Free Passion and Affect by Laurie Colwin Page B

right? Is everything O.K.?”
    â€œI’m fine,” Max said. “Everything is O.K. and I miss you.”
    â€œIt’s only a week,” Olivia said. “I love you. Do you have everything you need?”
    â€œYes,” said Max. “Everything.”

the girl with the harlequin glasses
    O N GUIDO MORRIS’S DESK was a framed photograph that showed Guido and Vincent Cardworthy looking splendid. This photo had been taken on a day when both of them were feeling very cavalier, and reveals them to be tall, lean men in expensive suits. Guido had angled the camera, which had a time exposure, and then rushed behind the desk. Vincent and Guido had been friends since babyhood. In fact, they were second cousins and their states of mind frequently coincided. Their cavalier state manifested itself in large, open smiles, hands thrust forcefully in pockets and heads thrown slightly backward, with appropriate locks of hair falling onto foreheads. On that particular day, Vincent and Guido were filled with an almost anachronistic sense of well-being and optimism. This mood was the occasion for the photo. “If we’re feeling this good, we ought to have a record of it,” said Guido.
    Between them in this photograph, almost obscured by the well-cut shoulders of their jackets, stood Jane Marshall-Howard, the beautiful English girl who at the time had been Guido’s surly and inefficient secretary. If there was any hint of tension in the photo, it was in some tiny bunched lines around Guido’s eyes: he was brooding about firing Jane. It was going to be difficult, because she was very decorative and because he had grown used to her, in the way one grows used to constant shooting pains. She was always late, she spilled coffee on his papers, and she could only type for five or six minutes until her attention strayed. The day after the picture was taken she told Guido that she had been secretly married to a Brazilian coffee heir and was quitting her job to join her husband, who had recently come into his plantation.
    On the afternoon of the day Jane Marshall-Howard quit, Guido’s wife called to say that she had gone to stay at her parents’ country house for a few months. She felt it would be good for their emotional development. “We should grow separately for a while,” she said.
    Jane’s quitting threw him into the large panic that comes with small change: he did not know what to think about his wife. She told him that she had taken some of her clothes and a few of her books. Barely realizing that he was being committed to living alone among her shoes, bottles, copper pots, and French books, Guido immediately called the employment agency and said that he needed a secretary, and that she must be able to type at least seventy-five words per minute. Then he drank a large glass of seltzer and did nothing more productive for the rest of the afternoon than empty his ashtray.
    On the other side of the desk was another photo of Guido and Vincent. This photo was not a record of one of Guido’s good moods, but of one of his decisions. Very much obscured, except for a pair of harlequin glasses, was the face of Betty Helen Carnhoops, the girl Guido hired to replace Jane. In this photo, Guido looked faintly pleased because he had hired someone sensible, and Vincent looked aghast but inscrutable. He had just pegged Betty Helen Carnhoops for a truly bad apple.
    Vincent said, “How could you hire her after Jane?”
    â€œJane,” muttered Guido, abstractly.
    â€œShe’s awful,” said Vincent.
    â€œShe’s pleasant. She doesn’t take any getting used to.” Guido looked absently out of the window. “A pleasant and efficient girl.”
    Guido and Vincent were both blessed with private incomes, and their sense of work was leisurely. Vincent was a free-lance statistician for the Board of City Planning, and his special field of interest was garbage. He did studies