Claire Marvel

by John Burnham Schwartz

  An image of my father long ago, dressed in pajamas and robe, came to me unbidden:

  He bends down at the front door of the apartment. When he rises, he’s holding a copy of the Times. That’s all. He is perhaps forty. His loosely worn slippers make a shuffling sound as he walks, already murmuring aloud the day’s news—Vietnam, the Black Panthers, the Six-Day War—back along the hallway to the kitchen.

  It is always the same; only the news changes.

  And I wanted to get up now and take my carefully folded pajamas and tear them to shreds. But there was a cold draft on the landing and all through the house, everywhere but where she was. So I stayed, on the wrong side of the almost-closed bathroom door, and brought my knees up and hugged them, and watched the steam curl out through the gap and disappear above my head.

  “Julian?”

  “What?”

  “What are you thinking about?”

  The sound of her moving in the water, and then the tap coming on again. I rubbed my hands over my face. My exhaustion was like a weight pressing me down. Through the doorway at the other end of the landing I could see into her room: a suitcase on the floor, clothes already flung about, a homemade lamp on a table, the bulb shining over the double bed.

  “Pajamas,” I said.

  “What about them?”

  Her tone was serious and true. I leaned my head back against the wall.

  “They remind me of my father.”

  She said nothing. The tap continued to run, a thin trickle, and my face began to burn with shame.

  “There’s a poem by Rilke,” she said. “ ‘Archaic Torso of Apollo.’ Do you know it?”

  “No.”

  “I think it would mean something to you.”

  “What’s it about?”

  “About?” The impatient, watery flutter of her hand in the bath. “Well, on the surface you could say it’s a poem about a Greek statue. But that doesn’t tell you anything.”

  She leaned forward. I still couldn’t see her. The tap continued to run, and around her body I imagined the water rippling in circles of light. More than anything, I wished I could see her.

  “It begins with the poet speaking to the statue, to the god alive in the art, inside the white marble,” she continued, the energy growing in her voice as she spoke. “He calls it ‘you,’ describes it to itself. And we’re so sure we know who he’s talking to, who the ‘you’ in the poem is. We’re reading along and saying to ourselves ‘How beautiful, how true,’ feeling all safe and wise and poetic. Then suddenly, in the last line, he blows it all to pieces. He says, You must change your life. And now we understand that he’s not talking to the god in the marble any longer, or to Art, but from them, straight into our souls. I was eighteen. I’d never read anything more urgent in my life. It was like being grabbed by the throat and shaken.”

  Her story finished, she turned off the tap, lay back heavily as if she’d just realized how tired she was. Now the house was as quiet as if it had been empty.

  And in that quiet, out on the landing, my frustration began to grow.

  “And have you, Claire?”

  “Have I what?”

  “Changed your life.”

  She exhaled in annoyance. “Life isn’t a switch you turn on and off, Julian. Love isn’t.”

  “Who’s talking about love?”

  She was silent.

  “I said who’s talking about love, Claire?”

  “I am.” Suddenly her voice was small, hardly recognizable.

  “Well, I am too.”

  Through the door came a new silence, more potent than speech.

  I sat thinking. How it was she who’d mentioned love first. How she seemed to be waiting, the door still between us, for me to act. And I imagined that if I reached for her I would find her where she lay waiting in the water, and my fingers would glide over her bare wet skin until every inch of her, every crook and hollow, would become mine. I would vouch for her with my life.

  But the silence wasn’t long enough. While I sat dreaming, Claire pulled the plug.

  She rose, I heard the water sliding off her in sheets. Her naked arm flashed across the gap in the door, then back again, trailing a cotton robe. When the door opened fully she was dressed in the robe, the belt loosely tied, holding her long water-dark hair in her hand.

  I got to my feet. My body was stiff from sitting so long on the cold floor, and I cleared my throat self-consciously—like a man who, after years of silence, intends to start singing again.

  In the end, though, all I said was good night.

  fifteen

  I WOKE LATE THE NEXT MORNING, alone in the narrow cot beneath the pitched roof, and looked out the square window at the tongue of mist covering the valley floor.

  Downstairs, the open room smelled of woodsmoke. Morning light broke through the east-facing windows in long, slanting shafts. Airy cobwebs like the ghosts of old ladies trembled at the tops of the tall windows, and the yellowed newspapers used for insulation during the winters were visible at the tattered edges of the straw floor matting.

  Through the open doorway I saw Claire at the kitchen table, reading a paperback. A bowl of coffee steamed in front of her. Her hair was tied loosely back and her face held pale light from the window. She smiled as I entered the room. “Good morning.”

  I asked what she was reading.

  She held up the book—La Cousine Bette. “About an old spinster who sabotages her niece’s one chance at true love,” she replied with a touch of irony. “Balzac in his romantic mode. Nice way to start off the day. Sit, and I’ll make you breakfast.”

  Putting the book aside, she stood up and moved to the stove. Shirttails stuck out from beneath her red sweater and her hiking boots were streaked with fresh mud.

  “Looks like you’ve already been out,” I said, sitting down at the table.

  “I have, and it’s beautiful. Around here it’s still the sixteenth century.” She lit a match, turned on the gas; a low flame appeared under a saucepan of milk. “How’d you sleep?”

  “Not bad.”

  There was a pause.

  “I had a strange dream,” I added.

  “What sort of dream?”

  When I hesitated she turned around and looked at me expectantly.

  We were bundled in furs on a dogsled being pulled across a snow-covered tundra, I told her. She and I. We came to the coast. Not an arctic coast; more like Cape Cod. Sitting on the beach was a raft made out of planks and old tires. She wanted to take it, but I worried about our chances. She persuaded me. Soon we’d shed our furs and dragged the raft down to the water. The waves nearly swamped us. But we made it. Time passed. We were becalmed in the middle of the ocean. Not a ripple or wave or boat. Then a moment when I called her name and as she turned toward me she slipped and tumbled off the raft, disappearing beneath the water. She didn’t surface. There was nothing. Many times I called her name. Then, in seconds that were like years, I began to grieve. My grief filled the dream until it was everything—until another moment when I turned my head and she was simply there again, alive in the water, waving to me. Mute, stunned with happiness and relief, I steered the raft over to her. I was reaching down to pull her to safety when I woke up.

  There, I said. My dream.

  Claire turned away. She switched off the burner under the saucepan. Into a small bowl she poured the hot milk and black coffee from a hexagonal metal pot. Steam rose. She added two lumps of sugar, stirred, then passed me the bowl without a word. I had no idea what she was thinking. Was she offended? All I had told was the truth. I studied her back as she cut an inch-thick slice of bread. The saw-toothed knife cracked through the crust as if it were wood and crumbs flew halfway across the room. She slathered the bread with butter and strawberry preserves and served it to me on a plate.

  Only then did she look at me. A long look, hinting at an intimate smile. And I believed she understood my dream; that she’d been listening.

  She leaned back against the stove
to watch me eat.

  I took a bite. The thick crust gave the bread a chewy heft while the preserves made it sweet and comforting. The coffee had a dense, sobering consistency leavened by the sugar and frothy milk. I held the bowl in both hands and sipped slowly, my eyes closed, relishing the warmth running down through me, savoring the earthy sweetness.

  “I like the way you close your eyes when you taste things,” she said.

  I opened my eyes. She had moved and was standing with her back to the window.

  Behind her daylight flooded in; the mist over the valley was gone. In the backdropped glare the subtleties of her expression were lost to me. With the bowl held before her in both hands, her face and body in silhouette, she might have been a saint painted on the wall of a village church to encourage the supplication of the devout. But the warmth of her gaze I could feel. And this perceptible difference in her today: how she looked at me without hurry, with tenderness and care.

  “Everything tastes wonderful here,” I said.

  She smiled. “Our secret.”

  I got to my feet. My heart was stumbling over itself and my mouth was dry. The house seemed to be waiting for me to declare something more than a dream.

  “Claire …”

  But I never finished. Coward. I saw that her eyes had dropped to the floor—as if she knew what I wanted to say and was embarrassed for me.

  “Nothing. Thanks for breakfast.”

  I walked out of the room and kept going until I was outside. I tried just to breathe. To find in each breath the end of the long winter and the beginning of spring—the day just begun; the sun blocked by the house; the dew gleaming on blades of grass in the dank shade; the mushrooms as white and round as marbles; the ground holes made by snakes.

  To the left of the door there was a stone bench—a slab of rock smoothed and hollowed by millennia of hard weather. Seeing it, I heard Claire’s voice in my head: la France profonde. Ancient France, true France, she’d said, earthy France, feminine and wise at heart, its spirit that of a woman so real that she has become immortal and cannot be changed by the vagaries of time.

  And here, now, this bench—solid, archaic, inexplicable. Above it, climbing the house, a swath of early roses. Pale pink flowers not yet opened, petals packed tight, all desire tamped down, waiting and hoping to be born.

  I heard a sound. I walked up to the gate and opened it and stepped out onto the road. From the left, about half a kilometer away, a blue truck was approaching. I watched it come. Almost an event, in a place like this. It moved slowly, puttering. I tried to remember the feeling I’d had waking just an hour before—the assured sense that simply being with her could be enough; the discipline to stop myself from wanting more. Because it was the endless wanting that would break you, I thought. The constant craving for a love that might never be fulfilled that would bring you low, bit by bit, until one day you’d no longer be able to recognize any part of yourself.

  The truck had three wheels rather than four; it looked like the runtish offspring of a small pickup and a tricycle. The man driving it was somewhere between seventy and a hundred. He wore blue coveralls and a cloth cap. He did not so much as blink as he went by.

  At lunch we were fine again, full of laughter. Claire teasingly recounted an adventure she’d had that morning, before I’d woken up.

  “I found a dead rat.”

  “A rat?”

  “In the kitchen. Right here on the floor. Dead. There must’ve been some poison around. Rigor mortis had set in. The poor disgusting thing. It died with this horrible rictus grin on its mouth, showing its sharp little teeth. I took a handful of paper towels and picked it up by the tail and took it out to the terrace.”

  “The terrace?”

  “Why not? Rats are biodegradable, aren’t they?” By now she was barely hiding a mischievous grin. “Anyway, I swung it like a kind of bola and let go. It had good velocity on takeoff. But you know that tree? The tall one, about ten feet from the terrace? It hit that.”

  “What?”

  “Not the whole tree. Just a limb. And because of the rigor mortis it was pretty much frozen in the shape of a hook. So when it hit the limb, it just kind of hooked on.”

  “It’s still there?”

  She couldn’t help herself: she was laughing. “Want to see it?”

  “Maybe later.”

  After lunch, though, the rat was forgotten; there was something else. Early that morning she’d gone investigating the property and discovered that the house, built into the side of a hill, had a natural cellar—to which Claire, having rummaged through a chest of drawers in the living room, now possessed the key.

  We descended the stone steps that curved around the house till we came to a wooden door.

  Inside, the cellar was as cool and damp as earth—cooler, because of the massive wall of limestone. Spiders’ webs made opalescent tracks across the quavering beam of our flashlight. The floor was strewn with chunks of stone, broken chair legs, empty gas cans, an armoire door, a rusted washing tub. Claire shivered. “So much history.” In front of us a reflection gleamed: an enormous glass jug lay cracked on the ground. I took her arm and steered her around the jagged shards. Small steps, our bodies leaning imperceptibly against each other. Her hand cold but the rest of her warm. The flashlight beam illuminating one object, then another—a visual excavation, oddly stirring. The cellar a book of forgotten poems broken by time into dusty words like mementos in a trunk.

  We came to the back of the underground room. Claire tilted the light up against the wall that was built into the hill. “This is what I wanted to show you.”

  From floor to ceiling, its rusted, attenuated limbs like the shadowed heights of some buried toy city, rose a metal wine rack. The beam of the flashlight shone through it, casting a netlike pattern onto the rough stone behind. Only a dozen or so bottles remained. While Claire held the light I carefully extracted one, rubbing it against my corduroys to remove the dust. According to the label it was a 1964 Pomerol. In the bed underneath was a 1962 St. Estèphe, and beneath that a 1966 St. Émilion Grand Cru, and beside that a 1965 St. Julien. Around these were others without labels, home-bottled, each capped with a hood of red sealing wax that was brittle and cracked though still garishly bright, like an old prostitute’s lipsticked mouth.

  One by one we carried the bottles out of the cellar and up the stairs to the house. Some of the wine would be stupendous; some of it would have turned. It hardly mattered. To us it was a major archaeological discovery. For the rest of our trip we would dine like ancient kings.

  And we would stand in the barn where she took me next and stare at the dust-blackened windshield of the 1940s Ford van that in another life had been laid to rest here and never brought out again. The sediment of time had worked an embalmment: seen from outside, the vehicle, so still and resolute, gave evidence of a state of unearthly physical perfection. As did everything we encountered that afternoon: the sky passing over our heads through the holes in the three-hundred-year-old roof—eyes of celestial blue looking down on us, in shafts of mote-drenched light like stalks of dry rain; the lingering smell of animals from the dark hay-filled stalls beneath our feet, where the animals no longer were; the old tools hanging on the walls, their wooden handles worn smooth by somebody’s hands, and waiting for another’s.

  sixteen

  SHE’D BROUGHT WITH HER a spiral-bound notebook filled with Lou Marvel’s recollections. This was our bible, consulted daily over breakfast—her father’s dictated words transcribed in Claire’s handwriting, the phrases all the more evocative for being terse and stenographically compacted. Sitting at the kitchen table reading aloud this compendium of mundane fact and remembered feeling, I unexpectedly caught some inkling, like the faint rhythmic pulse of his character, of the young man he once had been and of his daughter’s love and despair:

  Wine man’s name Raoul.

  Fresh trout from woman outside Martel. Look for sign.

  Once found whole snakeskin.

/>   Statue of Black Virgin, Rocamadour—relig. pilgrimage—looks like a Giacometti (???: did Giac. ever come & see?).

  Vicinity: ruined fortress—11th cent.—Knights Templars? From right spot on clear day see 20 châteaux.

  Old phonograph. Records. Ella and Louis. Scratchy tunes & plum eau de vie. Summer—light till 10.

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

  She’d sat beside his rented hospital bed in the living room of the Stamford house, she later told me, jotting down his memories. And what surprised her was how fresh it all still was to him, particular and distinct. As though it wasn’t the past that had gotten abstracted and fragmented by life, but rather the present.

  The ruined fortress we found on our eighth day, an hour’s walk from the house. It stood high on a promontory, on the hard limestone upland called the causse. From a one-lane paved road we followed a dirt path in the direction of the ruin. The land here was desiccated and unforgiving, savage with stone. A donkey stared at us with sly, questioning intelligence from a walled square of hard-bitten pasture. We stopped to feed her handfuls of grass, and then walked on.

  It was a fortress still, though the only thing it protected now was the past. You could see where the power had been—the vertiginous path winding down the mountain, wide enough at the top for only one invader at a time; the forty-foot walls and fifteen-foot hearth; the archer-slit windows that could see, like the eyes of God, every castle and château in the region. But nature was king now. Sky owned the roof. The hearth was a void. Two stories up, a small tree grew out of a crushed chimney. Loose boulders of sun-bleached limestone littered the tall grass between the decimated though still upright walls: white against green, skeletal though resonant, like the shattered marble columns of the Parthenon. It felt as old as that.