Passion and Affect (19 page)

Jane Catherine's closest friend was Leah Morrisy, and their loving admiration had been originally based on self-assumed uniqueness. They were stylistically different, but the intensity of their styles was similarly motivated. Basically, they thought their personalities were works of art, and they were not far wrong.

Leah's true love was Mick Skipworth, a blond, slightly walleyed National Science Foundation winner: he had mutated fruit flies. Her family lived in a townhouse, on the third floor of which she had a room cluttered with her secret possessions: a cheap nightie with a plunging décolletage, from a mail-order house in Hollywood; a leather jacket, stolen by Mick from his older brother; a set of spangled pasties; some hot, illiterate love letters, and an old briefcase filled with sultry, sulky photographs of herself, taken by Mick and several previous loves.

Leah was tiny, skinny, and her eyes were so brown they appeared to have no pupils, giving her the smoldering look of a burning tire. She was shaped on the lines of a vase and she was heavily addicted to Coca-Cola. For her birthday, Mick gave her a case of it, and it was gone within five days. Her hair was dramatically shaggy and waiflike.

Her mother said of her with a sigh: “I'm afraid to let her out on the street. She walks from her pelvic bones. My heart fails when she leaves for school, even in that uniform.”

Some afternoons, Leah and Jane Catherine walked through Central Park, wearing ritual clothing. Jane Catherine wore the hacking jacket that had been her mother's twenty years ago, loafers with tassels, and bright-green socks. The belt that held up her jeans was a present from Tito. Leah wore an old shocking pink windbreaker that had never been washed—she had bought it second-hand for half a dollar and taken it to her heart. She wore black velvet trousers, a pair of minuscule ballet slippers, and a fifty-dollar shirt.

“I'd like to turn Mick into an ice cream soda,” she said. “He has the most beautiful mouth I've ever seen. His brother is a moron and his parents are awful. He calls them the gargoyles. His mother cries all the time. He comes in, and she cries. He goes out, and she cries. He goes to play soccer and she's in tears and when he won that science thing, she almost fell apart.” Leah yawned. “She hates me. She thinks I'm cheap. She told Micky. She said: That little bit dresses like a tiny French tart.”

“Nobody's mother talks that way,” said Jane Catherine.

“I made it up,” Leah said. “But that's what she would say if she had a mind. They're all so brainless over there. Micky says he feels like a changeling. His sister Florence has begun to call herself Flopsy. It's depressing.”

“Tito's parents are invisible,” said Jane Catherine. “Or else we're invisible to them.”

“That's because you dress nice,” said Leah, pulling her cerise jacket around her. “Someday Tito and Mick will be memory.”

“I only think of that when I want to make myself cry.”

“Well, I think about it all the time and it makes me seasick. We'll all go off to college and be memories. We'll say: remember Tito? Remember Micky? God only knows what will become of us.”

“What will, do you think?” Jane Catherine said.

“I think no one will know what to do with us. We have too many tastes for our age, but it'll get worse. People will call us strange—it'll be our prefix. People will take you out to nice civilized parties and you'll come home and put the old record player on. People will say I'm cheap, or some variation of that. I'm a prisoner of my sultriness. I'll wear these kind of clothes, and so will you and only very odd, intense men will find us at all interesting.”

They walked past the boulders and toward the fountain where they saw Imelda holding the arm of an unnaturally tall, skinny man wearing green lizard cowboy boots and a ten-gallon hat. Next to him, Imelda was a peg. She had on a bright-pink dress that was as small as a scarf. She looked like a little flag that fluttered off his belt. When she saw Jane Catherine she smiled her unnerving, gold smile.

Jane Catherine was abashed. She was frightened of Imelda, who made her feel profoundly awkward. She did not approve of having servants and did not know how to deal with them. The Jacobys, who instilled in their children the belief that servants are human beings, did what all parents do: they treated their servants like human beings who are deaf, or blind, or suffering from some other lowering infirmity. The recently deceased old Suzie they had treated like a kindly grandmother from another planet, whose customs were not their customs—with the courtesy they would have doled out to a dignitary from an underdeveloped country.

But Imelda was named for a song on the Zaida label, sung by Los Graduados. It was a song Jane Catherine and Tito danced to for hours in the privacy of Jane Catherine's room. Had it not been for Imelda, this pleasure would have been unknown to them. Besides, Imelda was the genuine product, and Jane Catherine felt embarrassed about her record collection, her Spanish comic books, as if her love were simply poaching; that no matter how sincere her rapture at the Bronx Music Palace, she was slightly fraudulent.

Jane Catherine approached Imelda shyly, and asked her in self-conscious Spanish how she did. Leah stood beside her, slouching on the famous pelvic bones. Imelda held on to her young man, who Jane Catherine knew was Freddy Bonafia.

“You have an espanish boyfreng,” Imelda said, and then was silent. Since no one could find anything to say, they indulged in a spate of handshaking all around. Imelda had on a small diamond ring. She smiled at Freddy and they walked away.

Leah and Jane Catherine walked to the lake and watched the boats.

“Sometimes I can't talk to anyone,” Jane Catherine said. There were tears in her eyes.

“Don't get overwrought.”

“She had a ring on. She's probably getting married. She'll quit and I never even spoke to her.”

“What did you want her to tell you?”

“I didn't want her to tell me anything,” said Jane Catherine. “I just wanted to talk to her. Tito and I used to see her at the Music Palace and it always made me feel terrible and out of place.”

“Democracy is hard on everyone,” Leah said. “Remember Niles? I can't even remember his last name. He was from the Roberts-Arco driving school. He was my driving teacher but he wanted to be a cop. We used to go up to Van Cortlandt Park and kiss. When I got my license, that was that. But he called to find out if I passed my driving test.”

“It's just that the world seems to be divided between Imelda and those rotten Bieberman twins,” said Jane Catherine, “and I'm on the wrong side.”

“You're not on any side. You're a mutant, and so am I,” Leah said.

“Tito is a free-lance,” said Jane Catherine. “For a genius, he's sort of a blockhead. He doesn't have any sentimental memory. When I think that a day is over and will never repeat, I get all ropy inside, but Tito thinks that life is a string that pulls you along.”

They pulled their jackets tighter.

“Who knows,” said Leah. “It probably is.”

Imelda's token room at the Jacobys' was as bare as a bone, but her room in Washington Heights was another matter altogether. An enormous poster of Graucho and the band covered one wall. Over the bed hung a stuffed alligator, an enormous one. Affixed to its snout was a pair of sunglasses. Freddy's numerous cowboy boots decorated the floor, singly and in pairs. They had three-inch heels, which brought his height up to six six. He was thin as a ruler and his trousers would have all been too short for him had not Imelda made him ornamental cuffs out of multicolored velvet. She and Freddy were fond of multicolored velvet. The bedspread was made of it, and one wall was covered with it.

Together they had grandiose, technicolor dreams of domestic architecture: of a house built on stilts with a gabled roof made of bottles; of a coffee table made of a kettle drum; of a floor that was real grass. They wanted two babies called Flute and Cymba. They wanted a sequoia tree to bisect their living room. They were happy and visual. Two days after Imelda told Mrs. Jacoby in incomprehensible English that she was quitting, she and Freddy were married and pictures of their wedding appeared in the papers.

Jane Catherine kept the clippings. She sent Imelda a bottle of champagne and the Jacobys sent an ornate silver candy dish, of the kind sent to distant cousins.

Jane Catherine walked unhappily around Imelda's old pantry room. There was nothing in it but the furniture and some dust. She sat in the armchair and contemplated her future: in the summer, she and Leah were going to take a course at the Université de Grenoble given for high school students, and they had fought hard for the privilege.

“How can I let her go?” Mrs. Morrisy had agonized to her husband. “Alvin, how can I let her loose among the French? Oh, God, these kids. Why can't they just go to tennis camp, like everyone else?”

Mrs. Jacoby sighed as Jane Catherine procured six pairs of bluejeans for the event, and encrusted the cuffs of three of them with ten rows of solid buttons. Leah bought a pair of orange ballet slippers to wear on the boat across. Micky was going to Woods Hole to wash bottles for a marine biologist and Tito was going to his father's horse farm in Argentina. Jane Catherine felt her lightness collapse. She thought of what she would pack to keep her happy in France: the belt Tito had given her, one of his socks, a little blue plush vampire bat. She knew that she was storing up memories the way the rich collect paintings. She knew that making memories was the same as making history. But it didn't matter: she was crying anyway. Some day, she knew, this room, this time, Tito and Imelda, herself as she was now, would all be memory and it filled her with pain and tenderness. When she finished crying, she called Leah, who had been crying too. They met in the park and walked slowly downtown, to shop for what Leah called “trash items.”

“It's cosmic,” said Leah. “But it's also because we're precocious.”

“Pretty soon we won't even be that,” said Jane Catherine. “Pretty soon you and I will be talking about how dear and touching we were then, which is now, only later. It's very dislocating to think about.”

They sighed the light, profound sighs of adolescence and locked arms, since they were still young enough to do so. They walked without speaking, feeling very sage. Their steps were careful and precise, and as they walked toward the street and into the crowd, they knew that they were only two little girls, strolling past a line of trees.

children, dogs, and desperate men

A
T AN ENGAGEMENT PARTY
for her cousin Tom and Katie Rosenstatt, the art historian's daughter, Elizabeth Bayard met a man called Richard Mignon. At the time of her introduction, she was sitting on the sofa with one of the innumerable Rosenstatt nephews asleep by her side, and Tom's spaniel asleep on her feet.

“Are you always barricaded by small fry?” said Richard Mignon, looking down at her. “I'm the well-known drunken cartographer. You're Tom's cousin and you write about music.”

“I've never met a cartographer before,” said Elizabeth. “Not even a sober one.”

“The drunken ones are better. We're a very small, exclusive circle. We also do wine tasting. Care for a snort?”

She held her glass out, and he filled it up. At first glance, he looked like a boy who has seen catastrophe, but on second look, he was a slightly wrecked, boyish man on the fringes of middle age. His eyes were blue and as wide as plates and his hair was thick, curly, and graying. He had taken off his jacket and his shirt-tail hung out. When the nephew had been taken off by his mother for a formal nap, Richard sat down, squashing Elizabeth into a corner.

“Do you think there's a causal connection between wine consumption and cartography?” she said.

“Oh, absolutely,” said Richard Mignon. “My maps are all guesswork. Ancient cities, lost cities, places they only have accounts of. It takes me out of the real world. I can't be expected to cope.”

“You might use the subway guide as inspirational reading.”

“I've considered it, believe me,” he said. “But as far as wine goes, these art historians always have the best, so I like to soak it up while I can.”

“Situational gluttony,” said Elizabeth.

“How well you understand these things,” Richard Mignon said.

Tom Bayard was crazy about his cousin and he followed her the way you listen to a symphony with the score on your lap. To him she was serious, level-headed, and smart, but Elizabeth, who was recovering from an unhappy love affair, saw herself as shaken and out of place. She did not fall in love often, and when she did, she depended on what Tom called “refined instinct.” Since she knew she was generally good-natured and cheerful, she was a little surprised at how long it was taking for her heart to mend, but her instinct had played her false, and that gave her cause for serious and painful thought. The less complicated side of her nature was clear to children, who adored her, and animals, who generally took bread at her hand.

At the end of the evening, she and Richard Mignon shared a taxi downtown. He had consumed about two bottles of wine and behaved with the sloppy, affectionate dignity of a large dog, and held her hand as if it were an eggshell. She expected he would keep the cab, but instead he paid the driver and walked her to her door.

“If I don't get some coffee, I'm going to fall down the stairs,” he said, looking rattled and sad. “I know it's terribly late.”

He inspected her books while she made the coffee, and told her she was a beacon of kindness. He balanced the cup on his knees until the coffee was cold, and then drank it in two gulps.

“Are we fated to meet only at engagement parties, or could we have dinner together?” he said.

“No.”

“No what? No dinner, or not only at parties?”

“No dinner.”

“Is there something about me you find apelike and disgusting?”