Claire Marvel

by John Burnham Schwartz

  “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?

  Two weeks later she left a message on my machine saying to meet her at the café.

  When I arrived she was already there. We hugged longer than was usual for us; she seemed reluctant to let me go. Her face was thinner, her eyes large and bright. Once we sat down her hands would not stop fidgeting with a manila envelope that lay on the table.

  “How is he?” I said.

  She shook her head.

  Deep in our separate thoughts we sat watching her fingers tapping the envelope.

  Finally I said, “You should have let me come down and be with you.”

  “I don’t want you to see him like this.” Suddenly she looked up. “I told him about you.”

  I was pleased, but didn’t know what to say.

  “Julian, will you do something for me?”

  I told her I would.

  Opening the clasp, she emptied the contents of the envelope onto the table.

  I was staring at two plane tickets, round-trip between Boston and Paris.

  Claire said, “A long time ago, before he was married, my father spent time in a house in France that belonged to family friends. He’s been telling me about it. His memory’s driving him now. He says that time in France was the happiest of his life and he wants me to go back there for him, while he’s still around to hear about it.”

  She reached across the table for my hand and held it tightly in both of hers.

  “Julian, please come with me.”

  thirteen

  WE FLEW INTO CHARLES DE GAULLE at eight in the morning, eyes bloodshot and heads heavy from the wine served free on the flight. It was the middle of April. There had been rain in Boston when we’d left, but over Paris now the sky was clear, cool as an underground spring.

  Her father had arranged our trip with the scrupulousness of a man who knows this to be his final production. A road map and a two-door Peugeot awaited us at the car rental agency. In Claire’s pocket were keys and handwritten directions to the house in the central south of the country where Lou Marvel had stayed once, for a month, in his early twenties; and the name of his old friend, Leland Conner, to whom the property had since passed. Conner and his French wife would be out of the country, we were told, but nonetheless had offered us their house while they were gone. We planned to stay two weeks.

  This was my first time in France but Claire had been twice before—Paris, Nice, Aix-en-Provence. The region we were heading for was the Quercy; the department was the Lot, pronounced with a hard t.

  By request Claire drove first, which put me in the passenger seat with the map. With some confusion I managed to navigate us around the Périphérique de Paris (a hangman’s noose of traffic) and onto the autoroute, south toward Orléans.

  Then full speed ahead. Claire was a fearless driver, working the clutch in quick bursts, punching between smoke-belching camions and testosterone speedsters. Our car hummed like a bee.

  The metropolis fell back as the big open fields of the north reclaimed the land on either side of the autoroute: vast tracts of green, enormous fields of mustard like planes of sunlight. Looking out at the swaths of vibrant yellow, Claire said she was reminded of how Matisse, like van Gogh before him, was born in French Flanders, near the Belgian border—beet fields and smokestacks, the old forests leveled by factories, the Prussians marching across the flats, the cold and damp. A hard, dour northern light of muted pigments and even more muted hearts. And then how both painters in different ways had spent the rest of their lives moving ever southward, toward the sun and a brighter, more expressive palette unfettered by bourgeois convention. Matisse’s father was a seed merchant. There were no artists in his family nor in the town of Bohain-en-Vermandois; no model for the son’s imagination. When Matisse returned home thirty years after leaving, his old neighbors still spoke of him as a failed law clerk.

  Claire fell silent.

  She was wearing yesterday’s clothes—father’s old sweater, jeans, hiking boots. Perhaps it was the light that made her eyes shine so—as if some autonomous and morbid vision were alive within her. Seen from the side, she appeared on the brink of tears, the nascent lines at the corners of her eyes like faint hieroglyphs of sorrow or penitence.

  We reached Orléans by noon. In the old part of town, where Joan of Arc was martyred and all was made of stone, we found the Café des Pierres, still looking as Claire’s father had remembered it: a dark, timeless room on a cobbled side street, filled with bundles of wood, a crackling fire, and the smell of grilled fish. A lunch of trout and white wine, tarte Tatin and coffee. At the end of the meal the old couple who owned the place stopped by our table. Claire spoke French to them. I could understand only half of what was said, yet even with my high school vocabulary I sensed her gift for the language. She used it with secret joy, managing to imply both confidence and a polite deference. She gave each word its own, new light.

  Then it was my turn to drive, and our car hurtled back onto the autoroute. To either side the fields stretched out, brown and green and yellow. The odd château spied like a private realm in the distance. The ceaseless, cumulative roar of engines and the billboards of cartoon ugliness. In places the autoroute paralleled the high-speed train tracks; when a train went shooting by with a vacuumed whoosh, all the cars on the road seemed to be standing still.

  And then Claire, folding her coat into a pillow, curled up against the door. From the corner of my eye I watched her drift off to sleep. She grew still, her legs tucked underneath her, her hip inches from my hand.

  Two hours passed. I was tired yet very much awake, driving to the rhythm of her breathing, seeing France out of every window as she might have seen it. The open farmland of the Loire was giving way to the hill country of the Limousin and Périgord. Here were geologic boundaries wh
ere earlier there had been only the man-made divisions of agriculture and industry. Red-tiled roofs were beginning to appear in pockets of land that refused to lie flat.

  At Brive-la-Gaillarde, as we left the autoroute and turned southeast, she woke with a start.

  “Where are we?”

  “No idea, really.”

  She smiled drowsily, picked up the map, gave it a cursory glance, shrugged, and dropped it at her feet. As a general rule she ignored all maps and instruction manuals, considering them the propaganda of the confused. Arching her back against the seat, she stretched. Then she rolled down her window a few inches, sniffing the air.

  “We’re getting close. I can smell it.”

  I lowered my window too. The afternoon was clear and cool. The road was a country road, narrow and winding. It curved and dipped through sparse-wooded hills with fields arrayed down their sloping backs. Pastures were framed by limestone walls. There were few shadows on this land. Those that existed appeared ancient and fixed, birthmarks of creation. In the shaded hollows flocks of Roman-nosed sheep huddled together, and on the steepest slopes grapevines hung from their crosses like crucified children. There were plum orchards and solitary walnut trees growing in fields of raked bare earth with ragged lines of crows sitting on the gnarled black limbs and discreet herds of cows waiting in mud for their deliverance. The air smelled of all of it.

  Claire said, “Now I know why the French call this region ‘la France profonde.’ ”

  As she spoke we were descending into a valley. A narrow gray-blue river appeared on our left. The road ran alongside it and soon we began seeing occasional white signs written with unpronounceable names—not towns, we saw, not even villages, but hamlets consisting of a few houses, stone walls, a yellow postbox, a donkey or two; and the belled sounds of the animals.

  In time the river ran through the center of a market town. Here Claire suggested we buy food. I pulled to a stop on a main square girded by medieval houses darkly striped with creosoted timbers. We got out and stretched. It was late afternoon; the outdoor market was long closed. A few red-faced old men in blue work clothes stood chatting under a plane tree. They stared at us, then resumed their conversation. Otherwise the square was empty.

  But shops were open. In a food market that might have been someone’s parlor we bought fresh eggs, tomatoes, onions, lettuce, cornichons, pâté, strawberry preserves, butter, milk. Then we found the baker, wine merchant, cheese shop—where Claire asked the old woman for cabécou, white disks of the local goat cheese. The word itself sounded freshly made on her tongue.

  We loaded our provisions into the car, and set off on the final leg of our journey. The river flowed out of the other side of the town. Across it the early-spring sunshine lay thin and slanting. And the spindly poplars that grew alongside the banks could be seen too on the water’s mirrored surface, round leaves turning like coins. Following her father’s directions, we drove over a primitive bridge and turned left, then right, onto a road that wound its way up a mountain. The ascent was slow, circuitous, beautiful. The wide valley was splayed out behind us, first one angle, then another. High on a plateau the climb ended. We turned right again and proceeded slowly down a single-lane road flecked with sheep droppings, between lichen-covered walls and compact fields.

  A plain white sign. A hamlet of six old houses. And at the back, standing apart behind a low wall, two structures made of stone: a barn in the shape of an ancient granary, built up the slope, with a tiled roof like an oversized hat; and a simple two-story house with a steeply pitched roof and blue shutters. Beyond the buildings there was a raked field of walnut trees. Then, gradually descending all the way to the valley floor, there were more fields and walls, and the distant, dreamlike, gray-blue gleam of the river.

  fourteen

  THE INDELIBLE MOMENT OF ARRIVAL. Stepping through the doorway with Claire as if it was ours. The ancient house. Dust in the air, cold in the stones, cobwebs shivering at the tops of windows, scars and slants of furniture, the warping of the floor beneath its covering of worn straw matting.

  Claire stood in the center of the open room, her eyes radiant, turning from one object to another with rapture on her face.

  The hearth was tall and wide. A cast-iron bucket a yard deep held moss-covered logs of plum and walnut. The mantel was set high as a man’s head, burled and not quite level. Claire ran a hand over it, searching yet absent, as if looking for something whose shape she couldn’t remember. Then she turned and stared out through the glass panes of a back door to a small terrace—perhaps imagining the delicious meals we’d eat out there, if the weather was warm enough. Though the weather wouldn’t matter; we were here, had traveled all this way together, had left everyone else behind.

  She did not seem to notice the thick coating of dust that her fingers had picked up from the mantel, how nothing in the house was clean. She stood in the light that came in from the valley. And when she turned and asked me how I felt, I could smile and declare honestly that I was happy too.

  Then up the creaking, ladderlike stairs to stand with our bags on the landing between the two bedrooms and the bathroom. An unavoidable moment—the bigger of the rooms contained a double bed while the smaller held a narrow single. Yet we hadn’t envisioned this possibility or discussed it and we paused now, too awkward to catch each other’s eye.

  I stood debating with myself. Exhaustion, the long journey, a too-familiar cloud of romantic uncertainty—all this made me numb. Should I step forward or hold back? To set myself up for rejection now could mean the end of something. On the other hand, if I refrained from forcing the issue, perhaps she might feel compelled to reach out.

  “I’ll take the single,” I said.

  “You’re sure?”

  The question was too quick. I’d made it too easy. Disappointment brought the full weight of my exhaustion down on me and I turned away. Lifting my suitcase, I stepped into the room with the single bed.

  There, standing with head ducked under the eaves, I heard her drop her bags in the other room. Heard her as she opened the tall windows that looked out over the valley. Heard through the thin wall that now divided us, the complex silence of her listening.

  We’d agreed in advance that neither of us knew how to cook. Nevertheless I made an omelette for our first dinner—plain, empty as a fist, in the inelegant shape of something dropped on the floor—and we ate it at the lopsided kitchen table with slices of the thick-crusted local bread and half a bottle of a rough Cahors.

  The kitchen was large and drafty. Nothing about it was remotely modern. The floor tiles were scuffed and pockmarked. From one corner of the ceiling curled a strip of flypaper still dotted with the wizened corpses of bygone summers. The dishes were chipped, webbed with hairline cracks. The refrigerator was half-sized and slope-shouldered. The gas stove had the sturdy rounded presence of an old pickup truck.

  At the end of the meal, raising her glass, Claire awarded me two “Marvel” stars for my effort. She held out the promise of a third. I bowed, looking up at her through the flame of a candle stub, and in a phony French accent gave her my Hippocratic culinary oath: First do no harm. She laughed. Her face flickered and shone, her cheeks were red. We’d kept our heavy sweaters on against the chill.

  After dinner she was the first to go upstairs. I remained by the fire, poking the gnarled, slow-burning logs with a stick. Soon I heard her running a bath, the old pipes filling the house with their crotchety deliberations. I thought about the meal we’d just eaten and how afterward—contented, exhausted, quiet—we’d stood together at the stained white sink and washed the dishes. There were all the mundane aspects of her life about which I realized I knew little—how she put on lipstick, rode a bicycle, took a bath, opened a present, folded a shirt—and which appeared suddenly illumined now that we were here alone, living together: a series of prosaic firsts that felt like love letters and that I wanted to catalogue for myself as though they belonged to me.

  The pipes fell quiet. I o
pened the back door and stepped out onto the terrace. The night was cold and clear, every star in it bright enough, bold enough, it seemed, to be a planet.

  She would be getting into her bath.

  Not a sound could be heard, not a voice. Washed by the Milky Way, the walnut trees were the black of shadows.

  I climbed the stairs to the landing. The bathroom door was ajar an inch, steam suffused with artificial light swirling lethargically out through the gap. Unable to stop myself, I put an eye to the opening, and saw through the pearled air a corner of the tub, and her bare wet foot resting there.

  “Julian?”

  Startled, I jumped back—before catching her tone, a sleepy, heat-drugged murmur, minimally amplified by the bath in which she lay. Her luxurious calm reached me, and I relaxed. And the sound of the water too, a sinuous, glassy ripple as she moved.

  “Looks like an opium den in there.”

  “Mmm. This may just be the best bath I’ve ever had in my life.”

  I remained on the landing, staring at the inch of her bare foot. Then the foot disappeared. I heard her lean forward. The tap came on, trickle of water into water. After a minute there was a long sigh of contentment, and the tap was shut off.

  From out on the landing I said good night.

  “You’re not going to sleep?”

  “I’m exhausted.”

  “Stay and talk.”

  I was silent, waiting.

  “Please,” she said.

  I sat down on the landing, my back against the outer wall of my room, unable now to see any part of her. The floor was cold. The house was still. There were just her occasional liquid movements coming through the door like a private language.

  I tried simply to be. To listen to the sounds of her. To find contentment. Instead, inexorably, I began to think about the single bed in the darkened room behind me and the pair of light blue cotton pajamas that earlier I’d folded and placed neatly on the pillow.