Bird in Hand (16 page)

“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 driveway, 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.

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.