Passion and Affect

by Laurie Colwin

  Twice a week, Minnie Hoskins came to clean. If Anwar was around, she got almost nothing done. He turned up the portable radio Minnie carried with her everywhere she went and danced with her. She was a large, pecan-colored grandmother. If I came home and Anwar had been in, there would be Minnie, holding her broom, giggling.

  “That Anwar. He do make me laugh,” Minnie said.

  “Minnie,” I said to her one day, about four months after Lilly’s first visitation, “when you dust my books, be sure to put them back in order. They’re all out of place now. I can’t find anything I’m looking for.”

  “I vacuum your books. I never take nothing off the shelf,” said Minnie.

  “Well, it’s very perplexing,” I said. “None of them are where they’re supposed to be.”

  “You ask that Anwar,” Minnie said. “Maybe he been foolin’ in your room.”

  I asked him.

  “Filipo,” he said. “You have nothing in your room I would ever want to read.”

  “But the books are all out of order,” I said.

  “Perhaps you are in the middle of a nervous breakdown and know not what you do,” Anwar said. “Everyone in New York has a nervous breakdown. You could be having one yourself.”

  At four o’clock in the morning, the doorbell rang. It was one of Anwar’s nights out, so it could have been Anwar. But it was Lilly, smoking a cigarette. She was wearing a raincoat, a shirt, and a pair of jeans.

  “I don’t understand you,” I said. “I don’t understand what you want.”

  “I don’t want anything. I just came over.”

  “At four in the morning?”

  “The pipes burst in my building,” she said. “I don’t have any water.”

  It was the first time she ever spent the night. The next morning I made her a cup of coffee and brought it to her. She held it for a moment, and then put it on the night table. She watched me as I got dressed, immobile and disinterested.

  “I’m leaving,” I said. She nodded her head slightly in acknowledgment.

  When I got home the bed was made. The cup on the night table was full of cold, untouched coffee. The milk in it had curdled and shredded on the surface. The books were out of order.

  Lilly was listed in the telephone directory. I had never called her, never, in fact, had known where she lived.

  She picked the phone up on the fourth ring.

  “Do you put my books out of order?” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “I look at them and forget where I got them from.”

  “I see,” I said.

  “Goodbye,” Lilly said.

  I put the telephone down, invaded by a kind of despair. People are abandoned by their lovers, their spouses, their parents—and despair, lose their jobs or loved ones, and grieve. What had abandoned me was explanation. Perhaps it is a disease scholars suffer when reason deserts. It seemed to me I had been incorporated into an event for which there was no explanation, a vacuum that sucked in misery.

  If I had been held up or robbed, I felt I would have understood a progression of circumstances: someone was hungry or withdrawing from heroin and I passed by and was therefore mugged. But I felt I had been vandalized maliciously, gratuitously. Although my books stood gleaming on their shelves, none of them missing, they were out of order.

  On his petulant days, Anwar referred to me as Fra Filipo, and called my room “the cell.” He claimed I lived like a monk, although I had told him about Jane Pinkham, the American girl in Paris, whom I wanted to marry and who was coming back to New York. I wondered what Anwar would say if he knew that sometimes nightly, sometimes weekly, in the mornings or afternoons, a girl appeared who seemed to have no further interest in me beyond a couple of hours in bed. I carried this fact around in a little sling of smugness.

  Two days after the telephone call, I came home from a morning of work with Alden to find Lilly in my bed, staring at the ceiling.

  “How did you get in?”

  “Your roommate let me in,” she said.

  A sense of spoilage came over me, as if someone had sprung my plans for a surprise party or had taken the trump card from my hand and revealed it to me, smiling.

  “I don’t understand you,” I said. “Why do you keep coming here?”

  “If you don’t want me around,” Lilly said, “just say.”

  “Would it stop you if I did?”

  “I don’t know what would stop me from anything,” said Lilly Gillette. In novels, in movies, in plays, the hero looks deeply into the eyes of his girl and the audience sees that they have blundered into an understanding that changes things between them. I looked into the eyes of my girl, but she wasn’t my girl, and she did not look back. This was no novel or movie—it didn’t even seem to be life—and there was no audience. She looked at the ceiling, her head tilted toward her left shoulder. Some unsettled feeling caught me, some point where rage and tenderness fused. I wanted either to strike or comfort her, but, so paralyzed by a situation of forced silence, I did neither.

  Anwar, over coffee, read from France-Soir. “The victim,” he translated. “A Swede in the coffee business in France for two months said that his car was wrecked by a girl with whom he had a casual liaison. He described her as a dangerous French mistress type. When pressed for explanation, M. Bø1strom would say only that she was an extremely emotional and volatile person and had taken his car after an argument. The woman, whose identity has not been made public, is a French Canadian student, M. Bølstrom said.”

  “That’s what you need, Filipo,” he said, “a nice dangerous French mistress type, cut from the pages of France-Soir.”

  I looked at Anwar, whose face was feline and puckish. He lapsed into an imitation of the Swedish coffee man and his interviewer from the newspaper, until he got the laugh he wanted out of me. As he washed the dishes he said, “Cheer up, Filipo. You don’t even have a car.”

  The days went by. At night I slept with the windows open, struggling into sleep, waking out of dreams. It seemed that any sound sleep I got was pierced by the doorbell: Lilly, the ends of her pale hair wet with rain, or soft and cottony with mist. If this had been happening to someone else, and had been told to me as a story, if this thing with Lilly had been described to me, if I could see it, I would have lit a cigar, smiling as the smoke trailed out the window, and said: “Things like this happen in books and movies, not in life.”

  My life, which had a comfortable, likable, productive shape to it, had incorporated something—someone—I didn’t understand. But it must have fit, because it had happened, and kept happening. One afternoon I asked Lilly if she would like to come to Alden Marshall’s party with me. She didn’t answer and when I asked again, she said no.

  What was there between us? And if I didn’t know, how could I ask her? I racked my brain for a starting place, thought of sitting her down to ask what this was all about. Instead, it just went on, erratic visits, one after another. The months that had unraveled between us made the search for a starting place inappropriate, grotesque. If she stayed the night, which she did infrequently, I came home to find my books out of order, and once, one of the French vases turned on its side. There had been flowers in it and some petals lay scattered on the dark spot where water had seeped into the rug.

  I had never been to Lilly’s apartment. I didn’t know how she lived, what she read, what pictures were on her walls. Nothing warm or recognizable operated between us. After what I now realize was a long and anguished time, I thought she was pursuing me, but I was pursuing myself. I put my books back into order, sopped up the wet rug with a cloth, and put the vase upright. There were days when I came home from a morning or afternoon of hard work with Alden, or from the ease of dinner with him and Hattie, expecting to find my apartment ransacked, my vases split and shattered, the glass paintings splintered, the photographs ripped from the wall, my books pulled from the shelves, lying on their broken spines. Boris Godunov says: I cannot sleep, yet I have nightmare
s. My waking dream was of coming home to this landscape, and in the corner of it was Lilly, smoking in my chair, Lilly the vandal who would say nothing, explain nothing. She would walk over the broken books to the bed and sit upon it, and I, mute uncomprehending walrus, would follow, since I could not find any appropriate place in our silence to ask her what she’d done.

  But it never happened. The vase on the rug might have been knocked over by her raincoat as she threw it over her shoulder. The books misplaced and upside down might have been the result of uncaring, blind, vacuity. Still, mornings, afternoons, twilights, dusks, the bell rang, I answered it, it was Lilly and she got, presumably, exactly what she came for.

  What I did not know at the time was that on her first visit, it was not me, but Anwar, she was looking for. A few of the nights on which she did not ring the bell, it was her set of footsteps I heard behind his, trailing down the hall. The afternoon I found her lying in my bed, she had wakened that morning in Anwar’s. He had gone to school and she had simply transferred herself to me, so she had not lied when she said that he had let her in.

  After this was revealed to me, I wondered if I had never asked her anything because I would have hated to know. When I did ask her, it was in Alden’s study, not mine. He and Hattie had gone to Maine for two weeks. I, of course, had a key, and Alden had asked me to check his mail and water the plants. Lilly obviously had a key too. When I let myself in, I heard typing from the study and thought that Alden had delayed his trip. But it was Lilly, as pale as the paper she was typing on, as bland as bread. I wondered if she had trained herself not to look up at the sound of someone at the door.

  “I could have been a burglar,” I said. “You didn’t even look up.”

  “Looking up wouldn’t make much difference to a burglar,” she said, above the clacking of the typewriter. Watching her, it seemed to me that she was either totally innocent or totally insane, or had perfected a style of evasiveness so intense it nullified her. It was horrible—but I had let it live beside me.

  I spun her swivel chair around. Her eyes fixed on my mouth, as if she were a deaf mute priming to read lips.

  “Lilly, listen to me. I don’t know what you’re after, but I want to know. You can’t live like a specter, appearing at odd hours. You don’t love me, you don’t know anything about me and I don’t know anything about you. Would you please tell me what has been going on.”

  “If you don’t want me to come around, just say,” she said.

  “I want to know why you came around in the first place.”

  “I was looking for Anwar,” she said. “And he wasn’t home.”

  “Anwar?”

  “Your roommate. I didn’t know he was your roommate. He said it was someone called Filipo.”

  And then she told me that she had spent nights with Anwar while I slept down the hall, that she had gone from one bed to the other the afternoon I found her in my room.

  “Does Anwar know this?” I said.

  “He never asked,” Lilly said. “How would he know? You can tell him if you want.”

  “Don’t you care?”

  “Not especially,” said Lilly.

  That was the last contact I had with her. She stopped working for Alden. If I think about it, it is like a dark fairy tale in which the magic word is said and the riches disappear, except there were no riches to disappear. After that conversation, her visits stopped.

  Anwar’s ladies troop in and out. Alden and I work on his book and I follow my schedule. Thursdays I have dinner with Alden and Hattie. Jane Pinkham, the American girl, is coming to New York from Paris, she writes, and I am to meet her at the airport.

  Sometimes a streak of terror goes past me, like a shooting star, close enough to singe my coat. I think: what did Lilly want? Was she only mute, as mute as I was? Did I misunderstand, perform a cruelty? Was she in some state of acute distress, and I unable to help her?

  But then I think that spilling my vase and leaving my books where they did not belong were only a short step away from carnage and chaos, and that my waking nightmare was the logical conclusion of what she was up to.

  She must still work around here, since I have seen her on the street several times. We salute each other formally, with a diminutive flick of the head.

  the water rats

  IN THE BEGINNING of the spring, geese flew in V formation. Max watched them from the bay window. He looked out over the water and saw the first of the small craft battling its way to an old mooring. On the weekends he liked to sit by the bay window and watch his part of the Sound. It soothed him, and it gave him a sense of propriety to see the latticework gazebo, firm on its slope. A family of barn swallows was building a nest in its thatched roof. The spot Max watched was ringed by dense firs where the Sound was squeezed into an inlet. The wind made the water choppy and there were white tongues on the tops of the waves.

  Recently, Max had discovered that there were water rats in his part of the Sound. His four children played by the shore and reported that they had seen brown cats swimming there. Max called the Town Commission and the commission secretary suggested poison, but in the summer his babies swam face down, splashing and lapping, and Max asked if there was anything else he could do.

  “I don’t know what to tell you, Mr. Waltzer,” the secretary said to Max. “There’s a poison that kills only rats and is safe for children and pets, if you want to use it.” But Max said he didn’t want poison in his water.

  That Saturday, Max consulted Eddie Crater, the local vegetable man, who was known to be an occasional hunter. Every Saturday he drove his truck up the Waltzers’ driveway—Olivia Waltzer had a standing order for lettuce and tomatoes. Eddie was a large, tall man, about as tall as Max, but he didn’t slump as Max often did. Max took him aside and told him about the rats and his reluctance to use poison.

  “I think you’ll have to shoot them,” Eddie said. “I can understand how you feel about poison.”

  “I don’t have anything to shoot them with,” said Max. “I haven’t fired a gun in years.”

  “I’ve got two rifles. I go after ducks sometimes during the season.”

  “They make a hell of a lot of noise,” Max said. “I don’t want the kids to be frightened.”

  “Look,” Eddie said. “There was a bunch of wild toms in the woods behind our house, fighting with our cats and tearing them to shreds. I had to shoot them. My wife took the kids to her mother’s and that was the last trouble we had with toms. You get the kids out and call me and we’ll take care of things. It’s probably one nest, but it might be a whole pack. Anyway, you call.”

  Late one Sunday afternoon, Eddie Crater arrived with his guns. Olivia had taken the children to the city for the day and the house was flat and silent without them. Max had turned on all the lights but it was dim without his family. The air was wet and heavy as Max and Eddie walked down the slope to the water. Max looked back at his house. It was twilight and the upstairs windows were yellow with light. The water was still and the rats made soft, slapping sounds as they swam in circles.

  At the first crack, Max was startled. He had forgotten what guns sounded like. It was Eddie’s shot and the hit rat was knocked into the air. Then it fell abruptly into the water, trailing blood. They shot four rats in all, and the water was brown and purple with blood. Max and Eddie scooped the bodies up with crab nets and dumped them into a plastic bag. They put the bag into the trash and went into the living room to have a glass of beer.

  “You keep an eye out,” Eddie said. “I don’t know if we got them all. We may have frightened off the rest of them and they could come back.”

  When Eddie went home, Max paced the length of his large, empty house. Alone, he felt suspended between restlessness and calm. Even when Olivia and the children were there, he thought about them constantly. He felt that they lived in his heart. At times when he was stretched on the sofa reading or gazing at the water, he felt his life was filled with a loveliness so intense he wondered how he contained it.
His children spoke and laughed and shouted and sang: they were four boys with dark-blond hair, and he couldn’t get over them. When he went to their rooms to kiss them goodnight, he was overwhelmed by the tiny veins in their translucent foreheads. Before he and Olivia went to bed, he stood at the thresholds of their rooms. Then he would go in and kiss them while they slept. They would be slightly damp, smelling of talcum and milk. When he went to his own bedroom, Olivia would be reading. She read the way little girls in old-fashioned novels are drawn reading: the book was open on her lap and she bent down to it.

  Max was tall and pale. He walked with his shoulders slightly bent and his head a little bowed as if he were expecting to walk through a low door. He had pale-blond hair and amber-colored eyes set in a wide, mild face. His father had owned an unsuccessful glass bottle factory to which he had been devoted, and when he died Max took over the business. He liked glass: he liked the shape of the chunky green bottles coming off the line. In the fifth year of his ownership, Max had invented a shatterproof glass that was extremely thin, and it had made him rich—rich enough so that six years ago he and Olivia had bought the huge stone house for more money than Max had ever dreamed he would have. It was an old house and had been in the same family for many years. Max had it gutted and stripped, making large, graceful rooms out of the cramped, tight spaces. Huge panes of glass, Max’s shatterproof glass, formed the bay windows at the back of the house. Then Max and Olivia and the boys—Hamish, Sandy, Paul, and Scottie—moved in.

  Max was still in love with the house. Six years had not dulled his amazement that he owned it. He was in love with his wife and his babies. Looking at his sons, watching their bright heads move as they played, caused him to count his blessings with a sense of pain: he did not understand why all this was his, and he treasured it.