Claire Marvel (27 page)

Kate’s mouth and eyes tightened. “Oh, fuck it. I’m talking too much about too many things that don’t matter now.”

“They matter,” I said. “I need you to keep talking.”

Our eyes met.

“Please.”

She took a breath. “There’s not much more. She was writing the letter about six weeks after the illness. She’d gotten past it, was someplace else, maybe she didn’t know where, but things were a little better than they’d been, and certainly not worse. It was almost spring. And she had a friend, or kind of a friend, in the old woman who’d rented her the house. She was lonely, but free.”

Abruptly Kate’s face bunched in anger. “Don’t listen to me. Those aren’t her words, they’re mine, and I don’t have a fucking clue. Here I am again trying to explain her to you like some kind of expert. I didn’t do too well the last time, did I.”

“You did fine,” I said. “You were a good friend to her. You’re still a good friend.”

She shrugged weakly, as though drained.

“Tell me the rest,” I said.

“That was about the end of it. She said Carl didn’t know where she was and she didn’t want him to know, so please not to tell anybody that I’d heard from her, or give anybody her address. She said she’d write again when she could. She said she was sorry about being so out of touch but that unhappiness and mistakes had just about turned her to stone. She hoped I could forgive her. She hoped everyone could forgive her. And then just ‘Love’ and her name. And then after her name there was a last part about you. It wasn’t a P.S. It was more than that. It was all by itself at the bottom of the page, practically the only words in the whole cramped letter with any space around them, just floating there like an island. She said you were a teacher in Manhattan and wondered if I might look you up every now and then and send her word about you. But only so long as I promised not to tell you that I was doing it for her.”

In the afternoon, Kate left. She was taking the train back to Pennsylvania, where she lived in an apartment with her longtime girlfriend. There was a big dinner at her parents’ that night, including all her brothers and their wives. “Marcy and I are just another couple,” Kate explained dryly. “We just happen to be better at sports.”

We stood on the street corner, searching for a taxi, talking about trivial things. For three hours we’d sat in my living room trading memories of Claire. For this is what you do with the dead: resurrect them moment by moment, hoping that the edifice you’re constructing might one day house their spirit;
yet knowing it will not. The rest is faith and pain. We’d sat laying the foundation for how we would always talk about her. And then we’d grown tired, and wordlessly agreed to move on to other subjects.

A taxi arrived. Kate and I hugged, and I watched her drive off.

I stood on the street a while longer. Today, in April, the sky was clear, but there was a chill in the air that cut to the bone. I glanced up at the building I’d lived in for nearly ten years and saw how it was ugly and blocked the sun, throwing a perpetual cloak of shadow over the avenue and the people who went about their business there.

In front of me a livery cab slowed, hunting for a fare, and I angrily waved the driver off. He flipped me the finger and drove on.

I turned and went back inside the building.

Of the hidden things, the secret hands, the private knowledge, the memories that were all spirit, like sunlight trapped in a glass—I’d told Kate nothing. How could I have? And with what words, anyway? Claire was the only one who’d ever known how much I’d loved her. She was the only one who was ever meant to know.

five

“J
ULIAN
?”

Standing in her white nightgown at the edge of the darkened living room, Laura seemed almost a figment; only her voice was clear. It was the middle of the night. I peered at her from the chair across the room, where I’d been sitting for I didn’t know how long.

“Are you all right?” she asked.

I felt unable to answer her. In the dark I reached down for my glass on the floor and took a gulp of watery scotch. The sound of ice cubes ringing against glass.

“Julian.”

“Go back to bed, Laura.”

“No,” she said. “I won’t.”

She flipped a switch on the wall and the room was flooded with light.

I sat furiously blinking, trying to shade my eyes with my arm. Gradually my vision adjusted and my arm came down. Laura stared at me from across the room. It was not the tall glass of scotch that had fixed her attention, I realized, or the heavy wool sweater that, groping in the dark of our bedroom, I’d thrown over my pajamas. It was my face.

“I’ve never seen you cry before.”

“Leave me alone, Laura.”

She seemed momentarily stunned by what she was witnessing. Then, visibly arriving at some decision within herself, she came farther into the room. I ducked my head down—an image of David Glassman—and moments later felt her hands on my shoulders trying to hold and soothe me. But I would not be touched. I shrugged her off and without a word she moved away; her footfall faded down the hallway while I remained where I was, not stirring, feeling the ache rising in my chest and throat and eyes. It was the darkness I wanted again. And then I heard her coming back.

With grace and tender practicality she brought me a box of Kleenex. She waited patiently on the sofa a few feet away while I wiped my swollen eyes and blew my nose. When I was finished, though, it was a denser silence that came scudding into the room with us. We sat in its enormous shadow.

Finally, she drew a long hard breath. “It gets lonely out here, Julian. You must know that.”

“I’m sorry,” I mumbled, looking at my hands.

“I don’t want your apology. I want you to talk to me.”

“It’s not that simple.”

“Yes it is,” Laura said urgently. “Yes. It. Is. You’re my husband.
I love you. And I want you to talk to me. That’s how simple it is.” She leaned forward and grabbed hold of my wrist and shook it. “Talk to me, Julian. Something terrible’s eating you inside. And I’m supposed to watch it happen? Stay here and keep quiet? Wait for you to remember how much you need me? Well, forget it. I’m not blind, whatever you may think. And I’m not deaf or dumb, either. And my patience is not infinite.”

The room was still.

“A friend of mine killed herself,” I said.

Slowly, Laura released my wrist and sat back.

“Which friend?”

“You didn’t know her.”

There was a long silence.

“Which friend?” Laura repeated.

I rubbed a hand over my face. “Claire Marvel.”

She stiffened. It had been ten years since Claire’s name had been uttered in our house, but on my wife’s face now I saw immediate recognition, as if the name had always been present.

For a while neither of us spoke. From the street far below there came a faint reverberating din, a garbage can being knocked onto its side. My mind, seeking escape, dully attached itself to this far-off noise. I imagined a homeless man sorting through the spilled refuse, searching for bottles and cans.

Then, quietly, Laura said, “I’m very sorry. She must have been in agony to do what she did.” She reached out and pulled a tissue from the box. She seemed to need to do something with her hands and she folded the tissue in quarters and
placed it on the coffee table between us and did not look at it again. “I saw you talking to her that night at the opera,” Laura said. “I saw you out on the plaza. And I knew who it was.”

Her voice was hardly a voice anymore; I couldn’t hear her in it. An urge to reach out for her rose in me—but by then her expression had already changed, hardened, and a bitter and righteous anger lit her eye.

“That was the only time I saw her, Laura.”

“Don’t tell me that,” she snapped. “In your heart, Julian, in your real heart, you’ve never seen anybody but her. You’ve never truly loved anybody but her. Certainly not me. Not like that.”

She got to her feet. With grim determination she crossed the room. When she finally turned to face me she was on the verge of tears.

“You and I have been trying to conceive a child. For a long time now, a long time—” Laura’s voice fluttered, threatening to break; she waited, a fist pressed to her mouth, for her self-control to return. “We’ve put our hearts into it. More than our hearts. We’ve been trying to make a life together, to bring another life into this world. And for what reason, if not for love of each other? Tell me that, Julian. For what reason?”

six

B
REAK A PERSON’S HEART
and you become a kind of amnesiac killer. All the empathy you possess is momentarily held in abeyance while you address yourself wholeheartedly to your own emotional survival. You’re just doing what you have no choice but to do, you think. You’re just living.

Then it’s over, and standing amid the wreckage of your life you remember.

Laura and I tried to go on together.

In the morning she went to work earlier than usual, and returned later, often eating dinner with colleagues. During the rare hours when we were awake in the apartment at the same time, she spoke to me when necessary, was polite as always,
but otherwise kept to herself. It wasn’t hostility, it seemed, so much as exhaustion tinged with an almost spectral premonition of grief; a process of emotional damage assessment as a prelude, I sensed, to mourning.

I spent more and more time at school. There was no teachers’ meeting too routine to attend, no student concern or academic question too minor to try to assuage or answer. As if time had suddenly turned infinite; as if there were no reality but the present. Which was ironic, in a way. Because what I felt like, without understanding or shame, was nothing so much as a shattered hourglass, its sand leaking onto the ground.

seven

O
N A CLOUDLESS SATURDAY
in June I sat with my father on a bench overlooking the Riverside Park dog run. The dog run consisted of no more than a narrow strip of field worn to bare earth. Over it, watched by their owners, about a dozen animals of various shapes and sizes ran in a knot of swirling trajectories, chasing each other with unbounded joy. A light scrim of dust rose from the ground. The drone of unseen traffic carried from the Westside Highway.

My father wore neatly pressed khakis and a short-sleeved shirt frayed at the collar and a beige hat against the heat of the sun. A black eyeglass case bulged in his shirt pocket, and the gold clip of a Cross ballpoint glinted there too, for doing the
Times
crossword.

At seventy-five, he was feeling all right. Perhaps better. For
someone who’d never exercised in his life except to walk the seventeen blocks to his office, and then, post-retirement, to the movies and on Sundays to Zabar’s, his heart was in decent shape. There was a slight chronic wheeze in the lungs suggesting, his doctor had said, some diminishment in respiratory capacity. And there was the prostate exhibiting a bit of age-typical swelling. But his physique was surprisingly trim. And the inevitable map of wrinkles had had the paradoxical effect of adding interest to what admittedly had been a bland face. His eyes, pale as moonstones, seemed still to be searching, however cautiously, for clues to the bigger puzzle.

It wasn’t that he’d forgotten my mother, or ceased wishing she were part of his life. But in recent years some semblance of peace had come to him. It had come slowly, surreptitiously, from the ground up, as ivy climbs a wall. Until one day he stared out through the weblike mystery of its growth at a landscape that no longer frightened him. Suspicion fell away, leaving him lighter on his feet. Somewhere along the line he’d simply stopped trying to plug the myriad gaps in his understanding of her heart. She was another person. And what for years had felt like a searing judgment on his soul he now viewed rightly as some brute manifestation of personal choice. It wasn’t the choice he would have made, God knew, but he could accept it. And somehow that acceptance, however humble or hidden, had allowed him to regain his dignity.

I was thinking intensely about him. And then, abruptly, I was back in myself; an unwelcome shift prompted, somehow, by the familiar barrenness of the dog run. Everything green and living had been worn down to dust.