Free Happy All the Time by Laurie Colwin Page B

that you might live with someone whose sense of life was not your own. The world and Holly were on excellent terms. It did not flare up and surprise her. It held no disappointments, alarms, or clubs with which to beat a citizen over the head. She had no grand schemes, no secret visions. Her own notions of things were so internal that she barely spoke about them. But for all that, she was the best companion Guido had ever had.
    Holly had no ambitions to speak of, except to live nicely from day to day. Since she had enough money to support this one ambition, she devoted her life to domestic genius. She went to the Bronx Botanical Garden for lessons in Japanese flower arranging and bonzai. She took Chinese cooking classes and fed Guido the results. She had discovered that she had no talent for drawing but she did have a real affinity with clay. After a few small efforts on the potter’s wheel, she turned out a large black and silver Oriental urn, got bored, and began a survey of Chinese art. She read thrillers by the dozen, Victorian novels, French belles lettres, and large volumes on the subject of art history. It amazed Guido that she knew so much and did so little with it. When they had first met, she had been writing her master’s thesis on the subject of Chinese export porcelain. She had been encouraged to publish it. When the subject was brought up, she yawned and said she might some day. Education, she said, was something that enriched your life—not something you did things with. Guido thought of her as a city-state—strong, well-defended, and perfectly self-sufficient. Holly could cook, do needlework, play tennis, and fish. She had studied the Italic hand, the Carolingian minuscule, and the restoration of paintings and china. She could balance her checkbook to forty-five cents, make a perfect piecrust, identify most wild flowers in the northeastern United States, and bandage simple wounds. She could stand on her head, do a swan dive, repair lamps, and knew the collections of most major museums. Guido had once recited this list to Vincent, including the fact that Holly spoke French and Italian.
    â€œDoes she fly on commercial airlines?” Vincent had asked.
    â€œOf course she does. Why?”
    â€œAnything short of a transport carrier would crash under the weight of those accomplishments,” Vincent had said.
    Guido lived happily with the fruits of those accomplishments. Holly balanced his life and made it sweet. But she produced in Guido a violent longing, even when she was in the same room, as if he could never quite get enough of her. At times she appeared to him like a crystal of smoky quartz. You could see through it and into it. You gaped at its perfection. You looked it up to learn how it had been formed. You took it home and kept it as a treasure. It sat on a shelf to be considered in all its splendor, and it never, never revealed a thing about itself.
    By the time Vincent turned up for what had turned into a weekly Wednesday lunch, Guido had hired a secretary. The two temporaries had made appointments and then failed to show up. Five candidates had called. One was an actress who said she would be frequently on the road; one was a young man who said he was writing a novel with the aid of a computer; one did not know how to type; another could type but would not answer telephones; and the last did not speak very much English. A person named Betty Helen Carnhoops won hands down. She was a square girl with piano legs, short, efficient hair of no particular color, and green harlequin glasses that sprouted in each corner a gold rose with a rhinestone in the center. She typed ninety-five words a minute, took shorthand, and answered the phone in a brisk, businesslike manner. When Uncle Giancarlo eventually met her, he said, with a sigh: “How could you replace my beautiful tiger of wrath with such a horse of instruction? This is an office that gives money away for the purpose of making