Of course, anyone over eighteen was ancient in Clarissa’s eyes. She had her favorites among those beyond the pale — her new high school biology teacher, Granny Opal, the lead guitar of Blue Metal Studs, her daddy (by whom, for Clarissa, the sun rose and set), and especially Uncle Bruce — but her mother these days was not among them. She didn’t exactly do anything, but she just kept getting in the way, even when she was nowhere in sight. Oh, she loved her, you couldn’t help but love your mother, she supposed, but life was both incredibly exciting and incredibly boring, and her mother was part of the boring bit. Even just the idea of her mother was. Destined, she felt certain, like the beautiful faraway lady she had been named after, for a tragic fate, Clarissa wanted to taste it all before it was too late, the world for her was like an awesome carnival full of dynamite surprises with bright lights and screams and laughs and wild killer rides, like in one of her favorite videos, and she had an appetite for it that wouldn’t quit, but when her mother came around, or just came to mind, it all went away, like someone shut the music off, making her feel edgy and restless and completely exhausted at the same time. Her mother didn’t seem to affect Mikey that way, but Mikey was different and still a baby — he had only just stopped wetting the bed and he still liked to dress up and put on his silly wordless plays.
Clarissa’s parents’ second honeymoon in beautiful faraway Paris had been full of dynamite surprises, too, not least, though not then known, the conception, after nearly three years of trying, of their first child, and thus their daughter’s name, a tribute to their wonder-working hostess and to her gaiety and bravery and charm, and not, as Clarissa might have fancied — the events a part of her prehistory and their chronology confused — to Marie-Claire’s seeming propensity for romantic disaster. The invitation, proffered at the wedding three years before, had been to her parents’ palatial home in La Muette at the edge of the Bois de Boulogne, and the first surprise, upon arrival, was that Marie-Claire had become an artist and had had what she called a “blow-off” with her parents, whom she described, flinging her thin hands about, then choking herself and bugging her eyes, as tyrannical and stiflingly bourgeois, and she had left home, moving into a kind of artist’s garret in an unspoiled corner of the Latin Quarter above an Algerian cafe, a cellar cabaret, and the site of an open-air market. This rooftop space — all higgledy-piggledy with a hundred stacked and leaning canvases in its one large many-angled room, sketches and clippings taped to the water-stained walls under its coven ceilings, the toilet on the far side of the refrigerator and the claw-footed bathtub under the front window next to the sofa bed — she lent to them, moving out to stay with friends, but turning up each day to be their guide and companion. Thus, for ten days, the very center of the city was theirs, the towers of Notre Dame visible over the tiled roofs of the ancient district from their bathtub, the boats and bookstalls on the Seine a few steps from their street door. And the nights, too, were theirs, after their festive brasserie suppers with Marie-Claire, and perhaps it was the wine or the feeling of recklessness and danger and improvisation or the spicy air of couscous on the street below, the harsh music, or the delicious dislocation, the oddity of living in a kind of unwalled efficiency bathroom high above a medieval congestion all but unimaginable to them just a week before, back home in their neat brick house that Barnaby had built, that brought on such arousal, or more likely it was all of these things, together with, John had to admit it, the erotic presence of Marie-Claire, dressed mostly in wispy bits of widowy black (though the dreadful news did not come until the next-to-last day), but whatever the cause or causes, he seemed to be hot as a firecracker all the time, a veritable walking hard-on, in and out of the soft sweet saddle at every opportunity, and with an energy and urgency that took him back to his days as a high school athlete. And Clarissa — whose eyes, like John’s, were gray, and so no clue to the disputed color of her mother’s — was the consequence of this gloriously bohemian adventure. One of them anyway.
Eye color he seemed not to have noted down, but as to Clarissa’s mother’s disputed age, Trevor the accountant could tell it to the day, knew too her social and medical history, as well as that of most of the people related to her. Yet, as though knowing these things so well made the rest more unknowable, when he tried to think of her, all he could see was an abstract point on the abstract graph of his insurance actuarial tables. Of course, most people in town occupied similar featureless points in Trevor’s imagination, but none so exclusively, nor were their points so, well, so restless, so inclined to go adrift. Aware that his tendency to reduce all life stories to statistical data was a flaw of sorts, and one moreover that might cause offense, Trevor would set off to, say, a gathering at the country club, determined to greet her as a fellow human creature, to comment perhaps, with his customary tact and caution, upon her dress or her good health, and to concentrate upon some particular of her person which he might later recall as peculiarly hers. Shyness limited his close attention to her upper reaches, her nose perhaps, her ear and ring, her throat at his most daring, but stare as he might her image would not stick. At home he would draw out his charts and, after careful computations, locate her point, all he had left for all his effort, and — inevitably — would find it moved. As though his stare had altered her life expectancy, or his, at least, of hers. This indeterminacy made no sense. John’s wife was unknowable perhaps, but she was also unchanging, the very image of constancy, at least in this town. She was, abidingly, what she was. So what did it mean that he could not fix the fixed? Trevor felt he had been given a privileged glimpse of something, but he did not know of what. Only that, whatever it was, it was, well, disconcerting. He had tried, obliquely, to speak of this to his wife Marge, who had known John’s wife since childhood, and had found himself clumsily rambling on about her mother Audrey’s premature death and what that might signify, the relative statistical risks of attractive and unattractive women, the wealth factor in the prolonging or shortening of life, and the hazards of being anywhere near the center of a community’s focus, little of which was to the point, Marge cutting him off finally with: “Oh, she’s all right. But what do you think about John?” “John?”