Shine On, Bright & Dangerous Object

by Laurie Colwin

  Patrick liked to unfold on his couch. I curled into his big striped chair. On these laps of comfort, we read the hours away. It was a pleasure to look up from the page, turn my head, and see Patrick absorbed in his mysteries, his twilight fiction, his bird and snake books. He was a reactive reader: he laughed out loud, groaned, and snorted. When he hit a passage that set him off, he looked over politely and then read it to me.

  He was neat, but he had pockets of real sloppiness. He didn’t like to see a chair out of place, and a slightly crooked painting drove him crazy, but on his dresser was a huge glass ashtray into which he dumped the pennies his jacket pocket was always filled with. This ashtray was so full it spilled when you opened the top drawer. In the morning the floor was littered with pennies. His camera was safe in its case and the negatives were neatly filed, but the prints were stacked haphazardly in a tattered interoffice envelope. In one tiny closet, whose door had to be forced, Patrick had established a little spot of chaos. In it were crammed several unstrung tennis rackets, the set of watercolors, a broken ski, several torn sweaters, a couple of tarnished trophies, hiking boots, a carton of dusty term papers, his rock and mineral collection, a pith helmet, a large box containing his income tax statements, loose tennis balls, and a Malacca cane—relic of Cyrus Bax—that was decorated with dancing skeletons.

  Sometimes, if he left before me in the morning, I would wander around his apartment as if I had come to another planet by affectionate invitation. There were times when I pushed the jammed door of that closet open and stood looking into the jumble as if it were the middens of Troy. There were the artifacts of an entirely different life and the sight of his discarded toys gave me a turn. It seemed to me that no matter how long you lived with men—no matter how long you lived with a man—there were things that reminded you that they were totally unlike women. But then, it wasn’t men and women: it was me and Patrick. It was the heady sense with which you come to people you love—as if they were the history of Western civilization, full of shrines, museums, battles, monuments, churches, and arrowheads.

  When, in a moment of true soupiness, I revealed to Patrick that I had stood in front of this closet with tears in my eyes, he told me that when he discovered that I kept lavender soap in with my sweaters he had felt slightly dizzy, as if he had found a secret letter.

  All that rainy summer, I worked for Max at Butler Library. When the weather was fine, Patrick and I took off for the weekend to the beach, but not to Little Crab. It was the first year Patrick did not go up—we were waiting to go together and present ourselves to Leonard and Meridia as a pair. Meanwhile, we made nothing public, and we kept low, but we were positively prancing with good health. There are decisions your flesh makes for you, and we could not deny the visible evidence that we had struck some rich vein of happiness: the flesh carries on a happy, mindless life of its own.

  In late August, I was to go away to the Hamilton Conservatory for a month, and Patrick had to be in Washington and California, so we spent the summer consolidating. Before I left, I put my furniture into storage, except for the piano, which was moved on a stifling day to Patrick’s, along with my clothes, books, scores, and sentimental objects. We decided that when we both got back we would move, and then we would begin our perilous trek to Boston to confront the Baxes and to Old Lyme to confront the Marcuses, and we would have Henry Jacobs to dinner.

  But there were days when I thought I would die, days when my hold on Sam—a hold I had grown used to and counted on, that I had substituted for my hold of grief—was so tenuous and far away I felt I had lost a hold on myself. Sam was my first language, the mother tongue I referred back to in my sleep or when caught off guard. I was losing it, and it seemed too soon to lose it. I felt like a murderess or a betrayer. It was too much to think about, but nothing stopped it. When I sifted my affections and measured my feelings, I knew that in most ways my feelings about Patrick had nothing to do with Sam. Only in most ways, but there were others.

  My days with Sam were finally over, and I was frightened. Sam was a pip. Sam was a hoot. Sam was haywire. When I thought of Sam, and I saw how much my vision had changed, I felt like a true criminal of the heart. Energy was not passion: Sam had the one, but Patrick had them both. Part of Sam’s appeal was that you could never figure out if he had been spoiled or deprived. Anything you gave him thrilled him, anything you didn’t pained him. He kept himself safe that way. But Patrick made you feel he had been spoiled with the things he didn’t much care about and deprived of the things he valued, and he had carved out a life he valued, while Sam threw his away.

  I was still mourning, and that made me feel toward Patrick a fierce tenderness: he was grieving too. That knowledge complicated things. I was no longer mourning on my own and I did not want us to be caught in some ritual undercurrent, tied together by a boating accident or bound by a freak storm.

  There was more life, and Patrick was it. As the days passed, Sam got to be more and more a photograph. The thought that someone I had loved so much had passed into memory was bitter, bitter and appalling. I saw Sam as I would have seen him through the wrong end of a telescope at fifty paces on the beach. He was so close he was almost upon me, but when I looked, he stood at the end of a great expanse, so diminished I could hardly make him out, so small I could have put him neatly in my scrapbook.

  Part III

  16

  My first night in Hamilton, New Hampshire, a seventeen-year-old Canadian genius named Giles Bronner played Brahms intermezzi. He was a tall, gaunt boy with angry red hair. When he looked up from the keys, the expression on his face was a cross between rapture and goofiness, and in the more intense moments, he threw back his head and dropped his lower lip, giving him the look of a slack-jawed, beatified moron, but he played like an angel. The little hall in which he performed had once been a chapel—a gray and white chapel—with bare pine pews and painted beams. Under the great Bechstein slept a golden retriever that belonged to the caretaker and his wife.

  According to the booklet I found lying on my night table, the grounds of the Hamilton Conservatory had once been a Quaker boys’ school, which, upon folding in 1895, had been purchased by Thaddeus McCane, a railroad magnate and horse breeder who added to the stark clapboard school buildings several elaborate Victorian houses, a stable so huge it had been converted by the Conservatory into an administration building and dining hall, and a round Shaker barn that was now used as a snack bar and common room, furnished in Palm Beach wicker. When McCane died, the family had leased the property to a Protestant ecumenical group, which held meetings and retreats, and had built the chapel and several one-room cottages—now rehearsal halls. This architectural mix, painted a uniform gray and trimmed in white, was set in a valley surrounded by wooded mountains. At midday the sun poured down on the gray gables, dazzling you, and on cloudy days it looked as if the buildings had been painted the precise color of an overcast sky.

  I had arrived too late for dinner, but was given a cup of coffee and a doughnut by Theo Zeller, the director. After I registered I was shown to my room in one of the cottages—a former dormitory—by Laura Zeller, Theo’s daughter, a plump sixteen-year-old with white-gold braids and petulant sulk. She pointed me in the direction of the chapel so that I could find my way to Giles Bronner after I unpacked.

  The night cloaked everything and the lights from the chapel gleamed out of the darkness. I sat in the back row during the concert looking at the heads of a group of strangers. After the performance I was too tired and shy to socialize. The only person I could have located was Theo Zeller, but he had disappeared, and Laura Zeller was standing by the piano, patting the awakened dog. I found my way back to my room alone and fell asleep.

  The next morning, the light woke me, and I took a long walk before breakfast in order to get a feel of the place by myself. The campus lay soft and bright in the early sun. I stuck to the side of the main road and kept my eye on the surrounding woods and fields to get the lay of the land. I walked four miles do
wn the road, and on my way back I saw a large man in a sweat suit jogging across a field. He had thick dark hair that flopped in his face. When he saw me, he jogged in my direction and finally stood before me, blocking my path. He had an open, slightly bullish face and the body of an aging football player that he was trying to maintain against odds. He looked about forty, puffing furiously and dripping wet.

  “We’re the only people up,” he said when he had caught his breath.

  “I like to have the morning to myself,” I said. “How many miles do you jog?”

  “Three. How many miles do you walk?”

  “Eight.”

  “Admirable,” he said. He had a smile of incomparable sweetness and it came over his sweating, scowling features slowly and left a trace of itself at the corners of his mouth. He had dimples and a rich voice with the remnants of a drawl.

  “I’m Charlie Pepper,” he said, extending his large hand.

  “I’m Elizabeth Bax.”

  “Well, Elizabeth. You have one of the smallest hands I’ve ever clutched.”

  We walked back together and he told me that he was a pediatrician from Knoxville and that he played second cello in the symphony.

  “They keep me on for my curiosity value, but I come up here to make sure they don’t fire me. I’m the tallest person in the symphony and the only doctor.” He asked me what had brought me to the Conservatory and I told him that I played the piano, that I was researching for a book, and that I had been away from musical people for a long time.

  He said, “Some afternoon will you play duets with me?”

  “I’m out of practice. I haven’t played with anyone for a year.”

  “Honey,” he said, “you haven’t heard anything until you hear an oversized aging baby doctor like myself sawing away.”

  At the edge of the campus, he showed me where he was putting up, in one of Thaddeus McCane’s Victorian houses, and said he would see me at breakfast. He smiled his lovely smile and I saw that he wore around his neck a dull chain bearing a disk. Up close it had engraved upon it two crossed snakes stamped in red and a warning that the wearer was fatally allergic to penicillin.

  Breakfast was at eight thirty so very few people showed up for it. I sat with Theo Zeller, Charlie Pepper, and Laura Zeller. Theo was an old friend of Max Price’s and we talked about him until Mrs. Zeller—Anna—appeared with the morning papers. We drank our coffee and read in silence.

  By the end of the day, I had visited the library, walked four more miles, and eaten two meals. Under the trees, around the pond, on the creeper-covered porches, students and musicians were talking earnestly or taking the sun. Someone was playing the violin in one of the rehearsal halls as I walked by. I had had time to observe that Laura Zeller and Giles Bronner were in love, and this was verified by Charlie Pepper, who had spent five summers at the conservatory. At lunchtime their eyes were very glazed and sleepy, and I suspected that Laura and Giles took off time to smoke reefer in the woods.

  Before dinner I did the rest of my unpacking. My cottage had once housed eight Quaker boys. Now it held four women: me, an elderly German named Elsa Costello (her late husband was Irish), who was writing a biography of Michael Haydn, a nun from Cincinnati who taught at a Sacred Heart college, and Libby Hayes, a harpsichordist from London with the strong, determined hands of a strangler.

  A great wave of shyness had overtaken me, and I approached meals with something very like terror. Suppose the Zellers didn’t want me at their table? Laura and Giles spoke only to each other. Wasn’t I intruding? The staff all knew one another; a large percentage of people were summer regulars, and the students had school in common. I didn’t fit at all.

  I paused at the door before dinner, but as I stood there, two hands closed around my elbow and I looked up at Charlie Pepper.

  “I’ve come to appropriate you,” he said. “You sit by me.”

  After dinner, there was nothing to do until the eight o’clock performance. If you wandered around, you heard someone practicing the flute, you heard scales being played on a bassoon, and from the round barn, a Mozart sonata for four hands.

  It was dusk. You could see the last thin line of a pink sunset lowering itself down the side of a mountain. I sat on a stone bench in the middle of what had been the Quaker boys’ playing field and talked to Charlie Pepper, who described the social workings of the place. After the night performance you could go, if you were invited, to the Zellers’ house down the road and get politely drunk. Or you could sit around the barn drinking coffee in front of a fire. Or else you had a party in your room, or got invited to one. Or if you were Laura and Giles, you found a comfortable, out-of-the-way copse in which to get stoned. One of the cottages near the dining hall was run like a country club: you stashed your bottle there with your name on it, and a cheerful student functioned as bartender. If you were bored and had a car, you could go off the grounds. The most popular place was a bar in Milford Haven, four miles away, but Charlie’s spot was a seedy bar and grill in the minuscule town of Shortford.

  When the eight o’clock bell rang, Charlie and I walked toward the chapel to hear Libby Hayes play the Goldberg Variations. Afterward, I was at loose ends, invaded again by shyness. I told Charlie I was going back to my room.

  “I’m real sorry to hear that,” he said.

  “It takes me a while to get used to a place,” I said.

  “Don’t let it take too long.”

  By the end of the first week everyone had arrived and I was used to the pace. Each morning I got up early to take my walk, and as I came up the road Charlie would jog across the field so we could walk to breakfast together. I found myself beside him at most meals, and whenever he sat at another table, I felt a little disconnected. Laura and Giles had decided, apparently, that I was not too horrible to acknowledge, so when I didn’t sit with Charlie I sat with them.

  But until I got my real bearings, I hid out in the library on the ground floor of one of the Victorian houses. The chairs were ratty and comfortable, slightly damp when you settled into them. There was a bookcase of scores, a long shelf of records next to a stereo with headsets, file drawers of letters—composers and musicians connected with the Conservatory left their papers to it—and a collection of monographs on American music. When you looked up from your work, you saw rolling lawns dipping into woods that led up the sides of the hills.

  I stuck to the library, to Laura and Giles, and to Charlie, when he was not socializing elsewhere. Laura was plump and creamy. When she was abstracted, she wove and unwove her, plait. She wore bluejeans and old-fashioned blouses embroidered with flowers and she dealt with her parents as if she were a prisoner of war—sullen, but polite. She and Giles pulled their chairs close together at meals, and Giles kept his bony arms close to his sides while he ate in order not to elbow her away from him.

  In the evenings, I went to the Zellers’, or to the barn for coffee. I spent a few evenings drinking with Charlie Pepper, who revealed to me that he was forty-three, that he had a wife named Mary Beth, three children, a water spaniel, and a fifteen-pound cat whose name was Tiny. He had been born and raised in Knoxville, but he had spent eight years in Canada getting educated at McGill.

  So I settled in. The women I shared the cottage with were brisk and cheerful and considerate with the hot water in the shower. I was used to seeing Charlie, used to sitting with him at the Zellers’.

  One morning I was accosted by Laura Zeller before lunch.

  “Giles asked me to talk to you,” she said. “He likes you.”

  “I’m honored.”

  “Most people don’t understand Giles very well,” she said. “He doesn’t get along with adults, but he thinks that’s immature. You’re a sort of borderline case, so he and I thought you might come down to the pond with us tonight.”

  “To help Giles reconcile himself with the adult world?”

  “Well, Giles and I don’t meet all that many people up here that we like, and we like you. We’re just going to smoke
a little dope and sit around.”

  “Would you like some wine, if I bring it?”

  “Sure,” said Laura. “Right after the concert.”

  I met them by the pond at ten o’clock with a bottle of white wine and a clothesline. We tied up the bottle and put it in the pond to cool and Giles produced a clay pipe. While the wine cooled, we smoked a little dope, which glowed in the darkness as we passed it around. You could hear the pop of frogs jumping in the pond, and the crickets and mourning doves. We stretched out on the grass and I told them how glad I was they had invited me.

  “Most people are insane pigs,” said Giles. He had his arm around Laura, who had unbraided her hair and pushed it over one shoulder. Their faces were filled with innocence and hostility; a clear case of teenage them-against-us-ism, banded together as they were against the world.

  When we thought the wine had cooled sufficiently, we passed the bottle. Giles reloaded his pipe. You could smell the watery, earthy scent of the pond, and the crickets threw up a solid wall of sound.

  “We come down here to cool out,” said Laura.

  “We come down here to get away from all those insane pigs,” said Giles. “That’s why we asked you. You look placid, but not stupid.”

  “You are an adolescent monster, Giles,” I said.

  “That’s true,” he said.

  “You shouldn’t say that to him,” said Laura.

  “That’s okay,” said Giles. “Anything that’s true is okay. She was probably an adolescent monster herself.”

  We were quiet for a while, and then Laura began to sing. She sang an old Otis Redding song called “That’s How Strong My Love Is,” and she sang it in an ardent, dreamy voice. Giles dropped his head onto her shoulder and I sat with my arms locked around my legs.

  I’ll be the weeping willow drowning in my tears

  And you can go swimming whenever you are near

  And I’ll be the rainbow after the tears are gone