Passion and Affect

by Laurie Colwin

  “What about dinner?” Benno asked.

  “’S too hot. You gimme some money and I’ll go down to the deli and get some stuff and we can watch T.V.”

  She came back from the delicatessen with a shopping bag. Her hair had unraveled slightly and hung in her face. Benno realized that he thought she was the most beautiful girl he had ever seen.

  “Look,” she announced nasally. “I got cheese, ham, mustard, cherry soda, beer, and some cupcakes.” In addition to which she had bought a package of lemon Kool-Aid, two readymade tuna fish sandwiches, a large jar of mayonnaise, a frozen cake, and some plastic spoons. “It’ll be like a picnic,” Greenie said, and made sandwiches on the rug. They drank cherry soda out of the bottle while they watched a program called “Mr. Wilson’s Dream Wife,” which Benno insisted on. Mr. Wilson’s real wife was an outrageous shrew, but Mr. Wilson had found that if he simply turned a dial on the machine he had bought for forty-five cents in a junk store, Mrs. Wilson turned into a sleek, blonde sylph who said only yes, or no, breathily.

  “You only like this show ’cuz your wife is away,” said Greenie.

  “That isn’t so,” said Benno. “My wife is very beautiful and she’s not at all like Mrs. Wilson. I watch it because it’s a good show.”

  “Yeah,” said Greenie, nibbling her way through her second tuna fish sandwich. “Shaw.”

  They watched “Horror Theater” sitting on the couch, and when it became particularly horrible, they clung together. During “World of Romance,” Benno kissed Greenie. On the screen, Laura was kissing Jim just before he went to find the gang that had wounded his brother. Kissing Greenie was a series of diminutive experiences. Her pearlized mouth was slippery with lipstick and tasted of metallic peaches. Her squat teeth pressed against his lips. She tasted like minty smoke, cherry syrup, chocolate cupcake.

  As “World of Romance” flickered off, two animated sticks of margarine executed a two step.

  “Listen, Greenie. The Moscow Philharmonic is on the educational station. Would you mind?”

  “Naa,” said Greenie, who smiled when the screen crowded up with unkempt men in evening dress. She sat like a bored but polite child. During a crescendo, Greenie grabbed him, knocked him off balance, and kissed him.

  “What’s it gonna be,” said Greenie.

  “What do you mean?” asked Benno, who understood. “What about Roger?”

  “I’m mad at Roger. He can go to hell.”

  “But, I mean, Greenie, this is pretty serious stuff. I mean, we work together every day, and all. It would be very difficult.”

  Greenie lifted an eyebrow. “How old are you?” she asked.

  “Thirty-six,” said Benno.

  “You must be outa your mind,” she said. “Talk about the generation gap.”

  “What do you mean, Greenie?”

  “Oh, come off it. I’m mad at my boyfriend, and your wife is away and you think it’s all life and death.”

  “But it’s serious, Greenie.”

  “Yeah, shaw,” she smirked.

  “How isn’t it serious, then?”

  “If you don’t know, baby, I can’t tell you. It just isn’t, but it is now ’cuz you’re making an issue of it.”

  “O.K., Greenie,” said Benno, grabbing her around the wrist. “Let’s go.”

  “Go where?”

  “To the bedroom.”

  “Bedroom?” Greenie shrieked. “Bedroom?” She was laughing. “That’s the tackiest thing I ever heard.”

  “What does that mean, Greenie?”

  “Lissen,” said Greenie. “You know what Sylvia said about you? She said you were very square. I think it’s really kind of cute.”

  Benno sat and watched her. In her slick little dress she was prancing up and down the room.

  “I don’t understand what to do with you, Greenie. I don’t think you like me,” said Benno. His eyes were beginning to hurt from the glare.

  “Shaw I like you. I like you fine,” said Greenie. She sat down between him and the television set, and changed the channel. “Here’s something you’ll like,” she said, smiling. It was a documentary on nutrition and mental health. For several minutes they watched it sitting perfectly still.

  “O.K., come on,” said Greenie.

  “Come on where?” asked Benno. He had begun to falter. He felt that perhaps he had gone too far.

  “Come on and sit on the rug with me,” she husked.

  “O.K.,” said Benno. He sat on the rug with his arm around her bony shoulders. On the screen, a lady psychiatrist was talking about protein levels. With a pearly hand, Greenie changed the channel, again.

  “Hello,” purred the voice on the set. “I’m Nancy, your media lady.”

  “This is fine,” said Greenie. “I always like to make love to Nancy the media lady.”

  “Greenie,” said Benno. “Are you certain you know what you’re doing?”

  “Oh, shaw,” she answered. “Nancy the media lady’s great.”

  “I mean …” began Benno. He wasn’t sure what he meant, or meant to say. In four weeks Charlotte would come home. He felt invaded.

  “Greenie … do you know what you’re doing?”

  Greenie grabbed him by the arm and pulled him next to her. “Yeah,” she said. “Shaw.”

  dangerous french mistress

  IT IS SAID by some that I am beginning to take on the mannerisms of an agèd professor, but my friends know that the life I live is orderly, sober, and not at all cheerless. My suits are made for me by an old Viennese tailor in Washington Heights. The material, gray or black or blue, is supplied by a firm of haberdashers in Paris from whom I order direct. After Princeton, I went to Heidelberg and the Sorbonne, and I am now twenty-nine, in New York.

  The apartment I live in was left to me by a professor of classics at Barnard, a spinster with no family, a friend of Alden Marshall, the professor with whom I work. We used to have tea together on Sunday afternoons, and once she told me that she thought of me as a son. After she died, I wondered why she accepted me in this way; after all, she had spent her life unmarried, teaching at a girls’ school.

  The apartment has seven large rooms and three smaller ones off the pantry. It looks over the Hudson and was, when I took possession, filled with her clothes and books and furniture. The clothes I gave to the Salvation Army, and the books I didn’t want to the Barnard Library. All the Greek pots, statues, and ornaments she left to me. They are dusted every week by the maid who has been warned about their extreme fragility. The furniture, also left to me, was either good Shaker replica, Colonial American (clearly heirlooms from her family), or French provincial, all of which I kept.

  I wondered why she had maintained so large an apartment, but as Alden Marshall says, events collide in this world, so perhaps I collided with the apartment she was saving and her need for a son. But the apartment was too large for me, and, finally, too expensive. I had cut down my teaching to two classes a week so I would have more time for my thesis and book. My name was on the lease, and I decided I would find someone to share the rent. When I got married, whoever it was would leave and the apartment would be mine for my family.

  Opportunities overlap in life, and six months after I moved in, Alden sent me an Egyptian called Anwar P. Soole (the P. I later discovered was for Pasteur: his father was a doctor). Alden had met him in Paris: Anwar was living there but when his visa ran out, he came to New York and looked Alden up. He needed a place to live, so Alden sent him around to me.

  Anwar Soole was tall and lean. He reminded me of a greyhound because his spareness tended to diminish his height. He looked shorter than he actually was. His eyes were gray and his skin was the color of smoke. Straight dust-colored hair fell into his eyes. Women find him beautiful or boyish, or both, they tell me. I made him a cup of tea and we discussed not so much the possibility of his moving in, but how to get his five trunks and ten crates from Pier 84 to Riverside Drive. He talked earnestly about his painting and poetry, his eyes rather plaintive
and appealing. He sat, literally, on the edge of his chair and the intensity of his expressions was almost stagy. He moved, the way precocious children do, from the serious to the flirtatious and struck an irresistible balance in between. I have since learned that he does this with everyone; he would flirt with inanimate objects if he thought he could get a reaction out of them.

  Three days later, Anwar, accompanied by four movers, ten crates, and five trunks, moved in. In a week, he was unpacked and settled. Among his possessions were four Victorian birdcages complete with stuffed birds from Ceylon and India, a collection of jade ornaments that filled four glass cases, another four cases of ancient Egyptian artifacts, eighteen albums of photographs, a small Matisse, fifty or more of his own paintings, a teak bedstead from Pakistan, two tiger skins, several bolts of Egyptian batik, a series of African musical instruments packed in excelsior, a set of old spode, two fourteen-by-twenty Persian rugs, and two hundred books. One crate was filled with huge hunks of polished driftwood from Africa and Egypt that we suspended from wires flush with the wall in the living room. There was also some assorted French porcelain, linen, paint boxes, easels, a typewriter, a clothes press, fourteen suits, twelve jackets, two tuxedos, and a set of copper skillets.

  My own things, some glass portraits of my ancestors, some painted trunks from my Pennsylvania Dutch ancestors, the paintings and photographs I acquired in Paris and Heidelberg, and the dishes Hattie Marshall had given me, lived comfortably with Anwar’s litter. The tiger skins stretched gracefully on the wooden floor of the living room.

  Alden Marshall had taught me aesthetics at Princeton. He was seventy-five and Hattie, his wife, was seventy-three. They lived two buildings down from me on Riverside Drive. We were working together on what he said was his last book and our drafts were typed by his occasional secretary, a pale, plain, regular-featured girl named Lilly Gillette. Alden and Hattie, old and slightly preoccupied, scarcely noticed her. She appeared at the doorway and stacked the clean typed sheets on the desk, silent as a ghost. She seemed to require no notice at all, so it was unexpected—it was shocking—when she appeared at my door one afternoon. I had no idea what she wanted: Alden hadn’t sent her, she had no drafts or pages for me to correct. After a conversation about which I can remember nothing, she seduced me and left.

  She was middle-sized and blonde, and could have been anywhere between twenty and thirty. Her face showed nothing: she was vacant, but not passive. One of her eyes was green, and one was blue. This disparity gave her the facial profundity that statues with no eyes at all have. Looking at her, I remembered a white barn cat I once saw that had a blue eye and a green eye. It had the same sort of depth to its look that Lilly had to hers, but it was only one of nature’s tricks. It was impossible to tell if Lilly had any more depth to her than the cat. Her presence was almost neutral, her clothes were neutral. They fitted her like an extra skin, which is not to say that they were tight, but she wore them like a skin she lived in and paid no attention to. It was impossible to remember what she wore. Sitting in a chair, the chair diminished her; you noticed a chair containing a girl, not a girl sitting in a chair.

  She stood at the door to my apartment.

  “Phillip Hartman,” she said.

  “Yes,” I said. “You’re Alden’s secretary.”

  “Right.”

  I gave her a questioning look, but since she said nothing and was carrying nothing, and since her look revealed nothing, I walked into my study, making way for her to follow.

  She sat in the chair by my desk smoking a cigarette while I smoked a cigar. She looked over the rows of books, the glass pictures, the photographs, the large French vases. She looked to the bed, partially obscured by a bookshelf at the far end of the room. It seemed to place her: when she found it—I was following her eyes—she stopped looking. We must have had some conversation, but as I said, I cannot remember what about. I went to the kitchen to make a pot of tea and when I brought it back on a tray, with cups and milk, I found her standing by the bed. She had turned back the covers. Her clothes were on the floor.

  We became lovers, if that term is appropriate, and she left without a word, leaving not a hair on the pillow, or cigarette stub (she had emptied the ashtray while I made the tea), not one smudge of herself. We did not have dinner, she did not offer to cook or ask to be taken out. She put on her clothes and left.

  “Don’t get up,” was all she said. The tea, untouched, was cold in its pot.

  It was an event so unadorned that it took me a week to realize that I was catching my breath. After she left, I spent several hours looking for a book I thought was on my desk, but it was on a shelf where it should not have been. I have my books by subject—one shelf is art history, one philosophy, and one literature. They are alphabetized by author on each shelf. I was looking for a volume of Winkelmann and found it wedged beside a copy of Ulysses, upside down.

  On Tuesdays I have lunch with Alden Marshall at the Faculty Club. On Thursdays I have dinner with him and Hattie at their apartment or we go to a restaurant. Tuesdays and Thursdays we work on his book, Mondays and Fridays I teach. The rest of the time is for my thesis and my own work.

  Lilly Gillette sat in Alden Marshall’s study opening his letters with an ivory knife. Her face was impassive as a board and did not change when I came in.

  Alden and I spent the morning working. Lilly brought him his mail and some typed pages. When I got back from lunch, she was at my door. I felt a lurch go through me, as if my bones quaked. She followed me down the hall to my study. This time we had no conversation at all. I looked down into her face for anger, or love or tenderness or confusion, but found only bland acceptance. Her departure then was a replica of the first. She said, “Don’t get up,” and left.

  Anwar Soole was out more than he was in, but we frequently collided. He called me “Filipo” and made me help him hang his paintings. Once in a while he would cook a huge Middle Eastern meal to which he would invite several of the more luscious students from the girls’ college at which he taught, or some elderly specimens of Italian nobility. He had two kinds of friends: dull but opulent girls and Europeans in New York on business. After he had been teaching for several months, the girls turned up, elegant in silk, rustling like expensive leaves and leaving the apartment faintly scented with their perfume. If I was home, they were brought into my study to admire my French vases and glass paintings. Then Anwar made a pot of sweet, acrid coffee that we drank in the living room and watched Anwar drape himself languidly over the tiger skin.

  With his girls he was hyperanimated, lithe, and springy. He did parodies, imitations, little dances. He acted out hour-long comedies, taking all the parts. At parties he danced wildly, almost ridiculously I thought, until one of his more intelligent consorts said, “He looks silly, but he’s actually graceful. He has the best balance I’ve ever seen.” She was right, of course: Anwar could stand on one foot for ten minutes and almost twist his other leg around his waist.

  Once in a while he would turn up at the apartment with a really magnificent girl. The more beautiful they were, the less English they spoke. One of these was an extremely tall, catlike German and I was produced to help him out. Anwar spoke Italian, French, Arabic, and English, but no German, so he was helpless. Since you cannot translate manic charm, the evening was a waste for him, and the girl, who was quite nice and fairly intelligent, was leaving for Munich the next day.

  After a ferocious night at a party, blasting out all his energy, he would spend the next day painting in the studio he had created of the pantry rooms, getting it back. Several times during the winter, after weeks of frantic activity, he would get sick, so sick that I had to bring his food to him on a tray. Sick, he looked tiny, dark gray against the white sheets, and when he slept his features assumed the meek austerity of a child’s. Without his energy he was puzzled, frightened, and torpid. After a week ailing, he was up. The girls were in, or he was out. After a week of being out, he was domestically in, badgering Minnie, the ma
id who came in twice a week, or cooking his elaborate meals, or rearranging his studio. Since we both had social obligations to repay, we had a formal party during which Anwar drank from the silver punch bowl, danced nonstop for three hours, threatened to throw a dish of salad at the girl who had told me how perfect his balance was, and stood on his head. This went mostly unnoticed because there were about seventy people there. He was like a man racing on a tightrope, stumbling but never falling. The rhythm of his life was energy, dissipation, sickness, and recuperation. When his ancient Europeans came to dinner, he was grotesquely correct.

  There was no pattern to Lilly’s visitations. I am not a bad-looking man but I am hardly the sort of person women crazed with lust pursue. Nothing like Lilly had ever happened to me, and the women I had known, several of whom I loved—a girl I had lived with in Heidelberg, an American girl in Paris I had wanted to marry, were rather like me; mild, scholarly, cerebral. “Intellectual sensualists” is the term the girl in Paris invented for people like us. But here was Lilly Gillette, stolid, silent, bland, standing at my doorway, Monday afternoon, Thursday at two in the morning, Friday at lunchtime after my class. She never spent the night. She never drank so much as a glass of water. We barely talked at all and it was my fault, I often think, because I was so baffled, so buffaloed, and although I did not allow myself to know it, so disturbed that I simply couldn’t speak. How was I to start a conversation with a woman I had been to bed with fifteen, twenty times? Lying next to her, in the few minutes she gave herself for lying next to me, sentences blurted their way to the beginning of speech: elephantine sentences, all of which began with why. Why are you here? Why did you start this? Why me? Her whole presence said: there is nothing to say—so how could I ask? Sometimes a week would pass and I would see her only at Alden’s. No Lilly at my door. Those nights I would lie half asleep, the possibility of full sleep disturbed, waiting for the doorbell to ring. A key would turn and I could hear Anwar’s feet, sometimes two sets of footsteps, go quietly down the hall to his room, hear muffled laughter. Those nights I wondered how to start a conversation about something that had been going on for months. Each time she saw me, she said my name, Phillip Hartman, identifying me in the way one might classify a moth or bug. She never called me by name, except when she saw me; but then, how could she? We never spoke.