Happy All the Time (4 page)

“Wasn't it nice of Annie and Richard to invite me as a fourth?” Rachel said. She leaned closer to Vincent.

“It's awfully late,” Vincent said. “I think I ought to get back.”

“Oh, just have one little drinkie,” said Rachel. She leaped off the couch and left Vincent alone to contemplate his surroundings. The couch he sat upon was plaid. So were the shades of the big jug lamps and the rug on the floor. The chairs were the sort you see in men's clubs. Each had a plaid car rug tossed over the back. Vincent scanned the room for a gun case, but there was none. Instead there were framed photographs of two little children, Rachel, and a man who was doubtless the soon to be ex-husband, all in riding gear. There were pictures of children on ponies and adults on horses. On the end tables were vases of paper flowers and silver baby cups filled with stale cigarettes.

Rachel came back with two tall glasses.

“It's much too late to go home now,” she said.

“I think you'd better give me some directions,” said Vincent. He did not like the idea of being hijacked by a not sober woman or of being a bad houseguest.

“Oh, no,” said Rachel. “I just couldn't take the responsibility. It's too late and too dark and you've had too much to drink. You'd get lost. You'll have to stay here. I couldn't deal with the guilt if you drove off the road and got killed or anything.”

“I think it's important that you tell me right now,” Vincent said.

“Well, actually, I'm not too sure I know,” said Rachel. “On account of because the sitter drove me over and now she's gone. The brakes on the station wagon are shot and Aurélee has the little car.”

“Aurélee?”

“She's my French girl,” said Rachel. “She lives here and takes care of little Hugh and Sophie so Artie and I can go away on the weekends.”

“Artie?”

“My lawyer,” said Rachel. “You're my revenge on him. I told him he had a week to get on the stick and start rattling some papers. I told him if he didn't get moving, I'd take up with someone else and you're it.”

“You haven't given Artie his week,” said Vincent. Rachel had begun to loom at him. “Why can't Aurélee drive me home in the little car?”

“Aurélee drove somewhere to watch the hawks migrate. This is the week they migrate somewhere and she went to see it. So she isn't here. Besides, a little revenge will do me good.”

She sat up straight and Vincent noticed that she was quite a large package. Her cheeks were ruddy. Her pink scalp gleamed through the part in her bright blond hair. She looked positively overheated by her own good health. She was wearing a kilt, which Vincent had trouble distinguishing from the couch. He gulped his drink and remembered nothing until the morning, when he remembered a great deal and realized that he was massively hung over.

He was staring out the window calculating his terrible remorse when Rachel was suddenly sitting beside him.

“Either you're a real gent or a dud avocado or you can't drink worth a damn,” she said.

Vincent held his head slightly to the side. Upright, he felt as if someone were stabbing him. “What does that mean?” he whispered.

“It means you didn't come across,” Rachel said. “You can't imagine how put out I am.”

This information filled Vincent with relief. He believed that sex was involved with destiny. Had anything happened between him and Rachel, he would have dutifully gotten on a plane every weekend to see her until she got sick of him.

“What a damned shame,” Rachel said. “I hate missed chances.” She consulted her bedside clock. “If Aurélee were here, we'd have time for a little quick action, but she isn't. It's too late now. It's time for breakfast. You can use my toothbrush unless you have foot-and-mouth disease. There's a guest toothbrush in the guest bedroom but I don't want you trotting all over the house. Artie's electric razor is hidden in back of the baby powder. The towels are in a cupboard under the sink. Now, when you come down to breakfast, please don't say anything compromising to little Hugh and Sophie. They have conflicted images about male authority.”

Little Hugh and Sophie were delicate, goggle-eyed creatures with soft, curly hair. Clearly they took after their father. Vincent found Rachel and her children in the breakfast nook—a yellow room with French windows that looked out over the tennis court. Little Hugh was patting his English muffin with his fist and singing to himself. Sophie was eating oatmeal, but when Vincent appeared he absorbed all of her attention. She continued to eat, but the spoon landed in the vicinity of her cheek.

“Good morning,” said Vincent, sitting down. Sophie stared and waved her spoon. Gooey droplets of oatmeal fell on Vincent's lap. Little Hugh continued to sing and flatten his muffin with his fist.

“Say good morning to Mr. Cardworthy, children,” said Rachel.

“You're not Artie,” said Sophie.

“That's right. I'm Vincent.”

“What's a Vincent?” Sophie said.

“Vincent is a man's name,” Vincent explained.

“Are you a man?” Sophie asked.

“Yes,” said Vincent.

“Then prove it,” Sophie squealed. She giggled violently. The spoon fell to the floor and landed on Vincent's shoe.

“That's quite enough,” said Rachel. “Go into the kitchen and get some toast.” Sophie skipped into the kitchen, but little Hugh came over to inspect. He stood next to Vincent and rested his head on Vincent's knee. He was drooling. He looked deeply into Vincent's eyes and then departed, leaving two buttery smudges on Vincent's trousers.

Rachel handed him a muffin and a cup of coffee. “It's so hard to know if they're in the oral or anal stages these days.” She sighed and drank her coffee. While Vincent was finishing his breakfast, she called his host for directions and then sent Vincent on his way.

“Artie called while you were in the shower,” Rachel said. “So you'd better hightail it out of here. I do hope you didn't leave any traces of yourself anywhere. Children, come and say goodbye to nice Mr. Cardworthy.”

Vincent had lived in New York for almost three years. For two and a half, he had been a trouble-shooter for the Board of City Planning. This Board was not attached to any city—it was a think tank for urban study. Vincent was its crack expert on garbage—production, removal, potential dangers and uses, conservation, and politics. Garbage, at the Board of City Planning, was not called garbage. It was called “nonproductive ex-consumer materials.” As trouble-shooter he had been on the road, addressing city councils, government agencies, and sanitation conferences. His apartment in New York was rather monastic as a result, as was the rest of his nonworking life. Most of his free time, of which there was very little, he spent with Holly and Guido at whose wedding three years ago he had been best man.

After the publication of Vincent's last two papers, the Board had decided that he was too valuable to run around the country. Thus one of Vincent's underlings became the trouble-shooter. Vincent stayed in New York and was rented out to the government on special occasions.

Now that he was more settled, Vincent had found himself a romantic entanglement—one that was in no way productive, joy-producing, or oriented toward the future. Her name was Winnie Minor and she was married to a stockbroker named Henry whom she called “Toad” or “the Toad.” All of Henry's friends called him by this name, she had explained. She had ambled into the Board one day to attend a seminar on Urban Education. Winnie was a reading evaluator at Tift Memorial High School, which was famous for its basketball team and its low reading scores. She was having a little trouble compiling some data, so Vincent, who had a little free time, offered to help her plan a computer program. They met under the normal curve, Vincent said.

Guido and Holly had met Winnie once and both were alarmed. Holly thought Winnie was the worst of what she called “Vincent's vacuous no-shows” and Guido thought Winnie was the living symbol of something terrible in Vincent's life. Winnie was myopic, but even with her glasses, which she wore reluctantly, her face was so empty of expression that nearsightedness seemed a more animated and interesting condition. She wore the sort of clothes the Queen Mother wears to go trout fishing—tweeds and pearls.

Vincent was not in love with Winnie and he did not find her endearing. She was not in love with Vincent and never seemed very glad to see him. Nevertheless, they conducted what Winnie called their “hidden moments.” These occurred when the Toad was away on business or had devoted his evening to squash. The only positive sign Guido could detect in this was that Vincent seemed actually unhappy, and unhappiness in the optimistic Vincent was a good thing, Guido felt.

Vincent
was
unhappy. The incident with Rachel Montgomery had truly horrified him. What he had thought of as a silly, carefree social life had taken a turn toward the indicative, and what this indicated depressed him. Was he fated to be silly forever? Was it his destiny to fall in with married blond girls for the rest of his life? Did he have a tragic flaw? Was his luck the residue of his own design? Vincent began to consider his romantic conduct. He was unused to this form of thought. It turned his conception of the world upside down. He continued to see Winnie when the Toad's schedule permitted, but he did so with a sinking heart. When he dialed her number, he gritted his teeth, as if she were a form of penance. Then he celebrated his birthday with Holly and Guido. This warm and happy evening left him miserable once he was home alone. Holly and Guido had just the sort of apartment Vincent had imagined: it was on the tenth floor of an old building and it looked like a little French country house in the sky. Holly cooked his favorite meal and Guido poured his favorite wine. After dinner, they sat before the first fire of the autumn eating apples and drinking brandy. Vincent wanted to stay forever. When he left, he felt that domestic happiness was forcing the extra man out the door and onto the lonely streets.

His heart was further burdened by a discovery at the Board of City Planning. Now that Vincent had stopped traveling, he had time to investigate his colleagues. One morning, Vincent had discovered a girl named Misty Berkowitz. He found her sitting in her office, slumped over her old-fashioned calculator stirring her coffee with a fountain pen. She had amber-colored hair that fell into her eyes and small gold spectacles that slipped down her nose. She looked bored and misanthropic. The sight of her caused Vincent's heart to leap in an unexpected manner. He poked his head into her doorway and said good morning in a cheery fashion. Misty Berkowitz looked up.

“Get the hell away from me,” she growled.

Later, she came to his office to apologize.

“It's hell in the morning,” she said. Vincent was about to begin a conversation, but Misty Berkowitz had vanished.

After that exchange, Vincent found himself looking for her and he frequently found her. Her normal expression, he observed, ranged between the scornful and the malevolent, although Vincent had once caught her off guard. She was staring out the window of her office and did not know that she was being observed. In repose, Vincent noted that she was very pretty. She never smiled, that Vincent could see. In fact, she appeared to spend her life in a sort of tear. In the morning, she stormed into her office wearing a green suede coat that she threw onto a chair. When she was working, she muttered to herself, broke pencils, and threw them on the floor. She often swore horribly. When she condescended to bid Vincent good morning, she did so in a hostile whisper.

By snooping around the personnel office, Vincent discovered that Misty came from Chicago, had been educated in Chicago, and had taken an advanced degree at l'École des Hautes Études in Paris. Her field of study was linguistics and she had been hired by the Board to coordinate their Urban Language Information Unit. At present, this unit was studying the effects of urban life in New York City on the Spanish spoken by resident Hispanics. Her date of birth was not on her employment form but on a form not available to his prying. He calculated that she was in her late twenties. Since she was much too forbidding to talk to, Vincent kept this information to himself and carried it around like a secret weapon.

Meanwhile, his hidden moments with Winnie continued, except that there were fewer of them. When they occurred, they found themselves not at Vincent's bare apartment, but at the movies or a basketball game. He began to function as Winnie's baby-sitter and if she missed the more physical of their hidden moments, she did not say.

Vincent was not brash, for all his optimism. Around women, he had a certain hearty shyness and he usually planned carefully his mode of approach. But he surprised himself one day, when, passing Misty Berkowitz's office, he walked right in and asked her to have lunch with him. She said yes. Since Vincent had not expected to ask her for lunch, he had no plan to cover her acceptance. At lunch, the true folly of his action was displayed for him.

“Why did you ask me out for lunch?” Misty said.

“Do I have to have a reason?”

“Yes.”

“I find you very appealing. Is that enough reason?”

“No,” said Misty.

“Well, you intrigue me. Is that better?”

“No.”

“Look,” said Vincent. “Do you know any words of more than one syllable?”

“Yes.”

“I see,” said Vincent. “Why can't I simply take you out for lunch?”

“Behavior is no accident,” said Misty. “People have reasons for what they do. Besides, if you wanted some appealing girl, why didn't you go down to the PR department? It's loaded with appealing types.”

“I don't want any of those appealing types,” he paused. “I wanted you.”

“Oh, yeah?” said Misty. “What are you going to do when you get me?”

“Well, take you out for lunch,” said Vincent.