Claire Marvel

by John Burnham Schwartz

  Spring arrived. In mid-April, after two days of rain, I walked into the Square on an errand.

  The sun was out. The slowly drying sidewalks were thronged: bearded loiterers at Out of Town News, pierced rich-kid skateboarders from Newton and Brookline, coffee-nursing, clock-punching chess masters outside Au Bon Pain. The winter was over, as though just today, the air fresh and filled with a cacophony of sounds, machine and human, business and play, the fluttering of want ads on the kiosk by the T stop, the drag and slap of boarders hitting brick, a passing boom box, a car horn, the next big thing strumming guitar in front of Warburton’s. Filled too with smells, with blueberry muffins, with hot dogs and mustard, with the astringent tang of rain evaporating off pavement, with the brackish, bracing scent of a breeze that seemed to carry the tastes of the river and the harbor beyond and the ocean beyond that, the memory of ships.

  I checked my watch—I had twenty-five minutes to order my cap and gown for commencement and get over to Littauer in time to teach tutorial—and hurried into the Coop.

  At the back of the main floor I joined a line of undergraduate seniors waiting to order their caps and gowns. A cheerful group, many of whom seemed to know one another: in the buoyant notes of their laughter and talk there was an expression of communal achievement, some binding stroke of good fortune. Cares had been lifted, a curtain pulled back, a limitless horizon revealed. Everybody was young. Like some stiff-backed elder brother, I eavesdropped on them for a few minutes, then pulled a folder out of my shoulder bag and began reading over my comments on Peter’s final paper:

  Peter:

  First, don’t be disheartened by all the pencil marks—overall, the writing here is excellent. This is no small thing. Second, I am full of admiration for the scope of your thesis. You went for it, didn’t play it safe. Intellectually this bodes well, and I’m proud of you.

  That said, while interesting and elegantly elucidated, your argument that TR was more tolerant, indeed compassionate, on matters of race than generally believed unfortunately fails to convince. You seem to have completely overlooked …

  The line moved up. I checked my watch. More students had arrived, I was in their midst, three young men discussing their plans after graduation—a trip to Europe for one, the Radcliffe Publishing Course for another, a job with Morgan Stanley for the third. At the front of the line two stylish women were leaning on a table where a patient Coop employee sat measuring heads and writing down sizes.

  The line shuffled forward. Putting away my papers, I stepped up to the table and gave my name, academic department, and expected degree.

  “Height?”

  “Six feet.”

  “Sleeve?”

  “Thirty-four.”

  The Coop employee wrote this down and stood and deftly ran a tailor’s tape around the circumference of my head. “Seven and one-quarter,” he said, and wrote this down too beside my name. “Will that be Coop charge, cash, or credit?”

  I paid. The line had replenished itself; there seemed no end to its enthusiasms. Checking my watch again, I saw that I was on the verge of being late for class and hurried past the chatting students.

  Halfway to the exit I stopped in my tracks.

  Inexplicably I had the feeling of being watched. Though what was strange was that this wasn’t threatening but somehow familiar and wanted. My heart raced as I scanned the store.

  I saw her then. She was standing across the wide room beside shelves of stationery with the rooted stillness of someone who hasn’t moved in a long while.

  For a minute or more we stared at each other. Then, slowly, she approached.

  She was right in front of me. Her appearance was altered. Her pants and sweater and boots were expensive and finely cut—a far cry from the faded Levi’s and hand-me-down sweater of last year. She wore lipstick, eyeliner, jewelry—diamond engagement ring and gold wedding band, new silver earrings, a new watch. Her hair hung attractively down her back in a long plait. Her body and face seemed subtly fuller and more womanly. She no longer looked like any kind of student. She looked grown up, adult, married, well off. And of course, all the same, she looked beautiful, more than ever.

  She started to speak but her voice caught. She cleared it, began again.

  “I’ve discovered something interesting,” she said. “If you ever want to avoid somebody, this city’s as small as a postage stamp. But if you ever really want to run into somebody, if you really hope and pray, it’s as big as an ocean.”

  I said nothing. It was a nice enough first line, a line she’d probably even prepared, perhaps months ago, and we both knew it. We stood at slight angles to each other, her eyes roaming my face with an insecurity I did not associate with her. I checked my watch. I saw her take in the gesture as she was meant to—as if the appointment I had was more important than running into her again. I was trying to be cool, stoical, resolute. But in my mind the crowded store had been gutted, become a cave for the two of us, and my mouth had gone dry.

  Anxiously she said, “You’re late. You probably have a hundred places to be.”

  I stood looking at her. Seven months and a marriage lay between our old selves and now. A lifetime. More than her clothes and hair were different. She seemed tentative, her old confidence shaken as though by some still-remembered accident.

  “I have a class,” I said.

  “I don’t want to hold you up. I just … I’m glad to see you, Julian. That’s what I wanted to say.” She touched my arm, then abruptly turned and began to walk away.

  “Claire.”

  She stopped without looking back.

  “It’s just over in Littauer. If you don’t mind walking with me.”

  We went outside. Nerves up, heart rioting, static on the brain. It began awkwardly enough with silence, as if we’d forgotten how to speak to each other, which perhaps we had. Finally, sounding desperate, she jumped in and congratulated me on my doctorate.

  “I don’t have it yet,” I reminded her. “I’m still writing the last chapter. Dixon may hate it and even if he doesn’t there’s the oral defense.”

  “You’ll get it,” she said. There was something in her voice—I couldn’t be sure—something like quiet pride. She looked away. “Do you have … plans?”

  “I’d like to teach,” I replied. “But I don’t have a job yet, if that’s what you mean.”

  “No, I …” Flustered, she didn’t finish.

  A red light across from the north gate to the Yard; in silence we waited for it to change, then crossed Mass Ave. Passing the newly rebuilt guardhouse just inside the gate, Claire used it as a pretext to change the subject, to try again.

  “Do you know,” she asked me incredulously, pointing at the newfangled structure, about the size of an outhouse, with a uniformed security guard standing inside it, “how much that thing cost to build?”

  I told her I had no idea.

  “Twenty-five thousand dollars. Can you believe that? It’s like those eight-thousand-dollar toilets the Pentagon keeps building. Harvard should be ashamed of itself.”

  Suddenly an old bitterness darkened the edges of my feeling, and I told her that there was no shame around here that I could see, not at Harvard or anywhere else.

  Silence again. It persisted as we walked through the Yard. Already in the distance, above the high stone wall, I could see the paler stone facade of Littauer. We’d be there shortly, I thought, this would end; in two months I’d have my degree and probably never see her again. For the best, I told myself. Yet there, ahead, was Littauer. Davis and the world he’d made. His office with the tall windows and the view of the Law School and the Kennedy rocker and the brass nameplate on the door. I remembered the first day I’d met him, which was the first day I’d met her.

  He is her husband, I thought for the thousandth time. Her husband.

  I made myself speak, hoping to sound normal and well adjusted. “How about you?” I asked. “How’s Burne-Jones?”

  “Still a genius,” she replied vague
ly.

  I said nothing. An image of our sitting together in the café, her books open on the table before her.

  “Yes,” she added, her voice turning harsh with self-irony, “he’s still a genius, all right. But not me. I’m taking a leave of absence.”

  “What?”

  “I’ve left school.”

  “Why?”

  She shrugged, looking away.

  “That’s a mistake, Claire. You were good at it. You had a passion.”

  Her eyes met mine for a moment, then retreated. “I still do,” she said. She paused, visibly upset. “It’s just timing. Don’t you see that, Julian? Everything’s just timing.”

  “Bullshit, Claire. You don’t believe that any more than I do. Go back and get your degree. Finish what you started.”

  “I will,” she said faintly.

  But her tone was equivocal and suggested the opposite. She wouldn’t look at me. And this, more than anything she’d said, alarmed and pained me. Where was her old spirit? The Claire I remembered would at least have been defensive in the face of my telling her what to do, my challenging her. It was as though her assured mask of married womanhood were no more than a single coat of paint; while behind it, unplas-tered and unattended to, lay the same cracks and gouges that had always afflicted her. She’d been touched up, that was all, and the declarations of individual mind—the I wills or I won’ts—were just words to cover the difference. She wouldn’t be going back to her studies, I realized. Burne-Jones would shrink until he was just another picture book on a table in her fine new house. She’d given up her claim on him, though not the passion that gave birth to it. And already she was bruised by the loss.

  In silence we arrived at the steps of Littauer.

  “How late have I made you?” she said.

  I checked my watch: fifteen minutes late. “Five minutes.”

  Another minute passed. We continued to stare at each other. Between us the air rippled with unsaid words like waves of light. A strand of her hair came loose from her carefully constructed plait, and I reached out, tucking it behind her left ear.

  She looked down, touching the tip of her shoe to the tip of my mine.

  “You’d better go.”

  Neither of us moved.

  I tapped my watch, put it to my ear. “It may be a little fast.”

  She smiled. My heart lifted. Then her mouth went too far, her composure broke, and her eyes filled.

  “You don’t know how I’ve missed you,” she said, and began to weep.

  two

  SUPPOSE SOMEONE WERE TO SAY TO YOU: These are the happiest days of your life, right now, and they are already ending. What would you do? You might craft yourself a credo, a phrase to live by; might write the words REMEMBER THIS on an index card and tack it to the wall above your desk. You might practice meditation, seeking through the emptying of your mind that state of mindfulness in which your life with its many attendant contradictions might one day be appreciated as it is, without questions of ownership or control. You might fail miserably at this. You might turn your back on your desk and the invocation (or imprecation) on the card, on the whole static cowardly life of the desk, only to find that no other life occurs to you, that you are not fit for any other existence; and so, losing your nerve for the hundredth time, you might retreat. The card would still be there on the wall, waiting for you. And you might once again sit gazing into the wake of all your feeling, a prisoner of memory, until before too long you realize that every one of your love poems to her has become an elegy, and every elegy, a love poem.

  three

  LEANING AGAINST THE DOOR when I returned from class was her umbrella. Not her, just her umbrella, yellow the color of buttercups. I unfurled it, today believing in my own luck over any superstition. It snapped open, sunlike, and a note fell out:

  For you, this small patch of shelter, from me.

  Wherever you go.

  I love you.

  Her script was known to me. I’d seen it many times. As an intimate friend I’d sat by her shoulder and watched her scrawl and write, thoughtlessly and thoughtfully, on checks and applications, postcards and Post-its and letters.

  Still, it was new. Rightward-leaning, idiosyncratically fluent, with tall t’s, loopy, elongated I’s and f’s, with crazy r’s and s’s like little accidents, and perfectly round o’s.

  At the bottom, in letters more compact than the others, was her address.

  I stood outside my door, key still in my pocket, reading the note again. And again. Even though I already knew it by heart.

  four

  WE TOOK TO EACH OTHER AGAIN as though we had all the time in the world, and no time at all. This much I know: neither of us thought of it as an affair. It wasn’t breakage but renewal, regeneration, the inevitable rectifying of past mistakes, the passionate and just completion of unfinished business. History and gravity and truth were on our side. We weren’t against anyone, but for ourselves. Davis wasn’t our enemy. When he was away—two nights a week ensconced in the Jefferson Hotel in Washington—he was, in a sense, our ally. When he was home, he was simply an obstacle, a barrier, something to avoid, no more personal to us than a fallen tree that we must skirt, and skirt again, on our way to some private destination of our own. That he didn’t know what he was—hadn’t yet felt the force of the storm that already had leveled him—was not something we talked about.

  Lying on my bed half asleep, I felt her get up. The floorboards groaned under her feet and in my mind, with the window light embered and whorled through the thin folds of my eyelids, I saw her fully and clearly naked. Then through the open door of the bathroom there came the unabashed sound of her peeing.

  The toilet flushed and she came back into the room. Beneath her weight the bed dipped as though bowing. Facedown I felt the silky heat of her against the backs of my thighs as first she straddled me, then stretched out like my double, her body aligned with mine, her heart beating into me. The weight of her was nothing at all like weight.

  Finally, she slipped off. The soft cool air touched the places where she’d been, raising goose bumps on my skin. Missing her, I turned and found her again.

  Then she was tracing my mouth with her finger. Murmuring.

  “What would you do if you’d never met me?”

  I shook my head. It seemed unthinkable.

  “I mean it.”

  “Probably sit on a bench somewhere for the rest of my life thinking how I was a person who’d never met you.”

  “Sounds stoical.”

  I kissed her fingers one at a time.

  “Maybe.”

  “And sad.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “What else?”

  “I can’t really imagine it. I’d be another person. With another name.”

  “What kind of name?”

  I smiled. “Utterly forgettable.”

  She grew pensive. She began to stroke my hair.

  “There’s something I heard once. It came from an old man. He said, ‘If you want to be remembered, put yourself in a story’ ”

  “Sounds like good advice.”

  She stopped stroking my hair and her eyes searched mine.

  “Put me in your story, Julian.”

  “I already have.”

  We gave each other presents, unremarkable objects of personal history. As if with our newfound riches only impoverished things stripped of all gloss and affect would do.

  Here is one. It sits on my worktable. A little gray stone with raised white lines.

  She’d found it as a girl, walking on a shingle beach with her father. Later she’d remember how the stone had seemed to call up to her out of a sea of stones, as though meant especially for her, and how she’d had to let go of her father’s hand in order to pick it up.

  Since that day, everywhere she’d traveled the stone had traveled—tiny friend, talisman, hieroglyph. Until this morning, when she’d woken out of a dream of the two of us.

  We were back in France, sh
e told me, standing in the ancient barn, in front of the 1940s Ford van—whose headlights were lit, whose engine was running, exhaust billowing up like the breath of life. A vision that frightened her because there was no one inside the van and she did not understand how this could be. She began to cry in the dream, standing with me in the barn. I took her hand then and told her she must have faith. I kept repeating this. And finally, she said, faith was what she came to feel. Absolute faith in me. Which was why this morning, waking without me in her husband’s house, she’d decided to give me the little gray stone with the raised white lines, as a token of the faith that I had given her.

  five

  THERE WAS A PLACE—left of the long slope of stairs leading to Widener Library, in the little belowground nook of the entrance to Pusey—where, immediately following the commencement ceremony, tucked away from the cheering celebrants and beaming parents and mortarboards falling from the air, hidden from her husband and my family, we’d agreed to meet, to steal a moment for ourselves.

  When I arrived—newly minted doctor of government, still in my rented black gown with the crimson hood—she was already down the steps to Pusey, her back against the wall. I didn’t see her until she was right in front of me: just a flash of a pale woman hugging herself as though she were cold. Before I could get a better look, though, she was already in my arms, her face pressed against my neck.