Love Walked In (8 page)

For the first twenty-four hours or so, it didn’t matter. Their house had always been ridiculously large for just two people, full of rooms no one went into much except Max, who went into them to dust untouched furniture and vacuum un-stepped-upon rugs and to “chase out the ghosts.” Max played jokes on them sometimes, like hanging a painting upside down to see if anyone would notice. Now, with one occupant trying to be alone, and the other occupant spinning through days and rooms like a planet encircled by the atmosphere of her own distraction, the house was perfect. It colluded with Clare, who needed all the allies she could get, to keep them apart.

But on Wednesday morning, as Clare was finishing her toast, her mother walked into the breakfast room with the newspaper and sat down across from Clare.

“Morning, Clarey,” she said.

Clare put her toast down and thought how everything had become a decision. The decision to put down her toast. The decision to look at her own mother. She looked. In her soft, fawn-colored sweater, no makeup, her hair in a ballerina knot at the nape of her neck, her mother looked totally normal. That is to say, she looked extraordinarily beautiful. But Clare wasn’t fooled. Prettiness could be a lie, like anything else, and hope was not a game Clare played anymore.

She was right not to play it. Her mother began reading her bits of news from the paper, which seemed normal enough at first, and Clare responded with “ohs” and “reallys,” but, eventually, all the stories were sad or violent. Boy-soldiers in Africa. Suicide bombers. Snipers shooting people as they put gas in their cars or took their children to school. Clare’s mother would begin one story, break off mid-sentence, start another, her voice full of urgency, like a person crossing rushing water by jumping from stone to stone.

“So much heartbreak and disorder. How can the world hold all of it?” her mother said mournfully. Clare brushed the crumbs from the table onto her plate and stood up. Look around, Mom, she wanted to say, heartbreak and disorder are right here. Instead, she walked to the sink with her plate.

Then, her mother began to talk about the president, to rail against him, which wasn’t actually so strange, since she had always regarded him as both stupid and dangerous, but this time, the words had an odd rhythm, as though her mother were so angry, she could rant instead of breathe.

“Give me one day in the White House, just one day,” her mother said.

Clare blew out a harsh laugh. “Oh, yeah, Mom. You’d make a terrific world leader. We sure would be in capable hands if you were in charge!”

Clare had never spoken to her mother like this, and almost immediately, she wished she could take the words back; they were so biting and vicious. One glance at her mother told her that she hadn’t even heard but, just because someone can’t notice that you’re being mean, doesn’t mean you’re not; in fact, Clare decided, their not understanding makes it worse, like you’re hurting a child. I have to be careful, Clare thought, not to become a very bad person.

As she sat at her desk at school that morning, Clare opened her notebook and wrote: W. H. A. T. E. V. E. R. If nothing mattered to you, nothing could change you into someone terrible and cruel. Then, Clare turned to a clean sheet and began a list: Miss Havisham, Aunt Sponge and Aunt Spiker, Miss Minchin, Uriah Heep, Voldemort, Snape. People who had let life make them hateful. The characters no one wanted to be.

Clare
did not make a list of the things she had lost. If she had been able to face making such a list, she would have left off it the most obvious, the most searing losses. Mother, for example, would have been excluded because that word at the top of that list would have been a black hole, sucking everything into it and leaving no light to see by. She would have focused on daily, livable losses, would maybe have narrowed the list itself to something like “Lost Things I Hadn’t Even Realized I Had.” Near the top of this list would have been silence. Or maybe not silence, but that reliable quiet in which she, her mother, her house and everything in it had hung suspended every night of her life. After she’d gotten too old for lullabies, this quiet itself was her lullaby.

In her new life, night became a time for listening, for lying awake or half-awake, awaiting the bang of pans, the opening and shutting of doors, music playing, the creaking of floorboards as someone walked through a part of the house where she should not have been walking doing something she should not have been doing. “Whatever” didn’t work at night. At night, for Clare, bereft of quiet, everything mattered.

One night, a little over a week after Clare had sat in Lorelei’s Down Home planning out her days, she woke up not knowing what she’d heard or that she’d heard anything at all but knowing with certainty that there was a stranger in her house. Bleakly, without considering her options, Clare got out of bed, walked into the hallway, and then turned back to get her telephone. If the person were dangerous, she could call the police; quite apart from this was her need to hold a familiar object in her hands so that she wouldn’t be alone.

As she walked slowly down the stairs, avoiding almost automatically the creakiest spots, the faint scraps of sound began stitching themselves into a fabric. Nothing in Clare’s experience had taught her to recognize what she was hearing, but she believed she knew exactly what the sounds meant. She could have turned around then, gone back to her room, but she wanted to be brave. It’s better to know, she thought, to know and then, knowing, decide what to do next. “How bad is it?” sick people asked. “How long do I have?”

Even though Clare expected to see what she saw, it took a few seconds for her to understand. The letter L, her first thought, an L made of people’s bodies. Or a T, upside down. Her mother’s long hair dark against her white back, swaying as she rocked. A sound that wasn’t laughing and wasn’t weeping. The man lying under her, stretched out. Moonlight coming in through the windows, drawing a long shadow down the side of the man’s muscular thigh, shining on the man’s face. It was his face that struck Clare, struck her so that she vibrated like a struck bell and felt sick. The surfer from the Cohens’ rooftop, the one who had waved to her. Somehow, her recognizing him made what she saw worse and more real. Until then, she’d been OK; recognizing him made her unable to stand it.

They didn’t see her. She reeled away, heading straight for the back door. Her mother’s fur coat, a coat that had once belonged to her grandmother, hung on the coat stand next to the door and she grabbed it on her way out. Outside, the air was cold and smelled like snow, but the sky was clear. Clare dropped the telephone, put the coat on, and stared at her yard—at the box hedge, at the swing hanging from the oak tree, and finally, blankly, at the high, burning white moon. She didn’t cry, just sat on the ground like a squirrel or a raccoon in her fur coat. With her eyes open and her back against a tree, Clare waited for morning.

If
you’ve ever considered having a conversation about your sex life in a South Philadelphia cheese shop, stop that thought in its tracks right now and wring its scrawny, little neck.

Why?

I’ll tell you why, you know I will. But first I should say that I have nothing against such cheese shops, in general. In fact, I love one particular South Philadelphia cheese shop—the very one that figures into this story—with a love so exalted and sweet that the place has shown up more than once in my dreams. A couple of years ago, when I succumbed to overwhelming peer and societal pressure and took a yoga class, the instructor asked us to begin by imagining ourselves in a beloved, familiar place. While others were probably mentally transported to the seashore or their grandparents’ farm or their childhood tree house, I settled in among the wheels of Parmigiano Reggiano, the semisoft wedges of Bel Paese, the gorgeous white fists of Mozzarella di Bufala, and the giant provolones dangling from the ceiling like punching bags.

It’s not that I am on familial terms with the people who work there. I can’t keep them all straight, to tell you the truth, as there seem to be a great many of them in rotation, all loosely or closely related to one another, all equally nice. They talk about cheese—and not just cheese, but olives, charcuterie, pâté and so forth, with that combination of offhandedness and passion more commonly associated with reference librarians. (“We all know
The American Heritage Dictionary of Idioms,
but have you tried
Brewer’s Phrase and Fable, Millennium Edition
? Well, hold on to your hat; you’re in for the ride of your life!”). It’s the plenty of the place that speaks to me, and the language—
artisan, ash-coated, washed rind,
—and the unlikeliness of it all. From someone’s hands in France, Wisconsin, Italy, Argentina, Ireland, Greece, to this single, singular, well-lit store on South 9th and to me, if I can afford it. My head knows this to be true of many stores, that it’s the result of making phone calls, placing orders, but in this particular store, my heart sees only serendipity. In this store, I believe in luck.

Except, this time, the day after
Date Seven,
I’m unlucky enough to enter the store with Linny, who decides in her maddening Linny way to pick up the thread of a conversation we’d started two streets back, the thread she’d dropped in order to rush into a shop and buy a neon green watch cap right off a window mannequin’s head. The mannequin looked glad to be rid of it.

Anyway. For reasons that will soon become clear to you, I prefer to tell this story in the third person, thus keeping as much distance as possible between it and me. Here we go. The cheese store on a quiet afternoon. Two middle-aged men behind the counter. Linny and Cornelia enter. And boom:

“So, I’m sorry sex with Martin was no good,” chirrups Linny.

The middle-aged men smile sympathetically at Cornelia.

Cornelia hisses, “The sex wasn’t ‘no good.’”

Middle-Aged Man Number One says, “Any good. The sex wasn’t
any
good.”

Cornelia protests, not shrilly (not yet), “The sex was fine!”

An ample elderly woman, possibly the mother of the aforementioned men, drifts in from the back of the store to smile sympathetically at Cornelia.

“‘Fine?’ Around here, we call that damning with faint praise,” says Middle-Aged Man Number Two.

“You do?” says Linny, impressed.

“Fine’s not exactly what I meant,” Cornelia tries to insert. No one notices.

“He didn’t make that up!” the ample woman roars, poking Middle-Aged Man Number Two in the chest with her finger, as though he’d been an incorrigible plagiarist for years and she couldn’t stand by and watch it a second longer.

Shrewdly seizing the opportunity to turn the conversation away from her sex life and her grammar usage, Cornelia jumps in. “Shakespeare?”

“Pope,” Middle-aged Man Number One corrects, gently, his voice heavy with sympathy, almost sorrowful. She can’t read, she can’t speak, and she can’t have sex, is what he’s thinking.

The ample woman flaps two circular slices of
sopressaeta
at Linny and Cornelia. Linny takes hers, breathes its aroma for a second, and then pops it into her mouth. Suck-up, Cornelia thinks, and she starts to shake her head, but the ample woman’s eyebrows shoot up and Cornelia doesn’t wait for the emotion—anger or pain, she can’t tell which—to travel down the woman’s face. She takes; she eats.

“Feel better?” the ample woman asks her.

“Yes. No. I mean, I couldn’t feel better. I really mean, why would I feel ‘better’? Wait, what I’m saying is, I’m perfect. I feel perfect!” and now Cornelia is shrill, as you knew she would be, given time. Not shrill by nature; she’s been driven to it, you have to admit, by a relentless onslaught of pity and understanding.

“That’s it, then, for Martin, I guess,” says Linny with a sigh.

Apart from Cornelia, everyone in the store, perhaps everyone on the sidewalk outside the store, perhaps everyone in the entire city nods, knowingly.

“No, that’s not it. Of course that’s not it!” How did this happen to me? Cornelia thinks. She feels like the subject of her sex life is a puppy or a ferret, something she’d never in her right mind let off its leash, but which is now somehow running amok among total strangers. Pushed to the edge, she throws decorum to the four winds. Her voice blasts through the shop like a foghorn, only higher. “It was the first time! Just because there weren’t fireworks the first time doesn’t mean there will never be fireworks. We’re human; we’re adults; we teach each other; we communicate; fireworks don’t just go off, wham-bang; fireworks
evolve
!”

Awestruck by the utter, asinine nonsense of this metaphor, everyone is still. Into the stillness, the ample woman drops the word “Wrong.” Then she says it again. “Wrong.”

“Oh, jeez, now she’ll start in about her sexual history,” moans Middle-Aged Man Number One.

“I’m not talking about my sexual history, although I could. Fireworks! I’ve known fireworks. I’m talking about science.”

“Science?” says Linny.

“Pheromones.” The woman turns to Cornelia. “The chemicals in his body call out. The chemicals in your body answer. It either happens or it doesn’t.”

On top of being dumb, Cornelia is dumbfounded. The woman turns to Linny.

“She’s never heard of pheromones?”

“I’ve heard of pheromones,” whines Cornelia. She is pathetic beyond all imagining.

“Cornelia’s not a science person,” explains Linny to the ample woman. “Her sister Ollie, she’s the scientist in the family. Some kind of star geneticist. Beautiful, too. Tall. And you should see her husband.”

The ample woman clasps her hands together and nods, as though this explains a lot, which it probably does, but that’s another story and none of her business, goddammit. And, not to put too fine a point on it, but Cornelia would not call five foot six “tall.”

“For your information, I got excellent grades in science! All through high school, excellent grades!” the hapless Cornelia bleats.

This is why you don’t discuss your sex life in a cheese store in South Philadelphia. Because it can only end one way: with you standing in the middle of the shop, thirty-one years old, head thrown back, screeching about your report card at the top of your lungs.

On
the way back to my apartment, Linny and I stopped, as we always did, outside the playground at 11th and Lombard to watch the children through the fence. It was December and heading toward evening, but the kids who were there didn’t seem to notice the cold. They ran around with open coats and climbed all over the jungle gym, mittenless. I was wearing leather gloves and holding a paper cup of hot coffee but, all on their own, my palms remembered the feeling, the burn of the metal monkey bars under them, the numbness moving outward to my fingertips. I watched one kid cry as his mother peeled him off the pole he clung to. He wanted to keep playing; he didn’t want to go home, and I remembered that, too.

“Remember that?” said Linny, “That feeling of never wanting to stop even when you were freezing cold? Where do you think that feeling goes?”

She always does that, says the thing I’m thinking. I wanted to tell her about after sledding, how Cam, Toby, Ollie, and I, and sometimes our friends Star and Teo, too, would sit on the mudroom floor soaking wet, taking off our boots, and how it wasn’t until our feet and hands started to hurt with that bad, coming-back-to-life hurt that we’d realize we’d been cold at all. But I was punishing Linny for the cheese shop, so I just shrugged.

“You can’t stay mad at me, Cornelia. You know you never can, so why bother trying?”

I didn’t say anything. We kept watching the kids. One boy, three years old or so, in a lime green parka and a ridiculous, multicolored fleece jester’s hat was still swinging. His mother was pushing him, and he was singing, unaccountably but with great brio, “Gonna lay down my sword and shield, down by the riverside, down by the riverside, down by the riverside.” I’ll take him, I thought.

“I’ll take that one,” said Linny, pointing to the boy, “But only if the hat comes with him.” I looked at her.

“It’s not that I can’t stay mad at you,” I told her, “it’s that I can’t
get
mad at you. If I could ever get mad at you, I’d definitely be able to stay that way. Just so you know.”

We kept walking, “I ain’t gonna study war no moooore!” sailing over our heads like a streamer.

It
wasn’t that the sex was bad. It really wasn’t. It’s that the evening was so exquisite, so without flaw in every other regard that the sex should have been a revelation; it should have thrown us over the moon. And it didn’t—not quite.

When I told Linny this, back in my apartment, she’d said, “So you’re saying that the only thing missing from a night of otherwise perfect, unbelievable sex was perfect, unbelievable sex.”

In the allegory of my life, I can never decide if Linny is Snark or Truth.

“That’s not what I’m saying at all. You should have seen the dinner he made. The flowers on the table. The way the lights came in through the window. If you could have seen his face when he looked at me. And heard the things he said, not just before, but after. As a matter of fact, after was great. I loved after, and you know how awkward after can be.” I talked; then I stopped talking.

In the allegory of my life, if Snark and Truth turned out to be the same character, well, it would not surprise me a bit.

I’m
a fan of suggestion, obliquity, discretion, the cut to the morning after, the camera’s eye turning upward, outward—to the sky, to the cuckoo clock over the bed, to the rushing river, away. Forget those slick bodies tangled on the floor or grappling on kitchen tables. Sexy is Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed talking into the same telephone receiver, their anger tipping reluctantly over into desire, the desire as much in the distance separating their two mouths as in their proximity to each other. What I’m saying is, you’re not getting details—not detailed details anyway. If you’re anything like I am and, like most people, I assume most people are like I am, this is just fine with you.

That being said and at the risk of your believing me insane or at least supremely weird, I’ll tell you how I think of
Date Seven,
how it’s parsed out and catalogued in my memory. Bullets, they call them, right? Here are the bullets:

 

• Compliment One
  
• Almost
  Rear Window
  
• Notorious
  
• Not
  Casablanca
  
• Compliment Two
  
• Food
  
• Sleep/No Sleep
  

 

Compliment One: It didn’t get me into bed, if that’s what you’re thinking. Not because I’m not susceptible to flattery; I am, at least to the right sort of flattery, and this was very much the right sort. But because, precompliment—very precompliment, in fact—as soon as Martin had asked me to dinner at his apartment three days prior to the night in question, the going-to-bed part felt inevitable. We both knew it would happen, and we both knew that we both knew it would happen, but we didn’t mention or even hint at the possibility of its happening, which we both appreciated.

His apartment was perfection—no surprise there. “A bachelor pad,” he’d warned me, but its only bachelor-pad quality was its complete consistency. Every piece of furniture from the chaise to the sofa to the dining room chairs, and every other item in it—lamps, plates, martini shaker, pepper grinder—was clean, curvaceous, ingeniously put-together. My own apartment was uneven, overfull, raggedy in patches, but it grew around me organically, by accretion, like the shell of a chambered nautilus. I loved it and everything in it—loved every specific item with a specific love. But nine-and-a-half people out of ten would certainly prefer Martin’s ripped-from-a-magazine décor, its having so obviously lived as a vision in some visionary designer’s head before it became an actual living environ. And even I, tiny half-person clinging stubbornly to my funny, messy, personal idea of home, enjoyed the sensation of being a tiny, half movie-star on Martin’s elegant set.

Martin made drinks while I stood by a long window overlooking Rittenhouse Square, now aglimmer with Christmas lights, distance turning it into an underwater city. On a table next to the window, an orchid plant with a single white flower glowed.

“I bought the view, really,” said Martin. He handed me a cold shimmering martini in a cool shimmering glass. I looked at him as he looked out the window.

“The agent was waxing poetic about moldings and noiseless dishwashers in one of the most amazing displays of eloquence I’d ever heard. Scripted, probably, but it seemed completely extemporaneous. There was a whole stanza, I think, on the parquet floor, beautifully delivered. Hand gestures and everything. But all I did was go from window to window, looking out.” His voice was like music, low and warm. An oboe, maybe, or a French horn.