to me, as he went on to tell us about the teenage girl who ran into the square and put a flower on the tank, and what she wore, and how she looked. When he finished, I felt we should applaud. As I looked at him, I saw the flicker of a satisfied smile run across his perfect lips, but behind his glasses, his eyes were as blue as slate and about as hard.

  The barmaid brought another round of drinks, which Johnny said was their tenth, but Carlos said was only the seventh. Johnny, when drunk, slumped to the left and ran his hands through his hair so that it almost stood on end. Over their seventh or tenth round, they began to tell what I knew were a lot of lies. Johnny said his marriage was blissful and explained Maria’s absence by saying that she had the grippe. I was not sure for whose benefit this lie was, since he had told me the week before that they were separated, and it seemed that he and Carlos were friends. It might have been a gratuitous drunken lie, or perhaps Johnny was so chaotic he had forgotten what he had told me. Then Johnny staggered off to the men’s room and Carlos told me that he was an orphan who had been adopted in his teens by a pair of Viennese refugees. The only thing he knew about his mother was that she was Mexican—hence Carlos. Then he told me that he had been married twice, first to a singer who was wiped out with their young son in a plane crash, and second to a very sweet, conventional heiress from whom he was divorced. It was too perfect to be true. When Johnny came back, Carlos went to settle up the bill.

  “Is all that stuff Carlos told me true?” I said to Johnny.

  “If he says i
t is.”

  “Well, he’s your pal. Is it, or isn’t it?”

  “If he says it is, it is,” said Johnny, who was whispering at this point.

  I looked around and saw myself in the dim, blue-lit mirror. Here I was drinking with an old pal of my late husband’s and a newspaperman. Around the corner were my cheerful friendly digs, my fireplace, my wedding china. I felt as if I had wakened from a dream and found myself in the tropics. When I looked across the table at Johnny Porter, he had on his face the closest thing his mild, repressed prep school features could manufacture in the way of a leer. He looked positively evil and pimpish. For a moment I felt as vulnerable as I had ever felt in my life, alone at a bar with a drunken liar and a lying stranger.

  Someone put a dime in the jukebox, and Hank Williams sang “Half as Much.” If I had had any sense, I would have left. After all, wasn’t I a widow? Didn’t I have some urgent mourning to do at home? Didn’t I look across the crumpled cigarette packages, sticky glasses, and swizzle sticks at Johnny Porter with a jolt of something closely resembling hatred and suspicion? But I knew I wasn’t going to leave. I wanted to sit the evening out, and when Carlos Warren came ambling back, gave me a wide smile of inappropriate affection, and said, “You look like you could use a decent meal in a clean and cheerful place,” I realized I was in the grip of a king-sized crush.

  11

  We had our dinner in a cheap Italian restaurant that was cheerful enough, but neither Carlos nor Johnny was very much interested in food.

  “I’d like to be a helluva lot drunker than I am now,” Johnny said. “Food brings me down.”

  “Eat your meal, my son,” said Carlos. “You have to eat, if you’re going to drink. It’s the principle of feeding your nerves. Under the line of fire, it’s always wise to have something in your gut. Get him to eat, Olly. Spoonfeed our boy.”

  We polished off two bottles of wine, and by the time we finished dinner our little group was typecast. Johnny played the sloppy, wayward child who needed attending to. I played the intelligent girl guide who made sure Johnny did not say appalling things to the waitress and who brought a little tone to the group. Carlos played the object of hero worship, with brilliant condescension. It wasn’t real life at all.

  I felt like a child let out of school, or someone whose past had been rubbed away. I wasn’t someone who had ever been married, or who had a personal history. I was only myself in a moment of time, a curly-haired girl wearing a suede skirt, out on the town with a pair of irrelevant drunks, watching, without much interest, the bad boy of our group making himself worse, and observing with a kind of riveted, witless interest that good-looking half-human, Carlos Warren, who could have been filed under Journalists, see War Correspondents. If he hadn’t been so good at it, he would have been downright arch. He smoked cigars, little twisted cigars from an ornate tin—cigars from Ceylon, which could not, of course, be purchased in the United States. You got them through the diplomatic pouch, or from your pals who flew in from Southeast Asia. He smoked with studied casualness. Under the small table, our knees collided. Johnny slumped back in his chair, shredding a paper napkin.

  “You look like the last survivor of an earthquake,” said Carlos to Johnny. “I think we ought to get you home.”

  “I want another drink,” said Johnny.

  “If you have another drink, my son, you’ll turn into a lizard and have to crawl home. Ask for the check, Olly, and let’s bail out.”

  We got Johnny out into the cold. His shirt was open, his tie had disappeared, and he was half in and half out of his coat. When we crossed the street, I realized that we were all drunk, and Johnny was only drunkest. He sulked between us. He didn’t want to go home, he wanted another drink, he wanted to sit in the middle of the street and tie his shoes.

  “You’re a crashing bore, sonny,” Carlos said. “Stop making it so difficult for me and this ennobling woman to carry you home. Now, haul ass.”

  Johnny lived a good walk away, and Carlos figured the fresh air would sober him up. His building was a brick walk-up, and his apartment clearly that of a nice young couple, but it was also clear that one half of the nice couple had up and split. In the bedroom, the closet door was open and only Johnny’s suits hung in a neat line, next to a row of empty hangers, some askew. Hung on a peg was a yellow nightgown and on the closet floor was a black evening dress, packed into a lidless box. In the living room there was a stack of old copies of Vogue, tied up to be thrown out. When you got to the kitchen you saw that Maria had taken most of the pots and pans. A skillet and an enamel egg pan were all that was left on a hanging rack.

  We dumped Johnny gently on his unmade bed. Above it was a large white square of wall where a painting had been taken down. I left Carlos to deal with Johnny and sat in the living room to wait. It was a hopeful room, that living room, with a grandmother clock, and a painted chest, and some chic, unsittable wicker chairs. Hanging from the ceiling on a wire was a glass wind chime. I looked out the window, and Carlos came up behind me.

  “He’s down for the count,” he said. “Flat out.”

  He put his arm around me to guide me down the stairs. “What are we going to do now?” he said.

  I said, “What do you want to do?”

  “Either get drunk or get laid,” he said.

  “Let’s get drunk.”

  “It’s all the same to me,” said Carlos. “Let’s get a cab and go over to the South Africa.”

  So I was alone with him—another event. Everything seemed calculated from the time Sam died: my first appearance in public, the first time I had the heart to play the piano, my first time out on the town. In the taxi, he gave me a seductive feline smile, a smile that said: “What a refreshment you are to my jaded sensibilities.” What did I think I was doing? I should have stopped the cab and gone home, but I was the former wife of the More Life Kid. I was the More Life Kid. I wanted to hit the South Africa and hang around, getting drunker. I wanted to see what the rest of the evening would bring me. I wanted Carlos Warren to kiss me and I wanted him to follow me up the stairs to my apartment and make me an offer I could not refuse. I wanted him to seduce me, or me him. I wanted some big-time break between me and the world, between the death of Sam and the life of me. Carlos didn’t know the difference between me and seven hundred other women in New York. He didn’t know that I was a widow, or maybe he did. Maybe Johnny had told him, but enough time and drink had passed between him and that fact, and me. Besides, what did it matter? You aren’t what you have passed through, but only what you are, and I was only a girl in a taxi, late at night.

  The South Africa was a large, bare, whitewashed bar and the lighting made its patrons look like existentialists. On the window was a little neon sign that said “Shills.”

  I said, “Why is it called the South Africa if the sign says Shills?”

  “It’s owned by Gladys Shills,” Carlos said. “She’s a South African expatriate. A lot of exiles hang out here.”

  It didn’t look like the sort of place that sponsors loud good times. The stark walls bleached the joy and mellowness out of everyone’s face. You could sit at the long wooden bar, or you could sit, at a good remove from your fellows, at a number of round wooden tables. These tables were taken up by serious-looking couples and trios, wearing denim and corduroy, and Africans in bluejeans and batik. At the end of the bar sat Gladys herself, a large impassive blond woman wearing a leopard coat and a pair of green plush slippers. She nodded at Carlos when we walked in. No one spoke above a whisper, and the jukebox offered quiet, cerebral jazz. It was the most depressing bar I had ever been in. It had the beaten, serious air of a study hall in high school.

  Carlos ordered a pair of cognacs and I began to slide a little in my seat. I was less drunk than tired and I felt relatively disarranged, as if my clothes had suddenly stopped fitting. Carlos, of course, was exactly as he had been the moment I met him. No amount of wear or tear or liquor had any effect on him. His natty blazer was still buttoned and had no
t been unbuttoned all evening. Clean cuffs showed at the ends of his sleeves. His tie was still straight. His eyes were more vacant than strained, and when I looked into them, I saw how ruthless they were. When he smiled, he revealed beautiful white teeth.

  I drank my cognac and thought about the girls I had gone to school with, the nice ones whose social expectations and emotional lives walked hand in hand in some well-ordered universe, who knew what place they were destined for and sat neatly in it, who were not prone to wayward notions or desires. Girls I had gone to school with were now lawyers and doctors and captains of industry for all I knew, or married to them, but they still smiled benignly above their neat collars. If they had been recently widowed, they would not have found themselves at a morbidly lit bar for expatriate South Africans with an unknown journalist of dubious moral posture for whom they were in the grip of lust. Nor would they feel that they might die if the unknown war correspondent didn’t kiss them. They were neat in their neat places and I saw for that instant that Sam was both my places: he kept me placed, but on the side I wanted. It seemed too much to think that danger would ever be so tamely incorporated into my life again.

  As we sipped our drinks, Carlos talked about being in the line of fire, or rather, I grilled him. It did not amaze me how deep my interest in this matter went, and it did not surprise me how seductive his well-worked riff was.