Of course, I had no right to be frightened like that. She was after all a girl, a girl in a huge city, with the usual cares and the usual needs. Still, that unfamiliar face emerged from the depths of the mirror, as though to say, “Do you remember me? You must remember me.”
Several years ago—before Jessica Burke died, so Clementine would have been thirteen or just fourteen—we had finished breakfast and I was washing up when she asked, “So did she look like me? Like me minus you?”
“What do you mean, ‘me minus you’?” I asked.
“Like Clementine minus Dad?”
I knew what Clementine was asking: whether she could draw aside those features she attributed to my genetic contribution and look at last on her mother’s face. I do not remember my reply. Did I answer pretending that I could truly remember, as though that face that was always with me were not also always hooded in shadow? Or did I try to dodge the question, saying something like “She was French, of course, so she was darker than I am, her skin more olive, her eyes brown”? Did I say, “As for your height and eyes, you got them from me”? I confess there have been times when I have caught a glimpse of Clementine doing her homework at the table or reading on the sofa and the impossible notion has pierced me: Miriam is here.
—
I met Miriam on the landing outside a friend’s apartment in Paris. I was thirty-one years old. My friend and I had eaten dinner, and I had taken my leave, was on my way to the stairs, and there had been no reason to pause, to acknowledge a stranger. The stairs were the spiral sort one sees in Paris, the kind that wind around the caged shaft of an elevator. I could have kept going when the elevator door clacked open on its dimly lit interior, its single passenger, her downturned face. Her eye unmet, I could have departed by another way. I could have descended the stairs to the unlit foyer and stepped into a different future, any of a thousand different futures. Each time the memory resumes, each time it flickers into motion with the whir and rattle of the elevator ascending, I turn to descend the stairs, to follow their curve around the shaft so that the elevator and its passenger pass unnoticed….
I have thought there is nothing I wouldn’t give to have that chance again, to leave those eyes unmet, the chance to step out onto the Parisian street, out into any other future, any future other than this one. What, I have asked, would I not give?
Well, to that question, at least, I know the answer. I know what I would not give. I would not give my daughter.
—
I had been preparing my departure from Paris. I had my tickets, had communicated to my Romanian concierge—with the aid of a calendar, an approximate drawing of an airplane, and, finally, the advance payment of my last month’s rent—that the time had come for me to return to the States. My yearlong fellowship at the American Hospital was drawing to its close, and I had already packed up my scant possessions in boxes I’d saved from my arrival. I had bidden my farewells to the few colleagues I had come to know—all, that is, except for my friend Mathieu. I’d met him, also a young psychoanalyst, after a lecture at the Collège de France. Over many coffees and with impressive patience he had improved my French, and in return I had offered to translate an article he was hoping to submit to a prominent Anglo-American psychoanalytic review. That evening we had met to discuss the final draft, and he’d insisted on making a farewell dinner: a roast chicken with haricots verts and parsleyed new potatoes. For my contribution, I had brought a couple of bottles of a blackish Corsican wine chosen only because I could pronounce its name intelligibly to the wine merchant near my apartment.
We had set aside the writing when we moved to the second bottle of wine, discussing a journey he’d made to the States when a boy, how some stretch of coast in New England had reminded him of his native Brittany—did I know Brittany?—how a neighbor in his building, a graduate student in philosophy, was writing a thesis on certain English poets—would I be willing to help her too?—about my failure to visit more of France, more of Paris, during my stay. “And so you must come back, then, of course!” We agreed that I would, but only on the condition that I would put him up some August in New York. How often I have thought back over those bland exchanges, imagining a line of perforation between each, how easy it would have been to say, “Bon, voilà, I will go now.” How grateful we both would have been in the morning not to have uncorked a third bottle of wine, and I would have stepped over the threshold into the damp night that much earlier, would have followed the path of a different future: back to my rented room, back to the States to establish a practice, to resume my former life, all by saying ten or five or three minutes sooner, “Bon, voilà, I must let you sleep.”
But no,
