Shine On, Bright & Dangerous Object

by Laurie Colwin

  The worst part of emotional life is speculative: I had no information. I was very angry, between puzzlement and fear, inching toward fear. The language between me and Patrick was like a double-edged code. I had counted on his subtlety, on his standoffishness when it suited me. One of the blessings of Sam had been his straightforwardness. I counted on Patrick to be complicated, to work his complications out in private so that I could savor the results—but not up close. I had spent my life watching over my emotional states and everyone else’s as if they were emerging Art, and at the bottom of my soul I thought there was no more interesting thing in the world. How I loved and appreciated! At my final hour, the devil, or St. Peter, or some judgmentalist the Jews have planted in heaven would present me with tape recordings of my exegesis and rhapsodies on human conduct, a large portion of which would be devoted to the deeper workings of Sam, the intricacies of Patrick Bax’s nature, and of course myself, the lovely widow. I was a timepiece all right. I had the mechanism of one of those tinny watches that breaks down all the time. Patrick would be justified in preparing a brief to state that I was one of the quirkiest and most unpleasant people alive. On that note of Olympian self-hatred, I went to bed and spent half the night half awake and, when asleep, dreaming that I was lost in the stacks at Butler Library.

  The next morning, I got as far as dialing Patrick’s number and hanging up before it rang. I drank my coffee, assembled my notes, and called his law firm; but when it answered, I hung up again. Then I dragged up to Columbia, feeling alternately cheerful and decayed. After a couple of hours at work, I went to get some air and lunch, and on the way back, I passed a flower shop. It occurred to me that Patrick was not the only master of the open-ended gesture, so I sent to his office a huge, lavish bunch of tea roses and freesias, without a note, only my name scribbled on a pasteboard card. This kept me cheered as I walked back to the library, where I amused myself by browsing through back issues of Vogue and reading the Sonnets to Orpheus.

  My bouquet set me back thirty dollars and allowed me to believe that I had turned my panic into a nice cat-and-mouse game. Patrick would call. I would be snappish. We would have dinner. And then what? I didn’t think past it. If I had had any sense, I would have focused on my brother-in-law only as brother-in-law, but I did not think much about the recipient, who seemed to have conveniently slipped out of classification. But he didn’t call.

  He didn’t call for two weeks, but I went right on grinning until it occurred to me that the flowers might never have been delivered, at which point I called the shop to check. They had been delivered and signed for. This threw a little wrench of panic in the direction of my heart, but introspection had abandoned me, along with my delicate notions of appropriateness. For about five minutes I pondered the excess of my gesture and my extreme reaction to Patrick, but, then, a mood of high-spirited cretinism moved in, and I didn’t think at all.

  I was as wound up as a toy train until my manic cheerfulness was displaced by a mood of gothic desolation. I began to fear I had alienated Patrick, and that brought me to grief again. I was an immature little flame fanner who would rather have drama than friendship. I was the ninny who would whip up any situation rather than leave it be. The only real thing that had ever happened to me was the death of Sam, and the only unadorned emotion I had ever felt was well and correctly placed grief. But for that, I was a wayward, flighty, dopey kid. When another week went by, I added pride to my list of sins.

  I trudged up to the library and dragged home. I ate my meals in silence, practiced the piano, and went over my notes for Max Price. I sat at the piano and composed a little cubist music. I was filled with overblown, implacable emotion.

  When I felt I had calmed down, I decided that it was time to apologize to Patrick in person. It had been a month since I’d seen him. In my becalmed state I trusted to instinct, which decided on a rather harebrained plan. On a rainy Saturday toward the end of March, with a sky so dark the streetlights were on, I got on a bus to go puncture Patrick’s solitude and deliver myself of some sloppy, guilty sentiments. In all the time I had been in New York, I had never been in Patrick’s apartment; he had always come to mine. He lived in a brick house, on the top floor, but as I confronted his building, my courage failed. My convenient fantasies of this event had led me to expect a handy telephone booth on his corner. There was none, and I was far too cowardly to simply ring his bell. Around the corner was a bar I walked slowly to, getting myself good and soaked. There was a nice pay phone in a nice oak booth, in which I sat staring stupidly at the dial. Maybe he wasn’t alone. Maybe he was in bed with Sara, suddenly returned from Paris, or someone like her. Maybe he was out, or in but not answering, or had seen me from his window and bolted the door. And if he answered when I called, how was I to know if he would speak to me? Or if he spoke to me, would he tell me roundly to fuck off? I took a deep breath and dialed. It would have served me right if he had been out, but he was in.

  He asked me where I was calling from, since there was a lot of clatter in the background, and when I said I was in the bar around the corner from him he said, “You better come up, then.” I reflected, on my short walk, that Patrick was not so private as to keep me off his premises. I had expected him to meet me at the bar.

  I rang his doorbell and climbed three carpeted flights of stairs. He met me at the top and I stood in the doorway with my coat and umbrella dripping, wearing a battered straw hat I kept for rainy days, looking like the world’s wettest fool.

  I said, “I came to apologize.”

  “You’re dripping all over the floor,” Patrick said.

  “I don’t want to come in until I’ve said I’m sorry.”

  “I’m sorry, too,” said Patrick. “I was a little done in by your floral tribute and I’ve been thinking that I’ve been awfully condescending to you without meaning to be. I gave you a rough time purposely, but I forget what a private person you are.”

  “You’re very private, too,” I said.

  “We hermits have to stick together,” said Patrick. “Give me your coat.”

  14

  His apartment was spare and comfortable. He had been working at his desk, which was piled with papers. A lump of cannel coal was burning in the fireplace, and on the mantelpiece I was amazed to see a framed picture of me.

  “You look like you need a drink,” he said, and disappeared into the tiny kitchen. It was disconcerting to be in his exclusive corner of the world, so I looked around at his neat rows of books, the blue Chinese urn—clearly a bequest from his grandmother—and a pottery snail from one of Meridia’s craft projects on the other side of the mantel. On one wall he had a watercolor of a house almost hidden by two trees. The trees framed the house in the shape of a Valentine, and if you looked closely, you could see a tiny face at the attic window.

  He came back with a bottle of bourbon and two glasses full of ice. We sat in front of the fireplace and drank in silence.

  There are things that you know in your blood or in your cells and when they happen they make perfect sense, but the perfectness of that sense makes you reel. We sipped our drinks, and after a long time, I turned to Patrick. He looked like a boy who has read something disturbing and puzzling in a book, or as if he had been musing seriously over a calculus problem and was on the verge of solving it. I think I must have leaned forward in my chair and I think he must have leaned too, for suddenly he took me by the wrist and we were standing with our arms entwined. I felt such a jolt of longing for him that I seemed to lose my bearings. Any connection between us of family or legality or friendship was null and tepid in the face of it. It explained our connection all along; it explained my recent terrors; it explained the odd, shy, but intense bond I had always felt for him.

  Then we walked down a small hallway to his bedroom. The roof slanted and the windows were low, blocked by tree branches. You could hear the constant drum of rain on the roof.

  I seemed to be only skin. If I had thought about it, I might have realized that ther
e are connections deep enough to terrify. But I didn’t think. If there was such a thing as pure feeling, this was it.

  He wasn’t like Sam. He was only Patrick. Living with Sam, with Sam’s death, with grief, had changed me, and until I was with Patrick I didn’t know how changed I was. Pleasure requires high and loving spirits and energy, but living in the world—being battered by it—having your heart pierced, sharpens everything. I had grown up without knowing it, and now I knew. I knew that you might believe in rapture, but you had to earn the right to feel it. You had to pay for it with grief and loss, and it was worth it. I knew what it was like to be ultimately close to your best friend on earth, to someone you had waited to know, had watched and calculated, someone well loved and intelligible to you. I had bounced into bed with Sam. Our love had been larks, the loving of two relatively happy and game kids. But this was different. Patrick and I were not children. We were thoughtful adults with a lot on the line, with complicated histories and a long, complicated mutual bond. Being with him was ravishing. It was relief, and it was terrifying.

  He smiled a smile so profound it hit me physically. I was so sensitized I realized what the notion dying of joy is all about. It was a smile of total complicity.

  We were together for a long time and then Patrick took me gently by my shoulders and said my name, and then I pressed my head against his chest and began to laugh. It was laughter that seemed to start somewhere in the vicinity of my toes and I couldn’t stop it: it was the only way my flesh knew to affirm its feelings.

  We stayed locked together without speaking, and I wondered, when thought returned to us, as normal breathing returns to a runner, what we were going to say. We didn’t say anything.

  The rain beat down on the roof and against the windows. You could hear the clock ticking softly on the bureau. The room was filled with dark-green light and there was a wet breeze from the corner window. Patrick gleamed in the darkness. He looked beautiful to me, in the way a stranger’s beauty takes you by surprise and in the way a well-known face can bring you up short. I wanted that afternoon to suspend itself infinitely, but it was a countdown until reality intervened, even though the weather was on our side. It had been so dark all day you couldn’t tell what time it was. The smiles on our faces were of pure triumph, amazement, and delight, but the only recognizable thing that functioned between us was longing, and when we finally unlocked, it was past dinnertime and we were starving.

  Patrick captured all the pillows and propped up his head. His smug smile was back in full force; he was himself again.

  “I’d like scrambled eggs and bacon and toast and a salad and a bottle of wine and coffee,” he said. “Here’s the deal. You make dinner. I clean up. For dessert I’d like a chocolate fudge sundae with two scoops of coffee ice cream, and an apple.”

  “I’ll send out for it,” I said.

  “That’s not the plan. The plan is, I go out into the pouring rain to the delicatessen and get ice cream and some of that crummy fudge sauce I’m sure you don’t approve of, and when I come back you shower me with kisses and tell me how wonderful I was to go out in the rain and how much you missed me.”

  I said, “Will you miss me while you’re out in the rain, you smug bastard?”

  He turned on his side and wrapped his arms around me.

  “I love you,” he said. “I always have.”

  We had our dinner and killed a bottle of wine. At the end of dinner, a little clarity had set in and I didn’t know what to do. Patrick refused to let me help clean up, and suddenly I was uncomfortable among his things. I sat in a chair by the window and lit a cigarette, watching the smoke trail to the window and under it and out into the night. When he finished with the dishes, Patrick appeared in front of me holding his raincoat and mine. For an awful moment I thought he was dismissing me.

  “Come on,” he said. “Let’s go get the Sunday paper.” I bowed my head while he helped me on with my coat, close to tears of relief. I felt like a child in a Grimm fairy tale approaching the enchanted forest in a spirit of fear and high adventure, left without compass points or a sense of proportion. This wasn’t the beginning of an ordinary love affair: I was lost, without props. We walked out into the rain, huddled under Patrick’s umbrella. When we disengaged and I watched him buy the Sunday Times, I felt there was no more complicity: I was in my own corner. For that ten-minute walk, I didn’t know how to behave, but Patrick was effortless, unruffled, and happy. When he took my arm, I wondered if he was about to put me in a taxi and send me home. But we walked back, he unfurled his umbrella, dumped the papers into my arms, and kissed me. We walked up the stairs to his apartment with our arms locked. He whistled. I brooded.

  By rights, I should have been as comfortable as a cat. I was a cherished presence, in the company of someone who loved me. I spent Sunday curled up on the sofa and read the sports section while Patrick read The News of the Week in Review. It rained all day and we stretched out like two big cats in the sun, barely speaking, perfectly attuned. After a good, long dinner, we drank some brandy and went to bed.

  There is terror and there is joy and there is something that can be either; it takes you out of your own skin. If I had had to find a word for it, I would have known that it was ecstasy. It was nothing you could summon up: it happened to you and you were in its grip. I was old enough to know what my emotional range was, and I was used to it. Even grief was something I had incorporated and tamed: it and love and hate and anger and tenderness and fear and happiness had been domesticated, I had lived with them so long. But I could never have conjured this: it took me by storm, by flash flood. It seemed to me that I had been cohabiting silently with some very intense impulse toward Patrick, so deep I hadn’t known where it slumbered, and it frightened me. It was awesome to think that I had contained something this rich and not known it. It seemed to me that this was the sum total of everything I had ever thought about him, or depended upon him for, or brooded over or admired. It explained my terror when he had told me Sara was going away. Falling asleep, I thought I had been through an epiphany, and that event had opened up the world to joy and chaos.

  When I woke, I felt translucent. Patrick woke me up with a cup of coffee. I had slept through his alarm.

  “Get serious,” he said. “It’s Monday. How are we going to arrange ourselves this week?”

  “Am I being presented with another plan?” I was half awake and only meant to tease, but I must have struck some nerve.

  “What I mean is, we ought to see how much time we want to spend together.” He said it so softly I had to put my head on his shoulder to hear him. “I just thought if we made some arrangement, we wouldn’t have to go through the awkwardness of making arrangements.”

  This struck a nerve in me. How ardently I assumed he had the upper hand, and now he sat beside me, ardently assuming that I had. But neither of us had any hand at all: we were both slightly panicked. It made him more level in my eyes, and I realized that we were on equal ground. So before I cranked up my mental faculties, I wanted to lie back and loll in the ease of it. I sipped my coffee, balancing the saucer on my knees. Patrick was wearing a half-buttoned shirt and the trousers to his sober lawyer’s suit. I put my cup on the floor and fixed him with an intent look. I realized I had several seconds of pure tease to enjoy, so I simply smiled and didn’t speak. Then I locked my arms around his neck.

  “I don’t even want you to go to work,” I said. “I want you to call up and say that you have a debilitating disease and have to stay in bed all day.”

  He hooked my hair behind my ears. “I want you to take off your earrings,” he said. The earrings in question were tiny gold studs a little bigger than a pin head. “I don’t want you to have anything on.”

  I said, “Will you stay home with a debilitating disease?”

  Patrick said, “I’m going to call up and say I’ve died and gone to heaven.”

  It rained all Monday and we only left the house once, for five minutes, to buy the New York Times. No
t even rapture got in the way of that.

  I said, “If you did die and go to heaven, I bet you’d stop and buy the Times.”

  “I always buy the Times,” said Patrick. “But now I’m in love with it.”

  He looked like the man who invented ease, and we were both genuinely happy. I was not waiting for any crash, or for some grim insight to take its toll: this all felt perfectly right to me. We found ourselves in a glut of usable riches, which we compounded, and by the afternoon, worn out by our affection, we took a nap. We had kept a fire going in the bedroom fireplace all day, and as Patrick slept I watched the embers in that dark room. He lay beside me wrapped in a plaid car rug. The Baxes’ cars and guest rooms always had a plaid wool blanket neatly folded. They could not have napped without one. When he turned slightly in his sleep, the rug slipped off his shoulder and I could not bear to cover him up without putting my cheek next to his flesh. He smelled like cooked sugar, and his heart beat as steadily as a steel watch.

  It seemed to me, as I watched the glow die in the hearth, that there was daily life, and there was the secret heart of things. Daily life would find me and Patrick and the rest of the world taking showers, going to work, and planning out the details of living. The details Patrick seemed most eager to streamline were the elements of a ground plan that would keep us together in some gentle, close, unquestioned way, as if he felt that to talk things over was to have everything explode at once. He said he had been caught off guard by happiness. He said he had not expected any real joy in his life, but he had prepped for it anyway.

  In that moment of sweet comfort, I wondered about the history of our secret hearts. When Patrick was still my brother-in-law, I had counted on him, not for any sustenance, but because I knew I was intelligible to him in a way I was not to Sam. I had never wondered then if I loved him. He wasn’t mine to love, but he was someone in my immediate landscape whom I treasured. Now we were presuming on an untried intimacy, and we were frightened by it. In some parts of the world, it was incest we were committing, and daily life, if we continued together, meant Meridia and Leonard and my parents, a series of raised eyebrows and disapproving telephone calls.