Chez Cordelia (23 page)

“I'm going to stay out here and play with the dogs for a while, Nina,” I said, hearing in my voice that inexplicable delight I always feel around animals.

“Well, keep your eyes open,” she said nervously, and went up to the door. “And your ears.” She pulled the old brass bell, looking around at me. “Any little thing might be useful. Local-color stuff.”

“I know, I know.” I knelt in the grass hugging the dogs. I suspected they were a mama dog and her puppy. A tag that hung from the mama's leather collar said “Victoria.” The puppy wouldn't sit still long enough to show me his tag. He brought me an old yellow tennis ball and waited, rump in the air, until I threw it for him, while his mother sat by salivating approvingly.

A short man with curly, graying hair opened the door for Nina. She introduced herself, and then she said, “That's my friend Delia Miller. She wants to play with your dogs.”

“Well, come in for some iced tea when they get too much for you,” he called, waving his pipe at me. I said okay and waved back politely, but I had no intention of going in. I wasn't keen on hearing Nina and P. Lamberti talk about rare books, or any kind of books. Booksellers appealed to me about as much as book writers, or book readers. I stayed on the lawn with the dogs; the longer I stayed, the less inclined I was to go in. It was cooler there, under two vast maples. The sun got lower and lower. The dogs were some whiskery, impish breed I'd never seen before. I threw the sloppy tennis ball for the pup, and watching him romp with it filled me with satisfaction. The dogs and the falling sun, and the red barn down the road and the yellow house behind me, and the trees … I suppose it was corny, a calendar picture, but it had the kind of peaceful beauty that makes you homesick for a home you've never had. I sat down in the dry grass and thought of absolutely nothing except how nice it all was, hugging Victoria around the neck. She whined and licked my ear, and I giggled with a kind of generalized happiness that didn't exclude the mysterious future which, whatever it might be, was at my feet.

“Do you prefer dogs to people?”

The bookshop man had sneaked up on me. The gray-haired
Prop
. “No,” I said, letting go of Victoria. “But I prefer them to books.”

“Ah.” He nodded. “Well. There
are
a lot of books inside, but I keep them out back in the shop. We're through with them. In fact, we're just sitting in the living room drinking iced tea. Or maybe you'd like a Coke.”

I got up then. I saw I was being rude. “I'm sorry,” I said. “I meant to come right in. I just have a thing about books—about rooms full of them, especially. I thought they'd be all over the place. They give me the creeps.”

I expected him to look at me oddly, and he did, but he smiled, too. “Well, I'm not much of a reader myself. I just buy them and sell them.”

I looked at him with interest. “You don't read them?”

“Well.” He shrugged. The gray in his hair was more of a silver; when the sun hit it, it looked lit up. “Most of the books I deal with aren't the kind of thing you read. People buy them because they're old and rare or the bindings are beautiful. Or simply because they have a passion for it.” He put his pipe into his mouth and puffed on it loudly a couple of times, not the way Englishmen do in movies but as an old peasant might, with a pipe made from a goat's horn or a seed pod. “Don't you collect anything?”

“Coins,” I said, watching what he did with his pipe.

“Well then,” he puffed. “You know all about that particular passion.”

It hadn't occurred to me that I, a practical person, could be categorized as someone with a passion. I looked at the idea for a moment, thinking of my lovely silver and gold coins locked in my father's attic, and I missed them fervently, as earlier I'd missed my parents.

“And of course rare books are a good investment, like coins,” he said, and then—perhaps realizing how boring the conversation had become—he sighed deeply, removed the pipe, and gave a great stretch in the setting sun.

The dogs frisked around us, and P. (for Paul) Lamberti threw the ball a couple of times for the puppy. Then he said, “This is the last time, Albert.” The dog caught it in midair and took off around the side of the house, as if he understood. “Go on, Vicky,” Paul said to the mother dog, and she too disappeared down the dirt dog path that had been worn in the lawn—maybe it's a kid path, I thought, hoping not, though without understanding why, but then I spotted a swing set off in the back yard. Of course.

“Now will you come in for a cold drink?” he asked with another smile.

I said I would, but we lingered outside. Paul Lamberti wore wire glasses, and he took them off and squeezed his eyes shut and rubbed them, as if he was tired. I tried to figure out how old he was, and thought about forty. Thirty-eight.

“Nina and my wife are talking antiques. Antiques are Martha's great passion,” he said. His eyes were small and brown—they looked brown in that light, anyway—like mine and my father's. He had a sort of buttery-looking skin, very tanned. When he said that about his wife's passion for antiques, I knew with certainty that his marriage was no good—not from his words, but from the way he put his glasses back on quickly all of a sudden, almost jammed them on. From the first, I could read all his moves. I thought: he's unhappy with his wife, he is very attractive, he likes me, that's why he came outside. If the sun had already set, who knows what I might have done? Hugged him as I'd hugged the dog, there in the dusk under the maples. But it was a lingering summer sunset, gentle and rosy. I remembered the flashy city sunset I'd watched from the Ferris wheel with Danny, and it seemed to me that this sunset was just as important to me as that one had been, though I couldn't yet say how.

We stood, close together, looking at it for a few more minutes, talking about the dogs (German wirehair pointers), about the dairy farm down the road, about all kinds of things. I told him about Nina's peculiar journalistic methods.

“She talks to you for half an hour about rare books, and to your wife for an hour about antiques, takes a look around, skims through a price list or something—”

“I gave her a catalogue.”

“See? And then she sits down and writes the definitive story on you.”

“And I thought I was just too dull to interview.”

“Oh, no!” I said, and blushed, but I don't think he saw. He was looking down into his pipe, and frowning slightly.

“We have two children,” he said, taking the pipe out of his mouth and speaking very formally. “Megan is six, and Ian is four. My wife's last name was Lambert, mine is Lamberti. We met at a party and were so struck by the coincidence we got married.”

“It was that simple?”

“No—no, it wasn't very simple at all, really.”

We began to walk side by side down to the creek, and he dropped the subject. Why did he bring it up at all? I thought, though I was getting an inkling.

The lights in the dairy barn, off a little in the distance, were, on, and behind us the windows of the house shone with a pale light, but the sky was still pinky-gray, and we could see each other's faces well enough. We looked at each other sidelong, not directly, and when our eyes met by accident, we smiled and turned away.

We talked about living in the country, and I asked him why he had chosen this rural pocket of the state, this tiny town, this isolated road. We were standing in the small grove of birches by the creek at that moment—I remember it so well: the black water almost invisible except for silvery flashes as it moved, and the light sky behind Paul's dark head, and how near we were to each other. I watched him ponder my question, and I saw him come to a decision: to trust me.

“Do you want to know the real reason I live out here?” he asked. “I have a lot of fake reasons I usually give people when they ask. But I'll tell you the truth if you want to hear it.”

I said I did, and thought: with all my heart.

“I had a bad experience driving down Orchard Street in New Haven one day,” he said. His voice was very low, but he spoke slowly and each word was distinct, as if he'd rehearsed it many times. “Do you know Orchard Street?”

“Where the Black Panthers used to have their headquarters.”

“That's right.” He sounded pleased, as if I'd just taken a huge step toward understanding what he was going to say. “We lived in New Haven then, in a house on Canner Street. I don't remember what I was doing on Orchard—some errand. This was four years ago. Ian was a baby. Well, I was coming down Orchard, alone, right at dusk, when three men suddenly appeared before my car, holding guns. Rifles. Two black men and one white, lined up across the road like a firing squad. Just standing there, pointing.”

“What did you do?” I whispered when he stopped.

“What could I do?” he asked, sounding so elaborately nonchalant that I sensed it couldn't have been an act of heroism. “I put the car into reverse, backed up to Chapel Street, and drove like hell out of there.”

“I think that was a very smart thing to do.”

“Thank you,” he said, with a sigh.

“And they didn't shoot?”

“Just stood there.”

“Did you tell the police?”

“No. I mean, nothing had happened, really. And—” Again he hesitated, reluctant to confess. It was as if he was giving himself some sort of test. “I was afraid they'd track me down from my license plate and retaliate. And all for nothing. Nobody did anything. It was just …” He inhaled deeply. “I suppose I overreacted. I think now it was just some guys fooling around, acting tough. But it got to me.” He paused again, and repeated, “It got to me.”

“So you moved here.”

“Yes. I had been working in a bookshop, running my own business on the side, and I decided to go into rare books full time. Martha, of course …”

I looked at him in the gloom. He puffed on his pipe.

“Did she want to move, too?”

“Martha thought I imagined it. The guns.”

“You mean, made it up?”

“No. Imagined it,” he said shortly, and started walking slowly back toward the house as a way of closing off that phase of the conversation. “Anyway, we moved out here, and it's one decision I've never regretted.”

Tell me about the ones you do regret, I begged silently, but the dogs leaped on us as we left the grove of trees, and the subject was dropped.

“They like you,” Paul said as the dogs romped joyfully around me—an acknowledgment that he had been right to trust me.

The path to the house was made of bricks, in an intricate pattern, and as we walked up it to the front door I had the odd conviction that there was more to tell, and more I had to listen to.

Before we went in, we looked at each other—that was all, just looked. Not since sixth grade, when I used to study, furtively, Danny's arms and hands across the aisle, had I liked the look of a man so much. He was short, compact, and dark—again like me—and his face was strong and sensible and good. The silver threads of his hair shone, I noticed all this while we gazed at each other, the way you might notice the greeny-gray of the water as you were swept out to sea by the tide. Then he smiled a little and opened the door for me to pass in, and I did so, trembling with an indefinable and altogether strange emotion.

Inside, the house was as Nina had predicted, full of the kind of antiques that don't look, at first glance, much different from any beat-up old furniture. There were plants, a bowl of apples (early Macs) on the coffee table, brass candlesticks on the mantel. It was lovely. When I stepped inside with Paul, into the dimness of the entrance hall and then, just beyond, into the living room, where Nina was inspecting a faded sampler in a frame on the wall, I got the old cozy feeling. I don't know why certain places have this magnetism for me, the power to draw me to them as if they're enchanted castles and I the princess in distress, wandering the forest. The Lambertis' yellow house had this power. I could have moved in right then, eaten up all the apples in the bowl, searched out, deep in the house's bowels, the armoire with its color TV, and then curled up in the Lincoln rocker and gone to sleep there.

Then Paul's wife entered from the kitchen with a fresh pitcher of iced tea, and it all disappeared—not the house, just the sense that it welcomed me and was mine. The attraction was still there, I still found the house cozy and beautiful, but it wasn't mine; it was hers. She fitted into that house as neatly as Humphrey fitted his kitchen. Take her out of it and it wouldn't be the same house nor she the same woman. I'd say her pride in the place shone all around her, but
pride
doesn't begin to express it. Neither does ownership, or even love. Who was the old French king who said, “I am the state”? That's the way it was.

Martha Lamberti was fairly unremarkable to look at, just as the old furniture, taken separately, was unremarkable. But it all went together, Martha included, to the point where the rest of us seemed out of place. I must have looked as uneasy as I suddenly felt, a superfluous person in my faded sun dress, perched not on the Lincoln rocker but on the edge of a hard wooden bench painted dark red centuries ago. Nina looked blowsy; her curly red hair, frizzed from the heat, had flown all over the place, and the low-necked pink jersey, showing the substantial curved line where her breasts began, seemed in this setting like something meant for a whorehouse porch. Even Paul, who lived there, had the air of a visitor who should never have come. He seemed, in fact, aggressively ill at ease; there was something in the way he stood by the mantel, with both hands laced around his glass (pipe discarded) and his feet, in worn sneakers, turned in at the toes, that said: on my honor, I will do my best to be as unsuitable as possible.

Martha was the cause of all this, I'm not sure how. Her looks were part of it. She had a vaguely attractive upper-class face, blue eyes, neat eyebrows, short nose, good skin, thin lips. She was wearing a little tennis dress, with
MBL
stitched on the chest. She had a reddish tan, legs that were thin below the knee and fleshy above, and thick hair pulled into a neat blond bun like the one John Dean's wife wore at the Watergate hearings. One look at her and you knew everyone in her family had strong chins, good backhands, and superb dentists. Her middle name would be a last name, like Bromwich, or Bentley. (It was, in fact, Broughton.) But it was more than her looks that turned the rest of us into misfits; it was her manner: she was on top of things, in a way even Nina, for all her talent, her counterculture experience, and her city sophistication, would never be. Martha was utterly unshakable. I decided that five minutes after I met her, and she never proved me wrong, she never flagged. Some extra organ that in other people had been phased out revved up in her, reshuffled the heap when necessary, and put Martha back at the top of it, neat and smiling and saying the right thing.