Claire Marvel

by John Burnham Schwartz

  We wandered around for a while, quiet, stepping into and out of enormous ceremonial rooms cracked open by time. There were no other people. The weather was fair. It was exhilarating, but haunting too. All the feasts and declamations, the wild game sizzling in the hearth, the arrogant and fearful staring out at a world full of enemies from windows that no longer shaped the air.

  “Ghosts,” Claire said. It was the first word either of us had spoken.

  We sat down on a ledge of grass at the tip of the promontory. Behind us stood the ruin like a cliff face from which we’d turned back, hiding us from all sight but our own. Before us lay the valley, the castles and châteaux like stone islands in an ocean of chlorophyll; while across the entire breadth of the country the Dordogne River was a sun-gleamed snake, curved and deceptively quiet. Birdsong rose up from the trees that grew at impossible angles on the steep hillside below us. And from far off the droning of a tractor faded in and out.

  “He’ll be happy we found this place,” Claire said.

  That morning she’d called her father and told him all that we’d seen and done during our first week. She was thorough and patient in her telling. And when, far sooner than she expected, he confessed to being too exhausted to continue the conversation, she consoled him in a firm and loving voice. “All right, Daddy, I’ll call again tomorrow. You rest now.”

  Afterward, she’d stared at the phone for a long time. It was black plastic with a white rotary dial and sat on a three-legged table under the stairs.

  Out over the promontory a small hawk was circling.

  Claire said quietly, “He sent me here so I won’t see him die.”

  She began to cry. I reached out and slipped my hand under the soft column of her hair. Her nape was warm, almost feverish. I left my hand there, gently massaging her neck, until, like a fighter surrendering, she tipped her head back against the pressure of my fingers and closed her eyes.

  Late that afternoon we found the woman who sold fish. She must have been eighty, living in a stone hut by a stream. She scooped a net into the dammed-up pool of the stream and came out with two shimmering rainbow trout, and with quick brutality struck them headfirst against a rock and wrapped them in newspaper.

  As we were leaving she reached out a trembling hand and touched Claire’s cheek. “Ma belle fille,” she whispered.

  Tears sprang to Claire’s eyes. She grabbed the old woman’s fishy hand and kissed it.

  seventeen

  ON OUR NEXT TO LAST DAY WE packed a lunch of bread and cheese and wine into a knapsack and set off to walk the causse.

  There are stories still read in books and told in cafés about men who walked the causse from one end of the Lot to the other. Those were the old days, when the more remote fields were sparsely fenced, if at all, and any shepherd might find himself out on the hard bare upland as on some separate earth—grass and soil spread thinly over stone, ruins of stone, animals in thrall to stone. A barren plenitude. In winter stone held the cold like a vow; in summer it embraced the heat like a vendetta. The only protection from the elements were the odd stone huts built by shepherds long gone. You might walk for hours amid limestone rubble and hear nothing but the howling wind or the parched grass crackling in the heat. You might yearn like an exile for random proof of other living creatures—kites gliding high on precisely feathered wings, spoor of fox, a distant oratorio for sheep with bells. The snakes, called vipers, were gray as bilgewater and just eighteen inches long; yet step on one, two hours’ walk from anybody, and you would not be coming home for supper. All this was on the causse on any given day. There were more fences now, it was true, and more machinery. But the feat of walking alone from one end of the upland to the other could still be managed. It was still possible, in this country, to disappear willfully back in time. To disappear period. It was a paradise of solitudes.

  We didn’t make it all the way to the end. Perhaps there was no end. We walked through the morning, ate our lunch sitting under a tree, fell asleep with our shoulders touching. Woke, smiled at each other, walked back.

  We were silent much of the time. Words were becoming superfluous.

  Reaching the house, she went into the kitchen to make coffee. I went upstairs, my legs aching, and started running a bath.

  She was still in the kitchen when I undressed and eased myself into the steaming tub. I slid down until the water covered my shoulders, thinking how things between us had changed.

  I came out of the bathroom wearing a towel. She was standing in the doorway of her bedroom.

  “Today was the most beautiful day. I wanted to thank you.”

  I looked at her. Words came to mind, but they were just words. Out on the causse, napping with her under a tree, I’d dreamed a silent dream of a shelter made of stone, with a rounded roof and no door. She was inside, and I was walking back to her across the miles of forgotten fields. She was waiting for me. I didn’t know where I’d been. I only knew that I was coming home to her.

  “You don’t have to say anything,” she said finally. She turned and went into her room. After a moment I went into mine. On my pillow she had placed one of the pale pink roses that grew above the stone bench in front of the house. Its petals were open. It must have bloomed only in the last day. I picked it up, careful of the thorns, and held it to my nose. The scent was delicate and young.

  I turned. She was there in the doorway of my room. And I watched her come forward, her hands already reaching.

  eighteen

  THAT NIGHT IN THE BIG OPEN ROOM the fire had burned down to embers. Our dinner was eaten, the dishes neglected, the bottle of St. Julien drunk to sediment. The night was black beyond the dusty windowpanes. Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong were singing “They Can’t Take That Away from Me” on the antique Phillips turntable that, following instructions in Claire’s notebook, I’d found wrapped in a musty blanket in a cupboard outside the kitchen.

  At first, in deference to my complete lack of dancing skills, Claire guided me in a slow circle, treading water on land.

  Through “Gee Baby, Ain’t I Good to You.” Through “I Won’t Dance.” Through “It Ain’t Necessarily So.” Through “A Fine Romance.”

  I loved it anyway. I loved all the steps I didn’t know. I loved the awkwardness which with each subsequent song became more like an embrace, until our separate movements began to feel like one joined act, which was the dancing. I loved the two beautiful voices—one clean and limber and high, birdlike in its nimble airborne maneuvers; the other deep and rasped and lived-in though powerfully tender, a friend of the earth—two voices alternating, calling out to each other, talking, singing. I loved feeling that I had the right to hold her. I loved every one of the places where my body touched hers: our hips and thighs, her head on my chest, my left hand over her right, my other hand pressing the hot small of her back.

  On and on. Through “Stompin’ at the Savoy.” Through “A Foggy Day.” Through “Don’t Be That Way.” Through “Summertime.” Through “Cheek to Cheek.”

  Then the phone rang, and Claire lifted her head from my chest. She stepped back. The song continued to play but now the room had been cast down into silence. We stood frozen like figurines on a music box. Her face had lost its color, her eyes were aimed at the floor. Her nostrils were dilated and I could see her chest rising and falling with each breath. She stood like someone woken from a trance, thinking very hard, just beginning to feel the terror of it.

  The phone rang again.

  “My father,” she whispered.

  “I’ll get it.”

  She grabbed my arm. “Please don’t.” She turned and crossed the room. I realized that the record was still playing and I walked over and shut it off. Then the phone rang again, a sound loud enough to shatter any peace, and she answered it and learned that her father had died that afternoon.

  nineteen

  OUR PLANE TOUCHED DOWN in Boston in the late morning. Neither of us had slept on the flight. We came through customs and out through th
e double doors to stand dazed before the small crowd gathered there—parents, and parted lovers, and men in rumpled black suits holding cardboard signs with names scrawled on them. And even before I saw the tall man about my own age who stepped forward to greet us—the man with her coloring and her cheekbones and her long white wrists—even before I saw him and began to grasp his claim on her, I felt the difference, the wrenching displacement, of being back in the world again. As if France and our lives there, our intimate promising lives, had been dreamed by me.

  Alan Marvel strode quickly forward, straight to his sister. They hugged, their arms tight in a cradle of wordless exhausted grief, while I stood angled slightly away.

  Then Claire opened her eyes, lifted her chin off his shoulder, and stepped back. It was what she’d done in France when the phone had rung during our dancing, I thought; how she readied herself for pain: opened her eyes, lifted her chin, stepped back—out of one life that must have seemed to her a dream, and into this other life that was bitter and more real. She was here, now, with her brother, already turning forward to face the shadows that lay ahead. While I was still back in the old place, with her in my arms.

  Alan Marvel picked up her suitcase. “Ready?”

  “Alan, this is Julian.”

  “Sorry.” Awkwardly we shook hands. I told him that I was the one who was sorry—about his father. He nodded vaguely. My name meant nothing to him; he’d never heard of me. His eyes, hazel like hers, seemed instead to regard me from some remove. Stepping away, he turned to his sister again and repeated, “Are you ready?”

  Claire was silent.

  “Everybody’s at the house,” he said. “The funeral’s at three. We should get going.”

  She nodded absently, but turned to me.

  “Julian?” she said.

  That was all. My name uttered once, almost whispered, an unmistakable upward inflection at the end. Though in her eyes an urgent, vulnerable intensity I’d never seen before, a silent plea of some kind.

  And yet I stood before her and did nothing. Because her brother seemed to own her then, to know her with the unspoken completeness that I had foolishly begun to think was mine. I watched him take a step forward and put a comforting hand on her arm, silently urging her back toward a private world of home and family, and it was like having a door closed in my face, putting me on the outside.

  And so I looked away from her.

  It wasn’t much, but it was everything. An unseeing glance of no more than a couple of seconds, a hesitation not of feeling but of habit, a lifelong compulsion to gather my forces in the face of any potential rejection, to assess and weigh odds so as not to make an even greater mistake. I looked away at nothing, and only then did the possibility occur to me that she might be asking me to step forward too. To step forward and come home with her, as lover and friend, to help her face what she did not feel strong enough to face alone.

  But by the time I looked back it was already too late. Withdrawn was her unspoken plea for comfort, and with it some abiding belief in me. A blunt disappointment now shadowed her eyes like an eclipse; I had betrayed her.

  “Claire …” I said.

  “I’ll call you.” She stepped forward and kissed me coolly on the cheek. Then she turned to her brother. “I’m ready.”

  As I stood watching, she took his arm and walked away. She did not look back. The electronic doors parted and I saw taxis lined up and two porters in orange ponchos. It was raining, I remember. Then the doors closed and she was gone.

  For a long time I stood there.

  I stood as though in a trance, remembering a little boy in a state park in New York. Summer. Standing in that park in front of a wall of stone, a boulder the size of a small hill with a sheer vertical granite face, and Judith telling me I could never climb it, and my telling her she didn’t know what she was talking about. What I remembered, though, was not the climbing, but rather finding myself already partway ascended, about ten feet from the ground and twenty feet from the top: in limbo, without ropes or physical skill or knowledge. My hands gripping the rock face, my sneakered feet splayed like a duck’s, my pelvis jammed as flat as I could make it, one side of my face kissing boulder. Too afraid to move, to climb or descend, to speak or cry out. Loving that rock, and hating it.

  Judith, exasperated, calls out to me: “Scaredy-cat!” But I’m frozen. And eventually, with a theatrical accusatory sigh, she gives up and goes to get my father, who, with my mother, is sitting at a picnic table by a stream, some hundred yards away.

  Alone, a strange calm descends. My body maintains its grip with no less urgency, but my heart, which like some tiny jackhammer has been powering through my chest into the rock, begins to settle itself. Poised between two places, two states, I begin to imagine staying there indefinitely, moving in, like some new creature roosting in the cliffs.

  I hear my father before I see him. Because, for the first time in my life, I am above him in the actual world. If I were to open my eyes and look down, he would appear small and insignificant. I know this. And yet my eyes remain closed—the right because it’s plastered against rock, the left because of this strange calm that has graced me while alone.

  And then my father says my name. Doesn’t call or shout it, just says it in his usual voice—a voice quiet but not calm, unhurried but not in command. Julian, he says. I keep my eyes closed. Julian, he says, don’t move, whatever you do don’t move. And in his voice I hear the fear. He doesn’t know what to do, hasn’t got a plan. For some reason he’s not like other fathers. Experience hasn’t toughened his heart and made him strong, but drained him and left him afraid. I can hear it in his voice.

  I open my eyes, let go. The fall is quick and merciless.

  twenty

  I TRIED TO REACH HER. Again and again during the next few days I called the number in Stamford only to get her father’s voice on the answering machine—a sound that, no matter how many times I heard it, never failed to send a chill through me.

  But the machine was full and wouldn’t take my messages.

  Five nights later, in the faint hope that she might have returned without telling me, I showed up at her apartment.

  It wasn’t Claire who greeted me at the door, but Kate. Looking past her into the living room, I saw that the door to Claire’s bedroom was closed.

  “I can’t get through to her, Kate. How is she?”

  “How you think she’d be. Not here and not good.”

  “When’s she coming back?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What about her classes? Her exams.”

  “Lost,” Kate said. She tilted forward, studying me. “You look terrible.”

  “I haven’t been sleeping,” I admitted.

  Kate shook her head pityingly. “Jesus, Julian. All right, come in and I’ll make you some tea.”

  Depositing me on the sofa, she disappeared into the kitchen. She was wearing Penn State athletic sweats and plastic shower slippers—relics from her undergraduate days, when she’d placed fifth in the 200-meter butterfly at the NCAA swimming championships. She still moved with the fluid power of an athlete. Yet as a conventional jock Kate wasn’t entirely convincing; over the months I’d discerned in her a bluff tenderness and wary vulnerability. In Cambridge she spent her days openly besotted with a fellow Ed School student named Marcy. And once I’d seen her break into sobs after a painfully stilted phone call to her parents—conservative Republicans from Bethlehem, PA, who she was sure would never accept her if they knew she was gay.

  Nonetheless, her penchant for blunt honesty could be sobering.

  She returned from the kitchen carrying two steaming mugs. I asked her where Marcy was.

  “Dinner with her parents.”

  Seated on the sofa, we sipped our tea. She’d left the bags to steep indefinitely and the taste had turned metallic.

  “Did you go to the funeral?” I said.

  “Of course I did.”

  “How was it?”

  “I
t was a funeral. Sad. Maybe a little maudlin. Her mother made a truly unfortunate speech. Otherwise it was mostly just sad.” She paused. “You should have been there.”

  “Did Claire ask you to come?”

  “She didn’t have to,” Kate said pointedly.

  I was silent.

  She let out a sigh of frustration. “Can I say something here? Sometimes watching you two fail to connect makes me want to scream.”

  “That’s not how you felt a year ago.”

  “I was skeptical then. I didn’t know you. Your biggest mistake was winning me over. Now I’m frustrated.”

  “Not as frustrated as I am.”

  “Listen, Julian, you’ve got to step up to the plate. Not tomorrow—today. She needs you and you’re blowing it.”

  “I’m trying.”

  “Bullshit. You’re sitting on your hands. You want to be sure it’s all going to turn out roses before you commit. Well, get this: you can’t be sure. You’ll never be sure. In my book, sure’s for everyone who doesn’t care enough.”

  I didn’t sleep that night. In the morning I canceled a meeting with a student and rented a car. As I drove along Storrow Drive to the Mass Pike the sky was the color of lead, a wind was rising, and there were tiny whitecaps on the Charles.

  Passing Wallingford, Connecticut, it began to rain, a light spring shower that by Bridgeport had turned into a squall. I drove squinting through the windshield, wipers on high, hands gripping the wheel until they ached. By Stamford the rain had lessened. At a Mobil station just off the exit ramp I asked directions to Willow Road.

  A leafy suburban block, middle to upper middle class, houses big but not huge, the odd swimming pool set off to the side. I parked on the street outside number 14 and sat in the car with the engine off. Her house was a two-story neo-colonial of dark brown wood, rain-soaked and cheerless, with a front lawn and a garage at the end of a short driveway and, to the right and a little behind, a modest pool still covered with its winter tarp. A brown Mercury Cougar was parked in the driveway.