Passion and Affect (10 page)

“Why don't you write another garbage study?” Guido asked.

“I'm in the middle of one but I can't keep to it. I sit in that bloody misshapen coat closet over at the Board and all I do is think about Misty. She says I'm putting myself through my own hoops, whatever that means. She actually
threw
a magazine at me. It was one of those thick ones.”

“Be glad she didn't hit you with the telephone book,” said Guido. The sky darkened and it began to rain. Vincent read
The Wall Street Journal
and Guido read the
Times
. He told Betty Helen that he was out, if anyone should call.

Vincent and Guido sat in Guido's office. A member of the board had been visiting with a cigar and the window was open to clear the air. It was noon and they were eating pastrami sandwiches.

“Holly called this morning,” said Guido. “She's back from Paris and she says we should see each other.”

“What prompted it?”

“Nothing. She did it all herself.” He flicked his finger against a glass bowl, which gave off a little ping.

“Are you going to see her?”

“I'm going to take her for dinner at the Lalique, which is where we always used to go, and sit at our old favorite table and I'm going to order smoked salmon and Châteaubriand and peaches in wine because that's what she likes and then I'm going to give her a bag of those lemon candies she likes from that place on Liberty Street because she's probably too lazy to go there herself.”

“And why are you making these grandiose gestures?”

“Because it's time for me to straighten things out. I'm tired of being alone. I'm tired of being estranged and separated. I want it all back again.”

“Supposing she doesn't?”

“She has to,” said Guido grimly. “I really can't go on.”

“I'm off to my garbage,” said Vincent sadly. “Give Holly my love, will you. I'd love to see you back together.”

“How's Misty coming along?”

“I'm going to see if she'll condescend to have lunch with me today. God, my life is shabby. Sometimes I think it's love and sometimes I think it's sickness. Life really
is
as complicated as she says it is. Except for people like Betty Helen, of course.” Vincent and Guido looked at each other. For an instant they were twins, slightly exhausted by hope.

Betty Helen's eyeglasses glittered in the light as Vincent walked out. He mumbled goodbye to her.

Vincent was walking toward Misty Berkowitz's apartment. They had gone to lunch together and she had delivered a tirade at him, telling him that he was lacking in feeling, that he had no emotional life, that he was a typical polite rich person, and that if all it took to make him happy was for her to be polite back to him, he was a hopeless moron. He felt as if twenty magazines were hurled at him. Then he said: “I'm sorry, Misty. I am the only way I know how to be. It's senseless for me to tell you how fond I am of you because you don't believe me.” He was about to slink off like a hurt dog, but she tugged on his sleeve.

She actually grinned at him. “Will you come over tonight and let me cook supper for you?”

“Would it make any difference?” he asked, miserably. She gave him a large, open, bright smile.

“That remains to be seen,” she said, and kicked him gently on the ankle with her shoe.

Walking down the street he thought he heard a violin. It was followed by an oboe and a flute. Two more steps and he heard a bassoon and a cello. For a moment he thought he was hallucinating. As he walked farther the music got closer. He passed a brownstone with large open windows. A girl with a violin in her hand looked out onto the street. Behind her were a group of men and women holding oboes and flutes and bassoons and clarinets and violas, walking around tuning up. The notes scraped against one another. A plaque on the brownstone read: The Horton Little Symphony Society. Someone played a piano trill. The girl in the window looked at Vincent, smiled, picked up her violin, and began to play the opening bars of the Kreutzer Sonata. He smiled back and rushed down the street. He felt moved and foolish to find that there were tears in his eyes.

“Betty Helen quit today,” said Guido. “Her husband is going to Oklahoma to study with someone called Mezzrobian. Did you ever hear of anyone called Mezzrobian? It sounded like someone everybody's heard of.”

“There isn't anybody called Mezzrobian. There isn't even a Mr. Betty Helen Carnhoops. Jesus, who would marry her?”

“Well, she's gone. She had to go pack for the movers. Now I have to start this gavotte all over again. I suppose you'll start nagging me about Miss Berkowitz.”

“No,” said Vincent brightly. “She says she'll stay at the Board and see how we go.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means how we work out together.”

“Women are very strange,” said Guido. “Even if they do what you want them to, they're not understandable.”

“How's Holly?”

“She's looking for a new apartment for us. She says the old one is filled with bad vibrations and we should start out fresh.”

“So you're back.”

“Everything's back. Do you think you could write a poem about garbage? I have a page open.”

Vincent sat with a sheaf of papers on his lap. “I have to get this thing in to
Urban Affairs Dialogue
by Friday.”

On the desk, the glass bowls twinkled. No one answered the telephone on the first ring. No one typed behind the potted palm. Magna Carta Employment, a part of the foundation that found jobs for nonprofit agencies, was sending over some new girls tomorrow for interviews.

Guido corrected proofs. Vincent read his garbage study. They worked in silence for two hours. Then they both got up. Vincent had to meet Misty Berkowitz for lunch, and Guido had to meet Holly to look at an apartment. They paced around the quiet office for several minutes. Now that everything was back, they both felt dizzy and misplaced, like dancers after a long ballet.

passion and affect

G
UIDO MORRIS
and his wife, the former Holly Stergis, had been separated for almost six months, during which time Holly read the Larousse
Gastronomique
, went to France with her mother, and wrote Guido one vague postcard which did not explain why their present living arrangement suited her, or why she had thought of it in the first place.

One day, shortly before the six-month mark, she called from her parents' house in the country to say that she felt they ought to have dinner and talk things over.

“I think I've arranged my mind,” she said.

It was a brief, explosive meal. They met at the Lalique, an obscure, ornate restaurant that had been the partial scene of their courtship, but neither of them had much in the way of appetite. They left their dinner virtually untouched but drank two bottles of white wine. Holly stared at her glass and said, “This place is littered with memories.” Then they left abruptly, overtipping. At their apartment, the chamber of Guido's recent solitude, they decided to resume their life together.

“But we have to move,” said Holly, with whose wardrobe Guido had cohabited silently for months. “I don't think we should live amongst our separateness.”

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

“It means that this is where we started, and this is where things didn't work out. Besides, I never liked the kitchen.”

“I'm not at all sure why you left in the first place,” said Guido. “You never said you didn't like the kitchen.”

“I told you why I left,” said Holly. “I needed time to be alone with myself and now I have. I thought it would be a profitable emotional experience for both of us.” She propped her neck with one of the ornamental bed pillows she had resurrected from the closet, where Guido, who had not been able to look at them without pain, had put them.

“Holly, did I do something wrong? Are you, I mean, were you in love with someone else? I mean, did I have anything to do with this?”

“I worried about you,” said Holly.

“So did I,” Guido said grimly. They were silent for a while and then Holly turned over with the little sigh that indicated she was asleep.

Thus, their reconciliation. Holly was back, but even with her sleeping next to him, Guido turned over and over again during the night to make sure she was actually there. She always was, her hair nestled against the pillows and one elegant foot on top of the blanket. She was sleeping the sleep of the just and innocent. Her clothes were neatly folded over the armchair that had held nothing for the past six months but copies of
The New York Times
. While Holly slept beautifully away, Guido slept fitfully, dreaming of lizards and relief maps of Brazil.

The next morning, she was up before him. He found her drinking coffee and wearing his old camel hair robe. What she called her “essential clothing” was still in the country. Her dark, thick hair was only slightly disarranged by sleep and her eyes were bright with unfocused alertness. She was reading the society page. At his place was a covered plate of eggs and bacon. She read to him from the paper, as if they had never been parted.

“Do you know Phillip Lamaze?” she said.

“No. Should I?”

“It says here that he was in your class at college and that he's just been named curator of the Rope Collection.”

“What's that? Photos of hangings?”

“A gift of Mrs. Henry Rope. It's Chinese porcelain.” She poured herself another cup of coffee, and Guido, who was generally teetotal, found himself wanting a drink. He had the feeling he would see Holly and die, so he barricaded himself in back of the sports page.

“I'm going to look for an apartment today,” Holly said. “I've done the real estate page, and I made a whole bunch of calls before you got up.” With that, she dismissed him. He kissed the top of her head, the only part of her accessible to him since she was deeply engaged in the movie review.

“I'll call you at lunchtime,” she said.

Guido put on his tie and left. Walking down the stairs, he felt as if his knees were a pair of smashed artifacts from the Rope Collection and reflected that in matters of the heart, Holly was very businesslike.

It was a bright, strident autumn morning, of the sort Guido hated. The weather was not in correspondence with his mood: the sun shone through fat, white clouds, wind blew the leaves off the trees, and the sky was an intense, cheery gray. Guido was ripe for blizzard, or torrential rain. He walked to his office feeling dazed and weak-headed. His office housed the literary end of a foundation called The Magna Carta Trust, which he had inherited and which gave money to worthy artists with noble plans for large-scale cultural events. From his office, Guido dispensed money to colleges and poets, and novelists from Guam and Uganda. He also produced and edited the foundation's literary magazine,
Runnymede
. It was a sensible and elegant production, and in the seven years of Guido's editorship, had begun to turn over quite a tidy profit, a fact that caused considerable astonishment to the trustees.

Since he could not bear to think of Holly, whose return was more like a collision than an event, he thought about his secretarial problems. The girl who had worked for him, Betty Helen Carnhoops, had quit to go to Oklahoma with her husband. She was a dull, efficient, and unattractive girl, as bland as cream of rice and probably as stable.

At the door to his office, he was greeted by a young man wearing his hair in the manner of John Donne, a three-piece suit, and cowboy boots.

“Can I help you?” Guido said.

“Yeah. I'm looking for Guido Morris.”

“I'm Guido Morris.”

“Well, I'm Stanley Berkowitz and I'm your new secretary.”

“Did the temporary agency send you over?”

“No, my cousin did. Misty Berkowitz. The girlfriend of your friend Vincent Cardworthy.”

“I've never had a male secretary before,” said Guido.

“I'm not a secretary, man. I just type very fast. I just got out of Princeton and I used to be a speed freak. I'm in classics.”

“A speed freak?”

“Yeah,” said Stanley. Seeing Guido's blank face he said gently, “How old are you?”

“Thirty-four.”

“Well, man,” Stanley said. “A speed freak is someone who does ups, you know, methadrine, amphetamines. You must have read about it in the local media.”

“I see,” said Guido. “What's it like?”

“It's hell, man,” Stanley said. “It turns your brain into pea soup.”

“I've never had a speed freak for a secretary before.”

“You don't now. I'm an ex-speed freak, but I'm a very nervous type, see.”

“How nice for you,” Guido said. “Can you take dictation?”

“No, man. I just write very fast 'cause I'm a nervous type, like I said.”

Stanley wrote a rapid, legible hand. He made the coffee and spent two hours taking dictation. Shortly before lunch, he presented Guido with a stack of typed letters. All the “w's” had been left out and were beautifully written in by Italic pen.

“Is the “w” key on that typewriter broken?” Guido asked.

“No, man. It's a little device I made up to keep from freaking out. See, you choose a letter and then you leave it out and then you write it in. I started it when I was writing term papers, see. It's a little sanity device.”

“It looks very nice,” Guido said.

“Well, it looks like the key is broken, see, but it gives a sort of personal touch. Besides, I hate to type. It makes me edgy.”

Guido's office was a long, stylish L. The prints on the walls were mostly Dürers, chastely framed in gilt wood. His desk was mahogany and seemed to have been made by a hinge fanatic. There were brass hinges on the sides, nailed into the front, and on the drawers. It was large enough to take a nap on.