Claire Marvel (7 page)

Claire turned to face me.

“I found him a quarter mile up the road, curled against the cemetery wall,” she said. “He’d been hit by a car. Somehow he’d dragged himself. When he saw me he began to whimper. His hip was crushed and his stomach was bleeding. He died in my arms.”

It was afternoon. We stood on the perfect lawn as the sunlight thinned and an autumn chill spilled ink from the woods behind the house. A pair of robins hunted for worms in the grass. Beside me Claire seemed mired still in that long-ago scene with her mother, the violation of a trust that could never again be set right. Her arms were folded across her chest and her gaze was fixed on nothing.

We were almost touching. I wanted to throw her a line and haul her to safety, if I could. To press my hand against her cheek. Failing that, there were only words to fall back on, to attempt to tell her, by way of my own limited experience, that the darkness in which she now found herself was not an eclipse.

I said, “My mother and I don’t really speak anymore.”

Claire looked at me.

And I told her about the day, four years earlier, when my father returned from work to find an empty apartment and three
white envelopes lying on the kitchen table. The envelopes—one addressed to each member of the family—were thin. I still had mine. The letters were typed, a paragraph long, the same words for each of us. She was in love with another man, had been for a long time. She couldn’t go on like this. She was sorry. She loved us and always would. She hoped we’d understand in time. She would send her new address once she got settled.

“She lives in a Houston suburb now. He’s an orthopedist.”

“Do you miss her?”

“I miss believing in her,” I said.

A long silence then. Claire’s expression intense, collaborative. She smiled gently.

“Come on. I want to show you something.”

She turned and began walking toward the woods. I followed. As we neared the edge of the lawn a path grew visible, narrowly forged through the trees and strewn with dead leaves. The air, blocked from the sun and dank with humus, turned cooler. Our footsteps trod softly over the layered ground. In our noses was the scent of the vegetation.

I walked behind her. Thinking not about my mother but about my father. Quiet, mild man. Once immortalized out of his earshot by my older sister, Judith, as “Clark Kent minus Superman.” Had he ever even raised his voice at us? I couldn’t remember. Though he must have. Kids, after all, did stupid and dangerous things—ran into streets without looking, fell from trees, stepped on shards of glass, got crushes on girls who wouldn’t give them the time of day. He must have raised his voice at me, at least in warning. But I couldn’t remember.
Though the man I knew wasn’t inclined to shout. If a problem was discovered, his first instincts went inevitably toward reason and compromise. For nearly four decades he’d been with the same publishing house, beginning as an assistant editor in adult trade, a die-hard lover of literature. But when, five years after he’d joined the firm, his employers urged a move into the textbook division, he’d complied without a murmur. At his retirement recently he was given a crystal paperweight and a pension half the size it should have been. A history of neglect exacerbated, one might have speculated, by his physiognomy: his wide kind face was the very emblem of modest decency; his fine limp hair was of no distinctive color. His pale gray eyes were clear of the accrued resentments and morbid regrets typical of men in late middle age; but clear too, it had to be said, of the determined will and potential fierceness that make men remembered after they’re gone. Perhaps I’d grown up vaguely ashamed of his benign acceptance of the status quo and the smallness of his footprint on the earth.

And yet for much of his life my father had done all right, according to the rather modest terms he’d set for himself: marriage, kids, career. Until a few years ago, that is, too late in the game to defend himself, when the woman he’d loved and trusted and depended on had left him without so much as a word of tenderness. A quarter century in the making, and then a single paragraph had crushed him as if he were built of nothing more substantial than paper. After which he was by definition flat. Even his own past—especially this—would from that moment on appear like a perilous mountain. And he was no climber; he would lie down. I knew, because I’d
observed him from up close. Had for almost two years after college moved in with him in that dusty prewar co-op whose furniture, books, china, and pictures he had chosen with my mother.

Yes, I’d roomed with him again, driven by filial compassion. But when he’d failed to get up—when, day after day, I watched him hugging the floor of his memory like a boxer who’s thrown the fight—I’d fled to Cambridge as if my life depended on it, and not looked back. As if in his stunned misery he’d become a stone gorgon, capable at a glance of turning me to stone just like him.

Ahead, now, a flare of daylight: the path gave out onto a small wooden dock at the edge of a saltwater marsh. Here the sunshine was intensified rather than thinned, the water deep blue. Between two rocky islets more than a hundred swans floated, princely confections in a still parade. Visible on the far shore was a strip of scrub brush and beyond that a whiteness that must have been beach. In the distance, hazed like a mirage, lay the ocean.

I stood with her on the dock. Behind us there was an overturned Old Town canoe, the handles of two paddles, still shiny with varnish, poking out from underneath. Algae had stained parts of the dock green and water had rotted it; we stood a bit unsteadily, as if on the deck of a slowly sinking boat, and listened to the soft lapping of the marsh. Running some fifty yards out to our right was a cluster of desiccated cattails in the middle of which, raised above the water on a
square wooden platform and partially camouflaged by reeds and tall grasses, I was able to make out a duck blind.

“Hunters?” I said.

Claire nodded. “True story. My brother had an air rifle and used to go around shooting squirrels and birds, pretty much anything that moved. My father tried to make him stop. But Alan was thirteen and either a natural sadist or he’d just seen too many Dirty Harry movies. Eventually Daddy had to take the gun and lock it in the linen closet upstairs. Later I found where he’d put the key and started plotting my revenge. I was going to show the little macho freak. One day while my parents were in town I looked out the window and saw him tossing a tennis ball to himself on the lawn. I went and got the gun. It was still loaded—Daddy’d forgotten to empty the pellets. I went over to the window and took careful aim. Then I shot him twice in the ass before he ever knew what hit him.” Claire burst out laughing. “God, it felt good!”

I gave her an appraising look.

With a tough-girl grin she demanded, “How about you? Ever shoot anybody?”

“No, but when I was ten I burned the hair off Judith’s Barbie. Ever seen a bald Barbie?”

She laughed. Then, glancing away from each other, we entered a long silence. Invisible threads connected us—as if we were Siamese twins, sharing origins, necessities, desires, fates. This was the law of bound hearts: separate us and only one, at most, would survive.

Up again rose the liquid whispering of the marsh against the dock, while the rustling of the breeze through the
cattails sounded like fingers combing a wheat field. A swan began to beat the blue water with its wings. Massive, improbable wings. Began to walk on water, gathering speed. And Claire, as we sat watching, without a word reached out and laid her hand against the side of my head. Her touch was electric. I remained still. The swan achieved liftoff, beat the air, seemed to create the air, banked, curved, and flew off for the far side of the marsh, where the ocean was. She took her hand away. When it was gone the hard beating of my heart was all that remained in my ears—as if the earth’s elements had recombined, become one indivisible thing which was her. Then that sound too began to fade. I grew aware of some critical moment having passed without my grasping it, and of Claire standing beside me on the dock, still close, yet now angled away.

Then she turned to me.

“Another true story. My uncle proposed to my aunt on this dock,” she said. “He was over from Brown for the weekend, paying court. Her parents wouldn’t leave them alone. Then it was late Sunday and he had to be getting back. So, desperate and preoccupied, he took her for a walk down here. She was naive and didn’t see it coming. She’d brought her camera. Took her time like a tourist, peering through the viewfinder at everything. That was how he appeared to her—next to her here on the dock, so close she couldn’t quite get him into focus. He was blurry, fuzzy at the edges. It all kind of embarrassed her. As if it was her fault somehow that he wasn’t crystal clear, she must have been doing something wrong. It
confused
her. Then suddenly he blew up. He said, ‘Just put the
goddamn camera
down,
Ellen, for chrissakes!’ And because it was 1959 and she was a woman who didn’t know any better, she put the camera down. And that’s when she saw him clearly for the first time. Really saw him, his big blue eyes totally inward-looking, focused only on the question he was about to ask, not actually seeing her at all. Blind to her. She
knew
this. Yet two minutes later she’d accepted him. And three years later they had two kids.”

“And the marriage?”

Unsmiling, Claire drew a finger across her throat.

Thinking about my parents, I said, “It’s hard to understand the choices people make.”

“Not hard, Julian,” Claire replied with sudden vehemence. “Fucking impossible. The choices most of us make, most of the time, make no sense at all.”

She seemed angry, staring out toward the ocean. Seeing perhaps—she must have seen—that the day had declined subtly, the sunlight was no longer brilliant over the marsh, the water was no longer so blue; that large numbers of swans, following that intrepid first one, had begun to fly away.

Thinking about my parents had depressed me. “I like to think people like us won’t make the same bad choices our parents made,” I said.

“And I like to think there aren’t any people like us,” Claire replied. “I guess for my sanity I need to think it. That we’re basically blank slates. That the choices we’ve already made and will end up making—what we do with our lives, what I’m saying to you right this second—that all of it’s the story, our original message to ourselves and the world, getting written all the
time, again and again, till one day it just covers us like an epitaph….”

She leaned over and kissed me, briefly but feelingly, on the mouth.

“And then I guess we’ll know. Or someone will, Julian, if you and I aren’t around anymore. Someone will, if not us. How it all turned out, I mean. What the odds were. How we did.”

eleven

S
HE WROTE CHECKS
with a black Waterman fountain pen, a gift from her father, in emerald-green ink. Her signature was arguably the most voluptuous aspect of her character; debts were to be obliterated by the name of Claire Marvel. Which was perhaps the point—the presence of funds could be a spotty business with her. She might go from broke to flush, or flush to broke, in a matter of days. The money, like the pen, came from her father, who sent it without his wife’s knowledge; and who was embattled during these months, for his cancer had returned.

Every weekend now she spent with him in Stamford. I never accompanied her; she never asked me to. She made it clear she wouldn’t appreciate my calling while she was there. What I received instead of an invitation were letters, written
in the familiar green ink, sometimes as many as two a day. Claire imbued my mailbox with the sense of deliverance it had been lacking. Letters of all lengths, scrawled on folded sheets of lined paper torn from a spiral-bound notebook, composed at any hour of the day—though usually, I guessed, while her father rested; for whispered between her lines was a reverent, grieving hush.

By the time they arrived in my box, she would already be back in Cambridge. Mondays, Tuesdays, even Wednesdays I’d be reading what she’d written a few days before in her father’s house. And so her moods reached me belatedly, mountains whose troughs and peaks I was coming to know, like a climber in the dark, by feel rather than by sight. I scaled them with a careful sort of greed, pausing over each new turn of phrase as if it might prove the key to her. It never did, of course, but I wasn’t disappointed. Real knowledge had many faces, I was discovering; it wasn’t literal. There were aspects of her in everything she did or thought, more so in the discrepancies and contradictions that lit her mind like sparks. With time that fall and winter, it came to make a strange kind of sense that the Claire of the letter I read on a Tuesday morning should be so much warmer or cooler or angrier or more tender or more hopeful or more heartbroken than the Claire I saw in person that same evening.