Shine On, Bright & Dangerous Object

by Laurie Colwin

  Their house in Wycombe was a huge clapboard wedding cake set in a field. A columned porch wrapped around the house, and a set of outside stairs led to a turret. The night of the party they hung yellow banners from their weather vane.

  I drove over with Theo, Anna, Laura, and Giles. Charlie had gone to get the beer. There were about a hundred and ten people there when we arrived, spilling out onto the lawn, shouting from the turret, gathered in clusters on the porch. The Marshalls invited not only the entire Conservatory but also their summer chums, and you could tell the summer chums by the bronze leather of their skins, and their clothes, which cost collectively what some of the staff made in a year. It was a sweltering night. The sky was more red than black. Charlie arrived and was pressed into service, unloading kegs of beer into washtubs of ice.

  The party went in waves: the first to come and the first to leave were the Conservatory trustees, elderly formally dressed Yankees with white hair and summer dinner jackets or dresses with lace bosoms. With them left most of the older musicians. When they left, things loosened up and the younger and brasher of the staff began to dance, along with the teenage offspring of the Marshalls’ summer friends. The Marshalls believed that you had to build a party up to any wildness, so they began with their beloved smooch music. Laura and Giles sat in the corner and watched Boris Dorfman dancing with Libby Hayes to Frank Sinatra.

  “It’s like watching a rabbit dancing with a cow,” Giles said.

  Charlie was exhibiting party behavior. Because he was big he was expansive, and you could tell that he had spent a lifetime discharging the responsibilities of his size—opening stuck windows, carrying the heaviest bundle, and making sure the homely and fainthearted had dancing partners. He danced with a solemn middle-aged Schubert scholar from Paris, who hardly spoke to anyone at all. He danced with Laura Zeller, smiling down on her, and with Anna. Then he danced with Reggie Marshall and they looked as if they had been born to dance together. They were a perfect fit. They seemed to have fox-trotted out of another era, some jovial, larky, well-intentioned time.

  When the smooch music and Dixieland contingent gave up, the rock and rollers took over and I took my turn on the floor. During one slow, sultry number, Giles took me for a spin around the room and I was charmed by what was clearly dancing school training. By midnight the party was down to sixty and the room was lit by candles. The only lights on were in the kitchen, where the serious had gathered to talk and drink. Everyone was fairly drunk. From time to time, Laura and I collected bags of paper cups, beer cans, and chicken bones. The kegs had given out, and the Marshalls had broken open fifteen cases of beer.

  As it got later, it got hotter. It seemed about to rain. The lit ends of cigarettes dotted the porch, and one could see the red point of a reefer being passed hand to hand. The living room was full of dreamy couples, swaying back and forth on the dance floor, and people sitting in twos on the floor with their arms entwined. Finally Charlie claimed me and we cleared a little space to dance. I was past care, so I wrapped myself around him like a vine. Everyone was far too drunk to notice, and if they noticed, so what? This would be the party at which that young widow got drunk and made a fool of herself with Charlie Pepper.

  We danced until the heat drove us outside, where we sat on the porch steps to smoke. Then we walked into the field until, when we looked back, only the candlelit windows were visible in the distance. The grass was wet and long and we walked through it like explorers. The mosquitoes were severe. “These mothers are the size of Cadillacs,” said Charlie, slapping. The sky was hazy except for a glimmering, veiled spot where the moon burned dimly through. The earth was steaming and the air was as palpable as fruit.

  Charlie put his heavy arm around me. I moved closer and he took my hand.

  “That’s a little paw to fit around me,” he said.

  “It’ll fit.”

  “You’re in my bloodstream,” he said. “This is serious.”

  We stood in that field surrounded by crickets, sniped by savage mosquitoes. I wanted to stand there forever in the midst of that heat, listening to distant thunder with Charlie Pepper pressed to me. Standing on my toes, I could put my arm around his neck.

  “Say you love me,” said Charlie.

  I said I did.

  We walked back slowly. A boy was sleeping on the porch. The same couples were sitting, stoned, in wicker chairs. The dancing in the living room was more like clinging: those drunken twosomes were beginning to wilt. Half an hour later I left alone and walked the two miles back. The air was so wet it swirled in front of me. There was not a car on the road, not a star in the sky. I had a patch of the night to myself, and I breathed it in—earth and pine. Then I saw the lights ahead of me and walked slowly toward Charlie Pepper’s room. All around me were dreaming musicians, sleeping with their lawful spouses, I thought, or sharing the night with no one. Chaste girls sat with their desk lamps on, studying the Kindertotenlieder. Back in my cottage Libby Hayes was doubtless writing a letter to her amusing husband. I was sure there was a rightful place for everyone, and if there was sinning going on at the Hamilton Conservatory I didn’t think of it. I wanted to be the only sinner afoot in that sleepy landscape, and if Giles and Laura lay wrapped together under a blanket by the pond, it was sweetness that connected them, not stealth.

  A lamp glowed on the porch of Charlie’s house, circled by gnats. There was a light on in his room—I could see it from the road. As I walked under the porch light, the light made me feel publicly baptized. There was not a soul around. I crept up the stairs, shoes in hand, as quiet as an Indian, trying to find the spot on each stair that didn’t creak. All the rooms had large oak doors, and as I turned the knob to Charlie’s, the lock clicked and the door whined. It seemed an enormous noise. Dampness had made the door stick, so I finally had to shove it open with my shoulder.

  His leather suitcase was lying on its side and his cello case was propped against the wall. The bed was made, but he had napped on it, and the spread was dented and wrinkled where his shape had been. The desk lamp was on, casting a dingy, blue light. A huge moth beat its wings against the screen. How melancholy it all looked. On the desk were two wrinkled shirts and his bow. Next to his pillow was the Brahms score: he must have been studying it before he napped. On the dresser were his brush and comb, a bottle of vitamin pills, a bottle of whiskey, and a roll from dinner, as hard as a stone.

  I sat down on the side of the bed and put my face to his pillow, hoping his scent would still be there, grassy, smoky, and pungent. For all his artifacts, that room was as bare as a cell—it wasn’t his room, even for the box of cigars on the night table or his stack of checked handkerchiefs. It had oak floors and oak beams and the bed had a maple headboard. On the floor was a hooked rug. But still, it had the air of a cheap hotel, the sort of place renegade lovers go to crash.

  I heard a car go over gravel and stop. I heard Charlie saying good night. The car door closed. He took the creaking stairs slowly, and as I waited for him, I felt a pang of longing. He walked in and found me standing by his bed, but he didn’t greet me, or even speak. He looked tired, hot, and terribly sad. He sat down and held out his arms.

  “You better come over here quick,” he said. “I’m feeling very melancholy.” I stood in the circle his arms made. “Let me see you. Let me see how melancholy you are.” I put my arms around him. If there was something on my face for him to read, I didn’t know what it was.

  I said, “While I was waiting for you, I missed you.”

  He said, in the voice of an exhausted host whose guests have stayed too long, “Let’s go to bed.”

  Toward morning it began to storm and I woke up. The faint light reflected off the stained floor and tinted everything orange. Charlie’s arm encircled me. I was pinned to his side. All you could hear was the sound of rain being pushed through the trees and the steady drum of water on the roof. The thunder was like a low cough in the next room. All I felt was a sense of correctness and, snuggling closer to its sou
rce and focal point, I went back to sleep.

  It was still raining when we got up. The breakfast bell rang, but neither of us stirred. Charlie had a cheap electric kettle and some instant coffee and we drank, propped by pillows. Down the hall, Billy Henshaw began to play the clarinet. We heard a sharp knock at his door and the playing stopped.

  Charlie said, “Are you going to tell Patrick about this?”

  “Eventually. Are you going to tell Mary Beth?”

  “No.”

  “A lot of people would think this makes us a pair of true betrayers,” I said.

  “This is between you and me,” said Charlie.

  I said, “If I hadn’t met you, Charlie, I don’t know that I would have known very much about me and Patrick. If I hadn’t met up with you, there are things about him I never would have known, or things about myself. Being with you doesn’t shake my ties to him. It affirms them. I’m right to love him, and I’m right to love you. You’ve been a great friend to me. I’m glad this happened. I was balky about Patrick, with Sam in that straight line.”

  “We’re a very unsentimental pair,” said Charlie.

  “This is better,” I said.

  20

  We were set to play the Brahms sonata the last week of the Conservatory. At every turn, Corey Levenworth nipped at our heels, clucking like an old hen. He nudged us toward the rehearsal hall, and if he saw us without a score in hand, he looked amazed and disappointed. We were his wayward sheep and he was the chinoed, pink-spectacled sheepdog leading us to our rightful place. He was the sort of man who looked you straight in the eyes and then consulted his watch: Corey’s life was made up of minutes. His present worry was that the sonata wasn’t long enough for an entire program, but that was settled by Laura and Giles.

  They appeared at the rehearsal hall one afternoon and leaned against the window making faces against the glass until Charlie looked up and told them to come in.

  “We have a confession to make,” Giles said. He was wearing his Aztec Airlines tee-shirt. Laura wore a blouse with butterflies embroidered on it.

  “You have a confession,” Laura corrected.

  “Well, I lied,” he said. “I was being snotty when I said I didn’t play duets, because I do, but only with Laura.”

  Charlie and I looked puzzled. “She plays the violin, but she’s very shy about it. She’s good, too. So we figured that maybe I would stop being snotty and she would stop being shy and we could play a little Schubert sonatina on the same program. We heard Corey talking to Theo, see. If you wouldn’t mind, of course.”

  “Perfect,” said Charlie.

  “Perfect,” I said.

  “It’s the one in A,” said Laura. “I always think of Giles when I hear it because Schubert was only nineteen when he wrote it. We’ve been playing it for three years. We always play it when we get together.”

  So it was set. The news delivered, Corey stopped clucking and Charlie and I were left to our own devices. These devices included five hours a day of practice. We played after dinner, after the performance, and then we executed a neat social ritual at the Zellers’. At an arbitrary point in the evening, I left, having kissed the cheeks and shaken the hands of the assembled worthies, and walked, as brazen as a pot, to Charlie’s room, where I amused myself by reading David Copperfield until he saw fit to leave. Thus the affair between the fast little widow and the nice big cellist was not thrown into the face of the populace at large. No one noticed.

  No one noticed and no one cared, and if they had noticed, they probably would have thought it a nice thing to happen to two nice people, but my sense of propriety and my taste for the clandestine were like a genie let out of its bottle. Affairs had been conducted at the Conservatory and would continue to be. The gossip and rumor mill was subtle but effective. For a few days I was positively hagridden by the notion of appearing to be in sleazy fly-by-night circumstances, and then I stopped caring; but I still kept up my ritual.

  The morning of the performance I woke up shaky. It was a bright, gray day. When I heard the breakfast bell ring, I buried my head against Charlie’s chest and began to cry.

  “Don’t you worry about tonight,” he said. “We’ll do just fine. We’ve got it perfect.”

  “It’s not the music.”

  There were tears in his eyes too. “No, it’s not the music,” he said.

  “But we beat the clock, didn’t we, Charlie?”

  “Yes,” he said sadly. “We outfoxed time itself.”

  We practiced that morning and in the afternoon we took a walk through the field, through the birch stand, and into the woods. We sat on two flat rocks and dipped our naked feet into the icy stream. Whirlpools of gnats circled the water. We sat for a long time without speaking. Walking back, in the birch stand Charlie picked me up and threw me over his shoulder. He held me upside down by my ankles and shook me. Dimes and quarters fell out of my pockets and onto the forest floor.

  “It’s not often you get to turn the one you love upside down,” Charlie said.

  By sundown we had severe jitters. Charlie paced up and down in his room like a caged cat. I asked him if he wanted to be left alone.

  “Do you?” he said.

  I said, “We have two hours. It’s just dinnertime. I’m going to skip dinner and get dressed, but I’d like to spend the last hour before countdown with you.”

  “Perfect,” he said.

  We spent the last hour in his room. He was shirtless and still stalking.

  I said, “If you don’t sit down, I’m going to tackle you.”

  “You and how many others your size,” he said, but he sat in a rocking chair and threw his nervous energy into that. “I haven’t performed alone in a mighty long time. Let’s take a bath.”

  “We can’t take a bath,” I said. “We’re dressed. Have a little mercy, will you? I haven’t played seriously for over a year. I haven’t played in public for two years. If you’re edgy, we can have a fight about what shirt you’re going to wear.”

  “I’m going to wear a pink shirt to match your dress. I think that’s fitting and proper.”

  There were two bells before the performance. One was rung fifteen minutes before and one five minutes before. When the first bell rang, Charlie put on his shirt.

  “Okay, Mrs. Elizabeth. This is it,” he said.

  “Okay. Let’s go.”

  “Not before I kiss you.” He kissed me and buttoned his shirt. “We’re in this together,” he said, and we walked to the chapel clutching our scores. Giles and Laura were on first, so Charlie and I sat in the front row, sharing an armrest. The second bell rang and the little chapel filled up.

  Corey introduced Laura and Giles. For the occasion he had put on a Madras sports jacket so crisp and sharp you could have sliced yourself on its sleeve. The lights dimmed. Laura wore a silk blouse with hearts embroidered on it, and Giles wore a white shirt. They nodded to each other and began.

  You could tell why the Schubert sonatina reminded Laura of Giles. It sounded like a mournful love letter, interrupted by fits of overwrought hopefulness. Laura looked wholesome and serious. She had pinned her braid into a coil at the back of her neck. Her eyes were closed. Giles swayed away from the piano as he played. The music took them over and seemed to play through them. I imagined them at thirteen, using that music as a salute when they met. Hearing that music played by them was like having honey poured all over you. The audience was rapt.

  Giles and Laura got a lot of mileage out of the sweeter parts, but in the allegro vivace, you could see they were both prodigies. Theo and Anna wore on their faces expressions of such fierce pride it was hard to look at them. Even Boris Dorfman, upon whom Giles so loved to vent his hostility, was captivated. Corey looked as if tenderness were breathing heavily down the neck of his crisp shirt. You felt that instead of applauding, the entire audience would rush to the front of the chapel and smother them with kisses. The oldest member of the Conservatory, Dr. Heinrich von Arnheim, who had the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitun
g airmailed to New Hampshire, who was eighty years old and had fled the Nazis, who was known to his students at Berkeley to be a passionate taskmaster, looked as if he had fallen in love for the first time.

  When they finished, Giles bounced up from the piano and grabbed Laura’s hand. The audience cheered. Theo put his arm around Anna and drew her close.

  “This is some act to follow,” Charlie said.

  Immaculate Corey introduced us. Charlie and I clasped hands. I must have walked to the piano, because I found myself sitting at it, wondering what to do with all those keys. Twenty years of musical training fell away from me. Charlie picked up his bow and we began.

  So there we were, in that gray-and-white chapel, playing our hearts out. Charlie was right: we did have it perfect. We could have played it in our sleep. That music was our get-off point, but it was friendship that held us. It occurred to me that Sam soldered Patrick and me together in the same way. It was the bond that mattered, not what tied it up. Sam was a fact of life, like music.

  We seemed to have just started. The first and second movements went by. Halfway through the third movement I realized we were almost through. How nice it would have been to sit snug in the audience so I could see how we were doing, but then it was over. Charlie placed his bow on his knees and mopped his brow. We both stood up and the look that we exchanged was one of triumph and weariness. Then there was a great cheer. Giles leaped to his feet. The audience was such a blur I could only make out Laura and Giles. I stood next to Charlie by the piano. They were standing and cheering and for an instant it seemed that they were cheering us not for the music but for ourselves.

  Outside, Laura and Giles and Charlie and I were surrounded. Heinrich von Arnheim kissed us all. “It is a privilege to be witness to that devotion,” he said.