Charlie nodded, shrugging off his coat. He felt as if she’d gently slipped the knife under his skin. His conversations with June had always seemed this way to him, with the subtext italicized and partially exposed. You don’t fool me. We both know that you are absent here, disengaged. You need to change your attitude.
“We’re looking for a good therapist,” he said, which wasn’t exactly true. Dr. Waldron had given Alison some names, but the blue prescription slip with the contact information was somewhere in a pile of receipts and business cards on Charlie’s dresser.
“That’s a start, but I’m really talking about what Alison needs from you,” June said, spelling it out in case he hadn’t gotten it.
Charlie turned and hung his jacket on a hook in the hall, then came back into the kitchen. “I know. It’s going to be a long road,” he said, striving for a bland metaphor to close the conversation and realizing too late that it was exactly wrong.
“Well,” June said briskly, “that’s not how I would have put it, but yes.” Gesturing toward the pile of vegetables under her knife, she said, “I thought it might be time to introduce the children to something a little more interesting than baby carrots and frozen corn.”
“Good luck,” Charlie said. “What’s the backup plan?”
He found Alison sprawled on the floor of the playroom with Ed and Annie, watching them build a castle out of blocks. “Hi,” she said, looking up with a wan smile. “I heard you come in.”
“I was talking to your mother,” Charlie said, kissing Annie on the top of the head and squeezing Alison’s shoulder, then sinking down beside her. “Why haven’t the kids eaten yet?”
“We had a late lunch. Mom wants us all to eat together tonight.”
He raised his eyebrows at her. “It looks like nuggets are off the menu. You sure this is going to fly?”
“They can have toast, if it comes to that,” Alison said. “Bless her for trying, right?”
Charlie knew Alison was peacemaking; she was probably as skeptical as he was. The seething indignation he’d felt at June’s bullying insistence on what their kids should eat melted away. Alison was right—her mother meant well. Peace, love. Warm feelings, remember?
“How go the crusades? Doth the enemy lie vanquished?” Ed asked Charlie. He sat up, crowning a pile of blocks with a conical turret. Having worked in education all his life, Ed made no secret of his disdain for and utter ignorance of corporate America. It wasn’t personal, and Charlie didn’t take offense. Ed tended to equate working for a corporation—any corporation—with going to war, and Charlie had to admit that he wasn’t half wrong.
“The enemy lies, yet is not vanquished,” Charlie said, playing along. “But it appears that I have been summoned to the king’s court.”
Alison pulled herself up to a sitting position. “What do you mean?”
Charlie winced exaggeratedly, trying to convey his own displeasure at this news and his awareness of hers to come. “I need to meet with the client next week,” he said. “They’re feeling undervalued.”
“When?”
“Tuesday morning. Which means I have to fly out on Monday, I’m afraid.”
“I thought they were in Philadelphia. Can’t you just take an early morning train?”
Clearly, he’d told Alison more about PMRG than he’d remembered. “Ahh—their creative offices are in Chicago.” Creative offices? Chicago? It made no sense, even to him. And now he’d have to be sure to keep his flight itinerary from her—and hell, what if she wanted the hotel number? “But, actually, they’re on a company retreat in Atlanta, and they want me to go there.” He shifted uncomfortably. His ears felt hot.
Ed rolled his eyes and shook his head—further confirmation, in his mind, of corporate waste and stupidity—but Alison just said, “Oh. When do you get back?”
“I’ll get a flight that afternoon. I’ll be home Tuesday evening. As soon as I can, honey.” Three months ago it would have been unfathomable to Charlie that he could lie to his wife like this, with her father and their daughter listening in. The shocking thing was how easy it was, how readily their lifestyle accommodated his deception.
That night, after a predictably disastrous dinner, with Annie moaning about the unfamiliar vegetables and rudely shoving her plate to the middle of the table and Noah chewing bok choy and spitting it out in viscous lumps on his Blues Clues place mat, and then toast and bath time and five renditions of The Very Hungry Caterpillar, with Noah successively supplying more and more of the words, Charlie stood at the foot of the bed he shared with Alison, listening in the stillness to the sound of her crying through the bathroom door. The water was running and it was hard to hear, but occasional whimpers and the faint sounds of her sniffling confirmed his suspicions.
“Al,” he said, leaning his forehead against the doorframe.
After a moment she said, “I’ll be right out.”
“Are you all right?”
He heard the faucet shut off. The door opened, and she said, “Yeah.” She was wearing a lilac tank top and floral pajama bottoms, and her face was damp and pink. She sniffed and rubbed her nose with the back of her hand, like a child. Her ability to rally like this, to act resolute and self-possessed when she clearly wanted to fall apart, was a trait he’d always admired. One of the things that had attracted him to her at the start.
“Your parents are being helpful.” He phrased this as a statement, not a question, to show Alison that he was giving them the benefit of the doubt.
“Mostly.” She turned to pluck a sweater from the clothes piled on her dresser, shaking it out and folding it against her chest.
This was what passed for small talk between them these days— Charlie encouraging and slightly disingenuous, Alison only partly willing to play along.
“That stir-fry was actually pretty good. And it probably is reasonable every now and then to force the kids to deal with grown-up food, don’t you think?”
She held another sweater against the length of her body, draping the sleeve along her own arm and then folding it across the sweater, as if she were teaching it to dance. After a moment Charlie realized she wasn’t going to answer. He unbuttoned his shirt and took off his pants. He went to the closet and folded the pants on a hanger, then stuffed the shirt in a dry-cleaning bag that hung on a hook on the back of the door. In his white T-shirt and gray jersey shorts, he went into the bathroom to brush his teeth, leaving the door ajar.
“What time is your flight on Monday?” she asked.
He answered with a mouth full of toothpaste, and she went to the door. “What? I couldn’t understand you.”
“Midday,” he said, spitting into the sink with a studied casualness. “I’ll leave from work.”
She nodded, went back to folding. When she was done she shut all the drawers of her dresser and the closet door. Then she sat on the bed, squirted Kiehl’s lotion into her hand, and rubbed it into her hands, elbows, shins.
“I love that smell,” he said, trying to fill the silence.
“It’s unscented.”
“That’s just marketing. Everything has a scent.” He sprawled on the bed behind her.
“Oh, you’re an expert?”
“As a matter of fact.”
She turned toward him, nudged him with her shoulder.
This was what passed for flirting between them these days.
He put his hand up the back of her T-shirt, and she leaned against him. It was the first time since the accident that she’d shown any interest in him at all.
She sank back farther, the full weight of her body on his, and he felt himself beginning to stir. He moved his hand around to her warm stomach and then higher, the stretchy fabric of her shirt tight against his knuckles as he spanned his fingers between her small breasts, then cupped each one. She arched her back, her neck against his cheek, and he kissed her jawbone, her chin, the corner of her mouth before she turned her head to his and kissed him full on the lips, her tongue already in his mouth.
>
The lights were on, two bedside lamps and one overhead, and the bed was still made. It was only nine o’clock. It had probably been years, Charlie thought, since they’d had sex like this, at this hour, with the lights on. The door wasn’t even fully shut. Alison’s parents were downstairs puttering around; Alison hadn’t folded out the couch in the TV room for them yet, as she normally did each night. Annie was in bed, but probably not asleep.
These were the thoughts running through Charlie’s mind as Alison slid her finger under the waistband of his shorts, slipped them down, pushed him back against the pillows. Straddling him, she took his nipple between her teeth, running her tongue back and forth over it as it stiffened, and he shut his eyes and tried not to think of anything at all.
Concentrate. Pure physical sensation.
Slowly she moved down his body, her breath hot on his stomach, and then, finally, took him in her mouth. He was hard now, and she ran her tongue up and down his length, brushed her lips across the head, put her whole mouth around him. Light-headed, he opened his eyes, winced at the brightness, saw his wife’s silky dark hair spread out across his abdomen—her own eyes shut, her tongue curling around him—and closed them again. Now it was Claire’s tongue encircling him, her hand moving up his flank, her wavy hair against his skin. …
Charlie reached down and held Alison under the arm, urging her up. “Let’s fuck,” he whispered.
“No,” she said.
“I want to. I want to be inside you.”
“No.” She wouldn’t look up.
“Alison—”
“I want you to come in my mouth.”
Charlie was startled—though of course she’d gone down on him plenty of times over the years, as far as he could remember she’d never said those words before. It was vaguely unsettling: Was this some kind of self-flagellating impulse? Did she want to feel degraded? Did she feel him pulling away; was this a calculated gesture, a competitive move? Was she trying to control him? It might have been any of these things, or it might have been none. At that point, lying on the down comforter in a T-shirt and nothing else, Charlie decided he didn’t much care.
He closed his eyes and consciously tried to relax, pushing away the images in his mind, concentrating only on the opaque orange light through his eyelids, a thick, glowing sea of light, warm as summer. As she sucked steadily he felt a gathering wave of pleasure, and then the stronger pull of an undertow, blood orange, bleeding into the orange of the wave. His body shuddered and stiffened; he stifled a groan, and then felt a sudden, dissipating release.
After a moment he looked down. Alison was wiping her mouth on a corner of her T-shirt. She laid her head against his thigh. Then she moved back up the bed toward him.
“That was amazing,” he said, turning onto his side to make room.
“Umhh,” she said.
He got up and shut the bedroom door, turned off the lights, then went to the bathroom. When he came back to bed she was curved away from him, her hair half covering her face, with her eyes closed.
He wanted to tell her that he loved her—it seemed like the right thing to say. I love you isn’t much, he thought; it’s just what a husband says to his wife in bed in the dark, an automatic reflex, an acknowledgment of the bond between them. It isn’t like saying it for the first time to a girlfriend. It’s a touchstone, tacitly understood and only spoken aloud out of a desire to connect.
A few weeks ago, putting Annie to bed, Charlie had said, “Do you know how much I love you?” and she looked him straight in the eye and said, “Yes, because you tell me all the time.” Her lack of sentimentality had surprised him, and he wondered if she sensed that he’d said it automatically, almost glibly. Was the power of the phrase diminished through repetition?
Now, with Alison, he stayed quiet. In three days he was getting on a plane to Atlanta; by Monday night he’d be with Claire. He didn’t want to make any promises that he couldn’t keep.
Chapter Six
May 1998
In modern society, Charlie wrote, the psychoanalyst Erich Fromm contended, instinct, which guides us and keeps us safe, has been replaced by reason and imagination. At the same time that we have become more self-reliant, independent, and critical, we are also increasingly fearful, isolated, and alone. We have two alternatives, Fromm believed. We can use escape mechanisms such as authoritarianism and self-aggrandizement to try to reestablish the primary bonds, though these mechanisms will erase our individuality and integrity. Or we can try to relate to the world spontaneously and creatively.
The phone rang in the hall Charlie shared with seven other expatriate grad students, a shrill, insistent British telecom tone that startled him out of his chair. He put down his pen and hurried out of his room onto the landing. “Hello?” he said into the heavy black receiver. He had to stand close to the phone box; the receiver was tethered to it by a short metal rope.
“It’s Claire. What are you doing?”
Charlie was startled. He still wasn’t used to her habit of forgoing pleasantries. “Uh—working on a paper. Erich Fromm.”
“Wasn’t he completely nuts?”
“Not completely,” Charlie said. “Well, no more than the rest of them.”
“I guess you have to be nuts to state the obvious as if it were the answer to the universe,” Claire said.
“Or a genius,” Charlie said. He tried to lean against the wall but was yanked back by the cord. The landing was drafty, and he looked longingly at his open door and electric heater, its red coils visible from the hallway. “So what’s up?”
“Are you free Friday evening?” she asked. “We want you to come to dinner.”
Charlie had gotten used to the “we,” though he was always disappointed when she used it. He suspected it was a way of keeping him at a safe distance. Even worse was when she would say Ben thinks or Ben believes, or when she expressed a tender feeling for him in the course of their conversation: Ben is working so hard right now. I have to get back or Ben will worry.
A few days earlier, standing in the mist on Grange Road, saying good-bye at a traffic light, Claire had suddenly reached out and held Charlie’s arm. “I’m so glad you and Ben are friends,” she said. “I like you both so much.” It was at once a casual understatement of her feelings for Ben and, Charlie thought, a flattering revelation of her feelings for him. Both so much. That one phrase made him and Ben the same.
“I think I’m available,” Charlie said now. He’d been going to their house for dinner once or twice a week—whenever they invited him—since they’d met. It was better than sitting in a long, formal row and eating boiled peas in the Downing College Hall, and it definitely beat what he could come up with in the cramped kitchen he shared with the other grad students. “What can I bring?”
“Just some grog,” she said.
“How many people?”
“Four. You, me, Ben, and a friend of mine. Alison.”
“Really?” He was surprised. Their dinner parties were usually large and riotous, peopled with all manner of boisterous Americans and tolerant Europeans.
“Alison is my best friend from home. From North Carolina. She’s flying in on Thursday for a little visit. I don’t want to overwhelm her.”
“How did I make the short list?” Charlie asked, not so subtly seeking a compliment.
“Male, single, straight,” she said without hesitation.
“Flattered.”
“It’s our good fortune that you also happen to be charming, intelligent, and handsome.”
“Now you’re just making nice.”
“Whatever it takes,” she said. “So you’ll come?”
The truth was, he would have done anything for her. He would’ve hitchhiked to Siberia if she’d asked him to. To Charlie, reading Rossetti and Swinburne and Robert Browning for the first time, Claire seemed to have stepped out of the nineteenth century, with her translucent skin and full lips, the shapely curve of tummy and breasts under those tiny cashmere cardigans in oliv
e greens and deep reds, her searching gaze and unpredictable smile and wild hair. The expression in her eyes was a peculiar mix of innocence and knowingness; her curves were babylike, and sometimes she seemed so guileless that he wanted instinctively to protect her. She was often late, and sometimes she didn’t show up at all; if she did, she would be apologetic, usually bringing a peace offering of some kind—a coffee or Cadbury bar, with a long, involved story about where she’d been and why she was unable to tear herself away. It was frustrating to wait for her—all the more because he wanted desperately to be with her—but he never got the feeling that her lapses of civility were malicious, and he rarely got angry. He made allowances for Claire that he wouldn’t have made for anyone else.
Claire was constantly introducing him to someone new by saying, “Charlie, have you met my good friend so-and-so?” It was rare that he went somewhere she hadn’t already been, or learned something about Cambridge that she hadn’t already discovered. She knew the shortcuts, the back alleys, the restaurant that had half-price dinner specials on Tuesdays and the bakery where you could get free day-old muffins. They’d stroll through the outdoor mall downtown and she’d greet cross-dressers and vagrants, whom she knew from volunteering at the soup kitchen on weekends, like old friends. No matter how much she told him about herself, he never felt as if he had the whole story.
This is what it was: she surprised him. Whatever she did was different from what he would have done, or what he might have predicted. She could be formal one moment and irreverent, even crude, the next. She pulled a sweater over her head like a five-year-old, arms akimbo, hair snarling across her face. She laughed loudly and unabashedly at movies. One evening they got caught in a rainstorm coming back from a farmers’ market and ran to wait it out under the sloping roof of a locked boathouse beside the Cam. Standing there, soaking wet, Claire looked him in the eye and slipped her seaweed-slick stockings off under her skirt. At the time Charlie couldn’t tell whether it was flirtatious or ingenuous. It seemed simply impulsive, though her movements were graceful and adult.