Claire Marvel (30 page)

The single-lane road, the glistening sheep turds left that morning. At the edge of the hamlet an ugly, recently built house made of cement, stuccoed brown. Then the old stone houses. An upside-down wheelbarrow in the grass. A sloe-eyed donkey, his muzzle poking out from under the low-hanging branches of a plum tree, shrewdly contemplating the pool of his own shadow. An elderly man in blue workman’s jacket and large wooden shoes hoeing a rectangle of garden, slowly straightening himself to stare at my car as it passed.

It was still the last house, sitting slightly apart from the rest, behind a low wall. I stopped the car and got out and stood there. My heart suddenly calm to the point of numbness, and strange to me. Then I let myself through the gate.

The house was shuttered and locked as I’d expected it to
be. Apparently, no one had been there for some time. The parched grass reached to half a foot. The air vibrated with bumblebees, and butterflies sketched drunken lines of color against the cloudless sky. Clinging to the walls above the stone bench were the roses I remembered, already too late in the season, the pale pink flowers pinched by the killing heat until they looked like the delicate, unhappy faces of French schoolgirls. There was no scent left.

I turned away toward the barn. The double doors were unlocked and I eased them over the warped floorboards and stepped inside. Arrows of white light pierced the gloom through the roof holes, churning the heavy trapped air in the intense heat, illuminating swirling dust motes like colonies of tiny, swimming creatures.

That was all. I remained there, staring into the shadows and light. Then I went out, closing the doors behind me. I walked back to the house and sat on the stone bench. Around this particular place the air seemed to crackle with unseen life. Lower down the valley, a sheep bell sounded like a tin can being struck with a spoon, followed by a chorus of forlorn bleating.

I tried to think about Claire, but couldn’t.

Eventually, I must have dozed off.

I dreamed I was drowning under a mile of black water with my mouth wide open. How I’d got there I didn’t know. I was calling out, calling out, but making no sound. The sea was filling me.

Dazed and sweating, I woke. My head had fallen back against the blue shutters and my mouth was open as in the
dream. But here was the real day—light-filled, hot, and buzzing with life. And beyond it a sound, a childish giggling. Startled, I looked there. Two young girls stood on the other side of the stone wall, observing me from a safe distance. Seeing me awake, they abruptly fell silent. And then, holding hands, they ran away.

four

A
WEEK PASSED,
followed by another. Madame Conner did not return. The little house in the next hamlet remained shuttered and locked. The weather stayed hot and dry. And soon enough I had become a fixture at the Auberge du Soleil. This was not hard to do. Despite Delpon’s initial indications to the contrary, there were few other guests. I rarely saw another person there other than Delpon himself, rarely heard another voice besides his or mine. A quiet, forgotten place.

I took to using the lobby as my own reading room. It was there I wrote David Glassman a letter telling him that I thought his dissertation publishable, that it was something I would have been proud to have written myself, that he was someone I felt lucky not only to have taught but also to call a friend. You have already gone far, I wrote, and will go farther.
I told him not to forget to have a good time on the way. As for myself, I added, I was currently in the French countryside. I didn’t yet know what my plans were.

And it was in the lobby of the auberge one afternoon that I read a note from Laura:

Were you ever really there? Even on our wedding day, holding each other in my bedroom? This is what I keep asking myself. It’s a terrible thing not to believe the one you love. And still this wishing and wondering, damn you, what it might be like to have you whole.

As I finished reading, Delpon emerged from the spartan rooms behind the counter where he lived. He nodded at me and went out, the scruffy dog whose name was Max trotting after him, nails ticking against the tiles; the sound reminiscent of the ticking of the beaded fly curtain Delpon had stepped through on my first day in the épicerie. Such was the strange circular nature of my impressions those days. I didn’t know what they meant. I was a plane caught indefinitely in a holding pattern, circling, waiting for permission to land.

The house was closed. There was nobody in it. There was nothing to do but sit and wait. If this was grief, I thought, I despised it, and myself too. There were moments every day when I was afraid I might burst into tears, and other, more numerous ones when I seemed incapable of any feeling at all. It was as if I had come all this distance looking for Claire only to get further away from where she’d been. I could not seem to find even my love for her now except in dreams and day-dreams,
which inevitably were morbid and sometimes frightening and came like ghosts out of the walls of my memory, darkening whatever rooms they entered and then disappearing without a trace.

I sat holding my wife’s letter, wondering how, if ever, I might uncover in myself a person complete enough to go back to her.

At dusk I stood with Delpon outside the auberge, drinking the sharp-toothed red wine made by his son-in-law.

Neither of us spoke for a time. In the two weeks we’d known each other he had taught me how to be easily silent with another man. He had seen my wedding ring and my suitcases, and no doubt from my manner and my questions about the American woman who’d lived nearby he had drawn his own private conclusions about what I was doing alone, week after week, in the Auberge du Soleil.

“The wine is young,” he said now.

“Young but good,” I said.

“Passable?” The hint of a smile.

“Passable.”

His son-in-law had a problem with debt, I’d understood him to say, but otherwise was not a bad fellow. There was a daughter, divorced, in Paris. There were three grandchildren, two girls and a boy. Everyone lived elsewhere. He worried about the daughter, who was not happy. He’d asked if I had children and I’d told him not yet.

While we were standing there the valley darkened. In the
corner of the square a streetlamp turned on automatically (Delpon made a disapproving noise with his lips). And then into the translucent fan of its light small bats came swooping and the village dogs, Max among them, arrived and began darting in and out, like fish in the shallows.

I asked him how long he and his wife had been together before her death, and he answered without hesitation. “Fifty-eight years.”

“How did you meet?”

“She passed by one day on the back of her father’s tractor. I was standing practically where I am standing now. She had a scarf over her head, red, but anyway I could see some of her hair. It was long and dark, her hair, and when she saw me watching she touched it—” He brought his thick, hard-worked hand up to his shoulder. “They were going to the market in Bretenoux,” he said. “That tractor was not so fast. I followed behind all the way to town, ten kilometers, and when her father was not looking I went over and talked to her.”

Below us, past a stone wall, snaked the paved road on its long descent into the valley. A car was driving down it, the yellow headlights sweeping over the wooded mountainside, dusky poplars and oaks, throwing shadows colored with the sepia of time.

Delpon drained his glass. “One does not forget,” he said quietly. “My God, one does not forget.”

He whistled for his dog then, and turned back into the auberge.

five

I
WENT TO SEE THE HOUSE AGAIN.
I went twice, and both times it was the same. And then one afternoon I went again and saw that the shutters had been opened.

I stood outside in the tall grass. With the shutters folded back it seemed a different house, awakened, claimed, neither Claire’s nor mine. For weeks I’d been waiting for Madame Conner’s return, I had thought; but now that the waiting might be over it was clear to me that I had made a grave miscalculation. I did not want to see another person in this house. I did not want to find another person’s clothes hanging in the closet or a toothbrush in a glass or a dish in the sink. I did not want to have my face rubbed in the fact that in the end I owned nothing of my past except my own fragile idea of what had occurred. That what I had believed in as our history,
Claire’s and mine, what for years I had privately endowed as some inalienable right, was just a fiction, a floating dream no more real or lasting than a reflection glimpsed in a dusty win-dowpane, here played out on a stage that had been occupied by others before us and now, evidently, was to be occupied by others again.

These were my thoughts at the time. I stood with them for a while, feeling strangely chilled in the hot day; and then I approached the door and knocked. My palms had begun to sweat and my breath had quickened. No one answered. The house appeared empty, and I knocked again. Then, with a glance back toward the road, I tried the door. The latch gave and the door opened and I stepped inside. Daylight entered with me, breaching the room, flooding around my body and throwing my shadow onto the worn straw matting. It was the same matting I remembered. At the edges it was in tatters, and the newspaper stuffed underneath for insulation was in various stages of decomposition: smells of wood pulp and lichened firewood and cobwebs and burnt ash and shaded stone. In the stone was the winter held over, cold and damp and unforgiving, oblivious to the heat outside. I felt chilled again, and couldn’t seem to get enough breath. To the left, the long summer light shone through the glass panes of the door to the terrace, its ribbons bright and empty of anything but dust. A few logy flies careened through the air, while countless more lay dead on the floor beneath the windows.

I went into the kitchen. And it was all the same, down to the strip of flypaper hanging in the corner. As I stood there
among the old appliances and pieces of chipped china, a kind of panic began to rise in my chest.

I went out and climbed the steep, creaking stairs to the second floor. Where it was the same: the bathroom with nothing in it, the narrow room with the pitched roof and the single bed, the larger room with the French windows and the double bed. The mattresses bare and stained. There were no blankets, sheets, towels, books. There was nothing left of her.

I went back downstairs. I didn’t know what to do with myself now, and I stood again in the center of the big open room, remembering the first time. After the night and day of travel, she had stood right here, turning so as to see everything, her arms outstretched as if for balance, her face filled with rapture, wonder, awe. At what? I wanted to know now. At dead flies and rotting papers and warped floors and cracked mirrors and pounds of dust. At this dull, ordinary house whose walls enclosed nothing of the feeling I remembered, and all of the neglect.

It was then that my gaze landed on the wall cupboard by the entrance to the kitchen, and out of the gloom a memory broke like a beacon. I went to the cupboard and opened it. A strong smell of must rushed up my nose. I stood looking at a stack of familiar LPs, and at something else wrapped in a faded, moth-eaten blanket. I pulled back an edge of the blanket and read the name: PHILLIPS.

It was when I lifted the turntable from its resting place that I found the only signs left of her in that house: two spiral notebooks. One older, its cover stained and worn, immediately recognizable
to me as the impromptu anthology she had made of her father’s remembrances. The other notebook more recent, its cover unblemished. She had filled only about a third of the pages, I saw, but those were densely written.

My hands trembling, I sat down to read.

six

January 6, 1999

This is to you. I’m shaking a little at the moment, but that won’t last, I’ll calm down eventually. I don’t know why it’s so frightening to write words I know I’ll never send, you won’t ever see them, they’re for me and I feel the need to talk to you and it is everything.