Love Walked In (30 page)

My
life—my real life—started when a man walked into it, a handsome stranger in a perfectly cut suit and, yes, I know how that sounds. Or I know how it might sound, to the kind of person I used to be, one who spent her days skirting around the edges of adulthood, commitment, responsibility, accomplishment—whatever word you use to describe diving into the deepest part of being human. Take your pick; they’re all woefully inadequate, but they’re also all we have.

If you’re the kind of person I used to be, you might think that real life means going after what you want and getting it. I thought that, as I skirted those edges (and don’t get me wrong, I liked that skirting; there was joy in it—most of the time, that skirting was the lightest kind of dancing), gazing into other people’s real lives—Ollie’s, B’s and Ellie’s, Teo’s, Mrs. Goldberg’s, to name a few—like lit-up houses, places in which real people did the work of real life. I believed they’d all achieved their hearts’ desires or were in the process of achieving them. There. That’s what I mean: I believed the process of achieving them was life.

But in the months that followed Martin’s gracing of Café Dora’s doorway, I’d figured out that a real life didn’t mean attaining my heart’s desire, but
knowing
it, meant not the satisfaction, but the longing. Knowing what you love and why, I found out, is as real as it gets.

I love Mrs. Goldberg because she got sick and died, but is as alive as anyone I know. I love the trees in her yard and the treasures in her attic because they were her trees, her treasures. I love my family’s house because it is my family’s. I love Linny and Toby and Cam and Ollie because it is impossible not to. I love my gentle father for his fierceness and my happy mother for her sadness. I love Teo because he is the best man I know and because my arm bones ache when they’re not holding him and because I am myself. I love Martin for bringing Clare into my life, and I love Clare because she is brave and loving and smart and full of hope. Oh, how I love Clare.

I
wanted to be Clare’s mother, and then Clare’s mother came home, and the home she came home to was my own.

I
decided to do it. It took thirty seconds’ contemplation and one nod from Viviana to decide. I decided to move back to the street I’d grown up on and live in Mrs. Goldberg’s house with Clare and Viviana. It wasn’t what I’d hoped for, and I didn’t see how in the world it could work, but I decided to jump in and figure out later how to do it. How to do it and how to love it. I got on the phone that night and broke the news to Linny and began my campaign of persuading her to go to law school down the road from where I’d live, and I quit my job at the café, hired the cheapest moving company I could find, and talked my landlord out of six months’ rent and into taking down my chandelier.

And then, that night, I went into my room to find a story about a girl and a bear and a bleak, enchanted winter lying on my bed. I remembered the battered cover. The story had been in Clare’s backpack the first night she’d slept in my apartment, and I assumed Clare had left it on the bed, until I opened it to find a sheet of paper. The words written on the paper said
Clare’s Christmas gift to us. A book she made for Viviana, but Clare decided you and I should share it instead. Your turn. Be brave. Love, Teo.
I pressed a finger to his name and kissed the page like the lovesick girl I was, and then I read the story. I read it and I finished reading and I thought about it until the sun came up. The story was gorgeous and devastating, and it left me with a choice of two possible interpretations, like two paths. Both paths were rutted, difficult; either one would jar my bones and rattle my soul, but one was easier than the other. The easy interpretation was that Viviana’s illness had terrified Clare so completely that she had longed for an endless sleep, the particulars of which I couldn’t bring my imagination to imagine. The easiness lay in the conclusion that a child who had been this frightened should not be made to live alone again with the woman who had frightened her. The child needed me.

But there was something different one could take from the story, something both difficult and difficult to explain. When winter fell, it wasn’t only Annika’s world that the brute frost drained of life, but her very own flesh and hair and eyes, and, despite all his strength and goodness, even John the Bear couldn’t help Annika. Only spring’s return, getting her old world back, would save her. If you looked at the story this way, you’d see that there’s a power at the heart of mothers and their children—a mysterious connection no one else can touch. I could live with Clare and Viviana for a hundred years without ever coming close. Two roads diverged in a yellow wood.
Be brave,
Teo had written. I stood at that fork in the road and waited to be brave enough.

So
when Viviana appeared in Mrs. Goldberg’s attic the next evening and asked, “What will you do?” the question stopped me dead. I closed my laptop carefully, putting it to sleep. How simple, I thought; if only I could do that to Viviana. Turn her and her questions off long enough to make a run for it.

“What will I do?” I echoed, buying time. I knew exactly what she was asking.

Except I didn’t. Because the next thing she said was, “Here. What will you do here? Get a job? Go back to school?” Not on the spot after all, I felt giddy with relief.

“Oh. Gosh. I wish I could say I had a plan.”

Viviana sat down on the floor next to me and picked up the Art Deco cigarette lighter I’d been writing about. I watched her hold that elegant object in her hands, which were precisely shaped and almost creaseless, as though they were Art Deco as well.

“I know how you feel,” she said.

“Are you sure about this?” I wasn’t sure I wanted an answer to that, but I asked anyway. “Pulling up roots, living here, away from what you know.”

“I know Clare,” said Viviana, pausing to let the words resonate with me. And they did resonate. “I know the difference between her wanting something and her needing something. And this?” Viviana gazed around the attic and then out the window. “She needs this.”

Then Viviana looked at me and the tightness went out of her features. She sighed. “It’s not the leaving that will be hard. It’s the staying. The being watched over and the sharing. Sharing Clare. I don’t mean that unkindly.”

I could tell she didn’t, and I was amazed at how we could do this, Viviana and I, shift from wariness to intimacy, the way we could become two women talking.

“Maybe it’s not sharing, really. Maybe her world’s just getting bigger.”

Viviana nodded. “It needed to get bigger. I see that. A world of two is too small.” She cleared her throat. “So, back to you. What will you do here?”

I looked around the attic. “I need to finish going through all of this. That comes first. So, I’ll get some kind of job until I’m done. After that, I’m not sure. More school, maybe.”

“What would you study?” asked Viviana with real interest.

“I don’t know, exactly. I love doing what I’m doing, though. I started out just writing down the stories Mrs. Goldberg told me about her belongings.”

“A labor of love,” said Viviana. “Clare told me how much Mrs. Goldberg meant to you.”

“Yes.” I felt flustered at this, for some reason, and moved quickly past it. “But it turns out there are other stories attached to so many of these objects, ones I don’t think even Mrs. Goldberg knew. Stories I found online and in the university libraries.” I picked up a funny silvery turban and put it on. “Like this.”

Viviana smiled at the sight of me in the hat.

“I know,” I said, “can you imagine? It’s by Lilly Dache, a Frenchwoman who became the most famous New York milliner of her time. I mean, who knew there were famous milliners?” I couldn’t explain just why this sort of thing excited me, but it did. “And the silver. There are pieces dating back to the eighteenth century. And that old wrought-iron gate over there I
think
was made in Philadelphia by a former slave. Everything comes from someplace. Everything’s been held in so many hands.”

I took the hat off, embarrassed at my own gushing. The fact that I was going to live with this woman and her child loomed between us, and I sat there and talked about hats and gates.

“So, art history maybe?” said Viviana, nodding. “Conservation? Or material culture.” She stopped talking, set down the cigarette lighter, and looked at me. “There’s a wonderful program in Delaware, of all places, with a museum nearby housing the most astonishing collection, entire interiors re-created. Parquet floors, plaster moldings, furniture, paintings—everything. I’ve done some parties for a woman on the board. I’m sure she’d write a letter for you.” She stopped.

Delaware.

“Viviana,” I said in as neutral a voice as I could muster, “what are you asking?”

“It’s really not far,” she said crisply. “You could come back here, come—home, every weekend. Home to your house.”

“What are you asking?”

Her bravado disappeared. “She goes into your room every night. I hear her.”

She wouldn’t cry, I could tell, and I felt grateful for that. She sat there in her calm, upright blondness, her eyes proud like a marble statue’s, but I could feel the tension under her cool surfaces. Ruthless, I thought. This woman would be ruthless if she needed to be. I admired her for it.

“I need to be the one she needs,” said Viviana steadily. “She’s my life.”

I wanted to speak, but I couldn’t figure out what to say.

Viviana stood up and started for the door. Then she turned back to me.

“Please,” she began. And I cut her off. This proud woman pleading for her child would be more than I could bear.

“Don’t,” I told her. “Don’t say please.”

And Clare’s mother left me alone with myself.

“I
can’t decide if she’s beautiful,” said Clare halfway through the movie, “or if she just looks better than anyone I’ve ever seen.”

Cornelia sat on the floor, leaning against the big armchair Clare sat in. When Clare said this, Cornelia tilted her head back to look at Clare and laugh. “Exactly! She’s just—marvelous!”

She was marvelous, Tracy Lord, in her white dress with her frowny mouth and sculpted little face and those long eyes whose expression could switch from scornfulness to hurt without a blink.

When Clare had first seen Dexter, she’d gasped out, “Wow.”

“The wowest.” Cornelia sighed.

“But not only that,” began Clare, “he looks like…”

“You.” Cornelia smiled, then added, “And your father.”

I look like my father, Clare thought. People had always said this, and it used to bother Clare. But, somehow, it didn’t bother her anymore. Martin Grace was her father. Gone or not, he was part of who she was, and it looked more and more as though who she was was who she wanted to be.

I have my father’s eyes, she said to herself. And a tiny bright window of insight opened: Just because my father didn’t love me doesn’t mean I can’t love him, someday. The window shut, but Clare felt a newness inside her, a beginning. I have my father’s eyes, she thought again.

When the movie was over, Clare said with satisfaction, “That’s how movies should always end. With all the good people getting what they want.”

Cornelia switched off the television and turned around to face Clare. Seeing Cornelia sitting there, cross-legged in her jeans made Clare remember how small she was, like a child.

“Clare, I need to tell you something.” She paused. “You are part of my family, not just a friend. You’ll always be part of my family.”

This was wonderful, just what Clare wanted to hear. She should have felt happy, but she felt scared, instead. Cornelia’s voice and the expression in her eyes made her look more like a child than ever, like a child trying to sound stronger and braver than she feels.

Clare nodded, then said, “Why don’t we watch the movie again, from the beginning?”

“You and your mother will live in Mrs. Goldberg’s house.” Clare saw that she was trembling. “And I will come visit you all the time.”

“No,” said Clare. “You can’t do that, Cornelia. You already said you would stay.”

The anger in her own voice startled Clare. She sounded furious, when what she was was sad and scared. But she couldn’t stop the angry sound and, pretty soon, she felt angry too.

“We’ll spend holidays together and weekends. And you can come visit me whenever you want. In Philadelphia or wherever I end up.” Then she added quickly, “But wherever I end up, it won’t be very far away. I promise you that.”

“You
promised
you would stay.” The words hurt Cornelia, Clare could see that and, as angry as she was, she couldn’t feel any satisfaction in Cornelia’s pain. But her own disappointment was so sharp and awful.

“I promised because I wanted to be with you so much. I still want it. But you need to be alone with your mom.” Cornelia’s hands were so tightly clasped together, they were turning red.

“What if she gets sick again?” flashed Clare. “Did you even think about that?”

“You’ll come right over here and tell Ellie and B. And you’ll call me and I’ll come, no matter what. And we’ll all help.” Cornelia said it as though it were a solemn vow.

“Oh, honey—” Cornelia’s voice broke and she reached a hand toward Clare. But Clare got up and left her there, small and sitting on the floor, looking like her heart was broken.

It
makes sense that Mrs. Goldberg’s attic, that place I loved, would come to hold some of my story, along with all the other ones it held. It made sense that Teo would find me there—a sapphire blue dress of Mrs. Goldberg’s slung across my lap, shimmering—calm but with a sharp sadness that felt like a permanent addition to my heart.

“What light through yonder doorway breaks?” was what sprang to mind when he came walking through it. And I had to smile at that, because I couldn’t have been less in the market for a story about star-crossed love. I wanted my stars clean and steady and spelling out a happy ending straight across the sky. But if you’re like I am, you don’t treasure that play for its tragic ending but for its flawless rendering of love achieved. When your man has to leave you in the morning, the bird singing outside is always the nightingale, never the lark, and when your man appears in an attic doorway, the moon is always humbled by his radiance. Or the sun, if it happens to be daytime when he arrives.

Teo arrived and sat down across from me in a burnt-orange leather armchair, a chair whose only story seemed to be that Gordon Goldberg had purchased it himself and, for fifteen years, had steadfastly refused to relinquish it, even in the face of his wife’s offended sensibilities. Teo took off his coat, which made me inordinately happy. Take off your coat, I thought, and stay forever.

“I’ve lost her,” I told Teo. I showed him my empty hands. Somehow, I knew he knew about Clare.

“She won’t stay mad,” he said.

“I know she won’t.”

“She’ll grow up here, where we grew up. You’ll always belong to each other.”

“But not in the way I wanted us to belong to each other.” It was the simple truth.

“You wanted to see her every day.”

“I wanted to see her every day. I wanted her to climb in bed with me at night when she couldn’t sleep. I wanted her to come home to me with stories about school.” I slid my hand over the blue satin, smoothing it, even though it couldn’t get any smoother than it was. “And I came so close to having that. But it wouldn’t have been right.” I looked up at him. “Teo, I just wanted to do the right thing.”

I wanted him to tell me that I had done the right thing, but instead of saying something ordinary, Teo said something miraculous: “Of course you did. That’s how you are. Why do you think I love you so much?”

Before
you get too excited, remind yourself that there was never any question of Teo’s loving me; he’s loved me since I was four years old. This I know; this I’ve always known. But even this piece of irrefutable, twenty-seven-year-old knowledge did not prevent my heart from beating faster than a bird’s.

And imagine this: a lifetime spent wanting “I love you” to be poetry served up on a platter, a line from a movie script, and there I was, about to fly heavenward to hear it stated like accepted truth, like it didn’t need stating at all. As though Teo’s loving me were the trees and sky, the world we’d always lived in. Which I guess it was. But I needed something from him.

When I could speak, I said, “I need something from you.”

And he smiled his wide, warm smile and said, “You know you can have it.” And even this didn’t necessarily mean what it would’ve been so easy to let myself believe it meant, since Teo Sandoval was as naturally magnanimous a human being as had ever lived. Everyone who knew him knew that. Be brave, I told myself.

“Clarification,” I said, my voice shaking. “That question you asked me a second ago? Clarify it, would you? Because for you to mean that the way I want you to mean it—” I broke off. Be brave. “I would do anything.” Tears burned my eyes. “Just—anything.”

And he looked at me with kind concern and said, “You’ve been hit hard, haven’t you?”

“Oh, Teo. I’ve been
slammed
.”

Teo didn’t answer, but instead sat looking at me with that compassion on his face. Dizziness struck; I faltered. “But you haven’t, I guess.”

“Oh, yeah, I have.” He kept his eyes on my eyes. “But so long ago, I’ve had some time to get used to it.”

“How long ago?”

“That’s my secret.” He smiled. “I don’t plan to keep any others from you, but that one’s mine.”

If you’re thinking swells of music, heavens raining down celestial light, and a shining path into the future opening up before me, you’ve got it wrong. Instead: Mrs. Goldberg’s attic, ordinary afternoon sun, Cornelia sitting on the floor, Teo sitting in an ugly orange armchair. All anyone could ask for.

“Enough clarification?” asked Teo.

I am as skilled as anyone at being coy. And I know that there’s a time for being coy and then there’s a time for tossing what you’re holding to the floor, striding across the room, and dropping into your true love’s lap, relying on all your strength and on all your eighty-five pounds of weight and on the help you know gravity will give you, because nature and all its forces are on the side of love, to pin him to the spot.

“I love you,” I told him. “And a little more clarification would be good.” I put my arms around his neck, my face inches away from his, so as to leave him no choice but to do what he did, which was kiss me. I kissed Teo. Teo kissed me. We gave each other the kiss of a lifetime, of a hundred lifetimes. A thousand.

Yes,
it’s true, what I said earlier: A real life doesn’t mean getting what you want; the achievement, the privilege, too, is knowing what you love.

But getting what you love? Having what you love love you back? Oh, my friend, it’s miracle: your one tiny life’s head-on collision with divinity.

When
you are in love, you want to spread the word, to tell the fish in the ocean and the lamppost on the corner and to send the news spinning itself out across continents and seas, so that all of creation might rejoice with you.

When you are in love with your sister’s husband, or with your wife’s sister, you have to tell your family first.

After you and your beloved have touched each other into immortality, you have to descend the attic stairs on ordinary human feet and cut across lawns to your respective family homes with your heart in your throat and your fingers crossed hard and spend the next forty-eight hours facing what there is to face.

Conversation One: My father, that same afternoon.

 

Cornelia: Daddy, Teo and I are in love.

Daddy [
with startled eyes behind his glasses
]: You’re serious?

Cornelia [
buying time, splitting hairs
]: Do you mean do I mean what I just said or do you mean am I serious about Teo?

[
A pause.
]

Daddy: If it’s you and Teo, it could only be serious, so I guess I mean do you mean what you just said.

Cornelia [
from the bottom of her heart
]: I do.

 

 

Daddy [
grinning
]: Teo doesn’t look much like Cary Grant.

Cornelia [
grinning back
]: I can’t imagine what you’re talking about.

Daddy: Don’t tell Ollie but, Cornelia, it’s what I’ve always wanted.

[
Daddy’s eyes shining. Cornelia standing humbly in their light.
]

 

Conversation Two: Toby and Cam, early evening, as they throw a football and shout friendly insults at each other.

 

Cornelia [
shouting over friendly insults
]: Hey, you guys, you’ll never guess what Teo and I are in. Love.

[
Toby’s arm arrested mid-throw. Football thudding to the ground.

Cam cantering over like the golden retriever he is.

Finally…
]

Cam [
whining
]: But I got him after Ollie. I
called
it!

Toby: Shut up, dude. He’s mine!

[
Wrestling.
]

Cornelia: I adore you guys, you know that?

[
Toby and Cam looking pleased and sheepish.

Pleased, sheepish, and adoring moment broken by the inevitable picking up of Cornelia and the inevitable bodily tossing of her like a medicine ball from one brother to the other, as the evening star looks on.
]

 

And you don’t need to point out that the above conversations went worlds better than any bombshell-dropping daughter and sister has the right to expect. I got off easy, I knew it, and I was properly grateful, believe me. Grateful, grateful. I went to bed that night radiant with familial love.

You also don’t need to point out that in telling my father and my brothers first, I hadn’t exactly rushed boldly in and seized the bull by the horns, bearded the roaring lion in its den. But think about it: If you’re dropping a bombshell, why not choose the easier targets first, then tackle the really tough ones later, with a good night’s sleep under your belt and the glow of the early victories on your brow?

So there, you see? It wasn’t cowardice; it was strategy.

Conversation Three: Clare, at the breakfast table the next morning, alone with Cornelia.

 

Cornelia: Clare, I have to tell you something.

Clare [
not looking up from her cereal bowl
]:…

Cornelia: It turns out that I’m in love with Teo. And you know what?

Clare [
not looking up from her cereal bowl
]:…

Cornelia: He’s in love with me.

[
Clare meeting Cornelia’s eyes with hers. Her eyes full of Cornelia can’t tell what.
]

Cornelia [
taking a deep breath
]: I’m going to New York with him tomorrow. I mean, not permanently, but for a few days, until I can stand to be away from him. Then I’ll go back and pack up my apartment and move there. Eventually. And you know, it’s

New York. It’s not far at all. And I’m going to learn how to drive, so I can come see you all the time. Teo, too, he’ll visit a lot, whenever he can, with me or without me. Because we love you so much, and we can’t stand to be away from you for very long either. Clare, honey, please say something.

[
Nothing. Then…
]

Clare: Whatever.

 

Oh, Clare.

After we ate a silent breakfast together, I went up to my room and called Linny. I told her what I’d told everyone else.

She said, “Cornelia. I’m so delirious with joy, I can’t even make a joke.”

“You can’t?” I asked her. “Because, Linny, I could really use one.” Linny considered this and then said, “I can’t make a joke, but I can ask you about sex. Will that do the trick?”

“I think it might,” I said.

“Are you having it?”

“Linny. It hasn’t even been twenty-four hours!”

“Give or take twenty-four years.”

I thought about arguing, re-submitting my transubstantiation theory, but quickly recognized this thought for the self-abnegating lunacy it was.

“We’re not having it,” I said.

“Oh, God, Cornelia.” There was sudden horror in Linny’s voice. “You’re not putting it off until he’s divorced, are you?”

A good question, pertinent. So good and pertinent, in fact, that Teo had asked me his unhorrified but equally urgent version of the selfsame question during a stolen half-hour on the oriental rug in Mrs. Goldberg’s attic the night before, asked it after I’d pulled back, panting, at the feel of his hand sliding under my sweater and making its electric way along my rib cage.

“We’re playing by the rules, then?” he’d asked, raspy-voiced. The hand retreated, which is what I wanted, definitely wanted, because why would I have pulled away if I didn’t want it, except as soon as it was gone, I’d have given my eyeteeth to have it back.

“Teo. She’s my sister.” I sighed, knowing the same thought was in both our heads: how, husband or no husband, no way in hell was Ollie forbearing from a single thing, how no doubt even at that very moment, even as Teo and I lay side-by-side, frustration faintly tingeing our elation, Ollie and Edmund were on their pebbly beach, disporting themselves before God and tortoises.

But in my mind’s eye, alongside this all-too-lurid picture, was another one, more lurid still, of a lifetime of my looking in mirrors to find the goggle eyes of Bette Davis staring back. Who could face that kind of future? Could you?

I told Linny the same thing I’d told Teo: “We’ll abide by the letter of the law while entirely ignoring its spirit each and every chance we get.”

To which Teo had replied, with affectionate laughter, “Only you would say that.”

To which Linny replied, with affectionate disgust, “You are so fucking weird.”

Then, lamely, I added to Linny what I’d added, lamely, to Teo: “That’s the plan for now, anyway.”

To which Teo had said chivalrously, “Nope, better not leave that door open. I might be tempted to try to change your mind.”

To which Linny said derisively, “For now? Ha! You won’t make it a week, sister.”

Then she asked, “By the way, since they weren’t in love and so forth, did he and Ollie…?” Linny is not one to leave a stone unturned, not even that one.

“Linny, they were married for two years,” I said calmly. “One assumes they had sex.”

“One assumes? Come on, I know you asked him. I know you did,” she said knowingly.

“I don’t know why you’d say that,” I said.

“Cornelia.”

Damn that Linny.

OK, I had, I’d asked him. By way of testing a pet theory that my love for Teo existed on a plane above jealousy, I’d asked, and his answer hadn’t stung a bit. My jealousy-proof heart beat on, triumphant.

“They did. He said it was fine.” His exact words.

“Fine? Around here, we call that damning with faint praise,” said my friend Linny and, jealousy-proof or not, I’ll admit it, the evil grin I heard in her voice was music to my ears.

That
night as I was packing, my mother came into my room with a pair of my oldest jeans, an ironed, knife’s-edge pleat down the center of each leg.