Happy All the Time (15 page)

“I said, I just love you. Isn't that banal?”

“What a relief,” said Vincent, smiling.

With the box of marrons glacés under Misty's arm and a small bunch of sweetheart roses in Vincent's fist, they walked down the hallway to Holly and Guido. Before he rang their bell, Vincent backed Misty up against the wall and kissed her.

“You're crushing the marrons,” she said.

“I don't care,” said Vincent. “Half an hour ago you said that you would marry me.”

“Only because you got down on your knee in the middle of the street and I was afraid you would be run over by a taxi.”

“Can we announce it?” Vincent said.

“That you were almost run over?”

“That we're getting married. Kindly give me a yes or no answer. I can't take any more elegant defense.”

“Yes,” said Misty.

“It'll be nice—all of us together,” said Vincent.

“Aren't you the happy Boy Scout,” said Misty.

The table was set for four. The coffee was put out for six.

“Arnold Milgrim and his student are coming for coffee,” said Guido.

“It may be that only Arnold is coming,” said Holly. “Doria seems to have disappeared with Misty's cousin.”

“Stanley?” said Misty.

“Stanley,” said Guido. “Arnold and Doria came to the office this afternoon. Arnold and I closeted ourselves in my office to go over the article he's giving to
Runnymeade
and when we emerged, they had vanished.”

“Amazing,” said Misty. “Who on earth would run off with Stanley?”

The evening was easier than Misty had anticipated. At the door, there had been affection all around. Vincent and Guido clasped each other. Vincent kissed Holly. Guido kissed Misty. Holly and Misty shook hands and gave each other the thrice over. It didn't much matter to Misty whether or not she liked Holly. She was bound to like Holly whether she liked her or not, since Holly was about to become a fact of Misty's life. Holly treated Misty as if she had known her for years. Then she shepherded Misty into the kitchen.

“I just wanted to get you under the light,” said Holly.

Misty stood obligingly and displayed full face, three-quarters, and profile.

“Excellent,” said Holly. “Even better than I thought. I wouldn't have given Vincent credit for this much sense. My theory is that Vincent has just awakened from an altered state of consciousness to find you. Get the champagne out of the fridge, will you?”

On the way to the dinner table, Vincent made his announcement.

“Misty and I have decided to get married,” he said. This engendered another spate of handshakes and kisses all around.

They drank a great deal of wine at dinner. Misty felt the candlelight reflecting in her eyes as she looked around the table. Everyone at the table looked beautiful and kind to her. Holly behaved as if she had simply incorporated Misty, but Guido seemed quite moved. There are going to be thousands of dinners like this, thought Misty. This is my place at the dinner table. This is my intended husband's best friend and that is the wife of my intended's best friend whom I am going to spend the rest of my life getting to know. Across the table, Vincent looked seraphically happy. How wonderful everything tasted, Misty thought. Everything had a sheen on it. Was that what love did, or was it merely the wine? She decided that it was love.

It was just as she suspected: love turned you into perfect mush.

After dinner, Arnold Milgrim and Doria Mathers appeared. Doria looked more windblown than ever.

“This is a flying visit,” said Arnold. “Just a cup of coffee and we must dash.”

Holly did the introductions.

“Stanley has the same last name as you,” said Doria to Misty. “Is that common in New York, or are you kin?”

“First cousins,” said Misty.

“Blood relatives,” said Doria. “How thick. The idea of cousinship has lost its meaning in the modern world. It is entirely volitional, I feel. For example, I have several cousins. A few of them I have never seen. Some of them I remember hating and I have actually forgotten the names of two or three of them. Water, in the sense of distances, is now far thicker than blood, I feel. Your cousin reads Greek divinely. He read Plato to me this afternoon.”

No one had any reply to this statement. Holly poured the coffee and sat next to Arnold. On the other side of the room Vincent, Misty, and Guido clustered around Doria, who, Misty noticed, although not a small girl, had a knack of making ordinary objects seem tiny in her hands. She huddled over her coffee cup, which she held with both hands, as if it were a bird's egg. It was impossible to make conversation in her vicinity, but even in a silent group, with Doria as the focus, one felt that quite a lot was going on somewhere.

“Doria engenders thought,” said Arnold confidentially to Holly. “For example, the mechanics of emotional politics. Doria can inflict hurt, which she defines as power. I am quite sure that she and that Stanley went somewhere and quite innocently read Plato. But Doria knows that gesture sets off the idea of possibility.”

This sounded to Holly very much like a statement of jealousy.

“The danger of communion between the sexes is that one falls back on the stereotypic,” said Arnold. “By this I mean such pseudo-values as possessiveness. Or the idea of love as capitalism: return on investment. The very
idea
of Doria blitzes these conceptions. A mind like that must be shared in the way of a scientific discovery.”

During this recitation, Arnold's eyes never left the couch on which Doria was sitting. Her head was bent as if her hair was weighting her down. She appeared to be asleep, but then she always appeared to be asleep.

“I must take her home,” said Arnold. “She is on the point of frazzlement.” He looked quite frazzled himself.

He got up and stood next to Doria, who gave him a glazed look. Then she drank her coffee the way a child gulps down milk, and Arnold took her home.

“Alone at last,” said Guido. “Thank God the Quaker meeting is over. Let's have another bottle of champagne.” They trooped back to the dining room.

“I drink to Misty and Vincent,” said Guido.

“I drink to a lavish wedding,” said Holly.

“No lavish weddings,” said Misty. “You know what they say: the elaborateness of the wedding is in inverse proportion to the duration of the marriage.”

“Who says that?” Vincent asked.

“I say it,” said Misty.

“Does that mean you want to be married to me forever?” said Vincent.

“I'm marrying you, aren't I?”

Guido poured more champagne.

“Misty thinks all this institutionalizing of love makes you live outside the moral universe,” said Vincent.

“I drink to the moral universe,” said Guido.

They clicked their glasses and drank happily to the moral universe in the flickering light of Holly's beeswax candles.

CHAPTER 6

Misty and Vincent staggered home and into bed. The champagne was wearing off.

“Well, now it's official,” said Vincent. “Are you having second thoughts?”

“I never have second thoughts,” said Misty. “It's against my religion to have second thoughts or to enter the city of Mecca. Are you?”

“I'd express my deep joy to you,” said Vincent, “but unfortunately I can't seem to get any of my limbs to work.”

At breakfast, Vincent had difficulty moving his head.

“I'd be the happiest man in the United States if I didn't have such an enormous headache,” he said.

Misty, however, was back to normal. Having carried her love around like an albatross, she felt as well placed in the world as a fresh loaf of bread.

“You should be sick as a dog,” said Vincent. “I don't understand it. You never drink, whereas I am a man of the world. Therefore, you should be hung over and not me. Am I shouting?”

Misty set a glass of orange juice before him.

“That juice is very bright,” he said. “Do you think I could have some coffee first?”

Misty brought him his cup, with which he saluted her.

“Here's to our happy future,” he said.

“Your optimism is truly record-breaking,” said Misty.

“What's wrong with happy futures?”

“This is the twentieth century,” said Misty. “Not hardly the great age of happy futures.”

“There are happy futures for some,” he said.

“You and your debutante fantasies,” said Misty.

Holly had arranged to meet Doria Mathers at a tearoom. She had spent the morning perusing the telephone book trying to find a loom to get Doria into contact with. Her research revealed that knitting was a very popular indoor sport and that a loom was on permanent display at the Wool Institute, which also had a few samples of colonial fabric.

She was not much looking forward to this lunch: Holly liked her geniuses verbal; Doria, that interior wizard, was obviously capable of a silent meal. Holly did not approve of silent meals. She believed in dinner-table conversation and one of the things she loved about Guido was that he was a first-rate dining companion.

Doria, however, turned up talkative. The flip-side of interior silence seemed to be exterior gabbiness. Doria took tiny bites of her sandwich in between which she went on at some length about Arnold Milgrim. She said he was the greatest man she had ever met, and possibly the greatest man who had ever lived. It turned out that she and Arnold were going to be married, even though Arnold, who had been married once before, did not believe that exalted love needed social trappings.

“There are people I have met …” said Doria, lowering her voice to a whisper, “who centuries ago would have been proclaimed saints. Isn't it interesting that only the church has saints? The world has only merit, which is not sufficient. These people are saints of the mind. Their sacrifice is the sacrifice to the intellect. We need a new definition of holiness for times in which religion isn't relevant. Arnold is on the path to that sort of sanctity, I feel. He is all man, all mind. I, on the other hand, am entirely temperament. For example, I feel I must have two ounces of chocolate every day. Arnold has no quirks of that sort. He has no specific needs at all. He is beyond temperament and personality. He is simply spirit, motivated by ideas. I am a case of entrenched but suspended personality. Arnold says I am capable of profound and unexpected petulance as well as its transcendence.”

Doria was wearing an angora dress that had stretched in some places and shrunk in others. The heel on one of her shoes looked on the point of breaking. To ward off the cold, she wore as a cape what looked like a series of horse blankets with exposed seams. In the yarn shops, she did business briskly. Otherwise, she was a study in manifest chaos.

Holly was impeccable. She had not opted for neatness: it had been thrust upon her by nature. Her thick hair was always precisely cut and her unadorned features gave her an air of calm. Clothes looked neater and cleaner and more starched on her than they did on others. Hours of stalking yarn did not disarrange her in any way, while Doria looked almost frenzied. Holly watched as her piled hair slipped slowly down her neck. At the Wool Institute, her cape began to slide. Holly was transfixed. It had not occurred to her before that sloppiness might be a calculated style. Clearly, Doria was on to something. She stood in charming dishevelment in front of the Institute's loom.

“I feel that weaving is a precise metaphor for the way in which life is made,” she said. “By which I mean individually constructed. Any strand can be woven in at the dictation of the imagination. I think of the philosophy of history as a loom of that sort. It is, isn't it?”

“Quite,” said Holly.

Holly dropped her off at the hotel. Doria had bought hand-pulled yarn from Vermont, raw wool from Pakistan, tapestry yarn, twisted sock thread from the Himalayas, and a skein of alpaca. She shook Holly's hand goodbye.

“I'm very tired now,” she said. “Arnold and I are flying back to England. Thank you for all your input.”

That night over dinner, Holly asked Guido if he thought she was capable of profound and unexpected petulance and its transcendence.

“No,” said Guido. “I think you are capable of superficial and completely thought-out petulance.”

“Arnold
formulates
about Doria,” said Holly. “Do you ever formulate about me?”

“I try not to,” said Guido. “As for Doria, I think she's either drunk or drugged or extremely silly.”

“I think they're very romantic,” said Holly.

Over the peach mousse, Holly said, “I often think our temperaments are at variance.”

Guido threw down his spoon.

“Goddamn it, Holly. You go off and leave me and then can't get out a coherent sentence as to why. You come back and don't explain yourself. Then you want me to formulate about you. And you think that Milgrim and his sloppy girlfriend are romantic. The only thing profound about you is your constant wrongheadedness.”

With that, he stormed into the living room and brooded. He rarely lost his temper. To him it was like losing his keys. But as he sat in his armchair, he realized how sweet righteous anger really was.

He looked up to find Holly standing meekly in the doorway, carrying coffee cups on a tray.

“I'm sorry,” she said. “Sometimes everything is so smooth and invisible that I can't see it without discord.”

Guido sat without speaking.

“You're the only person I've ever loved,” said Holly.

“Good,” said Guido. “Glad to hear it. Since you love me so, do you ever formulate about me?”

“Of course not,” said Holly. “I don't think that way. You do. I simply love you.”

He gave her a look of love and grief.

“Whatever,” he said. “You are frequent hell to live with.”

Misty walked slowly past the Museum of Natural History. Her heart at the moment had four chambers, filled with love, dread, confusion, and certainty.