Claire Marvel

by John Burnham Schwartz

  We were almost touching. I wanted to throw her a line and haul her to safety, if I could. To press my hand against her cheek. Failing that, there were only words to fall back on, to attempt to tell her, by way of my own limited experience, that the darkness in which she now found herself was not an eclipse.

  I said, “My mother and I don’t really speak anymore.”

  Claire looked at me.

  And I told her about the day, four years earlier, when my father returned from work to find an empty apartment and three white envelopes lying on the kitchen table. The envelopes—one addressed to each member of the family—were thin. I still had mine. The letters were typed, a paragraph long, the same words for each of us. She was in love with another man, had been for a long time. She couldn’t go on like this. She was sorry. She loved us and always would. She hoped we’d understand in time. She would send her new address once she got settled.

  “She lives in a Houston suburb now. He’s an orthopedist.”

  “Do you miss her?”

  “I miss believing in her,” I said.

  A long silence then. Claire’s expression intense, collaborative. She smiled gently.

  “Come on. I want to show you something.”

  She turned and began walking toward the woods. I followed. As we neared the edge of the lawn a path grew visible, narrowly forged through the trees and strewn with dead leaves. The air, blocked from the sun and dank with humus, turned cooler. Our footsteps trod softly over the layered ground. In our noses was the scent of the vegetation.

  I walked behind her. Thinking not about my mother but about my father. Quiet, mild man. Once immortalized out of his earshot by my older sister, Judith, as “Clark Kent minus Superman.” Had he ever even raised his voice at us? I couldn’t remember. Though he must have. Kids, after all, did stupid and dangerous things—ran into streets without looking, fell from trees, stepped on shards of glass, got crushes on girls who wouldn’t give them the time of day. He must have raised his voice at me, at least in warning. But I couldn’t remember. Though the man I knew wasn’t inclined to shout. If a problem was discovered, his first instincts went inevitably toward reason and compromise. For nearly four decades he’d been with the same publishing house, beginning as an assistant editor in adult trade, a die-hard lover of literature. But when, five years after he’d joined the firm, his employers urged a move into the textbook division, he’d complied without a murmur. At his retirement recently he was given a crystal paperweight and a pension half the size it should have been. A history of neglect exacerbated, one might have speculated, by his physiognomy: his wide kind face was the very emblem of modest decency; his fine limp hair was of no distinctive color. His pale gray eyes were clear of the accrued resentments and morbid regrets typical of men in late middle age; but clear too, it had to be said, of the determined will and potential fierceness that make men remembered after they’re gone. Perhaps I’d grown up vaguely ashamed of his benign acceptance of the status quo and the smallness of his footprint on the earth.

  And yet for much of his life my father had done all right, according to the rather modest terms he’d set for himself: marriage, kids, career. Until a few years ago, that is, too late in the game to defend himself, when the woman he’d loved and trusted and depended on had left him without so much as a word of tenderness. A quarter century in the making, and then a single paragraph had crushed him as if he were built of nothing more substantial than paper. After which he was by definition flat. Even his own past—especially this—would from that moment on appear like a perilous mountain. And he was no climber; he would lie down. I knew, because I’d observed him from up close. Had for almost two years after college moved in with him in that dusty prewar co-op whose furniture, books, china, and pictures he had chosen with my mother.

  Yes, I’d roomed with him again, driven by filial compassion. But when he’d failed to get up—when, day after day, I watched him hugging the floor of his memory like a boxer who’s thrown the fight—I’d fled to Cambridge as if my life depended on it, and not looked back. As if in his stunned misery he’d become a stone gorgon, capable at a glance of turning me to stone just like him.

  Ahead, now, a flare of daylight: the path gave out onto a small wooden dock at the edge of a saltwater marsh. Here the sunshine was intensified rather than thinned, the water deep blue. Between two rocky islets more than a hundred swans floated, princely confections in a still parade. Visible on the far shore was a strip of scrub brush and beyond that a whiteness that must have been beach. In the distance, hazed like a mirage, lay the ocean.

  I stood with her on the dock. Behind us there was an overturned Old Town canoe, the handles of two paddles, still shiny with varnish, poking out from underneath. Algae had stained parts of the dock green and water had rotted it; we stood a bit unsteadily, as if on the deck of a slowly sinking boat, and listened to the soft lapping of the marsh. Running some fifty yards out to our right was a cluster of desiccated cattails in the middle of which, raised above the water on a square wooden platform and partially camouflaged by reeds and tall grasses, I was able to make out a duck blind.

  “Hunters?” I said.

  Claire nodded. “True story. My brother had an air rifle and used to go around shooting squirrels and birds, pretty much anything that moved. My father tried to make him stop. But Alan was thirteen and either a natural sadist or he’d just seen too many Dirty Harry movies. Eventually Daddy had to take the gun and lock it in the linen closet upstairs. Later I found where he’d put the key and started plotting my revenge. I was going to show the little macho freak. One day while my parents were in town I looked out the window and saw him tossing a tennis ball to himself on the lawn. I went and got the gun. It was still loaded—Daddy’d forgotten to empty the pellets. I went over to the window and took careful aim. Then I shot him twice in the ass before he ever knew what hit him.” Claire burst out laughing. “God, it felt good!”

  I gave her an appraising look.

  With a tough-girl grin she demanded, “How about you? Ever shoot anybody?”

  “No, but when I was ten I burned the hair off Judith’s Barbie. Ever seen a bald Barbie?”

  She laughed. Then, glancing away from each other, we entered a long silence. Invisible threads connected us—as if we were Siamese twins, sharing origins, necessities, desires, fates. This was the law of bound hearts: separate us and only one, at most, would survive.

  Up again rose the liquid whispering of the marsh against the dock, while the rustling of the breeze through the cattails sounded like fingers combing a wheat field. A swan began to beat the blue water with its wings. Massive, improbable wings. Began to walk on water, gathering speed. And Claire, as we sat watching, without a word reached out and laid her hand against the side of my head. Her touch was electric. I remained still. The swan achieved liftoff, beat the air, seemed to create the air, banked, curved, and flew off for the far side of the marsh, where the ocean was. She took her hand away. When it was gone the hard beating of my heart was all that remained in my ears—as if the earth’s elements had recombined, become one indivisible thing which was her. Then that sound too began to fade. I grew aware of some critical moment having passed without my grasping it, and of Claire standing beside me on the dock, still close, yet now angled away.

  Then she turned to me.

  “Another true story. My uncle proposed to my aunt on this dock,” she said. “He was over from Brown for the weekend, paying court. Her parents wouldn’t leave them alone. Then it was late Sunday and he had to be getting back. So, desperate and preoccupied, he took her for a walk down here. She was naive and didn’t see it coming. She’d brought her camera. Took her time like a tourist, peering through the viewfinder at everything. That was how he appeared to her—next to her here on the dock, so close she couldn’t quite get him into focus. He was blurry, fuzzy at the edges. It all kind of embarrassed her. As if it was her fault somehow that he wasn’t crystal clear, she must have been doing something wrong. I
t confused her. Then suddenly he blew up. He said, ‘Just put the goddamn camera down, Ellen, for chrissakes!’ And because it was 1959 and she was a woman who didn’t know any better, she put the camera down. And that’s when she saw him clearly for the first time. Really saw him, his big blue eyes totally inward-looking, focused only on the question he was about to ask, not actually seeing her at all. Blind to her. She knew this. Yet two minutes later she’d accepted him. And three years later they had two kids.”

  “And the marriage?”

  Unsmiling, Claire drew a finger across her throat.

  Thinking about my parents, I said, “It’s hard to understand the choices people make.”

  “Not hard, Julian,” Claire replied with sudden vehemence. “Fucking impossible. The choices most of us make, most of the time, make no sense at all.”

  She seemed angry, staring out toward the ocean. Seeing perhaps—she must have seen—that the day had declined subtly, the sunlight was no longer brilliant over the marsh, the water was no longer so blue; that large numbers of swans, following that intrepid first one, had begun to fly away.

  Thinking about my parents had depressed me. “I like to think people like us won’t make the same bad choices our parents made,” I said.

  “And I like to think there aren’t any people like us,” Claire replied. “I guess for my sanity I need to think it. That we’re basically blank slates. That the choices we’ve already made and will end up making—what we do with our lives, what I’m saying to you right this second—that all of it’s the story, our original message to ourselves and the world, getting written all the time, again and again, till one day it just covers us like an epitaph….”

  She leaned over and kissed me, briefly but feelingly, on the mouth.

  “And then I guess we’ll know. Or someone will, Julian, if you and I aren’t around anymore. Someone will, if not us. How it all turned out, I mean. What the odds were. How we did.”

  eleven

  SHE WROTE CHECKS with a black Waterman fountain pen, a gift from her father, in emerald-green ink. Her signature was arguably the most voluptuous aspect of her character; debts were to be obliterated by the name of Claire Marvel. Which was perhaps the point—the presence of funds could be a spotty business with her. She might go from broke to flush, or flush to broke, in a matter of days. The money, like the pen, came from her father, who sent it without his wife’s knowledge; and who was embattled during these months, for his cancer had returned.

  Every weekend now she spent with him in Stamford. I never accompanied her; she never asked me to. She made it clear she wouldn’t appreciate my calling while she was there. What I received instead of an invitation were letters, written in the familiar green ink, sometimes as many as two a day. Claire imbued my mailbox with the sense of deliverance it had been lacking. Letters of all lengths, scrawled on folded sheets of lined paper torn from a spiral-bound notebook, composed at any hour of the day—though usually, I guessed, while her father rested; for whispered between her lines was a reverent, grieving hush.

  By the time they arrived in my box, she would already be back in Cambridge. Mondays, Tuesdays, even Wednesdays I’d be reading what she’d written a few days before in her father’s house. And so her moods reached me belatedly, mountains whose troughs and peaks I was coming to know, like a climber in the dark, by feel rather than by sight. I scaled them with a careful sort of greed, pausing over each new turn of phrase as if it might prove the key to her. It never did, of course, but I wasn’t disappointed. Real knowledge had many faces, I was discovering; it wasn’t literal. There were aspects of her in everything she did or thought, more so in the discrepancies and contradictions that lit her mind like sparks. With time that fall and winter, it came to make a strange kind of sense that the Claire of the letter I read on a Tuesday morning should be so much warmer or cooler or angrier or more tender or more hopeful or more heartbroken than the Claire I saw in person that same evening.

  twelve

  I GIVE NOW THIS MAP OF OUR DAYS.

  Afternoons at the café. Short days growing shorter. Through street-level windows boots seen tramping soundlessly in powdery snow. Inside, smoky warmth and the illusion that this place had been built just for us.

  Today I sat buried in Davis’ manuscript, which seemed to be growing as exponentially as our great nation’s budget deficit. The man was a writing machine. This left me little time to work on my dissertation. It was December and I was still wrestling with the introduction, trying to winnow down the scope. Davis, fount of industry that he was, had time only to advise me to “pick your locus, Julian, and stick with it.”

  Pick my locus … ? In my dictionary a locus was most interestingly defined as “a center of intense concentration”; also, in mathematical terms, as “the configuration of all points whose coordinates satisfy a single equation.”

  I looked up. Claire was studying a painting by Dante Gabriel Rossetti in an illustrated monograph on the Pre-Raphaelite artists. Our table cluttered with empty cups and gritty with cookie crumbs. She was bundled in a heavy sweater red as a fire truck, and a beige muffler wrapped around her throat. Her elbows rested on either side of the book, an index finger tapping at the corner of her mouth. And so my locus was picked, as it were, and I had no choice but to stick with it.

  One afternoon Davis strode into the café. It was the sort of coincidence that makes even the biggest skeptic a believer—Claire and I had just been talking about him. She’d asked what sort of mentor Davis was turning out to be, and I’d replied that he was prolific, productive, ambitious, occasionally brusque; but also fair and sincere in his wish for me to get ahead. He was a better person than he liked to make out, I said. And here he was in the doorway, peering through the smoke, head nearly touching the ceiling, wearing a navy cashmere overcoat and black leather gloves and carrying a black leather briefcase.

  He navigated the cramped room to our table.

  “Been calling you all day, Julian. Now I know why. Hello, Miss Marvel. Pleasure to see you again.”

  “We were just talking about you, Professor Davis.”

  “Were you.”

  “According to Julian, you have a big heart. All that toughness is just for show.”

  “Is that right? Then clearly, I’m not working him hard enough.”

  “Not true!” I said.

  Everybody smiled.

  Opening his briefcase, Davis produced a sheaf of typed pages.

  “I talked to the folks at Random House this morning, Julian. They couldn’t be happier with what they’ve seen so far.” He handed me the pages, then put his hand on my shoulder. “I told my editor about you. A man named Fox. I said you were top material. He intends to keep his eye out for your work.”

  “He may need both eyes,” I said. “There’s not much to see.”

  “That will change.” With a quick smile he glanced at Claire. “So you’re the one who’s keeping him from his work?”

  “I don’t suppose you ever get writer’s block,” she said, returning his smile.

  Davis laughed. “Not me.”

  Then he turned and left us.

  Evenings at the Brattle Theater: retrospectives of Cassavetes, Kurosawa, Hitchcock, Buñuel. I was no connoisseur. My job was to buy the popcorn while Claire staked out the seats. Side aisles she preferred, life at an angle. Though once settled she liked to sit high, her coat folded under her, like a queen or a bus driver. And silent—her fiercest condemnation was reserved for people who talked during the film.

  Afterward, we’d have drinks at Casablanca, sitting side by side in a wicker cabana chair. Our interpretations of the film just watched were almost always different. She stared at a movie screen much as she did paintings in the Fogg, utterly absorbed by color and line. Dialogue, sound, music—nothing aural could compete with the images, if they were original and beautiful enough. Her expression then belonged not to an art historian but to an artist; a traveler who through circuitous wandering has stumbled upon an uncharte
d place beyond explanation.

  This, of course, was not my way. I believed in the existence of empirical truth. It was hard for me to bump up against anything without immediately supplying or reaching for a definition.

  One night after watching The Birds, I told her how I’d been struck by Hitchcock’s deft narrative construction. But Claire, though she’d grasped the plot clearly enough, wasn’t interested in its twists and turns. What had mesmerized her was the visual patterning of the birds themselves, black against gray sky, as they swarmed—a stroke of genius all the more notable, she insisted, for being beyond the artist’s initial conception or control. Another evening, after Ran, she emerged so moved by the extended dream of images, the battle scenes like long ribbons of color melding one into the other, that she appeared visibly altered: her eyes dimmed as though from sensory exhaustion, her lips imperceptibly stung.

  Mary’s living room, with fireplace roaring, was the best-heated part of the drafty old house. By invitation, this became our library. The Widener Reading Room was soon a distant necessity, for there was no fire there and no Gus to offer glasses of mulled wine when the afternoons turned dark. Besides, the older couple seemed to enjoy having us around. In Claire, Mary discovered a young woman who had been to, or at least read about, most of the great museums; who unlike myself knew what chiaroscuro really meant. (“The arrangement of light and dark elements in a pictorial work of art,” said my dictionary. “Also called clair-obscure.”) And Gus meanwhile found a new and appreciative set of ears into which he might murmur, with occasional inventive flourishes, some of the Top 40 tales from his book of wonders. Between January and March he played for her benefit every Dave Brubeck album in his huge collection of LPs. And in that warm, gold-lit room, Claire sat and listened. With older people, I was learning, she could be disarmingly courteous, even humble; could pay the sort of attention that made them feel invigorated about the time remaining.