The time traveler's wife (14 page)

"I had some help."

The passing bell rings and Ruth jumps. "Oh
my god. I've been late to gym five times in a row!" She moves away as
though repelled by a strong magnetic field. "Tell me at lunch," Ruth
calls as I turn and walk into Madame Simone's room.

" Ah, Mademoiselle Abshire, asseyez-vous,
s'il vous plait." I sit between Laura and Helen. Helen writes me a note:
Good for you. The class is translating Montaigne. We work quietly, and Madame
walks around the room, correcting. I'm having trouble concentrating. The look
on Henry's face after he kicked Jason: utterly indifferent, as though he had
just shaken his hand, as though he was thinking about nothing in particular,
and then he was worried because he didn't know how I would react, and I
realized that Henry enjoyed hurting Jason, and is that the same as Jason
enjoying hurting me? But Henry is good. Does that make it okay? Is it okay that
I wanted him to do it?

" Clare, attendez" Madame says, at my
elbow. After the bell once again everyone bolts out. I walk with Helen. Laura
hugs me apologetically and runs off to her music class at the other end of the
building. Helen and I both have third-period gym. Helen laughs. "Well,
dang, girl. I couldn't believe my eyes. How'd you get him taped to that
tree?"

I can tell I'm going to get tired of that question.
"I have a friend who does things like that. He helped me out."

"Who is 'he'?"

"A client of my dad's," I lie. Helen
shakes her head. "You're such a bad liar." I smile, and say nothing.
"It's Henry, right?"

I shake my head, and put my finger to my lips.
We have arrived at the girls' gym. We walk into the locker room and
abracadabra! all the girls stop talking. Then there's a low ripple of talk that
fills the silence. Helen and I have our lockers in the same bay. I open mine
and take out my gym suit and shoes. I have thought about what I am going to do.
I take off my shoes and stockings, strip down to my undershirt and panties. I'm
not wearing a bra because it hurt too much.

"Hey, Helen," I say. I peel off my
shirt, and Helen turns.

"Jesus Christ, Clare!" The bruises
look even worse than they did yesterday. Some of them are greenish. There are
welts on my thighs from Jason's belt. "Oh, Clare." Helen walks to me,
and puts her arms around me, carefully. The room is silent, and I look over
Helen's shoulder and see that all the girls have gathered around us, and they
are all looking. Helen straightens up, and looks back at them, and says,
"Well?" and someone in the back starts to clap, and they are all
clapping, and laughing, and talking, and cheering, and I feel light, light as
air. Wednesday, July 12, 1995 (Clare is 24, Henry is 32)

Clare: I'm lying in bed, almost asleep, when I
feel Henry's hand brushing over my stomach and realize he's back. I open my
eyes and he bends down and kisses the little cigarette burn scar, and in the
dim night light I touch his face. "Thank you," I say, and he says,
"It was my pleasure," and that is the only time we ever speak of it.

Sunday, September 11, 1988 (Henry is 36, Clare
is 17)

Henry: Clare and I are in the Orchard on a warm
September afternoon. Insects drone in the Meadow under golden sun. Everything
is still, and as I look across the dry grasses the air shimmers with warmth. We
are under an apple tree. Clare leans against its trunk with a pillow under her
to cushion the tree roots. I am lying stretched out with my head in her lap. We
have eaten, and the remains of our lunch lie scattered around us, with fallen
apples interspersed. I am sleepy and content. It is January in my present, and
Clare and I are struggling. This summer interlude is idyllic. Clare says,
"I'd like to draw you, just like that."

"Upside down and asleep?"

"Relaxed. You look so peaceful."

Why not? "Go ahead." We are out here
in the first place because Clare is supposed to be drawing trees for her art
class. She picks up her sketchbook and retrieves the charcoal. She balances the
book on her knee. "Do you want me to move?" I ask her.

"No, that would change it too much. As you
were, please." I resume staring idly at the patterns the branches make against
the sky. Stillness is a discipline. I can hold quite still for long stretches
of time when I'm reading, but sitting for Clare is always surprisingly
difficult. Even a pose that seems very comfortable at first becomes torture
after fifteen minutes or so. Without moving anything but my eyes, I look at
Clare. She is deep in her drawing. When Clare draws she looks as though the
world has fallen away, leaving only her and the object of her scrutiny. This is
why I love to be drawn by Clare: when she looks at me with that kind of
attention, I feel that I am everything to her. It's the same look she gives me
when we're making love. Just at this moment she looks into my eyes and smiles.

"I forgot to ask you: when are you coming
from?"

"January, 2000."

Her face falls. "Really? I thought maybe a
little later." "Why? Do I look so old?"

Clare strokes my nose. Her fingers travel
across the bridge and over my brows. "No, you don't. But you seem happy
and calm, and usually when you come from 1998, or '99 or 2000, you're upset, or
freaked out, and you won't tell me why. And then in 2001 you're okay
again."

I laugh. "You sound like a fortune teller.
I never realized you were tracking my moods so closely."

"What else have I got to go on?"

"Remember, it's stress that usually sends
me in your direction, here. So you shouldn't get the idea that those years are
unremittingly horrible. There are lots of nice things in those years,
too."

Clare goes back to her drawing. She has given
up asking me about our future. Instead she asks, "Henry, what are you
afraid of?"

The question surprises me and I have to think
about it. "Cold," I say. "I am afraid of winter. I am afraid of
police. I am afraid of traveling to the wrong place and time and getting hit by
a car or beat up. Or getting stranded in time, and not being able to come back.
I am afraid of losing you."

Clare smiles. "How could you lose me? I'm
not going anywhere."

"I worry that you will get tired of
putting up with my undependableness and you will leave me."

Clare puts her sketchbook aside. I sit up.
"I won't ever leave you," she says. "Even though you're always
leaving me."

"But I never want to leave you."

Clare shows me the drawing. I've seen it
before; it hangs next to Clare's drawing table in her studio at home. In the
drawing I do look peaceful. Clare signs it and begins to write the date.
"Don't," I say. "It's not dated."

"It's not?"

"I've seen it before. There's no date on
it."

"Okay." Clare erases the date and
writes Meadowlark on it instead. "Done." She looks at me, puzzled.
"Do you ever find that you go back to your present and something has
changed? I mean, what if I wrote the date on this drawing right now? What would
happen?"

"I don't know. Try it," I say,
curious. Clare erases the word Meadowlark and writes September 11, 1988.

"There," she says, "that was
easy." We look at each other, bemused. Clare laughs. "If I've
violated the space-time continuum it isn't very obvious."

"I'll let you know if you've just caused
World War III." I'm starting to feel shaky. "I think I'm going,
Clare." She kisses me, and I'm gone.

Thursday, January 13, 2000 (Henry is 36, Clare
is 28)

Henry: After dinner I'm still thinking about
Clare's drawing, so I walk out to her studio to look at it. Clare is making a
huge sculpture out of tiny wisps of purple paper; it looks like a cross between
a Muppet and a bird's nest. I walk around it carefully and stand in front of
her table. The drawing is not there. Clare comes in carrying an armful of abaca
fiber. "Hey." She throws it on the floor and walks over to me.
"What's up?"

"Where's that drawing that used to hang
right there? The one of me?"

"Huh? Oh, I don't know. Maybe it fell
down." Clare dives under the table and says, "I don't see it. Oh,
wait here it is." She emerges holding the drawing between two fingers.
"Ugh, it's all cobwebby." She brushes it off and hands it to me. I
look it over. There's still no date on it.

"What happened to the date?"

"What date?"

"You wrote the date at the bottom, here.
Under your name. It looks like it's been trimmed off." Clare laughs.
"Okay. I confess. I trimmed it."

"Why?"

"I got all freaked by your World War III
comment. I started thinking, what if we never meet in the future because I
insisted on testing this out?"

"I'm glad you did."

"Why?"

"I don't know. I just am." We stare
at each other, and then Clare smiles, and I shrug, and that's that. But why
does it seem as though something impossible almost happened? Why do I feel so
relieved? CHRISTMAS EVE, ONE ALWAYS CRASHING IN THE SAME CAR

Saturday, December 24, 1988 (Henry is 40, Clare
is 17)

Henry: It's a dark winter afternoon. I'm in the
basement in Meadowlark House in the Reading Room. Clare has left me some food:
roast beef and cheese on whole wheat with mustard, an apple, a quart of milk,
and an entire plastic tub of Christmas cookies, snowballs, cinnamon-nut
diamonds, and peanut cookies with Hershey's Kisses stuck into them. I am
wearing my favorite jeans and a Sex Pistols T-shirt. I ought to be a happy
camper, but I'm not: Clare has also left me today's South Haven Daily; it's
dated December 24, 1988. Christmas Eve. This evening, in the Get Me High
Lounge, in Chicago, my twenty-five-year-old self will drink until I quietly
slide off the bar stool and onto the floor and end up having my stomach pumped
at Mercy Hospital. It's the nineteenth anniversary of my mother's death. I sit
quietly and think about my mom. It's funny how memory erodes. If all I had to
work from were my childhood memories, my knowledge of my mother would be faded
and soft, with a few sharp moments standing out. When I was five I heard her
sing Lulu at the Lyric Opera. I remember Dad, sitting next to me, smiling up at
Mom at the end of the first act with utter exhilaration. I remember sitting
with Mom at Orchestra Hall, watching Dad play Beethoven under Boulez. I
remember being allowed to come into the living room during a party my parents
were giving and reciting Blake's Tyger, Tyger burning bright to the guests,
complete with growling noises; I was four, and when I was done my mother swept
me up and kissed me and everyone applauded. She was wearing dark lipstick and I
insisted on going to bed with her lip prints on my cheek. I remember her
sitting on a bench in Warren Park while my dad pushed me on a swing, and she
bobbed close and far, close and far. One of the best and most painful things
about time traveling has been the opportunity to see my mother alive. I have
even spoken to her a few times; little things like "Lousy weather today,
isn't it?" I give her my seat on the El, follow her in the supermarket,
and watch her sing. I hang around outside the apartment my father still lives
in, and watch the two of them, sometimes with my infant self, take walks, eat
in restaurants, go to the movies. It's the '60s, and they are elegant, young,
brilliant musicians with the entire world before them. They are happy as larks,
they shine with their luck, their joy. When we run across each other they wave;
they think I am someone who lives in the neighborhood, someone who takes a lot
of walks, someone who gets his hair cut oddly and seems to mysteriously ebb and
flow in age. I once heard my father wonder if I was a cancer patient. It still
amazes me that Dad has never realized that this man lurking around the early
years of their marriage was his son. I see how my mother is with me. Now she is
pregnant, now they bring me home from the hospital, now she takes me to the
park in a baby carriage and sits memorizing scores, singing softly with small
hand gestures to me, making faces and shaking toys at me. Now we walk hand in
hand and admire the squirrels, the cars, the pigeons, anything that moves. She
wears cloth coats and loafers with Capri pants. She is dark-haired with a
dramatic face, a full mouth, wide eyes, short hair; she looks Italian but
actually she's Jewish. My mom wears lipstick, eye liner, mascara, blush, and
eyebrow pencil to go to the dry cleaner's. Dad is much as he always is, tall,
spare, a quiet dresser, a wearer of hats. The difference is his face. He is
deeply content. They touch each other often, hold hands, walk in unison. At the
beach the three of us wear matching sunglasses and I have a ridiculous blue
hat. We all lie in the sun slathered in baby oil. We drink Rum and Coke, and
Hawaiian Punch. My mother's star is rising. She studies with Jehan Meek, with
Mary Delacroix, and they carefully guide her along the paths of fame; she sings
a number of small but gemlike roles, attracting the ears of Louis Behaire at
the Lyric. She understudies Linea Waverleigh's Aida. Then she is chosen to sing
Carmen. Other companies take notice, and soon we are traveling around the
world. She records Schubert for Decca, Verdi and Weill for EMI, and we go to
London, to Paris, to Berlin, to New York. I remember only an endless series of
hotel rooms and airplanes. Her performance at Lincoln