Passion and Affect

by Laurie Colwin

  Holly stood meekly in the doorway. She was carrying a tray of coffee.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “Sometimes you’re so level I feel I ought to fluff up the pillows between us. You’re the only person in the world I love. I think you’re the finest person I’ve ever met. It frightens me.”

  He gave her a look of love and grief.

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

  Vincent and Misty stopped at a florist on the way to dinner and bought Holly and Guido a large bouquet of snapdragons.

  “It’ll be nice, all of us together,” Vincent said.

  “Aren’t you the happy boyscout.”

  “Oh, give me a break,” Vincent said.

  She took his arm and they kissed in the street. In the beginning of their relationship, Vincent had been disturbed by what he called public displays of affection.

  “You think shaking hands on the street is risqué,” Misty used to say to him.

  Now Vincent found street-corner kissing one of the delights of life and it was Misty who had grown somewhat prim.

  “Arnold Milgrim and his lady friend are coming for coffee,” Vincent said.

  “That Holly,” said Misty. “If she doesn’t watch it, she’s going to be the Bonwit Teller edition of Madame Récamier.”

  At the door, there was affection all around. Vincent and Guido clasped each other on the back. Vincent kissed Holly. Guido kissed Misty. Holly and Misty took each other’s measure.

  Misty and Vincent stood bashfully in the hall.

  “We’re getting married,” Vincent said, which admission engendered another round of handshakes and kisses.

  “Did you know that Arnold Milgrim’s lady has run off with your cousin?” Holly said.

  “Whose cousin?” Vincent asked.

  “Misty’s,” said Guido. “Arnold and I were having a conference today, and Arnold brought Doria up with him. When we came out, Stanley and Doria had disappeared, and haven’t been heard from. If she comes back, they’re coming for coffee. Arnold and Doria, that is.”

  “I never thought of Stanley as someone you would run off with,” Misty said.

  After dinner, Arnold Milgrim and Doria appeared. She was looking more windblown than ever.

  Holly, Vincent, and Arnold had brandy. Misty and Guido drank coffee and watched Doria knit on the couch.

  “Stanley has the same last name as you,” Doria said to Misty. “Is that common in New York, or is he kin?”

  “First cousin,” said Misty.

  “Your cousin reads Greek divinely,” Doria said sleepily. “He read Plato quite movingly. We spent the afternoon reading the Apology. Your cousin has very beautiful forearms.”

  Then she and Arnold left.

  “I never noticed Stanley’s forearms before,” said Misty. “I’ll have to check them out.”

  They finished another bottle of wine at the dining room table and talked about the wedding. Holly and Misty exchanged looks of genuine sweetness, looks that were rare for both of them. Holly said she hoped they would be friends, and Misty, a little wine-dazed, knew that affection and love were general, once they had been specified. In love with Vincent, she was willing, and almost helpless, to love Holly, Guido, the rugs on the floor, the postman, telephone operators.

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

  “She’s right,” Guido said. “I drink to the moral universe.”

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

  “I drink to Arnold Milgrim and my cousin Stanley,” Misty said.

  “I drink to a deeply wonderful life,” said Vincent.

  They clicked their glasses, and under the fragmented lights of the chandelier, they drank to a deeply wonderful life.

  the man who jumped into the water

  DURING THE ONLY SERIOUSLY bad year of his business, Charlie Hartz bought the old Berkely house and installed himself, Flossie his wife, and their child Minna in it. It was an old, enormous house, built in the early 1900’s by a local millionaire. It had gray gables, five fireplaces, oak paneling, leaded-glass windows, and fifteen rooms for the three of them to live in. At the time my parents met them, they were cramped into four of the fifteen rooms while plasterers, carpenters, electricians, and painters brought the house down and put it back together.

  The next year, when his business was in better order and the house was complete, Charlie spent six months designing a swimming pool, and during the winter, when everyone said he was crazy to begin digging, Charlie and a crew of five dug, laid, and finished it. It was a bit shorter than a full-size Olympic pool, and it was very deep, except for a couple of yards at one end shallow enough for Minna, who was six, to learn how to swim, and for Flossie’s friends—the “bosom dippers,” Charlie called them—who were not up for serious swimming. It was said to be a miracle of construction, because of the angle and the slope and the fact that it was built between small swells in the ground. It had a bronze frog on one side that spat water, and the border and sides were inlaid with blue-and-white Mexican tiles with flowers on them, and that was miracle enough for me. After serious consultation with the diving pro at the country club, Charlie put in a low board and a high dive that was slightly lower than a standard high jump.

  My sister and Charlie spent hours diving, to the horror of Flossie and my mother, who thought that constant diving would do something to their hearing and sinuses. My sister was the better diver. She dove like some sleek bird—or the way diving might be done in an ideal water world. Charlie was forty-two at the time, and getting vaguely soft, and he dove with a solemn clumsiness. He was very determined about it. They had a general competition to see who could do the fanciest dives, and a personal competition in which one would stand on the high board and one on the low. The object of this game was to see if they could hit the water at the same time. One of them would call out the name of a dive, and they would have to correct for the difference in height and spring. This amused them endlessly. My sister was twenty-one at the time, and sullen. Except for her beau, Willis, who was clerking for the D.A., Charlie Hartz was one of the few people she liked. Since I had just turned seventeen, we didn’t have much to say to each other, and since neither of us had quite stopped battling our parents, we had nothing much to say to them. On Friday afternoons, Willis would appear at the pool, and Charlie, Flossie, my parents, Willis, and my sister would sit in the sun drinking gin-and-lime. Charlie had bought my sister her first drink in a restaurant, and she loved him for it.

  We spent days at their pool. I would take charge of Minna, who was interested in learning how to blow bubbles underwater. She was moonfaced and diffident. I taught her to stand on her head in the shallow end. Charlie and my father would listen to the ball game on the radio and plan some complicated, technological project for the winter. Flossie and my mother would roast delicately in the sun, splash once or twice in the pool, and get the lunch. Usually in the afternoons, the Flowers would arrive after their golf game. My parents and the Flowers clung to some dried-out, age-old feud between them, and they were civil but not cordial. The atmosphere became intensely sociable and civilized. Ice clinked diminutively in glasses.

  Jeremy was the Flowers’ son. When I was thirteen and he was fourteen, we had met at Sunday school and fallen in love. This meant that we wrote precocious notes to each other and, thrown together at parties, escaped out side doors and kissed in garages. No one paid much attention to us until Jeremy was sixteen and got his driver’s license. Then attempts at sabotage were made by both sets of parents, but we were still holding hands and running off in the car and coming home too late. He was going away to Dartmouth in September, and we spent the summer clinging to each other when we could and drugging ourselves into the numbness we thought would be helpful in the fall. That particular summer took on a klieg-light clearness. It was like sharp cutting glass, because we were on the edge of adolescent pain and loss.

/>   One afternoon, when Flossie and my mother were in town shopping and my father was swimming laps underwater, Charlie dragged me over to the garage, where he had taken apart the engine of the lawnmower and had unsuccessfully tried to get it back together. It was damp and mossy in the garage, and wherever I stepped crankcase oil slicked on me. I handed Charlie a pair of pliers. He said, “Is your heart going to break when the White Hope goes off to Dartmouth?” That made me angry, and I left him to his motor. I thought he was condescending and insensitive. In the pool, I realized that he was the only person who had taken enough notice of me and Jeremy to comment, and I was very struck with that. From then on I watched him, and I noticed that when the Flowers showed up with Jeremy slouched behind, Charlie arranged it so that we were off together or with him, away from where the air was being punctured with icicles of politeness.

  Jeremy at the time was a tall, gangling boy with slate-blue, stricken eyes. He had been too tall too young and had kept his defensive slouch long after he had grown out of the need for it. He was Scholar of the Year at his school, and got the Greek and Latin award and the prize for the best French poem, so Charlie called him the White Hope. He loathed his parents and tolerated mine, but years of social pressure had worn him down. When he was angry, his voice was an outraged whine, but usually it was blunted at its edges and came out as a smudgy hostile murmur. With Jeremy, Charlie was impatient and savage. He would cut through Jeremy’s posed nastiness and drive him into actual fury. He said to me of Jeremy, “That punk’s got a great future ahead of him if he can tell his parents to go to hell and someone doesn’t knock him off for his affectations.” I thought this was very revolutionary talk from a parent. He said to me, of me, “You’re an all-right girl, but you should wear lipstick and not run around looking like some two-bit beatnik.” I wondered why we took it, and we did because Charlie found some mutual ground between you and him, and fought an honest battle there. Besides, he swore in front of us and told us that our mothers were hysterical, and that generally goes over well with adolescents.

  Charlie Hartz was a very ordinary-looking man. The few times I saw him in a suit, I was shocked at how much he looked like hundreds of men in suits. He was medium height, medium weight, and his hair was a medium cut—colorless dark brown that became spiky when wet. He had a trick knee, which made him sway slightly when he walked, and he wore the usual kind of black-rimmed glasses. He wore them when he swam, and for diving he had a piece of elastic that went around his head like an Indian band to keep them on. Flossie worried, but they never broke. My father said that Charlie took nothing seriously and that he played with his business, but it never occurred to me then that he was the only person I had ever known who knew how to play, and he put himself entirely into whatever he was doing. He rarely laughed, but when he did it was like a meal.

  Toward the end of the summer, Charlie gave Jeremy and me a going-away present. He said to Jeremy, “I’m taking the family to New York for the weekend. Clean the pool, will you?” I was standing next to Jeremy, so he meant me, too. He threw us the keys to the gate and said, “Keep an eye on it.” The pool was ours for the weekend. We decided on night swimming, which neither of us had ever done. Since our parents knew that Charlie had given us use of the pool, it was a sanctioned thing; if I came home late at night with wet hair, there was no need for explanations.

  There were lights around the side of the pool, and behind heavy glass plates there were lights in the pool. We turned them all out and lit candles in glasses and picked some overripe roses and tossed the petals in. The air was cold and the pool was like a vast warm bath. “We should swim naked,” Jeremy said. We sat on the edge considering this, our flesh puckered and dripping. Some moths had knocked themselves out on the candle glasses and were lying in little pools of water, beating the powder off their wings until they died. “Let’s,” he said. We were very shy about it. We took our suits off underwater and threw them to the side of the pool. The water folded over us. I had never been swimming at night and never been swimming naked, and I had never been naked with anyone before. We floated on our backs away from each other, testing how it felt. Then we played a few timid water games, ducking each other, to play out the strangeness of it. When we got out, it was cold and overcast. It was as if the water had mated us, and we dried each other with the solicitous tenderness of old couples. We became very modest, and dressed in the garage with our backs to each other.

  The next day, we cleaned the pool and went swimming at night until it rained. On Sunday night, the Hartzes came back and gave an impromptu party. Jeremy and I had to put in an appearance but Charlie maneuvered us to the door and we escaped. We drove to the arboretum and threw stones into the pond. I said, “When we were swimming naked, what do you think they were doing?”

  Jeremy said, “I don’t care. Whatever they were doing, the others were thinking about it and Charlie was doing it.”

  Then the police cruised by and chased us out.

  The last week before Jeremy left for Dartmouth was very difficult. We felt as if a conspiracy of parents was keeping us apart, but the fact was that no one bothered to think we needed to be together, so he was kept busy shopping and I was kept busy with being busy. We escaped to the Hartzes’ as a convenient refuge. That week it was cold, and no one would swim with Charlie except us. When it looked like rain, he would jump into the water and stay there until the lightning began, and Flossie would come from the house and scold him until he got out.

  Suddenly Jeremy was packed and gone, my sister went back to college, and I hung around waiting for my last year of high school to begin. Jeremy and I wrote every day, and Jeremy’s parents started complaining about the telephone bills he was running up calling me. There were two mild crises, and both involved Charlie Hartz.

  First, Willis and my sister split up temporarily, and since she and my mother weren’t speaking, I found out from Charlie one afternoon in October. He was keeping the pool open until it got really cold, and I would go and swim with him. After his lecture about how sloppy my backstroke was, he said, “Your sister and that lawyer fellow had a fight.”

  “How do you know?” I said.

  “I’m not as out of it as you think,” said Charlie. “She called me up at work and told me.”

  “What did you say?” I asked.

  “I said that long-distance things like this either play out or she’ll marry him. And by the way, how’s the Dartmouth wonder?”

  At the end of October, my sister and Willis became engaged and decided to get married after New Year’s. It was all part of the winter’s loss. My sister and I had never been close, but I was used to her being around as my sister, not as Willis’s wife. At their engagement party, Charlie winked at me and said, “I told you so.” I remember thinking how ghastly and prim he was, but what a good time he was having at it.

  Then one afternoon Charlie called me up. “Come to my office. It’s important. Your White Hope is here.”

  When I got there, Charlie met me at the door. He was impatient and put out. “Would you please tell Jeremy that he is not to quit school.”

  “Is that what he says?” I asked.

  “He says that everyone up there is illiterate and no one has ever heard of Samuel Beckett. Is he the guy who wrote Way of All Flesh?”

  “Samuel Butler,” I said.

  “Never read it,” he said.

  “What did you say?”

  “I told him that he was an adolescent punk, so he’s very pissed off. He doesn’t understand that he needs something to put his intelligence into.”

  I was dispatched to Jeremy, and we sat on a leather couch necking. Charlie gave us half an hour; then he appeared with sandwiches and beer from the delicatessen. We discussed the alternatives to going back to school. One of them was working for Charlie, learning how to be a stockbroker. One was to live at home and fight with his parents. One was to travel without money and end up with mononucleosis. Jeremy decided to stay home for the weekend and go back to Dartmo
uth.

  After he was gone, I thought about Charlie Hartz. It seemed that he was very bound up in my life, but apart from the summer and at my parents’ dinner parties I rarely saw him. What kept people like me and Jeremy and my sister around him was that Charlie got the best out of what you were at the time you were it. Jeremy was a punk and I was a sloppy adolescent, and Charlie both savored our conditions and responded to what we were without any of the condescension adults usually fall back on. When he discovered that I could draw, he made me teach him and he spent several hours a day drawing pictures of Minna, which he would make me criticize. To pay me back, he became merciless about my backstroke, standing like a raja at the end of the pool, shouting insults until I got out of the water, blue in the face, and told him to go to hell. He arched an eyebrow. “If you were some sort of a spastic, I’d leave you alone. But if you tried you’d have a really poetic backstroke going for you.” He didn’t mind laziness, as long as it was not laziness about doing something. He pried out of Jeremy that Jeremy took pictures, and the two of them spent an afternoon in the New Jersey swamps taking artistic photos of swamp grass. It gave both of them fantastic head colds. When he found out that my father knew how to install telephones, splicing into the Bell lines, and thereby cheating the telephone company, he and my father put an antique phone in every room of the Hartz house, and when Flossie complained that the ringing was driving her crazy they figured out a way to shut off the ringing and silenced ten of the phones. With my sister, he went diving and did the crosswords. He got all the obscurities, like brass money of India and water birds of the South Seas, and she got all the puns.

  As winter started, Flossie and her set began their serious socializing with the usual round of dinner parties. At this time, Charlie and some local boy built a little car out of old parts, which Charlie used as a golf cart-cum-Land-Rover, and he appeared at parties slightly oil-stained. The gate to the pool was locked, and there was a flat wooden roof fitted over it, so that if Minna managed to get through the gate she couldn’t fall in. After the first snowfall, he took Flossie and Minna to Barbados for two weeks.