The Waters & the Wild

by DeSales Harrison

But those stories I could not memorize in the library, because they had to change each time. She knew too well how I had told them before, making them up as I went along; she knew even better how she had wanted them to end. They were stories about a mommy who had gone away—sometimes to become an angel, sometimes because she had been transformed into a swan, sometimes because it was revealed she had been a fairy all along. One way or another, she left her baby with the good sisters because she knew that Prince Daddy, on his gray horse, would one day find his way to the good sisters, and when he appeared, he would be leading a little pony, with a little saddle, by the halter. When she was old enough to ride a pony, they would go on a journey together to the sea.

  And didn’t the good sisters get to come along?

  Of course they came along, riding the wind, their great robes spread like sails or wings. How brave they were, jostling and tumbling over the treetops, or swooping so low that their hems skimmed the water of the pond!

  At the seaside they would embark on a boat and sail across the ocean, having many adventures along the way. However various, these adventures adhered to the strictest of conventions. The sisters were to stay in the crow’s nest, all of them except Sister Cook, who labored in the kitchen making meringues. All major discoveries and solutions must necessarily be the work of the little girl, figuring things out By Herself, though By Herself did not exclude the participation of Lloyd, her thoughtful pony.

  Sometimes, however, Prince Daddy would never arrive and Clementine would have to stay with the sisters.

  Why did he not appear?

  He had been locked inside a boulder.

  Who had locked him inside the boulder?

  Mr. Boulder.

  Why had Mr. Boulder locked Prince Daddy inside a boulder?

  Because the Swan Fairy had turned Mr. Boulder into a boulder in the first place, so this was Mr. Boulder’s revenge.

  Ah. But couldn’t Mr. Boulder be persuaded to let Prince Daddy go?

  No. Yes. Only if the Swan Fairy went away forever. So the Swan Fairy agreed to go away forever because she loved Prince Daddy very much and anyway she needed someone to take care of the little baby she had left with the sisters and who else was going to do that?

  * * *

  —

  These stories were important for her, I told myself, part of her great effort to illuminate her past. They were her way of making things make sense. I told myself that I could help her. I could be the sisters she didn’t have. I could be her pony, Lloyd. I could be Prince Daddy. But then, when she was seven or eight, the swan stories stopped. Once on a train trip I had started reading an actual book to her, something about a spaceship stuck in an apple tree. I remember nothing else about the book, only that from then on, for Clementine, it was as though the world of the Swan Fairy had never existed. From the spaceship in the apple tree until long after she could read fluently on her own, she sat on my lap through thousands of pages, caring less about the books themselves than the state she entered, twisting the ends of her hair or picking at her toenails while I read. Should I try to engage her in elaborations, in speculations about what had happened before or after, she objected curtly, as though I had sought to pierce the bubble of the story out of sheer malice or perversion. She especially hated my attempts to endow characters with different voices. “Just read it,” she would say. “Just read it normal.”

  It was not until some years had passed, until she was on the verge of adolescence, that she asked me outright why she had spent those months with the nuns. We were in the library, the branch library near the apartment; we went there together most weekends. She had gone off by herself, browsing the shelves; I was at a table, correcting proofs for a forthcoming article. She appeared at my elbow and pronounced the word hammer-hedge.

  “Pardon me?”

  “Catastrophic postpartum cerebral hammer-hedge.”

  “I think you mean hemorrhage, darling,” I said.

  “Hemorrhage,” she repeated. “Cerebral hemorrhage. Is that like a stroke?”

  “It is, a brain bleed.”

  “Is hemorrhage French?”

  “It’s regular English.”

  “But didn’t Mommy die in French?”

  “She died in France.”

  “Of a cerebral hammer—hemorrhage.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “Nobody. I looked it up in the encyclopedia. That’s what it was, wasn’t it?”

  “You looked it up?”

  “Wasn’t it?”

  What was I going to say? She did not seem upset, standing there balanced on one foot, her other foot braced against her inner calf to make a figure four.

  “Well?” she said.

  “That’s right. It was. A cerebral hemorrhage. There was nothing anyone could do.”

  It was in this way that Clementine managed to inform herself of what she wanted to know. One day she would display a fascination with medical details (how do strokes work? can you have a stroke in your knee? in your butt?), while at other times she would ask about the events themselves. What had the doctors done to try to save her? Had the doctors asked me to sit down before they gave me the news?

  In time her fascination with medical details eased its hold on Clementine, as though she had learned at last what she had wanted to know. Her curiosity shifted toward what she called “the big argument.”

  “After the big argument, Mommy’s parents wanted to take me home with them, right?”

  “That’s right.”

  “That’s stupid. You’re my dad.”

  “Doesn’t Oren at school live with his grandparents? Is that stupid?”

  “That’s different. They adopted him. He calls them Mom and Popster.”

  “That’s what Mommy’s parents wanted too, to adopt you.”

  “So you had to wait for the police to tell them no.”

  “Yes, but it wasn’t the police. It was someone called a magistrate. Anyway, the doctors and the sisters had to make sure you were healthy and happy. And I had to practice changing diapers and making bottles!”

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

  Click.

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

  Click.

  Then nothing.

  I tried to reverse-dial the number. Nothing. I called Clementine’s voicemail, my own. Nothing. Shouting at the operator, I made demands, entreaties, threats, was disconnected: nothing but silence on the line. It did not matter that the song was common, that every schoolchild in France learned it sooner or later. What mattered was that it was my song, our song, the bedtime song I would sing to Clementine. My correspondent knew that.

  THIRTY-TWO

  The café owner from Leuvray had dropped me off somewhere in the 17th arrondissement. I squinted at the Métro map but decided to walk instead. Never had Paris felt more strange, even when I had first arrived. I couldn’t shake the sense that people on the sidewalk did not see me, that I was invisible and insubstantial, so that people walked through me unawares. I stopped into a place called Le Bar Honcho and ordered a Pernod. Mounted on the wall, a video monitor displayed numbers for some kind of lottery. The barman had a special machine for placing bets. Every so often the numbers on the screen would change. I had another Pernod. The numbers changed. At the next traffic circle the bar had no lottery machine; after bringing me my Pernod, the bartender returned to his copy of L’Équipe, picking a scab on his bald pate while he read. A few traffic circles and several Pernods later, my surroundings seemed almost familiar, but still I did not know where I was.

  Did I even know my destination? My destination, I was surprised to discover, was Miriam’s apartment building. I had punched in the code and begun climbing the stairs before I realized where I was. I sat for a moment on the landing and went down again. By the time I reached my
own apartment, the fumes of the Pernod had boiled up in my throat like gases of putrefaction. I had not been to my own apartment in weeks. I had simply abandoned it when the affair with Miriam began. I discovered when I arrived there that I had not locked the door when I’d last left. A stale odor greeted me when I walked in, and the droppings of some creature dotted the countertop. Two oranges on the table had dried out, hard and light now as Christmas ornaments. The window protested when I tried to open it, then burst open as the blare of traffic shouldered into the room.

  I lay down on the bed. I would think.

  When I woke a hulking, brass-plumed creature, hissing like a jet of flame, had grasped the sill in its talons. I tried to roll away from its heat, but I could not move. When I truly woke I understood that the creature had been the sun, a sun now mollified, half-sunk under the horizon. Thirst gripped me, but all I found in the refrigerator was a carton of spoiled milk.

  * * *

  —

  I returned to our café, the café Miriam and I frequented on the rue de Vaugirard. It had not changed, the waiters, the clientele, all the same, even, it seemed to me, the river of pedestrians flowing by. There was no reason why I should not stop and have a glass of wine, a bottle of eau gazeuse, a cigarette. The waiter greeted me with a nod of dry recognition and took my order.

  Sipping my wine, I stared at the feet of the passersby, not their faces. The faces were too human. My gaze steadied on the pavement beneath the blur of shoes, sandals, and stroller wheels. After my second glass of wine, I thought that staring at the pavement was like standing at the edge of the sea, where the spent waves slide back into the surf. As a child, I liked to stand where the surf, sheeting up, loosened the sand beneath my feet and opened it. With each wave my feet sank a little deeper, and the sand settled in around my ankles as though pulling me into it. If I waited long enough, the sand would have locked me fast, however lightly it seemed to grasp my calves. Only by jerking each foot up with all my strength could I free myself. That’s what it felt like, staring at a single spot on the sidewalk, as though beneath the weight of my gaze the pavement would soften, would welcome me in. After my fourth glass, the waiter had begun to ignore me. I paid what I thought I owed and left. It was getting dark.

  * * *

  —

  The épicerie at the corner was out of my Corsican wine, and the grocer pretended not to know what I was asking for, thrusting at me a different, costlier bottle. “Vin de Corse, monsieur. Voulez pas? You don’t want it? Well, it’s what you asked for.” I left with a case of cheap rosé from the Languedoc. Sitting at my window, my head against the railing, I poured the orangish wine into a tumbler, the kind mustard comes in, the kind you’re meant to wash and keep. The first glass tasted a little like mustard, then like a berry bubblegum I used to buy with my allowance. The last glass tasted like nothing at all.

  * * *

  —

  How long did this go on? Two days, four days, five? At some point, I resolved to go out and get something to eat. After rising from my chair in the morning (having failed once again to leave it for my bed), I passed out while standing at the toilet. When my vision swam back into place, I was slouched on my back in the tub and warm water was dripping from the showerhead into my mouth and nose. Only when I had grasped the sink and hauled myself upright did I understand that the dripping had not been water but blood flowing from a cut over my eye. The room began to spin again. I managed to step into the bath again before vomiting; a coil of pinkish phlegm swirled in the water and refused to pass down the drain.

  My only clean clothes consisted of the suit I had brought from the States and had never worn and a shirt, pressed but stale, hanging inside the suit on the same hanger. I got dressed and lay down on the bed again to avoid another spell of dizziness. I must have slept, waking up on my face, the pressed shirt soaked with sweat, the pillow mottled with blood. I was so thirsty that I closed my mouth around the kitchen tap and drank until my stomach swelled and I vomited again.

  Out on the street, it was as though I had emerged tattered and blinded from a manhole after a year in the sewers. But at the café it was the same severe waiter who brought me, unasked, a tartine au beurre and coffee, the same flow of strangers washed by, surging down into the Métro station or up from it like waves in a rock cleft. I couldn’t drink the coffee or touch the tartine, and a bottle of mineral water did nothing to settle my stomach. A half carafe of red was not enough to stop my hands from trembling. “Night shift at the factory?” the waiter asked, or rather said, setting a second carafe on the table and turning his back before I could invent an answer.

  * * *

  —

  Was I waiting for someone, she asked, or was the waiter just protecting the dignity of the establishment when he set out two wineglasses?

  Reggie, remember? Reggie Short, Reggie-short-for-Regina. From the bookstore.

  Oh no, no Budweiser for her. That was just her line with American guys. She’d have what I was having.

  Did I live near here?

  What was I doing in France anyway?

  A psychoanalyst, for real? That’s heavy. I didn’t look like a shrink.

  Shrinks she knew looked more…she didn’t know…air-conditioned, maybe. Anyway, she was done with shrinks, especially psychoanalysts.

  Also: She was done with France. Had she mentioned that? She believed she had, on a previous occasion. As for her, she lived with her mother.

  Of course her mother was American. Her father too, though he was in Tunisia.

  Oil wells. He was an oil guy. The company had sent him to Tunisia three years ago, so his stint would be over soon. The first year, she’d stayed here, then gone back for college. Austin. UT. Hook ’em Horns. She was almost done, only had a few credits to finish, but her mother had made her come back to Paris. Her mother was helpless, hopeless, a lush, and yet had somehow managed to shop Paris blind. To get out of the house, Reggie had taken a job in a bookstore. That was the only place the mom wasn’t likely to show up.

  Cigarette?

  Obviously, she was done with her mother too. She should add she was done with French boys. She divorced them one and all.

  Her friends, though, her potes, those she would miss.

  Was I always this quiet? Was I feeling all right?

  Well, then I should order us another vat of wine.

  Dad had started out as a roughneck—didn’t I just love the word?

  Fuck if she knew. Something complicated, new oil from old wells. It made a killing. At least her mother acted like it did.

  No, no thanks, she had to work tomorrow.

  Oh fuck it, why not?

  She was done not just with French guys, she was done with the French tout court. She’d divorce every last one of them. Of course, it was easy to be done with them while she was still in Paris, with someone pouring free wine into her head. The minute some Texan sorority twat tried to evangelize her she would probably run screaming back to Paris.

  Would I be here then?

  What did I mean I didn’t know?

  Who cared anyway? En tout cas, we should draft a prenup. Before we divorce each other for good, we should agree that her complications were hers and mine were mine. Her recommendation was to go ahead and label everything ahead of time.

  No, really, she had to open the shop in the morning. It was time to scoot, to skedaddle.

  No, she hated the Métro. She would walk.

  Goodness, what sudden gallantry. Why, of course, Doctor, if it was no trouble.

  Was this where I lived? Here?

  Was it as depressing on the inside as it was on the outside?

  Well?

  Well, apparently I needed some help.

  If we were actually going to get divorced, weren’t we missing some preliminaries?

  Such as, jeez, she didn’t know, didn’t I have s
ome tropical fish?

  Okay, no fish then, what about etchings?

  Etchings like etchings, etchings of whatever, of Mount Vesuvius, of tropical fish for fuck’s sake—didn’t I have some etchings I wanted to show her?

  THIRTY-THREE

  As Clementine grew into adolescence, her curiosity subsided for long stretches. Then it would return abruptly, as though the narrative she had assembled to her satisfaction had suddenly broken down like a machine in need of a new part. One evening when she was fourteen or fifteen, she broke a long silence at the supper table: “So what’s in that box in the back of the hall closet?”

  “Which box? Probably process notes from my sessions,” I said, and it was true that regulations required me to keep all notes for five years. “Could be drafts for articles, tax forms, bank statements, that sort of thing. Why?”

  “But there’s a box from France too. Is it Mom’s stuff?”

  “Since when did you start snooping around in my closet?”

  “Since when was it your closet? Is Dan hiding something? And for your information I was looking for an empty shoebox for flash cards, if you have to know.”

  One of the boxes in the closet had come over with us from France, and like the others, it was heavy with files. I had been advised to keep those papers too: the deposition transcripts, affidavits and disclosures, the copious correspondence with lawyers and notaires, as well as the final decrees. I had planned to get rid of it all as soon as possible once I got to the States, but Clementine was still in diapers and I was scrambling to build my practice. When I thought of the box at night, or unbidden as I listened to a patient in my office, I told myself there would be time. Process notes, however, had piled up along with article drafts, and soon enough the box was just one among many.

  The day after Clementine asked about the papers, I waited until she was at school and then hauled out the box. How queer the passage of time flowing around this box, like a stream around an islet, so that as I leafed at random through the papers, the legal language for all its formality seemed uncannily fresh and urgent. It was as though an alternate universe had been folded up and filed in the box, a universe where the whole process still continued, where in an alternate courtroom in an alternate Nevers, a bailiff had just closed the door and a robed prosecutor had just arisen to address the magistrate.