Chez Cordelia (24 page)

The first thing she said to me after “Hello” and “Have some of this lovely cold iced tea” was—since I hate iced tea and asked for a Coke instead—“Luckily, we do keep Coke on hand.” It was typical, with its implication that I was somehow outside the normal run of things in her house—that I was a special case—but that her graciousness (and the bounty of her house) would envelop even that, even Delia Miller and her bizarre desire for a Coke in the face of lovely cold iced tea. I've never known anyone who wanted so to be liked and approved of, and who was so good, having attained that love and approval, at throwing it back at you as an unworthy gift.

But it took me months to reach these subtleties. At the time—my first evening inside Martha's yellow house—all I knew was that Martha made me uncomfortable. I thought of how she'd dismissed Paul's terrifying experience as a delusion. How could she? I fumed to myself, and felt pools of sympathy fill up inside me.

Paul went for my Coke. When he handed it to me, a spark of electricity shot between us through the cold glass.

I suppose we stayed another fifteen minutes. Nina, her interview done, was mostly silent and looked restless. I could sense the wheels turning, the articles she would write getting into gear in her head. Paul didn't say much, either. From his place by the mantel, I could feel his gaze on me. I became aware of my thin brown arms and my bare legs and my short, heavy brown hair, wondering how they looked to him. I tucked in the corners of my lips, as if reflectively, to show my dimples—a trick I learned in seventh grade from Sandy Schutz and hadn't practiced since—and I angled my profile in Paul's direction to show off what I fancied were its neat lines.

Now and then I was able unobtrusively to turn and study him, particularly his mouth, which interested me. It was almost pretty—the corners turned up, and under his lower lip a deep bite was chiseled out—and contrasted nicely with the rest of his face, which wasn't pretty at all but rather harsh (short blunt nose, hollow cheeks, and those narrow nut-brown eyes behind the glasses). In short takes, I tried to print his face on my mind forever. I may never see him again, I thought. It made me panicky, though I didn't really believe it for a minute.

Martha and I did most of the talking. She drew me out in a way I hated, asking me questions because there was time to fill, not because she wanted to hear the answers. But of course I had to answer them. I told her about my job, my sore feet, Nina's article on Grand'mère, my sister's work at Yale and her impending trip to Greece, and my desire to become a first-class cook, maybe open my own restaurant someday. As I said this last, in response to “What do you want to do with your life, Delia? Or are you too young to feel you have to answer that?”, I realized I'd never told it to anyone before, not even to myself. At some point in the recent past (When Danny returned? When I heard Malcolm was dead? When Paul and I looked at each other out on the brick path?), order and purpose had begun to flutter inside me. I had the sense that
this
was why I had to throw off Grand'mère and Juliet's apartment and the memory of Danny's dirty hands on me—because with these burdens weighing me down I'd never be light enough to fly where I had to go.

Nina glanced over in surprise at my confession, though she said nothing, and Martha looked at me with an interest that was momentarily real. I immediately regretted what I'd said. It seemed a bad omen to confide my ambition to a being as alien as Martha, and I drained my glass with an abrupt show of haste and said, “We really should be going, Nina. I promised my sister I'd get in kind of early.” (It wasn't really a fib; my life had become so separate from Juliet's that she no longer took much interest in my comings and goings, but she still bugged me if I got in late, as if I were fourteen. I assumed it was on my mother's orders.)

“So when your sister leaves New Haven, will you stay on?” Martha asked me as we all stood up. “Take cooking lessons or something?”

“I don't know,” I said at the door, matching her smile, though I could never match, can't even adequately describe, the combination of maternal concern and hostessy goodwill contained in the faint frown that accompanied it. “I'm open to possibilities.”

When the door closed on her good wishes for Nina's article and my future, and a lovely, fierce look at me from Paul accompanying his brusque good-bye, I regretted that we'd left so soon.

“Well, they were really nice,” Nina said when we were in the car. I said I thought so, too. “You and the husband sure stayed outside a long time,” she added.

“I liked him.”

“I saw that. So did the wife, I think.” She started the engine and backed efficiently out of the driveway. I looked up at the lighted windows of the yellow house, with their tiny wavery panes. No one was looking out that I could see. “But they're very married,” Nina went on, in a big-sisterly way, as we drove down the road past the dairy farm. “A real
couple
. Even partners in the business. They travel to these rare-book shows all the time together. And did you hear the story about their last names? Isn't that wild? Though I gather their families are incredibly opposite. Apparently she comes from top-drawer New England stock, and his parents are immigrant Italians, big on character and savings accounts and going into business for yourself. Interesting, anyway. What kind of dogs were those two bruisers?”

I told her, and I also told her Paul wasn't much of a reader. “He just buys them and sells them. Never opens them.”

“Oh, thanks,” Nina said. “I like that. That's cute.”

“Did you get the kids?”

“I met them just before they were hustled off to bed. They shook my hand. Little
beasts.
”

“Nice furniture, though,” I said, with a smile over at her. I was glad to hear the kids were beasts. “But I didn't see any flannel shirts or cornmeal mush.”

“Well, this isn't the country after all,” Nina said as we passed the darkened cow barn. “This is
fake
country.”

We were silent after that, Nina worrying about driving at night, me thinking about Paul. I tried to recall the moment when he'd taken off his glasses and then put them back on again and I'd known he and his wife weren't a
real couple
at all and my heart had lifted. In the car, as we sped down Route 7, the moment got away from me, and I thought to myself: I must be crazy. And then, just before we hit New Haven, it all came back, the precise look of his face, his eyes, his gesture, and I was filled with overwhelming happiness. I'm in love with that man, I thought, and with equal sureness knew he was in love with me.

It should have been a staggering thought, but it didn't stagger me. It seemed delightful and appropriate that, after Danny and my long, gradual, doomed courtship, this love should come so suddenly—practically at first sight. I'm in love with a forty-year-old gray-haired bookseller, I thought. With a wife and kids. Still it didn't stagger me. It seemed absolutely right. We'll work it out, I thought with serene vagueness, and when Nina dropped me off I smiled at her gratefully, benevolently.

“I can't wait to read your article, Nina.” I thought of how I would clip it, treasure it, keep it always.

“Did you say German short-hair pointers?”

“Wirehair.”

“Right,” she said, and sped away with a wave. I watched her
IM NINA
license plate turn the corner, thinking
Good old Nina
in a bemused way, as if I were drunk.

“Cordelia?”

Professor Oliver came toward me from the apartment house courtyard and stood in front of me with his hands in his pockets. I said hi, and he said, “I've just been dropping some books off for Juliet, Cordelia, and I'd like to talk to you about her, if you have a minute.”

I said I did, of course, though I wanted badly to go upstairs and get into bed and think of Paul. “Do you want to walk around the block?”

“Maybe we could find a coffee shop …”

“There's a bar at the corner,” I told him. “I could buy you a beer.” That appealed to me, having a beer with my sister's professor of Greek.

“Are you old enough to drink?”

“I'm twenty-two,” I said indignantly, thinking: I'm in love with a forty-year-old man.

“Then I'll buy
you
a beer,” he said, and took my arm in a courtly way.

I smiled up at Mr. Oliver, and he gave me a paternal smile and said, in his Pakistani accent, “You look happy. Were you coming from a date?”

“Sort of.”

“I suppose that question makes me old-fashioned,” he said in his regular voice. “I suppose young people do things differently nowadays, and dating as we used to know it is quite passé.”

I looked closely at him as we passed into Dutch's Shamrock Tavern and tried to imagine him out on a date, younger, necking at a drive-in or something. I failed. He must be about Paul's age, maybe even less. Was the gap between forty and twenty-two that huge? Was it just that Mr. Oliver was a stodgy professor of Greek? I imagined him in some grimy, book-cluttered office downtown in one of those massive Yale buildings, poring over his books and losing touch with the real world. Then I remembered that Paul must spend a lot of his time doing the same thing, and I began to get depressed. Would books forever blight my life in some way? He's too old for me, I thought. I don't even know him. He has a wife and two kids. I resolved to forget the sunlit moments on the lawn with the dogs, the spark that leaped through my Coke glass, his last fierce stare at me in the doorway … and while I resolved all this, I knew it was nonsense, I knew I loved him and he loved me, and our ages and our tastes didn't matter a bit.

“What did you want to talk to me about?” I asked, since Mr. Oliver simply continued to look at me, a little mournfully, stroking his goat beard. The waitress came with our beers, and when she was gone he said, “I think you should get your sister out of here.”

“What do you mean? Out of where? She and Alan are going to Greece.” I thought he meant she'd been working too hard and needed a vacation.

“I don't mean to Greece, and I think you should get her away from Alan. I think you should call your parents and make them come get her. I'd call them myself—I met your father once when he was at Yale—but I don't want to interfere directly. And you seem a sensible girl, Cordelia. Call your parents. Call your mother, and get her to come take a look at Juliet. In my opinion, Alan is crazy, and Juliet is seriously ill.”

Nonsense, was my first thought. I tried to get a mental picture of Juliet. I hadn't seen her much since I started eating all my meals out. I hadn't, in fact, seen her at all that day. I'd left while she and Alan were out jogging, as usual, and hadn't been home since. But except for her chronic bowel troubles and her thinness, she seemed healthy. She'd always been healthy. No one in our family was ever sick; our parents had taught us to despise illness.

“Ill with what?”

“Mentally ill, Cordelia.”

I was filled all of a sudden with foreboding. Mentally ill: that was a different cut of meat entirely. I thought of the glint in her eyes, and Alan's. I always told funny food stories at work about Juliet and Alan. “Juliet, my nutty sister.” You'd have to be nuts, I'd often thought, to live on tofu and seaweed; what if it was true? I remembered how I'd suspected it, and had put it out of my mind. I was seized with a need to see her, to look at her up close and test Mr. Oliver's opinion.

“Excuse me for a minute,” I said to him. I got up and walked quickly through the bar and out the door. I ran around the corner to our apartment building and up the four flights. I burst panting into 5-B and there was Juliet, sitting in a rocking chair by the window—just sitting there. The apartment seemed curiously bare; the bookcases were empty. Juliet stood out with peculiar distinctness against the stark walls, and I remembered that she and Alan had been going to pack up their stuff that day and farm it out to friends in preparation for their trip to Greece. “I don't know when we'll be back—if ever,” Juliet always said dramatically when asked about their plans. It was a well-known fact that Greece was her spiritual home.

I looked at Juliet, trying to get a fast, objective view. She had a book in her hand, but it was closed. She was emaciated, I realized with a shock. Her body was like a child's, or an old woman's. Her face was ravaged. She took up hardly any room on the chair, and on that hot night (I had to go and get a towel to wipe the sweat off my face) she looked cool—chilled.

“I've just come to get something,” I said to her, throwing down my towel, and went to the phone for the address book, not yet packed, which contained my parents' California phone number. “Where's Alan?” I asked, hoping I sounded casual. Juliet just sat there rocking and looking out the window down into the filthy courtyard; it came to me suddenly that she had been doing that a lot lately. I wondered if she had watched Mr. Oliver leave, seen him stop me and talk. It wouldn't be good for her, probably, to feel spied on.

“Alan's gone to bed,” Juliet said, and her voice sounded sepulchral, like a voice coming through a tiny window in a padded cell. Why hadn't I noticed all this? How could I have dismissed her eccentricities as harmless?
Joked
about her? I was filled with dismay at my summer of self-absorption.

“Oh, Juliet!” I said, and knelt next to her chair. I took one of her cool little hands. “Are you okay?”

She looked down calmly into my face and gave my hand a slight squeeze. I could feel all her bones; even her palm felt bony. Then she let me go and opened her book. “Of course I'm okay, dopey. Don't be out too late.”

I could have cried. I don't know when she'd spoken to me with such affection. I took one more look at her, said good night, and ran out and down the stairs again.