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 desperately 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.
“Misha’s just like a little dog,” she observed one fair evening in late June. Her voice was old New England, singsongy on the vowels. It wasn’t the first time she’d offered such an opinion.
“Dogs can be trained,” I said.
“Don’t be narrow-minded, Julian. Misha chooses to ignore us. It’s a sign of his independence and self-possession.”
“Some of the world’s biggest despots are known for their independence and self-possession, Mary.”
“Now you’re being ridiculous. Come here, Misha dear. Come to Mother.”
Lurching forward, Misha threw himself against Mary’s purple stockings and began aggressively rubbing. His purring, amplified within his capacious belly, was deep and undulating in rhythm.
“I’ve always found feline mating rituals fascinating,” I said.
Mary sniffed. “Don’t be cruel. Misha’s testicles were removed ages ago. It was a trauma I’m sure he doesn’t wish to revisit.”
I bowed my head. “Apologies to Misha.”
“I will relay them.” She stroked the cat’s obscenely arched back. “See what a little dear he is? Gus, there you are. I was beginning to worry.”
Gus Tolland, in his seventies, dressed in a sage-green high-waisted suit of a bygone era, emerged from the house carrying a tray with a martini shaker and two glasses. A widower himself, he’d been the best friend of Mary’s husband. They’d been together now—drinking martinis, watching Hill Street Blues and Dynasty, and taking semiannual trips to Europe—for more than a decade.
“Sure you won’t have a drink, Julian?”
“No thanks, Gus.”
He set the tray down on the low iron table and began pouring the clear diamondlike liquid evenly into the glasses. He spoke with a mild lisp and walked with a slight limp. His real life, Gus liked to say, began not on Beacon Hill, where he’d been born into a prosperous Boston family, but in France, where during the last months of the war he’d ended up playing clarinet in an Army band led by a gifted young jazz pianist named Dave Brubeck. They’d performed for the troops all over the European front; once they’d even opened for the Andrews Sisters. A lean introspective boy in youth, the war had woken in Gus appetites and joys he’d sensed in himself but never officially recognized. And now, decades later, with so much behind him, it was his privilege to have a martini and let his thoughts wander back: the band, on their way to a gig, getting lost in the Ardennes behind enemy lines; the jamming with Brubeck on the back of a truck otherwise filled with chickens. The girls! It was a piano, leaned on by the formidable derrière of a woman from Nantes, that had rolled over his foot and given him the limp. It wasn’t his intention to make light of the war—too many of his friends had died—but Christ, once back home and conscripted (this time for life) into the family law firm, never had he missed anything so much as the waking dream of those days, mornings when he woke hearing, over the drone of turbines and the brave whistling of homesick men, the constant rhythm and jump of jazz in his head.
Mary said, “Gus, Julian has been amusing himself at the expense of poor Misha’s vanished testicles.”
“Has he, now?” An eyebrow amiably cocked, Gus handed her a martini. His age-spotted hand shook, spilling some of the drink onto the grass. “Well then, I’d hate to hear what he’d have to say about me when I wasn’t around.”
“Oh, a great deal, I should imagine.”
They shared a private smile.
Mary picked up her book again—P. N. Furbank on E. M. Forster—and Gus, hitching up his pants, sat down with his drink and his memories.
Above our heads birds sang boisterously in the trees. The old trees, thick with leaves, on the old street. This was the beginning of the Golden Mile of manses that stretched almost to Fresh Pond Parkway. Longfellow had lived nearby, Hawthorne too. H. H. Richardson had designed houses for the rich. A sense of original privilege, of enlightened remove from the heedless, hectoring pace of the unreflecting multitude, persisted here as an embodiment of exalted New England stateliness and the founding ideals of Harvard itself. Ideals meant to be irrefutable, I supposed. A stateliness oppressive, it often seemed to me, for being so certain of its claims.
A low stone wall with an iron gate surrounded Mary’s garden. Across the street stood a more recent building made of plain red brick—a general dorm for grad students, many of them foreign, who had nowhere else to stay. The dining hall was on the ground floor. During the long winter months when daylight was as scarce as wartime rations and the city was dark by five o’clock, I’d stood in my bedroom spying down through the windows at the big hall lit like a sunken stage. The stark wooden tables occupied by solitary men and women—grown students like myself—who routinely ate their dinners while reading.
“Gus and I are planning a little trip to the Veneto,” Mary said.
I looked at her. Her glass was empty and her eyes brighter and two gentle blossomings, like wilted rose petals under rice paper, had appeared on her cheeks.
“When?”
“We leave the fourteenth, I believe. Is it, Gus?”
“Fifteenth,” Gus replied, swallowing the last of his drink. “The fourteenth’s Bastille Day.”
“So it is! Of course, that’s France and has nothing to do with the Italians. Well, the fifteenth, then. We return on the fifth.”
“Sixth,” said Gus.
“The sixth of August. It’s a Palladian trip. I’ve always wanted to see the villas. And now we will. Won’t we, Gus? Not that you particularly care about Palladio. But we’re not getting any younger.”
“Speak for yourself,” Gus said.
“All right. I’m not getting any younger. Soon Gus will be hitting puberty. He’ll find Misha’s lost testicles and dance till the cows come home. Forgive me, Misha! Anyway, Julian, you won’t mind taking care of him while we’re away?”
“Who, Gus?”
Gus began to chuckle.
“Misha,” Mary said sternly.
I grinned. “I won’t mind, Mary.”
“Thank you. I know I’m biased but he really is the best company. I’ve always found it impossible to be lonely with Misha around. I hope he’ll be the same comfort to you.”
“Julian isn’t lonely,” Gus objected.
Mary didn’t say anything. She just patted my arm and asked Gus to mix another shaker of martinis.
As scheduled, they left on the fifteenth. Mary had written out a detailed explication of Misha’s daily regimen. Included were afternoon walks on the leash around the neighborhood, fifteen-minute “play sessions” with a catnip-filled mouse, and the addition of a special gravy to his Tender Vittles.
So it happened that late one July afternoon I was once again sitting in the garden, this time with a copy of Karl M. Schmidt’s Henry A. Wallace: Quixotic Crusade, 1948 on my lap. Much of my summer had already passed like this. For it seemed better, or at any rate less worse, to sit alone in an old woman’s garden than to sit with sunbathing couples on the grassy banks of the Charles.
The day had not gone well with Misha. First he’d managed to lose his catnip mouse—I suspected him of eating it—which meant that I was going to have to locate another before Mary’s return. Then he’d refused either to walk or be carried on his afternoon constitutional around the neighborhood, forcing me to drag him by the leash the entire way.
He sat now, in the listless heat and fading light of late afternoon, on the lawn chair as on a throne, cleaning himself. Every pass of his paw over his fat pushed-in face represented a little sneer of disdain in my direction.
“Misha,” I told him calmly, “you are a pampered piece of shit.”
Glancing up at that moment, I felt the breath freeze in my throat. Claire was standing on the other side of the low wall in a blue dress patterned with flowers, her skin tanned, her dark hair streaked auburn by the sun.
“Quite a beauty,” she said. “That cat.”
“Actually, he’s Himmler with fur. How’s your father?”
She didn’t reply. There was a gate but she ignored it; I watched her step over the wall. The dress rose to the tops of her thighs before slipping back again to touch the thumb-sized indentations of muscle just above her knees. Her hair tumbled across her face. Her skin wasn’t pale as I remembered except where two narrow strap marks strayed across her shoulders and the delicate bones of her clavicle. Then she was over. Reaching Misha’s chair, she began to scratch him between the ears, and in no time had him purring like an opium junkie.
“What’ve you been up to?” she asked.
There was a breeziness to her tone that I didn’t believe, given the circumstances. You’ve been away seven weeks and four days without calling, I wanted to say. Do you have any idea what that feels like? Instead, I held up my library book on Wallace.
“The usual?” she said.
“What else? Now tell me how your father is.”
“Not very well.” Her gaze settled past me, onto the front of the house. “Though his weight’s started to come back. He says he’s returning to work by the end of next week and damn anybody who tries to stop him. That means me.” She paused, holding her head very still. Tears had appeared from nowhere, floating in her eyes like pure light. “They say hair grows back differently after chemo,” she said. “Is that true? He had beautiful dark hair before. He thinks it’ll be white when it comes back. Is it true?”
“I don’t know, Claire.”
She nodded. On an impulse I reached out and took her hand. For a few moments she returned the pressure. Then, gently, she let my hand go. When she spoke again her tone was a few degrees harder; the shine in her eyes was gone.
“I feel as if I should be wearing one of those skull-and-crossbones signs. I’m a danger to myself and others right now.”
“Is that a warning?”
“It’s a confession.”
“What’s the point of confessing to me, Claire?” I said, unable to keep the anger out of my voice.
“Because I trust you. I don’t know why. I just do.”
I said nothing. Some light of my own was going out in my heart, like a beacon sinking into black water; and I stood watching it.
She said, “You’re misunderstanding me.”
“I think I’m understanding you perfectly.”
“Listen, Julian. I loved our night together. You made me happy. Happier than I’ve been in a long time. But my father’s very sick. He may be dying. And if you and I were to get seriously involved now, with the way things are, I’d end up killing it somehow. I know I would. And you’d end up hating me.”
“I would never hate you.”
“Yes, you would. And then I’ll have lost you for good. Don’t you see?” The luminous cast of imminent grief was back in her eyes; hardly seeming aware of what she was doing, she reached for my hand. “And I don’t have the strength now, or the courage, to risk losing you for good. I can’t explain it. Just be my friend, Julian. Please. Be my friend.”