Claire Marvel (26 page)

“You remember Colin Weeks,” she said as I joined them.

I looked at the man.

“It was Colin who took the gamble and hired me all those years ago,” Laura said.

“Hardly a gamble,” Weeks commented pleasantly to me. “And it couldn’t have been that long ago—Laura still looks twenty-five. Hello Julian, Colin Weeks. I think we met last year at Amanda Baird’s.”

I had no recollection of him. His hand had come out and I shook it. Then he politely asked how I was enjoying the production. A question to which I responded with an answer so terse and beside the point that it was followed by an awkward social pause, a pocket of dead air, which Laura tried to fill by observing that she thought Barbara Bonney’s voice more than equal to the hall. To which Weeks thoughtfully replied that Bonney possessed a beautiful vocal instrument, there could be no doubt about that, but as for its capaciousness for opera, in his mind the jury was still out.

I mumbled my excuses, left them talking. Down the wide, curving staircase. I pushed through the glass doors onto the plaza and a gust of freezing air smacked me in the face; instantly my cheeks stung and my eyes began to water. Nearby, a handful of opera fanatics stood huddled in front of posters announcing upcoming productions. I walked past them, buttoning my coat and turning up the collar. Ahead lay the
fountain, lit as well as any Parisian monument, around which, on occasional balmy evenings in summer, a jazz orchestra played ballroom and swing tunes and couples of all ages danced under stars they could not see. Laura had never been able to persuade me to do this. I wasn’t a dancer, I’d explained numerous times; I hadn’t even danced at our wedding.

The plaza was nearly empty now. I came to the fountain and tilting my head one way, the water looked a cheap swimming-pool blue; tilting it another, it was gold I saw. My breath steamed into the night. Through the heavy slabs of stone and the soles of my best shoes the cold pressed up into me. The fountain flowed and sprayed, creating a mist rain-bowed with light. Around it where the water had splashed onto the stone there were bluish gleams of thinly iced puddles. I remembered dancing once, in another country. How slowly we’d moved. I could name every song on that album, and the order of the songs, even though I hadn’t listened to it since. I remembered how her head had seemed to support my shoulder, rather than the other way around. How once I’d looked over at our reflection in the windowpanes and seen us moving together, suspended on glass, the image grainy from dust, yet luminous from within like coupled ghosts.

I turned around and there was the Met—acres of gold-lit glass. The light spilling far out onto the plaza. And standing in it, now, a familiar silhouette.

Claire came forward, away from the light, her heels knocking cold stone. With each stride she became less of a shadow. And my heart began to step with her, to climb a ladder of feeling long unused, like something stored and forgotten in an attic.
First her pale face, emerging like an apparition. Then her white throat disappearing into the depths of a black overcoat. Her hair as long as it had ever been and brushed down her back. Her eyes never leaving my face. She came forward and stopped in front of me and now the distance between us, after eleven years, was down to a yard.

“Where do we begin?” she asked in a quiet voice.

My mouth was too dry to speak; I shook my head.

“Does that mean we don’t begin? Or that you have no idea where to begin?”

“I don’t know what it means.” My voice sounded rusty to me, weak.

“That makes two of us.” She frowned, as if unhappy with how this had sounded. Her anxiety appeared to be growing rather than lessening.

“It’s all right,” I said. Then I said it again.

My words seemed to calm her. We stood looking at each other, our breaths tiny smoke signals forming and dissipating in the air between us. Then she tried again.

“He said you were a teacher. What kind of teacher are you?”

“High school. Political science and history.”

“Do you like it?”

“Yes.”

“Then I’m happy for you.” Her voice was low and steady but her eyes had begun to glitter with what might have been tears, or light reflecting from the fountain behind me. “Are you married?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said.

I watched her take this in; she hugged herself.

“Children?”

“No.” I hesitated. “Not yet.”

“Do you—”

“I think we’ve covered me.”

For the first time she smiled. “Oh no,” she said with a flash of the old irony. “We could never cover you.”

We stood smiling at each other. And then, after a while, we looked away.

“Now you,” I said.

“Me?” she replied dismissively. “I went back and got my Ph.D.”

“Good for you.”

“I went back and resurrected Burne-Jones to the best of my ability,” she said, her tone darkening with every word. “You try to show people what beauty is, how it’s more alive than we are, the best of ourselves. You want to spread the gospel like some sort of prophet. But after a while you start to feel you’re shouting into a vacuum. You’re quite certain that nobody out there is listening.” A wave of the hand, and then she was done with herself. “C’est tout.”

“You’ve had your reasons,” I said.

“I don’t know about that. Housewife isn’t much of a reason.”

“There’s being a mother.”

The words came out of my mouth sounding reasonable and not especially embittered. I felt almost proud for having forced myself to say them, as if here, finally, was evidence that I had not been trapped in time.

But then I saw the effect my words had on her: she’d gone still and expressionless.

“I’m not a mother,” she said quietly.

I stared at her, my heart like a bird grabbed out of the air.

“I had a miscarriage that first time,” she went on in the same quiet voice. “Then twice more.”

“You didn’t tell me.”

She shook her head as though helpless about the past, but said nothing.

I turned away from her. Out of the corner of my vision the fountain appeared as a burning pyre. I tried to breathe but could not seem to get enough air.

Turning back, I saw that the glitter in her eyes had returned; she was trying to wipe it away with her hand. Some tears fell anyway, soundlessly, picking up reflected light, painting her face in pale licks of color. In a stricken voice she said, “I’d already hurt you too much. I had to let you go.”

I held up my hand to silence her. I couldn’t stand to hear any more. Her mouth opened but she made no sound, and then she covered her mouth with her hand, as if to stanch whatever thoughts were on the verge of speech.

“I have to go,” I said. “My wife is waiting.”

Her chin lifted. Her tears were falling freely now. I lowered my eyes and walked past her toward the opera house.

Four months later she was dead.

four

I
T WAS TEN O’CLOCK
on an April morning. Laura had left for work an hour before. I was sitting at the dining table reading the
Times
when the intercom buzzed and the doorman announced that Kate Daniels was in the lobby.

A moment’s hesitation as my brain sought to place the name of Claire’s old roommate, whom I hadn’t seen in a dozen years. But only a moment: the snap of recognition brought with it a clear picture of Kate’s strong face and chlorine-tinted hair, and then the once-familiar sound of her husky voice.

She stepped out of the elevator, turned, saw me standing at the end of the hallway. We stood looking at each other. An uneasy smile showed on her face—the expression of someone determined to walk the plank and trying to seem enthusiastic
about it—then withdrew. She shook her head, admonishing herself.

“I should’ve called first.”

I told her not to worry. She came down the hallway and we hugged. Her hair was short and already gray, her body slimmer and less obviously athletic than I remembered, though still fit. On her way through the door she stopped to scrutinize me again.

“You look good, Julian. A little skinny maybe, but good.”

I left her in the living room and went to the kitchen for coffee. As I poured her a cup and refilled my own, a sad self-awareness reared its head: sometime during the winter, without ever discussing it, Laura and I had stopped following the advice of the how-to-get-pregnant guides, despite the fact that we were still ostensibly trying to conceive a child. We had an appointment scheduled with a new fertility specialist in two weeks. But we were drinking wine and coffee again, Laura no longer checked her body temperature with any regularity, and our lovemaking had dwindled to hardly more than once a week.

I carried the cups back down the hallway and into the living room. Kate was standing by the window with her head down, deep in thought. As she looked up, her unmasked expression showed a mix of grief and apprehension that I didn’t understand, but that already was infecting the room.

“You’re probably wondering how I knew you’d be home on a weekday morning,” she said.

I smiled and shrugged. “It’s spring break. But actually, I’m wondering a lot of things.”

“It was an educated guess. I’m a teacher too. Public
high school, Bethlehem, PA. My alma mater. I teach social studies.”

“How’d you know I was a teacher?”

There was a pause. She wasn’t facing me directly but obliquely, still half angled toward the window. “From Claire.” Kate watched me. When I remained silent, she added, “In a letter.”

“How is she?” I asked, hearing my own dull voice in my ears.

Taking a deep breath, Kate turned to face me. “She’s dead.”

I didn’t hear her at first. Or I must have heard her, but I didn’t feel anything.

“Julian,” Kate said gently, “Claire killed herself.”

Within my body there was no sign of what I knew I’d heard. A grievous dislocation was what it was. As if her words had not been what they’d appeared to be, as if it was all some trick. I stood waiting for the real words, which would carry the real meaning. Hoping to feel something. And then, with brutal and unsentimental swiftness, it came. Nausea flared in my stomach and my face went cold.

“She was in France,” Kate went on grimly. “The police found her in a river not far from the house where you two stayed. There were things in her pockets. Heavy things. The French police say she drowned herself.”

“When?” I heard myself ask.

Kate gathered herself. Her eyes, which had been cast down as she’d been speaking, now rose to meet mine. “They found her body ten days ago. She was living there. She’d left Carl just before Christmas.”

She waited, visibly expecting a question, some reaction. But I could not speak.

“I may be the only person who knew where she was,” Kate went on. “She wrote me from there last month. To tell you the truth, I was surprised to hear from her. We’d sort of fallen out of touch the last couple of years. Not a lack of closeness, more like drift. Carl and I had our problems. Then out of the blue I get a letter from her with that address on the back. The Lot. When I saw it I figured she and Carl were on vacation. I remembered how you and she went there together. And I thought it wasn’t right for her to take him to that place, even if they were married. I never liked Carl. Still, she married him, and for a while I tried my best to be a good friend about it.”

She paused again, trying to straighten her thoughts.

“The letter was dated March eighteenth. It was on thin blue sheets of airmail stationery and she filled most every inch of five pages. Just seeing her handwriting made me smile. At that point I had no idea she’d left him, or the country, or any of it. Then I read the letter. It was warm but strangely matter-of-fact about events. She’d left while he was on one of his trips to Washington. Packed what she could carry in two suitcases and abandoned the rest. Never looked back. Didn’t leave him so much as a note. Almost makes me sorry for him. In the letter she said it wasn’t planned, she just knew she had to leave. By the next morning she was on the train from Paris. By that evening she was in a little hotel in the Lot. She found that house you stayed in, sitting empty, and five days later she was living in it. Managed to track down the owner and persuaded her to rent it. It was cheap because there wasn’t much heating.
She moved her suitcases over there and within a couple of weeks she’d gotten sick. She thought it was just a cold and didn’t pay much attention. Anyway, she was alone and didn’t know anybody and didn’t want to know anybody and there was no one to call. Turned out it was pneumonia. She didn’t say much about it in the letter except that she was very sick and it lasted five weeks and that the owner of the house, who lived not far away, turned out to be very kind. ‘Saved my life’ were her exact words. ‘Saved my life.’ ”