Who was this person who had masturbated in the front seat of the car, her right foot jammed under my rib cage, and yet crossed herself before and after each meal? Had I been assigned a role in a fetish play? Or had I been scheduled for conversion? The silence seemed almost to amuse her, as though it protected not a holiness but a depth of irony. Her greeting for me, should I encounter her under the cloister or in the library, was a bug-eyed dumb-show Shushhhh, index finger pressed to her lips, as though I had just unleashed a cavernous belch. I took to returning the salute: Shushhhh, we would gesture noiselessly at each other, especially if a sound from somewhere else—a crow’s caw, a backfiring tractor—broke through the stillness. As far as I could tell, I was the sole occupant of the men’s dormitory, and nothing seemed to prevent Miriam from padding through the rusted gate, across the gravel courtyard, and up to my Spartan room. There she would peel off her clothes and slip beneath the blanket, pressing her finger not to her lips this time but to mine.
When I try to assemble my memories of that week in the monastery, it is as though all voices, indeed all human sounds, have in tacit agreement withdrawn. What is left, however, is not a silence. Rather, this absence opens a vaulted space where the bells’ pealing, the thud of a dropped book, or the groan of a bedspring all boom and rebound, their echoes undiminished, unable to escape.
The Gregorian plainsong of the monks was something else entirely, sound too but of a different order, of alien substance, as if silence had been compressed to a liquid state and was, at intervals, poured out smoking on the stones of the chapel floor. No, I am wrong. It was not beautiful like that, unbeautiful rather, galvanically so, as a body’s nakedness is electrifying, not because it is beautiful but because it terrifies, flooding the onlooker with his unchecked hungers. It was as though those simple melodies were the product of millennia of stripping away: whoever composed them, whatever they meant to say, all dissolved, even the meaning of the texts dissipated over centuries of usage, nothing left but the starkness of a distilled longing.
Do you understand, Father, what I am trying to say? Do I understand, haunted as I am even now by the fleeting glimpse of Miriam’s nakedness as she slipped beneath my sheet, or the image of her wedged against the dashboard, hand gripped behind her knee, pulling it back, knuckles white as she came? How can I explain to you what I have since come to believe—that all artifice, even the ancient artifice of the monks’ plainchant, labors to hide an awful nakedness, a nakedness as of a body dumped in a ditch, the nakedness of a girl motionless in the cold water of her bathtub?
That is the nakedness I am speaking of. Who hasn’t seen it somewhere? Just the other day, in the subway, it was there: a lunatic woman, carapaced in parkas, overcoats, cardigans, and what looked like a pair of ski pants, wrestled her bags through the closing doors, shouting something about “little machines! little machines!” She fell silent and I forgot about her, but then there was an abrupt commotion, a flailing at the far end of the car, and I saw that she was entirely naked (except for her galoshes), each nipple hedged in whiskery hairs, her sex hidden by the slack pouch of her belly. “Little machines!” she shrieked. “These fucking little machines!”
That is how it seemed to me, the plainchant of the monks: exposed, unbeautiful, unbearable. Of the readings in church I remember nothing. I remember speaking with no one. What I remember is the nakedness of the plainchant, that volatile distillate penetrating everything. It suffused everything, along with the smell of the place, the crumbling dank of the cloister, the boxwood acrid and effluvial in the garden, all mingled with the ardor of her body, redolent under my sheet or splayed in the hot car.
* * *
—
On the way home after the week was over, we had driven a good hundred kilometers before either of us spoke, or rather, before Miriam spoke.
“So,” she began, “do you see now what my ticket is?”
I didn’t see.
“At the monastery. That is what I am becoming,” she said.
“A celibate man?” I said. “You had me fooled.”
“No,” she said, “I am becoming a religious.”
Still I didn’t understand, thinking that by religious she meant simply a religious person. Nothing about her seemed religious. Though I had observed her precise, habituated participation in the round of worship with the monks, the idea of her belief seemed unreal, not false, just unreal. My hobbled French, however, was incapable of communicating any part of this. I said only, “You, religious?”
“But,” she said, “only when I am done with you. So that is my ticket,” she said. “You have yours. America. New York. Your patients. This is mine.”
“But what is it?”
“You wouldn’t want me,” she said, “cheating on God forever, would you?” She explained that religieuse meant a monastic, a monk or a nun. Then she added, as an afterthought: A religieuse was a kind of pastry. “They are very delicious,” she said with a smile. “I will make you eat one.” And we were silent again, all the way up the autoroute to the périphérique.
And then in some way I can never explain, it was all over. Between that day years ago and this moment there is no distance. There is no distance between the crunch of gravel under the monk’s foot and the beating of my typewriter against this page, no distance between Miriam’s profile in the car and Clementine’s as she slept on the pillowless expanse of a crib mattress, just as there is no distance between Clementine’s face as it was then and as it was the day I saw her, rounding the corner with her friend, that day I received the first photograph of Jessica Burke in the mail.
Not very long after Clementine’s and my return from France, a patient of mine, a woman in her sixties, announced in a session, “I cannot tell you…I think it is impossible for you to understand, how quickly they go, the years. It is sickening.” I remember the interpretation I made because, quite frankly, I was proud of it, and I credited it (and myself) with having brought the patient to the threshold of a breakthrough. It was clear to her, I had said, it was undeniably, irrefutably true for her, that I would never, could never, understand her malady. In fact (I went on) that belief was her malady, her conviction that no one would ever or could ever understand her, that she could not be reached, touched…
And yet, now, I have come to believe that she was right: I could not possibly understand; I was too young. Now, however, with the past so much longer than the future, I see finally what she meant: the closer you are to the end, the shorter the distance you know you have traveled. The road does not stretch out behind you, but folds up, the point of origin gaining on you with every step.
Maybe this is a commonplace. Maybe anyone who lives long enough learns it. But I was a slow and stiff-necked learner. I thought that I had time, that we did, Clementine and I, that time was our recompense, that after all the disasters, time had been restored to us. Clementine and I had made it: we had made it to New York, to safety, to our apartment with its doorman, its sidewalk pear trees flowering in spring, her childhood stretching into the future like a meadow sloping toward the sea.
Of course, time was not our birthright. What we had been given was the illusion of stillness, a false reprieve. That is the way they do it, children, the way they detain time. Our apartment still smelled of new paint, its interior hermetic, a satellite’s self-sustaining atmosphere. That atmosphere was our own, that rarefied air of new paint, of the moth-breath in her sleeping mouth, of the fish-liver pungency of diaper cream. Yes, that is what it was like: a minute, habitable bubble, a satellite affixed in geosynchronous orbit as bright as a star and seemingly as still, though in reality traveling at incomprehensible speed.
All the years of her childhood we spent in that capsule, all those long spring afternoons, summer afternoons, whiled away on the carpet or in the park. As I sat on a playground bench, Clementine would lie, it seemed, for hours, belly down over the seat of a swing, walking her fe
et around in a circle, twisting together the chains of the swing until she could twist them no further. Then she would lift her feet and begin to spin, slowly at first, then faster and faster until—thunk—the chains would release each other, stand separate for an instant until—clink—the swing’s momentum would bend the chains around each other again but in the opposite direction, and Clementine would walk her circle once more. All the long afternoon it went—thunk, clink—thunk, clink—the pendulum of Clementine’s chain clock.
NINE
Several days had passed since I had seen or heard from her, and I had begun to suspect that I would not see her again. Perhaps she had succeeded—as she said she would—in getting me out of her system. Perhaps the fact that I had stayed in Paris, had simply failed to get on my flight back to the States, had spooked her. Perhaps I had violated some statute in the unwritten code for affairs with foreigners, the requirement that one must be, above all, a body in motion, passing through.
Shame was what I felt, shame to have been so brusquely unhorsed by my own intoxication. I would set about shipping my things. I would find a new flight home. What I felt I did not register as grief, or longing, but as stunned disorientation. Something had happened, something to do with her voice in the upper reaches of the Miserere, something to do with her teeth in my shoulder as she came—something that had passed over and through me, leaving me dazed, lost, altered.
* * *
—
But then, abruptly, there it was again, her voice on the phone: Could we meet? Had I forgotten? I had said I would help her with some translating.
No…no, I had not forgotten.
I made out her face in the crowd as she approached the café on the rue de Vaugirard. She had not been late, but by then I was finishing my third pastis. “I was afraid you had left,” she said.
“Maybe I ought to have.”
I realized then what I had hoped for. I had hoped that the sensation of aftermath would stay with me. That she would, in appearing, reveal herself to be merely someone, anyone, a face in the crowd, a face already sinking into the past. But she was there, each gesture intensely her own even to the trembling of the match flame at the tip of her cigarette. Her proximity was something I could taste, could breathe, just as she seemed to breathe it in with the first drag of smoke. Her level gaze settled on my face as though it could rest there.
“You look well,” she said.
“You are beautiful.”
She said nothing, then said, “No.”
“No what?”
“Not beautiful. You say so because you think you do not want to go back to New York. But you have your tickets.”
“We each have our tickets,” I said, “mine to New York, yours to a monastery.”
“You want to escape,” she said. “That’s why you took me in the first place.”
“You want to escape too,” I said, “to become a religieuse.”
“For me escape would be not to become one. For you, escape is Paris.”
Now the persistence of her gaze seemed part of a laborious preparation, a laying up of stores for a long journey. She would take it alone. The pastis now tasted dreggy and acrid, like panic.
“You are telling me that you have gotten me out of your system,” I said.
“You speak as though you will not leave before I leave,” she said.
“Haven’t I given you what you wanted?”
“And what was that?”
“A temporary American. A disposable one.”
The gleam brimming in her eye accused me.
“You said you would help me with translation, as you did for Mathieu,” she said, and unfolded a photocopied sheet on the small tabletop. The waiter, having placed my fourth pastis and her first at the table’s edge, set the water carafe right on the paper with an aggrieved thump.
Was I acquainted with someone named Ronsard?
A friend of hers?
Everyone knew Ronsard; every student in France was required to memorize a Ronsard poem at one point or another. She recited a few lines in an ironic singsong cadence, like a student repeating an assigned text. In a couple of weeks, she would perform a concert of Ronsard song settings.
Some of the settings were of Ronsard’s poems translated into other languages. Had I really never read him, not even translated into English? This Mr. “Yeets,” one of Ronsard’s translators, he was a famous English poet, no? Did I not know him either?
Yeats, I had heard of Yeats, the Irish poet.
“Yeats,” she said, cautiously drawing out the vowel, “Yayyts. Am I saying it correctly? Ah. But read it to me, Daniel, can you?”
I read the poem printed on the sheet.
“Again, please, Daniel, so I can know how to sing it in English. Read it slowly, doucement.”
I read it once more, slowly this time, looking up at her when I could. She was looking at me as I read, or rather, at my mouth.
When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;
How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;
And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.
The last lines, she said, they are different.
Different?
From the original, from the conclusion of the original poem. She recited the French version, its cadences stately and mournful. I could follow only with difficulty the courtly, antiquated French but understood that the final lines said something about picking “the roses of life” before those roses fade.
“So what are these mountains?” she asked, pointing at the poem on the table. “There are no mountains in the French. And what is this crowd of stars?”
I had no answer for her, and she merely asked me to read it a third time, and once again, as I read it, she watched my mouth as I spoke the words.
“Peelgreem?” she repeated when I had finished. “Pilgreem is how you say it?”
“Pilgrim.”
“And eed? Do I say it right?”
“Hid,” I said.
“It is impossible!” she said, exasperated, smiling. “Heed.”
“Hid.”
“Hid.” She winced slightly as she repeated it, as though the h-sound hurt her to make. “So you see,” she said, “you cannot leave. Without you I am hopeless.” At some point she had folded the paper and put it back in her bag. It had been on the table for no more than fifteen minutes, but those words had burned themselves into me with the hiss of a brand.
Not that I remembered them, not literally, not that I remembered anything from that stilted, sunstruck meeting beyond the fixity of her gaze on my mouth, when I looked up from the words on the page, while her lips moved almost imperceptibly, in complete silence.
I tell you I never thought of the poem again. But when I saw the diagonal shadow of an envelope in box 5504, Jessica Burke’s post office box, and when, back at my desk, the envelope disclosed a single sheet, folded so often that the paper had begun to soften along the folds, to wear away where the folds crossed, the sheet marked with a ring where the aggrieved waiter had set a sweating carafe down on it—the same sheet Miriam had unfolded before me nineteen years ago in Paris—that sheet appeared as familiar to me as if I had unfolded and read it in faithful observance every day since that day we met on the rue de Vaugirard.
…how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.
“So you were each other’s language teachers,” Clementine said when she was old enough to say such things.
I supposed we had been.
“Will you teach me French, like Mommy taught you?” she asked.
But I was never any good at it, not as good as I should have been after a year in Paris, never good enough to feel as though I weren’t speaking through a veil of static.
For Clem, however, it was different. As soon as she could make her choice known, Clementine elected to attend the Lycée Français de New York, and it was not long before she, with an amused exasperation not unlike Miriam’s, was correcting my pronunciation and syntax, pointing out “la différence évidente, non, mais vraiment évidente,” between “dessus” and “dessous,” the difference—really, the obvious difference—between “over” and “under.”
TEN
Clementine’s questions became harder the older she grew. There was no more wondering whether mommies die after having babies the way bees die after they sting you. Now she was on the hunt, her curiosity piqued by each scrap she found. Even when she was a toddler her look could unnerve me, so level I could believe Miriam had bestowed it on her, to track and haunt me. When Clementine’s questions beset her, however, her gaze shifted, now sidelong, now scavenging.
The Waters & the Wild Page 6