Goodbye Without Leaving

by Laurie Colwin

  “I went to the Kaiser Wilhelmschule,” Leo said. “But every day I had tea with two old British ladies who taught me English. When I came to this country I wore an Eton suit and spoke with a British accent, and the other little boys beat me up.”

  I thought of Little Franklin. What sorrows would my little darling have to face?

  “Now that I work at the Regensteins’,” I said, “I feel totally amorphous. Gertje talks about what America is like to Europeans, but I don’t quite identify with what she describes. In some ways, nothing ever happens in America. It’s like a sponge. I feel as if I have no qualities whatsoever.”

  “Really?” Leo said, smiling. “No qualities whatsoever?”

  “I’m a fabulous driver,” I said.

  A few weeks later, I lied to Johnny about where I was going. I went to Leo’s apartment on the pretext of borrowing a book and shortly thereafter I went to bed with him.

  52

  It was snowing when I left my nice warm apartment, my nice warm husband, my sleeping child. I had made a meatloaf for supper. The dishes were washed, the laundry was done, folded and stacked on the dining room table. Little Franklin had been fed his supper, bathed, settled into bed in his striped pajamas, read to and kissed good-night. Johnny sat at his desk in a corner of the living room going through a pile of papers. I left the house without a pang.

  I said I was going to the movies with Mary, a safe lie since she was on a retreat at her monastery. Without my boy, without a bag full of crackers and Mickey Mouse statuettes and little boxes of grape juice with straws attached, and extra mittens, to say nothing of the battered elephant I was required to carry with me when accompanied by my son, I felt totally unlike myself: light, unanchored, an unidentifiable person on the subway.

  I had arranged with Leo that I would stop by on my way to visit my friend Mary Abbott, who lived in his neighborhood. I was going to borrow a book called Kindervater’s Vienna, the English edition of which we did not have at the office. As far as I could tell, Leo thought I was a nice, ordinary, married person with a child.

  I felt I was being compelled toward him. I felt I would die if he did not kiss me. It had nothing to do with Johnny or Franklin; it had to do with me. Just for a minute, I said to myself, I want to be in Leo’s arms. Then I will somehow be fortified and can go on with the rest of my life. I was sort of a blank slate and Leo was a school. I needed the experience of him. He would kiss me and I would turn into Hannah Arendt. I would definitely be a better person for it.

  I was the innocent American, making trouble right and left—a microcosm of imperialism, except that I only sought to colonize a tiny portion of Old Europe. A small, green elevator took me to the sixth floor. I rang his doorbell and in a minute we were face to face.

  “Hi!” I said, in a bright, rattled way.

  “Come in,” said Leo. “Take your coat off. There’s snow all over you.”

  I took my coat off and threw it over a chair in his hallway.

  “I’m sorry to look so grubby,” I said.

  “You don’t look grubby,” Leo said. “Would you like a cup of tea?”

  “Oh, yes!” I said, feeling that the voice of some jaunty, moronic member of the Junior League had entered my body.

  His living room looked disorganized and rich, like a room in a domestic Victorian painting: an old couch covered with a paisley shawl, lamps with the kind of heavy paper shades that throw off yellow light. These things, he told me, were found by his flea-marketing mother and given to him. Two walls were covered in books.

  I followed him into the kitchen, a small, functional space, and saw that he had one of those old enamel French coffeepots with a top that looks like a pagoda. In his kitchen he looked slightly over-lifesized. A person could have just thrown her arms around him from the back while he filled the kettle. I felt that if I opened the cupboards, which I longed to do, I would find a jumble of exotic things I had never seen before, but when Leo himself opened a door, all I saw was peanut butter, Rice Krispies and grape jelly.

  On a tray he put two cups, a teapot and a plate of wafers he took from an ornamental tin. “They’re Carlsbad Oblaten,” Leo said. “My mother makes sure I always have some around.”

  I looked at him with longing.

  “Food of my childhood,” he said. “Come into my study.”

  At the end of another small hallway were two rooms separated by a bathroom. One was a bedroom—I could see the bed and a bureau. The other was his study, with a desk, a reading chair and an ottoman. The walls were covered with bookshelves and his desk was covered with papers. The reading lamp had a paper shade too, which made me feel that I was sitting in the middle of a pool of yellow light.

  Leo poured the tea and I stared at his large, strong-looking hands.

  “When I was a little boy,” he was saying, “my mother used to take me to Kleine Café every Thursday afternoon after school. I guess I must have been about eight, because I had already turned into an American boy. I wore blue jeans and Keds and played baseball instead of soccer. I sort of looked forward to it and dreaded it, too. There would be all her friends, sitting and drinking their coffee and eating those little cakes with the decorations on them. I wanted to go home and eat Oreo cookies like my friends, but my mother had no idea what they were. I knew I was being a good boy since it meant so much to her to have this weekly outing, and I hated her for it, too.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “You have a little boy,” Leo said. “Ludwig mentioned what a wonderful child he is.”

  “Yes,” I said. “He’s the most wonderful person I have ever known.”

  “It’s nice to be from the same place as your child,” said Leo. “Look at Gertje and Buddy. She’s totally devoted to him, and he totally baffles her. All that European culture and what does she get! A rampaging American capitalist.”

  As I drank my tea, a feeling of desolation overcame me. I had not had the opportunity to feel this way for some time. It was a way I had tried not to feel on tour, or up at the Race Music Foundation, or out in social life with Johnny. I was everywhere under false pretenses. I had no rock to stand on.

  “And do you find it strange to work around so many Jews?” Leo was asking me.

  “I am Jewish,” I said.

  “Really,” Leo said. “I wouldn’t have known that.”

  “Well, I am,” I said. “In fact, I’m looking for a synagogue. I need to be educated. I mean, I’ve never known anyone who knows as little about things as I do.”

  “But you’re a wonderful driver,” said Leo, smiling.

  “I’m a red-blooded American girl,” I said. “I drive like a dream and swim like a fish. I know the words to every rock and roll song in a ten-year period. When our baby was little, the first song he ever learned was ‘Rockin’ Pneumonia and the Boogie Woogie Flu.’”

  “Sounds good to me,” said Leo.

  “Oh, come on,” I said. “I mean, it’s nice for a kid to know the words to ‘Camptown Races’ and ‘Shoofly Pie and Apple Pandowdy,’ but, you know, where is the larger picture?”

  “Are babies interested in the larger picture?” Leo said.

  “You know what I mean,” I said.

  “I do, but here’s what I mean. My mother sang me all the songs she knew as a child. When I came here, America was something to learn. If I had known you as a child, I would probably have wanted to be just like you.”

  “Oh, no,” I said. “I have too many horrible qualities.”

  “That may well be,” Leo said. “But you don’t know how romantic you red-blooded Americans are to us Europeans.”

  At that moment I wanted to hurl myself into his arms.

  “I am here under false pretenses,” I said.

  “Oh?”

  I took a deep breath. I felt actually rather sick.

  “I’m a very bad person,” I said. “I wanted to kiss you.”

  “People often want to kiss people,” Leo said.

  “Yes, but I’m a wife and mothe
r.”

  “Wives and mothers often want to kiss people,” Leo said.

  “If you kissed me, would it be because you feel sorry for me?”

  Leo gave me a puzzled look. “It would be because I wanted to kiss you,” he said. “I assume that you are going off to see your friend who lives in my neighborhood.”

  “That was a pretense,” I said.

  “Actually,” Leo said, “we ought to think about this a little. Naturally, I’d love to kiss you, but then what?”

  “You have a girlfriend,” I said.

  “I have a woman I have been seeing for a few years.”

  “Are you going to marry her?” I said.

  “I’m not going to marry anyone for a long time,” Leo said. “I’m going to spend a few years in Europe before I get married.”

  “You know,” I said, “I think I should put on my hat and coat and get out of here.” I stood up. He stood up too. The yellow light in his study threw a soft shadow over him. The top of my head grazed his chin. That half darkness seemed to keep us pinned to our places. We didn’t speak: we breathed at one another. We moved like people under water. The tiniest gesture brought us closer.

  He kissed me and kissed me. We kissed any number of times, and then we walked the few paces out of his study and across the hallway to his bedroom. I felt as if I were on fire.

  When we connected, I felt a deep, inward shiver. This was not like sex for having fun or having children. It did not seem to be about falling in love, or even about having a sexual encounter, but about some ancient, primitive longing desperate to be fulfilled. Leo was more like a destination than a person. Being near him gave me access to something I needed to know.

  We lay in bed and watched the big, lazy flakes spiraling down.

  “We better see if it’s sticking,” Leo said.

  “It’s melting,” I said. “I won’t have any problems getting home.”

  “When the time comes, I’ll drive you,” Leo said.

  I got into bed next to him. “I’m freezing,” I said.

  He warmed me up, and then he smoked a cigarette and put the ashtray on the bed between us.

  “Tell me why you think you don’t know anything,” Leo said.

  “I don’t,” I said. “Nothing that I know sticks together. Rock and roll. Victorian novels. How to drive. I know I’m Jewish and I wouldn’t know how to give a proper Seder if my life depended on it.”

  “There are books devoted to that subject,” Leo said.

  “You don’t understand,” I said. “I don’t want to be the sort of person who learns about a Seder from books. I want to be the sort of person who knows these things by heart.”

  “So this isn’t about knowing. It’s about being.”

  “It’s about knowing and being as the same thing,” I said. “There isn’t anything to being an American. You don’t even have to know American history. I mean, you know things. You’re from Western Civ.”

  Leo put out his cigarette. “Hush,” he said. He put his arms around me. “You have no idea,” he said. He kissed my neck and whispered in my ear. “Oh, my America,” he said. “My newfound land.”

  53

  It was a cold afternoon. I sat in Mary Abbott’s apartment helping her pin up three black skirts and a black denim jumper. These were her postulant’s clothes. I had bought her five pairs of black cotton tights and she had bought herself a pair of black sneakers and a pair of plain black walking shoes (for feast days, she said). Under her bed was a tin trunk in which all these things would be packed, including white cotton underwear, cotton socks in white and black, plain white towels, washcloths and a camp blanket.

  “Everything in my life is in motion except me,” I said. “You’re leaving me forever. Johnny’s working on a big case, Little Franklin’s growing up, and Leo’s going to Europe any day.”

  “I don’t get him,” said Mary, her mouth full of pins.

  “You’d like him,” I said. “He’s kind of like you.”

  “I don’t mean him personally,” Mary said. She spread a skirt over her desk and smoothed it down. “I mean, why you need him.”

  “My soul sort of cries out to him,” I said. “If you get my drift. I don’t want to run away with him. I just feel destined to know him.”

  “You are a pilgrim,” Mary said.

  “You always say that.”

  She sat amidst her black clothes, which lay in piles and heaps around her. She had pulled her hair back in a ponytail, which made her look very young and stark. When she took her glasses off to rub her eyes, she looked like a child.

  I said, “Most people believe what makes them feel better to believe.”

  Mary nodded.

  “Johnny is unusual in this regard,” I said. “He believes what he needs to believe because he’s in the big arena, but he also knows it. You and Leo don’t have any reason to believe anything. Maybe I took up with Leo because he reminds me of you. Oh, lucky, lucky you! To know what your life will be like day after day, year after year. And to think that the life you’re living has been lived the exact same way for centuries.”

  “I don’t think that’s much consolation when you’re lonely and miserable and thinking that you did the wrong thing.”

  “Really? You?”

  “Everyone. Except people like your friends the Grains. It’s man’s fate.”

  “I just don’t want to be left alone surrounded by a bunch of saps.”

  She pinned up the hem and hung the skirt over a chair, an amazing sight since I had never seen her sew so much as a button before. Then she moved all her papers back onto her desk and began sorting through them. Her dissertation was finished. She was putting in the footnotes, and then her life would be tidily filed away. She looked down at her notes.

  “Saps,” she said. “Martin Luther King, Jr. felt the same way. He said, ‘The laxity of the white church in general has caused me to weep tears of blood.’ Is that the way you feel?”

  “You shut up,” I said.

  “You ought to sing again,” said Mary. “In fact, you should sing right now. You don’t have to go on tour with Ruby to do it. In college you used to sing all the time. Remember that night you and I and Audrey Stein got all dressed up and went to Mickey’s Rib House and you sang ‘Holy Cow’?”

  “What a pretty song,” I said. “Little Franklin loves it. He seems keen on the New Orleans sound.”

  “You sang ‘Holy Cow’ and ‘Nobody Home,’” said Mary. “Everyone loved it.”

  “Nobody believed that a white chick had ever heard of Lee Dorsey or Howard Tate,” I said. “Good old Howard Tate.”

  “You were good,” said Mary.

  “I was okay,” I said. “Let’s have some tea or something. All this nostalgia is making me hungry.”

  We went into the kitchen. I sat at Mary’s nasty little kitchen table, which we had found on the street and carried upstairs to her apartment one hot summer night. This had always been my second home. When Mary left, I would have only one home. There would never be another place on earth where I would feel as comfortable.

  “Sing to me while I boil the water,” said Mary.

  “Perhaps you’d like to hear ‘The Doggie Poop Song,’” I said. “Another of Little Franklin’s golden gassers.”

  “Sing me some Otis Redding,” said Mary.

  I sang “Good to Me” and “I’ve Got Dreams to Remember.” I sang “Your Feeling Is Mine.” Then I sang Smokey and the Miracles’ most perfect hit, “I’ve Been Good to You.” We sat at the table and let the water boil away.

  “Listen,” I said. “When it’s time for you to go, I want to drive you up.”

  “I think I have to go by myself,” said Mary.

  I felt my scalp tighten.

  “Listen,” I said. “I only want this one thing. I never asked anything like this before. You’re my best friend. Don’t deny me this. I’m losing you forever. Don’t say no. It’s unchristian.”

  Mary brought our teacups to the table. She
put some cookies on a plate. Soon all these things, which were second nature to me, would be in the hands of William Hammerklever, who was taking over the apartment.

  “There are some things I want you to have,” said Mary. “I want you to take that red cashmere sweater you always liked, and the lamp with the glass globe.”

  “I want to drive you up,” I said.

  “I know you do,” Mary said. “Get the tear stains off your face. Johnny and Franklin will be here to pick you up any minute.”

  “I mean it, Mary.”

  “All right! All right!” Mary said. “I think it’s dangerous. You’ll just cry the whole time.”

  “Don’t you worry,” I said. “I can cry and drive at the same time.”

  54

  Inexorably it was spring. In our neighborhood the snowdrops and crocuses showed their heads. Buds burst out on the trees. From Little Franklin’s window sparrows could be seen flying purposefully, their beaks streaming with urban nest-building materials: excelsior, string, shredded gum wrappers, and the papers from drinking straws.

  Like an oncoming train, the day of Mary’s leaving bore down on me. I sat with her while she packed up her apartment—she was leaving it mostly furnished for William Hammerklever.

  “Getting a divorce, huh?” I said.

  “Never,” Mary said. “He’s Catholic. They just won’t live together, except for major holidays and the children’s birthdays. In fact, they’ll always be married.”

  “And what happens if he falls in love with someone?” I said.

  “That’s the price he pays.”

  “Pays for what?”

  “Listen, Geralds. The Church has sacraments. You take the sacraments and you pays the price.”

  I sighed. How neat, I thought. How consoling. Even horrible emotional pain would have a reason, some terrible law one was compelled to obey.

  Passover was coming, another oncoming train. I felt some primal urge to celebrate. Surrounded by my relentlessly assimilated family, I had nowhere to go. My parents had never had a Seder. Instead, we went to a series of Seders at the houses of more observant friends. The sense of spring coming, the scent of sweet renewal in the air, made me want to scream in frustration. What, as we learned in Anthropology I, were holidays if not old planting and harvest festivals? Perhaps Hanukkah and Christmas were originally about lighting up the darkest time of the year. It mattered not one jot. These were the oldest stirrings of mankind: that sense of beginning when the air turns light in the spring, or after the first chill in the fall. My deepest stirrings had no formal expression.