Passion and Affect

by Laurie Colwin

  “I mean, I’m getting a divorce. I’m in the process of it. I’m not telling you that so you’ll think I’m available or anything.” He let go of her hand and sat down.

  “Raiford,” Mary said.

  “Roddy,” said Roddy.

  “Roddy. How old are you?”

  “Thirty-one.”

  “You’re very silly for thirty-one.”

  “I don’t like this conversation,” said Roddy. He drank his coffee and looked out the window. “You have no idea how nice it is here. Why am I silly for thirty-one?”

  “Because first of all you kiss me, then you say you’re married, then you say you’re not married, and then you tell me not to think you’re available. How do you know I’m available? How do you know I’m not married?”

  “Are you?” Roddy said. “I saw the picture of that guy on your mantelpiece. Is he someone in your life?”

  “He used to be my fiancé,” Mary said. “We were going to get married last July, but we broke it off. He’s in India now, but we write to each other. We’re still friends.”

  “You are?”

  “We started out friends,” Mary said. “You can stop being lovers, but you can’t cancel out friendship. Maybe it’s different if you’re getting a divorce—harder to know if you and your wife are still friends.”

  “I don’t know what we were,” said Roddy. “We had a kid, but it didn’t seem to help much.”

  Mary looked at him sadly. He was sitting in a dark corner of the sofa; his head was lowered, hidden in a shadow. When she turned a lamp on, he looked up and the glow hit him full in the face. She sat on her side of the sofa watching him. The light played over his face like expression, and when he finally turned to her the slight lines around his eyes softened.

  “This is the first time I’ve felt comfortable in months,” Roddy said. “You have no idea how nice you are.”

  On Sunday evening, Roddy sat in his apartment waiting for Mary, who was coming to borrow his copy of Darwin’s Finches. He was happy and nervous anticipating her, so he thought about her apartment, which to him was like the finch room. He liked the way she watched him, the serious way she reacted. “It’s like a movie, being with you,” he had said to her. “I feel like a camera being watched by a camera. It’s like being in a situation and outside it at the same time. If I look at you, I can watch me being here. I’ve never seen anything like it, the way you take note.”

  She arrived on time, wearing a raincoat, a gray skirt, a white sweater.

  “Don’t you ever wear anything that’s a color?” Roddy asked.

  His apartment was on the ground floor of a dingy brick building near the river. In the living room was an aluminum work table, piled with papers, two cheap chairs, and a matching sofa. It looked as if someone had lived in the two rooms for a brief, uninspired time and had fled abruptly, leaving faded furniture and curtains behind. In the middle of the floor was an air-conditioner turned over on its side. Its parts were strewn in a circle around it.

  “I’m in the process of fixing it,” Roddy explained.

  Behind a partition was his bedroom—a nook big enough for a bed, on top of which were stacks of clean laundry and a small generator. In the kitchen was a Bunsen burner and a pegboard hung with hammers, ratchets, wrenches, and drills. On the Formica sideboard was an acid beaker that functioned as coffee-maker. There were two tin plates and two tin cups that he had gotten as a premium for buying the five bottles of soy sauce that were lined up on a shelf next to some empty orange-juice tins. The icebox emitted a hum, and when Roddy hit it with his forearm the door opened, revealing a container of cottage cheese, a bottle of wine, and a carton of eggs.

  “That’s my next project, that icebox,” Roddy said. “I got the hum out once, but it came back.”

  He made coffee in the acid beaker. There was powdered milk and sugar he had filched from the museum cafeteria.

  “What an odd way to live,” Mary said. “You go to all the trouble of making coffee with filter paper and then you don’t have any proper milk. These are only temporary quarters to you, aren’t they?”

  “Proper milk, as you call it, doesn’t keep, and since I’m not here all that often, why bother?”

  “Then why bother about anything?” Mary said.

  “I work most of the time. That’s what my time is for.”

  They drank their coffee side by side on the sofa, holding hands. The icebox began to hum.

  “I’ve got to fix that, but first I have to call Templeton. I’ve been trying to get Garlin all day. She’s never in, or else she’s not answering the phone.” He dragged the telephone from under the couch and dialed a series of numbers.

  “Let me speak to Sara,” he said into the receiver. “Is she any better? … Hello? S. J., it’s Poppa. I hear you got a shot. You didn’t cry? Well, I’m very pleased to hear that. I’m sending you a postcard in the mail and I want you to send me one of the pictures you draw at school. O.K.? Ask Mama if she wants to speak to me. … Hi. I didn’t get the lawyer. I’ll call him tomorrow. O.K.? Right.” He hung up.

  Mary had moved to a corner of the sofa, to keep a distance between herself and the conversation.

  “Why are you hiding over there?” Roddy said. “To pay me back for calling my wife? You can call your boyfriend in India if you want.”

  “Don’t tease,” said Mary. “How old’s your little girl?”

  “Four.”

  “Do you have any pictures of her?”

  “I don’t have anything around,” Roddy said. “Most of my stuff is with my parents in Westchester. I brought a whole bunch of stuff back from New Caledonia once—feathers and nests and bows, carved boats, that sort of thing. After I got married, it was all nicely on display, and Sara got her baby hands on what hadn’t disintegrated and tore it apart.”

  “It’s a spare life,” Mary said, smiling.

  “You can be my possession. I’d put you in a little nook and lay flowers at your feet.”

  “Don’t tease,” said Mary.

  “I wish I were teasing,” Roddy said. “God, how glad I am you’re here.”

  He took the wine from the icebox, opened it with a corkscrew, and poured out two water glasses.

  “Celebration,” he said.

  “Cheers,” said Mary. “It’s the beginning of April.”

  They stood in happy silence, drinking wine. The icebox hummed.

  “Stand over here,” Roddy said. “I’m going to fix that damned thing once and for all.”

  “Don’t fix it, Roddy. Talk to me.”

  “I’ve got the time now and I might not tomorrow. Besides, I can do both. Hand me that wrench—the smaller one.”

  He took the wrench and a screwdriver and, after taking off the bottom plate, lay on his back, looking into the motor of the icebox.

  “There’s a flashlight in that drawer,” he said. “Can you shine it right above my head so I can see into this?”

  She held it as she was told, flashing the beam from time to time onto his face.

  “This machine is an antique,” Roddy said. “Why do you keep flashing that into my eyes?”

  “To behold you.”

  Half an hour later, the hum diminished, Roddy got up from the floor and took the flashlight from Mary.

  “I shouldn’t be doing this,” he said.

  “Fixing the icebox?”

  “Asking you if you’ll stay here tonight.”

  “You know I will,” said Mary.

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s the right thing to do.”

  “Do you always do things for a reason?” he asked.

  “Aren’t you doing this for a reason?”

  “Your coming up to the finch room was an act of vast good fortune for me,” Roddy said. “You’re the nicest person I think I’ve ever met. You’re the only person I’ve ever met who seems to be prepared for things. Are you prepared for a lot of pain?”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” said Mary. “I don
’t think you do, either.” She rinsed the glasses, happy to feel the water running over her wrists.

  Every day, they left the museum together, took walks through the park, and had dinner. During the week, they spent nights at Roddy’s, and on the weekends at Mary’s. Often in the middle of dinner or a walk, they would stop and look at each other seraphically.

  “I’ve never been this happy,” Roddy said.

  “Neither have I,” said Mary.

  “I love walking through time with you,” Roddy said frequently.

  They read each other’s books, talked for hours, and planned to write a paper together on the function of song patterns in caged and wild finches. Roddy was astonished at how long Mary liked to sit over dinner. They talked, and quarreled, and kept regular hours. Each day the leaves got rounder. The cherry trees in the museum garden blossomed. The grass was lusher—wet and slick in the evenings. They did not arrive at the museum together in the mornings.

  In the middle of June, they strolled through the park. The earth gave up a cold mist that collected in fuzzy halos under the street lights. The trees had blossomed late and were just shedding their petals, which fell on the grass like spilled paint. They did not walk hand in hand but held themselves in a close orbit, arm against arm. They stopped by a stone wall and studied each other. He had a way of keeping his face in a state of blankness tinged only by worry. When the tightness broke and he smiled, Mary sometimes found herself close to tears. Often he looked at her with a tenderness so intense that she had to force herself to make him laugh in order to break it.

  “You are a blessing I don’t deserve,” Roddy said.

  “Shut up.”

  “When I think that it’s only chance that you work at the museum, that you might not have come up to the greenhouse …”

  “You think it’s chance that we’re together,” Mary said. She walked under a plane tree, out of the light.

  “Why are we, then?”

  “I don’t know about you,” said Mary, almost mumbling. “But some people act out of love.”

  He caught her by the elbow. “Does that mean you love me?”

  “That’s not your business,” Mary said.

  “What do you mean, it’s not my business?”

  “It isn’t information you really want,” she said. “Don’t go trying to get me to say what you don’t want to hear.”

  The summer seemed reluctant to break. By the middle of July it was still cold and wet, and the stone corridors of the museum were damp. The days spun themselves out in solid grayness. On a rainy Friday in August, Roddy and Mary ambled under an umbrella toward Mary’s apartment. People on the streets moved in slow motion against the downpour, and the trees moved like underwater flora. The front door to Mary’s apartment was swollen with damp and Roddy had to shove it open.

  He sprawled on the couch and shut his eyes. Mary sat on the floor pouring coffee.

  “Are you sleepy?” she asked. For a couple of weeks, he had been edgy and occasionally sleepless.

  “I’m trying to see what this will look like in memory,” Roddy said. “We’re not living in real time. This isn’t real time at all.”

  “It’s real enough for me,” said Mary. She looked up to find him still lying there, his hands folded on his chest, his eyes shut, like a knight on a medieval coffin.

  “It isn’t real. It’s pleasurable suspension. Real time has nothing to do with chance. It’s loaded with obligations and countercharges and misfires.”

  She put her cup down and wound her arms around her knees. “Is something going to make this change?” she said. “Is that why you’re so restless?”

  He sat beside her on the floor and took the pins out of her hair. “You think life goes in a straight line, Mary. This all seems clear and straightforward to you, because that’s what you’re like, but it isn’t that way for me.”

  “If you mean that you have to go to Westchester with Sara Justina, I knew that a long time ago.”

  “Look, Mary. What we have now is a little gift wrapped up in time. It’ll never be this way again. There are things I have to do that will cut me off from you eventually, and you’ll hate me.” He wound her hair around his wrist. Then he let go, and she got up and sat in a hard-backed chair, clutching the cane seating until she could feel it imprint her hand. She had been haunted for a month, expecting some dire interruption between them.

  “If what you’re saying, Roddy, is that we can’t be together any more, say it. Don’t be such a chicken.”

  He kneeled in front of the chair. “I’m used to these lovely free days, and I get sick to think what the world is going to do to them.”

  “Talk straight,” Mary said. She collected the coffee cups, and when she reached for the cream pitcher it slipped out of her hand and smashed on the floor. She sat down abruptly, put her head in her hands, and cried for several minutes.

  Roddy put his arms around her. He ran his fingers over the tears on her face and drew a little pattern on her cheekbone. “I want to maintain the time we have,” he said. “But, Mary, the earth spins on its axis and everything changes. You can’t freeze things, not things as delicate as this, and hope they’ll survive a thaw.”

  “I don’t know how to fight you on this,” Mary said, “when I don’t know what I’m fighting.”

  “Time,” said Roddy. “I’ve never seen a life arranged like yours. It’s organized for a kind of comfort. Mine isn’t.”

  Her eyes were very grave. “You said I was a good arranger,” she said. “Time is the easiest thing in the world to arrange.”

  “I want to be with you,” Roddy said into her hair. “But I don’t see how. All I see is a messy world nibbling at the corners of this.”

  “You’re not talking about the world. You’re talking about yourself. The world is outside us. This is an inside job.”

  “Look, life has a lot of holes in it. This is going to get worse, not better. That’s why all this time was so beautiful—because nothing got in the way of it.”

  She spoke very slowly. “I didn’t want to say this to you, Roddy, but you know I love you. I can’t get to the bottom of what’s bothering you, but if it’s something you have to go through by yourself, I’ll stand by you. You go off and take care of Sara Justina, and when that’s finished we can sort it out. I don’t want to live in unreal time with you.”

  “You’re making this very hard for me,” he said.

  “I’m trying to make it easy. I’m trying to clear a way for you so you can see us,” said Mary. “But don’t make me hang too long.”

  “I’ll figure it out,” Roddy said wildly. “I’ll figure it out.”

  The first week they were apart, Mary worked on a chart on the song patterns of the thrush. She made tapes of canary songs and wrote them down in musical notation, sitting in her tiny office with a set of headphones clamped to her ears. They blotted out the sound of footsteps, but they did not blot out what she replayed over and over in her mind: Roddy talking to her. When Ethel Reddicker went to lunch or lectures, Mary took off her earphones, locked the door, and wept. She stayed away from Roddy’s office, but the thought that he was in the building, walking the corridors, using the elevator, made her feel bonded to him.

  At night, she ran their moments together through her mind until, with a sense of loss, she realized that she was thinking in the past tense. There was no one she could talk to—she and Roddy had sealed themselves up, keeping their time to themselves.

  Then for a month she kept busy, knowing that he was in Westchester with Sara Justina, but when the month was out she found that she was prone to tears that caught her off guard. She walked through the museum in a glazed and headachy state until she came down with a cold that kept her home for three days, watching the rain clouds low over the spires of the museum.

  In the beginning of September, she went to the greenhouse when she was certain Roddy would not be there, to speak to José Jacinto Flores. She found him feeding Roddy’s finches. His hand was extended
into the cage and the birds perched on his sleeve, picking millet from his palm. He greeted her in soft, courtly Spanish.

  “Why are you feeding the finches, Mr. Flores?”

  “Because he”—José Jacinto nodded toward the empty table—“went to a conference in Bermuda for two weeks, so I have to take care of them.”

  This information filled Mary with hope and despair in equal parts: he was back—he had gone away without telling her, but he was away. And how could she hear from him if he was in Bermuda?

  Mary knew when he came back—she felt it. Then she saw him in the back of a lecture room as she walked by. He was writing on a blackboard, talking to one of the ornithologists. His shoulders were hunched in the old familiar way. Everything about him was familiar, but she couldn’t call to him. She had given him her form of trust, and knew, because he had said so, that he trusted her. If he was waiting, it was for a reason—she had taken him on trust and stood by it. In her memory she heard his soft voice say, “You don’t realize that I adore you.” She raced to her office in tears.

  How they contrived to work in the same building, live in the same neighborhood, and never meet amazed her, but they did. She was not the sort of girl to leave notes in his mailbox or letters taped to his office door. When two months had passed, she realized that he was going to do nothing about her and she was filled with a sense of pain so intense it astonished her.

  The last bugs floated lazily on the air currents. The weather was hot and wet, or cold and wet. In Mary’s garden, a row of cats sat on the wall, baring their teeth, chattering at the chickadees, making little rattles in the back of their throats.

  She had got into the habit of using the public entrance to the museum instead of the staff door. It was the third week of public school, and lines of giggling children patrolled by nervous teachers looped around the stone eagles and spilled down the steps, forming rows on the sidewalk.

  One morning before she went to her office, Mary stopped in the gem collection, cutting her way through a sea of beings that reached her waist. She looked down on a mat of bobbing heads. There was a mixed din of shouts and giggles, flattened by the stone walls to a loud hush.