Another Marvelous Thing (16 page)

Billy let go. Francis saw that her face was flooded with relief, which was instantly supplanted by anger.

“You bastard,” she said. “Stringing me along like that.” She felt tired and sad. So Aaron had gotten married and she had never known!

“It shouldn't make any difference to you one way or the other,” Francis said. “Now that you're a respectable wife and mother.”

“Are you in love with anyone else?”

Francis did not have to repress the desire to kiss her: it was not easy to contemplate kissing a woman who was holding a baby. Instead he hung his scarf around her neck and pulled her a little closer. William found this very entertaining and began to laugh.

“Does that mean that if I can't be in love with you, I can't be in love with anyone else?” he said.

“I didn't mean that,” said Billy, slipping out from under the scarf.

“I think you did,” said Francis. A few fine snowflakes began to fall. “I'll get you a taxi so your precious darling doesn't get wet.”

Francis hailed a cab and opened the door. He bent to kiss Billy good-bye.

She ducked her head to get through the door, so instead of kissing Billy, Francis kissed William on the side of his head, and as he watched them drive away, he could still smell that clear, benign baby smell of talcum powder and biscuits.

The next day Billy and Penny Stern took William to the park. Penny, who was a month away from having her own baby, and her husband, David Hooks, were William's godparents.

The park was in the back of a private school and was open to local children. The walk was lined with hedge, and beyond a lawn were swings, baby swings, a play house, slides, and a jungle gym. In the center was one enormous old cherry tree used for climbing.

Penny pushed William in his stroller, and Billy ambled along.

“Do you realize,” she said, “this time next year we'll both have children to take to the park?”

“I realize it but I don't believe it,” Penny said. “I can't even believe how enormous William is.”

“He looks more like Grey every day,” said Billy.

“Not so,” Penny said. “He looks just like you. Of course, you and Grey look alike, so it's hard to tell who William resembles most.”

It took having a baby to see how true this was. Billy had spent countless nights nursing William to sleep in the red rocking chair trying to figure out how in this gigantic, overpopulated world you invariably found your true other: a person you could live with who even looked like you. Grey might have married someone else, or become an anthropologist and gone to Mozambique, or he might have gotten a job in Buenos Aires and the world would have swallowed him up. Instead, he was waiting for her, right where they had started out—in London, on a warm June night. She could not get over that she and Grey had created this remarkable child, who looked like both of them but also looked only like himself. Someday he would go off and find
his
other.

And where, Billy wondered as she walked, did Francis fit into this? The fact was, he didn't. He had never fit in at all. He and Billy had nothing in common and were as different as two people can be. Yet there was no denying they had fallen in love, a process as mysterious as creating a child out of two cells. A love affair was another amazing product of human ingeniousness, like art, like scholarship, like architecture. It was a created thing with rules, language, and reference. When it was finished it lived on in its artifacts: a million memories and gestures.

William cooed in his stroller. Soon he would learn to talk. It often seemed unfair to Billy that she and Grey had not known each other as babies. His first word, according to his mother, had been “boot.” Since William had been born Billy had been through boxes of her own and Grey's baby pictures. As far as she could tell, they all looked like William.

These days William was her constant reference. She liked to sit quite still and let her feelings for him run over her, like pure, warm, water. Early in the morning when William got up, she brought him into bed between her and Grey, and she often felt at once content and quite wild with happiness.

The park, when they got there, was full of children, but the baby swings were empty.

“Give that child to me,” Penny said as Billy got William out of his stroller. “I need swinging practice.”

Billy sat on a bench and watched a group of little boys climbing the cherry tree under a sky full of low, silver clouds. She watched her child being swung by her oldest friend. William loved the swing. He closed his eyes and shrieked with joy, revealing his four beautiful teeth. It seemed an instant ago he had been an infant. Soon he would be walking, talking, going to college and writing articles on third world economies, like Dr. Obutu. Or perhaps he would fulfill one of his father's secret desires and become either a marine biologist or a forest ranger. He would grow up, get married, and have a baby of his own. The baby on the swing would be a sweet, distant memory.

“We're bored,” said Penny sitting down beside Billy. “Let's go swing on the big swings. You take him. I don't have a lap any more.”

They sat on the big swings, side by side. William settled into Billy's arms.

“I saw Francis Clemens yesterday,” she said.

“Really?” Penny said. “And what did he have to say for himself?”

“He said his children loved their snowsuits.”

Penny arched her eyebrow.

“I saw him at that party,” Billy said. “He took us out for a drink.”

They swung for a while and watched the children climbing on the jungle gym. In their bright clothes, they looked like a flock of parrots.

“How was it?” Penny said.

“Seeing Francis?” said Billy. “He was with a really beautiful girl who turned out to be his daughter-in-law. I was extremely jealous.”

“Hmm,” said Penny. “What's that about?”

“When I think about him it's always in the past tense, but when I saw him I realized how
alive
these things are, even when they've ceased to be,” Billy said. “The water doesn't close over your head. I mean, it doesn't close over mine. I realize that no matter what happens Francis is indelible. He's part of my experience—like seeing Stonehenge or traveling in India.”

“Or going to college,” said Penny.

“He was more like graduate school,” Billy said.

She looked down and saw that she had swung William right to sleep. She felt her heart open and expand: she loved everyone—William, Grey, Penny, Francis. Her baby breathed against her. He was growing so fast he seemed to melt away before she could get used to him.

She wondered what William would look like at thirteen. She remembered Grey so clearly at that age with his wavy hair, and his round, wire-rimmed glasses and the ink stains on his fingers.

She looked over to the street and gave a start. She thought she saw Francis walking toward the park but it was only a man about Francis's height, wearing a familiar-looking coat.

A Biography of Laurie Colwin

Laurie Colwin (1944–1992) was an American novelist and short story author, most famous for her writings on cooking and upper-middle-class urban life.

Colwin was born on June 14 in Manhattan, New York, to Estelle and Peter Colwin. She spent her childhood in Lake Ronkonkoma, Long Island; Philadelphia; and Chicago. During her time in Philadelphia she attended Cheltenham High School and was inducted into its hall of fame in 1999. After graduation she continued her education at Bard College, the New School, and Columbia University.

In 1965 Colwin began her career working for Sanford J. Greenburger Associates, a literary agency in New York City. From there she went on to work at several leading book publishers, holding editorial positions at Viking Press, Pantheon Books, G.P. Putnam's Sons, and E. P. Dutton. Most notably during this time, Colwin worked closely with Isaac Bashevis Singer, winner of the 1978 Nobel Prize in Literature, editing and translating his works.

An aspiring writer all her life, Colwin sold her first short story to the
New Yorker
in 1969 at the age of twenty-five—an auspicious start. Over the course of the next few years, her work appeared in
Harper's Magazine
,
Allure
,
Redbook
,
Mademoiselle
, and
Playboy
. Many of these early stories were included in a collection,
Passion and Affect
, which was published in 1974.

Food and the act of cooking played an influential role in Colwin's life from early on. During the Columbia University campus uprisings of 1968, she famously cooked for student protestors occupying various buildings. “Someone put a piece of adhesive on the sleeve of my sweatshirt that read:
KITCHEN/COLWIN
,” she wrote in
Home Cooking
, published in 1988. “This, I feel, marked me for life.”

As Colwin began crafting her short stories, she also became a regular food columnist for
Gourmet
magazine, and many of her columns were anthologized in
Home Cooking
. The release of this work secured a fan base of up-and-coming casual gourmands who loved Colwin's unfussy, personal style and who remain devoted to her long after her death. Later in her life, even as she wrote about privileged Manhattanites, Colwin continued to volunteer and cook for homeless shelters in New York.

By the late seventies, Laurie Colwin was writing full time. Her first novel,
Shine On, Bright & Dangerous Object
, was published in 1975, and in 1977 Colwin received the prestigious O. Henry Award for short fiction. Her second novel,
Happy All the Time
, was received with much critical acclaim in 1978. By the time
The Lone Pilgrim
—a short story collection—and the novel
Family Happiness
were published in 1981 and 1982, respectively, Colwin had solidified her reputation as a writer to watch. She became known for her entertaining wit and wonderfully complex protagonists, whom readers understood immediately.

Colwin's story collection
Another Marvelous Thing
was published in 1986, and the next year, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 1990 she published
Goodbye Without Leaving
, the last novel that would go to press before her untimely death.

Laurie Colwin died of an aortic aneurysm in her Manhattan home on October 24, 1992, at the age of forty-eight. She was survived by her husband, Juris Jurjevics, a founder of Soho Press, and their daughter, Rosa.

In 1993
A Big Storm Knocked It Over
and
More Home Cooking
were published posthumously, serving as final invocations of Colwin's distinct voice and the New York characters she loved.

The author's parents, Estelle Colwin (née Wolfson) and Peter Colwin.

The Wolfsons, Colwin's mother's family, lived in Philadelphia and congregated there for the holidays. Colwin (at front), her older sister, Leslie (at upper left), and their father, Peter, pose by a statue in Rittenhouse Square, Thanksgiving, c. 1950.

Colwin at age seven or eight. As a child and teen, she did print modeling work at her mother's urging.