Claire Marvel (16 page)

“Yes. So I waited.”

“Industrious of you.”

“Only you never came home.”

She said nothing.

“Where were you?” I demanded.

“What do you want me to say, Julian?”

“I want you to say you weren’t with him. I want you to say you weren’t with anybody. You were up all night in the library catching up on your work and you forgot the time. Or maybe you went to the late show at the Brattle and afterward decided you might as well stay up till breakfast. Or maybe, maybe you just got plastered and had a fling, some stupid one-nighter with some harmless idiot you couldn’t give a shit about. That would hurt, but I could live with it. I’d survive. But not him, Claire. Just don’t tell me you were with him.”

“I’m not going to lie.”

“Goddamn it, I don’t want you to lie.”

“Then what do you want?”

“You,” I said. “I just want you.”

She looked away. The sunlight slanted across us, already hot, and a small, shrill voice rose in my head telling me to walk away, that what felt unbearable now was only going to get worse. Then Claire sighed and looked at me again. And I thought, She is still here, there is still time, and I stood my ground like an ox or a tree.

She said, “He called after his party, wanting to talk. He doesn’t understand how you could have turned on him like that, after all the support he’s given you. And personally I don’t either. It was cheap and cruel, if you want the truth, not to mention professional suicide. It’s shaken him.”

“You can’t be serious.”

“I’m very serious.”

“Claire, listen to me. You don’t know him. He’ll suck the pleasure from your life and his ego will swallow you whole. A month with him and you’ll feel up to your neck in sand. Just stay away from him.”

“I don’t want to stay away from him, Julian. It’s already been a couple of months, as a matter of fact, and I don’t feel buried. He’s not what you think he is. You have no idea what he is. He’s decent, kind, supportive. He listens to me. He’s considerate and strong. Turned out my father was a wonderful man but not much of a businessman. He left quite a few debts behind him. The dealership needed to be sold right away. It was Carl who worked out the details of the sale and made it happen. Carl, not some lawyer, not my brother. Carl, because he cared. I’ll always be grateful to him for that. I trust him, Julian. Trust him a lot. I may even be in love with him. So forgive me if I don’t agree with your assessment. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going home.”

Quietly, without fanfare or drumroll, I changed advisors on my dissertation. Professor Charles Dixon, whose tutelage I’d had before Davis’, agreed to take me back. A small-nosed, balding
man, tweedy and thoroughly academic, he was well respected by his peers. But he wasn’t feared or envied. In almost every regard he was the antithesis of a political player like Davis. At our first meeting, over glasses of iced tea in his house, he asked me why I was interested in switching advisors. I replied that Professor Davis was away too often, a bit too oriented toward the White House and too professionally distracted for my interests and needs, which were more academic. Dixon looked pleased. He nodded approvingly, said yes, he could see how that might be so. He agreed to take me on. The first thing we did together was to work out a writing schedule.

My dissertation would have eight chapters. It was September, and I was still mired in the second. We agreed that I would turn in a new chapter every six weeks, which if all went well should see me finished in time to receive my doctorate at next year’s commencement. Wonderful, we concluded, a wonderful prospect—and yet, imagining it, I felt nothing. There would be staying, or there would be going—a career sought after, hungered for, somewhere, by someone. Why? To what end? I no longer felt anything about it, if I ever had. And what, Dixon wanted to know, had I been doing in the way of applications for foundation grants and future teaching positions? It was hard out there, even for the brightest, he said, didn’t I know that? And I said yes, I knew that, and we agreed that with the coming academic year I would radically step up my efforts in this area. And we went on talking and planning out my future. And somewhere in the neighborhood Claire went on seeing Davis, sleeping with him, falling in love with him. And soon I saw myself standing in a field alone, far from
everyone I knew, with my arms out—a human sundial waiting for the sun, waiting to feel it on my back and arms, waiting for my shadow then to appear over the green grass, the perfectly delineated shadow, time held there in precise configuration; time told, for just that moment, in that shadow that was the absence of light.

PART TWO

one

T
HE SEASONS TURNED
. Through the leaf-strewn fall, through the day she married him.

Through the frigid winter, alarm clock ringing in the black mornings, the hiding under bedcovers, the sound of windshields being scraped, the steam of car exhaust, the handsome city pocked with gray scabs of frozen slush.

I turned twenty-eight.

Much to my surprise, I was not crippled outwardly. Mornings I woke and stood on my own two feet. Life, as they say, marched on. Every six weeks I continued to produce a new chapter of my dissertation for Professor Dixon’s perusal. And twice every week I continued to lead a junior undergraduate tutorial on the philosophy of politics. Such elemental concepts as Democracy, Natural Law, Justice, Sovereignty,
Citizenship, Revolution, Marxism, Anarchy, Power and the State, Liberty and Reason as expounded by thinkers from Plato, Aristotle, Locke, and Montesquieu to Burke, Rousseau, Kant, and John Rawls. No exams, only papers. It was in helping the students determine their next year’s thesis topics that I came to know them best. Two favorites stood out: Peter, gangly and unathletic, with a hearing aid (the result of falling through the ice one long-ago winter on a pond in his native South Dakota), who shared my interest in Teddy Roosevelt and the ambiguous legacy of the Progressives; and plucky, feisty Margaret, four feet ten inches tall in platform heels, who’d grown up working evenings in her parents’ Korean grocery in Los Angeles, and who, when she wasn’t quoting liberally from Georges Sorel’s
Reflections on Violence
or Ralph Ellison’s
Invisible Man,
was busy writing an allegorical novella about a rabble-rousing, bank-robbing Korean-American circus clown.

And twice in six months I went on dates, both times with women from my department: Megan, a blue-eyed ecoterrorist from Oregon; and Dal, the lithe squash champion from New Delhi. Neither relationship lasted long. By the end of our first dinner—at a Back Bay bistro, where I foolishly ordered the steak frites—Megan had already concluded that my commitment to the ecomovement was suspect. With Dal, however, the problem was not so much disappointment as a general lack of urgency. She moved to her own mysterious beat. It was she who’d asked me out, yet once at the Central Square Indian restaurant (and later back in her room), she couldn’t seem to rouse herself to any heights of enthusiasm. The diffidence
she’d shown me in the past had not been personal, I realized. It was simply her way with the world, the same supreme coolness of temperament that allowed her to go for—and hit—a three-wall nick at match point in the finals of the national championships.

And (speaking of which) Thursday nights at Hemenway Gym, after the varsity was done practicing, Mike Lewin and I played a regular game of squash. We weren’t particularly skilled, but we were evenly matched. It was a routine that would continue until the first week of March. On that night I became a different person; or, to put it another way, I completed a transformation that had been in the works all winter long. Some bitter darkness was rising in me, a brutally competitive spirit taking root—no-holds-barred, win-at-all-costs. I didn’t just want to beat my friend, I wanted to annihilate him.

Back and forth the match went, and by the end of the fifth set we were tied, leading to an overset. And then on match point I hit what I thought was a winning forehand. With triumphant satisfaction I watched the ball bounce once, twice—only to feel, a split second later, Mike’s hand on my back, and hear him mutter, “Let.” I turned on him in a rage. Mike Lewin never called lets, but he’d called one now, on match point. “You can’t be serious!” I yelled at him—hearing even as I spoke a distorted echo of the words I’d said to Claire on the sidewalk outside her building. But Mike was indeed serious, and already stepping into the service box to replay the point. He was counting on the fact that squash was a “gentleman’s” sport—the rules an honor code, combatants (even the most amateurish) schooled in the accepted politesse and
obliged to respect the sanctity of the opponent’s honest judgment. He knew we’d replay the point. And for that alone, just then, I hated him. A malevolent anger surged to my core from all the tributaries of those long months of disappointment. Before he could serve I slammed the flat of my hand three times against the white wall streaked with black ball marks, the noise a series of detonations that reverberated like gunshots through the court. Mike looked at me as if he’d never seen me before. Then he served and won the match. It was the last time we played together.

Spring arrived. In mid-April, after two days of rain, I walked into the Square on an errand.

The sun was out. The slowly drying sidewalks were thronged: bearded loiterers at Out of Town News, pierced rich-kid skateboarders from Newton and Brookline, coffee-nursing, clock-punching chess masters outside Au Bon Pain. The winter was over, as though just today, the air fresh and filled with a cacophony of sounds, machine and human, business and play, the fluttering of want ads on the kiosk by the T stop, the drag and slap of boarders hitting brick, a passing boom box, a car horn, the next big thing strumming guitar in front of Warburton’s. Filled too with smells, with blueberry muffins, with hot dogs and mustard, with the astringent tang of rain evaporating off pavement, with the brackish, bracing scent of a breeze that seemed to carry the tastes of the river and the harbor beyond and the ocean beyond that, the memory of ships.

I checked my watch—I had twenty-five minutes to order my cap and gown for commencement and get over to Littauer in time to teach tutorial—and hurried into the Coop.

At the back of the main floor I joined a line of undergraduate seniors waiting to order their caps and gowns. A cheerful group, many of whom seemed to know one another: in the buoyant notes of their laughter and talk there was an expression of communal achievement, some binding stroke of good fortune. Cares had been lifted, a curtain pulled back, a limitless horizon revealed. Everybody was young. Like some stiff-backed elder brother, I eavesdropped on them for a few minutes, then pulled a folder out of my shoulder bag and began reading over my comments on Peter’s final paper:

Peter:

First, don’t be disheartened by all the pencil marks—overall, the writing here is excellent. This is no small thing. Second, I am full of admiration for the scope of your thesis. You went for it, didn’t play it safe. Intellectually this bodes well, and I’m proud of you.