Claire Marvel

by John Burnham Schwartz

  The room was still.

  “A friend of mine killed herself,” I said.

  Slowly, Laura released my wrist and sat back.

  “Which friend?”

  “You didn’t know her.”

  There was a long silence.

  “Which friend?” Laura repeated.

  I rubbed a hand over my face. “Claire Marvel.”

  She stiffened. It had been ten years since Claire’s name had been uttered in our house, but on my wife’s face now I saw immediate recognition, as if the name had always been present.

  For a while neither of us spoke. From the street far below there came a faint reverberating din, a garbage can being knocked onto its side. My mind, seeking escape, dully attached itself to this far-off noise. I imagined a homeless man sorting through the spilled refuse, searching for bottles and cans.

  Then, quietly, Laura said, “I’m very sorry. She must have been in agony to do what she did.” She reached out and pulled a tissue from the box. She seemed to need to do something with her hands and she folded the tissue in quarters and placed it on the coffee table between us and did not look at it again. “I saw you talking to her that night at the opera,” Laura said. “I saw you out on the plaza. And I knew who it was.”

  Her voice was hardly a voice anymore; I couldn’t hear her in it. An urge to reach out for her rose in me—but by then her expression had already changed, hardened, and a bitter and righteous anger lit her eye.

  “That was the only time I saw her, Laura.”

  “Don’t tell me that,” she snapped. “In your heart, Julian, in your real heart, you’ve never seen anybody but her. You’ve never truly loved anybody but her. Certainly not me. Not like that.”

  She got to her feet. With grim determination she crossed the room. When she finally turned to face me she was on the verge of tears.

  “You and I have been trying to conceive a child. For a long time now, a long time—” Laura’s voice fluttered, threatening to break; she waited, a fist pressed to her mouth, for her self-control to return. “We’ve put our hearts into it. More than our hearts. We’ve been trying to make a life together, to bring another life into this world. And for what reason, if not for love of each other? Tell me that, Julian. For what reason?”

  six

  BREAK A PERSON’S HEART and you become a kind of amnesiac killer. All the empathy you possess is momentarily held in abeyance while you address yourself wholeheartedly to your own emotional survival. You’re just doing what you have no choice but to do, you think. You’re just living.

  Then it’s over, and standing amid the wreckage of your life you remember.

  Laura and I tried to go on together.

  In the morning she went to work earlier than usual, and returned later, often eating dinner with colleagues. During the rare hours when we were awake in the apartment at the same time, she spoke to me when necessary, was polite as always, but otherwise kept to herself. It wasn’t hostility, it seemed, so much as exhaustion tinged with an almost spectral premonition of grief; a process of emotional damage assessment as a prelude, I sensed, to mourning.

  I spent more and more time at school. There was no teachers’ meeting too routine to attend, no student concern or academic question too minor to try to assuage or answer. As if time had suddenly turned infinite; as if there were no reality but the present. Which was ironic, in a way. Because what I felt like, without understanding or shame, was nothing so much as a shattered hourglass, its sand leaking onto the ground.

  seven

  ON A CLOUDLESS SATURDAY in June I sat with my father on a bench overlooking the Riverside Park dog run. The dog run consisted of no more than a narrow strip of field worn to bare earth. Over it, watched by their owners, about a dozen animals of various shapes and sizes ran in a knot of swirling trajectories, chasing each other with unbounded joy. A light scrim of dust rose from the ground. The drone of unseen traffic carried from the Westside Highway.

  My father wore neatly pressed khakis and a short-sleeved shirt frayed at the collar and a beige hat against the heat of the sun. A black eyeglass case bulged in his shirt pocket, and the gold clip of a Cross ballpoint glinted there too, for doing the Times crossword.

  At seventy-five, he was feeling all right. Perhaps better. For someone who’d never exercised in his life except to walk the seventeen blocks to his office, and then, post-retirement, to the movies and on Sundays to Zabar’s, his heart was in decent shape. There was a slight chronic wheeze in the lungs suggesting, his doctor had said, some diminishment in respiratory capacity. And there was the prostate exhibiting a bit of age-typical swelling. But his physique was surprisingly trim. And the inevitable map of wrinkles had had the paradoxical effect of adding interest to what admittedly had been a bland face. His eyes, pale as moonstones, seemed still to be searching, however cautiously, for clues to the bigger puzzle.

  It wasn’t that he’d forgotten my mother, or ceased wishing she were part of his life. But in recent years some semblance of peace had come to him. It had come slowly, surreptitiously, from the ground up, as ivy climbs a wall. Until one day he stared out through the weblike mystery of its growth at a landscape that no longer frightened him. Suspicion fell away, leaving him lighter on his feet. Somewhere along the line he’d simply stopped trying to plug the myriad gaps in his understanding of her heart. She was another person. And what for years had felt like a searing judgment on his soul he now viewed rightly as some brute manifestation of personal choice. It wasn’t the choice he would have made, God knew, but he could accept it. And somehow that acceptance, however humble or hidden, had allowed him to regain his dignity.

  I was thinking intensely about him. And then, abruptly, I was back in myself; an unwelcome shift prompted, somehow, by the familiar barrenness of the dog run. Everything green and living had been worn down to dust.

  Lately my insomnia had returned full force. My trouble wasn’t in falling asleep but in staying there. Wake at three in the morning, every morning on the dot, and the remaining hours are a tundra, blurred at the edges by fatigue and a vague disconnected panic; something to be crossed slowly in the dark, a long trudging toward sunrise. All the regrets you can’t allow yourself to think about are strewn like stars in the sky above you. All you know is that you must not look up, must not think, or you will never make it across.

  But Laura was a good sleeper, a profound sleeper. Watch her in bed at night, from lights-out till the first rhythmic bars of her somnolent breathing, and you’d witness a beautiful paradox: a surrender that was also an embrace. Once, early in our marriage, I watched her fall asleep smiling—not from anything to do with me, I felt sure, but from something private and inexpressible, like a sky diver’s thrill in falling alone through the ether. From her expression then you might have started to believe that my wife’s real story lay precisely in that moment of commingled loss and gain—the invisible X where the quiet girl gives up the safe act of quietness and claims the passion of her hidden self. But you’d have to look hard for that story. You’d have to want to know the state of her soul. You’d have to wait for the moment of surrender and embrace, listen to her breathing, study her face as it relinquished the burden of consciousness. You’d have to be devoted enough to give that moment of her private desire your total imagination. You’d have to love her as if she were the love of your life.

  Out on the field somebody hurled a tennis ball. Two black Labs shot off after it in pursuit. The ball sailed through the air, bounced high, and both dogs ran under it and lunged at the same instant, mouths primed, sleek as panthers in the heat-glazed air. They missed each other by inches. They missed everything, and while they were barking at each other the ball rolled away and was retrieved by a dachshund.

  “What do you know,” my father commented dryly. “The little guy won.”

  For an hour we stayed there, not saying much.

  Some of the dogs, who would have gone on happily playing all day, were too soon taken away by their owners. New
dogs arrived, dragging their humans behind them, living for the moment when the leash would be unclipped and they could run free, out into the thriving, sniffing, barking maelstrom of their own kind.

  It made me feel young again, and old. I remembered walking in this park as a little boy, holding my father’s hand. The field covered with grass back then. A Great Dane loping across it. I point to the immense beautiful dog, black as anthracite and running like a foal, and try to say something. But I am speechless. It isn’t fear. I point and point. Until, frustrated by my inability to articulate the wonder I feel, I burst into tears. “What’s this?” says my father lightly, crouching down and putting his hands on my shoulders. “What’s this? My little guy,” he says.

  Now he said, “You seem unhappy.” He spoke slowly, carefully measuring his words, looking out at the dog run. “Actually, you’ve seemed unhappy for a long time.”

  I stared at him.

  “It’s just my impression,” he added, still facing straight ahead.

  “There was a woman in Cambridge,” I said. “I was in love with her. You asked me about her once, and I told you she’d married somebody else.” I paused. “You may not remember.”

  “I remember.”

  “She killed herself.”

  He turned to face me then. Color had risen in his cheeks. And I sat waiting for him to say something, while out on the field the dogs scurried and ran and played, nipping at each other.

  My father remained silent, though, and finally I began to give up on him.

  Then, as I was turning away, I felt his hand on my shoulder. He squeezed hard and for a long time, and the pressure that rose at the bottom of my throat was almost unbearable.

  In a tight voice I said, “I don’t think I’m going to get over it.”

  He nodded, looking me in the eye. “Do you want to get over it?”

  I thought about this, and then I shook my head.

  “What are you going to do?” he asked after a while.

  “At the end she was living in a place in France where we were together. Where we were happy.” I felt the pressure rising behind my eyes and I paused again, swallowing repeatedly. “I think I need to go there.”

  “For how long?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Have you told Laura?”

  I shook my head.

  “This will be tough on her,” he said. He’d loved Laura from the beginning.

  “The whole thing’s been tough on her.”

  The dachshund was leaving. He followed at his owner’s heels, trotting with head up as though wearing an invisible cape.

  “There goes the little guy,” said my father softly.

  His smile was thoughtful and sad. Most likely, I thought, he didn’t know the comfort he gave, just sitting on that bench with me. Though I hoped he did.

  eight

  IT WAS A BRIGHT SUNNY AFTERNOON and I was afraid of myself.

  After dropping my father at his building, I didn’t go home straightaway. For a while I aimlessly wandered the Upper West Side, staring into shopwindows. Later, passing the cineplex on Eighty-fourth and Broadway in the late afternoon, I noticed that a teenage horror spoof I had no interest in seeing was about to start, and I bought a ticket and went in. Two hours went by in a goofy haunted summer camp of screams and fake blood. It was almost a relief to sit in the darkness believing I knew what to do.

  I returned to the apartment in the early evening. I let myself in and stood by the door, looking across the living room. Through the windows the view carried west over rooftops to the Hudson and into New Jersey. At the cusp of the horizon an orange sun floated, radiating a garish wash of color over the factories and abandoned terminals that reached all the way to the river. The room was on fire with that light, and in it now my heart felt constricted, on the verge of suffocation. Thinking I was alone, I let a sound escape, something between a groan and a sigh.

  “Your father called a little while ago,” Laura said.

  Startled, I looked down. She was sitting on the sofa, watching the sunset as I was. She hadn’t turned around. It was just the back of her head I saw, a silhouette speaking with her voice. The voice not fully realized yet, as if she’d already spoken the words in her head and was merely repeating them secondhand, offering an objective report. Giving me the news from there, I thought sadly, just as I’d taken to giving her the news from here. News for news. This was what it was down to.

  Slowly I walked around the sofa and sat on the leather chair.

  “What did he say?”

  “He said he wanted me to know he loved me like a daughter. I told him I felt the same way. It was a little awkward at the end, though. You see, he thought you’d already come back and told me whatever it is you have to tell me.”

  I could see her face now, her cheekbones dimly reflecting the conflagration outside. I could see her eyes but not their expression.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, regretting the words the moment they were out of my mouth.

  “You’re sorry?”

  The room was still. The sun continued its imperceptible decline. The light deepened: rose, burnt umber, tangerine, blood.

  “Do you remember my grandfather?” Laura said, and abruptly her tone was almost blithe, though hard as a bullet. “He was the one in the wheelchair at our wedding. Kidney cancer. Grandpa George, the grand old prince of Wall Street. Maybe you don’t remember. He died two months later. Well, here’s what you probably never would’ve known about him, even if you’d cared. The kind of thing you wouldn’t know unless you’d been married to him. Poor old George was a stinking bastard. He ignored my grandmother for fifty-five years, never gave her a dime of love, never said please or thank you or isn’t that a nice dress or I like your hair that way. Hardly ever kissed her. Hardly ever even spoke to her except to say his shirt wasn’t ironed properly or the roast was overdone. She spent too much of his money. She looked big in the hips. She looked scrawny. She was too loud. She was too dull. He’d be overheard asking her rhetorically why he’d married her in the first place. The girls had been all over him in college, she should remember. He’d been a big goddamn deal. But he’d married her, picked her, chosen her, and she should thank her lucky stars, shouldn’t she.”

  She paused. The words had come all in a rush to the surface, and now in the still room I heard her breathing.

  “He died on the operating table,” Laura said. “The last kidney wouldn’t cut the mustard. He died like anybody else, maybe worse. He saw it coming. Grandpa George was shrewd when it came to looking after himself. His posterity mattered to him. Maybe this was what he was thinking about as they wheeled him out of his hospital room on a gurney. My grandmother walked alongside, holding his frigid hand. You know the last thing he ever said to her, just before they rolled him into the elevator? Probably the last word he ever uttered. Just one. He was always efficient, my grandfather. One word sent out to do the job of a lifetime. ‘Sorry,’ he said. He was sorry. He told her he was sorry, and then he died.”

  I looked up. The sun had fallen behind New Jersey, the colors were just about gone. We were turning into shadows where we sat.

  “Laura—”

  “I’m not finished yet,” Laura said. “I’ve been quiet. You think I’m quiet, and I am. But I’m tired of being quiet. I’m tired of being so quiet that sometimes you forget I’m even in the room. I’m tired of giving you so much room that after a while you don’t even see me. Do you ever even ask yourself what that speck is in the distance? It’s me, Julian. It’s me. Even though I’m right here next to you. And I am tired of walking alone through a desert. It’s too hot during the day and too cold at night. I am tired of being held up to the standard of somebody I never met and who isn’t even on this earth anymore. I am tired of being made to suffer for the fact that you can’t remember if she loved you enough. What’s enough, Julian? Will anything ever be enough for you? Well, I won’t be made to feel any longer that I’m not enough. I am enough. I am more than enough. If no
t for you, then for somebody else.”

  She was crying. Her arm came up to shield her face and she curled up on the sofa, trying to make herself invisible. It was more than I could bear to watch. I got to my feet and went to hold her. She tried to push me away but I forced my arms around her and her crying grew louder. Her body was shaking against my chest. And then my own tears came and we were holding each other with a fierceness we’d never known during the long calm days of marriage, and her fists were drumming on my back and her mouth was at my ear, murmuring in a voice racked with sadness that she hated me, that loving me had never been her choice.

  PART FIVE

  one

  THE SAME COUNTRY and not the same. Summer now, not spring. The same rental car—a Peugeot—and nothing like the same; all the models of everything had been changed. In thirteen years the French government had extended the autoroute through much of the Quercy, shortening the trip from Paris by an hour. Unless you happened to be me. If you were me, peering anxiously through the windshield with the road atlas on your lap, you’d get lost somewhere in the Paris banlieue and the trip south from the airport would take two hours longer than it took that other time, back when the map was written with the names only she knew how to pronounce.

  Not everything was different. Tiny cups of bitter coffee along the way, a croque-monsieur. Around Châteauroux, the open fields of turned soil and vibrant yellow and cool green beginning to lose ground, gain complexity, geometry, grow humps; become the Limousin, old hill country of stone walls and red-tiled roofs. Then off the autoroute, onto the small roads that curved and dipped. Low hills already parched and half browned under the full blaze of summer, Roman-nosed sheep packed like salmon in meager wedges of shade offered by the odd plum or walnut tree, swallows perched on telephone lines like unused punctuation. The few cows paragons of bovine stillness. The valley and the narrow gray-blue river, the miles of jagged limestone walls, the hamlets and their simple white signs, the market town with the half-timbered facades in the square, the food shops where she’d shaped her tongue around the words and made them delicious.