Claire Marvel (11 page)

Claire turned away. She switched off the burner under the saucepan. Into a small bowl she poured the hot milk and black coffee from a hexagonal metal pot. Steam rose. She added two lumps of sugar, stirred, then passed me the bowl without a word. I had no idea what she was thinking. Was she offended? All I had told was the truth. I studied her back as she cut an inch-thick slice of bread. The saw-toothed knife cracked through the crust as if it were wood and crumbs flew halfway across the room. She slathered the bread with butter and strawberry preserves and served it to me on a plate.

Only then did she look at me. A long look, hinting at an intimate smile. And I believed she understood my dream; that she’d been listening.

She leaned back against the stove to watch me eat.

I took a bite. The thick crust gave the bread a chewy heft while the preserves made it sweet and comforting. The coffee had a dense, sobering consistency leavened by the sugar and frothy milk. I held the bowl in both hands and sipped slowly, my eyes closed, relishing the warmth running down through me, savoring the earthy sweetness.

“I like the way you close your eyes when you taste things,” she said.

I opened my eyes. She had moved and was standing with her back to the window.

Behind her daylight flooded in; the mist over the valley was gone. In the backdropped glare the subtleties of her expression were lost to me. With the bowl held before her in both hands, her face and body in silhouette, she might have been a saint painted on the wall of a village church to encourage the supplication of the devout. But the warmth of her gaze I could feel. And this perceptible difference in her today: how she looked at me without hurry, with tenderness and care.

“Everything tastes wonderful here,” I said.

She smiled. “Our secret.”

I got to my feet. My heart was stumbling over itself and my mouth was dry. The house seemed to be waiting for me to declare something more than a dream.

“Claire …”

But I never finished. Coward. I saw that her eyes had dropped to the floor—as if she knew what I wanted to say and was embarrassed for me.

“Nothing. Thanks for breakfast.”

I walked out of the room and kept going until I was outside. I tried just to breathe. To find in each breath the end of the long winter and the beginning of spring—the day just begun; the sun blocked by the house; the dew gleaming on blades of grass in the dank shade; the mushrooms as white and round as marbles; the ground holes made by snakes.

To the left of the door there was a stone bench—a slab of rock smoothed and hollowed by millennia of hard weather. Seeing it, I heard Claire’s voice in my head:
la France profonde.
Ancient France, true France, she’d said, earthy France, feminine and wise at heart, its spirit that of a woman so real that she has become immortal and cannot be changed by the vagaries of time.

And here, now, this bench—solid, archaic, inexplicable. Above it, climbing the house, a swath of early roses. Pale pink flowers not yet opened, petals packed tight, all desire tamped down, waiting and hoping to be born.

I heard a sound. I walked up to the gate and opened it and stepped out onto the road. From the left, about half a kilometer away, a blue truck was approaching. I watched it come. Almost an event, in a place like this. It moved slowly, puttering. I tried to remember the feeling I’d had waking just an hour before—the assured sense that simply being with her could be enough; the discipline to stop myself from wanting more. Because it was the endless wanting that would break you, I thought. The constant craving for a love that might never be fulfilled that would bring you low, bit by bit, until one day you’d no longer be able to recognize any part of yourself.

The truck had three wheels rather than four; it looked like the runtish offspring of a small pickup and a tricycle. The man driving it was somewhere between seventy and a hundred. He wore blue coveralls and a cloth cap. He did not so much as blink as he went by.

At lunch we were fine again, full of laughter. Claire teasingly recounted an adventure she’d had that morning, before I’d woken up.

“I found a dead rat.”

“A rat?”

“In the kitchen. Right here on the floor. Dead. There must’ve been some poison around. Rigor mortis had set in. The poor disgusting thing. It died with this horrible rictus grin on its mouth, showing its sharp little teeth. I took a handful of paper towels and picked it up by the tail and took it out to the terrace.”

“The terrace?”

“Why not? Rats are biodegradable, aren’t they?” By now she was barely hiding a mischievous grin. “Anyway, I swung it like a kind of bola and let go. It had good velocity on takeoff. But you know that tree? The tall one, about ten feet from the terrace? It hit that.”

“What?”

“Not the whole tree. Just a limb. And because of the rigor mortis it was pretty much frozen in the shape of a hook. So when it hit the limb, it just kind of hooked on.”

“It’s still there?”

She couldn’t help herself: she was laughing. “Want to see it?”

“Maybe later.”

After lunch, though, the rat was forgotten; there was something else. Early that morning she’d gone investigating the property and discovered that the house, built into the side of a hill, had a natural cellar—to which Claire, having rummaged
through a chest of drawers in the living room, now possessed the key.

We descended the stone steps that curved around the house till we came to a wooden door.

Inside, the cellar was as cool and damp as earth—cooler, because of the massive wall of limestone. Spiders’ webs made opalescent tracks across the quavering beam of our flashlight. The floor was strewn with chunks of stone, broken chair legs, empty gas cans, an armoire door, a rusted washing tub. Claire shivered. “So much history.” In front of us a reflection gleamed: an enormous glass jug lay cracked on the ground. I took her arm and steered her around the jagged shards. Small steps, our bodies leaning imperceptibly against each other. Her hand cold but the rest of her warm. The flashlight beam illuminating one object, then another—a visual excavation, oddly stirring. The cellar a book of forgotten poems broken by time into dusty words like mementos in a trunk.

We came to the back of the underground room. Claire tilted the light up against the wall that was built into the hill. “This is what I wanted to show you.”

From floor to ceiling, its rusted, attenuated limbs like the shadowed heights of some buried toy city, rose a metal wine rack. The beam of the flashlight shone through it, casting a netlike pattern onto the rough stone behind. Only a dozen or so bottles remained. While Claire held the light I carefully extracted one, rubbing it against my corduroys to remove the dust. According to the label it was a 1964 Pomerol. In the bed underneath was a 1962 St. Estèphe, and beneath that a 1966 St. Émilion Grand Cru, and beside that a 1965 St. Julien.
Around these were others without labels, home-bottled, each capped with a hood of red sealing wax that was brittle and cracked though still garishly bright, like an old prostitute’s lipsticked mouth.

One by one we carried the bottles out of the cellar and up the stairs to the house. Some of the wine would be stupendous; some of it would have turned. It hardly mattered. To us it was a major archaeological discovery. For the rest of our trip we would dine like ancient kings.

And we would stand in the barn where she took me next and stare at the dust-blackened windshield of the 1940s Ford van that in another life had been laid to rest here and never brought out again. The sediment of time had worked an embalmment: seen from outside, the vehicle, so still and resolute, gave evidence of a state of unearthly physical perfection. As did everything we encountered that afternoon: the sky passing over our heads through the holes in the three-hundred-year-old roof—eyes of celestial blue looking down on us, in shafts of mote-drenched light like stalks of dry rain; the lingering smell of animals from the dark hay-filled stalls beneath our feet, where the animals no longer were; the old tools hanging on the walls, their wooden handles worn smooth by somebody’s hands, and waiting for another’s.

sixteen

S
HE
’
D BROUGHT WITH HER
a spiral-bound notebook filled with Lou Marvel’s recollections. This was our bible, consulted daily over breakfast—her father’s dictated words transcribed in Claire’s handwriting, the phrases all the more evocative for being terse and stenographically compacted. Sitting at the kitchen table reading aloud this compendium of mundane fact and remembered feeling, I unexpectedly caught some inkling, like the faint rhythmic pulse of his character, of the young man he once had been and of his daughter’s love and despair:

Wine man’s name Raoul.
Fresh trout from woman outside Martel. Look for sign.
Once found whole snakeskin.
Statue of Black Virgin, Rocamadour—relig. pilgrimage—looks like a Giacometti (???: did Giac. ever come & see?).
Vicinity: ruined fortress—11th cent.—Knights Templars? From right spot on clear day see 20 châteaux.
Old phonograph. Records. Ella and Louis. Scratchy tunes & plum eau de vie. Summer—light till 10.
Corinne—French, beautiful. Walked the causse w. her. Married. Still think about.

She’d sat beside his rented hospital bed in the living room of the Stamford house, she later told me, jotting down his memories. And what surprised her was how fresh it all still was to him, particular and distinct. As though it wasn’t the past that had gotten abstracted and fragmented by life, but rather the present.

The ruined fortress we found on our eighth day, an hour’s walk from the house. It stood high on a promontory, on the hard limestone upland called the causse. From a one-lane paved road we followed a dirt path in the direction of the ruin. The land here was desiccated and unforgiving, savage with stone. A donkey stared at us with sly, questioning intelligence from a walled square of hard-bitten pasture. We stopped to feed her handfuls of grass, and then walked on.

It was a fortress still, though the only thing it protected now was the past. You could see where the power had been—the vertiginous path winding down the mountain, wide enough at the top for only one invader at a time; the forty-foot walls and fifteen-foot hearth; the archer-slit windows that could
see, like the eyes of God, every castle and château in the region. But nature was king now. Sky owned the roof. The hearth was a void. Two stories up, a small tree grew out of a crushed chimney. Loose boulders of sun-bleached limestone littered the tall grass between the decimated though still upright walls: white against green, skeletal though resonant, like the shattered marble columns of the Parthenon. It felt as old as that.

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.”