The Waters & the Wild

by DeSales Harrison

  But I do not know what thoughts troubled that darkness, otherwise filled with the hush of wings, the singular voice of the night bird. How unwilling the mind is to make an account of itself. What I remember: only the bird’s solitary voice, and in the bed beside mine, the regular, roughened breathing.

  In time a gray glow filled the window. There would be no more sleep for me. I rose and slipped from the room, pulling on my clothes and shoes in the hallway to keep from waking Miriam. Outside, the little walkway brought me over the milldam, and I climbed the far slope up to the pastures. Finding at last the lane Jean-Marie had led us down when we were moving the cattle, I set out between the hedgerows, traversing the fields.

  I did not believe I had walked very far, certainly not the nine kilometers separating the mill from the town of Leuvray, but there it was, the Leuvray church perched on the brow of its hill under a blue sky, buttresses slender as rigging, the bell tower leaning against the racing clouds, the building’s silhouette as lumbering and weightless as a lightship riding at anchor. At the hill’s skirt, among the newish outlying houses, the lane turned into a road. I crossed an athletic field and climbed toward the center of town. On the main street, a solitary, aproned man was cranking down a café awning. The café looked to be the only establishment open in town.

  * * *

  —

  “Someone is up early,” said the proprietor of the café. The awning’s scalloped edges snapped in the wind.

  I was passing through? he asked, drying cups on his apron.

  A double coffee? Coming right up.

  Ah, yes, the mill. Oh, the count, he liked his projects. And when he gets an idea in his head—ooh là!

  Sugar?

  But not a bad man, for an aristo. He had raised money for the church’s new roof. His wife had been very devout. Yes, he was un peu bizarre, the count, but generous.

  As for the, er, communauté, of course the café owner had his doubts about it, to say nothing of the kinds of people who would be showing up at the mill. But, bon, enfin, as long as they weren’t Dutch. I wasn’t Dutch, was I?

  Another coffee? No? Perhaps something to eat? Nothing? Eh ben, merci beaucoup alors. And if I ever needed a ride back to Auxerre, I should just call. He and his wife operated a taxi. Of course, that is, if the garçon from the community, Jean-Marie, couldn’t take me. A good kid, that Jean-Marie.

  I said I would be grateful for a ride.

  Bien! If I could wait just two seconds, he would find a card somewhere here behind the counter.

  No, I said. I would be grateful if I could get a ride this morning. To Paris.

  This morning? To Paris?

  Yes, this morning, if the taxi was available.

  Comme ça? Just like that? With nothing? No baggage? Rien du tout?

  Eh ben alors, he’ll call his wife to take over the café, and we’ll be off.

  THIRTY

  That is how I left, Father: a morning walk, a coffee, a little small talk, and the long gray road to Paris. The road had sought me out, I thought, like a penetrator cable hoisting a downed pilot up through jungle canopy. All through the long drive, the café owner smoked without ceasing, lifting his hands from the steering wheel to light another cigarette, filling the tiny Peugeot with a cloud of smoke and furious gesticulation, railing against “ces foutus arabes,” “ces socialos pourris,” the bloody Arabs, the rotten Socialists. You will say, Father, that I had sold myself to the first trader. You will say that no one was hauling me to safety, that I had hitched a ride instead to the kingdom of shame. And yet (I am certain of this) what I felt in the moment was only relief, not the transient relief of retreat, but the shuddering, bone-deep release of moral acquittal. Nothing could be clearer. I had had no choice, no choice whatsoever, but to withdraw myself.

  Béatrice had been precisely right with respect to the facts in question. Miriam had what my colleagues would call a history, a history of suicidal depression, probably with psychotic features. How many times had I myself written out the DSM code for it, 296.34, on bills or insurance forms? And Miriam had known from the beginning that I was a psychoanalyst. Her friend Mathieu had introduced me as one. With those givens, I would have been for her, inevitably, a figure, an iteration of earlier professionals: the psychologists, the group therapists, the social workers, the prescribing psychiatrists, the unnamed Monsieur le Médecin. I would have signified for Miriam a component in that great machine that had lifted her up and shaken her free from oblivion. The machine had thrust its tube down her esophagus, voided her stomach, then pumped it full of activated charcoal. The machine had netted her in tubes and wires and bladders, easing her upward like a salvaged ship until she broke, streaming, from the depths of her coma. It had peered into her eyes as they fluttered open to the fluorescent glare of a world she had done everything possible never to see again.

  Béatrice had been precisely right: I was a citizen of that fluorescent, treacherous world, but she had been wrong—just as precisely—about what this meant. For her the fact of love meant that I should stay with Miriam, and because Béatrice was a religious, under vows herself, staying certainly meant the formalization of love’s obligation. How could it not? For her it was a given that love should seek a home for itself, a dwelling. As for the type of dwelling, that was only of secondary concern. It could be marriage, hermitage, church, monastery, or a lay community established on the banks of the Yonne. But here was the problem: The order could not accept a postulant so recently rescued from hopelessness. How could it be certain that such a postulant’s embrace of monastic life was not on a hidden level another attempt to escape existence? The order must be vigilant against those who would confuse it for an afterlife or underworld. In Miriam’s case the order’s moral obligation was to restore her to the world, not lead her into withdrawal from it. The fledgling lay community on the Yonne could be such a restored world. While it would be ordered on Benedictine principles and dedicated to the work of God, it would remain independent, governed by its members and ventilated with the liberties of the secular world: the freedom to come and go, to marry, to raise children. This would have been the case that Béatrice had made to Miriam as her spiritual advisor.

  And how did I fit? The possible roles I could occupy seemed at once various and elusive. My presence wasn’t in any real way required, was it? Had I been a stipulation of Miriam’s? Had she said she would not consider joining the community unless I could be persuaded to join too? I would not believe it, could not believe that the sweet transience of our time together had transformed itself into the vision of an unlimited future. How could she and Béatrice share the fantasy that I too was not only free but willing to embark on such an uncertain project? Was the Miriam I knew even capable of such a thought? But then again, hadn’t Béatrice informed me that the Miriam I knew was in fact a Miriam I had invented? Was this new Miriam, the real Miriam, capable of imagining that I—not a believer, not a Christian—would willingly surrender myself to the impetuous utopianism of the community, that mirage shimmering between the count’s grief-stricken eccentricity and the church’s dream of communal Christian life, a dream that history had ground to rubble, then to silt?

  Nevertheless, its absurdity made a kind of sense. The proposition was clear enough, clear enough to elicit in me an unambiguous obligation to resist. I was not free. In fact, I was bound to remove myself from a position at once compromised and compromising. I could no more continue with Miriam than I could have continued with someone revealed to be my half-sister.

  I wonder now, Father, in the car with the café owner, did I permit myself the indulgence of indignation? I had been willfully deprived of understanding. How could I continue with something begun under false pretenses—or if not false, then at least partial? I had been manipulated, perhaps unwittingly but manipulated nonetheless. I had been cast in a role wholly different from the one I understood myself to have been playing. (
I thought of our trip to the first monastery, where I had suddenly found myself thrust into the role of silent retreatant. That silence did not care if I was a devout pilgrim or Miriam’s leash boy.) Surely I had earned the righteous satisfactions of outrage.

  These weeks, these months, together had been a dream, shared in part, but in essence solitary for each of us. In our cells, adjacent but isolated, each of us had painted and gilded the other person into an icon of our own desires. Miriam’s desire, I believed, had been to strip away the tar of death that clung to her after her suicide, to consume it with her own hunger, as a mare craves to lick the caul from her new foal. I was merely the instrument of this instinct, used to nudge her awake, lick her upright, fuck her out of her black bag. She in turn had fucked it into me, the tar of death, filling my hollows with it. Freighted with her unbearable burden, I was to be dispatched, driven out from the city, and Miriam, spent and naked at last, could consign herself to the spent, naked enclosure of the monastery.

  In my own reverie I had fashioned from her person a solitary companion for my own solitude. Certainly I had known or had at least sensed her desolation. I must have sensed from the very beginning that the mere fact of her living, of her breathing, was the accomplishment of a great labor: the perfectly simple, perfectly impossible task of staying alive. No doubt this intuition had flattered my pride, pride that she had elected me to receive the full weight of her body, to hold her up, to prevent her from sinking. She would remember me as one who had saved her from drowning, while I in turn would hold the note of an unpayable debt. How my pride, in secret, must have feasted on that.

  The entirety of this secret revelation had been encoded in the strange thrill of being (as she called me) “her last lover.” The first, she had said, is special only in theory, the experience is unforgettable because it is so forgettable. The last, though, she went on, tracing her finger along my eyebrow, the last was something else entirely.

  In the fullness of time, having been employed in Miriam’s great labor, I would return to my world, to my own city and my work. I would go back to being a doctor, an expensive New York doctor, the doctor into which I had been so expensively made. Wasn’t that what New York meant, expense? When I returned, everything would be expensive. Rent for my private office would be expensive. My hourly rate would be high. And however dizzying, the fee for my patients was only the beginning of the cost, the analytic undertaking promising neither comfort nor relief. It is instead a severe curriculum, Freud’s school of suffering: the universal conviction of shame, the pain of disclosure and of the resistance to disclosure, the awful vertigo of free association, the torment of encountering one’s hungers, hatreds, lusts, avowing them, claiming them as one’s own. I would become, anew, the minister of that suffering. In my costliness I would be a temple prostitute set apart and ceremonially dressed (in cardigan, gray flannels, polished cap-toe oxfords). My patients would pay me, not for something that they received from me, but instead for me to neutralize the account of whatever they had inserted or discharged into my person.

  That was the world for which I was destined. And like Miriam’s world, mine was founded on a kind of trust: the belief that the life of the body—its desires and hungers, its suffering—made for a kind of currency, valid and negotiable, a living tender to be traded for wisdom. I would place myself in the hands of this belief the day I returned to New York and reported to the clinic I was to direct. This belief, this scandalous idea (I was only now aware of this), had terrified me at least as early as the first year of medical school, when in gross anatomy my scalpel first trembled over the solar plexus of the cadaver assigned to me, the body I was to excavate for the entirety of that term. The dissection itself provoked in me neither disgust nor dread. On the contrary, from that first medial incision, it elicited a steady thrill. The work had combined, in exquisite symmetry, both violence and delicacy, one day requiring me to bear down through the squeal of the cranial saw, another demanding I hold my breath as I teased free the minute bones of the inner ear. What did appall me (I know now looking back) was the ease with which the body opened and unfolded itself, as though in life it had been as densely and tightly closed as a bud, a bud whose destiny was to unfurl itself in perfect shamelessness. Each organ repeated the desire of the body itself, to lay itself out as a single layer of cells on a glass slide, a patterned abstraction offered up to the microscope’s eye. That was what terrified: to be witness to and recipient of that offering, to acknowledge that my own interior spaces were of the same sort, pulsing with a living energy, to be sure, but pulsing as well with the beat of that darker desire, the desire to be spread to that thinness, to be laid open and smeared out beneath a stranger’s eye—a desire, in short, incompatible with life.

  * * *

  —

  With what care, what diligence, one nourishes a hatred for an earlier self. At times I feel that I am pressing the intervening years into that earlier self as one might lean with all one’s weight on an oar, pinning a person underwater until his struggling ceases. But his struggle never ceases; in fact, he hardly seems to struggle at all. Look at him where he sits, impassive and preoccupied behind the flashing windscreen of a Peugeot on the A6 autoroute, while the café owner talks and smokes and talks. See how the road appears to vanish into him, as though he were swallowing a string, like a spider eating its web. At the end of the line is Paris, is New York, is the future, and he will make it to the end. He is on his way.

  After all, he was convinced, certain, he was in the right. It is I, on the other hand, the man typing these words, who was wrong—intricately, extravagantly, unforgivably wrong. The truth, by contrast, could not have been simpler. Miriam was pregnant. She was carrying our child. Digging weeds from the garden, peeing in the middle of the night, fumbling back to bed, at every instant she had been carrying our child. Some people conceive children. She was one of those people. And why not? We had never been particularly careful.

  Miriam had known it. Béatrice had known it. And Béatrice would have told me outright, I am certain, if Miriam had not extracted a vow of confidence. Miriam would keep the child; an abortion was out of the question. So, therefore, was the novitiate. Everything had changed. When the phone had rung in Miriam’s apartment, when I had stepped off the train in Auxerre, everything had already changed. The question had never been whether or not I was obligated to Miriam. As the father of our child, I was already bound. The question for Béatrice was merely whether or not I would keep faith with that obligation once Miriam informed me of it. There were no choices but those.

  I had thought Béatrice was inviting me to consider a new possibility, a new life. But the new possibility and the new life were already real, a new world brought into being by us and through us, a world that a new person would inhabit, a new person who in time would outlive us, whose world would absorb our own once we were nothing but memories. That I had turned heel on that world and fled made no difference. It was to follow me regardless. I might as well have tried to flee the moon overhead, shadowing me in dogged and silent pursuit through the branches.

  THIRTY-ONE

  I must have leapt from the bed at the first ring of the phone, crashing into the doorjamb on my way to the hall. I must have managed to get to the phone anyway, to pick it up and answer it. But it must have happened before I was awake because all I remember was the song and the pain in my head and the awareness that I was not standing but lying down, the phone pressed to my ear and the song, really just the refrain of the song, playing over and over, punctuated with a faint click:

  Il y a longtemps que je t’aime, jamais je ne t’oublierai.

  Click.

  Il y a longtemps que je t’aime, jamais je ne t’oublierai.

  Click.

  Il y a longtemps que je t’aime, jamais je ne t’oublierai.

  Click.

  The voices were children’s voices, distant, nearly submerged under echoing scrapes, coughs
, whispers, as though the recording had been made in the hubbub of a school auditorium. The only distinct sound was the unmistakable “chhhut” of a French speaker commanding silence.

  So long have I loved you, I will never forget you.

  Click.

  Then nothing.

  When Clementine was six or seven, she took to asking me about “her sisters.” “Her sisters” were the nuns who looked after her in the hospital during the months after Miriam’s death. She never asked how she got there, content, it seemed, to assume that all babies spent some time—a few months, give or take—in the hospital after they were born. It was the sisters’ job to make sure that she was healthy and happy, I had said.

  And did they play games with her, and sing her songs?

  They did, I said.

  Which song?

  She knew perfectly well which song, I said.

  Would I sing it again?

  And I would sing it again, as best I could, having looked up the words in the public library and memorized them:

  Chante, rossignol, chante,

  Toi qui as le cœur gai,

  Tu as le cœur à rire,

  Moi, je l’ai à pleurer.

  Il y a longtemps que je t’aime,

  Jamais je ne t’oublierai.

  The words felt alien in my mouth (Sing, joyful nightingale) as I rehearsed them under my breath (Your heart is full of laughter, mine of tears).

  And did sisters tell her stories?

  She knew perfectly well they did, I said.