I felt suddenly weary, looking at Phaedra and Allegra and the shining black pram. And if a woman weighing less than ninety pounds can be said to heave herself, I heaved myself out of my seat and lugged myself back to my spot behind the bar.
All of which is meant to demonstrate the ordinariness of the day and how the ordinariness was even taking on shades of dreariness and futility. Because you have to understand what my life was like in the “before” in order to see just how much it changed in the “after.” Ordinary, ordinary. Except that—and I honestly believe this, Linny’s pooh-poohing of movie moments notwithstanding—just before, a minute before the café door opened one more time, the ordinary day turned itself up a notch, in preparation.
The light falling through the high, arched windows went from mellow to brilliant, turning the old copper of the espresso machine to pure gold. And the music—Sarah Vaughan, whom I worship, singing George and Ira, whom I worship—was suddenly floating and dipping like some kind of bird in the clear space above the cigarette smoke and chitchat. The coffee smelled sublime, the flowers I’d bought that morning pierced the air with their blueness, the coffee cups lost their chips and glowed eggshell-thin, and standing in my red sweater and vintage suede skirt, my boots solidly on the floor, I felt almost tall.
The door of Café Dora opened, and Cary Grant walked in.
If you haven’t seen The Philadelphia Story, stop what you are doing, rent it, and watch it. It’s probably overstating the point to say that until you watch it, you will have been living a partial and colorless life. However, it is definitely on the list of perfect things. You know what I mean, the list that includes the starry sky over the desert, grilled cheese sandwiches, The Great Gatsby, the Chrysler building, Ella Fitzgerald singing “It Don’t Mean a Thing (If You Ain’t Got That Swing),” white peonies, and those little sketches of hands by Leonardo da Vinci.
If you have seen it, then you know there’s a moment when Katharine Hepburn as Tracy Lord steps from a poolside cabana. She’s got a straight white dream of a dress hanging from her tiny collarbones, a dress fluted and precise as a Greek column but light and full of the motion of smoke. A paradox of a dress, a marriage of opposites that just makes your teeth hurt it’s so exactly right.
I was fourteen when I first saw it. It was three days before Christmas, which in my family’s house meant, means, and will always mean, Yuletide sensory overload: every room stuffed to the gills with garland and holly, the whole place booming with Johnny Mathis, and a monstrosity of a tree towering in the living room, weighed down with ornaments of every description, including dozens defying description that my brothers, sister, and I had made in school over the years.
Fourteen was not a good year for me. I was the latest of late bloomers, of course, about two feet high and scrawny as a cat, still shopping in the children’s department, profoundly allergic to every member of my family, and convinced that nothing could make me happy.
But then my grouchy channel-surfing landed me in the middle of a black-and-white heaven: Tracy, the dress.
I was so struck, I forgot how to swallow and began to truly asphyxiate on a sip of 7-Up. And when, a little later, Tracy unfastened the belt from her willow waist and slipped her faultlessly formed self out of that faultlessly formed garment, I stood up and yelled, “Holy shit, that’s her bathing suit cover-up!” which my father, who was sitting on the floor fastening—no joke—jingle bells to the collars of our cats, did not appreciate.
I turned every atom of myself over to the rest of the movie. People must’ve gone tearing through the room, because people always did go tearing through rooms, especially my brothers Cam and Toby, who were eight and nine at the time. But a volcano could have begun spewing molten rock inches away from me, and I would not have noticed. I sat. I watched. If a girl could sling a poem over her swimwear as though it were an old T-shirt, what else might be possible?
I slid my fingers over my face, feeling for Tracy’s winged cheekbones. And when Dexter (Cary Grant) took Tracy to task, saying, “You’ll never be a first-rate woman or a first-rate human being until you have some regard for human frailty,” I recognized it as wisdom and wondered whether I had it, that kind of regard, and just how to get it if I didn’t.
In college, I took a film studies class subtitled something like “Turning the Formula on Its Head” in which the professor talked about the trick The Philadelphia Story pulls off. It should never have worked: creating a fantastic love scene between two characters whom you know are not in love with each other, getting you somehow to root for them wholeheartedly during the scene, but then to feel completely satisfied when they end up with other people.
Before you get the wrong impression, you should know that I’m not and never was one of those film people, the kind who argue into the wee hours about the auteur theory and whether Spielberg is the new Capra, or whether John Huston impacts, in unseen ways, every second of American life. I don’t know from camera angles, and I don’t have an encyclopedic knowledge of pre–World War II German cinema, but I fell a little in love with the film professor when he looked upon us with shining eyes and proclaimed, “No, it should not work. But work it does!” because he was so passionate and right.
When I heard Mike (Jimmy Stewart) say to Tracy in that tender, marveling voice, “No, you’re made out of flesh and blood. That’s the blank, unholy surprise of it. You’re the golden girl, Tracy,” I clasped my hands under my pointy chin, prayed that she would run away with him, and swore to God that someday a man would say those words in that voice to me or else I would die. But then, at the movie’s end, my father heard cheering and left water running in the sink to watch his lately distant, disaffected teenage daughter bang her fists on the arms of her chair and turn to him crying, “with a face as open as a flower” (my dad’s own improbable words), saying breathlessly, “She’s marrying Dexter, Daddy.”
I’ll admit it. I’ve always been more than a little proud of myself for having been fourteen and deeply benighted about almost everything, but having had the sense to recognize what is surely a universal truth: Jimmy Stewart is always and indisputably the best man in the world, unless Cary Grant should happen to show up.
His name was Martin Grace. An excellent name, which, you may have noticed, shares all but three letters with “Cary Grant.” Of course, if you’re not a freak of nature, you probably didn’t notice, and you’ll be relieved to know that it didn’t even spring to my mind right away. It was later, as I lay in bed that night, that I figured it out, mentally crossing out letters with an imaginary pencil, concentrating pretty hard, but sort of affecting an offhand, semi-interested attitude about it, cocking my head casually on the pillow, even though there was no one in the room to see me.
Truth be told, I’m a little superstitious about names. Back in college, I dated an enormous, blond, dumb fraternity boy from Baton Rouge with a voice like a foghorn purely on the strength of his being named William Powell, whom everyone knows from the Thin Man movies, but who is even better in Libeled Lady and is one of those men whose handsomeness you believe in completely even though you know it doesn’t exist.
My mother met the boy and knew instantly what I was up to. “Your nose looks like Myrna Loy’s,” she’d said. “Be satisfied with that.” Even so, I didn’t ditch Bill until a few nights later when I stood in his Georgian-mansion-turned-dank-cave of a frat house and watched Bill dancing shirtless on a tabletop, his bare, unfortunate belly pulsating like an anguished jellyfish. The bellyfish pulsated, and William Powell, with a delicate shrug, chose that moment to detach himself from Bill forever and slip out into the honeysuckle-scented night.
Slippery things, names. Still: Martin Grace. Good. Very good.
He’d stood dark-eyed and half-smiling in the doorway. Tall. Suit, hair, jawline all flawlessly cut. “Imperially slim,” is the phrase that jumped out of my fourth-grade reading book into my head. But the man in that poem ended up shooting himself, I remembered later, while this man, my man, clearly
had only a seamless, sophisticated, well-shod life ahead of him. I’m exaggerating, but not much, when I say that as he walked to the counter—walked to me—the dogs, chess players, prams, etcetera parted before him like the Red Sea.
“Hello,” he said, and his voice wasn’t mellifluous or stentorian or melting or sonorous but was nonetheless unmistakably leading-man. As you knew he would, he had a dimple in his chin, and for a wild second or two I considered touching it and asking him how he shaved in there, because if you’re going to rip someone off it might as well be Audrey Hepburn. I didn’t, but I distinctly felt the dimple impress itself upon my unconscious, if such a thing is possible.
“Hi” is what I said.
“A coffee, please. Black.” And you could just tell that’s really what he liked and didn’t sense a self-conscious backstory involving a Marlboro Man masculinity obsession trailing like a long, stupid tail behind the request.
When I handed him his coffee, I let my hand linger on it an extra beat, so that it was still there when he reached for it. I like to pretend to myself that the cup became a little conduit and that our electricity shook it. Anyway, coffee spilled on my hand and I yelped and pressed it to my mouth like a two-year-old.
He looked at me with real concern and said, “I should be kept in a cage.”
“Occupational hazard.” I shrugged. “It’s fine.”
“It’s fine? Really? Because if it’s not, you have to tell me so I can go drown myself in the Delaware.”
“Don’t be silly,” I said. “The Schuykill’s closer.”
“The Delaware’s deeper. I don’t have the guts to drown myself in shallow water, even for you.”
Even for you, even for you! my heart sang.
“Except,” he said.
“Except what?” I snapped, snappily.
“Except it’ll have to be the Thames. I leave for London in two hours.”
This might not sound so earth-shattering to you, so fabulously clever or romantic, but trust me when I tell you that it was. Right from the start, we just had a cadence, an intuitive rhythm that I might possibly compare to the sixth sense that jazz musicians sometimes have when they’re playing together if I knew the first thing about jazz. You’ve seen Tracy–Hepburn movies, yes? It was the conversation I’d been waiting for all my life.
And it kept up, that back-and-forth. He talked about his business trip—four days in London, finance something or other—and about fog, how the thing of it was it really was foggy in London.
I felt taut and tingly and flushed, as though I were wearing a new skin, but I wasn’t exactly nervous. Miraculously, I was up to the challenge of meeting this man, perfect as he was. I was “on.” I even had the presence of mind, in the presence of Martin Grace, to continue doing my job, which was fortunate because that’s the way life is, isn’t it? Even as you and the Embodiment-of-All-Your-Hopes stand percolating your own little weather system, two teenaged boys with skateboards under their arms are bound to walk up, splash a pile of dimes onto the counter, and order triple mocha lattes. And usually, it’s not when your eyes are locked with the black-lashed, chocolate-colored stunners the dream man apparently carries around on his face all day as though they were ordinary eyes, but when you’re busy jittering the dimes into the cash register that you’ll hear him say, “Why don’t you come with me?”
Because he said that, Martin Grace did. To me.
I heard it again, an eerily precise aural memory, as I lay in bed that night, turning over the all-but-three-letters/Cary Grant idea for the first of you don’t even want to know how many times. At the sound of Martin’s voice in my head, I sat up, got up, walked over to the window, my white nightgown floating like a ghost around me, and sat in the chair I’d covered last spring with figured, lead-heavy green silk that had once been a monster of a fifties ball gown hanging in a resale shop in Buena (pronounced Byoona) Vista, Virginia. I cranked open my third-floor casement window, looked at Philadelphia—my piece of it—and let my affection for it lift lightly off of me like scent from a flower and drift out into the cool air. Spruce Street: cars and lights; the synagogue on the corner; the hustlers in front of it, male and heartbreakingly young. I felt the two tugs I always felt when I looked at those boys: the tug toward wanting the cars to stop, the tug toward wanting them not to stop.
I could be in London right now, I thought. Right now, lying back on unfamiliarly English pillows with Martin Grace beside me.
Why I wasn’t is a long story—so long that it probably isn’t a story at all. It’s probably just the way I am. But the next thing I said, a major-league clunker, the conversational equivalent of falling on my face, pretty much sums it up.
I stood there in tumult, weighing common sense against desire, trepidation against adventure, caution against impulse, while inwardly banging my head against the wall because, tumult or no tumult, my answer was a foregone conclusion:
“I want to, but I can’t. My mother wouldn’t like it.”
“So we’ll leave her home this time. She can come on the Paris trip.”
As I sat at my window replaying this conversation, lonely, night-gowned, face burning, but still somehow happy, I watched a helicopter in the distance drop its beam of searchlight and swing it slowly back and forth. I imagined a couple in evening dress doing a song-and-dance number in the street below, the woman’s skirt blooming like a white carnation as she spun.
Then I tried to imagine a world in which my mother would accompany me and my older (by maybe fifteen years?) lover to Paris, and blew out a single, sarcastic, “Ha!”
My mother alphabetizes her spice rack, wears Tretorn sneakers, and never puts eleven items on the ten-item express grocery counter, ever. She is a garden club president, and I mean that both literally and figuratively. On the outside, my life doesn’t look much like hers; I’ve made sure of that. But the truth is that I am my mother’s daughter, literally, figuratively, forever.
Still, I made sure Martin Grace did not walk out the door without my number. I leaned over, folded back his lapel, and placed it in his inside breast pocket myself. Then, I gave him a look so worthy of Veronica Lake, I could almost feel my nonexistent blond tresses falling over one eye.
2
Clare
It started with towels. Ten full sets, thick Egyptian cotton-dyed dark plum, pale yellow, flamingo pink. Her mother dropped the huge white shopping bags heavy with towels on the floor of Clare’s room, then ran back to the car for more, until there were ten bags lined up like teeth on Clare’s rug. “Wait until you see them all, sweetheart. So beautiful. The best. The very best.”
Clare leaned against the doorjamb, let the wood press into her shoulder, half inside, half outside the room. She listened to her mother chatter and watched her toss the towels onto the bed, really pitching them so that the bath sheets unfolded like banners in the air and the washcloths fluttered open like little birds. Apple green, crimson, hydrangea blue. The bed was heaped with them. Clare put her thumb-nail between her teeth, didn’t chew it, but held it there.
“Have you ever seen such beautiful towels? I feel the colors in my bones. Right inside my bones. Don’t you, Clarey?” Clare’s mother was breathing hard, almost panting, as though looking at the towels were like running or dancing.
Clare said, “We have towels already.”
Her mother walked over to her and swaddled her in a towel the soft brown of a brown egg. The towel was huge. Clare was going on eleven and was tall for her age, but the towel wrapped around her twice and puddled at her feet. Inside it, she felt skinny and hunched. Clare’s mother took Clare’s face in her hands, gently. Under her makeup, her cheeks were flushed. “It’s important to wash them before you use them the first time. And to wash each set separately so you don’t spoil the colors. Do you understand that?” Her voice was hushed and serious, so Clare nodded. Her mother took her hands away and looked over her shoulder at the bed covered with towels.
“We’d better go down and have lunch now, Mom,” Cl
are said.
“Oh, they just make me want to weep,” said Clare’s mother, and she lay down on the towels and wept.
The next morning, Clare sat in her fifth-grade classroom making lists.
Orphans. All of Clare’s favorite characters were orphans, and she wrote their names in the back of her notebook while her teacher went over the reading-comprehension questions for the Helen Keller autobiography the class had read. The questions were on a sheet of paper on Clare’s desk, with Clare’s answers penciled in underneath each question.
Clare’s mother called her worksheets “soulless,” not because the questions were stupid and reduced the readings to a bunch of lumpish facts; not because for what her mother was paying for the fancy Main Line school, they should have been coming up with something a lot fancier than worksheets; but because the sheets were copied on a Xerox machine. She recalled for Clare the mimeographs of her youth—the curling, slick paper, orchid purple smudgy ink, and the odor, a fragrance like none other. “I’d pick up the worksheet first thing and just breathe it, Clarey! That smell was the smell of school.”
Clare had wanted to say something good in response to this, something original and declamatory about her own school, how it smelled or didn’t, something to let her mother know that they were a team, two interesting people who noticed smells and soullessness. Clare tried hard to toss off sharp, quirky comments in front of her mother, to quip, is how she thought of it, the way girls in books were always quipping. Anne of Green Gables was a big quipper, for example. Once in a while, at school or with their cleaning lady, Max, who wasn’t a lady really but a nineteen-year-old with a tattoo of a phoenix rising from smoldering ashes across her bony shoulder blades, Clare was capable of quipping. But often, with her mother, conversation was tricky. Clare found herself trailing after, while her mother’s mind and voice dashed ahead, doubled back, ping-ponged in amazing ways.