Claire Marvel (31 page)

Every day for almost fourteen years I’ve talked to you in my head. Every day we’ve had conversations, whispers, Socratic dialogues, and there have been monologues and soliloquies and pieces of poems and snippets of songs, even silences, long ones, the kind that speak, and you are good at them and I don’t mind. In my most private thoughts you never left.

And so I write.

January 10

This afternoon a woman from the hamlet came by with a basket containing two turnips, four potatoes, and five fresh eggs. Fifty-ish, with good strong farming hands and that local accent straight from the troubadours, a decent woman even if beyond her charitable instincts she was mainly interested in snooping around my life on behalf of the rest of the neighborhood. (Neighborhood? This is the Land That Time Forgot.) She assumed I was British so I gave her a cup of tea, which was about all I had to offer anyway, I haven’t had the strength of mind to buy groceries. I think about it, but then almost immediately a lethargy comes, despite the freezing cold, a lethargy or something heavier, a steel net, and there’s no point then but to lie down under the crushing weight. I’m getting very good at lying down. Still, it’s a different weight, and a different darkness, than the migraines I used to get. You don’t know about those. My first came about a month after you left Cambridge.

Carl had invited a couple of professors and their wives to dinner. I didn’t know how to cook but I was supposed to learn, but I never did learn, not really. While the chicken was roasting we had drinks in the living room, where there was the usual talk about Iran-Contra and Carl was wearing a pink shirt and silver cuff links and his face was red as he talked, going on about Reagan and what a visionary he was and how reviled by his enemies, and I was just sitting there thinking quietly about you and the baby I was carrying. Trying to weigh you in one hand and the baby in the other and make the balance come out right, as if I were a scale, true and old and wise, one
of those scales from the Bible whose arms were believed by some to represent God’s arms and His divine justice and so could shed light and determine fates. But it was just me, you see, and I wasn’t doing very well, was more or less paralyzed with grief. I couldn’t think about you because if I did I’d start to cry, and crying wasn’t allowed in that living room or that life, not by the rules I’d set for myself. So I tried to concentrate on the baby, tried to feel the baby, the baby was sacred, the baby was who I had. But I couldn’t feel the baby then, it wasn’t moving or kicking, I could sense its nascent weight but not the life inside it. I felt utterly alone then, is what I’m trying to say, and it was terrifying.

There was a dull pounding in my head, focused behind my right eye, a dull pounding like waves, a rough sea, if you’re on the other side of a high dune and can’t see it but know it’s there and coming. And light, spots and streaks at the corners of my vision. And nausea. I got to my feet. Carl stopped talking and looked at me, they all sat gawking at me like baboons, and I was holding my head in my hands and could feel the waves pounding and coming closer and see the light flickering at the edges, giving everything I looked at a nasty little halo. And I thought, The chicken will burn, the potatoes will burn, and I could have laughed. Then the waves crashed all together and I stumbled from the room, swimming in the pain. But I wasn’t sorry, I knew I was free, if only for as long as the pain lasted. Nothing else to think about then, or to regret. I went upstairs and locked the door and lay down in the dark with a damp cloth over my eyes.

That was the first time.

January 11

Snow. Nothing to say.

January 14

The power’s out, don’t know why. I’m writing this by the fire and there’s not enough wood, everywhere but right here the house is dark and freezing. A little while ago I went upstairs with a flashlight to get some blankets, and on the way down lost my footing and almost fell.

Now I have a blanket on my lap, another around my shoulders. The dust makes me sneeze, I feel strangely hot in the head, the sky outside is black, the sun hasn’t showed itself for days, the moon is a fucking coward.

January 16

Fever today, chills, not so good, thank you. Writing this from bed, blankets piled high, thinking, Stupid, stupid to have come, ashamed to see myself like this. Always prided myself on courage and intelligence and wit, but there’s none of that in evidence now.

Once, about a year after you’d gone, I went to New York for the day. Took the train down by myself, just to be somewhere near you, and sat in a coffee shop, then Central Park, looking for my nerve. Never found it until too late. Saw multitudes that day, none of them you.

My unsent letters could fill a book.

More snow. Tired now.

February 5

A woman has saved my life.

Corinne Conner owns this house. Her husband Leland and my father knew each other for nearly fifty years, you may remember. Well, Corinne’s still here, though she lives in another house now, down in the valley. She was stopping by, checking up on the new tenant—around here doors are never locked—and says she found me upstairs in bed mumbling to myself like a madwoman. (I
am
a madwoman, couldn’t she tell?) My temperature was 105 but I don’t remember. All I really remember is the sense of existing in a bubble, neither gripping the world nor being gripped by it. Something had got away from me and I was watching it go, that was all. It wasn’t difficult. It was easy.

How she got me down the stairs and into her car I’ll never know. She’s not a big woman. I’m not sure of her age but my guess would be seventy. The nearest hospital is an hour away and I spent a week there, and then they sent me home with Corinne to recuperate. She lives alone in a house across the river because Leland died a few years ago and they never had children. She gave me my own room and I’m there now, my coughing filling the house. I’ve lost a lot of weight and she keeps making hearty soups and stews trying to fatten me up, but my appetite isn’t coming back. She went to the other house for some of my things, including this notebook, so here I am—awake, skinny, alive, writing these words and wondering what it would have been like to keep letting go. I wouldn’t be sorry, I think. I wouldn’t miss you then. But I owe a great deal to this woman I hardly know, and don’t want her to realize that now the fever’s gone and the weird
dreams have receded and I’m thrown back on my old self, I’m starting to feel desperate again. That I was saved but not born again. Medicine hasn’t figured that one out yet. It’s still me here, with the content of my character, such as it is, held up to the ruthless light: what I’ve done and not done, the choices I’ve made, inexplicable mistakes. I don’t think I’ve ever missed you as much as I do right now. Dip a hand in me and you’d bring it up holding your picture in a thousand pieces, all the minutes hours and days I was lucky enough to have with you, and I don’t know, I still don’t know, if that’s reason enough to keep holding on, or reason enough to let go.

February 10

Today Corinne drove me back to the little house. While I was staying with her she had someone come and fix the heating here (she says she blames herself for my getting sick), so now the three radiators are faintly warm to the touch instead of ice cold, and she’s given me one of her husband’s sweaters, which I’m wearing. It must be thirty years old but the wool’s still oily and pungent, as if the sheep it came from all those years ago were somehow still alive.

Tomorrow I’ll wake up and not hear Corinne puttering around her kitchen, talking to Gaston, her Belgian shepherd. She calls him her joyous shadow—ombre joyeuse—and that’s exactly what he is. While I was still drifting in and out that first week I’d hear her murmuring to him, and once in a low voice when she thought I was asleep she sang him a song about a hedgehog.

She has soft white hair cut short and beautiful hands. Lines at the corners of her mouth make her look uncertain and severe at the same time, though I don’t believe she’s either of those
things. Her eyes are bright and large and with her hands they do much of her talking.

Every so often I’d wake up and see her standing at the foot of the bed just watching me, and it would be like waking up into expectation, a space already cut to my size, and then I’d realize I’d been talking in my sleep. I’ve never asked what I said and she’s never volunteered it, but I think we’ve grown close so quickly in part because of my communicating like that, telling her the unconscious things that I’d forgotten myself or was afraid to believe in or maybe never really knew.

One time I woke and she was there, standing very close, looking at me with a peculiar intensity. “I was seeing your father,” she said. “I was seeing Louis.”

She told me then how she’d been twenty-five and waitressing in the auberge in Carennac when two good-looking “Américains” walked in for dinner one night and started paying court to her. It was Leland Conner who had the perfect French and genteel manners, but it was my father—handsome, witty, a “smiling pessimist”—she fell in love with. They began an affair. He was open about the fact that he had a job waiting for him back in Connecticut and was only visiting for a month, but after a few days the passion between them was so strong Corinne believed he would change his plans and stay. She was wrong. He went back to Connecticut, took his job, and later met my mother. Corinne nursed her hurt for a long while, and Leland offered consolation. He was patient, even reverent, and he was loyal. She made a decision to grow her heart toward a different sun, she said, and gradually that’s what happened. It was a decision, she said, and then it was her life.

I have the notebook in front of me now, the one filled with my father’s memories. He made a decision, too, all those years ago, and here’s what it says, all it says, about that:

Corinne—French, beautiful. Walked the causse w. her.
Married. Still think about.

Sometimes I imagine there’s a great rope circled around all of us like a noose. We don’t know who controls it, but when by an invisible hand it tightens, the circle grows smaller and we’re thrown in against one another—sometimes fatally, sometimes ecstatically, sometimes for life, with our arms open. But then when the rope loosens and the circle grows wider again, grows huge, the forces that have pressed us so closely together turn opposite. We fall back, fall a little way or a long way, depending maybe on how far we traveled in the first place, and when we come to our senses again we’re in the outer reaches of a much larger world and alone, like Ovid exiled to the edge of the Black Sea, hum-bled now by how small we are and how far we’ve fallen, hungering for the old crowded intimacy, and endlessly surprised by the love we’ve known.

The only good thing about your not being here is you can’t leave.

February 12

The sheep are sent out no matter the cold or rain. A man from the hamlet—husband of the woman who brought me the eggs, I think—tends them. I’ve glimpsed him through the window
in the distance, early morning or late afternoon, walking in the early darkness, conducting the animals with a long stick like a wand. They don’t know enough to run away. Where would they go, anyway? Doesn’t he have a son to help him? All the young people have left for the cities, or at least the towns. It’s six weeks since my arrival and I’ve never seen his face.

February 16

Rain four days straight, rain down the chimney and the fire hissing like a snake. Too much darkness coats everything with the same brush until there are no variations or discrepancies, and the spirit goes numb.

February 17

The pen isn’t mightier than the hand that holds it—there’s my little epigram for the week, good for me. See how my words are drying up, shriveling, growing weightless; any stiff breeze will scatter them, and that’ll be me they find out on the causse one day, hunting wild-haired for my lost words among the stones of the ruined walls.

March 9

Lost heart there for a little while. Forgive me. But here I am again, the hand steadies and grips, the pen moves.

Yesterday morning the sun shone. Corinne showed up unannounced in her pale blue deux chevaux and declared she was
taking me to town for market day. I didn’t want to go, but there was hardly any food in the house and I hadn’t seen another human being for almost a week and the sun was out and she wouldn’t leave until I agreed. So I ran a brush through my hair and changed sweaters—from heavy sheep to light sheep—and we went. An hour or two of sun had stripped the gauze off the valley, leaving blues and greens, the limestone luminous, the river rippling with light. We drove along in silence until Corinne announced that she’d been telephoning for a week, had I been away? I said no, the phone must have been broken. With a pointed look she said, But certainly it’s fixed now? And I said, Yes, it’s fixed. And then—I couldn’t quite believe myself—I smiled at her, I didn’t know where it came from, I couldn’t remember the last time I’d smiled. It just happened, and we drove on to town.

You remember the livestock farmers in their royal blue smocks and black berets and knee-high rubber boots gathered at one end of the square, over by the river, auctioning cattle and sheep. Behind them under the plane trees a couple of games of boules going on, and in the middle of the square the café with the dilapidated pinball machine and the teenagers half crazed with boredom, and the Produits du Quercy shop with the fancy tins of foie gras and bottles of eau de vie. Also—one performance only—a ground-floor apartment through whose open window I happened to spy a woman in a head scarf sweeping her living room while happily belting out, in heavily accented English, the theme song from
Titanic.