From the Corner of His Eye (56 page)

So much argued against the idea that they could succeed as a couple. In this age when race supposedly didn’t matter anymore, it sometimes seemed to matter more year by year. Age mattered, too, and at fifty, he was twenty-six years older than she was, old enough to be her father, as surely her father would quietly but pointedly—and repeatedly!—observe. He was highly educated, with multiple medical degrees, and she had gone to art school.

Yet had the obstacles been piled twice as high, the time had come to put into words what they felt for each other and to decide what they intended to do about it. Celestina knew that in depth and intensity, as well as in the promise of passion, Wally’s love for her equaled hers for him; out of respect for her and perhaps because the sweet man doubted his desirability, he tried to conceal the true power of his feelings and actually thought he succeeded, though in fact he was
radiant
with love. His once-brotherly kisses on the cheek, his touches, his admiring looks were all still chaste but ever more tender with the passage of time; and when he held her hand—as in the gallery this evening—whether as a show of support or simply to keep her safely beside him in a crosswalk on a busy street, dear Wally was overcome by a wistfulness and a longing that Celestina vividly remembered from junior high school, when thirteen-year-old boys, their gazes filled with purest adoration, would be struck numb and mute by the conflict between yearning and inexperience. On three occasions recently, he seemed on the brink of revealing his feelings, which he would expect to surprise if not shock her, but the moment had never been quite right.

For her, the suspense that grew throughout dinner didn’t have much to do with whether or not Wally would pop the question, because if he didn’t broach the subject this time, she intended to take the initiative. Instead, Celestina was more tense about whether or not Wally expected that a heartfelt expression of commitment should be sufficient to induce her to sleep with him.

She was of two minds about this. She wanted him, wanted to be held and cherished, to satisfy him and to be satisfied. But she was the daughter of a minister: The concept of sin and consequences was perhaps less deeply ingrained in some daughters of bankers or bakers than in a child of a Baptist clergyman. She was an anachronism in this age of easy sex, a virgin by choice, not by lack of opportunity. Although she’d recently read a magazine article containing the claim that even in this era of free love, forty-nine percent of brides were virgins on their wedding day, she didn’t believe it and assumed that she’d chanced upon a publication that had fallen through a reality warp between this world and a more prudish one parallel to it. She was no prude, but she wasn’t a spendthrift, either, and her honor was a treasure that shouldn’t be thoughtlessly thrown away.
Honor!
She sounded like a maid of old, pining in a castle tower, waiting for her Sir Lancelot.
I’m not just a virgin, I’m a freak!
But even putting the idea of sin aside for a moment, assuming that maidenly honor was as passé as bustles, she still preferred to wait, to savor the thought of intimacy, to allow expectation to build, and to start their conjugal life together with no slightest possibility of regret. Nevertheless, she had decided that if he was ready for the commitment that she believed he’d already teetered on the edge of expressing three times, then she would set aside all misgivings in the name of love and would lie down with him, and hold him, and give of herself with all her heart.

Twice during dinner, he seemed to draw near The Subject, but then he circled around it and flew off, each time to report some news of little relevance or to recount something funny that Angel had said.

They were each down to one last sip of wine, studying dessert menus, when Celestina began to wonder if, in spite of all instincts and indications, she might be wrong about the state of Wally’s heart. The signs seemed clear, and if his radiance wasn’t love, then he must be dangerously radioactive—yet she might be wrong. She was a woman of some insight, quite sophisticated in many ways, with the raw-nerve perceptions of an artist; however, in matters of romance, she was an innocent, perhaps even more pitifully naive than she realized. As she perused the list of cakes and tarts and homemade ice creams, she allowed doubt to feed upon her, and as the thought grew that Wally might not love her
that way,
after all, she became desperate to know, to end the suspense, because if she
didn’t
mean to him what he meant to her, then Daddy was just going to have to accept her conversion from Baptist to Catholic, because she and Angel would have to spend some serious heart-recovery time in a nunnery.

Between the one-line description of the baklava and the menu’s more effusive words about the walnut mamouls, the suspense became too much, the doubt too insidious, at which point Celestina looked up and said, with more girlish angst in her voice than she had planned, “Maybe this isn’t the place, maybe it isn’t the time, or maybe it’s the time but not the place, or the place but not the time, or maybe the time and the place are right but the weather’s wrong, I don’t know—Oh, Lord, listen to me—but I’ve really got to know if you can, if you are, how you feel,
whether
you feel, I mean, whether you think you
could
feel—”

Instead of gaping at her as though she had been possessed by an inarticulate demon, Wally urgently fumbled a small box out of his jacket pocket and blurted, “Will you marry me?”

He hit Celestina with the big question, the
huge
question, just as she paused in her babbling to suck in a deep breath, the better to spout even more nonsense, whereupon this panicky inhalation caught in her breast, caught so stubbornly that she was certain she would need the attention of paramedics to start breathing again, but then Wally popped open the box, revealing a lovely engagement ring, the sight of which made the trapped breath
explode
from her, and then she was breathing fine, although snuffling and crying and just generally a mess. “I love you, Wally.”

Grinning but with an odd edge of concern in his expression that Celestina could see even through her tears, Wally said, “Does that mean you…you will?”

“Will I love you tomorrow, you mean, and the day after tomorrow, and on forever? Of course, forever, Wally, always.”

“Marry, I mean.”

Her heart fell and her confusion soared. “Isn’t that what you asked?”

“And is that what you answered?”

“Oh!” She blotted her eyes on the heels of her hands. “Wait! Give me a second chance. I can do it better, I’m sure I can.”

“Me too.” He closed the ring box. Took a deep breath. Opened the box again. “Celestina, when I met you, my heart was beating but it was dead. It was cold inside me. I thought it would never be warm again, but because of you, it is. You have given my life back to me, and I want now to give my life to you. Will you marry me?”

Celestina extended her left hand, which shook so badly that she nearly knocked over both their wineglasses. “I will.”

Neither of them was aware that their personal drama, in all its clumsiness and glory, had focused the attention of everyone in the restaurant. The cheer that went up at Celestina’s acceptance of his proposal caused her to start, knocking the ring from Wally’s hand as he attempted to slip it on her finger. The ring bounced across the table, they both grabbed for it, Wally made the catch, and
this
time she was properly betrothed, to wild applause and laughter.

Dessert was on the house. The waiter brought the four best items on the menu, to spare them the need to make two small decisions after having made such a big one.

After coffee had been served, when Celestina and Wally were no longer the center of attention, he indicated the array of desserts with his fork, smiled, and said, “I just want you to know, Celie, that these are sweets enough until we’re married.”

She was astonished and moved. “I’m a hopeless throw-back to the nineteenth century. How could you realize what’s been on my mind?”

“It was in your heart, too, and anything that’s in
your
heart is there for anyone to see. Will your father marry us?”

“Once he regains consciousness.”

“We’ll have a grand wedding.”

“It doesn’t have to be grand,” she said, with a seductive leer, “but if we’re going to wait, then the wedding better be
soon.
”

From Sparky, Tom Vanadium had borrowed a master key with which he could open the door to Cain’s apartment, but he preferred not to employ it as long as he could enter by a back route. The less often he used the halls that were frequented by residents, the more likely he would be able to keep his flesh-and-blood presence a secret from Cain and sustain his ghostly reputation. If too many tenants got a look at his memorable face, he would become a topic of discussion among neighbors, and the wife killer might tumble to the truth.

He raised the window in the kitchen and climbed outside, onto the landing of the fire escape. Feeling like a high-roaming cousin to the Phantom of the Opera, bearing the requisite fearsome scars if not the unrequited love for a soprano, Vanadium descended through the foggy night, down two flights of the switchback iron stairs to the kitchen at Cain’s apartment.

All windows opening onto the fire escape featured a laminated sandwich of glass and steel-wire mesh to prevent easy access by burglars. Tom Vanadium knew all the tricks of the best B-and-E artists, but he didn’t need to break in order to enter here.

During the cleaning, installation of new carpet, and painting that had followed the removal of the diarrheic pig set loose by one of Cain’s disgruntled girlfriends, the wife killer had spent a few nights in a hotel. Nolly took advantage of the opportunity to bring his associate James Hunnicolt—Jimmy Gadget—onto the premises to provide a customized, undetectable, exterior window-latch release.

As he’d been instructed, Vanadium felt along the return edge of the carved limestone casing to the right of the window until he located a quarter-inch-diameter steel pin that protruded an inch. The pin was grooved to facilitate a grip. An insistent, steady pull was required, but as promised, the thumb-turn latch on the inside disengaged.

He raised the lower sash of the tall double-hung window and slipped quietly into the dark kitchen. Because the window served also as an emergency exit, it wasn’t set above a counter, and ingress was easy.

This room didn’t face the street by which Cain would approach the building, so Vanadium switched on the lights. He spent fifteen minutes examining the mundane contents of the cupboards, searching for nothing in particular, merely getting an idea of how the suspect lived—and, admittedly, hoping for an item as helpful to a conviction as a severed head in the refrigerator or at least a plastic-wrapped kilo of marijuana in the freezer.

He found nothing especially gratifying, switched off the lights, and moved on to the living room. If Cain was coming home, he could glance up from the street and see lights ablaze here, so Vanadium resorted to a small flashlight, always carefully hooding the lens with one hand.

Nolly, Kathleen, and Sparky had prepared him for Industrial Woman, but when the flashlight beam flared off her fork-and-fan-blade face, Vanadium twitched in fright. Without fully realizing what he was doing, he crossed himself.

The white Buick glided through the tides of fog like a ghost ship plying a ghost sea.

Wally drove slowly, carefully, with all the responsibility that you would expect from an obstetrician, pediatrician, and spanking-new fiancé. The trip home to Pacific Heights took twice as long as it would have taken in clear weather on a night without a pledge of troth.

He wanted Celestina to sit in her seat and use her lap belt, but she insisted on cuddling next to him, as if she were a high-school girl and he were her teenage beau.

Although this was perhaps the happiest evening of Celestina’s life, it wasn’t without a note of melancholy. She couldn’t avoid thinking about Phimie.

Happiness could grow out of unspeakable tragedy with such vigor that it produced dazzling blooms and lush green bracts. This insight served, for Celestina, as a primary inspiration for her painting and as proof of the grace granted in this world that we might perceive and be sustained by the promise of an ultimate joy to come.