I had just burned the photograph at the stove. It had arched and stiffened over the burner, the image darkened, inverting itself into a ghostly negative before igniting all at once. My regret for burning it was immediate and permanent. Those words at the lower margin, were they a command? Remember me! Never forget! Or did they pose a question: Remember me? How could it matter now, I think, then think next: Before long I shall find out.
Clementine informed me that I had met Liza already. If I had, it was in an earlier version of this young woman, without fuchsia-dyed hair and a ring piercing her nose. “Dude,” said Liza to Clementine, “show me a picture of your mom.”
“Dan doesn’t keep any,” she said. She’d taken to calling me Dan, I thought, because no one else did, because doing so was both more insolent and more intimate than calling me Daniel, as others do.
“Why not just Dad?” I had asked, saddened by the development.
“Because you’re not just Dad, you’re Dan,” she had said.
“Dude, juices,” said Clementine to Liza. Their plan was to “do some juicing,” a new enthusiasm of Clementine’s, before heading out again for the evening.
“Where are you going?” I asked.
“Just friends, just out,” said Clementine as she snapped together the components of a juicing machine she’d persuaded me to buy. “Dan doesn’t drink juice,” Clementine said to Liza. “He’s the only shrink in New York who doesn’t believe in health.”
Taking turns feeding hanks of kale and beet greens to the machine, they closed around themselves a patter of hermetic jokes and imitations, all conducted in the ironic hybrid of French and English common to students at the Lycée Français.
“Encore de leg-yooms,” said Liza, calling for more vegetables.
“Dude,” said Clementine, “cool ton jets.”
“Aren’t you girls going to eat something before you go out?” I asked in what struck me, even as I spoke, as an impersonation of parenthood.
“Aren’t you going to read something,” said Clementine, “before falling asleep at nine?” The girls finished off their juices and left. Where had she learned to solicit and cultivate friendship? Not from her father, I thought.
After the girls had gone out for the evening I discovered the empty vermouth bottle hidden under some carrot greens in the garbage. The pulp-clogged parts of the juicing machine, abandoned in the sink, stank of vermouth and yard waste. I put the empty bottle back in the garbage, covered it again with the carrot greens, and retreated to my room.
I was not asleep at nine, or at two thirty when Clementine’s key finally turned in the door, my wakefulness unblinking, like the shutter of a camera open forever over the body of Jessica Burke. I was not asleep hours later when first light, wet and livid, dissolved the black mirror of my windowpane, replacing it with the veiled, oblique, first face of the world, an image like that of a motionless girl in her bath, fixing itself on a submerged sheet of photographic paper.
FIVE
That dawn arrived like a bailiff’s summons. I had been given notice that the end awaited me. Whatever else the photograph of Jessica Burke meant—that someone had been with her when she had died and had removed the bag before the body was discovered—for me it meant that the end was here. It said: See, it is over; the end is here. It has found you at last.
The face was Jessica Burke’s, of course, and yet not hers. It was also Clementine’s, as though its look alone said: Whose child is safe? Whose child cannot be stalked and taken? What shield is your care, your worry, when I can enter through a keyhole, the prick of a needle? That which in her infancy you could only wonder at—what she would come to look like, who she would become—I already knew, I who can see through everything, through everyone. What you would ignore, what you would deny, I know already. Whom you would keep from me, I have already marked as my own.
And it is also another face, the one I had tried so often to describe to Clementine when she, standing in front of a mirror, would ask me about her mother: Was her nose like mine? Are my eyes like her eyes?
I had thought I could describe Miriam’s face to her, just as I had thought I could explain Miriam herself. I would invent, discard, rehearse the sentences I would say to Clementine. I would even write them down. Should I say, Sometimes when babies come into the world their mommies have to leave and become angels? Or: When you were a tiny, tiny baby your mommy got very sick and she didn’t wake up? Holy God. Could I think of nothing better?
When Clementine was a little girl, I read books, consulted colleagues, prepared myself for her inevitable curiosity, for her inevitable confusion, disbelief, grief, rage. Her questions, however, proved both simpler and more stymieing than I’d imagined.
“When you used to be Mommy did I use to be a boy?” was one of the first. Somewhat later she asked, “Was Mommy dead when you first met her?”
In the end, it was not so much her inquiries as her physical being that pushed the question of her mother out into the open. Late to develop, even her body
