Claire Marvel

John Burnham Schwartz
CLAIRE MARVEL

John Burnham Schwartz is the author of
Bicycle Days
and
Reservation Road
, which have been translated into more than ten languages. His writing has appeared in numerous publications, including
The New York Times
,
The New Yorker, The Boston Globe
, and
Vogue
. He lives with his wife, filmmaker Aleksandra Crapanzano, in Brooklyn, New York.

Also by John Burnham Schwartz

Reservation Road

Bicycle Days

For my brother Matt

That is my home of love; If I have rang’d,

Like him that travels I return again.

—SHAKESPEARE, SONNET 109

PART ONE

one

T
HERE WAS BEFORE HER
and now there is after her, and that is the difference in my life.

I will begin here because there can be no other beginning for this story. It was the middle of May, 1985. I was walking along Quincy Street on my way to see a professor one Monday afternoon when the weather turned suddenly. The sky broke open and rain poured down. I sprinted for cover, my book bag thudding against my ribs, reaching the Fogg Art Museum just as the rain became a torrent.

There was a rushing sound as I ran, and a flash of golden yellow.

I reached the museum’s low front steps. Standing there watching me from under an umbrella the color of buttercups was a young woman.

“I hate to be the bearer of bad news. But the Fogg’s closed Mondays.”

Still breathing hard from my sprint, I shook my head. Rain the size of Tic Tacs was pelting me; water was leaking out of my hair and down the back of my neck. I rubbed a sopping shirtsleeve across my face.

She began to laugh, not unkindly. Against the gray stone building and storm-darkened sky her pale face gleamed like bone china.

“Sorry,” she said after a while.

“It’s okay.”

“It’s just that you’re really, unbelievably wet.”

Raising the umbrella a few inches higher, she offered me a place beside her.

I hesitated. Hazel eyes alive with amusement; a refined nose above a mouth of promising fullness; straight brown hair falling to the middle of her back; a body slender and lithe. I kept glancing at her, then down at the ground. She wore sandals and the hems of her jeans were frayed and her toenails unpainted and a sexy, glistening wash of spattered rain shone on the pale tops of her feet.

I stepped under the umbrella.

“Better, isn’t it? Bring your bag under, too. Don’t want your great thoughts getting wet.”

Her irony was nimble, inviting. I lifted the flap of my stuffed book bag and showed her my inventory:
Party Systems and Voter Alignments
(5th ed., 1967);
A Theory of Parties and Electoral Systems
(1980);
Political Parties and the Modern State
(1984). A well-thumbed paperback of Bellow’s
Seize the Day.
Also the current issues of
Foreign Affairs
and the
Harvard Gazette,
a spiral notebook, five ballpoint pens, a fluorescent highlighter, and half a roll of Life Savers. Everything damp, of course, from the rain.

Reading the titles, she raised an eyebrow but said nothing.

“It’s all right,” I assured her. “This isn’t the first conversation killed off by my interests.”

“Oh, I’m pretty sure Bellow’s never killed anybody,” she said, “except maybe one or two of his ex-wives.” She reached for the book. On the cover there was a black-and-white photograph of the back of a man’s head, no face, just a hat visible, a pale fedora with a dark band, the hat tilted up in an angle of recognition or perhaps even of wonder at a skyscraper rising in the background.
“Seize the Day’s
not bad,” she said, slipping the book back into the bag. “But you should be reading
Herzog.
The others—well, I’m sure they’re fascinating.”

I began to close the bag, then changed my mind. “Want a Life Saver?”

She cocked her head skeptically. “Depends on the flavor.”

“Butter rum,” I said.

Brightening, she nodded—a girlish bounce of her head that sent a thrill through me. I peeled the damp foil back so she could take one.

“I forgot how good these are.” She was rolling the candy noisily around her tongue.

I stood watching her. Her simple but vivid pleasure had its own kind of pull. Oddly elated, I told her a story about my grandfather taking me to Central Park to play shuffleboard when I was a kid. His propensity to cheat had led him to ply me
with butter rum Life Savers so I wouldn’t tell my parents. It had worked. A tale I pursued until I became excruciatingly aware of the drone of my own voice. At which point I faded out.

“Your arm must be tired. Let me hold that for you.”

Passing me the umbrella, her hand touched mine. Her fingers were cool with the moisture in the air. My gaze hurried over the unbuttoned area of her shirt (man’s dark red oxford, worn untucked) yet still managed to get hopelessly stuck on the edge of her black bra.

In a voice of deceptive calm I asked about her field of study.

“What?” she said.

The rain was thunderous. I repeated the question, this time raising my voice practically to a shout.

Art history, she yelled back, first-year Ph.D. with particular interest in Burne-Jones and the Pre-Raphaelite painters. Then without warning she drew three fingers across my eyebrows and shook her hand, loose at the wrist, until the water that she’d lifted from my skin flew off her fingertips like sparks.

“Thank you.”

“Don’t mention it.”

She turned to watch a car passing on the street, its windshield wipers working frantically to beat back the rain.

Too soon it ended. It wasn’t the great deluge after all, coupled beasts driven onto the hastily built ship to voyage for a lifetime. No, a mere spring shower experienced by two relative strangers.

She extended her hand out past the golden canopy, probing for renegade drops. Her shirt cuff drew back, exposing elegant ringless fingers and a very white wrist.

“Well,” she said lightly, “that was certainly an adventure.”

She was smiling. But it was a distant smile, as if the connection we’d just shared, however fateful or fortuitous, was finished now. She took the umbrella from my hand and began to furl it. She was getting ready to leave.

“I’m on my way to see a professor,” I announced simply to keep her there. “I hope he has a towel.”

“I’m sure he’ll appreciate your tenacity. ‘Neither rain, nor sleet …’ How does it go?”

“I think that’s for postmen.”

She laughed, turning her face up to the sky. Just then the sun was breaking through the cloud cover, silvered rays brightening the pothole puddles of Union Street and the fat beads of water sitting like fake jewels on the hoods of parked cars.

“I have to go,” she said.

“I’m Julian Rose,” I blurted out, offering my hand.

“You’re pretty good company in a storm, Julian Rose.”

She held my hand for a couple of seconds. Then, a smile at the corners of her mouth, she let it go. She turned and descended the four steps to the sidewalk, where she paused, looking at me over her shoulder. Her expression had softened, and for a moment I thought she would come back.

“I’m Claire Marvel,” she said casually. “I’m at Café Pamplona sometimes. Afternoons. I go there to read.”

With that she turned and walked up the street. I watched until I couldn’t see her anymore.

two

I
HAD BEEN ON MY WAY
to see Carl Davis, Sherbourne Professor of Government and Public Policy, during his office hours. Although I was in his lecture class on American political institutions, I’d never actually met the man whose brilliant reputation preceded him like the prow of a destroyer. It was my hope that afternoon to introduce myself and persuade him to advise me on my doctoral dissertation. As it was, because of the storm, I reached Littauer later than I’d hoped. The door to Professor Davis’ office was closed, and filling the bench in the hallway were three graduate students from my department.

Mike Lewin, a thirty-year-old Brooklyn native obsessed with Joseph McCarthy, looked up from a new book on Hollywood’s blacklist and muttered, “Hey. Raining out?” His reddish hair was shaggy, his jaw bristling with the wildfire beginnings
of a beard. Beside him, pretending to ignore us, sat Parker Bing. An incongruous pairing, I thought. Bing was from Greenwich. His idea of political life belonged to that anachronistic age of WASP class-worship and finals-club “gentlemen” best exemplified by his heroes Acheson and Harriman. He wore hats and bow ties and sometimes even suspenders, which he insisted on calling “braces.” Through connections he’d already had a three-month stint in the State Department and preferred to acknowledge only those colleagues he deemed likely to find similar advancement.

The third student was a slender woman from New Delhi named Dal. I’d heard she was a champion squash player.

The bench was full, so I took a seat on the floor. My three colleagues were all reading diligently. I pulled
Political Parties and the Modern State
from my shoulder bag and made an attempt to join them. But I couldn’t concentrate. My damp khakis chafed against my thighs and Claire’s yellow umbrella kept breaking into my thoughts. Beneath it I’d stood with her, the rain buffeting the thin sunlike carapace above our heads. Already it was hard to remember what had occurred. What had I actually said to her? Had her comment at the end been an invitation, or just a dodge?

“See you,” mumbled Lewin, shuffling by. He’d already finished his meeting with Davis. I looked up to see Bing striding into the office and the door shutting behind him. Dal’s glance met mine and I raised my eyebrows but she hastily lowered her eyes to her book, a tome called
Grassroots Nation,
leaving me stranded once again with my thoughts about Claire Marvel.

The odds weren’t in my favor, I reckoned. Meeting her had been a freak occurrence, some weird twist of meteorological fate. I’d go on being myself—brain-channeled, sometimes awkward, sometimes amusing; occasionally, in moments as radiant and evanescent as soap bubbles, something more than just smart. But mainly safe. Safety lay not in numbers but in the assurance that where one has already walked no surprises can lurk. There was the future to think about. This was our creed. Among hard-core grad students in government romance was considered a questionable sideline. A muddy source to be handled with extreme circumspection, it might taint the waters of pure, wonkish ambition.

Bing emerged from Davis’ office looking smug. He offered Dal a curt nod, as if permission to enter were his to bestow, then walked past me without a glance. Dal gathered her things. She was pretty and moved with an easy grace. She walked into the office, closing the door behind her.

There are men who feel handsome, I assume; perhaps, on occasion, even godlike. I was never one of them. It’s not that I was necessarily unattractive—no one had ever called me that. But neither had I ever felt myself the object of a woman’s delighted aesthetic scrutiny, her unmistakable, unassailable desire. My girlfriends in the past had been few and far between and willfully indifferent to my physical presence. Or they’d been mentally absent, perpetually immersed in their weekly planners, seminars, and fencing classes. A condition which I with my innate cautiousness had always accepted and reciprocated, perhaps even understood.

I wasn’t particularly athletic or strong. My body came in at
just under six feet, a hundred and sixty pounds. My skin was a Semitic shade of pale olive. My short dark-brown hair parted quietly to the left. My eyes were brown and spaced widely to either side of a medium-to-large nose that, given old photographs of certain relatives on my mother’s side, had to be considered something of a blessing. I had nice hands, my grandmother used to assure me, with long pianist’s fingers; though musical talent had not accompanied this gift.