Goodbye Without Leaving by Laurie Colwin Page B

here you scallop the potatoes and cook them in cheese and cream.”
    â€œWe both have to learn,” he said.
    I curled my eyebrow at him.
    â€œHey!” Johnny said. “We’re supposed to be a team. Let’s have a little cooperative spirit.”
    â€œOh, take it to work,” I said. “Walk the dog till you feel better.”
    â€œDon’t be intractable. Eventually we’re going to get married.”
    â€œI don’t want to get married. I want things to be the way they are.”
    â€œCome over here.” He put his arms around me. “You wanted to stay a Shakette. Now you want us to live like two graduate students going out on dates and living together on the weekends. Things change. You have to roll with the times.”
    â€œI don’t want to roll with the times.” Tears spurted out of my eyes. “Life is nice now. Can’t we just groove with the now? Besides, why do you want to marry me? I can’t cook. I’m not a social asset. I’m a drag at dinner parties.”
    â€œYou’re my soul and my inspiration,” Johnny said.
    â€œI never liked that song,” I said.
    â€œBut it’s true,” Johnny said. “‘ Without you, baby, what good am I ?’”

16
    Because I loved him, I tried to get nicer. I read the newspaper every day and tried to figure out what my opinions were. Unfortunately, my opinions were almost identical to Vernon Shakely’s, which was not much use if you happened to be a white middle-class person whose boyfriend was a lawyer.
    Most intimidating to me was an invitation to the home of Bill and Betty Lister. Bill, a serene, gray-haired man, was Johnny’s mentor at the firm. Betty was the administrator at a small foundation that gave away tons of money to worthy causes. They had two children: Penny, a filmmaker who had documented the plight of migrant workers and rural midwives, and Bill Jr., a journalist whose beat was city politics. They lived in a big, somewhat shabby house—after all, it was not material things that mattered—and their walls were decorated with the pickings from their extensive travels: Haitian folk quilts (sewn with tiny stuffed people riding on tiny stuffed buses pursued by trapunto alligators), a !Hmong wall hanging, a watercolor done by a sharecropper at a Freedom School in Mississippi. Their silverware, I noticed, was extremely heavy and old. I mentioned this to Johnny, who had spent a good deal of time telling me how much above such things Bill Lister was.
    â€œOh, come on,” said Johnny. “People have things like that. They don’t buy them.”
    Betty Lister did not cook but, as Johnny pointed out, this had never stood in her way.
    â€œShe has servants to cook for her while she’s out doing good deeds,” I said.
    â€œShe knows that you can always hire people to help you.”
    â€œHow very upright of her,” was all that I could say.
    Friday night Betty Lister, who believed that a good hostess drew out her shy guests, decided to focus on me. She was a tall, wide-eyed woman, with the wondering gaze of a child. She wore long velvet skirts and what looked like an evening shirt tailored for a woman.
    She sat next to me on a love seat in front of the wood-burning fireplace. We had been served our leg of lamb and were having coffee in the Listers’ enormous living room.
    â€œNow,” she said, “Johnny tells me you work for a foundation. I do too! Which one do you work for?”
    I said I worked for the Race Music Foundation.
    â€œReally,” Betty said. “I’ve never heard of it. Who does it give money to?”
    â€œIt takes money from,” I said. “It isn’t a foundation in your sense. It’s an archive for the preservation of black music.”
    â€œHow marvelous!” Betty said. This was the sort of thing her foundation funded. “And what is the guiding principle of the Race Music