Happy All the Time (6 page)

“I hate figures of speech,” said Misty calmly.

Vincent took another deep breath and pressed on.

“What I mean to say is, I'm sorry to have kissed you like that yesterday.”

Misty lifted her eyes from the tablecloth. The most remote flicker of a smile crossed her lips.

“Is that really what you mean to say?” she said.

“I thought it was,” said Vincent.

“Think again,” said Misty. The flicker had turned into a real smile, a smile that looked almost warm. That, of course, was an excellent sign. “Did you actually drag me out to dinner to tell me that you didn't mean to kiss me?” She was still smiling.

“I'm sorry,” said Vincent. “I was just being conversational.”

“Conversational about
kissing?”
said Misty. “Very interesting.”

“What I meant to say is that I wanted to kiss you, but I didn't mean to.”

“Well, that certainly clears things up,” said Misty. “You and I seem to have very different ideas about intent
and
about kissing.”

“I mean, you can't just go around kissing people,” said Vincent.

“You did,” said Misty. She looked at him thoughtfully. “You know what?” she said.

“And furthermore,” interrupted Vincent, “I want to know if that fellow I saw you with last night … I mean, I was wondering who he was.”

“You were wondering?” said Misty. “You know what the trouble with you is? You're smart but in all the wrong ways. First you kiss me. Then you say you didn't mean to. Then you run into me with some nearsighted woman on your arm and
then
you want to know who was that fellow you saw me with. I ask you.”

Relief left Vincent quickly. What a dark mistake his life had been. Misty looked very calm and cool. There was no particular expression on her face. Was it a good sign that she had noticed Winnie's myopia or was it simply ammunition gathering? Her calmness was extremely forbidding. He decided, since he could not figure out what else to do, to continue being the fool he was.

“The girl you saw me with last night is a sort of casual friend,” said Vincent. “Or rather she was.”

“Is ‘casual friend' a figure of speech too?”

“I used to sleep with her,” said Vincent. “For no good reason.”

“I'm not interested in your disgusting social habits,” said Misty.

“She's married to a fellow called Toad.”

A huge smile lit Misty's face.

“Toad,” she said. “How adorable. Why is it that you upper-class types always name yourselves after reptiles?”

“Amphibians,” said Vincent. “Now, who was that man?”

“I am under no obligation to tell you anything,” said Misty.

“I told
you,”
said Vincent. “It isn't fair.”

“No?” said Misty. “Well, here's a revelation for you. You don't have to be fair in this world.”

“I'll pay you to tell me,” said Vincent. He pulled his wallet out of his jacket.

“My goodness,” said Misty. “You really are far gone. Well, okay. That man was my cousin Stanley, who is nineteen years old.”

They sat in silence. A waitress brought them each a plate of spaghetti. Vincent had no appetite, but Misty dug in.

“You ought to eat your dinner before it gets cold,” said Misty.

“I will,” said Vincent, but he didn't pick up his fork. All the clichés about confusion had been created for him, he felt. He was all at sea. He was adrift, a man without an anchor.

Misty ate daintily, twirling her spaghetti neatly around her fork. When she lifted her wineglass, he noticed that her hair was the same amber color as the wine. She had light brown eyes. He noticed that in candlelight she took on the color of an apricot. She had small delicate hands and pale, oval nails. Her only jewelry was a plain gold watch.

“The trouble with you,” said Misty, “is that you're so committed to being polite and doing the right thing.”

Vincent sat staring at his cold spaghetti and said nothing.

“If you weren't so polite, you wouldn't have had to go out of your way to take me to dinner to apologize for your random behavior.”

Vincent looked up. Misty was smiling.

“You should be more like me,” she said.

“I should?” said Vincent. “In what way?”

“I am the scourge of God.”

Vincent sat still, listening to his heart beat. Misty was smiling again. Her smile revealed to him that his behavior was far from random. He was in love.

“I just felt bad,” he said. “About yesterday.”

“In order to feel bad,” said Misty, “you should have kissed me a lot more.”

CHAPTER 3

Misty Berkowitz's given name was Amelia Elizabeth. She had been named for her great-grandmother and her grandmother, but her cousin Michael's mispronunciation had stuck with her. Misty was stoical about her names. She had ceased to cringe at either Misty or Amelia. She felt that all girls should be called Mary and since she was not she would have to endure, although she took a grim, ironic pleasure in the fact that there was nothing misty in her character.

She had come back from two years at l'École des Hautes Études with a strong command of the French language, a trunkload of books, a green suede coat, and a broken heart. This broken heart had been inflicted upon her by an embassy brat by the name of John Bride, who ran an American cinema on the Left Bank. There he showed grade B cowboy movies and police thrillers. During one of her bouts of homesickness, Misty had broken her vow not to see films in English while in France. One bitter winter day, she went to Le Cinéma Américain to watch a movie called
Rush Street Episode
, which was set in Chicago. There was no one else in the movie house. She sat through the movie weeping. At the end, she realized that there was someone sitting next to her. That someone was John Bride.

Misty had had two love affairs. Neither had been satisfactory and they had left her with the notion that she was not generally attractive: that only weird, intense men would ever fall in love with her. John Bride was the sort of man who never did. He was neither weird nor intense. He was the sort of man you see walking down the street with a fashion model on his arm. He was tall and cool and had the lean sort of mouth more experienced women know marks a deep sensualist who doesn't kiss much. He was the sort of man who knew his way around women. He was very skilled. He gave Misty a handkerchief and said: “You're an American girl from Chicago, I bet. No one else would come out on a day like this to watch this crummy film and cry too.”

Misty was young enough to be stunned. She felt instantly understood. She took the handkerchief and wiped her eyes.

“How about a cup of real American coffee?” said John Bride. He took her through the freezing wind to an American bar and restaurant for coffee and hamburgers, where he smiled coolly as she revealed herself to him. He knew what questions to ask and he probably knew what answers he would get. Had Misty been older, she might have known the mechanics of this form of heartless approach, but she did not. She had never met a womanizer before. The next day he came to fetch her and took her to the Cluny Museum and out to dinner. Several dinners followed. One night he took her out for a drink, in the course of which she realized that her knees were shaking.

John Bride said: “I can feel you trembling under the table. Do you think you ought to come home with me?”

It occurred to Misty that an adventure was exactly what she needed. Her social life in Paris was composed of long serious talks with young economists and linguistics students and tame, expensive dinners with American boys who were working for six months at Société Générate. John Bride seemed able to x-ray into her desires. She went home with him. At the time, she could not quite distinguish between love, lust, confusion, and longing. That mixture looked briefly like the real thing. As a result, their alliance did not amount to much. It simply turned Misty around. It gave her a taste of what she now knew she was too old for: that high-flown emotional deprivation that is the earmark of hopeless romantic love.

Women did not leave John Bride; he left them. He felt he left them better off—after all, they had had the experience of him. He was not haveable, he explained. He was not interested in relationships. He was after experience.

Misty had always known that her appeal was not general. The general run of man did not want someone as quirky as she was. She had always run with a precocious set who had spent their afternoons at the Museum of Science and Industry as children and at the symphony as teenagers. The boys who fell in love with her at college engaged her in lengthy conversations about Marxism, Freudian notation, and The New Philosophy. John Bride was symbolic of normal man, which meant that he was handsome and at ease with women. He did not engage Misty in long conversations about anything. He kissed her in alleyways. He took her dancing. He told her he found her beautiful, and the most intelligent person in the world is a fool for this sort of information. John Bride stood for all the men Misty felt were out of her range. Suddenly, one of them was by her side, but only briefly.

This affair was intensely painful for a short time. When the pain passed, revelation set in. From John Bride, Misty learned that yearning was a remarkably time-consuming pastime and that it was not especially useful. She learned that a man who was not intense, myopic, afraid of dancing, or unwilling to kiss in public places might find her attractive. She learned that she could flirt, if she wanted to. The most lasting benefit of this affair was that Misty went to a salon on the Right Bank where she was given a perfect haircut. This had been done on John Bride's behalf.

But she was confirmed in her view that she was a special case of one sort or another. Only another special case might truly love her and since those were rare, and Misty was not a compromiser, it was clear to her that she would probably float through life alone. The John Brides of this world were not in fact for her.

Misty's personality was a deliberate creation. She felt she was not unlike one of those seashells that looks elaborate, but is only the housing for a very soft animal. There was no point—and no fun—in committing the imitative fallacy in matters of self, especially when the self you were housing was moved by scenes of ordinary human kindness. It seemed to her unwise to let the world at large know how easily moved she was, so she kept it to herself. Even John Bride, who behaved like a creature from another planet who had come to earth to see how its creatures might amuse him, was unaware of how deep her feelings were.

In Paris she felt that her girlhood had ended. She returned to America surer of herself. One good hurt inflicted by an unworthy but perfectly beautiful man is not the worst thing that can happen to a woman of principle. It taught you about your own weaknesses. It taught you about style. It polished off your rough edges.

Now in New York, she had no intention of falling in love with anyone. She was not and had never been interested in social life as it was commonly conducted. She did not wish to be taken out for dinner or to have a beau. She was interested in ultimates—like passion and honor. The rest seemed tepid and irrelevant to her.

Vincent Cardworthy, however, was another special case: goofy, harmless, the sort of man who knows as much about the life of the emotions as an infant knows about plasma physics. There was a certain sweetness in the midst of his silliness, and he looked like a man who wanted to be played with. Things probably came easily to him, Misty thought. She saw no reason why she ought to be one of them. That she thought about him, that she found the freckles on his cheekbones, his ruddy face, and his ardent blue eyes compelling was nobody's business but her own.

The Board of City Planning had been founded by Hubert McKay, the great urbanist and city planning pioneer. It was to function as a center for thought, work, and action in the matters of cities and their problems. Each year, members of the Board produced books and studies and monographs. Its staff was hired out to the federal government, to state and local governments, to developing nations.

The present head of the Board was Hubert McKay's son Denton, a trim, forty-four-year-old specimen who wore English sport jackets and boots. He had woolly brown hair, big, empty, platelike blue eyes that were much admired by the female staff, an office full of fishing rods, potted trees, and pictures of his children. In addition, he had a terrific backhand, useful for conning tennis-playing government officials and civic-minded philanthropists out of large chunks of money for the Board. Denton had hired Misty for the junior staff and set her to work on one of the lower floors. Now, as the youngest member of the senior staff, she was brought up to the eleventh floor, where she caught Denton McKay's attention. During her first week in her new office, Denton McKay had sauntered in, positioned himself on the corner of her desk, and helped himself to one of her cigarettes. He lit it and exhaled a curl of blue smoke.

“Who are you, anyway?” he said.

“My name is—”

“I know your name. I think I do. Who hired you?”

“You did,” said Misty.

“I did? Gee, I don't remember. What did I hire you for?”

“I started on the language of politics study and now I'm on the Hispanic change in language project,” Misty said.

“Right, right,” said McKay. “Which one is that?”

“It's the effect of American speech patterns on—”

“Yes, yes,” said McKay. “Well, how do you like it here? You're new, aren't you?”

“I've been here almost a year,” said Misty.

“Right. Well, when you get used to it, come and tell me what you think of it. I like input from the staff.”

Four weeks later he was back. He took a cigarette and said: “Now, let's see. You're working on the transport project, right?”

“Wrong,” said Misty.