Trust Exercise(80)
“That’s all right,” Claire said. “I’ll do the knocking.”
“Have you met him before?”
“No.”
“Are you interviewing him or something?”
“Yes,” Claire decided to say.
“That’s awesome,” the girl said, craning her neck very slightly to peer through the crack of the door.
“Thanks for showing me the way,” Claire said and waited until finally the girl went catwalking back down the hall.
“You’re the Claire Campbell who wanted to see me? I’d started to think they had lost you,” he said as he pulled the door open. He shoved it fully closed as soon as she stepped in, turning back toward his desk without shaking hands or otherwise introducing himself. There was a visitor’s chair and she perched on its edge while he bent himself into his own chair, removed a frail pair of glasses from the top of his anvil-like head, folded the glasses, and laid them on his desk. He was not what she’d expected. She would never have admitted it aloud but she’d expected a fey man in a bow tie with a Hello, Dolly! poster framed on his wall. Not this granite-hewn, glowering man with dramatic black streaks in his white, lupine beard. Claire stared at his large, shapely knuckles. She was always surprised to encounter such actually masculine men, with their sword-tip eyes and their brooding brows and, when old, their somehow all the more menacing physical diminishments, as if their power hadn’t been lost but just put in reserve.
“So.” He picked up a pink While You Were Out slip from a pile on his desk, looked at it, and put it back down, without putting his glasses back on. A tic? A performance? “You had questions about our program.” This was the moment Claire had mentally rehearsed so many times: not the stuttering phone call to make the appointment, nor the unintended rivalry at the threshold with bare-midriffed Julie, but this moment of belated disclosure, to this man she’d expected to be so unlike he was. Even more than information she’d expected sympathy. Kindly interest or as much as delight at the prospect of helping her. Why had she thought that would happen? Because she’d thought he’d be gay, and therefore sensitive?
“They’re not exactly questions about your program. I have questions about someone I think was enrolled in it.”
“And who might that have been?”
Claire had worked long and hard on a response to this anticipated question but now the words disappeared from her mind. Instead she fumblingly took out the folder and held out the sheet. He let her keep proffering it while he slowly unfolded the glasses again, put them on, and unfolded a Look at her over their tops. “You’d like me to read this?” he asked, still not taking it.
“That would be great, if you could. I think it’ll be a lot more clear than me.”
“Are you saying your parents misnamed you?”
“I’m sorry?”
“Claire. They named you Claire,” he repeated as she stared dumbstruck at him. She couldn’t fathom how he already knew. That she’d had first one name, then another—but then she saw he didn’t know this. She’d misconstrued him, but it was too late to stop the sensation of having been seen, which instead of being the recognition she always desired took the unpleasant form of a wave of heat under her clothes.
“‘Claire’ means ‘clear,’” he was suffering to explain to her.
“Right! No, I know that. I misunderstood you.”
He let fall one last very protracted Look at her over the tops of his glasses before he took the sheet and read the words she knew by heart.
Baby Evangeline, as she was known in this loving Christian environment where she spent her first months, was born January 1985 to a healthy Christian mother, Caucasian, age sixteen years. Birth mother’s heritage on the maternal side Scotch-Irish, many generations in this region, on the paternal side German, also many generations in this region. Mother’s mother attended secretarial school, mother’s father vocational school, no college attendance in the family to date. Growing up, mother was a healthy active girl showing normal development. Church attendance on and off due to divorce but Christian principles prevailing in both homes. Showed an early aptitude for acting and dancing and was accepted in the region’s leading school for these arts; described herself, at the time of her residence with us, as an aspiring actress. Pregnancy normal, carried baby to full term and normal delivery. Nothing known of the father apart from Caucasian and Christian, good health.
He took much longer to look up from the sheet than it would take even a very slow reader to read it. At last he asked, “And what am I supposed to glean from this story?”
“‘The region’s leading school for the arts’: that’s this school.”
“Is it? It’s not even clear from this scant paragraph what the region is that it refers to.”
“It’s this region.”
“Is it?” He made to pore over the sheet again, even running his finger down each of the lines.
“That’s just an excerpt from my file.” Claire caught herself twisting her hair. “What region it is—the rest of the file makes that perfectly clear.”
“Makes it perfectly Claire.”
“Yes.” She tried to smile. Perhaps that was what he was after, less solemnity on her part, more banter. Already the appointment had become about what he was after. Remotely Claire remembered it was she who was after something. “The question isn’t what region it is or even what school it is, because I know it’s this school—there’s no other school that it could be,” she tried. “The question is, which student was it—of yours. Which student of yours was my birth mother.”