Claire Marvel Read online

  “Here we are,” she said, “on this beautiful afternoon.”

  A faint smile infused her face with the inward light of a dream. Then, raising her eyes to mine, she kissed me on the mouth. An explosion of heat—I shivered as though burned and half turned away to gather myself.

  “Julian Rose,” she murmured into my ear. “What are you thinking?”

  I turned back to face her. Ready, now; such terror, I was discovering, had very nearly the same effect as courage.

  This time the Fogg was open. Past the security desk (the portly middle-aged guard greeted Claire by name) we entered the roofed central courtyard of the museum: an Italian palazzo with monastic impulses, resplendent yet austere—dark mahogany benches, arched colonnades through which the galleries could be reached.

  I followed her across the courtyard, under a stone arch, and into a small, square gallery lined with nineteenth-century British pictures.

  She said, “He grew up in Birmingham. Never saw a great painting till he was a teenager. At Oxford he met William Morris. Then at twenty-six, on Ruskin’s dime, he took his first trip to Italy. He’d never imagined such beauty. When he finally saw it he stopped being afraid of failure in himself.”

  Before a large gold-and-sepia-toned watercolor she halted. A plaque at the bottom of the frame said, Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones—1863—Love Bringing Alcestis Back from the Grave.

  Two women in golden robes were arranged in close proximity—Alcestis on the right, head bent slightly, eyes glittering as though bejeweled, gaze angled toward the ethereal winged goddess who is leading her back from the underworld. Love’s wings were diaphanous, delicately outlined in blue. A shell like a blood-red scallop rested above her left breast. And though she faced ahead her gaze was visibly focused off to the side, away from Alcestis, into a middle distance.

  “Maybe Love is looking at the husband,” Claire speculated quietly. “Maybe he’s waiting there just offstage for his wife, who sacrificed her life for him. Missing her so much that he can hardly stand to wait another minute. We’ll never know. But that’s what I think.”

  She paused. As she’d been speaking her face, her whole body, had taken on a melancholy aspect that I had not seen in her before; her head was bowed and her shoulders slumped. A long minute of silence ensued. Then an echo of footsteps and voices reached us from the courtyard, pulling her out of her reverie, and with sudden intensity she continued.

  “Ruskin bought it and lectured on it at the Royal Institution in 1867. He described it as having a ‘classical tranquility and repose,’ and he was right. But that’s not why I fell in love with it. I fell in love with it because it’s beautiful and the husband’s not in it. He’s invisible, everywhere and nowhere. You feel his sadness and hope and waiting permeating the picture—the way love permeates things in real life. It’s sad and beautiful. The women are like two stories that have come together on a journey to tell a single story, and even though we think we know how it’s supposed to end, there’s a mystery in their differences that makes us wonder. I believe in that.”

  She was silent again. Not an echo penetrated the invisible walls that her words had built around our place in front of the canvas. And yet I was still hearing her voice. It was inexplicable. As if listening to her I had turned over a beautiful painting in the museum of my heart; and found on its reverse side, hidden from the world’s cold gaze by no more than a fragile deception, another painting, more original than the first, more mysterious, and far more beautiful, at least to me.

  six

  MY EYES OPENED. There was a taste like a spent dream in my mouth and a net of shadows on the ceiling. A street-lamp’s careless light spilled around the edges of the window blind.

  Questions. Where was I? Whose room? I lay as if dead. Until after a long moment’s drop into the void, a cupboard creaked open in my mind and the hours just passed with her came tumbling out—

  The arched footbridge between Dunster House and the Business School. Late afternoon. We stand at the center as a Boston Whaler passes underneath, casting the brown water of the Charles into shivering waves. The owners’ lily-white arms waving, fists holding cans of Miller Lite, Steely Dan on the boom box singing “My Old School,” raucous shouts and frat-boy challenges—I hold Claire’s hand as if to protect her from something, though I have no idea what. The boat skims away. Joggers and bicyclists on the riverbank path, rush-hour traffic on Memorial Drive. The sun by now huge, low, nearly gone. I am still holding her hand as we stroll beneath haloed streetlights far up Kirkland Street to her apartment. Even my own sense of credulity is strained by these events. Yet it continues, we aren’t finished here, she emerges from a closet-sized kitchen with glasses and bottle. “The good news about the champagne is it’s French,” she announces. “The bad news is it only cost six bucks.” Then, glasses charged, we sit together on the russet-colored flea-market sofa with the Balinese sarong draped over the back. She tells me that a great-aunt on her mother’s side was Danish and that as everybody knows the Danes are blessed with a gift for the art of toasting; a gift that has come down to her (the only thing of any worth, Claire insists in a calm yet bitter aside, that has passed through the maternal line of her family) in the form of this toast, now, between the two of us. Whereby, led by her murmured instructions, we raise our glasses and without ever breaking eye contact stare at each other over the rims saying, “Skoal, dear Julian”; “Skoal, dear Claire.” And that is the whole of it.

  And I can’t say why or how, but to me these stilted, formal phrases sound like ancient invocations; vows that must at all costs be kept. And every brilliant idea I’ve ever had has begun to fail me; one by one I watch them drop from my grasp until I am bereft, without recourse or plan. It feels like freedom. I lean forward and kiss her. The moment passes between us like a current. She tilts back, her face close, her fingers buried in my hair. Already her eyes have begun to lose focus. We kiss again—and now as she pulls away I see in the dim light of the room that her eyes are opaque pearls of brown and green and gold. And that sound in the air—whispered, urgent, permanent, in a voice familiar and strange—is her name, and I am calling it.

  She was looking at me, her head propped on her hand, her hair an aura, darkly luminous, around the shining depths of her eyes.

  “He wakes.”

  Her voice was hushed, dusky; it must have been three or four in the morning. The same sheet that partially covered me snaked around her legs, ending at her hip. A wash of stray light the color of antique brass glowed on the curve of her exposed skin.

  “Hello,” she murmured. “You look kind of stunned.”

  “I guess I’m not used to being watched while I sleep.”

  “By anyone?”

  “By you,” I said.

  Tipping her head forward, she kissed me. “Thank you for saying that. Are you feeling all right?”

  I reached out and brushed the hair from her face. “Better than all right.”

  She smiled, a match struck, vanquishing shadows. I sat back against the wall, the sheet slipping below my waist. I began to pull it up but she stayed my hand.

  “Wait. Don’t I get to look?”

  I lay back, trying not to think too much—a fantasy condensed into a moment that was also an eternity, her hand resting halfway up my left thigh. Seconds and minutes. Hours. Already thinking too much. How was it possible that this was still the same day? How was it conceivable that I was where I now found myself? Whose hand was this? Too many blessings. Enough to make a habitually wary and skeptical man afraid, this sudden altering, for no logical reason, of the accepted laws of the universe.

  “Okay,” she said lightly. “That was a treat.”

  I was silent. But I did not cover myself again with the sheet.

  Then it was my turn. She sat up and the sheet fell away. Her naked body, lithe yet full, absorbed the room’s shadowed refractions until she was burnished. The time passed too quickly.

  She reached down for the bottle of champagne on the flo
or. “There’s an inch left.”

  “I don’t need it,” I said.

  “There’s need and there’s want.” She poured the last of the champagne for herself and set the bottle down.

  “I can’t help it,” she continued. “My father taught me never to waste.”

  At the mention of her father her voice seemed to lose altitude.

  “Well, mine taught me never to be the first person to clap after a performance,” I said. Then I paused, staring at the shadows on the ceiling, caught in the undertow of an old, un-nameable sadness. “He has a problem with being noticed.”

  Pressing her hand against my cheek, Claire brought her lips to my ear and whispered, “It’s too late for you. You know that, don’t you? You’ve already been noticed.”

  seven

  IN THE MORNING SHE WAS GONE.

  My head was pounding from the champagne. The apartment was quiet. For the first time I observed her room. Around the tattered window shade daylight edged in, yellowed as though dirty; there was a poster in French of The 400 Blows; the sheet was in a tangled knot at the foot of the bed. I lay in a state of foggy rumination. Suddenly anxious, I raised myself onto my elbows—but my throbbing head was a painful distraction. I eased it back onto the pillow. It was Saturday, I seemed to recall. Soon I was asleep.

  When I woke next, the headache was less severe; the light in the room was more white than yellow; the air was hot.

  During the night, I remembered, she’d fallen asleep with her head on my chest; against my cheek her hair was a dream of softness, granted to me while awake. Her breathing slowed, then evened, as she dove into the depths of herself, taking me with her. A gift of some kind, I somehow understood. And yet I could feel myself resisting. Years of habit: even as a boy I’d been no good at receiving gifts, never seemed able, like my sister, to appreciate a gesture of pure feeling without subjecting it to some awkward form of scrutiny. Guilt and a convoluted practicality had been my watchwords. At eighteen, opening a birthday present from my mother—a leather-bound set of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire that had belonged to John F. Kennedy during his Harvard years—I thoughtlessly told her that she shouldn’t have done it, it was too expensive. To which my mother, her eyes black with hurt, replied bitterly that if that was how I felt she would take the books back. Which she did. I never saw that set of Gibbon again. Presumably it was resold, and so it became the quiet pleasure of somebody with a bigger heart than mine to run his hand over the same gilt-edged pages that the future president had fingered. In my past were other stories like this—in which, one step removed from the emotional truth of the moment, I had misread another person’s loving intentions. Perhaps had my own nature been as vivid to me as the historical figures in books, I might have gained some insight into my condition sooner. As it was, resting in Claire’s bed with her head on my chest, for once I felt convinced of the lifelong cowardice of my doubts. Here she was, hardly knowing me at all. Why should her reasons matter? Her trust—unfathomable to me—was to give herself to sleep in my arms. My trust was to remain awake, never losing sight of her, never wanting to.

  Slowly now I sat up in bed. A new day. I was myself again, and alone. To my night with Claire I had brought a host of ignorant suspicions about the relative accountability of the heart, both hers and mine—all of which returned now in force.

  I dressed, opened the bedroom door, and was hit in the face by a wall of daylight. My hands flew to my eyes to cut the glare.

  “You must be Julian,” said a husky voice. “I’m Kate Daniels. Claire’s roommate.”

  I blinked, fighting to see into the living room: a tall, muscular woman with Slavic cheekbones and clear blue eyes was sitting on the sofa, surrounded by sections of the Boston Globe. Her short blond hair had a greenish tint. She wore denim shorts and a V-neck T-shirt and her feet were bare.

  “It’s almost noon. I was starting to worry you might be dead. Want some coffee? There’s a pot in the kitchen.”

  “No thanks.”

  “Claire’s gone. She left a note. She was sorry.”

  “What happened?”

  “A message from Alan. Her father’s had some bad news. She had to get to Stamford right away.”

  I was silent. And perhaps it was my expression but Kate’s attitude toward me softened visibly. Pity, followed by an almost imperceptible sigh. As if she’d just realized that I wasn’t the usual overnight guest, no Lothario, just a tourist who without guidebook or common sense had stumbled blindly into the wrong country and now must be handled with diplomatic compassion.

  “Alan’s her brother,” she explained patiently. “Twenty-eight, five years older than Claire, lives in San Francisco. Stamford’s where they’re from. Her father owns a car dealership there.”

  “Did her note say anything about when she might be back?”

  Kate shook her head.

  “Could you give me a phone number there, Kate? I’d really appreciate it.”

  “Sorry.” This wasn’t the same thing as saying she didn’t have it, I was meant to understand.

  I looked away. Through a half-open door a glimpse into the second bedroom: a crimson-and-black gym bag sitting atop a trimly made double bed. Kate’s room. I knew nothing about this place or the people who lived in it.

  “I’m going to get my things,” I said.

  I retreated into Claire’s room, shutting the door after me. Silence once more. My head was throbbing again and a nausea that might have been no more than regret was eddying around my gut. I sat down on the bed. On the floor at my feet were tokens of our night together: the black knot of her panties; her velvet hair ribbon; the empty bottle of champagne.

  I found my shoes and put them on, careful how I moved.

  When I came out again Kate was standing just beyond the bedroom door.

  “You seem like a nice guy, so I’ll level with you. Her dad’s just been diagnosed with lung cancer. They’re really close and she’s going to be devastated. You should know that heading in.”

  I brushed past her. “Thanks for everything.”

  “I’m not finished,” Kate said. “She’s my best friend. I adore her. But I still don’t have a fucking clue what she’s going to do from one day to the next. That’s how she is. I just wouldn’t want you to have any illusions about how it’s all going to turn out. For your own sake.”

  I turned and looked at her. “I appreciate the concern. But I wouldn’t worry about my having illusions.”

  eight

  SO IT BEGAN. Life without her. A week without word from her became two. Then three. Exams cast a general hush over the college, followed by commencement and reunions; a conflagration of human noise and heat. Then silence once more over the campus and the Square, the flames of euphoria fading quickly into exhaustion and a swampy nostalgia. The undergrads went home.

  When I had tried to reach Claire through a Connecticut operator I was told that the Stamford number for Marvel was unlisted and by law could not be given out; she was sorry. Not as sorry as I was, I told her.

  Imagine being offered a rare delicacy the like of which you believe you’ll never have the opportunity to taste again. Wouldn’t such a condition overcharge the senses, warp the stakes of feeling? Force you to taste with an unhealthy, perhaps crippling expectation of fulfillment? Wouldn’t, afterward, memory be called forth with a distorted sense of urgency?

  To remember the taste. To never forget. To know the taste with a certainty that could never be taken from you.

  In which case, if you were someone like me, you might berate yourself for having foolishly, hungrily desired the taste in the first place. You might, in the days and weeks following your first and only night with a woman named Claire Marvel—days and weeks during which the phone doesn’t ring and the mail delivers nothing but the usual crap and the ache around your heart that originally felt like a premonition is gradually solidifying into a steel-lined bomb shelter—you might just conclude that you’d made a terrible mistake. Might grow desper
ately angry. Might try to forget, get back to square one, to the impossible zero (discounting, of course, Zeno’s Paradox), where for more than twenty-five years you’d been living peacefully, if not always happily, in studied oblivion of any tastes whatsoever.

  Before her.

  I threw myself into my work.

  My undergraduate teaching was finished for the year; all my attention turned to Professor Davis’ work in progress. Three hundred and seventy-five pages of undeniably lucid conservative ideology hammered out in a prose notable for its frequent use of the first-person singular, as well as its unshakable confidence in its own historical significance.

  I read it twice. On the first pass I wrote my comments on a legal pad accompanied by corresponding page numbers and bibliographical references. On the second I winnowed my queries down to ten and transferred them to yellow Post-it notes which I inserted into the manuscript. As I saw it at the time, my job was to appear politically savvy and intellectually scrupulous in Davis’ eyes without causing him either to doubt my loyalty or to balk at what he might perceive as impertinence. It seemed to me that a few critical notes would be more palatable to him than dozens. So, as agreed upon, I crafted my brief observations in such a way as to almost entirely suppress any evidence of my own feelings about the subject at hand.

  My work was well received.

  Summer. Clear, hot days, everyone down by the river—rowers and lovers, pedants and geriatrics, mothers with babies. Animals to the water hole and the whole human parade.

  In the long, slowly cooling evenings I sat with my landlady, Mary Watson, in the front garden of her rambling Brattle Street house. My apartment was on the second floor, with its own entrance. Occasionally Mary and I would pass an hour or so together at the end of the day, reading in companionable silence as her obese Blue Persian waddled mewling at our feet on a leash.