The Achieve of, the Mastery of the Thing by Laurie Colwin

Author:Laurie Colwin [Colwin, Laurie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2022-10-11T00:00:00+00:00

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The nice thing about being high all the time is that life suspends itself in front of you endlessly, like telephone poles on a highway. Without plans you have the feeling that things either will never change, or will arrange themselves somehow someday.

A look around the campus did not fill the heart of this tender bride with visions of a rosy adult future. It was clear who was having all the fun and it was not the grown-ups. Thorne and I were the youngest faculty couple, and this gave us—I mean me—a good vantage point. A little older than us were couples with worn-out cars, sick children, and debts. If they were not saddled with these things, they had independent incomes and were saddled with attitudes. Then they got older and were seen kissing the spouses of others at parties, or were found, a pair of unassorted spouses, under a pile of coats on a bed at New Year’s Eve parties. Then they got even older, and the strife of their marriages gave them the stony affection battle comrades have for one another.

There were marriages that seemed propped up with toothpicks, and ones in which the wife was present but functionless, like a vestigial organ. Then the husband, under the strain of being both father and more to little Emily, Matthew, and Tabitha plus teaching a full course load, was forced to have an affair with a graduate student in Boston whom he could see only every other weekend.

The thought of Thorne and my becoming any of these people was so frightful that I had no choice but to get immediately high. Something would either occur to me, or nothing would happen. Meanwhile, time drifted by in the company of Lionel Browning—a fine fellow and a truly great pothead for whom I had not one particle of sexual feeling. He was my perfect pal. Was this cheating? I asked myself. Well, I had to admit, it sort of was. Thorne did not know how much time I spent with him, but then Linnie was soon to graduate, so I had to get him while I could, so to speak.

In the spring, Thorne went off to a convention of the Historical Society and I went on a dope run to Boston with Linnie. I looked forward to this adventure. It did not seem likely that life would bring me many more offers of this sort. The purity of my friendship with Linnie was never tainted by the well-known number of motels that littered the road from school to Boston. Sex was never our mission.

We paid a visit to a dealer named Marv (he called himself Uncle Marv) Fenrich, who was somewhat of a legend. The legend had it that he had once been very brilliant, but that speed—his drug of choice—had turned his brain into shaving cream and now he was fit only to deal grass to college boys. He also dealt speed to more sinister campus types, and he had tried to con Linnie into this lucrative sideline.

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