eleven

SHE WROTE CHECKS with a black Waterman fountain pen, a gift from her father, in emerald-green ink. Her signature was arguably the most voluptuous aspect of her character; debts were to be obliterated by the name of Claire Marvel. Which was perhaps the point—the presence of funds could be a spotty business with her. She might go from broke to flush, or flush to broke, in a matter of days. The money, like the pen, came from her father, who sent it without his wife’s knowledge; and who was embattled during these months, for his cancer had returned.

Every weekend now she spent with him in Stamford. I never accompanied her; she never asked me to. She made it clear she wouldn’t appreciate my calling while she was there. What I received instead of an invitation were letters, written in the familiar green ink, sometimes as many as two a day. Claire imbued my mailbox with the sense of deliverance it had been lacking. Letters of all lengths, scrawled on folded sheets of lined paper torn from a spiral-bound notebook, composed at any hour of the day—though usually, I guessed, while her father rested; for whispered between her lines was a reverent, grieving hush.

By the time they arrived in my box, she would already be back in Cambridge. Mondays, Tuesdays, even Wednesdays I’d be reading what she’d written a few days before in her father’s house. And so her moods reached me belatedly, mountains whose troughs and peaks I was coming to know, like a climber in the dark, by feel rather than by sight. I scaled them with a careful sort of greed, pausing over each new turn of phrase as if it might prove the key to her. It never did, of course, but I wasn’t disappointed. Real knowledge had many faces, I was discovering; it wasn’t literal. There were aspects of her in everything she did or thought, more so in the discrepancies and contradictions that lit her mind like sparks. With time that fall and winter, it came to make a strange kind of sense that the Claire of the letter I read on a Tuesday morning should be so much warmer or cooler or angrier or more tender or more hopeful or more heartbroken than the Claire I saw in person that same evening.