Claire Marvel

1 There was before her and now there is after her, and that is the difference in my life. I will begin here because there can be no other beginning for this story. It was the middle of May, 1985. I was walking along Union Street on my way to see a professor one Monday afternoon when the weather turned suddenly. The sky broke open and rain poured down. I sprinted for cover, my book bag thudding against my ribs, reaching the Fogg Art Museum just as the rain became a torrent. There was a rushing sound as I ran, and a flash of golden yellow. I reached the museum's low front steps. Standing there watching me from under an umbrella the color of buttercups was a young woman. "I hate to be the bearer of bad news. But the Fogg's closed Mondays." Still breathing hard from my sprint I shook my head. Rain the size of Tic-Tacs was pelting me; water was leaking out of my hair and down the back of my neck. I rubbed a sopping shirtsleeve across my face. She began to laugh, not unkindly. Against the gray stone building and storm-darkened sky her pale face gleamed like bone china. "Sorry," she said after a while. "It's okay." "It's just that you're really, unbelievably wet." Raising the umbrella a few inches higher she offered me a place beside her. I hesitated. Hazel eyes alive with amusement; a refined nose above a mouth of promising fullness; straight brown hair falling to the middle of her back; a body slender and lithe. I kept glancing at her, then down at the ground. She wore sandals and the hems of her jeans were frayed and her toenails unpainted and a sexy, glistening wash of spattered rain shone on the pale tops of her feet. I stepped under the umbrella. "Better, isn't it? Bring your bag under, too. Don't want your great thoughts getting wet." Her irony was nimble, inviting. I lifted the flap of my stuffed book bag and showed her my inventory: Party Systems and Voter Alignments (5th ed., 1967); A Theory of Parties and Electoral Systems (1981); Political Parties and the Modern State, (1984). A well-thumbed paperback of Bellow's Seize the Day. Also the current issues of Foreign Affairs and The Harvard Gazette, a spiral notebook, five ballpoint pens, a fluorescent highlighter, and half a roll of LifeSavers. Everything damp, of course, from the rain. Reading the titles she raised an eyebrow but said nothing. "It's all right," I assured her. "This isn't the first conversation killed off by my interests." "Oh, I'm pretty sure Bellow's never killed anybody," she said, "except maybe one or two of his ex-wives." She reached for the book. On the cover there was a black-and-white photograph of the back of a man's head, no face, just a hat visible, a pale fedora with a dark band, the hat tilted up in an angle of recognition or perhaps even of wonder at a skyscraper rising in the background. "Seize the Day's not bad," she said, slipping the book back into the bag. "But you should be reading Herzog. The others--well, I'm sure they're fascinating." I began to close the bag, then changed my mind. "Want a LifeSaver?" She cocked her head skeptically. "Depends on the flavor." "Butter rum," I said. Brightening, she nodded--a girlish bounce of her head that sent a thrill through me. I peeled the damp foil back so she could take one. "I forgot how good these are." She was rolling the candy noisily around her tongue. I stood and watched her. Her simple but vivid pleasure had its own kind of pull. Oddly elated, I told her a story about my grandfather taking me to Central Park to play shuffleboard when I was a kid. His propensity to cheat had led him to ply me with butter rum LifeSavers so I wouldn't tell my parents. It had worked. A tale with whicSchwartz, John Burnham is the author of 'Claire Marvel' with ISBN 9780385503440 and ISBN 038550344X.