Losing Charlotte (19 page)

He’d been relieved so far not to have to talk during his hours here, except in response to the questions the doctors and nurses posed. Though he didn’t think of Knox as a talker, not as the kind of person who needed to fill a vacuum with noise. Still. The only talking he voluntarily undertook was to the boys—barely above a whisper, and tentatively—while he held them. For some reason he felt embarrassed at the possibility that he would be overheard doing this, marked as clumsy by the people around him who were more experienced with children. He couldn’t afford to be learning on the job; he felt instinctively that he needed to know exactly what he was doing, to have been made an expert father through the very appearance of his children in the world, and even to appear vulnerable on this score to a stranger was to have failed. He might have preferred simply to stare at Ethan and Ben, communicating what he needed to in silence, but Sophia had assured him that this was a good thing to do, that they might already recognize his voice, and would feel relief at hearing it often. He didn’t know what to tell them, except that they were going to be okay. He described the view, described each of them to the other. During the times when both boys lay in the Isolette facing each other, exhausted from the work of growing well enough to get out of here, Bruce watched them, his arms slack at his sides, and wondered what he was beholden to tell. Charlotte would have known how to direct the parts of their lives that still confounded him toward their places in an orderly line; she was good that way, could take an argument that had left him reeling and soften it the next morning, describe to him the ways in which this happened to everyone, was part of the beautiful bargain they’d made, was
healthy
. She’d be wry and talk about what was natural in life and in death. Now Bruce was left alone to justify and reckon with what they’d had together, without Charlotte to explain any of it, to explain himself, back to him. Theirs had been as fathomless and
bewildering and defiant of logic as any couple’s shared life, he supposed, before the end. But how could he really know?

They had been married almost five years, tried to have a baby together for three. Finally, insemination—the turkey basting, Charlotte had called it—had worked, a fact that left them incredulous and grateful. They hadn’t had to do in vitro, which they’d dreaded equally, after all.

No. Whatever litany of facts he began with, when practicing the telling, turned reductive within seconds. Start again.

In a grassy corner of the park, they would lie on their backs, not unlike Ethan and Ben now, his head flush with her hip, her legs extending beyond his line of vision, and the tips of Charlotte’s fingers would gather up folds of her cotton skirt and she would pull it up by increments, inch by inch, so slowly he was mesmerized, he was laughing, waiting to see how far she would go, knowing she wouldn’t be wearing anything under her clothes in summer.

Was this their marriage?

Start again.

They had loved each other. He was sure of that. Beyond this, he wasn’t sure of much: what her friends thought, what her parents had been privy to, the true measure her siblings took of him. His bond to Charlotte had been a solid thing built on sand, so that he simultaneously trusted in its strength and doubted anew each day whether, when his eyes opened, it would exist. He had no religious faith, but the ecstasy of belief—this had been available to him in the privacy of his bedroom, his kitchen, in conversation held over the noise of their leaky shower. He was a supplicant at his own breakfast table, sipping Charlotte’s perpetually shitty coffee. His communions were the toasts they’d made across countless tables in New York, looking each other in the eye with an exaggerated concentration that always made him laugh; Charlotte thought it was bad luck to clink while looking away. Bruce had read somewhere that the tradition of the toast dated from the Middle Ages as a precaution against getting yourself poisoned; the contents of one’s cup were meant to spill a little into the cups of one’s companions,
and a refusal on anyone’s part functioned as an instant alarm. “If I go, you go,” he and Charlotte had made a habit of announcing to each other, sotto voce, bug eyed, knocking their wineglasses together as hard as they dared without breaking them.

Bruce climbed out of the gray chair. The boys had been asleep in their Isolette (though how they could sleep through all the racket in here was a mystery) for the better part of an hour now. He would take his hall walk, grab another Coke at the vending machine, circle the floor in time to be back before their next bottle-feeding.

Knox was due to arrive the next week. The boys would be home then, according to the doctors. Bruce thought, as he pushed his way out of the NICU doors, aware of the few curious eyes that lit upon him in the waiting area as he emerged, an emissary from the VIP section of the obstetrics wing, closed off to the plebes with a velvet rope fashioned out of everybody’s worst nightmare, that his grasp of Charlotte’s history within her family had never been total, perhaps couldn’t be, because of his mortifying, groveling helplessness in the face of any intact family. It wasn’t easy for him to understand why his wife wasn’t closer to Mina and Ben and Knox and even Robbie, though he tried, repeating Charlotte’s version of events to himself in his head from time to time: Mina and Ben’s devotion to each other and their growing business was so complete during Charlotte’s early childhood that she’d felt, if not left out, then uncomfortably peripheral. Though she’d been loved and attended to, she was close enough to the edge of the circle the three of them made that she could imagine stepping into the cold territory beyond its circumference. This made her feel both terrified and curious. As she grew, some part of her ceded the insider status to Knox willingly (though Charlotte never seemed to forget the ferocity with which, according to her, Knox had claimed it), and began to look past her family for the kind of affirmation she needed, had always needed, in order to breathe. The money the farm started to bring in thrust her parents further into a world Charlotte viewed as phony and meaningless; though Knox and Robbie were still young enough never to have known anything
different, Charlotte recognized the speed with which things were changing. Finally, she’d wanted out, and on some level, it seemed, they’d let her out, which Charlotte felt was right and unforgivable at once. This was the Cliffs Notes account as Bruce understood it, the synopsis Charlotte had arrived at after years spent in therapy and engaged in the burial of her former self under a series of East Village walk-ups, temporary jobs, and pointless left turns. Then came Bruce. He was part of the story, too. He was supposed to be the happy ending.

Of course, this was a story with the blood drained out of it. But Bruce was glad to possess something boiled down that he could invoke at the sight of all that insane beauty on his visits to the farm, and the warm enthusiasm, the trust, really, with which Mina and Ben had taken him in. Otherwise, he would have little idea why Charlotte scheduled so few visits home or could be drawn so quickly into an argument behind the closed doors of her childhood room during their rare visits—her room with its lone Gauguin poster still pinned to the corkboard wall, its desk drawers filled with school ephemera and murky, undated Polaroids of Charlotte in Day-Glo makeup, everything preserved so carefully that entering it, for Bruce, was akin to stumbling into a Pharaoh’s tomb.

He had no idea what Knox knew, or thought, about his marriage to her sister. He suspected not very much, on both counts. She’d always struck him as someone who remained resolutely single—like certain bachelors did, refusing to wade all the way into the pond of human incident, full of mess and danger and caterwaul as it was. This refusal made sense to him, though he was incapable of it himself. He respected it, even gracefully accepted the judgment inherent in it. Of course, Knox did have that boyfriend. A nice guy; Bruce had met him a couple of times. At the moment, he was having trouble remembering his name.

He reached the vending machine. He stood in front of it, suddenly baffled as to what he’d thought he wanted. There was a machine for drinks of all colors and caffeination levels and degrees of sugar content—flavored waters, sports drinks, sodas—and
another for food: cellophane-wrapped cakes, bags of chips, candy, jerky, small boxes of cereal. He slid his hand into the pocket of his jeans and jangled the change there. He didn’t even know if he had enough. The sodas here cost two dollars apiece. He’d left his wallet in the backpack beside the chair, the backpack that he’d balled a receiving blanket into, that held a portable bottle of hand sanitizer, his phone, a work file that he couldn’t fathom ever cracking again but nonetheless hadn’t removed. (He needed to call Susan, his boss, to find out how many weeks it was acceptable for him to take. Two, three more? However many he needed? Though the firm was small, devoid of the cold, swinging-dick culture that characterized larger shops, it was a business, and he followed a lot of companies. They wouldn’t keep paying him forever.) He swallowed against a faint taste of bile at the back of his throat. He wouldn’t think about anything now.

T
HE TURKEY BASTING
hadn’t happened in the hospital but in the OB’s office, all of two blocks away from here. Charlotte had been given a week’s cycle of Clomid and had the moment of her ovulation zeroed in on definitively the day before. When they saw each other in the waiting room at the appointed time, they laughed! They were still young! They were fine! They’d fallen into the hands of professionals in the nick of time! Somehow, they both recognized hilarity in the moment, and in each other’s relief. The source of their inability to conceive still hadn’t been diagnosed; still, Bruce privately suspected himself as the reason for their problem. He wondered if Charlotte suspected him, too, though she’d assured him she didn’t, that it was surely her fault if it was anyone’s, she was probably defective, marked, the star of their infertility show.

He jacked off into a paper cup. He only had to do it once. The bathroom they sent him into was no bigger than an airplane’s, the process blessedly quick—so quick that he lingered for another few minutes after, embarrassed to show himself too early. He hadn’t
been thinking of Charlotte. Instead, he’d summoned a detailed image of the body of a woman sent into the bathroom to pleasure him. An employee. A fluffer in a tight, white coat. He’d even told Charlotte this, back in the waiting room, as they waited for his issue
(issue
—this was the kind of word that reduced them to more teary, helpless laughter, to obnoxious nine-year-olds at the back of a bus) to be spun, so a nurse could then insert it with a catheter into Charlotte’s uterus. He knew Charlotte would ask him what he’d been thinking of. She loved that kind of stuff, loved to weasel it out of him and then tease him with her mock outrage.

That the turkey basting had ultimately become necessary didn’t seem as important, in the end, as the fact that it worked (on the first try!), clear evidence that they were charmed. It took weeks for the pregnancy test to confirm it, but Charlotte claimed she knew right away, though it was probably only the effects of the drugs that she was feeling. Between the day of the visit and the day of the bright blue line, Bruce did something he’d never expected to do, that he still couldn’t fully explain. He sat at his computer at work one morning and, without premeditation, typed in a string of keywords, chosen a site, dialed a phone number, made an appointment for the following afternoon, which he nearly missed when the time came, having sunk into a near-somnambulant denial, perhaps, of what he’d set in motion. At the chosen hour he was listening to the new hire’s droning breakdown of the back exercises his chiropractor had assigned him, lingering in the conference room doorway, when he remembered with a start, and, after a moment’s reconsideration of the whole thing, made his way calmly down to the street and caught a cab up to the same Sheraton he frequented for work functions. He’d had plenty of chances to back out, then, had chosen and rechosen what came next through the small series of efforts required to show up, but he felt at the time (in the cab, back on the street, adjusting his messenger bag on his shoulder, checking in at the reception desk) like someone who had chosen nothing but was operating from a proscribed set of directives. He’d seen a woman he knew, a broker, crossing the Sheraton
lobby on her way to lunch at the moment he entered and felt nothing but mild pleasantness at the sight of her, felt no rush to draw their conversation to a premature close.

They’d found each other easily. In the elevator, he’d introduced himself by name, had smiled in a ridiculous effort to put a twenty-five-year-old prostitute at ease, as if she were the one who was uncomfortable. Two condoms folded together along the perforated seam that joined their wrappers, in the bill compartment of his wallet, purchased hastily at the deli next to his office building. God. He was really in this elevator, he thought, awed. Things like this actually happened. It all seemed normal, ordinary. The magnetized key card in his pocket. The synthetic, cool smoothness of the burgundy-colored spread in the room. The paper wrapper looped around the toilet seat to telegraph hygienic sterility. Come to think of it, that is what the sex had been like, too: hygienic, a performance utterly outside of context, history, or feeling. Sex with Charlotte had always had an intimacy that threatened to cancel him out; he could literally lose track of where he was, feel himself dissolving, while at the same time his mind grew increasingly jumbled and frantic. He loved his wife too much, invested her with too much, feared for her too much; if anything, sex with an indifferent woman, buffed to artificial perfection like a product, was a relief. It was terrible and revelatory at once.

He needed a secret. He needed something outside his life with Charlotte to help him fashion a space, even as thin as a membrane, around himself so he could function apart. Even the guilt that burned in him like a coal provided some ballast to weight his side of the scales—it was his alone; he’d generated it himself. That was something. What he hadn’t reckoned on was that as soon as he had the secret he needed, he felt simultaneously compelled to hold on to it and give it away.