Shine On, Bright & Dangerous Object

by Laurie Colwin

  “I want your body in my arms. I’m in love with you.”

  “Well, if you’re so in love with me, and so anxious to get my body in your arms, why did you let Corey get in the way of it?”

  “I couldn’t help it. What do you want from me?”

  I looked out the window and watched a solid wall of rain bending the prehistoric ferns. There was a deep toll of thunder. I had never asked Sam what he wanted from me, or Patrick, nor had I wanted to be asked. These were not questions I thought proper in emotional life. I held to the rarefied notion that these things were known by intuition or not at all. I believed that love functioned on silent insight. What a foolhearted simp I was. The moment of my epiphany coincided with a flash of lightning—a truly banal example of the objective correlative—and I saw that I had lived a life of artful fear, that out of small-time terror I had fabricated my moral universe, in which you did not presume to ask the one you love what was expected of you or what you expected of him. I saw that I, cheering admirer, had given Sam license to be the reckless fool he was. I saw that out of my grand claim that you do not mess with the one you love, I had let the one I loved mess himself and me ultimately.

  I thought of Patrick in my Cambridge kitchen wearing his mourning suit, saying, “It spared you the misery of eventual divorce.” And I realized that half the reason I had let Sam be was to spare myself the witness of what he might have been unable to come up with. I couldn’t have stopped him from doing anything, so I had taken myself out of the running and never asked at all, because it never occurred to me that Sam might make a gesture for me that was contrary to his nature. How very, very scared I was. I thought of Patrick, with whom I had managed to keep a lot of things tacit: I had thrown in my lot with him, and, so sure that love made everything understood, had never told him how much I loved him. I wanted us to live on some elevated, frictionless plane. I had never understood before that the love of another gives you ground to stand on: that it was not dishonorable to state the terms of love.

  I said, “I want your friendship.”

  He said, “You’ve got it.” And we clasped hands, like tycoons over a deal. At this point, we might have rushed out into the rain and up to Charlie’s room, but instead we sat quietly in the library. Charlie sat in a wing chair by the window, watching the rain and smoking his cigar. It was so still that the smoke barely floated but hung above his head in a cloud the shape of a Portuguese man-of-war, and then dispersed.

  My deep belief in the friendship between men and women grew out of an inactive kind of awe: theory was my safe haven, and appreciation is the safest thing on earth. You get to love and think about loving, and you might as well be conducting your life inside a hermetic bottle. For all my belief in emotional heroics, I liked a safe, static bet. Risk and intuition are at the bottom of love, but slugging it out in the adult world is something else again, and I was neither skilled nor courageous at it.

  I didn’t plot for Sam—we went off like a pair of firecrackers. Patrick and I flared up like a fire—I didn’t plot for him either. I didn’t believe in plotting. It was wrong, I thought, to put strategy in the way of friendship. But the world was full of lovers laying their cards on the table, making demands, waiting to trap the ones they loved for good and proper reason and for a just and noble end. But I had never asked a thing, safe and snug under my blanket of moral justifying. All that flare and fire circumvented the cards upon the table. My moral nobility, my reluctance to take the chances the rest of the world took, I bottled and labeled and placed lovingly on the shelf with a tag reading moral refinement. But it was all dodge. Going off with Sam was a risk. That done, how dare I ask for more? The chances the rest of the world took were small-time, like asking a husband to abandon his recklessness. The rest of the world said to its lover: “But what about me?” But I had never said it.

  Patrick was my lucky star. He was the luckiest thing that had ever happened to me. I could ask Patrick anything if I wanted, but I hadn’t wanted, so deep in thrall to things assumed. Assumption only looks safe; there isn’t any safe and painless way to love. You have to stand and deliver, as the highway robbers say.

  The room filled with cigar smoke and the rain began to lessen. A fine, damp breeze flooded in when Charlie opened the window. If we had been seen by a casual observer, he would have seen a man in a wing chair dreaming over his cigar and a girl in a Shaker replica rocker, reading. You could have used us for a painting called “Comfort and Yankee Weather.”

  The man in the chair was a married pediatrician and the girl was fresh from the arms of her brother-in-law, with whom she was in love. But personal history is nothing to a casual observer passing an occupied room by chance. We were not a couple enjoying the wetter part of the day. We were pending lovers, negotiating. I realized as I sat there that I was standing my ground. I wanted to know how serious Charlie was in order to decide how serious I would be. I wanted it stated, clear and simple. I thought how little I had asked from Sam, how, cowed in his presence and sure of my own correctness, I had made a judgment on him that made it unnecessary for him to act or me to expect it from him.

  The bell rang for lunch. I had spent two weeks walking into the dining hall and waiting around to see where Charlie would place himself. I tried to make it all seem chance, since I assumed he would not want it publicly displayed that we were forming a friendship. But I was wrong. It hurt him. He said, “You make me feel it’s an accident when you sit next to me at meals. I want you to sit next to me, for Chrissake.”

  How I did love cool and stealth. Weren’t Sam and I cool and stealthy? Was it an accident that Patrick and I had not gone public? I thought of love as a concealed weapon against the world. So I stood on my side with my precise notions, and Sam stood on his side, thinking of love as a form of hubcap stealing—something you got away with. And Patrick stood at the center of the universe, a patient man, full of propriety, which is only the marriage of stealth and caution. But Charlie Pepper was right out front. He was like a glass clock that showed you how it worked. He wanted me beside him, and if I wanted to sit with him at meals, why didn’t I just sit? But I was of the watch-and-wait school of lovers. They watch, you wait, and when they give you a sign, you rush in.

  We sat at an empty table and watched the hall fill up. Laura Zeller appeared and slumped into a chair.

  “Giles is in one of his horrible moods,” she said. “So if he comes to lunch, watch it.” She stared abstractly into her water glass. Then she looked up. “He had a fight with Boris Dorfman and Corey about Prokofiev,” she said, watching her hero stomp across the room. Even his hair looked furious. He was wearing a tee-shirt that had emblazoned across its front in red letters: Aztec Airlines.

  He jerked back his chair and sat down. “Those guys are such antiquated fucking swine. Dorfman especially. Him and his creepy tone poems and program music.” He pushed his plate aside. “Those people are insane pigs. They don’t like music. They like cartoons. I hate for music to be about anything.”

  “Giles got into trouble with the Toronto Symphony for refusing to play in the Carnival of the Animals when he was eight,” Laura said.

  “Let’s get out of here,” said Giles. “Let’s grab some sandwiches in the barn and go down to the rehearsal hall and listen to you guys practice.”

  My heart failed. “I can’t,” I said. “I’m not going to be made a fool of in front of some boy genius.”

  Giles put his bony arm around my shoulders. “It’s only music,” he said, his face alight with the effort of his kindness. “Besides,” he said, “I don’t play duets.”

  Giles and Laura sat in the corner holding hands and Charlie and I played the sonata straight through. We creaked and stumbled, but on that afternoon we stopped playing our separate parts. It was a real duet. Between the first and second movements, Charlie took his pocket handkerchief and wrapped it around his neck, and after the second movement, he unwound it and tied it around my neck. It smelled of him, grassy and warm. He kissed me on the t
op of my head and I kissed him on the shoulder.

  If love overcomes technique, the third movement was brilliant, mistakes and all. As I played, I could hear it: the spirit was right. When we were through, Charlie sighed and laid his bow across his knees. I slumped over the piano. The rain had made that hall like the inside of a steam room.

  “That’s pretty good,” said Giles. Laura smiled faintly. “You guys are really lovely,” she said.

  In the afternoon, Charlie went to his cello workshop and I went back to the library. A large ginger cat was curled up in a chair, directly in a patch of sunlight. After the rain, the day had taken on a hazy red glow and the sun broke through the clouds in streamers. I sat and wrote Patrick a long letter addressed to his hotel in San Francisco. I told him about Laura and Giles and that I was going to play the Brahms E minor cello sonata with a pediatrician from Knoxville. I told him how much I missed him and I told him that after a long spell I was taking music seriously again. But mostly I wrote a love letter. When I was by myself, I realized that I missed Patrick the way you would miss your arm if it were sheared off, or your eyesight, or your best friend.

  I took my letter to the mail room, and then strolled back to my cottage, where I found Libby Hayes bent over an air letter. She seemed to be in distress, but when she heard me coming up the path she raised her head, and I saw that she was laughing.

  “My husband is the silliest man on earth,” she said. “He’s had the carpets taken up and he says it took six men and the au pair girl from next door to do it. What an amusing person he is. He says his arm is in plaster.” Libby Hayes was a large woman with a chunky face. Her hair was pulled back into a chignon and she had beautiful white teeth, the shape of horse’s teeth.

  “Husbands aren’t like other people,” she said. “At least, not mine. A very strange breed, but then, of course, you’ve been spared this.”

  “I was married,” I said.

  She seemed surprised by this information.

  “Oh, you young American girls,” she said. “I keep forgetting. Everyone divorces these days.”

  “I was widowed.”

  “Oh. Quite,” said Libby Hayes. “You also had this Vietnam business.”

  “Boating accident,” I said, and went skipping up the stairs, as light as Libby’s air letter.

  When I got to my room, I saw that I was still wearing what was clearly Charlie’s handkerchief around my neck. Charlie was a big-time brow mopper and those blue-and-yellow cloths were his alone. Libby Hayes had an eye out for what she called “the gossip of the place.” It was her topic of conversation and she spoke of burgeoning relationships as if she were dealing with small animals dressed in children’s clothes. “Isn’t it sweet to see that nice little Tate girl going off with that clarinetist from Peabody,” she remarked one afternoon, watching the Conservatory’s most pained and tortured pair walking down the road. To Libby Hayes, the world was full of garden gnomes. How nice to flash Charlie’s kerchief in front of her. I saw her scan my wanton face and peg me as a fast little widow. What terrific copy for a letter to her husband.

  What could I do? Sam was history. I honored and mourned him on my own time. It was a fact of the heart.

  Charlie met me on the path, walking toward dinner, looking somewhere between sheepishness and grief.

  I said, “What bureaucratic entanglement snared you for tonight?”

  “I can’t get away with anything around you,” he said. “Theo asked me if I could put up some guy from the Boston Globe since all the guest rooms are full and my room is big enough for a cot.”

  “What a saint you are.”

  “Now, don’t get petulant,” he said. “I said we’d have our time together, and we will.”

  “You can go to hell,” I said. “I’m going to the drive-in with Laura and Giles. You can shack up with the Boston Globe and I hope you two will be very happy together. I’m not going to grapple with a moral decision on your behalf if all you do is waffle out.”

  “What moral decision?”

  “You said you wanted me. We’re both people with deep commitments. I don’t make decisions like this easily. I had to go through some hard times trying to figure out what was right. Now I’ve made up my mind, and now you’re chicken.”

  “Our time will come,” Charlie said. “I’ll work it out.”

  “Not without me you won’t,” I said. “So long, sucker.”

  Giles and Laura and I sat through a five-year-old Western while necking couples steamed up the windows around us. Then we drove to Wrights’ in Shortford and ordered burgers with everything on, and they discussed the nature of their relationship.

  Theo taught theory and composition at the Eastman Conservatory and Anna taught English at the University of Rochester. Giles’ parents were both doctors in Toronto, so Laura and Giles weren’t that far apart, but they got to see each other only on special occasions.

  “I have three hundred letters from Giles,” she said. “We sort of write a diary and send it to each other. Then we have to sneak, but it’s a drag because we’re both underage.”

  “Up here would be perfect if it weren’t for all these creeps and morons,” Giles said. “But at least they’re all so self-absorbed that Laura and I can just disappear and nobody cares. If we make it to twenty, we’re going to elope.”

  “I’ll lend you my car,” I said.

  We drove back, but no one leaned out the window and sang “Careless Love.” At the parking lot they kissed me good night and I watched them walk hand in hand down to the pond. When I got to my room, there was a note on my pillow:

  I’m at Zeller’s drinking and mourning you.

  Come save me. I’m being held captive by the Boston

  Globe.

  My first impulse was to go. My second was to take a shower and go to bed. There was plenty of time. That charming note annoyed me, but I was entitled, I felt, to a little righteous anger.

  I slept the sleep of the just and innocent, but the next morning I was dragged away from my coffee by Charlie, who gathered me down to the rehearsal hall.

  “You didn’t come and get me,” he said. “You’re a heartless, ruthless woman. Why didn’t you come and get me?”

  “Why should I be tormented by the sight of what I can’t have?”

  He smiled his enormous smile. “I’m mightily glad you said that,” he said.

  We spent the day practicing, since we had just a week before the performance to get it perfect. After three hours of hard work, I looked around me and for an instant it was like coming out of a dream. Everything looked strange and new. The pines outside were not trees known to me. The room in which we sat was an alien structure and no place I had ever been before. Even Charlie was a stranger, sitting against the windowsill. The score in front of me was only a page of black, indecipherable marks, and when I came out of my dreamlike state I realized how little time we had left, how little time we had.

  It had gotten uncommonly hot, so hot you could almost see the air. My shirt was sticking to me. Charlie mopped his forehead. When we looked across at each other, we were both exhausted, wiped out by heat and work. I looked at Charlie as if to memorize him forever, to imprint him in my vision so I would not lose him. I stared at the rafters and the beams of the rehearsal hall, at the hot, murky light the windows seemed to hold back. I wanted to fix it all forever, as I had not fixed Sam. I thought how careless I had been, thinking I had all the time in the world.

  There Charlie sat. He was dreamy too. Besides the heat, besides our private histories and the mutual history between us, we were bound by the score of the Brahms sonata. I felt a great heave of tenderness for him, for his bulk and kindness, for the disk around his neck that announced his fatal vulnerability, for the family photos he kept in his wallet, for the kerchiefs he kept in his back pocket. I imagined him at the hospital surrounded by ailing children, and I imagined that if I were a sick child, I would want to hide myself inside his coat, secure against his ample frame.

  I
stopped watching him, stopped watching anything. His hand on my shoulder surprised me. Then I leaned my cheek against it.

  I said, “Oh, Jesus. It’s so sad,” and stood up to put my arms around him, safe against his vulnerable bulk.

  19

  The next morning all the mailboxes contained a grainy brown envelope. Inside, on brown paper, was an invitation to the Walter Marshalls’ annual summer Conservatory party.

  The Marshalls lived in Atlanta, but Reggie Marshall had grown up in Hamilton, and her father had been a trustee of the Conservatory. Their summer house was two miles up the road in Wycombe and every year students, teachers, visiting dignitaries, journalists, and performers gathered at the Marshalls’ to raise a little hell.

  The parties were famous—loud, boozy, and amalgamating. Everyone danced at the Marshalls’. Unlikely couples formed. There were kegs of very cold beer and buckets of fried chicken, and the stereo blared out alternately rock and roll for the youthful and Dixieland or smooch music for the elderly. People who had been at the Conservatory over the years remembered their summers by the Marshalls’ parties: the year the horn player from the Chicago Symphony lost both his shoes and found them hours later being worn by the cellist from the Gramercy String Quartet, or the year Boris Dorfman, that staid regular, had rumbaed a serious Formosan violinist out of the Marshalls’ and into the night. Or the year there was a fistfight between two drunken conductors over an interpretation of Richard Strauss. Couples met at the Marshalls’ parties and two years later married, or fought and six months later divorced.

  The Marshalls were tall, leggy, and tanned, as if they spent their lives around horses and water; their manner was offhandedly cheerful and breezy. They dressed in silk and whipcord, like oversized jockeys. They were the sort of people who would know how to string up your hammock, or what to do if you broke your ankle in the woods or your horse died. Neither of them exuded the slightest glimmer of sexuality, and while neither of them was strikingly good-looking they had three beautiful teenaged daughters whose photos festooned the walls of their summer bedroom. These daughters were in Grenoble for the summer, perfecting their French. The Marshalls missed beauty by a fatal inch, and you could see how they would have gorgeous offspring.