Love Walked In (12 page)

“Be
not afraid of parenthood; some are born parents, some achieve parenthood, and others have parenthood thrust upon ’em.”

And yes, cheese-shop snafu notwithstanding, I know enough about William Shakespeare to know that this is not how the quotation actually goes. I matriculated two months in a Ph.D. program in English Literature, did I not? I did. And
Twelfth Night,
if not my favorite play by W.S., is in a dead heat for first place:
Twelfth Night
for wit and charm;
King Lear
for heartbreak. A balanced diet, the major mental and emotional food groups brilliantly represented. I have been to dinner parties at which saying this would be like dropping a bucket of bleeding fish into a shark tank: a lot of vicious snapping, grim hangings-on, and no one getting away unscathed. The sort of argument I both appreciate and avoid because, on the one hand, art does matter and is something to get riled up about; on the other hand, I could batter someone over the head repeatedly with the Lear/Cordelia reunited in prison scene or the line “And my poor fool is hanged,” and someone could batter me back with “To be or not to be” and where would that get us? In my experience, people love what they love. They just do.

Or fail to love what they fail to love. Which naturally brings me back from what you’ve no doubt noticed was a pathetic attempt at digression and diversion, which are generally two of my specialties, as you also may have noticed. But even I can’t escape the fact that there is only one possible topic here, a topic that is not a topic at all but a child, Clare Hobbes—once Clare Hobbes Grace, daughter of Martin as Cordelia was daughter of Lear.

I brought up the previous tweaked quotation mainly to discuss how it’s only partly accurate because, as far as I can tell, no matter what the circumstances, parenthood is thrust upon a parent. No one is ever quite ready; everyone is always caught off guard. Parenthood chooses you. And you open your eyes, look at what you’ve got, say “Oh, my gosh,” and recognize that of all the balls there ever were, this is the one you should not drop. It’s not a question of choice.

Before you get your political hackles up—and I like those hackles; they’re fine hackles, I have a set myself—I should clarify that I’m not talking about choice as we ordinarily use the word. Not Choice as in Pro-. I’m talking about post-choice, the embodied baby, the done deal, the child trailing clouds of glory, etcetera. And, of course, because I see said hackles rising again, I know there are plenty of people with done deals who are smart and brave enough to recognize that they need to thrust parenthood upon someone else, someone with more resources. I’m not talking about those people or taking them to task. If I’m taking anyone to task, and apparently I am, it’s those people who have the material resources (and then some; if you can afford a penthouse, more than one signed and numbered Edward Weston photo, and a Mies Van der Rohe chaise, you can afford a child, yes?); who are grown-up; who are in splendid, chiseled, glowing, shockingly handsome health; and who are in all ways suited not to be let off the hook.

I’m talking about Martin. Obviously, Martin. Because as his eleven-year-old daughter slept the sleep of the spent and brokenhearted in the next room, in a strange bed, Martin sat next to me on the couch and said, “I’m just not cut out to be someone’s parent. I never was,” neatly lifting himself off the hook, without so much as a wrinkle in his English custom-tailored shirt.

Except that I couldn’t let it go. I could have admired his candor. I could have eaten up this long-awaited snip of self-revelation, savored its sweetness on my tongue, and moved on. It would have been so easy to let it go, but I couldn’t do it.

“Father,” I said.

“What?”

“Someone’s father. You said parent, not father,” I said.

“Does that matter? Is there a difference?” he asked, not completely rhetorically, thank goodness. Still, the Sheila E. song was back in my head;
“If you have to ask, you can’t afford it…”
I forwent singing it aloud, for which I drearily awarded myself a couple of dreary points.

“Maybe being a father isn’t something you do because you’re cut out for it. Maybe it’s something you do because your child needs you to do it.” I said that. Afterward, there was a long silence.

“We haven’t known each other very long, Cornelia. But we have something. I think we have something. Enough so that you are a person on whom I wouldn’t rush to judgment. I’d give you the benefit of the doubt. Can you do that for me?” His voice was so quiet, and there were so many other things he could have said to me. Things like, “You’re the thirty-one-year-old, single, childless manager of a coffee bar, Cornelia. What the hell do you know about being a parent?” Or “Let’s think. Have you managed every last thing in your life in the best possible manner?” Or “Must be nice up there on your moral high ground, Cornelia. Nice clear air up there lets you see other people’s faults in crystalline detail.”

But he was tender and sad and far more fair than I deserved and, disenfranchised child in the next room or no, I wanted to be in love with Martin, still. I hadn’t given up on that. I wanted our being in love to remain in the realm of the possible. Apart from that, I knew that all the things he didn’t say but could have were true responses, entirely just, and I felt bad about that. I don’t mind being wrong, but I can’t bear to be
in
the wrong, or on the side of wrong.

“I’m sorry, Martin,” I said. “I’m sorry, and yes, I can do that.” There were tears in my eyes, and I took his hand and kissed it. “But, because we’re talking about us, I want to ask”—shut up, shut up, shut up, Cornelia—“why didn’t you tell me about Clare?” Good God, can I ever just keep my mouth shut? Is that ever possible?

And that’s when I saw it, the befuddled, unguarded look on his face. The look that said “I didn’t tell you about Clare because it didn’t occur to me to tell you,” with the follow-up, “Because it didn’t seem important enough to tell you.” With this look still on his face, Martin began, “I don’t know. I didn’t think it…” and the word hanging in the air was “mattered.” I could see it hanging there, black and jagged, but Martin recovered.

“I wanted to tell you. I meant to. All I had to do was put one word in front of the other, but I couldn’t seem to do it. As you can tell, it’s not a happy or a simple relationship, mine and Clare’s. Maybe I was afraid you’d run away from me.”

Obviously, this was a good answer. A grade-A, magnificent answer. He was expressing vulnerability; that’s what I wanted, right? Also, expressing the desire to keep me—wanted that, too, right? But it came too late. I’d caught a glimpse behind the curtain, at the little lever-pulling man behind the Great and Powerful Martin.

I would have to think about this—definitely would have to, no doubt about that. But, though it doesn’t come easily to me, I can avoid hard truths, at least for a while, and Martin’s being a man capable of misplacing the idea of his child like an old set of keys was the kind of hard truth for which the word “later” was created. Besides, I had more pressing issues before me. The facts were these: There had never been a little girl asleep in my bed before. Yesterday, no little girl. This morning, no little girl. Now, there was a little girl; now, there was Clare.

“What are we going to do now, Martin? For Clare,” I asked.

“Right. Well”—Martin was brisk, all-business—“we need to find Viviana, of course. I should file a missing-persons report, I know I should. If Clare’s right and Viviana’s ill or having some kind of breakdown, she could be a danger to herself. I almost called the police this afternoon, but I didn’t do it. I don’t know the law, but it’s possible Viviana could be in serious trouble for abandoning Clare. Legal trouble. There could be far-reaching consequences. Also, Viviana is a fairly prominent figure in social circles around here; it would be difficult for her and for Clare if these problems became public knowledge. Clare needs her mother. She needs her life to return to normalcy as soon as possible, with the least amount of messiness.”

As do you, I thought uncharitably.

“So I took a rather bold step today and engaged a private investigator,” said Martin.

“You did?” I asked, and Sam Spade, Philip Marlowe, and every film noir detective to whom the word “hard-boiled” was regularly attached began gumshoeing his way around my mind. As I looked at him, the usual refined, sparkling, spotless Martin became a little grainier, his immaculate edges the tiniest bit roughened up. I was intrigued.

“A good detective firm, I think, very reputable. I got the name from a guy at work who’d used them a few times with good results. I guess the job itself involves an inevitable amount of sleaziness, but this place seems as discreet and above reproach as most businesses ever are. Do you think it was the right thing to do?” I caught myself loving, as I’d loved before, the way Martin asked my opinion, as though my input were of immense value.

“I suppose so,” I said. “If the agency is really trustworthy.” I wasn’t sure, though, not at all sure. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m my mother’s daughter, and my mother is as merrily careful and law-abiding a soul as ever lived. No way she’d call a private dick, a shamus, a hard-boiled anything. She would contact the proper authorities and let the cards fall where they may. That’s what I was brought up to do. But when you’re mired in confusion as I was, it’s wisest to hold close those things you do know. The one crystal-clear fact here was that Clare needed her mother, and because it was the one crystal-clear fact, the proper action to take was whatever action would bring them back together.

“But, meanwhile…” I said, because until Martin had started in with his private detective solution, I had hardly even been thinking about finding Viviana. I’d been thinking about the child in the fur coat on the bed who wouldn’t sleep forever or even just until her mother returned home, although I bet she wanted to do just that. Clare would wake up. She would wake up needing what children needed. “What about Clare?”

Martin was thrown off, even stricken. “I don’t—I don’t know. I don’t know what to do. She needs…well…” Martin floundered. Then his brow cleared for a moment. He picked a backpack up off the floor and handed it to me. It was L.L. Bean, colored two shades of pink, and had
CLARE
stitched on the front pocket. “She left this in the car. Maybe there’s something in it she needs.”

I opened it and found a spiral notebook full of writing and some sort of book, crumpled, an art project maybe. I didn’t read either. Martin looked at me, hopeful.

“She’ll probably want these, Martin,” I said gently. “But I was thinking more along the lines of toothbrushes and sweaters. Pajamas. Food. A bed. You’ll need to take time off work to be with her, I guess.”

Never underestimate the power of physical beauty. Physical beauty is sly. It works on you in ways of which you are not even aware and over which you have little control. There’s probably a genetic or evolutionary reason for beauty and our response to it, about which I could ask my geneticist sister who explores precisely that sort of question as a fellow at some fancy lab on Long Island and who explores it in her own life, too, probably, as she’s no slouch in the pretty department. But, as I’ve mentioned, Ollie and I aren’t exactly close.

In any case, there’s just something about a terribly beautiful man in distress that is irresistible, and when I asked Martin what we should do about Clare, Martin became a terribly beautiful man in distress. I was moved.

“Oh,” said Martin in the smallest voice I’d ever heard him use. He opened his mouth to speak, shut it without speaking. He looked around himself, casting about for answers to the question of Clare, but found only couch cushions. He rapped the knuckles of one hand lightly, repeatedly, against the dimple in his chin.
Think, think, think,
I could almost hear him thinking.

Then from under his classical forehead, from under his black, thick-but-not-too-thick, shapely-but-not-in-a-manicured-feminine-way eyebrows, he lifted his dark eyes in their remarkable frame of lashes to meet mine, and what I saw in their wondrous depths was simple, naked panic. I’m not made of stone. I said, “She can stay here. With me. If she wants to.”

“I’ll come over a lot, of course, as much as I can. I’ll do whatever you tell me to. Thank you, Cornelia. Thank you for helping.” Martin was just this side of jumping for joy. His gratitude was tremendous, oceanic. “I can’t thank you enough.”

“You have. You’ve thanked me enough.” Martin was never one of those people who are oblivious to the ways others might perceive him, and, right now, the magnitude of his relief was unseemly, clearly unseemly. That it wasn’t clear to him is an indication of just how carried away he was, of how much he dreaded spending time with his daughter. It made me angry.

Focus on Clare, I reminded myself, on what Clare needs. And the irony of that struck me with no small amount of force. In my entire adult life, I’d never even owned a pet. How could a woman who’d never trusted herself to meet the needs of a hamster have any idea what to do for a child? I pushed the thought aside. Focus.

“Clothes. Did you get some for her when you went to the house to leave the note?” I asked him.

He looked sheepish.

“I told her you would go. You didn’t go,” I said.

“I’ll go tomorrow. All I could think about was finding Viviana. I spent the day hunting down the detective agency and hiring the detective. Anyway, the detective—his name is Lloyd—he needs to go to the house, find out what he can. I’m taking him there tomorrow. We want to give him all the help we can.”

“And you’ll bring back clothes for Clare,” I said, reminding him.

“And I’ll bring back clothes for Clare. And whatever else she wants. Ask her. I’ll get whatever she wants,” he said.

Just then, there came from the bedroom the most lost, the most forlorn sound I’d ever heard. Clare. Telling us what she wanted.

“Mommy, Mommy, Mommy.”

I jumped up. And then stopped. I looked at Martin, who slowly stood and walked to the bedroom. He was in there less than a minute.