Happy All the Time

by Laurie Colwin

  “I’d like to strangle you,” said Guido.

  “You’re being unreasonable.”

  “Unreasonable!” shouted Guido. “You’re the one who’s leaving me.”

  “I am not leaving you,” said Holly. “I am going to France for a little while. We are getting very smug and used to each other and I will not have us taking each other for granted. My instinct tells me that this is right. It isn’t for me alone. It’s for us.”

  “It’s for you,” Guido said.

  “You don’t want to understand this,” said Holly. “You want to feel as if you’re being badly treated. But you aren’t. I feel that our love is very secure—at rock bottom, I mean. I believe in security but not in the matter of love from day to day. I want to miss you and I want you to miss me. If you believe in me, let me go. It’s only for a little while.”

  Guido sat on the chaise. Holly slid off the edge of the bed and onto Guido’s lap. His anger did not get in the way of her irresistibility. She smelled of jasmine and her thick, dark eyelashes brushed his cheeks.

  “Trust me,” said Holly. “This is good for us.”

  By the next afternoon she was gone.

  Guido spent the first day of her departure in his office staring out the window. As the days went by, he stared more and more. In the afternoons he became increasingly weary. Often he put his head down on the blotter and took a short, miserable nap. He found himself talking to himself in the mirror.

  “I’m not going to be undone by you, or anyone like you,” he said. His mirror reflected back Holly. On good days he made plans for their future. On bad days he felt severed from all human contact.

  Meanwhile, he had to put up with Vincent, who had become increasingly more agitated in his pursuit of love.

  “It’s cresting,” he said. “Misty invited me for dinner. Do you know, I’ve never seen the inside of her apartment before?”

  “Good for you,” said Guido bitterly. He was a little sick of love in its infant stages.

  “Betty Helen seems to be helping you out a lot,” said Vincent brightly, hoping this change of conversation would engage Guido. It did not.

  “I mean, with Holly gone and all, she’s a real symbol of dependency. Misty says it says a lot about you that you hired her.”

  “I will not have Betty Helen made into a symbol of my mental state,” snapped Guido. “And I do not wish to hear the ravings of your psychoanalytical girlfriend on this subject.”

  “I’m sorry, Guido. I was just trying to cheer you up. But Misty says some very interesting things about things.”

  “I don’t want to hear another interesting thing said by a woman,” said Guido. “They’re all far too interesting.”

  “Betty Helen must look pretty good to you,” Vincent said.

  “Vincent,” said Guido in a voice of sinister calm. “Get out of here. You have turned into a chimpanzee. Stop gibbering and go back to work, if you can work.”

  “I’m sorry, Guido,” said Vincent. “I’m not too good about knowing how to react. I feel awful about Holly. I just don’t know what to do. Maybe I should take you out and we should get drunk.”

  “That sounds fine,” said Guido. “As long as you don’t say anything.”

  When Vincent left, Guido canceled all his afternoon appointments and gave Betty Helen the afternoon off. She peered at him, puzzled.

  “I don’t understand,” she said.

  “I’m declaring a holiday,” said Guido. “And giving us both the afternoon off.”

  Betty Helen peered at him again.

  “This is probably a more casual office than perhaps you’re used to,” said Guido. “Go shopping. Go to the zoo. Go to the movies. Entertain yourself. Tomorrow will be business as usual.”

  Betty Helen stood before him with her hands on her hips. Her glasses glittered at him. It was impossible to imagine that face smiling.

  “Business will not be as usual tomorrow,” said Betty Helen. “There is not one usual thing about this place. I’m not complaining. I find it very interesting. It just isn’t usual. I hope you don’t mind me saying this. I like working in an unusual atmosphere. I find it very stimulating. However, I am a very organized person. I have not typed all my letters and if I left work early, I would have nothing planned to do. I like to do what I plan to do. So, if you don’t mind, I’ll stay here and finish those letters. Now, I would like to say something to you which I hope you won’t mind. I am a teetotaler myself, but if I were you, I would go home and make myself a drink. You look terrible.”

  Guido had never heard Betty Helen say more than a sentence or two. Now she had given him what was almost a lecture. And did he look so awful that it was visible even to Betty Helen? He peered back at her. Behind her glasses was yet another person he did not understand.

  Guido did not entertain himself. He had no interest in zoos, shopping, or museums. The thought of going home upset him. Instead he went walking with the collar of his coat turned up. He bought a pack of cigarettes and smoked as he walked. Then he sat on a bench by the river and let the cold wind make his eyes tear.

  Holly had him by the short hairs. She might know if the pictures on the wall were just a fraction crooked, but she was Genghis Khan in emotional matters. Was she one of those orderly people who wanted some form of disorder from time to time? Whatever she was, she certainly knew what she was doing. Guido might sit in his office every day and long for her, but not as ferociously as he did now. Maybe he had taken his marriage for granted after all. This infuriated him. How could he be angry with Holly for going away if she had been right to go away? The smooth surface of Guido’s life now looked more risky, more uneven. Tranquillity was not a given of life—that was Holly’s message. Guido tossed the pack of cigarettes into the river and pulled a cigar out of his pocket. Fairness of judgment certainly got in the way of temperament. Had he been able to work himself up to a real fury, he might have gone out and had one of those brief not unjolly affairs. He could have prowled around the Frick Collection looking for an adventuresome girl. Without that capability, he was condemned to living in that Holly-less apartment, forced to confront the light, sweet smell of her part of the closet, to grit his teeth over a lonely dinner, and write his Foundation report at the empty dining room table. He would see a few movies he had no desire to see. He would get drunk with Vincent and listen to him babble about his unpleasant girlfriend. There was no one he wanted to have an affair with but Holly. Each day brought him a postcard from her—a gorgeous postcard of some gorgeous place. Today’s had been from a castle in Normandy. It read: “Am thinking all the time. Won’t write a letter as would rather talk. Instructive to miss you.”

  Misty had told Vincent to come to dinner at eight. That gave him three hours in which to be nervous and to rid himself of the last remnants of the hangover he had gotten on Guido’s behalf. He scribbled Guido a note on office stationery. “Sorry to have wrecked your liver,” it read. He went home, changed his shirt, watched the evening news, read the paper, and paced around his apartment. Two blocks from Misty’s apartment he realized he was fifteen minutes early. This led him around the corner where he found an open florist’s shop.

  “Give me something that looks like the things they hang on prize-winning horses,” he said.

  The florist, a stooped old Greek, gave him an expressionless stare.

  “Death, birth, or you got a girl?” he said.

  “Girl,” said Vincent.

  “Yeah,” said the florist. “How much you wanna spend?”

  “Lots,” said Vincent.

  The florist disappeared into a back room after looking at Vincent in a way that made it clear he dealt regularly with emotionally turbulent men who knew nothing about flowers. Vincent himself knew very little. About all he knew was that his Aunt Lila had once bred a hybrid rose and named it after her cleaning woman, Mrs. Iris Domato. The florist returned with a huge bouquet of tea roses, snapdragons, and stock.

  “Usually you wanna spend this much, you have a
fight with your wife,” said the florist. “You have a fight with your wife?”

  “Girlfriend,” said Vincent.

  “Flowers help sometimes,” said the florist. “And sometimes they don’t.”

  Vincent was almost sure Misty did not like flowers, but he wanted to bring her something huge and showy. A gesture of affection and hostility was just the sort of thing she might appreciate.

  It was Friday night. Walking down Misty’s street, Vincent thought he heard a violin. It was followed by an oboe and a flute. For a moment, Vincent thought he was hallucinating. As he walked, the music got closer. He passed a brownstone with open parlor windows. A girl with a violin in her hand looked out into the street. Behind her, Vincent could see a group of musicians tuning up. A plaque on the brownstone read: The New York Little Symphony Society. The girl in the window smiled at Vincent. She pointed to his flowers and smiled again. Then she picked up her violin and began to play the opening bars of the Kreutzer Sonata.

  Vincent smiled and waved at her. He felt moved and foolish. How many other men were walking around the streets wearing fresh shirts and carrying huge bouquets of flowers? He sighed. Love put you under a yoke, the same yoke all lovers walk under like oxen. Love, he reflected, was not at all like science. It seemed unfair to him that there was nowhere one might research except to go to the thing itself. These thoughts brought him to Misty’s door. He rang the bell and waited for her to ring back and let him in.

  Misty’s apartment was rather like her office, except that there was slightly more to see. She was neither tidy nor untidy. She was simply casual. She claimed not to be sentimental about possessions, and Vincent could see that this was true. She had an old blue couch, a blue chair, and a three-legged stool. In her bedroom was a plain bed with a blue and white spread and an oak desk. Most of the walls were taken up by bookshelves. The only decorative objects were a glass photograph of two stiff-looking people, a platter embossed with an ear of corn, and a little glass vase.

  “These are for you,” said Vincent, handing her the bouquet. She took them without a word.

  “Do you have anything to put them in?” he said.

  “Probably not,” she said. They walked into her kitchen, where on the top of a shelf Misty was too short to reach without a chair was the small glass vase’s taller brother, covered with dust.

  “That’s an awful lot of flowers,” Misty said. “Now what am I supposed to do with them?”

  “It is common practice to put them in water and then place them attractively on a surface,” said Vincent.

  The vase was washed and filled with water. The flowers were arranged. Misty looked at them suspiciously.

  “What attractive surface?” She looked over to the table in the corner of the living room which was set for two. “They’re too big for the table.”

  Vincent took the vase out of her hand, carried it into the bedroom, and placed it on a low bookshelf across from her bed.

  “When you wake up in the morning, you can think of me.”

  “Fat chance,” said Misty.

  For dinner Misty gave Vincent pot roast and potato pancakes.

  “It’s a Jewish Friday night dinner,” she said. Vincent displayed grand appetite, but after dinner any ease that had ever manifested itself between them evaporated. In her apartment—on her turf—Vincent was silent. It was a little awesome to him that she had allowed him this intimacy. He had never thought of a girl’s apartment as the setting for any intimacy at all. A girl’s apartment was something you crashed into shortly after a first meeting for a nightcap. Then, if the girl had roommates, or a tiny bed, you crashed off to your apartment. Now Vincent felt that he had stumbled into a cloister. He had expected Misty to be lordly and energetic in her own territory, but she was not. She was silent, withdrawn, and edgy. She got up to clear the table, knocked over an empty wineglass, and sat down again.

  “This is awful,” she said. “I wonder why I bother. See what you get? You get invited to dinner and it’s rotten.”

  “You mean the pot roast and potatoes? They were wonderful.”

  Misty looked at him sadly. “You’re so dumb you don’t even know the difference,” she said. “Now you’re finally here. That’s what you wanted, wasn’t it? You’re here and neither of us has a thing to say. Now you know.”

  “Know what?” Vincent said.

  “Now you know where you don’t belong. Or maybe I know where you don’t belong. Think of how much nicer it would have been for you if one of those girls in the PR department who wears bright green sweaters and pink shirts and who goes to Bermuda in the spring had invited you for dinner. You would have had salmon mousse and a soufflé and a nice long chat about the people in the office and you could have discovered that your cousin went to school with her cousin.”

  It took Vincent several seconds to realize that Misty was not being snappish. She was plainly unhappy. She took off her spectacles and rubbed the bridge of her nose. This gesture went straight to his heart. He had never seen her in this condition before and he did not know what to do. So he knelt on one knee beside her and took her hands in his.

  “I’ve had dinners like that,” said Vincent. “But I wanted dinner here.”

  “This won’t work,” said Misty.

  “What won’t work?”

  “Any ideas you might have had about you and me.”

  “What ideas?”

  “You don’t know what I’m like,” said Misty.

  “I have a fair idea,” said Vincent. “You’re the scourge of God.”

  “Well, there you are,” said Misty, listlessly. “It won’t work.”

  “I love you,” said Vincent.

  “I don’t believe you,” said Misty. “I think you find me sociologically interesting. You like the novelty but it’ll wear off and then you’ll get bored.”

  “Look,” said Vincent, “is it so awful having someone love you?”

  “Yes,” said Misty.

  “Does that mean having someone like me love you?”

  “Yes,” said Misty. “I don’t get it. I think you think that if you hang around with someone totally unlike anyone else you’ve ever hung around with, you’ll feel all grown up.”

  “I see,” said Vincent. “You mean, you don’t trust it. Is that a reflection on you or on me?”

  “That’s interesting,” said Misty. “I don’t know.”

  “Look,” said Vincent, “I never have been in love, before you. I never said I love you to anyone. This is all new to me, and you’re behaving like a prima donna. Supposing you get bored with me? Maybe you like me because I’m sociologically interesting to you.”

  “I never said I liked you,” Misty said.

  “That’s more like it,” said Vincent. “But you do like me, don’t you?”

  “Maybe,” said Misty. “If I do, it’s against my better judgment.” She got up to clear the table. Vincent leaped up to help her. She washed the dishes in silence and he dried them in silence, hunting around in her cabinets for the right places to put them. They stood side by side at the sink, which filled Vincent with contentment. This, he thought, is adult life and domesticity. He said as much to Misty.

  “What a dope you are,” she said.

  The dishes were washed, dried, and put away. Misty and Vincent found themselves standing in the living room. The air around them was tense again: the tension of inevitability.

  “I wish we weren’t quite so standoffish,” Vincent said.

  “Is that the polite way of saying you think we should go to bed?”

  “Yes,” said Vincent.

  “Okay,” said Misty. “Let’s go.”

  The next morning, Misty woke to the sight of Vincent’s flowers and of Vincent himself, who was lying on his side, smiling at her.

  “‘O night, O night divine,’” sang Vincent. “That’s my Christmas voice,” he added.

  Misty considered him, as if she had wakened to find a fish in her bed and was pondering how it had gotten there and what
to do with it.

  “What time is it?” she growled.

  “It’s seven-thirty,” said Vincent. “I am now going to make you a cup of coffee and bring it to you in bed. You won’t like that at all, will you?”

  “Not much,” said Misty.

  “You lie,” said Vincent. “I’ll bet no one has ever brought you coffee in bed, have they? They think you don’t need it. Is that right?”

  “Yes,” said Misty.

  “Isn’t life delightful?” said Vincent. He sprang out of bed, giving Misty a view of his long back. His shoulders were freckled and his hair was rumpled.

  “You won’t be able to find anything,” Misty said. “You won’t know how to make coffee in a drip pot.”

  “I am a scientist,” said Vincent. “I will not only find everything, but I will make you a cup of coffee so wonderful that you will froth at the mouth with love for me.” He sat down on the edge of the bed. Misty, it turned out, was the color of an apricot all over. Gently he pushed the hair out of her eyes and kissed her on the forehead.

  “It doesn’t take a lot to make you boys happy,” said Misty.

  “Au contraire,” said Vincent. “It turns out it takes a great deal to make me happy. Now, listen, you can be as sullen as you want. I’ll be happy for both of us, but I want you to look deep into my eyes and tell me that you are marginally fond of me.”

  Misty looked him in the eyes.

  “All right,” she said. “I’m marginally fond of you. And now, if you will kindly heave over your great bulk, I’d like to go and brush my teeth. One scant sugar in the coffee, please.”

  Vincent made a wonderful cup of coffee. It was one of his few kitchen skills. That cup of coffee surprised Misty. She leaned back against her pillows and drank it slowly. It was little things that did you in, she thought. She did not mean to lean over and kiss Vincent on the shoulder, but she did. This made her cross, so she gulped down her coffee, threw the covers at Vincent, and stalked off to take a shower.