The Waters & the Wild

by DeSales Harrison

  Clementine could have found them, could have cut the packing tape and lifted the lid just as easily as I had done. She could have read through the documents just as easily, in fact more easily, than I had, her French now fluent. The papers had always been here, never more than fifteen or twenty feet away. Stunned, sickened that chance alone had spared me, I waited for relief to break over me, to wash away the terror of what had not, in fact, happened. The relief, however, did not come, and what might have been seemed to press against me, a cold counterfactual. The possibility remained simultaneously present and entirely abstract, as an asymptomatic aneurysm must seem to a patient once it has been removed, at once lethal and unreal.

  A couple of hours later, a document disposal truck arrived. Apparently the driver, a Russian, had mangled my name beyond recognition when announcing himself to Itzal, and Itzal had sent him away. Beaten back by Itzal but not defeated, the Russian had summoned me by cellphone from the cab of his truck.

  “It’s okay, Itzal. He’s here for me,” I said, arriving in the lobby, the box in my arms.

  The Russian hoisted us to the level of the truck bed on the hydraulic tailgate. “We shred right in truck, so people witness,” he explained, dumping out the box into a sort of broad hopper. In less than half a minute, the machine had devoured the box’s contents and then the box itself. “Maximum efficiency!” said the Russian. “I call shredder Cookie Monster. You know Cookie Monster? My wife she says to me, Dmitri, Cookie Monster teached you English!”

  I paid the Russian’s fee in cash and watched as the truck disappeared around the corner.

  A few days later, at dinner, Clementine announced, “I sold your French box to the Russians for a million dollars and one of those cool hats they wear. I figured you didn’t need it anymore.” I blinked at my plate. Clementine had made beets. She went on. “Actually, Itzal told me you had it ground up.”

  “He told you?”

  “What was in it?”

  “Nothing was in it, Clem. Just what I told you. Papers. Drafts. Statements.”

  “Then why’d you have it shredded?”

  “I had several boxes shredded,” I said, lying. “Most of that stuff in the closet needs shredding. I would have done it all at once, but there was only so much I could carry down.” She looked at me, weighing what I had said. I took her hesitation as an opportunity to press home my explanation.

  “You still think there was something in there from your mother, Clem. Am I right?”

  “The box was from France, with the movers’ label still on it. It looked like it had never been opened.”

  “You know I would never throw away anything you wanted.”

  “How would you know what I wanted?” she said, suddenly flushed.

  “Anything that had to do with your mother,” I said, correcting course.

  After several endless seconds, she blinked and said: “I want to ask you a question.”

  Those words would have chilled me any other time, but now, after her silence, they conveyed a reassurance, the pledge that she would be satisfied with what I had to tell her.

  “You know you can ask me anything, Clementine,” I said.

  “What I want to know is: Why wouldn’t I have stayed with either you or Mom’s parents during the hearings? I was going to end up with one or the other of you in the long run, right?”

  I swallowed my last wedge of beet. “Miriam’s—your mother’s parents had alleged that I was an unfit father.”

  “Okay, then, why didn’t I stay with them?”

  I explained how I had been advised to file a countersuit claiming that they themselves were unfit. My chances of prevailing would be greater, my lawyers had said, even though in the short term the child was likely to be remanded to state care.

  “Remanded?”

  “Handed over.”

  “Wow. Parked in state care. So was it like a showdown? Was it like one of those movies where two Chinese guys each jam a gun in the other guy’s eye and start screaming at each other?”

  “Not quite.”

  “So that’s how I was shipped off to the nuns,” she said, as though she’d been the one recounting the events.

  I said that where she was there were lots of nurses, and only some of those nurses were nuns.

  “So all you had to do was prove you weren’t some sort of satanic goon.”

  “Easier said than done,” I said, trying a joke, but she was quiet again.

  “But what did they say you had done to me?” she pressed.

  “Done to you? What could I have done to you? You were hardly visible to the naked eye.”

  “No,” she said, and repeated her question: “What did they say you had done to me?”

  I explained that it had just been a strategy, an aggressive one, pursued by Miriam’s parents and their lawyer. “They simply hated the idea that you would end up with me, back in the States. Your mother and I had been having a difficult time. A very difficult time. Her parents had taken her side. That happens. If you were having a difficult time, I would take your side.”

  “Okay, you were separated when I was born—” This was a statement and not a question. “That doesn’t mean you weren’t my parent.”

  “They weren’t arguing that I wasn’t your parent. They were arguing that I was unsuitable.”

  “But they hadn’t even met you.”

  “They wanted to prove that I had already abandoned her, and you too.”

  “What do you mean, already? You never abandoned us.”

  “Clem,” I said. I said it was true that I had not been in the hospital when she was born.

  With the tine of her fork, Clementine was drawing beet-juice curlicues on her plate.

  “So she died alone?”

  “Not alone alone. There were doctors, of course, and nurses, trying to save her.”

  “But Mom’s parents were trying to say that she died alone. Shouldn’t the judge—the magistrate—have just laughed at them? I mean, didn’t women use to pretty much die all the time in childbirth? Nobody sued their husbands for custody.”

  “It made it more complicated that Miriam and I weren’t married.”

  “It still doesn’t seem fair,” she said.

  “No,” I said. “It didn’t seem fair to me either.”

  “What kind of difficult time had you been having? Had you like socked her or something?” Clementine pantomimed an uppercut.

  “No, Clem. Never.”

  “But Dan must have done something. Perhaps Dan was spending too much time at work?”

  “Hardly. I had become—how to put it…”

  “Insensitive?”

  “More like involved.”

  “Self-involved?”

  “No, Clem, I had become involved with someone else.”

  “Like involved involved?”

  “Involved enough. Involved enough for her parents to say—to argue that I wasn’t a fit parent.”

  “Involved with who?”

  “And for good measure they said I was a drunk.”

  “A drunk! You never drink.”

  “Before I never drank, I drank.”

  “Like drunk drank?”

  “Drunk drank. In short, they wanted to convince the judge I was a bum.”

  “I still think the judge should have laughed at them.”

  “A magistrate has to listen to both sides.”

  “He could have listened and then laughed.”

  “It was a she. Everybody gets to make an argument and rebut the other guy’s argument, and then there’s all the technical maneuvering and bureaucratic business. Your mother’s parents were hoping I would just give up.”

  “Instead you won and punished them by turning their precious granddaughter into an American.”

  “Is that what you
are?”

  “God, why can’t I have normal grandparents, the kind you can visit in Yonkers? Did they stay angry with you after the trial?”

  “I don’t know how they felt. We never communicated.”

  “Never ever?”

  “No, Clem,” I said. “It had all been too hard.”

  * * *

  —

  When Clementine was still a baby, I took on a supplemental position in the laboratory of a Dr. Tauer, a well-known developmental analyst. Parents would bring their children, between six months and eighteen months old, to what Dr. Tauer referred to as “the play-space.” In an airless closet, seated behind a one-way mirror, I would watch the parents and their children, recording their interactions with a series of numeric codes. Normally this would have been the job of a research assistant or even a college intern, but I had volunteered for my own education. The job, I thought, would teach me how to be a father. With Clementine, nothing felt instinctual, nothing felt natural, while every one of these parents possessed an innate ease and confidence, even those who clearly found child rearing boring or disquieting.

  I have never been able to find a suitable word to describe what I saw in those exchanges, however dutifully I applied the appropriate code: Giving an object; Hiding an object; Eye contact (questioning); Eye contact (anxious); Eye contact (delighted); Parental intervention (requested); Parental intervention (volunteered); Distress; Agitation; Acknowledgment….

  Acknowledgment—is that what pierced me as I stared secretly at those parents and children? It was like a field, invisible, existing nowhere except in the space between parent and child. The parents I observed—whether sweet or severe, harried or amused—they were there, there with their children and there for them. Whether eager or hesitant, each did what the day, the hour, the minute, required. I felt that I had been visited by an epiphany, without knowing what it was that had been revealed. Was it a vision of openness and intimacy I despaired of ever providing for Clementine? Was it the obscenity of my learning to parent by sealing myself in a closet behind a one-way mirror? (But surely I was no more or less Clementine’s parent in the booth than when I was sponging oatmeal from the crease in her neck or rocking her to sleep!) Finally, I understood. What had pierced me was a fact as immediate and unmistakable as Clementine’s own face turned toward me: that I was hers, that her claim had been made. She had claimed me for her own.

  In session, in supervision, in case presentations, how often it recurs, the threadbare truism: you cannot choose your parents. But as I think back, Father, to those suffocating days, watching the children and their parents, I am convinced now there is something exactly and precisely wrong about that statement. Nothing more fateful—nothing, I tell you—has befallen me than the moment Clementine’s newborn gaze, solemn and slate-eyed, fixed me for her own. And today I believe I understand how mythical Love takes the form of a baby, staring down the shaft of his drawn dart, his intentions unsearchable but his aim unerringly true.

  “Oh,” the nuns would say when I went to visit Clementine, “regarde comme elle tend ses bras! Quelqu’un connaît son papa!”

  See how she opens her arms!

  Somebody knows her daddy!

  THIRTY-FOUR

  How long do you have? Reggie had asked.

  Days had passed since my return from the communauté. She had just returned to my apartment after going out for soda and another bottle of whiskey. With two packs of cigarettes this time (she added), so that I didn’t smoke all of hers. I had met her at the bookstore that afternoon, and we had returned to my apartment.

  Before I go back?

  No, dork, before you die.

  Eight days, I said, though it was a lie. I had done nothing to reserve a flight back to the States.

  Oh! she said. She would have divorced me long before that. I was cute enough, even though I was like, what, ten years older? And anyway, shrinks were bad news. Everyone knew that. Common knowledge. Which wasn’t to say she didn’t like that fuck-you-awake thing I did in the mornings.

  * * *

  —

  Was it weird to be in France banging a German chick? American German, that is, from-Texas Germans, brewers, polka dancers, tuba players all. Some French dude told her sleeping with her was like sleeping with a man. Could I believe it? She should have told him he was like fucking a Gauloise Bleu.

  Anyway, if she was going to get fat and depressive before our divorce and I was going to get morose and cruel, we’d better get cracking. I was already morose, so she was going out to get food and more whiskey so she could catch up. I was to stay in bed. She liked me best in bed.

  * * *

  —

  Fucking cow! (She had called her mother but in two minutes had slammed down the receiver.) Did the cow think she was going to spend her evenings at home listening to a drunk fucking cow? With nothing to do but get drunk with a cow or lock herself in the bathroom and masturbate in the Jacuzzi?

  See, see, I liked my little pervert, my punky little dirty smart-ass Texas pervert, admit it. Admit it! Hah! Proof! Corroboration! Hard evidence!

  * * *

  —

  Motherfucker if we hadn’t been indoors for three days, or was it four? (she said). We were going to go for a walk. We were going to acknowledge that we were making each other miserable and that we had no future. We would pretend it was fall. We would pretend we were in a French movie from the sixties. Goddard or Truffaut, I could pick. She would be succulent and pouty. Chain-smoking, I was to be ill-tempered, silent, and unreadable. Like I was already. Pure cinéma vérité.

  Get up, Dr. Slampiece (she said, whipping the sheet back). I could put my clothes back on now. In any event, we had run out of whiskey.

  * * *

  —

  It was late, but still with a little light, the evening warm and cloudless. In a bistro we had split an omelet and a carafe. Reggie was trying to teach me how to roll a cigarette. God, she hoped I wasn’t a surgeon. Did my hands always shake like that? That one was better. That one she could smoke. Maybe I wasn’t a lost cause. Maybe her de-dorkification and reintegration program was not doomed to complete failure. With luck I might survive the transition back to the wild.

  * * *

  —

  That night, after midnight. We had found a bench under a linden tree in a dark little cul-de-sac just off my street. Almost dark: a white bead burned glassily in Reggie’s eye. She’d taken a slug from the bottle, swung her leg over my lap, straddling me. Opening my lips with her tongue, she let the wine flow from her mouth into my mouth. See, she said, that’s how baby birds learn how to drink wine. Was I worried that we would scandalize the bourgeoisie? she asked with a little squirm. See, see, I liked this kind of thing. Or at least somebody liked this kind of thing. Couldn’t we give him a little fresh air? Couldn’t we let him have a little look around?

  See, he liked it when she just pulled her panties over to the side. Didn’t I see how he appreciated that?

  See that.

  Didn’t I like to watch that—

  Didn’t I think—

  See, like this. Nobody. Nobody could see us. Knew.

  (Astride me, she pressed the meat of her palm between my teeth for me to bite it.)

  Like that. See how quick. See, nobody—

  See, nobody knew that she was going to, fuck, nobody knew that she was fuck motherfucker coming fuck.

  Shit. Gah.

  And then she had me in her hand and she was saying, Whoops, hey, there we go, oh gosh, Doctor, sorry about your shirt, but that was better now, wasn’t it? Wasn’t everything better now?

  * * *

  —

  How long did she stay astride me like that? Her face was pressed against my neck, and as her breath slowed and eased, the pressure of her body against mine was like nothing so much as (how soon I was to learn) the heaviness of a ch
ild in my arms, having surrendered her whole exhausted weight. Her breath was now regular, yeasty with wine. Now and again, a tremor fluttered through her.

  I couldn’t have slept, but time had somehow passed, or skipped.

  How long had we been there, Reggie’s face buried in my neck, astride me still, the heat of her long body close and heavy against me?

  How long had she been there, on the sidewalk in front of us, small, motionless, her arms at her side?

  Miriam.

  How long until she said, her voice without tone or inflection: “J’ai eu raison, Daniel: c’est toi”? I was right, Daniel: it is you.

  Light from the streetlamp somewhere hollowed her face with shadow. It laid across her face a blaze lead white like greasepaint: that face a mask, a moon, my moon, my Miriam.

  And how long did she stand there, motionless, after speaking? How long did it take for that face, blank behind its grille of shadow, to brand itself on my retina, to pierce through the prospect of all future days to my very last, like an arrow through mist, like a telegram homing in on its addressee, like a pellet of white phosphorus burning through a book of hours?

  THIRTY-FIVE

  At that moment, everything stopped. And nothing did. The streets filled and emptied as always. The sun went down and the sun went up; commuters went back and forth. Up went the grates over the storefronts, and awnings fluttered down. At night, newspapers accumulated in piles at the kiosks; in sunlight the piles melted away. The hands of the clocks wheeled in circles. Leaves fell from trees; days flaked from the calendar. Do I remember nothing? No, I remember that time passed. How much? Seconds. Years. Weeks. Weeks like years like seconds.