“Betty Helen quit today,” said Guido. “Her husband is going to Oklahoma to study with someone called Mezzrobian. Did you ever hear of anyone called Mezzrobian? It sounded like someone everybody’s heard of.”
“There isn’t anybody called Mezzrobian. There isn’t even a Mr. Betty Helen Carnhoops. Jesus, who would marry her?”
“Well, she’s gone. She had to go pack for the movers. Now I have to start this gavotte all over again. I suppose you’ll start nagging me about Miss Berkowitz.”
“No,” said Vincent brightly. “She says she’ll stay at the Board and see how we go.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means how we work out together.”
“Women are very strange,” said Guido. “Even if they do what you want them to, they’re not understandable.”
“How’s Holly?”
“She’s looking for a new apartment for us. She says the old one is filled with bad vibrations and we should start out fresh.”
“So you’re back.”
“Everything’s back. Do you think you could write a poem about garbage? I have a page open.”
Vincent sat with a sheaf of papers on his lap. “I have to get this thing in to Urban Affairs Dialogue by Friday.”
On the desk, the glass bowls twinkled. No one answered the telephone on the first ring. No one typed behind the potted palm. Magna Carta Employment, a part of the foundation that found jobs for nonprofit agencies, was sending over some new girls tomorrow for interviews.
Guido corrected proofs. Vincent read his garbage study. They worked in silence for two hours. Then they both got up. Vincent had to meet Misty Berkowitz for lunch, and Guido had to meet Holly to look at an apartment. They paced around the quiet office for several minutes. Now that everything was back, they both felt dizzy and misplaced, like dancers after a long ballet.
passion and affect
GUIDO MORRIS and his wife, the former Holly Stergis, had been separated for almost six months, during which time Holly read the Larousse Gastronomique, went to France with her mother, and wrote Guido one vague postcard which did not explain why their present living arrangement suited her, or why she had thought of it in the first place.
One day, shortly before the six-month mark, she called from her parents’ house in the country to say that she felt they ought to have dinner and talk things over.
“I think I’ve arranged my mind,” she said.
It was a brief, explosive meal. They met at the Lalique, an obscure, ornate restaurant that had been the partial scene of their courtship, but neither of them had much in the way of appetite. They left their dinner virtually untouched but drank two bottles of white wine. Holly stared at her glass and said, “This place is littered with memories.” Then they left abruptly, overtipping. At their apartment, the chamber of Guido’s recent solitude, they decided to resume their life together.
“But we have to move,” said Holly, with whose wardrobe Guido had cohabited silently for months. “I don’t think we should live amongst our separateness.”
“I’m not at all sure what that means,” Guido said.
“It means that this is where we started, and this is where things didn’t work out. Besides, I never liked the kitchen.”
“I’m not at all sure why you left in the first place,” said Guido. “You never said you didn’t like the kitchen.”
“I told you why I left,” said Holly. “I needed time to be alone with myself and now I have. I thought it would be a profitable emotional experience for both of us.” She propped her neck with one of the ornamental bed pillows she had resurrected from the closet, where Guido, who had not been able to look at them without pain, had put them.
“Holly, did I do something wrong? Are you, I mean, were you in love with someone else? I mean, did I have anything to do with this?”
“I worried about you,” said Holly.
“So did I,” Guido said grimly. They were silent for a while and then Holly turned over with the little sigh that indicated she was asleep.
Thus, their reconciliation. Holly was back, but even with her sleeping next to him, Guido turned over and over again during the night to make sure she was actually there. She always was, her hair nestled against the pillows and one elegant foot on top of the blanket. She was sleeping the sleep of the just and innocent. Her clothes were neatly folded over the armchair that had held nothing for the past six months but copies of The New York Times. While Holly slept beautifully away, Guido slept fitfully, dreaming of lizards and relief maps of Brazil.
The next morning, she was up before him. He found her drinking coffee and wearing his old camel hair robe. What she called her “essential clothing” was still in the country. Her dark, thick hair was only slightly disarranged by sleep and her eyes were bright with unfocused alertness. She was reading the society page. At his place was a covered plate of eggs and bacon. She read to him from the paper, as if they had never been parted.
“Do you know Phillip Lamaze?” she said.
“No. Should I?”
“It says here that he was in your class at college and that he’s just been named curator of the Rope Collection.”
“What’s that? Photos of hangings?”
“A gift of Mrs. Henry Rope. It’s Chinese porcelain.” She poured herself another cup of coffee, and Guido, who was generally teetotal, found himself wanting a drink. He had the feeling he would see Holly and die, so he barricaded himself in back of the sports page.
“I’m going to look for an apartment today,” Holly said. “I’ve done the real estate page, and I made a whole bunch of calls before you got up.” With that, she dismissed him. He kissed the top of her head, the only part of her accessible to him since she was deeply engaged in the movie review.
“I’ll call you at lunchtime,” she said.
Guido put on his tie and left. Walking down the stairs, he felt as if his knees were a pair of smashed artifacts from the Rope Collection and reflected that in matters of the heart, Holly was very businesslike.
It was a bright, strident autumn morning, of the sort Guido hated. The weather was not in correspondence with his mood: the sun shone through fat, white clouds, wind blew the leaves off the trees, and the sky was an intense, cheery gray. Guido was ripe for blizzard, or torrential rain. He walked to his office feeling dazed and weak-headed. His office housed the literary end of a foundation called The Magna Carta Trust, which he had inherited and which gave money to worthy artists with noble plans for large-scale cultural events. From his office, Guido dispensed money to colleges and poets, and novelists from Guam and Uganda. He also produced and edited the foundation’s literary magazine, Runnymede. It was a sensible and elegant production, and in the seven years of Guido’s editorship, had begun to turn over quite a tidy profit, a fact that caused considerable astonishment to the trustees.
Since he could not bear to think of Holly, whose return was more like a collision than an event, he thought about his secretarial problems. The girl who had worked for him, Betty Helen Carnhoops, had quit to go to Oklahoma with her husband. She was a dull, efficient, and unattractive girl, as bland as cream of rice and probably as stable.
At the door to his office, he was greeted by a young man wearing his hair in the manner of John Donne, a three-piece suit, and cowboy boots.
“Can I help you?” Guido said.
“Yeah. I’m looking for Guido Morris.”
“I’m Guido Morris.”
“Well, I’m Stanley Berkowitz and I’m your new secretary.”
“Did the temporary agency send you over?”
“No, my cousin did. Misty Berkowitz. The girlfriend of your friend Vincent Cardworthy.”
“I’ve never had a male secretary before,” said Guido.
“I’m not a secretary, man. I just type very fast. I just got out of Princeton and I used to be a speed freak. I’m in classics.”
“A speed freak?”
“Yeah,” said Stanley. Seeing Guido’s blank fa
ce he said gently, “How old are you?”
“Thirty-four.”
“Well, man,” Stanley said. “A speed freak is someone who does ups, you know, methadrine, amphetamines. You must have read about it in the local media.”
“I see,” said Guido. “What’s it like?”
“It’s hell, man,” Stanley said. “It turns your brain into pea soup.”
“I’ve never had a speed freak for a secretary before.”
“You don’t now. I’m an ex-speed freak, but I’m a very nervous type, see.”
“How nice for you,” Guido said. “Can you take dictation?”
“No, man. I just write very fast ’cause I’m a nervous type, like I said.”
Stanley wrote a rapid, legible hand. He made the coffee and spent two hours taking dictation. Shortly before lunch, he presented Guido with a stack of typed letters. All the “w’s” had been left out and were beautifully written in by Italic pen.
“Is the “w” key on that typewriter broken?” Guido asked.
“No, man. It’s a little device I made up to keep from freaking out. See, you choose a letter and then you leave it out and then you write it in. I started it when I was writing term papers, see. It’s a little sanity device.”
“It looks very nice,” Guido said.
“Well, it looks like the key is broken, see, but it gives a sort of personal touch. Besides, I hate to type. It makes me edgy.”
Guido’s office was a long, stylish L. The prints on the walls were mostly Dürers, chastely framed in gilt wood. His desk was mahogany and seemed to have been made by a hinge fanatic. There were brass hinges on the sides, nailed into the front, and on the drawers. It was large enough to take a nap on.
The windows looked over the roofs of mid-Manhattan and Central Park. On a shelf that ran the length of the wall were back numbers of Runnymede and books by authors subsidized by the foundation or published in the magazine. On a long table was the collection of Peking glass bowls left to Guido by his Newport aunt. There was a brass watering can filled with eggshells and water, a combination suggested by Holly to give his plants a better life. Every morning, Guido watered the hanging fern, the geraniums, the grape ivy, and the potted palms behind which Stanley now sat. In the hall connecting the outer and inner offices was a little refrigerator made of bird’s-eye walnut that when opened contained several cans of shrimp bisque, bottles of Seltzer, and a plastic lime.
At lunchtime, Vincent Cardworthy appeared. He was Guido’s oldest and closest friend and, by quirk of good fortune, second cousin. They were both tall and lean. Guido was dark and Vincent was ruddy, but they both had happy, boyish, slightly haunted faces.
Vincent’s office at the Board of City Planning was several blocks from Guido and he frequently walked over for lunch. It was at the City Planning Board that he had fallen in love with Misty Berkowitz, who disapproved of Guido and Vincent with equal venom. Vincent was a free-lance statistician whose special field of expertise was garbage removal and disposal. “I’m in garbage,” he often said but was forgiven, as his studies on the subject were considered to be quite brilliant. They were quoted in The New York Times, and republished in a large number of urban journals.
He found Stanley eating a pastrami sandwich behind the potted palm.
“What’s happening on the rubbish heap?” said Stanley, by way of greeting.
“How’s the life of a male secretary?” Vincent said.
“It’s pretty far out,” said Stanley. “I was just reading a little Homer here to get my mind uncoiled.”
Vincent found Guido sitting at his desk drinking a glass of lime and Seltzer and reading a manuscript.
“What’s happening on the rubbish heap?” he asked Vincent.
“Is Stanley writing your material now?” Vincent said. “How’s Holly?”
Guido felt a surge of despair. “She’s wonderful. I’m terrible. I feel as if I had been flattened by a truck, but she’s as adaptable as a thermostat so she’s happily reading the paper. She wants to move. She says we shouldn’t live in the scene of our separation.”
“I’m not at all sure I know what that means,” Vincent said.
“It means that that’s where we started and that’s where things didn’t go right. She said something last night about the artifacts of dissatisfaction. I can’t talk about it. All I know is she’s back, and that’s what I wanted. It would be nice to know on what terms, but that doesn’t seem to interest her.”
“If Misty didn’t hate your part of town so much, I’d take your apartment, seeing as mine is stereotypic and banal. Your part of town, according to her, is filled with uptight gentiles and rich people.”
“Maybe one of these days we’ll all be poor and happy.” They exchanged a look of mutual exhaustion.
“I’m going to ask her to marry me,” Vincent said. His eyes were slightly glassy.
“Why don’t you stick your head in a coal stove? It saves time.”
“I love her,” Vincent said. “I know she loves me, but she won’t say because she says I don’t deserve to know.”
“Isn’t life simple,” said Guido bitterly.
“In the old days,” Vincent said, “I’d pop the question and she’d say yes and we’d go and do it. Then we’d settle down and live our lives. Everything would be as it should be.”
“In the old days, there weren’t any Mistys, or Hollys either. I don’t think I know any more how things should be.”
“Well, I’m just going to go ahead on the theory that things are the way they’re supposed to be, and I think that Misty and I should get married.”
“I’ll send you the name of a good divorce lawyer for a wedding present,” Guido said.
Misty Berkowitz was a small-boned girl with a long stride. Her hair was the color of amber and she wore wire-rimmed glasses. She was an assistant structural theorist at the Board of City Planning, where she had met Vincent. In the spring and summer she wore an old green suede jacket and in the winter she wore an old green suede coat. She had not intended to stay at the Board of City Planning: she wanted to go to the École des Hautes Études to study linguistics, but she had met Vincent and put it off. Vincent knew she had been planning to go abroad, but he had no idea that she had put it off because of him. Vincent was everything Misty disapproved of, and since she felt he was a blockhead, she had no intention of telling him anything.
She did, however, tell herself quite a lot of things, and one of the things she knew was how she felt about Vincent. No matter what she said aloud about him—things that were generally savage—she knew him to be a level, good-tempered, and intelligent person, deeply affectionate, but a man who knew as much about the life of the emotions as an infant knows about parachuting.
Misty and her cousin Stanley did not frequent each other, but since he had come East to college, a loving animosity had sprung up between them. Basically, they met at times of personal crisis, and the last time Misty had seen him, he had been miserably stewing over a girl called Sybelle Klinger who could not make up her mind whether or not to share his sublet with him. She had finally said yes, and Misty and Stanley had not had any reason to get together.
When Misty called him, he assumed that it was a time of emergency, so they met in the park and ate hot dogs at the zoo. Stanley was family, and he was smart. His father and Misty’s were labor lawyers in Chicago. They got right down to cases.
“What do you think of Vincent?” Misty said. They were standing at the seal pool.
“I think he’s a straight dude, man.”
“Oh, knock it off, Stanley. I want to know what you think.”
“I like him a lot. I mean, viscerally. But then, I haven’t been around him much.” He watched the seals with envy. “That’s the way to live,” he said.
“Do you think I should marry him?”
“I don’t know from marriage,” Stanley said. “Do you wanna?”
“Why can’t you be serious?” Misty wailed.
“Don’t get
all worked up,” Stanley said. “I need another hot dog. You should marry him if you love him, right?”
“You are a rude, selfish little pig, Stanley.”
“No I’m not, man. I’m just saying that if you love him, you should do it to it.”
“Isn’t life simple.”
“Yeah, man, it probably is, but not for weirdos like us. Come on, let’s get another hot dog and go see the yak.”
In the weeks that they had been back together, Guido heard Holly mention someone called Arnold Milgrim several times. Since she neither explained nor described him, Guido supposed that he had been Holly’s lover, but when she began to speak about him with the disembodied reverence with which you refer to the very famous, he assumed Arnold Milgrim was someone universally known—a sort of prime source, and not Holly’s lover at all. But still he was not sure, and he endured this form of self-torture for a week or so. Then, one morning, he looked meaningfully at the coffee pot and said: “Pour me some more of that Arnold Milgrim.” By the end of breakfast, he had called nearly every object by this name.
“Where’s my Arnold Milgrim?” He said menacingly, looking for his briefcase.
Holly then explained that Arnold Milgrim had been a student of her grandfather’s and she had met him on her recent trip to France. He taught philosophy at Oxford, on loan from Yale, and was the author of The Decay of Language as Meaning, The Automatic Memory, and Fishing in the Waters of Time, which was about Hegel.
As the day progressed, it seemed to Guido that he was perhaps the only person alive who had not heard of Arnold Milgrim: Stanley had read Fishing in the Waters of Time and said it was far out. Vincent reported having seen Arnold Milgrim on television in London. Finally, Guido made the first telephone call he had ever made to Misty Berkowitz, who told him that she had read parts of The Decay of Language as Meaning and found it provocative, but basically silly.
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