Then Claire laughed, saying distinctly, “You did not! I can’t believe it.”
I entered the room. My own forward motion was a shock to me. They were alone, standing to the left by the windows, close together but not touching, like lovers in a drawing-room play. She was wearing a pale green linen dress and high-heeled shoes and she was as beautiful, as ravishing, as I had ever seen her.
Their heads turned at the same moment.
“Julian!” she exclaimed in surprise. Her face was flushed. As she spoke, I saw her take a step back from him.
“Julian,” said Davis in a more restrained voice. “There you are.”
I looked only at her. “How long have you been here?”
I saw her hesitate. The room was still and quiet, and in the stillness she seemed to be debating with herself whether to tell me the truth.
“When I came in Carl was standing by the gate,” she said. “We got to talking and he said he had a Gwen John….” She made a halfhearted gesture at a small painting on the wall beside her. “I lost track of the time. I’m sorry.”
“How long have you been here?” I repeated in a harder voice.
“Half an hour.”
“No. I would’ve seen you arrive. I’ve been here over an hour and I didn’t see you.”
“Are you calling me a liar?”
“I just want the truth.”
“The truth! My meeting got out early and I came right over. I came because you asked me to. And if that’s not good enough for you, then you can go to hell.” Suddenly she was livid, shouting. “Do you hear me, Julian? You can go to hell!”
Now Davis joined in. “Julian, listen to her for Christ’s sake. What she’s saying is obviously the truth.”
At the sound of his voice something inside me cracked. “Nobody asked you, Carl.”
“What did you just say to me?”
“I said shut up, Carl. Nobody asked you.”
“You’ve just made the biggest mistake of your life,” he said in a low voice.
“Claire,” I said.
But she turned her back on me. Which was the last thing I saw before leaving.
twenty-four
THROUGH THE WRONG SIDE of the peephole I saw a light come on. A shadow approached, unbolted locks, then the door opened and he stood in the doorway, in his pajamas and robe, squinting into the light.
“Julian?”
“Dad.”
It was past midnight. A pillow crease marked one side of his face. His hair stood up like the wind-torn crest of a wave. He reached out and laid a hand on my shoulder. “Has something happened? Are you all right?”
The worry in his voice and the weak, questioning touch of his hand caused a bubble of sadness to rise up in my chest; my whole body tensed with the effort not to give in to it. My father misunderstood this, or perhaps not, because he quickly pulled back his hand, as though afraid he’d offended me.
I told him that nothing had happened.
He nodded. Then, looking down, he noticed my suitcase and the concern began to lift from his face. “You’ve come for a visit?”
“If it’s all right.”
“You know it is. When was it ever not all right?”
“I caught the late train. I should have called first.”
He studied me, the corners of his pale eyes starting to bunch again with worry. “You’re really all right?”
Secretly he wanted an answer that would explain things, but not too much.
“I’m just worn out, Dad.”
After a moment he nodded.
I followed him into the apartment. Smells of old rugs, wood, potted plants, bric-a-brac. Years of Kraft mac and cheese, Stouffer’s frozen, Jell-O pudding cups, canned soups. Piles of papers, the faded useless manuscripts of old college textbooks he’d edited, their versions long since revised, their figures and theories and declarations no longer sound, and yet here preserved and collected, offered their own museum. Strata of anxiety, ninety-nine percent of it untold, closeted, held mute, stoically and for years, all the years of sitting by himself, married and divorced, eons of woolgathering. And books, not to be forgotten, easily over a thousand volumes, fiction in the living room, biography in the master, philosophy and psychoanalysis in the little study at the end of the hall that once had been my bedroom, books like paving stones to a quiet man’s fortress.
Through all these essences, remembered and literal, I followed my father, his slippers scuffing the worn floorboards, the belt of his robe dragging.
We came to his study, my old room. He switched on the light. “I would have cleaned up if I’d known you were coming. But it’s been … well, it’s been a while, hasn’t it.”
“Yes.” It had been ten months since my last visit.
I set down my suitcase. The room looked almost as it had always looked. An old corduroy sleeper sofa where, during my teens, my bed had rested; his desk, now, where my desk had stood. Otherwise the same. Change had never been his friend. He was like a man who, try as he might, could not get a weather report—not on TV, not in the papers, not in any almanac—and so regarded the ever-shifting sky with incredulity and suspicion.
“That old sofa,” he said, shaking his head.
“Do you still have the number for that chiropractor?”
He laughed softly, touching my shoulder, shyly glancing at me out of the corner of his eye. We stood looking at the room. The silence was familiar to him, seemed to remind him of something. He took back his hand and asked, “Have you eaten?”
“No,” I answered.
We went into the kitchen. This too was unchanged. When she’d gone to Houston, my mother had taken with her just her most personal belongings, her essential clothes and papers. As if there had been no joint enterprise here, no real union, ever. As if, for all those years, we’d been merely passengers in a lifeboat, lumped together by circumstance and the brute laws of survival, and then one day we’d landed, and she had climbed onto that new shore by herself and never looked back.
My father stood staring into the refrigerator, cold white light flooding out around him: no matter how long he stood there, we both knew, the kitchen would always be hers.
“Scrambled eggs all right?”
“Sure, Dad, but let me do it.”
“No, no. You must be tired.”
I removed the cushions and unfolded the sofa. I made the bed with the sheets my father had given me, and got undressed, and lay down in the dark.
A long night. The room airless, with just one small window that looked out onto an air shaft. My back ached from the steel crossbar that ran under the two-inch-thick mattress, and my mind would not let me go. Every time my thoughts began to return—to the day’s events; to Claire and Davis standing together in that room and her turning her back on me; to the mistakes I had made and kept making despite my overwhelming desire not to; to the possibility, so awful to contemplate that it repeatedly forced my eyes open in the darkness, that she would never love me as I loved her—every time these thoughts came near, I tried to divert them. But I could not. There are some thoughts that can be manipulated in this way, ideas which seem to come from outside the self like choices waiting to be made. But there are other kinds too. Intuitions which, like water mysteriously seeping from the ground during a drought, are born so deep within the self that their source, finally, is beyond reckoning.
I stayed with my father all that summer. A placid time, still and flat, despite the city’s racing pulse. The city hardly touched us. It was a time of known silences and familiar oblique glances—an interlude of implicit understanding to the extent that certain long-standing arrangements between us were maintained without argument, like an anachronistic treaty:
It was not to be assumed by my sudden reappearance that there had been any fundamental change in my thinking with regard to family.
Whatever general lassitude and rudderless deportment he observed in me at present was not to be interpreted or commented upon.
No more than h
alf of all the movies we saw could be subtitled.
Oh, we were a pair, the two of us. He was sixty-three and prematurely retired and probably lonely and his days were his own. I was twenty-seven and heartsick and my days too were my own, utterly free, though I doubted very much if I could have given them away had I tried.
And so that summer passed.
twenty-five
IN SEPTEMBER I RETURNED TO CAMBRIDGE. Where nothing had changed, and everything had. Where early one morning I stood waiting for Claire outside her apartment building, and in the new light watched her walk slowly up Kirkland Street, her hair unbrushed, her clothes wrinkled. When she saw me she stopped, apprehension on her face, and crossed her arms over her chest as though she wasn’t sure what I might do.
“You’ve been away,” she said.
I nodded.
“All summer. Where were you?”
“I went to see my father.”
Concern softened her face. “Is he all right?”
“Fine,” I replied tersely. She was the one I wanted to talk about, not my father. “I got back last night and came by to see you but nobody was there,” I said.
The concern departed, replaced by a mask of defensive indifference. “Did you?”
“Yes. So I waited.”
“Industrious of you.”
“Only you never came home.”
She said nothing.
“Where were you?” I demanded.
“What do you want me to say, Julian?”
“I want you to say you weren’t with him. I want you to say you weren’t with anybody. You were up all night in the library catching up on your work and you forgot the time. Or maybe you went to the late show at the Brattle and afterward decided you might as well stay up till breakfast. Or maybe, maybe you just got plastered and had a fling, some stupid one-nighter with some harmless idiot you couldn’t give a shit about. That would hurt, but I could live with it. I’d survive. But not him, Claire. Just don’t tell me you were with him.”
“I’m not going to lie.”
“Goddamn it, I don’t want you to lie.”
“Then what do you want?”
“You,” I said. “I just want you.”
She looked away. The sunlight slanted across us, already hot, and a small, shrill voice rose in my head telling me to walk away, that what felt unbearable now was only going to get worse. Then Claire sighed and looked at me again. And I thought, She is still here, there is still time, and I stood my ground like an ox or a tree.
She said, “He called after his party, wanting to talk. He doesn’t understand how you could have turned on him like that, after all the support he’s given you. And personally I don’t either. It was cheap and cruel, if you want the truth, not to mention professional suicide. It’s shaken him.”
“You can’t be serious.”
“I’m very serious.”
“Claire, listen to me. You don’t know him. He’ll suck the pleasure from your life and his ego will swallow you whole. A month with him and you’ll feel up to your neck in sand. Just stay away from him.”
“I don’t want to stay away from him, Julian. It’s already been a couple of months, as a matter of fact, and I don’t feel buried. He’s not what you think he is. You have no idea what he is. He’s decent, kind, supportive. He listens to me. He’s considerate and strong. Turned out my father was a wonderful man but not much of a businessman. He left quite a few debts behind him. The dealership needed to be sold right away. It was Carl who worked out the details of the sale and made it happen. Carl, not some lawyer, not my brother. Carl, because he cared. I’ll always be grateful to him for that. I trust him, Julian. Trust him a lot. I may even be in love with him. So forgive me if I don’t agree with your assessment. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going home.”
Quietly, without fanfare or drumroll, I changed advisors on my dissertation. Professor Charles Dixon, whose tutelage I’d had before Davis’, agreed to take me back. A small-nosed, balding man, tweedy and thoroughly academic, he was well respected by his peers. But he wasn’t feared or envied. In almost every regard he was the antithesis of a political player like Davis. At our first meeting, over glasses of iced tea in his house, he asked me why I was interested in switching advisors. I replied that Professor Davis was away too often, a bit too oriented toward the White House and too professionally distracted for my interests and needs, which were more academic. Dixon looked pleased. He nodded approvingly, said yes, he could see how that might be so. He agreed to take me on. The first thing we did together was to work out a writing schedule.
My dissertation would have eight chapters. It was September, and I was still mired in the second. We agreed that I would turn in a new chapter every six weeks, which if all went well should see me finished in time to receive my doctorate at next year’s commencement. Wonderful, we concluded, a wonderful prospect—and yet, imagining it, I felt nothing. There would be staying, or there would be going—a career sought after, hungered for, somewhere, by someone. Why? To what end? I no longer felt anything about it, if I ever had. And what, Dixon wanted to know, had I been doing in the way of applications for foundation grants and future teaching positions? It was hard out there, even for the brightest, he said, didn’t I know that? And I said yes, I knew that, and we agreed that with the coming academic year I would radically step up my efforts in this area. And we went on talking and planning out my future. And somewhere in the neighborhood Claire went on seeing Davis, sleeping with him, falling in love with him. And soon I saw myself standing in a field alone, far from everyone I knew, with my arms out—a human sundial waiting for the sun, waiting to feel it on my back and arms, waiting for my shadow then to appear over the green grass, the perfectly delineated shadow, time held there in precise configuration; time told, for just that moment, in that shadow that was the absence of light.
PART TWO
one
THE SEASONS TURNED. Through the leaf-strewn fall, through the day she married him.
Through the frigid winter, alarm clock ringing in the black mornings, the hiding under bedcovers, the sound of windshields being scraped, the steam of car exhaust, the handsome city pocked with gray scabs of frozen slush.
I turned twenty-eight.
Much to my surprise, I was not crippled outwardly. Mornings I woke and stood on my own two feet. Life, as they say, marched on. Every six weeks I continued to produce a new chapter of my dissertation for Professor Dixon’s perusal. And twice every week I continued to lead a junior undergraduate tutorial on the philosophy of politics. Such elemental concepts as Democracy, Natural Law, Justice, Sovereignty, Citizenship, Revolution, Marxism, Anarchy, Power and the State, Liberty and Reason as expounded by thinkers from Plato, Aristotle, Locke, and Montesquieu to Burke, Rousseau, Kant, and John Rawls. No exams, only papers. It was in helping the students determine their next year’s thesis topics that I came to know them best. Two favorites stood out: Peter, gangly and unathletic, with a hearing aid (the result of falling through the ice one long-ago winter on a pond in his native South Dakota), who shared my interest in Teddy Roosevelt and the ambiguous legacy of the Progressives; and plucky, feisty Margaret, four feet ten inches tall in platform heels, who’d grown up working evenings in her parents’ Korean grocery in Los Angeles, and who, when she wasn’t quoting liberally from Georges Sorel’s Reflections on Violence or Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, was busy writing an allegorical novella about a rabble-rousing, bank-robbing Korean-American circus clown.
And twice in six months I went on dates, both times with women from my department: Megan, a blue-eyed ecoterrorist from Oregon; and Dal, the lithe squash champion from New Delhi. Neither relationship lasted long. By the end of our first dinner—at a Back Bay bistro, where I foolishly ordered the steak frites—Megan had already concluded that my commitment to the ecomovement was suspect. With Dal, however, the problem was not so much disappointment as a general lack of urgency. She moved to her own mysterious beat. It was she who’d asked me
out, yet once at the Central Square Indian restaurant (and later back in her room), she couldn’t seem to rouse herself to any heights of enthusiasm. The diffidence she’d shown me in the past had not been personal, I realized. It was simply her way with the world, the same supreme coolness of temperament that allowed her to go for—and hit—a three-wall nick at match point in the finals of the national championships.
And (speaking of which) Thursday nights at Hemenway Gym, after the varsity was done practicing, Mike Lewin and I played a regular game of squash. We weren’t particularly skilled, but we were evenly matched. It was a routine that would continue until the first week of March. On that night I became a different person; or, to put it another way, I completed a transformation that had been in the works all winter long. Some bitter darkness was rising in me, a brutally competitive spirit taking root—no-holds-barred, win-at-all-costs. I didn’t just want to beat my friend, I wanted to annihilate him.
Back and forth the match went, and by the end of the fifth set we were tied, leading to an overset. And then on match point I hit what I thought was a winning forehand. With triumphant satisfaction I watched the ball bounce once, twice—only to feel, a split second later, Mike’s hand on my back, and hear him mutter, “Let.” I turned on him in a rage. Mike Lewin never called lets, but he’d called one now, on match point. “You can’t be serious!” I yelled at him—hearing even as I spoke a distorted echo of the words I’d said to Claire on the sidewalk outside her building. But Mike was indeed serious, and already stepping into the service box to replay the point. He was counting on the fact that squash was a “gentleman’s” sport—the rules an honor code, combatants (even the most amateurish) schooled in the accepted politesse and obliged to respect the sanctity of the opponent’s honest judgment. He knew we’d replay the point. And for that alone, just then, I hated him. A malevolent anger surged to my core from all the tributaries of those long months of disappointment. Before he could serve I slammed the flat of my hand three times against the white wall streaked with black ball marks, the noise a series of detonations that reverberated like gunshots through the court. Mike looked at me as if he’d never seen me before. Then he served and won the match. It was the last time we played together.
Claire Marvel Page 10
