Passion and Affect Read Free Page A

apartment waiting for Mary, who was coming to borrow his copy of Darwin’s Finches . He was happy and nervous anticipating her, so he thought about her apartment, which to him was like the finch room. He liked the way she watched him, the serious way she reacted. “It’s like a movie, being with you,” he had said to her. “I feel like a camera being watched by a camera. It’s like being in a situation and outside it at the same time. If I look at you, I can watch me being here. I’ve never seen anything like it, the way you take note.”
    She arrived on time, wearing a raincoat, a gray skirt, a white sweater.
    â€œDon’t you ever wear anything that’s a color?” Roddy asked.
    His apartment was on the ground floor of a dingy brick building near the river. In the living room was an aluminum work table, piled with papers, two cheap chairs, and a matching sofa. It looked as if someone had lived in the two rooms for a brief, uninspired time and had fled abruptly, leaving faded furniture and curtains behind. In the middle of the floor was an air-conditioner turned over on its side. Its parts were strewn in a circle around it.
    â€œI’m in the process of fixing it,” Roddy explained.
    Behind a partition was his bedroom—a nook big enough for a bed, on top of which were stacks of clean laundry and a small generator. In the kitchen was a Bunsen burner and a pegboard hung with hammers, ratchets, wrenches, and drills. On the Formica sideboard was an acid beaker that functioned as coffee-maker. There were two tin plates and two tin cups that he had gotten as a premium for buying the five bottles of soy sauce that were lined up on a shelf next to some empty orange-juice tins. The icebox emitted a hum, and when Roddy hit it with his forearm the door opened, revealing a container of cottage cheese, a bottle of wine, and a carton of eggs.
    â€œThat’s my next project, that icebox,” Roddy said. “I got the hum out once, but it came back.”
    He made coffee in the acid beaker. There was powdered milk and sugar he had filched from the museum cafeteria.
    â€œWhat an odd way to live,” Mary said. “You go to all the trouble of making coffee with filter paper and then you don’t have any proper milk. These are only temporary quarters to you, aren’t they?”
    â€œProper milk, as you call it, doesn’t keep, and since I’m not here all that often, why bother?”
    â€œThen why bother about anything?” Mary said.
    â€œI work most of the time. That’s what my time is for.”
    They drank their coffee side by side on the sofa, holding hands. The icebox began to hum.
    â€œI’ve got to fix that, but first I have to call Templeton. I’ve been trying to get Garlin all day. She’s never in, or else she’s not answering the phone.” He dragged the telephone from under the couch and dialed a series of numbers.
    â€œLet me speak to Sara,” he said into the receiver. “Is she any better? … Hello? S. J., it’s Poppa. I hear you got a shot. You didn’t cry? Well, I’m very pleased to hear that. I’m sending you a postcard in the mail and I want you to send me one of the pictures you draw at school. O.K.? Ask Mama if she wants to speak to me. … Hi. I didn’t get the lawyer. I’ll call him tomorrow. O.K.? Right.” He hung up.
    Mary had moved to a corner of the sofa, to keep a distance between herself and the conversation.
    â€œWhy are you hiding over there?” Roddy said. “To pay me back for calling my wife? You can call your boyfriend in India if you want.”
    â€œDon’t tease,” said Mary. “How old’s your little girl?”
    â€œFour.”
    â€œDo you have any pictures of her?”
    â€œI don’t have anything around,” Roddy said. “Most of my stuff is with my parents in Westchester. I brought a whole bunch of stuff back