Claire Marvel (28 page)

Lately my insomnia had returned full force. My trouble wasn’t in falling asleep but in staying there. Wake at three in the morning, every morning on the dot, and the remaining hours are a tundra, blurred at the edges by fatigue and a vague disconnected panic; something to be crossed slowly in the dark, a long trudging toward sunrise. All the regrets you can’t allow yourself to think about are strewn like stars in the sky above you. All you know is that you must not look up, must not think, or you will never make it across.

But Laura was a good sleeper, a profound sleeper. Watch her in bed at night, from lights-out till the first rhythmic bars of her somnolent breathing, and you’d witness a beautiful paradox: a surrender that was also an embrace. Once, early in our marriage, I watched her fall asleep smiling—not from anything to do with me, I felt sure, but from something private and inexpressible, like a sky diver’s thrill in falling alone through the ether. From her expression then you might have started to believe that my wife’s real story lay precisely in that moment of commingled loss and gain—the invisible X where the quiet girl gives up the safe act of quietness and claims the passion of her hidden self. But you’d have to look hard for that story. You’d have to want to know the state of her soul. You’d have to wait for the moment of surrender and embrace, listen to her breathing, study her face as it relinquished the burden of consciousness. You’d have to be devoted enough to give that moment of her private desire your total imagination. You’d have to love her as if she were the love of your life.

Out on the field somebody hurled a tennis ball. Two black Labs shot off after it in pursuit. The ball sailed through the air, bounced high, and both dogs ran under it and lunged at the same instant, mouths primed, sleek as panthers in the heat-glazed air. They missed each other by inches. They missed everything, and while they were barking at each other the ball rolled away and was retrieved by a dachshund.

“What do you know,” my father commented dryly. “The little guy won.”

For an hour we stayed there, not saying much.

Some of the dogs, who would have gone on happily playing all day, were too soon taken away by their owners. New dogs arrived, dragging their humans behind them, living for the moment when the leash would be unclipped and they could run free, out into the thriving, sniffing, barking maelstrom of their own kind.

It made me feel young again, and old. I remembered walking in this park as a little boy, holding my father’s hand. The field covered with grass back then. A Great Dane loping across it. I point to the immense beautiful dog, black as anthracite and running like a foal, and try to say something. But I am speechless. It isn’t fear. I point and point. Until, frustrated by my inability to articulate the wonder I feel, I burst into tears. “What’s this?” says my father lightly, crouching down and putting his hands on my shoulders. “What’s this? My little guy,” he says.

Now he said, “You seem unhappy.” He spoke slowly, carefully
measuring his words, looking out at the dog run. “Actually, you’ve seemed unhappy for a long time.”

I stared at him.

“It’s just my impression,” he added, still facing straight ahead.

“There was a woman in Cambridge,” I said. “I was in love with her. You asked me about her once, and I told you she’d married somebody else.” I paused. “You may not remember.”

“I remember.”

“She killed herself.”

He turned to face me then. Color had risen in his cheeks. And I sat waiting for him to say something, while out on the field the dogs scurried and ran and played, nipping at each other.

My father remained silent, though, and finally I began to give up on him.

Then, as I was turning away, I felt his hand on my shoulder. He squeezed hard and for a long time, and the pressure that rose at the bottom of my throat was almost unbearable.

In a tight voice I said, “I don’t think I’m going to get over it.”

He nodded, looking me in the eye. “Do you
want
to get over it?”

I thought about this, and then I shook my head.

“What are you going to do?” he asked after a while.

“At the end she was living in a place in France where we were together. Where we were happy.” I felt the pressure rising behind my eyes and I paused again, swallowing repeatedly. “I think I need to go there.”

“For how long?”

“I don’t know.”

“Have you told Laura?”

I shook my head.

“This will be tough on her,” he said. He’d loved Laura from the beginning.

“The whole thing’s been tough on her.”

The dachshund was leaving. He followed at his owner’s heels, trotting with head up as though wearing an invisible cape.

“There goes the little guy,” said my father softly.

His smile was thoughtful and sad. Most likely, I thought, he didn’t know the comfort he gave, just sitting on that bench with me. Though I hoped he did.

eight

I
T WAS A BRIGHT SUNNY AFTERNOON
and I was afraid of myself.

After dropping my father at his building, I didn’t go home straightaway. For a while I aimlessly wandered the Upper West Side, staring into shopwindows. Later, passing the cineplex on Eighty-fourth and Broadway in the late afternoon, I noticed that a teenage horror spoof I had no interest in seeing was about to start, and I bought a ticket and went in. Two hours went by in a goofy haunted summer camp of screams and fake blood. It was almost a relief to sit in the darkness believing I knew what to do.

I returned to the apartment in the early evening. I let myself in and stood by the door, looking across the living room.
Through the windows the view carried west over rooftops to the Hudson and into New Jersey. At the cusp of the horizon an orange sun floated, radiating a garish wash of color over the factories and abandoned terminals that reached all the way to the river. The room was on fire with that light, and in it now my heart felt constricted, on the verge of suffocation. Thinking I was alone, I let a sound escape, something between a groan and a sigh.

“Your father called a little while ago,” Laura said.

Startled, I looked down. She was sitting on the sofa, watching the sunset as I was. She hadn’t turned around. It was just the back of her head I saw, a silhouette speaking with her voice. The voice not fully realized yet, as if she’d already spoken the words in her head and was merely repeating them secondhand, offering an objective report. Giving me the news from there, I thought sadly, just as I’d taken to giving her the news from here. News for news. This was what it was down to.

Slowly I walked around the sofa and sat on the leather chair.

“What did he say?”

“He said he wanted me to know he loved me like a daughter. I told him I felt the same way. It was a little awkward at the end, though. You see, he thought you’d already come back and told me whatever it is you have to tell me.”

I could see her face now, her cheekbones dimly reflecting the conflagration outside. I could see her eyes but not their expression.

“I’m sorry,” I said, regretting the words the moment they were out of my mouth.

“You’re
sorry
?”

The room was still. The sun continued its imperceptible decline. The light deepened: rose, burnt umber, tangerine, blood.

“Do you remember my grandfather?” Laura said, and abruptly her tone was almost blithe, though hard as a bullet. “He was the one in the wheelchair at our wedding. Kidney cancer. Grandpa George, the grand old prince of Wall Street. Maybe you don’t remember. He died two months later. Well, here’s what you probably never would’ve known about him, even if you’d cared. The kind of thing you wouldn’t know unless you’d been married to him. Poor old George was a stinking bastard. He ignored my grandmother for fifty-five years, never gave her a dime of love, never said please or thank you or isn’t that a nice dress or I like your hair that way. Hardly ever kissed her. Hardly ever even spoke to her except to say his shirt wasn’t ironed properly or the roast was overdone. She spent too much of his money. She looked big in the hips. She looked scrawny. She was too loud. She was too dull. He’d be overheard asking her rhetorically why he’d married her in the first place. The girls had been all over him in college, she should remember. He’d been a big goddamn deal. But he’d married her, picked her, chosen her, and she should thank her lucky stars, shouldn’t she.”

She paused. The words had come all in a rush to the surface, and now in the still room I heard her breathing.

“He died on the operating table,” Laura said. “The last kidney wouldn’t cut the mustard. He died like anybody else, maybe worse. He saw it coming. Grandpa George was shrewd when it came to looking after himself. His posterity mattered
to him. Maybe this was what he was thinking about as they wheeled him out of his hospital room on a gurney. My grandmother walked alongside, holding his frigid hand. You know the last thing he ever said to her, just before they rolled him into the elevator? Probably the last word he ever uttered. Just one. He was always efficient, my grandfather. One word sent out to do the job of a lifetime. ‘Sorry,’ he said. He was sorry. He told her he was sorry, and then he died.”

I looked up. The sun had fallen behind New Jersey, the colors were just about gone. We were turning into shadows where we sat.

“Laura—”

“I’m not finished yet,” Laura said. “I’ve been quiet. You think I’m quiet, and I am. But I’m tired of being quiet. I’m tired of being so quiet that sometimes you forget I’m even in the room. I’m tired of giving you so much room that after a while you don’t even see me. Do you ever even ask yourself what that speck is in the distance? It’s me, Julian. It’s me. Even though I’m right here next to you. And I am tired of walking alone through a desert. It’s too hot during the day and too cold at night. I am tired of being held up to the standard of somebody I never met and who isn’t even on this earth anymore. I am tired of being made to suffer for the fact that you can’t remember if she loved you enough. What’s enough, Julian? Will anything ever be enough for you? Well, I won’t be made to feel any longer that I’m not enough. I
am
enough. I am more than enough. If not for you, then for somebody else.”

She was crying. Her arm came up to shield her face and she curled up on the sofa, trying to make herself invisible. It
was more than I could bear to watch. I got to my feet and went to hold her. She tried to push me away but I forced my arms around her and her crying grew louder. Her body was shaking against my chest. And then my own tears came and we were holding each other with a fierceness we’d never known during the long calm days of marriage, and her fists were drumming on my back and her mouth was at my ear, murmuring in a voice racked with sadness that she hated me, that loving me had never been her choice.

PART FIVE

one

T
HE SAME COUNTRY
and not the same. Summer now, not spring. The same rental car—a Peugeot—and nothing like the same; all the models of everything had been changed. In thirteen years the French government had extended the autoroute through much of the Quercy, shortening the trip from Paris by an hour. Unless you happened to be me. If you were me, peering anxiously through the windshield with the road atlas on your lap, you’d get lost somewhere in the Paris banlieue and the trip south from the airport would take two hours longer than it took that other time, back when the map was written with the names only she knew how to pronounce.