Losing Charlotte (10 page)

Thank you, he kept saying to his father, for the drinks; he was forever saying thank you, had been since he was a kid; the impulse toward gratitude for even the smallest, most self-serving gestures was somewhere drifting among the viscous platelets of his blood.

He heard a truck rumbling, far down the street. He smiled automatically. He felt the sweat begin to heat and slick his armpits, and thought of holding the shirt away from his body with his fingers, so he wouldn’t wet it before Charlotte arrived. It still surprised him that she provoked a vanity he hadn’t known in himself. He prepared himself for her, worried over what she might think, threw out his oldest, torn boxers and bought new pairs, joined a regular pickup game at the gym, carried himself taller in those moments before he caught sight of her—then forgot himself so completely during their times together that when he glimpsed himself again, in the mirror over a restaurant’s bathroom sink or in the bits of misshapen glass that Charlotte had pasted to the wall above the bureau opposite her bed, he felt like laughing over his earlier nervousness. Here he was, the wine consumed, his pressed clothes removed from him, his hair wild, the skin on his face rougher, his eyes clearer, and he looked fine. Better than before, if he cared to make a judgment—which, at those times, he didn’t.

“Hey hey!” A shout, from below. Bruce looked down and Charlotte was there. She wore a printed silk dress that he had never seen before, buttoned carelessly over a T-shirt, sneakers on her feet.

“Hi,” he shouted back, leaning out the open window. He knelt on the sill, which Charlotte had already turned into a makeshift window seat over the course of her weekends at his place. There were a few tapestry pillows strewn on it now, a brass ashtray which Bruce had cleaned the butts out of this morning, rinsed, dried, put back in its place.

“That’s
what you wear to move in?” He spoke at a lower volume, now that his head hung over the street, just above her.

Charlotte laughed, looked down at herself, yanked at the waistband
of the dress. “I know,” she said. “I’d packed everything else. This happened to be on top of the Goodwill pile.”

Bruce smiled. He tried to stop smiling, but he couldn’t.

Charlotte smiled back, drawing her brows together. “Why am I nervous,” she said, loud enough for Bruce to think of neighbors, listening over their morning tea. “Why am I standing in the street like this?”

“Hold on,” Bruce said, in a quieter voice than she had used. “I’m coming down.”

“I have two hot Israeli movers, by the way.” Charlotte could never let him go; she extended conversations a subject or two beyond their natural conclusion—often nodded, then kept talking, after the word
goodbye
. “They let me drive.”

“They did? Where are they?”

“I don’t know,” Charlotte said, looking around. “I imagine they’re tight on my tail. I asked them to let me out at the corner. I lost confidence once we hit all these little streets—the progress felt so … slow.”

“Stay,” Bruce said. “Hold on.”

He hit his head on the window casing on the way back in and kneed the ashtray aside in an attempt to raise himself from the window seat. He opened the door, flipped the deadbolt shut, and let it bounce on its hinges as he ran down the stairs. The possibility of framed photographs of people from Charlotte’s life on the mantel, the bedroom walls, excited him. He had lain in his bed until late last night, awake (after she had called to wish him good night and complain about having left so much work until the last minute—which she always did, he was learning—to complain again that she didn’t need a moving truck, she didn’t have enough real furniture to warrant it), and imagined her clothes in his closets. He imagined her coats, the long gray tweed he had seen, and the celery-colored poncho, and a rain slicker, if she owned one, perfuming the darkness of the closet by the front door, hanging among his own coats. He wished they were hanging there already, believed for the few moments just before sleep that they might be, so that, if he had the energy, he could get up and close himself in
with them, finger their empty sleeves, explore the little piles of detritus in their pockets: the squares of cellophane, pennies, tokens, crumbs, broken matches, bits of gravel.

Out on the street, the air was cooler. Bruce felt a flick of relief that he had remained relatively unmussed until this moment: his head wasn’t bleeding from the place where he’d knocked it, his shirt wasn’t soaked through, not yet. He remembered the building door a couple of beats before it closed and locked behind him, and whirled around to hold it open with the palm of his hand. He kicked off one of his shoes, used it to prop the door, and hopped on one foot down the cold brownstone steps to Charlotte. He opened his arms to her.

“Welcome to your house,” he said.

She leaned into him. “Thank you,” she mumbled into his shirt.

Bruce wanted to hold her here forever, his nose in her hair.

“I almost had a nervous breakdown this morning,” she said, still mumbling.

“Oh,” Bruce said. He blinked. He didn’t exactly want to hear about it, not now. “Let’s sit here on the steps,” he said. “You really drove?”

Charlotte wiped at her nose with the sleeve of her T-shirt. She looked at him, then moved to sit down beside him. “Just for a few blocks,” she said. She began to smile again. “It was great. I sat between them at first, they were letting me downshift, and I screwed it up, you could hear my stuff sliding around in the back and the thing almost stalled, but then I begged them to just let me try driving, so they did. The steering wheel on those trucks is gigantic. It’s up to my chin.”

Bruce laughed. He knew that this would become one of Charlotte’s stories, the one she might tell next, when they found themselves among new friends around someone’s kitchen island, or drinking on a roof. The Israelis might become skinny Russians; a hand might be placed on her bare knee; the wheel might become so big that all three of them had to turn it together; the truck might jump onto a curb. He had learned early not to question the evolving details of Charlotte’s tales in front of others, though exactitude
was somewhere in his nature, and it took willpower not to mind a little.

“I didn’t get to bed until four,” Charlotte said. She reached for the cuff of his shirt, began to tug the small button at his wrist.

“You were packing until that late?” Bruce asked. He touched her back. He felt a tiny thrill; perhaps she’d brought everything, perhaps she possessed more than he’d realized. He wanted all of her objects in his house, even the useless ones.

“Well, I really finished up this morning. But I was on the phone for hours last night,” she said. She withdrew her hand from his cuff and placed it over her face. “I am so tired, love.”

“Why?” Bruce said. What he’d really meant to ask was: Who? Who were you talking to?

He didn’t have to ask. “I feel like I called everyone I know. I called my sister, but she didn’t answer the phone. I’m sure she knew it was me. Then I called Stephen. Remind me never to call him again in the middle of the night. Not that I plan to.”

Charlotte scratched at the gritty swath of step between them with her fingernails. Bruce resisted an impulse to cover her hand with his, to still it. Stephen was one of the old boyfriends. An actor whom Bruce had met. He had met so many people already. The caterer Charlotte staffed for, Helen from Trinidad, her temporary coworkers, the waves of friends that seemed to shift by the week, according to both Charlotte’s ideas about them and certain of their given characteristics: stamina, thick skin, ego, drama. From what Bruce had observed, it was important either to possess an exaggerated surplus of these qualities or not to have them at all if you expected Charlotte to keep choosing you, talk about you at parties, cook you supper, call you in the middle of the night. He wasn’t sure yet whether he was blessed or doomed because of where he fell.

“You know that I used to go out with him, right? God, I hate that phrase:
go out.”

“Of course. You told me all about that.”

Bruce reached down and began to rub his exposed foot. It was cold out here. He needed patience when Charlotte forgot things,
forgot bits of conversation they’d had, things they had confided in each other.

“I did tell you. I remember. Well, it doesn’t matter,” Charlotte said.

Bruce nodded, tucked his foot behind the opposite knee to warm it.

He and Charlotte had bumped into Stephen in a restaurant on Sixth Avenue not too long after they’d met; Stephen had joined them for coffee. Bruce had known right away that Stephen and Charlotte had been together; right away he had despised Stephen’s gnomish upper body, the way he hunched over the marble table and accepted everything offered him, from their invitation to sit to the hard bread in the basket to the coins that Bruce pushed toward him once the bill was paid, protesting that someone deserved to pocket the extra change. When Charlotte made a trip to the bathroom Stephen had picked up her coffee cup and dipped his finger into the sediment that coated the bottom, said something to the effect that Bruce had his blessing, that Charlotte was special, a friend, good luck, he hoped they would all have a chance to “spend time together” in the “future.”

“Sure,” Bruce had said, for lack of any better response. He made no attempt to correct Stephen’s impression that he and Charlotte had any kind of assured future—or past, for that matter; he himself wasn’t even completely convinced that she was seeing him exclusively. He felt surprised at any gallant show from a man who, only minutes before, had described a theater director he and Charlotte knew as a “hideous cunt,” sending Charlotte into fits of laughter. Stephen shrugged; he fixed the chipped surface of the table with a look that struck Bruce as defiant. Bruce watched him. His hair was gray and almost shaved at the temples; his face was thin, all angles.

“I don’t know,” Stephen said. “I honestly wasn’t sure if you were her new boy when I first walked in. She’s never been with anyone like you before. But it makes sense. She deserves someone who will balance her, the way you seem to. Do you mind my saying that?”

Bruce shook his head. Had Stephen been watching them from some hidden place before he’d walked by their table? Had he deduced all this in thirty minutes? He tried to remain wary. He reminded himself that Stephen’s observations were shallow, nothing to base hope on, and shook his head again, as if coming awake. He shifted in his chair.

“My initial reaction—she’s admitted to herself that she isn’t a very good actor, for example. That takes courage. She’s one of those who’s too much herself to really disappear into a part, you know?”

Bruce said nothing.

“To gravitate toward what’s good for you, or to what you’re good
at
, takes real maturity. I admire it, is what I’m saying. God knows I’m not there yet,” Stephen said. “She’s paranoid about relationships. But clearly, she’s safe with you.”

Bruce felt a sudden thrill: if this went much further he thought he had license to be rude. Under the table, he tapped at his knee. “You seem pretty comfortable speaking for her,” he said.

Stephen smiled at him. There were narrow gaps between several of his front teeth; he had the bright gums and teeth of a child. “I mean, I think she grew up on a fucking horse farm! Do you know what I mean? She is not from New York! I don’t think she should end up with an actor. She’d come to her senses eventually, and then have to wreck her life.”

Stephen placed his index finger in his mouth and sucked on it. He winced.

“Where are you from?” Bruce asked. His voice was quiet, angry. He didn’t know why this was the question he chose; he had many. He supposed it was the only question whose answer didn’t threaten him, or Charlotte, in some way. He wished there was some water left in his glass.

Stephen looked at him.

“Kansas,” he said.

Bruce choked. “You’re kidding.”

“For some reason, I don’t dislike you,” Stephen said. “So I’m
going to be honest with you. I am from Topeka. I am absolutely serious.”

Bruce wrapped his hand around the back of his neck and looked at Stephen. He felt a laugh rising, a delirious laugh that, given a choice, he would have preferred to repress. But I dislike
you
, he thought. He held the laugh in for as long as he could. Then it erupted from him in a hard wheeze. He was still settling by the time Charlotte returned to the table and had some difficulty catching his breath. Stephen was laughing, too. He had muttered, through his laughter, something about what an asshole he could be, something both proud and apologetic. Charlotte stood over Bruce and watched him as he tired himself and finally stilled. He could see that she was irritated.

“Talking about me?” she asked them both, smiling.

“No,” Stephen said. “Actually, talking about me.”

“We should go,” Bruce said, looking up at her. He felt sorry that Charlotte looked uncomfortable, sorry for his part in it. He thought she deserved a graceful exit.

“If you’re ready,” Charlotte said. She seemed to relax. “Stephen, it was—interesting to see you.”

Stephen laughed and rose to kiss her.

Outside, she had said, “He hates me,” but before Bruce could console her she had sighed and changed the subject.

Bruce had thought of Stephen since—thought of him at those moments when he felt unsure of his place, of whether Charlotte was moving through him, the way he’d watched her move in only a short time through other phases, through friends, proclivities, even colors (“that’s
my
favorite color”), the diaphanous shirt and skirt she wore together for days at a time before discarding them. He didn’t know. Perhaps everything that Stephen said—it was hard to remember, later, exactly what he had said, or whether he had been directly insulting—had been true. What Bruce did think set him apart was this: though he wondered about Charlotte’s focus on him, whether she truly loved him or whether she sought him as Stephen had thought—for balance, as a kind of antidote for
something—there was no possibility that would kill him. He could allow for Charlotte to be attracted to him for a few less-than-flattering reasons, as long as she remained attracted, as long as there were other reasons, too. Maybe he was the first to allow her such a thing. As Bruce looked at Charlotte now, he realized something else: he was able to let himself be comforted by the suspicion that she didn’t fully understand, either, why she was here. Her lips were chapped. Her hair was loose, hanging over her eyes. Premeditation like the kind Stephen had alluded to, the making of logical choices, seemed ridiculous in this flat light, at this hour on a Saturday morning.