Passion and Affect by Laurie Colwin Read Free Book Online

are dusted every week by the maid who has been warned about their extreme fragility. The furniture, also left to me, was either good Shaker replica, Colonial American (clearly heirlooms from her family), or French provincial, all of which I kept.
    I wondered why she had maintained so large an apartment, but as Alden Marshall says, events collide in this world, so perhaps I collided with the apartment she was saving and her need for a son. But the apartment was too large for me, and, finally, too expensive. I had cut down my teaching to two classes a week so I would have more time for my thesis and book. My name was on the lease, and I decided I would find someone to share the rent. When I got married, whoever it was would leave and the apartment would be mine for my family.
    Opportunities overlap in life, and six months after I moved in, Alden sent me an Egyptian called Anwar P. Soole (the P. I later discovered was for Pasteur: his father was a doctor). Alden had met him in Paris: Anwar was living there but when his visa ran out, he came to New York and looked Alden up. He needed a place to live, so Alden sent him around to me.
    Anwar Soole was tall and lean. He reminded me of a greyhound because his spareness tended to diminish his height. He looked shorter than he actually was. His eyes were gray and his skin was the color of smoke. Straight dust-colored hair fell into his eyes. Women find him beautiful or boyish, or both, they tell me. I made him a cup of tea and we discussed not so much the possibility of his moving in, but how to get his five trunks and ten crates from Pier 84 to Riverside Drive. He talked earnestly about his painting and poetry, his eyes rather plaintive and appealing. He sat, literally, on the edge of his chair and the intensity of his expressions was almost stagy. He moved, the way precocious children do, from the serious to the flirtatious and struck an irresistible balance in between. I have since learned that he does this with everyone; he would flirt with inanimate objects if he thought he could get a reaction out of them.
    Three days later, Anwar, accompanied by four movers, ten crates, and five trunks, moved in. In a week, he was unpacked and settled. Among his possessions were four Victorian birdcages complete with stuffed birds from Ceylon and India, a collection of jade ornaments that filled four glass cases, another four cases of ancient Egyptian artifacts, eighteen albums of photographs, a small Matisse, fifty or more of his own paintings, a teak bedstead from Pakistan, two tiger skins, several bolts of Egyptian batik, a series of African musical instruments packed in excelsior, a set of old spode, two fourteen-by-twenty Persian rugs, and two hundred books. One crate was filled with huge hunks of polished driftwood from Africa and Egypt that we suspended from wires flush with the wall in the living room. There was also some assorted French porcelain, linen, paint boxes, easels, a typewriter, a clothes press, fourteen suits, twelve jackets, two tuxedos, and a set of copper skillets.
    My own things, some glass portraits of my ancestors, some painted trunks from my Pennsylvania Dutch ancestors, the paintings and photographs I acquired in Paris and Heidelberg, and the dishes Hattie Marshall had given me, lived comfortably with Anwar’s litter. The tiger skins stretched gracefully on the wooden floor of the living room.
    Alden Marshall had taught me aesthetics at Princeton. He was seventy-five and Hattie, his wife, was seventy-three. They lived two buildings down from me on Riverside Drive. We were working together on what he said was his last book and our drafts were typed by his occasional secretary, a pale, plain, regular-featured girl named Lilly Gillette. Alden and Hattie, old and slightly preoccupied, scarcely noticed her. She appeared at the doorway and stacked the clean typed sheets on the desk, silent as a ghost. She seemed to require no notice at all, so it was unexpected—it