BIRTHDAY Wednesday, May 24, 1989 (Henry is 41, Clare is 18)

BIRTHDAY


Wednesday, May 24, 1989 (Henry is 41, Clare is 18)

HENRY: I come to with a thud and skid across the painful stubble of the Meadow on
my side, ending up dirty and bloody at Clare’s feet. She is sitting on the rock, coolly
immaculate in a white silk dress, white stockings and shoes, and short white gloves.
“Hello, Henry,” she says, as though I have just dropped in for tea.

“What’s up?” I ask. “You look like you’re on your way to your first communion.”

Clare sits up very straight and says, “Today is May 24, 1989.” I think fast. “Happy
birthday. Do you happen to have a Bee Gees outfit squirreled away somewhere
around here for me?” Without deigning to reply Clare glides off the rock and,
reaching behind it, produces a garment bag. With a flourish she unzips it to reveal a
tuxedo, pants, and one of those infernal formal shirts that require studs. She produces
a suitcase containing underwear, a cummerbund, a bow tie, studs, and a gardenia. I
am seriously alarmed, and not forewarned. I ponder the available data. “Clare. We’re
not getting married today or anything insane like that, are we? Because I know for a
fact that our anniversary is in the fall. October. Late October.”

Clare turns away while I am dressing. “You mean you can’t remember our
anniversary? How male.”

I sigh. “Darling, you know I know, I just can’t get at it right now. But anyway.
Happy Birthday.”

“I’m eighteen.”

“Heavens, so you are. It seems like only yesterday that you were six.”

Clare is intrigued, as always, with the notion that I have recently visited some
other Clare, older or younger. “Have you seen me when I was six lately?”

“Well, just now I was lying in bed with you reading Emma. You were thirty-three.
I am forty-one at the moment, and feeling every minute.” I comb through my hair
with my fingers and run my hand over my stubble, “I’m sorry, Clare. I’m afraid I’m
not at my best for your birthday.” I fasten the gardenia through the buttonhole of the
tuxedo and start to do up the studs. “I saw you at six about two weeks ago. You drew
me a picture of a duck.”

Clare blushes. The blush spreads like drops of blood in a bowl of milk.


“Are you hungry? I made us a feast!”

“Of course I’m hungry. I’m famished, gaunt, and considering cannibalism.”

“That won’t be necessary just yet.”

There is something in her tone that pulls me up. Something is going on that I don’t
know about, and Clare expects me to know it. She is practically humming with
excitement. I contemplate the relative merits of a simple confession of ignorance
versus continuing to fake it. I decide to let it go for a while. Clare is spreading out a
blanket which will later end up on our bed. I carefully sit down on it and am
comforted by its pale green familiarity. Clare unpacks sandwiches, little paper cups,
silverware, crackers, a tiny black jar of supermarket caviar, Thin Mint Girl Scout
cookies, strawberries, a bottle of Cabernet with a fancy label, Brie cheese which
looks a bit melted, and paper plates.

“Clare. Wine! Caviar!” I am impressed, and somehow not amused. She hands me
the Cabernet and the corkscrew. “Um, I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned this, but I’m
not supposed to drink. Doctor’s orders.” Clare looks crestfallen. “But I can certainly
eat.. .I can pretend to be drinking. I mean, if that would be helpful.” I can’t shake the
feeling that we are playing house. “I didn’t know you drank. Alcohol. I mean, I’ve
hardly ever seen you drink any.”

“Well, I don’t really like it, but since this is a momentous occasion I thought it
would be nice to have wine. Champagne probably would have been better, but this
was in the pantry, so I brought it along.”

I open the wine and pour us each a small cup. We toast each other silently. I
pretend to sip mine. Clare takes a mouthful, swallows it in a businesslike fashion, and
says, “Well, that’s not so bad.”

“That’s a twenty-something-dollar bottle of wine.”

“Oh. Well, that was marvelous.”

“Clare.” She is unwrapping dark rye sandwiches which seem to be overflowing
with cucumbers. “I hate to be obtuse...I mean, obviously it’s your birthday....”

“My eighteenth birthday” she agrees.

“Um, well, to begin with, I’m really upset that I don’t have a present for you...”
Clare looks up, surprised, and I realize that I’m warm, I’m on to something here, “but
you know I never know when I’m coming, and I can’t bring anything with me...”

“I know all that. But don’t you remember, we worked it all out last time you were
here; because on the List today is the last day left and also my birthday. You don’t
remember?” Clare is looking at me very intently, as though concentration can move
memory from her mind to mine.

“Oh. I haven’t been there yet. I mean, that conversation is still in my future. I
wonder why I didn’t tell you then? I still have lots of dates on the list left to go. Is


today really the last day? You know, we’ll be meeting each other in the present in a
couple years. We’ll see each other then.”

“But that’s a long time. For me.”

There is an awkward pause. It’s strange to think that right now I am in Chicago,
twenty-five years old, going about my business, completely unaware of Clare’s
existence, and for that matter, oblivious to my own presence here in this lovely
Michigan meadow on a gorgeous spring day which is the eighteenth anniversary of
her birth. We are using plastic knives to apply caviar to Ritz crackers. For a while
there is much crunching and furious consumption of sandwiches. The conversation
seems to have foundered. And then I wonder, for the first time, if perhaps Clare is
being entirely truthful with me here, knowing as she does that I am on slippery terms
with statements that begin “I never,” since I never have a complete inventory of my
past handy at any given moment, since my past is inconveniently compounded with
my future. We move on to the strawberries.

“Clare.” She smiles, innocently. “What exactly did we decide, the last time you
saw me? What were we planning to do for your birthday?”

She’s blushing again. “Well, this ” she says, gesturing at our picnic.

“Anything else? I mean, this is wonderful.”

“Well. Yes.” I’m all ears, because I think I know what’s coming.

“Yes?”

Clare is quite pink but manages to look otherwise dignified as she says, “We
decided to make love.”

“Ah.” I have, actually, always wondered about Clare’s sexual experiences prior to
October 26, 1991, when we met for the first time in the present. Despite some pretty
amazing provocation on Clare’s part I have refused to make love to her and have
spent many amusing hours chatting with her about this and that while trying to ignore
painful hard-ons. But today, Clare is legally, if perhaps not emotionally, an adult, and
surely I can’t warp her life too much.. .that is to say, I’ve already given her a pretty
weird childhood just by being in her childhood at all. How many girls have their very
own eventual husband appearing at regular intervals buck naked before their eyes?
Clare is watching me think this through. I am thinking about the first time I made
love to Clare and wondering if it was the first time she made love to me. I decide to
ask her about this when I get back to my present. Meanwhile, Clare is tidying things
back into the picnic basket.

“So?”

What the hell. “Yes.”

Clare is excited and also scared. “Henry. You’ve made love to me lots of times....”

“Many, many times.”


She’s having trouble saying it.

“It’s always beautiful,” I tell her. “It’s the most beautiful thing in my life. I will be
very gentle.” Having said this I am suddenly nervous. I’m feeling responsible and
Humbert Humbertish and also as though I am being watched by many people, and all
of those people are Clare. I have never felt less sexual in my life. Okay. Deep breath.
“I love you.”

We both stand up, lurching a bit on the uneven surface of the blanket. I open my
arms and Clare moves into them. We stand, still, embracing there in the Meadow like
the bride and groom on top of a wedding cake. And after all, this is Clare, come to my
forty-one-year-old self almost as she was when we first met. No fear. She leans her

head back. I lean forward and kiss her.

“Clare.”

“Mmmm?”

“You’re absolutely sure we’re alone?”

“Everyone except Etta and Nell is in Kalamazoo.”

“Because I feel like I’m on Candid Camera, here.”

“Paranoid. Very sad”

“Never mind.”

“We could go to my room.”

“Too dangerous. God, it’s like being in high school.”

“What?”

“Never mind.”

Clare steps back from me and unzips her dress. She pulls it over her head and
drops it on the blanket with admirable unconcern. She steps out of her shoes and
peels off her stockings. She unhooks her bra, discards it, and steps out of her panties.
She is standing before me completely naked. It is a sort of miracle: all the little marks
I have become fond of have vanished; her stomach is flat, no trace of the pregnancies
that will bring us such grief, such happiness. This Clare is a little thinner, and a lot
more buoyant than the Clare I love in the present. I realize again how much sadness
has overtaken us. But today all of that is magically removed; today the possibility of
joy is close to us. I kneel, and Clare comes over and stands in front of me. I press my
face to her stomach for a moment, and then look up; Clare is towering over me, her
hands in my hair, with the cloudless blue sky around her.

I shrug off my jacket and undo the tie. Clare kneels and we remove the studs
deftly and with the concentration of a bomb squad. I take off the pants and underwear.
There’s no way to do this gracefully. I wonder how male strippers deal with this
problem. Or do they just hop around on stage, one leg in, one out? Clare laughs. “I’ve
never seen you get undressed. Not a pretty sight.”


“You wound me. Come here and let me wipe that smirk off your face.”

“Uh-oh.” In the next fifteen minutes I’m proud to say that I have indeed removed
all traces of superiority from Clare’s face. Unfortunately she’s getting more and more
tense, more.. .defended. In fourteen years and heaven only knows how many hours
and days spent happily, anxiously, urgently, languorously making love with Clare,
this is utterly new to me. I want, if at all possible, for her to feel the sense of wonder I
felt when I met her and we made love for what I thought (silly me) was the first time.
I sit up, panting. Clare sits up as well, and circles her arms around her knees,

protectively.

“You okay?”

“I’m afraid.”

“That’s okay.” I’m thinking. “I swear to you that the next time we meet you’re
going to practically rape me. I mean, you are really exceptionally talented at this.” I
am?

“You are incandescent,” I am rummaging through the picnic basket: cups, wine,
condoms, towels. “Clever girl.” I pour us each a cup of wine. “To virginity. ‘ Had we
but world enough, and time’ Drink up.” She does, obediently, like a small child
taking medicine. I refill her cup, and down my own.

“But you aren’t supposed to drink.”

“It’s a momentous occasion. Bottoms up.” Clare weighs about 120 pounds, but
these are Dixie cups. “One more.”

“More? I’ll get sleepy.”

“You’ll relax.” She gulps it down. We squash up the cups and throw them in the
picnic basket. I lie down on my back with my arms stretched out like a sunbather, or a
crucifixion. Clare stretches out beside me. I gather her in so that we are side by side,
facing each other. Her hair falls across her shoulders and breasts in a very beautiful
and touching way and I wish for the zillionth time that I was a painter.

“Clare?”

“Hmmm?”

“Imagine yourself as open; empty. Someone’s come along and taken out all your

innards, and left only nerve endings.” I’ve got the tip of my index finger on her clit.

“Poor little Clare. No innards.”

“Ah, but it’s a good thing, you see, because there’s all this extra room in there.

Think of all the stuff you could put inside you if you didn’t have all those silly
kidneys and stomachs and pancreases and what not.”

“Like what?” She’s very wet. I remove my hand and carefully rip open the
condom packet with my teeth, a maneuver I haven’t performed in years.

“Kangaroos. Toaster ovens. Penises.”


Clare takes the condom from me with fascinated distaste. She’s lying on her back
and she unfurls it and sniffs it. “Ugh. Must we?”

Although I often refuse to tell Clare things, I seldom actually lie to her. I feel a
twinge of guilt as I say, ‘“Fraid so.” I retrieve it from her, but instead of putting it on I
decide that what we really need here is cunnilingus. Clare, in her future, is addicted to
oral sex and will leap tall buildings in a single bound and wash the dishes when it’s
not her turn in order to get it. If cunnilingus were an Olympic event I would medal,
no doubt about it. I spread her out and apply my tongue to her clit.

“Oh God,” Clare says in a low voice. “Sweet Jesus.”

“No yelling,” I warn. Even Etta and Nell will come down to the Meadow to see
what’s wrong if Clare really gets going. In the next fifteen minutes I take Clare
several steps down the evolutionary ladder until she’s pretty much a limbic core with
a few cerebral cortex peripherals. I roll on the condom and slowly, carefully slide into
Clare, imagining things breaking and blood cascading around me. She has her eyes
closed and at first I think she’s not even aware that I’m actually inside her even
though I’m directly over her but then she opens her eyes and smiles, triumphant,
beatific.

I manage to come fairly quickly; Clare is watching me, concentrating, and as I
come I see her face turn to surprise. How strange things are. What odd things we
animals do. I collapse onto her. We are bathed in sweat. I can feel her heart beating.
Or perhaps it’s mine.

I pull out carefully and dispose of the condom. We lie, side by side, looking at the
very blue sky. The wind is making a sea sound with the grass. I look over at Clare.

She looks a bit stunned.

“Hey. Clare.”

“Hey” she says weakly.

“Did it hurt?”

“Yes.”

“Did you like it?”

“Oh, yes!” she says, and starts to cry. We sit up, and I hold her for a while. She is

shaking.

“Clare. Clare. What’s wrong?”

I can’t make out her reply at first, then: “You’re going away. Now I won’t see you
for years and years.”

“Only two years. Two years and a few months.” She is quiet. “Oh, Clare. I’m
sorry. I can’t help it. It’s funny, too, because I was just lying here thinking what a
blessing today was. To be here with you making love instead of being chased by
thugs or freezing to death in some barn or some of the other stupid shit I get to deal


with. And when I go back, I’m with you. And today was wonderful.” She is smiling,
a little. I kiss her.

“How come I always have to wait?”

“Because you have perfect DNA and you aren’t being thrown around in time like a
hot potato. Besides, patience is a virtue.” Clare is pummel-ing my chest with her fists,
lightly. “Also, you’ve known me your whole life, whereas I only meet you when I’m
twenty-eight. So I spend all those years before we meet—”

“Fucking other women.”

“Well, yeah. But, unbeknownst to me, it’s all just practice for when I meet you.
And it’s very lonely and weird. If you don’t believe me, try it yourself. I’ll never

know. It’s different when you don’t care.”

“I don’t want anybody else.”

“Good.”

“Henry just give me a hint. Where do you live? Where do we meet? What day?”

“One hint. Chicago”

“More.”

“Have faith. It’s all there, in front of you.”

“Are we happy?”

“We are often insane with happiness. We are also very unhappy for reasons

neither of us can do anything about. Like being separated.”

“So all the time you’re here now you’re not with me then?”

“Well, not exactly. I may end up missing only ten minutes. Or ten days. There’s
no rule about it. That’s what makes it hard, for you. Also, I sometimes end up in
dangerous situations, and I come back to you broken and messed up, and you worry
about me when I’m gone. It’s like marrying a policeman.” I’m exhausted. I wonder
how old I actually am, in real time. In calendar time I’m forty-one, but with all this
coming and going perhaps I’m really forty-five or -six. Or maybe I’m thirty-nine.
Who knows? There’s something I have to tell her; what was it?

“Clare?”

“Henry.”

“When you see me again, remember that I won’t know you; don’t be upset when

you see me and I treat you like a total stranger, because to me you will be brand new.
And please don’t blow my mind with everything all at once. Have mercy, Clare.”

“I will! Oh, Henry stay!”

“Shh. I’ll be with you.” We lie down again. The exhaustion permeates me and I
will be gone in a minute.

“I love you, Henry. Thank you for.. .my birthday present.”


“I love you, Clare. Be good.”

I’m gone.