Passion and Affect

by Laurie Colwin

  But Imelda was named for a song on the Zaida label, sung by Los Graduados. It was a song Jane Catherine and Tito danced to for hours in the privacy of Jane Catherine’s room. Had it not been for Imelda, this pleasure would have been unknown to them. Besides, Imelda was the genuine product, and Jane Catherine felt embarrassed about her record collection, her Spanish comic books, as if her love were simply poaching; that no matter how sincere her rapture at the Bronx Music Palace, she was slightly fraudulent.

  Jane Catherine approached Imelda shyly, and asked her in self-conscious Spanish how she did. Leah stood beside her, slouching on the famous pelvic bones. Imelda held on to her young man, who Jane Catherine knew was Freddy Bonafia.

  “You have an espanish boyfreng,” Imelda said, and then was silent. Since no one could find anything to say, they indulged in a spate of handshaking all around. Imelda had on a small diamond ring. She smiled at Freddy and they walked away.

  Leah and Jane Catherine walked to the lake and watched the boats.

  “Sometimes I can’t talk to anyone,” Jane Catherine said. There were tears in her eyes.

  “Don’t get overwrought.”

  “She had a ring on. She’s probably getting married. She’ll quit and I never even spoke to her.”

  “What did you want her to tell you?”

  “I didn’t want her to tell me anything,” said Jane Catherine. “I just wanted to talk to her. Tito and I used to see her at the Music Palace and it always made me feel terrible and out of place.”

  “Democracy is hard on everyone,” Leah said. “Remember Niles? I can’t even remember his last name. He was from the Roberts-Arco driving school. He was my driving teacher but he wanted to be a cop. We used to go up to Van Cortlandt Park and kiss. When I got my license, that was that. But he called to find out if I passed my driving test.”

  “It’s just that the world seems to be divided between Imelda and those rotten Bieberman twins,” said Jane Catherine, “and I’m on the wrong side.”

  “You’re not on any side. You’re a mutant, and so am I,” Leah said.

  “Tito is a free-lance,” said Jane Catherine. “For a genius, he’s sort of a blockhead. He doesn’t have any sentimental memory. When I think that a day is over and will never repeat, I get all ropy inside, but Tito thinks that life is a string that pulls you along.”

  They pulled their jackets tighter.

  “Who knows,” said Leah. “It probably is.”

  Imelda’s token room at the Jacobys’ was as bare as a bone, but her room in Washington Heights was another matter altogether. An enormous poster of Graucho and the band covered one wall. Over the bed hung a stuffed alligator, an enormous one. Affixed to its snout was a pair of sunglasses. Freddy’s numerous cowboy boots decorated the floor, singly and in pairs. They had three-inch heels, which brought his height up to six six. He was thin as a ruler and his trousers would have all been too short for him had not Imelda made him ornamental cuffs out of multicolored velvet. She and Freddy were fond of multicolored velvet. The bedspread was made of it, and one wall was covered with it.

  Together they had grandiose, technicolor dreams of domestic architecture: of a house built on stilts with a gabled roof made of bottles; of a coffee table made of a kettle drum; of a floor that was real grass. They wanted two babies called Flute and Cymba. They wanted a sequoia tree to bisect their living room. They were happy and visual. Two days after Imelda told Mrs. Jacoby in incomprehensible English that she was quitting, she and Freddy were married and pictures of their wedding appeared in the papers.

  Jane Catherine kept the clippings. She sent Imelda a bottle of champagne and the Jacobys sent an ornate silver candy dish, of the kind sent to distant cousins.

  Jane Catherine walked unhappily around Imelda’s old pantry room. There was nothing in it but the furniture and some dust. She sat in the armchair and contemplated her future: in the summer, she and Leah were going to take a course at the Université de Grenoble given for high school students, and they had fought hard for the privilege.

  “How can I let her go?” Mrs. Morrisy had agonized to her husband. “Alvin, how can I let her loose among the French? Oh, God, these kids. Why can’t they just go to tennis camp, like everyone else?”

  Mrs. Jacoby sighed as Jane Catherine procured six pairs of bluejeans for the event, and encrusted the cuffs of three of them with ten rows of solid buttons. Leah bought a pair of orange ballet slippers to wear on the boat across. Micky was going to Woods Hole to wash bottles for a marine biologist and Tito was going to his father’s horse farm in Argentina. Jane Catherine felt her lightness collapse. She thought of what she would pack to keep her happy in France: the belt Tito had given her, one of his socks, a little blue plush vampire bat. She knew that she was storing up memories the way the rich collect paintings. She knew that making memories was the same as making history. But it didn’t matter: she was crying anyway. Some day, she knew, this room, this time, Tito and Imelda, herself as she was now, would all be memory and it filled her with pain and tenderness. When she finished crying, she called Leah, who had been crying too. They met in the park and walked slowly downtown, to shop for what Leah called “trash items.”

  “It’s cosmic,” said Leah. “But it’s also because we’re precocious.”

  “Pretty soon we won’t even be that,” said Jane Catherine. “Pretty soon you and I will be talking about how dear and touching we were then, which is now, only later. It’s very dislocating to think about.”

  They sighed the light, profound sighs of adolescence and locked arms, since they were still young enough to do so. They walked without speaking, feeling very sage. Their steps were careful and precise, and as they walked toward the street and into the crowd, they knew that they were only two little girls, strolling past a line of trees.

  children, dogs, and desperate men

  AT AN ENGAGEMENT PARTY for her cousin Tom and Katie Rosenstatt, the art historian’s daughter, Elizabeth Bayard met a man called Richard Mignon. At the time of her introduction, she was sitting on the sofa with one of the innumerable Rosenstatt nephews asleep by her side, and Tom’s spaniel asleep on her feet.

  “Are you always barricaded by small fry?” said Richard Mignon, looking down at her. “I’m the well-known drunken cartographer. You’re Tom’s cousin and you write about music.”

  “I’ve never met a cartographer before,” said Elizabeth. “Not even a sober one.”

  “The drunken ones are better. We’re a very small, exclusive circle. We also do wine tasting. Care for a snort?”

  She held her glass out, and he filled it up. At first glance, he looked like a boy who has seen catastrophe, but on second look, he was a slightly wrecked, boyish man on the fringes of middle age. His eyes were blue and as wide as plates and his hair was thick, curly, and graying. He had taken off his jacket and his shirt-tail hung out. When the nephew had been taken off by his mother for a formal nap, Richard sat down, squashing Elizabeth into a corner.

  “Do you think there’s a causal connection between wine consumption and cartography?” she said.

  “Oh, absolutely,” said Richard Mignon. “My maps are all guesswork. Ancient cities, lost cities, places they only have accounts of. It takes me out of the real world. I can’t be expected to cope.”

  “You might use the subway guide as inspirational reading.”

  “I’ve considered it, believe me,” he said. “But as far as wine goes, these art historians always have the best, so I like to soak it up while I can.”

  “Situational gluttony,” said Elizabeth.

  “How well you understand these things,” Richard Mignon said.

  Tom Bayard was crazy about his cousin and he followed her the way you listen to a symphony with the score on your lap. To him she was serious, level-headed, and smart, but Elizabeth, who was recovering from an unhappy love affair, saw herself as shaken and out of place. She did not fall in love often, and when she did, she depended on what Tom called “refined instinct.” Since
she knew she was generally good-natured and cheerful, she was a little surprised at how long it was taking for her heart to mend, but her instinct had played her false, and that gave her cause for serious and painful thought. The less complicated side of her nature was clear to children, who adored her, and animals, who generally took bread at her hand.

  At the end of the evening, she and Richard Mignon shared a taxi downtown. He had consumed about two bottles of wine and behaved with the sloppy, affectionate dignity of a large dog, and held her hand as if it were an eggshell. She expected he would keep the cab, but instead he paid the driver and walked her to her door.

  “If I don’t get some coffee, I’m going to fall down the stairs,” he said, looking rattled and sad. “I know it’s terribly late.”

  He inspected her books while she made the coffee, and told her she was a beacon of kindness. He balanced the cup on his knees until the coffee was cold, and then drank it in two gulps.

  “Are we fated to meet only at engagement parties, or could we have dinner together?” he said.

  “No.”

  “No what? No dinner, or not only at parties?”

  “No dinner.”

  “Is there something about me you find apelike and disgusting?”

  “You’re married,” said Elizabeth.

  “Bless my soul,” said Richard Mignon. “You don’t often hear that in this day and age. Well, you’re a very sweet girl to have put up with me, drunken as I am.” He gave her a courtly kiss in the vicinity of her forehead, put on his coat, and walked unsteadily down the stairs.

  Two days later she received an elaborate note, in italic hand, apologizing for alcoholic behavior and inviting her to a publication party at the Renaissance Club for a book called The Structure of Renaissance Florence. He had done the maps. The postscript said: “Please, please be there.”

  Elizabeth put her feet up on her desk and studied the note. It was written on thick, cream-colored paper. She showed it to Tom.

  “What am I supposed to make of this?” she said.

  “He thinks you’re an attractive, intelligent girl and he wants you to come to his party.”

  “But if I go, Tom, he’ll think I’m flirting with him.”

  “It’s not against the law to flirt,” Tom said.

  “It’s pretty high on my list of sins,” said Elizabeth. “What’s the story on him?”

  “Katie says he’s married to a harpsichordist and they have six daughters or five sons. A lot of kids. He’s known for his bumptious charm.”

  “But if I go to this party, it’ll look as if I want him to come around.”

  “Elizabeth, you have more scruples than the Book of Common Prayer. He’s a nice fellow. You obviously find him interesting enough to think about. This doesn’t put you on the line. Why don’t you just go?”

  “I don’t like slight connections,” said Elizabeth. “These things don’t speak well of me. Look at George.”

  George was George Garzanti. He was a physicist, and the year before, he and Elizabeth had fallen in love at explosive first sight. They had met at a Christmas party and had been almost inseparable for about six months. There was no way, it seemed, in which they did not fit. Her best articles had been written at his kitchen table. They sat side by side, knees touching, in the library, looking up from their books to smile rhapsodically. George thought it was miraculous that they had met at all. These months filled Elizabeth with a joy intense enough to cause suspicion: nothing that luminous and sharp could last. George was recently divorced. He was moody and frenetic. Elizabeth waited for their situation to calm down, for some comfortable normalcy in which they could both relax, but George lived at a skittish and eruptive pace. He invented crises. He drove himself. Even his moments of concentrated tenderness were unnerving, followed as they were by panic and frenzy. It was hit and run.

  Finally, there was a showdown. Love was getting in the way of work, George said, and since she didn’t want obligation to fill the slot of affection, she let herself into his apartment one afternoon, collected her books, and left on his desk the books and clothing he had left at her apartment. Then she hung her set of keys on a hook by the door, and left, locking herself out.

  She assumed that it was over, but George, who could not find a way of incorporating her into his life, was not about to let her go. He wrote and phoned, but he had no emotional vocabulary to explain his feelings with, and finally she asked him not to call.

  The night before the publication party, the telephone rang and it was George. He said he had had a terrible dream about her, and wanted to know if she was all right. It knocked her backward to hear from him. She told him again not to call, and then cried herself to sleep.

  The Renaissance Club was a series of formal rooms in a mansion off Madison Avenue. People moved from room to room, leaving their drinks on Florentine tables. A flat band of smoke extended above their heads. Elizabeth lounged against the wall, waiting for Richard Mignon, or anyone else she knew. The wall opposite her was mirrored and when she looked across, she saw herself in a silk dress, her ashy hair brushed to a shine, grinning. Then she spotted him. He was surrounded, and the strain of politesse looked as if it was strangling him. He was holding a glass of wine, standing sideways, restless, anxious to get over to her, gesturing.

  Finally he was free, and dragged two chairs next to the window.

  “Are you very bored?” he said.

  “No. I always like looking around,” said Elizabeth.

  “A lot of old stiffs here,” he said.

  “If you don’t see all that many stiffs, it’s kind of a thrill.”

  “You’re making fun of me,” he said. “Why am I the target of everyone’s mirth?”

  “It’s probably because your socks don’t match,” said Elizabeth. He looked at his feet. One sock was green and the other gray. “I feel as if I’d been here for several months. I don’t have to stay. Let’s have a quick dinner.”

  He did most of the talking over the meal, and Elizabeth surveyed him. His charm was obviously the result of considerable cultivation, but it worked. Besides, there was something about him that was as innocent as a kitten, and he seemed to be perennially baffled. After dinner they found themselves cramped into another taxi.

  “This guy is trying to kill us,” he said, grabbing her shoulder, as the cab hurtled down the West Side highway.

  Once in her apartment, they were as tentative as adolescents. In a crowd, he was civilization itself, but faced alone with a girl he was abashed, and it was contagious. They drank wine standing up in front of her fireplace, and they talked about the Renaissance Club. It was not what Elizabeth wanted to hear: she wanted to know about his home life, and what lead him to be standing in her apartment, and why his wife hadn’t come to his publication party, but he kept such a tight rein on his conversation that any personal interjection would have been inappropriate, almost rude. When he finished his wine, he wound his muffler around his neck. It was midnight. She wondered if he were going to kiss her, and if so, how he would go about it.

  Like a boy at the end of a prom, he kissed her at the door, holding her by the elbows. It was a light, shy, boyish kiss.

  Then he looked at her intently. “Say something,” he said.

  “This is meant to be a sin,” she said.

  “Kissing?”

  “Kissing a married man.”

  He gave her a puzzled, dismissing look and then held her so close she felt that she was being impaled by the buttons on his Chesterfield. Then he gently pushed her away. She opened the door.

  “If there were another boring party to invite you to, I would, but there isn’t. I hope I’ll see you anyway,” he said, and left.

  Sometimes Elizabeth thought she would never get over George Garzanti, that he would stay with her like a splinter, sleeping under the skin. She wanted a life that was clear and straightforward, that made sense. George was like a tornado, or a random act of God.

  That night, she thought of Richard Mig
non. It was a balm of sorts to have a man pay court to her, but was she to Richard Mignon what George had been to her, urging on something she had no intention of fulfilling?

  They met again, at a large, formal dinner party. The Rosenstatts were there, and Tom and Katie. Richard Mignon introduced her to his wife, Violet, whose dry hand she shook. It was a large enough party to get lost in: there were a series of tables and she was separated from him by the length of the room. After dinner, she sat with Tom, and Justin Rosenstatt, Katie’s cousin. Richard Mignon stopped her at the door as she was leaving.

  “Are you going, so soon?” he said.

  “I’ve got work to do,” she said.

  “We must see each other again,” he said.

  She left in a kind of despair. George Garzanti occurred to her, sitting at his kitchen table, barefoot. Thinking about the intimacy they had constructed gave her a sense of loss as dizzying and palpable as an earthquake.

  Outside, she breathed the icy air and realized that, for all her high-mindedness, she was curious to see how far Richard Mignon would go, how much effort he would make on her behalf. She knew exactly what her limit was, and, probably, what she and Richard Mignon needed was an emotional clinch, something to wrap some withered or disappointed affections around. They would cling to each other some night, worked up to a misguided longing, and turn it down in the name of honor and good sense.

  Saturday afternoon, Tom and Katie appeared, bringing Becky, the spaniel, who was snappish from being in the park. Her paws were covered with shredded leaves. They dragged three armchairs in front of the fire and had coffee. Becky paced and snarled, and finally jumped into Elizabeth’s lap, where she slept for the rest of the afternoon, leaving Elizabeth covered with dog hairs. Tom said:

  “You seem to have captured Mignon’s heart.”

  “I haven’t captured anything.”

  “He’s always talking to you,” said Katie.