But then, later, while he was doing the dishes, and Birdie was splayed out on the couch in the living room reading The Canterbury Tales for school, he heard the distinct sound of Charlotte lifting the wine bottle out of its slot in the refrigerator door. She’d already had a glass at dinner (maybe two?), and while he didn’t want to be monitoring her (it’s not like she’s been pouring vodka into her morning coffee), it did seem like she was drinking more than ever lately, and he had started to notice a correlation: The more she drank, the more they fought.
Sure enough, after Birdie went to bed and Charlotte took over her spot on the couch, he was watching the Caps game in the chair across from her when she looked up at him, her laptop balanced on her legs, and laid into him again about how he had kissed Finch’s ass all night Saturday night. He told her—again—that he was just trying to be a good guest. Of course he knew that Finch Cunningham was a blowhard and a prick (how many times had they been over this?), and he also told her, for possibly the millionth time, that he didn’t love the idea of Birdie dating Tucker either, but that the worst thing they can do is try to pull Birdie away from him, because then she’d only want to be with him more. And it got worse from there.
It was infuriating, how the fights just came out of nowhere, as intense and sudden as summer thunderstorms. There’d been a time when they knew better, when they would rationally talk things out, using the techniques that Charlotte had learned in her psych classes as an undergrad—no blaming, no finger-pointing—but now it almost seemed like they were too far gone for that. Worse, it felt like they both knew as much, that it was the unspoken thing between them, and what did it say that neither of them was trying to do anything about it?
“This is a nightmare,” Jamie says, trying to keep the hose in place as Jason pushes the pieces together to close the gaps. The weaving reminds him of those pot holder craft kits that Birdie used to get for birthday gifts when she was younger.
“Hold on a sec.” Jamie lets go and takes a big swig from her Nalgene, and when she lifts the edge of her shirt to wipe her lips, Jason unwittingly catches a glimpse of the slice of skin above her waist. He feels an involuntary little surge and looks away.
Jamie’s attractive, outdoorsy and muscular, like the rock-climbing women in the Patagonia catalogs that come in the mail. He’d be lying if he said he hadn’t had the occasional lazy fantasy about her. It’s only natural given all of the time they spend together, and Charlotte is so constantly and increasingly irritated by him that Jamie is, in some ways, a sort of escape valve, but he’d always felt intensely guilty when he’d thought of her privately, in the ways he knew he shouldn’t, so he tried to just not let his mind go there.
“So did you do anything special this weekend?” she asks, sitting cross-legged next to the hammock.
“Not really,” he says, reaching for the PDF to study it once more. He glances up at her and she’s looking at him oddly. Suspiciously. “What?”
“You seem weird,” she says.
“Weird how?” he says, leaning back and wiping his palms on the front of his pants.
“You seem edgy,” she says. “Stressed.”
“Compared to you, everyone seems edgy and stressed.” More than once, Jason has teased that she’s in the wrong part of the country—she belongs out in Boulder or Southern California, among laid-back people like herself—but Jamie has always said that being the most easygoing person in DC would probably make her the most uptight person in one of those places, and she’s probably right. How would Charlotte handle it, he wonders, if an ape came at her full speed, throwing its own shit right at her? Would she turn and laugh, like Jamie had a few weeks ago? Unlikely.
“I told you, I just didn’t sleep well. And this thing . . .” He gestures toward the hose.
She tilts her head to the side, squinting at him. “Jason, c’mon,” she says, reaching over and giving his arm a quick squeeze. He notices the little silver ring she wears on her middle finger, a simple knot with a turquoise stone in the middle. She told him once that Warren gave it to her when they were teenagers. “Seriously, what’s wrong?” She sits back on her heels, biting her lip like she’s thinking something through. “If I can be honest . . . ?”
“What?” he says, feeling a squeeze in his stomach. They never talk like this.
“I can tell that something’s up. You haven’t seemed like yourself for a while now.”
A heavy silence falls over the room. He doesn’t know what to say.
“Listen, it’s none of my business,” she says. “But I’ve spent a lot of time in therapy this year so I feel like I’m developing kind of a sixth sense. You just seem . . . sad.” She pauses, then chuckles. “Dude, I’m the one who lost my husband. If either one of us gets to mope around and be miserable . . .”
Jason looks away, feeling himself flush. This is exactly . . . Oh, fuck it. He takes a deep breath. “Charlotte and I aren’t really getting along that well lately.”
“What?” she says, her tone kind. “I never would have known.”
“I know,” he says, then shrugs. “Actually, I don’t know . . . I don’t . . . It’s stupid.”
“What do you mean?” she says. “What happened?”
He shakes his head, wishing he had a good answer. “Things just haven’t been ideal between us for a long time.”
“I’m so sorry,” she says.
“It’s fine,” he says, not letting his eyes meet hers. “It’ll work out.” He can feel her watching him, studying him. When he looks up, she is still watching him, like she’s waiting for him to say more.
“You know, you can always talk to me about stuff,” she says, smiling.
He nods. “I keep thinking it will pass. That it’s just a rough patch.”
“Right,” Jamie says.
He runs his hand along the hose. “Charlotte’s just been so . . .” Stop talking, Jason, he tells himself, but it’s like there’s this tiny part of him that suddenly wants to get this out. “She used to be this . . . fun person . . . but everything with her job is so crazy now. I thought the intensity would die down a little but it hasn’t, and I’m worried about the toll it’s taking on her, and on us. You can’t imagine how much it’s changed her.”
“Charlotte?” Jamie says. “The happiness expert?”
Jason rolls his eyes. “Yup, that’s Charlotte, all right; Little Miss Sunshine, met with thundering applause wherever she goes. She jets all over the country, signing her books, staying at five-star hotels. She goes on national television, gets interviewed in newspapers all over the world.” It’s like a dam has broken, he can’t stop now that he’s started . . . “And I don’t think she enjoys one iota of it. All she fucking does is complain.”
Jamie narrows her eyes at him.
“What?”
“Well . . .” she says.
“What? Tell me.”
“Honestly, you sound a little jealous, Jason.”
“I’m not jealous!” he barks, a little too insistently.
“Don’t get—” She lifts a palm. “Don’t get mad, but is it possible you resent her success just a little?”
His ears burn. “How could I be resentful? Her success is our success, right? She does well, we all do well.”
“You sure?”
He shrugs.
“Maybe she feels under pressure, now that she has this image to uphold? Or maybe working so much has made everything harder for her.”
He thinks about the way Charlotte constantly talks about how tired she is, how every “how are you?” he tries is met with something like “exhausted” or “stressed.” And then there’s the drinking, the constant replenishing of the wine supply. “I know.” He nods. “Trust me, that’s crossed my mind. And it’s not like we haven’t talked about it . . . or . . . I’ve thought about it. She gets so defensive . . .”
“It’s been a big year for you guys, with Birdie starting high school, and you starting Asia Trail.”
“Yeah,” he says. Not that Cha
rlotte ever asks about my job, he thinks. “You’re right, I’m sure it’s all related. I just don’t understand why she’s decided to make me the . . .” He pauses, running his tongue along the inside of his bottom lip. “She just seems like she hates me. Honestly, Jamie, we can barely be in the same room.” He looks up at her for just a moment before he looks away. There’s a part of him that’s horrified that he’s revealing all of this; he doesn’t talk like this with anyone; the only person he’s ever really confided in is Charlotte, and on very rare occasions, his brother. But it also feels good, finally getting it all out. “It’s really bad.”
“Are you thinking . . . I mean, when you say ‘really bad,’ how serious is this? Are we talking, like . . . separation?” she asks.
“I don’t . . . No,” he says. “Definitely not.” He’s thought about it, fleetingly, what it might look like if things were to get to that point: a sad single-dad apartment in one of the generic high-rises in Ballston. Nights alone, the creepy old guy at a bar, surrounded by twenty-somethings. “No, that’s not what I want.”
“What about counseling?” she says. “Honestly, I don’t think the boys and I would be able to get out of bed without it.”
He sighs. “No.” The truth is that he’d asked Charlotte once a few months ago if she would go to a marriage counselor and she refused. “How would that look?” she’d said. “For me, given my so-called expertise, to be in counseling?” He could tell, once the words were out of her mouth, that she was embarrassed to have said it, to have thought that her sort of fame was the kind that would make her so instantly recognizable.
“Wait,” Jamie says, lowering her chin. “Is there someone else?” she whispers.
“What? No!” he says. “No, of course not.” He shakes his head. “I would never, and Charlotte is married to her job. That’s the other thing she said about counseling: When would she find the time?”
Jamie scrunches her lips to the side, thinking this over.
He puts his hands out. “Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that I’m not excited for her, or proud of her success, it’s just . . . it’s hard to explain. I don’t mean to put it all on Charlotte,” he adds. “It’s me, too. I just need a break. I think we both need a break. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t be . . . This feels stupid, talking to you like this.”
“No, no, please,” she says. “Don’t ever say that. I know how hard marriage is. What happened to me didn’t erase that. I remember feeling the way you do. I used to fantasize about getting my own secret apartment, or a little houseboat somewhere, a place to go where nobody could find me.”
“Really?” He laughs.
“Oh, yeah,” she says. “All the time. I had the whole place decorated in my head. And I had a Vespa.”
“You’re kidding?”
“I’m not.” She laughs. “You should get your buddies together. Go on a golf trip or something. Go down to your parents’ place at the beach, I don’t know . . . what do a bunch of forty-something dads do when they need to blow off steam? Actually, don’t answer that. I don’t think I want to know.”
Suddenly, his phone vibrates in his pocket. He pulls it out and looks at the screen. “Speak of the devil,” he says, holding it up to Jamie.
“Be nice,” she says.
He puts his hand to his mouth. “I really didn’t mean it that way,” he says, standing and walking out of the room as he answers.
“Jason, fuck!” Charlotte screams into the phone. “You won’t believe this.” He can tell from the whooshing hollow background noise that she’s in the car.
“Is everything okay?”
“Yeah, yeah, I mean, it’s not okay, but there’s no emergency. I was just on my way in and Stephanie called. You won’t believe this!”
“What?” he says. “What is it?”
“The other night. Friday? When Birdie slept over with Hannah?”
“Yeah?”
“They snuck out of the house!”
“Snuck out of the . . .” The images flicker before Jason’s eyes: Birdie, walking along a dark street, or in a random Uber headed into DC. Oh, God. He’d done plenty of stupid things as a teenager: climbed the fence at the pool to swim in the middle of the night, egged a few houses with his friends, used a fake ID to get into Mr. Henry’s, a bar on Capitol Hill where everyone was underage. But Birdie? “How did Stephanie find out?”
“Another mom told her at her exercise class early this morning. That kid Morgan Duncan, who used to be in Birdie’s Girl Scout troop? She felt guilty and confessed to her mom. Our daughter, on the other hand, did not.”
“Where did they go?”
“According to Hannah, there was a group of five of them—the other girls were all sleeping over at another kid’s house—and they went to the playground by the Knights of Columbus pool to meet up with some boys.”
“What boys?”
“Who do you think, Jason?” she shouts. “Tucker and his friends, of course! His Instagram account, remember? You’d told me to stop spying, but I knew in my gut something was off, Jason! I knew it!”
He closes his eyes and rubs the bridge of his nose with his thumb and forefinger. “Okay,” he says. “So this obviously isn’t good, but at least they didn’t get into any trouble. At least they weren’t, you know, out in DC or something, or didn’t encounter anyone who could’ve . . .” His voice trails off as he remembers the stories that sometimes show up in the daily local news email he subscribes to, about some drunken guy exposing himself or groping a young woman as she walks home from one of the bars in Clarendon. To think that Birdie . . .
“Jason, she’s never openly lied to us like this before!” Charlotte wails. “She’s never done anything like this before! She waltzed into the house on Saturday morning and said they went out for ice cream and watched Ferris Bueller and went to sleep! And then she and Tucker sat right through that dinner on Saturday, the two of them! After they’d been doing God knows what on that playground the night before!”
“I know, I know . . .” he says, his mouth going dry. “It’s not good.”
“Not good? That’s an understatement! We have to ground her, Jason. She can’t think for one second that this is remotely okay.”
“I’m with you,” he says, pacing back and forth in the narrow hallway. “One hundred percent.”
“Okay,” she says, some of the force leaving her voice with a sigh. “Okay. So will you promise you’ll help me with this tonight? You won’t back down with her?”
“What?” he says, incredulous. “I do realize that the parenting of our child is half my job. Of course I’m going to handle this with you! And of course I’m not going to ‘back down.’ What makes you . . .” He sees someone down the hall—Alan, opening the door to his office, a thermos of coffee in his hand—and he realizes that he can’t get into this now. Not here. “Never mind.”
“Okay,” she says, her voice clipped. “Well. I guess I’ll see you at home then.”
“See you then,” he says.
He shoves the phone into his pocket and turns the corner back into the conference room.
“Well, you won’t believe this,” he says to Jamie, who miraculously, in the short time he’s been on the phone, has almost half the hammock woven. He relays the details of Charlotte’s call, and when he’s done, nervously tapping his fingers against his side, still thinking of Birdie in the dark with that damn kid, Jamie bursts out laughing.
“This is funny?” he says, a contagious smile materializing on his face despite what he’s just learned.
“Of course it is!” she says. “Don’t you remember being a teenager? Your first love? I mean, obviously you need to ground the poor kid, but Jason, come on . . . We all did stuff like that!”
“You did?”
She nods. “You bet your ass I did! Warren and I snuck out and met up so many times in high school. Those are some of my best memories!”
“I guess you’re right,” he says. “But were you fourteen?”
“More or l
ess.” She shrugs. “Give or take.”
He nods. “I know you’re right, but try telling that to Charlotte.”
“She’s pissed?”
“Out of her mind.”
Jamie sticks out her bottom lip, a sympathetic pout. “I’m sorry,” she says. “You guys are just . . . You and Charlotte will work this out, I know you will.”
“I hope so,” he says.
“Just be . . .” She pauses. “Not to be all . . .” She tilts her head toward the ceiling, like she’s weighing whether to say more. “Life’s too short, Jason. You never know what’s around the corner.”
“I know,” he says, feeling guilty. “I’m sorry for—”
“Please!” She stands and grasps his arm again, but this time she leaves her hand there. “What are friends for?” And then, for only the second time in their two decades of working together, the first time being the day she came back to work after burying her husband, she leans into him and hugs him. Hard. Too hard? Jason freezes. This isn’t a platonic side hug like you’d give a coworker. He can feel her chest against his, her torso against the bump of his belt buckle. He feels a prickling chill run over him. It is weird and a comfort, all at once. “I’m here for you,” she says as he starts to pull away, her voice a little too soft in his ear.
Four
“Dammit!” Charlotte screams, banging the heel of her hand against the steering wheel after she hangs up with Jason.
She moans into the hollow cocoon of her Volvo SUV, bumping the back of her head against the headrest. This is the first nice new car she’s ever owned, a present to herself on her birthday last year when Loretta, the sputtering Subaru Outback that she bought during grad school, finally died. Unlike so many of the people she knows in Arlington where even the high school parking lot, packed with hand-me-down Audis and BMWs, looks like a luxury car dealership, she and Jason had never really been car people. But now that they had the money for it, she’d decided that her daily battle with DC traffic was enough reason to go for something nice. Plus, she reasoned, aside from her office in White-Gravenor Hall, her car (which Birdie nicknamed “Serena,” no surprise) was the only space that was truly her own. She could zone out, tune out, and often, when she arrived somewhere, pulling into the parking garage at work or the driveway at home or the grocery store parking lot, she’d realize she’d been riding along in hermetic silence.
Perfect Happiness Page 6