Bird in Hand (15 page)

“Thanks,” Charlie said. “Bill, I’d appreciate it if you don’t share this with anyone. Alison is a pretty private person, and I think she’d prefer to keep this quiet.”

“Of course. I understand,” Bill assured him.

Actually, Alison hadn’t said anything to Charlie about keeping it quiet. He was the one who didn’t want people to know. His wife had been drinking, and a small boy had died. A child—a boy like his boy—someone else’s son: dead. It was inconceivable. If he had been driving, this wouldn’t have happened, he was sure of it. He was more confident on the road, not to mention heavier; he would have absorbed the alcohol differently. Anyway, he wouldn’t have drunk two gimmicky blue martinis.

But to go to Claire’s party with Alison would have been unbearable.

Before the accident Charlie had wondered if it might be possible for things to continue as they were indefinitely; he and Claire could lead their separate lives and come together in a kind of biospheric space, outside the constraints of real life. Their relationship would exist beyond the realm of everyday concerns. Even at the time Charlie had known that this conceit was foolish; the delicate balance required to sustain such a precarious arrangement was bound to become upset. Either he or Claire would come to feel that it wasn’t enough; Alison or Ben would find out. Eventually things would have to change. But now he felt like those prisoners of war he’d read about who were strapped, alive, to the dead bodies of their fallen comrades and thrown into the river. He was bound to Alison in a way that he hadn’t been before—he was, or would have to be, the stalwart husband.

STANDING ON THE platform an hour later, waiting for the 1:17 train, Charlie pulled out his cell phone.

“Hey there, you,” Claire said in a groggy voice.

“Oh God, did I wake you?”

“It’s okay. I was napping,” she said. “I had to get up at the crack of dawn for a morning show.”

“Sorry. Where are you?”

He could hear the rustle of sheets, and he pictured her sitting up, turning on the bedside lamp in the hotel room. “Nashville. The weather is downright balmy. Flowers are blooming.”

“How’d the reading go last night?”

“Fine. An old friend from college lives here, so she rustled up a crowd. Otherwise it would’ve been a homeless man and three old ladies who heard me on Tennessee Public Radio yesterday afternoon.”

“How are you?” he asked, impatient with the details.

“Charlie, I’m fine. Fine, fine—it doesn’t matter. The question is, how are
you
?”

He inhaled quietly, filling his lungs with the cool spring air. A mile or so away, at the other end of town, the warning horn of the train sounded as it pulled into the station. He should’ve called her sooner. In a minute the train would be here.

“Ahh. Not so great,” he said. Leaving the house, he’d run into Alison’s father in the kitchen, sitting at the table eating a tuna sandwich and reading the
Times
. Charlie had said a quick hello and ducked back into the hall to get his laptop bag, but Ed got up and stood in the doorway with his glass of milk.

“I know this is tough,” Ed said. “Maybe as tough as it gets.”

Charlie had nodded, gathering his keys, BlackBerry, silver iPod from the bowl on the hall table and putting them in various pockets in his bag. “I’m glad you’re here, Ed,” he said, and he meant it. Charlie liked Ed, liked his quirky sensibility and mild good humor. Ed was the one who constructed elaborate train tracks for Noah, using every odd piece of the Thomas the Tank Engine track that had been collected over the years. During his previous visit, he had made Annie a set of fairy wings out of coat hangers and pink mesh, and took both children to the local museum and ice cream shop for the afternoon. Ed was curious about Charlie’s work, in an anthropological way, and sent him books on Thomas Jefferson, in whom they shared an interest—books that Charlie rarely got a chance to finish, but still. Charlie, in turn, had walked Ed through his first computer purchase and set up his e-mail account, and then periodically e-mailed him newsworthy tidbits from the Internet he thought Ed might appreciate.

Charlie’s feelings about Alison’s mother were more complicated. He didn’t like her much, and it wasn’t just because he found her self-absorbed and grandiose. June was tuned in to him in a way that made him uncomfortable. She, alone among her husband and daughter, seemed to have sensed from the beginning that Charlie was not entirely engaged, that he had always been, on some level, distracted, even when he didn’t yet know it himself. She seemed to be constantly watching him. For a long time he thought it was unfair. He complained to Alison that he didn’t think he’d ever be able to please her mother, that she expected the worst from him. “That’s nonsense, she thinks you’re wonderful,” Alison had said (smoothing things over as usual, ignoring the obvious, making peace). Now it occurred to Charlie that June’s suspicions—that he was not devoted enough, involved enough with his fledging family—were in fact dead-on. Perhaps she understood him in a way that no one else did. Ed’s generous spirit and Alison’s willful denial had kept both of them in the dark. June alone saw him as he really was.

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 had 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.”