Love Walked In (5 page)

“No,” said Clare, her voice rising, “I need to talk to him now. Please.”

After another pause, the woman said, “Well, look, sweetie, I just got off the phone with him, so I bet I can catch him. He’ll call back in a few minutes. How does that sound?”

“It sounds good,” said Clare, softly. “Thank you.”

She hung up and waited for what felt like a long time, with one hand on the phone. When it rang, she jumped and pulled her hand back as though the phone had suddenly caught fire. Then, she answered.

“Hello.”

“Sparrow!” said her father’s voice, “Good to hear from you! How’s your afternoon?” Just like that—“how’s your afternoon”—as though he talked to her every day instead of almost never. Clare wondered if there were someone else in the room with him, listening.

“I need to talk to you,” said Clare.

“I’ve only got about five minutes, sadly enough, but for five minutes, I’m all yours.”

Clare gathered herself. “This is important. It might take longer than five minutes. It’s about Mom.”

Clare expected him to say something, ask something, but he didn’t.

“She’s sick, I think. Or maybe she’s”—Clare faltered—“she’s changing; she’s not acting like herself. And this has been going on for a pretty long time.”

“I’m sure it’s nothing to worry about, Clare,” he said. “People change. You’re different every time I see you. You took maybe two tiny sips of your egg cream last time you were here, and you remember, don’t you, how you used to love them?”

Clare felt a flash of hatred for the playfulness in his voice. “No. No. It’s not like that. It’s not any kind of regular change. Listen to me!”

“I’m listening.” Her father sounded tired.

“She cooks all the time, all night sometimes.”

“Well, that doesn’t sound so bad. Go on,” said her father.

“And she buys things, weird things. Big pans and cookbooks.”

“Well, she never did seem to have any trouble spending money,” he said dryly.

“No, you don’t understand. Like—towels. She bought all these towels, in every color.” This sounded ridiculous, even to Clare. She heard her father cover the mouthpiece and speak to someone. She began to fill with panic; she was losing him.

“And she took me out of school for lunch. She gave me wine!” She didn’t want her voice to sound the way it did, desperate. But she was desperate.

“Well, I think that’s wise. French children younger than you drink wine, Clare. What did you think of it?”

“What did I
think
of it? I hated it! And she flirted with this really young waiter; she held his hand. And she said things to me that she wasn’t supposed to say. That she wouldn’t say. Things about, about…” Clare was crying now.

“Calm down, Sparrow. About what?”

Clare shut her eyes. “Sex.” Now I’ve done it, thought Clare. Now I’m a traitor. Unbelievably, her father laughed.

“Look, Clare, your mother is a grown woman, a single woman and, if memory serves, a beautiful one. If she wants to flirt with a waiter or anyone else, that’s her business. It might make you uncomfortable, but it’s perfectly natural. And you’re nearly eleven years old. I only wonder why she hasn’t already had a conversation with you about the facts of life.”

Clare ignored this. “All I can think is that it was the bat.”

“Bat?”

“We woke up one day last summer, and there was a bat in the house. Mom told Dr. Aduba about it, and he said, just to be safe, we should both get a round of rabies shots. Not the stomach kind. Mom didn’t think you could get bitten by a bat and not know it, but she made me get the shots anyway. But she didn’t get them. And now she’s sick.”

“Your mother doesn’t have rabies, Clare.” His voice now was the voice of a person who is making a show of being patient. For a moment, despite Clare’s efforts, desperation won out over pride. When she spoke, her voice was smaller than she wanted it to be.

“Dad? What’s happening, it’s scaring me. I can’t sleep.”

“There is nothing to be afraid of. I promise you that. And now I have to go. I’m sorry.” He was about to hang up. Pluck, Clare thought, pluck, pluck.

“You’re not sorry. But you’re my father. You have to help.” There was a pause.

“I’m telling you, as your father, that everything’s fine, Clare. I’ll talk to you soon.” He hung up.

Clare looked at the phone in her hand, then stuck it under her pillow, so she didn’t have to look at it. She slid onto the floor, tucking her knees up under her shirt, holding them hard.

It didn’t make sense to feel more alone after this conversation, she thought. It wasn’t like she’d lost something, because there was never anything there to lose. But she felt more alone anyway.

Less
than twenty-four hours after I got the flowers, he called. Didn’t just call, but called from London, thank you very much. When I heard his voice, I could just
feel
the presence of scones and lemon curd on a tray next to him and the red double-decker buses lumbering by outside.

“Hello,” I said.

“Do you eat?” he asked.

“Sometimes,” I said.

“Did I just say, ‘Do you eat’? I meant, ‘What do you eat?”’

“Oh, things,” I said. I pressed two fingers to my wrist. Pulse leaping. Voice cool.

“Vegetarian?”

“Omnivore.”

“Omni means all. Do you eat all things?”

“No tongues of any kind. And no licorice.”

He laughed a pure, warm, amber-colored laugh that made me feel pure, warm, and amber-colored.

I wore the dress, with a short, lightweight, cranberry wool coat with bracelet sleeves (but no bracelets) over top, and my favorite knee-high black boots. The sole advantage to freakish smallness is that the feet that accompany it are also freakishly small, enabling one to make out like a bandit at shoe sales. (Don’t be alarmed, I don’t plan to regale you with descriptions of every outfit I wear, although I remember, as a kid, loving that about Nancy Drew books: “Wearing a dainty, ice-blue blouse, Nancy opened the door”; “Nancy tossed a soft yellow cardigan over her slender shoulders and slipped into her convertible”; “Nancy removed her blouse, skirt, and shoes, and put on a pale green shift dress and a pearl necklace.” But the fact is, sometimes clothes are
significant.
)

Being my mother’s daughter, I turned a deaf ear to the inner voice screaming at the top of its lungs, “Trust this man completely!” so that when Martin asked where he should swing by and collect me, I told him I’d meet him at the restaurant. Five days later I walked up, and there he was, waiting. I won’t gush about his appearance, except to say that he was beautiful in the way certain handcrafted wooden objects are beautiful—so seamless, smooth, curved, lustrous, so fully realized and self-contained that it only strikes you seconds later and with the force of a lightning bolt: “Oh my God, that’s a chair!” At which point, you sit down and want to stay forever.

The restaurant was of the jewel-box variety: tiny, booths and chairs covered in silver-gray velvet, a fireplace hanging on the wall like a picture in a frame. The food was superlative, I’m sure it was, no doubt made with fresh, seasonal ingredients, no doubt appropriately crusty on the outside and melting on the inside, inspired but unpretentious, simple but original. I vaguely remember being surprised by the taste of figs, and I’m pretty sure I lifted a spoonful of something creamy and the color of a sunset to my lips. But my senses, hijacked by Martin, barely registered what was maybe the best meal of my life.

We talked and talked and talked. Maybe love comes in at the eyes, but not nearly as much as it comes in at the ears, at least in my experience. As we talked, lights flicked on inside my head; by the end of the night, I was a planetarium.

He told me he loved my name, how there were a handful of women’s names that turned all other women’s names into cotton candy, and my name was in the handful.

“Along with what?” I asked him.

“Eleanor, Mercedes, Augusta,” and he reeled off four or five more like a man reciting a poem, so I told him about my first college roommate, a purebred palomino of a girl from Savannah with unimpeachable calves and an antique amethyst the size of a walnut on a chain around her neck. She could fling a Frisbee like a pro, speak flawless French, and had a sweet, long-and-pointy-canine-toothed smile that threatened to collapse half of fraternity row like a house of cards. If she’d been slightly less pretty or if her family’s money had been slightly less ancient, I’m sure she would’ve turned up her turned-up nose at me every chance she got. But because her own social position was unassailable, she could like whomever she chose. She liked me; I knew because she told people in the lilting, slightly hoarse (due to years of yelling across lacrosse fields or from horseback to others on horseback, I’m guessing) voice all future Tri-Delt presidents have, “Cornelia’s a great girl!” I liked her, too, because she was nice and also because she cast a golden glow that fell on everything around her, including her ant-sized roommate.

But she decided within a couple of weeks that my name was just too “out there” and set about pulling a nickname out of “Cornelia.”

“Well, the obvious choice would be…” said Martin, wincing.

“Don’t say it. Don’t even think it,” I told him. “Are you thinking it?”

Martin shook his head and crossed his heart. I told him that she’d settled on C. C., even though my middle name, being Rose, did not begin with a C, and my last name, being Brown, did not begin with a C. For two semesters, I was C. C. Brown.

“Throw in a ‘Little’ or a ‘Blind’ and you’ve got yourself a bluesman,” said Martin, helpfully. “This roommate of yours, what was her name?”

“Selkirk Dalrymple,” I told him.

He laughed his molten laugh, and I felt like the kid at the party who whacks open the piñata. Victorious and with treasures raining down on me.

He told me about his own first college roommate, a guy who had a thing for the “beret set” girls and whose pièce de résistance seduction technique was to casually mention having read Proust’s
Remembrance of Things Past,
all seven volumes (and, yes, Martin did use the French title at one point, pronouncing it accurately but not in an Alex Trebek kind of way, so stop worrying), which worked like a charm. When I asked Martin if the roommate had really read it, Martin said that was the beauty of it: The kind of people who were most jealous of him and who would have been, consequently, those most scathingly skeptical of him, were also the kind of people who would’ve preferred death over anyone’s discovering that they had not themselves read it or at least not gotten any further than
Swann’s Way
and so had no idea of what questions to ask to test him.

This is the kind of conversation it was: convivial, both of us making gifts to each other of little funny stories, sort of shining them up and handing them over and being nice to each other about them. We didn’t drag out our secret souls and let them dance naked around the restaurant, but our little stories were glimpses into the interior, colorful postcards from the lands of Martin and Cornelia. A good way to begin.

Afterward, Martin walked me to the door of my apartment building. Under a streetlamp, he looked at me and ran one hand over my head, cupping the place above my neck for a second or two.

“It suits you, this cap of hair,” he said.

“And look at you,” I said. “Your eyelashes. They’re like miniature whisk brooms.” Then he laughed, reached for my hand, and placed a kiss in the center of my palm.

The next morning:

Linny: Let me guess, you watched him walk away, then took the stairs two at a time, singing “I Get a Kick Out of You.”

Cornelia: Wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong.

Linny: “Embraceable You.”

Cornelia: Fiend. Hell-fiend friend from hell.

Linny [warbling smugly]:
“Don’t be a naughty baby. Come to mama, come to mama dooooooo.”

On our second date, we ate with our fingers at a gold-and-red-draped Ethiopian restaurant; gaped at the otherworldly, ultrarefined, long-necked, sloe-eyed beauty of the entire restaurant staff from hostess to busboy; walked for an hour, my hand tucked into the crook of his arm in a way that cried out for me to be in pearl-buttoned, wrist-length gloves; and then, in the foyer of my apartment building, we filled five minutes with kisses so delicate, so intimate and gentle that, afterward, I walked up the stairs to my apartment, carrying the moment carefully as though it were a glass globe full of butterflies.

The next morning:

Linny: I know. Ethiopians are amazing. Can you believe that Peter Beard photographer guy gets so much credit for discovering Iman? Boy, finding a beauty in
that
country was tough!
That
took a real discerning eye!

Cornelia: I believe I man is actually from Somalia.

Linny: Tomato, tomahto.

Cornelia: Nice. Very nice. Very culturally sensitive.

Sure, I could’ve told Linny about the wrist-length gloves and the butterfly globe, or else I could’ve just gone ahead and plunged an horsd’oeuvre fork into my ear.

On our third date, we went to a Tom Stoppard play about A. E. Housman that left me awed and exhilarated. On the way out of the theater and for blocks and blocks, I gushed about the braininess and wordplay and passion and compassion and ruthlessness and how I’d sat in the theater and trembled with the sense that what was happening onstage was turning me into a better person. Martin said he felt the same way, “Except that you were watching the play, and I was watching you.”

Amazing, right? How could there be more, right? There’s more.

“I love movies, but usually plays make me restive,” I told Martin, after a pause both elated and shy.

“Oh, restive. One of
those
words,” said Martin, nodding.

“I know,” I said, almost certain that I did.

“One of those words that mean the opposite of how they sound,” said Martin.

“I know,” I said again, because I did know, exactly. “Like enervated.”

“Spendthrift,” said Martin.

“Attrition.”

“Obviate.”

“Cleave.”

“Cleave,” said Martin, who didn’t miss a trick.

On my doorstep we kissed, urgently, for somewhere in the neighborhood of twenty minutes.

The next afternoon:

Linny: So you and your new boyfriend are unregenerate dweebs in exactly the same way. De-lovely.

Cornelia: De-fuck off.

But I took that word
boyfriend,
folded it right up, and tucked it into my back pocket to think about later.

Over Vietnamese food on our sixth date, I somehow hopscotched from describing the best Halloween costume I’d ever worn (Charlie Chaplin; I was the spitting image, same too-small jacket—not easy to find for a too-small someone like me—big shoes, big eyes, cane…all but maybe three people thought I was Hitler, but
I
knew, which is what truly matters, right?) to confessing what I suspect is my worst personality trait.

“Fearfulness,” I said. “I’m fearful. Fundamentally fearful, overly cautious, lacking an adventurous spirit. A fraidy-cat.”

“You’re not fearful, Cornelia,” said Martin.

“I bailed out of my junior year abroad three days before I was supposed to leave for Spain, even though I was dying to go. I don’t go in the ocean because I might get attacked by a great white shark. I’ve never owned a dog because those suckers can turn on you in the blink of an eye. I went to college in the town I grew up in. The same college in whose medical school my father teaches. I’m the only person I know who has never lived in New York City. And I turned down your offer to go to London.”

“Fearful’s not so bad. Fearful’s good, actually, in some ways,” said Martin, dunking a summer roll into the summer-roll sauce. I reached across the table and touched his cheek with my hand, ostensibly to thank him for the attempt at consolation, but really, secretly because I could and was relishing that fact. His skin was taut and warm under my fingers.

“My ex-wife used to tell me I was fearful,” he said, “but I had a pug named Puggy as a kid, so she must’ve been wrong.” I kept my hand on his cheek for another beat to demonstrate my coolness upon hearing the ex-wife news, then lifted it away with mothlike lightness. He bit into the summer roll. Not even the tiniest bit of vermicelli, not even the smallest drop of sauce fell; Martin was the tidiest eater I’d ever seen. I thanked my stars I’d neglected to include the fear of men with ex-wives on my fears list.

“So how long were you together?” I asked, examining a fragment of peanut on the tablecloth with my finger, casually, I hoped. Although, when I thought about it later, devoting any attention at all to a fragment of peanut is probably a dead giveaway that one is not feeling casual.

“Just over a year. She had that respiratory thing and breath like rotten cauliflower. I went camping for a week, came back, and she’d been disappeared.”

I looked up at him, finger on the peanut.

“She was also hopelessly incontinent.”

I kept looking.

“Four years,” he said.

“What happened?” I asked.

“Nothing very interesting. We had a good run. Just weren’t meant for the long haul.” So gallant and good-natured, so feather-light and civilized, so Cary Grant. It was an answer I should have savored; instead, it gave rise to that moment. You know what I mean. The moment in a relationship in which at the same time you discover you’ve been floating in air for five and a half weeks, you also discover that your feet have dropped a little closer to the earth.

“You make her sound like a racehorse. Or like a play,” I said. Teasingly, I hoped.

“Now that you mention it, Viviana was a little of both. Leggy, over-bred, no shortage of drama, some of it melo-.”

I am leggy insofar as I have legs.

“Viviana. She’s Latin, then?” Jennifer Lopez, Salma Hayek, Penelope Cruz. They began slinking around my head on endless legs. Cameron Diaz, too, although it’s unclear to me that she’s actually Latin, and if Natalie Wood in
West Side Story
made an appearance, well, all I can say is I was a little agitated.

“Viviana Hobbes. Her first name being one of those things Anglo-Saxon aristocrat families do to exoticize themselves.” And, instantly, there was Grace Kelly, shooing the Latin and pseudo-Latin lovelies away with one swipe of her Kelly bag.

That night, when I kissed Martin good-bye, over his shoulder (I was standing a few steps above him), I imagined I caught a glimpse of Grace Kelly as Viviana Hobbes looking at us. But her gaze, when it met mine, wasn’t the cool blue regard we all associate with Grace, not the gaze of
To Catch a Thief
or
High Society
. Instead those eyes were Georgie Eligin’s from
The Country Girl,
all rue, patience, and loneliness.