Shine On, Bright & Dangerous Object

by Laurie Colwin

  To wrap you in my colors and keep you warm.

  She sang the same verse three times. Her voice echoed slightly.

  “I love Otis Redding,” Giles said.

  “So do I,” said Laura dreamily. They seemed locked forever, and had I not been so high, I would have felt that bond exclusionary. Instead, it drew me to them. I moved a little closer. Laura began to sing again, and then we all sang. Giles had a throaty, squeaky voice.

  I’ll be the moon when the sun goes down

  Just to let you know that I’m still around.

  That’s how strong my love is, that’s how strong my love is.

  When we stopped, I saw that we were sitting in a circle and that we were holding hands. The moon appeared from behind a cloud and we blinked in the sudden, soft brightness. They moved closer together and I knew it was time to leave them alone. We smiled fuzzily, and I kissed them both good night.

  As I crossed the road to my cottage, I saw Charlie Pepper walking toward his room and I thought to call to him but didn’t. The light in my room was out, and I didn’t put it on. I lay beneath the scratchy sheets, a cool breeze on my neck, humming myself to sleep.

  17

  My room smelled of camomile and mown grass. The library smelled of pine and varnish and had large, curved windows against which grew a species of prehistoric fern. In front of one of the windows was a drooping spruce. When the light came in, it came in green, but a space amidst the foliage let in a charge of pure sunlight that illuminated a spot of worn-out carpet. The day after my night with Laura and Giles I stayed in the library, drinking coffee and working.

  Late in the afternoon, I took a stroll through the woods to stretch my legs and heard the music of a cello. I walked toward one of the rehearsal halls, but when I got there, the music had stopped. The little quarters looked like something out of Grimm—some dotty architect’s notion of spatial solitude—with peaked roofs and diminutive windows. I looked in and saw Charlie Pepper sitting in the middle of that empty whitewashed room. The floor had been varnished Colonial orange and the whole room glowed with it. It was near sundown and a stripe of pink light came through the west window. His bow rested across his knees. He was huge beside the cello, like a big man on a little horse. It had been a hot day and he had his pocket kerchief tied around his neck.

  He picked up his bow and began to play the Saraband from the Sixth Cello Suite, with beautiful deliberation. I leaned my elbows against the window ledge and took a deep breath. It seemed just that such a big man should produce such a deep sound, that the room should be flooded with sunset, that he should have around his throat a yellow-and-blue bandana. The back of his shirt was wet. He stopped and put the bow across his knees, and when he began to play again, I walked away. It wasn’t just practice for him—it was obviously a private moment and I didn’t want to peer invisibly at it. As I walked back, the music followed me.

  I ambled though the woods, past a stand of birches to a stream, where I sat on a rock and watched the water running past me. Then I ran across the field. When I got to my room, flushed and out of breath, Charlie Pepper was standing in the doorway.

  “Where were you last night?” he said. “Where were you today?”

  “I was down at the pond getting high last night and today I was in the library.”

  “I looked all over for you,” he said.

  “Well, you didn’t look in the right places.”

  “I looked everywhere.” He glared at me with pure accusation, which I took to be a form of tease.

  I said, “You’ve found me, so what’s the difference?”

  He said, “I’m in love with you.”

  “Don’t be so silly.”

  “I’m not being silly. I’m being serious.”

  “Listen,” I said. “You don’t know me and you’re seven times my size, so knock it off.”

  He sat down on the bed.

  “You New York girls have no heart,” he said. “I heard you singing down by the pond.”

  “That was Laura Zeller.”

  “That was you. I could tell it was you when the three of you were singing together.”

  “Why didn’t you make your presence known?”

  “I didn’t think you teenagers would want a great beast of the wilderness crashing in on you.”

  “I watched you play this afternoon,” I said.

  “Was I any good?”

  “You were terrific.”

  “Then kiss me as my reward.”

  I said, “You Knoxville doctors are spoiled brats.”

  “It won’t kill an honorable girl like yourself to kiss a man in need.”

  I bent down and kissed him on the mouth. He smiled.

  “You’re supposed to turn into Gregor Piatigorski,” I said.

  “I’m just Good Time Charlie Pepper,” he said. “Now. My motive for being in your room is to tell you that I’ve done a little research on you, and I’m told you have a car. Will you allow me to drive it and you down the road a piece to get a decent meal?”

  I fished in my bag and tossed him the keys. He caught them left-handed. “Half an hour,” he said. “In the parking lot.”

  Before I met him, I stopped by the library and got two scores for the Brahms E minor cello and piano sonata. Charlie scrutinized it in the car.

  “This’ll kill me,” he said.

  “It’s always wise to overreach.”

  “Well, aren’t you the primmest thing since shredded wheat,” he said.

  “I don’t think that’s a fit way to talk to a girl you’re in love with.”

  He started the car. “It’s never wise to mock at something you’re too flippant and suspicious to accept.”

  “I don’t like being teased.”

  “You’re a serious girl,” said Charlie. “I have no recourse but to get you drunk.”

  We drove into the twilight down a crooked road that followed a creek.

  “If you sit any farther away, you’re going to fall out of the car,” Charlie said. “There are a lot of hairpin turns on this road.”

  I slid over next to him and he put his arm around me.

  I said, “Aren’t you the ardent teen.”

  “I’m the ardent adult,” he said.

  We drove to a roadhouse in Milford Haven, a whitewashed Colonial house with a neon beer sign in the window. It was the home of the best smothered chicken in the north, Charlie claimed. We were the only people in the restaurant, but at the bar were a pair of sleepy-looking locals. Charlie ordered two double bourbons and drank half of his in a gulp.

  “Your car isn’t the only thing I’ve found out about you,” he said.

  “It’s one of the more interesting.”

  “You’re a widow,” he said, drawling out the word.

  I sipped my drink, amazed at how unsteady my voice felt.

  “That just about wraps me up,” I said. “Now you can tell me how sad it is and we can have a good old weep.”

  “Don’t be defensive,” he said. “It’s only a condition. You don’t appear to be a tragic figure.”

  “It isn’t tragic. It’s just hard on you.”

  “Well, I’m sympathetic to that,” he said, and took my hand.

  Over dinner, he told me about Mary Beth. They had been grammar school sweethearts, and then she had moved away. They found each other again at McGill by what they considered miraculous coincidence. She wrote children’s books and was, he said, his lifeline. From his wallet he produced a picture of his children: Charles Jr., who was ten; Nell, eight; and Andrew, a three-year-old with enormous eyes.

  “Mary Beth is the rock on which I stand,” he said. “But my flesh is weak and I fall in love. Not very often, and when I do, it’s usually a mistake. It doesn’t last long but it puts a little fire into my life, although it doesn’t shake the bond. But you are something else again. Something else entirely.”

  I said, “You Southerners are deeply specious.”

  He grabbed me by the arm. “Don’t you know when
you’re being told something, you doltish woman?”

  “I know when I’m being flirted with.”

  “I’m not flirting,” Charlie said. “You haven’t any faith, but you’ll learn.” He poured us both another glass of bourbon. “Now let’s even things up,” he said. “Who were you married to, and what happened to him?”

  I told him about Sam. I described him, since there was nothing I could pull out of my wallet to show. I hadn’t looked at a picture of Sam since his death, and it pained me to think that the day would come when I could face that mound of photographs again.

  After dinner, Charlie lit a cigar and ordered brandy. By the time the place closed, he was as drunk as a skunk.

  “Gimme the keys. You’re not fit to sit behind the wheel,” I said.

  “Only if you put out in the back seat.”

  “I’m not even putting out in the front seat.”

  He gave me the keys with a great grin, but when we got into the car, he stopped grinning. He put his arms around me and kissed me.

  “You’re a very restrained woman,” he said.

  “I’m not a restrained woman, but I’m not sure what I’m doing. I don’t want to be a tease.”

  “I can see how you’d be sensitive on that issue,” he said.

  “You put me in this position.”

  “Then don’t come at me with Brahms sonatas.”

  “Well, don’t take anything as a come-on.”

  He leaned against the door looking mournful, and my heart gave way. After a week of chat with strangers, he was the one person I didn’t want to keep strange. My instinct told me I was right to want to know him, and hadn’t I always put my trust in instinct? Didn’t I believe in friendship at first sight? We were knocking out the lines of friendship and the form it took was flirting.

  I said, “I like you a lot, Charlie.”

  “Is that a considered statement?”

  “It’s instinct.”

  “Good,” he said. “Let’s go back now. I’ll walk you to the door of your little shack, but we’re going to have to do some serious negotiating.”

  I said it was fine with me, and as I drove that twisting road with the desperate caution of the slightly drunk, Charlie hung his head out the window and howled “Careless Love” to the black night and the silent trees.

  We spent the next afternoon in a rehearsal hall, the largest of them, set deep in the woods. It was the only hall large enough to contain a piano. The negotiating we did concerned the Brahms sonata, and since we were on about the same level as sight readers, we got a decent fix on the first movement by the time the dinner bell rang. Charlie put his cello into its case.

  “Want to take a bash at it after dinner?” he said.

  “It’ll be dark by then.”

  “We can play by kerosene lantern. There’s a whole mess of them in the round barn.”

  Charlie and I skipped the evening performance to practice. He had checked with Theo to make sure the sound wouldn’t carry to the chapel. We played in the faint light of the kerosene lamps, and many thousands of mosquitoes and moths gathered around to listen. At several of the more rhapsodic parts of the first movement, I was severely bitten on the forearm, elbow, and leg. When Charlie played, he closed his eyes and rocked the cello back and forth as if it were a child. There were times I lost my place just to look at him. We played for two hours and he worked up quite a sweat.

  “I’d give anything to go swimming,” I said.

  “Let’s do it,” Charlie said. “We can have the pond all to ourselves.”

  “What about your cello?”

  “Theo gave me a key, so I can lock it up.”

  “It’s too early. There’ll be people around.”

  “Come on, Elizabeth, you come up with some grand idea and then you squash it. Let’s go.”

  I expected to see Laura and Giles, but there was no one there. The air was wet, and a thick mist had settled in. You couldn’t even see the moon. We put our clothes on a flat stone and walked to the water’s edge. Charlie put his foot in. “Oh my god,” he said. “Cardiac gulch.”

  We joined hands and slid in. Icy water rolled over us.

  “I knew I’d get you naked,” Charlie said. I swam away from him and sat down on the grassy bank to dry, and watched him swimming toward me like a great friendly bear. When he got out, he shook the water out of his hair the way a dog will, and sat beside me.

  “You’re a tiny little thing,” he said. “You don’t act it, but you are.”

  I put my head on his large comfortable shoulder and began to cry.

  “Look here,” Charlie said. “I know you’re a good and proper girl. It’s no accident we found each other. Don’t agonize. This isn’t a tease. It’s a swim.”

  He stroked my wet hair. “You tell Good Time Charlie Pepper what’s on your mind,” he said.

  I told him about Patrick. I told him how frightened we were that Sam was between us and even though we thought we went deeper than that, we feared we were only refusing to admit it. I told him I thought that swimming naked with him was betraying Patrick.

  “First of all, it’s not your fault that he’s your former brother-in-law,” Charlie said. “Can’t you just love him and not theorize? Can’t you just go swimming without your clothes on and sit beside me because you want to? You aren’t betraying Patrick. We’ve formed a friendship too, and this is part of it.”

  I said, “Charlie, you have a supple and loving heart.”

  “Only when stirred,” he said. “Now, get your clothes on.”

  We walked toward the Victorian house his room was in, past the porch light and up the steps. In his room, he gave me a glass of whiskey. It seemed to me that I had never been so tired, tired of thinking, of reflecting, of turning life over and over in my mind. I curled up in an armchair and smoked a cigarette. Charlie sat in a rocker and smoked a cigar. The whiskey went directly to my head.

  “I didn’t come up here to mess around,” I said.

  “Good Christ, woman, neither did I.”

  “This isn’t messing around, anyway,” I said, pouring myself another shot.

  “I want you to stay the night with me,” Charlie said. “What do you want?”

  “That’s what I want.”

  “Maybe you’d like a couple of hours to think about it.”

  “You shut up. Don’t make fun of me.”

  “You’re so little I could flip you right over my shoulder and onto that bed with no more trouble than I’d swat a fly.”

  “It’s only next to hulks like yourself that I’m small. Besides, I’m very strong.” I stood up, trying to think of some demonstration of my strength, but I was interrupted by a knock on the door, and sat down unsteadily.

  It was Corey Levenworth, Theo Zeller’s overanxious assistant. He was a lean, athletic man with colorless spiky hair and pink plastic glasses. He wore chino pants with a knife-edge crease to them. During the year he was the director of a foundation that gave money to symphonies. He spent the summer with his wife and children on Martha’s Vineyard and took off for a month to donate his time to the Conservatory. He had played the violin as a boy but he had given it up because he wasn’t a genius, and he loved musicians, although at first glance it was hard to tell why he did. He looked like someone who had been born under the normal curve and what he liked to do best was administer. Theo was the genius of the Conservatory. He got people who had carried feuds for years to form string quartets and behave at dinner. But Corey was the Conservatory’s dynamo, filled with health and energy, surrounded by a number of people who looked as if they had not been in the fresh air for many centuries and whom he felt he helped to function. His naiveté was breathtaking.

  He found himself in Charlie’s ill-lit room, confronted by a shirtless man and a clearly tipsy girl curled familiarly into a chair, but he was unstoppable, nonetheless.

  “I saw the light on, and I thought I’d stop by since I’ve been looking for you two all day.” He paused and squinted. “Wha
t luck to find you in the same place. Theo says you’ve been practicing some Brahms together, and I thought maybe you’d give a performance of it.”

  “Sure,” said Charlie.

  “No,” I said.

  “Come on, Elizabeth,” Corey said. “Theo said he heard you walking past the hall and the sonata sounded good. You owe it to your fellows.”

  “Great idea,” said Charlie.

  “It’s what we’re here for,” said Corey. “To learn from each other. Even our prodigies have something to learn.”

  He sat on the edge of the bed, as prim as a little tin soldier. The word for him was immaculate: he looked as if he had been dusted over with chalk, and he never appeared to sweat.

  “I say yes,” said Charlie. “What say, Elizabeth?”

  I said okay, and Charlie gave me a fatherly wink.

  “As long as I have you, Charlie,” Corey said, “I’d really like to talk to you about the cello workshop.”

  “Fine, fine,” said Charlie, reaching for the whiskey. “Drink?”

  “Just a tiny one,” said Corey.

  I uncoiled my legs and stood up. Sitting there was too garish a gesture for me, even in front of a witless ninny.

  “I’ll walk you to the door,” said Charlie. At the top of the stairs, he kissed me on my forehead.

  “That’s what we’re here for,” he said. “To learn from each other.” He smiled at me across the banister.

  “You’ll pay for this,” I said.

  18

  The next day, during a violent thunderstorm, Charlie and I had a fight in the library. He appeared at the door wearing a bright yellow slicker and carrying Anna Zeller’s umbrella so he could walk in the rain and keep his cigar lit at the same time.

  I said, “Why didn’t you throw that motor moron out of your room last night?”

  “Why the hell didn’t you stay around?” Charlie said.

  “If you’re so hot on this ongoing friendship, why don’t you implement it?”

  “It’s not my fault I got entangled in a bureaucratic net.”

  “Yes it is. You could have thrown him out. What the hell do you want from me, anyway?”