As she lay in that hotel room bed, staring at the ceiling, a coil of questions unfurled in her head. What kind of happiness is possible? Is it worth risking what I have? What would I give up; what would I gain? She wished she had a crystal ball that would reveal the shape of the years to come—that would tell her what to do. Then she was ashamed of her conventionality, her parochial need for direction. Wasn’t that what she had to overcome? That there was no clear path was precisely the point.
And yet … she worried about money, worried about the future; she could feel the minutes ticking by. It was as if time had started up again, after years at a standstill. When it seemed that she would be with Ben for the rest of her life, the passing of time had felt fluid, unimportant. But now, suddenly, she was exposed to the possibilities and limitations of a different kind of life.
THE NEXT MORNING, Claire was up at seven. She was supposed to meet the local media escort in the lobby of the Hampton Inn in forty-five minutes. According to the faxed itinerary she’d picked up at the front desk when she checked in the night before, they had a full day planned—two local radio interviews, a lunch interview with the Raleigh News & Observer, an interview with the book editor of the UNC campus newspaper. She was also supposed to drop by some of the chain stores to sign piles of books set aside by the managers. These signings were always a little humbling; stores couldn’t return autographed books, so the manager calculated sales potential before presenting a writer with a pile of books. Sometimes Claire signed ten, sometimes fifteen, occasionally a discouraging three. The media escort—in Claire’s experience, either a nice older woman or a young gay man who’d driven more glamorous and exciting writers around in the past month and was dying to dish every detail—would be chatty and charming, and she was expected to be the same. When an interview didn’t work out or if only four people showed up at a reading, Claire felt guilty, as if she’d let the escort down or wasn’t worth the trouble.
After a few interviews and signings, she realized that she was being asked the same questions over and over: How much of this novel is based on your life? Was your mother an alcoholic? What do your parents think of the book? Now and then there’d be an interviewer, usually from a local National Public Radio station, who had actually read the book and asked questions that were a pleasure to answer, about the writing process, structural decisions, themes or connections that Claire might not even have been aware of herself. But these were rare. More often, she felt that she was running an obstacle course, trying to avoid pitfalls without making a fool of herself, or of the person who asked the question.
As the tour progressed, she’d begun to sense that the serendipitous things that happen to some authors—splashy reviews in national publications, the public endorsement of the book by a celebrity writer (or any type of celebrity, for that matter), some kind of controversy, a Zeitgeisty appeal that tapped into a general feeling or national mood—weren’t happening to her, though nobody would tell her that directly. The cognitive dissonance of this experience—the need to promote the book by conveying a sense of its popularity (Dreamworks! Entertainment Weekly!) while getting the distinct impression that this popularity was artificially hyped—was unsettling. It was hard to discern what was real and what was propaganda, and perhaps even harder because she wasn’t sure she really wanted to know.
She called Jami, back in New York, for a reality check, and got a party line instead—“Everyone’s really happy with the book! National reviews don’t matter, it’s the local reviews people read! And besides, your book is all over the Internet. It’s still early, relax!” But she knew it wasn’t really true. First novels have the shelf life of Wonder Bread, and what she was beginning to understand was that for most books the sell-by date was actually the publication date. The important time was before that, when bookstores placed their orders and long-lead glossy magazines decided whether your book was worth ink. Buzz was created then. If not, the publisher picked up and moved on to the next promising first novel. Unless a book got a lucky break, it was old news a month after it came out.
It had been three weeks since the publication date. There were two national reviews, in People and Entertainment Weekly; the New York Times hadn’t bothered. The southern papers were enthusiastic; they ran profiles and reviews and included Claire’s book in roundups with other first novelists writing about the South. Bluestone didn’t have an independent bookstore, but there was a Borders, with a Starbucks, no less, the next town over. The book had been featured in the Bluestone Record—a profile and review, side by side, with a big publicity photo of Claire and flattering references to Bluestone’s “hometown girl.” The profile was little more than a whitewashed account of Claire’s years in Bluestone and a verbatim recitation of the half-truths and puffery of her publicity release. The review, on the other hand, by a snarky former high school classmate, was full of insinuations about her motives, cast in a dimly positive light. It was clear that the reviewer had been told she needed to be nice but couldn’t resist getting in a few jabs: “One wonders why Ms. Ellis felt the need to confirm northern liberals’ stereotypes of southerners. Just for the record, not every southern matron is an alcoholic, and not every southern teenage girl is a rebellious slut. But despite the novel’s weaknesses. … ”
Claire had been on the radio, three different stations, the morning of her homecoming, and she’d spoken at the high school, a semihonest testament to the instruction she’d received there that enabled her to excel, get out, move to New York, and write a book about her hometown. Many of the students were curious about meeting someone who’d grown up in Bluestone and actually left; a few, seeing in her the idealized fulfillment of their own longing, hung on her every word. It was flattering. Claire felt famous, for once. These students didn’t ask her to explain why she’d called Bluestone—Hatfield, in the book—a “small, dying mill town,” or any of the other mildly critical descriptions in the book of the town’s landscape or social milieu. The hypocrisy and racism she’d depicted, the inclusion of which some of her mother’s friends found deeply offensive, came across to these kids as an interesting history lesson.
Claire had sent her mother a copy of the galleys months earlier, after scrawling a lighthearted disclaimer on the title page—“Remember, Mother, it’s a novel!” —but all Lucinda ever said about it was, “You always did have a peculiar way of looking at things,” and “It’s probably just as well your father isn’t around to see what you have to say about him.” At the book party in New York, Lucinda had seemed flattered by the attention people paid her, even as the ones who’d actually read the book lingered on her face a little too long (searching for signs of melancholy or perhaps the Alzheimer’s that, as Claire had written, ran in the family) or scrutinized her now-veiny hands (at sixteen she’d been a hand model for Joy dishwashing liquid).
They never discussed the specific incidents that Claire had dredged out of the well of her past and laid to dry on the exposed pages of her book—the time her father had hit her mother across the face and Claire called 911; the time Lucinda had gotten sloshed on those blue martinis and went skinny-dipping in a neighbor’s pool with a golfing buddy of her husband’s; the time Lucinda walked in on Claire, at seventeen, having sex in the master bedroom with a minor league baseball player she’d met at a bar. It was as if Lucinda had decided that Claire was a sculptor and she’d created a book that was just a physical object—with its sturdy spine and splashy cover and sans serif typeface—and not what was inside.
Actually, the book was beginning to seem like an object to Claire, too. When she was writing it she couldn’t imagine how she would ever talk about it. Even fictionalized, the revelations felt so intensely personal that she had to pretend to herself that she was writing in a journal; otherwise she’d never have said the things she did. But now that these moments from her life were contained in discrete, tidy chapters, she felt like any salesperson shilling a product. In interviews she said the same things over and over, wavering between candor
and subterfuge. She acknowledged painful secrets as if they were someone else’s. And in some ways it felt as if they were—not her secrets anymore, just stories she’d overheard or read or seen on TV.
About a hundred people from Bluestone showed up at the Borders reading that night, an exponentially larger number than Claire had drawn anywhere else. Her mother was there with her sidekick, Martha Belle, and again Claire was struck by the power of her mother’s denial, her steadfast desire to see the book as a thing, a product, rather than the sardonic, barely disguised recollections of a still-wounded daughter. As people filed in, Lucinda situated herself by Claire’s side at the front, greeting friends with the benevolent smile of a proud grandparent: “Come see the baby!” She ignored curious looks and answered insinuating questions with bland responses: “I raised her to have her own opinions,” Lucinda said to anyone who would listen, and, “She’s been her own boss since she was three years old.”
For a lot of reasons, Claire was nervous. There’d be people in the audience who appeared, in one guise or another, in her book; they might have reason to be hostile. Since leaving home for college, Claire had returned as infrequently as possible. When her parents’ marriage dissolved and her father, at the age of fifty-five, married a local woman two years older than Claire and had another child, Claire had been aghast and her mother devastated. Claire had had little contact with her father in the past decade; they exchanged Christmas cards, and on the few occasions Claire had visited her mother in Bluestone she had dutifully spent several awkward afternoons with him and his new wife, Mandy, and their daughter Brianna, Claire’s half-sister.
Claire felt fairly certain that her father wouldn’t come that evening, and as she scanned the crowd she was sure she’d been right. Only after the reading was over—three carefully chosen, self-deprecating passages that touched on nothing more serious than the death of a pet guinea pig and her capricious destruction of her mother’s prize flower bed (an incident she depicted with far more frivolity than it had occasioned at the time)—did Claire look up and see her father standing alone at the back, a tall man with distinguished gray hair, his impassive expression a bracing shock above the indulgent smiles of the audience she had charmed, clapping politely in their seats.
When the inevitable question arose about her parents’ response to the book, Claire gestured toward Lucinda, sitting with Martha Belle, and then to her father—but he was gone. Even as the question was being asked, he had slipped out.
AS THE QUESTION-AND-ANSWER period was winding down, a balding, paunchy, vaguely familiar man in a red windbreaker stood up.
“Hey, Claire, don’t know if you remember me. I was in the class behind you at Bluestone High. Terry Shaw. How’re you doing.” He held his hand shyly in a half-wave, hitched up his pants, and cleared his throat. “Just wondering what ‘Jill’ thinks about all this.”
Claire had known that she might get a question like this, but somehow it caught her off guard. She took a breath. “Well,” she said, “this book is a novel, which means, as you know, that the characters are made up. Some are composites, so you might recognize bits of people here and there. But Jill isn’t based on any one specific person.” Cool it, she thought; you’re lecturing—and worse, you sound defensive. Anyway, Terry didn’t look convinced. Claire saw him raise his eyebrows at someone a few rows over. She smiled weakly. “Next question?”
Terry raised a half-curled index finger. “She sure seems a lot like Alison Gray.”
Claire felt her chest constrict. It was hard to breathe. “Really?” she squeaked. “Huh, that’s interesting. Maybe a little, I guess.”
Alison. Claire didn’t know what she thought of her book. She didn’t even know if she’d read it. And now it didn’t matter, did it? Real life had taken precedence, relegating Claire’s small book to an appropriately minor place in Alison’s mind. If she thought of it at all.
Chapter Four
May 1998
When Alison opened the door at 32 Barton Road to find Charlie standing there, the first thing she noticed was his blond wavy hair. The second was that he looked unabashedly American, tan and robust, with a white T-shirt under his frayed oxford, sleeves rolled to the elbows. His shoulders were broad, though he was quite thin, and his face was a little soft, as if he hadn’t outgrown the last traces of baby fat. His eyebrows were blond caterpillars over light blue eyes.
At dinner that night she watched him. He and Ben were a study in contrasts: Ben lanky and angular and slightly awkward, with his glasses and dark hair and air of suppressed whimsy, Charlie as loose-limbed and sandy haired as a golden retriever. Right away she was suspicious: easy charm like his tended to come wrapped around a roguish core. This M.O. was prevalent in southerners of a certain type—affluent, entitled, fraternity bred—and it wasn’t a type she usually went for. But as they started talking she realized that there was something else, something in his character that she couldn’t pin down. He wasn’t cocky, and his humor was gentle. He had a mild confidence, a lack of self-consciousness, an ironic take on the world that wasn’t caustic or bitter. Despite his social ease, he had a solitary air.
At one point, when Ben was gesturing animatedly, Charlie leaned back in his chair, laughing, and caught Alison’s eye. She knew he’d seen her studying him.
“What?” he said, an expectant half smile on his face. It was an expression she would come to know well—seemingly guileless, more guarded than it appeared.
“Nothing,” she said.
“Tell me.”
He seemed familiar to her, like a fond memory or a recurring dream. “I feel like I’ve met you somewhere before.”
“Ever been to Kansas?” he asked jokingly.
“He’s like that, Alison,” Ben said. “Not just with you. He has this protean face, or something—I don’t know. It’s misleading. You think you know him and then you make assumptions about his likes and dislikes, and more times than not you’re wrong; you’ve misjudged him. It’s bloody annoying.”
“I don’t know what he’s talking about,” Charlie said.
Falling in love with Charlie was like traveling to a foreign country and feeling unexpectedly at home. It surprised Alison to discover that he didn’t wear deodorant; he showered every day and that was enough, he said, and it was. He had a clean midwestern smell, as sweet as hay. He didn’t like pills or lotions or creams; he washed his face once a day, in the shower, with shampoo. He toweled off quickly, like a dog shaking off after running through a sprinkler. Like a dog, too, he was refreshingly unneurotic—he ate what he liked until he was full, and then he stopped; he worked on a paper until he decided he was done, and then he put it aside. He didn’t second-guess everything. He once told Alison that he couldn’t remember being picked on as a kid. She imagined that he had been raised like an ear of corn in a big field out there in Kansas, ripening on the stalk until he was ready to leave.
From the first time Alison touched him, Charlie’s skin was a welcoming place—a warm place, a refuge. It smelled familiar, like her own skin or the skin of a child she might someday give birth to. Falling in love with Charlie was as easy as breathing. Years later, when he started to pull away and Alison finally, stupidly, belatedly, realized that something was wrong, it was still incomprehensible to her that they might ever be separate, that a time would come when his sandpapery face and sinewy arms would be off-limits.
Chapter Five
At Cambridge Charlie had studied the early church philosopher Augustine, who believed that although true happiness is possible, most people will never experience it. You cannot be happy if you don’t possess what you love—or, possessing it, you realize that it is bad or harmful—or if you don’t love what you have, no matter how objectively good it is. True happiness exists only when you have what you love, and when what you love is good for you.
Charlie believed he was in love with Alison when he married her—even if it was clear to him later that what he thought was love was nothing like true happiness, not
the barest shadow of it. He saw Claire’s delight in Alison’s smile, the sparkle in their eyes when they told a story together, their habit of finishing each other’s sentences like sisters. The truth was, he had such strong feelings for Claire that he didn’t know what to do with them. Sharing some of them with Alison seemed as reasonable a strategy as any. For a time this transfer of emotion was effective enough to fool both of them into thinking that it might be theirs alone.
But in the past few months, since reconnecting with Claire, Charlie had begun to recapture the way he felt at Cambridge. He didn’t know what it was, exactly, only that it was transformative. The boredom, his sense of going through the motions—all of that had dissipated.
WHEN CHARLIE GOT home from work that evening, June was in the kitchen, chopping organic vegetables for a stir-fry he knew the kids wouldn’t eat.
“You’re home early,” she said with surprise when he opened the back door.
Having booked an e-ticket to Atlanta for Monday afternoon, Charlie had taken Bill Trieste up on his offer and shunted his biggest account, with its irksome client, off on a colleague. Then he took an earlier train home than he’d said he would. Now that he had a plan, he felt a surge of warm feelings toward Alison and her parents that was directly proportional to the guilt he felt for leaving, the anxiety he felt about lying to them, and the fear that his plan might somehow be foiled. “I wanted to get home as soon as I could. How is she?” He gestured vaguely upward.
June, chopping bok choy, lifted her shoulders slightly. “She’s not in bed, at least. She’s in the playroom with Ed and Annie.”
“How are her spirits?”
“Hard to tell.” She stopped chopping and held the knife aloft in apparent contemplation. “I don’t think this is the kind of thing you can get over easily. Not if you’re Alison, at least. She’s going to need a lot of support—a lot—in the next few months. Years, maybe.”