Bird in Hand

  It was tempting to let it go. That was all she needed: a good long rest, and she’d be right as rain. (What did that mean, anyway, “right as rain”? It wasn’t like her to invoke a cliché. If nothing else, it was an indication of the falseness of the sentiment.) All he wanted was for things to be the way they were—two well-meaning and rational adults living their lives together, devoted to each other. She did love him; he was sure of it. She’d written dozens of cards and letters and e-mails over the years attesting to the depth of her feeling. (Here he was, he thought ruefully, invoking those long-ago letters, as if they proved something!)

  He didn’t want his fears confirmed. He didn’t want to know. But he couldn’t live this way (or could he? he wondered in a late, desperate negotiation with himself; maybe he could). It would be better, as with a loose tooth, to yank it out quickly, rather than endure the torture of slow detachment. Right?

  “Claire—”

  “Not now, Ben,” she said, as if sensing what he was thinking. “I’m so tired. Can we do this later?”

  “Do what?”

  “This. This—” She moved her hands in an angry flurry in the air.

  Stirring things up, Ben understood. Agitating. Opening Pandora’s box, allowing the Furies to escape. Once they were out, they could never be put back. Did he want that? Did he really want to do this now?

  “Are you sleeping with Charlie?” he asked abruptly.

  “What?” she said, her voice rising in a strangled laugh. Her eyes grew bright.

  He waited.

  “Why do you … what do you … What makes you think that?”

  “Don’t do this, Claire.”

  “I’m sorry, Ben,” she said, “I don’t think this is the time to. … ”

  “To what?”

  “Look,” she said, as if she were about to level with him.

  He waited.

  She bit her bottom lip.

  “Look at what,” he said finally.

  To his surprise, she started to cry. He watched dispassionately as tears welled in her eyes and ran down her cheeks. Her mouth quavered; she let her wavy auburn hair fall across her face. She covered her eyes with her hands and stood there in front of him, her shoulders heaving and legs shaking, muffled cries rising out of her until she was flat out sobbing in a way he’d never seen before.

  So this was it, the moment he’d been dreading. Yes. Claire was sleeping with Charlie. It would stand to reason that she was in love with Charlie. She would probably leave him for Charlie. Ben felt as if he were experiencing all this from a great distance, from the ceiling, perhaps, or maybe even farther away. He felt as if it wasn’t actually his life that was disintegrating but someone else’s, someone he didn’t know. He felt sorry for the guy, in a general kind of way—the way you feel sorry for people in earthquakes or other disasters, fire and flood and warfare and car accidents. It would suck to be him, to be that guy whose wife was having an affair with her best friend’s husband. But he didn’t actually feel sorry for himself. Not yet, anyway. What he felt instead, he realized with dawning comprehension, was relief. Relief that it was out in the open, that he wasn’t going crazy, that his instincts had been right. And something else. He didn’t know how to define it, exactly; he wasn’t sure what it was. But it felt like a larger kind of liberation, an unburdening. He felt free, for the first time since he could remember. He might never have chosen this freedom, but here it was, for the taking.

  Watching Claire as she stood in front of him, crying still, Ben felt a rush of tenderness for her, and he went over and took her in his arms. He hated that she felt terrible. He wished there were something he could do. Of course she was in love with Charlie; he understood completely. Hadn’t both of them been in love with Charlie, on some level, for all these years?

  Later he would feel other things—bitterness, rage, loneliness, loss. He would make mad promises that he would change, that things would be different, that somehow he would become the person Claire had decided she loved more than him. He would become Charlie. But he didn’t know the first thing about becoming Charlie. He couldn’t have done it if he’d wanted to.

  Chapter Six

  November 1997

  “Ah, hello,” said the tall, thin, dark-haired man who answered the door. “Careful, we’re missing a step. The stone dislodged itself last week and I don’t know how the devil to replace it.”

  How the devil. Another American trying to sound English. “I’m Charlie. Granville.” Charlie stuck out his hand.

  “Ah, yes, Charles Granville. Benjamin Sayers. Ben.” He squeezed Charlie’s hand and smiled. “Claire said she’d invited you. Said she found you aimlessly wandering the streets.”

  “Something like that.” He could see Claire inside the house. She was biting the lip of a plastic cup, laughing at something somebody was saying.

  “Come in, come in,” Ben said, waving him up. “Claire likes to think of us as the Cambridge University Immigration Service for New Americans. Been here long?”

  “Two weeks.”

  “Bit of a culture shock, isn’t it? Flats and lifts and all that.”

  “There’s a lot of rain,” Charlie said. By now they were standing at a drinks table in the middle of a small living room crowded with people, most of them sitting. Without asking, Ben poured a tiny glass of pale sherry and handed it to him.

  “You’ll get used to it,” he said. “Have you got a bike?”

  Charlie took a sip of the sherry and winced at the flame in his throat. He’d only tasted sweet sherry before. “I need to get one.”

  Ben looked him up and down. “What are you, five nine?”

  “Five ten,” he said, color rising to his cheeks.

  Ben smiled. He’d obviously caught Charlie’s sensitivity about his height. “Just a few inches shorter than me,” he said. “I have a bike you can use, if you want it. A friend left it behind last spring.” Before Charlie could answer, Ben asked, “So where are you from?”

  “Kansas.”

  “Kansas!”

  “What about you?” Charlie said, ignoring Ben’s response. He was used to it; Americans at Cambridge all seemed to be from the East Coast or California.

  “New York,” Ben said, confirming Charlie’s generalization. “You’re not a ‘Harvard man.’” He drawled the words with self-conscious irony. “I’d know it if you were—we’re a pretty insular group. I’m guessing—Penn?”

  “University of Kansas, actually.”

  Ben raised his eyebrows.

  “My mother taught there,” Charlie said, hating himself for feeling the need to explain. “Tuition was practically free, so—”

  “So you saved your parents a bucket of money and ended up here anyway. That’s the way to do it. You on a Marshall?”

  “Fulbright.”

  “Law?”

  “Philosophy. You?” Charlie said, struggling to regain some leverage in the conversation.

  “Mellon. Architecture. I’m auditing Petrovsky’s lectures on ancient Greek philosophy, though. Fascinating stuff. Have you made it to any of those?”

  “It’d be a lot less work if you two just exchanged résumés,” Claire said, coming up behind Ben and putting her arms around his waist. “Hi, Charlie.” She smiled a big, open smile. “So nice of you to come.”

  He looked at the two of them—Ben tall and lanky, with unruly brown hair and small, round wire-framed glasses, and Claire with those wide-set hazel eyes and high cheekbones and candy apple lips—and suddenly wanted more than anything to be a part of their lives. “Thanks for inviting me,” he said.

  “Come on. There are people you should meet.” Claire flashed a smile at Ben and took Charlie’s hand, leading him into another room.

  Chapter Seven

  Ever since Charlie had returned from Atlanta, several days ago, Alison had been wary and brittle. She clearly knew something was going on, but as long as she didn’t push it there was no reason to initiate a conversation—not yet, at least. Charlie needed time
to figure things out. It was funny—when he was with Claire he was certain she was what he wanted: she was the love of his life. But when he was home with Alison and the kids, he felt rooted. He had planted this family here; he was loath to tear it up. He did love Alison—as much as, if not more than, most men love their wives, he thought. And he was crazy about his kids—Annie with her single-minded concentration and pixie chin and a smile just like his, Noah with his mother’s dark eyes and trusting gaze. How could he choose to leave them?

  And yet in forming the question he had already supplied a phantom answer.

  Sunday afternoon he drove into the city to work for a few hours. What with the accident and then his trip to see Claire, he’d been out of the office quite a bit; several deadlines were looming, and he hadn’t bothered checking e-mail for days. Alison was suspicious when he told her he needed to go in, and it was a guilty pleasure to be genuinely affronted when she didn’t believe he was telling the truth. “It’s just a few hours, honey,” he said. “I’ll be home by six. Let’s do a family dinner, okay?”

  There were 316 e-mails in his in-box, half of which were spam and half of which had to be dealt with, one way or another.

  Let’s raise the idea at the staff meeting on Tuesday. I’ll get you the proposal by Wednesday.

  Delete, delete, delete.

  Call my cell phone. We need to talk.

  Charlie sat back in his chair. It was an e-mail from Claire, sent a few hours earlier. Why hadn’t she called? He looked in his bag and saw that he’d forgotten his cell phone; it was at home in the charger on his dresser. He hadn’t bothered to listen to the messages on his blinking office phone.

  He dialed her number.

  “Charlie,” she said breathlessly when she picked up. “I’m so glad you called. I didn’t know what to do. I was considering smoke signals to get your attention.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “Oh, my God,” she breathed. “I—I got home from the airport and Ben just—assaulted me—”

  “Assaulted you?” Charlie broke in.

  “No, no,” she said. “I mean, he confronted me. About us. He knew. He figured it out.”

  “Oh. Wow,” Charlie said.

  “Yeah. But then it was weird—he didn’t seem upset, really. I mean, I’m sure he is, but—well, you know Ben. He keeps a lot inside.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “I don’t know. He went out.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah. I’m fine. I guess in a way it’s a relief. I hated lying to him.”

  Charlie looked out his office window at a pigeon sitting on the ledge. He reached over and tapped the glass with his finger. Fly away, pigeon. The bird didn’t budge.

  “So what about Alison?” Claire asked.

  In bed that morning, before the kids were awake, Charlie had molded his body around Alison’s sleeping form. She stirred, opening her legs slightly, and he found his way in, stroking her until she came, arching back against him, and then he came, too, shuddering quietly and drifting back to sleep. When he woke up a little while later he could hear her downstairs with the kids, making breakfast—pancakes, by the sound of it. Noah was clamoring to crack the eggs, and demanding a dinosaur shape; Annie chimed in asking for a heart.

  “I don’t know,” Charlie said. “She hasn’t said anything. But … she suspects. Something.”

  “Umm,” said Claire. She was silent for a moment. Then she said, “So what are you going to do?”

  That was the question, wasn’t it? Charlie had meant every word he’d said to Claire in Atlanta, but—Christ, this was soon. He stared out the window at the pigeon, which, as if sensing the intensity of his gaze, bobbed its head at him and turned away.

  “I’m not saying you should do anything,” Claire continued. “I was just wondering what you were thinking. And also—well—I guess there’s a chance Ben might call Alison. He didn’t say he was going to, but. You never know.”

  “Yeah,” Charlie said, thinking, Holy shit. This is happening. He thought of the children’s fable about the dog with a bone that, seeing his reflection, mistakes it for a dog with a larger bone, and drops his own in pursuit of the illusion. “I need to figure this out,” he said. “I guess … I’ll call you later.”

  “Listen, Charlie.” She sighed. “I didn’t mean to set anything in motion prematurely. You should wait until you’re ready. If—if you’re ready.”

  He nodded abstractly, then realized she couldn’t see him. “I’ll give you a call in a few days,” he said.

  When he hung up the phone he felt a grim foreboding. He stood up and went to the window, leaning his forehead against the cool glass. The bird was gone. Below, on another window ledge, Charlie could see several pigeons huddling together, and he wondered for a moment if one of them was his pigeon; if it had left his ledge in search of company, or if it had flown off to someplace else by itself.

  AT ABOUT FIVE-THIRTY, as he was finishing up, Charlie called Alison from his office and asked if he could pick up anything for dinner on the way home.

  “I was just about to boil water for pasta,” she said.

  “No, don’t. You should take a break. How about Chinese?”

  “All right.”

  “I can be in Rockwell in forty-five minutes. I’m just about to leave.”

  “I’ll call in the order,” she said. “Do you want anything special?”

  This was a formality. In fact, their order was always the same: sesame noodles, dumplings, chicken and broccoli for the kids, garlic string beans, and Alison’s favorite, spicy shrimp and eggplant. She would call their order in to the least mediocre of the mediocre Chinese restaurants in town (and the only one that served brown rice, as Alison told newcomers to town who asked for a recommendation, though they never actually ordered brown rice themselves), and he would pick it up.

  But this time he said, “Maybe so.” It hadn’t occurred to him until that moment that he wanted something special, but perhaps—yes—he did. “How about—uh—a noodle thing, like chow fun. With pork.”

  “Instead of shrimp and eggplant?” He could hear the surprise and disapproval in her voice.

  “We could do both.”

  “That’s too much food,” she said. “And we already have a noodle thing, sesame noodles.”

  “So cancel the sesame noodles.”

  “But the kids love them.”

  “So just order all of it. We can have leftovers.”

  “That place is never any good on the second day. You know that.”

  He sighed. “Come on, Alison, it’s eight bucks. I’m in the mood for chow fun. Could you just order it, please?”

  “Okay,” she said tersely.

  As he took the elevator down to underground parking, he wondered at Alison’s truculence. Though of course she had every reason to be mistrustful, Charlie had no idea whether she actually was. She’d never confronted him with any suspicions; if she had them, she’d done a good job of keeping them to herself. Even if she did think he was up to something, she had no reason to suspect that Claire was involved. Unless … what if Ben had called? But surely then they wouldn’t be arguing over noodles. No—she didn’t know. He was sure of it.

  In a way it might have been easier if she did. The idea of being honest with Alison was profoundly unnerving. How was he going to summon the strength to tell her? And what would happen then? Charlie felt as if he were poised on the edge of a cliff, and he could either step back to the safety of land or step forward into a free fall. He knew what was behind him, but had no clue what lay ahead.

  AT DINNER ALISON was friendlier. She took some chow fun for herself and exclaimed over how good it was, then urged it on the kids, both of whom refused to try it. Too many unidentifiable green things. “Just take a noodle. A noodle! You love noodles,” she said to Annie in the falsely jovial tone of a Mouseketeer.

  “I love sesame noodles,” Annie said. “And only because they have peanut butter on them.”

&nb
sp; “It’s not peanut butter. It’s sesame paste,” Alison said.

  “Eww. Then I don’t like them either.”

  “It’s peanut butter,” Charlie said quickly. “Mom was kidding.” He raised his eyebrows at Alison, who nodded, signaling her complicity.

  “Is that true, Mommy?” Annie asked suspiciously.

  “Yes.”

  Annie sniffed the brownish noodles already congealing on her plate. “Okay. Because I do love them,” she said, clearly relieved.

  Alison glanced at Charlie, who smiled back. Disaster averted. It was these kinds of moments, Charlie realized with a stab in his gut, that he would regret giving up most, the moments he couldn’t share with anyone else, embedded in the intimacy of creating a family. He hadn’t really thought it through, but suddenly it occurred to him that all of this would be off-limits as soon as he told Alison what was going on.

  He looked at Alison, cutting broccoli into Skittles-size pieces on Noah’s plastic Tigger plate, furrowing her brow in concentration. There was a fine vertical line between her eyes that seemed to have become permanent in the past few months. In her dark hair he saw glints of gray. She was wearing a long-sleeved purple T-shirt and old Levi’s, her “mommy uniform,” as she called it, and the holes in her earlobes were empty; she must have forgotten to put earrings in, or maybe she didn’t wear them anymore. He had to admit that he didn’t know. It had been a long time since he’d noticed much about her. Was that a symptom of the problem, he wondered, or was it, in a larger sense, the problem itself?

  After all that fuss about the noodles, Charlie didn’t want them. He wasn’t hungry. He choked down a few bites, moved the food around on his plate like a cagey anorectic, and went to the fridge for a second Sam Adams. Or maybe a third. Yep—he’d gulped down one right away when he came in, opened a second when they sat down to eat. When everyone else was finished, he scraped and stacked the plates—which Alison had once told him was rude to do at the table, but which he did now anyway—and loaded the dishwasher.