Bird in Hand

  “Noah, stop it,” she said. He thrashed and turned, trying to get her off. It was like wrestling a Komodo dragon. As he wrenched himself to one side he lost his balance and slid halfway down the side of the canopy, his head about ten feet from the ground.

  Alison could feel her hands slipping, his shoes loosening on his feet, his legs sliding out of her grasp. “Help, Mommy,” he said, alarm in his voice now, a whimper in his throat. She let go with one hand and grabbed his pants leg, then wrapped the other arm tightly around both legs and slowly pulled him toward her. When she got his stomach to the edge, she grabbed around his waist and lifted him off, turning him around. He grasped her tightly with his arms and legs, nearly making her lose her balance on the small platform, but she braced herself and leaned against the railing.

  “Oh, thank God,” her mother said from below, holding up her arms absurdly, as if she might have tried to catch them both.

  “That child’s too young to be unsupervised on that slide,” one babysitter clucked loudly to another, who nodded and said, “Um hmm.”

  All at once Alison was filled with rage—at the babysitters, who had no right to judge her; at her mother, whose distant, critical stance toward her grandchildren and son-in-law had precipitated this; at herself for neglecting her child. He could have fallen ten feet onto his head, he might have been killed.

  She was a bad mother, a terrible mother—she didn’t deserve to have children of her own.

  It was then that she realized she was furious with Charlie. Things between them were terrible, and had been for some time. When was the last time Charlie had told her he loved her? For months he’d been distant; he’d gone through the motions of being a good husband and father without actually engaging with her or with their children. And she overcompensated; she’d done half the work for him of pulling away. She made excuses for his absences; she’d given him every possible benefit of the doubt. He had a lot on his mind. He was stressed, he was tired. In some ways she had even appreciated Charlie’s distractedness, which gave her a little breathing room. The children were so close, sometimes suffocatingly close; it was nice—wasn’t it?—to have some space to herself.

  But something was wrong. Deeply wrong. The fog of sadness that had enveloped Alison since the accident had obscured the trouble between them, but her blindness went deeper than that. She had feared from the beginning that Charlie was not truly in love with her, that she fit his idea of what he wanted in a wife but didn’t actually fit him. And what about her? The first time she’d seen Charlie, with his broad shoulders and good bone structure, Alison had thought: this man is good husband material; he will age well. Was he really the one person in the world for her, or had she just convinced herself that he was the closest she would get?

  Before the accident, Alison would have said that she was happy, that her life was just as she wanted it. Charlie worked hard, brought home a paycheck, tucked the children into bed at night. Yes, he was distracted, but he also brought her flowers; he may have snapped at her with little provocation, but then he kissed her on the back of the neck. So many things happened moment to moment, day to day, good and bad—how was she to sift through, to separate the significant from the inconsequential? Marriage was hard enough—preposterous enough—in the best of circumstances. Two people, from different backgrounds, whose eating habits and tastes and educations and ambitions might be vastly dissimilar, choose to live in the same house, sleep in the same bed, eat the same foods. They have to agree on everything from where to live to how many children to have. It was sheer lunacy, when you thought about it. Alison’s marriage didn’t look that different from her friends’ marriages—husbands and wives in two distinct camps, their lives largely separate. Long fallow periods of coexisting interlaced with rare moments of connection. Everybody joked about it; everybody knew. Maybe they were all unhappy, and maybe all of the marriages would end in divorce.

  If not, why not?

  As Noah clung to Alison, sobbing, she made her way down the steep metal stairs to the bottom of the slide, falling into her mother’s ineffectual if vaguely comforting embrace. They walked most of the way home in silence, Noah still holding on tight. As they got close to the house, Alison’s mother turned to her and said, “I don’t blame you. For what happened.”

  Alison’s stomach tightened. She nodded.

  “But I wonder … ,” her mother said.

  “Mother—”

  “Alison, let me finish. Your going alone to the party—and drinking too much—”

  “Please,” Alison pleaded. “Please stop. Noah is right here.”

  “Oh, he doesn’t know what we’re talking about. Do you, Noah?” her mother said, bending to look in his face.

  “Mommy drinking too much.”

  “Too much what?”

  “Too much juice.”

  “See?” Alison’s mother said.

  “Too much juice make a tummy ache.”

  “Yes, it does. Your mommy had a big tummy ache.”

  “Yeah. She was sad.”

  “Yes, she was. She still is a little sad.”

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s why you need to be especially nice to your mommy right now.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” Alison snapped.

  “Yeah,” Noah said. “For God’s sake.”

  Alison’s mother smiled at her, wanting to share the joke, but Alison looked away.

  “Anyway, I don’t know what’s going on with Charlie,” her mother said, “but something is going on with Charlie, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” Alison said. She held Noah tight, tighter than he wanted; he squirmed and wriggled down. “I think he’s going to leave me.” As soon as she said the words, she knew they were true.

  “Oh, Alison,” her mother said. She put her arm around her shoulders and Alison started to cry. Her mother pulled her close, the way she had sometimes when Alison was a child, and Alison felt both the desire to resist and the desire to submit, to be held, to let go.

  “Why Mommy crying?” Noah asked, looking up at the two of them, his arms around their knees. When he got no answer he mumbled, “Juice make a tummy ache,” and nodded his head. Juice make a tummy ache; a tummy ache make Mommy sad. It wasn’t so hard to understand if you really thought about it.

  part four

  Do I dare

  Disturb the universe?

  In a minute there is time

  For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

  —T. S. ELIOT,

  “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

  Chapter One

  Sitting at a table in a Barnes & Noble in Atlanta at eight-thirty Monday evening, after her reading, making small talk with the staff and signing books for a few stragglers, Claire felt a rising impatience. Earlier, between appointments, she had called Charlie’s cell phone to give him the name of the hotel. His flight had been scheduled to land at 7:49 P.M., too late to make the reading, so he was taking a cab to the hotel, and would meet her in the bar. Now he’s in the cab, now he’s arriving at the hotel, now he’s ordering a drink. … She imagined running her hand down the front of his pants, feeling him stiffen in anticipation as he unzipped her jeans and slid his finger inside her. …

  “Can you just write ‘To my good friend Ursula’—that’s U-R-S-U-L-A— and, oh, I don’t know, ‘Good luck with your own novel,” said the woman standing in front of Claire, holding out a copy of Blue Martinis.

  Claire blinked. She took the book and opened it to the title page.

  “It’s five hundred pages, Times New Roman double spaced. I was wondering if you can recommend an agent? I’m gonna need one soon. Everybody who’s read it says my book has ‘best seller’ written all over it, so I need someone who really knows the biz. By the way, can I have your e-mail address? I can send it to you as an attachment, and maybe you could look it over, tell me what you think.”

  No, no, and no, Claire was thinking as she dutifully transcribed onto the title page exac
tly what the woman had dictated. “Uh—there are a lot of great resources for writers on the Internet,” she said, skirting Ursula’s requests as she closed the book and handed it back. “Try literarymarketplace.com, for starters. You could also check the acknowledgments of books you think are like yours, to see if those authors thank their agents. Then you can Google those names to get their addresses.”

  Ursula frowned. Clearly, she expected more for her twenty-four dollars. “But what about your agent?”

  “Oh. She says she’s not accepting any new clients at the moment,” Claire said, parroting the words her agent had said to her when she left on tour. (“Under no circumstances will you give any would-be writer who comes to your reading my e-mail address!”)

  “Well, I know that’s not true,” Ursula said, adopting a mock-jovial air. “I have a subscription to Writer’s Digest. I know how it goes down. Agents are always looking for new clients. Just because I don’t live in New York City doesn’t mean I can’t string two sentences together, you know. I was listed in the Encyclopedia of American Writers last year, by the way. Not to brag. Just to make my point.”

  Claire had seen ads for the Encyclopedia of American Writers; they charged seventy-nine dollars to list your name and bio, and then you had to pay ninety-nine dollars for the tome itself. She was suddenly bone weary; all she wanted to do was flee. It had been too long a day. She’d smiled and chitchatted with too many random people, and now she just wanted to get back to her hotel and meet Charlie at the bar and fuck him in her king-size bed.

  She willed herself to smile at Ursula. “Wow, congratulations!” she said brightly. “I’m sure you’re very talented, and I’m sorry I can’t be more helpful. But feel free to contact me through my Web site if you have other questions.”

  By this time Gary, the media escort, and Alan, a store clerk with a weedy goatee, had descended on the table, sensing a situation. “Can I assist you with anything else this evening?” Alan asked Ursula in a sugary singsong.

  Stuffing Claire’s book in her bag with a frown, Ursula said, “No, thank you. And I just want to say one more thing to Claire Ellis. Irregardless of what that critic said, I don’t think your book is tedious navel-gazing masquerading as fiction. At least from what you read tonight. So good luck. I hope the reviews get better.”

  “What is she talking about?” Claire asked Gary when Ursula was gone.

  “Lord knows. She clearly has a screw loose. She probably made it up.” He flapped his hand dismissively.

  Alan, stacking chairs against a bookcase, called over, “Actually, I saw that one. It’s the newest customer review on Amazon, right at the top. One star.”

  “Oh, well, then,” Gary scoffed. “Customer review. Nobody pays any attention to those anyway.”

  A tiny dark cloud was forming behind Claire’s eyes, meeting up with other clouds, gathering size and heft by the minute. She felt an achy exhaustion that had become familiar over the past week, the result of erratic surges and ebbs of adrenaline that occurred throughout the day as she moved from one appearance to another.

  “Hey, you two want to go out for a drink?” Alan asked, rolling a heavy bookcase back to its customary place. “I can show you around ‘happening’ downtown Atlanta.”

  “Fine by me,” Gary said. “We could have a few beers on the publisher.” He looked expectantly at Claire. “I’ll bet you could use a cosmo right about now.”

  “I’d love to,” Claire said, “but I’m going to have to pass. I’m wiped. Thank you, though.”

  “You don’t have to get up in the morning,” Gary said, leafing through Claire’s typed schedule. “Your flight to Richmond isn’t until two.”

  “I need to take a bubble bath and go to bed,” she said, pulling on her coat. “I’m sorry. I’m a boring old lady.”

  I’d love to. I’m sorry. I’m sure you’re very talented. I’m sorry I can’t be more helpful. Thank you, thank you, I’m sorry. Claire felt as if she were choking on her own white lies. She just wanted to go back to her hotel, damn it; was that too much to ask? She felt horribly guilty, but she hated this part of it—the endless expectation that one be grateful and polite. As he drove Claire around in his Prius all day, Gary had regaled her with stories of difficult writers: minor celebrities hawking kiss-and-tell memoirs, querulous old historians, bitchy divas with outrageous requests. So-and-so demanded total silence. Another requested, via the publisher, that Gary never look her in the eye. Another wanted to stop at every fast-food restaurant he came across and sample the fries. Still another dropped Gary in front of a mall and took off in his car for three hours, never bothering to explain where he’d gone. These people were obnoxious, she had to agree. But secretly she was beginning to have a tiny bit of sympathy for them.

  “I’m coming back to Atlanta in a few months with my husband to visit his family,” she told Gary and Alan, lying brazenly now, “so I’ll get to explore a little then.”

  This seemed to satisfy them. They made plans to meet up later by themselves. Was Alan gay, too? Of course, she realized—that was it. She was just the stage prop to get them together.

  In front of the hotel, sitting in Gary’s car, Claire said that she wouldn’t need him to ferry her to the airport the next day; she’d take the hotel shuttle.

  “I’ve got to get you on that plane,” Gary said with alarm. “If you don’t get to Richmond on time my ass will be grass.”

  “Your ass will not be grass,” Claire said. “I’m a big girl. I’m not going to miss my plane.”

  “Promise?”

  “Promise.”

  When she got out of the car, Gary was checking his reflection in the rearview mirror, rubbing his finger across his teeth, tousling his hair.

  “Have fun tonight,” she said.

  “Oh, honey, you know I will,” he said. “You have a nice bubble bath.”

  “I plan to,” she said, feeling a flush of anticipation.

  WALKING INTO THE dim bar from the hotel lobby, Claire was momentarily blinded. The first thing she saw, when her eyes adjusted, was the whiteness of Charlie’s shirt. He was sitting at the far end of the bar, nursing a beer and chatting with the bartender. It was as if she’d conjured him just by wishing. It didn’t seem possible that he was actually here—the bar might as well have been in a distant solar system, light-years from Earth.

  Then he saw her. “At last,” he said, rising with a grin.

  She moved toward him. “Sorry I’m late.”

  “No, don’t be,” he said quickly, grasping her hand, threading his fingers through hers. “It was nice. The anticipation. Knowing you were coming.”

  She leaned over and kissed him on the mouth. She felt the weight of his sadness, like a blanket over his shoulders, and she put her arms around him.

  “Oh,” he breathed. She could hear his heartbeat, or at least she thought it was his heartbeat—it might have been the percussive undercurrent of the music, a Carrie Underwood song she recognized from the radio.

  After a moment Claire pulled back. She lifted his glass, which was half full, and took a swallow.

  “You need a drink,” he said.

  She shrugged. “You’ve been here a while. What do you want to do?”

  “I don’t care. I just want to be with you.”

  She slid onto the vinyl stool beside him. “Charlie—the accident … . it’s all so awful.”

  “It is.”

  “How is she?”

  “Not so good.”

  “What does she—what do they … ” Claire stopped, unsure how to continue.

  “There will be a hearing in a few weeks,” he said. “Mandatory sentencing for DWI—she’ll lose her license for three months and has to take some classes. Thank God, though—it doesn’t look like she was at fault in the accident. Technically.”

  “Technically.” Claire repeated the word flatly, without affect, but it was a question. Did Charlie think that Alison was at fault?

  “She shouldn’t have been driving in that
condition,” he said.

  “She had a couple of drinks. I’m sure she felt she was fine to drive.”

  “Her judgment was impaired, yes.”

  “Come on, Charlie,” Claire said, finding herself in the odd position of defending her lover’s wife to him. “You’ve never driven anywhere on a few drinks?”

  “Yeah, I probably have. But I can absorb more, I have faster reflexes. … ”

  “Basically, you think your judgment is better.”

  He didn’t answer. He lifted the glass of beer and drained it.

  Claire shook her head. “It could’ve happened to any of us. The other car ran a stop sign, for God’s sake! And I’ve never understood the rules of a four-way stop—when to go, when to stop. … It can be ambiguous.”

  This wasn’t how she had envisioned their evening together—arguing about Alison. She was suddenly aware again of the headache lurking behind her eyes. Her shoulders felt tight; her feet were sore. Steaming water, a fluffy terry cloth robe, a stream of pink liquid frothing into bubbles … “Charlie,” she said, capitulating to his stronger emotions, “I don’t want to get into this with you. It’s really none of my business.”

  “Of course it is,” he said wearily. “It’s my business, it’s your business. I wish it weren’t. I wish it had nothing to do with us. But it does, and— Jesus.” He put his head in his hands, his elbows on the bar. “Alison is depressed—her parents—the kids. And being with you is suddenly. … ” He sighed heavily, almost theatrically. “It’s not like this thing between us is just a fling, and everything will go back to normal. It isn’t, it won’t. At least not for me.” He looked up, and Claire nodded, not wanting to respond until he was finished. “I don’t know. I don’t know, Claire. I just don’t know. Alison is usually such a careful person. To a fault. Right? Haven’t we always joked about that? She gave up coffee the minute she found out she was pregnant—didn’t touch alcohol once in the whole nine months, or when she was nursing. Always wears a seat belt. She insisted that the two of us finish our will before we went away together overnight for the first time after Annie was born. I know she’s not at fault—I know she didn’t kill that kid. But this accident has fucked up everything. I feel—I feel like she’s ruined my life.”