Passion and Affect

by Laurie Colwin

  Right before Christmas the weather became unnaturally warm. Snow melted into mud and car wheels skidded in it. The sky and the ground were mud-colored; it was like living between two roofs. I came home from school one afternoon on the warmest day, and in the living room I found my sister, who was not due home for another week. She and my mother were drinking and they were both red-eyed. It was another crisis. I wondered if she and Willis had broken off the engagement. I hung up my coat and my mother met me at the closet.

  “What’s going on?” I said.

  She was very tense. “Something’s happened,” she said.

  “What?” I asked.

  She said very quietly in a hysterical voice, “Charlie Hartz is dead.”

  It was shocking, and I stepped backward, away from her voice. “Why?” I asked.

  She said, “He shot himself this morning in his car,” and rubbed her knuckles against her teeth.

  It was the first time anyone I knew had died. I tried to imagine what Charlie had thought of when he got into his car and when he put the gun up to his temple. I wondered what he felt when the bullet went through his head. I wondered what he felt now, dead, and where he was. Then I went to my room and cried. I wondered if it wasn’t true at all and he was in his garage, working on his golf cart. When my father came home, he made me drink some brandy and then we went to Flossie’s house. Minna had been sent to an aunt’s, and Flossie was under sedation. Her mother was there, a keen-eyed, regal old woman, who had a foxlike intelligent face that prowed over an enormous bosom. She spoke to my parents off in a corner, and what I wasn’t supposed to hear was that Charlie hadn’t left a note, that his business was in order, and that, as far as they knew, his health was good. The rumors were that he was bankrupt or had cancer. But there was no note, no sign.

  My parents stayed with Flossie’s mother at Flossie’s that night, and my sister and I went home. We were both dazed and kept mumbling “I don’t believe it” at each other. She talked to Willis for an hour on the telephone. When we finally had dinner, it was as if the whole house was in the midst of a funeral. None of the lights seemed to work and we ate in dimness. We picked at our food. Willis came over and spent the night.

  My parents came back the next morning and we sat at breakfast, all of us tired and strained. The telephone rang and my mother answered it. “It’s for you,” she said to me, frosty in the voice. “It’s Jeremy’s mother.”

  Mrs. Flower said how sorry she was to disturb me, that we all must be very upset. What she was calling about was that Mr. Flower had called Jeremy to tell him the news. He had taken it very badly and refused to come for the funeral. She wanted me to call and make him come home for it.

  I called, and Jeremy said that he knew what he felt about Charlie and that his coming to the funeral wouldn’t bring Charlie back and he refused to come down to hear someone who barely knew Charlie reciting insincerities over his body.

  I asked him if he would come home for me, because I had to go to the funeral.

  “I won’t watch those vultures socializing around him,” he said. We were both very shaky. He said he would come down to see me, but not to go to the funeral. Then he said, “Did they tell you exactly what happened?”

  “He shot himself,” I said.

  There was an odd sort of glee in his voice, like someone championing a defeated, finished fighter. “He got up, had breakfast, and drove his car off and did it,” he said. “But that’s not all. It’s very corny.”

  I was furious. “What are you talking about?”

  “It’s corny,” he said. His voice was ragged. He was very near tears. “Don’t you know where he did it? He drove to Paradise Lane. Paradise Lane. That’s very corny. He did it deliberately.” He went on and on, about how Paradise Lane was the suicide note he didn’t leave, and how it was an existential gesture. He was babbling and I was crying.

  After I hung up, I asked my father if the bit about Paradise Lane was true.

  He said it was.

  “What do you think it meant?” I asked him.

  He put his pipe in his mouth and looked at me with the sort of worldliness that spans humor and outrage. “Not a damn thing,” he said. “Just a place to park his car.”

  a road in indiana

  RAD MC CLOSKY was born in 1938, Patricia Burr knew. His hair is dark blond, he is six feet tall, and he weighs in at one hundred and eighty-five pounds. At the age of twenty-three he married the former June Hulton and was divorced six years later. He has a son, Tyler, for whom he has written a number of songs, including “Tow-Headed Angel.” This information appears on the back of Rad McClosky’s record album, Closing Doors, and it is from this source that Patricia Burr also knew that Rad McClosky had been a delivery man with the Tina Laundry in Nashville before he was discovered singing with Farron Leeds and the Neap Brothers, as one of the Neap Brothers. Patricia had never heard music like this until she got to Indiana, where the air waves were pulsating constantly with it. During the day, when Richard was teaching, she played the record over and over, learning the songs by heart. At night, and in the shower, she hummed the title song. When the record was playing, she sang with it:

  “The lights went out when you walked out on me

  Closing doors is all that I can see

  Now my heart is dark and shuttered and

  My windows painted shut

  At night I cry for what can never be.”

  The first day she had the record, Patricia played it for Richard, who sat smoking his pipe and listening intelligently, hunched in his chair with his elbows on his knees. When it was over, she looked at him hopefully. He thought for a minute and then asked her if she would mind not playing it when he was at home.

  Rad McClosky was Patricia’s only happy discovery in Indiana. She had been there a year, but she had been an Easterner all her life, and she was a stranger. One afternoon, driving home from the Great West Supermarket, she punched randomly at the buttons on the radio and stopped at the first few bars of what the announcer later said was a cut from the new Rad McClosky album. She pulled over to the side of the road and parked the car to listen to it. It was a song called “Long Ago Love,” backed by bass, piano, and slide guitar, sung in a husky, mournful voice. The guitar was so sharp that Patricia felt her heart was being sliced. Tears came into her eyes. Then she made an illegal U-turn and drove back to the shopping center. At Flame’s discount record store she asked the clerk shyly for the new Rad McClosky album, as if it were a phrase in code. She was afraid that she had gotten the name wrong and the clerk would look blankly at her. It was slightly miraculous to her that the clerk nodded and put the record into her hands. On the cover was a picture of Rad McClosky, smiling and scowling—the expression that made him famous. A bright lock of hair fell onto his high forehead.

  She drove home impatiently through the traffic, her heart beating with frustration at every red light. She was so eager with her keys that she dropped them at the door. Inside she put the record on and was relieved to find a note from Richard taped to the icebox informing her that he would be home late. It read:

  P. Fac. meeting today. Home 6:30 or thereabouts. Fridge filthy, I might add. R.

  She listened to both sides of the record twice, sitting on the floor with her ear pressed up against a speaker. She was dazzled and rapt, anxious to memorize all the songs at once. She turned the sound up and went back to the kitchen. The icebox was not filthy that she could see, but dry shreds of lettuce and breadcrumbs littered the bottom. There were faint finger smudges on the door. But if Richard said it was filthy, it probably was. Patricia believed that Richard possessed a higher wisdom, and that her own chief flaw was failure of vision. Richard was very solid: he took responsibility seriously. He took his classes, his marriage, the order of his rooms, and his newspaper in the morning seriously. Richard was the most thoroughly informed person Patricia had ever known. He believed that if you opted, out of conscious will, to do a thing, it should be done completely. In his presence, Patri
cia knew she was a child. The only thing she knew anything about was music, but this slight knowledge was discounted by Richard on the grounds that she was untrained and couldn’t read it. His interest in music was perfunctory. He had a basic record library of the standard obscure classics, and he liked to hear Stravinsky during dinner.

  Patricia wished the crumbs in the icebox bothered her; she wished the smudges on the door were offensive. These things ought to matter, she knew, like knowing how to read music if you loved it so. She picked up a rag, intending to clean, but instead she made herself a cup of coffee and listened to Rad McClosky. She realized that she was in the grip of what Richard called “emotional sloppiness,” and that it was getting worse. After all, she had chosen to stay home and keep house, chosen it over going back to school as Richard suggested. She was not keeping her end of the bargain up. She and Richard had been discussing this of late, and of late Patricia had stopped sleeping properly, stopped cleaning the house properly as she once had, and had stopped reading Bleak House two hundred pages in. The application for a modern dance class sat on her bureau, filled out but unsent. It had been there for two months. Sitting over her coffee, Patricia realized that what she really wanted to do was to listen to Rad McClosky singing “Closing Doors.”

  For a month she played the record over and over during the day, and she was afraid that it was getting some what worn. There was a small scratch on “Closing Doors” and a larger one on “The Fire in My Heart That Burns for You.” She thought she might buy another copy as a contingency, in case the first gave out altogether. At night she suffered slightly that she couldn’t listen to it since it disturbed Richard. He was finishing his novel, called Pain in Its Simplicity, and he needed quiet. She knew that if she were finishing a novel, she would be annoyed if Richard played Stravinsky all the time and she knew that if that were the case, Richard would be good about Stravinsky. Every night, Richard put in two hours on Pain in Its Simplicity and an hour preparing his lectures for the three English courses he taught.

  Richard was very sensitive to noise: they had the top floor of an old frame house and Richard had chosen it so there would be no footfall above them. Richard’s study faced the yard, but he kept the window closed although no one was ever out back at night. Three walls of solid book shelving kept out even the noise of the wind. While Richard worked on Pain in Its Simplicity, Patricia sat in the living room. Through the closed door of the study she could hear the muffled clacking of a typewriter. A copy of Bleak House was unopened on her lap: she was reading the back of the Rad McClosky album.

  Richard had pursued her: Patricia had been a student in his survey of English Literature 12001. She was a junior in college, and Richard was getting his doctorate. On the first paper she handed in he had written: “This is beneath you. You could do so, so very much better.” She realized that special interest was being taken in her, but how did he know that she could do better? When he lectured, he paced, and when he paused to look at her, she was sure she was being seen into. One afternoon he asked her to stay after class: she was certain she was flunking, but he only asked her out to dinner. He began to take her out to dinner once a week, then twice. After a while she discovered that most of her time was spent with him. Her friends, bouncy undergraduates who got together on weekends to dance at the local bar, annoyed him, and gradually she fell away from them. He was interested in seriousness, he said. He was interested in potential.

  “When I look at you,” he would say, “what I see is not some flip kid running around dancing, but a finished person.” By spring, Patricia was very strained. She tried spending some time away from Richard, sitting at the bar watching her friends dance. It was what she wanted to do while young. Basically, she was a good-natured girl, known for her high spirits. She wanted to string her college days like bright glass beads, one by one by one. After an evening with her friends, upset at her longing to be what she once was—just a kid—she looked in the mirror and realized that what Richard told her must be true: she was past being silly. She was passed being flip. She had to be—there was no future in it. Something about Richard frightened her and she fought against it. One night they discussed it, and Richard told her that she was only frightened of being what she could be, if she wanted to.

  “Then what are you hanging around with me for?” Patricia had asked.

  “You tell me.”

  “Because I’m fabulously pretty.”

  “That’s very flip, Pat. As a matter of fact, I don’t think you’re pretty. From time to time, you’re something much better. You’re beautiful, but pretty you’re not.” Then Richard told her that children fooled around, but adults went to bed with each other—which side was she on? She took the side of the adults and it was settled. At the end of her junior year they were married in her parents’ house in Connecticut.

  In the mornings after Richard left for school, Patricia put on the Rad McClosky record and drank her coffee sitting next to the speaker. She drank two cups of coffee and listened to the record three times. On the shelf above the stereo was a picture of herself and Richard, taken by a friend. They were sitting on a sofa, and Richard’s arm was around her. He was medium-sized and wiry, with shiny black hair, straight teeth, and a mustache. Next to him in the photo, she felt she looked flimsy and insubstantial. Her hair curled and fell into her eyes. She was wearing and still wore what Richard called “baby sweaters” and her legs in their boots twisted around one another. In the photo, he looked as if he were Architecture, and she was a random, flying buttress he was supporting.

  She was three years married and when she looked at herself in the mirror, she did not see that she had become any more serious, any less young and heedless, or any more willing to get down to what Richard called “the things of life.” He was right when he said that she had not made up her mind about anything. She was shy in Indiana. There seemed to be a code of life that she didn’t understand. In the East, things had familiar shapes, and a familiar place to put them in. Born in Connecticut and educated in Cambridge, she felt she was in the midst of an alien order. She felt in Indiana the way she had felt in France when she was eighteen. Since Richard was at work on his novel, they kept socializing to a minimum, except for invitations to dinner parties at faculty houses, which were repaid by dinner parties at their house. One afternoon a week she took a bundle of laundry to the laundromat, and watched a collection of fat women in Hawaiian shirts feeding towels into the washing machines. In the afternoon she listened to Rad McClosky and drank coffee. Richard had stopped plaguing her about Bleak House or about the modern dance class. Now he watched her silently and she felt like a patient about whom the doctor has said: We can do nothing but wait.

  It had been decided, after one long, serious talk, that Patricia should not do anything until she felt ready, and when she was ready, she and Richard, together, would work out the details. At the time she wondered how she would know when she was ready. Then she had thought that Richard would know.

  What she did was listen to Rad McClosky. She learned every song by heart and knew every nuance. She knew when the guitars broke in unexpectedly, when the piano took over, and when the rhythm line changed. While doing the laundry or shopping at the Great West, she could listen to it in her head, as if there were a switch in her mind that would play Rad McClosky for her.

  Richard’s birthday was in April, and three weeks before it Patricia realized that she had no money other than the weekly house money. She knew what she wanted to buy him: a set of the Arden Shakespeare they had seen in a second-hand book store. Richard had always wanted it. While they were still in Cambridge, he used to comparison shop the book stores for a set, but either they were annotated in ballpoint ink, or tattered, or in mint condition and therefore overpriced. In secret, Patricia had gone to the second-hand store, priced it, and calculated how much money she could possibly take out of her house money to add up to forty dollars. But buying Richard a present with house money was wrong: it took food out of his mouth in orde
r to provide him with a’gift. Besides, she was buying it with his money. If she asked her parents for a check, it would have to be accounted for.

  Finally, she saw a job for a part-time typist advertised and took it. Twice a week for three weeks she sat behind a gray filing cabinet at Harley’s Auto Supply and typed out shipping bills. She asked to be paid in cash and hoarded the bills in a spice jar that she hid at the back of a cabinet. It was her constant fear in those three weeks that Richard might decide that the shelves needed rearranging and would come across a jar of coriander with five-dollar bills hidden in it.

  Three days before Richard’s birthday, Patricia drove to the book store with the jar of coriander in her handbag. At a stoplight on the way it occurred to her that the set might have been sold and she panicked: she had never thought to check if it were still there. Richard was right about her: she simply couldn’t plan.

  But the set was there—in mint condition—and it was hers for forty dollars. The clerk watched as she produced the jar of coriander and picked the bills out from the seeds.

  She took the set home in a carton and hid it under the sink in back of the rags. The day of his birthday, she wrapped each volume in pink and green tissue paper and stacked them back in the carton, which she wrapped in yellow paper and tied with a green bow. In the afternoon she roasted a chicken and made a carrot pudding for Richard’s birthday supper. Rad McClosky sang from the living room and she hummed with him. When she looked at the carton sitting on the table, she was dazzled at her accomplishment. With the baster in her hand, she harmonized to “The Fire in My Heart That Burns for You”: