Claire Marvel (13 page)

For a long time I stood there.

I stood as though in a trance, remembering a little boy in a state park in New York. Summer. Standing in that park in front
of a wall of stone, a boulder the size of a small hill with a sheer vertical granite face, and Judith telling me I could never climb it, and my telling her she didn’t know what she was talking about. What I remembered, though, was not the climbing, but rather finding myself already partway ascended, about ten feet from the ground and twenty feet from the top: in limbo, without ropes or physical skill or knowledge. My hands gripping the rock face, my sneakered feet splayed like a duck’s, my pelvis jammed as flat as I could make it, one side of my face kissing boulder. Too afraid to move, to climb or descend, to speak or cry out. Loving that rock, and hating it.

Judith, exasperated, calls out to me: “Scaredy-cat!” But I’m frozen. And eventually, with a theatrical accusatory sigh, she gives up and goes to get my father, who, with my mother, is sitting at a picnic table by a stream, some hundred yards away.

Alone, a strange calm descends. My body maintains its grip with no less urgency, but my heart, which like some tiny jackhammer has been powering through my chest into the rock, begins to settle itself. Poised between two places, two states, I begin to imagine staying there indefinitely, moving in, like some new creature roosting in the cliffs.

I hear my father before I see him. Because, for the first time in my life, I am above him in the actual world. If I were to open my eyes and look down, he would appear small and insignificant. I
know
this. And yet my eyes remain closed—the right because it’s plastered against rock, the left because of this strange calm that has graced me while alone.

And then my father says my name. Doesn’t call or shout it, just says it in his usual voice—a voice quiet but not calm,
unhurried but not in command. Julian, he says. I keep my eyes closed. Julian, he says, don’t move, whatever you do don’t move. And in his voice I hear the fear. He doesn’t know what to do, hasn’t got a plan. For some reason he’s not like other fathers. Experience hasn’t toughened his heart and made him strong, but drained him and left him afraid. I can hear it in his voice.

I open my eyes, let go. The fall is quick and merciless.

twenty

I
TRIED TO REACH HER
. Again and again during the next few days I called the number in Stamford only to get her father’s voice on the answering machine—a sound that, no matter how many times I heard it, never failed to send a chill through me.

But the machine was full and wouldn’t take my messages.

Five nights later, in the faint hope that she might have returned without telling me, I showed up at her apartment.

It wasn’t Claire who greeted me at the door, but Kate. Looking past her into the living room, I saw that the door to Claire’s bedroom was closed.

“I can’t get through to her, Kate. How is she?”

“How you think she’d be. Not here and not good.”

“When’s she coming back?”

“I don’t know.”

“What about her classes? Her exams.”

“Lost,” Kate said. She tilted forward, studying me. “You look terrible.”

“I haven’t been sleeping,” I admitted.

Kate shook her head pityingly. “Jesus, Julian. All right, come in and I’ll make you some tea.”

Depositing me on the sofa, she disappeared into the kitchen. She was wearing Penn State athletic sweats and plastic shower slippers—relics from her undergraduate days, when she’d placed fifth in the 200-meter butterfly at the NCAA swimming championships. She still moved with the fluid power of an athlete. Yet as a conventional jock Kate wasn’t entirely convincing; over the months I’d discerned in her a bluff tenderness and wary vulnerability. In Cambridge she spent her days openly besotted with a fellow Ed School student named Marcy. And once I’d seen her break into sobs after a painfully stilted phone call to her parents—conservative Republicans from Bethlehem, PA, who she was sure would never accept her if they knew she was gay.

Nonetheless, her penchant for blunt honesty could be sobering.

She returned from the kitchen carrying two steaming mugs. I asked her where Marcy was.

“Dinner with her parents.”

Seated on the sofa, we sipped our tea. She’d left the bags to steep indefinitely and the taste had turned metallic.

“Did you go to the funeral?” I said.

“Of course I did.”

“How was it?”

“It was a funeral. Sad. Maybe a little maudlin. Her mother made a truly unfortunate speech. Otherwise it was mostly just sad.” She paused. “You should have been there.”

“Did Claire ask you to come?”

“She didn’t have to,” Kate said pointedly.

I was silent.

She let out a sigh of frustration. “Can I say something here? Sometimes watching you two fail to connect makes me want to scream.”

“That’s not how you felt a year ago.”

“I was skeptical then. I didn’t know you. Your biggest mistake was winning me over. Now I’m frustrated.”

“Not as frustrated as I am.”

“Listen, Julian, you’ve got to step up to the plate. Not tomorrow—today. She needs you and you’re blowing it.”

“I’m trying.”

“Bullshit. You’re sitting on your hands. You want to be sure it’s all going to turn out roses before you commit. Well, get this: you can’t be sure. You’ll never be sure. In my book, sure’s for everyone who doesn’t care enough.”

I didn’t sleep that night. In the morning I canceled a meeting with a student and rented a car. As I drove along Storrow Drive to the Mass Pike the sky was the color of lead, a wind was rising, and there were tiny whitecaps on the Charles.

Passing Wallingford, Connecticut, it began to rain, a light spring shower that by Bridgeport had turned into a squall. I drove squinting through the windshield, wipers on high, hands gripping the wheel until they ached. By Stamford the rain had lessened. At a Mobil station just off the exit ramp I asked directions to Willow Road.

A leafy suburban block, middle to upper middle class, houses big but not huge, the odd swimming pool set off to the side. I parked on the street outside number 14 and sat in the car with the engine off. Her house was a two-story neo-colonial of dark brown wood, rain-soaked and cheerless, with a front lawn and a garage at the end of a short driveway and, to the right and a little behind, a modest pool still covered with its winter tarp. A brown Mercury Cougar was parked in the driveway.

I got out of the car. The rain was a drizzle now, a ghost of its former strength. The temperature was mild. I hadn’t thought to bring an umbrella or jacket. Still, for a few moments I stood with my face turned up to the sky, so full of longing I was afraid of myself. The rain fell on my body with the muted, whispery sound of secrets. Then I walked up the driveway.

I rang the doorbell and waited. A middle-aged woman with brassy hair opened the door and glared at me as though I were a confused deliveryman.

“Yes?” she demanded. Her eyes were at once blurry and hard and her aquiline nose was veined from drink.

“Mrs. Marvel,” I said, “I’m Julian Rose.”

“Who?”

“Julian Rose.”

“How do you know me?” she demanded harshly.

“I’m a friend of your daughter’s, Mrs.—”

“I said how the hell do you know who I am?” she shouted.

“I don’t, I …”

She turned on her heels. Through the open door I heard her stomping up stairs. Silence then, except for the eerie whispering of the rain. My hair was stuck to my temples, my shirt was damp and steaming; had I come for any other reason, I would have fled.

Then the known sound of her feet on the stairs, approaching.

She appeared in the foyer dressed in old pajamas and socks, her hair a tangled nest and her eyes visibly dimmed.

“Julian,” she said in a dull voice that I hardly recognized. “What are you doing here?”

I hesitated. During the trip down I had planned what I imagined would be an appropriate apology. But standing before her now everything vanished but instinct.

“I’m sorry I wasn’t with you for the funeral,” I blurted out. “I should have been. I wanted to be.”

Her head tipped up, her eyes and voice waking angrily from their stupor. “Then why weren’t you?”

“I was afraid.”

“Afraid of what?” she demanded.

“Disappointing you. Which is exactly what I’ve done.” I took a breath. My hands were trembling and I gripped them in front of me. “I’m a fool, I was wrong, and I’m sorry. I’m asking you to forgive me.”

She said nothing. She stood there thinking. Her gaze was oddly deliberate, as if she were seeing me through the haze of our disparate griefs. The waiting was a torture. Then, almost imperceptibly, she nodded once. Relief of a kind coursed through my body, easing fear and urging hope toward the daylight. My arms opened and I stepped toward her.

And for a few seconds it worked. She held me as I held her, fiercely, emboldened by the resilient force of our feeling, our arms silent benedictions of an unbreakable bond.

Then she went cold and still. Cold in my arms, stilled by some new thought or decision. Shaking her head, she stepped back, murmuring, “No.”

“Claire …”

“No, Julian. I can’t. I’m sorry. I don’t have it in me right now to make everything okay. Maybe when I’m feeling stronger.” She paused, her eyes welling—until, with a clench of her jaw, she willfully hardened them to glass. “I really appreciate your coming down,” she concluded formally, as though I were but the stranger her mother had assumed me to be. And then she stood there, staring at her feet, waiting for me to leave.

twenty-one

I
RETURNED TO
C
AMBRIDGE,
and for a while did not attempt to see or speak to her. I hung back in the shadows of desire, thumbing thoughts of her like worry beads, her grief as visceral to me as my own longing.

Through Kate I learned that Claire was still in Stamford. And so at night I lay awake for hours imagining her in that house, that childhood room whose bookshelves and private corners I’d never seen. I imagined her on her bed hugging her knees and weeping.

I thought about her so hard that a paralyzing confusion spread like a cloud over my life. Until I could take no real action toward her at all, could do nothing but think about her.

Inaction is not the same thing as patience. It is instead a kind of perpetual waiting room, a sterile holding pen for unlived desire, a negative sanctuary. You wait and wait, but the receptionist is very stern and, somehow, the appointment book always full. To make matters worse, crowded into the adjoining cell like so many desperate immigrants, and separated from you by nothing more than the thin permeable wall of your own fear, are all the anticipated rejections of your life. You would think it might be noisy in there, but you’d be wrong. It is totally silent. There’s a small Plexiglas window through which you can study these things, this silence, if you have the inclination and the nerve. And eventually, if you have been a diligent enough student and not wasted your time in dreaming, you come to understand that it is not the rejections that make this a prison, not the defeats, but rather your own grim expectation of defeat; not life but its bodily outline drawn in chalk, where the body should be but isn’t, where it once was, this ingrained cowardly pessimism, this relentless betting against love and instinct. This is where the silence comes from.