Happy All the Time

by Laurie Colwin

  “I must take her home,” said Arnold. “She is on the point of frazzlement.” He looked quite frazzled himself.

  He got up and stood next to Doria, who gave him a glazed look. Then she drank her coffee the way a child gulps down milk, and Arnold took her home.

  “Alone at last,” said Guido. “Thank God the Quaker meeting is over. Let’s have another bottle of champagne.” They trooped back to the dining room.

  “I drink to Misty and Vincent,” said Guido.

  “I drink to a lavish wedding,” said Holly.

  “No lavish weddings,” said Misty. “You know what they say: the elaborateness of the wedding is in inverse proportion to the duration of the marriage.”

  “Who says that?” Vincent asked.

  “I say it,” said Misty.

  “Does that mean you want to be married to me forever?” said Vincent.

  “I’m marrying you, aren’t I?”

  Guido poured more champagne.

  “Misty thinks all this institutionalizing of love makes you live outside the moral universe,” said Vincent.

  “I drink to the moral universe,” said Guido.

  They clicked their glasses and drank happily to the moral universe in the flickering light of Holly’s beeswax candles.

  CHAPTER 6

  Misty and Vincent staggered home and into bed. The champagne was wearing off.

  “Well, now it’s official,” said Vincent. “Are you having second thoughts?”

  “I never have second thoughts,” said Misty. “It’s against my religion to have second thoughts or to enter the city of Mecca. Are you?”

  “I’d express my deep joy to you,” said Vincent, “but unfortunately I can’t seem to get any of my limbs to work.”

  At breakfast, Vincent had difficulty moving his head.

  “I’d be the happiest man in the United States if I didn’t have such an enormous headache,” he said.

  Misty, however, was back to normal. Having carried her love around like an albatross, she felt as well placed in the world as a fresh loaf of bread.

  “You should be sick as a dog,” said Vincent. “I don’t understand it. You never drink, whereas I am a man of the world. Therefore, you should be hung over and not me. Am I shouting?”

  Misty set a glass of orange juice before him.

  “That juice is very bright,” he said. “Do you think I could have some coffee first?”

  Misty brought him his cup, with which he saluted her.

  “Here’s to our happy future,” he said.

  “Your optimism is truly record-breaking,” said Misty.

  “What’s wrong with happy futures?”

  “This is the twentieth century,” said Misty. “Not hardly the great age of happy futures.”

  “There are happy futures for some,” he said.

  “You and your debutante fantasies,” said Misty.

  Holly had arranged to meet Doria Mathers at a tearoom. She had spent the morning perusing the telephone book trying to find a loom to get Doria into contact with. Her research revealed that knitting was a very popular indoor sport and that a loom was on permanent display at the Wool Institute, which also had a few samples of colonial fabric.

  She was not much looking forward to this lunch: Holly liked her geniuses verbal; Doria, that interior wizard, was obviously capable of a silent meal. Holly did not approve of silent meals. She believed in dinner-table conversation and one of the things she loved about Guido was that he was a first-rate dining companion.

  Doria, however, turned up talkative. The flip-side of interior silence seemed to be exterior gabbiness. Doria took tiny bites of her sandwich in between which she went on at some length about Arnold Milgrim. She said he was the greatest man she had ever met, and possibly the greatest man who had ever lived. It turned out that she and Arnold were going to be married, even though Arnold, who had been married once before, did not believe that exalted love needed social trappings.

  “There are people I have met …” said Doria, lowering her voice to a whisper, “who centuries ago would have been proclaimed saints. Isn’t it interesting that only the church has saints? The world has only merit, which is not sufficient. These people are saints of the mind. Their sacrifice is the sacrifice to the intellect. We need a new definition of holiness for times in which religion isn’t relevant. Arnold is on the path to that sort of sanctity, I feel. He is all man, all mind. I, on the other hand, am entirely temperament. For example, I feel I must have two ounces of chocolate every day. Arnold has no quirks of that sort. He has no specific needs at all. He is beyond temperament and personality. He is simply spirit, motivated by ideas. I am a case of entrenched but suspended personality. Arnold says I am capable of profound and unexpected petulance as well as its transcendence.”

  Doria was wearing an angora dress that had stretched in some places and shrunk in others. The heel on one of her shoes looked on the point of breaking. To ward off the cold, she wore as a cape what looked like a series of horse blankets with exposed seams. In the yarn shops, she did business briskly. Otherwise, she was a study in manifest chaos.

  Holly was impeccable. She had not opted for neatness: it had been thrust upon her by nature. Her thick hair was always precisely cut and her unadorned features gave her an air of calm. Clothes looked neater and cleaner and more starched on her than they did on others. Hours of stalking yarn did not disarrange her in any way, while Doria looked almost frenzied. Holly watched as her piled hair slipped slowly down her neck. At the Wool Institute, her cape began to slide. Holly was transfixed. It had not occurred to her before that sloppiness might be a calculated style. Clearly, Doria was on to something. She stood in charming dishevelment in front of the Institute’s loom.

  “I feel that weaving is a precise metaphor for the way in which life is made,” she said. “By which I mean individually constructed. Any strand can be woven in at the dictation of the imagination. I think of the philosophy of history as a loom of that sort. It is, isn’t it?”

  “Quite,” said Holly.

  Holly dropped her off at the hotel. Doria had bought hand-pulled yarn from Vermont, raw wool from Pakistan, tapestry yarn, twisted sock thread from the Himalayas, and a skein of alpaca. She shook Holly’s hand goodbye.

  “I’m very tired now,” she said. “Arnold and I are flying back to England. Thank you for all your input.”

  That night over dinner, Holly asked Guido if he thought she was capable of profound and unexpected petulance and its transcendence.

  “No,” said Guido. “I think you are capable of superficial and completely thought-out petulance.”

  “Arnold formulates about Doria,” said Holly. “Do you ever formulate about me?”

  “I try not to,” said Guido. “As for Doria, I think she’s either drunk or drugged or extremely silly.”

  “I think they’re very romantic,” said Holly.

  Over the peach mousse, Holly said, “I often think our temperaments are at variance.”

  Guido threw down his spoon.

  “Goddamn it, Holly. You go off and leave me and then can’t get out a coherent sentence as to why. You come back and don’t explain yourself. Then you want me to formulate about you. And you think that Milgrim and his sloppy girlfriend are romantic. The only thing profound about you is your constant wrongheadedness.”

  With that, he stormed into the living room and brooded. He rarely lost his temper. To him it was like losing his keys. But as he sat in his armchair, he realized how sweet righteous anger really was.

  He looked up to find Holly standing meekly in the doorway, carrying coffee cups on a tray.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “Sometimes everything is so smooth and invisible that I can’t see it without discord.”

  Guido sat without speaking.

  “You’re the only person I’ve ever loved,” said Holly.

  “Good,” said Guido. “Glad to hear it. Since you love me so, do you ever formulate about me?”

  “Of
course not,” said Holly. “I don’t think that way. You do. I simply love you.”

  He gave her a look of love and grief.

  “Whatever,” he said. “You are frequent hell to live with.”

  Misty walked slowly past the Museum of Natural History. Her heart at the moment had four chambers, filled with love, dread, confusion, and certainty.

  She was getting married. The thought of it astounded her. This great leap forward made her feel like her own shadow. When other girls got married, they were filled with joy, not rumination. Each event in the walk toward marriage was supposed to be taken with untainted gladness—wasn’t it?

  The truth was that Misty had never given the notion of marriage any thought at all. Now she was infusing it with all manner of sentimentality. This, she felt, was the price you paid for never envisioning your father walking you down the aisle, or a little cottage by the sea, or a honeymoon spent touring the château district or bicycling in Bermuda.

  She had never thought about the mechanics of marriage: she had thought only about love. The mechanics, however, were there to be dealt with. These preyed on her mind and made her grim, but they expanded Vincent’s boundless optimism: all life was an adventure. All events contributed to the gaiety of nations. All people were flowers embroidered on the rich, entertaining tapestry of life.

  Misty was thinking about family. She and Vincent had broken the news to their respective sets of parents and soon their families would be united. Vincent found this a charming prospect and thought about it very little. Misty faced this with alarm and thought about it constantly.

  Vincent’s parents lived in the small town of Petrie, Connecticut. The family had lived in and around Midland County since the beginning of time, it seemed. Life, for the Cardworthys, was patterned. The family had helped found the Petrie Country Day School and all members of the family were sent to it. The women of the family were community pillars. They ran the library subscription, the garden club, the Petrie Lecture Society, the Midland County Improvement and Preservation Society, and the annual hospital art show. Once in a while, a Cardworthy ran for local office and was elected. One of these Cardworthys had served in the state senate and had eventually gone to Washington. Mostly they were country lawyers or country doctors. Vincent’s father was a lawyer. His mother was an Edith Whartonite and a fanatic gardener. The only eccentric in the family was Aunt Lila, who had bred the rose named after her cleaning lady. Now she was working on another she intended to name after the man who serviced her car.

  Vincent’s family was tranquil. Misty’s family, on the other hand, was far too exciting. Her family included Communists, Trotskyists, socialists of every stripe, union organizers, professors of political science, neurophysiologists, and lay analysts.

  Misty’s great-grandfather had come from Russia with his brother, who was a tin broker. In the United States, they did not settle in a large urban center but went west as tin peddlers and smiths. In Chicago they accrued a little capital with which they repaired to the town of Medicine Stone, Wisconsin. There Misty’s great-grandfather bought a dairy farm and his brother opened a dry goods store. Misty’s father and her uncle Bernie were grandsons of the pioneers. Uncle Bernie said that when he wrote his autobiography he would call it Jew Boy of the Prairie. Berkowitz cousins still ran the dairy farm and the dry goods store. Misty’s father had been sent to Chicago to be educated and had stayed there. He was a labor lawyer. Uncle Bernie had gone to Chicago too, but Uncle Bernie was a crook.

  The family put its communal hand over its communal heart when Uncle Bernie’s name was mentioned. No one was sure what his crime had been or if, in fact, there had been any crime. But after a career as a song plugger, Uncle Bernie had done something funny in the sheet music business and had absconded with a large sum of money to the Bahamas. He came back to the States only to see his lawyers. Uncle Bernie had also written a song that had had a brief vogue in the forties when it had been recorded by Dan Staniels’s Gopher Band. The song was called “Dancing Chicken” and it celebrated the courtship rites of Prout’s Hen, a cousin to Attwater’s Prairie Chicken, whose rituals Uncle Bernie had observed as a young boy. This is what Vincent’s family had in store.

  “I can’t marry you,” Misty said to Vincent. “My family is too weird.”

  “Your father is a lawyer and Stanley’s father is a professor,” said Vincent. “That seems very dull to me.”

  “That’s only two out of many,” said Misty.

  “Not to worry,” said Vincent. “Wait until you meet my cousin Hester.”

  Misty did not want to meet Vincent’s cousin Hester or any other family member. The whole idea of family meetings, weddings, apartment searches put her off. What did any of this have to do with love, anyway?

  The subject of family kept cropping up. It sprouted one evening during a dinner with Stanley and Sybel Klinger. They were sitting on the floor of a restaurant called the True Life Inn, one of the few eating places in New York that served what Sybel thought was food.

  Vincent poked his chopsticks into a large bowl of vegetables and pulled out something punctured with holes.

  “Do you eat this?” he said. “Or did it fall off someone’s shoe?”

  “That’s lotus root,” said Sybel.

  “And what’s this stuff that looks like green hair?”

  “That’s seaweed,” said Sybel primly. “It purifies your body and puts minerals in. There are certain tribes of Indians that live on it and they never get any blood diseases.”

  “Don’t ask what it is,” said Stanley. “Just chow it down. It’s great for you, man. So you guys are getting married. That’s really far out. Did you tell everyone yet? I mean family.”

  “It’s entirely official now,” said Vincent.

  “That’s really something,” said Stanley. “Wait till you meet all of us. Wait till you meet my brother Michael, but we don’t call him Michael. We all call him Muggs. He married this girl named Nancy and we all call her Ninny. Muggs and Ninny.”

  “What do Muggs and Ninny do?” Vincent asked.

  “Well, Ninny teaches children how to be more artistically aware,” said Stanley. “And Muggs is carrying on the great Berkowitz song-writing tradition. Did you tell Vincent about Muggs’s opera?”

  “No,” said Misty.

  “What opera?” said Vincent.

  “Muggs wrote this opera,” said Stanley. “It’s called Thirteen in Miami. It’s about how the apocalypse takes place during this lavish bar mitzvah at the Fontainebleau Hotel, but no one will produce it because they all think it’s too strange. So Muggs writes movie music and makes a lot of dough.”

  Misty sighed. Getting married changed everything. Here she was sitting on the floor eating out of a communal pot with her husband-to-be, her cousin, and her cousin’s girlfriend. This was the sort of evening you preserved in amber, against your will, and found it years later as a pre-nuptial memory. Perhaps she would remember it with fondness. Perhaps she would remember Sybel as adorable. Perhaps she would remember herself as adorable. How she hated it all. What she wanted to do was to go down to City Hall and get it over with. She stared glumly at her plate. Sybel was giving them a lecture on nutrition.

  “You can kill your cells with bad food,” she said. “People won’t face the fact that the way they eat is just like suicide only slower. Another thing is that your spine is the center of your energy and what you eat goes directly into your spine. If anything happens to your spine, that’s it. This masseur I go to can tell everything that’s wrong with you from your spine. I mean, he told me that I had a potassium deficiency and he was right. He could tell just from my back. This dancer I knew had stomach trouble only he didn’t know he did and this masseur diagnosed it. I mean, if you eat wrong, your spine starts to atrophy. People think neurosis is in your mind but it’s in your spine.”

  Misty uttered a silent prayer that Stanley would never marry Sybel or anyone like her. Finally, they finished their mint tea, Sybel finished her lecture, an
d it was time to go home.

  Sybel and Stanley walked ahead. Misty and Vincent strolled some distance behind.

  “Is Sybel a runaway slave?” said Vincent. “Or is there something wrong with her feet? She seemed to have some sort of shackles on her ankles.”

  “Those are her leg weights,” said Misty. “She says they keep her calf muscles clear and full of physical intelligence.”

  “She ought to try wrapping one around her head,” said Vincent.

  “Vincent,” said Misty, “can we go to City Hall to get married? Just the two of us? Can’t we elope?”

  “Are you ashamed of marrying me in public?” said Vincent.

  “We can have a reception afterward. Please, Vincent, if we’re going to do it, let’s just do it.”

  “Okay,” said Vincent. “It’s nice to know you want it done. Of course, this will break our mothers’ hearts. My father called today and told me that no time has been wasted. Your mother wrote my mother and my mother wrote your mother and their letters crossed. Now they’ve been on the telephone cooing to each other. They’ve dug up this ecumenical team—a rabbi and minister act who are all set to go.”

  “I can’t stand this,” said Misty. “I will not have drippy relatives talking to me about mixed marriages. I want to get a blood test, a license, and get married.”

  “Think of the presents we won’t get,” said Vincent.

  “Don’t you worry,” said Misty fiercely. “We’ll get.”

  That night, they made a few decisions. Misty’s apartment was well equipped but small. Vincent’s was bare, but large. He also had furniture in storage, left to him by a childless great uncle. Therefore it was decided that Vincent’s apartment would be painted and that they would move into it. Misty’s lease was almost up, which Vincent took as providential.

  The next day, she began to pack her books, arrange her clothes, and get estimates from moving companies.

  That evening, after dinner, they went to Vincent’s to get the lay of the land. His kitchen, which had been used only to boil water in, was bigger than Misty’s. The living room looked out over the tops of the London plane trees on the street. There was a big bedroom and a small, empty room that looked perfect for a double study. Vincent had two large closets. One was filled with clothes. The other was filled with junk.