Passion and Affect (2 page)

“That's not why. I don't like my privacy invaded.”

“Would it interest you to know I've seen you sleeping before?”

“Well, I don't like it. I don't like it at all. What are you doing, snooping around up here?”

Mary put a cool hand on his arm. “Don't shout,” she said. “You're overreacting. I've been here a couple of times to talk to Mr. Flores. He's Peruvian, and I used to live in Lima when I was little, so I come up to speak Spanish to him.”

“How nice for you.”

“No need to be nasty,” Mary said. “I really
am
sorry I woke you up. Goodbye.”

“How long were you standing around?”

“You lost ten minutes of privacy,” Mary said. “I didn't wake you, because you looked so angelic.” She moved as quickly as a cat and was gone before Roddy had collected himself.

On Saturday afternoon, Roddy was going over galleys in his office at the museum. He heard a knock and turned to find Mary Leibnitz standing at the threshold, wearing bluejeans and her lab coat.

“Hello,” she said. “Should I go away? I only came by because I wanted to go upstairs and was checking to see if you were here.”

“Why did you ask if you should go away?”

“You said you didn't want your privacy invaded. I don't want to people your solitude unless you want it peopled.”

“People my solitude,” Roddy repeated. She looked very fragile in the doorway. There was a sweetness in her eyes when she looked at him.

“Can I go up and see the finches? I mean, is it all right?” she asked.

Roddy stood looking at Mary for a long time before he spoke. “You're not like other people,” he said.

Mary looked at the floor. “Can I go up?”

“I'll go with you,” said Roddy, and he took her arm.

She followed him up the spiral staircase. He was tall and rangy and hunched his shoulders. Where his hair waved slightly, it was reddish, but generally it was brown. By a cage of golden finches, Mary studied him. He had round green eyes, with delicate lines around them that made him look tired in an exquisite way. His skin was very fine and his nose was flat. In the light he looked boyish.

“What do you want to see?” he asked.

“I just wanted to be here,” Mary said. “I don't think I've ever seen a room I've liked so much.”

“There's a lot I can show you,” Roddy said.

“I just wanted to be here,” Mary said. She smiled, then she stopped. “It never occurred to me. I'm really sorry. I probably took you away from your work, just for an aesthetic thrill. I mean, I didn't want to come up for any scientific reason. I'm really sorry if I took your time.”

“It's all right,” said Roddy. “At least you like birds.”

When they opened the door of his office, Aggie, Bert, Russell, and Gem started from the curtain rod and flew to the bookshelves. Roddy pulled down the blinds.

“I have to get them into their cage. Stand by the switch, and when I tell you, turn the lights off.” He stood in the center of the room, waving his arms. The birds left the bookshelves and flew to the corners. “Now!” he shouted.

Mary turned off the lights and heard the sound of wings threshing the air, then beating furiously against the wall.

“O.K.,” Roddy said. “Put them on.” He had a towel in his hand and from it poked a tiny white-and-yellow head. “It's Aggie,” he said. “Come and see.”

Mary watched as he put the towel to the cage door and Aggie hopped out to the back of the cage, looking rumpled and frightened. “Can't you catch them any other way?” she asked.

“No. I go through this every afternoon.”

“I can't bear to hear them beating against the wall like that,” Mary said.

“There isn't any other way. They have to be in their cage at night.”

“Won't they fly onto your hand?”

“Not these. They're friendly but not very trusting.”

“Mr. Flores seems to pick them out of the air.”

“You stick with Flores,” Roddy said. “He's a regular Francis of Assisi.”

When Gem, Russell, and Bert had been caught, Mary leaned back against the wall. “That's the most unnatural sound I've ever heard,” she said.

“No more unnatural than anything else you have to get used to,” said Roddy, covering the cage with a blue cloth.

They walked away from the museum past a line of trees. Damp leaves printed the sidewalks.

“I live quite close by,” Mary said. “Would you like to come and have coffee?”

“I don't think so,” Roddy said. “I've got lots of work to do.”

Mary lived in a brownstone with a wide oak door. Her apartment looked over a garden in whose center a cement Cupid with a broken-off right arm was standing in a pool of watery dead leaves. The pictures on the wall were old-fashioned watercolors of flowers. She had a small prayer rug and a Peruvian wall hanging. Her furniture was plain and comfortable. There was an oak desk, an oak table, a gray sofa, and two blue armchairs.

From the window Roddy could see the spires of the museum and the edge of the park. In the corner of the garden grew a catalpa tree, whose dried pods hung like snakeskins amid green emerging buds.

Mary appeared and put a tray of coffee and cups on the table.

“It's bliss here,” Roddy said. “How can you like the finch room so much if you have this?”

“I'm glad you decided to come up after all,” Mary said. “Come have coffee.”

“Wait a minute,” Roddy said. He took her by the shoulders and pointed her into the afternoon light. Her eyes were level and serious. Then she grinned and he kissed her.

“Thank you,” she said.

“Thank me?”

“I was hoping you'd kiss me, but I didn't know how I could arrange it. I'm shy.”

“You don't seem very shy,” said Roddy.

“I am, but not in usual ways,” she said. She bent toward the coffeepot, but he caught her arm and kissed her again. They stood at the window with their hands interlocked, and she scanned his face as if she were memorizing it.

“I'm married,” he said.

“You shouldn't have kissed me, then.”

“I mean, I'm getting a divorce. I'm in the process of it. I'm not telling you that so you'll think I'm available or anything.” He let go of her hand and sat down.

“Raiford,” Mary said.

“Roddy,” said Roddy.

“Roddy. How old are you?”

“Thirty-one.”

“You're very silly for thirty-one.”

“I don't like this conversation,” said Roddy. He drank his coffee and looked out the window. “You have no idea how nice it is here. Why am I silly for thirty-one?”

“Because first of all you kiss me, then you say you're married, then you say you're not married, and then you tell me not to think you're available. How do you know I'm available? How do you know I'm not married?”

“Are you?” Roddy said. “I saw the picture of that guy on your mantelpiece. Is he someone in your life?”

“He used to be my fiancé,” Mary said. “We were going to get married last July, but we broke it off. He's in India now, but we write to each other. We're still friends.”

“You are?”

“We started out friends,” Mary said. “You can stop being lovers, but you can't cancel out friendship. Maybe it's different if you're getting a divorce—harder to know if you and your wife are still friends.”

“I don't know what we were,” said Roddy. “We had a kid, but it didn't seem to help much.”

Mary looked at him sadly. He was sitting in a dark corner of the sofa; his head was lowered, hidden in a shadow. When she turned a lamp on, he looked up and the glow hit him full in the face. She sat on her side of the sofa watching him. The light played over his face like expression, and when he finally turned to her the slight lines around his eyes softened.

“This is the first time I've felt comfortable in months,” Roddy said. “You have no idea how nice you are.”

On Sunday evening, Roddy sat in his apartment waiting for Mary, who was coming to borrow his copy of
Darwin's Finches
. He was happy and nervous anticipating her, so he thought about her apartment, which to him was like the finch room. He liked the way she watched him, the serious way she reacted. “It's like a movie, being with you,” he had said to her. “I feel like a camera being watched by a camera. It's like being in a situation and outside it at the same time. If I look at you, I can watch me being here. I've never seen anything like it, the way you take note.”

She arrived on time, wearing a raincoat, a gray skirt, a white sweater.

“Don't you ever wear anything that's a color?” Roddy asked.

His apartment was on the ground floor of a dingy brick building near the river. In the living room was an aluminum work table, piled with papers, two cheap chairs, and a matching sofa. It looked as if someone had lived in the two rooms for a brief, uninspired time and had fled abruptly, leaving faded furniture and curtains behind. In the middle of the floor was an air-conditioner turned over on its side. Its parts were strewn in a circle around it.

“I'm in the process of fixing it,” Roddy explained.

Behind a partition was his bedroom—a nook big enough for a bed, on top of which were stacks of clean laundry and a small generator. In the kitchen was a Bunsen burner and a pegboard hung with hammers, ratchets, wrenches, and drills. On the Formica sideboard was an acid beaker that functioned as coffee-maker. There were two tin plates and two tin cups that he had gotten as a premium for buying the five bottles of soy sauce that were lined up on a shelf next to some empty orange-juice tins. The icebox emitted a hum, and when Roddy hit it with his forearm the door opened, revealing a container of cottage cheese, a bottle of wine, and a carton of eggs.

“That's my next project, that icebox,” Roddy said. “I got the hum out once, but it came back.”

He made coffee in the acid beaker. There was powdered milk and sugar he had filched from the museum cafeteria.

“What an odd way to live,” Mary said. “You go to all the trouble of making coffee with filter paper and then you don't have any proper milk. These are only temporary quarters to you, aren't they?”

“Proper milk, as you call it, doesn't keep, and since I'm not here all that often, why bother?”

“Then why bother about anything?” Mary said.

“I work most of the time. That's what my time is for.”

They drank their coffee side by side on the sofa, holding hands. The icebox began to hum.

“I've got to fix that, but first I have to call Templeton. I've been trying to get Garlin all day. She's never in, or else she's not answering the phone.” He dragged the telephone from under the couch and dialed a series of numbers.

“Let me speak to Sara,” he said into the receiver. “Is she any better? … Hello? S. J., it's Poppa. I hear you got a shot. You didn't cry? Well, I'm very pleased to hear that. I'm sending you a postcard in the mail and I want you to send me one of the pictures you draw at school. O.K.? Ask Mama if she wants to speak to me. … Hi. I didn't get the lawyer. I'll call him tomorrow. O.K.? Right.” He hung up.

Mary had moved to a corner of the sofa, to keep a distance between herself and the conversation.

“Why are you hiding over there?” Roddy said. “To pay me back for calling my wife? You can call your boyfriend in India if you want.”

“Don't tease,” said Mary. “How old's your little girl?”

“Four.”

“Do you have any pictures of her?”

“I don't have anything around,” Roddy said. “Most of my stuff is with my parents in Westchester. I brought a whole bunch of stuff back from New Caledonia once—feathers and nests and bows, carved boats, that sort of thing. After I got married, it was all nicely on display, and Sara got her baby hands on what hadn't disintegrated and tore it apart.”

“It's a spare life,” Mary said, smiling.

“You can be my possession. I'd put you in a little nook and lay flowers at your feet.”

“Don't tease,” said Mary.

“I wish I
were
teasing,” Roddy said. “God, how glad I am you're here.”

He took the wine from the icebox, opened it with a corkscrew, and poured out two water glasses.

“Celebration,” he said.

“Cheers,” said Mary. “It's the beginning of April.”

They stood in happy silence, drinking wine. The icebox hummed.

“Stand over here,” Roddy said. “I'm going to fix that damned thing once and for all.”

“Don't fix it, Roddy. Talk to me.”

“I've got the time now and I might not tomorrow. Besides, I can do both. Hand me that wrench—the smaller one.”

He took the wrench and a screwdriver and, after taking off the bottom plate, lay on his back, looking into the motor of the icebox.

“There's a flashlight in that drawer,” he said. “Can you shine it right above my head so I can see into this?”

She held it as she was told, flashing the beam from time to time onto his face.

“This machine is an antique,” Roddy said. “Why do you keep flashing that into my eyes?”

“To behold you.”

Half an hour later, the hum diminished, Roddy got up from the floor and took the flashlight from Mary.

“I shouldn't be doing this,” he said.

“Fixing the icebox?”

“Asking you if you'll stay here tonight.”

“You know I will,” said Mary.

“Why?”

“Because it's the right thing to do.”

“Do you always do things for a reason?” he asked.

“Aren't you doing this for a reason?”

“Your coming up to the finch room was an act of vast good fortune for me,” Roddy said. “You're the nicest person I think I've ever met. You're the only person I've ever met who seems to be
prepared
for things. Are you prepared for a lot of pain?”