Shine On, Bright & Dangerous Object

by Laurie Colwin

  But the secret heart of things was the ground I stood on. What arrangements people construct in the name of love are as formal and artful as any other product of human devotion. You figured them out as you went along, with an eye toward grace, as if you were writing a sonata, and the sense that propelled you was the goodness of the thing. My feelings for Patrick propelled me along. I didn’t want their history explained to me. I didn’t want to know if Patrick, at Little Crab, or in Cambridge, or some night at the Baxes’ had fallen into love, and I didn’t want to ask myself what set of intricate baby steps had led me to what I felt was so inalienably right. It didn’t matter.

  When Patrick woke up, we watched the evening news and had our dinner, after which Patrick looked over a brief and read a mystery entitled The Serpent in the Suitcase. He read with fierce concentration.

  “Who wrote that thing?” I said.

  “Shut up,” said Patrick.

  “What’s the title of it?”

  “I don’t know. Leave me alone. There’s a water moccasin wrapped around the shower curtain.”

  It took him forty-five minutes to read it, after which we drank hot toddys and watched a late-night movie called The Terror, another mystery Patrick was hot to watch. It concerned a pair of French aristocrats being kept prisoner in their own château by a flock of men wearing ski masks, speaking to one another in badly synched English. “Give this gun to me, or I shall have to blow your guts out,” said the largest of the masked men. We turned it off and went to bed.

  We slept the sleep of the just and innocent, that sweet sleep you keep waking from then drift back into. After our long weekend, we treated each other with exaggerated but gentle respect, as if marking the boundaries of our separate privacy in order to see them more clearly. But still, we couldn’t stay apart for very long.

  15

  I didn’t want to love Patrick: I didn’t know how to go about it. I knew all about leaping into love, about getting carried away, about jumps of faith and flashes of intuition. I knew about chance and dare and lust and the love of risk it takes to get into a car with Richard Cruise. But I didn’t know anything about the slow approach, the accumulation of admiration, the long slide into the depths of love. I believed that if you connected, you went off like a flashbulb. I didn’t know anything at all about patience, and it seemed to me that no matter with what stealth you approached passion, no matter how long the waiting time spins out before it erupts, it is the soul of impatience, and recklessness lives right in the heart of it.

  I thought that although I hadn’t plotted for Sam, I had waited all my life for someone like him. Sam tied up the whole package. My feelings for Patrick functioned out of another set of rules in a game I was new to, whose order was dim to me. We slipped into a slightly chaotic but definitely domestic routine. After all, I had been domesticated for quite a while, and Patrick had been hoping for the shape his life was assuming. We were too grown up for snipings in the dark, hysterical telephone calls, cryptic messages, and we had known each other too long for clashing histories and misunderstandings. So we didn’t undergo what emerging lovers have to bear, but it was only superficially that we were the other’s most convenient choice. The fact is, we were a perfect match. We had the same fondness for order, for quietude, we had the same deep streak of intensity running through us, and we savored it in the same way. We went to concerts. We went to the movies. We went dancing at a big, slummy joint called Penny’s Paradise. Basically, we hung around, divided equally between my apartment, where the piano was, and Patrick’s, where his papers were.

  Our privacy, our quietude, our mutual propriety kept the world at bay for a time. We were working on feeling, not talking about it. Being lovers had rearranged our friendship and superseded the bond we were used to. But above us, like a bright, high cloud with a dark side, floated the idea of Sam, causing me and Patrick to do battle with a strong sense of sin. Had he been coveting his brother’s wife? And had his brother’s wife been keeping a secret eye out for him? But Patrick hadn’t coveted me. He had been stumped by my presence in Sam’s company, and he had never thought Sam and I would end up together. In the hardheadedness of my loyalty to Sam I had thought, but never noticed, how difficult it was to be married to him. But it didn’t matter, except that Patrick and I didn’t want the issue of us confused. We didn’t want to fall into some awful mistake, so for a while we made a mutual pact to rack up as much pleasure as we could with the least amount of intrusion.

  You can suspend thought, but you can’t stop yourself from thinking. I wondered how much Sam there was latent in Patrick and he wondered how much revenge on Sam there was in his choice of me. We were right to wonder and we were not shy about asking, but there was a real possibility of turning Sam into an obsession; we wanted to see how deep our bond went without him.

  Joining with Patrick was no accident caused by rain and whiskey. The event itself was a surprise, as all events are, but not the fact of it. The fact of it was as natural as the weather. Once past the fact, we were only two people who knew each other, up to a point.

  Sam’s rebelliousness had made him accident prone: he was all surfaces, and his waywardness was as apparent as the sling on his arm. Patrick dealt in depth charges. Sam was a lawyer because it was the easiest and smoothest thing for him to be—because Leonard was and because Cyrus Bax had been. Sam liked to discuss cases with Leonard. It was another form of tennis for them both. But, as Henry Jacobs said, Patrick’s connection to the law was passionate, and this passion was unintelligible to Leonard, with whom he never discussed anything. Life to Sam was matter, and to Patrick it was the mind over it. Waywardness in Patrick led to slaps in the face of this kind—the son who wouldn’t speak, the son who would take up his father’s profession and never talk shop, the son who had made himself, by virtue of constant, cautionary lessons, what his parents were not, while Sam was the caricature of what they were. Patrick lay back. His manners were flawless. He hadn’t flipped out, shot heroin, or lived in a truck. He was a son you could take around in company. But, underneath, the priorities of his life had been arranged away from anything Leonard or Meridia had to offer, and his life was spent in vigilance against what he was heir to: that cold, offhand, tunnel-visioned amputation of the heart and soul the Baxes had undergone and never, never rued.

  The first few months we were together I could not get over the feeling that I was being given the key to a locked room containing secreted treasures. Patrick gave me access and it wasn’t easy for him, but it was what he wanted. There is privacy, there is remoteness, and there is the stand you take about privacy. Patrick believed that a confidence was an honor conferred in friendship, and so did I. Sam blurted, but he was as remote as his mother, that stylish flint wall. I had known Sam as well as he could be known, I thought with grief, but the key to his locked room was lost even to him. He hadn’t had much in the way of an emotional vocabulary and when he said he loved me it was true, but it was only a fact, like Meridia’s domestic arrangements. Loving me made life easier for him. It got him off the hook of life. Having said it, there was nothing more to be done. Sam was complicated, all right, but he didn’t care.

  But Patrick was a miracle of rare device. He was the precision machine that contemplates with interest the workings of its own parts. He was a great speculator; he was a distinction-maker. In his bottom drawer was a file of clippings cut from the newspapers and I often thought if I could find out the lowest common denominator of those clippings I would have known him all at once: family murders, faith healers, bogus stock issues, the history of the Albanian community in the Bronx, the scandal of Tipica College, which gave out divinity degrees if you sent in twenty-five dollars and your blood type and a pledge that you had never had any alcoholic beverage, the death of a race horse at the three-quarter-mile pole. There was a grand private design to these, known only to Patrick.

  Having him tell you the plot of one of his mysteries was better than reading it, and I used to make him tell me the plots
of movies I had seen, just to hear him. For Patrick, there was a plot beneath the plot—he called it underplot—and he could knock off the story in a couple of sentences. What he liked was what got the thing going. He was a big fan of tone and gesture, those nuances you could fix on sixty different ways. If he had not been so capable of delight, his interest in detail would have approached the sinister. But life did delight him, in all its moving parts. He sat back and watched the world plot and move and shift. In public he was slightly shy, but he was charmed by what people thought, or thought they thought, and what they did unthinkingly. Patrick found odd sides on even the dullest citizen. If he had not had a nasty side, if he had not had a small streak of natural mimic, he might have approached sanctity. But he also had a temper.

  Patrick angered on a slow burn. His propriety was such that shouting or on-the-spot hostilities were impossible for him, so he took proper stock of what annoyed him and who had wronged him and saved it up until his anger burned through, and then he was prone to incandescent rages, but they were only flash fires—hot and brief. You knew what he disapproved of only by the flicker of disgust that ran across his eyes. When I first met him, the word for him was lofty. From the perch of his high horse, he looked down on the rest of the world and judged harshly, and while he had once been fury waiting for an outlet, he had calmed down as he got older. There was still a fiery keenness about him, but his life was no longer a struggle for mildness against vehemence. He was not so vehement as he had thought, nor was he so addicted to mildness as he had once believed. But he was a good solid hater when he wanted to be, and his hates, which he kept sharpened, were all ancient history: a professor he had wanted to murder, and a colleague in his first law firm. He never saw either of these people, but he liked to keep his hate intact, so from time to time he would trot it out, and I would get fifteen minutes of pure invective.

  The list of things he liked or loved or craved was endless. He was in fact quite easy to please. He wanted coffee ice cream all the time and you could make him happy with any book about birds or snakes. He loved mystery novels, which he bought, read, and threw away, and he liked what he called “German twilight fiction”—Brosch, Storm, and Robert Musil. The movies he admired were in color, had a lot of love interest and very little social content—a really bloody Western or some unbelievably tear-jerking romance. As a child he had filled his cupboards with rocks and minerals, and his collection, a modified edition thereof, was still with him. When you walked on the beach with Patrick, you noticed that he walked with his head down. Some of his collection dotted the mantelpiece in his bedroom, and some of it was used for paperweights. If you asked him he could tell you where each was from, and on what walk in what town in East Anglia he had found his lump of red flint.

  He loved clocks, and in the back of his closet was a box of old watch parts he had bought for a dollar in Maine. He had inherited Cyrus Bax’s grandfather clock, which had painted on its lid a four-rigger, and from Meridia’s mother an alabaster clock on top of which sat a brooding bronze griffin. On his desk was a blue plastic elephant clock with the face in its stomach, the clock that had been a childhood gift. None of these clocks told the right time. For that you went into the bedroom, where he kept a cheap white electric alarm clock that did not ring but rasped you out of sleep.

  He liked to be read to, and he liked to read out loud. He liked to buy the early edition of the New York Times and read it before he went to bed. He liked beer and he liked to go to the races, and he watched basketball on television, since his firm—to his great sorrow—didn’t have seats at the Garden. He liked to putter around when he was thinking, and his artistic ambitions were confined to a set of watercolors he dragged out one rainy evening. We sat head to head under a high-intensity lamp, painting a clumsy, primary-colored, visually illiterate edition of a unicorn tapestry, which Patrick had framed and hung over the bed. The unicorn, a joint effort, had one blue eye and one faintly green one, of two different shapes. He looked somewhat goat-like, and his horn was striped blue and yellow and red. In the background were a pack of dogs that looked like boulders with cat faces, but the wildflowers were very precise.

  If we were at my apartment, he liked to listen to me practice and he made me play the pieces I had written; he paced while he listened, his hands locked behind him like a cartoon edition of a German philosopher. Although we cohabited with real sweetness and our intentions at the time were blockheaded and direct as we fended the world off, those first few months were difficult once our mutual amazement wore off. First of all, it was hard to push things aside, although we knew we were right to. It was hard to establish an easy rhythm between us—after all, we were strangers keeping house. And it was hard to maintain that calculated innocence. It made us slightly fragile. As a result, Patrick got the flu and had to stay home for three days. He propped himself up with pillows, looking haggard and boyish, reading the New York Times and watching soap operas on the television. He was sweet and fevered and bored. When I came home, we played Scrabble and then a card game he and Sam had made up and played since childhood called “Killer Swaps,” whose rules were ridiculous and complicated. This amused him nicely for an hour, and then he napped. When he woke up, he feebly gulped down pints of coffee ice cream, the only thing he wanted to eat besides buttered toast. His fever made him mellow and sentimental, and when I got up early on a wet, bitter day to go out and get him the paper I had to fling it on the bed and stalk out for fear he would weep with gratitude.

  When he got well, I got sick. I hadn’t been sick since childhood, and the brand of flu I got gave me a fever so low grade that I woke up one morning with hands and feet and bones so cold I thought I had died during the night. Patrick got me out of bed, sat me down in front of a fire, and changed the bedding. Being sick made me despair.

  When I looked at myself in the mirror, I was the color of ash, but when the worst was over and I began to look less like a corpse, Patrick made me a formal dinner. He covered the table with a cloth that must have been Meridia’s. He was a precise, good cook: this was the meal to welcome me back to the world of the living, and he watched over me with a solicitude that made me weepy. Over dessert, I broke down, sobbing apologies.

  Patrick said, “After a death in the family, everyone gets sick.”

  I said, “I want to talk about Sam.”

  “So do I,” said Patrick.

  “My instinct tells me that the way I feel about you doesn’t have anything to do with him, but that can’t be the truth.”

  “My instinct tells me that you don’t have anything to do with him, in the way I feel, but I believe it.”

  “It can’t be.”

  “It can and it can’t,” said Patrick. “There are some nasty facts in this matter. What’s going on now couldn’t have happened if Sam hadn’t died. I didn’t want him to die, but he did. I know that in the back of my mind I’ve held you as something I’ve wanted for years, but I never would have done anything about it, and I never hoped that Sam would fade away. I thought you two would divorce, and I wondered what I’d do if you did.”

  “But you thought we would.”

  “Listen, Elizabeth. I don’t have any love for the members of my family. Leonard’s all right. He’s a good father for a five-year-old boy. Meridia is all right too, but they’re the coldest fish this side of the South Pole. I loved Sam probably the way you did. He was great to watch, but you know how fixed his limits were. In family matters, my family is all alike. They hang together like icicles. I wondered how long you could keep on being what you manifestly are in that company.”

  “Where do you fit in?”

  “I’m their opposite. The wonderful thing about Leonard and Meridia is how little keeps them pleased. They like to keep the lid on. Sam liked to blow the lid off. I’m not interested in lids. I’m their odd duck.”

  He was their odd duck, all right, their swan, their eagle, the heron that stood brooding and reflecting in a still pool. That was the first of our discussions ab
out the Baxes: I was a Bax, too, technically. We discussed these things in short takes, over a long time. But the rest of the time we put our hands over our eyes, with only a space between our fingers to see the other. Both of those stances, we felt, were right. We would have been silly if we had not been so serious, so dedicated to caution, so careful to see if we were right, since we both felt our position to be risky and assailable. What would the world say about us, we sinning in-laws? Couldn’t a case be made for the plotting of the thing? Didn’t it look just too convenient for words? It would have been a falsity not to have thought these things through, so we thought them. But Patrick and I knew what a pair of ponderosos we could be, and there was too much joy in us to be denied. Everyone in love is foolish, so we trotted around like a pair of perfectly matched fools. We were also fools for order.

  Patrick was almost as fastidious as Meridia, but not for the sake of dispensing with things. Order saved time, he thought, but in matters of the heart—the explosive matter of our communal heart—it was correctness he wanted and so did I. Order in the world created comfort for Patrick, and his apartment was a cross between a neat boy’s room and Meridia’s study. There was no place you couldn’t comfortably sprawl or shut yourself off if you needed to. We spent stretches of our time together in peaceful quietude. Together, we got a lot of work done. Sam had been too frenetic to read in the same room with. The piano bothered him, and in order to study he had to lock himself away. If he couldn’t find a place in Widener Library, he holed himself up in the bicycle room of our apartment building.