Claire Marvel (9 page)

Two weeks later she left a message on my machine saying to meet her at the café.

When I arrived she was already there. We hugged longer than was usual for us; she seemed reluctant to let me go. Her face was thinner, her eyes large and bright. Once we sat down her hands would not stop fidgeting with a manila envelope that lay on the table.

“How is he?” I said.

She shook her head.

Deep in our separate thoughts we sat watching her fingers tapping the envelope.

Finally I said, “You should have let me come down and be with you.”

“I don’t want you to see him like this.” Suddenly she looked up. “I told him about you.”

I was pleased, but didn’t know what to say.

“Julian, will you do something for me?”

I told her I would.

Opening the clasp, she emptied the contents of the envelope onto the table.

I was staring at two plane tickets, round-trip between Boston and Paris.

Claire said, “A long time ago, before he was married, my father spent time in a house in France that belonged to family friends. He’s been telling me about it. His memory’s driving him now. He says that time in France was the happiest of his life and he wants me to go back there for him, while he’s still around to hear about it.”

She reached across the table for my hand and held it tightly in both of hers.

“Julian, please come with me.”

thirteen

W
E FLEW INTO
C
HARLES DE
G
AULLE
at eight in the morning, eyes bloodshot and heads heavy from the wine served free on the flight. It was the middle of April. There had been rain in Boston when we’d left, but over Paris now the sky was clear, cool as an underground spring.

Her father had arranged our trip with the scrupulousness of a man who knows this to be his final production. A road map and a two-door Peugeot awaited us at the car rental agency. In Claire’s pocket were keys and handwritten directions to the house in the central south of the country where Lou Marvel had stayed once, for a month, in his early twenties; and the name of his old friend, Leland Conner, to whom the property had since passed. Conner and his French wife would be out of the country, we were told, but nonetheless
had offered us their house while they were gone. We planned to stay two weeks.

This was my first time in France but Claire had been twice before—Paris, Nice, Aix-en-Provence. The region we were heading for was the Quercy; the department was the Lot, pronounced with a hard
t.

By request Claire drove first, which put me in the passenger seat with the map. With some confusion I managed to navigate us around the Périphérique de Paris (a hangman’s noose of traffic) and onto the autoroute, south toward Orléans.

Then full speed ahead. Claire was a fearless driver, working the clutch in quick bursts, punching between smoke-belching camions and testosterone speedsters. Our car hummed like a bee.

The metropolis fell back as the big open fields of the north reclaimed the land on either side of the autoroute: vast tracts of green, enormous fields of mustard like planes of sunlight. Looking out at the swaths of vibrant yellow, Claire said she was reminded of how Matisse, like van Gogh before him, was born in French Flanders, near the Belgian border—beet fields and smokestacks, the old forests leveled by factories, the Prussians marching across the flats, the cold and damp. A hard, dour northern light of muted pigments and even more muted hearts. And then how both painters in different ways had spent the rest of their lives moving ever southward, toward the sun and a brighter, more expressive palette unfettered by bourgeois convention. Matisse’s father was a seed merchant. There were no artists in his family nor in the town of Bohain-en-Vermandois; no model for the son’s imagination.
When Matisse returned home thirty years after leaving, his old neighbors still spoke of him as a failed law clerk.

Claire fell silent.

She was wearing yesterday’s clothes—father’s old sweater, jeans, hiking boots. Perhaps it was the light that made her eyes shine so—as if some autonomous and morbid vision were alive within her. Seen from the side, she appeared on the brink of tears, the nascent lines at the corners of her eyes like faint hieroglyphs of sorrow or penitence.

We reached Orléans by noon. In the old part of town, where Joan of Arc was martyred and all was made of stone, we found the Café des Pierres, still looking as Claire’s father had remembered it: a dark, timeless room on a cobbled side street, filled with bundles of wood, a crackling fire, and the smell of grilled fish. A lunch of trout and white wine, tarte Tatin and coffee. At the end of the meal the old couple who owned the place stopped by our table. Claire spoke French to them. I could understand only half of what was said, yet even with my high school vocabulary I sensed her gift for the language. She used it with secret joy, managing to imply both confidence and a polite deference. She gave each word its own, new light.

Then it was my turn to drive, and our car hurtled back onto the autoroute. To either side the fields stretched out, brown and green and yellow. The odd château spied like a private realm in the distance. The ceaseless, cumulative roar of engines and the billboards of cartoon ugliness. In places the autoroute paralleled the high-speed train tracks; when a train
went shooting by with a vacuumed whoosh, all the cars on the road seemed to be standing still.

And then Claire, folding her coat into a pillow, curled up against the door. From the corner of my eye I watched her drift off to sleep. She grew still, her legs tucked underneath her, her hip inches from my hand.

Two hours passed. I was tired yet very much awake, driving to the rhythm of her breathing, seeing France out of every window as she might have seen it. The open farmland of the Loire was giving way to the hill country of the Limousin and Périgord. Here were geologic boundaries where earlier there had been only the man-made divisions of agriculture and industry. Red-tiled roofs were beginning to appear in pockets of land that refused to lie flat.

At Brive-la-Gaillarde, as we left the autoroute and turned southeast, she woke with a start.

“Where are we?”

“No idea, really.”

She smiled drowsily, picked up the map, gave it a cursory glance, shrugged, and dropped it at her feet. As a general rule she ignored all maps and instruction manuals, considering them the propaganda of the confused. Arching her back against the seat, she stretched. Then she rolled down her window a few inches, sniffing the air.

“We’re getting close. I can smell it.”

I lowered my window too. The afternoon was clear and cool. The road was a country road, narrow and winding. It curved and dipped through sparse-wooded hills with fields arrayed
down their sloping backs. Pastures were framed by limestone walls. There were few shadows on this land. Those that existed appeared ancient and fixed, birthmarks of creation. In the shaded hollows flocks of Roman-nosed sheep huddled together, and on the steepest slopes grapevines hung from their crosses like crucified children. There were plum orchards and solitary walnut trees growing in fields of raked bare earth with ragged lines of crows sitting on the gnarled black limbs and discreet herds of cows waiting in mud for their deliverance. The air smelled of all of it.

Claire said, “Now I know why the French call this region ‘la France profonde.’ ”

As she spoke we were descending into a valley. A narrow gray-blue river appeared on our left. The road ran alongside it and soon we began seeing occasional white signs written with unpronounceable names—not towns, we saw, not even villages, but hamlets consisting of a few houses, stone walls, a yellow postbox, a donkey or two; and the belled sounds of the animals.

In time the river ran through the center of a market town. Here Claire suggested we buy food. I pulled to a stop on a main square girded by medieval houses darkly striped with creosoted timbers. We got out and stretched. It was late afternoon; the outdoor market was long closed. A few red-faced old men in blue work clothes stood chatting under a plane tree. They stared at us, then resumed their conversation. Otherwise the square was empty.

But shops were open. In a food market that might have been someone’s parlor we bought fresh eggs, tomatoes, onions, lettuce, cornichons, pâté, strawberry preserves, butter, milk.
Then we found the baker, wine merchant, cheese shop—where Claire asked the old woman for cabécou, white disks of the local goat cheese. The word itself sounded freshly made on her tongue.

We loaded our provisions into the car, and set off on the final leg of our journey. The river flowed out of the other side of the town. Across it the early-spring sunshine lay thin and slanting. And the spindly poplars that grew alongside the banks could be seen too on the water’s mirrored surface, round leaves turning like coins. Following her father’s directions, we drove over a primitive bridge and turned left, then right, onto a road that wound its way up a mountain. The ascent was slow, circuitous, beautiful. The wide valley was splayed out behind us, first one angle, then another. High on a plateau the climb ended. We turned right again and proceeded slowly down a single-lane road flecked with sheep droppings, between lichen-covered walls and compact fields.

A plain white sign. A hamlet of six old houses. And at the back, standing apart behind a low wall, two structures made of stone: a barn in the shape of an ancient granary, built up the slope, with a tiled roof like an oversized hat; and a simple two-story house with a steeply pitched roof and blue shutters. Beyond the buildings there was a raked field of walnut trees. Then, gradually descending all the way to the valley floor, there were more fields and walls, and the distant, dreamlike, gray-blue gleam of the river.

fourteen

T
HE INDELIBLE MOMENT OF ARRIVAL
. Stepping through the doorway with Claire as if it was ours. The ancient house. Dust in the air, cold in the stones, cobwebs shivering at the tops of windows, scars and slants of furniture, the warping of the floor beneath its covering of worn straw matting.

Claire stood in the center of the open room, her eyes radiant, turning from one object to another with rapture on her face.

The hearth was tall and wide. A cast-iron bucket a yard deep held moss-covered logs of plum and walnut. The mantel was set high as a man’s head, burled and not quite level. Claire ran a hand over it, searching yet absent, as if looking for something whose shape she couldn’t remember. Then she turned and stared out through the glass panes of a back door
to a small terrace—perhaps imagining the delicious meals we’d eat out there, if the weather was warm enough. Though the weather wouldn’t matter; we were here, had traveled all this way together, had left everyone else behind.

She did not seem to notice the thick coating of dust that her fingers had picked up from the mantel, how nothing in the house was clean. She stood in the light that came in from the valley. And when she turned and asked me how I felt, I could smile and declare honestly that I was happy too.