Clare didn’t know what to say next, but it turned out not to matter because at that moment, she happened to glance over toward the café entrance and standing there, tall and lean, in a plain dark blue peacoat and duck boots—not a costume at all—was the handsomest man Clare had ever seen. He had a light brown face, he needed a haircut, and even from all the way across the room, Clare could see that his eyes were bottle green.
“Oh!” Clare gasped. Linny turned to look.
“Well, look who’s here,” she said. “Suddenly, I’m feeling starry-eyed myself.”
The man looked in the direction of the coffee bar. He smiled.
And then, above the noise of the café, a voice rang out, joyfully singing a tune Clare recognized right away. It was Cornelia’s voice: “Taaayyyyo! Tay-ay-ay-yo-oh!”
A number of people, Linny and Clare included, joined in. “Daylight come and me wanna go home.”
The man standing in the door ducked his head a little, shyly, smiling again. Again, Clare gasped. Then, as the other people in the café went back to their conversations, the man walked across the room to the coffee bar, and Cornelia stepped out from behind it, and the two of them hugged so hard, Cornelia was lifted right off the ground.
13
Cornelia
I’d never been so happy to see anyone in my life. I know that sounds dramatic, but it’s a fact.
The shock of the new. I like it; you like it. There’s no jolt like a new jolt. But, I’m an even bigger fan of the shock of recognition, and when Teo walked through the door of the café, I’d had my fill of newness; newness was old-hat. I wanted my pleasures as familiar as they come, and, for me, they don’t come much more familiar than Teo. Even though I hadn’t thought about him in quite some time, as soon as I saw him, in that coat he’s had for eons and with his hair falling in his eyes, I realized that no one else would do. No one but Mateo Sandoval. Teo. Taaayyyyo. My brother-in-law. A little piece of home.
And, when I think about it, I don’t mean actually that I hadn’t thought about him in quite some time. Instead, I mean that I hadn’t thought about him directly in quite some time. Because he is not one of the myriad people I’ve known in my life or continue to know who enter my mind, stay awhile, and leave. He’s just in there, like Linny or my mother or father or siblings. So long ago I don’t know how long ago, Teo took up permanent residence.
Even “brother-in-law” sounded wrong to me, and not just because his and Ollie’s elopement two years earlier had come utterly out of the clear blue sky and thrown us all into confusion, but also because I’d known him for so many years before he became my brother-in-law. His family moved down the road from mine when I was four and Teo was seven. Like my father, his father was a doctor. They still played golf together. And our mothers were best friends, fellow garden-clubbers, tennis partners, and co-pillars of the community—despite the fact that, unlike my mother, who is definitely a pretty woman, Teo’s mother, Ingrid, was and remains a Swedish blond bombshell whom you’d think would fit in better at the Cannes film festival on the arm of a star director twenty years her junior than at a Junior League meeting in a twinset from Talbots.
Teo and Estrella (his younger sister, whom we all call Star—a name that suits her to a T) and Ollie, Cam, Toby, and I lived our childhoods in and out of each other’s houses, yards, and even beds, in a purely nonsexual way. (Although Teo did give me my first kiss for the simple reason that I was fourteen years old and desperately in need of being kissed, after which I thanked him and we went back to pounding each other and the rest of the neighborhood kids with snowballs.) “Brother-in-law” didn’t scratch the surface. More like brother-in-arms. Or just brother. Whatever the title, I loved the guy.
Loved not, apparently, in the same way my sister, Ollie, loved him, although not one person in their mutual acquaintance could have guessed this fact. When they showed up together at our house in Virginia one Christmas morning, married, my dad demanded to see the marriage license before he’d believe them. “Since when are you even in love?” blurted Cam, who is a dear boy, though distinctly lacking in subtlety—a question that made Ollie laugh and Teo look sheepish, but one that neither of them answered, although we all were dying to know.
But once the two families got over the shock, some of us rejoiced mightily at the union of the two nice, bright, successful young people and of the two nice, bright, successful families, and others of us all but forgot about it, since the man in question had seemed like a member of our family forever and since the two lovebirds were not particularly lovey-dovey around us and seemed to relate to each other in pretty much the same way they always had.
As far as I could tell, the only two differences were that they slept in the same room at my family’s house and, a couple days after Christmas, left together, returning to Teo’s Park Slope apartment which was now Teo’s and Ollie’s Park Slope apartment, even though she stayed out at her place near the lab when she was working.
But when I saw Teo standing in the café, I didn’t think about Ollie or our families or any of that. In fact, I didn’t think much at all; I just felt, and what I felt was glad.
I pulled Teo across the room, dragged another chair up to our table, and made some fluttery motions with my fingers in the air to Jacques to indicate that he should carry on without me, as I’ve found that people respond better to being bossed around when their boss appears vaguely idiotic while bossing them.
“You’re looking wonderful, Teo,” Linny said, a bit breathlessly. “I mean, hi, Teo. You’re looking—wonderful.”
Teo is the only man in the universe who can render semi-incoherent my otherwise inexorably coherent friend Linny. She claims that Teo is the most beautiful human alive, that there should be a law against being so beautiful, that Teo glows with an unearthly, possibly radioactive light, that beauty alone will win Teo a place at the right hand of God. I am not making these statements up. Linny uttered them and other similarly hyperbolic utterances after seeing Teo on various occasions and, as she spoke each time, her face shone with the kind of divine ecstasy that had surely transfigured Sir Galahad’s features when he’d achieved the Holy Grail.
“Outbreeding” is how my sister, Ollie, sentimental fool, explained his appearance, referring to Teo’s being the product of a Swedish mother and a Filipino father—a genetic combination that in all likelihood also makes him less vulnerable to diseases like Alzheimer’s and malaria. (OK, so maybe I’m not remembering what she said exactly right, but it was something like that.)
While I knew that Linny’s response to Teo verged on the insane, I also knew that he was handsome. But I knew it the same way I know George Washington was the first president of the United States. I did not doubt it, but beauty is something you know objectively and also something you experience, and I just didn’t experience Teo as beautiful. Linny maintained that I saw Teo the way certain autistic people see everyone, as a collection of separate features. She claimed I saw the sum of his parts and not his whole, a whole that turns intelligent women—not all intelligent women, but it isn’t just Linny—into howling lunatics. Maybe she was right. When I saw him, I saw a quiet, green-eyed man with messy hair whose personal style had not evolved much since his prep-school days, if it had evolved at all. But mostly, what I saw was Teo—just the regular, standard-issue Teo. Instead of a being drenched in celestial light, I still saw the kid who spent an entire sweltering summer in a Spider-Man costume, pretending to stick to walls.
“It’s good to see you, too, Linny,” said Teo, apparently oblivious to the fact that he was flapping the unflappable Linny. Even if he’d noticed, it wouldn’t have made much difference. The only effect Teo’s effect on women like Linny seemed to have on him was embarrassment, which no doubt only served to make him more adorable to them. A cycle too silly to even call vicious.
“Well, thanks, Teo,” Linny bubbled, giving her hair a small, unconscious fluff.
“And I don’t think I’ve had the pleasure of meeting you befor
e,” said Teo to Clare. He said it in a natural way, not in a manner designed to charm and flatter, but when I saw Clare blush, I saw that charmed and flattered she certainly was. In fact, it was glaringly obvious that Clare had been bitten by Linny’s bug, and how.
“Clare, this is my brother-in-law, Teo. Teo, this is Clare,” I said. Clare couldn’t speak, but nodded with great and tremendous vigor, as if to verify that—yes, I was right! She was Clare!
“Let’s give these two a minute to get their bearings, Teo. It’ll help if you refrain from smiling at them,” I said. “So tell me what brings you to my fair city.”
“A medical conference. An amazingly boring medical conference. I was sitting there listening to some amazingly boring lecture, and I felt my bones starting to petrify. So, I ducked out to visit my friend Cornelia,” said Teo.
“Good decision. And where’s the DNA goddess? Out ruthlessly hunting down the Nobel Prize like a dog?” I asked, and I may have been mistaken, but I thought I saw Teo flinch, ever so slightly. It occurred to me that maybe my flippant attitude toward his wife might pain him, which was the last thing I wanted. He’s in love with her, I reminded myself. I should be able to understand that, as I’d spent much of my life being in love with her too.
“Sort of. I guess,” he said, with a wry smile. “She’s away right now, doing some research. Won’t be back for a while.”
“What about Christmas?” asked Clare, having rejoined us on planet Earth and sounding worried.
“Overachieving types like Teo, Ollie, and myself exist on a plane above what you people call the ‘holiday season,’” said Linny, having also rejoined us on planet Earth and sounding snarky.
“Yeah, well, Ollie does work pretty hard,” said Teo. Then he perked up. “Hey, Cornelia, remember that holiday season you made the whole neighborhood watch It’s a Wonderful Life every day for—wait—was it a month?”
“Don’t be silly,” I said.
“At least a month,” said Teo. He turned to Clare. “You’re lucky you weren’t born yet, Clare. She would drag children still in diapers out of their warm homes by force and plunk them in front of the television. It was brutal.”
Clare laughed—a gorgeous sound.
“I’ve only known her a day, and she’s already making a list of movies for me to watch,” said Clare, laughing again.
“Great, now you’ve got her in cahoots against me.” I reached over and gave Teo a pinch.
“It’s good for her, don’t you think?” Teo asked Clare. “Being ca-hooted against?”
“I think so,” said Clare, nodding sagely.
“So what are your Christmas plans?” I asked Teo, and right away, I knew I’d made a mistake.
“Don’t have any. My parents are spending Christmas with Star in London. Ollie and I had talked about going to your parents’ house, but once this research thing came up, I decided not to make the trip without her. I might go down for a few days in January. What about you? Who are you spending Christmas with?” We’d all been intent on keeping things light, on keeping Clare smiling her sweet smile, but it was bound to come along sooner or later, a question bearing a freightload of other questions, all requiring heavy, difficult answers.
“Well, Teo,” I could have said. “I didn’t plan a trip home because I had an inkling my emotionally distant boyfriend had a romantic getaway up his sleeve, during which I hoped to bridge said emotional distance, but then his daughter whom I didn’t know existed and whom had just been abandoned by her mother showed up at the café yesterday and is sitting right here, in all her misery and loveliness, so what we’re doing for Christmas now is anybody’s guess.” But I didn’t say this, of course. I didn’t say anything. No one said anything. Clare dropped her gaze to the center of the table, then to her lap.
Linny looked around the table. She stood up. “Excuse me,” she said. “I need to see a man about a shirt.” Before walking away, she rested her hand on the top of Clare’s head. Linny wasn’t bailing out on us, I knew that. I’d filled her in on enough of Clare’s story for her to know that the story, what little I knew of it, was full of sorrow, and, if it—or parts of it—were going to get told here in a crowded café, the smaller the audience, the better. Linny walked in the direction of Hayes, calling, “Halliburton!”
Clare lifted her eyes, and they met mine. “His name is Hayes,” Clare said in a flat voice.
Without meaning to, I sighed. “I know,” I said to Clare. It’s a cliché to say that the air was thick with all our unsaid words, but sometimes, clichés speak truth. I was finding it difficult to breathe.
“Clare,” said Teo softly, “watch.” And he began to send a quarter rolling and flashing over and between the fingers of one hand, then the fingers of the other, back and forth. It was a trick I’d seen him do before, seen other people do too, although usually just with one hand, and I knew it wasn’t the hardest trick in the world. But Teo did it exceptionally well, so that the quarter rippled like water over his long fingers. If you were a worn-out, hurting child, the trick might look like a miracle.
Clare’s eyes widened. “Can you teach me?” she almost whispered and, even though nothing had been explained, the air in the room suddenly felt like ordinary air.
They worked at it for ten minutes, and Clare wasn’t really getting it, but that didn’t matter, because with each minute she was looking more like an eleven-year-old child. I left to check on Jacques, and when I got back, Teo was saying, “There are two stages. First, you have to learn how to do it. And second, you have to forget how to do it and just do it. Turn off your brain and trust your hands.” Clare nodded, and I could tell she was writing this down in her head, word for word.
Then Clare did an amazing thing: She put the quarter between her two palms, clasped her hands together tightly with the quarter inside, and said, “Teo, have you ever known anyone who went crazy?”
It was a surprising question, but Teo didn’t look especially surprised, just thoughtful. “Yes, I guess I have.”
“Did they ever get better?” asked Clare.
“They did. The ones I knew did. The ones I knew were themselves for a long time, and then they started to change. They got confused or started to forget things, and they would behave in ways you’d never expect. Sometimes, they were even scary.”
“They stopped being themselves,” said Clare. She never took her eyes from Teo’s face. He never looked away either.
“Well, no, not really, although it seemed that way. They still carried inside all of what made them themselves and nobody else. They had lived lives and loved people, and all that was in there somewhere.”
“Do you really think they still loved the people they’d loved when they were well?” asked Clare.
“I really do. They may not have been able to get to the love very easily, and they may not have acted all the ways the love would usually make them act, but the love didn’t disappear. No way. What happened to the people I knew was that the delicate chemicals in their brains got thrown off balance, so that there was too much of one thing and not enough of another.”
“Like being sick?”
“Exactly like being sick. And medicine and good, listening doctors helped them get well.”
“Does everyone get well?”
Teo hesitated.
“Not everyone. But a lot of people do. And scientists are learning more all the time about how to make even the sickest people better.” In Teo’s calm, even voice, the answer wasn’t a howling wilderness. I watched Clare pass through it and emerge on the other end, whole. Then she set the quarter down and took hold of the table’s edge with both hands.
“My mother is sick like that. She started changing in the beginning of October. It was just the two of us in our house, and I watched her get worse and worse. She would buy all kinds of strange things, and she took me out of school for a day for no reason and, one time, she gave me wine to drink.” I listened to Clare, astonished. She had the most expressive face I’d ever seen, and what w
as in those dark eyes, in the set of her jaw, and across her smooth forehead was unmistakable: trust. I’d seen a flicker of it earlier, when Clare told me about Barcelona. This was no flicker, but a steadfast, shining lantern of trust, shining right at Teo. Under other circumstances, I might have felt slighted—why Teo, why not me?—but this was far too important. Good choice, Clare, I thought, good girl.
“That must have been hard,” said Teo, and Clare nodded, her eyes glazing with tears. No storm came, though, no breakdown. The tears didn’t even fall.
“She stopped taking care of me. She’d always taken great, great care of me, and she stopped. But she didn’t mean to. That’s why I had to keep everyone from finding out she was sick.”
“Because you were afraid people wouldn’t understand? That she might get in trouble?”
Clare nodded.
“She picked me up at school on the last day before vacation, and she was different again. Different from the way she’d been different before. She cried so much, and told me she was sorry. And then she dropped me off by the side of the road. That’s why I’m here.”
“Is Cornelia your mother’s friend?” Teo asked.
“No, her father is my…,” I began. I paused, rifling through the standard labels, rifling through and discarding. Suddenly, all those words felt broad and clumsy, seemed to either carry too much weight or too little. I thought, briefly, of my personal favorite of the Piers Plowman allegorical character names: Tom-True-Tongue-Tell-Me-No-Tales-Nor-Lies-For-To-Laugh-At-For-I-Loved-Them-Never. Exactly the kind of precise nomenclature I needed, but before I came close to piecing anything together, Clare jumped in.
“Boyfriend. Cornelia’s my father’s girlfriend,” said Clare.
“I see,” said Teo but, of course, he didn’t see, not the whole complicated picture, and I fought the urge to explain. Why did I want to explain to Teo what didn’t even make sense to me, yet? I’m not sure, but I’d sat at this table and witnessed two people being as brave and honest as people ever are. Maybe I wanted to be brave and honest too. For now, though, I kept my unpeaceable peace.