Happy All the Time

by Laurie Colwin

Doria curled up in the corner of the couch and took from her carpet bag a ball of mouse-colored yarn and a pair of knitting needles. As the conversation continued around her, she stared at a point midway between Holly and Arnold Milgrim and knit mechanically.

  On the sofa, Arnold was again enlightening Holly on the subject of Doria.

  “She is completely interior. Apparently, she always has been. She didn’t speak until she was four. It turned out she did in fact speak, but not in front of anyone. She had invented her own language, which she spoke to her toys. She still remembers it and has written a dictionary for it. She kept a diary in code. The key is in a safe deposit box. She isn’t really shy, you know. She’s just dreamlike and still. She worries constantly about overstimulation. It’ll take her at least a week to take in this dinner party. When she first got to Oxford, she stayed in her room for a month just to absorb her immediate surroundings.”

  Then he asked Holly if she would show Doria around New York while Arnold went off to see his publisher.

  “Will she be able to stand it?” Holly said.

  “She has developed an intentional delayed reaction facility,” said Arnold. “When we get back to Oxford, she’ll have to withdraw for a while.”

  As they left, Holly asked Doria what she might like to see.

  “I’d like to go to all the knitting shops,” Doria said. “I want to see some rustic, hand-pulled yarn. I would also like to see some colonial fabrics, and, if possible, I would like to have some contact with a loom.”

  Life was back to normal, sort of. Holly said: “Why is Vincent unavailable every time I ask him for dinner? I’ve seen him once since I’ve been back, and that’s not enough. I want to check out this girl of his I’ve been hearing so much about. Is he actually spending every minute of his day with her?”

  “Our Vincent is finally part of a pair,” said Guido.

  “Is that good news?” Holly said.

  “It looks that way.”

  “Is he afraid to submit her to my scrutiny, or is he ashamed of me?” said Holly.

  “I think it has to do with her, not him,” said Guido. “She’s what you might call a difficult case, but not in the way of his previous girls.”

  “That sounds very encouraging,” Holly said. “Let’s get them over here. You invite them. If I do, Vincent will think I’m snooping.”

  “You are snooping,” said Guido. “Poor Vincent.”

  “Poor me,” said Holly. “Vincent doesn’t approve of me anymore. I don’t think he’ll ever forgive me for going away for a few weeks. Sometimes I think you won’t either. But it was the best thing to do. I feel that a great many emotional cobwebs have been swept away.”

  Guido looked from his beautiful wife to his beautiful apartment. He did not remember ever seeing so much as a speck of dust, let alone a cobweb. But somewhere along the line, Holly was right. Their daily routine had always been extremely pleasing. Now it seemed magnificent. The real breakfast Holly believed in was more like a gift than a meal. As always, she read him items from the paper that she found entertaining, usually dim quotes from public officials, or equally dim remarks made by society matrons. These recitations, which Guido had always found charming, now seemed endearing. Her daily telephone call to his office made him gladder than ever. The walks they took, the dinners they had out, and the meals they had at home were no longer pleasant spots in the day, but events that brought them closer together. Holly’s absense had put a sheen on her return. Their normal pastimes were not so normal now. It was undeniable that her trip to France had made life richer. Their evenings were rhapsodic and passionate. Their mornings were sweet and affectionate. Through all of this, Holly conducted herself like a bird of paradise that had flown through the window of a house in Des Moines and settled down; she explained very little. She let her presence be enjoyed. Guido’s great happiness in her presence canceled out his bafflement when he was alone.

  They ceased to discuss their separation, if separation it had been. What was the use of discussion? Holly simply went her own way, and if her way was not Guido’s, Guido reminded himself that he was not married to his double. And now that she was back, he was happy. It was only when Holly went out that Guido realized how much her going away had hurt him. He knew it would wear off, but when Holly came back from so little as a trip around the corner to buy a bunch of parsley, Guido felt his life had been saved.

  The idea of dinner with Guido and Holly appalled Misty.

  “I will not sit around making nervous small talk over some garbagy rack of lamb,” she said.

  “You’re not getting rack of lamb,” said Vincent. “You’re probably getting roast chicken. And there will be no nervous small talk. There will be calm, large-scale talk. Holly is very hot to meet you.”

  “I will not be observed,” shouted Misty. “I will not be surveyed to see if I pass muster or if they think I’m good enough for you.”

  “Oh, Misty,” Vincent said. “They’ll think you’re far too good for me. Guido likes you. I love you. How could you possibly not pass muster?”

  “That’s an egocentric notion if I ever heard one,” Misty said. “I’m not going.”

  “I don’t ask for much,” said Vincent. “Jesus, it’s only dinner. Guido is my oldest friend.” He looked woebegone and puzzled.

  This interchange took place in Misty’s kitchen, where Vincent had been drying the dishes and feeling like a real adult. He put the dish towel down and discovered that Misty had stomped off into the living room and was standing by the window. It had begun to snow. Vincent stood beside her and gently turned her toward him. To his amazement, he saw that her eyes were filled with tears. His heart failed.

  “Misty, what is it? It’s only dinner.” To his further astonishment, she put her head on his chest and wept onto his shirt.

  It was the first time Vincent had ever seen her cry. She never cried, not even in the movies. Vincent suspected that she cried in private, but this, of course, was public. She had never even snuffled. He was filled with awe and panic.

  “Do you know how much I love you?” he whispered into her hair.

  “If you love me so much, give me a handkerchief.”

  He looked steadily at her. Her cheeks were wet, but her eyes were clear.

  “How can you be this way, Misty? How can you be so flip when I’m serious?”

  “You get mushy only when I cry,” said Misty.

  “I’m always mushy,” said Vincent. “And I’ve never seen you cry before.” He handed her his handkerchief.

  “Misty,” he said. “Do you have any feelings for me at all?”

  “Enough,” she said. “More than you deserve.” Then she pressed her head against the window and began to cry again. He took her into his arms and begged her to explain.

  “What the hell am I supposed to wear?” she sobbed. “Oh, God, this is awful.”

  Vincent took the handkerchief from her hand and gently dried her tears. He asked her to marry him. She told him that he was asking because she had broken down, and then she suggested a game of gin.

  “If I win, will you marry me?” Vincent asked. He shuffled the cards with professional aplomb.

  “How can you be so flip when I’m serious?” said Misty, and ginned out after four picks.

  The next day, Misty paced around her office like a caged cat. At lunchtime she went out and bought a silk blouse she could not afford and a box of marrons glacés she also could not afford. The marrons were to be taken to Guido and Holly, but they were secretly for Vincent, who adored them. She slunk through a couple of shops, gazed in store windows, and thought of calling Maria Teresa to see if she wanted to come out and have a sandwich. It would be calming to talk to someone, but what was left to say? Instead, Misty talked silently to herself.

  It was all over, she thought. What was all over was the person she had been all her life until yesterday—a person on the verge of something. She had been that person for so long it frightened her to give it up. That person had been waiti
ng for The Big Event. The Big Event, of course, was love. Love had to do with flexing your personality to see what it might attract. What it attracted was some resplendent being who dropped from the sky and immediately loved you for your character. That the resplendent figure was Vincent Cardworthy seemed somewhat unbelievable to Misty, but there it was. He had dropped out of the sky and he loved her for her character.

  She could put him off no longer. She had put him off to give herself the leisure to make up her mind about him. That was the intelligent woman’s way to gauge love. But of course she hadn’t put Vincent off at all, she realized. She had put herself off. Vincent accused her of nastiness, but she knew that if she expressed even a small amount of the tenderness she felt she would be in tears most of the time.

  Now, as she walked slowly back to her office, the world looked askew. Nothing seemed to fit. Intelligence had nothing to do with this at all. The jig was up. She was in love.

  Vincent came to claim her at five o’clock.

  “Do we have time to go home before we go to Guido and Holly’s?” Misty said.

  Vincent nodded.

  She sat in the taxi looking like a child being dragged off to the dentist. When they got to her apartment, she took a nap on the couch. Vincent stared at her from behind the newspaper. Even in sleep she looked intelligent. Vincent went back to his paper. The sight of Misty asleep always affected him. It made him feel woolly and tender.

  Misty woke abruptly and felt awful. She groped around for her glasses, couldn’t find them, and sat very still, looking unfocused and bereft, as if she had awakened from a kind dream to find merciless and cruel reality waiting for her. Vincent thought he understood unhappiness, but he was not sure if this was it. He sat beside her and took her hand.

  “Are you going to tell me what’s going on?” he said. “I can’t bear to see you this way.”

  She shrugged her shoulders.

  Vincent asked, “Does it help if I tell you I love you, or does it make it worse?”

  She began to cry. It was the second time in two days, but its effect on Vincent was not dimmed by repetition.

  “Okay,” she said. “Here goes.”

  His heart seemed to stop. This was it, but what was it?

  “It’s not what you’re thinking,” said Misty, looking at his stricken face. “It’s worse. You’re stuck with me. This is your last chance to bail out, Vincent. I don’t think we were made for each other. Maybe you were made for me, but I was made for Attila the Hun.”

  “Are you telling me that life with you will be a living hell?”

  “I am giving you one last chance to go off and find some nicer girl,” said Misty. “Someone who knows her way around a sailboat.”

  “That’s a disgusting thing to say. Last week you gave me a very compelling analysis on the workings of my stunning intellect. Now I’m supposed to take my intellect off and go sailing?”

  “And besides that, there’s the Jewish question,” said Misty.

  “Oh, that,” said Vincent. “I don’t notice either of us being religious. Besides, my Aunt Marcia is Jewish. She married Uncle Walter. She’s everybody’s favorite relative. What’s the big deal?”

  “Our backgrounds are very different,” said Misty.

  “This is not worth discussing,” said Vincent. “We’ve done very well up till now, and we’ll continue to do well.”

  “I’m not like your other flames,” said Misty. “I don’t know anything about dog breeding.”

  “Yes, you do,” said Vincent. “The night we were comparing eccentric relatives, you told me that your Aunt Harriet wanted to cross Welsh corgis and Doberman pinschers and get a vicious but barkless guard dog for sneak attacks. That will be quite sufficient. Throw in my Aunt Marcia and you can see that we are ideally suited.”

  Tears slid out of the corners of Misty’s eyes. She put her arms around his neck.

  “I’m just scared,” she said. “That’s all.”

  “That isn’t all,” said Vincent. “What are you scared of?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What else don’t you know?”

  “That’s all,” said Misty.

  “I assume that means that you have given a good deal of analytical thought to your feelings about me.”

  “My feelings about you appear to transcend analysis.”

  “Wonderful,” said Vincent. “What are they?”

  “I just love you,” she mumbled.

  “Speak up, please,” said Vincent.

  “I said, I just love you. Isn’t that banal?”

  “What a relief,” said Vincent, smiling.

  With the box of marrons glacés under Misty’s arm and a small bunch of sweetheart roses in Vincent’s fist, they walked down the hallway to Holly and Guido. Before he rang their bell, Vincent backed Misty up against the wall and kissed her.

  “You’re crushing the marrons,” she said.

  “I don’t care,” said Vincent. “Half an hour ago you said that you would marry me.”

  “Only because you got down on your knee in the middle of the street and I was afraid you would be run over by a taxi.”

  “Can we announce it?” Vincent said.

  “That you were almost run over?”

  “That we’re getting married. Kindly give me a yes or no answer. I can’t take any more elegant defense.”

  “Yes,” said Misty.

  “It’ll be nice—all of us together,” said Vincent.

  “Aren’t you the happy Boy Scout,” said Misty.

  The table was set for four. The coffee was put out for six.

  “Arnold Milgrim and his student are coming for coffee,” said Guido.

  “It may be that only Arnold is coming,” said Holly. “Doria seems to have disappeared with Misty’s cousin.”

  “Stanley?” said Misty.

  “Stanley,” said Guido. “Arnold and Doria came to the office this afternoon. Arnold and I closeted ourselves in my office to go over the article he’s giving to Runnymeade and when we emerged, they had vanished.”

  “Amazing,” said Misty. “Who on earth would run off with Stanley?”

  The evening was easier than Misty had anticipated. At the door, there had been affection all around. Vincent and Guido clasped each other. Vincent kissed Holly. Guido kissed Misty. Holly and Misty shook hands and gave each other the thrice over. It didn’t much matter to Misty whether or not she liked Holly. She was bound to like Holly whether she liked her or not, since Holly was about to become a fact of Misty’s life. Holly treated Misty as if she had known her for years. Then she shepherded Misty into the kitchen.

  “I just wanted to get you under the light,” said Holly.

  Misty stood obligingly and displayed full face, three-quarters, and profile.

  “Excellent,” said Holly. “Even better than I thought. I wouldn’t have given Vincent credit for this much sense. My theory is that Vincent has just awakened from an altered state of consciousness to find you. Get the champagne out of the fridge, will you?”

  On the way to the dinner table, Vincent made his announcement.

  “Misty and I have decided to get married,” he said. This engendered another spate of handshakes and kisses all around.

  They drank a great deal of wine at dinner. Misty felt the candlelight reflecting in her eyes as she looked around the table. Everyone at the table looked beautiful and kind to her. Holly behaved as if she had simply incorporated Misty, but Guido seemed quite moved. There are going to be thousands of dinners like this, thought Misty. This is my place at the dinner table. This is my intended husband’s best friend and that is the wife of my intended’s best friend whom I am going to spend the rest of my life getting to know. Across the table, Vincent looked seraphically happy. How wonderful everything tasted, Misty thought. Everything had a sheen on it. Was that what love did, or was it merely the wine? She decided that it was love.

  It was just as she suspected: love turned you into perfect mush.

  After
dinner, Arnold Milgrim and Doria Mathers appeared. Doria looked more windblown than ever.

  “This is a flying visit,” said Arnold. “Just a cup of coffee and we must dash.”

  Holly did the introductions.

  “Stanley has the same last name as you,” said Doria to Misty. “Is that common in New York, or are you kin?”

  “First cousins,” said Misty.

  “Blood relatives,” said Doria. “How thick. The idea of cousinship has lost its meaning in the modern world. It is entirely volitional, I feel. For example, I have several cousins. A few of them I have never seen. Some of them I remember hating and I have actually forgotten the names of two or three of them. Water, in the sense of distances, is now far thicker than blood, I feel. Your cousin reads Greek divinely. He read Plato to me this afternoon.”

  No one had any reply to this statement. Holly poured the coffee and sat next to Arnold. On the other side of the room Vincent, Misty, and Guido clustered around Doria, who, Misty noticed, although not a small girl, had a knack of making ordinary objects seem tiny in her hands. She huddled over her coffee cup, which she held with both hands, as if it were a bird’s egg. It was impossible to make conversation in her vicinity, but even in a silent group, with Doria as the focus, one felt that quite a lot was going on somewhere.

  “Doria engenders thought,” said Arnold confidentially to Holly. “For example, the mechanics of emotional politics. Doria can inflict hurt, which she defines as power. I am quite sure that she and that Stanley went somewhere and quite innocently read Plato. But Doria knows that gesture sets off the idea of possibility.”

  This sounded to Holly very much like a statement of jealousy.

  “The danger of communion between the sexes is that one falls back on the stereotypic,” said Arnold. “By this I mean such pseudo-values as possessiveness. Or the idea of love as capitalism: return on investment. The very idea of Doria blitzes these conceptions. A mind like that must be shared in the way of a scientific discovery.”

  During this recitation, Arnold’s eyes never left the couch on which Doria was sitting. Her head was bent as if her hair was weighting her down. She appeared to be asleep, but then she always appeared to be asleep.