Shine On, Bright & Dangerous Object

by Laurie Colwin

  “Life is very stripped down,” he said. “You know the meaning of gut friendship. It’s completely nihilistic. There’s no reason for anyone to do anything for anyone else, but they do. It’s sheer survival, so if someone hands you a cigarette, you carry that gesture around forever. There are no frills. No niceties. None of the chatter and shadow boxing you have to do in the real world. I’ve had very intense friendships with guys whose names I never knew.”

  I said, “How do you get along in the real world after that?”

  “It isn’t the real world,” he said. “That’s the real world. Coming back is like coming to another planet. You have to learn to socialize all over again, and you realize how much time you waste getting along with all these flabby fatheads. Contact between two people, or just between people, should be more elementary. Life in the world is just one goddam cocktail party. It’s a big fucking waste of time, because we’re all under the gun, after all.”

  He gave me, full force, an expression of bitter sadness, and I smiled back at him. It was better than having a theatrical company playing just for you, but his every word rang in my teenage heart. He wasn’t believable at all, but I could have taken a bath in what he said. I was girl darling to boy war correspondent, and as I looked at him I knew that somewhere, probably in some swank modern apartment, he had a wife working herself into a fury over him. He smiled and his beautiful teeth gleamed. No matter how much I knew I was being softened up, that he knew exactly what stops to pull, that he was a real stray in the world, I wanted him. He looked me deeply in the eyes, and I saw again how cold and disinterested his were.

  “Let’s get out of here,” he said.

  “I have to go home,” I said. It was three o’clock in the morning.

  “That’s where we’re going,” he said.

  In my apartment, I got the kiss I wanted, and it was pretty gut-crunching, I thought.

  “I want you,” he said into my ear.

  “You’d want anyone who was standing here and female.”

  He pinned me by my shoulders to the wall and kissed me again.

  “We could be very good together,” he said, and I silently agreed.

  This was the logical conclusion. After a certain age, you don’t just get kissed, and after a certain age, things become very stripped down between two people. There was no reason for me to turn him down. It wasn’t a question of honor, and this was not, after all, the line of fire. I was torn up with pure lust. There was no morality to cover it, and my only shame was that I was going to say no and chalk myself up squarely with the rest of the ninnies and teases of the world.

  “It can’t be,” I said.

  “Why do you say that?” he said. “What’s the point of that?” He stroked my hair. “Don’t be so silly,” he said, at which point I began to cry. I put my arms against him and wept into his blazer. Whatever he thought of this, he held me close and stroked my back.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to cry all over you. I haven’t been out much, so I’m a little scrambled.”

  He looked at me with scorn and disbelief. It was clear that he didn’t have the vaguest idea what I meant, and he didn’t much care. It was the perfect moment for me to tilt my tearstained face into the dim light and explain that I had been recently, tragically widowed, that my emotional condition was delicate, and to explain the deep seriousness with which I took passionate connections between women and men, but I hated myself as those convenient words came to me. This was my show, mine alone. Besides, you can’t make personal connections with those who don’t put any stock by them, and it was my own fault for diving around town with Carlos Warren.

  But I didn’t have to explain anything to him. He was only a stranger who wanted to shack up late at night. It didn’t matter if his desire was general or specific, but I felt obliged to explain nonetheless, and the reason was that he had struck in me real physical longing. I could see that he was puzzled and bored—but mostly bored—and I was in despair. How wantonly I wanted to be understood, and how deeply uninterested he was in whatever I was going to say. He wanted what he wanted at the moment, and what he wanted was not some complicated moral justifying from a young woman he rightly suspected of being a tease.

  But my reasons weren’t so high-handed after all. It wasn’t only the Sams of the world who got their Lyle Crosbys. I had had my Lyle Crosby too, and his name was Richard Cruise.

  Richard Cruise was one of the landmarks of my college. He was a lean, wiry man who lived in a stone house in the country and did some casual, gentlemanly farming. He had his friends among the country gentry, the country arts and letters rustics and some of the faculty who had put down local roots. He was sometimes seen driving his beat-up Rover up the college drive when the head of the English department gave dinner parties. He was in his thirties, he was alone, and he had a look of mournful boyishness that gave rise to considerable erotic speculation and fantasy among the more sultry and artistic of my classmates. Occasionally he took a solitary beer in the college bar and you sometimes found him in the afternoon drinking in a dark corner with the writer in residence or the professor of sculpture.

  He crossed everyone’s mind, and when he crossed mine, I struck a chord of something very like hero worship: the sight of someone so cut off inflamed my most romantic imagination and it seemed to me heroic that he could do without. My room was cluttered with my possessions, my life was cluttered with my friends, but I imagined the life of Richard Cruise to be as sparse and neat as a Japanese brush painting. He came and went as he pleased—for months he wasn’t seen at all. He seemed to have invented his own rules of order, and although he smiled at the bar or waved if you passed him on the road, he was as remote as a boulder that weathers time alone.

  I met up with him one day by chance at a bar and grill in a town called Plattshook. Plattshook was five miles from campus, and I was taking a serious late autumn walk. By the time I got there, I was ravenous. The bar and grill was a run-down, faded place and Richard Cruise was having a beer at a table by himself when I walked in. He nodded at me, and when I got my hamburger, he motioned for me to come and sit with him since we were the only people around. We spent the afternoon feeding dimes to Conway Twitty on the jukebox and talking about college. This was around the time that I was getting sick of Eddie Liebereu, when life looked a little too assured and shapely for my comfort. I had the fine, gray day to myself, and Richard Cruise was its private treasure.

  He told me that he had spent his childhood summers in the area, and after college, after graduate school, and after six months in the Marines and a year working in Boston, he had decided to come back. We talked about my professors. By the time we finished our extended chat, it was dusk and he offered to drive me back to school.

  We took the scenic route by the river, and when we passed his house, which you could just see the roof of from the road, he asked if I would like to come in, and I said yes. It was a stone house with small rooms and in the living room was a gray marble fireplace on which a garland of flowers had been carved. We sat in his spare kitchen drinking coffee, and when it got dark we made omelettes on the woodstove. It was not at all odd to be there, but nothing was said about it except that he asked if he was keeping me from anything at school and I said no. I was afraid that if I questioned my own presence in his house, the bubble would be broken and I would find myself teleported to my college room. I showed him how to flip an omelette, and he told me he made his own catsup and applesauce. He was not even marginally seductive. It was simply a break in ordinary life for both of us, and he was boyish enough to be the sort of polite, shy friend your brother brings home at mid-semester break. But his house seeped into me: it was bare and broody and smelled of ash. His worn tweed jacket smelled of wood smoke.

  He was cut off all right, but he was very polite and we kept up a breezy, flowing conversation that made me feel terrifically uncomfortable, since you never got to the heart of anything with him, and at that stage of my life, connection wa
s all. There was nothing in his manner that made me understand why he wanted me around, but he didn’t make any gesture to get me back to school. He announced his ways, his rules of order, and his priorities with such bearing and silence that it seemed to me intrusive not to float along with them, so I floated.

  After dinner, he showed me the artifacts he had bought with the house: the hooked rugs, the whale oil lamp, the wooden closet doors that had boating scenes painted on them, and a trio of stuffed birds perched on a branch under a large glass bell.

  We sat in front of the fire and drank brandy, and when we stopped to see what time it was, we were amazed to find that it was after curfew, so it was arranged, out of necessity, that I spend the night. I spent it in his bed—there was no other bed and the couch was too hard and small to sleep on—and began it by wearing one of his soft, faded work shirts. It is hard to get comfortable next to a stranger, even if you have sat with him for hours, especially if in those hours you never cross the bridge from politeness into friendship. Sometime during that night we turned to each other and his work shirt fell to the floor, and for all that we had not crossed the bridge into friendship, we crossed some other bridge into the kind of passion that does not need intimacy in order to thrive. When we woke, the sky was solid gray and we faced each other with the same intensity.

  By noon we were dressed, and Richard Cruise asked me what I liked for breakfast, if I liked my toast light or dark and what I took in my coffee. We had toast and jam, over which we discussed the misery of my college’s soccer team and its humiliation by a bunch of seminarians from St. Joseph’s of the Cross. That sexual fire didn’t tear down any walls. It only made us more formal. I told him I would walk back to school but he drove me to the top of the college road, since he had errands to do, and gave me a painless kiss on my cheek.

  From time to time I saw him at the bar, and we always smiled. For a couple of months during the winter he was not around, but one spring day we sat and had a drink together. He asked me how my classes were going. It was all stiff and friendly, but that one-night stand confused my notion of things. How could we have been so passionate if we had still been strangers, and how could we still be strangers with all that passion between us? The event had its place for him—it ended where it ended. The only thing we had in common was the landscape and a mutual admiration for the vocal works of Conway Twitty. Even though I had spent a night in his bed, I had no idea if he had committed the act between us to his mind or heart. It shook me to my bones; it seemed so random, so extraordinary, and so able to be shelved. Carlos Warren brought it all back.

  Finally I didn’t care what I said, so I told Carlos Warren that I had been recently widowed, and after looking at me with what appeared to be real sympathy, he clutched me again. It didn’t matter what you said to him—no truth or lie got in his way. He didn’t have much in the way of emotion to affect, so what could you appeal to? Besides, his stance was reasonable enough. Wasn’t it late at night? Wasn’t this the apartment of an unattached woman? Hadn’t we been hanging out all evening?

  “You’re a real weird kid,” he said.

  “This is my first night out on the town. I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be sorry,” he said. “You’re a very nice person.” And on that note of chilling cordiality, he left.

  When he was gone, I stalked my apartment in the grip of something that made me want to trash the place. I wanted to break up the furniture, stomp on the china, and watch the glasses as they shattered brilliantly against the fireplace. It wasn’t just desire or denial.

  When in my room at college I brooded about Richard Cruise, I had felt bereft and unworthy. He was the solitary other and I had had the chance to puncture his solitude, but I had failed. When I met Sam, he was available; he had the same remoteness, and I had won. They were excessive types, and so was Carlos Warren. To get through to them, to connect with them seemed to me a feat that singled you out and branded you with specialness. A gesture from them was the decoration you got after an act of courage.

  You cannot be a secret champion of excess without being excessive yourself, and the state I had worked myself into over Richard Cruise returned to me in memory as I paced the room, looking for something fragile enough to throw against the wall.

  It was only Sam’s conventional, evasive side that saved me, that got me him. Now he was where he belonged, as lost as Richard Cruise, as ungettable, as unobtainable. Carlos Warren was one more excessive, inaccessible stranger who liked to live on any suitable knife-edge, cut off in a stone house, on a bored-out Vincent Black Shadow, or directly in the line of fire. I was there too, not on the sidelines, but in the midst of them, grinning the smile of an innocent appreciator, my hot excessive heart flashing admiration. That’s where I belonged, and that’s where I had put myself, like those injured jaywalkers who tell you they were drawn into the traffic.

  12

  On the weekends I worked over my notes for Max Price, practiced the piano, and cruised the neighborhood for domestic items I didn’t need. I bought an unnecessary French teakettle and an overpriced basket from Zaire. Nothing sold in Greenwich Village seemed to be American in origin, but at the end of Bleecker Street was a good old U.S.A. general store that sold bluejeans, work jackets, and underwear. There I found a pair of men’s pajamas so lovable I almost bought them. They had red stripes, and between the stripes a vertical rank of giraffes wearing crash helmets. I stood at the counter contemplating them until I realized the depths of my self-indulgence and left.

  Every few weeks I got on the train and went to visit my parents. These visits were agreeable enough: my parents struggled valiantly against normal worry, and I struggled valiantly against the threat of loving invasion. But they only said that I looked thin and so provided large cheering meals, or said that I looked pensive and so engaged me in games of backgammon or midnight gin rummy. To lift my spirits, my mother took me shopping, my father read grim items from the newspaper in the voice of Groucho Marx, and we took bracing walks in the afternoon. But they didn’t press to find out what I was up to, and since I was not in danger, they were calmed to see me recovering slowly.

  I spent some time reflecting, with real despair, on Carlos Warren, that typecast flash in the pan. I knew I would never see him again, unless I happened to bump into him during a revolution in the Sudan, but my encounter with him gave me what my father called “cause for pause.”

  Just as I had been Sam’s wedge, the door of evasion he closed between himself and the world, so he was mine. Left to my own devices, what would I have done? Run around cracking my heart against the grim, engaging smiles of heartless punks like Carlos Warren is what I would have done. Sam kept me steady: he kept me from giving my impulses a good run for their money since he came so close to what I craved. I loved outlaws or anybody who looked like one. I liked anything with a hard edge on it. I’d take a cowboy if there weren’t any Indians around, but Indians were smarter, angrier, had better horses, and didn’t need a saddle when they rode. Confronted with the nice tame faces at Butler Library or at a concert hall, a yearning for mayhem welled in me, and I knew it was better to be excessive. It was better to fall into harm’s arm than to snuggle up with safety and mildness. But Sam hadn’t been very wild, actually. He wasn’t very dangerous at all; Carlos Warren was the hard core. Sam’s dealings with danger were all flirtation, while Carlos conducted the serious love affair. He had been shot at, strafed, bombed nearby. He had been thrown out of several banana republics and jailed in Rhodesia. His nerves, if he had any, were made of catgut, not steel; his wildness was dead set, and he was heartless as a result. But I had never outgrown the belief that life is best performed by gemlike flames, and Sam was a domestic variety.

  Carlos Warren made me realize how valuable Sam was, and the useless love and longing for him that burned inside me almost did me in. I thought I had missed him, but I hadn’t known what missing was. In a world of Carlos Warrens, I wanted Sam, and I spent three weeks in desolation as solid as a st
one fence. I was relapsing heavily.

  At which point Patrick turned up. He had been away on business and was friskier than I had ever seen him. He appeared one Sunday afternoon, armed with his Nikon camera and several rolls of film. I told him that I was not up for any outdoor photographic expedition, but he said it was a brand-new camera and he had brought it over to try it out on me. I was low and worn out—wounded—and did not feel like a proper subject for a new camera, but Patrick bullied me into a chair and arranged me. He adjusted the shutters and switched the lights on and off*. I didn’t want my picture taken. I wanted to be carted into the street and shot like a dog, but Patrick didn’t care. When he got bored with a sitting subject, he allowed me to move around and followed me. Nothing was about to get in the way of his buoyant spirits. I had never seen him like this, and I wondered what was the cause of it, but Patrick never explained why or what he felt. He only broadcast it.

  I didn’t know anything about Patrick. The tie between us didn’t make us close; it only held us close. I didn’t have to get to know Patrick; I already knew him. But when I contemplated the sum total of my knowledge, I came up empty. Across the room, he was unloading his camera, as private as a bank vault, possessor of a rich history I knew nothing about.

  I said, “Where have you been keeping yourself, Patrick?”

  “I’ve been working,” he said. “I had to go to Washington a couple of times. There’s nothing like complicated litigation to keep your brain poised and wreck your body. What have you been up to?”

  “Nothing much. I’ve been working for Max and going up to the library.”

  “And you’ve been alone except for that?”

  “I’ve been out a little.”

  “That’s good to hear,” he said brightly. “Who with?”

  I told him I had been out with an old college pal of Sam’s and he pressed me for a name. When I told him Johnny Porter, he said, “That jerk.”