Cornelia shook her fork at Teo and began chewing furiously so that she could say what she wanted to say.
Teo groaned and set his forkful of pancit back on his plate with a clink, waiting.
Cornelia swallowed, then cried, “Teo!” reproachfully.
Teo rolled his eyes, then held up his index finger. “One dish,” said Teo. “One.”
“I will not sit idly by. I can’t. Ingrid Sandoval is a tremendous cook! Huge!” said Cornelia, indignantly, but her face glowed, vivid and lit up with unlaughed laughter.
Teo laughed and shook his head. “One dish. Not even a dish really,” he said to Clare and her father.
“Swedish pancakes. Teo’s mother’s pancakes are to die for,” said Cornelia, glaring at Teo. “Whenever I’d spend the night at Teo’s house, his mom would make them for me. Pancakes for dinner, which at my house would’ve been a departure on par with pruning bushes in the nude. Pancakes for dinner was heaven.”
Clare noticed her father watching Cornelia and Teo talk, his eyes going from one of them to the other, as though he were watching a tennis match. There was an amused smile on his face, but Clare thought he looked uncertain, thrown off—only by inches, maybe, but until today, she couldn’t remember having seen him be anything but confident and at the center of things.
“With powdered sugar and lingonberries?” he asked, which surprised Clare and then annoyed her. The pancakes belonged to Cornelia and Teo, not to him.
“Lingonberries when she could get them, but usually strawberries,” said Teo.
“Or sometimes strawberry syrup. Remember that strawberry syrup? And they were thin—whisper, whisper, whisper thin…” Cornelia’s voice trailed off, and she fell back in her chair, limp, her eyes shut.
“A shame about Cornelia,” said Teo. “Death by pancake.”
“Death by memory of pancake, by virtual pancake. Poor girl,” said Clare’s father, correcting Teo, or so it seemed to Clare, and she burned with resentment. She turned to Teo, but he didn’t seem to be burning with anything. He smiled at her, and she noticed that his eyebrows were darker than his hair, that they were very straight like dashes, but slanted slightly upward. Accent grave, accent aigue, she thought. But even as she thought about Teo’s eyebrows, she felt anger at her father simmering inside her.
Cornelia sat up, blinked, and smiled at them all with the look of someone awakened from pleasant dreams.
“She lives!” said Clare’s father. “And a good thing, too, because we need to discuss important issues.”
Abruptly, without a glance at her father, Clare got up to get the desserts she and Teo had bought. She’d spent time arranging the desserts on a large plate in what she believed and hoped was an artistic way. They were so pretty.
“Such as?” asked Cornelia.
“Such as tomorrow is Christmas Eve,” said Clare’s father. He reached for one of the desserts, without asking what it was or saying anything about the platter. The dessert had rested on a bit of banana leaf, and Clare wondered, angrily, what kind of person would take a dessert off a banana leaf and not ask what it was.
“Teo, I expect you have plans for the holidays, unlike the three of us who are flying by the seat of our pants this go-round.” Clare’s father turned to Clare and smiled. “Which, as everyone knows, often turns out to be the best way to fly.”
“That’s a piece of bibingka,” said Clare, coolly. “The dessert you’re eating. It’s cooked on a banana leaf. And Teo’s staying here with me and Cornelia. He’s spending Christmas with us.”
Clare’s father looked thrown off again, to Clare’s satisfaction, although it only lasted a moment. He glanced at Cornelia, then returned his attention to Clare.
“Excellent,” said Clare’s father, graciously. “The bibingka and Teo’s plans.”
“They weren’t his plans, actually,” explained Cornelia. “He was railroaded. Ollie’s away working, and we couldn’t have Teo spending Christmas alone, watching football and eating tuna salad out of the bowl, could we?”
“We definitely could not,” said Clare’s father. Not you, Clare thought hard in her father’s direction. Cornelia’s “we” hadn’t included him; “Clare and I,” that’s what Cornelia meant by “we.”
Her father went on. “Since it’s Christmas Eve, Clare, and you may not have had time to do much shopping before you got here”—Clare saw Cornelia glance at her with concerned eyes—“I thought maybe you and I would go, make a day of it. Maybe take in the light show at Wanamakers?”
“It’s called Lord & Taylor now,” Clare corrected. “And I don’t think I should go without…” No way was Clare going to cry in front of him again, no way. “I don’t think I want to go this year.”
“I understand,” said her father. Inside, Clare felt herself grow cold and taut.
“You don’t understand anything,” she said in a hard voice. Saying this didn’t give her any relief or satisfaction. Still, although later she might wish she hadn’t said it, she didn’t wish it now. She lifted her chin.
“And I already have shopping plans. Teo’s taking me,” she said. And as she said it, she remembered that it was only what she’d been hoping, not what she and Teo had been planning. They hadn’t discussed Christmas shopping at all. Oh, no, she thought. But Teo didn’t look mad or even taken off guard. He didn’t say anything. For what seemed like a long time, no one said anything.
“Clare.” Cornelia almost whispered it, and Clare saw that her face was troubled and was asking Clare for something. Clare thawed, just a little. Clare knew she hadn’t hurt her father, because nothing she said to him could ever hurt him. He’d been embarrassed probably, to have Teo hear how she’d spoken to him, but his feelings hadn’t been hurt. Clare knew that, but Cornelia didn’t, and Clare didn’t want Cornelia to be upset.
“Teo’s taking me because I have to get a present for you, Dad.” Clare spoke to her father, but looked at Cornelia. Cornelia nodded almost imperceptibly at Clare, and the two lines between her eyes grew less pronounced.
“Oh, I see,” said her father. “OK, then, Clare.” His expression and tone were carefully kind, carefully patient, as if to say, “I am an adult talking to a poor damaged child.”
“And that works out nicely because…Martin, do I have to remind you about the butternut squash incident?” Cornelia took Clare’s father’s hand as she spoke. The lines between her eyes had smoothed out completely, but Clare saw how Cornelia’s words drew her father gently into a circle of two. Whatever the butternut squash incident had been, it had belonged to the two of them. The words and the way she held his hand were meant to comfort. Maybe that was Cornelia being in love, Clare thought.
Clare’s father laughed. “If you have to you have to, but I wish you wouldn’t.”
“So you know that if I’m left alone to buy groceries for Christmas dinner, I’ll get enough to feed twenty-five adults. We’d have to rent a truck, and how easy would that be on Christmas Eve? I need you with me.”
“Twenty-five ravenous linebacker adults, you mean,” Clare’s father said with a laugh. “You’re right. You do need me.” He lifted Cornelia’s hand to his mouth and kissed it, seeming happier than he had all evening. Cornelia looked relieved.
The thought just appeared in Clare’s mind: If Cornelia married Clare’s father, then Clare would have her. They would belong to each other in official ways. Visits to her father would mean visits to Cornelia. She remembered how, in the later books, Anne Shirley would play matchmaker and everyone would end up happy. Maybe Linny was wrong about her father and Cornelia. Maybe with some help from Clare, they would end up married to each other. Why not try? She pictured a scene in which she and Cornelia ate breakfast at her father’s dining room table in gleaming pajamas, laughing and drinking hot chocolate out of identical white mugs while her father sat behind his Wall Street Journal a small distance away, on the very edge of the scene.
As Clare held this thought in her mind, Clare’s father took another dessert from the
platter, cut it in half, placed one half on Cornelia’s plate and popped the other into his mouth. Cornelia lifted the dessert, a tiny, precious cake filled with ube paste, and asked, “Now, Clare, Teo, what makes this one purple?”
The scene of the three of them together lost its bright colors and blurred. Cornelia was so nice. She deserved better than Clare’s father. Clare sighed and allowed the scene to vanish altogether.
15
Cornelia
They went to the light show after all, Teo and Clare did. They’d shopped for a while and talked for a while—Clare especially had talked—and over slices of pizza, Clare had suddenly said, “Do you know about the brass eagle? The big brass eagle between the shoe department and the jewelry department?” And Teo thought about this and then, in his uncanny Teo way, asked, “At Lord & Taylor?” Even though I’m pretty sure he’d never been there, since Teo doesn’t live in Philadelphia; is a less-than-exuberant shopper; and claims to be allergic to large department stores—literally, not metaphorically, allergic. I’ve heard him say this more than once or, rather, mumble it apologetically, usually while declining an invitation to enter just such a department store. The standard mumble includes incoherent references to ventilation and cleaning fluid, which oddly enough people seem willing to accept, possibly on the grounds that he is a physician or maybe just because they are disarmed by his general disarmingness. Although, I have to say that Teo doesn’t exploit his ability to disarm nearly as often as most people would.
Anyway, despite his well-guarded ignorance regarding department stores, Teo asked, “At Lord & Taylor?” And Clare said, “Yes. Just to the side of the eagle, that’s the best place to sit. If you’re closer, it hurts your neck, and if you’re farther back, you get stepped on by people shopping for hats and scarves.” So they went. They sat on the marble floor, just to the right of the brass eagle to watch a light show that’s been going on, in some form or another, since something like 1955. You’d think kids these days, with their easy access to Pixar animation, Imax, and video games that break clean through their computer screens and scramble around their rooms, would fail to be transfixed by organ music and nutcrackers and sugarplum fairies in lights raising one leg, then the other in their stiff little dance. You’d think so, but you’d be wrong. They’re transfixed.
“Was she transfixed?” I asked Teo.
We were sitting on what would be Teo’s bed for the second night in a row but what was at that moment still my couch. Clare was asleep in my room.
And he said, “Yeah, that’s the perfect word for what she was.”
That struck me as such unequivocally good news, and hearing it caused me to feel relief and hope, which in turn caused me to ramble excitedly and at some length about the wonderful resilience of children, until I noticed that Teo’s expression bespoke not relief and hope, but worry and puzzlement.
“What?” I said.
“I hadn’t thought about it that way,” he said.
“What way did you think about it?” I asked, nervously.
“Do you know that Clare’s been to that light show every year since she was born? When she asked to go today, I just thought, she’s eleven, it’s Christmas Eve, her mother is God knows where, and she wants to go to the show they’ve seen together every year since she was born. I almost said no,” Teo said, with the air of someone who wishes he’d said no.
“You couldn’t say no,” I told him consolingly.
“I couldn’t. That’s the only reason I didn’t. But when we were sitting there, with about a million happy families, waiting for the thing to start, all I could think was, ‘Where did you get the idea that you had to be so brave? And what is it going to cost you?’”
“Oh,” I said, and for a while this was all I could think of to say. Then I added, “I bet you’re right. I bet it was too much.” And as it turned out, he was right. Of course, he was. But before I get to how it turned out, and what happened as a result of how it turned out, I want to stop and fill you in on what was happening to me about the same time Clare was cross-legged on a marble floor awaiting a light show that might further break her heart.
And it’s funny because I feel guilty about stopping and filling you in on what, not so long before, would have been a shining moment in my life, possibly the shining moment, possibly the diamond-bright point around which everything else would turn. There was a time when I would have sung full-throated from the rooftops what Martin said to me in the park on Christmas Eve.
But it seems somehow wrong that while the story of Clare’s heartbreak was unfolding itself in my presence, the story of my romance with Martin didn’t come to a respectful halt. It didn’t wait discreetly in a corner until a more appropriate time. Instead, in its uncertain, unsettling way, it continued to unfold as well.
Do you know that Auden poem about suffering? The one where he talks about how at the precise moment Icarus was splashing into his ocean death, the ploughman went on ploughing his field, undisturbed? Well, about suffering, and most other things as well, Auden was never wrong. I think you see where I’m going with this. While Clare suffered, Martin and I continued ploughing, although in a rather subdued manner and certainly not in the metaphorical sense à la Shakespeare, Sophocles, etcetera, which would have been abominable of us.
Here’s what happened. We were walking through the square on our way to buy, among other items, a turkey of reasonable size when, quite suddenly, Martin pulled me down next to him on a park bench and let his gaze travel searchingly over my face. I may have mentioned that his eyes were astoundingly beautiful, a fact of which, at that moment on that bench, I was not unaware. In fact, I was acutely, achingly aware of it. And Martin had a certain way of looking at me that made me feel exactly as though he were touching me, even when he wasn’t.
He looked. Then he said, “It’s the wrong time to tell you this,” and I knew what he was going to say, and I felt pulled in so many different directions that I couldn’t go in any of them and was frozen. I should say I knew the general gist of what he was going to say because, as usual, Martin’s language was pure Martin.
“Every day, I live with wonder. I walk around with it and lie down with it and wake up with it every morning, no matter where I am. I’ve never known anyone like you because there isn’t anyone like you. And because there isn’t anyone like you, I’ve never wanted anyone the way I want you.”
The words weren’t silky; they cost him effort and had weight. They didn’t sound rehearsed, if that’s what you’re thinking.
“Cornelia, I love you. It’s the wrong time to tell you, but I’m telling you. I love you. And all of what’s going on with Clare, as hard as it is and will be, I think it could turn out to be a good thing for us because if we’re going to share our lives, you need to understand what my life is—all of it. And I want us to share our lives, Cornelia.”
Alarm. At this, I felt alarm. “Martin,” I began.
But he stopped me by giving me a wry smile and saying, “No, I’m not proposing. Even my timing isn’t as bad as that. And I don’t want you to say anything right now. In fact, I strictly forbid it. I wanted to tell you that I love you, that’s all.”
He kissed me, then, and I said, “Am I at least allowed to say thank you?”
“No,” he said, smiling.
“Thank you,” I said, smiling back.
You might think you know what I should have felt and wanted, where Martin was concerned. No doubt it is crystal clear to you. But what you have to understand is that all of those clichés and dead metaphors people use to describe confusion were suddenly alive and kicking: My life was a roller coaster; everything was happening too fast; I didn’t have time to catch my breath; my head was spinning; information overload; cannot compute cannot compute cannot compute.
No, Martin was not exactly the man I’d hoped he would be. Yes, he was chilly to his daughter, even in her time of great need. Yes, this chilliness disturbed me. And yes—I hadn’t forgotten this—my doubts regarding his rightness
for me had begun rearing their unfortunate heads before Clare ever appeared in our lives. In my life, I mean, as she had been in his since her birth—although obviously not in the way one would expect and wish.
But while that sounds simple enough, when you think about it, it wasn’t simple at all. For one thing, all of the above reasons for at the very least keeping Martin at a distance and at the very most breaking it off with him on the spot did not erase everything else that was true about Martin and about me and Martin together. If they should have erased all that, they did not. When it was just the two of us, in so many ways, Martin lifted and lit me up; he made me quicker, smarter, funnier; he was gentle when I needed gentleness; we loved the same things in the same ways, at least mostly, and that is nothing to sneeze at.
For another thing, he wasn’t a list of attributes, but a flesh-and-blood man, as physically present a presence as anyone I’d met in my life. When he told me he loved me, he said it in his particular voice with catches in his particular throat, and the bones and muscles of his face moved in familiar ways and also in ways I’d never seen. Can you understand what I’m saying? I’m not just talking again about the power of physical beauty. Less-than-fantastic sex notwithstanding, we were intimates; I’d breathed his breath; my skin knew his skin; my nerve endings had sparked under his touch. That kind of knowledge was deep and had never been something I could walk away from with ease. And he had taste and humor and effortless elegance. He was down-right debonair, and how many men could you say that about? And, OK, he was. He was so beautiful.
A reminder: Strangers stopped him on the street to tell him he looked like Cary Grant.
And he was in love with me. Come on.
I was in turmoil. I didn’t know what to do, so what I did as soon as I got the chance was behave like a horse’s ass to the person who least deserved it.