Claire Marvel (25 page)

Then the vision tilts again—it’s just a vision after all, it’s not life—and the reception is over, the echoing hall is empty, everyone has gone. But the feeling remains, such hope mingled with such sadness, a fragile net of all desires past and present….

I was tired then, and finally I slept.

PART FOUR

one

I
WOULD TELL YOU
that it was a good marriage. I would tell you that for eight and a half years Laura and I were more than merely peaceable companions. I would tell you that we were husband and wife, sharing a life together, books, food, music, theater, friends, quiet nights. That we talked to each other every day, recounted, explained, discussed, advised, comforted, gently humored. That we rarely had serious arguments or complaints. That at night when we touched each other, it was with ever wiser and more understanding hands. That a loving trust was our currency, our savings and our gold, the essence of all that we had made together, and until the end neither of us willingly squandered it.

It would all be true.

I would tell you that after almost seven years of marriage
we decided to try to conceive a child. That Laura was by then thirty-nine, and I was thirty-eight, and though we’d been discussing the issue for several years, we kept putting it off for professional reasons, Laura’s mainly. That during those years of talking about it, while most of our friends were having children left and right, Laura was promoted three times at Lincoln Center, eventually being named director of promotion. It was only then, she said, that she felt she’d earned the right to take a year off to have a child. Though from that moment onward, she looked ahead to motherhood with a quiet but abiding passion.

I would tell you that in my own way I eventually grew to want a child every bit as much as Laura did. It just took me longer to know it. Surrounded by teenage boys all the time, lecturing and quizzing and supposedly molding them into the adults of the future, I spent my days in a romper room of fatherly intimations. These were children. They came from all kinds of homes and families. Their individual needs differed no less than their names, faces, smiles. Some students wore their spirits on their sleeve while others kept them locked within. There was a secret password for each, had to be, if only I could figure it out.

I would tell you that David Glassman was long gone from these waters, being then a doctoral student in history at the University of Chicago. Every so often I received an e-mail from him. He was doing well, living with a girlfriend. The program was good—though the teaching, he kindly suggested, had yet to reach the level of inspiration that he remembered so vividly from his days at Cochrane. His parents both had remarried;
he had a three-year-old half sister now. “I guess this is the modern family,” he’d written dryly in his last message. “Which, if you’re me, kind of makes you think twice about the whole notion of human progress.”

Where David had been in my life there was now a lingering feeling, a need to care for and instruct, to watch out for, that was too deep to be simply reactive; it was, I only gradually intuited, biological, perhaps even spiritual.

And so I’d tell you that when Laura and I finally began trying to conceive, we did so in earnest, without reservation, we did so with hope. We consulted books, followed the calendar, checked her temperature five times a day, gave up alcohol and coffee. The days were a series of physiological signals to be read and acted upon; the human body turned out to be at once cruder and more mysterious than I’d imagined. Still, it was boss, channeling its unsentimental demands through my wife. More than once I received a lunchtime call in my office telling me, as it were, to get home and fire up. Which, of course, I did.

Together and separately, we turned our faces toward the future.

And I would tell you that when, after a year and a half of trying, we still hadn’t conceived, it was with a growing sense of dread that we consulted a fertility specialist. Tests were done. After a week of anxious waiting, the results came back: egg and sperm counts both appeared normal, the doctor assured us. We should just keep at it. Sometimes it took as long as it took, especially at our “advanced” ages.

That day, without talking about it, Laura and I returned to
our apartment and went straight to the bedroom. We would make love, try again. It wouldn’t work, either, this time, but we couldn’t know that. It was the effort that counted now, or so the doctor had encouraged us.

What we felt that day, I believe, each in our own way, was gratitude. A reprieve had been granted. No, more than that: sitting in the waiting room at the doctor’s office, dreading the irrefutable evidence of the test results, my longing to be a father—to be something more than myself—had finally been revealed to me. Here in the opportunity about to be lost lay the seeds of the life I’d always wanted, and had not lived.

two

I
N
D
ECEMBER
1998, I found myself in the Metropolitan Opera House, standing over a brushed-aluminum drinking fountain fifteen minutes before the start of James Levine’s star-studded production of
The Marriage of Figaro.
A well-heeled opening-night crowd filled the passageway, conversing in hushed but excited tones and strolling over the thick crimson carpet. Laura had gone ahead to our orchestra seats. Stepping away from the fountain, I’d just noticed an ugly water stain on my new silk tie when from behind me a man muttered sarcastically, “Well, well.”

The clenching of my heart told me who it was. I turned around.

Dressed in black tie, Carl Davis looked statelier and more self-assured than I remembered him. If anything, the added
years seemed only to have increased his regal hold on himself. He was tall and still handsome, with those eyes of such a hard cerulean blue that behind the rimless glasses they glimmered like fragments of iced sky. The silver head was truly leonine now, indomitable; not even six years of a Clinton presidency had dimmed this Republican star. It might have been the second coming of Kissinger: a man perversely and continuously elevated in the world’s eyes not despite, but because of, his moral failings.

“How long has it been, Julian?” he asked in the same biting yet refined voice, rhetorical as ever.

“Twelve years,” I answered coldly without hesitation. And even as I uttered them, the words triggered the simple, staggering awareness that if Davis were here, then in all likelihood Claire would be too. She might be within sight. Might even be approaching at this very moment. My heart began to pound, and I scanned the passageway for any glimpse of her.

“Twelve years,” Davis repeated with elaborate slowness. His stentorian voice reeled me back to him—just as, with the unerring marksmanship of a sniper, his own gaze dropped to my water-stained tie. A small, brittle smile appeared on his lips. “And what brings you here?”

“Mozart.”

“Still the young wise-ass, I see.”

“You’re not remembering, Carl. I was never a wise-ass. That was my problem.”

The smile vanished, the eyes seemed to darken.

“So what happened to you, Julian? Charlie Dixon says you dropped off the face of the earth.”

“I don’t imagine Dixon gets out of Cambridge much.”

“I’ll make sure to pass the kind words along to him.”

“I’ve been in New York, Carl. All these years. I’m a teacher.”

“A teacher? Really. And where might that be?”

“The Cochrane School.”

“The Cochrane School?” At my news a complacent satisfaction spread over him, softening his mouth but making it crueler. It was the look of a smug winner, and I wanted to knock it off his face. “Sounds highly rewarding,” he remarked, his voice dripping condescension.

“It is.”

I bit my tongue then; there was no point to this. With anger and apprehension and hope I turned to watch the people filing by, strolling down the long, sloping aisles to their seats. And then Davis shifted his feet like a boxer who’s got the fight in the bag but still wants one more punch.

“Well,” he said, and there was a finality to his voice (there always had been, I thought). “I think that about covers it. No point in dredging up old disappointments.” He paused and with a decisive gesture lifted his glasses and resettled them on the bridge of his nose. “I’ll make sure to give your regards to my wife.”

“You do that.”

He walked away then. I strained to follow his tall, silver-capped figure with my eyes until, too quickly, he was swallowed by the crowd. There was no sign of her.

For some moments I stood where I was, in a moving sea of strangers. I couldn’t keep myself from thinking that even here,
among his own kind, Davis distinguished himself like a king—which fit in some way the hushed, luxurious procession, and the muted tuning of the instruments from the orchestra pit, and the lush carpet that gave to all privileged enough to walk on it the soundless tread of royalty.

In a kind of daze I made it to our seats. Laura was there, leafing through her program. She asked me where I’d been for so long—but at that moment the lights went down and the audience fell quiet, and I used this as an excuse not to answer her.

With the silent marking of Levine’s baton, the music began. The overture. Inside it the instrumental refrain of the entire opera, to be heard again in the second act, the third, the finale; in your head as you walked home in the snow or lay dreaming in the bath; in the weeks to come as you scratched yourself or shaved or drank a glass of wine, as you made love to your wife—these exuberant, comical, bittersweet, absurd, love-besotted threads of simple notes that, woven together in just this way and to this higher purpose, formed an eternal tapestry of experience.

I looked at Laura. This opera was her sentimental favorite. She could recite much of da Ponte’s libretto by heart in Italian, knew the machinations, the timing, the quicksilver entrances and exits, the hide-and-seek. She was sitting forward, listening intently, eyes glued to the stage, anticipating, like someone about to open a present, the parting of the gold curtains.

Then it happened. The curtains parted. I looked from
Laura to the stage. Time became something else, became music and story:
A partly furnished room, with an easy chair in the center. Figaro with a measure in his hand, Susanna at the mirror, trying on a hat decorated with flowers.
Figaro calling out numbers: five … ten … twenty … thirty … thirty-six … forty-three. Susanna saying no, the room won’t do, not for a wedding bed, not with the Count next door waiting to pounce. Figaro singing his plan to foil the Count…. Oh, it was farce, it was tragedy. The costumes and disguises, the misguided messages, the chronic lack of seeing, the voices calling to one another, the misunderstandings and false recognitions, the broken hearts that certainly will mend. The foolish Count wishes his wife were somebody else.

Then my mind went off it, tumbled off it like a boy off a bicycle. I lost the music and the story. As though my ears suddenly went deaf and my eyes, blinded by the light of the stage, turned inward to where my deepest and most impermeable thoughts resided, and soon were seeing only what was imagined there. And what was imagined there was not these characters in costume. It was not my wife, whom I loved, sitting beside me and mouthing the words.

Claire’s here, I thought. She’s here, somewhere close, sitting in this same darkness.

three

I
GOT TO MY FEET
as the houselights were rising for intermission. There was still scattered applause as I reached for my overcoat on the back of the seat. Laura looked inquiringly at me, and I murmured that I wasn’t feeling well. My chest felt uncomfortably tight, my face hot. Cold fresh air was what I needed, some atmospheric jolt that would knock every last memory and feeling out of my head.

Then Laura offered, “I’ll come with you,” and reached for her coat too.

Through the buzzing crowd I slowly navigated my way up the aisle, Laura following. We reached the already jammed passageway and I was forging across the flow of traffic toward the staircase when I heard Laura calling me. I looked back and beyond the moving net of people saw her standing beside
a trim well-dressed man in his fifties. She motioned for me to come over.