When I withdrew she broke the thread of semen between us with her finger and said, “Et toi, t’as joui aussi, mon ami.” She said this—You came too, my love—as a matter of fact. Nor had I been aware of coming, or of anything except the force of her embrace, a force that, in the end, had failed to obliterate her completely.
Afterward Miriam lay naked, facedown on the planks, staring through a gap between the boards. I did the same, and we lay like that for a while, looking down into the water. The bright surface of the stream beneath us reversed to transparency as it passed beneath the bridge’s shadow. From time to time a fish would steer into one of the clear patches, idling slowly upstream though motionless against the streambed beneath it, or a leaf, dry on its upper side, would glide under the bridge. Mostly, though, the stream carried nothing but patches of sky and the shadows of our faces, which scattered and regrouped on the shifting surface of the water.
—
That bridge must have long since rotted out and buckled or vanished in a spring flood. And though Miriam herself has vanished, the stream remains, motionless and unresting, and from its shallows her reflection still looks up at me, through me, to a future she will not inhabit, in a country she will never see, at a girl, a stranger, the Clementine she will never know.
TWENTY
We had met again at the café on the rue de Vaugirard to consider a new poem. The Yeats poem we had discussed first had been a photocopy, but this time she appeared with a broad book, wider than it was tall, and placed it on the table between us. Leaning over, she kissed me and said, I love to approach you from a distance, to see you before you see me.
Do I look different then?
You look like the man I love.
Will you introduce me to him one day? I said.
She shrugged. One day—maybe, she said.
The wide book was a musical score, settings of poems by George Herbert. I had not heard of him. A seventeenth-century English poet, Miriam explained, an Anglican priest. She would be performing one of the songs soon, and she had been struggling with several pronunciations, the word guest, for example, and worthy, to say nothing of the name Herbert itself, which she pronounced Air-bear.
“It’s ‘guest,’ ” I said.
“Guayst,” she repeated, frowning. “Again once, please.”
“Guest,” I said again.
“Gust. C’est ‘gust,’ non? Non, pas vraiment…Merde!”
“Guest. The sound is eh…eh—guest.”
“Eh,” she said. “Guehh-st. Guehst. Guest.” The flat vowel seemed to darken the word, obscure it. She switched back into French: “C’est un invité, n’est-ce pas?” And just like that, once she had restored “guest” to its proper sense of “invité,” the poem itself seemed suddenly to recover transparency for her, as though a ray of sunlight had opened up the overcast clouds of English. She must have experienced in my own mauling French a similar wrongness, a shadowing or clouding of the medium that was for her merely the clear precipitate of thought. And yet when she suggested that we each stick to our own language, that I speak to her in English and she to me in French, I refused, saying something inept like On est dans France donc il doit parler français. We are at France so it must to speak French.
“Tu es adorable,” she said, lifting my hand and kissing it on the palm, “but when in Rome, maybe it is not always necessary to do as the French do?”
—
Every couple (it seems to me) adopts a story of origin, whether to testify to a great and fated love or merely to answer the question “So, how did you two meet?” But when did Miriam and I begin? Was it the moment I first saw her, in the dim light of the elevator? Or the night I first heard her sing, which was also the first night we slept together? On the trip to the monastery, perhaps on the rotting bridge, something had changed; had that been the moment? (Surely it was then, or nearly then, that Miriam conceived.) I am convinced, however, that none of those encounters was it. Still, in each of these meetings, we had yet to meet each other.
When I consider the brevity of those months, I can believe we ended before we began, that it was all over before it even started. But no: there was a time when we were wholly each other’s, and it began that day, at the café on the rue de Vaugirard, a musical score unfolded on the café table. That, I believe, was our moment of beginning.
I believe this because the poem lying open on the table had marked for her, as she put it, her point of no return. It was the crisis that sheared her away from her prior life, and it was along the arc of that deviation that I was to accompany her. Before we met, she had been pursuing a doctorate, her thesis on the French philosopher Simone Weil. Weil, a suicide or nearly one, had allowed herself to die of self-imposed starvation at the age of thirty-four in the summer of 1943, having escaped from occupied France to England. Up to the end she had nurtured a hope that the Free French, under de Gaulle, would put her to some heroic use, this skeletal, zealous, bluestocking fugitive. Though Jewish by birth and violently opposed to fascism, she deplored and repudiated her Judaism and converted to Christianity or, rather, to a caustic and unstable isotope of Christianity, a system she cooked out in her writings, most notably in her sprawling journals. These journals in particular had fascinated Miriam. She had first encountered them preparing for her baccalauréat, discovering in Weil a version of herself, a young woman of ardent and unruly talents. Miriam’s
