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.
He went down the steps from the platform to the sidewalk and crossed the street. Bagels—no one would object to that. In the shop he began to order: everything, garlic, pumpernickel, onion—then remembered a time a year or so ago when he and Claire had come out to Rockwell for brunch, bearing smoked sturgeon and lox from Barney Greengrass, to find that Charlie had purchased only plain and, good lord, cinnamon crunch bagels. “Kids,” Charlie had said and smiled apologetically.
“Do you have cinnamon crunch?” Ben asked now.
Their house was easy to find. Clutching the warm, lumpy paper sack of bagels in one hand, the rustling plastic bag of gaudy presents in the other, with his satchel slung over his shoulder, Ben set off into the neighborhood. Though the ground seemed dry, clumps of snow, like errant tufts of cotton, dotted the dead curbside grass. Through the naked trees that lined the sidewalks, the houses along the way were starkly visible. A front porch here, a picture window there, hanging planters, a child’s bike: every home contained promise and mystery. As he used to do when he was a child, Ben fantasized about the lives behind each door, ascribing to each a glowing fire, a simmering soup, burbling children—idealized tableaus of domestic tranquility.
Nearing the Granvilles’ front walk, Ben slowed. He lingered before the gate of their white picket fence (really! A suburban cliché come to apparently unironic life), wanting to postpone the inevitable rush of feeling. For the first time, he considered the obligation that his presence would impose on Charlie to host him, the sadness and shame that Alison would be forced to express in response to his own unfiltered emotions (Alison—who loved children, who devoted her life to children), the patronizing futility of his sympathy.
He was, he realized in that moment, there for himself, not for them.
Claire was right. He was too myopic to see it until now. He was here to assuage his own guilt, to make himself feel better. To put his own mind at ease. What did he possibly have to say to a woman who’d just been in a fatal accident, to two confused small children, to a friend with whom he had fallen out of touch? What foolish posturing. The Zabar’s basket was one thing. Showing up on their doorstep with bagels and cheap toys was quite another.
And yet here he was. He unlatched the gate.
Charlie opened the door as Ben was mounting the steps. “Hey, man,” he said, extending his hand for a shake and clapping Ben on the shoulder at the same time, the kind of half-hug Ben associated with pro athletes. “Really appreciate your coming out. How was the train?”
“Oh, fine. Easy,” Ben said, following Charlie inside. “How—how is she?”
Charlie nodded, hands on hips. “She’s in the kitchen,” he said, as if that were an answer. “Al, Ben’s here,” he called out. “Just go on in,” he told Ben. “I’ve got to get out an e-mail, but I’ll be there in a minute.”
Ben was surprised to find Alison sitting at the kitchen table, drinking coffee and making a puzzle with Noah. Then he chided himself. What had he expected, that she’d be crumpled in a ball on the floor?
She looked up and smiled, and it was then that he saw the dark circles under her eyes. He went over to her, and she half rose.
“No, no, don’t get up,” he said.
“I want to.” She reached over and hugged him awkwardly, the corner of the table between them. “I can’t believe you came out. And on a weekday.”
“Oh, goodness, no,” he said senselessly, at a loss for words. He ruffled Noah’s hair like a jocular uncle. “What are you making here?”
“Lion King,” Noah said without looking up. “We’re finding the straight edges first.”
“That’s the way to do it,” Ben said, flashing back to his own obsessive puzzle-making days. All those straight edges! “Simba,” he said, pulling the knowledge up like a bucket out of some pop-culture well in his brain.
“And Nala. And Mufasa. The picture’s on the cover of the box,” Noah said, motioning to an upside-down box top at the end of the table. “But Mommy and I don’t want to look. That’s cheating.”
“Oh. Right. Well, you’re doing a great job without it. Where’s your sister?”
“She’s at school, silly. It’s Tuesday.”
“ ’Course it is. Silly me.”
Alison was watching Ben with her stead
y brown eyes. He caught her eye and smiled, and she, seemingly startled, smiled back.
“Hey, monkey,” she said, putting her hand on Noah’s shoulder. “Think you can handle this on your own for a few minutes?”
“Why?”
“Ben needs a cup of coffee. Right?” she asked, looking up at him.
“Sure—no, whatever,” Ben sputtered. “Don’t go to any—”
She waved her hand at him and went over to the coffeemaker.
“I can’t do this without you, Mommy,” Noah said.
“Just do as much as you can. Or you can take a break.”
“Can I watch TV?”
She sighed. “Sure.”
“Cartoon Network?”
“PBS.”
“But—”
“Oh, all right, but only for half an—”
Before the words were out of her mouth, Noah had slid off his chair and slipped out of the room.
Ben shrugged the leather satchel off his shoulder and set the bag of bagels on the counter. “I wasn’t sure what to bring, so I just got these. And here are some godawful things for the kids, from a drugstore, of all places—”
But when he turned back to Alison she was collapsed in a chair, her shoulders heaving, her hands covering her face.
“Oh my God,” he said, “Alison.” He went over and knelt beside her, stroking her back.
“I’m sorry,” she sobbed.
“No, I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m so sorry, Alison. I’m so sorry.”
Chapter Eleven
September 1998
It was Freud who first proposed convincingly that motives can be hidden from consciousness. Writing this line four months after Alison had gone back to the States and they’d begun a long-distance telephone relationship, Charlie had a revelation. He understood that he’d been prepared to fall in love with Alison not only because he couldn’t have Claire, but also because he’d fallen in love with Claire and Ben—the whole idea of them, the way they lived and the way they saw themselves. He liked the person he imagined he was when he was with them; they made him more interesting to himself. Even before he met Alison, he had envisioned a perfect life for the four of them, traveling around Europe by train, staying up late in smoky bars, sharing dog-eared paperbacks, drinking espresso at midmorning in Parisian cafés—every cliché a midwesterner might have about the sophisticated life, joie de vivre and all that.
Claire and Ben would traipse off to Europe for a week on a whim. Days would go by without a word, and then they’d pop up at a master’s tea with sunburned noses and announce that they’d been in a seaside town in Andalusia. “The weather was so dismal here,” Claire would say, by way of explanation. “We had to do something.”
When they finally did invite Charlie along he wasn’t given much notice. He was standing outside the university library, thumbing through notes from a lecture, when he felt someone pinch his waist. “We’re going to Paris,” Claire whispered in his ear. “Wanna come?”
“Hello, Claire,” he said. Over the past year Charlie had become accustomed to her abrupt greetings.
“Hello.”
“When?”
“Umm … ” She looked at her watch. “Five hours from now. We’re taking the four-twenty train to the ferry.”
“I have a tutorial tomorrow,” Charlie said.
She tilted her head sympathetically. “I’m so sorry to hear you’re not well. There is something going around. I’m sure your tutor will understand. Mine did.”
Of course he agreed; how could he not?
They stayed in a sliver of a pension, the three of them in one big room with an in-room sink. They shared a toilet with eight other guests in a closet at one end of the long hallway, and a bathtub at the other end of the hallway that heated water only after you dropped coins in a box. They went out late for Italian in the Marais—the cheapest food in town—and drank Chianti from bulbous straw-covered bottles and ate spaghetti with red sauce. They made their way to the late-night clubs, drifting in and out of the ones without a cover charge, scraping together enough change to get into the Pink Pussycat. Of the three of them, only Ben spoke passable French, so he did the negotiating while Claire and Charlie stood back and let the sounds and smells drift over them, content just to be there, in that moment, where they were.
Strolling back to their pension through deserted cobblestone streets, sleepy and light-headed from the smoke and the noise, they were quiet. Then Claire said, “Remember in middle school, learning about metamorphosis—that stage between cocoon and butterfly? What’s it called again?”
Ben glanced at Charlie and smiled, acknowledging their shared tolerance for Claire’s non sequiturs. “Instar,” he said.
“Yes, that’s it!” She clapped her hands together. “That’s where we are, the three of us, isn’t it? Between one phase and another. Instar.”
“ ‘Isn’t it lovely to think so,’ ” said Ben.
“Quoting Hemingway is not allowed,” she said. “Not in Paris, anyway.”
Later that evening, as Charlie sat in the badly lit common room of their pension, polishing off a jug of wine and trying to make small talk in his broken Spanish with an Argentinean backpacker, he could hear Claire and Ben in the creaky double bed in their room directly above, thudding arythmically against the floor. Charlie wasn’t sure why it made him so uncomfortable—they were often physically affectionate in his presence. Ben would kiss Claire on the forehead when he came back from the library, or Claire might run her hand along Ben’s back and squeeze his shoulders, or twine her fingers through his. Of course Charlie knew they had sex. But knowing and hearing were different things.
It dawned on him then that perhaps there was something odd about the fact that he was along on this excursion with them—that they seemed so content to have him around, and that he was so pleased to be included. Sometimes, even in England, he felt as if he were their child, on a family vacation. Sometimes he knew he was there to amuse them. Sometimes it was as if he and Ben were the practical menfolk and Claire was the zany, impulsive female, and at other times Claire and Charlie were the adventurers and Ben was the fey intellectual whom they had to force outdoors for a little fresh air. Charlie couldn’t predict what the dynamic would be on any given day—and that, for him, was part of the charm. When he was with them he didn’t want to be anywhere else, with anyone else. They insulated one another from the gray weather, the wary English, but most of all from taking their own futures too seriously. While they all complained about the fog and the rain, the heavy food, the incomprehensible rules and the seemingly endless reading and writing, they also knew that a time like this in their lives would probably never come again. Charlie didn’t want it to end. And as he sat in that dank common room, chatting with the Argentinean, feeling the vibration against the ceiling, he understood that the only way they might continue like this, together, was to make their group of three a four.
Chapter Tweleve
For Alison, now, the world was a different place, and yet it was strangely the same. She was present and not present in her own life. She went through the motions of a routine—getting out of bed in the morning, herding the kids from their bedrooms to the bathroom to the kitchen and then out the front door to the bus and the car, but it was as if she weren’t there; she inhabited a shadow. She felt transparent, her mind a blank. She watered houseplants and separated laundry and even went to the grocery store, but she was playing a role; the real Alison was in bed with the shades drawn. She was tired all the time. She fantasized about sleep the way you might dream about a lover, yearning for the bliss of escape.
When, after several days, Alison went to get her wrist examined, Dr. Waldron asked her a series of questions:
“Are you sleeping?” No.
“Are you having trouble getting up in the morning?” Yes.
“Do you blame yourself for this?” Yes. Of course.
“Is your husband providing you with the support you need?” Yes. No. I don’t know.
Somehow, in the past few days, they had barely spoken about the accident. It wasn’t that they didn’t have the time; it was that the time was never right. The kind of talking they needed to do required a level of intimacy and trust that neither of them was sure they shared. Alison used to believe it was mutual respect that kept them from revealing themselves to each other all the time, that each was allowing the other autonomy and space. She didn’t think that anymore. Now she believed that there was too much at stake in talking, too much to risk. There was a fault line at the base of their relationship, and both of them were afraid that tapping at the surface would make it worse.
Dr. Waldron wrote out a prescription for Xanax. “We’ll monitor this closely,” she said. “But Alison, you really should see a therapist.”
She nodded.
“I’ll give you some names.”
Alison had been in therapy only once in her life, when, in college, she went to the women’s clinic to talk about a guy she thought she was in love with who made her crazy. The therapist wasn’t particularly insightful or even empathetic, and Alison barely lasted the ten sessions her insurance subsidized, but the process itself, as she remembered, was vaguely comforting—it was useful to have a place to go once a week to talk about the stuff she was either too embarrassed to tell her roommates or that they were sick of hearing. One time she said—in what felt like a moment of revelation—“I could make anything up about my life and you’d believe me,” and the therapist smiled and said, “And that would reveal something else, wouldn’t it?”
Whether it was time or therapy, Alison got over the guy. And she’d never had an inclination to go back.
But if ever there was a time to go to a therapist, she knew, this was it. Charlie kept nudging her. She suspected that he just wanted help—someone, anyone, to pull her out of this funk. It would reduce his burden, relieve his stress. But she resisted calling the numbers Dr. Waldron had given her. In some perverse, obstinate way, she wanted Charlie to have to deal with it, with her. She didn’t want to make it so easy for him to shake her off.
Bird in Hand Page 10