Claire Marvel (10 page)

Then up the creaking, ladderlike stairs to stand with our bags on the landing between the two bedrooms and the bathroom. An unavoidable moment—the bigger of the rooms contained a double bed while the smaller held a narrow single. Yet we hadn’t envisioned this possibility or discussed it and we paused now, too awkward to catch each other’s eye.

I stood debating with myself. Exhaustion, the long journey, a too-familiar cloud of romantic uncertainty—all this made me numb. Should I step forward or hold back? To set myself up for rejection now could mean the end of something. On the other hand, if I refrained from forcing the issue, perhaps she might feel compelled to reach out.

“I’ll take the single,” I said.

“You’re sure?”

The question was too quick. I’d made it too easy. Disappointment brought the full weight of my exhaustion down on me and I turned away. Lifting my suitcase, I stepped into the room with the single bed.

There, standing with head ducked under the eaves, I heard her drop her bags in the other room. Heard her as she opened the tall windows that looked out over the valley. Heard through the thin wall that now divided us, the complex silence of her listening.

We’d agreed in advance that neither of us knew how to cook. Nevertheless I made an omelette for our first dinner—plain, empty as a fist, in the inelegant shape of something dropped on the floor—and we ate it at the lopsided kitchen table with slices of the thick-crusted local bread and half a bottle of a rough Cahors.

The kitchen was large and drafty. Nothing about it was remotely modern. The floor tiles were scuffed and pockmarked. From one corner of the ceiling curled a strip of flypaper still dotted with the wizened corpses of bygone summers. The dishes were chipped, webbed with hairline cracks. The refrigerator was half-sized and slope-shouldered. The gas stove had the sturdy rounded presence of an old pickup truck.

At the end of the meal, raising her glass, Claire awarded me two “Marvel” stars for my effort. She held out the promise of a third. I bowed, looking up at her through the flame of a candle stub, and in a phony French accent gave her my Hippocratic culinary oath:
First do no harm.
She laughed. Her face flickered and shone, her cheeks were red. We’d kept our heavy sweaters on against the chill.

After dinner she was the first to go upstairs. I remained by the fire, poking the gnarled, slow-burning logs with a
stick. Soon I heard her running a bath, the old pipes filling the house with their crotchety deliberations. I thought about the meal we’d just eaten and how afterward—contented, exhausted, quiet—we’d stood together at the stained white sink and washed the dishes. There were all the mundane aspects of her life about which I realized I knew little—how she put on lipstick, rode a bicycle, took a bath, opened a present, folded a shirt—and which appeared suddenly illumined now that we were here alone, living together: a series of prosaic firsts that felt like love letters and that I wanted to catalogue for myself as though they belonged to me.

The pipes fell quiet. I opened the back door and stepped out onto the terrace. The night was cold and clear, every star in it bright enough, bold enough, it seemed, to be a planet.

She would be getting into her bath.

Not a sound could be heard, not a voice. Washed by the Milky Way, the walnut trees were the black of shadows.

I climbed the stairs to the landing. The bathroom door was ajar an inch, steam suffused with artificial light swirling lethargically out through the gap. Unable to stop myself, I put an eye to the opening, and saw through the pearled air a corner of the tub, and her bare wet foot resting there.

“Julian?”

Startled, I jumped back—before catching her tone, a sleepy, heat-drugged murmur, minimally amplified by the bath in which she lay. Her luxurious calm reached me, and I relaxed. And the sound of the water too, a sinuous, glassy ripple as she moved.

“Looks like an opium den in there.”

“Mmm. This may just be the best bath I’ve ever had in my life.”

I remained on the landing, staring at the inch of her bare foot. Then the foot disappeared. I heard her lean forward. The tap came on, trickle of water into water. After a minute there was a long sigh of contentment, and the tap was shut off.

From out on the landing I said good night.

“You’re not going to sleep?”

“I’m exhausted.”

“Stay and talk.”

I was silent, waiting.

“Please,” she said.

I sat down on the landing, my back against the outer wall of my room, unable now to see any part of her. The floor was cold. The house was still. There were just her occasional liquid movements coming through the door like a private language.

I tried simply to be. To listen to the sounds of her. To find contentment. Instead, inexorably, I began to think about the single bed in the darkened room behind me and the pair of light blue cotton pajamas that earlier I’d folded and placed neatly on the pillow.

An image of my father long ago, dressed in pajamas and robe, came to me unbidden:

He bends down at the front door of the apartment. When he rises, he’s holding a copy of the
Times.
That’s all. He is perhaps forty. His loosely worn slippers make a shuffling sound as he walks, already murmuring aloud the day’s news—Vietnam, the Black Panthers, the Six-Day War—back along the hallway to the kitchen.

It is always the same; only the news changes.

And I wanted to get up now and take my carefully folded pajamas and tear them to shreds. But there was a cold draft on the landing and all through the house, everywhere but where she was. So I stayed, on the wrong side of the almost-closed bathroom door, and brought my knees up and hugged them, and watched the steam curl out through the gap and disappear above my head.

“Julian?”

“What?”

“What are you thinking about?”

The sound of her moving in the water, and then the tap coming on again. I rubbed my hands over my face. My exhaustion was like a weight pressing me down. Through the doorway at the other end of the landing I could see into her room: a suitcase on the floor, clothes already flung about, a homemade lamp on a table, the bulb shining over the double bed.

“Pajamas,” I said.

“What about them?”

Her tone was serious and true. I leaned my head back against the wall.

“They remind me of my father.”

She said nothing. The tap continued to run, a thin trickle, and my face began to burn with shame.

“There’s a poem by Rilke,” she said. “ ‘Archaic Torso of Apollo.’ Do you know it?”

“No.”

“I think it would mean something to you.”

“What’s it about?”

“About?” The impatient, watery flutter of her hand in the bath. “Well, on the surface you could say it’s a poem about a Greek statue. But that doesn’t tell you anything.”

She leaned forward. I still couldn’t see her. The tap continued to run, and around her body I imagined the water rippling in circles of light. More than anything, I wished I could see her.

“It begins with the poet speaking to the statue, to the god alive in the art, inside the white marble,” she continued, the energy growing in her voice as she spoke. “He calls it ‘you,’ describes it to itself. And we’re so sure we know who he’s talking to, who the ‘you’ in the poem is. We’re reading along and saying to ourselves ‘How beautiful, how true,’ feeling all safe and wise and poetic. Then suddenly, in the last line, he blows it all to pieces. He says,
You must change your life.
And now we understand that he’s not talking to the god in the marble any longer, or to Art, but
from
them, straight into our souls. I was eighteen. I’d never read anything more urgent in my life. It was like being grabbed by the throat and shaken.”

Her story finished, she turned off the tap, lay back heavily as if she’d just realized how tired she was. Now the house was as quiet as if it had been empty.

And in that quiet, out on the landing, my frustration began to grow.

“And have you, Claire?”

“Have I what?”

“Changed your life.”

She exhaled in annoyance. “Life isn’t a switch you turn on and off, Julian. Love isn’t.”

“Who’s talking about love?”

She was silent.

“I said who’s talking about love, Claire?”

“I am.” Suddenly her voice was small, hardly recognizable.

“Well, I am too.”

Through the door came a new silence, more potent than speech.

I sat thinking. How it was she who’d mentioned love first. How she seemed to be waiting, the door still between us, for me to act. And I imagined that if I reached for her I would find her where she lay waiting in the water, and my fingers would glide over her bare wet skin until every inch of her, every crook and hollow, would become mine. I would vouch for her with my life.

But the silence wasn’t long enough. While I sat dreaming, Claire pulled the plug.

She rose, I heard the water sliding off her in sheets. Her naked arm flashed across the gap in the door, then back again, trailing a cotton robe. When the door opened fully she was dressed in the robe, the belt loosely tied, holding her long water-dark hair in her hand.

I got to my feet. My body was stiff from sitting so long on the cold floor, and I cleared my throat self-consciously—like a man who, after years of silence, intends to start singing again.

In the end, though, all I said was good night.

fifteen

I
WOKE LATE THE NEXT MORNING
, alone in the narrow cot beneath the pitched roof, and looked out the square window at the tongue of mist covering the valley floor.

Downstairs, the open room smelled of woodsmoke. Morning light broke through the east-facing windows in long, slanting shafts. Airy cobwebs like the ghosts of old ladies trembled at the tops of the tall windows, and the yellowed newspapers used for insulation during the winters were visible at the tattered edges of the straw floor matting.

Through the open doorway I saw Claire at the kitchen table, reading a paperback. A bowl of coffee steamed in front of her. Her hair was tied loosely back and her face held pale light from the window. She smiled as I entered the room. “Good morning.”

I asked what she was reading.

She held up the book—
La Cousine Bette.
“About an old spinster who sabotages her niece’s one chance at true love,” she replied with a touch of irony. “Balzac in his romantic mode. Nice way to start off the day. Sit, and I’ll make you breakfast.”

Putting the book aside, she stood up and moved to the stove. Shirttails stuck out from beneath her red sweater and her hiking boots were streaked with fresh mud.

“Looks like you’ve already been out,” I said, sitting down at the table.

“I have, and it’s beautiful. Around here it’s still the sixteenth century.” She lit a match, turned on the gas; a low flame appeared under a saucepan of milk. “How’d you sleep?”

“Not bad.”

There was a pause.

“I had a strange dream,” I added.

“What sort of dream?”

When I hesitated she turned around and looked at me expectantly.

We were bundled in furs on a dogsled being pulled across a snow-covered tundra, I told her. She and I. We came to the coast. Not an arctic coast; more like Cape Cod. Sitting on the beach was a raft made out of planks and old tires. She wanted to take it, but I worried about our chances. She persuaded me. Soon we’d shed our furs and dragged the raft down to the water. The waves nearly swamped us. But we made it. Time passed. We were becalmed in the middle of the ocean. Not a ripple or wave or boat. Then a moment when I called her name and as she turned toward me she slipped and tumbled
off the raft, disappearing beneath the water. She didn’t surface. There was nothing. Many times I called her name. Then, in seconds that were like years, I began to grieve. My grief filled the dream until it was everything—until another moment when I turned my head and she was simply there again, alive in the water, waving to me. Mute, stunned with happiness and relief, I steered the raft over to her. I was reaching down to pull her to safety when I woke up.

There, I said. My dream.