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| ISBN-13: | 9780452287891 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Penguin Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 11/28/2006 |
| Pages: | 320 |
| Sales rank: | 437,205 |
| Product dimensions: | 7.92(w) x 5.34(h) x 0.67(d) |
| Lexile: | 940L (what's this?) |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
Hometown:
Wilmington, DelawareDate of Birth:
August 12, 1966Place of Birth:
Baltimore, MarylandEducation:
Un. of Virginia, BA in Eng; Sarah Lawrence College, MFA in Poetry; Un. of Houston, Ph.D. in Eng. and Creative WritingWebsite:
http://www.marisadelossantos.com
My life-my real life-started when a man walked into it, a handsome stranger in a perfectly cut suit, and, yes, I know how that sounds. My friend Linny would snort and convey the kind of multipronged disgust I rely on her to convey. One prong of feminist disgust at the whole idea of a man changing a woman's life, even though, as things turned out, the man himself was more the harbinger of change than the change itself. Another prong of disgust for the inaccuracy of saying my life began after thirty-one years of living it. And the final prong being a kind of general disgust for the way people turn moments in their lives into movie moments.
I do this more than I should, I'll give her that, but there was something backlit and sudden about his walking through the door of the cafe I managed. If the floor had been bare and not covered with tables, chairs, people, and dogs, the autumnal late-morning sun would have slung his narrow shadow dramatically across the floor in a real Orson Welles shot. But Linny can jab me with her three-pronged disgust fork all she wants, and I'd still say that my life started on that October morning when a man walked through the door.
It was an ordinary day-palpably ordinary, if that makes any sense, like it was asserting its smooth usualness. A Saturday, loud, smoke already piling up and hovering like weather over me and the customers in Cafe Dora. I sat where I always sat when I wasn't waiting on someone-on a high stool behind the counter-and I watched Hayes and Jose play chess. Everyone said they were good players. They themselves said they were. "Not prodigy good," said Hayes. "Not Russian, Deep-freakin'-Blue-playing good. But hell." Hayes was from Texas and wrote the wine column for the Philadelphia Inquirer. He liked to swear in offbeat ways, liked to walk in, turn a chair around backward with a bang, and straddle it.
As I watched, Jose lifted his shaggy head, gave Hayes a liquid-eyed, sorrowful look, and moved a chess piece from one square to another. I don't know the game well, but whatever Jose had done, it must have been something, because Hayes tossed back his head and hooted, "Hot damn, boy! You pulled that one right out of your ass!" Hayes looked at me with a wry smile and a genial cowboy twinkle in his eye, and I lifted one corner of my mouth in a kind of rueful facial shrug. "What can you do?" my face said.
But don't get attached to Hayes. As he was already in the room, he's obviously not the man who walked into it bearing the new life on his shoulders, and he doesn't finally figure into this story much. Not sure why I started with Hayes, except that in lots of ways he's a neat little embodiment of the old life: a self-invented, smartish, semialluring wine snob disguised as a cowboy, not un- nice, with fairly amusing comments tripping off his tongue and probably a real person under there somewhere, but possibly not. In college, I read Piers Plowman in which this man Will goes on a journey and runs into characters like Holy Church and Gluttony. Think of Hayes as a character like that: Typical-Denizen-of-Cornelia's-Old-Life. I've always found allegories kind of comforting. When you encounter people named Liar and Abstinence, you might not be crazy about them, but you know exactly what you're getting into.
Another regular, Phaedra, made her entrance, all blowsy auburn curls, leather pants, and nursing-mother breasts, and tugging a giant black pram behind her-one of those English nanny prams with high, white rubber tires. Five people jumped up and nearly cracked one another's skulls trying to hold the door open for her. Phaedra directed a beseeching look at the couple sitting at the table nearest the door, a look that turned out to be unnecessary. The man and woman were already hustling up their cappuccinos, jackets, camera bags, and backpacks on metal frames, not minding a bit.
"Cornelia!" Phaedra sang at me across the room in just the sort of musical voice you'd expect to come out of her mouth. "Could you? Cafe au lait? Loads of sugar? And something sinful!" We don't have table service. Phaedra made a helpless, sighing gesture with her shoulders and her long hands, indicating her child, her exhaustion, the whole ancient weight of motherhood. Phaedra was a pain. But Allegra was a different story. Bearing the coffee and a croissant, I came out from behind my counter and made my zigzag way around tables and dogs for the sake of Phaedra's baby, Allegra.
And there she was, wrapped in a leopard-print blanket, just waking up. A blue-eyed, translucent, bewitching witch of a baby, fresh as new bread in that smoky room. Allegra resembled Phaedra, same white skin, same glorious Carole Lombard forehead, but with carrot-orange hair that flew out in all directions. I waited for the pang; the pang came. I never saw Allegra without wanting to touch her, specifically to sleep with her in the crook of my right arm. I put the croissant and the coffee in front of Phaedra, then cradled my elbows with my hands. Allegra was asleep and making nursing motions with her mouth because what else would babies dream about?
"Face it. You want one," said Phaedra. With effort, I shifted my gaze from gorgeous child to gorgeous pain-in-the-ass mother. "See that?" said Phaedra. "You had to literally drag your eyes away from her." Ouch, I thought, and then sat down to talk for a minute, Phaedra's misuse of the word "literally" having created a warm spot in my heart, tiny but large enough to prompt a five- minute conversation.
"How's business?" I asked. Phaedra was a jewelry designer.
"Not good. I'm starting to think people just don't get it," said Phaedra. Her signature pieces, or what would be her signature pieces if anyone bought and wore them, were made out of sea glass and platinum, a juxtaposition of the ordinary and extraordinary, Phaedra claimed, that forced one to rethink one's perceptions of "value" and "preciousness." Maybe people didn't get it. Or maybe they got it but didn't feel sufficiently moved to shell out eight hundred dollars for a bracelet made of old Heineken bottles.
Phaedra lifted her coffee to her lips, eyeing me brightly through the steam. "Cornelia, what if you wore some of the pieces in the cafe, just to generate interest?" Her tone suggested the idea had just popped into her head. In fact, this was the third time she'd asked.
"I can't wear jewelry at work," I said, not elaborating but rolling my eyes in a way I hoped suggested some unseen powers-that-be who hovered over me, forbidding jewelry. The truth was that I never wore jewelry anywhere, ever. I'm five feet tall and built like a preteen, eighty-five pounds soaking wet, as my father says, and my fear is that, given my smallness, jewelry will make me look like a geegaw or doodad, a spangly ornament to hang on a tree. It's a shame, too, because I adore it. Not so much Phaedra's kind-cool, angular objects-but serious jewels: diamonds, cuffs and chokers, brooches like shooting stars, tiaras. Jean Harlow jewels, Irene Dunne on the ship in Love Affair.
Allegra stirred in her leopard-print nest, yawned, and shot out a fist. Phaedra lifted her onto her lap, instantly dipping her swan neck, dropping her face into the orange hair, breathing in her child's scent. An authentic gesture, automatic, unstudied. I felt prickles shoot down my arms. I touched a finger to Allegra's hand, and she gripped it hard and hung on.
"You should have one, you know," said Phaedra, harping, and this instantly got my hackles up, until I saw her face, which was something like kind. Phaedra was always a better person with Allegra in her arms. So I just trilled a little laugh and said, breezily, "Me with a baby. Can you imagine?"
"Of course, I can. Perfectly," said Phaedra. "And so can you."
While I resented her smug smile, and while I'd have died before admitting it to her, I had to admit to myself that she was at least partly right: I couldn't imagine it perfectly, but I could imagine it. Had imagined it, in fact, more than once. But, every time, what brought me to my senses was my conviction that before a person dropped a new life into this world, she should probably get a real one herself.
The truth was, I was treading water and had been for some time. If you're wondering why a thirty-something woman who had gone to all the trouble of attending a university and slogging through medieval allegorical texts had risen no higher on the career food chain than cafe manager, I don't blame you. I wondered myself. And the best answer I'd come up with was that I hadn't figured out anything better-not yet. If I were to ever have a full-fledged vocation, as opposed to a half-assed avocation, I needed to love it and, in my experience, it isn't always easy to figure out what you love. You'd think it would be, but it isn't. Also, if you stay in it for any length of time, like anyplace else, a cafe becomes a world.
I felt suddenly weary, looking at Phaedra and Allegra and the shining black pram. And if a woman weighing less than ninety pounds can be said to heave herself, I heaved myself out of my seat and lugged myself back to my spot behind the bar.
All of which is meant to demonstrate the ordinariness of the day and how the ordinariness was even taking on shades of dreariness and futility. Because you have to understand what my life was like in the "before" in order to see just how much it changed in the "after." Ordinary, ordinary. Except that-and I honestly believe this, Linny's pooh-poohing of movie moments notwithstanding-just before, a minute before the cafe door opened one more time, the ordinary day turned itself up a notch, in preparation.
The light falling through the high, arched windows went from mellow to brilliant, turning the old copper of the espresso machine to pure gold. And the music-Sarah Vaughan, whom I worship, singing George and Ira, whom I worship-was suddenly floating and dipping like some kind of bird in the clear space above the cigarette smoke and chitchat. The coffee smelled sublime, the flowers I'd bought that morning pierced the air with their blueness, the coffee cups lost their chips and glowed eggshell-thin, and standing in my red sweater and vintage suede skirt, my boots solidly on the floor, I felt almost tall.
The door of Cafe Dora opened, and Cary Grant walked in.
If you haven't seen The Philadelphia Story, stop what you are doing, rent it, and watch it. It's probably overstating the point to say that until you watch it, you will have been living a partial and colorless life. However, it is definitely on the list of perfect things. You know what I mean, the list that includes the starry sky over the desert, grilled cheese sandwiches, The Great Gatsby, the Chrysler building, Ella Fitzgerald singing "It Don't Mean a Thing (If You Ain't Got That Swing)," white peonies, and those little sketches of hands by Leonardo da Vinci.
If you have seen it, then you know there's a moment when Katharine Hepburn as Tracy Lord steps from a poolside cabana. She's got a straight white dream of a dress hanging from her tiny collarbones, a dress fluted and precise as a Greek column but light and full of the motion of smoke. A paradox of a dress, a marriage of opposites that just makes your teeth hurt it's so exactly right.
I was fourteen when I first saw it. It was three days before Christmas, which in my family's house meant, means, and will always mean, Yuletide sensory overload: every room stuffed to the gills with garland and holly, the whole place booming with Johnny Mathis, and a monstrosity of a tree towering in the living room, weighed down with ornaments of every description, including dozens defying description that my brothers, sister, and I had made in school over the years.
Fourteen was not a good year for me. I was the latest of late bloomers, of course, about two feet high and scrawny as a cat, still shopping in the children's department, profoundly allergic to every member of my family, and convinced that nothing could make me happy. But then my grouchy channel-surfing landed me in the middle of a black-and-white heaven: Tracy, the dress.
I was so struck, I forgot how to swallow and began to truly asphyxiate on a sip of 7-Up. And when, a little later, Tracy unfastened the belt from her willow waist and slipped her faultlessly formed self out of that faultlessly formed garment, I stood up and yelled, "Holy shit, that's her bathing suit cover-up!" which my father, who was sitting on the floor fastening-no joke-jingle bells to the collars of our cats, did not appreciate.
I turned every atom of myself over to the rest of the movie. People must've gone tearing through the room, because people always did go tearing through rooms, especially my brothers Cam and Toby, who were eight and nine at the time. But a volcano could have begun spewing molten rock inches away from me, and I would not have noticed. I sat. I watched. If a girl could sling a poem over her swimwear as though it were an old T-shirt, what else might be possible?
I slid my fingers over my face, feeling for Tracy's winged cheekbones. And when Dexter (Cary Grant) took Tracy to task, saying, "You'll never be a first-rate woman or a first-rate human being until you have some regard for human frailty," I recognized it as wisdom and wondered whether I had it, that kind of regard, and just how to get it if I didn't.
In college, I took a film studies class subtitled something like "Turning the Formula on Its Head" in which the professor talked about the trick The Philadelphia Story pulls off. It should never have worked: creating a fantastic love scene between two characters whom you know are not in love with each other, getting you somehow to root for them wholeheartedly during the scene, but then to feel completely satisfied when they end up with other people.
Before you get the wrong impression, you should know that I'm not and never was one of those film people, the kind who argue into the wee hours about the auteur theory and whether Spielberg is the new Capra, or whether John Huston impacts, in unseen ways, every second of American life. I don't know from camera angles, and I don't have an encyclopedic knowledge of pre-World War II German cinema, but I fell a little in love with the film professor when he looked upon us with shining eyes and proclaimed, "No, it should not work. But work it does!" because he was so passionate and right.
When I heard Mike (Jimmy Stewart) say to Tracy in that tender, marveling voice, "No, you're made out of flesh and blood. That's the blank, unholy surprise of it. You're the golden girl, Tracy," I clasped my hands under my pointy chin, prayed that she would run away with him, and swore to God that someday a man would say those words in that voice to me or else I would die. But then, at the movie's end, my father heard cheering and left water running in the sink to watch his lately distant, disaffected teenage daughter bang her fists on the arms of her chair and turn to him crying, "with a face as open as a flower" (my dad's own improbable words), saying breathlessly, "She's marrying Dexter, Daddy."
I'll admit it. I've always been more than a little proud of myself for having been fourteen and deeply benighted about almost everything, but having had the sense to recognize what is surely a universal truth: Jimmy Stewart is always and indisputably the best man in the world, unless Cary Grant should happen to show up.
His name was Martin Grace. An excellent name, which, you may have noticed, shares all but three letters with "Cary Grant." Of course, if you're not a freak of nature, you probably didn't notice, and you'll be relieved to know that it didn't even spring to my mind right away. It was later, as I lay in bed that night, that I figured it out, mentally crossing out letters with an imaginary pencil, concentrating pretty hard, but sort of affecting an offhand, semi-interested attitude about it, cocking my head casually on the pillow, even though there was no one in the room to see me.
Truth be told, I'm a little superstitious about names. Back in college, I dated an enormous, blond, dumb fraternity boy from Baton Rouge with a voice like a foghorn purely on the strength of his being named William Powell, whom everyone knows from the Thin Man movies, but who is even better in Libeled Lady and is one of those men whose handsomeness you believe in completely even though you know it doesn't exist.
My mother met the boy and knew instantly what I was up to. "Your nose looks like Myrna Loy's," she'd said. "Be satisfied with that." Even so, I didn't ditch Bill until a few nights later when I stood in his Georgian-mansion-turned-dank-cave of a frat house and watched Bill dancing shirtless on a tabletop, his bare, unfortunate belly pulsating like an anguished jellyfish. The bellyfish pulsated, and William Powell, with a delicate shrug, chose that moment to detach himself from Bill forever and slip out into the honeysuckle-scented night.
Slippery things, names. Still: Martin Grace. Good. Very good.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Love Walked In by Marise de los Santos Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
“This is a book that will be passed from friend to friend with the words, ‘You have to read this.’” —Richmond Times Dispatch
“Love Walked In, by Marisa de los Santos, is the kind of book that makes you want to hunker down on a chilly day in a comfy chair and read straight through ’til dark...This [is a] poignant, heart-tugging story about a single woman and a little girl who develop an unlikely bond.” —The Washington Post Book World
“A bewitching, warmhearted grown-up fairy tale about old movies, charming princes, and finding happily ever after in the place where you’d least expect it.” —Jennifer Weiner, author of Good in Bed, In Her Shoes, and Little Earthquakes
“Marisa de los Santos’s funny and beautifully written love story is as luminous as the silver screen.” —Lolly Winston, author of Good Grief
“A touching, triumphant story of the power and variety and responsibility of love. A joy to read, filled with characters you wish you knew in real life. Love Walked In is every bit as engaging as the classic movies Marisa de los Santos lovingly invokes.” —Karen Joy Fowler, author of The Jane Austen Book Club
“Exquisite and stylish, Love Walked In proves that love in all of its forms—romantic, friendship, familial—is all around us.” —Sarah Jessica Parker
INTRODUCTION
When Martin Grace enters the hip Philadelphia coffee shop Cornelia Brown manages, her life changes forever. Charming and debonair, the spitting image of Cary Grant, Martin sweeps Cornelia off her feet, but, as it turns out, Martin Grace is more the harbinger of change than change itself.
Meanwhile, on the other side of town, eleven-year-old Clare Hobbs must learn to fend for herself after her increasingly unstable mother has a breakdown and disappears. Taking inspiration from famous orphans (Anne Shirley, Sara Crewe, Mary Lennox, and even Harry Potter) Clare musters the courage to seek out her estranged father. When the two of them show up at Cornelia’s café, Cornelia and Clare form a bond as unlikely as it is deep. Together, they face difficult choices and discover that knowing what you love and why is as real as life gets.
An award-winning poet, Marisa de los Santos currently teaches English at the University of Delaware. Love Walked In is her first novel. Her first collection of poems, From the Bones Out, was published by the University of South Carolina Press in 2000. Her poetry has appeared in Poetry, Southwest Review, Antioch Review, Prairie Schooner, and The Virginia Quarterly Review.
When Love Walked In first started to take shape inside my head, I was living in Center City, Philadelphia, and I never considered setting the novel anywhere else. I have tremendous affection for the place. New York is an astonishing city, dazzling, but I've always had a soft spot for cities that are smaller, less glamorous, less firmly planted in the culture's collective imagination. Philadelphia isn't smug because it can't afford to be. It's scrappy, vibrant, a little raggedy, but full of history and unexpected pockets of loveliness. It's also a very livable, negotiable city, and, while Cornelia may have bigger cities in her future, when Love Walked In begins, Philly just suits her.
Q. There is much reference throughout the novel to Cornelia's physical appearance and stature. Why was it important to you for Cornelia to be such a physically small person?
I hear this question fairly often, and it's an interesting one for me to consider because Cornelia's smallness was a very intuitive decision for me. She just was small; from the beginning, it was something I knew about her. But like most intuitive decisions, when I look back at that one and examine it, I see all kinds of reasons for it. Mostly, I see that Cornelia's size has had everything to do with who she is when the novel opens. Growing up, Cornelia's smallness was something she grappled with and worked against. Because her body refused to cut her a break and develop stature, glamour, or curves, she developed those aspects of herself that were developable: her wit, her intelligence, her convictions, her strength of character. It would have been much easier for her to go the cute and helpless route, but she refuses that. She becomes a big person in a small body. Also, I like that she and Clare are the same height. It's a sort of physical manifestation of the way their personalities rhyme. But I like that they won't stay the same size; Clare will outgrow Cornelia eventually.
Q. How did all the classic movies you reference inspire this novel?
Cornelia comes by her love of classic movies honestly. I'm a fan, particularly of the romantic comedies of the 1930s and 1940s. I think we associate that era with high glamour, but, ultimately, that's not what draws me to those films. First of all, I love the language: that elegant, rapid-fire, razor-sharp, incredibly funny but incredibly revealing dialogue. You listen to those people talk and understand the real necessity and nobility of humor. The language feels so fresh, and, certainly, I wanted to make language feel fresh in the novel. I didn't want to foreground language or decorate with it, but I wanted to use it in unexpected ways.
Second of all, I love the women in those old films. The men are glorious, but the women steal every show. Carole Lombard, Irene Dunne, Katharine Hepburn, Jean Arthur. They're so subtle and sexy and vibrant and wicked-smart. They're not invulnerable, though. They're not perfect. They're capable and strong, but they're human. I wanted Cornelia to be human in that way, too.
Q. Was it difficult to make the transition from poetry to fiction? Did you always write fiction as well?
Before I wrote Love Walked In, I'd never written any fiction, at least in my adult life. Not a short story. Nothing. So if I'd stopped to think about the transition from poetry to fiction, it probably would have been very difficult. It probably would've scared me silly. Luckily, it happened gradually, and I didn't stop to analyze it. One day, I had a character in my head, a voice, and over time, that voice developed into Cornelia. She was quite fully fleshed out in my head before I had a sense of her story, and then the plot started to form, and then Clare showed up. All of this happened before I wrote a single word, and it took a long time. Then, I started to write down what I'd been thinking about, and there I was, writing a novel.
Q. What are you working on now?
I'm working on a second novel, a sort of follow-up to the first. I hesitate to call it a sequel because it's a very different book. Cornelia is a main character, but she shares time pretty equally with three other main characters, a woman named Piper who is in many ways the anti-Cornelia, a thirteen-year-old spooky-smart boy named Dev, and Dev's mother, Lake, a woman with a secret. Cornelia is married and living in the suburbs, where she's a fish out of water, and her life intersects with the lives of these other characters in unexpected ways. If the first book was about finding love, the second book is about what we do once we've found it.
Q: Was the transition from writing poetry to writing a novel easy?
A: I've always been a reader of novels. Honestly, even when I wrote poetry exclusively, when it came to reading, novels were what I loved most and, more than any other form of literature, novels are what shaped-and what continue to shape-my personality in deep, lasting ways. The simple truth is that I wrote poems because I knew how to write poems and I didn't write novels because I didn't know how and because I didn't have a story to tell. Maybe no one knows how to write "poetry" or "fiction"; maybe one only knows how to write specific poems and specific novels. Certainly, until I had a story to tell and until I had characters whose voices I could hear very distinctly, I had no idea how to begin to write a novel. And then one day I found that I had characters and the shadowy outlines of a plot living in my head.
This month brings us several poignant family dramas and plenty of neighborhood intrigue, from a wealthy New York City enclave to a scandal-plagued Ohioan suburb. A heart-pounding thriller aboard an airplane; a TV star’s abduction; and three books set in Italy will have you staying up late turning pages and practicing your grazies and pregos! Lastly, […]
