Authors: Christina Baker Kline
“It’s a pleasure to serve such a lovely young couple, sir, a pleasure. A good weekend to you.”
Frank was from the old school, and all you could do was nod. Even Charlie realized this, and he waved good-bye with a pained smile, which Frank returned with a brisk salute.
“I suppose when we have a baby we’ll actually need a doorman,” Alison said as Charlie pulled into traffic.
“Umm,” he said.
“But I like it now, too,” she said. “It makes me feel safe. And packages—it’s useful for packages.”
“Actually,” he said, slowing to a stop at a red light, “I was reading that people in doorman buildings get lulled into complacency. Anyone can talk their way in, or slip past when the doorman isn’t looking.”
“It’s green,” Alison said. They picked up speed over the next few blocks—Seventy-fourth, Seventy-third, Seventy-second, down into the Sixties, until they hit a snarl of traffic around Lincoln Center. “I don’t care if it’s an illusion,” she said as they sat stalled at an intersection. “I like to feel safe.”
He looked over at her with an amused smile. “Well, aren’t you conventional all of a sudden. Next you’ll be wanting a white picket fence in Connecticut.” This was a game they played, accusing each other of bourgeois aspirations. It was their way of dealing with the legitimate fear that their lives were becoming demographically predictable.
“Let’s not rush things,” she said. “First the Jack Russell. Then the baby. Then the house.”
He glanced at the digital clock. “I can’t believe you told Claire we’d pick them up, Al. They could easily have met me at the lot. It’s adding an hour to our travel time.”
“So?” she said. “It gives us some quality time together, right?”
“Quantity time, maybe,” he said.
Charlie was right; it took twenty-five minutes just to get through Midtown traffic. There was much to talk about, but little was said. Sighs and mutterings, attention to traffic. As they passed through Times Square, neon rinsed the dashboard, splashed in their eyes.
When they got to the warehouse on Seventeenth Street, Charlie jumped out and rang the buzzer.
“Benjamin, sir,” he said with exaggerated formality, “the car and driver are downstairs.”
Charlie got back in the car. He and Alison sat in silence for a few minutes, waiting. She adjusted some knobs on the dashboard, turning down the heat. The street was quiet. Cars were double-parked on one side, sharking for a space; every time a truck came along, Charlie had to circle the block.
Alison put her hand on Charlie’s leg, just above the knee, a peace offering of sorts, though she wasn’t quite sure why she felt she needed to offer one. “What,” he said in a neutral voice, neither a question nor a demand.
She pulled her hand away.
“Did you pack my green sweater?”
She nodded.
“Good. It’s going to be cold.”
“I love you,” she said.
After a moment he said, “I know.” Then, as if realizing that wasn’t enough, he said, “Love you, too. Here they are.”
There was a hard rap on her window. “Hey, guys.” It was Claire, all sparkly hazel eyes and dangling earrings and big crimson mouth, wearing a black cashmere turtleneck and modishly faded jeans. Alison unlocked the doors, and Claire slid in. Ben rapped on the trunk, a thump that vibrated against Alison’s feet, and Charlie triggered the lock. Ben fiddled in the trunk for a moment, then slammed it shut. Alison looked back at Claire, and Claire smiled and squeezed her shoulder. “An adventure,” she said. “This is just what we need.”
Out of the city, trees were everywhere. The colors reminded Alison of
New York
magazine’s fall fashion color palette: sage green, burnt sugar, cinnamon, yellow apple, moss. The fact that she even saw it that way, she thought ruefully, meant that she’d probably been living in the city too long.
Later, Alison framed a snapshot from that weekend of the four of them sitting on the pebbled beach of a lake. It was a cold morning; they all wore mismatched scarves and mittens borrowed from the garrulous proprietor of the bed-and-breakfast. In the photo they’re all laughing, but it’s as if they’ve been laughing too long; their smiles are held in place like the afterimage of a bright light in a dark room. You can tell there’s been some self-conscious arrangement: Alison is leaning back against Charlie, who has his arm draped over her shoulder, and Claire and Ben are tilting their heads together. It was only when Alison examined the picture closely that she noticed Claire’s arm on Charlie’s knee, and his fingers touching hers. She might have seen it at the time, but if so it didn’t register.
Ben had, of
course, been to New Jersey, but he’d never taken the train. Now, in the marble well of New Jersey Transit at Penn Station, he stood, like the other commuters (not many; it was 9 A.M. on Tuesday; almost everyone was going the opposite way) with chins tilted up expectantly, watching the big, black, surprisingly old-fashioned sign overhead to find out which track his train was on. Rockwell, on the Essex County line, was scheduled to leave in ten minutes.
Flip, flip flip—Track 2.
About half a dozen people in the large vestibule now turned, as one, in the same direction. Ben was reminded of how he’d felt traveling in Europe—the unfamiliar rituals, the secret language of commuters, the customs that appeared to be second nature to everyone else. So he did now what he’d always done abroad: he identified the person who seemed most at ease—in this case, a woman with a severe haircut talking into a wireless earpiece—and followed her surreptitiously.
The escalator to the trains wasn’t working, so everyone walked down the ribbed steps, strangely unfamiliar in stasis. Trains on both sides. Which one? There was no conductor in sight. Ben followed the wireless woman to the right and up to the front of the train.
Earlier, he had packed his leather satchel with the
Times
, a current
New Yorker
, a bottle of water, an apple. The toy store on his route to the subway was closed, so he’d ducked into Rite Aid and bought shamelessly crowd-pleasing presents for Annie and Noah: Day-Glo lollipops as big as saucers, a Dora the Explorer coloring book for Annie (a wild stab—what did little girls want? He had no idea), a froglike stuffed animal for Noah that apparently came with a code for access to some no-doubt addictive Web site. Charlie and Alison would almost certainly disapprove. Then again, Ben supposed, they had bigger things on their minds.
On the phone, when Ben had asked what he could do and Charlie said, “Really—nothing,” Ben realized that he would have to answer that question himself. What he could do was come to them. Claire had left for her book tour yesterday afternoon, as planned—of course she had to go; it would have been unreasonable not to—and Ben had gone into work, though he couldn’t shake the feeling that he didn’t belong there. That he should somehow do more.
There was no clear etiquette for this. After all, he didn’t know (thank God) the child who had died. And it truly appeared that it wasn’t Alison’s fault. It was a terrible tragedy, but it wasn’t his tragedy—it wasn’t even
their
tragedy, exactly. So why did he feel compelled to take a day off work and come to Rockwell? How could it possibly help? He thought of Claire’s justifications: there’s nothing we can do. It’s a horrible situation, but really it’s no one’s fault; nobody should be taking this on themselves. Yes, yes, she was right. Rationally, this was none of his business. But instinctively he felt that coming to see Alison was the right thing to do.
The train was a bit dingy, and altogether too fluorescent—a poor relation to Metro North, the Westchester line that Ben occasionally took to see a client, filled with prosperous mortgage brokers and lawyers talking on cell phones and reading the
Wall Street Journal
. The people around him now seemed comparatively down-market: secretary types, men with shiny, buzzed hair in cheap inky suits; beleaguered mothers with unwieldy strollers. Was it the time of day? It was, to be honest, a little depressing.
The train lurched slightly as it left the station. Ben looked at his watch: 9:37. As he settled into his hard maroon vinyl seat, he was reminded of the many times, as a boy, he had gone with his mother to visit her father in a rest home in upstate New York, an hour from their home. He’d liked those trips—his mother, faced with nothing to do for an hour, relaxed and even seemed to enjoy it, chatting above the steady hum with an intimacy that was rare when they were home. They played card games and read books and talked. Ben liked looking out the window and watching the world glide by. He liked knowing that it might be this easy to leave one place for another. You got on a train, and then you were somewhere else. He particularly liked reading novels on the train; it felt doubly transporting.
For a long time, while Ben was growing up, the world outside his head held little interest. Outside his head, his mother was bustling around in the kitchen, fixing a family dinner his father wouldn’t show up for. The dinner would get cold as they sat there, Ben and his mother and his younger brother, Justin, and then his mother would say, in a strained, careful voice, “Well, you two go ahead,” and push her own plate away. Ben would struggle to eat the chicken and peas that tasted like dog food in his mouth. His mother would watch them silently for a few minutes, then rise abruptly and start clearing up around them, an angry clatter of dishes reverberating in the still room.
Ben could read anywhere. He read waiting for the bus, sitting on the bus, walking into school. He read at recess and before orchestra. He read at night in the room he shared with his brother after his mother had turned off the overhead light, squinting to see the words by the eerie glow of the night-light in the socket beside his bed. In his world the wizard Merlin was as real as Jim Townsend and Tyler Green, two boys who lived on his block and threw gravel at him when he walked by, hiding in the stairwells of their split-levels. Ben rode the trains with the Boxcar Children; he stepped through a wardrobe into a land where a great lion saved children from an evil witch. He was three inches tall, navigating the perilous terrain behind his house, where sparrows were airplanes and rain puddles lakes. At home Ben often felt helpless, at school he was invisible, but in his head he was a fearless traveler, a brilliant inventor, a hero.
Before Ben knew what an affair was, he sensed that his father was having one. The distraction and irritation, the careless lies—Ben could see that he was tearing away from the family, as slowly and painfully as an animal caught in a steel trap chewing off its own limb. To Ben it made no sense: they were a family, in a house with a yard—a tiny, scrubby patch of yard, but a yard nonetheless—in a neighborhood filled with families, mothers and fathers and kids. The only thing he could fathom was that his father must have another, better, family somewhere else. Later Ben would learn that, essentially, he did. Across town, in a small, second-floor apartment, a mistress and a baby were waiting.
At school, where he got As without even trying, Ben felt like a fraud. He couldn’t articulate what he really thought or felt or saw, so mostly he stayed quiet. By the time he was in ninth grade he was drifting through his classes, smoking pot with the stoners behind the school between periods. He joined the chess club, won every match, and then quit; he discovered Nietzsche and shaved his head. It was at this particularly confused point in his midteens that a high school guidance counselor stepped in. Handing Ben a stack of prep-school brochures, he’d given him a thirty-minute seminar on the ins and outs of scholarships and financial aid. A year later, Ben was at a small school in New Hampshire where there were so many smarter, weirder kids that he seemed fairly normal, even ordinary, by comparison.
When, in April of his senior year, he called his mother to tell her that he’d gotten into Harvard, she squeaked and started to cry. He was standing at a pay phone in the student center, using the phone card she’d given him for his birthday. All around him, other kids were opening their college letters, the contents telegraphed by the size of the envelopes. As his mother carried on he watched the faces register a flickering range of emotion. Ben had kept his application to Harvard a secret. There were kids in his class, legacies of legacies, for whom getting in seemed as inevitable as getting a driver’s license. He hadn’t wanted to set himself up for almost certain humiliation, so he told no one but the college counselor and the teachers he’d asked for references.
“Benjamin,” his mother breathed. “This will set you up for life.”
His mother’s elation was nearly matched by his father’s wariness when Ben called him a few days later. “So how’s this gonna work? You got a scholarship or something?”
“They’re offering me a package,” Ben said. “Some money outright, work study, loans—”
“Because I gotta tell you, Ben, I’d like to help you out, but it’s not a real good time. I got debts like you wouldn’t believe.” His father sighed. “Listen, I know you can do this. I had to work my way through school—”
“Dad, you dropped out.”
Ben could hear the static on the line between them. “You’re a smart kid, Benjamin. Smarter than I was, I guess. Right? I didn’t get into fucking Harvard. With that degree you can get any job you want, go into investment banking and make a killing. Jesus. A kid of mine, going to Harvard. I’m starting to like the sound of that.”
STEPPING DOWN FROM the train, Ben looked around, trying to get his bearings. The station was located in Rockwell village, across from a bagel shop that Ben recognized and the requisite small-town strip of dry cleaner, post office, bookstore, and coffee shop. Farther down the street were a nail salon and—of course; he should have guessed—a tasteful toy shop with educational wooden toys displayed in the window. It was a lovely day, mild and sunny, and despite the purpose of his visit, Ben felt strangely at peace. This was such a pretty town, Rockwell. Ben could imagine that one day he and Claire might move here, when they had a child, perhaps. It felt quite far from New York, more than the fourteen miles he had traveled to get here.