Claire Marvel (15 page)

I swallowed more champagne and checked my watch, wondering when Claire would arrive. I’d already lost track of how long I’d been at the party. Fifteen minutes? Half an hour? Telling Mike I’d catch up with him later, I headed off for the far shore, looking for her, beginning suddenly to feel the anxiety of it, hoping that somehow, someway, I’d be able to whisk her out of the party quickly, get her alone. Perhaps for the first time since France we’d have dinner together. And late into the
night we’d sit declaring to each other all the feelings we had not yet declared, the hard-to-say feelings, perishable because true. Feelings that had to be spoken now or else thrown away. And I would not allow them to be thrown away. For the life of me I would refuse…. So many people, I was musing, as I emerged from the backside of the throng of partygoers…. And yes, the shrimp boat was there, just as Lewin said it would be, but Kissinger wasn’t in it. Though he easily might have been, I concluded, for it was a kind of Chinese junk made of plastic, with a cargo of pink boiled shrimp piled high above the gunwales, and miniature wooden barrels of cocktail sauce. Egregious, I thought, turning away—and saw nearby, at the edge of the big yard, a hammock strung up between two trees, with an esteemed professor of political philosophy sprawled in the netting, asleep.

I stepped through the front door of the house and into the foyer. Immediately the murmuring of the crowd was left behind, replaced by interior quiet and shaded repose. I stood listening. From the back there came faint sounds of the catering staff at work in the kitchen, and the strangely comforting smell of brewed coffee.

At that moment, drifting out of the living room, I caught the sound of Davis’ voice. Not his usual speaking voice but softer. Not the words but the tone—no less forceful for being lowered, still uncanny in its confidence, though something lighter in it today, I thought, quietly jaunty, like that of a man at a party, late at night, in smoke and haze, telling an intimate joke—

Then Claire laughed, saying distinctly, “You did not! I can’t believe it.”

I entered the room. My own forward motion was a shock to me. They were alone, standing to the left by the windows, close together but not touching, like lovers in a drawing-room play. She was wearing a pale green linen dress and high-heeled shoes and she was as beautiful, as ravishing, as I had ever seen her.

Their heads turned at the same moment.

“Julian!” she exclaimed in surprise. Her face was flushed. As she spoke, I saw her take a step back from him.

“Julian,” said Davis in a more restrained voice. “There you are.”

I looked only at her. “How long have you been here?”

I saw her hesitate. The room was still and quiet, and in the stillness she seemed to be debating with herself whether to tell me the truth.

“When I came in Carl was standing by the gate,” she said. “We got to talking and he said he had a Gwen John….” She made a halfhearted gesture at a small painting on the wall beside her. “I lost track of the time. I’m sorry.”

“How long have you been here?” I repeated in a harder voice.

“Half an hour.”

“No. I would’ve seen you arrive. I’ve been here over an hour and I didn’t see you.”

“Are you calling me a liar?”

“I just want the truth.”

“The truth! My meeting got out early and I came right over. I came because you asked me to. And if that’s not good enough
for you, then you can go to hell.” Suddenly she was livid, shouting. “Do you hear me, Julian? You can go to hell!”

Now Davis joined in. “Julian, listen to her for Christ’s sake. What she’s saying is obviously the truth.”

At the sound of his voice something inside me cracked. “Nobody asked you, Carl.”

“What did you just say to me?”

“I said shut up, Carl. Nobody asked you.”

“You’ve just made the biggest mistake of your life,” he said in a low voice.

“Claire,” I said.

But she turned her back on me. Which was the last thing I saw before leaving.

twenty-four

T
HROUGH THE WRONG SIDE
of the peephole I saw a light come on. A shadow approached, unbolted locks, then the door opened and he stood in the doorway, in his pajamas and robe, squinting into the light.

“Julian?”

“Dad.”

It was past midnight. A pillow crease marked one side of his face. His hair stood up like the wind-torn crest of a wave. He reached out and laid a hand on my shoulder. “Has something happened? Are you all right?”

The worry in his voice and the weak, questioning touch of his hand caused a bubble of sadness to rise up in my chest; my whole body tensed with the effort not to give in to it. My father misunderstood this, or perhaps not, because he quickly pulled back his hand, as though afraid he’d offended me.

I told him that nothing had happened.

He nodded. Then, looking down, he noticed my suitcase and the concern began to lift from his face. “You’ve come for a visit?”

“If it’s all right.”

“You know it is. When was it ever not all right?”

“I caught the late train. I should have called first.”

He studied me, the corners of his pale eyes starting to bunch again with worry. “You’re really all right?”

Secretly he wanted an answer that would explain things, but not too much.

“I’m just worn out, Dad.”

After a moment he nodded.

I followed him into the apartment. Smells of old rugs, wood, potted plants, bric-a-brac. Years of Kraft mac and cheese, Stouffer’s frozen, Jell-O pudding cups, canned soups. Piles of papers, the faded useless manuscripts of old college textbooks he’d edited, their versions long since revised, their figures and theories and declarations no longer sound, and yet here preserved and collected, offered their own museum. Strata of anxiety, ninety-nine percent of it untold, closeted, held mute, stoically and for years, all the years of sitting by himself, married and divorced, eons of woolgathering. And books, not to be forgotten, easily over a thousand volumes, fiction in the living room, biography in the master, philosophy and psychoanalysis in the little study at the end of the hall that once had been my bedroom, books like paving stones to a quiet man’s fortress.

Through all these essences, remembered and literal, I followed
my father, his slippers scuffing the worn floorboards, the belt of his robe dragging.

We came to his study, my old room. He switched on the light. “I would have cleaned up if I’d known you were coming. But it’s been … well, it’s been a while, hasn’t it.”

“Yes.” It had been ten months since my last visit.

I set down my suitcase. The room looked almost as it had always looked. An old corduroy sleeper sofa where, during my teens, my bed had rested; his desk, now, where my desk had stood. Otherwise the same. Change had never been his friend. He was like a man who, try as he might, could not get a weather report—not on TV, not in the papers, not in any almanac—and so regarded the ever-shifting sky with incredulity and suspicion.

“That old sofa,” he said, shaking his head.

“Do you still have the number for that chiropractor?”

He laughed softly, touching my shoulder, shyly glancing at me out of the corner of his eye. We stood looking at the room. The silence was familiar to him, seemed to remind him of something. He took back his hand and asked, “Have you eaten?”

“No,” I answered.

We went into the kitchen. This too was unchanged. When she’d gone to Houston, my mother had taken with her just her most personal belongings, her essential clothes and papers. As if there had been no joint enterprise here, no real union, ever. As if, for all those years, we’d been merely passengers in a lifeboat, lumped together by circumstance and the brute laws of survival, and then one day we’d landed, and
she had climbed onto that new shore by herself and never looked back.

My father stood staring into the refrigerator, cold white light flooding out around him: no matter how long he stood there, we both knew, the kitchen would always be hers.

“Scrambled eggs all right?”

“Sure, Dad, but let me do it.”

“No, no. You must be tired.”

I removed the cushions and unfolded the sofa. I made the bed with the sheets my father had given me, and got undressed, and lay down in the dark.

A long night. The room airless, with just one small window that looked out onto an air shaft. My back ached from the steel crossbar that ran under the two-inch-thick mattress, and my mind would not let me go. Every time my thoughts began to return—to the day’s events; to Claire and Davis standing together in that room and her turning her back on me; to the mistakes I had made and kept making despite my overwhelming desire not to; to the possibility, so awful to contemplate that it repeatedly forced my eyes open in the darkness, that she would never love me as I loved her—every time these thoughts came near, I tried to divert them. But I could not. There are some thoughts that can be manipulated in this way, ideas which seem to come from outside the self like choices waiting to be made. But there are other kinds too. Intuitions which, like water mysteriously seeping from the ground during a drought, are born so deep within the self that their source, finally, is beyond reckoning.

I stayed with my father all that summer. A placid time, still and flat, despite the city’s racing pulse. The city hardly touched us. It was a time of known silences and familiar oblique glances—an interlude of implicit understanding to the extent that certain long-standing arrangements between us were maintained without argument, like an anachronistic treaty:

1. It was not to be assumed by my sudden reappearance that there had been any fundamental change in my thinking with regard to family.
   

2. Whatever general lassitude and rudderless deportment he observed in me at present was not to be interpreted or commented upon.
   

3. No more than half of all the movies we saw could be subtitled.
   

Oh, we were a pair, the two of us. He was sixty-three and prematurely retired and probably lonely and his days were his own. I was twenty-seven and heartsick and my days too were my own, utterly free, though I doubted very much if I could have given them away had I tried.

And so that summer passed.

twenty-five

I
N
S
EPTEMBER
I
RETURNED TO
C
AMBRIDGE.
Where nothing had changed, and everything had. Where early one morning I stood waiting for Claire outside her apartment building, and in the new light watched her walk slowly up Kirkland Street, her hair unbrushed, her clothes wrinkled. When she saw me she stopped, apprehension on her face, and crossed her arms over her chest as though she wasn’t sure what I might do.

“You’ve been away,” she said.

I nodded.

“All summer. Where were you?”

“I went to see my father.”

Concern softened her face. “Is he all right?”

“Fine,” I replied tersely. She was the one I wanted to talk
about, not my father. “I got back last night and came by to see you but nobody was there,” I said.

The concern departed, replaced by a mask of defensive indifference. “Did you?”