Passion and Affect (11 page)

The windows looked over the roofs of mid-Manhattan and Central Park. On a shelf that ran the length of the wall were back numbers of
Runnymede
and books by authors subsidized by the foundation or published in the magazine. On a long table was the collection of Peking glass bowls left to Guido by his Newport aunt. There was a brass watering can filled with eggshells and water, a combination suggested by Holly to give his plants a better life. Every morning, Guido watered the hanging fern, the geraniums, the grape ivy, and the potted palms behind which Stanley now sat. In the hall connecting the outer and inner offices was a little refrigerator made of bird's-eye walnut that when opened contained several cans of shrimp bisque, bottles of Seltzer, and a plastic lime.

At lunchtime, Vincent Cardworthy appeared. He was Guido's oldest and closest friend and, by quirk of good fortune, second cousin. They were both tall and lean. Guido was dark and Vincent was ruddy, but they both had happy, boyish, slightly haunted faces.

Vincent's office at the Board of City Planning was several blocks from Guido and he frequently walked over for lunch. It was at the City Planning Board that he had fallen in love with Misty Berkowitz, who disapproved of Guido and Vincent with equal venom. Vincent was a free-lance statistician whose special field of expertise was garbage removal and disposal. “I'm in garbage,” he often said but was forgiven, as his studies on the subject were considered to be quite brilliant. They were quoted in
The New York Times
, and republished in a large number of urban journals.

He found Stanley eating a pastrami sandwich behind the potted palm.

“What's happening on the rubbish heap?” said Stanley, by way of greeting.

“How's the life of a male secretary?” Vincent said.

“It's pretty far out,” said Stanley. “I was just reading a little Homer here to get my mind uncoiled.”

Vincent found Guido sitting at his desk drinking a glass of lime and Seltzer and reading a manuscript.

“What's happening on the rubbish heap?” he asked Vincent.

“Is Stanley writing your material now?” Vincent said. “How's Holly?”

Guido felt a surge of despair. “She's wonderful. I'm terrible. I feel as if I had been flattened by a truck, but she's as adaptable as a thermostat so she's happily reading the paper. She wants to move. She says we shouldn't live in the scene of our separation.”

“I'm not at all sure I know what that means,” Vincent said.

“It means that that's where we started and that's where things didn't go right. She said something last night about the artifacts of dissatisfaction. I can't talk about it. All I know is she's back, and that's what I wanted. It would be nice to know on what terms, but that doesn't seem to interest her.”

“If Misty didn't hate your part of town so much, I'd take your apartment, seeing as mine is stereotypic and banal. Your part of town, according to her, is filled with uptight gentiles and rich people.”

“Maybe one of these days we'll all be poor and happy.” They exchanged a look of mutual exhaustion.

“I'm going to ask her to marry me,” Vincent said. His eyes were slightly glassy.

“Why don't you stick your head in a coal stove? It saves time.”

“I love her,” Vincent said. “I know she loves me, but she won't say because she says I don't deserve to know.”

“Isn't life simple,” said Guido bitterly.

“In the old days,” Vincent said, “I'd pop the question and she'd say yes and we'd go and do it. Then we'd settle down and live our lives. Everything would be as it should be.”

“In the old days, there weren't any Mistys, or Hollys either. I don't think I know any more how things should be.”

“Well, I'm just going to go ahead on the theory that things are the way they're supposed to be, and I think that Misty and I should get married.”

“I'll send you the name of a good divorce lawyer for a wedding present,” Guido said.

Misty Berkowitz was a small-boned girl with a long stride. Her hair was the color of amber and she wore wire-rimmed glasses. She was an assistant structural theorist at the Board of City Planning, where she had met Vincent. In the spring and summer she wore an old green suede jacket and in the winter she wore an old green suede coat. She had not intended to stay at the Board of City Planning: she wanted to go to the École des Hautes Études to study linguistics, but she had met Vincent and put it off. Vincent knew she had been planning to go abroad, but he had no idea that she had put it off because of him. Vincent was everything Misty disapproved of, and since she felt he was a blockhead, she had no intention of telling him anything.

She did, however, tell herself quite a lot of things, and one of the things she knew was how she felt about Vincent. No matter what she said aloud about him—things that were generally savage—she knew him to be a level, good-tempered, and intelligent person, deeply affectionate, but a man who knew as much about the life of the emotions as an infant knows about parachuting.

Misty and her cousin Stanley did not frequent each other, but since he had come East to college, a loving animosity had sprung up between them. Basically, they met at times of personal crisis, and the last time Misty had seen him, he had been miserably stewing over a girl called Sybelle Klinger who could not make up her mind whether or not to share his sublet with him. She had finally said yes, and Misty and Stanley had not had any reason to get together.

When Misty called him, he assumed that it was a time of emergency, so they met in the park and ate hot dogs at the zoo. Stanley was family, and he was smart. His father and Misty's were labor lawyers in Chicago. They got right down to cases.

“What do you think of Vincent?” Misty said. They were standing at the seal pool.

“I think he's a straight dude, man.”

“Oh, knock it off, Stanley. I want to know what you think.”

“I like him a lot. I mean, viscerally. But then, I haven't been around him much.” He watched the seals with envy. “That's the way to live,” he said.

“Do you think I should marry him?”

“I don't know from marriage,” Stanley said. “Do you wanna?”

“Why can't you be serious?” Misty wailed.

“Don't get all worked up,” Stanley said. “I need another hot dog. You should marry him if you love him, right?”

“You are a rude, selfish little pig, Stanley.”

“No I'm not, man. I'm just saying that if you love him, you should do it to it.”

“Isn't life simple.”

“Yeah, man, it probably is, but not for weirdos like us. Come on, let's get another hot dog and go see the yak.”

In the weeks that they had been back together, Guido heard Holly mention someone called Arnold Milgrim several times. Since she neither explained nor described him, Guido supposed that he had been Holly's lover, but when she began to speak about him with the disembodied reverence with which you refer to the very famous, he assumed Arnold Milgrim was someone universally known—a sort of prime source, and not Holly's lover at all. But still he was not sure, and he endured this form of self-torture for a week or so. Then, one morning, he looked meaningfully at the coffee pot and said: “Pour me some more of that Arnold Milgrim.” By the end of breakfast, he had called nearly every object by this name.

“Where's my Arnold Milgrim?” He said menacingly, looking for his briefcase.

Holly then explained that Arnold Milgrim had been a student of her grandfather's and she had met him on her recent trip to France. He taught philosophy at Oxford, on loan from Yale, and was the author of
The Decay of Language as Meaning, The Automatic Memory
, and
Fishing in the Waters of Time
, which was about Hegel.

As the day progressed, it seemed to Guido that he was perhaps the only person alive who had not heard of Arnold Milgrim: Stanley had read
Fishing in the Waters of Time
and said it was far out. Vincent reported having seen Arnold Milgrim on television in London. Finally, Guido made the first telephone call he had ever made to Misty Berkowitz, who told him that she had read parts of
The Decay of Language as Meaning
and found it provocative, but basically silly.

Then the subject of Arnold Milgrim was dropped, because the artifacts of dissatisfaction were dispelled by a series of painters, plasterers, and paperhangers who invaded the apartment. Guido had always wanted to have a closet papered with a map of eighteenth-century Paris—it was one of his low-level fantasies—and Holly spent two weeks looking for wallpaper with the right map on it. Monkeys climbing blue poles decorated with green squash blossoms appeared in the guest bathroom. Soft coats of unnecessary white paint were spread on all the walls. Five strange-looking men appeared on a Friday to scrape, stain, and wax all the floors. The Persian rugs came back from the cleaners glowing richly. Two boys who looked vaguely like Stanley showed up and fixed the kitchen by putting up some chic and useful shelves.

Finally, the last dust cloth was taken up, the rooms no longer smelled of paint, the curtains swayed immaculately in the autumn breeze.

One Saturday morning, the postman delivered a very heavy cream-colored envelope addressed to Holly. It looked as heavy as a wedding invitation—but it was a letter from Arnold Milgrim to say that he was coming to New York with one of his students. Embossed in gold on top of the page was the seal of Halifax College, Oxford.

“This is the sort of paper they use when the Empress dies,” Guido said to Holly, who fired off a reply, inviting Arnold and his student for dinner.

“Spear me another of those little Arnold Milgrims,” Guido said, and Holly absently dropped an Irish sausage on his uplifted plate.

Arnold Milgrim called on a Tuesday afternoon, and at eight o'clock he appeared. To Guido he seemed to be the size of a bug and wore a suit the sheer smallness of which was touching. It looked as if it had been reduced to scale to fit a box turtle. His socks were the deep red of arterial blood and around his neck he wore a scarf long enough to wrap around an elephant's midsection. On his arm was a thin girl whose toast-colored hair was so tenuously arranged that Guido was afraid to shake hands with her. She was introduced as Doria Mathers and she appeared to be asleep.

Arnold Milgrim was bald and his face had the naked political sensuality found on busts of Roman generals. He wore round glasses and it was not odd to see him with such a tall, thin girl. They were both dressed to the nines, or some odd version of it. Doria Mathers wore a long yellow knitted dress and stockings that matched Arnold Milgrim's socks.

By the time drinks were finished, Arnold Milgrim had given Guido an excerpt from his new book for
Runnymede
. It was on the subject of the new metaphysics and was titled “The Amorphous Cage”. Doria, on the other hand, had not spoken, and although she said nothing and did not raise her eyes from the sight of her own knees, she was hardly a quiet presence. As she later said of herself: “I fill my own space with a kind of inaudible loudness.”

Guido thought that perhaps she had invented a new form of communication, so he sat opposite her by the fireplace and said nothing. From time to time he filled her glass and she gave him a mysterious, vacant smile. Arnold had decided to divide his time equally between Guido and Holly, and, finished with Guido, he talked quietly with Holly on the sofa.

“Doria is my most extraordinary student,” he said. “The sheer weight of her mind oppresses her. Sometimes she simply can't speak because the process of thought is too intense. She thinks she sees birch trees where there aren't any. Oxford does not compensate for a life spent in Blessington, Vermont. I think the birch trees are a metaphoric orientation for her.”

After dinner, while Guido and Doria sat on the sofa in silent communion, Arnold Milgrim talked to Holly. He talked about the weight of Doria's mind and, to Holly, he appeared to be almost out of his senses with love, but on the other hand, it was rather like the deep love a researcher might have for an experimental pet. Doria had uttered one entire sentence, at dinner, over the quiche, which Holly felt was a meal appropriate for people who had been on planes. Doria said: “Jet lag is the true disease of the late twentieth century.”

As the evening wore on, she became more and more disarranged. She had taken off her shoes, which lay one on top of the other on the floor. Her tenuous hair arrangement had dissolved completely, and Holly, whose neatness was like the sheen on an Oriental pearl, could see that there was a lot to be said for dishevelment.

On his side of the room, Arnold Milgrim said to Holly: “Look at her shoes. She always leaves her shoes like that and when I see them and I think of the power of her intellect, it almost brings me to tears. Once I found her slip crumpled up into the shape of a heart.” He sounded almost anguished. He asked Holly to show Doria around New York while he went to see his publisher. As they left, Holly asked Doria what she would like to see.

“I'd like to go to all the knitting shops,” Doria said. “I love to knit. It's like playing chess for me.”

Life was back to normal, sort of. Holly said: “Now that we've had one set of dinner guests, it's time to have Vincent.”

“Vincent is part of a pair, now.”

“I know, and I want to meet her. Besides, now that we're consolidated, I want to see how it feels in front of real friends.”

“I'm not sure what that means.”

“It means that we're really back together and it would be nice and tightening to throw it around in front of a crowd.”

“It's murk to me.” Guido said. “Besides, Vincent isn't a crowd.
Misty
is a crowd.”

He looked at his beautiful wife, his beautiful apartment. Life had all the accoutrements of grace. Their communal mornings were brisk and affectionate, their nights rhapsodic and passionate, but Holly conducted herself like a bird of paradise that had flown through the window of a house in Des Moines and settled down. She did not bother to explain her presence, or the reason for their parting, or her reason for coming back. She was simply, solidly there. His happiness in her company made Guido forget to mention his great bafflement on these issues when he was alone.