Love Walked In (16 page)

“I spoke to Lloyd. The good news is that the Barcelona tickets were never used. In fact, there’s no indication that Viviana got on a plane going anywhere,” said Clare’s father. “The bad news is that before she picked Clare up at school that day, she withdrew a large sum of money from the bank. If she’s using cash, we won’t be able to track her credit-card charges.”

“I can hear you,” Clare wanted to call across the room. “I’m not deaf. You know that, right?”

Immediately, Cornelia turned her attention from Clare’s father to Clare. Their eyes met.

“Clare,” said Cornelia, waving her over, “your father was just filling me in on the search for your mom. Come sit with us?”

Clare’s father looked startled, which disgusted Clare. He never realized how old she was. She remembered being in the car with him the morning before, after they’d driven away from her empty house, how he’d said, “I bet some really good hot chocolate would fix you right up.” Now she imagined him thinking,
The baby’s over there, busy with her noodles and shrimp; she won’t notice we’re discussing her life right in front of her.

“No, thanks,” Clare said nonchalantly. “Maybe you can just tell me about it later, Cornelia.” She popped a grape into her mouth, turned her back on them, and stood there wishing she had something to do with her hands when Teo handed her a big pan and said, “Ready?”

As Clare sautéed garlic and onions, she focused on distilling her feelings down to simple gladness that her mother had not left the country. Everything they didn’t know about where her mother was or what she was doing tried to crowd in with its darkness and clamor, but she willed herself to ignore it, to push it out and slam the door. It was only when Teo put his hand over hers, the one that held the funny metal spatula that resembled a child’s sandbox shovel, that she realized how hard she was gripping it.

“There you go,” he said, shifting the garlic and onion around in the pan. “Perfect.”

The
pancit
was delicious; everyone said so, even Teo and Clare—especially Teo and Clare. Clare said it was better than spaghetti, lo mein, pad thai, and spaetzle put together, and Cornelia congratulated her on her sophisticated palate.

“When I was eleven, I didn’t know spaetzle from pretzels,” Cornelia said.

“Or pad thai from bad pie,” said Clare’s father.

“Or lo mein from Rogaine,” said Clare, who had thought of this in the nick of time, and everyone laughed.

“When you were little, did your mother make this?” Clare asked Teo.

“My dad makes it. My mother tells this story about how, before they got married, a whole troop of my dad’s aunts came to meet her. They brought her a big pearl ring and some other stuff to wear at the wedding, but she figured out pretty fast that this was just an excuse. Their true mission was to teach her how to cook.”

“Did she learn?” asked Clare.

“Sure. She learned. And then, after the wedding, the aunts boarded the plane to go home, and she promptly forgot everything. Turned the kitchen over to my dad, for which we are all eternally grateful,” said Teo.

Cornelia shook her fork at Teo and began chewing furiously so that she could say what she wanted to say.

Teo groaned and set his forkful of
pancit
back on his plate with a clink, waiting.

Cornelia swallowed, then cried, “Teo!” reproachfully.

Teo rolled his eyes, then held up his index finger. “One dish,” said Teo. “One.”

“I will not sit idly by. I can’t. Ingrid Sandoval is a tremendous cook! Huge!” said Cornelia, indignantly, but her face glowed, vivid and lit up with unlaughed laughter.

Teo laughed and shook his head. “One dish. Not even a dish really,” he said to Clare and her father.

“Swedish pancakes. Teo’s mother’s pancakes are to die for,” said Cornelia, glaring at Teo. “Whenever I’d spend the night at Teo’s house, his mom would make them for me. Pancakes for
dinner
, which at my house would’ve been a departure on par with pruning bushes in the nude. Pancakes for dinner was
heaven
.”

Clare noticed her father watching Cornelia and Teo talk, his eyes going from one of them to the other, as though he were watching a tennis match. There was an amused smile on his face, but Clare thought he looked uncertain, thrown off—only by inches, maybe, but until today, she couldn’t remember having seen him be anything but confident and at the center of things.

“With powdered sugar and lingonberries?” he asked, which surprised Clare and then annoyed her. The pancakes belonged to Cornelia and Teo, not to him.

“Lingonberries when she could get them, but usually strawberries,” said Teo.

“Or sometimes strawberry syrup. Remember that strawberry syrup? And they were thin—whisper, whisper, whisper thin…” Cornelia’s voice trailed off, and she fell back in her chair, limp, her eyes shut.

“A shame about Cornelia,” said Teo. “Death by pancake.”

“Death by memory of pancake, by virtual pancake. Poor girl,” said Clare’s father, correcting Teo, or so it seemed to Clare, and she burned with resentment. She turned to Teo, but he didn’t seem to be burning with anything. He smiled at her, and she noticed that his eyebrows were darker than his hair, that they were very straight like dashes, but slanted slightly upward.
Accent grave, accent aigue,
she thought. But even as she thought about Teo’s eyebrows, she felt anger at her father simmering inside her.

Cornelia sat up, blinked, and smiled at them all with the look of someone awakened from pleasant dreams.

“She lives!” said Clare’s father. “And a good thing, too, because we need to discuss important issues.”

Abruptly, without a glance at her father, Clare got up to get the desserts she and Teo had bought. She’d spent time arranging the desserts on a large plate in what she believed and hoped was an artistic way. They were so pretty.

“Such as?” asked Cornelia.

“Such as tomorrow is Christmas Eve,” said Clare’s father. He reached for one of the desserts, without asking what it was or saying anything about the platter. The dessert had rested on a bit of banana leaf, and Clare wondered, angrily, what kind of person would take a dessert off a banana leaf and not ask what it was.

“Teo, I expect you have plans for the holidays, unlike the three of us who are flying by the seat of our pants this go-round.” Clare’s father turned to Clare and smiled. “Which, as everyone knows, often turns out to be the best way to fly.”

“That’s a piece of
bibingka
,” said Clare, coolly. “The dessert you’re eating. It’s cooked on a banana leaf. And Teo’s staying here with me and Cornelia. He’s spending Christmas with us.”

Clare’s father looked thrown off again, to Clare’s satisfaction, although it only lasted a moment. He glanced at Cornelia, then returned his attention to Clare.

“Excellent,” said Clare’s father, graciously. “The
bibingka and
Teo’s plans.”

“They weren’t his plans, actually,” explained Cornelia. “He was railroaded. Ollie’s away working, and we couldn’t have Teo spending Christmas alone, watching football and eating tuna salad out of the bowl, could we?”

“We definitely could not,” said Clare’s father. Not
you,
Clare thought hard in her father’s direction. Cornelia’s “we” hadn’t included him; “Clare and I,” that’s what Cornelia meant by “we.”

Her father went on. “Since it’s Christmas Eve, Clare, and you may not have had time to do much shopping before you got here”—Clare saw Cornelia glance at her with concerned eyes—“I thought maybe you and I would go, make a day of it. Maybe take in the light show at Wanamakers?”

“It’s called Lord & Taylor now,” Clare corrected. “And I don’t think I should go without…” No way was Clare going to cry in front of him again, no way. “I don’t think I want to go this year.”

“I understand,” said her father. Inside, Clare felt herself grow cold and taut.

“You don’t understand anything,” she said in a hard voice. Saying this didn’t give her any relief or satisfaction. Still, although later she might wish she hadn’t said it, she didn’t wish it now. She lifted her chin.

“And I already have shopping plans. Teo’s taking me,” she said. And as she said it, she remembered that it was only what she’d been hoping, not what she and Teo had been planning. They hadn’t discussed Christmas shopping at all. Oh, no, she thought. But Teo didn’t look mad or even taken off guard. He didn’t say anything. For what seemed like a long time, no one said anything.

“Clare.” Cornelia almost whispered it, and Clare saw that her face was troubled and was asking Clare for something. Clare thawed, just a little. Clare knew she hadn’t hurt her father, because nothing she said to him could ever hurt him. He’d been embarrassed probably, to have Teo hear how she’d spoken to him, but his feelings hadn’t been hurt. Clare knew that, but Cornelia didn’t, and Clare didn’t want Cornelia to be upset.

“Teo’s taking me because I have to get a present for you, Dad.” Clare spoke to her father, but looked at Cornelia. Cornelia nodded almost imperceptibly at Clare, and the two lines between her eyes grew less pronounced.

“Oh, I see,” said her father. “OK, then, Clare.” His expression and tone were carefully kind, carefully patient, as if to say, “I am an adult talking to a poor damaged child.”

“And that works out nicely because…Martin, do I have to remind you about the butternut squash incident?” Cornelia took Clare’s father’s hand as she spoke. The lines between her eyes had smoothed out completely, but Clare saw how Cornelia’s words drew her father gently into a circle of two. Whatever the butternut squash incident had been, it had belonged to the two of them. The words and the way she held his hand were meant to comfort. Maybe that was Cornelia being in love, Clare thought.

Clare’s father laughed. “If you have to you have to, but I wish you wouldn’t.”

“So you know that if I’m left alone to buy groceries for Christmas dinner, I’ll get enough to feed twenty-five adults. We’d have to rent a truck, and how easy would that be on Christmas Eve? I need you with me.”

“Twenty-five ravenous linebacker adults, you mean,” Clare’s father said with a laugh. “You’re right. You do need me.” He lifted Cornelia’s hand to his mouth and kissed it, seeming happier than he had all evening. Cornelia looked relieved.

The thought just appeared in Clare’s mind: If Cornelia married Clare’s father, then Clare would have her. They would belong to each other in official ways. Visits to her father would mean visits to Cornelia. She remembered how, in the later books, Anne Shirley would play matchmaker and everyone would end up happy. Maybe Linny was wrong about her father and Cornelia. Maybe with some help from Clare, they would end up married to each other. Why not try? She pictured a scene in which she and Cornelia ate breakfast at her father’s dining room table in gleaming pajamas, laughing and drinking hot chocolate out of identical white mugs while her father sat behind his
Wall Street Journal
a small distance away, on the very edge of the scene.

As Clare held this thought in her mind, Clare’s father took another dessert from the platter, cut it in half, placed one half on Cornelia’s plate and popped the other into his mouth. Cornelia lifted the dessert, a tiny, precious cake filled with
ube
paste, and asked, “Now, Clare, Teo, what makes this one purple?”

The scene of the three of them together lost its bright colors and blurred. Cornelia was so nice. She deserved better than Clare’s father. Clare sighed and allowed the scene to vanish altogether.

They
went to the light show after all, Teo and Clare did. They’d shopped for a while and talked for a while—Clare especially had talked—and over slices of pizza, Clare had suddenly said, “Do you know about the brass eagle? The big brass eagle between the shoe department and the jewelry department?” And Teo thought about this and then, in his uncanny Teo way, asked, “At Lord & Taylor?” Even though I’m pretty sure he’d never been there, since Teo doesn’t live in Philadelphia; is a less-than-exuberant shopper; and claims to be allergic to large department stores—literally, not metaphorically, allergic. I’ve heard him say this more than once or, rather, mumble it apologetically, usually while declining an invitation to enter just such a department store. The standard mumble includes incoherent references to ventilation and cleaning fluid, which oddly enough people seem willing to accept, possibly on the grounds that he is a physician or maybe just because they are disarmed by his general disarmingness. Although, I have to say that Teo doesn’t exploit his ability to disarm nearly as often as most people would.

Anyway, despite his well-guarded ignorance regarding department stores, Teo asked, “At Lord & Taylor?” And Clare said, “Yes. Just to the side of the eagle, that’s the best place to sit. If you’re closer, it hurts your neck, and if you’re farther back, you get stepped on by people shopping for hats and scarves.” So they went. They sat on the marble floor, just to the right of the brass eagle to watch a light show that’s been going on, in some form or another, since something like 1955. You’d think kids these days, with their easy access to Pixar animation, Imax, and video games that break clean through their computer screens and scramble around their rooms, would fail to be transfixed by organ music and nutcrackers and sugarplum fairies in lights raising one leg, then the other in their stiff little dance. You’d think so, but you’d be wrong. They’re transfixed.

“Was she transfixed?” I asked Teo.

We were sitting on what would be Teo’s bed for the second night in a row but what was at that moment still my couch. Clare was asleep in my room.

And he said, “Yeah, that’s the perfect word for what she was.”

That struck me as such unequivocally good news, and hearing it caused me to feel relief and hope, which in turn caused me to ramble excitedly and at some length about the wonderful resilience of children, until I noticed that Teo’s expression bespoke not relief and hope, but worry and puzzlement.

“What?” I said.

“I hadn’t thought about it that way,” he said.

“What way did you think about it?” I asked, nervously.

“Do you know that Clare’s been to that light show every year since she was born? When she asked to go today, I just thought, she’s eleven, it’s Christmas Eve, her mother is God knows where, and she wants to go to the show they’ve seen together every year since she was born. I almost said no,” Teo said, with the air of someone who wishes he’d said no.

“You couldn’t say no,” I told him consolingly.

“I couldn’t. That’s the only reason I didn’t. But when we were sitting there, with about a million happy families, waiting for the thing to start, all I could think was, ‘Where did you get the idea that you had to be so brave? And what is it going to cost you?’”

“Oh,” I said, and for a while this was all I could think of to say. Then I added, “I bet you’re right. I bet it was too much.” And as it turned out, he was right. Of course, he was. But before I get to how it turned out, and what happened as a result of how it turned out, I want to stop and fill you in on what was happening to me about the same time Clare was cross-legged on a marble floor awaiting a light show that might further break her heart.

And it’s funny because I feel guilty about stopping and filling you in on what, not so long before, would have been a shining moment in my life, possibly
the
shining moment, possibly the diamond-bright point around which everything else would turn. There was a time when I would have sung full-throated from the rooftops what Martin said to me in the park on Christmas Eve.

But it seems somehow wrong that while the story of Clare’s heartbreak was unfolding itself in my presence, the story of my romance with Martin didn’t come to a respectful halt. It didn’t wait discreetly in a corner until a more appropriate time. Instead, in its uncertain, unsettling way, it continued to unfold as well.

Do you know that Auden poem about suffering? The one where he talks about how at the precise moment Icarus was splashing into his ocean death, the ploughman went on ploughing his field, undisturbed? Well, about suffering, and most other things as well, Auden was never wrong. I think you see where I’m going with this. While Clare suffered, Martin and I continued ploughing, although in a rather subdued manner and certainly not in the metaphorical sense à la Shakespeare, Sophocles, etcetera, which would have been abominable of us.

Here’s what happened. We were walking through the square on our way to buy, among other items, a turkey of reasonable size when, quite suddenly, Martin pulled me down next to him on a park bench and let his gaze travel searchingly over my face. I may have mentioned that his eyes were astoundingly beautiful, a fact of which, at that moment on that bench, I was not unaware. In fact, I was acutely, achingly aware of it. And Martin had a certain way of looking at me that made me feel exactly as though he were touching me, even when he wasn’t.

He looked. Then he said, “It’s the wrong time to tell you this,” and I knew what he was going to say, and I felt pulled in so many different directions that I couldn’t go in any of them and was frozen. I should say I knew the general gist of what he was going to say because, as usual, Martin’s language was pure Martin.

“Every day, I live with wonder. I walk around with it and lie down with it and wake up with it every morning, no matter where I am. I’ve never known anyone like you because there isn’t anyone like you. And because there isn’t anyone like you, I’ve never wanted anyone the way I want you.”

The words weren’t silky; they cost him effort and had weight. They didn’t sound rehearsed, if that’s what you’re thinking.

“Cornelia, I love you. It’s the wrong time to tell you, but I’m telling you. I love you. And all of what’s going on with Clare, as hard as it is and will be, I think it could turn out to be a good thing for us because if we’re going to share our lives, you need to understand what my life is—all of it. And I want us to share our lives, Cornelia.”

Alarm. At this, I felt alarm. “Martin,” I began.

But he stopped me by giving me a wry smile and saying, “No, I’m not proposing. Even
my
timing isn’t as bad as that. And I don’t want you to say anything right now. In fact, I strictly forbid it. I wanted to tell you that I love you, that’s all.”

He kissed me, then, and I said, “Am I at least allowed to say thank you?”

“No,” he said, smiling.

“Thank you,” I said, smiling back.

You
might think you know what I should have felt and wanted, where Martin was concerned. No doubt it is crystal clear to you. But what you have to understand is that all of those clichés and dead metaphors people use to describe confusion were suddenly alive and kicking: My life was a roller coaster; everything was happening too fast; I didn’t have time to catch my breath; my head was spinning; information overload; cannot compute cannot compute cannot compute.

No, Martin was not exactly the man I’d hoped he would be. Yes, he was chilly to his daughter, even in her time of great need. Yes, this chilliness disturbed me. And yes—I hadn’t forgotten this—my doubts regarding his rightness for me had begun rearing their unfortunate heads before Clare ever appeared in our lives. In my life, I mean, as she had been in his since her birth—although obviously not in the way one would expect and wish.

But while that sounds simple enough, when you think about it, it wasn’t simple at all. For one thing, all of the above reasons for at the very least keeping Martin at a distance and at the very most breaking it off with him on the spot did not erase everything else that was true about Martin and about me and Martin together. If they should have erased all that, they did not. When it was just the two of us, in so many ways, Martin lifted and lit me up; he made me quicker, smarter, funnier; he was gentle when I needed gentleness; we loved the same things in the same ways, at least mostly, and that is nothing to sneeze at.

For another thing, he wasn’t a list of attributes, but a flesh-and-blood man, as physically present a presence as anyone I’d met in my life. When he told me he loved me, he said it in his particular voice with catches in his particular throat, and the bones and muscles of his face moved in familiar ways and also in ways I’d never seen. Can you understand what I’m saying? I’m not just talking again about the power of physical beauty. Less-than-fantastic sex notwithstanding, we were intimates; I’d breathed his breath; my skin knew his skin; my nerve endings had sparked under his touch. That kind of knowledge was deep and had never been something I could walk away from with ease. And he had taste and humor and effortless elegance. He was down-right debonair, and how many men could you say that about? And, OK, he was. He was so beautiful.

A reminder: Strangers stopped him on the street to tell him he looked like Cary Grant.

And he was in love with me. Come on.

I
was in turmoil. I didn’t know what to do, so what I did as soon as I got the chance was behave like a horse’s ass to the person who least deserved it.

After he’d told me about the light show, after a long silence during which Teo and I sat together, sharing mute, mutual distress at Clare’s distress, Teo turned to me and asked, “Cornelia, are you sure about Martin?” It wasn’t a question I was ready to answer or even to hear with the smallest amount of grace. I was overwhelmed and over-wrought, dry brush ready for a spark. I knew the question was real, but I pretended to think it was rhetorical, and doing that is mean—mean and unfair, not to mention cowardly. “Chickenshit” is what Linny would say. When faced with direct questions about Martin, I was plain chickenshit.

I’m not proud of my behavior. The spark caught. I blazed.

I blazed, but my voice was pure ice: “So you’re here two days and you’re an expert on Martin?”

What would most people have done in response to this response? Gotten mad, probably, which would have been entirely called-for, or backpedaled, tap danced, apologized, made a self-effacing joke, but Teo knows his way around a silence. He can keep quiet in an eloquent, watching, unfidgety way, and he knows an unanswerable question when he hears one. I’ve always admired these traits in Teo, but I wasn’t in an admiring mood. I set about filling up his steady, green-eyed quiet with my venom.

“You’ve decided he’s a bad father and a bad man. You’ve decided he’s emotionally stingy and detached and God knows what else.”

Silence.

“But what exactly do you know about having a kid, Teo? It’s pretty easy to arrive in a child’s life at a vulnerable moment and be a hero. But thinking you’re now an expert on Clare and Martin, thinking it’s your place to pass judgment, well that’s going a bit far, don’t you think?” When I finished, I was winded.

“I don’t know Martin,” said Teo. “I was wondering how well you knew him.” Teo was angry; I recognized the tightness around his eyes and the red stain spreading down the centers of his cheeks. But angry or not, when discussing important matters, Teo tends not to stoop to sarcasm, and he wasn’t being sarcastic now. It didn’t matter. I was wildfire, out of control and, apparently, there was nothing to which I would not stoop.

“Ah, so you’re not judging Martin’s relationship with Clare, but with me. Is that right? Do I have that straight now?” It gets worse. “That’s great. That’s just fine. And what about you? You’re so happily married that your wife leaves you alone during the holidays. Just how well do you know Ollie, Teo?”

This would have been unkind under any circumstances, but it wouldn’t have been so wretchedly awful, so lowdown, had I not harbored serious doubts about Teo’s marriage. In my defense, as little as I deserved defending, my suspicions regarding this were only suspicions. It’s possible that Teo and Ollie had been spending the last two years in the most blissful marital bliss imaginable, in which case my poisoned arrow of a question would have bounced off the armor of his happiness without leaving a dent. My mother certainly thought they were happy. But I had my doubts.

And, unlike most of my doubts, these didn’t arise out of my own natural and well-developed cynicism, because while I can be a cynic about some things, you may also have noticed that I can be a bit of a romantic about others. I believe in true love. On the list of things I believe in, true love is tops.

And as far as I can tell, Ollie believes in true love too, because not two months prior to her marriage to Teo, she introduced me to her “soul mate” (her phrase, not, God forbid, mine). He was her fellow fellow and fellow fast-rising star at the laboratory and was gloriously good-looking, which is probably why Ollie wanted me to meet him. Six and a half feet tall, Jamaican-born, Oxford-educated, a serious cyclist who probably did not win the Tour de France only because his broad shoulders, otherworldly cheekbones, and massive IQ weighed him down.

Even more breathtaking than his physical and mental attributes was the way my cool-as-a-cucumber sister became a lovesick, spellbound, eyelash-batting girl in his presence. When he entered a room, Ollie was just a hairsbreadth away from turning into one of those Beatles-Come-to-America girls, the ones who weep openly, clutch their cheeks with both hands, and scream. In the hour and a half I spent with them, she even deferred to his intellect on matters of science, twice.

Anyway, at some point, they’d applied jointly for a hefty grant to go work on some project in the Galapagos Islands, and what killed their relationship is that the grant was given to Edmund (that was his name, Edmund Battle) only, and he accepted it sanguinely without insisting that Ollie come too, her not inconsiderable charms losing out to the siren calls of turtles and finches and career opportunity. Edmund up and left, and next thing I knew: Ollie and Teo, till death do them part. Draw your own conclusions.