Goodbye Without Leaving by Laurie Colwin Page A

gone to school together. They wore snappy clothes and owned small European cars. They worked hard and took interesting vacations in wilderness areas. They were healthy and hale and red-cheeked and they had never spent a minute of their lives worried about the essentials. The essentials had all been taken care of. Instead they had worried about grades, getting into college, law school. They worried when their cars didn’t work and when cholera broke out in some part of the world they had an impulse to go touring in. Later they had children and worried about early childhood development, what schools to send their children to. When they got together they talked about cooking equipment, and skiing, and gossiped about mutual friends. I was a total misfit.
    The older set, the senior partners, lived not in one-bedroom apartments but in large spaces overlooking the park, or in brownstones and duplexes. These people had grown children, all full of accomplishment, and gave large multigenerational dinner parties. At these dinners the great issues of the day were debated. A successful dinner party to this group was one in which spirited discussion took place.
    â€œIf I hear one more conversation about social justice, as the colored maid serves me my leg of lamb, I’m going to faint,” I said after one such event.
    â€œHow very noble you are,” said Johnny.
    â€œThese people just feel they can say anything they want.”
    â€œVernon Shakely said anything he wanted,” Johnny pointed out. “It’s all very well to talk about the white honky devil when your accountant is a white honky devil from the Wharton School of Business.”
    â€œYes, but Vernon meant what he said,” I countered.
    â€œWell, so do these people,” Johnny said. “And they treat you nicer.”
    â€œThey don’t treat me nicer. They’re like my mother. They only like me because I’m appended to you.”
    â€œYou don’t give them a chance,” Johnny sighed. “You’ve had an amazing career. You have lots of interesting things to say.”
    â€œI don’t feel that these people are on my side.”
    â€œYou’re hopeless,” Johnny said. “Life is not about who’s on whose side.”
    I was incredulous. Could anybody actually believe that life was not about who was on whose side? I hung my head. How nice it would be, I thought, to withdraw from reality and spend the rest of my life dancing in front of the stereo in the privacy of my own warm home.
    Not only was I shy, I could not cook. The only thing I could fix was red beans and cabbage salad, and neither Johnny nor I felt that this was appropriate for a dinner party.
    â€œGee,” he said one day. “We can’t feed Alice and Simon Crain red beans.”
    â€œI thought Simon used to work in the slums,” I said. “Didn’t Alice do some kind of field work in the Caribbean? Why can’t we give them red beans?”
    â€œWe don’t say ‘slums,’ “Johnny said. “We say ‘inner city.’”
    â€œWe can order out,” I said. “Besides, your kitchen isn’t what I would call well equipped.”
    â€œWe’ll have to do something about this,” Johnny said.
    When Johnny said, “We’ll have to do something about this,” he wasn’t kidding around. The next evening I ambled over to his apartment and found his kitchen full of important-looking boxes, inside of which was a battery of orange enamel French cooking ware: a soup pot, a frying pan, a family of saucepans and a flat pan with little ears.
    â€œIt’s a gratin,” Johnny said, reading the fancy brochure.
    â€œOh, yeah?”
    â€œIt’s to make gratin in.”
    â€œOh, yeah?”
    â€œWell, yes. Look, here’s a picture. It says here you scallop the potatoes and cook them in cream and cheese. Sounds swell.”
    I peered over his shoulder. “It says