Claire Marvel (3 page)

I sat back, breathing hard.

“Interesting,” said Davis. “I think you might be onto something….”

His tone seemed truly encouraging; a prospective protégé could have hoped for nothing more. It was his attention I’d lost, perhaps some time ago. He was staring past me, toward the entrance, and he was utterly absorbed in what he saw. I turned to follow his gaze. And so I discovered that while I’d been talking Claire Marvel had entered the café and stood, now, just inside the door.

five

“W
ELL, IF IT ISN’T JULIAN OF THE STORM.”

She was dressed as she’d been four days ago—sandals and faded blue jeans and an untucked cotton shirt. Though she was even more beautiful than I remembered. I stood up as if hauled by the collar.

To Davis she said, “Your friend and I had the pleasure of meeting in a tempest. He was nothing short of heroic.”

“What she means is she let me stand under her umbrella.”

“I can think of worse places to be,” murmured Davis.

He was looking at her intently, a faint smile working the corners of his mouth. With an odd feeling of reluctance I made the introduction. “Professor Davis, this is Claire Marvel.”

He rose and took her hand. “A pleasure.”

“You’re Julian’s professor?”

“I am. And now, I guess you could say, employer.”

“Really,” Claire said with a raised eyebrow; with a start I realized she was teasing him. “Are you somebody famous?” she went on in a jesting tone. “Should I know you?”

“Only if your world is politics and government.” Davis’ voice had assumed a grave rhetorical modesty.

“Do you consider art political?” A challenging smile had come to her lips.

“Not in any legitimate sense, no,” Davis replied.

“Then we come from separate worlds.”

“In that case I suppose it’s my good fortune to meet you under any circumstances,” Davis said with a smile of his own. He checked his watch and laid a five-dollar bill on the table. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m afraid I have a meeting. Julian, if your choice of female company is any indication, you have a brilliant future ahead of you. In the meantime read the manuscript and get back to me. I’d like to push ahead full throttle on this thing. And with regard to the dissertation, the answer is yes.”

“Thank you, Professor Davis.”

“Carl. Don’t thank me. Just work your ass off and make us both look like winners. Please excuse my French, Miss Marvel.”

“I always excuse the French, Professor Davis.”

A look of admiring astonishment fleetingly crossed his face. Then he got hold of himself and, remembering to check his watch a last time, took his leave.

We stared after him; he was one of those men who seemed to leave a wake. When he was gone we sat back down.

“An ego the size of Wyoming,” was Claire’s facetious verdict. “Yet weirdly charming. I take it from his comment about art he’s not exactly a lefty?”

“Let’s just say he counts Ed Meese as one of his closest friends.”

“And you set him straight?”

“He’s the one who generally does most of the talking.”

“That’s not how it looked. I watched you delivering your pitch. Very impressive hand gestures.”

“I was telling him about my dissertation. You make it sound like an act.”

“Not an act. I’m just making a distinction between mind and body.” She reached for my hands, which were resting on the table. Her touch made the hairs on my arms stand up. “I’d trust these hands,” she said.

Her gaze was direct. I couldn’t imagine hiding, even if I’d wanted to.

“You’re blushing,” she said. “Are you always so easily embarrassed?”

I didn’t answer. With an apologetic smile she released my hands. After what I hoped was a dignified interval, I removed them to the safety of my lap.

The waiter appeared bearing a mug of peppermint tea and a large chocolate chip cookie. “Lunch,” explained Claire. It was three in the afternoon. She put a piece of cookie on the table in front of me and took a bite herself, chewing slowly.

“How old were you when you first became interested in politics?” she asked.

“Political science,” I replied. “There’s a difference—I’m not out to become president.” I ate the piece of cookie. “I was twelve,” I said.

“Twelve? Shouldn’t you have been out playing stickball?”

“I wasn’t any good at sports. Stickball included.”

“Chess, then. Or looking after your pet rock.”

“I wasn’t cool enough to have a pet rock.”

“Seriously,” she said.

“I’m being serious. Something happened when I was twelve. Something that got me interested in the meaning of politics and the political system in people’s lives.”

“Something to do with a girl?”

“At twelve? In my dreams.”

She was leaning forward, listening. So against my better instincts I went on. I told her the strange unfashioned truth: that the way in for me—the witch in the wardrobe—was model rocketry. I’d been hooked at an early age. The whole shebang: Sputnik, NASA, Yuri Gagarin, Glenn and Armstrong. Then a minor home-equipment malfunction, a run-in with the police, a memorable old woman from Budapest. And so, ta-dum, was the course of my life changed.

I glanced up: she was still listening. So I went on. I told her how at age twelve and a half, with money saved from a year’s worth of allowances and odd jobs, I bought an eighteen-inch balsa-wood rocket from a catalogue. I built and painted this interplanetary vehicle in absolute secrecy—everything geared toward a big spring launch out my bedroom window. The
building across the street was a few stories lower than ours. And my plan—simple yet daring—was to aim the rocket above the opposite roofline so that after blastoff it would arc over all obstacles in its path and end up drifting down into the Hudson River on its little built-in parachute.

I told her how, after weeks of prep, the big day arrived. A clear day with no wind; perfect conditions such as have stirred entire nations as they sit watching history made on their television sets. Careful not to fall out, I opened my bedroom window as far as it would go and aimed the launching pad. Then I lit the fuses and jumped back to watch from behind a chair. The fuses went squirreling rapidly up into the rocket like Roman candles—then a double explosion, and the rocket blasted out the window! My sense of triumph was indescribable—until I saw what was actually happening. The explosions hadn’t been simultaneous. The first had jolted the nose to the left; then the counterforce of the second had depressed the altitude. Now the rocket was flying directly toward the building across the street at warp speed. The noise, meanwhile, had brought people to their windows. Mostly old folks and housewives. It was afternoon. One old woman in particular was looking out her window on the sixth floor and observed what she thought was a flaming, heat-seeking missile zooming right for her heart. She began to scream. Who could blame her? She screamed so much one of her neighbors called the police. She was still screaming when the rocket crashed into the building just above her window and dropped, smoking, into the window box of pansies that, it turned out, was her pride and joy. It also turned out—all this
my parents learned later from the policeman who interrogated me—that this woman was a Jew from Budapest who somehow had managed to survive the war, the Holocaust, and countless other tragedies and degradations; who decades ago had made it to America and the Upper West Side, wife of a camp survivor, the mother of two and grandmother of three, and, recently, a widow; who loved her neighborhood and the lox at Zabar’s and her window box of pansies with the kind of fervor and gratitude that can come only through a lifetime of suffering.

“Oh no,” said Claire.

That wasn’t all, I said. About a month afterward I spotted the woman on Broadway, outside Fairway. She was small and hunched, with a face so wrinkled that the sum of it all was a kind of radiance: from out of this thicket of tortured history her eyes, brown and deep-set, took in everything that moved. Her shopping bags she pushed slowly down the sidewalk in a wheeled wire basket. I followed for a couple of blocks, trying to gather my nerve to approach her. Not far from her building I overtook her, told her who I was and what I’d done. For some time she stood sizing me up with those eyes that had seen much of the worst that human beings have to offer. Finally with a nod she said, “You may push, if you like.” And so, pushing her shopping cart, I went home with her. Into her building, up the elevator: she said not a word until we were standing outside her apartment in a hallway that smelled of cooked cabbage and vinegar. “You may come in, if you like.” And I went in: a railroad flat, long and narrow, stained with shadows like resin, one room leading into another, depressing,
yet also homey, full of things—books, black-and-white photographs, stuffed pillows, candles stuck in dried pools of wax, many things I couldn’t even name. At the back the kitchen. She made tea with spoonfuls of jam in it and gave me three small chocolate rugelach to eat.

“After that, I went back to see her fairly often,” I told Claire. “Some days her joints were so bad it could take her five minutes just to sit down. In Budapest before the war she’d studied piano and had a dachschund named Gustav. She never gave a thought to history or politics. But in New York she became an exemplary citizen. She read the newspapers cover to cover and knew the names of every local politician and never missed a chance to vote. The next November she asked me to take her to the polling station. By then she already needed help getting around. She was in the booth a long time. When she came out I saw she’d been crying. I asked if she was all right. She said, ‘One day you’ll know how important this is.’ ”

I stopped talking. A knot of grief had lodged in my throat. I was surprised, all of a sudden, to discover other people in the room, conversations, the hazy drift of smoke; a man with a terrier on his lap; a woman dealing a deck of tarot cards.

“What happened to her?” Claire asked.

“One day I came home from school and there was an ambulance in front of her building.”

Outside, there on the curve of Bow Street, we stood close, breathing the same fresh air, feeling the warmth of sunlight on
our faces. Spring. My thoughts reeled. Was this the same person I’d met only days ago?

Claire plucked a bit of brown fuzz from my cotton sweater; it floated to the ground like a minuscule toupee.

“Here we are,” she said, “on this beautiful afternoon.”

A faint smile infused her face with the inward light of a dream. Then, raising her eyes to mine, she kissed me on the mouth. An explosion of heat—I shivered as though burned and half turned away to gather myself.

“Julian Rose,” she murmured into my ear. “What are you thinking?”

I turned back to face her. Ready, now; such terror, I was discovering, had very nearly the same effect as courage.

This time the Fogg was open. Past the security desk (the portly middle-aged guard greeted Claire by name) we entered the roofed central courtyard of the museum: an Italian palazzo with monastic impulses, resplendent yet austere—dark mahogany benches, arched colonnades through which the galleries could be reached.

I followed her across the courtyard, under a stone arch, and into a small, square gallery lined with nineteenth-century British pictures.