Passion and Affect (21 page)

He stood as formally as a young Prussian soldier about to present her with a bouquet, but his face was relaxed, lazy, and grinning. Quietly he stroked her bright hair.

“Are you dismissing me?” he said.

“In a way.”

“Does that mean if I call you you won't speak to me?”

“No.”

“Then I'll phone you up,” he said.

Katie's cousin Justin taught history at Columbia. He was in his middle thirties and had been divorced. His wife had left him with a kitchen full of French cooking ware, whose existence he justified by going once a week to a cooking school run by a German lady poet who had been at Cordon Bleu. Every few months he gave a small dinner party to announce one of his culinary triumphs, and he liked to mix his friends. At the last of these, Elizabeth had sat next to a Southern lawyer who wrote tone poems. His name was Terry Parmett, and over the pears he had said: “Do you have a lovah?” And when she asked him why he wanted to know, he said: “If you don't, it seems to me a real waste of lovely flesh.”

The next time she went to one of Justin's dinners, Terry Parmett was there.

“Katie and Tom were supposed to come, but they had to go to New Haven,” Justin said, “so it's just us.”

“You git better looking every time I see you,” said Terry. He had a snub nose, eyes full of manic inertia, and glasses that seemed either too big or too small for him.

“You've only seen me once,” Elizabeth said.

He drank a good deal of Bourbon before dinner, and a lot of wine during it. After dinner, Justin, who was compulsively neat, took the dishes to the kitchen. Elizabeth heard the sound of running water. Terry Parmett slumped toward her, looking as if he would melt onto the table.

“I'd give an awful lot to know you,” he said.

“I'll give you my social security number.”

“You know what I mean. I find you quite delectable, but I think that if I called you up, you'd mock me. But I could get quite het up over you.”

“That's very flattering.”

“I'd give a lot,” he said. “You have no idea how fine I think you are. I'm quite degenerate, you know.”

Elizabeth said, “I'm sorry to hear it.”

“What I mean is, what would you say if I offered you money. For your favors.” It was so outrageous she laughed.

“How much?” she said.

“Ten thousand dollars,” he said. “That would be about my limit, but I'm extremely wealthy, as Justin will tell you.”

“That's quite a come-on.”

He took out his checkbook and put it on the table. “I keep a running balance,” he said coldly. “It's all there. I give you the check, you call the bank.”

“Enough,” said Elizabeth.

“I'm quite serious,” Terry Parmett said.

As they were leaving, Elizabeth took Justin aside. “Your pal Terry is a maniac. Can I trust him to get me a taxi?”

“He's drunk,” said Justin. “Wild but harmless. He'll get you a taxi. Southerners are always polite.”

The night was full of cold, gray fog. The traffic lights blinked woozy red and green. The cars, as they passed, lit up a snow flurry. As they turned the corner, Terry said:

“We're being followed.”

“You're being silly.”

“We
are
being followed,” Terry said. “Turn around.”

Out of the corner of her eye, Elizabeth saw a man stalking close to a building. Then he raced across the sidewalk, and crouched by a parked car. He crept into the street, flattened himself against a truck, and darted over to a mailbox. Elizabeth squinted through the fog. It was George Garzanti, wearing his old leather jacket. They were three blocks from his apartment. His eyes met hers and glared like a cat's, caught by a torch. He moved under a streetlight and stood illuminated, snow falling on his shoulders. He looked pained, and crazy.

“Get me a cab,” Elizabeth said to Terry and as they walked to the corner, she saw George watch, move forward, and then turn and walk the other way.

“Are you going to let me come home with you?” Terry asked.

“Does that mean can you see me home?”

“No. It means can I stay with you.”

“No.”

“Then I'm not interested. Here's your cab.”

When she got home, there was a note on her mailbox that said:

I came by to see you, but obviously you were out. Call me at Ox 3-5727 between nine and twelve and tell me when I can see you.

Richard Mignon

She walked up the stairs, tearing the note into tiny pieces that fluttered behind her like confetti.

wet

L
UCY WAS A BORN SWIMMER:
she had been in the water as an infant and swam without water wings by the time she was three. At five, she was swimming underwater with ease and began to practice diving when she was six.

Her family lived in St. Paul and spent the summers in a cedar-shingled house at Stone Boy Lake. A set of steps led from the house to the dock. The lake was a mile long, ringed by dense, moss-sided firs and overshadowed by hills of timber. It was almost gothically dark, except at high noon when the sun cut straight down onto the water like the beam of a klieg light. It was so quiet that if you swam early in the morning all you would hear was the sound of your own splashing. At Stone Boy Lake, you swam to your friends, and it was not uncommon for Lucy to swim several miles a day. The summer people kept towels waiting on their docks.

In the winter, Lucy swam in the pool of Mallard Academy in St. Paul. In the East, at college, she swam through the seasons, through exams, through love affairs. She was in the water the morning of her marriage to Carl Wilmott, keeping her scarfed head up so as not to ruin her wedding hairdo.

Carl and Lucy had met in Boston, and were married three years later in the summer house on Stone Boy Lake. They lived in a light, sparse apartment in Cambridge. The wooden floors were highly polished and the furniture was so trim and modern that it looked as if it would skim across the room if pushed. Lucy worked for the law review, and Carl had an assistantship in the history department, but when he was offered a position in Chicago, they decided to take it, packed, and were ready to move within a week. Neither went in much for heavy baggage or personal artifacts. They liked what could be easily carried. Their only decorations were a Peruvian wall rug, two Appalachian quilts, a watercolor of Boston Common in the 1880's, and a soapstone seal, carved by Eskimos. Three days after New Year's, they flew to Chicago and were settled the next day.

Lucy was middle-sized and lean. Her features were small, but craggy, as if they had been reduced to human scale from some large, rough-hewn monument. When she smiled, her eyes almost disappeared behind her cheekbones and her skin was so translucently white you could see the veins beneath it.

Carl, who was ruddy and large, was often stricken at the thought of her fragility, and he was constantly amazed by her ruggedness. His sports were handball and squash—he liked to sweat and strain—and he watched with wonder as his delicate wife dove from boulders into mountain pools so cold they shocked his entire body if he put so much as a foot in. She raced into the ocean at Maine in October while he sat shivering on the beach wearing double sweaters. He watched her slide down waterfalls in Vermont, her hair tangled by white water.

The first day in Chicago, Carl went to a faculty meeting, while Lucy unpacked the last two cartons and then called University Information to find out where she could swim. There was a pool, she was told, at McWerter Hall, nine blocks away.

It was below freezing. She could feel the cold through her boots. It had been ten years since she had lived in this kind of weather, and her body had forgotten. The inside of her nose was stiff. By the time she reached McWerter Hall her feet felt like stones.

The guard pointed the way to the ladies' locker room, where she filled out forms for an official pass and was given a temporary card stamped “new faculty.” The pool was empty except for two girls who sat on the side in dry bathing suits, dangling their feet in the water. Their voices murmured and echoed. When they laughed, it sounded like distant gun shot.

Lucy dove off the high board and swam a lap under water. When she surfaced, she was alone, and she swam by herself for two hours. In the locker room, she combed her lank hair in front of the foggy mirror, and by the time she got home, even with a hat and scarf, the front of her hair was frozen.

In February, it snowed, and then got colder. Coal trucks unloaded in the streets, turning the ice black, and children coming home from school skated on jet-colored humps that formed in the middle of the streets. They played with their heads down and walked backward against the wind. People passed each other with their eyes streaming. When the wind let up, they brushed the tears off with their gloves, as if suffering from secret heartbreak.

Carl hated the cold, but he and Lucy liked Chicago. Their new apartment was very much like the one they had had in Cambridge—light and sparse. A small set of people they had known at college formed the beginning of their social life. Carl was making friends in the department, and Lucy, who was job hunting, explored the neighborhood.

After his two o'clock class, Carl usually had coffee with Johnny Esterhazy, who had gone to high school and college with him. They were both New Yorkers and the cold exhausted them.

“I saw Lucy on the street yesterday,” Johnny said. “I thought I was coming down with terminal frostbite, but she looked like the breath of spring.”

“She's the old original polar bear,” said Carl. “She grew up in St. Paul, which is the arctic circle, as far as I'm concerned.”

“Well, I admire her,” said Johnny. “Her bangs were frozen.”

“You admire her because her bangs were frozen?”

“What I mean is, it takes real fortitude to swim in this kind of weather. It takes courage to even
walk
in this kind of weather. I told her I thought she was crazy, but she said she'd been in the pool almost every day since you came here.”

Carl drank his coffee in silence and watched a group of girls go by, so swaddled in their layers of clothing they could hardly walk. He knew Lucy loved to swim: she swam all summer, but it surprised him to know she swam in the winter, too. The fact that she had gone swimming every day since they had come to Chicago and had never said a word about it left him speechless. He had no idea where the university pool was, and thought of asking Johnny, but it seemed to him that asking was an admission of some terrible ignorance. How could he not know such an elementary fact about his own wife?

Walking home, he decided to confront her, but he could not arrange a question that was neither accusatory nor whimpering, and he could not articulate the source of his pain. Was it that she swam, or that she didn't tell him? Lucy had been swimming all her life: it was a perfectly natural thing for her to do, but he was suffering nonetheless.

She was in the kitchen when he came in. Her hair wasn't wet. It didn't smell of chlorine. Her face was cool when she kissed him, as it always was. They sat down to a large, cheering dinner, after which they stretched out on the sofa and read. It was normal life. At midnight, they yawned, and with their arms around each other, went to bed.

In March, the cold began to crack and the black ice softened, forming deep, muddy puddles. When it snowed, the snow was light and fine. Then it sleeted, and by April it only rained. Tiny green swells began to appear on the stunted hedges.

Finally, it was clear, cold prairie spring. Lucy walked toward Lake Michigan. The grass in the park was brown and scorched, and the bridle path was as wet as a creek. Clouds of mist embraced the Museum of Science and Industry. She walked across the bridge above the Outer Drive and onto the rocks by the lake. Under her bluejeans, sweater, and coat she was wearing a bathing suit, and in her book bag was a beach towel. Johnny Esterhazy had told her that Lake Michigan was polluted, but it was clear enough so that she could see the rocks beneath the water and the swaying beards of algae on their sides. Whatever it had in it, it did not have chlorine. She stripped to her bathing suit and the wind smacked her like a fist.

There was not a soul around. She climbed from rock to rock until she was standing in water up to her knees, and then she jumped.

Over dinner, Lucy and Carl talked about the casual, easy shape their life was taking. Johnny Esterhazy and his fiancée were coming to dinner on Friday. The head of the history department had invited them to a cocktail party. Lucy had an interview at the law library. Ted and Ellie Lifter, a pair of sociologists who lived downstairs, had asked them for coffee and dessert.

They reviewed the events of their day, and wondered whether to get orchestra or box seats for the Chicago symphony. But Lucy never said anything about swimming, and Carl knew that in some way he had overreacted. Swimming to Lucy was like breathing, and did she report to him that she had breathed all day?

When he looked at her across the dinner table, her pale, fair hair and skin, her pale eyes, and the vein that divided her forehead, he looked for any sign of deception, but there was nothing but openness and affection. He looked into her steady, unblinking eyes and tried to see if she was capable of duplicity, but every feature in her face was loving, straightforward, and direct.

At night, her long thighs were cool and the insides of her arms were cold. As she slept, Carl thought how fragile she appeared, and how tough she actually was. It occurred to his sleepy mind that this was a deception in itself. At times, he was overwhelmed that she was purposely shutting him out of a part of her life, and then, suddenly, it all seemed normal to him. If he asked her, she would smile her eye-diminishing smile and tell him of course she swam every day. But he did not ask, and could not. He could not bear to admit that what was second nature to her had been news to him. He fluctuated between panic and calm. If she was swimming every day in Chicago, it meant that she had done the same in Cambridge—all that time and she had never said a word, but had simply arranged a part of her life away from him and gone swimming in it.