A what?
“A place to write, a place to think and write. Heaven, as the Jews sometimes imagine it, is a place where a person can study in peace.”
With a click the door shut behind her, and there I was, deposited in a sudden solitude. The week gaped, suddenly vast. What had been confusion at her abrupt departure changed to anger: to be made to play monk, while Miriam was off playing nun! And here I was still undressed, sitting at the edge of the bed. The remnants of last night’s supper lay in disarray on the little table, some books and papers shoved aside, the wine half-finished, the cheese hardened and cracked at the edges. The objects looked dazed, as though stunned by a flashbulb or abandoned in haste.
It took a long time to rouse myself to make coffee, to shower and dress, but by the time I had fed myself (the bread not entirely stale, the cheese edible if dry), the sourness had departed from me. The bird had returned and scrutinized the crumbs, from first one side of his head, then the other. I swept them onto the ledge and the bird pecked them up, eyeing me with suspicion.
I picked up Miriam’s volume of Herbert translations and began to read the French versions alongside the English, the originals gathered in a loose sheaf of photocopies. Words and phrases had been underlined throughout, and question marks dotted the margin. As for the French translations, they appeared reasonable enough, at least from what I could make out, though prone to archaism and ornament. In English, however, the poems spoke with disarming frankness:
Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright,
The bridal of the earth and sky,
The dew shall weep thy fall tonight
For thou must die.
I recognized the tone from the poem Miriam had shown me at the café, its candor a kind of nakedness, communicating an invitation simultaneously seductive and disconcerting:
Love bade me welcome, yet my soul drew back,
Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-ey’d Love, observing me grow slack
From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning
If I lack’d anything.
The cheese and the bread had now disappeared, and the patterned sunlight on the parquet had slid into shadow. Without thinking, I had poured myself a glass of wine and then another; in fact, I had emptied the bottle before noticing I had begun to drink. The wine had warmed the poems to incandescence, as though they themselves produced the light by which I read. That light, it seemed to me, was visible only when I was reading the French translations and comparing them with the originals, pondering what the original English had refused to give up. This light (I thought) was like the corona of an eclipse, visible through the smoked glass of my contemplations. Yes, I thought, uncorking a new bottle of wine, that is what I was doing: contemplating.
I began to take notes, both in the margin of the book and on the photocopied pages, eventually spilling over into the pages of a notebook I found in Miriam’s bedside table. It occurred to me that I must be hungry, and yet I had no desire to leave the table where my papers had spread out around me like the petals of a huge flower.
When I finally dislodged myself to go out, I did so expressly to lay up provisions so that I could continue this new work. I purchased tins of sardines, two bricks of coffee, and a log of goat cheese from the corner épicerie and from the baker next door a round loaf of some dense, brownish bread, thinking it would last longer than the usual slender baguettes. At the wine store, the wine that had made up our now depleted supply was still on sale, so I bought a case, or rather two cases, once I learned that a French case contained only six bottles.
—
In the shadow of the intervening years, I have come to think of the weeks I spent with Miriam in Paris as the one time I was to know love, a love, that is, other than that compelled in parents by their children. As for those few days I spent alone, with my notebook, the book of translations, and the photocopied poems, I think of them as the only time in which I knew solitude. Of course I have been alone for many years since then, alone as only a single parent can be, alone in spite of Clementine. But that is not solitude. I cannot describe the sweetness, in memory, of knowing that I had been afforded a little wedge of time and a task that fit into it. I would fulfill my obligation, and I would taste fulfillment in turn. This fulfillment depended not on Miriam’s absence, but on the anticipation of her return: she would come back and there would be much to discuss.
The expanse of time that had yawned so cavernously upon Miriam’s departure now seemed a tidy hermitage. How unused my hand had grown to writing; how sullenly my crabbed letters crept from margin to margin. But this was my task and I would fulfill it, and Love would see to it that I would be fulfilled in return.
It had to end, but it wasn’t over yet.
In an analytic session, the impersonal constraint of the therapeutic hour is a necessary precondition for successful work. The clock moves like a cog on a cog rail. Whatever else the patient feels, he is aware of this inexorable shortening; what is to be said must be said before the end of the hour. The natural impulse to delay inhabits both patient and analyst alike, but the pressure of the hour opposes this impulse with a silent and invisible violence. Breaking off the session at precisely the appointed time is one of the hardest things a young analyst must learn, though even for the experienced
