Clare had held her breath and inched into the living room, holding the glass of water in front of her as though it were a candle lighting her way. She’d almost dropped it when she saw the woman, a stranger, half-lying on the loveseat, hair tumbled to one side, a hand dangling, face slack, mouth wide open as she snored. A sharp noise jumped from Clare’s throat, and she ran to her father’s bedroom, water splashing over her hand onto the floor. The room was empty. Crying, she called her mother’s cell phone, and her mother left the mountain retreat that minute. Clare packed her bag, heart banging, and took the elevator to the lobby where she waited for her mother. In the two hours it took for her to get there, for Clare’s hot face to be pressed against the soft wool of her mother’s coat, her father never came back, and the woman he’d left to watch her never noticed she was gone.
After that, Clare felt something new for her father, something that might have been anger but that came out as unease and watchfulness and didn’t leave much room for sweetness.
So it would have to be pluck, Clare decided. She sat looking at the phone. The vacuum cleaner was a distant, reassuring whine and tangled up with the sound was Max’s sprightly, off-key soprano: “You are lost and gone forever! Dreadful sorry, Clementine!” Max’s voice made the words sound jolly.
Clare listened to Max sing a second longer, then shoved the books off her bed with a decided bang; plucky or not, she’d rather call with Max in the house.
Besides, her mother might be home soon, with bags full of quirky, expensive food she’d culled from various groceries and specialty stores. The past week or so, Clare’s mother had been on a cooking tear, had taken to buying armloads of cookbooks, issues of Food & Wine and Gourmet, as well as cooking tools that were expensive and exquisitely specific in nature, like a huge paella pan with its own circular propane burner.
Clare would watch her mother unpack grocery bags, cradling the food in her thin hands as though each item were a fragile precious gift, an offering: morels; saffron; white truffle oil; Dover sole; a bag of small, purple potatoes; a long, thick stalk with Brussels sprouts growing around it like a spiral staircase. Then, she’d cook in a fevered, chattering way, sometimes tumbling half-finished dishes into the sink and beginning over, sometimes pulling golden, fragrant soufflés or loaves out of the oven and arranging them before Clare in a gesture that seemed oddly far removed from feeding someone. Sometimes, Clare would wake up in the middle of the night and hear her mother chopping. On these occasions, Clare would wait until her mother went to bed, then would tiptoe downstairs to turn off the lights and, once, two of the burners on the stove.
Clare dialed her father’s office, and when his secretary answered, Clare said firmly, “This is Clare. Please put my father on. It’s imperative that I speak with him right away.”
There was a pause, and then the secretary said, “Oh. Well, how are you, Clara?” She sounded young, not intimidated by what Clare hoped was her own forcefulness, and also…what? Sympathetic, maybe. Despite getting Clare’s name wrong, the secretary sounded nice. Clare felt a little thrown off. It was easier to be plucky in the face of opposition.
“Fine,” said Clare, the edge in her voice smoothing in spite of herself.
“Your father’s not in the office, but I can have him call you back. OK?”
Clare felt deflated. No. She didn’t trust him to call back, but even if he did, it might be too late. Her mother might be home. Her mother might even answer the phone.
“No,” said Clare, her voice rising, “I need to talk to him now. Please.”
After another pause, the woman said, “Well, look, sweetie, I just got off the phone with him, so I bet I can catch him. He’ll call back in a few minutes. How does that sound?”
“It sounds good,” said Clare, softly. “Thank you.”
She hung up and waited for what felt like a long time, with one hand on the phone. When it rang, she jumped and pulled her hand back as though the phone had suddenly caught fire. Then, she answered.
“Hello.”
“Sparrow!” said her father’s voice, “Good to hear from you! How’s your afternoon?” Just like that—“how’s your afternoon”—as though he talked to her every day instead of almost never. Clare wondered if there were someone else in the room with him, listening.
“I need to talk to you,” said Clare.
“I’ve only got about five minutes, sadly enough, but for five minutes, I’m all yours.”
Clare gathered herself. “This is important. It might take longer than five minutes. It’s about Mom.”
Clare expected him to say something, ask something, but he didn’t.
“She’s sick, I think. Or maybe she’s”—Clare faltered—“she’s changing; she’s not acting like herself. And this has been going on for a pretty long time.”
“I’m sure it’s nothing to worry about, Clare,” he said. “People change. You’re different every time I see you. You took maybe two tiny sips of your egg cream last time you were here, and you remember, don’t you, how you used to love them?”
Clare felt a flash of hatred for the playfulness in his voice. “No. No. It’s not like that. It’s not any kind of regular change. Listen to me!”
“I’m listening.” Her father sounded tired.
“She cooks all the time, all night sometimes.”
“Well, that doesn’t sound so bad. Go on,” said her father.
“And she buys things, weird things. Big pans and cookbooks.”
“Well, she never did seem to have any trouble spending money,” he said dryly.
“No, you don’t understand. Like—towels. She bought all these towels, in every color.” This sounded ridiculous, even to Clare. She heard her father cover the mouthpiece and speak to someone. She began to fill with panic; she was losing him.
“And she took me out of school for lunch. She gave me wine!” She didn’t want her voice to sound the way it did, desperate. But she was desperate.
“Well, I think that’s wise. French children younger than you drink wine, Clare. What did you think of it?”
“What did I think of it? I hated it! And she flirted with this really young waiter; she held his hand. And she said things to me that she wasn’t supposed to say. That she wouldn’t say. Things about, about…” Clare was crying now.
“Calm down, Sparrow. About what?”
Clare shut her eyes. “Sex.” Now I’ve done it, thought Clare. Now I’m a traitor. Unbelievably, her father laughed.
“Look, Clare, your mother is a grown woman, a single woman and, if memory serves, a beautiful one. If she wants to flirt with a waiter or anyone else, that’s her business. It might make you uncomfortable, but it’s perfectly natural. And you’re nearly eleven years old. I only wonder why she hasn’t already had a conversation with you about the facts of life.”
Clare ignored this. “All I can think is that it was the bat.”
“Bat?”
“We woke up one day last summer, and there was a bat in the house. Mom told Dr. Aduba about it, and he said, just to be safe, we should both get a round of rabies shots. Not the stomach kind. Mom didn’t think you could get bitten by a bat and not know it, but she made me get the shots anyway. But she didn’t get them. And now she’s sick.”
“Your mother doesn’t have rabies, Clare.” His voice now was the voice of a person who is making a show of being patient. For a moment, despite Clare’s efforts, desperation won out over pride. When she spoke, her voice was smaller than she wanted it to be.
“Dad? What’s happening, it’s scaring me. I can’t sleep.”
“There is nothing to be afraid of. I promise you that. And now I have to go. I’m sorry.” He was about to hang up. Pluck, Clare thought, pluck, pluck.
“You’re not sorry. But you’re my father. You have to help.” There was a pause.
“I’m telling you, as your father, that everything’s fine, Clare. I’ll talk to you soon.” He hung up.
Clare looked at the phone in her hand,
then stuck it under her pillow, so she didn’t have to look at it. She slid onto the floor, tucking her knees up under her shirt, holding them hard.
It didn’t make sense to feel more alone after this conversation, she thought. It wasn’t like she’d lost something, because there was never anything there to lose. But she felt more alone anyway.
5
Cornelia
Less than twenty-four hours after I got the flowers, he called. Didn’t just call, but called from London, thank you very much. When I heard his voice, I could just feel the presence of scones and lemon curd on a tray next to him and the red double-decker buses lumbering by outside.
“Hello,” I said.
“Do you eat?” he asked.
“Sometimes,” I said.
“Did I just say, ‘Do you eat’? I meant, ‘What do you eat?”’
“Oh, things,” I said. I pressed two fingers to my wrist. Pulse leaping. Voice cool.
“Vegetarian?”
“Omnivore.”
“Omni means all. Do you eat all things?”
“No tongues of any kind. And no licorice.”
He laughed a pure, warm, amber-colored laugh that made me feel pure, warm, and amber-colored.
I wore the dress, with a short, lightweight, cranberry wool coat with bracelet sleeves (but no bracelets) over top, and my favorite knee-high black boots. The sole advantage to freakish smallness is that the feet that accompany it are also freakishly small, enabling one to make out like a bandit at shoe sales. (Don’t be alarmed, I don’t plan to regale you with descriptions of every outfit I wear, although I remember, as a kid, loving that about Nancy Drew books: “Wearing a dainty, ice-blue blouse, Nancy opened the door”; “Nancy tossed a soft yellow cardigan over her slender shoulders and slipped into her convertible”; “Nancy removed her blouse, skirt, and shoes, and put on a pale green shift dress and a pearl necklace.” But the fact is, sometimes clothes are significant.)
Being my mother’s daughter, I turned a deaf ear to the inner voice screaming at the top of its lungs, “Trust this man completely!” so that when Martin asked where he should swing by and collect me, I told him I’d meet him at the restaurant. Five days later I walked up, and there he was, waiting. I won’t gush about his appearance, except to say that he was beautiful in the way certain handcrafted wooden objects are beautiful—so seamless, smooth, curved, lustrous, so fully realized and self-contained that it only strikes you seconds later and with the force of a lightning bolt: “Oh my God, that’s a chair!” At which point, you sit down and want to stay forever.
The restaurant was of the jewel-box variety: tiny, booths and chairs covered in silver-gray velvet, a fireplace hanging on the wall like a picture in a frame. The food was superlative, I’m sure it was, no doubt made with fresh, seasonal ingredients, no doubt appropriately crusty on the outside and melting on the inside, inspired but unpretentious, simple but original. I vaguely remember being surprised by the taste of figs, and I’m pretty sure I lifted a spoonful of something creamy and the color of a sunset to my lips. But my senses, hijacked by Martin, barely registered what was maybe the best meal of my life.
We talked and talked and talked. Maybe love comes in at the eyes, but not nearly as much as it comes in at the ears, at least in my experience. As we talked, lights flicked on inside my head; by the end of the night, I was a planetarium.
He told me he loved my name, how there were a handful of women’s names that turned all other women’s names into cotton candy, and my name was in the handful.
“Along with what?” I asked him.
“Eleanor, Mercedes, Augusta,” and he reeled off four or five more like a man reciting a poem, so I told him about my first college roommate, a purebred palomino of a girl from Savannah with unimpeachable calves and an antique amethyst the size of a walnut on a chain around her neck. She could fling a Frisbee like a pro, speak flawless French, and had a sweet, long-and-pointy-canine-toothed smile that threatened to collapse half of fraternity row like a house of cards. If she’d been slightly less pretty or if her family’s money had been slightly less ancient, I’m sure she would’ve turned up her turned-up nose at me every chance she got. But because her own social position was unassailable, she could like whomever she chose. She liked me; I knew because she told people in the lilting, slightly hoarse (due to years of yelling across lacrosse fields or from horseback to others on horseback, I’m guessing) voice all future Tri-Delt presidents have, “Cornelia’s a great girl!” I liked her, too, because she was nice and also because she cast a golden glow that fell on everything around her, including her ant-sized roommate.
But she decided within a couple of weeks that my name was just too “out there” and set about pulling a nickname out of “Cornelia.”
“Well, the obvious choice would be…” said Martin, wincing.
“Don’t say it. Don’t even think it,” I told him. “Are you thinking it?”
Martin shook his head and crossed his heart. I told him that she’d settled on C. C., even though my middle name, being Rose, did not begin with a C, and my last name, being Brown, did not begin with a C. For two semesters, I was C. C. Brown.
“Throw in a ‘Little’ or a ‘Blind’ and you’ve got yourself a bluesman,” said Martin, helpfully. “This roommate of yours, what was her name?”
“Selkirk Dalrymple,” I told him.
He laughed his molten laugh, and I felt like the kid at the party who whacks open the piñata. Victorious and with treasures raining down on me.
He told me about his own first college roommate, a guy who had a thing for the “beret set” girls and whose pièce de résistance seduction technique was to casually mention having read Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, all seven volumes (and, yes, Martin did use the French title at one point, pronouncing it accurately but not in an Alex Trebek kind of way, so stop worrying), which worked like a charm. When I asked Martin if the roommate had really read it, Martin said that was the beauty of it: The kind of people who were most jealous of him and who would have been, consequently, those most scathingly skeptical of him, were also the kind of people who would’ve preferred death over anyone’s discovering that they had not themselves read it or at least not gotten any further than Swann’s Way and so had no idea of what questions to ask to test him.
This is the kind of conversation it was: convivial, both of us making gifts to each other of little funny stories, sort of shining them up and handing them over and being nice to each other about them. We didn’t drag out our secret souls and let them dance naked around the restaurant, but our little stories were glimpses into the interior, colorful postcards from the lands of Martin and Cornelia. A good way to begin.
Afterward, Martin walked me to the door of my apartment building. Under a streetlamp, he looked at me and ran one hand over my head, cupping the place above my neck for a second or two.
“It suits you, this cap of hair,” he said.
“And look at you,” I said. “Your eyelashes. They’re like miniature whisk brooms.” Then he laughed, reached for my hand, and placed a kiss in the center of my palm.
The next morning:
Linny: Let me guess, you watched him walk away, then took the stairs two at a time, singing “I Get a Kick Out of You.”
Cornelia: Wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong.
Linny: “Embraceable You.”
Cornelia: Fiend. Hell-fiend friend from hell.
Linny [warbling smugly]: “Don’t be a naughty baby. Come to mama, come to mama dooooooo.”
On our second date, we ate with our fingers at a gold-and-red-draped Ethiopian restaurant; gaped at the otherworldly, ultrarefined, long-necked, sloe-eyed beauty of the entire restaurant staff from hostess to busboy; walked for an hour, my hand tucked into the crook of his arm in a way that cried out for me to be in pearl-buttoned, wrist-length gloves; and then, in the foyer of my apartment building, we filled five minutes with kisses so delicate, so intimate and gentle that, afterward, I walked up the stairs to
my apartment, carrying the moment carefully as though it were a glass globe full of butterflies.
The next morning:
Linny: I know. Ethiopians are amazing. Can you believe that Peter Beard photographer guy gets so much credit for discovering Iman? Boy, finding a beauty in that country was tough! That took a real discerning eye!
Cornelia: I believe I man is actually from Somalia.
Linny: Tomato, tomahto.
Cornelia: Nice. Very nice. Very culturally sensitive.
Sure, I could’ve told Linny about the wrist-length gloves and the butterfly globe, or else I could’ve just gone ahead and plunged an horsd’oeuvre fork into my ear.
On our third date, we went to a Tom Stoppard play about A. E. Housman that left me awed and exhilarated. On the way out of the theater and for blocks and blocks, I gushed about the braininess and wordplay and passion and compassion and ruthlessness and how I’d sat in the theater and trembled with the sense that what was happening onstage was turning me into a better person. Martin said he felt the same way, “Except that you were watching the play, and I was watching you.”
Amazing, right? How could there be more, right? There’s more.
“I love movies, but usually plays make me restive,” I told Martin, after a pause both elated and shy.
“Oh, restive. One of those words,” said Martin, nodding.
“I know,” I said, almost certain that I did.
“One of those words that mean the opposite of how they sound,” said Martin.
“I know,” I said again, because I did know, exactly. “Like enervated.”
“Spendthrift,” said Martin.
“Attrition.”
“Obviate.”
“Cleave.”
“Cleave,” said Martin, who didn’t miss a trick.