Love Walked In (9 page)

He turned to me. “She hates me, that agent. I’ve seen her around town a few times over the years, and she snubs me cruelly. You know what I love best about you?” Just like that.

It took a minute for me to say “What?” because that word
love
was flying around the room like a bird, flashing its wings. I looked at the small luminous face of the orchid for help but, like all orchids, she was entirely self-involved, enwrapped in her own beauty.

“Your stillnesses. Those listening stillnesses. I don’t know anyone who keeps herself so still while other people are talking.”

The compliment, the view, the lights, the orchid, the drinks in our hands, Chet Baker quietly singing “Time After Time.” It was one of those dropped-from-the-sky silvery moments when you stand there believing that every last thing in the world is delicate, lovely, and precise, including and especially you. I set down my drink and gave the mouth that had just bestowed such fine words upon me a truly sterling kiss.

Almost Rear Window
: Grace Kelly can be a lot like an orchid herself, gazing at the world from several gold-and-white removes away. But she can smolder, too; she can flirt like nobody’s business. That’s what I like best about
Rear Window,
how flesh-and-blood she gets when she comes on to Jimmy Stewart, the gleam in her eyes when she opens the secret compartment of her Mark Cross bag to reveal the peignoir set and slippers she’s brought with her.
Does she ever have plans for you, mister,
say the peignoir set and slippers, with delicious frankness.

As I leaned into Martin with my sterling kiss, we bumped into the orchid’s table. The orchid didn’t budge, of course, didn’t blink an eye, but, at the other end of the table, my handbag went flying onto the floor, spilling out—not its entire contents, but just two items. Martin and I swooped down to retrieve them, almost bumping heads. I got the toothbrush; he got the fresh pair of underwear. I considered going the embarrassed excuses route. Instead, I chose the knowing, can-you-handle-this smolder. I smoldered, and Martin—God bless him—smoldered back.

Notorious
: The smoldering was interrupted by the chime of the kitchen timer, and my first thought was, Please, please, please don’t let him say “Saved by the bell!” because it would have been too obvious, amateurish, but he didn’t of course, and I could tell it didn’t even occur to him, which evidently is more than one could say for me. He walked away, turning once to toss me my underwear and flash me a grin, and I returned my workaday version of slippers and peignoir to my handbag, then followed him into the kitchen.

It was duck, glistening darkly and smelling like heaven. Martin stood poking it with the kind of authority I rarely feel while cooking, even though I’m quite a decent cook, which made me want to stand behind him and put my arms around him. So I did. Thanks to my ridiculously high heels and a lifetime of practice standing on tiptoe, I was able to rest my cheek against his shoulder. His sweater was sage green and the softest sweater I’d ever felt.

“I love men in sweaters,” I said.

“I’m a man in a sweater,” he said.

“Tell me about the duck,” I said, and he turned around in my arms and began to do just that, beginning with the market where he bought the duck and the alleged purity of the duck’s diet, thus sparking the
Notorious
segment of the evening. Hitchcock again, I know, but the man knew his way around a love scene. Ingrid and Cary kissing and laughing their way from the balcony to the living room, straight through a telephone call, and all the while talking about dinner—that they would stay in; she would cook a chicken; they’d eat it with their fingers. Kissing him, laughing, she accuses him of not loving her. “When I don’t love you, I’ll let you know,” he says, kissing her. We didn’t say anything like this to each other—I threw it in because the line is just so great—and we talked about duck instead of chicken, but the moving from one room to the next, the smiling into each other’s mouths, the shadows sliding into all the right places, under cheekbones, along jawlines, and just the pleasure of it all, happiness suffusing every glance and touch, we got that spot-on, exactly right.

Not
Casablanca
: “The chief beauty of the duck is that it can wait,” Martin told me, mid-kiss, and this is the point at which the camera turns away, maybe running over the sensual lines of the Art Deco and Modernist furniture, taking a peek at the street beneath the window, resting on the duck cooling in its pan, before switching off altogether.

If you’ve been wondering whether Martin was one of those men who looks so divine in clothes that he is diminished and somehow nakeder than naked without them, he was not.

He had delectable sheets.

We hit that hard-to-hit balance between intensity and kindness, demand and generosity. We really did.

There was not one awkward second, not a single readjustment, no “Ow, my arm’s sort of twisted under…that’s better” business. Our rhythm was as effortless as the ocean’s; we waltzed; we tangoed.

And the earth did not shift on its axis. It should have. Clearly, it should have. The stars could not have been more aligned. But it did not.

I’m not sure why. But just afterward, before either of us had even caught our breaths, I looked at his faultless profile, at his lashes resting on his cheeks, and at the hollow at the base of his throat that is one of my favorite parts of the human anatomy as it is one of everyone’s favorite parts of the human anatomy, and in the presence of all this loveliness, the words that came into my head were these: “Who are you really? And what were you before? And what did you do and what did you think?” Except that when Rick says this to Ilsa in the Paris flashback, you know that they already know everything that matters about each other. You know because you’ve seen them together in Casablanca, seen Rick’s eyes when she walks into the room in her white dress, his dark, broken, longing gaze, and you’ve seen her tilt her face up to see him, her eyes lit with tears, and you understand that, in spite of Nazis and husbands and distance and leave-takings and history, they are connected to each other in the deepest way and for all eternity.

I wasn’t disappointed, exactly. But I lay on Martin’s bed and knew in my bones that this night was not ever going to give rise to a moment in the future when Martin and I would stand together, alone and outside of time, with the world going mad around us, and say to each other, “We’ll always have Philadelphia.” It wasn’t that kind of night.

Compliment Two: Martin said my face was pretty.

Something you should know about me: I have a pretty face. I do. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t.

Although I’m not remotely blond, I get a lot of Mia Farrow circa
Rosemary’s Baby
. And Jean Seberg. Jean Seberg was a name thrown around a good deal at the café—you probably guessed that—mainly because the desire to discuss Jean-Luc Godard was simmering just under the surface of everyone’s interactions and they’d give themselves any excuse to let that desire boil over.

That’s what people do; they compare people they see every day to famous people. The guy who delivers pastries has Humphrey Bogart’s hairline and slightly buck teeth; the girl roller-skating outside the museum is the spitting image of June Allyson in the 1949 version of
Little Women;
your parents’ accountant, from a distance, looks so much like Sidney Poitier in
The Lilies of the Field,
it takes your breath away. That sort of thing. So any famous woman with a little triangular face and big eyes who, being a famous woman, is way more beautiful than I am, that’s what I hear.

Oh, and I’ve gotten Audrey Hepburn from exactly two men. While there’s not a drop of truth in the comparison, I gave them credit for at least knowing on which side their bread was buttered.

So, I’m pretty—pretty enough. The trouble is that my kind of pretty is not the kind I’d have chosen. I’ve heard all those words: gamine, piquant, waifish, what have you. I’ve heard elfin; elfin stings. And pixie…
pixie
? A word to the wise: The grown women who want to evoke pointy-eared beings scaling mushrooms and wearing acorn caps for hats are few and far between. We all know what those words truly mean; they mean I’m teetering on the edge of cute. And cute is death. Denigration, death, and decay.

Still, every boyfriend I’ve ever had has told me I have a nice face. (I dated one misbegotten guy who said, “You’re definitely a face girl, Cornelia.” Translation [as if you or anybody else would need one]: “You’ve got no body to speak of. Your face was a bone thrown to you at conception, and not every man would appreciate it, but I do.”)

But Martin, Martin, Martin. As I lay there thinking the “Not
Casablanca
” thoughts, Martin did something that pushed all of those thoughts not out of, but certainly to the back of, my mind, to a shadowed little corner where their own mothers wouldn’t recognize them. Martin propped himself up on one elbow and, seriously and with great care, began to run his finger lightly over my face. He did this for a long time, and in his eyes and in his fingertip was reverence, just the sweetest kind of awe. My bones and skin turned golden under his touch.

Finally, he said, “The trouble with your face is that it’s ruining me for other faces. It’s making me rethink every face I’ve ever liked.”

Then he smiled, and his eyes didn’t say “What a cunning little chin!” His eyes murmured, “Garbo, Gardner, Bacall, they’ve got nothing on you, Cornelia.”

Food: We talked; we laughed; we ate the duck. It was the last word in ducks. That duck was a marvel.

Sleep/No Sleep: We went back to bed. Martin held me. He slept. He was the kind of sleeper you knew he would be: serene, dignified, no snoring, no talking, his profile casting its elegant shadow on the wall, the bed, the woman in his arms. I was the woman in his arms, and all night long I didn’t sleep a wink.

The
story was called “Annika and the Bears.”

The beginning of the story is really the end, and Annika is staring wide-eyed into new velvet-black darkness. The eyes she stares with were brown once, sparkling and the exact color of root beer, but are now an empty ice-blue, almost white. Annika is waiting for her body to grow warm so that she can fall asleep and, as she waits, she remembers life outside this darkness, remembers the world she loved and how it changed. Once, her home was called the Land of Spring and Fall because that’s what it was, a place in which the seasons didn’t turn in a circle, but moved like a seesaw, Fall becoming Spring becoming Fall becoming Spring. And there had been a moment every year when the seesaw hit a perfect balance. This was Annika’s favorite time because blossoms burst from branches alongside red and gold leaves, crocuses opened between rows of corn, and baby animals were born under autumn skies. In the Land of Spring and Fall, it was never too cold or too hot to play outside; brooks never froze or dried up; leaves never fell from the trees; and people and animals never grew old or died.

But then a witch appeared in the land, a witch who was furiously angry, but for no reason anyone could understand, and the witch cast a spell that plunged the land into a never-ending winter. In Winterland, terrible things began to happen. People and animals got sick, with wrenching coughs and burning fevers. Desperate for warmth, the people began to kill their friends the animals in order to wrap themselves in fur coats. Food became scarce, and everyone began to fight over what little there was. And strangest of all, one by one, every living, breathing creature in the land began to turn white as chalk, as colorless as snow with no sun shining on it.

One day, Annika sat at her window, looking sadly at the blank world, when she saw, trudging across the snow, her beloved friend John the bear and his family of bears. Some of the bears were white, some were a dull gray, but only John was still a rich chestnut brown. The bears walked with their immense heads hanging down and some of them cried, dropping tears onto the snow. Before they hit the ground, the tears turned to ice. Annika ran outside, calling John’s name. He stopped and looked at her with his kind eyes and told her that they were going away, to a cave deep inside one of the high hills that surrounded Winterland. “To sleep,” he said. “To wait.” Annika threw her arms around John, buried her face in his beautiful fur, and then stood and watched as the procession of bears patiently resumed their long journey.

That night, Annika woke up with a start. She sat up in bed and saw that the hair falling over her shoulders was as white as milk, and she ran to the mirror. As she stared at her reflection, the pink began draining from her cheeks. “Oh, no,” she whispered. “It’s happening. I’m turning into someone else. A winter girl.” In a flash, she had on her shoes and her thickest wool cloak and was out the door. The trail of crystal tears the bears had left gleamed in what little moonlight could force its way through the clouds and, slogging through snow, cold eating into her bones, Annika followed the trail.

When she got to the cave and moved away the rock that blocked the entrance, all the bears were asleep, except John. He rested his paw on the patch of soft dirt next to him. “For you, dear heart,” he said sleepily. Then he moved the rock into place and lay back down. Annika curled up between John and another bear, listening to their slow breathing, readying herself for sleep. The bears’ bodies warmed her own from the outside in. The last thing to get warm was her heart, and then Annika fell asleep.

The story ends this way: “Imagine the deepest sleep you’ve ever slept. Multiply its deepness by the number of stars in the sky and the number of fish in the sea. Then you will know the sleep of Annika and the bears.”

It was the best and longest story Clare had ever written. She had worked on it all term, filling pages of a notebook during every free period at school. Ms. Packer followed the story’s progress, sometimes asking Clare to read pieces of the story aloud to the class. Ms. Packer was crazy about the descriptions of the Land of Spring and Fall and wrote “Wonderful simile!” next to the seesaw section. In December, when the story was nearly finished, Ms. Packer suggested Clare make it a Christmas present for her mother.

“What’s the matter, Clare?” she said. “It’s an amazing story. I just know she’ll love it, don’t you think?”

Clare smiled then, and nodded, and that day she began to copy the story over onto creamy, unlined paper. In art class, she worked hard on a cover for it, first drawing the face of a brown bear on light blue card stock and then cutting out tissue-paper snowflakes and gluing them all over the cover, over the bear’s face. She paintbrushed the whole thing with watered-down glue to create a kind of glaze, and when she was finished, the bear looked out from the cover—blurred and difficult to see through the snowflakes, but there.

Ms. Packer read the end of the story while the rest of the class was at lunch. Not hungry and eager to hear what she was sure would be praise, Clare asked permission to stay in the classroom. She sat at her desk, pretending to write in her notebook. After Ms. Packer finished, she sat down next to Clare and, with alarm, Clare saw that her teacher’s eyes were filling with tears. Ms. Packer took both of Clare’s hands in hers.

“Oh, sweetheart,” she said in a choked-up voice.

Clare turned her face away. Her hands felt like two cold stones inside Ms. Packer’s thick, warm, square ones. Clare wanted Ms. Packer to let go, but she didn’t.

“What happens when Annika wakes up?” Ms. Packer asked.

“What do you mean?” said Clare, startled by the question.

“I thought Annika would figure out how to break the spell, but she doesn’t.” Clare shook her head and looked at Ms. Packer’s shoes. They were red canvas sneakers with white rubber across the toes. Dumb little-boy sneakers, thought Clare fiercely.

“She just goes to sleep,” continued Ms. Packer, and Clare felt Ms. Packer’s eyes on her face, felt how hard Ms. Packer was waiting for something from her. Clare tried to imagine what Ms. Packer wanted her to say.

“Right. She goes to sleep and waits for the winter to be over,” explained Clare. “I think it’s a good ending.” Clare pulled her hands away. “I thought you liked the story,” she said. Don’t cry, don’t cry, don’t cry, she told herself.

“It’s not that I don’t like the story. It’s a brilliant story. Really great. I just want to know, what happens when Annika wakes up? Is the spell broken? Is it spring again?”

Clare shrugged. “Maybe. I don’t know. It’s just a story.”

Ms. Packer hesitated, then touched Clare’s chin with her fingers to turn her face toward her own. Without meaning to, Clare flinched away from the touch.

“I want to go to lunch now,” Clare said, starting to stand. Ms. Packer stopped her with a hand on her shoulder. Her hand was firm, not rough, but Clare shrank under the light grip and sat down. Stop touching me every two seconds, she wanted to yell, but she kept quiet.

“Everything’s not all right at home.” Ms. Packer stated it like a fact.

“Yes, it is,” said Clare automatically. She could feel her heart beating in her neck and the sides of her head, and she concentrated on keeping her breathing normal, pulling the air all the way down into her chest. Clare had seen Ms. Packer staring at her in the past few weeks. The same way she stares at the crossword puzzle during free time, Clare had written in her notebook, like I’m some problem she’s trying to figure out. But even as she wrote the words, she felt their injustice. Ms. Packer cared about her; she knew that. Ms. Packer believed there was something wrong in Clare’s home, and she was right.

But, although Clare would not have been able to say exactly why, the something wrong had become a secret, and keeping the secret had become the one clear goal of Clare’s life, the point of every single day. And the secret was not the small hard kind you could hide at the bottom of a pocket or in a closed fist. The secret was a living creature. It followed her everywhere, fluttering in the curtains, squatting in the corner of the room, or darting across the floor, and Clare’s hours were spent distracting people from the secret’s presence. It took all of her energy, but she was succeeding. She believed that.

She smiled a lot, laughed and gabbed with the girls in her class during lunch and in the courtyard before school started. She packed herself large, healthy lunches, completed every bit of her homework, and paid meticulous attention to her grooming, scrutinizing her full-length reflection every day before leaving the house. Clean, ironed clothes, neat ponytail, scarves, hats, and gloves in cold weather. She bathed and brushed her teeth more often and more thoroughly than she ever had before. In short, Clare became the picture-perfect child, obviously well-cared-for, obviously loved.

So when Ms. Packer started in with her questions, Clare was able to say with confidence, “Why would you think there’s anything wrong? I feel fine. I look fine. Don’t I?”

Ms. Packer puffed out a small sigh. “You look…” Then, she seemed to change her mind about something. “Yes, you look fine.” She smiled. “I didn’t mean to worry you, Clare. Go eat your lunch.”

Clare had this conversation with Ms. Packer three days before the start of winter break, and although she’d hated every second of it, the experience turned out to be good, in a way. In a way, helpful. Because Clare had been dreading the end of school with a terrible dread. Like a person dangling from an edge, Clare had held on to school’s familiar shape. School meant a pattern, an arranged life, a predictable amount of boredom. Winter break lurked like an enemy: almost a month at home, the loose hours, her mother—every day, her mother—the feeling that anything could happen, nothing was too bad to happen, and on top of it all, a Christmas that would not be a Christmas—a mean joke of a Christmas. Clare did her best to keep these thoughts away, but they could crowd around her in an instant, at any moment, a buzzing swarm from which she was never safe.

Then Ms. Packer said the words “Everything’s not all right at home” and turned school into the enemy. Suddenly, weeks at home meant relief; home gave Clare a fighting chance to keep the secret. She only had to make it through three more days.

On the third day, just before they went home, the kids in Clare’s class took the holiday gifts they’d made for their parents off the walls and out of the cases in which they’d been displayed. Clare took down “Annika and the Bears” and slid her palm lightly across the cover. A story is only words living inside a person’s head, she thought, floating and invisible. But she’d written the words down and made a book, an object that took its place in the world of objects. She was proud of the book’s weight. Never had a project turned out so precisely as she had envisioned it. She slung her backpack over her shoulder and started down the hallway, keeping the story in her two careful hands. Kids flowed by her, rushing and buoyant. Someone shouted, “Merry Christmas!” and then everyone was shouting, their voices wide-open and joyful. Clare listened.

Clare stopped walking and stepped to the side, out of the stream of children. She leaned back against the wall, bent one knee, and rested her backpack on her leg, yanking the zipper open. In one fast, angry motion, she folded the story over like it was nothing—a magazine you’d smack a fly with—and shoved it into her backpack, ruining the cover. “Good,” she said out loud. When Clare looked up, she saw Ms. Packer staring at her, and Clare took off down the hall, running.

Out in the air at last, breathing hard, Clare looked around for her friend Josie; she whisked her head from side to side, scanning the crowd like a frantic person in a movie. She was a frantic person. Clare forgot to care how she looked to other people; all she cared about was leaving. Then she saw the dark blue Volvo at the front of the pick-up line—Josie’s mother’s car, Clare’s ride home. She started running toward it, but before she even got close, the car started pulling away. Horrified, Clare waved her arms, and yelled, “Stop! You forgot me! You forgot me!” But the car was gone. Clare let her arms fall to her sides. She stood there. The crowd thinned as all the children got into cars and headed for home.

A horn started beeping. Beeping was not allowed during pick-up, but someone was beeping over and over again. The noise came from the teachers’ parking lot close to the school’s entrance. “Ms. Packer,” Clare whispered, and because she was sure the beeping would go on until she did it, she turned slowly around and looked.

Not Ms. Packer. Her mother. Not in their white Land Rover, but standing next to it. Her mother standing there, upright as a queen, with one hand through the open driver’s side window beeping and the other hand high in the air, waving at Clare. “Oh, no,” said Clare. “Oh, please, please, please, please.”

Clare ran toward the parking lot. “Oh, please, please, please, please.”

When her mother saw Clare coming, she stopped beeping, got in the Land Rover, and started the engine. “Please, please, please, please.” Clare was still saying it as she got in the car and slammed the door. She bent her head down and put both hands on her forehead, rocking a little.

“Please, what, Clare?” asked her mother in a normal voice, but Clare didn’t know. The word was connected to nothing specific or nameable, because that would make what was going on in Clare’s head hoping. Clare didn’t hope. In Clare’s mouth, “please” was pure wish.

Clare sat like that for a few minutes, holding her forehead, her knees pulled up, her elbows pressed tightly against her body, as though she were literally keeping herself together. When finally she unfolded and looked up, she didn’t recognize the road they were traveling, traveling fast—a narrow road with curves and dips and great brown blurs of trees on either side. Clare heard heavy
thunks
as objects in the back of the vehicle bounced and slid. Instinctively, Clare reached for her seat belt.

“Slow down,” she said, also instinctively, knowing her mother wouldn’t listen.

Her mother said something Clare didn’t understand, a string of meaningless sounds. Clare kept her eyes on the road. Clare’s mother said the sounds again, more loudly, and she seemed to be laughing. Out of the corner of her eye, Clare saw something blue waving back and forth.