“Do you want to do the dishes, and I’ll do the kids?”
“Nah, I’ll do the kids,” he said. He brought the plates over to the counter, holding his beer by the neck, and then took a long swig. He was beginning to feel a little fuzzy around the edges, and it was so much more appealing than the alternative that he determined to finish this one and have another.
“Okay,” Alison said equitably. “I’m reading On the Banks of Plum Creek to Annie; she knows which chapter we’re on. And Noah gets to choose three books from his shelf.”
“Four! Four books,” Noah said. “No, five.”
“Right,” Charlie said, thinking, Wouldn’t it be much more efficient to read them both the same book?
“I’ve tried reading them the same book and it never works,” Alison said, divining his thoughts. “But you could try.”
“I want to read Plum Creek,” Annie said, pouting, “not dumb baby books.”
“That’s it, then, we’ll read Plum Creek,” said Charlie. “And six books for you, Mister.”
“Yay!” Noah dashed out of the kitchen and clambered up the stairs in giddy anticipation. Annie slunk out after him.
Charlie finished his beer and put the bottle in the recycling bin under the sink, where it clinked loudly against the others. For a moment he lingered in the doorway. Could he get another beer without Alison noticing? Spying a tub of Country Crock whipped margarine on the counter, he grabbed it as an alibi and opened the fridge. While Alison’s back was turned, he slipped a beer into the front right pocket of his khakis. “Well, I’m heading up,” he said cheerily, ducking out the door.
The two-socket ceiling light in the upstairs hall was bright, too bright; it made him wince. Why hadn’t he noticed it before? The bulbs were probably 100 watt, too strong for the fixture. Charlie turned it off as Noah came tearing out of his bedroom, wearing socks and nothing else.
“I want to take a bath!” he shouted, and against Charlie’s feeble protests he ran into the kids’ bathroom and turned on the spigot.
“I don’t have to take one, do I?” Annie said, coming into the hall in her yellow nightgown with white unicorns frolicking across the bodice and matching yellow slippers. “Anyway, I told Mommy I’m too old to take a bath with a boy.”
Reaching into his pocket and shifting the cold beer so it wouldn’t make a mark like an iron on his now partially frozen upper thigh, Charlie realized he didn’t have a bottle opener. Shit. He couldn’t go downstairs; it would be too obvious. “He’s not a boy, he’s your baby brother,” he said absently, going into Annie’s room and rummaging around on her little white desk. Plastic ruler? No. Stapler? Scissors? Hmm—no. Finally he came across a claw-shaped staple remover, and positioned it, Jaws of Life–like, over the bottle cap. Twisting and prying, he managed to get the cap off at the expense of the staple remover, which appeared irreparably mangled. He tossed it into Annie’s white plastic wastebasket with a thud, and took a long swallow.
“My staple remover!” Annie cried, rushing toward the wastebasket and sifting quickly through the contents. Damn, she must have been watching. Holding the battered item up accusingly, she wailed, “Daddy, you broke it!”
“I know, I know, shhhh,” Charlie said, holding his free hand out in front of him and flapping it as if he were dribbling a basketball. “Hush, sweetie. It’s not a big deal. It was cheaply made, anyway. I’ll get you a better one.”
“I don’t want a better one. I want this one. You ruuuined it!” she sobbed, holding it tightly against her chest.
In the next room, Noah started to howl. “The water’s too hot. It bunned my fingas. MOM-MY!”
With both of his children in tears, and his wife already sprinting up the stairs, Charlie took another gulp of his beer, draining it, and set it strategically behind him on the desk, blocking it from Alison’s view. What was wrong with these children? Why did everything have to be so dramatic?
“What in the world is going on?” Alison said as she came into the room.
“Daddy broke my staple remover!”
“I bunned my fingas!” Noah said, barreling in behind her, holding up his injured digits.
Alison inspected the chubby splayed hand. Apparently satisfied that Noah would live, she turned to Charlie and asked, “What were you doing with a staple remover?”
“Oh—well—I was just—”
“He was opening a bottle, Mommy, and that is not what you’re supposed to use a staple remover for,” Annie said indignantly.
“What kind of bottle?” Alison asked, and Charlie, his ears reddening slightly, reached behind his back and retrieved the empty Sam Adams. “Another beer?” she said. For a moment they were all silent, listening to the water filling the bathtub in the next room. The children gazed up at both of them with their mouths open. Alison looked at them and then at Charlie, as if to say let’s not do this here. “Okay, look. You go finish the kitchen. I’ll get them to bed.”
“Awww, why can’t I have a bath?” Noah whined.
“But—” Charlie said.
“Charlie, you’re drunk,” she said quietly.
“I am not.”
“We’ll talk about this later,” she said.
“It’s nice to have the moral upper hand, isn’t it?” he said somewhat desperately.
She gave him a look of such cold fury that he stepped backward, bumping against the desk. “You would know,” she said.
AFTER FINISHING THE dishes—which were almost done, anyway; Alison was a marvel of efficiency—Charlie sank onto the couch in the TV room and flipped to CNN to watch the news. Unfortunately MarketWatch was on, which made him anxious (the fact that he’d never been particularly interested in the stock market was his secret; he knew it was his masculine duty to care, but now that the market was tanking, taking his 401K with it, he cared even less), so he flipped through channels, skipping from a family comedy from the seventies to a show with contestants eating bugs, before landing on The Simpsons.
This was more his speed. He watched the show, prone, with one wary eye. When the episode ended—a complicated story involving Clint Eastwood, mud pies, and the nuclear power plant where Homer worked—Charlie turned off the TV. The house was quiet; the children, he concluded, were in bed. He sat up, feeling groggy. Four beers weren’t so many; in college that amount wouldn’t have fazed him at all, but he wasn’t used to drinking that way anymore. And he hadn’t eaten much dinner. All he wanted to do now was go to bed.
He could hear Alison in the room directly above him—their bedroom—padding around. He knew he should go up there, but he didn’t want to.
He sat up. Fuck. There was a small mallet in his brain, hammering his cerebral cortex. With each throbbing pulse his head seemed to grow larger.
Lying down again, he closed his eyes. He might have even drifted off.
“So what was all that about?” a blunt, angry voice demanded from above.
Charlie blinked. Groggily he pulled himself onto one elbow and swung his legs over the side of the couch. He squinted up at the shadowy figure looming over him—Alison, wearing blue flannel pajamas (in April? An unseasonably cold April, but still). Her face, free of makeup and damp around the hairline, shiny with moisturizer, seemed strangely exposed, as if she’d not only washed her face but also scrubbed off an epidermal layer.
“What time is it?” he asked.
“Nine-forty-five.”
“Oh. Wow.” He rubbed his face.
She crossed her arms. “We need to talk.”
He frowned, as if surprised. He wasn’t surprised, but he didn’t want her to think he’d been waiting like a coward for her to make the first move—which was, of course, exactly what he had been doing. “Okay,” he said.
She sat down on the couch, close to the edge, as if she might skitter away at any second. She bit the corner of her lip, twisting her mouth into a grimace. “I just realized something,” she said. “You have been blaming me since the accident for killing that little boy.”
“Alison—”
“Stop. That’s not what I realized. What I realized is that I’ve been blaming myself, too. I’ve been blaming myself for killing that boy, and for the problems in our marriage, and for the fact that you’ve essentially absented yourself from our lives. I thought it was all my fault. But you know what?” Her voice rose in a sharp crescendo. “I wasn’t the one who ran a red light. I wasn’t holding my child on my lap in the front seat. Maybe if I hadn’t had two drinks I could’ve moved out of the way faster—but probably not; I’ve never had fast reflexes, especially driving, especially at night. Believe me, I’ll live with that memory for the rest of my life. But I will not live with your judgment and scorn.”
“Hey, hey,” he said gently, trying to calm her down, “I don’t—”
“You’re gone most of the time,” she snapped. “You’re gone emotionally, too. And when you actually do spend some time with us you get drunk. You fucking hypocrite. You’ve basically checked out, haven’t you?”
He waited to see if she had more to say, but she just sat there, looking at the floor, her chest moving rapidly up and down in her flannel pajama top. That old philosophical question flitted through his mind: who breaks the thread, the one who pulls or the one who hangs on?
This is happening. There’s no turning back.
“Alison, you’re right,” he said, putting his hand on her arm. “You’re right. About all of it.”
An evolving expression slid across her face, like a cloud moving across the sun—relief to mistrust to defensiveness. “What do you mean?”
“I guess … I guess I have blamed you. Maybe I thought if I made you into a villain it would be easier.”
“What would be easier?”
Shit. “It would be easier to … say what I have to say.”
She recoiled, pulling her arm away. “I don’t understand.”
“I don’t know how to tell you this.”
“Oh God.” She put her hands over her eyes.
“I just—It’s nothing you’ve done.”
“I knew it,” she murmured.
“Knew what,” he said, trying to sound sympathetic instead of like he was fishing. How much did she know?
“That you weren’t—in love with me anymore.”
“It’s not that,” he said. “I do love you. I’ll always love you.”
“Please,” she said, holding up her hand.
“I don’t. … ”
“Just tell me.”
There wasn’t a single molecule of Charlie that wanted to be having this conversation. He felt as if he had been pushed out onto a tightrope, high above the ground; now all he could do was try to keep his balance and make it across.
“I’m—I think I’m in love with Claire,” he said.
He had heard the expression “the blood drained from her face,” but he’d never seen it before. Alison actually went white. “Wh-what?” she sputtered.
Charlie shrugged helplessly, deploying an old weapon, the equivalent of a girl flirting to get her way. If he could become a little boy in her eyes, naughty or willful or irresponsible, it might not be so devastating; she might even somehow forgive him. Unfortunately this tactic seemed to have lost all effectiveness.
“Claire Ellis? My-best-friend-from-childhood Claire?”
He didn’t respond. It hardly seemed necessary.
“You’ve got to be joking,” she said. “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me. Please tell me this is a joke.”
“It isn’t a joke.”
“What—how—” She shook her head, as if trying to wake from a bad dream.
“I think I’ve been in love with her since Cambridge,” he said haltingly.
She stared at him.
He looked down.
“Go on,” she said.
“She—Claire—didn’t want me then. I mean, she was already with Ben.”
“Jesus.” Alison’s lip curled in disgust. This, he could tell, was even worse—that Claire had first rejected him and then passed him along to her.
“And I thought the feeling would go away,” he continued. “I mean, I had a crush on her, but she was with Ben, and that was that. I liked Ben, too. I liked being with both of them. For a while I thought maybe it was that—I just wanted to be in their life, you know? Their life—their lives—seemed so much more interesting than mine. And then … you came.”
Alison’s body went rigid. She looked straight ahead, at some imaginary point in space halfway across the room.
“And you were so beautiful,” he said. “You are—you are so beautiful.”
“Don’t, Charlie.”
“I fell in love with you, I did. I had never met anyone like you. So poised and yet—I don’t know—open.”
He could see tears welling in her eyes.
“I wanted you. I wanted to marry you.”
“You were in love with her.”
“No, I—I wasn’t then. Or I convinced myself that I wasn’t, because there was nothing I could do about it.”
“So I was the consolation prize,” she said bitterly.
“No. No,” he said, “it didn’t feel that way.” He had intended to be scrupulously honest with Alison—he owed it to her; it was the least he could do. But she was right. The stark truth was that he would not have married her had Claire been free. And even though he did grow to love Alison—he had been, he truly believed, in love with her—a part of him was always thinking about Claire, imagining how things would have been different if he had married Claire instead. “I was happy to be with you.”
She looked at him for a long moment. “I don’t believe you.”
He shifted uncomfortably.
“This whole marriage has been a lie.”
“No, Alison.”
“Just stop the bullshit,” she said. “How long have you been fucking her?”
“Al—”
“How long?”
He sighed. “We started seeing each other a few months ago. In the winter.”
He could see her calculating the date in her head. “When?”
“Before the holidays.”
“Oh, that’s lovely,” she said, her voice heavy with sarcasm. “Where? Where did you go?”
“The—the first time?”
She made a face.
“A hotel. In Midtown.”
“Where was I? Or was this on your lunch hour?”
“No, it was—it was a Friday. You were visiting Pam Thurgood in upstate New York with the kids.”
“Aah,” she said, nodding slowly, “I remember that weekend. You said you had to work late, right? That was why you couldn’t come.”
“You know,” he said hesitantly, “the actual details are kind of irrelevant.”
“Really,” she said.
“Yeah. I just think … it’s not important what happened when, and all that.”
“Uh-huh,” she said. “So how was it?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, was she a good fuck?”
“Come on, Alison.”
“What? Is that irrelevant, too? I’m guessing it matters to you.”
“I just—I don’t think we need to be doing this.”
“Ummm.” She nodded, parodying amiability. “Yeah, you’re right. We don’t need to be doing this. You’re fucking my best friend—you say you’re ‘in love with’”—she knifed quote marks in the air with hooked fingers—“my best friend—my best friend—but you’re right, how rude, how impolite of me to ask you anything about it.” She bit down on the words, her voice rising with each syllable until she was practically shouting.
Jesus, she’s going to wake the children. Charlie wanted to stifle her somehow; he had to restrain himself from putting his hand over her mouth or telling her to shut the fuck up. He knew he didn’t deserve to be impatient with her; he had to hear her out, but Christ it was hard. He didn’t want to explain, pick over each detail, sit there and take it as the enormity of it sunk in and she got more and more furio
us.
“Yeah, that would be crass, wouldn’t it?” she continued. Now she was on her feet. “You fucking asshole! You low-life. You brought two children into the world, and now you’re going to abandon them.”
“No I’m not.”
“Yes you are.”
“I’m not, Alison. I wouldn’t do that.”
“Oh, okay. I see. Is Claire going to move in with us?”
“Alison, please.”
“I have given the best years of my life to you—that fucking cliché, it’s true,” she cried, spitting the words at him. “I devoted myself to you, to this marriage. To being a family.”
“I know, I know,” he said, patting the air with his hands, as if trying to tamp down her emotion. “And you are an amazing wife and mother. This may sound crazy, Alison, but I mean it—this is not about you.”
“Exactly!” she screeched. “This is not about me. It’s never been about me, has it?”
“Alison,” he said miserably.
“Stop saying my name.” She strode out of the room, and for a brief moment Charlie wondered if the conversation was over. Then she came back with a handful of tissues, which she pulled out of her balled fist one after another like a magician with silk scarves. She blew her nose loudly. Tears were streaming down her face. “Does Ben know?”
“I think so.”
“You think so?”
“Yes, he does.”
“How do you know?”
“Because … Claire called me.”
She hiccupped. “When?”
“Today.”
“When today? When you were ‘at work’?”
He nodded.
She shook her head. “I knew you were fucking lying about going to work today,” she sobbed.
“I wasn’t lying. I really had to go in.”
“How convenient, that she knew you ‘had to go in.’”
“She didn’t know. She called my cell phone.”
“Bullshit. Your cell phone was here.”
“Right,” he said, struggling to keep up with her detective work, “so then she sent me an e-mail on the off chance—Jesus, Al, what does it matter?” he said finally. “I wasn’t lying to you about today. I had to go to work. I didn’t see Claire. But … I have lied to you. I have been lying to you. I hate that part of it—”