“I’ve fallen in love with you, Cordelia,” he whispered, and Crystal came to take our order.
We had cold broccoli soup and tournedos of beef Ebbets and sorbet (lemon for me, raspberry for him) and coffee and a couple of brandies. I was glad Paul could still eat under the influence of strong emotion. I’ve never had any sympathy with people who are too much in love to eat. We talked about how miraculous it was that we’d fallen in love in the sunset like that, simultaneously. We kept laughing, happily, as little kids laugh when they’re having fun. We didn’t talk at all about Martha or Danny, though I told Paul I was separated from my husband. He looked just slightly relieved, and I knew without his saying so that this fact subtracted some of the falseness of his own position with Martha—and I think it made me seem older. He was forty-two.
“You could be my daughter,” he said with chagrin.
“I’m awfully glad I’m not,” I said, taking his hand again.
I wanted to ask him why he didn’t leave Martha, but—this will sound odd—I felt I didn’t know him well enough, and it wasn’t yet any of my business. We had a long road to go down, I saw—a lot of words would have to pass between us.
Our talk, over dinner, was sparse. We ordered more wine. I kept remembering the eating scene in the movie Tom Jones. We held hands from time to time, our knees rubbed together under the table, and when we traded bits of our fruit sorbets, licking from each other’s spoons, I thought I might slide off my chair from the ecstasy of it.
We did talk some, if only for appearances. I was vividly aware that I was under the surveillance of the entire Grand’mère staff. I told Paul about Juliet and Alan and my mother’s return, and the fact of the empty apartment sat before us like dessert. When we finished eating, he said he’d drive me home.
“You could come up and see my coin collection,” I said, indicating the bag on the floor.
“I’d like that very much,” he said seriously.
I told Crystal to tell Humphrey I’d see him in the morning—there was his bald head, peeping out through the pane in the kitchen door, and I waved tipsily. Paul and I left with his astonished eyes upon us. We drove out Whalley Avenue, my coin albums separating us on the seat, and we didn’t talk any more, except that Paul swore softly at each red light. When we got to Juliet’s, we lugged my stuff up the four flights to the strangely silent, empty, clean 5-B and, once inside, dropped everything and rushed panting into each other’s arms. We kissed frantically. I felt we had waited years to kiss each other instead of exactly one day, and until the moment I die—probably on my deathbed it will be my last impression of this wonderful world—I will remember the way it was, kissing Paul.
“I want to make love to you,” he said after a while, but at that point I made us stop. We sat on the sofa, holding hands. The speed of it all had exhilarated me; now it scared me a little. “I’m not ready,” I said. I had put clean sheets on Juliet and Alan’s double bed, intending to move myself into their room for as long as I stayed on. (Since Danny’s invasion of my bed, my own room had lost its appeal.) Now the big bed awaited us, clean and cool and ready, but I held on to Paul’s hands tightly as if to keep us fastened down together, decorously, on the sofa. “I’m a slow sort of person,” I told him, wishing I weren’t. “I need to digest this much first.”
He accepted it, though I don’t think he understood. It was one of the great differences between us, that his instinct was to grab fast and hard and impulsively, while I was cautious, looking ahead. Part of the reason I wouldn’t take him to bed was that I didn’t want to reminisce someday about the start of our love affair and remember that we made love before we ever got to know each other. I don’t know why—it made the feeling between us less like love, I suppose. When he put his glasses back on and left, later than he plausibly should have, I was glad that the bed was still clean and cool and neatly tucked—and yet I lay there sleepless for hours, wanting him. Maybe it was twelve years at St. Agatha’s School that gave logic to such behavior.
Paul picked me up the next day after work (SALAD PERSON WANTED, Humph’s sign read once again) and drove me out to the yellow house to have dinner and talk to Martha. We held hands all the way and kissed at stoplights. We were very carefree. I knew I would take the job, and we loved each other. Wives, husbands, children—none of it mattered.
I was daunted, though, by Martha. I had forgotten, totally, that she was daunting. She was in a silk dress, and she exclaimed, “Delia, dear, you’re like the answer to a prayer!”
There it all was, the gleaming house, the dogs, the antiques, the same bowl of apples, even the low sun—just the same, but completely, indescribably changed. I was no longer a casual visitor: I was a hired domestic fooling around with the master of the house.
Martha had set the table on a screened-in porch off the big old kitchen, and the table setting—which was arty, with a centerpiece of exotic seashells and flowers, and the napkins folded into birds—daunted me almost as thoroughly as Martha had.
Then there was the kitchen itself. It was nothing like the kitchen I had reveled in at Colonial Towers, where I used to thaw and heat up and blend the goodies Danny and I loved. That had been a tiny place, all Formica and chrome and plastic with everything within reach. This was all brick and wood and copper, bigger than the kitchen at Grand’mère, but very obviously done by a decorator. A stage set, I thought.
Martha showed me the gadgets; she had more, many more, than even Humphrey had. I felt defeated already, looking around that room. It was too big, too complicated, too elaborate and classy. I began to doubt my ability to learn to cook in a place like that.
The two rooms over the bookshop were promising, though. Martha and I took our glasses of sherry there—up a stairway off the laundry room, near the back door and handy to the kitchen. There was a large room and a smaller one and a toilet and a sink.
“We’ll enclose the bathroom part and put in a fiberglass shower stall,” Martha said, kicking aside some empty cartons and not seeming to notice that a visible layer of dust settled over one of her elegant shoes. “We’re having insulation blown in—been meaning to do that for years, actually. We also have a little heater for you to use in cold weather. You could have a hot plate, too, if you wanted. To make coffee on? And here—do you like this wallpaper?” She showed me a sample, flower-sprigged and old-fashioned. “I thought paper on the walls would be cozy. You’ll have a bedroom, you see, and this would be a sitting room. We have a nice old spool bed up in the attic, I’ll have Paul bring it down …”
These details cheered me. They made it real, for one thing. The last few days of my life had been dreamlike in their swiftness and fullness. The rooms over the bookshop gave me a stopping place, an anchor to attach my thoughts to. But when Paul’s name came up in that casual, wifely way, I saw that it was going to be difficult, too, living in those rooms—living at Lamb House Books. It would be better to be in love with Paul at a distance. “Something different”—that’s what I’d giddily decided I wanted. Well, I would have it. I couldn’t imagine how it would end, and I kept myself from trying. I thought instead of the pretty wallpaper and the nice old spool bed and coffee made on the hot plate, and I smiled as hard as I could at Martha.
“Chez Cordelia!” she cried, looking inspired. She gestured around the dusty space. “That’s what it’ll be—your own place, off limits to the rest of us. By invitation only!”
She spoke gaily, and I nodded with approval. Chez Cordelia: I liked it, it sounded like a restaurant.
We went back to the main house and sat down to eat, Martha and I flanking Paul at the square table. I wondered, humbly, if I would eat with them, or alone in the kitchen, or with the kids. When I asked, Martha said, looking hurt, “Why, we’ll all eat together, Delia! Good Lord, you don’t think we’d let you eat alone! Sweetie, you’re not a servant here!” She shot a distressed look at Paul, who was hunched over his plate and didn’t notice, but the look was meant for me, anyway, to underline her words.
She was pleased. The meal had been designed to win me over, but the guilty thought that what I liked best about it was Paul’s knee comfortably against mine under the tablecloth made the food, delicious as it was, go down tastelessly, over a lump of dismay. Each bite was one more knot binding me there where I shouldn’t be: sitting at their table, eating their food, giggling at the antics of their dogs out in the yard, listening to Martha’s tales of her cooking-school days in Paris. The elaborate, beautifully arranged and garnished food, the careful mix of tastes and textures, the pale-green wine in old, etched glasses—it all seemed silly, frivolous.
“We do look forward to having you here, Delia,” Martha said to me over espresso—just as I’d been trying to come up with a plausible reason for backing out. She patted my arm as she spoke. I have trouble resisting these affectionate physical gestures, however casual, and I gushed out something appropriate. Martha announced that I’d better meet the children, and Paul went to hunt them up. They were obviously well trained, and had, I gathered, eaten early and been sent up to their playroom—the usual procedure when the Lambertis had guests, I was to discover, though in the future I’d be up there with them. (Martha’s democratic ideals didn’t include inviting the cook to her dinner parties.)
The kids came decorously out to the porch, two blond little kids in summer pajamas, and shook hands and said they were pleased to meet me.
“And tell Miss Miller you’re looking forward to having her stay with us,” Martha said to them.
Ian buried his face in his stuffed dog. Megan began, “We’re looking forward to—”
“Oh, please!” I interrupted. “Couldn’t they just call me Delia?”
Martha frowned. I shouldn’t have proposed this variation on standard etiquette in front of the children, I realized. But she was gracious about it, smoothed out her frown, and said, “Would you like to call Miss Miller Delia, Megan?”
I could tell Megan didn’t care much one way or the other, but she said, “Oh yes.”
“Delia is short for Cordelia, Megan,” her mother said. “Isn’t that a pretty name?”
Megan said it was. Paul’s brown eyes stared out of Martha’s family’s face.
“Ian? Would you like to tell Cordelia that you’re looking forward to having her stay with us?”
Ian didn’t speak, and I said, “We’ll have a lot of fun, Ian,” but he looked dubiously at his dog as if he didn’t believe it. And why should he? Megan, prompted by a look from her mother, said, “We’re looking forward to having you to stay with us, Delia.” She gave a meaningful, longing look to the mousse, but Martha hustled them back upstairs.
“They’re cute,” I said inanely to Paul.
He shrugged and said, “This may sound terrible, but they’re her children. All hers.”
We were silent, staring at each other. This is a mistake, I kept saying to myself. A mistake, a mistake, a mistake.
“Well!” Martha said briskly, coming in. “It’s true, Cordelia. We just can’t wait for you to come!” She beamed at me. “All settled? You’ll come as soon as they get a replacement for you at the restaurant?”
I said I would, trying not to look miserable. “You’ll be one of us,” Martha said. “Just one more member of our slightly wacky family,” and she laughed and pecked me on the cheek.
As soon as Paul and I got into the car, I told him it was a mistake. “I can’t do this! She’s so nice. I can’t do this to her! Think of all the lies, Paul!”
He said nothing. We drove down the road past the darkened barns, to Gresham. At the stoplight there he kissed me, but I felt no better, and I drew away.
“We can’t!” I said, keeping my voice under tight control. I didn’t want to cry in front of him. I hate women who cry all the time in front of men. Why should women have to break down in tears, when men don’t? Then I looked over at Paul and saw tears slipping down his face.
I made him pull over into the empty parking lot of a supermarket, and I held him in my arms. “I’ve been thinking all during dinner, Delia,” he said. “We have to talk. We have to get this straight.” He sat up, and we held hands. “I know how you’re feeling,” he said. “But don’t.” His voice was stern, though he looked at me tenderly. “Don’t feel that way. You’re not stealing someone else’s husband. Martha and I hate each other. She despises me, I despise her. We loathe each other. We’re enemies, total enemies, but we don’t even fight because we don’t care enough.” His grip on my hands got tighter and tighter. “We stay together for the kids and the business, and because of our incredibly complicated economics, and because it’s the easiest thing to do. But we have nothing—nothing, I swear it. We go our own ways.” I looked at him in despair, shaking my head. “There are plenty of marriages like ours, Delia,” he said gently.
“I’ve never seen one.”
“There’s a lot you haven’t seen.”
“You should just—break up,” I insisted. It was horrible, unthinkable, that two people could live like that. Was it even possible? Could it be true? It occurred to me that I knew nothing about the man who was holding my hands so tightly. “You should leave if that’s the way things are,” I said.
“You have no idea—it’s so complex. It seems simple to you because you’re so young, Delia. But I hope that someday …” He left the rest unsaid, looking earnestly into my face, but it was enough for me. I could imagine Paul and me flying off somewhere alone together—like the couple in a print of a painting Miranda used to keep in her room—sweeping through the sky over cows and roofs and trees, clasping each other. “I love you, and I won’t have Martha wrecking it,” Paul said in a different voice, loosening his grip on my hands and pulling me toward him. His words were like music; I could have got up and danced.
We necked in the parking lot, under the lights and the ads for toilet paper and ham and tomatoes on sale, and then we drove back to my apartment.
“You love me, Delia?” he asked.
Of course I did, but I considered carefully. “I know hardly anything about you,” I said, looking at his profile. His glasses lit up every time we passed under a streetlight. That was almost all I knew of him: what he looked like, the texture of his hands. Only what I could see and feel. He still had no past. His past was as mysterious to me as our future was, and as delicious, full of potential goodies.
I wanted to know about how he cried and wet his pants on the first day of kindergarten, about the death of his turtle, about the day his brother Tom threw a fastball straight at Paul’s head and knocked him cold, about his mother’s lasagne and his father’s butcher shop and his Aunt Rosie and his Uncle Pete and his college days and his tonsillectomy—all the things I know now but didn’t then, the things that made Paul Paul. I hungered for them. I looked at him in the intermittent light, while he waited for me to speak: profile, curly hair, glasses (His glasses! How old was he when he first got glasses? Was he nearsighted? farsighted? astigmatic?) and wished for long, free hours with him so he could turn himself inside out for me. I thought of all the years Danny and I had had to get to know each other, and yet already I knew Paul better than I would ever know Danny.
“I love you with all my heart,” I told him confidently.
Ah, what a smile that man has. Even in the near-dark, I felt his smile down in the depths of my bones.
By the time I got home, I was wearier than I could ever remember being. I’d been through the wringer, all right—squeezed flat again and again like a cat in a cartoon. I needed to sleep. But after Paul left me I was su
ddenly starving. It was as if Martha’s perfect meal had been a dream. I went into Juliet’s kitchen and ate some swiss cheese and some peanut butter crackers. Then I stumbled into bed with the crumbs still on my face and dreamed of nothing.
I lived in the apartment after that as if it were a hotel, keeping the door securely locked (fearful, always, of Danny’s return), knowing I would leave it soon. My parents gradually retrieved all of Juliet’s books and papers and clothes. My father, jolly and unchanged by his semester in California and the illness of his middle daughter (and the new disappointments of his youngest), took me out to dinner one night. We went to Grand’mère so I could show off Humphrey’s cooking. But Humph had the only off night I’d ever known him to have: the soup was salty and the veal was tough. My father ate without enthusiasm, and when I told him that my new career as a cook would be beginning any day, he looked at me sadly, and said, “With your brains, Cordelia? Your background?”—adding, with heavy irony, “Upon such sacrifices, my Cordelia, the gods themselves throw incense.”
“It’s not a sacrifice, Daddy!” All my life he’d quoted things at me when I wanted to be taken seriously. “It’s what I want to do, it’s what I can be good at.”
He just smiled and looked resigned, as if I had announced I was entering an order of cloistered nuns, but later he said, when I told him more about the Lambertis, “They sound like nice people.”
“Just because they sell books.”
“No, no,” he protested. “They’ll take care of you, at least. You’ll be in good hands.”
I thought of Paul’s square, tanned hands reaching under my T-shirt, and I smiled at my father.
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