Love Walked In by de los Santos Marisa

Author:de los Santos, Marisa [Marisa, de los Santos,]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Plume
Published: 2006-11-28T07:00:00+00:00

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.

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