Claire Marvel (18 page)

Finally, she slipped off. The soft cool air touched the places where she’d been, raising goose bumps on my skin. Missing her, I turned and found her again.

Then she was tracing my mouth with her finger. Murmuring.

“What would you do if you’d never met me?”

I shook my head. It seemed unthinkable.

“I mean it.”

“Probably sit on a bench somewhere for the rest of my life thinking how I was a person who’d never met you.”

“Sounds stoical.”

I kissed her fingers one at a time.

“Maybe.”

“And sad.”

“Yes,” I said.

“What else?”

“I can’t really imagine it. I’d be another person. With another name.”

“What kind of name?”

I smiled. “Utterly forgettable.”

She grew pensive. She began to stroke my hair.

“There’s something I heard once. It came from an old man. He said, ‘If you want to be remembered, put yourself in a story’ ”

“Sounds like good advice.”

She stopped stroking my hair and her eyes searched mine.

“Put me in your story, Julian.”

“I already have.”

We gave each other presents, unremarkable objects of personal history. As if with our newfound riches only impoverished things stripped of all gloss and affect would do.

Here is one. It sits on my worktable. A little gray stone with raised white lines.

She’d found it as a girl, walking on a shingle beach with her father. Later she’d remember how the stone had seemed to call up to her out of a sea of stones, as though meant especially for her, and how she’d had to let go of her father’s hand in order to pick it up.

Since that day, everywhere she’d traveled the stone had traveled—tiny friend, talisman, hieroglyph. Until this morning, when she’d woken out of a dream of the two of us.

We were back in France, she told me, standing in the ancient barn, in front of the 1940s Ford van—whose headlights
were lit, whose engine was running, exhaust billowing up like the breath of life. A vision that frightened her because there was no one inside the van and she did not understand how this could be. She began to cry in the dream, standing with me in the barn. I took her hand then and told her she must have faith. I kept repeating this. And finally, she said, faith was what she came to feel. Absolute faith in me. Which was why this morning, waking without me in her husband’s house, she’d decided to give me the little gray stone with the raised white lines, as a token of the faith that I had given her.

five

T
HERE WAS A PLACE
—left of the long slope of stairs leading to Widener Library, in the little belowground nook of the entrance to Pusey—where, immediately following the commencement ceremony, tucked away from the cheering celebrants and beaming parents and mortarboards falling from the air, hidden from her husband and my family, we’d agreed to meet, to steal a moment for ourselves.

When I arrived—newly minted doctor of government, still in my rented black gown with the crimson hood—she was already down the steps to Pusey, her back against the wall. I didn’t see her until she was right in front of me: just a flash of a pale woman hugging herself as though she were cold. Before I could get a better look, though, she was already in my arms, her face pressed against my neck.

“Hey,” I said with a laugh.

She was silent, holding me fiercely. I tried to step back to see her better but she wouldn’t let go.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Nothing,” she mumbled into my neck. “I’ve missed you.”

“Well, I’ve missed you.” Gently, I removed her arms from around my sides and stepped back. She did not look well. Her face was pale, the whites of her eyes streaked with red. I laid my hand against her forehead; she felt warm to me, possibly feverish. “Are you sick?”

“Maybe. I don’t know.”

“Have you seen a doctor?”

She didn’t answer.

“Claire?”

“You’d better go.”

“I can take another minute.”

“No,” she said firmly, almost pushing now, “you’d better go.”

“Wait a second.” I put my hands on her shoulders and suddenly the energy seemed to drain from her. “Now tell me what’s the matter.”

“It’s just … this is hard, Julian. This is really hard.”

I tried to think of something about the future that would soothe her; a comforting truth. But none came to me. “I know,” I murmured. “I know.”

Her grip tightened on my arms, but she said no more.

I hurried back to the commencement area—where my father, by arriving four hours early, had managed to secure good seats.

By now, nearly all of the thousands who’d attended the
ceremony had dispersed to the undergraduate houses and respective graduate schools for the handing out of diplomas. Already the crimson-bedecked stage in front of Memorial Chapel stood empty as a prom hall at noon, and the festooned quadrangle with its hundred-year-old trees was but a sea of unoccupied chairs; the air, alive with jubilation just twenty minutes ago, felt sadly spent.

I saw my family: my mother, conspicuously angled with her back to my father, talking to my brother-in-law Ben (a computer programmer in Silicon Valley); and, a few feet away, my father and Judith standing in easy silence with each other.

As I approached them an old panic began to stir; ten yards away I paused as if catching sight of a ghost. Two years had passed since I’d seen my mother for twenty-five minutes in a New York coffee shop. Our last conversation—a New Year’s Day phone call—had ended with my request that she not bring Mel, her husband, to Cambridge for my commencement. She’d hung up on me (I didn’t blame her), and until just recently I had assumed she would boycott the event altogether. But here she was: hair dyed russet and cut in a Texas bob, waist a bit thicker—yet looking, even from this modest distance, visibly less careworn than when she’d been living with us. She claimed to enjoy her new life, and there was no reason not to believe her. What made the difference? It wasn’t anger I felt at seeing her, or even guilt, but rather an anxious bewilderment at my inability to muster any happiness on her behalf.

“Well,” called my father. “There he is. The man of the hour.”

“Hi, Dad.” I covered the last of the distance to them and my father squeezed my shoulder.

“Quite a day.” His voice was flushed with pride.

Judith reached out for me. “Look at you!”

“Hey Jude.”

She never failed to laugh at this tired joke. We hugged long and hard, which was the only way my sister knew how to hug. She was the giver in the family, a bank vault of loving-kindness in a world of emotional penny-pinchers. Occasionally I found this frightening.

The hug ended only when Ben—decent, balding, brown-eyed Ben—cut in with a smile. He shook my hand warmly.

“Congratulations, Julian.”

“Thanks, Ben.”

Then an odd silence among the members of my family, as if a crow were flying overhead.

“Hello, Julian.”

“Hi, Mom.”

For a few wary seconds we stood sizing each other up. Until—two forces capitulating—we leaned forward and I kissed her presented cheek.

“Mel’s feelings are hurt you didn’t want him here,” my mother said.

I stepped back.

“Mom,” Judith warned. “You promised.”

“Why not? Is this a temple? A place of worship? No, I won’t be silenced. How often do I get to see my son, anyway? So I’m going to tell the truth. Feelings have been hurt. Feelings. My husband is a sensitive man. A good man. He doesn’t
hold grudges. Why should he? He was told he wasn’t wanted here but still he sends his best to my son on his day of celebration. Why? Because you’re my
son,
Julian. I thank God for Mel every day of my life.”

“You just had to do it, didn’t you, Mom?” Judith said bitterly.

My father cleared his throat. “Well, why don’t we all get going? We don’t want to be late. Where to next, Julian?”

But I was no longer there. I’d jumped ship. It was all Claire now. I saw her again as she’d just been, her troubled pallor and the fierceness of her embrace, her unhappiness. I began to imagine untold reasons, causes, illness or depression, things I’d done or not done, mistakes I’d made. I began to imagine loss. A feeling that threw a cloud over the bright day like a cloth over a portraitist’s camera, leaving me enclosed behind the scene, suffocating in my own darkness, unable to focus on anything through the lens but the image of her suffering.

Abruptly I looked up. My family, four pairs of eyes.

“I’m going to have to meet you there,” I said.

“What?” Judith said. “Why?”

“Meet us where?” said my father.

“A close friend of mine’s sick. I need to get over to her house now and see her.”

“Now?” demanded my mother.

“It’s important.”

“How sick is she?”

“For Christ’s sake.”

“What about your diploma, Julian?” asked my father.

“I’ll meet you there. I promise.”

“This is entirely disrespectful,” my mother said angrily.

“No,” disagreed Judith. “It’s okay.”

Then I felt Ben’s hand on my shoulder. “Julian,” he said calmly, “just tell us how to get there.”

I ran through the Yard and out the gate to Mass. Ave., up the double-wide avenue, the hem of my graduation gown flapping behind me like a mourning skirt. Past Hemenway Gym and the Law School, Nick’s Beef and Beer, Changsho Chinese Restaurant, left on Linnaean, right on Humboldt. When I finally stopped I was panting, standing with hands on my knees, damp with sweat. I pulled the gown over my head and bunched it in my hand.

The street was still. Trees grew tall on either side. The houses were big and handsome with lovely gardens behind. Professors lived here, lawyers, at least one Nobel laureate. In these gardens in June there were inflatable kiddie pools, telescopes for stargazing, tricycles on their sides, chemistry sets.

Their house was on the corner. Pale gray clapboard with black shutters. They had moved into it the week they were married. It had four bedrooms and two studies and a formal dining room and a living room big enough for the valuable paintings he already owned as well as those he intended to own, someday. There was a garden as big and lovely as any of the neighbors’ gardens. In it was a single magnolia tree and the beds of irises Claire had planted late last fall, soon after the wedding. They were in bloom now. I had seen them.

I climbed the steps to the porch. On the days when he was
in Washington, when she knew it could only be me, she left the front door unlocked.
I want you to feel that you can walk in anytime. I want you to know that I’m always waiting for you.
Today, though, as everyone was aware, he was not in Washington. Today on the stage he’d sat with the other distinguished faculty in full view, his hood brighter and more honorific, it seemed, than anyone else’s.

The door was locked.

I walked around the side of the house, past their Volvo station wagon parked on a rectangle of slate gravel, and into the garden.

The irises were purple and white. They stood straight and full in their neat beds. The magnolia was awash in white blossoms. The sweet fragrance reached my nose just as I saw her.

Three wooden steps led from the back door off the kitchen to the grass. She was sitting on the middle one, her arms resting on her knees. Her eyes were swollen and bloodshot. Her cheeks were blotched with color from where she’d been holding her face. Her only movement when she saw me was to lower her head.