Claire Marvel

by John Burnham Schwartz

I mumbled my excuses, left them talking. Down the wide, curving staircase. I pushed through the glass doors onto the plaza and a gust of freezing air smacked me in the face; instantly my cheeks stung and my eyes began to water. Nearby, a handful of opera fanatics stood huddled in front of posters announcing upcoming productions. I walked past them, buttoning my coat and turning up the collar. Ahead lay the fountain, lit as well as any Parisian monument, around which, on occasional balmy evenings in summer, a jazz orchestra played ballroom and swing tunes and couples of all ages danced under stars they could not see. Laura had never been able to persuade me to do this. I wasn’t a dancer, I’d explained numerous times; I hadn’t even danced at our wedding.

  The plaza was nearly empty now. I came to the fountain and tilting my head one way, the water looked a cheap swimming-pool blue; tilting it another, it was gold I saw. My breath steamed into the night. Through the heavy slabs of stone and the soles of my best shoes the cold pressed up into me. The fountain flowed and sprayed, creating a mist rain-bowed with light. Around it where the water had splashed onto the stone there were bluish gleams of thinly iced puddles. I remembered dancing once, in another country. How slowly we’d moved. I could name every song on that album, and the order of the songs, even though I hadn’t listened to it since. I remembered how her head had seemed to support my shoulder, rather than the other way around. How once I’d looked over at our reflection in the windowpanes and seen us moving together, suspended on glass, the image grainy from dust, yet luminous from within like coupled ghosts.

  I turned around and there was the Met—acres of gold-lit glass. The light spilling far out onto the plaza. And standing in it, now, a familiar silhouette.

  Claire came forward, away from the light, her heels knocking cold stone. With each stride she became less of a shadow. And my heart began to step with her, to climb a ladder of feeling long unused, like something stored and forgotten in an attic. First her pale face, emerging like an apparition. Then her white throat disappearing into the depths of a black overcoat. Her hair as long as it had ever been and brushed down her back. Her eyes never leaving my face. She came forward and stopped in front of me and now the distance between us, after eleven years, was down to a yard.

  “Where do we begin?” she asked in a quiet voice.

  My mouth was too dry to speak; I shook my head.

  “Does that mean we don’t begin? Or that you have no idea where to begin?”

  “I don’t know what it means.” My voice sounded rusty to me, weak.

  “That makes two of us.” She frowned, as if unhappy with how this had sounded. Her anxiety appeared to be growing rather than lessening.

  “It’s all right,” I said. Then I said it again.

  My words seemed to calm her. We stood looking at each other, our breaths tiny smoke signals forming and dissipating in the air between us. Then she tried again.

  “He said you were a teacher. What kind of teacher are you?”

  “High school. Political science and history.”

  “Do you like it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then I’m happy for you.” Her voice was low and steady but her eyes had begun to glitter with what might have been tears, or light reflecting from the fountain behind me. “Are you married?” she asked.

  “Yes,” I said.

  I watched her take this in; she hugged herself.

  “Children?”

  “No.” I hesitated. “Not yet.”

  “Do you—”

  “I think we’ve covered me.”

  For the first time she smiled. “Oh no,” she said with a flash of the old irony. “We could never cover you.”

  We stood smiling at each other. And then, after a while, we looked away.

  “Now you,” I said.

  “Me?” she replied dismissively. “I went back and got my Ph.D.”

  “Good for you.”

  “I went back and resurrected Burne-Jones to the best of my ability,” she said, her tone darkening with every word. “You try to show people what beauty is, how it’s more alive than we are, the best of ourselves. You want to spread the gospel like some sort of prophet. But after a while you start to feel you’re shouting into a vacuum. You’re quite certain that nobody out there is listening.” A wave of the hand, and then she was done with herself. “C’est tout.”

  “You’ve had your reasons,” I said.

  “I don’t know about that. Housewife isn’t much of a reason.”

  “There’s being a mother.”

  The words came out of my mouth sounding reasonable and not especially embittered. I felt almost proud for having forced myself to say them, as if here, finally, was evidence that I had not been trapped in time.

  But then I saw the effect my words had on her: she’d gone still and expressionless.

  “I’m not a mother,” she said quietly.

  I stared at her, my heart like a bird grabbed out of the air.

  “I had a miscarriage that first time,” she went on in the same quiet voice. “Then twice more.”

  “You didn’t tell me.”

  She shook her head as though helpless about the past, but said nothing.

  I turned away from her. Out of the corner of my vision the fountain appeared as a burning pyre. I tried to breathe but could not seem to get enough air.

  Turning back, I saw that the glitter in her eyes had returned; she was trying to wipe it away with her hand. Some tears fell anyway, soundlessly, picking up reflected light, painting her face in pale licks of color. In a stricken voice she said, “I’d already hurt you too much. I had to let you go.”

  I held up my hand to silence her. I couldn’t stand to hear any more. Her mouth opened but she made no sound, and then she covered her mouth with her hand, as if to stanch whatever thoughts were on the verge of speech.

  “I have to go,” I said. “My wife is waiting.”

  Her chin lifted. Her tears were falling freely now. I lowered my eyes and walked past her toward the opera house.

  Four months later she was dead.

  four

  IT WAS TEN O’CLOCK on an April morning. Laura had left for work an hour before. I was sitting at the dining table reading the Times when the intercom buzzed and the doorman announced that Kate Daniels was in the lobby.

  A moment’s hesitation as my brain sought to place the name of Claire’s old roommate, whom I hadn’t seen in a dozen years. But only a moment: the snap of recognition brought with it a clear picture of Kate’s strong face and chlorine-tinted hair, and then the once-familiar sound of her husky voice.

  She stepped out of the elevator, turned, saw me standing at the end of the hallway. We stood looking at each other. An uneasy smile showed on her face—the expression of someone determined to walk the plank and trying to seem enthusiastic about it—then withdrew. She shook her head, admonishing herself.

  “I should’ve called first.”

  I told her not to worry. She came down the hallway and we hugged. Her hair was short and already gray, her body slimmer and less obviously athletic than I remembered, though still fit. On her way through the door she stopped to scrutinize me again.

  “You look good, Julian. A little skinny maybe, but good.”

  I left her in the living room and went to the kitchen for coffee. As I poured her a cup and refilled my own, a sad self-awareness reared its head: sometime during the winter, without ever discussing it, Laura and I had stopped following the advice of the how-to-get-pregnant guides, despite the fact that we were still ostensibly trying to conceive a child. We had an appointment scheduled with a new fertility specialist in two weeks. But we were drinking wine and coffee again, Laura no longer checked her body temperature with any regularity, and our lovemaking had dwindled to hardly more than once a week.

  I carried the cups back down the hallway and into the living room. Kate was standing by the window with her head down, deep in thought. As she looked up, her unmasked expression showed a mix of grief and apprehension that I
didn’t understand, but that already was infecting the room.

  “You’re probably wondering how I knew you’d be home on a weekday morning,” she said.

  I smiled and shrugged. “It’s spring break. But actually, I’m wondering a lot of things.”

  “It was an educated guess. I’m a teacher too. Public high school, Bethlehem, PA. My alma mater. I teach social studies.”

  “How’d you know I was a teacher?”

  There was a pause. She wasn’t facing me directly but obliquely, still half angled toward the window. “From Claire.” Kate watched me. When I remained silent, she added, “In a letter.”

  “How is she?” I asked, hearing my own dull voice in my ears.

  Taking a deep breath, Kate turned to face me. “She’s dead.”

  I didn’t hear her at first. Or I must have heard her, but I didn’t feel anything.

  “Julian,” Kate said gently, “Claire killed herself.”

  Within my body there was no sign of what I knew I’d heard. A grievous dislocation was what it was. As if her words had not been what they’d appeared to be, as if it was all some trick. I stood waiting for the real words, which would carry the real meaning. Hoping to feel something. And then, with brutal and unsentimental swiftness, it came. Nausea flared in my stomach and my face went cold.

  “She was in France,” Kate went on grimly. “The police found her in a river not far from the house where you two stayed. There were things in her pockets. Heavy things. The French police say she drowned herself.”

  “When?” I heard myself ask.

  Kate gathered herself. Her eyes, which had been cast down as she’d been speaking, now rose to meet mine. “They found her body ten days ago. She was living there. She’d left Carl just before Christmas.”

  She waited, visibly expecting a question, some reaction. But I could not speak.

  “I may be the only person who knew where she was,” Kate went on. “She wrote me from there last month. To tell you the truth, I was surprised to hear from her. We’d sort of fallen out of touch the last couple of years. Not a lack of closeness, more like drift. Carl and I had our problems. Then out of the blue I get a letter from her with that address on the back. The Lot. When I saw it I figured she and Carl were on vacation. I remembered how you and she went there together. And I thought it wasn’t right for her to take him to that place, even if they were married. I never liked Carl. Still, she married him, and for a while I tried my best to be a good friend about it.”

  She paused again, trying to straighten her thoughts.

  “The letter was dated March eighteenth. It was on thin blue sheets of airmail stationery and she filled most every inch of five pages. Just seeing her handwriting made me smile. At that point I had no idea she’d left him, or the country, or any of it. Then I read the letter. It was warm but strangely matter-of-fact about events. She’d left while he was on one of his trips to Washington. Packed what she could carry in two suitcases and abandoned the rest. Never looked back. Didn’t leave him so much as a note. Almost makes me sorry for him. In the letter she said it wasn’t planned, she just knew she had to leave. By the next morning she was on the train from Paris. By that evening she was in a little hotel in the Lot. She found that house you stayed in, sitting empty, and five days later she was living in it. Managed to track down the owner and persuaded her to rent it. It was cheap because there wasn’t much heating. She moved her suitcases over there and within a couple of weeks she’d gotten sick. She thought it was just a cold and didn’t pay much attention. Anyway, she was alone and didn’t know anybody and didn’t want to know anybody and there was no one to call. Turned out it was pneumonia. She didn’t say much about it in the letter except that she was very sick and it lasted five weeks and that the owner of the house, who lived not far away, turned out to be very kind. ‘Saved my life’ were her exact words. ‘Saved my life.’ ”

  Kate’s mouth and eyes tightened. “Oh, fuck it. I’m talking too much about too many things that don’t matter now.”

  “They matter,” I said. “I need you to keep talking.”

  Our eyes met.

  “Please.”

  She took a breath. “There’s not much more. She was writing the letter about six weeks after the illness. She’d gotten past it, was someplace else, maybe she didn’t know where, but things were a little better than they’d been, and certainly not worse. It was almost spring. And she had a friend, or kind of a friend, in the old woman who’d rented her the house. She was lonely, but free.”

  Abruptly Kate’s face bunched in anger. “Don’t listen to me. Those aren’t her words, they’re mine, and I don’t have a fucking clue. Here I am again trying to explain her to you like some kind of expert. I didn’t do too well the last time, did I.”

  “You did fine,” I said. “You were a good friend to her. You’re still a good friend.”

  She shrugged weakly, as though drained.

  “Tell me the rest,” I said.

  “That was about the end of it. She said Carl didn’t know where she was and she didn’t want him to know, so please not to tell anybody that I’d heard from her, or give anybody her address. She said she’d write again when she could. She said she was sorry about being so out of touch but that unhappiness and mistakes had just about turned her to stone. She hoped I could forgive her. She hoped everyone could forgive her. And then just ‘Love’ and her name. And then after her name there was a last part about you. It wasn’t a P.S. It was more than that. It was all by itself at the bottom of the page, practically the only words in the whole cramped letter with any space around them, just floating there like an island. She said you were a teacher in Manhattan and wondered if I might look you up every now and then and send her word about you. But only so long as I promised not to tell you that I was doing it for her.”

  In the afternoon, Kate left. She was taking the train back to Pennsylvania, where she lived in an apartment with her longtime girlfriend. There was a big dinner at her parents’ that night, including all her brothers and their wives. “Marcy and I are just another couple,” Kate explained dryly. “We just happen to be better at sports.”

  We stood on the street corner, searching for a taxi, talking about trivial things. For three hours we’d sat in my living room trading memories of Claire. For this is what you do with the dead: resurrect them moment by moment, hoping that the edifice you’re constructing might one day house their spirit; yet knowing it will not. The rest is faith and pain. We’d sat laying the foundation for how we would always talk about her. And then we’d grown tired, and wordlessly agreed to move on to other subjects.

  A taxi arrived. Kate and I hugged, and I watched her drive off.

  I stood on the street a while longer. Today, in April, the sky was clear, but there was a chill in the air that cut to the bone. I glanced up at the building I’d lived in for nearly ten years and saw how it was ugly and blocked the sun, throwing a perpetual cloak of shadow over the avenue and the people who went about their business there.

  In front of me a livery cab slowed, hunting for a fare, and I angrily waved the driver off. He flipped me the finger and drove on.

  I turned and went back inside the building.

  Of the hidden things, the secret hands, the private knowledge, the memories that were all spirit, like sunlight trapped in a glass—I’d told Kate nothing. How could I have? And with what words, anyway? Claire was the only one who’d ever known how much I’d loved her. She was the only one who was ever meant to know.

  five

  “JULIAN?”

  Standing in her white nightgown at the edge of the darkened living room, Laura seemed almost a figment; only her voice was clear. It was the middle of the night. I peered at her from the chair across the room, where I’d been sitting for I didn’t know how long.

  “Are you all right?” she asked.

  I felt unable to answer her. In the dark I reached down for my glass on the floor and took a gulp of watery scotch. The sound of ice
cubes ringing against glass.

  “Julian.”

  “Go back to bed, Laura.”

  “No,” she said. “I won’t.”

  She flipped a switch on the wall and the room was flooded with light.

  I sat furiously blinking, trying to shade my eyes with my arm. Gradually my vision adjusted and my arm came down. Laura stared at me from across the room. It was not the tall glass of scotch that had fixed her attention, I realized, or the heavy wool sweater that, groping in the dark of our bedroom, I’d thrown over my pajamas. It was my face.

  “I’ve never seen you cry before.”

  “Leave me alone, Laura.”

  She seemed momentarily stunned by what she was witnessing. Then, visibly arriving at some decision within herself, she came farther into the room. I ducked my head down—an image of David Glassman—and moments later felt her hands on my shoulders trying to hold and soothe me. But I would not be touched. I shrugged her off and without a word she moved away; her footfall faded down the hallway while I remained where I was, not stirring, feeling the ache rising in my chest and throat and eyes. It was the darkness I wanted again. And then I heard her coming back.

  With grace and tender practicality she brought me a box of Kleenex. She waited patiently on the sofa a few feet away while I wiped my swollen eyes and blew my nose. When I was finished, though, it was a denser silence that came scudding into the room with us. We sat in its enormous shadow.

  Finally, she drew a long hard breath. “It gets lonely out here, Julian. You must know that.”

  “I’m sorry,” I mumbled, looking at my hands.

  “I don’t want your apology. I want you to talk to me.”

  “It’s not that simple.”

  “Yes it is,” Laura said urgently. “Yes. It. Is. You’re my husband. I love you. And I want you to talk to me. That’s how simple it is.” She leaned forward and grabbed hold of my wrist and shook it. “Talk to me, Julian. Something terrible’s eating you inside. And I’m supposed to watch it happen? Stay here and keep quiet? Wait for you to remember how much you need me? Well, forget it. I’m not blind, whatever you may think. And I’m not deaf or dumb, either. And my patience is not infinite.”