“There’s something else,” said Clare suddenly. She wanted to be completely honest with Cornelia. It was important.
“What’s that?”
“The other day, when we were pruning, I slipped. I told your mom my mom was sick, about how she left. Everything.”
“You’re kidding me.” Cornelia didn’t sound mad, just shocked.
“You’re not mad?”
“Oh, honey, no. It was your secret to tell. I just can’t believe my mother’s kept quiet about it for two days. I would’ve sworn she’d have called in the National Guard on the spot to find your mother. How interesting.” She seemed completely mystified. Then she said, “Well, I won’t bring it up, unless she does.”
“We’ll mail this, then?” said Clare, touching the letter with one finger.
“There’s a box at the end of the street. Let’s go together right this minute,” said Cornelia.
They started walking, but then Cornelia stopped. As she paused, everything seemed to pause, lightly, like an evening on tiptoe, the trees still and listening.
“You’re such a brave girl, Clare, do you know that? I love that about you.” She dropped her eyes for a second, looking down at Clare’s hand; she took the hand and squeezed it. When she looked back at Clare’s face, her expression was happy and sad, both, an in-between, twilight expression for an in-between half-lit hour. “I love you,” she said. “You should know that.”
At that moment, Clare didn’t feel at all like a girl rattling around inside a shaken-up life; under the slate-blue sky and its scattered early stars, what she felt was lucky and so glad to be herself. The words were right there, where they’d been waiting. “I love you, too,” she said.
27
Cornelia
Sometimes a house can sit there for years, in desperate need of having its roof blown off, and then out of nowhere, there’s a little whoosh, and the dang thing is gone, blown off and spinning away, first a black speck, then the blue sky closing over it as though it were never there. And the people inside, what do they do when it’s gone? Probably, it varies from house to house, but when the house was the Browns’ and the whoosh was a Christmas card no bigger than my hand, they did this:
“Jesus Christ,” wailed my father, pacing the kitchen, nearly in tears, and this from a man for whom “Jesus Christ” is the limit; one man’s “Jesus Christ” is another man’s “Jesus Motherfuckittohell Christ,” and my father is that first man. “Jesus Christ! This’ll kill Rudy. I’ll tell you that. It’ll kill him.”
“It’s totally her fault,” fumed Toby, holding a soccer ball and punching it. “She thinks she can just change her mind. Like, ‘OK, I changed my mind. See ya.’”
Cam shoved a cookie the size of a dessert plate into his mouth and sputtered, crumb-ily, “She’s a woman! What’d you expect! Women are so fucking—whimsical.” And this impressed me, I have to say, impressed me twice, once because of the both-parents-present expletive and again because of the word “whimsical,” which I’d have sworn the boy didn’t know. That’s how far he’s been pushed, I thought, driven to S.A.T. prep course vocabulary from some ten years back. Hats off to you, Mr. Kaplan.
Clare sat at the table, also snacking, but looking less like a nice girl chewing a cookie and more like the proverbial cat who’s sinking her eye-teeth into the proverbial canary. All smug satisfaction. I think I even saw her lick her chops, afterward.
I’d been working in Mrs. Goldberg’s attic for hours and, all unsuspectingly, had walked in on a world gone mad. I turned to the one person in the room who appeared, more or less, to be functioning normally. The cords in her neck were stretched a bit tightly, but other than that, she looked as calm and collected as ever.
“Mom, what in God’s name is going on?” I asked, and she had the presence of mind to give me a reproving stare, as though “God’s name” didn’t pale to near-invisibility next to “fucking” and “Jesus Christ.” Still, I took it as a good sign.
She handed me a card in an envelope.
“There’s a way to do a thing, if it needs to be done,” she said tersely. “And this was not the way.”
I looked the envelope over, then took out the card, a Christmas card, belated by nearly three weeks. A card from my sister, Ollie. The lateness was no surprise. The surprise was that she’d sent a card at all. And, in all fairness, this particular little card had an excuse for being late. It came from the Galapagos Islands.
“The Westermarck effect,” said Teo drearily.
As soon as I’d been able to breathe normally, I’d called him.
The Westermarck effect was how Ollie had explained her leaving, explained in person to Teo, which was decent of her because leaving a note was much more her style, as evidenced by the Christmas card. She’d given him only twenty-four hours’ notice, though, before hopping on a plane, which seemed somewhat less decent to me. But who am I to judge?
I thought for a moment.
“Oh, right, that thing where a butterfly flaps its wings in one country and sets off a tornado halfway around the world,” I said.
“That would be the butterfly effect,” Teo said, and the smile I heard in his voice came as a vast relief, although it was somewhat disappointing to shelve my image of a heedless lepidopteran in Beijing—a blue swallowtail is what I’d been picturing, for no particular reason—giving a flutter and creating in Brooklyn a mighty breeze that blew Ollie clean out the door of her apartment and into the well-muscled arms of Edmund Battle. I thought about the uproar and discombobulation I’d just left downstairs. Chaos theory, indeed.
“The Westermarck effect is some built-in mechanism we all have to keep us from marrying our own siblings.”
“Oh. But you and Ollie aren’t siblings…Are you?” Suddenly, anything seemed possible.
“No, Cornelia, we’re not.” Teo’s voice was dry as dust. “But according to the theory, because most males and females who grow up together are siblings, all males and females who spend their childhoods together are programmed not to be sexually attracted to each other. It’s instinct.”
No, it most certainly is not, I was on the verge of yelling. Dr. Westermarck and the scientific method be damned! I imagined marching into a lab somewhere, Teo in tow, and offering myself up as living disproof of this cockamamie theory. “Look!” I’d shout, victoriously, “I can’t keep my hands off him!” And just thinking about my hands on him turned my face hot and my breath shallow because, I’m not sure if I mentioned it before, but in addition to being in love with Teo, I was also practically radioactive with desire for him, in danger of spontaneously combusting, of sending up my own miniature mushroom cloud at the mere sound of his voice.
“Do you believe that?” I asked, seriously. There was a long pause on the other end. I almost jumped headfirst into the pause with an inchoate tumble of verbiage maligning Westermarck, the know-nothing bastard, the dastardly fraud, and his bullshit effect, but I restrained myself.
“What I believe is that I was a goddamn idiot to marry a woman I wasn’t in love with.” Teo’s voice was so flat, so deflated, that I couldn’t even feel a flicker of joy at the news he’d just given me. Besides, if he had any sense, and he had plenty, barking up the Brown family tree again was about the last thing Teo Sandoval would ever do. Westermarck effect or not, why would anyone chance it?
As we sat there in our own separate unhappinesses not saying anything, I began to consider what I hadn’t so far considered: that if Ollie had left weeks and weeks ago, then Teo, the very soul of honesty, had, for weeks and weeks, been living a lie, living some of it right alongside me, alongside me and Clare both. Cooking in my apartment and out sitting in the Adirondack chairs in Clare’s yard and driving in his car, the lie had been with us the whole time, like an extra person, a stranger we couldn’t see. The thought made me cringe, but I decided to save the “Why didn’t you tell me?” This conversation would be about Teo’s hurt, not mine.
“Cornelia, I meant to tell you,” said Teo finally. ?
??I came there to tell you, that day in the café.”
“It’s fine,” I said. “Don’t worry about explaining.”
“But when I got to you, so much was happening. Clare and Martin. And then the accident. How could I bother you with my trivial, asinine…shit?” If Teo, who, under normal circumstances, was the last person to undermine the importance of anything remotely important, was calling the dissolution of his marriage “shit,” he was in pretty bad shape.
“Oh, Teo.” I sighed.
“But that’s just an excuse, I think. You would have made room for my stupid mess. I know that about you. You would’ve listened.”
“I would’ve. I’d listen now, too.” Now and for the rest of my life, to whatever you have to say. Just try me.
“I know. Forget what I said about not wanting to bother you. That sounds—I don’t know—noble. And I wasn’t noble.” He almost spat the word “noble.” Teo sounded so disgusted with himself, I could hardly bear to hear it. “I was glad to plunge myself into other people’s heartache, to tell you the truth. Remember when you said it was easy for me to come in and be a hero to Clare?”
“Teo,” I said, alarmed. “You know I didn’t mean that.”
“You didn’t, but you were right. It was easy to come in and feel like I could help, like I could fix something. I was so sick of myself and of Ollie. All of it. Nothing there I could fix”—he made a bitter sound—“and nothing worth fixing.”
“What happens now?” It would have been kinder, I know, to allow him to direct the course of the conversation, but I couldn’t help myself.
“Divorce,” said Teo bleakly. “Which is no picnic in New York. No such thing as nobody’s fault in New York. Either I have to say terrible things about Ollie or she has to say terrible things about me, and then it could be over fast. That’s what Ollie wants. Or…” Teo seemed to just give out, too tired to go on, but I would not be deterred.
“Or?”
“Or we separate, live apart a year and, at the end of the year, our separation quietly becomes a divorce.”
“You want to do that, don’t you?” Of course he did. Goddamn, goddamn integrity. Jeez, Teo.
“I hate the idea of our blaming each other. On record. It was a mistake we made together.”
“How did it happen? Can I ask that? How did you and Ollie end up together?” Because if you’re going to act like a hard-nosed investigative reporter, the kind people call intrepid when what they really mean is detestable, you may as well go all the way.
“Right after Edmund left, Ollie and I ran into each other in Midtown. We’ve known each other forever, you know? We like each other. We never pretended to be in love. Ollie was through with true love; she thought she was, anyway.”
“And what about you? Were you through with true love?” God, I was relentless. But I needed to know.
“No, not exactly. But I felt pretty sure that the right woman—the real thing, I guess—wasn’t going to…happen. And I was disgusted with the person ‘casual relationships’ were turning me into.” His quotation marks around that phrase just sizzled with bitterness; I could hear them. I’d felt it too, that dating, having some fun, playing the field were euphemisms for as Machiavellian a game as was ever invented. In such a game, no one’s soul was safe. Then he added, vehemently, “And I was sick of sick people.”
He paused, like a child who’d just said something awful and was waiting for someone to start yelling. I didn’t yell. When he spoke next, his voice was calmer.
“Ollie said that people marry for love all the time, and it goes up in smoke. We thought, why not take a chance; maybe the love would come later. Ollie cited all these cases of countries with arranged marriages that worked out fine.”
I had to smile at the word “cited.” Ollie was always and forever Ollie.
“You went into it with the spirit of adventure,” I said encouragingly. And I could imagine how it happened, how they got caught up in that sense of adventure. Let’s go for it! Birds do it, bees do it, even educated fleas do it. I could see wanting to be part of life in all its coupling and ongoingness; lately, in fact, I’d become something of an expert on that kind of wanting.
“I’ll sure as hell never do that again,” he bit out. “We said that, that it was an adventure. But really, we were just reckless. Thorough, though. We managed to hurt every single person who cares about us. I don’t think we left anyone out.” He paused, then he said with icy resolution in his voice, “My days of taking chances are over.”
My tattered heart sank into my shoes then, for if ever, oh, ever a risk there was, Cornelia Brown was one because. Because, because, because, because, because.
Ollie’s sister. Teo’s childhood pal. If he was through taking chances, there was no chance for me.
As soon as we hung up, I remembered something. Seconds later, I called him again.
“Cornelia,” he said as soon as he picked up, even though I knew there was no little screen on his phone telling him who was calling. We both hated those screens. He thought they violated people’s privacy. What if a person started to call, then had a change of heart? I just disdained the screens as yet another means of sucking the mystery from life.
“Teo,” I began and was instantly incredibly self-conscious. “I just…well, I wondered…I—” I groaned, inwardly, and started over. “You said you came to Philadelphia to tell me about you and Ollie. Why? Why me and no one else?” You can probably see why I had to ask this, why I had no choice but to ask it. What would you have done?
“Because you’re my…” Oh, God, what? My heart lodged itself in the very back of my throat and squatted there, pounding. “My pair of clear eyes.”
Oh.
I considered. “Pair of clear eyes” is not the same as “heart’s desire,” but it is something. “You’re like an MRI, you know? I was sort of—bogged down in it all. I wanted you to help me understand it, to tell me how bad or not bad the damage was.”
“Oh,” I said. “OK.”
He laughed. “I’ll be honest, I wanted you to take one look and tell me it wasn’t that bad.”
I took a breath. Lost cause or not, I’d make my pitch.
“You want to know what I see, now?”
“We’re on the phone, Cornelia.”
“I know. I’m that good. I can see you when you’re not here.” Around every corner and every time I close my eyes, Teo.
“And what do you see now?”
“Bruising. Pretty deep, but I’ve seen worse. And you want to know what else?”
“What else?”
“I see a man who has a little chance-taking left in him. A man who should keep the faith.”
There was a pause.
“Good night, Cornelia,” said Teo in his voice.
Just that. Nothing more.
“Good night.”
Good night, sweet Teo, good night, good night. Good-bye.
It never rains, but it pours. A solid, serviceable idiom if ever there was one, and it was about to pour like gangbusters directly into the Browns’ newly roofless house, leaving all of us drenched.
That evening, my mother took Clare over to the Sandovals’ house. A diplomatic mission, likely, although I didn’t think it would be necessary. Civilized people don’t blame parents for their daughter’s behavior, no matter how feckless or adulterous, and the Sandovals were nothing if not civilized. And Teo had no doubt called them posthaste to deliver the news that, New York law notwithstanding, his and Ollie’s split was a clear case of no-fault, which, when you think about it, actually means both of their faults, thus getting Ollie at least partway off the hook. Plus, and more important than all the rest, Ingrid and Rudy loved Ellie and B, and Ellie and B loved them right back.
My mother came home after about an hour, but Clare stayed for dinner.
“Clare started talking about Swedish pancakes in the kind of voice people use to talk about Mount Everest or the moon, and before she’d finished, Ingrid was measuring out the flour,”
said my mother. Then she came over to where I was sitting and first touched the cuff of my sweater, then circled my wrist with her fingers. She smiled at me. “She’s a nice girl, baby. And she worships the ground you walk on.”
“It’s mutual,” I said.
“Yes, I can tell,” said my mother. She let go of my wrist, smiled again, and then left to go perform some task or other, to work out her fury and worry about Ollie and Teo by beating rugs or changing sheets or scrubbing nonexistent mildew from the bathroom tile. If it weren’t so well on its way to being dark outside, I knew she’d be in her garden, torturing some plant into good behavior, into a future of breathtaking blooms.
I’m not much of a sitter and thinker either. I don’t hack away at poor, innocent shrubbery but, especially in times of stress, I think things out by talking, as you may have observed, and I would have done just that, had there been the proper listener anywhere nearby. Linny was who I wanted. I could have picked up the phone, but Linny’s a person who conveys half of what she means through little twitches of her mouth, finger flutters, shrugs, and almost imperceptible widenings and narrowings of her keen, keen eyes. I wanted her in person or not at all and, besides, even I can do with short bouts of tranquil contemplation now and then. Although, in this instance, the tranquility was a bit forced, which I guess means it wasn’t tranquility at all.
After my mother left, I sat and thought. Thought about Teo, how he felt as lost to me as ever or nearly as lost. “They’re writing songs of love, but not for me.” That kind of thing. But mostly, I thought about Clare, about the nuts and bolts of how she and I would be OK. My mother was on the board of the private school we’d all gone to and, middle of the year or not, she’d pull strings and get Clare in. There was money enough from Martin, who had left everything to Clare, a fact that had surprised me, although it shouldn’t have. Martin’s blind spots had been large and appalling, but when he could see the right thing to do, he’d almost always done it. I was sure Martin’s attorney, Woods Rawlings, would get Clare money if she needed it. But I hoped she wouldn’t need it. I’d get a job, something real, and maybe take graduate courses as well.