Standing at the station, with Claire on the phone, Charlie looked down the tracks to the train, some distance away, speeding toward the platform. Commuters were folding newspapers, snapping shut cell phones, rummaging for train passes. The whistle sounded, a low, sonorous noise that seemed to hang in the air.
“I can’t stop thinking about what happened—how terrible it is,” Claire said. “Alison never called me back, and I don’t want to bug her. But—”
“She’s not calling anybody right now.”
“I just want her to know—oh, shit. I guess it doesn’t matter.”
“No, it does. It matters,” he said, not paying attention to the words, trying to put an end to the topic. Charlie didn’t want to talk about Alison with Claire. The only way he was getting through this was by keeping the two of them separate in his mind.
“I feel like this is my fault … ridiculous blue martinis … and to tell you the truth I was kind of avoiding her; it just felt—well, you know, we hadn’t spoken in a while … that dumb article … if I’d been more welcoming—if I’d thought about how she might feel … And this damn book … I know she feels betrayed … And you. Jesus, Charlie—you. … ”
Every other word she said was drowned out by the train as it pulled into the station, and Charlie shut his eyes, relieved by the intrusion. “The train’s here,” he said. Now he felt irritated by Claire—her self-absorption was getting on his nerves. He had forgotten this about her, or maybe he just hadn’t noticed lately, overwhelmed as he was by other, more primal concerns: the firm weight of her breasts in his hands, the curve of her naked hip. …
“God, I’m a narcissist.” It was almost as if she was reading his mind.
“No,” he said, stepping on the train and finding a seat. He couldn’t bear to reassure her; it was hard enough responding to Alison. And he had his own guilt to deal with, even as he dreamed of escape … the baby-soft skin of her inner thigh … waited for Claire to return from her book tour.
Or maybe—maybe—could he go to her?
He handed his monthly pass to the conductor, awkwardly cradling the flat phone against his jaw. “Where will you be on Monday?” he asked Claire, nodding at the conductor as he passed.
“Umm … Atlanta, I think,” she said.
Charlie took a deep breath. “How would you like company for a night?”
“Are you serious? How could you?”
“Her parents are here,” he said, finding the pronoun easier than Alison’s name. “They’re staying for five or six days. Maybe these new clients of mine need some hand-holding.”
“Oh, yes,” she said. “They do need hand-holding. Come.”
Chapter Two
May 1998
On a clear Friday evening at seven, the moon a faint night-light in the sky, Charlie locked his bike to the stair rail and pushed the doorbell at Claire and Ben’s house. A slim woman opened the door. Her back was half-turned to him, and she was in the middle of a sentence. “I’m sorry,” she said, turning back. “You must be Charlie. I’m Alison.”
She held out her hand for him to take. It was small and cool, her grip surprisingly strong. Her large eyes were chestnut colored, and her hair was straight and dark brown. She had clear skin and a wide mouth, almost too wide for her face. Her ass, in faded Levi’s, was, he noticed, small and firm. “Ben’s in there cooking snails, of all things,” she said, and now Charlie could detect her soft southern accent, more pronounced than Claire’s. She shook her head. “I don’t know what this country is doing to you people.”
“Turning us into snobs and pedants and raging Europhiles,” Charlie said. “It’s the Brits’ revenge on us for defecting two hundred fifty years ago.”
She laughed. “Then I suppose you’ll want a sherry.”
He followed her inside, where Ben was chopping garlic on a tiny board with a tiny knife, hunched over it like a dressmaker.
“I brought some hard stuff,” Charlie said, holding up a paper bag.
“What is it?” Ben paused, looking up, while Charlie unsheathed a bottle of Dalwhinnie. “ ‘A superior Highland Scotch,’ ” Ben read off the label. “Ex-cellent. Let the wild rumpus start,” and went back to chopping.
Charlie felt a glow of pleasure at having pleased the notoriously exacting Ben. “You, too?” he said to Alison.
She wrinkled her nose, hesitating, and then said, “When in Rome, I suppose,” with a shrug.
Opening the cabinet, Charlie found four mismatched glasses and took them down. “And Claire?”
“Better not,” Ben said. “I don’t know when she’ll be back.”
“Isn’t she coming?”
“Don’t know.” Ben didn’t look up.
Charlie glanced at Alison questioningly. She raised her eyebrows but didn’t say anything. They both watched Ben throw the garlic in a pan with some butter. “Almost done,” he said, stirring the sizzling beads with a wooden spoon. “Then we can sit down for a few minutes and enjoy that Scotch.”
“Straight up, or rocks?” Charlie asked, going to the freezer.
“Straight up. Always straight up,” Ben said.
“Bartender’s choice,” said Alison, smiling.
“Umm—I’ll give you rocks,” Charlie said. “You might want the water if you nurse this all night.”
“Sorry, I’m a total flyweight,” she said. “My college experience consisted of keg beer and Sutter Home. And the occasional Sunday morning Bloody Mary.”
“Wow, that sounds familiar. Where did you go?” Charlie asked, remembering that Claire had filled him in on Alison’s vital statistics, and wishing he’d paid better attention.
“Chapel Hill. University of North Carolina.”
“I know what Chapel Hill is.” Charlie grinned. “It’s practically Ivy.”
“So they insist,” she said. “And you’re from Kansas. Lawrence, right? I’ve heard it’s a great college town.”
“Yeah, it’s this bizarre oasis. Albeit with a Wal-Mart the size of Delaware.”
“How does this compare?” she asked, gesturing vaguely toward Ben, or perhaps toward the university beyond him.
“It doesn’t. A whole other world.” He handed her a drink, ice clinking in the glass, and looked in her eyes. They were darker now, lively and warm. I could do this, he thought. He wondered, fleetingly, if Claire had stayed away on purpose, to give Alison a fighting chance.
“All right.” Ben turned the flame down to low and lifted his Scotch. “Cheers. Here’s to public education.” He clinked their glasses with his own.
Claire did show up around ten o’clock, after the snails and the salad and the pan-fried trout with a cornmeal crust that Alison had prepared while Ben and Charlie stood around the stove. They were well into the Dalwhinnie at that point, Ben having decided after a few drinks that it would be foolhardy to switch. When Claire walked in, Ben was standing on the table, singing, “I’m just a little black rain cloud,” and doing a fair imitation of Winnie-the-Pooh.
“Hello,” she said coolly.
Ben looked at Charlie. “I say, Piglet. I believe we’re in for some stormy weather.”
She stared at them for a moment. Then she dropped the bag of books she was carrying and went into the bedroom, shutting the door behind her.
Ben stepped off the table and sank into a chair. He crossed his long limbs, bent and unbent like a grasshopper. His fingers skimmed the tablecloth, tapped his plate, retracted, unfolded. Candlelight flickered on his glasses.
Charlie glanced at Alison, and she glanced back at him. “Am I the only one who doesn’t know what’s going on?” he said, forcing a small laugh.
In a soft voice, Ben finished his song. “I’m just floating a-round, o-ver the ground, won-der-ing where I will drip.”
“So what do you think?” Claire asked Charlie the next day. They were sitting at opposite ends of the living room couch, sipping tea. Ben had gotten up early to attend a Saturday morning lecture a prominent architect was giving at the museum, and Alison h
ad decided at the last minute to accompany him.
“Of your going AWOL?” The evening had ended with Alison claiming exhaustion and going to bed, and Ben and Charlie finishing the Scotch in silence with the lights off, watching the red-hot coils of the electric heater in the living room. Charlie had slept on the couch. Claire stayed in her room. He was hoping that now she might tell him what was going on.
“God.” She shook her head. “No, of Alison.”
“I’m more interested in you, at the moment.”
“I’m interested in what you think of Alison.”
“I’ll tell you if you tell me.”
“You’re impossible,” she said, throwing a pillow at him.
He ducked, lifting his cup. “You’re the one who didn’t show up last night.”
“You seemed to do fine without me.”
“Come on, Claire.”
She took a long sip of tea. “Maybe I was jealous,” she said.
“What?” Charlie said incredulously.
“Maybe,” she said.
His heart leapt a little and then, just as quickly, sank. It made no sense. “You’re the one with the boyfriend. Excuse me, fiancé. And you—you set me up with Alison. She’s your friend.”
“I know,” she said. “But maybe I decided I didn’t want to share you.” She set down her cup and put her hands over her eyes. “I’m being a baby. Alison is my best friend, and you—you’re my closest friend here, besides Ben, of course, and I just realized that if you and Alison got together I’d lose both of you. You’d become obsessed with each other.”
“Aren’t you moving a little fast? I just met the girl last night. I don’t even know if she likes me.”
“She does,” Claire said matter-of-factly.
“How do you know?”
“I just do. That’s why I set you up. I knew she’d like you, and you’d probably like her.” She pushed his leg with her bare foot. “So do you?”
“You’re a mindfuck, Claire,” Charlie said.
She gazed at him for a long time, and he stared steadily back at her. It was the first time they’d looked in each other’s eyes, and Charlie refused to look away. What had she just said? That she was jealous, that she wanted him for herself. Did she really mean it? He feared that if he didn’t seize this moment it would slip past him like so many others. He had a habit of not taking seriously the choices that were laid in front of him, or perhaps not recognizing their magnitude until too late.
Finally she said, “I love Ben.”
“I know,” he said.
“He’s good for me.”
“I know.”
“I wish. … ” She sighed. “I wish I could live two lives.”
Charlie shrugged, feeling the weight of rejection pressing on his chest, though until that moment he hadn’t imagined that she would ever see it that way—as a choice between him and Ben. “I—”
She reached over and put the flat of her hand against his lips. “Don’t,” she said, and sank back into her corner of the couch. “Don’t say anything. I want everything to be the way it was.”
He looked at her for a long moment, trying to gauge whether to pursue it. What are you really saying? This was the kind of question you didn’t ask, or at least that Charlie didn’t ask. Midwestern circumspection had been bred in him too well. You accepted what people told you about themselves, even when you knew there was more to the story. You respected their desire to reveal only what they were comfortable with, comfort being the ruling principle.
“Okay,” he said.
They sat there for a few minutes, listening to the Bach concerto playing on the portable cassette player in the corner, the ticking of the wind-up clock in the kitchen, the muffled whoosh of cars going by in the rain. Claire seemed closed again, determinedly friendly and distant.
“I like her,” he said eventually. “She seems nice. Maybe a little naïve?”
“A little,” Claire said. “That’s not necessarily a bad thing, you know. Haven’t you read Henry James?”
“No,” he admitted.
“Well, you should,” she said. “Alison is a classic Henry James heroine.”
Later, after the rain subsided, Charlie stepped out the back door onto the uneven concrete patio and looked up at the sky, white as skim milk. Trees, heavy with rain, shook their sodden leaves in the wind. He would have liked to see this break in the weather as an omen, but he was finished with omens for now.
Chapter Three
Standing at a podium in a small independent bookstore in Raleigh, North Carolina, Claire looked out at the sparse collection of people scattered across the rows of folding chairs, and opened her book to a Post-it-marked page. “Thank you all for coming,” she said. “I’m just going to read a few short sections. Then we can talk.” She smiled nervously and began:
Emma’s college roommate was a girl named Colleen who met her boyfriend, Steve, on the first day of freshman orientation. On a rare evening when Steve wasn’t around, Emma asked Colleen how she knew so early that he was the one she wanted to spend the rest of her life with.
“What gave you that idea?” Colleen asked.
“Well, you spend every waking minute with him,” Emma said. “Not to mention sleeping. I just figured.”
“Look,” Colleen said. “I met Steve in the dining hall and we hit it off. We’re both pre-med, we run cross-country—we’ve got a lot in common. But what if I’d taken a year off before college? What if I’d gone to a different school? Well, I know what. I would’ve met a different Steve. You know—a nice, smart guy who’s ambitious enough but a little shy, who’s looking for a girlfriend to make him feel secure. There are probably hundreds of them out there—maybe thousands! It all comes down to timing and circumstance. If I had been born in a different town, or a different country—or, for that matter, a different decade—there’s no doubt in my mind I’d find the Steve I need.”
At the time Emma found Colleen’s philosophy shocking, and then, for a while, she was inclined to agree. But experience taught her something else. She came to believe that there was such a thing as true love, and that it was the most important thing in the world—more important than kindness or constancy, more important even than trust.
The reading went pretty well, given that two members of the Raleigh audience appeared to be mentally ill, three were distantly related to Martha Belle Clancy, two were bookstore employees, and one was the media escort. The four remaining people—“civilians,” as Suzy, the store clerk, called the audience members who attended out of genuine interest, not obligation or happenstance—had read a review or heard Claire earlier in the day on the radio, or, as one of them told her, stumbled across the novel on Amazon.com, where for a brief cyber-moment it had been a featured selection.
Back in her hotel room later that evening, Claire lay in bed, thinking about how strange it was that she had written those lines more than a year ago. She thought of Ben, of his dark hair slick after a shower, his crisp Thomas Pink shirts and beautiful hands, his attention to detail, his kindness. She thought of him sautéing scallops for dinner, pouring her a glass of wine, saving an article in the Times he thought she’d like.
Falling in love with Ben had been easy. Claire was captivated by his intelligence and humor; he was unlike anyone she had ever met. She knew plenty of southern boys with smooth moves and social skills and even, perhaps, brains, but she’d never met anyone with Ben’s mordant, deeply sardonic take on life. And he was kind. From the beginning, Ben wanted to protect her, take care of her, send her out into the world with a better sense of who she was—or rather, a sense of her better self.
“I’m not as good as you think I am,” she told him once.
“You’re not as bad as you think you are, either.”
“Is that a challenge?”
He looked at her sharply. “I’m not your father.”
I’m not your father. Recently Claire had told her therapist about a time when she was eight, skipping rope in the drive
way, chanting a song to herself, waiting for her father to get home from work. When he pulled up in his blue Chevy wagon, the first thing he said was, “For Chrissakes, Claire, stop yowling.”
She didn’t miss a beat. “I’m not yowling, Daddy. I’m singing.”
“Well, pipe down. You’re bothering the neighbors. And you’re filthy,” he’d said. “I’ll expect you to change that dress before dinner.”
His words stung, and she let the jump rope go slack. It was the last time she would ever wait for him after work.
“That’s some powerful shame,” Dina said.
Ben was the first man Claire had ever met who didn’t make her feel neurotic. He told her he loved her energy, her passion and intelligence. For a while it made her doubt him all the more. “I can’t be the person you’re telling me I am,” she’d say. “I’ll go crazy if I have to be the person you want me to be.”
“I don’t want you to be anything. Except yourself.”
“What if I don’t know who that is?”
It wasn’t like Claire had fallen out of love with Ben, she realized. It was more like she had drifted, the way you do on a plastic float in a pool with your eyes closed, moving away from the edge without realizing it. Some minute shift had occurred deep within her, and it altered the way she looked at everything. The peace they shared became interminable. Scrabble bored her; her sleep became restless. It was like waking from amnesia, or some epic dream; her head felt clear for the first time since she could remember. Ben didn’t take it seriously, thought it was the miscarriage; a mood, or a phase, part of the natural ebb and flow of their relationship. But Claire knew this was different—something had changed. She had changed. And the life they shared would never look the same to her again.