Family Happiness by Laurie Colwin Read Free Book Online Page A

“That’s from the delicatessen, isn’t it?”
    â€œOh, Linky, I tried.”
    â€œI was only teasing, Doe.”
    â€œNext time,” said Polly, “I’m going to make up a huge sandwich, wrap it in my napkin, and stick it into my bag—right in front of everyone. When they ask what I’m doing, I’ll say: At these seminars I perform the miracle of the loaves and the fishes. This one sandwich is going to feed forty reading technicians.”
    â€œThey’d never ask,” said Lincoln.
    â€œProbably, they wouldn’t,” said Polly. “That’s the bliss of it. I never even have to lie. Nobody ever asks me what I do.”
    â€œWell, come over here, Dora,” said Lincoln. “Put your arms around me and tell me everything you’ve thought or felt since Friday.” He held her close. “I really do love you to pieces.”
    â€œI love you to pieces, too,” said Polly. “Isn’t it sad?”
    Polly and Lincoln had met once the year before, at a group show that included a series of his landscapes in oil, and then again at Lincoln’s one-man show the first week in September. Of course, they had met, long ago, as children.
    Henry, Jr., and Andreya had taken Polly out for an evening when Henry Demarest was away on business. Their friend Lincoln Bennett was having a one-man show and they took Polly to it, since she had been so entranced by the group show they had taken her to. She had just come back from Maine.
    At the gallery, Polly put her glasses on. She was slightly nearsighted but Henry, Sr., believed that unless you were almost blind, spectacles weakened the eye muscles. Polly had always worn her glasses on the sly and still felt sneaky about it.
    The show consisted of portraits and still lifes, all oil on paper. They were all so beautiful that she was glad Henry and Andreya did not feel obliged to stick with her. She wanted to react privately to these pictures.
    She realized, as she moved from picture to picture, that Lincoln Bennett had been in the back of her mind since she had met him in the spring. She had had an impulse to send him a letter—a fan letter—and she had composed it over and over in her mind but had never written it. She had thought of him as she had sent the children off to their grandparents in Maine for the summer, and as Henry’s schedule invaded the time they had set aside to be alone together in June and July. She had found herself reflecting on every scrap of information Henry, Jr., and Andreya had given her about Lincoln—chiefly that he was antisocial and that he lived alone in his studio. She imagined a studio. She imagined being constantly alone. She remembered the pictures from the show and wondered what sort of person would have painted them.
    That August Henry had spent his Maine vacation on the telephone. It was impossible to be angry with him: his holiday was being spoiled, too. Polly was used to canceling appointments, juggling dates, and having to turn up at the last minute by herself. She was used to being by herself, after all, even when Henry was around. What, she had wondered, would it be like never to have to switch anything in behalf of anyone?
    To be in a room full of Lincoln’s paintings gave Polly a sense of intimacy with him, and she wanted to savor it. She suddenly realized that she had been thinking about Lincoln all summer long, more or less unconsciously. A little shiver of guilt went through her: she did not believe it right to think, consciously or unconsciously, about someone who had no connection to you.
    But of course, she told herself, it was not Lincoln she had been thinking about, but clean, lean lives of solitude and work—Henry and Andreya had told her how very solitary Lincoln was and that Lincoln had been through some awful time or other (awful times were not in Henry, Jr.’s emotional range, so he could not imagine what would cause one) and had