The Waters & the Wild

by DeSales Harrison

  * * *

  —

  In the shadow of the intervening years, I have come to think of the weeks I spent with Miriam in Paris as the one time I was to know love, a love, that is, other than that compelled in parents by their children. As for those few days I spent alone, with my notebook, the book of translations, and the photocopied poems, I think of them as the only time in which I knew solitude. Of course I have been alone for many years since then, alone as only a single parent can be, alone in spite of Clementine. But that is not solitude. I cannot describe the sweetness, in memory, of knowing that I had been afforded a little wedge of time and a task that fit into it. I would fulfill my obligation, and I would taste fulfillment in turn. This fulfillment depended not on Miriam’s absence, but on the anticipation of her return: she would come back and there would be much to discuss.

  The expanse of time that had yawned so cavernously upon Miriam’s departure now seemed a tidy hermitage. How unused my hand had grown to writing; how sullenly my crabbed letters crept from margin to margin. But this was my task and I would fulfill it, and Love would see to it that I would be fulfilled in return.

  It had to end, but it wasn’t over yet.

  In an analytic session, the impersonal constraint of the therapeutic hour is a necessary precondition for successful work. The clock moves like a cog on a cog rail. Whatever else the patient feels, he is aware of this inexorable shortening; what is to be said must be said before the end of the hour. The natural impulse to delay inhabits both patient and analyst alike, but the pressure of the hour opposes this impulse with a silent and invisible violence. Breaking off the session at precisely the appointed time is one of the hardest things a young analyst must learn, though even for the experienced the moment never passes without a flutter of apprehension. “That is all the time we have today—” we say, resorting to the worn formula, or “Perhaps we shall return to this topic on Monday.” When that moment arrives for the child patient, how fascinating the letter opener or white-noise machine becomes. What bitter commotion overwhelms the borderline patient if the end of the session surprises him unawares. Nevertheless, it is this stark perimeter that protects the patient’s session from intrusions, even as it protects the patient afterward from whatever menace or fury or grief has been cast upon the analyst’s blank attentiveness. The session is an invention of absolute artifice, as contrary to nature as a diving bell or vacuum chamber.

  It wasn’t over yet, but it had to end.

  That period of solitude in my scriptorium, at first it had felt like a sentence, but the sentence changed from solitude to the love of solitude, a predilection discovered and claimed, a longing instilled for good. I did not know what I was waiting for, only that I was to wait, attentive, bent over the pages Miriam had asked me to translate. Just as the efficacy of the analytic session depends on the session’s fixed limits, the power of this reverie derived from the fact that it had to end. My task was approaching completion, and Miriam would be back in a few days. I had scribbled a commentary for each of the poems, and the commentaries had filled the notebook. The notebook’s weight satisfied me, each side of each sheet dense with words and each sheet now somehow more substantial, textured with the impress of my pen, so that the notebook took on a new thickness, as if the book had been left out in the rain and then carefully dried, its pages now puckered and curling at the edges.

  * * *

  —

  As for the fact that such happiness was possible only in the strict condition of solitude—will you charge this to my affliction, Father? Have you diagnosed in me a malady of the soul by then, no doubt, already advanced? Surely I knew that this fever dream had to end, not only the dream of studious solitude, but the dream of Miriam’s and my affair. Had we not called it a dream, and in the very act of calling it that, hadn’t we acknowledged that the dream had already ended? At times this regret has consumed me, even though regret is in its own way a kind of wishful thinking: there was in fact no choice to make. What was to happen had already begun to happen. What had been stored up had to spend itself. It had already begun to spend itself, had already begun to spend the lives it was to spend.

  Even then I must have known it. Had I not spent those days staring at the pages themselves? Had I never comprehended them?

  Sweet spring, full of sweet days and roses,

  A box where sweets compacted lie;

  My music shows ye have your closes,

  And all must die.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  “Shit shit shit shit shit putain fuck shit!” said the American girl behind the cash register as I stepped over the threshold of the tall, narrow bookshop. Her hair was short, a shock of shorn flax, her tone more amused than enraged. A loop of harness bells had been hung on the door, and they jangled as the door closed behind me. “Merde de la fucking merde!”

  * * *

  —

  When I was a boy, no more than seven or eight years old, I saw my first movie. I remember nothing of the circumstances, neither who took me nor where the theater was. All I recall is the plot, a kid’s feature, the story of a girl growing up amid snowy mountains. The girl was a skier, a tomboy, and had a big dog, a St. Bernard, maybe, or a Newfoundland. There was something about saving for new skis and bashing open her piggy bank when she had enough money to buy them. Alone on her new skis, she ventured off-trail, against the admonitions of her father, in spite of her dog’s yelping protest. In the inevitable avalanche that followed, she was trapped, though not entirely buried. Someone, probably the dog, summoned aid. A search party, led by the father, arrived and pulled the girl from the snow.

  A simple formula, briskly executed, but it drove into me a kind of barb that snapped off in the bone. For days afterward that girl’s face visited me, at school, in daydreams, in sleep, renewing each time that strange ache. Absurd to think a wound could be sustained from such a story, less a story than a frieze-flat arrangement of customary forms, the girl’s face, for all its freshness, stamped from the die of ironbound convention. One kid, spunky—check. One dad, kindly—check. One dog, fearless and cautious—check. One calamity, fearsome and toothless—check. Surely, even as a boy, I knew how it would end.

  But ah, you will say, you had fallen in love! The wound was only that sweetest wound, the wound of first love!

  Was it?

  I believe it was not.

  When I think of that girl as she is today—a woman more or less my age, pinched by the frosts of midlife—even now that broken-off bone-pang emits its pulse, and I know that it is not the wound of love, but the wound of—I have no word for it except an encounter. Yes, that is the word, however unsatisfactory, though I am certain now that the encounter was not with a person, or even with desire, but with the impossible itself. The ache inside me knew that she was unreal. The object of my longing was a figment, not of my imagination but of what was not. I did not know this, but the ache knew it. The ache knew that her face was the mask that nothingness itself had chosen.

  Of course I had no words for that then. Even now I cannot say what I mean. Yet throughout my life, that ache has accompanied me like a companion animal, or a friend.

  When Jessica Burke died, the wound opened again. For her it remains open, and toward her the ache drifts for reasons known only to itself. In my dreams, the ache guides my hand toward her. It is through her solid form that my hand passes, ghostly and insubstantial. Sometimes in the dream she turns into Miriam. We are underwater, together at last, but in my embrace her body goes rigid and crumbles, a statue of salt. Galled, enraged, my longing convokes the body of another girl: an American girl in Paris who called herself Reggie. Her arms, her legs, wrap around me, hungry and muscular, my grip seeks purchase in her short-sheared hair, and it is into her body that my longing voids its smoke.

  Have I not spoken of her? Reggie Short? Why should I have? She was nothing to me.

  * * *

/>   —

  “Merde fuck merde fuck merde!” said the American girl behind the bookstore counter as the loop of harness bells jangled at my back. I had gone first to Shakespeare and Company on the rue de la Bûcherie, seeking a recent English edition of George Herbert’s poems. “Ah, yes, gentle Herbert,” said the bespectacled man as he tapped out the name on his computer. “I believe we have— No, we sold that copy. Shall I place the order for you?”

  I said I would check the library first.

  “Yes,” he said. “If there’s a used copy in Paris, it will be there.” I must have looked at him strangely because he said, “You mean the bookshop called ‘the Library,’ not the actual library, the bibliothèque?”

  “In fact,” I said, “I was referring to the bibliothèque, the actual library.”

  “Ah, my apologies! I thought you meant the bookshop! There’s one called the Library. Clever for an English bookshop in Paris, no? La Librairie. Ha.”

  “Ha,” I said.

  He said they specialized in translations from the French but had a good back-stock of English originals as well. “You should try them,” he said, sketching out a map on the back of a receipt.

  Hearing the harness bell ring, the girl behind the counter of the Library interrupted her cursing with a cheery American “Hello!” then just as cheerily resumed, “Fuckadoodle donkeyschlong!” She appeared to be on the phone, the receiver held between her shoulder and cheek. “I’m on hold, don’t worry,” she said. “Of course I’m on hold. This is France.” With that she began whistling—was it “La Marseillaise”?—waving an imaginary flag or conducting baton. After a while she hung up and said, as though continuing a conversation, “Yes, I believe I hate them. I believe I hate them all. I divorce them, one and all….Don’t you just hate them?”

  “Every last one,” I said. “Who are we talking about?”

  “The French. You’ve probably seen them. They’re everywhere.”

  “Ah,” I said. “I’d suspected as much.”

  “You think I’m kidding. Have you ever tried dealing with the phone company? Ever tried to get your service restored? Because I am fucking ready to shoot myself in the face.” I said I had not. “Well, don’t start now,” she said. “Get out while you can, while you are still young”—she paused as though seeing me for the first time, then added—“ish….

  “I don’t suppose you came in here to escape. Anyway, you’re not safe. The French are liable to come here too, especially the professors, especially the really disgusting professors. Are you secretly disgusting because if you are I’m divorcing you too.”

  I asked if she had a copy of Herbert’s work.

  “Herbert like Dune Herbert? Sand-for-breakfast, I-respectfully-spit-on-your-shoes Herbert?”

  “Herbert the poet. English. Seventeenth century.”

  “Whoa, recherché!” she said, dragging the word out in a campy drawl: ray-share-shay. “Did George Lucas steal all his ideas too?” She found a newish Penguin paperback copy. “Good thing you came in today,” she said, blowing off the dust that had collected on its upper edge. “These things go like hotcakes.

  “Not,” she went on, ringing up the book, “that I’ve ever had a hotcake. But wouldn’t you kill for one? Wouldn’t you just kill for a hotcake?”

  “Maim, maybe, but kill—”

  “Or a Budweiser? Wouldn’t you kill for a Bud?”

  I observed that you could in fact get a Budweiser in France. “En fait,” I said, aping a Parisian nonchalance, “c’est très branché.”

  “That, Mister American Man, is exactly the problem. I want a Bud that is not très branché, not très cool. Fuck it, there’s no charge for the book.”

  “No charge?”

  “Not for the book.”

  “Much obliged,” I said.

  “Yes, you are, Professor,” she said. “I like mine tall and cold.” She ran her hand over her brush of pale hair.

  * * *

  —

  The whole duration of Clementine’s childhood occupies what feels like a stilled instant. That span of years was (I now believe) a sort of monasticism in its own right, where the seasons, the years, turned around a single, motionless point.

  This is not to say that my solitude weathered no assault. Sometimes it was an advance made by one or another of the mothers I’d met in the school yard, the divorcées lean and illusionless and, God knew, some of them beautiful. The fiercest battering, however, came from my own desire for another’s body, for the sheer banality of shared life, for a companion to wake beside at three in morning because she has turned on the light to read, glasses perched on her nose, because she wakes often at this time of night and cannot get back to sleep, because we both wake easily now, because neither of us is young any longer or even, as Reggie had said, youngish.

  Such companionship, however, never seemed even remotely possible, though Clementine herself, by the time she was thirteen or fourteen, took to enumerating possible wives: Ms. Strang, the vice principal; or the mother of Clem’s friend Dylan, a woman who was, according to Clem, “not only smoking hot but an architect.” Not now, I would say to myself. Later. When Clementine is older, we will see. But now it is later, and the solitude has become a kind of hunger in its own right. Now it is not only easy but in some way irresistible to retreat from the warmth of a flirtatious exchange, from the shudder of possibility. “Daniel, it’s Denise again. Really, think about it. It is only Hadlyme, and only for a weekend. I don’t bite. Er, unless asked. Joking. So call me.” I did not call Denise. Or Ms. Strang. Or Dylan’s mother. “Jesus, doesn’t Dan ever get lonely?” Clementine asked. “Maybe when I go to France you’ll become one of those swinging empty nesters, the hot tubs, the key parties, the sleaze-wad medallion nestled in the chest hair. I can see it. Dan can’t see it, but I can.”

  * * *

  —

  “Reggie!” she called out after me, when with a jangle of harness bells I opened the door to leave the store.

  Turning, I said, “Reggie? I’m Daniel. My name is Daniel.”

  “Good to know,” she said, “but Reggie’s my name. Reggie Short. As in Reggie-short-for-Regina. Impossible to forget, right? Like me.”

  She had somehow inserted herself between me and the door and was holding it open with her back.

  “Reggie,” I said. “Enchanté.”

  “Well, on-shan-tay, Professor,” she said, again in her camp drawl, clasping her hand over the top of mine and dipping in a mock curtsy.

  “Until next time,” I said, not knowing what to say.

  “Remember, Professor. Tall and cold.”

  The harness bells jangled again as the door shut behind me.

  TWENTY-SIX

  Miriam had said she would return the following evening. Walking back to her apartment from the bookstore with my new copy of Herbert, I decided I would prepare a dinner to celebrate her return and the completion of my notes on the Herbert poems. First thing in the morning I set out to gather provisions. A roast chicken I could manage, I decided, though the one the butcher wrapped up for me still had its lower legs and feet attached, the shanks black-scaled and reptilian. The feet were folded up like squash flowers, and a tuft of feathers made a garter on one of the legs. In a boulangerie-pâtisserie I purchased two baguettes and a tart of apricots and raspberries shellacked with glaze. At the épicerie I decided we would have green beans steamed with tiny carrots. From the cheesemonger I requested a Saint-Félicien because I recognized the name. He presented me with one so ripe, it appeared to have deflated in its little box. Resting on the counter under a towel, the cheese filled the apartment with a funk partly of silage and partly of fresh manure. I laid down two bottles of champagne on the floor of the refrigerator and girded my resolve to amputate the bird’s squash-flower feet.

  After the chicken was safely in the oven, I attempted to wrap the
notebook of my commentaries. I wanted to set it out on the little table as a present for her, but I botched the job, tearing the improvised paper wrapping as I tried to tape it. I decided instead to inscribe the cover. I wrote, “For his Nightingale, Miriam, from Daniel, her Friend and Admirer, with Respect and Love,” but when I read over my inscription, I tore off the cover and threw it away.

  I considered meeting her at the train, but not knowing what train she would arrive on, I decided just to wait in the apartment for the crunch of her key in the door. An hour passed and I decided to open a bottle of wine. A second hour passed; the chicken had collapsed, the apartment fogged with the oven’s meaty breath, the wine bottle empty. By the time I had finished the second bottle, I knew she would not arrive. In the morning, I woke in the little bed, greased with sweat; the visitor bird, whose howling had disrupted my shallow sleep, eyed me from the sill. I must have dozed again because now the phone was ringing. Miriam’s voice came through metallic and fractured, as though relayed by radio on a stray frequency.

  I told her I had made dinner for her.

  She was very sorry and should have called.

  Was she on her way home now?

  That was why she had called.

  What was why had she called?

  To ask if we could change our plans.

  Seemed we’d already changed our plans.

  Could I come and meet her?

  Where? At the monastery in Leuvray?

  She was not at the monastery. A place nearby. I could come and meet her there?

  Was everything all right?

  Take the train to Auxerre, she said. Someone will pick you up there. I don’t know who yet, but they’ll find you.

  I said again, Was everything all right?

  No, of course, everything was all right. I was sure I did not mind?