Reggie must have gone back to the States, because I was standing at the counter in my apartment, watching a letter with a Texas postmark burn unopened in the sink. I must have left my apartment for provisions: bottles emptied of Corsican wine reproduced themselves on the kitchen counter, by the bed. I must have gone to the maison de la presse for tobacco and rolling papers, because at times, alongside the bowl I used for an ashtray, twenty or thirty cigarettes lay in a row. (I had learned to roll them, steadying my hands against the table edge.) Sometimes the bowl held thirty or forty stubbed-out butts. I must have gone out because I must have gone to the café, Miriam’s and my café on the rue de Vaugirard. That was where he found me. His shadow had fallen across my table, and he said my name deliberately, first name and last, as though his purpose were to serve a subpoena. When I looked up, the sun was directly behind his head, and I had to squint to see his face.
“Mathieu,” I said, as though informing myself of a name I had forgotten. Miriam’s neighbor. I had not seen him since the night I met Miriam. When he said nothing, I said, “Sit, please. A glass of wine? A pastis?”
He would not have a glass of wine. He would not sit. He said, “You have not heard from Miriam.” I thought he was asking a question.
“It’s been several—”
“You have not,” he said. “Take this,” he said, placing a newspaper on the table in front of me. “It’s yours. Keep it.”
The article, short, unsigned, had been printed below the fold.
NEVERS: DIVERS RETRIEVE WOMAN’S BODY FROM THE LOIRE
In the photograph, people in wetsuits stood in waist-deep water beside an inflatable boat. Behind them, a sandbar. In the distance, scattered on the bank, clumps of spectators. An autopsy would be performed, though police stated that the death was presumed a suicide. The deceased had been identified as Miriam Levaux of Paris, 27 years old. Police stated that Levaux had informed the police by letter where her body could be located. A quotation from an officer concluded the little article: “Of course we had hoped that the letter would prove a hoax, but in the end she was exactly where she said she would be.” How tender the expression seems to me now: “Finalement, elle était exactement là où elle nous avait indiqué”—just where she had said. Were I to live long enough to lose every other memory, to recognize no human face—the image of that article will remain with me, as an arrowhead might repose in the hollow of a collapsed rib cage a thousand years after the heart it pierced has returned to dust.
And yet it was a surprise to receive in the post office box yesterday—or was it the day before?—a clipping of the article itself, yellowed and brittle now, taped carefully to a square of Bristol stock and sealed in a glassine sheath, frail as a moth’s wing.
When I can no longer bear to look at it, I will turn it over. On the back of the Bristol board I will find written (in the familiar block print) the last stanza of the poem—the clock counting down—and once again the words will read themselves to me, in Miriam’s voice.
Away with us he’s going,
The solemn-eyed:
He’ll hear no more the lowing
Of the calves on the warm hillside
Or the kettle on the hob
Sing peace into his breast,
Or see the brown mice bob
Round and round the oatmeal-chest.
For he comes, the human child,
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than he can understand.
THIRTY-SIX
The last stanza. The clock that my correspondent has made ticks down. At times, when I think of Clementine, when I wake in the darkest, smallest hours, panic sets around me like cement. At other times, a different stillness enfolds me, the stillness of absolute conviction, conviction that when the end comes I will know what I am to do.
For days nothing arrived in the post office box. Today, again, I thought it was empty, until I opened it and discovered one little buff slip indicating a package to claim. The package was a cardboard tube, perhaps twenty inches long, capped and taped at either end and addressed in block capitals. Please, please, I thought without knowing what I was pleading for.
—
At the end of her junior year in high school, Clementine won a prize for an essay she had written. Her name as well as the title, “A Certain Slant of Light,” had been engraved on a plaque Clementine refused to let me hang in the apartment. (“If you put it up,” she said, “I’m hiding it the next time you leave for work.”) The title was a quotation from one of Emily Dickinson’s poems.
There’s a certain Slant of light,
Winter Afternoons—
That oppresses, like the Heft
Of Cathedral Tunes—
Heavenly Hurt, it gives us—
We can find no scar,
But internal difference—
Where the Meanings, are—
None may teach it—Any—
’Tis the seal Despair—
An imperial affliction
Sent us of the Air—
When it comes, the Landscape listens—
Shadows—hold their breath—
When it goes, ’tis like the Distance
On the look of Death—
When I looked up the poem, I was convinced that whatever Clementine had written, she had written about Miriam, even though she had never let me read it. But whom did Clementine imagine when she imagined her mother? I had no photographs to show her. The only
