Chez Cordelia (29 page)

The kids came decorously out to the porch, two blond little kids in summer pajamas, and shook hands and said they were pleased to meet me.

“And tell Miss Miller you're looking forward to having her stay with us,” Martha said to them.

Ian buried his face in his stuffed dog. Megan began, “We're looking forward to—”

“Oh, please!” I interrupted. “Couldn't they just call me Delia?”

Martha frowned. I shouldn't have proposed this variation on standard etiquette in front of the children, I realized. But she was gracious about it, smoothed out her frown, and said, “Would you like to call Miss Miller Delia, Megan?”

I could tell Megan didn't care much one way or the other, but she said, “Oh yes.”

“Delia is short for Cordelia, Megan,” her mother said. “Isn't that a pretty name?”

Megan said it was. Paul's brown eyes stared out of Martha's family's face.

“Ian? Would you like to tell Cordelia that you're looking forward to having her stay with us?”

Ian didn't speak, and I said, “We'll have a lot of fun, Ian,” but he looked dubiously at his dog as if he didn't believe it. And why should he? Megan, prompted by a look from her mother, said, “We're looking forward to having you to stay with us, Delia.” She gave a meaningful, longing look to the mousse, but Martha hustled them back upstairs.

“They're cute,” I said inanely to Paul.

He shrugged and said, “This may sound terrible, but they're her children. All hers.”

We were silent, staring at each other. This is a mistake, I kept saying to myself. A mistake, a mistake, a mistake.

“Well!” Martha said briskly, coming in. “It's true, Cordelia. We just can't wait for you to come!” She beamed at me. “All settled? You'll come as soon as they get a replacement for you at the restaurant?”

I said I would, trying not to look miserable. “You'll be one of us,” Martha said. “Just one more member of our slightly wacky family,” and she laughed and pecked me on the cheek.

As soon as Paul and I got into the car, I told him it was a mistake. “I can't do this! She's so nice. I can't do this to her! Think of all the lies, Paul!”

He said nothing. We drove down the road past the darkened barns, to Gresham. At the stoplight there he kissed me, but I felt no better, and I drew away.

“We can't!” I said, keeping my voice under tight control. I didn't want to cry in front of him. I hate women who cry all the time in front of men. Why should women have to break down in tears, when men don't? Then I looked over at Paul and saw tears slipping down his face.

I made him pull over into the empty parking lot of a supermarket, and I held him in my arms. “I've been thinking all during dinner, Delia,” he said. “We have to talk. We have to get this straight.” He sat up, and we held hands. “I know how you're feeling,” he said. “But don't.” His voice was stern, though he looked at me tenderly. “Don't feel that way. You're not stealing someone else's husband. Martha and I hate each other. She despises me, I despise her. We loathe each other. We're enemies, total enemies, but we don't even fight because we don't care enough.” His grip on my hands got tighter and tighter. “We stay together for the kids and the business, and because of our incredibly complicated economics, and because it's the easiest thing to do. But we have nothing—nothing, I swear it. We go our own ways.” I looked at him in despair, shaking my head. “There are plenty of marriages like ours, Delia,” he said gently.

“I've never seen one.”

“There's a lot you haven't seen.”

“You should just—break up,” I insisted. It was horrible, unthinkable, that two people could live like that. Was it even possible? Could it be true? It occurred to me that I knew nothing about the man who was holding my hands so tightly. “You should leave if that's the way things are,” I said.

“You have no idea—it's so complex. It seems simple to you because you're so young, Delia. But I hope that someday …” He left the rest unsaid, looking earnestly into my face, but it was enough for me. I could imagine Paul and me flying off somewhere alone together—like the couple in a print of a painting Miranda used to keep in her room—sweeping through the sky over cows and roofs and trees, clasping each other. “I love you, and I won't have Martha wrecking it,” Paul said in a different voice, loosening his grip on my hands and pulling me toward him. His words were like music; I could have got up and danced.

We necked in the parking lot, under the lights and the ads for toilet paper and ham and tomatoes on sale, and then we drove back to my apartment.

“You love me, Delia?” he asked.

Of course I did, but I considered carefully. “I know hardly anything about you,” I said, looking at his profile. His glasses lit up every time we passed under a streetlight. That was almost all I knew of him: what he looked like, the texture of his hands. Only what I could see and feel. He still had no past. His past was as mysterious to me as our future was, and as delicious, full of potential goodies.

I wanted to know about how he cried and wet his pants on the first day of kindergarten, about the death of his turtle, about the day his brother Tom threw a fastball straight at Paul's head and knocked him cold, about his mother's lasagne and his father's butcher shop and his Aunt Rosie and his Uncle Pete and his college days and his tonsillectomy—all the things I know now but didn't then, the things that made Paul
Paul
. I hungered for them. I looked at him in the intermittent light, while he waited for me to speak: profile, curly hair, glasses (His glasses! How old was he when he first got glasses? Was he nearsighted? farsighted? astigmatic?) and wished for long, free hours with him so he could turn himself inside out for me. I thought of all the years Danny and I had had to get to know each other, and yet already I knew Paul better than I would ever know Danny.

“I love you with all my heart,” I told him confidently.

Ah, what a smile that man has. Even in the near-dark, I felt his smile down in the depths of my bones.

By the time I got home, I was wearier than I could ever remember being. I'd been through the wringer, all right—squeezed flat again and again like a cat in a cartoon. I needed to sleep. But after Paul left me I was suddenly starving. It was as if Martha's perfect meal had been a dream. I went into Juliet's kitchen and ate some swiss cheese and some peanut butter crackers. Then I stumbled into bed with the crumbs still on my face and dreamed of nothing.

I lived in the apartment after that as if it were a hotel, keeping the door securely locked (fearful, always, of Danny's return), knowing I would leave it soon. My parents gradually retrieved all of Juliet's books and papers and clothes. My father, jolly and unchanged by his semester in California and the illness of his middle daughter (and the new disappointments of his youngest), took me out to dinner one night. We went to Grand'mère so I could show off Humphrey's cooking. But Humph had the only off night I'd ever known him to have: the soup was salty and the veal was tough. My father ate without enthusiasm, and when I told him that my new career as a cook would be beginning any day, he looked at me sadly, and said, “With your brains, Cordelia? Your background?”—adding, with heavy irony, “
Upon such sacrifices, my Cordelia, the gods themselves throw incense.
”

“It's not a sacrifice, Daddy!” All my life he'd quoted things at me when I wanted to be taken seriously. “It's what I want to do, it's what I can be good at.”

He just smiled and looked resigned, as if I had announced I was entering an order of cloistered nuns, but later he said, when I told him more about the Lambertis, “They sound like nice people.”

“Just because they sell books.”

“No, no,” he protested. “They'll take care of you, at least. You'll be in good hands.”

I thought of Paul's square, tanned hands reaching under my T-shirt, and I smiled at my father.

My mother came to see me, too, during that time. My parents never came together because someone had to stay with Juliet every minute. They were afraid she was suicidal. She hardly ever ate. The one time she had gorged—actually gorged—on crackers and cheese, my mother had found her in the bathroom trying to make herself throw up. They had begun taking her once a week to a doctor in New York who specialized in her condition.

“It's called anorexia,” my mother said. I was astonished that Juliet's oddities had a name, and specialists. “She and I might need to live in Manhattan during the week for a while so she can see this doctor more often. He's awfully good.” She sighed.

“Poor Mom,” I murmured.

She actually said, then, near tears of tiredness, “You're my comfort, Cordelia.”

But she didn't approve of my plans. “Cooking,” she said in a wan, despairing voice. “You could study cooking in college. That's the kind of thing I
meant
, honey. They have all sorts of nonacademic courses like that.”

“Why should I spend good money to learn to cook in college when I can get paid to learn at the Lambertis? Besides, if you mean those cooking schools, Humphrey told me they aren't that good.”

“Oh—Humphrey,” my mother said, waving her hand in dismissal at the very idea of my fat friend in the white hat. My father had told her about the veal and the soup.

We dropped the subject before we both got mad. She knew my mind was made up, and she wanted to stay on good terms with me. I knew what my mother meant when she called me her comfort. It was only by comparison. Juliet was ill. Miranda, she told me—it was my first inkling of this; it had been kept top secret in the hope that it could be remedied—had left her husband, Gilbert, and was living with three other women in a commune near Boston. And Horatio—my mother looked grieved whenever his name came up. My father had jokingly called him “the international playboy,” my mother spoke sorrowfully about waste. At the moment, with my culinary ambitions, my bank account, my common sense, my stodgy (for all they knew) lifestyle, I was not a bad specimen of a daughter, and my mother's recognition—however circumstantial—of that fact touched me profoundly.

I didn't tell either of them about Danny's return; they seemed to have forgotten his existence. I certainly didn't tell them about Paul, or about why I had left Madox Hardware. I told my mother plenty about Juliet's eating habits, and I told my father about Mr. Oliver's Pakistani accent and his concern for Juliet.

“Remember Professor Bhaer and Jo March?” my father said with a twinkle in his eye. “In
Little Women?
”

I'd seen the movie on TV, twice. “But Mr. Oliver already has a wife, Daddy. And Juliet is—you know.” Not much like Katherine Hepburn at the moment, I didn't say.

“Well,” he said, refusing to relinquish his lovely idea. “You never know.”

My parents told me, each in turn, about California, my father emphasizing the inspiring beauties of the scenery, my mother the vital and delightful young people the place was packed with. They showed me photographs of beaches, orange groves, Berkeley. The more they said, the less I wanted to go out there.

“What makes you such a homebody, Cordelia?” my mother asked in half-mock exasperation. “Are you going to stay in Connecticut all your life? I'd suggest sending you to Paris, to learn to cook there yourself, at that school, but I know what you'd say.”

“I don't speak French.”

“Honey, you could
learn.
”

She never gave up, my mother. “I don't want to learn French,” I said. “Except for the food names. Humphrey taught them to me.” I picked them up effortlessly: all the
pâtés
and
salades
and
potages
and
cassoulets
and
patisseries
and
gateaux
I'd learned about at Grand'mère. I began reeling them off to impress my mother. I hoped she would at least compliment me on my accent, but I suppose that was like trying to impress a duck with your backstroke.

“Man cannot live by bread alone, Cordelia,” my mother said with a sigh, getting up. She had Juliet's last load of stuff piled by the door, ready to go.

“
Pain,
” I said, trying to get her to laugh. “
Pain de ménage, petits pains, ficelles, brioches, croissants …
”

She smiled, but then she sighed again, kissed me, and left. I'll make them a meal, I vowed. When I've learned to cook. A meal that'll knock them on their ears.

When I'd been in the apartment, alone, for a week, during which Paul made two more decorous visits, Humphrey hired a new salad person, a skinny little guy named Nelson.

“He may not have salad hands,” Humph said, holding mine, “but he's got it
up here
. Salad brains! Not the instinct, but the capacity. Second best,” he hissed so Nelson wouldn't hear, and treated me to a dinner on the house. When he kissed me good-bye, smelling of fines herbes, we both wept a little.

I had a last meal with Nina, too. She had quit her job with the
Nickel
and was going to New York with Archie. Some connection of hers had wangled him an audition with a prestigious piano teacher, and Nina had plans to worm her way into a job on the
Village Voice
.

“But for the moment,” she said, with a light in her eye, “my job is to keep him psyched up. This is his big chance. I want to see him at Carnegie Hall. I want him making records, and giving concert tours.”

We wished each other luck. She gave me a number in New York where she could be reached. “Call me any time, Delia,” she urged. “To get things off your chest, to complain, to gossip—you know. Whatever.” I said I would, and she gave me her reporter's sharp look. “Are you sure you know what you're getting into out at that bookshop?” She'd heard, then, from Humphrey or Crystal, about Paul and me holding hands and trading bits of sorbet.