Family Happiness by Laurie Colwin Read Free Book Online

got married.
    Lincoln was not a heartbreaker. He knew he wanted love, but he did not see how he could successfully get it, and he was uncomfortable with the conventional methods of finding it. Everyone was settling down around him. One day he had fallen in love with a girl named Audrey Warren. He and Audrey had gotten engaged and set up housekeeping together. It was a disaster for Lincoln. Domesticity rubbed against him like a hair shirt. How he could be so much in love and so miserable at the same time amazed him. It seemed overwhelmingly clear to him that he could not live with another person, and this made him feel unknown to himself. Audrey said his problem was psychological and had suggested to Lincoln that he go and talk to a psychiatrist. Dutifully he went, to a cultivated, sympathetic old Italian psychoanalyst who saw him twice a week. In the course of a year he learned a great deal about himself, and he came to see that his need to be alone was at the bottom of everything about him. He saw it as a problem: after all, he had the heart of a faithful husband. The rest of him did not feel at all complicated. He felt that he was moving through a dense thicket of psychological vegetation and that if he cut it all down with a machete, he would still be left with his problem: that he needed love but could not bear to live constantly with another person. He and Audrey arranged to be together on weekends. For a while this worked very nicely, but what Audrey wanted was to be married to Lincoln. When it was clear this would never occur, she left him.
    Lincoln had taken it stoically. He deserved to have Audrey leave, since he could not change enough to get her to stay. He felt that he had not been made for the chaos and tumult of early adulthood—of romance and mating and nest-building and childrearing. He had been born to be in his early seventies: peaceful, wise, and immersed in slow, painstaking work. In the meantime, he thought it would be immoral for him to have a social life. He did not want to fall in love or to be fallen in love with, since it led to such disappointment and pain. He was not interested in anything casual—he was not a bounder or a flirt—and eventually he got used to being lonely. He felt that since he was looking for love, he should stay by himself, lest he actually find it.
    Polly was the answer to his prayers. Her marriage made everything possible. He had love and he had solitude, both guaranteed. He never had to wish that Polly would leave. She had to leave.
    Lincoln’s studio was on a little side street in a row of studios that had been built for artists in the 1920s. On the other side of the street were warehouses. It was impossible to walk down this street without coming upon a homeless cat. Some of the cats were feral and raced away. Some were lonely and followed you, throwing themselves against your legs and crying mournfully. These lonely cats brought Polly almost to tears. They reminded her of herself: so willing, so hungry for love.
    Lincoln was waiting at the door for her. Seeing him, Polly realized, felt the same as coming home might to a sailor after a long voyage. She did not mean to feel this way but it was undeniable to her that she did. She saw him and her heart turned over. Once she had divided the world into the sort of women who had love affairs and the sort of women who did not. But now she, a woman who did not, did, and with considerable expertise. In her gravest moments she gritted her teeth and said to herself, “I deserve this.”
    â€œHi, Linky,” she said.
    He took her into his arms and kissed her all over her cold cheeks.
    â€œI am a woolly beast,” Polly said.
    â€œYou are the most gorgeous, swell person that ever lived,” Lincoln said. “Get your coat off. Where’s my salmon?”
    Polly took a sandwich wrapped in thick waxed paper from her handbag.
    â€œThat’s not Solo-Miller salmon,” Lincoln said.