Claire Marvel (23 page)

After a couple of hours of this, after cake and tone-deaf singing, I snuck off to the bathroom, simply to be alone. I’d been having a decent evening. But beyond the daily routine of the classroom, I guessed, I’d fallen out of the habit of being around a social group for any length of time.

I closed the door and sat down on the edge of the tub. Beside me lay my heavy winter coat, where earlier I’d put it to dry. The wool was still damp. The snow that had covered it was strangely vivid to me, despite having disappeared. In my mind I saw it still falling, felt it settling once again on my head and shoulders. I put my face in my hands.

I was thirty years old. I needed to stop remembering, looking over my shoulder, being dragged from shore by a swirling tide of feeling for a woman who was gone and would not be coming back. Gone. A mother now, I had to presume. I didn’t know whether she’d had a girl or a boy, but I imagined a girl made in her image, and I saw this child walking, almost stumbling…. And Claire picks her up—

“Julian?”

Toby’s voice, through the door, followed by a tentative knock.

I jumped to my feet. “Just a minute.”

He knocked again. I flushed the toilet for the sake of appearances, turned the tap on and off.

“What is it?” I demanded, opening the door.

Toby’s eyes were bloodshot with drink. “You okay?”

“Fine.”

“You weren’t puking, were you?”

“No.”

After a moment his face broke into a lopsided grin. “Good. Because we’ve got company.”

I followed him out of the bedroom and down the hallway. In the living room three women stood surrounded by eager, nervous men as at a high school dance. Two of the women were laughing. The third, standing slightly apart, was Marty Goodman’s sister, Laura.

She was pretty, if quietly so, with short dark-blond hair, gray eyes, and small, finely made features. Years before I had known her in that way—if you were a pimpled, late-blooming boy imprisoned in the dungeon of adolescence—you inevitably knew the elder sisters of your friends: across a hopeless chasm of immaturity. A year older than us and several inches taller, Laura Goodman had belonged to another, better race. Once while visiting Marty in his parents’ palatial Central Park West apartment (a bunch of us, including Toby, had gathered to play a marathon game of Risk), I’d had a glimpse of his sister in her room, sitting on her bed with her back against the wall, reading
Jane Eyre.
Looking up from her book, she caught me spying on her through the half-open door. And there followed—or so I’d imagined—a shared ephiphany of eros, during which she saw through the humble chrysalis of my present physique to the gallant winged man within. I’d felt readier than ever to fly.

But then she shut her door, and that had been that.

All this I wanted to recount to her now that we were adults. But she hadn’t been at the party more than a few minutes
before she put on her coat, clearly intending to leave. On an impulse I asked her where she lived; when she said the Upper West Side, I offered to accompany her. To my surprise, she accepted.

I walked with her back down West End. The snow had stopped, the sky was a frozen pond tipped above us. Our breaths fogged in the night. But the sidewalks were no longer pristine: boot prints and dog piss and soot. A snowplow came grinding up the avenue, thrusting mounds of gray slush against the sides of the frozen, parked cars. Then the tar of the street was visible again, wet and glistening.

I told her about the last time I’d seen her, fifteen years ago. By the time I reached the part about her closing the door in my face, she was laughing.

“You were all such pests!” she said.

“Thank you.”

“You know what I mean.”

“You bet I do.”

“You were more interesting than the others, though,” she added thoughtfully. “I remember you.”

Subtly encouraged, I told her what else I remembered. The
Chorus Line
poster on the wall above her bed. The shelf of books about horses and the light blue bedspread with dark stripes and the old stuffed horse with the missing eye. How when she read a magazine as opposed to a book, she’d sit hunched over with her legs crossed and the magazine in her lap, turning the pages noisily from the bottom. All of it meaningless except that it should be recalled now, years later, by two different people.

“Yes,” she agreed, looking me in the eye. “Different.”

Outside her building, within view of the uniformed doorman, she let me kiss her. Our breaths blew smoke. The surface of her lips was like polished stone. But past that I tasted in her an abundant warmth.

I had been celibate for too long. Untouched, a tribe of one, muttering my own language, ritualizing myself to no avail. Not caring or wanting or having. The months simply passing.

Now, through the bulky layers of our clothes, in a public street, I felt the first resonant intimations of Laura’s slender body, and pressed myself against her like an animal.

She pressed back.

eight

F
ROM THAT NIGHT FORWARD
we were a couple. I would return home from teaching and find the red light blinking on my answering machine. (Her modesty evident in this too: she always opened her message with, “Hi, it’s Laura,” as if in the intervening twelve hours I might have forgotten the sound of her voice.) Or I’d walk straight to her one-bedroom apartment on Eighty-ninth and Columbus, to which just a few minutes earlier she’d returned from her administrative job at Lincoln Center. Often she greeted me at the door still dressed in her cold-weather work clothes: white or blue blouses and trim gray flannel pants, a navy cashmere blazer and black ankle boots. Plainly elegant, well-made things were what she liked. She had grown up with money, though most of the time she took pains not to show it. This
was the locus of her private contradictions: she wasn’t vain in the least but she dutifully took excellent care of herself, as though she instinctively felt obliged to uphold the standards of appearance she’d been raised with. Once a month she went to a chic East Side salon to get her hair cut. Opalescent half-moons floated on her perfect, unpainted fingernails.

She was slender, small-boned, physically and emotionally discreet. From my adolescence ogling her down hallways and through half-closed doors, across vast rooms, I’d imagined her as a cold and willful queen. But I was wrong. Laura turned out to be gentle, kind, on occasion thoughtful to the point of passivity. It was five weeks before she would undress in front of me with a light on in the room (and then she rushed quickly into bed, like someone hurrying naked through the cold). When we made love the first time and she came, in the dark, in her own bed, her arms wrapped as far around me as they could go, her brief, poignant cry held a note of surprise or confusion, as if she’d just discovered that passion was really only another form of vertigo.

In the spring I moved in with her. I was a hermit crab, ditching my one-room apartment like a spent shell, scrabbling sideways with vigor. No crying or weeping, no memories to speak of. And my furniture, the corduroy sleeper sofa, my mother’s old chest of drawers, heavy as a yak—all this went onto Ninety-seventh Street one morning, and by nightfall was gone.

She lived, surprisingly, in one of those recently built yuppie towers, a high-rise sided in toneless brick—though otherwise chock-full of amenities, such as an in-house gym, designed to appeal to the legion of young bankers who had flocked to the neighborhood in the last few years. Still, way up on the fifteenth floor, it wasn’t so bad. Laura’s apartment faced west, and received plenty of afternoon light.

There was a comfortable sofa and a leather reading chair. There was her impressive collection of opera CDs and her books, novels by the Brontë sisters and James and Ford Maddox Ford, the stories of Chekhov and Alice Munro and William Trevor, the poems of Emily Dickinson. There was her equestrian library, still intact as I remembered it, how-tos on English riding and show jumping, an encyclopedia of equine body types, a catalogue of rare handmade saddles. On these titles and others the dust jackets had been worn from countless childhood handlings to a clothlike nap, the very feel of the past.

I added my belongings to hers. She encouraged this. She did more than make room; she opened her life wide to me. It may sound ridiculous to talk about manners in this day and age, but I believe that Laura’s manners were as important and as fine an expression of her true nature, her tender modesty and thoughtfulness of spirit, as any speech or promise she ever made. She did not tell lies, either in gesture or in word. She did not flirt or tease. There was a reason why animals, dogs and horses above all, trusted her implicitly, often would come forward from wherever they were playing or running or feeding to thrust their wet noses
against the palm of her hand, or sometimes simply to lean into her.

A good person, in other words. Someone who, despite her own intrinsic reservations and fears, with courage tried to give all of herself, to love with a full heart while holding nothing back.

nine

O
NE EVENING IN
M
AY
my father stepped through our front door bearing a bouquet of white chrysanthemums. He was dressed in a tie and tweed sport coat, and seemed as nervous as a schoolboy.

“So,” he said carefully, “how are you?”

“I’m all right.”

“You look all right.”

We nodded at each other, then away. He came forward, still holding the flowers, letting his eyes roam the living room, taking in the books on the shelves (Horses? I could almost hear him thinking; horses are so East Side), the stacks of multidisk opera CDs, the costly leather chair. Signposts, I assumed, ways of reading this new life of mine. He’d never been here before, never met the woman I now lived with. In fact, these past months I’d hardly seen him.

“Laura’s just getting out of the shower,” I said. “Can I get you something to drink? A glass of wine?”

But he was too absorbed in what he was seeing to hear me. He was standing close to the CDs; something there had caught his attention. I followed his fixed gaze to the top of one of the stacks and a cover photograph of a striking, dark-haired woman.

“She came to the Met,” he murmured.

“Who did?”

“Callas,” he said more firmly, without looking at me, still lost in his own world. “December ‘56,
Lucia di Lammermoor.
She already owned opera then. You can’t imagine the sound of that voice at its best. A voice that could stop time. I waited hours in line just for standing room. Beside me in the stall that night was a woman about my own age. Magnificent. Dark hair, huge dark eyes. I told her she looked like La Divina herself. The performance hadn’t started yet. We were packed into standing room like cattle, right next to each other, but she wouldn’t even give me the time of day. Looked down her nose at me, with that haughty eye of the Jewish princess saving herself for better things. I recognized that look, all right. My God, though, was she something! Still, it wasn’t just anybody singing that night. It was Callas. And when the music started, I forgot all about that woman next to me. Callas sang the first aria. And soon people, grown men and women I’m telling you, people were crying at the beauty of it. Tears were rolling down faces. Underneath the music you could hear the weeping like a dirge. Like being sung to by a voice too beautiful to be human or real. Then she finished, Callas finished, just the first
aria, and there was a pause like a single cumulative breath, a pulse, and then the audience—three thousand men and women, the rich sitting, the middle class standing, the poor at home listening on their radios—the audience couldn’t contain itself. Oh, it was bedlam, total goddamn rapture. And the woman next to me, that cool beauty next to me, your mother, she was weeping too, and she took my hand. Just reached out and grabbed it. Because of the music. Because of that voice. It was the greatest moment of my life.”

My father looked up and found me staring at him.

I stood there, wanting to know where that man had gone. The man who was the first to applaud after a performance, who wept at the sound of the human voice, who knew his desires, who wasn’t afraid of being noticed. A man who was
visible,
in weakness and in strength. A man to pity and yet to admire, who’d risked and lost but who at least had wanted, a wounded veteran of love. Where had he been while I’d been growing up? As though, like a miser, he’d hoarded all the best for himself.

From the back of the apartment Laura’s footsteps sounded against the bare hardwood floor. We turned just as she was entering the room.

I cleared my throat. “Dad, this is Laura Goodman. Laura, my father, Arthur Rose.”

She came forward smiling, her short hair still wet from the shower, slicked back from her face. Her dress the same soft gray as her eyes, falling just below her knees. A single strand of pearls around her neck, their unadorned radiance amplifying her smile and her good intentions, which she presented to
him now with innate grace, crossing the room and kissing him on his cheek, welcoming him.