Shine On, Bright & Dangerous Object

by Laurie Colwin

  There is something horrible about available emotions. Overuse cheapens every time. Six months before I dumped poor Eddie Liebereu for Sam, he had discovered a facility in himself for tears and seemed to fall in love with the idea of crying. He told me he was being liberated from his more rigid side, the side that told him men don’t cry. I said I had seen men cry on occasion, but then it seemed to me that Eddie was crying quite a lot. Tears welled up in his eyes the way they do in children. After one great bout of weeping, he told me that he was finally in touch with his emotions and that he no longer felt it was unmanly to cry. Thereafter, he wept at the drop of a hat or shoe or ignition key. Otherwise, he was as of old. Even in those excessive college days, when I could indulge in tears by locking my door and putting on the Marvelettes singing “Please Mr. Postman,” or the second movement of the second Prokofiev violin concerto, depending on what sort of weep I wanted, I was touched by Eddie and his emotional freedom until I discovered that nothing else about him was any different. He had simply turned into what used to be called a crybaby. Tears in public cost, and even a group of two is public. It seemed to me that you cried in front of people you trusted and that they created a bond. Eddie splattered his trust like fingerpaint in kindergarten, and when I went off with Sam I knew I was right.

  Sam never cried, which was probably as bad, except that it had more dignity to it. The one time he did break down it was the real thing. It came at the end of an all-night drunk, after he passed the bar exams. Patrick was there, and Danny Sanderson, with a girl whose name I don’t remember, and two classmates of Sam’s, John Murphy and Reuben Heifitz. And me, but at about one o’clock in the morning I flaked out and drove home. At seven in the morning, Sam appeared. He looked quite morbid, and I later learned that he had had a bottle of Scotch and several hundred beers. He also looked beaten, bloated, and sick. I was half asleep but I think he must have stayed in the bathroom for an hour. When I got up, he was asleep on the living-room floor with a laundry bag under his head and a pair of gloves over his eyes. I managed to get him off the floor and into bed. His last words, before he passed out, were, “Forgive me.”

  I spent the morning waiting for him to wake up, thinking that if I had decided to tie one on, I would have informed Sam, hit every bar in town, spent at least fifty dollars in quarters on the jukebox, danced till I dropped, been sick several times, and kept on going. When I had had enough, I would have gotten myself home, kissed my wiry spouse, and passed out. I would have spent the day in my bathrobe, sipping tea and staggering back to normalcy. At the end of the day, I would have had a light and succulent supper and gone to sleep newborn.

  When Sam woke up, he was green. I gave him tea and toast and he went back to sleep. Late in the afternoon, he took a shower and appeared wrapped in a big orange towel with his hair slicked down. He sat on the edge of the couch with his head in his hands, and at first I thought he was only getting used to what must have been, or should have been, a massive hangover. When I put my arm around his shoulder, he buried his face against me and began to sob.

  “I wish someday you’d tell me how essentially worthless I am,” he said. “Why do I do it? Why do I do it?”

  “Do what?”

  “I get myself sick. I let all my shiftless impulses take over and I never do anything anyone could be proud of.”

  I reminded him that all he had done was to get drunk, that the cause of the drunk was his passing the bar exam. I told him how much I loved him, and that everything he did made me proud. His eyes were red and he was pouting, but he really was stricken, for all that he looked like a spanked boy.

  “Name one thing,” he said. “One thing you could be proud of.”

  “If I were the outside world, I’d say the law review, your senior thesis, and having Henry Jacobs admire you.”

  He stared at the rug, and when he turned to me the expression in his eyes was truly bitter.

  “Those are the stickers on my windshield,” he said. “Not the floor I stand on.” Then he let himself be comforted, and the next day he was as good as new. He knew what those windshield stickers were worth, but for that one moment, when he forgot, he was desolate.

  8

  The first three months in New York, besides getting used to my surroundings, I did almost nothing but think about Sam. I wanted to know what was his part and what was mine. I thought about Patrick coming into the kitchen the morning after the funeral to tell me that I had been spared the misery of eventual divorce. And I did not want to remember, but I did, that at the moment he said it I had known it was true. The more I thought about it, the less I could locate anything, clouded by love and loss.

  I kept my time to myself because I needed to. Nothing was going to be normal until I made it so, but since I hadn’t, it seemed just and proper to face the chaos, which I knew was finite. So I did not call Henry Jacobs’ friend Max Price, although I did write and tell Henry I was putting it off for a few months. I did not call the number of friends who wanted to invite me for dinner and get my life started again, the way you would kick over the engine of a car that has been left out in the cold.

  The things I loved Sam for did not need to be romanticized. He had filled the car with roses and bittersweet on our first anniversary and we had driven into the country amidst all those flowers. The weekend he went trekking in the Smoky Mountains with Danny Sanderson, he brought me back a split-oak basket with my initials woven in. He remembered events in our courtship by songs from the Top Forty. He liked to kiss on the street at night.

  When I met him, he seemed to me like some bright, dangerous object on a dark road that you go toward because it shines at you. Up close you see that it is a phosphorescent marker, or a white stone, or a patch of luminescent tape, but before you see what it is, all you see is brightness facing you out of the night, and if you are alone on the road, it is beautiful and frightening.

  Sam was my comet. Up close, he was a comet still, but he was the comet I came home to live with. He was bright and dangerous and I knew the alternative to having him was something the world would consider a safe bet, and that was not the sort of safety I was after. I was for the safety that lives on the side of the roughnecks. But that might have driven us apart: Sam only took chances in the world. It was the world against him—the hill climb, the uninsurable motorcycle, the swaying twenty-foot ladder propped unsteadily against a crumbling barn. He took calculated risks. When I met him, I was in love with anything that shoved you out on a creaky limb. As I got older, my notion of risk changed.

  Sam was my risk. He was the biggest emotional risk I had ever taken, and it seemed to me that it was in love and friendship that risk is real. A broken bone is a broken bone, but a broken heart is quite another thing. Sam’s risks were risks of the bone, and they did drive us apart, since he died as a result of one. His risks were only dares.

  Sam’s chance on me was in no way like my chance on him. I was a sure thing, surer than the shock absorbers on his Black Shadow, surer than the law boards. I was his cheerful companion, happy bedmate, his introspective, musical, well-placed wife. In my deep appreciation of him, I was nullified. Anything he did was fine with me if he was doing it, and I believed that if you loved, you loved uncritically. If I had taken exception to Sam’s ways, how could I have loved him at all? It would have canceled everything out. I knew what I had married, and I stuck by it.

  But to Sam, I was only a sure thing. I was the wedge he stuck between himself and everything else. I was his lead line to an emotional world where he took no chances at all.

  I thought of him in that fragile Sailfish, watching the storm blow in. I could see him grinning, calculating himself and the boat against it. He was probably having the time of his life when he died, and it probably never occurred to him that Patrick and I might be heartsick. The Bax boys tested themselves constantly, and in those times there was never anybody else, only themselves and their nerves. When I thought of Sam in that boat, a wave of anger swept me and I let it sweep. I saw myself
standing completely useless watching his brother watching him. How outside it all I was! What sort of a woman was I to let my husband, the love of my life, die by making a damned fool out of himself? I did beg him not to go, so I had done my part, and he had looked petulant and stubborn when I tried to stop him. There wasn’t any stopping him. His whole life was like a traffic accident that I was witness to. I watched it to the end, always about to but never quite standing in its way.

  When I looked back on our beginning, I saw a long-legged girl, with dark, shiny curly hair standing on the road wearing a proper Chesterfield coat with the collar turned up, confronted by a wild person on a huge bike. Standing in back of him, crash helmet in hand, was his nice stolid pal, his tame rider, my beau, Eddie Liebereu. That dark-haired girl surveyed the two of them and knew at once she was standing on the wrong side, that all her impulses all her life—every acceleration on every curve, every gallop without a saddle, a scrapbook filled with yellowing pictures of James Dean, every joy ride—put her with that grinning Bax, that dangerous, accident-prone kid, that hero. It was not for nothing that “He’s a Rebel” by the Crystals was on the college bar’s jukebox for two years and it was not in vain that I fed my dimes to it. To have your rebel be second in his class, to marry your rebel, to have your rebel make law review buttered both sides of the bread and coated it with strawberry jam. What a life it was.

  His part was that he never could sit still, and my part was that I watched him with such deep pleasure. The recklessness in my nature was quiescent, and I thought that anyone who did not view Sam or anyone like him with admiration was half dead, or all dead, or lying.

  On our third anniversary, Sam took me to a boxing match. It was held in a gym in the south end of Boston where local fights were held. You sat on camp chairs, and brought your whiskey in a paper bag. The place was filled with truckers, longshoremen, nightwatchmen, and bookies. I had never seen so many massive shoulders in one place. We sat down to watch Kenny Reilly take on Josco Pierpont of Montreal, and there was a nice, mellow aura in the place. When the fight started, something changed. The tension mounted until you felt the gym was booby-trapped with live wires. Sam said there were always fights after fights and when Josco Pierpont knocked out Kenny Reilly, the Boston Wonder, all hell broke loose in one intense corner of the room. A couple of bottles smashed against the wall, a camp chair was thrown into the ring. A couple of drunks were going at it.

  Sam shouted, “Put the chair over your head!” And when I looked at my boy wonder, his eyes were shining. It was just the sort of thing he loved: violence and protection. He moved us through the crowd and got us out before the police moved in.

  In the car he said, “That wasn’t a real blowout. Patrick and I once saw Sugar Ray fight and they threw bottles from the top tier.”

  That fight held me for a long time. At night, I dreamed it in slow motion. I remembered the flat band of blue smoke above the ring, the feeling of heat and restlessness before the fight began. The air was so charged you thought a lit match would cause an explosion. But for Sam it was only another fight: it hadn’t been a big blowout after all.

  There was no one I could clear this all with, no one I wanted to talk to. There was Patrick, but together we behaved like a pair of survivors of a dreadful shipwreck who want each other’s company as a memento of the experience, but not for a dialogue about it. Patrick was around a lot those first few months. We went to the movies. We had dinner. He helped me put up bookshelves, and we went for walks. When Patrick didn’t want to talk, he was the man who invented silence. Sam had been private by default: he didn’t know anything about himself, so there was nothing for him to reveal—he liked things to be revealed to him. With Patrick you felt he knew everything about himself but would only tell you what he wanted when he felt like it.

  Then there was Sara Lazary, She was either the most private or the most evasive person I had ever known. Talking to her was like talking to a stranger uncertain of the language or the culture she found herself in, but it was all by design. She was very clear and glossy. Her hair was honey-colored and her eyelashes were jet black. Her eyes were brown, and they always seemed downcast, as if she had a book on her lap she was reading in secret while she talked to you.

  Once in a while, she turned up and we went out to lunch. She never spoke about Patrick. He mentioned her, but not often. When you saw them separately, they seemed to have no connection at all, and in the old days when they appeared together, I was always amazed. Whatever communion they had between them seemed so special I could not imagine them making plans or discussing anything as ordinary as where they would meet. To me, they were an established fact of life—Patrick and Sara—but I didn’t know a thing about them. Did she call him at work? Did he cry on her shoulder? Did they spend weekday nights together? Their silence about each other seemed so enforced I couldn’t ask. Asking would be blundering and so I assumed they had some transcendental, secret, uncrushable bond that made references in front of a third party entirely unnecessary.

  Her style was so particular it made you feel you knew something about her. Everything she wore looked like the only one of its kind: her skirts were embroidered, her blouses were monogrammed, her sweaters were crocheted, and her shoes from year to year were the sort of shoes you thought they weren’t making anymore. If you asked her where she got any of her clothing, she would tell you the name of the shop and how many years ago it had gone out of business. She was immaculate and nothing she owned was new; her touch on things was so light it looked as if everything she had would last forever. Her handbags were always black, and everything inside them was green. She had a green wallet, a green checkbook, and a green cigarette case. When she spoke, you felt she had considered her every sentence for a long, long time before she made it public, and she never made mistakes of fact. Her profession, as much profession as she had, was translating from the French, and a large part of my conversation with her concerned musical references in whatever she was working on. I spent several afternoons with her and never mentioned Sam or Patrick, although I wanted to. She seemed to accept the way things were without reflection.

  When she was gone, I thought about the shape her life appeared to have and it looked as clear as glass and as shapely as a Brancusi statue. She would not have married someone like Sam. If she had, she would not have allowed him to die. I imagined her sitting at a rosewood desk, working on a translation with a gold-tipped fountain pen. She was another Lyle Crosby. Nothing about Patrick would break her heart, but she didn’t seem heartless, only contained, only level—someone with a fixed mind and no holes in her life. In her unswerving correctness and by her unflappable elegance, she made me aware of a curious sideproduct of tragedy: embarrassment. Grief and mourning single you out. You are the one afflicted, while the rest of the world goes off scot-free, even if you know that death catches up with everyone. If you are recovering from the death of someone near you, you are its victim: it happened to you, and not to anyone else.

  Sara probably wasn’t unsympathetic. If she had talked to me about Sam, she might have been a comfort. But even if she had, she would have been a representative of the healthy, untouched world, needing to console one of its stricken former members. Her surface looked so unshaky, so contained, that even though I sat in my corner of the world, in my chaste and charming flat, I felt that I wore sackcloth and jabbered out of politesse in the face of disaster. Sara was like a visiting nurse, or so I saw her. It would have been more fitting if I had been a wreck, but my hair was properly cut, my clothes were crisp and fitting, and when I looked in the mirror I saw only a slightly tired edition of my same old self.

  Sara got me out of doors. We went to the Frick and to an exhibition of Gerard David at the Metropolitan. As we walked those polished halls and corridors, we looked like serious girls doing some comparative study, except to me. I was being dragged around, but Sara was effortless. Our conversations were the conversations of a pair of bluestockings, and my impulse to sit her down to lun
ch and blurt Sam’s name or Patrick’s withered in the face of her stalwart avoidance. A day with Sara left me tired of trying. It was my fault, not hers.

  After a few of these expeditions, I began to wonder if there was a space in Sara’s life that I invaded, something that had to do with the notion of death, or something between her and Patrick. Perhaps she was merely being polite, taking someone’s sister-in-law out for an airing. It could have been that the death of Sam—of anyone—was terrifying. Or she simply had nothing to say about the matter. Or she wasn’t interested. But she seemed to me like an egg, a perfect, opaque oval with no edges, that will crack at any point or at no point at all.

  9

  In December, Patrick took me to a coffee concert. This was one of a series of chamber music concerts given by the Society for Stringed Instruments, which resided in an old brownstone off Madison Avenue. You walked into a formal, mirrored room, in the center of which was a small stage. Clustered around it were a series of tables laid with white cloths. On each table were a brass samovar and plates of Danish pastry. The idea was to listen to music in perfect comfort, having polished off your Danish and coffee before it started.

  It was cold, and snowing. Patrick picked me up and when I gave him a drink, he said, “Don’t you think it’s’ a little old-fashioned to wear black all the time?”

  “I don’t wear black all the time.”

  He said, “Every time I see you, you have on at least one black garment.”

  “I don’t feel like wearing colors yet,” I said.

  “I had no idea you were so theatrical,” Patrick said. “Besides, our Sam would probably approve if you were racing around in yellow.”

  “I wouldn’t like it.”

  “I don’t think you ought to put yourself at such a remove.”

  I told him I didn’t think I was living at such a remove, but it wasn’t true. The delivery boy from the grocery store, the man who owned the dry cleaners, Mrs. Pratt in the stationery store didn’t think I was at a remove. I smiled and nodded. I spent afternoons with the selective Sara Lazary, nodding and smiling. I knew I was living in a sling, but what could I do? My energy had abandoned me and I was living in a state I could not approve of. I was unenthusiastic, quiet, craving solitude and enfeebled by it. I was learning what distance was all about, and I was perpetuating it. I didn’t want the start of a new life; I wanted to get used to things slowly. So I had not set out on any course, and although I was living on my own funds, Sam’s were locked away and that padding frightened me. I thought I would know when my spunk returned, and then I thought I would have to summon it. It was as if every feeling I had ever had was crowding me in one great swoop and there was no way for me to fix on anything at all.