Passion and Affect

by Laurie Colwin

  Several men appear, armed with light meters, cables, and sound boxes. Three more ride on huge moving cameras that poke their snouts at and away from her. Over her head, a man is sitting on a metal catwalk surrounded by sound equipment. The director hangs a wire around her neck. At the end of it is a little metal pencil that he tells her is the microphone. “Talk into it,” he says.

  “Hello … hello,” says Essie.

  “Is that coming up, Jimmy?” he yells.

  “She has to say more,” answers a disembodied voice.

  “You have to say more,” the director says.

  “My topic is pollution and the human spirit in contemporary American fiction,” says Essie into the microphone.

  “Not so close into the mike,” shouts Jimmy.

  “You have to speak above it, Mrs. Beck. Not into it.”

  “My topic is pollution and the human spirit in contemporary American fiction,” she says carefully above her metal pencil.

  “O.K.,” says Jimmy.

  “Now Mrs. Beck,” says the director, “we’ve timed your speech …”

  She interrupts. “It’s not a speech. It’s a paper.”

  “Your paper,” says the director. “We read it through, and it should take twenty minutes, give or take. Now the thing to remember is: don’t rush, and just speak as you would normally.” He emphasizes the word “normally.” “I think you should read us several paragraphs just so we’ll get the feel of your voice.”

  Essie Beck gives him a professorial, puzzled look. The feel of her voice? As she begins to read, another man appears, carrying a doctor’s satchel.

  “Excuse me, Mrs. Beck. This is our makeup man. Put the lights full, Charlie.” The lights go up. Essie Beck squints.

  “Not so full on the eyes,” says the director, checking out her glasses. The lights dim.

  “I think,” the makeup man says, “we need a little powder. Just around the eyes and nose. And a little eye liner.”

  “Wait a minute,” says Essie. “Am I supposed to read a few paragraphs or not?”

  “In a minute, Mrs. Beck. Just a little powder,” says the director.

  “This is not a quiz show. I’m a college professor, not a model.”

  “Certainly, Mrs. Beck,” says the director, looking at her. “This is a very dignified competition, but it’s still television.”

  “If you don’t have some powder, you’ll come out like a shiny pumpkin,” adds the makeup man.

  Essie Beck looks at him. “Oh, will I,” she says tartly.

  “It’s just a little,” explains the makeup man. “We have to do it—the lights and all. Really, everyone has to have it. Walter Cronkite has it. Even the President has it. All the other ladies we taped had it.”

  “All right,” says Essie. “But just a little.” She suffers her face to be powdered. A slimy feeling runs across her eyelids as the eye liner is applied.

  “O.K.,” says the makeup man grimly, stepping back. “Great.”

  While they set the lights and position the camera, Essie wonders who “all the other ladies” are. She and Stuart have made calculated guesses: after all, the community of scholars is small and interwoven. They are pretty sure that one is Joan Splenny, the constitutional law scholar, and another is probably Sylvia Vesparrugio, the marine biologist. One of them, she is very sure, is Virginia Cadwalder, her old Radcliffe rival, a sociologist. According to the alumnae bulletin, Virginia Cadwalder appeared in the “People Are Talking About” section of Vogue, and it is Essie’s belief that she is not a reliable academic.

  “Tell me,” says Essie to the director in a carefully absent tone, “have you taped Virginia Cadwalder yet?”

  “Now Mrs. Beck, you know it’s against the rules and spirit of this competition to say who’s in it.”

  “I’d forgotten,” she says in her Oxford ladies’ college voice. She settles in her chair as they adjust the lights for the last time. The powder weighs heavily on her face and she feels somewhat smudgy about the eyes, but still, she is beyond confidence. Under the desk she crosses her feet and lets her heels slip out of her shoes. Now she feels just as if she were on Riverside Drive with her bedroom slippers on.

  She arranges her notes in front of her and gives the first page a brief, satisfied skim-through. They are all lined up in front of her: the director, the makeup man, the gaffers, and the camera grips, the sound men, and the newspaper photographers. The cameras move in like tanks. They are taking her in. The makeup man whispers “hair” to the director, who looks at her and shakes his head. She feels as Moses must have felt confronting a line of Israelites before giving them the Ten Commandments.

  As a last touch, one of them puts a little plastic sign in front of her. It reads, in raised black letters on a gray background: Essaline T. Beck.

  “My topic is pollution and the human spirit in contemporary American fiction,” she begins.

  Stuart Beck fills his pipe. He has had dinner out and is drinking a cup of Sanka. The television is on and the announcer is talking about the Smartest Woman in America Competition, what it means to education and to women in general. Then the judges are presented. They appear in various states of tweed and pin stripe, looking either as bland as squash or pinched and harried. The famous editor looks like a boyish gangster. The President has sent his good wishes and his hopes that events of this sort will set an example for the youth of the nation. A lady journalist makes a short speech. She says that although the winner will not, of course, be the smartest woman in America, she will be a symbol of all that is best in women, and that this competition gives stature to the cause of women’s rights and is an inspiration to young girls. Now the papers are to be read. The first is given by Sylvia Vesparrugio, the marine biologist. Stuart drowses over The New Statesman, pleased that he and Essie have guessed one right.

  “I only half watched, Es. Yours was clearly the only relevant one,” he will say.

  Next comes an ecologist whose name is unfamiliar to Stuart. He writes it down on a pad. Then Joan Splenny, the constitutional law scholar, appears, and Stuart smiles to himself. Finally there is Essie, and there will be one more after her. The commentator says her name, where she went to school, where she got each of her three degrees, in what journals she has published, and that her husband is Stuart Beck, a New York lawyer who with his wife is co-author of a monograph entitled Law in the Novels of Charles Dickens.

  Essie’s face is on the screen, blurred by the lines of the television. Stuart wonders if a face he knows so well is blurred, how blurred are the faces he doesn’t know? He makes a note on the pad to call the television repair people. Her face is flat, like a face on a poster. Stuart fiddles with the fine tuner, trying to get a clearer picture, but it remains fuzzy. Essie reads her paper, looking up from time to time, glittering behind her spectacles. It is clearly the best speech. Stuart wonders who the last contestant will be. He hopes it will be Virginia Cadwalder: Essie will be so glad to beat her. He could recite the paper along with Essie, they have been over it so many times. When she is finished, she smiles the smile of a lecturer and is followed by the announcement of a future program about Uganda.

  Essie is being lifted away from Washington, and the lights on the runway blink spastically. She has rather liked Washington. A member of the National Science Foundation took her to the National Gallery. She sits back in her seat, comfortable in the knowledge that Stuart is at home on Riverside Drive watching her on television. She has never been in two places at the same time before. At this moment, the thing she wants most is to see the pad on which Stuart has promised to write the names of the other contestants. It is the horsefly in the ointment of her satisfaction that she doesn’t know whom she is beating. Since it is obvious to her that she will win, it not a question of tension or nerves, but she wants to know what she calls “the level of the competition.” After the taping she was shown around the studio, feigning interest, but what she was really after was any chart, program sheet, schedule, or announcement that would
tell her what she wanted to know. When she left the studio she looked at the doorman and wondered if he knew and were approachable. The thought occurred to her in a weak moment that money buys information, but she rejected it immediately as a notion born of the corrupting influence of having been in a television studio.

  On the plane she almost itches with irritation that she cannot even see who the contestants are. It is a short flight from Washington to New York, and a short ride from the airport to Riverside Drive. Stuart offered to pick her up, but his place is by the television set, marking down the names of the other women. Of course, in a few hours she will know who they are, but she will not be able to witness their performance until the award ceremony at the Smithsonian, when the entire program will be rebroadcast. Then she will get her award—a money grant—which she will use to finish her book on linguistics and the ethics of American fiction.

  She is quite comfortable, and it is not until midway through the flight that an image of Virginia. Cadwalder flashes through her mind, sporting a halo on which the words “People Are Talking About” are printed. She wishes that she believed in telepathic communication and that she were in communication with Stuart right now. Then she pushes Virginia Cadwalder out of her mind and begins to make mental notes of her acceptance speech. Finally, she projects the smile of triumph on Stuart’s face when she walks in the door.

  The stewardess brings her a snack of Danish and coffee, which she exchanges for Sanka. She feels somewhat cheated that the stewardess does not know who she is and what she has done. It would have been nice to be recognized. But of course tomorrow they will all know not only who she is and what she has done, but what she is: the Smartest Woman in America.

  The man sitting next to her is sleeping with his mouth open and as he sighs, a little puff of gin emerges. Finally he wakes up and stretches. Of course he has no way of knowing who is sitting next to him. He pulls The New York Times out of his briefcase and starts to work on the half-finished crossword puzzle, but he is stuck on a French composer, five letters long, whose third letter is “t.”

  Essie reads over his shoulder. “Satie,” she says. It fits. He thanks her.

  mr. parker

  MRS. PARKER died suddenly in October. She and Mr. Parker lived in a Victorian house next to ours, and Mr. Parker was my piano teacher. He commuted to Wall Street, where he was a securities analyst, but he had studied at Juilliard and gave lessons on the side—for the pleasure of it, not for money. His only students were me and the church organist, who was learning technique on a double-keyboard harpsichord Mr. Parker had built one spring.

  Mrs. Parker was known for her pastry; she and my mother were friends, after a fashion. Every two months or so they spent a day together in the kitchen baking butter cookies and cream puffs, or rolling out strudel leaves. She was thin and wispy, and turned out her pastry with abstract expertness. As a girl, she had had brightred hair, which was now the color of old leaves. There was something smoky and autumnal about her: she wore rust-colored sweaters and heather-colored skirts, and kept dried weeds in ornamental jars and pressed flowers in frames. If you borrowed a book from her, there were petal marks on the back pages. She was tall, but she stooped as if she had spent a lifetime looking for something she had dropped.

  The word “tragic” was mentioned in connection with her death. She and Mr. Parker were in the middle of their middle age, and neither of them had ever been seriously ill. It was heart failure, and unexpected. My parents went to see Mr. Parker as soon as they got the news, since they took their responsibilities as neighbors seriously, and two days later they took me to pay a formal condolence call. It was Indian summer, and the house felt closed in. They had used the fireplace during a recent cold spell, and the living room smelled faintly of ash. The only people from the community were some neighbors, the minister and his wife, and the rabbi and his wife and son. The Parkers were Episcopalian, but Mr. Parker played the organ in the synagogue on Saturday mornings and on High Holy Days. There was a large urn of tea, and the last of Mrs. Parker’s strudel. On the sofa were Mrs. Parker’s sisters, and a man who looked like Mr. Parker ten years younger leaned against the piano, which was closed. The conversation was hushed and stilted. On the way out, the rabbi’s son tried to trip me, and I kicked him in return. We were adolescent enemies of a loving sort, and since we didn’t know what else to do, we expressed our love in slaps and pinches and other mild attempts at grievous bodily harm.

  I loved the Parkers’ house. It was the last Victorian house on the block, and was shaped like a wedding cake. The living room was round, and all the walls curved. The third floor was a tower, on top of which sat a weathervane. Every five years the house was painted chocolate brown, which faded gradually to the color of weak tea. The front-hall window was a stained-glass picture of a fat Victorian baby holding a bunch of roses. The baby’s face was puffy and neuter, and its eyes were that of an old man caught in a state of surprise. Its white dress was milky when the light shone through.

  On Wednesday afternoons, Mr. Parker came home on an early train, and I had my lesson. Mr. Parker’s teaching method never varied. He never scolded or corrected. The first fifteen minutes were devoted to a warmup in which I could play anything I liked. Then Mr. Parker played the lesson of the week. His playing was terrifically precise, but his eyes became dreamy and unfocused. Then I played the same lesson, and after that we worked on the difficult passages, but basically he wanted me to hear my mistakes. When we began a new piece, we played it part by part, taking turns, over and over.

  After that, we sat in the solarium and discussed the next week’s lesson. Mr. Parker usually played a record and talked in detail about the composer, his life and times, and the form. With the exception of Mozart and Schubert, he liked Baroque music almost exclusively. The lesson of the week was always Bach, which Mr. Parker felt taught elegance and precision. Mrs. Parker used to leave us a tray of cookies and lemonade, cold in the summer and hot in the winter, with cinnamon sticks. When the cookies were gone, the lesson was over and I left, passing the Victorian child in the hallway.

  In the days after the funeral, my mother took several casseroles over to Mr. Parker and invited him to dinner a number of times. For several weeks he revolved between us, the minister, and the rabbi. Since neither of my parents cared much about music, except to hear my playing praised, the conversation at dinner was limited to the stock market and the blessings of country life.

  In a few weeks, I got a note from Mr. Parker enclosed in a thank-you note to my parents. It said that piano lessons would begin the following Wednesday.

  I went to the Parkers’ after school. Everything was the same. I warmed up for fifteen minutes, Mr. Parker played the lesson, and I repeated it. In the solarium were the usual cookies and lemonade.

  “Are they good, these cookies?” Mr. Parker asked.

  I said they were.

  “I made them yesterday,” he said. “I’ve got to be my own baker now.”

  Mr. Parker’s hair had once been blond, but was graying into the color of straw. Both he and Mrs. Parker seemed to have faded out of some bright time they once had lived in. He was very thin, as if the friction of living had burned every unnecessary particle off him, but he was calm and cheery in the way you expect plump people to be. On teaching days, he always wore a blue cardigan, buttoned, and a striped tie. Both smelled faintly of tobacco. At the end of the lesson, he gave me a robin’s egg he had found. The light was flickering through the bunch of roses in the window as I left.

  When I got home, I found my mother in the kitchen, waiting and angry.

  “Where were you?” she said.

  “At my piano lesson.”

  “What piano lesson?”

  “You know what piano lesson. At Mr. Parker’s.”

  “You didn’t tell me you were going to a piano lesson,” she said.

  “I always have a lesson on Wednesday.”

  “I don’t want you having lessons there now that Mrs. Parker’s gone.
” She slung a roast into a pan.

  I stomped off to my room and wrapped the robin’s egg in a sweat sock. My throat felt shriveled and hot.

  At dinner, my mother said to my father, “I don’t want Jane taking piano lessons from Mr. Parker now that Mrs. Parker’s gone.”

  “Why don’t you want me to have lessons?” I said, close to shouting. “There’s no reason.”

  “She can study with Mrs. Murchison.” Mrs. Murchison had been my first teacher. She was a fat, myopic woman who smelled of bacon grease and whose repertoire was confined to “Little Classics for Children.” Her students were mostly under ten, and she kept an asthmatic chow who was often sick on the rug.

  “I won’t go to Mrs. Murchison!” I shouted. “I’ve outgrown her.”

  “Let’s be sensible about this,” said my father. “Calm down, Janie.”

  I stuck my fork into a potato to keep from crying and muttered melodramatically that I would hang myself before I’d go back to Mrs. Murchison.

  The lessons continued. At night I practiced quietly, and from time to time my mother would look up and say, “That’s nice, dear.” Mr. Parker had given me a Three-Part Invention, and I worked on it as if it were granite. It was the most complicated piece of music I had ever played, and I learned it with a sense of loss; since I didn’t know when the ax would fall, I thought it might be the last piece of music I would ever learn from Mr. Parker.

  The lessons went on and nothing was said, but when I came home after them my mother and I faced each other with division and coldness. Mr. Parker bought a kitten called Mildred to keep him company in the house. When we had our cookies and lemonade, Mildred got a saucer of milk.

  At night, I was grilled by my mother as we washed the dishes. I found her sudden interest in the events of my day unnerving. She was systematic, beginning with my morning classes, ending in the afternoon. In the light of her intense focus, everything seemed wrong. Then she said, with arch sweetness, “And how is Mr. Parker, dear?”