OUR PLANE TOUCHED DOWN in Boston in the late morning. Neither of us had slept on the flight. We came through customs and out through the double doors to stand dazed before the small crowd gathered there—parents, and parted lovers, and men in rumpled black suits holding cardboard signs with names scrawled on them. And even before I saw the tall man about my own age who stepped forward to greet us—the man with her coloring and her cheekbones and her long white wrists—even before I saw him and began to grasp his claim on her, I felt the difference, the wrenching displacement, of being back in the world again. As if France and our lives there, our intimate promising lives, had been dreamed by me.
Alan Marvel strode quickly forward, straight to his sister. They hugged, their arms tight in a cradle of wordless exhausted grief, while I stood angled slightly away.
Then Claire opened her eyes, lifted her chin off his shoulder, and stepped back. It was what she’d done in France when the phone had rung during our dancing, I thought; how she readied herself for pain: opened her eyes, lifted her chin, stepped back—out of one life that must have seemed to her a dream, and into this other life that was bitter and more real. She was here, now, with her brother, already turning forward to face the shadows that lay ahead. While I was still back in the old place, with her in my arms.
Alan Marvel picked up her suitcase. “Ready?”
“Alan, this is Julian.”
“Sorry.” Awkwardly we shook hands. I told him that I was the one who was sorry—about his father. He nodded vaguely. My name meant nothing to him; he’d never heard of me. His eyes, hazel like hers, seemed instead to regard me from some remove. Stepping away, he turned to his sister again and repeated, “Are you ready?”
Claire was silent.
“Everybody’s at the house,” he said. “The funeral’s at three. We should get going.”
She nodded absently, but turned to me.
“Julian?” she said.
That was all. My name uttered once, almost whispered, an unmistakable upward inflection at the end. Though in her eyes an urgent, vulnerable intensity I’d never seen before, a silent plea of some kind.
And yet I stood before her and did nothing. Because her brother seemed to own her then, to know her with the unspoken completeness that I had foolishly begun to think was mine. I watched him take a step forward and put a comforting hand on her arm, silently urging her back toward a private world of home and family, and it was like having a door closed in my face, putting me on the outside.
And so I looked away from her.
It wasn’t much, but it was everything. An unseeing glance of no more than a couple of seconds, a hesitation not of feeling but of habit, a lifelong compulsion to gather my forces in the face of any potential rejection, to assess and weigh odds so as not to make an even greater mistake. I looked away at nothing, and only then did the possibility occur to me that she might be asking me to step forward too. To step forward and come home with her, as lover and friend, to help her face what she did not feel strong enough to face alone.
But by the time I looked back it was already too late. Withdrawn was her unspoken plea for comfort, and with it some abiding belief in me. A blunt disappointment now shadowed her eyes like an eclipse; I had betrayed her.
“Claire …” I said.
“I’ll call you.” She stepped forward and kissed me coolly on the cheek. Then she turned to her brother. “I’m ready.”
As I stood watching, she took his arm and walked away. She did not look back. The electronic doors parted and I saw taxis lined up and two porters in orange ponchos. It was raining, I remember. Then the doors closed and she was gone.
For a long time I stood there.
I stood as though in a trance, remembering a little boy in a state park in New York. Summer. Standing in that park in front of a wall of stone, a boulder the size of a small hill with a sheer vertical granite face, and Judith telling me I could never climb it, and my telling her she didn’t know what she was talking about. What I remembered, though, was not the climbing, but rather finding myself already partway ascended, about ten feet from the ground and twenty feet from the top: in limbo, without ropes or physical skill or knowledge. My hands gripping the rock face, my sneakered feet splayed like a duck’s, my pelvis jammed as flat as I could make it, one side of my face kissing boulder. Too afraid to move, to climb or descend, to speak or cry out. Loving that rock, and hating it.
Judith, exasperated, calls out to me: “Scaredy-cat!” But I’m frozen. And eventually, with a theatrical accusatory sigh, she gives up and goes to get my father, who, with my mother, is sitting at a picnic table by a stream, some hundred yards away.
Alone, a strange calm descends. My body maintains its grip with no less urgency, but my heart, which like some tiny jackhammer has been powering through my chest into the rock, begins to settle itself. Poised between two places, two states, I begin to imagine staying there indefinitely, moving in, like some new creature roosting in the cliffs.
I hear my father before I see him. Because, for the first time in my life, I am above him in the actual world. If I were to open my eyes and look down, he would appear small and insignificant. I know this. And yet my eyes remain closed—the right because it’s plastered against rock, the left because of this strange calm that has graced me while alone.
And then my father says my name. Doesn’t call or shout it, just says it in his usual voice—a voice quiet but not calm, unhurried but not in command. Julian, he says. I keep my eyes closed. Julian, he says, don’t move, whatever you do don’t move. And in his voice I hear the fear. He doesn’t know what to do, hasn’t got a plan. For some reason he’s not like other fathers. Experience hasn’t toughened his heart and made him strong, but drained him and left him afraid. I can hear it in his voice.
I open my eyes, let go. The fall is quick and merciless.