Claire Marvel (8 page)

twelve

I
GIVE NOW THIS MAP OF OUR DAYS
.

Afternoons at the café. Short days growing shorter. Through street-level windows boots seen tramping soundlessly in powdery snow. Inside, smoky warmth and the illusion that this place had been built just for us.

Today I sat buried in Davis’ manuscript, which seemed to be growing as exponentially as our great nation’s budget deficit. The man was a writing machine. This left me little time to work on my dissertation. It was December and I was still wrestling with the introduction, trying to winnow down the scope. Davis, fount of industry that he was, had time only to advise me to “pick your locus, Julian, and stick with it.”

Pick my locus … ? In my dictionary a locus was most interestingly defined as “a center of intense concentration”; also, in mathematical terms, as “the configuration of all points whose coordinates satisfy a single equation.”

I looked up. Claire was studying a painting by Dante Gabriel Rossetti in an illustrated monograph on the Pre-Raphaelite artists. Our table cluttered with empty cups and gritty with cookie crumbs. She was bundled in a heavy sweater red as a fire truck, and a beige muffler wrapped around her throat. Her elbows rested on either side of the book, an index finger tapping at the corner of her mouth. And so my locus was picked, as it were, and I had no choice but to stick with it.

One afternoon Davis strode into the café. It was the sort of coincidence that makes even the biggest skeptic a believer—Claire and I had just been talking about him. She’d asked what sort of mentor Davis was turning out to be, and I’d replied that he was prolific, productive, ambitious, occasionally brusque; but also fair and sincere in his wish for me to get ahead. He was a better person than he liked to make out, I said. And here he was in the doorway, peering through the smoke, head nearly touching the ceiling, wearing a navy cashmere overcoat and black leather gloves and carrying a black leather briefcase.

He navigated the cramped room to our table.

“Been calling you all day, Julian. Now I know why. Hello, Miss Marvel. Pleasure to see you again.”

“We were just talking about you, Professor Davis.”

“Were you.”

“According to Julian, you have a big heart. All that toughness is just for show.”

“Is that right? Then clearly, I’m not working him hard enough.”

“Not true!” I said.

Everybody smiled.

Opening his briefcase, Davis produced a sheaf of typed pages.

“I talked to the folks at Random House this morning, Julian. They couldn’t be happier with what they’ve seen so far.” He handed me the pages, then put his hand on my shoulder. “I told my editor about you. A man named Fox. I said you were top material. He intends to keep his eye out for your work.”

“He may need both eyes,” I said. “There’s not much to see.”

“That will change.” With a quick smile he glanced at Claire. “So you’re the one who’s keeping him from his work?”

“I don’t suppose you ever get writer’s block,” she said, returning his smile.

Davis laughed. “Not me.”

Then he turned and left us.

Evenings at the Brattle Theater: retrospectives of Cassavetes, Kurosawa, Hitchcock, Buñuel. I was no connoisseur. My job was to buy the popcorn while Claire staked out the seats. Side aisles she preferred, life at an angle. Though once settled she liked to sit high, her coat folded under her, like a queen or a bus driver. And silent—her fiercest condemnation was reserved for people who talked during the film.

Afterward, we’d have drinks at Casablanca, sitting side by
side in a wicker cabana chair. Our interpretations of the film just watched were almost always different. She stared at a movie screen much as she did paintings in the Fogg, utterly absorbed by color and line. Dialogue, sound, music—nothing aural could compete with the images, if they were original and beautiful enough. Her expression then belonged not to an art historian but to an artist; a traveler who through circuitous wandering has stumbled upon an uncharted place beyond explanation.

This, of course, was not my way. I believed in the existence of empirical truth. It was hard for me to bump up against anything without immediately supplying or reaching for a definition.

One night after watching
The Birds,
I told her how I’d been struck by Hitchcock’s deft narrative construction. But Claire, though she’d grasped the plot clearly enough, wasn’t interested in its twists and turns. What had mesmerized her was the visual patterning of the birds themselves, black against gray sky, as they swarmed—a stroke of genius all the more notable, she insisted, for being beyond the artist’s initial conception or control. Another evening, after
Ran,
she emerged so moved by the extended dream of images, the battle scenes like long ribbons of color melding one into the other, that she appeared visibly altered: her eyes dimmed as though from sensory exhaustion, her lips imperceptibly stung.

Mary’s living room, with fireplace roaring, was the best-heated part of the drafty old house. By invitation, this became our library.
The Widener Reading Room was soon a distant necessity, for there was no fire there and no Gus to offer glasses of mulled wine when the afternoons turned dark. Besides, the older couple seemed to enjoy having us around. In Claire, Mary discovered a young woman who had been to, or at least read about, most of the great museums; who unlike myself knew what chiaroscuro really meant. (“The arrangement of light and dark elements in a pictorial work of art,” said my dictionary. “Also called
clair-obscure.”)
And Gus meanwhile found a new and appreciative set of ears into which he might murmur, with occasional inventive flourishes, some of the Top 40 tales from his book of wonders. Between January and March he played for her benefit every Dave Brubeck album in his huge collection of LPs. And in that warm, gold-lit room, Claire sat and listened. With older people, I was learning, she could be disarmingly courteous, even humble; could pay the sort of attention that made them feel invigorated about the time remaining.

“Julian,” said Mary one day as we stood waiting for the kettle to boil, “she is a lovely, unusual young woman.”

“Yes, Mary, she is.”

“Do you have intentions?”

“Intentions?” I almost smiled. The kettle began to sing and Mary turned off the burner. “Yes,” I said. “I have intentions.”

“Then I wouldn’t wait. That’s my advice, for what it’s worth.”

“It’s worth a lot, Mary. Only it’s not quite as simple as that.”

“It never is,” said Mary.

In March Claire drove down to Stamford for one of her weekend visits, but this time didn’t return. There was no word from her until a letter arrived in my mailbox on the following Thursday:

Sunday

They say it’s in his liver now. Other places, too. That’s what they say. We’ve moved a hospital bed down to the living room. A hired nurse will come six days a week. Josette, from Martinique. Daddy lies there, half his old weight. The look on his face says he knows the joke’s on him. Other times he’s in too much pain to look like anything I recognize. I love him so much I’d kill him if he asked.

Tuesday

My mother took to her bed today, complaining of “symptoms.” She is a diva with a head cold, the kind who can’t be counted on to show up. The kind who can’t stand attention being directed at anybody else—even at her husband, who is dying. I won’t forgive her.

There’s a Burne-Jones you’ve never seen. A portrait of his wife. He never exhibited it during his lifetime, supposedly wasn’t satisfied with it. Though I think he was wrong. Her moral courage and her fierceness in love are there. Her eyes are the most exquisite gray. Their children are in the background, the son painting at an easel, like his father. In the foreground Georgie holds a book of herbals, open to the page for pansy, with a real pansy there like a bookmark. The other name for pansy was heartsease; it symbolized undying love. This was the flower she later put on his grave. Heartsease. My mother has no right to behave like this. She has never put his heart at ease. She’s done nothing all their lives together but make him heartsick and uncertain, and he has stood it and stood it and stood it. Well, he won’t have to stand it much longer. Then who will she blame?