Passion and Affect (3 page)

“I have no idea what you're talking about,” said Mary. “I don't think you do, either.” She rinsed the glasses, happy to feel the water running over her wrists.

Every day, they left the museum together, took walks through the park, and had dinner. During the week, they spent nights at Roddy's, and on the weekends at Mary's. Often in the middle of dinner or a walk, they would stop and look at each other seraphically.

“I've never been this happy,” Roddy said.

“Neither have I,” said Mary.

“I love walking through time with you,” Roddy said frequently.

They read each other's books, talked for hours, and planned to write a paper together on the function of song patterns in caged and wild finches. Roddy was astonished at how long Mary liked to sit over dinner. They talked, and quarreled, and kept regular hours. Each day the leaves got rounder. The cherry trees in the museum garden blossomed. The grass was lusher—wet and slick in the evenings. They did not arrive at the museum together in the mornings.

In the middle of June, they strolled through the park. The earth gave up a cold mist that collected in fuzzy halos under the street lights. The trees had blossomed late and were just shedding their petals, which fell on the grass like spilled paint. They did not walk hand in hand but held themselves in a close orbit, arm against arm. They stopped by a stone wall and studied each other. He had a way of keeping his face in a state of blankness tinged only by worry. When the tightness broke and he smiled, Mary sometimes found herself close to tears. Often he looked at her with a tenderness so intense that she had to force herself to make him laugh in order to break it.

“You are a blessing I don't deserve,” Roddy said.

“Shut up.”

“When I think that it's only chance that you work at the museum, that you might not have come up to the greenhouse …”

“You think it's chance that we're together,” Mary said. She walked under a plane tree, out of the light.

“Why are we, then?”

“I don't know about you,” said Mary, almost mumbling. “But some people act out of love.”

He caught her by the elbow. “Does that mean you love me?”

“That's not your business,” Mary said.

“What do you mean, it's not my business?”

“It isn't information you really want,” she said. “Don't go trying to get me to say what you don't want to hear.”

The summer seemed reluctant to break. By the middle of July it was still cold and wet, and the stone corridors of the museum were damp. The days spun themselves out in solid grayness. On a rainy Friday in August, Roddy and Mary ambled under an umbrella toward Mary's apartment. People on the streets moved in slow motion against the downpour, and the trees moved like underwater flora. The front door to Mary's apartment was swollen with damp and Roddy had to shove it open.

He sprawled on the couch and shut his eyes. Mary sat on the floor pouring coffee.

“Are you sleepy?” she asked. For a couple of weeks, he had been edgy and occasionally sleepless.

“I'm trying to see what this will look like in memory,” Roddy said. “We're not living in real time. This isn't real time at all.”

“It's real enough for me,” said Mary. She looked up to find him still lying there, his hands folded on his chest, his eyes shut, like a knight on a medieval coffin.

“It isn't real. It's pleasurable suspension. Real time has nothing to do with chance. It's loaded with obligations and countercharges and misfires.”

She put her cup down and wound her arms around her knees. “Is something going to make this change?” she said. “Is that why you're so restless?”

He sat beside her on the floor and took the pins out of her hair. “You think life goes in a straight line, Mary. This all seems clear and straightforward to you, because that's what you're like, but it isn't that way for me.”

“If you mean that you have to go to Westchester with Sara Justina, I knew that a long time ago.”

“Look, Mary. What we have now is a little gift wrapped up in time. It'll never be this way again. There are things I have to do that will cut me off from you eventually, and you'll hate me.” He wound her hair around his wrist. Then he let go, and she got up and sat in a hard-backed chair, clutching the cane seating until she could feel it imprint her hand. She had been haunted for a month, expecting some dire interruption between them.

“If what you're saying, Roddy, is that we can't be together any more, say it. Don't be such a chicken.”

He kneeled in front of the chair. “I'm used to these lovely free days, and I get sick to think what the world is going to do to them.”

“Talk straight,” Mary said. She collected the coffee cups, and when she reached for the cream pitcher it slipped out of her hand and smashed on the floor. She sat down abruptly, put her head in her hands, and cried for several minutes.

Roddy put his arms around her. He ran his fingers over the tears on her face and drew a little pattern on her cheekbone. “I want to maintain the time we have,” he said. “But, Mary, the earth spins on its axis and everything changes. You can't freeze things, not things as delicate as this, and hope they'll survive a thaw.”

“I don't know how to fight you on this,” Mary said, “when I don't know what I'm fighting.”

“Time,” said Roddy. “I've never seen a life arranged like yours. It's organized for a kind of comfort. Mine isn't.”

Her eyes were very grave. “You said I was a good arranger,” she said. “Time is the easiest thing in the world to arrange.”

“I want to be with you,” Roddy said into her hair. “But I don't see how. All I see is a messy world nibbling at the corners of this.”

“You're not talking about the world. You're talking about yourself. The world is outside us. This is an inside job.”

“Look, life has a lot of holes in it. This is going to get worse, not better. That's why all this time was so beautiful—because nothing got in the way of it.”

She spoke very slowly. “I didn't want to say this to you, Roddy, but you know I love you. I can't get to the bottom of what's bothering you, but if it's something you have to go through by yourself, I'll stand by you. You go off and take care of Sara Justina, and when that's finished we can sort it out. I don't want to live in unreal time with you.”

“You're making this very hard for me,” he said.

“I'm trying to make it easy. I'm trying to clear a way for you so you can see us,” said Mary. “But don't make me hang too long.”

“I'll figure it out,” Roddy said wildly. “I'll figure it out.”

The first week they were apart, Mary worked on a chart on the song patterns of the thrush. She made tapes of canary songs and wrote them down in musical notation, sitting in her tiny office with a set of headphones clamped to her ears. They blotted out the sound of footsteps, but they did not blot out what she replayed over and over in her mind: Roddy talking to her. When Ethel Reddicker went to lunch or lectures, Mary took off her earphones, locked the door, and wept. She stayed away from Roddy's office, but the thought that he was in the building, walking the corridors, using the elevator, made her feel bonded to him.

At night, she ran their moments together through her mind until, with a sense of loss, she realized that she was thinking in the past tense. There was no one she could talk to—she and Roddy had sealed themselves up, keeping their time to themselves.

Then for a month she kept busy, knowing that he was in Westchester with Sara Justina, but when the month was out she found that she was prone to tears that caught her off guard. She walked through the museum in a glazed and headachy state until she came down with a cold that kept her home for three days, watching the rain clouds low over the spires of the museum.

In the beginning of September, she went to the greenhouse when she was certain Roddy would not be there, to speak to José Jacinto Flores. She found him feeding Roddy's finches. His hand was extended into the cage and the birds perched on his sleeve, picking millet from his palm. He greeted her in soft, courtly Spanish.

“Why are you feeding the finches, Mr. Flores?”

“Because he”—José Jacinto nodded toward the empty table—“went to a conference in Bermuda for two weeks, so I have to take care of them.”

This information filled Mary with hope and despair in equal parts: he was back—he had gone away without telling her, but he was away. And how could she hear from him if he was in Bermuda?

Mary knew when he came back—she felt it. Then she saw him in the back of a lecture room as she walked by. He was writing on a blackboard, talking to one of the ornithologists. His shoulders were hunched in the old familiar way. Everything about him was familiar, but she couldn't call to him. She had given him her form of trust, and knew, because he had said so, that he trusted her. If he was waiting, it was for a reason—she had taken him on trust and stood by it. In her memory she heard his soft voice say, “You don't realize that I adore you.” She raced to her office in tears.

How they contrived to work in the same building, live in the same neighborhood, and never meet amazed her, but they did. She was not the sort of girl to leave notes in his mailbox or letters taped to his office door. When two months had passed, she realized that he was going to do nothing about her and she was filled with a sense of pain so intense it astonished her.

The last bugs floated lazily on the air currents. The weather was hot and wet, or cold and wet. In Mary's garden, a row of cats sat on the wall, baring their teeth, chattering at the chickadees, making little rattles in the back of their throats.

She had got into the habit of using the public entrance to the museum instead of the staff door. It was the third week of public school, and lines of giggling children patrolled by nervous teachers looped around the stone eagles and spilled down the steps, forming rows on the sidewalk.

One morning before she went to her office, Mary stopped in the gem collection, cutting her way through a sea of beings that reached her waist. She looked down on a mat of bobbing heads. There was a mixed din of shouts and giggles, flattened by the stone walls to a loud hush.

The room was packed; she could hardly walk. Children were standing four deep in front of each glass case and a teacher was reading to them about star sapphires from a printed card.

She fled to one of the galleries. A group of quiet children was standing in front of a bronze stork. At the far end of the gallery was a small tapestry behind a glass shield. A brass plaque announced that it had been woven by the nuns of Belley in the sixteenth century. In a lush green field, full of shells and wild flowers, was a heron—pure white and slightly lopsided. Its delicate feet were red, and its wings drooped by its sides. As she walked closer, she saw that on its face was embroidered an expression of almost human mournfulness. The room filled up behind her as she stood. Tears came into her eyes and her mouth twisted. When she turned, the room was swimming with children.

In late October, Roddy was lying on the table in the finch room. His eyes were open, and he was looking at a half-opened window in the skylight. A bird flew across it. He heard the door open, but didn't look up. Steps went past him, and through the cages he could see the back of Mary Leibnitz's head. He heard her walk to where José Jacinto Flores kept his lovebirds and tropical fish. Through the cheeping of the birds he could hear Spanish being spoken. He heard a chair scrape, then footsteps. Mary walked into the finch room, and Roddy sat up on the table. He looked at her through an opening in the cages, and she stared back like a startled animal. He could not imagine what she was reading on his face, but when he focused he could see what was on hers. It was pure grief; if he had ever seen it before, he hadn't known what it was. He swung his legs around.

“Please don't get up,” she said, in a soft voice, and he watched her as she walked slowly past the cages and out the door.

the elite viewer

B
ENNO MORAN
sat down to his evening round of television. He thought of this ritual as circular, beginning and ending at the same point—the first and last word of news, or the first and last chirp of the margarine commercial. Now that Charlotte was gone, Benno discovered that he was making some changes in his life. He had not been looking for them especially; he had not expected Charlotte to go away, but she had gotten a fellowship to go to England as part of a two month seminar. The first few days she was gone, the house had seemed strange and uninhabited. Benno felt like a clam reentering its shell. Suddenly he realized what it meant, Charlotte's going away. Once he had been a raw clam in its natural state, a clam with a roommate. Now he was cooked and he decided vaguely, without knowing quite what to do, that it was time to smother himself in butter, or at least to dip his feet in the cocktail sauce.

The first thing Benno thought of was to find some willing, random girl and go to bed with her. But, he reflected, any man can do that, and most men in his present position do. Benno was an industrial inventor. He had recently invented a plastic cartridge that could be inserted into chemical freight cars. Surely he could do better with his wife away than to find some fast girl.

At first it rattled him that he was thinking of things to do—exotic things to do—because Charlotte was away. After all, he loved Charlotte and he thought that what he was feeling was childish rebellion. It didn't quite make sense. But still, it was the first time in nine years that he had been alone.

He had found the television set by accident, simply turned it on and watched. Several weeks later he realized that watching television was the exotic thing he was doing in Charlotte's absence.

He considered this. When Charlotte was home, they never watched television, not even the news. They had been given a set for a wedding present and it had been turned on four or five times: for inaugurals and assassinations. Charlotte, who taught British history, did not approve of the television set, of newscasters and especially of late-night talk programs. Benno had begun to think of the late-night talk program as some truly corrupting pageant so fanatic was Charlotte's moral outrage at the idea of it. “It's ruining the art of conversation,” she said. “Talk about communication gaps. Really, I think my students would listen better if I sang a commercial every half hour or so.”