Love Walked In (10 page)

“What are you saying?” she asked. “You’re not saying anything.” Clare took a breath and turned to look at her mother. Her mother was wearing a soft, thick, white turtleneck sweater, dark blue jeans, and diamond stud earrings. Her hair was tucked smoothly behind her ear. Clare hated her for looking like that, like a model or an actress on vacation. In her hand, her mother held two blue envelopes.

“Bon Nadal i un Bon Any Nou!”
her mother sang out again, “Merry Christmas, in Catalan, darling. You didn’t forget?”

Plane tickets—two plane tickets in blue envelopes. Luggage thumping in the back. Barcelona. Clare’s throat released a high-pitched moan, and her mother turned to look at her.

“No, no, no, we can’t go to Barcelona, Mom. You’re sick. We can’t be on an airplane or in Spain or anyplace when you’re sick. Don’t you understand that there’s something wrong with you? Stop the car, Mom. Please.” Clare spoke as though her mother were a child. She knew she couldn’t give in to panic. If she gave in, they would be lost. But as Clare spoke, it came to her that something was strange about her mother’s face: Her right eye was wide, black-lashed, her left eye was different, smaller, incomplete, almost erased-looking. The two sides didn’t match, and this imbalance broke Clare. The bottom dropped out of the moment and she fell. For the second time in her life, she was overtaken—possessed—by screaming, by rage she didn’t own. In the grip of this rage, she screamed the word “Stop!” and she kicked and she slammed her fists against the dashboard with all her strength.

Miraculously, her mother did stop, pulling to the side of the road and putting the car in park. It took some time for Clare’s anger to subside and for her to come back to herself. Even after her breathing slowed, her head and body shook with intermittent sobs, something Clare had only ever seen happen to babies. She felt like throwing up. She wrapped her arms around her stomach and looked at her mother.

To her amazement, her mother was weeping. Tears poured down her face, wetting her sweater. Her cheeks and the corners of her mouth trembled, and the trembling went on for a long time, and then her mother opened her mouth and cried long sounds, “Ahh, ahh, ahh,” over and over, like a machine.

“You’re right, Clarey, it has to stop. It has to stop. All of it. All of it. You’re right.” Her mother’s voice was the saddest voice Clare had ever heard.

Clare’s mother reached across and opened Clare’s door.

“I’m so sorry. How did everything go to hell? I don’t know. I didn’t mean to do it. I’m so sorry, Clare.” And she was, Clare could tell; her mother was sorry for everything in the world.

There was nothing else to do. Clare unbuckled her seat belt, pushed the car door wide open, and stepped down into the weeds and gravel. Clare’s mother was still crying, her head tilted back against the headrest, her eyes closed. “Mommy,” said Clare flatly, leaning forward in order to leave the word inside the car. Then she stepped back and pushed the door shut. It’s click was the most final sound Clare had ever heard.

The Land Rover pulled away. Clare watched it until the road curved and it was gone. The sky overhead and behind the treetops was an uninflected pale gray. “It’s over,” she told the trees and the sky. There was no relief in her voice. Clare slid her backpack over both shoulders and started to walk.

“What
breaks your heart? Has your heart been broken? Tell me. When has your heart been broken?” I asked Martin. Because if you’re going to ask a stupid, graceless question, you may as well ask it three times in succession with very little variation. A rotten question. I knew that before I asked it, before it reverberated in the air around me like a wrong, wrong note, before I saw the “Oh, no; here we go” look flicker over his face then disappear. No way to make such a question sound nonchalant, particularly as I’d asked it in triplicate, more particularly as I’d asked it in bed—mine, not his, thus taking advantage of home court advantage—and most particularly as it came on the heels of yet another story of my own heartbreak. Another unsolicited story, if you insist upon accuracy, and I know that you do. I depend upon it.

Before I asked Martin that question—days before, as I contemplated asking it—I was already bored with myself, with how deeply unoriginal the question made me. Like a wicked fairy—
poof
—the question turned me into a first-name-only, hypothetical character in the pages of a self-help book. Exactly the kind of book we all disdain because it reduces to formulae our irreducible human selves, but which we at least think about buying (thus abetting the book’s piranhalike devouring of the
New York Times
bestseller list). That time we had a terrible cold and were listlessly switching channels on the
tiny
television we hardly ever watch and even forget we have, we happened upon Oprah discussing such a book and found that, as much as we hated to admit it, the book rang true—at least, some of it rang somewhat true, truer than we’d ever expected. “He doesn’t talk to me,” Cornelia whines and, looky there, she is not Cornelia but the universal, allegorical Whining Woman. Suddenly, Martin is from Mars, and Cornelia, God help her, is from Venus.

The only comfort I can take is in the fact that I put my own little spin on the whining, tinted the whining a vaguely Cornelia-like color. It’s not that Martin didn’t talk to me. He talked, he shared, he was forthcoming, regularly coming forth with loads of information about himself.

Apart from the facts about him you already know, I knew that he was born and raised in Rye, New York. I knew he’d been blond as a child. I knew that he’d gone to the University of Chicago and had gotten an MBA at Harvard. I knew the things he felt he should like but secretly did not: horses, Russian novels, recycled paper products, Langston Hughes poems, French cinema, the city of New Orleans, cheese for dessert. And the things he felt he shouldn’t like but secretly did: sports cars, those chalky orange circus peanuts, seersucker (never wore it, but wanted to), Olympic figure-skating, and the Jerry Lewis film
Cinderfella
. (I know, pretty tame as far as guilty pleasures go. You were expecting monster trucks and Japanimation?). I knew
The Exorcist
still gave him nightmares and that the only time he felt truly patriotic was when he heard instrumental versions of “America the Beautiful.” I knew that at age thirteen, he’d been airlifted out of the Maine wilderness after stumbling upon a bees’ nest on a summer camp nature hike. I knew he spent astronomical sums on custom-made shirts and felt guilty about it. I knew he found me funny and beautiful and smart.

He talked to me. I talked to him. Rarely, in fact, did we stop talking. Conversationally, we were Fred and Ginger—spin, slide, shuffle, bend. Giddy. Effortless.
Tappity tappity tappity tappity boom boom slap,
went I.
Tappity tappity tappity tappity boom boom slap,
returned Martin, and then he’d set me spinning like I’d never spun before, my dress flaring, my hair platinum blond and shining like the moon.

But I thought I’d figured it out, why our sex life wasn’t more spectacular; or to be specific, was several worlds away from spectacular. For all our talk, all our exchanges, we never handed over anything of real importance. We were all laughter and lightness and glow. We liked each other till the cows came home, but I never saw his broken places, nothing soft or stinging or half healed-over. He’d never seen mine, either. And I decided that truly stellar sex wasn’t possible without that kind of knowledge. Love either, although, at that point, I wasn’t ready to do more than give the subject of love a passing glance, a nod of acknowledgment. “Be patient,” I told love under my breath. “I’ll tackle you eventually.”

I didn’t take the clunky direct-question approach to begin with. He’ll reveal himself if I reveal myself, is what I thought. So, I waited for an opening, the slightest invitation. But the invitation didn’t come, which is when I started the aforementioned unsolicited storytelling. One afternoon, I told him about my best friend Andie who died of leukemia at the start of fifth grade. After the funeral, her mother gave me the new winter coat Andie never got a chance to wear—a purple parka with fur around the hood that I hung, tags and all, in the coat closet of every place I’d ever lived, including my current apartment.

I told him about having dropped out of graduate school after half a semester, which wasn’t in itself so hard because I hated all my classes and believed if I stayed another minute, I’d never love another book. Afterward, though, I lived inside the four grim walls of my failure, my first huge failure, for weeks, unable to tell anyone.

I told him about my sister Ollie, two years older than I am, and how passionately we’d loved each other as kids, but that somehow we didn’t seem to anymore. It wasn’t even a story, really, because there was no drama, no plot, no climactic falling-out I could put my finger on, which was maybe the worst part about it. We just stopped being sisters. I was making a salad while I told him this, and when I started to cry, I blamed it on the onions and dumped the salad in the trash.

It wasn’t easy, since I don’t like being vulnerable any more than the next guy, possibly less than the next guy, and also since all the above events and conditions are among the few topics the importance of which I am unable to undermine with jokes and a mocking tone. Which shows you how much I wanted Martin. I just wanted him.

Not that he made any of it any easier. Each time I began to give him one of my heartbreaks—and I was straightforward, not dramatic, used as few words as possible, only cried the one time—I could almost see him deliberately settle the parts of his body, one by one, into an attitude of what was meant to be interest but ended up as something more like patience, forbearance. He forbore, I think, and looked tender and handsome enough while doing it. And afterward, each time, he’d give a rueful little smile that crinkled the corners of his eyes, and he’d touch my cheek or run a hand along my forearm. Nothing wrong with that—entirely appropriate and above reproach, except that the touches ended up feeling to me like pats on the head.

Just before I came out with “What breaks your heart?” et al., I was telling Martin about Mrs. Goldberg—Suzette Goldberg. I’d arrived at Suzette’s story more or less naturally, although, once I got started, I had no qualms about incorporating it into Project Drawing-Martin-Out. Which would have been just fine with Mrs. Goldberg, of that I was sure.

As I told you, Martin and I were in bed, propped up on pillows, my head leaning against his shoulder; we were being quiet, for once, and I broke the silence by saying, “
Mousquetaire
.”

“Musketeer or Mouseketeer?” asked Martin.

“
Mousquetaire
.” I pointed to the far wall of my bedroom. “Opera glove,” I said. “They used to call them that.”

They were framed, the opera gloves. Late nineteenth-century, white kid with pearl buttons. I’d lined the back of the frame with lavender velvet. If my apartment ever caught fire, the gloves in their frame would be the first thing I grabbed.

“Mrs. Goldberg gave me those gloves,” I began. She was our neighbor, and although she was much too old to be my mother—I can’t remember a time when she didn’t seem old—she felt like my mother in ways my real one never did. There’s too much to tell about her and not enough. As I described her to Martin, my descriptions struck me as ordinary and flat, even clichéd, and Mrs. Goldberg and the feelings I had for her were none of these things. She fed me madeleines and fresh figs. She told me stories about her life in New York City and her husband, Gordon, with whom she’d fallen in love when she was eleven and he was seventeen.

We’d sit for hours in her bright attic looking at her carefully stored belongings, everything nestled in boxes or swathed in pieces of soft cloth. A painted fan, Venetian lace, four strings of luminous pearls, each with a clasp shaped like a different insect: a ladybeetle (her word), a dragonfly, a butterfly, and a bumblebee. She and her three sisters had each received one upon turning sixteen. There were albums of photographs and countless family portraits, some postage-stamp size, others larger than life. Mrs. Goldberg had magic in her hands, so that every object she touched was instantly rare and profound, an artifact from Atlantis or Troy.

And each object had a story attached—or not attached, but glowing delicately around it like a halo. Mrs. Goldberg’s stories were dense and rich with details, bristling with New York lights, wars, music and dance, travel, and even sex, although Mrs. Goldberg was not one of those adults who makes a big show of talking to children as though they were adults. When we talked, I felt singled-out and specific. “You see how this heel curves, Cornelia?” she’d say, placing a shoe in my hand. “Not made for hiking, certainly, but I walked for miles in these shoes, at Gordon’s sister Lizzie’s country house, the summer I turned nineteen.”

I’d never not known her, but my true friendship with Mrs. Goldberg began when I was eight, and even after I started college, I’d visit her once a month, at least. I loved her more than I needed her, but I did need her. Her life had been so splendid, so intensely and attentively lived, that connecting with it made me feel rich, excited, hopeful, even when I was at my most muddled and drifting.

The fog began to float in when I was in my last year of college—a barely perceptible haze, but it thickened over the years. Alzheimer’s, I guess, although no one, not my parents or either of her children ever said that word in my presence, and while I know how both futile and presumptuous it is to assign intent to nature, I envisioned the bad genes sitting on some remote arm of whatever tangled chromosome they called home and cursed them with all my strength. Impossible not to see malice in that particular disease attacking that particular woman, a person who was a receptacle, a living jewel box—if you’ll forgive the disconcerting metaphor—of so many memories, exquisite and surprising, regular Fabergé eggs of memory. Her children chose a perfectly nice assisted-living facility, tucked into a little bowl of a valley in the Blue Ridge Mountains not far away, and because she couldn’t stand to sell her house, they didn’t. Her daughter Ruth called me in Philadelphia. “She wants you to help her choose some things to take with her. It can’t be much, though,” said Ruth. So I went.

It was a good day. Actually, it was a terrible day, but good insofar as Mrs. Goldberg’s illness seemed to recede a bit, enough so that we could glean from her Ali Baba’s cave, one terribly small box of treasure. She gave me the opera gloves just before I left. “They were my mother’s and then they were mine, and now they are yours, child of my heart,” she told me. A good day—a gift of a day—but brutal, brutal.

Martin patted my head. OK, he didn’t pat my head. A stroke is not a pat, and it was a stroke—two strokes actually, as though two were better than one, as though it were a two-stroke story. The truth is that, Project Drawing-Martin-Out notwithstanding, I’d almost forgotten he was there. So when I pulled away from him, really I jumped away from him, and stared at him. I was stung. Stung and desperate, even angry, and the three-headed, hangdog dog of a question just fell out.

“What breaks your heart? Has your heart been broken? Tell me. When has your heart been broken?”

I hope my tone wasn’t challenging, but I can’t promise it wasn’t. Or petulant or demanding, although, a demand is a demand no matter how you slice it. I hope it didn’t have overtones of “tit for tat,” which would’ve been awful. Plaintive, I’m quite sure it was plaintive. There’s an old Sheila E. song—stay with me, here—in which a woman is shopping for if-you-have-to-ask-you-can’t-afford-it lingerie, and I’m not entirely sure why I bring that up and very obviously shouldn’t have, but it has something to do with my question(s) to Martin. Do you see what I mean at all? Questions the asking of which erases the reason for asking, yes? Something like, “If you have to ask, no way are you ever getting the answer you’re looking for.” Or maybe more like, “If you have to ask that question in order to keep him, girl, he’s already gone.”

After the barely-there exasperation left his face, Martin recovered. He smiled, cupped my face in his hands. Tenderly, all charm, laughter gilding the edges of his voice, he said to me, “I guess I’ve been keeping it in cold storage. Saving it for you, C. C. Brown.”

He was as sweet and as giving as he could be. I still believe that.

What
followed Martin’s leaving the next morning—a blithe leaving on his part, as he never suspected a thing—was a miserable forty-eight hours. I wore my bathrobe and shuffled around my house crying and consuming tea and hot soup and other types of invalid food. I opened books and shut them. I lifted the phone receiver and put it down. I remembered his voice and all the extraordinary things it had said to me. I listed on the couch, blown sideways by my own unhappiness, and tried to watch
Meet John Doe
because, despite what anyone thinks, no one does dark the way Capra does dark, and tried to remind myself that compared to everyone’s disappointment and isolation, my disappointment and isolation were puny, not even garden variety. The movie backfired on me, though, because, as in all Capra films, love saves the day, and what I was pretty sure of was that it was not going to save mine, not this time.