Another Marvelous Thing

by Laurie Colwin Narrated by Kristen Sieh, Mark Deakins

Overview

The acclaimed author of Happy All the Time charts the story of a whirlwind love affair of two people who are happily married (just not to each other)-from its fabulous inception to its inevitable end. ¿ "Virtually flawless.... A tour de force." -Los Angeles Times

Billy and Francis couldn't be more different, at least when it comes to age and disposition, but that doesn't prevent them from falling in love and settling into the easy rhythms of romance-phone calls every morning, rendezvous every weekday afternoon, the odd out-of-town escape-despite both still being very partial to their spouses. In interconnected stories, Laurie Colwin deftly reveals each character's point of view and examines, in razor-sharp detail, the “marvelous” and messy glory of modern love and the curious desires of the heart. 

This whirlwind romance, perfectly captured in Colwinesque frank and funny style, is firm proof that oppositesreally do attract.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

In her deceptively simple, witty style, Colwin (Happy All the Time, Family Happiness continues to write with perception about the bliss and pain of people in love. Her protagonists in these eight linked stories are Josephine (Billy) Delielle and Francis Clemens, both intelligent achievers happily married to their respective spouses, who fall into an unlikely but tender affair when they meet in the offices of the highbrow journal to which they both contribute articles on economics. Billy is young, sloppy, often grumpy, unsentimental, determinedly minimalist in her tastes in food and clothing. Francis is older, sophisticated, urbane, committed to neatness and routine. The stories depict some of the same events told from their differing points of view; despite passion and familiarity, each discovers the essential unknowableness of the other. Both know the relationship will have to end, but the ache of parting is ameliorated for Billy by the consolidation of her marriage through the birth of a baby. Billy and Francis are somewhat improbable as lovers, and Colwin studs the text with too many pithy apothegms about the indelible effects of a love affair, but there are many moments in this slim volume when the reader is touched and moved. March 31

Library Journal

Here is another treat for admirers of Colwin's Happy All the Time. As before, she traces the subtleties of love, both married and adulterous; but this time she adds another marvelous thingthe birth of a baby. The book consists of eight linked stories (five of which appeared in the New Yorker) tracing the course of a love affair between professional associates, each married to someone else. It sparkles with Colwin's customary wit, delicacy, and intelligence. Polly Warren, formerly with Southern Methodist Univ. in Paris

From the Publisher

Virtually flawless.... A tour de force.” —Los Angeles Times

“These should be read one at a time, perhaps just before bed as a respite from an especially trying day.” —The New York Times

“Colwin is a bard of burgeoning adulthood.” —The New Yorker

“If anyone wrote eloquently and magnificently about affairs of the heart, it was Laurie Colwin." —San Francisco Chronicle

"Colwin is ingenious, comedic, and spirited.” —The Boston Globe

“A witty, literate and intelligent entertainment, a commodity not so easily come by these days.” —The New York Times

“Colwin wrings magic from ordinary lives.” —Entertainment Weekly

“I have loved Laurie Colwin’s work for forty-some years, all of it, every honest, deep, friendly, funny, heartbreaking, hopeful word.” —Anne Lamott, bestselling author of Almost Everything and Dusk, Night, Dawn

"Colwin had the power to make her readers believe in life’s possibilities.... Her books still have that power.” —NPR

“I read my first Laurie Colwin book way way back in the 1970s and have adored her ever since: Reading her exuberant prose, her elegant (but not at all stuffy) sentences, I always marvel at her absolute love for her characters in all their foibles and their flaws, and how she urges us to have the same generosity toward them (and ourselves). Basically, reading (and rereading) Colwin's short stories and novels always makes me happy.” —Nancy Pearl, co-author of The Writer’s Library

“Laurie Colwin’s great subject was happiness—whether romantic, familial, domestic, or culinary—and she managed to write about it with both élan and emotional depth.... How wonderful it is that her books are still with us.” —The Christian Science Monitor

“[Colwin’s] intricate worlds—full of people who lovingly revolve around one another, with occasional pit stops in their kitchens, dining rooms, and local coffee shops—have been a refuge from my own overcomplicated life more times than I can count.”—Melanie Rehak, Bookforum

"An infallible recipe for happiness: read as much Laurie Colwin as you can.” —Emma Straub, bestselling author of All Adults Here

"A writer whose rare gift it was to evoke contentment, satisfaction, and affection.” —The New Yorker

“To read Laurie Colwin, whether her wryly eloquent fiction or her richly detailed nonfiction, is to enter the sensibility of a singular human. Long before there were food bloggers and Bookstagrammers, Colwin understood that strong opinions and witty failures could appeal to readers of all ages and stages.” —Bethanne Patrick

“Touching and wise.” —The Village Voice

“Colwin writes with such sunny skill, and such tireless enthusiasm.... One reads with fascination the steps by which lovers in one story after another stumble upon their forthright declarations.” —Joyce Carol Oates, The New York Times Book Review

“The glittering, generous, delicious world of Laurie Colwin’s fiction is a gift and a lodestar. When writers speak of our favorites, our literary godmothers, her name invariably enters the conversation. How thrilling to know that readers new to her will now have the pleasure of discovering her glorious work. We need her voice, her heart, and her paean to joy, now more than ever.” —Dani Shapiro, bestselling author of Inheritance

Product Details

BN ID:	2940175632027
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	04/12/2022
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One

My Mistress

My wife is precise, elegant, and well-dressed, but the sloppiness of my mistress knows few bounds. Apparently I am not the sort of man who acquires a stylish mistress — the mistresses in French movies who rendezvous at the cafés in expensive hotels and take their cigarette cases out of alligator handbags, or meet their lovers on bridges wearing dashing capes. My mistress greets me in a pair of worn corduroy trousers, once green and now no color at all, a gray sweater, an old shirt of her younger brother's which has a frayed collar, and a pair of very old, broken shoes with tassels, the backs of which are held together with electrical tape. The first time I saw these shoes I found them remarkable.

"What are those?" I said. "Why do you wear them?"

My mistress is a serious, often glum person, who likes to put as little inflection into a sentence as she can.

"They used to be quite nice," she said. I wore them out. Now I use them for slippers. They are my house shoes."

This person's name is Josephine Delielle, nicknamed Billy. I am Francis Clemens, and no one but my mistress calls me Frank. The first time we went to bed, my mistress fixed me with an indifferent stare and said: "Isn't this nice. In bed with Frank and Billy."

My constant image of Billy is of her pushing her hair off her forehead with an expression of exasperation on her face. She frowns easily, often looks puzzled, and is frequently irritated. In movies men have mistresses who soothe and petthem, who are consoling, passionate, and ornamental. But I have a mistress who is mostly grumpy. Traditional things mean nothing to her. She does not flirt, cajole, or wear fancy underwear. She has taken to referring to me as her "little bit of fluff," or she calls me her mistress, as in the sentence: "Before you became my mistress I led a blameless life."

But in spite of this I am secure in her affections. I know she loves me — not that she would ever come right out and tell me. She prefers the oblique line of approach. She may say something like: "Being in love with you is making me a nervous wreck."

Here is a typical encounter. It is between two and three o'clock in the afternoon. I arrive and ring the doorbell. The Delielles, who seem to have a lot of money, live in a duplex apartment in an old town house. Billy opens the door. There I am, an older man in my tweed coat. My hands are cold. I'd like to get them underneath her ratty sweater. She looks me up and down. She gives me her edition of a smile — a repressed smile that is half smirk, half grin.

Sometimes she gets her coat and we go for a bracing walk. Sometimes we go upstairs to her study. Billy is an economic historian who teaches two classes at the business school. She writes for a couple of highbrow journals. Her husband, Grey, is the resident economics genius at a think tank. They are one of those clashing couples, or at least they sound like one. I am no slouch either. For years I was an investment banker, and now I consult from my own home. I too write for a couple of highbrow journals. We have much in common, my mistress and I, or so it looks.

Billy's study is untidy. She likes to spread her papers out. Since her surroundings mean nothing to her, her work place is bare of ornament, a cheerless, dreary little space.

"What have you been doing all day?" she says.

I tell her. Breakfast with my wife, Vera; newspaper reading after Vera has gone to work; an hour or so on the telephone with clients; a walk to my local bookstore; more telephoning; a quick sandwich; her.

"You and I ought to go out to lunch some day," she says. "One should always take one's mistress out for lunch. We could go dutch, thereby taking both mistresses at once."

"I try to take you for lunch," I say. "But you don't like to be taken out for lunch."

"Huh," utters Billy. She stares at her bookcase as if looking for a misplaced volume and then she may give me a look that might translate into something tender such as: "If I gave you a couple of dollars, would you take your clothes off?"

Instead, I take her into my arms. Her words are my signal that Grey is out of town. Often he is not, and then I merely get to kiss my mistress which makes us both dizzy. To kiss her and know that we can go forward to what Billy tonelessly refers to as "the rapturous consummation" reminds me that in relief is joy.

After kissing for a few minutes, Billy closes the study door and we practically throw ourselves at one another. After the rapturous consummation has been achieved, during which I can look upon a mistress recognizable as such to me, my mistress will turn to me and in a voice full of the attempt to stifle emotion say something like: "Sometimes I don't understand how I got so fond of a beat-up old person such as you."

These are the joys adulterous love brings to me.

Billy is indifferent to a great many things: clothes, food, home decor. She wears neither perfume nor cologne. She uses what is used on infants: baby powder and Ivory soap. She hates to cook and will never present me with an interesting postcoital snack. Her snacking habits are those, I have often remarked, of a dyspeptic nineteenth-century English clubman. Billy will get up and present me with a mug of cold tea, a plate of hard wheat biscuits, or a squirt of tepid soda from the siphon on her desk...

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