There should be a word at the beginning concerning the peculiar name of Aaron and Ariadne Lent’s only daughter, Joie-de-vivre.  The name is a French noun meaning literally The Joy of Life and is usually used to describe a certain gusto or spirit of a thing which engenders its greatest value.  The Lent’s agreed upon the name as soon as it was suggested, for though it seemed eccentric it was also perfect, and once it was between them, no other name would feel as right. The couple was young and handsome and had so far enjoyed a life full of promise.  They understood they were exceptionally fortunate in every important and trivial way and felt somewhat guilty for wanting more.  The child crammed their lives with a meaning they lacked before.  She was the quality which engendered their perfect world with its greatest possible value.  Before, they had been shallow and pretty.  The child animated them, made them somehow more real than other things.  Now they were truly enviable, and knew the joy of life.

*

Ariadne Lent came from a rich tradition of eccentricity.  Her mother was a classicist and named her after the daughter of King Minos, who helped Theseus find his way through the labyrinth to slay the Minotaur.  As a young girl it disturbed Ariadne that her namesake was later abandoned by her hero on a lonely island, but her mother reminded her that Ariadne was also rescued from her exile by her true love, the God Apollo.

*

Her father was a semi-famous film actor.  He had been lucky enough to have a name which every movie-goer knew and a face almost no one recognized beyond the screen.  He was dashing and handsome but never attained sex symbol status.  He was talented and respected by the public, and his friends in the industry admired him for a good family man.  Ariadne’s mother often speculated the reason her father never attained greater fame was due to his ability to stay out of the tabloids.  Ariadne grew up affluent and sheltered, and Aaron Lent was the only man she ever loved.

Her father did not approve at first.  He said the young man was below her, an idea Ariadne had supposed died a long time ago.

“Not below your station,” he corrected, “below your person.”

The two had been together for five years and had lived together for one, and this disapproval had never surfaced before.  He had never been critical of her boyfriends and seemed to like Aaron as much as the others.  Her father had a nervous inaptitude for confrontation, and always found a way to be friendly with even the shadiest of young men.  But none of them had wanted to marry his daughter, or rather, she hadn’t wanted to marry any of them.

The evaluation was that Aaron Lent was too sensitive, precisely the reason Ariadne had fallen in love with him.  Her father feared Aaron would be too easily discouraged by the responsibilities of private and professional life, that he was too thin skinned, that he would buckle and eventually take the cowards way out, either by running away, or worse, by staying with her and making himself more of a burden than an asset.

Her father was also a sensitive man in an insensitive world and had adjusted accordingly, and Ariadne saw no reason why Aaron wouldn’t be able to do the same.  Her mother assured her with a scholar’s certainty if she wanted to marry Aaron she should, her father was only worried.  The wedding was splendid, her father did nothing to intervene, for he had raised her to take care of herself and wanted to prove it.

*

Aaron Lent, like his wife an only child, had recently been offered a high position with an advertising firm based in Salt Lake City.  He did not want to break up with Ariadne so he proposed, and she accepted, and moved to Utah with him.  They bought a new ranch style house with five bedrooms on a steep hill.  Their lives together endowed the house with a beatific charm.  They gave it a fresh coat of cream paint and in the summer put new siding on the outside.  Together they coordinated the walls with the carpets and the living room with the kitchen.  In the yard they slaved side by side behind identical sun visors for a small garden with cooking herbs, squash, zucchini, tomatoes, and melons.  The bloodstone inlay of the granite countertops brought out the green flecks in Aaron’s eyes.  The marble wall in the shower complimented the precise shade of Ariadne’s skin.  Aaron would dab paint on the end of his new wife’s nose as an excuse to coax her to the shower.

While caressing her he whispered, “I wanted to marry you anyway.  I didn’t think I deserved you until I got the job offer.”

She sighed.  “You are sweet to me.”

“I just want you to know I didn’t ask you to marry me to get you to leave everything behind and come here with me.  I wanted to marry you anyway.”

“I know, Love.”

And after making love he would cry silently with happiness upon her pale breast.  She held him close.  He had not expected such happiness to be possible in the world.  He had always thought the world to be a good place, and a happy one, but this defied his comprehension—even his dreams were sparse compared. 

“I can’t breathe,” he whispered into her hair, “I’m too happy.”

“Yes,” she said, and wiped his eyes.  “I think I could die of too much love.”

They had been married three years when Aaron got his break at the firm.  He was made marketing director of a large account.  The client was enthusiastic with Aaron’s work, they thought him naïve but earnest and told him so.  The young couple had accidentally been very wise with their finances; they were so enthralled with one another that they had not gone into debt for want of distraction, and now a large income was theirs.  Ariadne had her Master’s Degree now and a good job as a network manager, which she could perform from home.  They made her up a cozy office in the basement, and fussed over a nursery across the hall from their bedroom, and worked diligently through the night to fill it with a baby.

The baby did not come.  There were complications.  Ariadne’s body was inhospitable to Aaron’s sperm.  It was chemical, the doctors explained, the Ph was all wrong, too base or too acidic.  It was a rare condition, a case of mistaken compatibility.  Ariadne’s body rejected Aaron’s like a virus.  Hundred of thousands of men could impregnate Ariadne with ease, but Aaron could not, and likewise, he would have no trouble impregnating a host of women—but not his wife.

They wept apart, believing that was where they belonged.  But in the night they found they could not sleep without the other and were rejoined.  They had never been so frightened.  In the morning they found the courage to hope against science, and how else could it be?  After, there was hormone therapy, and a planned diet for both of them, and elevated hips, and temperature checks on litmus.  They made love happily, and then ferociously, and then desperately as they cried.  Months passed that soon surpassed a year.

There were trips to an earth mother in the valley, New Age Religionists and Christian Scientists, too.  There were herbs at specific times of day and foul potions.  There were incantations to be chanted over the bed or over the womb.  Talismans to be clutched in the throes, some meant for the hand and others for the teeth.  Impossible positions.

Finally a trip to New Hampshire to see a specialist.

Another year and the nursery stayed empty and unlit.  Aaron mentioned adoption again and this time Ariadne could grimace without sobbing.  The woman was fertile.  The man was potent.  They could not conceive.

“What if we were never meant to be,” Ariadne asked her husband.

“We’re in love.”

“Surely there are more important things in the world.”

“I’m sorry for anyone who believes that.”

Ariadne doubted Aaron’s surety and for that felt ashamed.  She was troubled by dark and repetitious dreams.  She saw, or was, an interior nighttime, lightless, scentless, soundless existence.  In the dream a vacuous space that was, Ariadne understood, both mind and womb at once.  There was a sticky darkness.  Suffocating world.  Her whole body, under the sheets, went arid and brittle.  She woke disturbed and feeling nothing, nothing could grow.  Her body could not even sustain microbes.  She wept for herself and for Aaron and for the desolation within her, and for the poor microbes, too.  That month she did not bleed.

They peered at one another through tender eyes.  They sniffled like stunned children, rubbed their eyes, and secretly believed a nightmare all the while impossible had finally passed.  For it made sense to both of them that they should be happy.  Indeed, the happiest time of all was to come.

*

When everything was over, even the guilt, Ariadne would recognize this as the best day of her life.  The happiest was still to come, but this was the best.  Years later, as she thought back, she would admit that somehow there was a difference.

Ever since they’d married, the Lent’s had breakfasted together.  Because Ariadne worked from an office in the house, she had no commute and so made breakfast for them both every morning.  She enjoyed doing this.

She made pancakes in the kitchen.  She could hear from down the hall Aaron running water in the bathroom sink, the dipping sound of his disposable razor in the water, and the dry scrape of the razor against his skin.  She imagined the creamy water gone opaque.  She heard the draining sink and she heard Aaron walk back into the bedroom to put on his shirt.

Outside the window, behind the kitchen table, hung a birdfeeder and the first bird of the morning, a robin, had come to peck nervously at it.  The robin watched her through the window until she noticed, and then it flew away.

Aaron entered looking clean and straight and new, his face scrubbed to a soft pink shine.  “There was something I wanted to tell you,” he said.  “What was it?  I can’t remember,” but she already knew what it was.

She had sat breakfast out on the table, and now she got a handful of raspberries from the plastic carton in the refrigerator and rinsed them under the tap.  A crisp plate of water ran down the pile of dimpled berries and over her cupped hand.  The scent of wet fruit and the shocking cold on her hand, and the clear water beaded on the raspberries as if a storm had passed in the night.

“It’ll come to me.  I wish I could remember, though,” Aaron mumbled, and stirred sugar into his coffee.  He read the morning paper, and Ariadne craned her neck to see if perhaps more birds might come to the feeder.  She thought she’d like to watch the birds while she ate.

Aaron read her a story from the paper about African warlords who in their desperation to get medicine to the villagers had threatened to hack arms off of the very children they sought to save, if proper aid was not forthcoming.  It was a complicated situation.  The country had been known by threescore names over the last century.  Nine months was the longest any government had been able to keep power in all that time.  A sick and a wartorn people.  Aaron sipped his coffee and Ariadne shook her head and they sat in a prolonged quiet while she thought about the sick children who will either receive medicine or lose their arms.  A sick and a wartorn people, and the one could not be separated from the other, it was a complicated situation.

“It’s driving me crazy trying to remember what I wanted to tell you,” he said again, but she already knew what he’d forgotten to tell her.  She stroked her tummy, full of pancakes and baby, and wept softly for the sick African children.  But only for a moment.  She didn’t want Aaron to see her crying, didn’t want to explain it to him, so she wiped her eyes and rallied, taking the breakfast dishes to the dishwasher.

She stood at the loaded dishwasher with her back to him, angry with herself now for hiding tears.  It wasn’t that he wouldn’t understand.  It was that if she explained, she wouldn’t understand it anymore.  She would have to explain it to him through the context of pregnancy and hormone imbalance, and that would reduce it neatly enough, but it wouldn’t explain it at all.  Aaron knew that.  He knew why she’d cried as well as she did in a sensation that existed outside of language.

Her belly had turned hard as a pit, but it hadn’t started growing yet, not much.  Only in certain clothes from certain angles did she even look rounder than normal.  Aaron announced he had to leave and fetched his jacket, and Ariadne waited for him at the door with his briefcase.  He kissed her, and together they rubbed her hard belly.  Aaron said, “Oh, I remember.  It was about Iceland.  Remember, we were talking about Iceland the other day.”

Ariadne smiled up at him, pumped her head once in affirmation, yes, she’d known that, what he wanted to tell her, she already knew, and it didn’t strike her as the least bit spooky that she just knew.  They were toying with the idea of vacationing in Iceland, and had spoken of hydroelectric power, long haired ponies, hotpots, and sagas.  It’d seemed to Aaron an Icelander had won the Nobel Prize, but he couldn’t remember the name. “Halldòr Laxness was his name.”

They kissed again and he left.  Ariadne leaned against the refrigerator and stared out the window.  She sighed deeply, and suddenly there was something in her eye.  She could see it lying across the upper lashes of her right eye, blotting out her peripheral vision.  It touched the white and stung a little.  Carefully she pinched it between her forefinger and thumb and held it up for inspection.  A hair, short and sandy blonde.  She sniffed it.  It wasn’t hers; it was his.  His hair was in her eye, and this pleased her very much.  Outside, the robin had returned, this time with its mate.  The two birds took turns at the feeder, the one keeping a lookout, the other plunging its beak into the cup of seed.  They sat nuzzling one another, necking in the shade of eaves, perhaps proud of her watching.

*

This was the time of cigars around the office, of baby showers and doctor visits.  When the sickness came Aaron would get up with his wife to hold her hair out of the toilet bowl, wipe the crust of sleep from her eyes.  There were ointments and bath salts for her.  Her belly grew to a stubborn lump and Aaron waxed her with lotion.  Ariadne fretted for her stretching skin, all the while hoping to herself she would warp deep and permanent; she hoped the marks would shine like blisters in the light.  Towards the end Aaron massaged her feet before bed, shaved her legs in the bath, and tied her shoes which she could not see or reach.  He awaited eagerly her incensed cravings at two in the morning that would send him in slippers and bathrobe to the all night market for exotic canned goods.  A luxuriant hue came over her; she was possessed of a deep calm and mysterious sensuality that left her husband trembling.  She hardly understood it herself but bore it straight with a confidence.  It was the most lovely she’d ever been.

The child came under Aquarius, small and warm and perfect.  Her skull crowned oblong at her mother’s portal, ripped open into the world, the chakra glowed hot, and she spilled out of mucus into cold.  Shuttered in her birth-rattles, voiced as if broken her great rebellion, and the rest was silence.  She came to the world in a halo black as smoked oak that she never lost, wrinkled and yawning, hushed, never colicky, never distempered.  It worried Ariadne to have a baby who never cried.  Hunger nor fear nor boredom roused her lungs.  Ariadne wondered at what that moment must be like when the amniotic skin split and the child spat out like yolk from the warm white into emptiness.  She thought it must be dazzling, the shock of the world coming into contact with life, she was surprised more didn’t die in its grip.

“I wonder if the body presses you out,” Ariadne whispered to her husband.  They squatted in each other’s arms under covers.  The new one made of them drowsed only a foot away.  “Does the mother reject you?  Or does the world invite you?  Are you pushed out of the mother, or are you sucked into the world?”

Aaron shook his head and kissed his wife’s brow, “I don’t know.”

“I want to know what it sounds like.  Does the whole world sound like the sea before you’re born?  Do you feel sounds like vibrations?  What must the difference be?  Are sounds the same, just clearer, after you’re born, or are they piercing?  Do you think it’s painful, at first, to hear?”

“We don’t know.”

“At the time it seemed as though I could tell but it’s gone from me now.  I didn’t know, but my body did!”

“We can’t know now,” Aaron said in the darkness, “We’ve forgotten all that.”

“Listen,” Ariadne begged, “Listen.  I don’t want to have pushed her out of me.  I want her to have felt welcome in my body.  I want her to have stayed as long as she liked.  But I don’t want to have held her in, either, against her will.  I wanted her to be born when she felt ready.  I didn’t want to push her out or keep her in any longer than was right.”

*

Forever, truly, the rest of his life that was how he would remember his daughter.  A year old at the public park.  She stood wobbly and ecstatic with the high sun upon her in a vast field of rich green grass choked with dandelions.  The yellow flowers vivid as the sun, or crowned with white bolls like pompoms full of seed.  They swayed on coarse straws, and Aaron could feel their aching for the gentle breeze.  Joie-de-vivre stood against the wind twenty yards from where he watched.  She gloried in her independence; she stumbled away if he dared approach, her little smile on fire with the distance she kept.

Beautiful creature.  Bell-shaped in a sleeveless summer dress given a sunflower print whose canary petals and honeycombed inflorescences could not become the beauty about.  Her buttery skin swollen tight by the fat that covered her.  She stood isolated in a forest of chin high dandelions and worshiped the sun.  She bent and broke a yellow flower at the stem and offered it to the sky.

There was a game he taught her this day:  if you break the flower at the stem and blow on it very hard, or run with it high over your head, the white fluff will disperse with the seeds and fly away.  She watched him blow.  She couldn’t understand why it didn’t work when she tried.  She was confused.  Daddy’s not kissing the flower, he’s blowing.  Blow.  Like this.

She would ramble a gulf away and pick a flower and come back.  She would hold it to his lips and he would blow, and together they would watch the fluff fly away.  She loped giggling away from his embrace.  She thrilled at so much empty space between her and him, as if she could feel him at the other end of so much grass, as if she would always be connected to him.  He made her promise him.  Promise you’ll never grow up.  Stay little.  Love Daddy.  Never die.

*

Joie-de-vivre grew dark and straight and quiet.  She assumed a musty scent akin to garden mulch deep in her pores.  An organic smell, sharp and woody, her father could never exactly place.  Once, when Joie-de-vivre was two, he commented to his wife about it, and she agreed.  There had never been a smell like it in her family.  It was light and bitter and pleasant, and haunted her with an earthy beauty she found unsettling.  That night she made wrathful love, and Aaron could not know if it was caused by the smell or something other, and yet what else could tempt such violence?

And the baby not a baby ever again.  The eve of her fourth year and already a woman skulked the corners of her smoky eyes.  Her long hair soapy as nightshade petals.  She loved balloons and trees and playing make believe.  Joie-de-vivre culled the grace and thoughtful sensitivity of her mother.  At play she was careful not to soil her dresses.  She sat straight and folded the hem neatly.  She was always watching and brought a calm intelligence to everything, so that Aaron, by seeing the inflections on his daughter’s face as she observed, noticed things about the world he’d never understood before.

And already it was impossible for him to ignore that a few more years and she like her mother would be slaying.  She would enchant men as Ariadne had enchanted him.  The idea of men lusting after his daughter made him almost as ill as the idea that they might ignore her.

Daughter at play.  All the years between the beginning and the end and his thoughts would always return to this.  It is inevitable he find his reckoning in it.  The day that is the end of days.

She made him a picture with crayons and construction paper, balloon people who live in a thin square hut beneath a sun like a lemon hung low enough in the sky for the daddy to strike.  She sat on his lap.  This is the mommy.  The little girl.  The daddy’s car over here.  You can’t see it but there’s a swing-set behind the house.  In the corner her name in heavy black lines like claw marks.  They are still scarring.  Even now.  The ‘d’ is a ‘b,’ and the ‘r’ is also backwards, and the first ‘i’ is dotted below, like an exclamation point.  She lied in bed sober and attentive as he read a story about the illicit rendezvous’ of teddy-bears who picnic under the full moon.  And after, she asked questions about bears and the moon he could not answer to her satisfaction.  Frustrated with his ignorance but in love with the whole world she slept.  Her father in a gush declared all love for her mother.  They wept into each others’ mouths and found the rapture.  They stifled cries for god’s wounds with mouthfuls of their twinned shoulders, and all of it was in celebration of the tiny spark dreaming down the hall.

Happy fourth birthday.  In the morning, Ariadne made pancakes and watched the birds feed out the kitchen window.  Aaron drank coffee and read the paper.  Ariadne knew what he would say before he said it.  His hair was all over her.  Joie-de-vivre bounced excitedly through the kitchen.  She danced and sang.  She wore a powder blue dress trimmed in white lace, tights, buckled shoes.  She clambered onto a chair between the kitchen table and the window and watched the blackbirds take turns at the feeder.  The sable wings casting blue shadows on the yard of snow-bails.  Her mother combed out her hair and together they hummed.  Aaron sat a pile of loose change on the kitchen table to count.  He put all but the pennies in his pocket and left two cents on the counter.  He kissed them both, promised to meet them at noon, and went to work.

He cannot remember exactly the last time he looked at her.  It must have been while kissing her waxy head, or shortly after, smiling at her on his way out the door.  He doesn’t remember.  Whatever it was, whenever it happened that morning, it was the last time.  There were signs, that’s clear.  Signs, and he ignored them.  He left for work with blackbirds at the window and two copper coins on the counter, and like a fool had no idea what would happen.

*

There was a phone call.  Mr. Lent, come now.  They couldn’t tell him what had happened, only that he must come immediately.  He knew the neighborhood.  There was a dressmaker in that block Aaron and Ariadne had visited twice the past month.  There had been a plan for Ariadne to take her daughter there to collect a new dress for the child’s birthday before heading downtown for the party at noon.  It was a loose rabble of old world houses just outside the city, mansions of a hundred years before refurbished and given a second birth as home to small artisans rather than large families.

He drove there.  It was late January, the cars strove single file in the slushy street.  The sidewalks peopled with bundled shapes plodding to and fro beneath the eaves of shops bundled in snow as if to keep warm.  He saw the orange cones, the roadblock, the smartly dressed officers redirecting through-traffic to the detour a block south.  The black and white cruisers crowned in mute strobe lights.  He saw in the street behind them the yellow tape and the ambulance.  He parked in the gutter and ran.  Sound of his footfalls the flagellation of the earth.  The rhythmic whip of rubber soles against concrete.  He heard all the terror of anticipation in the brief silence between steps.  The strike of shoes on cement full of pain, for already it was too late to run away.

She was already gone.  They’d packed her up in the belly of an ambulance and fled before his arrival.  The sirens were not on.  This seemed of primary importance to Ariadne, for it was the first thing she said to him.  He asked her what had happened, where his daughter was.  “The sirens weren’t on,” she repeated, “They didn’t even turn on the sirens.”

*

It took days for him to understand very little, and he dimly realized, after a whole lifetime he would understand little more.  All questions are answered by death, though probably not our own.

“Not answered by our own death, or our own questions aren’t answered?” Ariadne asked, but he couldn’t be sure.  The woman distraught beyond thought.  The man distraught beyond all else.

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