Passion and Affect

by Laurie Colwin

  “I can’t help it, I can’t sleep

  It’s like walking right through smoke

  From the fire in my heart that burns for you.

  As you sow so shall you reap

  But believe me it’s no joke

  The fire in my heart that burns for you.”

  Dinner was ready when Richard got home, and the carton was sitting on his chair. He pulled his chair out, saw it, and asked Patricia what it was.

  “It’s your birthday present,” she said. Richard looked at it with suspicion, but he was visibly touched.

  “Should I open it now or wait till after dinner?” he asked.

  “After,” said Patricia, but it was a bad choice. She could scarcely eat in anticipation.

  Dinner finished, Richard untied the green ribbon and tore off the yellow paper. Then he took the tissue paper carefully from each volume and stacked them on the table. He pushed his chair back and asked Patricia where she got the money to buy it.

  “I worked as a typist, part-time.”

  “Where?”

  “At a place called Harley’s Auto Supply off Route 3.”

  “Why did you do that?”

  She looked at him, on the verge of tears. “To get your birthday present for you.”

  Richard drummed his fingers on the top volume. Then he folded the tissue paper neatly and restacked the books in the carton. Patricia watched him, squinting, one leg wrapped around the other.

  “I’m very touched,” said Richard. “But we have to take them back.”

  “But you said … when we were downtown, you always said you wanted it.”

  “Pat, I’m very touched, but I think you misunderstand. I’m really touched that you wanted to get me a birthday present, but I can’t possibly approve of what you did to get it. If you wanted to work, you should work for you, not to get things for me. It’s a way of buying me. I couldn’t possibly keep this knowing that you worked at some awful job to get it for me. It’s slavish.”

  By this time, Patricia was weeping into her napkin. “I don’t think they’ll take it back,” she said. “It’s second-hand.”

  “I want you to do things for you, Pat,” said Richard softly.

  The following Saturday, they drove downtown. The bookstore would not take back the set of the Arden Shakespeare since it was second-hand, although in mint condition. Richard was silent on the drive back, and Patricia thought he was angry, but at home he arranged the set carefully on one of his shelves. He displaced several volumes of Matthew Arnold, George Meredith, and Henry James in the process. He spent the rest of the afternoon rearranging his shelves in order to find a proper slot for each one.

  Monday afternoon, Richard came home early. Patricia was sitting in front of the speaker listening to Rad McClosky. She had hardly moved out of the chair all day. She heard the key turn in the door and Richard appeared.

  “Hello,” she said brightly.

  “Would you turn that off, please?”

  Patricia switched off the stereo and sat back in her chair.

  “Pat,” said Richard. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing’s wrong. I’m just fine.”

  “Pat, you are not just fine. You haven’t been fine for quite a while. I’ve been very concerned about you recently, and we haven’t talked about it at all. I came home early today to really sit down with you.”

  “There’s nothing wrong,” said Patricia. “I’m fine.”

  “Pat, come on. You’ve let everything go. You don’t seem to want to do anything any more. You fall into this childish ennui. There are any number of things you can do, you know that. But it seems to me that all you do is sit around the house and listen to that ape boy and his slide guitars. Is that what you do?”

  Patricia stood up and took the record off the record player. Then she broke it over her knee.

  “No,” she said.

  That night she slept badly. There had been no fight, no discussion. At dinner, Richard began to speak of her inability to cope, a favorite phrase of his, and Patricia uttered six commonplace words she had never said before as a sentence. “I don’t want to discuss it,” she said. After dinner Richard worked on Pain in Its Simplicity and his lectures. Patricia hemmed a skirt and was in bed with the light off when Richard came to sleep. He went to sleep at once: he was an immediate but light sleeper. Patricia was stiff on her side of the bed. She knew how easily his sleep was broken and she didn’t want to interrupt it. Tears spilled out of her eyes and down her cheeks. She wondered if she had broken the record out of childish pique or as a concession to Richard, a sign that she would do better. Then she wondered how she was going to live without Rad McClosky, and the tears spilled faster. She looked over at Richard, asleep on his side in striped pajamas. They were as separate as the eggs in the icebox. After lying awake rigidly for hours, she fell asleep as the dawn came up. When she woke it was ten thirty and Richard had gone to his classes.

  She made the bed, had a cup of coffee, and washed the dishes. In the living room she saw that the record was lying on the floor in two jagged pieces. Richard had left them there to remind her. She picked them up and tried to fit the pieces together. They connected for an instant and fell apart in her hands. She threw them into the wicker basket. Then she sat in the chair in front of the stereo and thought about her first college beau, and of her roommate. She was the same girl now that she had been then, she thought. She went into the bedroom and packed a book bag with two pairs of underpants, a blouse and skirt, a comb, brush, and extra toothbrush—nothing that would be missed. She wrote a note and taped it to the icebox, the place messages were left. It read:

  Richard: The car is in my name and I am taking it for a drive. I may be back, but may not. Patricia.

  She drove to Flame’s Discount Record store and bought another copy of Closing Doors. Once in the car, she was confronted with Indiana. All she knew of it was the triangle that formed her life there: from house to downtown, from downtown to University, and from University to shopping center. Even Harley’s Auto Supply had fallen within this pattern. The thought of the expressway frightened her: sign upon sign upon sign. Besides, it was a toll road and she had only six dollars, Rad McClosky having claimed four of her ten. She drove away from Flame’s on a road she had never taken. She knew it did not lead downtown, or to the University, or to home. For an hour she drove abstractly with the radio on, past rows of frame houses, past factories and oil refineries. She passed through a series of small towns. At the edge of each was a marker giving its name, date of founding, and density of population. She was welcomed by the Elks, Optimists, Kiwanis, and Hoosier clubs, and the Methodist and Episcopal churches. After three hours, she knew she was lost. Listening to the radio distracted her and she had made several turns. She thought she might drive to Connecticut, but she had no idea what highway to take, how long the trip would be, how much the tolls and gas would cost. Besides, if she got to Connecticut, what would she say? She was not a daughter: she was a wife.

  The radio played all the songs she liked, “Closing Doors,” “Hickory Holler’s Tramp,” and “A Road in Arkansas.” She sang the chorus:

  “Down this road in Arkansas, I can’t even see a sign

  My tears have lead me down the highway

  All I know is you’re not mine, and I’m lonely and I’m poor

  And I’m stranded on this road in Arkansas.”

  She tried to substitute “Indiana” for “Arkansas” but it didn’t fit.

  She wondered what Richard was doing, if he had come home early and found her note. Would he call the highway patrol, or would he wait for her to come back? If she called the house, would he be there? It would be easy enough to get back: all she need do was pull in at a gas station and get directions.

  She was in the middle of a flat road, surrounded by mud-colored fields. If she got home before Richard, she could untape the note and he would never know that she had left. If she came back and he was there, he would be sitting in the study or in the li
ving room with her note in his hand. It got later as she drove.

  A light rain smudged the windshield. The sky darkened and large drops hit the windows on a slant. The road was shiny and slick.

  “The next gas station,” she said aloud. “I’ll stop at the next gas station.”

  The sky was the color of tin. She looked at her watch and it was much later in the afternoon than she had thought. A sign on the road said “Gas five miles.” She drove until she could see a Gulf sign around the bend. She stayed on the right, and signaled to turn, but her hand stayed steady on the wheel and she looked at the road ahead through the spaces the windshield wipers cleared for her. Finally, she saw the Gulf station in the rear-view mirror.

  She made a pact that she would stop at the next one. She swore she would. She was longing to turn back. Miles of gray road stretched in front of her. Her foot was tired on the accelerator. On the seat next to her was the new copy of Closing Doors. When she saw the sign announcing gas in three miles, she was filled with gladness and resolve. Coming up to it she could see that it was a brick station with a shingled roof. She downshifted carefully into third. It was Richard who had taught her how to drive a stick shift. He had been very patient. “It’s the only way to drive, Pat. If you’re going to drive a car, you may as well drive a real one,” he had said.

  Her blinker signaled a right turn. There were no cars in back of her. Her hand went out and she turned on the radio up full, so loud that she could not hear the rain. Shifting into fourth she shot past the station and looked into the rear-view mirror only when she knew it would be a dot far off down the road.

  the smartest woman in america

  ESSIE BECK is sitting in a hotel room in Washington, D.C. The television is on with the sound turned down, for she feels quite close to the pulse of the news. Her hotel room is a comfortable one—it has none of the cheap, rough edges of hotel rooms—pale, soft, and expensive, and Essie is sitting in one of its soft, old-world chairs. Her feet, in flannel travel slippers, are resting on a table. With one hand she is making corrections on her lecture with a ballpoint pen. There are very few corrections to be made in this paper—she has been over it five times and is completely satisfied with it, although by this time it has the stale quality of home-baked pastry overadmired by its cook.

  The mouths of the newsmen flap open and shut and they might be singing opera for all the interest she has in them. They have already reported that the Smartest Woman in America Competition is in its final stages and that tomorrow the contestants are to tape their lectures. Tomorrow, at 10:45. Essie will go to the Educational Television studio, where she will read her paper and be taped. This is the final leg of the competition, which she knows with a feeling of certainty, warm as the inside of a piece of toast, she will win. The only hook into her sureness is that she does not know who the other contestants are. It is a rule of the contest that the participants are not publicly announced, never see or confront one another, and in fact never know who the other contestants are until after the winner has been selected.

  Another of the provisions is that during the final judging (which is done by televising the taped lectures to a panel of judges in the studio), the contestants must be on their various ways home, so that even then they cannot see themselves or their rivals. Several months ago, when the rules were sent to Essie, she expressed puzzlement.

  “I don’t really understand that,” Essie said to her husband, Stuart.

  “It gives it a certain purity,” said Stuart. “I mean, what did you expect, Es? To get orchids for being the smartest woman in America? This isn’t a quiz show, with prizes. It puts the competitive element on a higher plane.”

  “I still think it’s kind of odd,” Essie said.

  “Intelligence,” said Stuart, pulling on his pipe, “is its own reward.”

  It is a very dignified contest judged by two college presidents, the Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, the head of the National Science Foundation, the education editor of The New York Times, a senior editor from a distinguished publishing house, and the head of the Ford Foundation. The five finalists are given a loose topic, made up by the panel of judges, and each composes a paper. This year’s topic is “The Effect of Technology on the Human Spirit.” Essie, who teaches contemporary literature, has written on “Pollution and the Human Spirit in Contemporary American Fiction.” It is a splendid and capable paper. It is not out of any intellectual aggression that she knows she will win: she simply knows a good thing when she sees it.

  Small, runty, and rooty, she looks like a young edition of an old, gnarled tree. She has wispy brown hair, cut short and efficient. Both she and Stuart, a lawyer, have sober, unimaginative faces. In this serious world they are not often amused, but an occasional cartoon in The New Yorker makes them laugh politely. The two of them hang together like icicles. They have never been asked, but if they were, they would say that love is not an issue relevant to the twentieth century. They will eventually have two children. Life is tidy and satisfactory and functional, like water—good in itself. Although they are healthy in the way wiry people are, they often look a bit seedy, as if they suffered from minor ailments such as falling arches and thinning hair. But they suffer from neither: they merely look as if they do.

  Two nights ago, Essie and Stuart were sitting over coffee on Riverside Drive. The Sharps and the Robarts had been over for dinner and Alice Robart had done the dishes “to take some of the strain off,” though Essie insisted that the strain wasn’t on. Then they left, and Essie and Stuart were talking about what the ghost of Hamlet’s father means.

  “I think it’s just to bring the familial element into very strong focus,” Essie said.

  “Well, it could be a kind of legal device. It lets the audience know that a wrong has been done and that Hamlet is in the right,” said Stuart. Whenever they discussed anything, they sat very eagerly, their upper torsos pressing against the table.

  “But it also has to do with Hamlet’s madness,” Essie said.

  “Yes, dear. But in Shakespeare’s time, they did believe in ghosts, so Hamlet’s madness has nothing to do with that. It’s on another level entirely.”

  Essie bit at her cuticle. She is a reasonable woman. There was something to that.

  Later, she sat in bed rereading The Scarlet Letter. Stuart sat on his side of the bed in striped pajamas, reading Foreign Affairs. He smelled of fresh towels.

  “Say, Es. You’re only in Washington for two days, you ought to splurge. Buy a dress where all the Senate wives get theirs.”

  “It’s no big event,” said Essie, but it wasn’t a bad idea.

  “Will you get your hair done?” he asked, loading his pipe. He always had a pipe before bed.

  “Hair done? Good Lord, no. I haven’t had my hair done in years, since college graduation.”

  “You had your hair done when we got married,” said Stuart, puffing.

  “That was different.”

  “Well, but you’ll be on television.”

  “That,” said Essie, “is their business, not mine. Besides, why should I have my brain fried by a hair dryer. I couldn’t possibly read under one of those things, with all those chattering women. As you said, this is a dignified event, not a quiz show. I’m supposed to look like a college professor, which is what I am.”

  “You could have it done dignified,” Stuart suggested.

  “Stuart,” said Essie, in the clipped twang she saved for being annoyed, “hairdressers can’t be trusted. I see no reason why I should look like Lady Astor’s horse just to read a paper on pollution and literature on television.”

  “It’s national…”

  “I’m fine just the way I am. I’ll just be who I am,” said Essie.

  “It’s just a thought, Es. It’ll be like a little vacation for you.”

  “It’ll be just like being here, except I’ll be in Washington.”

  “Just a thought,” he said, knocking out his pipe.

  The lights hang aroun
d like gnats, but gnats made out of neon or tiny two-hundred-watt bulbs. They seem to be pointed at her eyes, and she blinks behind the glasses she wears for reading and going to the movies. “Too much light off those glasses,” says a young man in a blue shirt, consulting his light meter. Next to him is a mustachioed man with a camera who is taking still shots for the newspaper.

  “Have her sit down, like she’s reading her lecture,” he says.

  “Really, I think this is silly,” says Essie. An older man appears. He looks rather like the man who had been her dissertation adviser.

  “Can you get her to sit and pose reading her lecture?” the man with the camera asks him.

  “Mrs. Beck, I’m the director of this show. Can you sit and look as if you’re reading your lecture, so the newspapers can have a picture?”

  “I think it’s really very silly,” says Essie.

  “For the newspapers, Mrs. Beck.” He takes her elbow, as if she were a mental patient. “Can you put your head up, Mrs. Beck?” says the man with the camera.

  “How can I read with my head up?” she asks, sharply.

  “We won’t be able to see your face. Anyway, you’re not supposed to read. You’re only supposed to look like it.” She looks up, but just. The man with the camera shoots. Little points of light concentrate in the middle of her eyes. Squinting, she takes a hard look at the director, wondering how she can get him to tell her who the competition is. Since he looks like her dissertation adviser, she decides he is the one to approach. She is thinking of a subtle way to ask, but the director interrupts.

  “Now, Mrs. Beck,” he says. “I’ll take you to the set. We had it decorated like a home library. It’s very tasteful. Underdone. You’ll be very comfortable.” He takes her by the elbow and leads her deeper into the studio, stepping over pythonlike cables and wormy strings of wires. Alone and abandoned amidst huge cameras, spotlights hanging like iron bananas, machines on dollies, drooping microphones and more wires is the “set,” a room with two of its walls hacked off, lined with bookshelves. The books are old leatherbound law reviews, The Congressional Record, Diseases of the Skin, Volumes VI through XLV, and an encyclopedia. There is also a desk with false drawers on the front and no back. She sits in the chair provided for her and looks out over the desk.