“Imagine what she must be feeling about her own life,” Claire said.
“Of course, of course I do,” he said edgily. “That’s the point—her own life is a wreck. She’s a wreck. And I’m married to her. How can I—how can we possibly—”
“Stop,” Claire said abruptly, putting a finger to his lips. “These questions are way too big to settle in Atlanta on a Monday night.” She slid off her stool, put her hand on his thigh. “I suggest that for the next twelve hours we pretend that we’re alone in the world. Nobody else. Just us, right now, here.” She glanced around. “In this lame bar.”
“Yeah. In this anonymous office park,” he said. “In this random city.”
“Tomorrow we’ll be gone.”
“What’s your name again?”
It was already happening, she thought; the past was indistinct. “No names,” she said. She reached into her bag and pulled out a room card, held it up between two fingers. “You know what I’m craving?”
“Can I guess?”
“A bath. With you. What do you think about that?”
“No thinking,” he said. “Remember?”
Maybe they were at their best like this—pretending they were strangers, with no history between them, drawn together only in lust. In the hotel room they had sex in a frenzy, with their clothes half on, standing up against the door, then took a long bath together, reveling in the luxury of time. Later they made love again, stretched out across the huge bed, their movements slow and deliberate. Though it was exciting to pretend that Charlie was unknown to her, when Claire finally came (it took a while; she’d been so tense) she felt stripped of this pretense, revealed; his fingers and tongue knew her so well. Their years of friendship and flirtation, the low flame of desire—it was all in his eyes and the way he touched her. I know you.
The next morning, when Charlie was in the shower, Claire called Ben. They made small talk for a few minutes—How’d it go last night? I’m tired of being on the road. Any calls or mail I need to deal with?— until Charlie came out in a towel and Claire cut the conversation short, tugging off his towel as she snapped the cell phone shut. Lying back against the pillows, she let the phone drop to the floor as Charlie stretched across her, seal-damp, his wet hair brushing against her face, his minty lips on her mouth.
Room service arrived after a while, and they drank coffee and ate English muffins like a long-married couple, exchanging information about their flights. They left for the airport together—Charlie had coordinated his flight time with hers—and went through security before realizing they’d have to split up; she was flying to a different hub.
They were early. Airport security in Atlanta was more relaxed than in New York; they’d allotted more time than necessary. So they found a corner booth in an Au Bon Pain and bought a coffee to share. Sitting in a public place, in the bright light of midmorning, they were suddenly self-conscious with each other. What had been thrilling the night before, now, under threat of exposure, felt a little furtive. If someone they knew stumbled on them and asked what they were doing, it would be easy enough to lie—Charlie on a business trip, Claire on a book tour, a chance meeting in line for the security machines at the airport—but it would be bad. They weren’t ready to be stumbled on.
Thoughts hung in the air between them, unspoken. What are we doing? Where is this going? How can it possibly work?
“I want to wake up beside you every morning,” Charlie whispered after a while, abandoning protocol. He leaned forward, folding his arms on the marble tabletop. “I want to go to movies with you. I want to build a life together.”
She took a sip of coffee.
“I need to know if you want that, too.”
“How could it ever work?” Claire said. “Your children, your house—Alison. You’re so deeply”—she cast around for the right word— “embedded.”
“Yes.” Charlie nodded. “But that’s my problem, isn’t it? What I’m asking is if you’re ready to do what it would take to make this work for you.”
She swished lukewarm coffee around in the paper cup. “I’m afraid.”
“Of what?”
“This is going to sound ridiculous, but it’s scary to have such strong feelings. To feel so … out of control.”
“I feel that way, too.”
“I know. I mean, that’s part of it. Your emotions are so—boundless. It’s hard to trust that they’re real.”
“Look,” he said, “I’ve spent my whole life doing the right thing, and it hasn’t gotten me very far. I figured if I got a steady job and married a good girl and lived in a nice house, I could keep it all together. And look at me now—I’m bored with my job. I’m not in love with my wife. Is that any way to live? Is that the answer? I want to take a chance, before it’s too late. I am in love with you, Claire.” He laid his hand on her thigh under the table.
“Charlie,” she said.
“I want to be with you.”
“It would be terrible for everyone.”
“Except us.”
She nodded slowly.
“When do we stop worrying about what everyone else wants? When do we start thinking about ourselves?” Charlie said.
“I think we’ve already started,” Claire said. “I mean, here we are. Lying to everyone.” She pushed the cup away. “Though I hate it. I hate that part of it.”
“I hate it, too,” he said, but she wondered at the quickness of his reply. On one level she felt as if she knew Charlie intimately, better than she’d ever known anyone. And yet in another way Charlie was opaque to her. There was a paradoxical openness and secrecy about him—was it midwestern? Maybe she was reading between the lines, filling in the gaps with her own assumptions and opinions—and, in doing so, creating an idealized version of what this relationship was, who Charlie was.
Why had she not simply broken up with Ben in England and gone out with Charlie, if they were so perfect for each other?
She knew what it was: Charlie had seemed like a much bigger risk. Back then an emotional risk was the last thing she was looking for. Ben was a sure thing—he loved her without question, without ambiguity; Charlie, she thought, was merely infatuated. She liked the heat and the drama, but she’d never been sure how much of it had to do with her and how much was about him—his boyish insecurity and competitiveness with Ben, his sadness about his dead mother, his craving for a female who might be strong enough to contain him, to hold the sadness, who might comprehend the unarticulated depth of his own loss.
Claire had been in love with Ben; she had wanted to spend the rest of her life with him. But she felt differently now. A life with Charlie probably wouldn’t be as calm, and it wouldn’t be easy, but it would be exciting. To feel this turmoil in her stomach—a feeling she had never experienced—was astonishing. She was thirty-four years old, and she wanted to feel completely alive, whatever the cost. She and Charlie were being reckless and selfish, but they were also being true to themselves, and in that way, she thought, they were being brave. If she didn’t make a choice that was right for her, she would regret it for the rest of her life. And wouldn’t that be far worse?
An hour later, sitting in a coach seat next to a man in a cheap suit reeking of drugstore aftershave, Claire sat back and closed her eyes. Her brain was skittish and wandering; it skipped off the point and had trouble finding it again. All through school Alison had been her best friend—the skinny girl with dark eyes, elfin face, and warm smile. They’d weathered middle-school taunting and high school comparisons; they’d been maid and matron of honor at each other’s weddings. They had been friends for nearly thirty years. Moving to New York ten years ago had smoothed Alison’s rough edges, but when Claire looked at her she still saw a bird-boned ten-year-old with long skinny legs, dark kelpy hair tucked behind her ears, freckles baked across her nose, and crusty scabs on her shins from sliding into first during kickball games at recess. When they were kids, Alison had reminded Claire of one of those plucky heroines of young adult novels,
the kind who doesn’t let the calamitous things that keep happening to her dim her sunny worldview.
When Claire and Charlie had parted at the airport, he’d grasped her hands. “I mean what I said. I want to spend the rest of my life with you.”
“I don’t think you can propose to a married woman,” she said. “A few other things have to happen first.”
But those things were terrifying. Claire thought of Ben—dear Ben—completely in the dark. What was she supposed to do now—go home and tell him she was in love with Charlie? It was inconceivable, impossible. And Alison she couldn’t even think about. The rift between them now was essentially meaningless, Claire had to admit, a cover for her betrayal, nothing more. How could she do this to Alison? Alison would never have done this to her.
Claire was in love with Charlie, yes, but how much did that matter, really, in the grand scheme of things? Maybe, she thought, we are on our way to ruining everything: the two of us and the four of us.
She didn’t know what she was going to do.
She felt the plane beneath her lumber down the runway, a heavy body on tiny wheels, gathering speed and then, incomprehensibly, lifting into the air, all forty tons of steel and metal and flesh and blood, rising up to soar through the clouds. It made no sense, it made no sense—and yet here they were, taking flight.
Chapter Two
February 1998
Alison, Claire had written in her lazy scrawl, you must come visit us at Cambridge. It’s cold and gray and horrifically overpriced here—and Ben has a chronic sinus infection—but we are having an incredible time.
Alison glanced up at the gray cubicles that spread out around her like an enormous maze. Out of the corner of her eye she could see her boss, Renee Chevarak, through the glass wall of her office, talking loudly in the general direction of the speakerphone, filing her nails, and checking her lipstick in the hand mirror she kept propped on her desk. She caught Alison’s eye and pushed the intercom button. “Al, would you come in here?” the box on Alison’s desk blared. Alison got up, grabbing a spiral notebook, and went to the door.
“I need to talk to you. Shut,” Renee said, waving her nail file at the door. “So,” she said when Alison had complied. “I want you to be the first to know. But this is. … ” She ran the nail file across her closed mouth, simulating, Alison was to understand, a zipper.
Alison nodded.
“I’m in negotiation with another magazine.” Renee sat back, dropped the file, and ran her hands through her short blond hair. “It’s time for me to move on. You understand.”
Alison nodded again, feigning empathy. She was twenty-three years old, less than a year out of UNC, living with three other girls in an illegal sublet on the Lower East Side, and barely covering her part of the rent. After temping all over New York for four months she had finally landed a job, this job, six weeks ago. It wasn’t the most exciting position of all time—assistant to the beauty editor of a middlebrow women’s magazine—but it was a start. All she could think about was that in a week she’d be back to answering phones at Smith Barney.
The summer before, when Alison had been living with her parents in Bluestone after college, writing obituaries for the local newspaper and wondering what she was going to do with her life, Claire came home for a visit and persuaded her to move to New York. “If you really want to be an editor, New York is where you have to be,” she declared. “And I know exactly how to do it. You start as a temp at a magazine or a publishing house, and then you charm your way in.”
“I don’t even know anybody up there,” Alison said doubtfully.
“You know me,” Claire said.
“But you’re going to England.”
“Exactly. So here’s my brilliant idea. Why don’t you take my spot in my apartment when I go? Then I don’t have to sublet to some stranger, and you have a place to live. Honestly, Alison,” she added, “you have to get out of Bluestone. Otherwise you’re going to end up here forever, like everybody else we know from high school. And trust me—you’ll love New York.”
But Alison had hated New York at first—the cacophony, the trash in the gutter, the miles of concrete, the closed, expressionless faces of people on the street. As the months passed, though, she began to understand its appeal. She learned something about herself she’d never known before: she liked to be alone. Wandering around the Union Square farmers’ market or Central Park on a Saturday morning, she was dependent on no one; nobody knew where she was. It was a strange and magical feeling. After work she’d walk slowly back to her apartment, forty-seven blocks, watching the day turn to evening and the city light up like a Lite-Brite board.
“I’ll be frank, Al,” Renee was saying. “I don’t know what’s going to happen to you.”
There’s a tiny room full of boxes beside the kitchen that’s just big enough for a futon, Claire had written. There’s a restaurant down the street called Tatties that serves only baked potatoes. I’m eating sausages and grilled mushrooms for breakfast. And the rain is fabulous for your complexion. Tell that to your beauty editor!
“I don’t think I can bring you with me, at least not yet,” Renee said. “So I guess it’s okay for you to make an appointment with H.R.—I’ll be telling them soon enough. I don’t know anyone who’s looking for an assistant right now, but of course I’d be happy to give you a reference. I’m sure something will come along.” She smiled. “You might want to work on your word-processing skills in the meantime. And hey, like I said, mum’s the word.” She looked at Alison quizzically, her head cocked to one side. “Where the hell does that expression come from, anyway?”
The “Yanks” (anyone with an American accent is a Yank here—what an insult for a Tar Heel!) tend to cluster together, I’m sorry to say, to reminisce about things like college football and decent Mexican food. Ben and I have been hanging out with this one guy, a Kansan on a Fulbright named Charlie Granville, who’s funny and charming and smart. A little midwestern for my taste, but not bad to look at. I thought of you. … How’s your love life? Come over and take him for a test drive. What do you have to lose?
Alison left her soon-to-be-nonexistent job that day with Claire’s letter in her black tote bag, an appointment with H.R., and the number for an obscure discount airline she’d found in the newspaper tucked into her day planner.
Chapter Three
For the whole afternoon before Charlie got home from Atlanta, Alison’s stomach was upset. She couldn’t eat; her hands were cold. She moved aimlessly around the house, picking up toys in one room and setting them down in the next, separating laundry into darks and lights and leaving the two heaps in the hall. At one point she set a watering can in the kitchen sink and turned on the faucet to fill it, only to come back ten minutes later and find the water gushing down the sides of the can, splashing all over the floor.
Her parents had left that morning. Her mother wanted to stay, but her father had been anxious to get home. “I’m like a circus elephant. I need a routine,” he’d said.
“What are you going to do?” her mother asked as Alison sat on the floor of the TV room, playing with Noah and watching her pack.
“I don’t know.”
“Do you want my advice?”
“No, I … ” Alison sighed.
“You need to talk to a lawyer.”
“Unh,” she grunted.
“Just to find out your options.”
“Don’t you think it’s a little premature?”
“Maybe,” her mother said. “Maybe not. It can’t hurt.”
“I don’t know,” Alison said. “Maybe it can hurt. Maybe I’m—we’re—blowing this whole thing out of proportion.”
“That could be,” her mother said diplomatically, holding her roller suitcase down with one hand and zipping it up with the other. “But Alison—you’re a housewife. If Charlie wants to abandon this marriage, you’re not in a strategic position to get what you need.”
“I can’t believe we’re even having this conv
ersation.”
“Talk to a lawyer,” her mother said. “A good, smart, feminist lawyer. Then whatever happens, you’ll be ready.”
How had it come to this? All through the afternoon, as she made Noah a sandwich and cut it into stars and hearts, folded a basket of laundry, hung Annie’s dresses on hooks in her closet, Alison turned things over in her mind. Nothing about her life at the moment was what she’d envisioned for herself when she got married. For one thing, she and Charlie had always planned on staying in the city. They thought they would raise their children to be like the teenagers they saw on the crosstown buses after school, precocious and watchful and savvy; they’d juggle full-time jobs with the help of a nanny and take their kids with them to restaurants and gallery openings after work and off-Broadway plays on the weekends.
Instead, they had moved to the suburbs. Now Alison felt as if she were inside a giant bubble that moved with her wherever she went, shielding her from extremes, a bubble of middle-class suburban life—a life composed of errands and repairs and strolls to the playground, of chitchat with acquaintances in the grocery store, of scheduling electrician visits and car maintenance, of thumbing through magazines and catalogs that fell through the mail slot every afternoon at two, of her book club and health club and pediatrician appointments, of late-night lovemaking that evolved less from desire than from proximity, of bland kid dinners, fish sticks and chicken nuggets and Annie’s macaroni and cheese and Classico sauce with spaghetti on an endless loop.
“You’ve turned into a nag,” Charlie had said one evening several months ago when he announced he planned to go to a Saturday afternoon basketball game in the city, and she said she wished he wouldn’t. He was gone all week, she protested; it wasn’t fair to leave her with the kids for a whole day alone on the weekend (yes, she loved them fiercely, but enough was enough!). Also, she’d made a list of a few simple chores he needed to do around the house, like repairing a window in the attic and unclogging the basement sink.