Passion and Affect by Laurie Colwin Read Free Book Online Page B

was in, but we frequently collided. He called me “Filipo” and made me help him hang his paintings. Once in a while he would cook a huge Middle Eastern meal to which he would invite several of the more luscious students from the girls’ college at which he taught, or some elderly specimens of Italian nobility. He had two kinds of friends: dull but opulent girls and Europeans in New York on business. After he had been teaching for several months, the girls turned up, elegant in silk, rustling like expensive leaves and leaving the apartment faintly scented with their perfume. If I was home, they were brought into my study to admire my French vases and glass paintings. Then Anwar made a pot of sweet, acrid coffee that we drank in the living room and watched Anwar drape himself languidly over the tiger skin.
    With his girls he was hyperanimated, lithe, and springy. He did parodies, imitations, little dances. He acted out hour-long comedies, taking all the parts. At parties he danced wildly, almost ridiculously I thought, until one of his more intelligent consorts said, “He looks silly, but he’s actually graceful. He has the best balance I’ve ever seen.” She was right, of course: Anwar could stand on one foot for ten minutes and almost twist his other leg around his waist.
    Once in a while he would turn up at the apartment with a really magnificent girl. The more beautiful they were, the less English they spoke. One of these was an extremely tall, catlike German and I was produced to help him out. Anwar spoke Italian, French, Arabic, and English, but no German, so he was helpless. Since you cannot translate manic charm, the evening was a waste for him, and the girl, who was quite nice and fairly intelligent, was leaving for Munich the next day.
    After a ferocious night at a party, blasting out all his energy, he would spend the next day painting in the studio he had created of the pantry rooms, getting it back. Several times during the winter, after weeks of frantic activity, he would get sick, so sick that I had to bring his food to him on a tray. Sick, he looked tiny, dark gray against the white sheets, and when he slept his features assumed the meek austerity of a child’s. Without his energy he was puzzled, frightened, and torpid. After a week ailing, he was up. The girls were in, or he was out. After a week of being out, he was domestically in, badgering Minnie, the maid who came in twice a week, or cooking his elaborate meals, or rearranging his studio. Since we both had social obligations to repay, we had a formal party during which Anwar drank from the silver punch bowl, danced nonstop for three hours, threatened to throw a dish of salad at the girl who had told me how perfect his balance was, and stood on his head. This went mostly unnoticed because there were about seventy people there. He was like a man racing on a tightrope, stumbling but never falling. The rhythm of his life was energy, dissipation, sickness, and recuperation. When his ancient Europeans came to dinner, he was grotesquely correct.
    There was no pattern to Lilly’s visitations. I am not a bad-looking man but I am hardly the sort of person women crazed with lust pursue. Nothing like Lilly had ever happened to me, and the women I had known, several of whom I loved—a girl I had lived with in Heidelberg, an American girl in Paris I had wanted to marry, were rather like me; mild, scholarly, cerebral. “Intellectual sensualists” is the term the girl in Paris invented for people like us. But here was Lilly Gillette, stolid, silent, bland, standing at my doorway, Monday afternoon, Thursday at two in the morning, Friday at lunchtime after my class. She never spent the night. She never drank so much as a glass of water. We barely talked at all and it was my fault, I often think, because I was so baffled, so buffaloed, and although I did not allow myself to know it, so disturbed that I simply couldn’t