Authors: Christina Baker Kline
“I think she might’ve had more than two,” Claire said. She was sitting on the couch, distractedly leafing through the
New York Times Book Review
. She put it down. “Anyway, our going out there today is not going to help. I’m sure there are plenty of people looking after the kids and bringing casseroles and all that. We’d be in the way. And besides, Ben, I’m leaving for two weeks tomorrow. I’ve got a lot to do.”
Ben stopped pacing and looked at her. “You’re still holding a grudge, aren’t you?”
It took her a moment to realize what he was talking about. “What? No. I just think we should give them space. She needs some time alone, and they need time as a family.”
The thought of seeing Alison and Charlie together like this filled her with dread.
“It’s just—appalling. Unbelievable,” Ben fretted. “There has to be something we can do.”
“You did find them a lawyer,” Claire said.
He shook his head. That wasn’t enough.
“We could send flowers,” Claire said. She wanted to be alone, away from Ben’s needy articulation of disbelief. She was desperate to talk to Charlie, to find out what he was thinking and feeling, but she didn’t know how or when she might get a chance. What was going to happen now? Alison must be shattered. Charlie would, of course, have to attend to her. And what then? Matters that had seemed relatively simple yesterday—the deception, the affair, feelings that had been reawakened after so many years—now felt immensely complex.
“Flowers … I don’t know,” Ben said. “Aren’t they a bit—funereal? Or falsely cheerful? It seems like the wrong message, somehow.”
“Of course, you’re right,” she murmured, and Ben went off to call Zabar’s, to see if they would send a gift basket to the hinterland, and then trekked over to the store to handpick the items. A task, an errand, was exactly what Ben needed. Faced with being able to do nothing, he needed something to do.
He’d always been that way. The evening of their first real date—they’d made a plan to go out for Thai in the Village a few days after the party where they’d met—Claire had sat on a bench in Washington Square Park and watched him walk toward her, alone with his backpack and a paper cone of flowers: a tall, gangly, dark-haired Harvard student with a soft smile and little gold glasses that were too round for his face. She could tell that he felt a bit exposed coming toward her like that. Even then, before she knew him, she saw through his thin veneer of self-assurance to the insecurity lurking beneath, instantly identifying in him what she recognized in herself.
“Hello, Claire Ellis,” he’d said when he reached her. His voice was deep, croaky. He handed her the flowers—black-eyed Susans (what guy brought black-eyed Susans?), eased the backpack off his shoulder, and pulled out a bottle of wine, a hunk of cheese, a floury baguette, two small juice glasses. “I didn’t know what to bring, so I brought all this. Hope you’re up for a picnic.”
For a long time Claire thought that maybe she could live inside Ben’s love, that it would keep her sane. She often wondered, in fact, if Ben, with his erudite good sense, was all that stood between her and a life of manic unpredictability. Sometimes she suspected that Ben was living through her—he didn’t have to be impulsive because she was; she enabled him to be the nurturing presence in the background. It was a safe role for him, a comfortable one. But was it good for her? Was he helping her by keeping her from her demons, her own unmanageable feelings? At times she felt like an exotic plant, a bonsai tree, perhaps; he was the custodian who kept her healthy but also tightly pruned.
“I CAN’T DO it. I can’t go out there.”
“Why not?” Claire’s therapist, Dina Bronstein, peered at her over her reading glasses.
Claire pushed her forefinger into the leather seat cushion of the couch, making doughy indentations and watching them disappear.
“What’s keeping you from going?” Dina pressed her.
“For one thing, I’m flying to Birmingham tonight.”
Dina wrote something on the pad of paper she always had in her lap. “Uh-huh.”
“It’s my tour. It’s important.”
“It is.” Dina nodded.
“I could have canceled this session, I guess. I could’ve gone this morning. But I needed to see you. I just—I can’t face her like this.”
“Like what, Claire?” Dina asked gently.
Claire looked at the oil painting above Dina’s head of the Maine coast, a picture so familiar to her that she was sure she could identify every rock. She had asked, once, where it was from, and Dina told her it was Spruce Harbor, the village she disappeared to for four weeks every summer. Beginning in May, it changed, in Claire’s mind, from a soothing seascape to a provocation, a reminder that Dina had a life outside the office, far away from here.
“The whole thing is so—ironic.”
“In what way?”
“Alison is the most cautious person I know. In high school she was always the designated driver. I was the one who did stupid things.”
“Like what?”
“Drinking and driving.” Tucking her legs under her, Claire sat back in the deep couch. She took a breath and let it out slowly. “Sleeping with someone else’s husband.”
“Ah.”
“Ah.”
Dina placed the notebook on the small round table beside her. “And not just anyone else’s husband.”
Claire nodded.
“So when you say that you can’t face her—”
“It’s really awful, isn’t it?”
Dina just cocked her head.
Claire looked at the thick slabs of blue and gray in the painting, the bold strokes of green. Orange, red, ochre: how did the artist see all those colors in the rocks? “I guess I feel that, deep down, Alison has to know about Charlie and me, whether it’s conscious or not. I introduced them to each other, you know. I set them up. I think she knew that there was kind of a—flirtation between us.”
“Were you jealous when she and Charlie got together?”
“No, I don’t think so. I saw myself as having given her a gift—the gift of his love.”
“So how do you see it now?”
“Uhh.” Claire sighed through her nose. “I don’t know. Maybe the truth is I wanted to keep him around—and giving him to Alison was the only way I could imagine holding on to him.”
Dina shifted in her chair. “That’s quite an admission.”
“You must think I’m an awful person.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because I would, if I were you.”
“Why?”
Claire took a deep breath. “Well, for one thing, this accident.”
“Do you feel responsible for this accident, Claire?”
“No. I don’t know. I mean, maybe partially. Charlie was supposed to meet her at the party and drive home, but he didn’t come because—because of the awkwardness of it, I guess. And she had those martinis—and then I wouldn’t even let her come to dinner. Ben invited her, but I didn’t want her to come.”
“And you feel badly about that.”
“Yeah. It’s just all so—complicated.”
“It is,” Dina agreed.
The windows rattled, and though the shades were drawn, Claire knew a city bus was going by; she could feel it rumbling under her legs. “I can’t stop thinking about this time in high school with Alison, when I was driving drunk.”
Dina nodded, picking up the pen again.
“We were at someone’s house, and I had a few beers. We decided to go to this swimming hole called Grover’s Gulch. I remember Alison asking me if I was okay to drive, and I said, Sure, of course. I did think I was. I was driving a bunch of people, and she was in the car behind me. It was just getting dark. The road went up and down”—Claire demonstrated, gliding her flat hand over imaginary ripples—“with these slow, steep inclines and long, coasting descents. Halfway down a hill I could see these blurry white shapes, stretching across the road. I slowed down, but I was going too fast. I felt this thump under the wheels. Thump thump. It was sickening. Nobody in my car even noticed; they were all laughing about something. But when we got there, I pulled Alison aside and told her I thought I might’ve hit something. Something white.
“I remember she put her arm around me and said, ‘Well, it ain’t white anymore.’ Then she whispered, ‘I won’t tell if you won’t.’ ” Claire laughed a little. “‘I won’t tell if you won’t.’” She shook her head. “Alison had this way of making the things I did seem okay, even when we both knew they weren’t.”
“She was a good friend,” Dina said.
“She was.”
“And now … ”
“And now,” Claire said.
Going through her dresser drawers later that afternoon and pulling out clothes to pack, watching the neon bars on the digital clock change configuration as the minutes clicked by—4:19, 4:20, 4:21—Claire realized that she couldn’t leave without calling Alison. She picked up the phone and held it in both hands. Pressing talk with her thumb, she watched the small electronic window light up. Then she clicked it off. She pressed it again, the window lit up again, and she dialed Alison and Charlie’s number.
No one picked up. The call went straight to voice mail. Prickling with relief, Claire forced herself to leave a message. “Hi, Alison,” she said. “I just want you to know that I’ve been thinking about you constantly and feel terrible about what happened. I’m flying out tonight, but please call me if you want to. I know Ben is coming out there, and I”—she stumbled over the lie—“I really wish I could come, too. Well. I’m sorry I missed you. I’m … I’m really sorry.”
Now this was true. She was really sorry. But even as she said it, she was pushing Alison out of her mind. Because if she really let herself feel for Alison, she would have to feel all of it: the immensity of her own betrayal, the terrible cruelty of what she and Charlie were doing. And she couldn’t do that. Not now. Not yet.
October 2008
When Claire lost the baby, on a windy Monday morning in October, Ben had just arrived at his office. “I’m bleeding,” she told him when he picked up the phone.
“Holy shit, what do you mean?”
“I don’t know. Jesus, I don’t know,” she said, sobbing into the phone.
“Call the doctor. Do you want me to call the doctor?”
“Just come home,” she said.
He left work without telling anyone, left his sketches scattered on the floor. Took the elevator down forty-seven flights, hailed a cab, got stuck in crosstown traffic, climbed out and found a subway, changed at Forty-second Street and sat on the local watching the stops go by in slow motion: Fifty-ninth, Sixty-sixth, Seventy-second, Eighty-sixth. As he ran up the sidewalk, trash skittered across the street in front of their West Eighty-seventh Street building.
When Ben got to their apartment, Claire was in the bedroom. She wasn’t crying. She lay on the bed, facing the wall, wrapped in a blanket. “It’s gone,” she said.
“Are you sure?”
She didn’t answer. Ben went over and sat beside her and touched her shoulder, and she curled toward him, put her head in his lap. Silently he stroked her hair, cresting the waves with the tips of his fingers. After a few moments she said, “I wish we hadn’t told anyone.”
“I’ll take care of it,” he said.
She was silent again. Then she said, “Do you think God is punishing us because we weren’t sure?”
He looked down at her, lying there in his lap. He couldn’t see her eyes. “I was sure,” he said.
After a while Ben went to the window. The sky was the same soft white with gray undertones that they’d chosen for the living room from the Benjamin Moore sample chart several months earlier, when they’d moved into this family-friendly building. China White. He looked out the window and glanced back inside. It was as if he could open a window and step into another room, and for a moment he wondered what it would feel like to do it. He looked down at the street, the dirty yellow cabs, their downstairs neighbor in a striped fur coat like a human-size raccoon tapping her foot impatiently as her leashed Pomeranian sniffed the front tire of a parked car, and he closed the window.
He turned back toward Claire, but she seemed to have fallen asleep. Suddenly thirsty, Ben turned and made his way to the kitchen, a narrow alley at the back of the apartment, as streamlined as a ship’s galley. Opening the stainless fridge, he found a jar of sun-dried tomatoes, a deli container of Fairway olives, various ludicrous condiments like almond paste and truffle mustard, a half-eaten Belgian chocolate bar, and an expired quart of fresh-squeezed orange juice. He opened the cabinet above the sink and found a pack of organic brown coffee filters, but no coffee. Now that he thought about it, he couldn’t remember the last time they’d made coffee at home.
He shut the door and slid down the smooth stainless cabinet until he was crouching on the floor, staring out the large window at the other end of the apartment.
For the next few nights Claire tossed in her sleep. “Where are you?” she cried.
“I’m here.”
“Where are you?”
“I’m here. Right here, Claire.”
She’d shake her head and turn away.
“Don’t you think,” Ben said a few weeks later, “don’t you think”—he traced the blue lines on her forearm—“we should think about trying again?”
She turned away.
“When you’re ready.”
“What if I’m never ready?” she said.
“Hey. How
is she today?”
“Come in.” Charlie held the door open, and Robin did, in fact, stride right in. Over the past few days he had come to admire her forthrightness; it was refreshing not to have to do the dance of “what-do-you-need,” “oh-nothing-we’re-fine” with people who wrung their hands and offered help but didn’t know how to come through. With Robin there was none of that—she just showed up. She didn’t ask what they wanted; she just brought what she thought they’d need: milk and bread and a warm lasagna. She whisked Annie and Noah over to her house (a pleasure dome, Charlie saw when he picked them up, their eyes wide with wonder at the Disney-like bounty of video games and animated movies on a theater-size flat-screen TV, gaily colored packaged snacks, impossible-to-get toys of the moment tossed carelessly around the family room). He’d practically had to drag the kids away by their heels.