On her first night in the city Emma took the subway to Times Square. It was one of those summer evenings when the city seems to shimmer; the air has cooled, the light softened. Everybody’s away, in the Hamptons or at the Shore. Restaurants are half empty, taxis sail down Broadway, doormen idle under awnings. New York feels like a secret you’re privileged to know.
Wandering up Broadway, she squinted at the tall buildings, dazzled by the lights. If anyone caught her eye she smiled and said hello. She looked like a tourist, though she didn’t feel like one. She had only been in New York for six hours, but already it felt like home.
Emma’s past—Hatfield and everyone in it—was behind her now. As she walked around the city she could feel it: her past fading into memory. Real life, she knew, was just beginning.
And yet here Claire was, Alison thought, pretending the past back into existence. The difference was that now she could talk about it like an adult; she could look at it with cool and even ironic distance. She could be philosophical. Her past was real and not real, true and imagined. It didn’t really matter, did it? It was childhood, long ago.
I won’t tell if you won’t.
Alison closed the book. She could hear Noah singing the “Open, Shut Them” song to himself in his bed. She got to her feet and put the book back on the shelf, then went to her son, her own real life, in the next room.
part five
The only future we can conceive is built upon the forward shadow of our past.
—MARCEL PROUST
Chapter One
From where Ben is standing, on a hard-packed mound of dirt above the scooped-out dig, the tractors and yellow backhoes below look like toy trucks. It’s a boy’s fantasy come to life (not his fantasy, exactly, he thinks, but some boy’s). As he watches the machines lurch around in the mud Ben spies a bird, probably a sparrow, perched on one of the teeth of a loitering digger. He remembers a story he loved as a child, about a baby bird that falls out of its nest and sets off in search of its mother, though it doesn’t know what she looks like. “Are you my mother?” the bird asks everything it comes across—a digger, a crane, a dog, a flower.
This is a little how Ben feels at the moment—lost, without direction, unable to find his way because he doesn’t know what he’s looking for.
Are you my wife?
It doesn’t do any good to recount the details, but Ben can’t help it; he keeps running over things in his mind. For all the time he has spent replaying it, he honestly can’t make any more sense of what happened than he could in those first slow-motion minutes when he saw the shape of his future, and Claire’s, and realized that they were not the same.
He feels as though he’s living someone else’s life. It’s as if he’d been watching a show on TV and then, with the click of a remote, changed the channel. There’s no continuity and no flow; it’s just a whole different story.
A week or so after Claire left, Ben had called Alison.
“Did you have any idea?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” she said. “But I didn’t want to know.”
They were quiet for a moment. Then she said, “They could’ve saved us both a lot of time.”
“And themselves,” he said.
There was not much more to say. Each was embarrassed for the other. To be linked in this way was terrible.
It would be easier if Ben could separate the strands of the story, but they remain tangled in his mind in an impossible snarl. There is his marriage to Claire, his relationship with his mother and father, his rural childhood and urban adulthood, his friendship with Charlie and Alison. As he thinks about the past it is as if he is looking too closely at the dots in a pointillist painting but can’t step back to see the larger image.
It makes no logical sense to him that Claire would leave him for Charlie. Charlie is a good guy (or at least Ben used to think so), but he possesses little ambition or fire. He is stuck in a job he doesn’t like, and seems in no particular hurry to figure out what he wants.
Except, that is, for Claire.
How foolish. How wasteful. Claire hurt two of the few people in the world who truly cared about her, who always wished the best for her, who loved her. And Charlie—Charlie has two children who need him, a house, a yard, a whole conventional adult life that Claire has always seemed happy enough to avoid. When Ben really thinks about it, he gets angry. So he tries not to think about it much.
Since moving to Boston to oversee the construction of the Boyd Arts Center six weeks ago, Ben has been constantly on-site. How he ever tried to oversee this job from New York is hard for him to imagine now. Weekly visits did not permit this kind of access and accountability. When Philippa Boyd decided on a whim that the façade demanded sandstone, not limestone, Ben was able to convince her that limestone was more in keeping with the design, the location, the symbolic import of the whole project. On-site, he could intercede when the chief engineer decided to shift the building 20 percent to the left for vague structural reasons, thereby altering the entire focal point, the meeting of earth and water.
On weekends Ben strolls through Cambridge, revisiting old haunts. Restaurants he frequented as a student, record stores, The Coop—he can lose himself for hours. He has signed on to teach a continuing education class one evening a week in the fall at Harvard—a place he had mixed feelings about as a student but that now feels as comfortably familiar as an ancestral home. Observing the undergraduates—remarkably more diverse, even, than when he was a student—he feels a mixture of nostalgia and envy. Their adult lives are embryonic; they have no idea what’s in store.
Boston feels safe, familiar, clean-rinsed by frequent rain. Ben appreciates the New Englandness of it all—the neat, conservative clothing people wear, the discrete provincial villages, even the twee romanticizing of colonial history. He likes the cool evenings and the boats in the harbor. He loves his job, and is happy enough not to feel pulled back to New York, with its clamor and unpredictability. Water finds its own level, his mother likes to say, and Ben thinks that’s about right—he has found his level, and it’s neither too deep nor too wide.
Sometimes Ben worries that he will end up as one of those persnickety single men in small spectacles and bow ties who make a fetish of neatness and erudition. The other morning, as he ground his coffee and steamed milk and read the Boston Globe at the round oak table in his breakfast nook with a piece of buttered whole grain toast, he felt a brief, sudden panic: might his world have permanently narrowed to this?
He has told the other partners at Sloane Howard that he’s only in Cambridge to see the project through, but Ben suspects he will stay. A few days ago he called a friend from graduate school, a partner in a small local architecture firm, who set up an exploratory lunch. Besides, he has no home to go back to. He and Claire put the New York apartment on the market, and it sold surprisingly quickly. They divided their lives fairly amicably: Ben took the books, Claire kept most of the wedding presents. Claire and Charlie are already living together, from what he understands, in a friend’s apartment downtown.
It seems to Ben that the breakup of his marriage was like a carefully choreographed dance, except he hadn’t been taught the steps. All he could do was follow, and try to pick it up as he went along. He’d always thought that when you’ve been with someone for a long time your feelings are like an iceberg, only a small part of which is visible above the surface. Now he can see that what he thought was the tip of Claire’s deeper feeling was in fact all that was left—a shard of intimacy, a nub of desire, the only remaining fragment of a dissolving relationship. She was lost to him before he realized he was losing her.
Ben has come through this experience changed, but he can’t say, as he has always said before about times of stress and uncertainty, that it is for the better. He is stronger now. More wary. Less inclined to expect the best, as if it were his due. He has avoided bitterness, and maybe that is the most he can hope for.
As a child, Ben would not do things that hurt t
oo much—look directly into the sun, push his body past endurance, run the water too hot. His goal was to avoid pain. And yet here it is, unavoidable.
ONE DAY, WHEN his life is still in boxes and his head in disarray, Ben answers his cell phone to hear the voice of the girl he hired last fall, Sarah, the one who deserted Drone Coward for a more prestigious job.
“I’m bored at this place,” she tells him with characteristic bluntness—a bluntness he finds both alarming and intriguing. “I want to come back, if you’ll have me.”
“The Boston project is an exception,” Ben says. “You really want to design pools and guesthouses?”
“No. But I want to work with you.”
“Why?”
“Because you care about your work. I’m finding that’s rare.”
“Oh, you are, are you,” Ben remarks absently, recalling details about the girl—her corn silk hair and thin wrists and unsettling intelligence. Her steady gaze and stone gray eyes. “Where’s the boy?” he asks.
“Who? I have no idea. I never liked him much.”
When she comes up to Boston on the train he takes her to dinner, and by dessert he has hired her as his associate on the Boyd project. It will be nice, he thinks, to have someone to talk to about work. Not that he hadn’t talked to Claire—he just wasn’t ever sure she wanted to listen.
“So what do you want to do with your life?” Ben asks Sarah one day, and she answers, “I want to design interesting buildings and I want to have a baby, not necessarily in that order.”
I want to have a baby. In his marriage to Claire Ben had begun to give up on the idea, to reconcile himself to the life it appeared they would lead, but now that he has been set free perhaps he can finally admit how important it is to him, how he yearns for a child.
How strange, Ben thinks: I could grow to like this life. Maybe all of us could live several lives, giving some things up and gaining others, assembling different versions of contentment. Here in Boston, it isn’t hard to imagine that Claire was simply a part of his life that is over, a stage he went through, a phase, a bloodless leaving—like graduating from college, or quitting one job and starting another, or losing touch with an old friend.
Claire was large, greedy. He was always trying to please her, to make her happy. He appreciates that Sarah is so self-contained; he doesn’t have to be the sane, logical one. He can be spontaneous and even offbeat. He can be greedy himself.
After work, now, Ben goes home to a rented loft space on the top floor of an old brick factory building with a half-moon living room window leading to a balcony overlooking a cobblestone street. On clear nights he goes out on the balcony and gazes up at the stars, chips of light, halogen-bright, against the velvety expanse. He plays his childhood game of searching for ancient constellations, Leo the Lion and Orion the Hunter. He notes the moon’s progress from crescent to full, and watches meteors streak across the sky. Standing there, surrounded by stars, he thinks about how easy it would be to believe, as people did for thousands of years, that all the stars and planets move around the earth.
One of the first major purchases Ben makes in his new apartment is a telescope. Setting up the tripod in front of the half-moon window, he thinks of Galileo, who in the early seventeenth century trained his rudimentary telescope (less powerful than modern-day binoculars) on the moons revolving around Jupiter, and made the stunning discovery that the earth is not the center of the universe. Over the next hundred years, astronomers came to believe that all the planets orbited around the sun. Now, of course, they know that the sun is just one of many stars, spinning far from the center of the Milky Way galaxy, which is itself only one of billions of galaxies.
Through his telescope Ben follows the moons of Jupiter and identifies the hazy Orion Nebula. He sees the stars of the Milky Way, Saturn’s rings, the spiral arms of the Andromeda galaxy. Sometimes he imagines that he can see his life with Claire like this, from a great distance, the way satellites orbiting above the planet’s atmosphere can identify objects on earth as small as cars. Claire was the sun in his solar system; he hadn’t questioned whether to revolve around her. But there are other solar systems in the galaxy, other galaxies in the universe. How far does he want to travel? He doesn’t know yet, and maybe he doesn’t need to know. Maybe it is enough for now to know that other worlds exist.
“It’s so—small,” Claire says.
“We prefer to say ‘charming,’” the Realtor says, holding open the front door. After a moment she peers around the corner into the hallway. “Now where did your husband go?”
“What? Oh. He’s not my husband.”
“Sorry,” the Realtor says, “I just assumed.”
Claire nods. Then she says, “Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why did you assume?”
The Realtor gives her a look, as if she’s trying to gauge what Claire wants to hear. “You seem—connected,” she says. “And of course,” she says, tapping her ring finger with her thumb, “the wedding bands.”
Claire looks down at the gold ring on her left hand. Four months have passed since she and Ben parted, so why is she still wearing it? For that matter, why is Charlie wearing his? She thinks it has something to do with the fact that everything happened so quickly—the revelation of the affair, the dissolution of their marriages. Maybe the rings are a talismanic symbol of normalcy that neither of them is ready to give up.
For the past few months, ever since Alison asked Charlie to move out and Ben left for Boston, Claire and Charlie have been living in the apartment of a former professor of Claire’s, Eva Stokes, who’s been on sabbatical in Europe. In her first year at NYU, Claire had taken Professor Stokes’s “Intro to Women’s Studies,” and, predictably, it had changed her life. Eva became Claire’s thesis advisor, and they’d stayed in touch. Every few months they had lunch or dinner together; Eva would rail against patriarchal hegemony and Claire would nod in agreement. When it looked as if Claire and Charlie would need a place to stay, Claire contacted Eva and asked about the huge, university-subsidized apartment on Eighth Street that sat empty while she was in Rome. Impressed that Claire was breaking the shackles of institutional oppression (that is, ending her marriage), Eva offered the use of her place until her return in early August.
It is a hot afternoon in July. Claire and Charlie are looking at apartments in their price range and feeling the sting of sticker shock. What they can afford, given Charlie’s financial burdens and Claire’s sporadic income, turns out to be uniformly cramped, dark, and charmless.
Claire goes to the window and tries to open it, but the sash is broken. This apartment is in the East Thirties near the river, a part of town with which Claire is unfamiliar, and she is fighting a feeling of panic at the idea that they may have to live here, so far from her usual haunts. They would get a better deal in Brooklyn, she knows, but she doesn’t want to cross a bridge; the East Side is distant enough. The Realtor calls this an “emerging” neighborhood, but all Claire sees out the dirty window are a parking garage and several dreary buildings, fronted at their bases with locked grille work. They look to her like bared teeth.
But wait—down on the street, now, a woman with dark hair and Jackie O sunglasses is walking by, pushing a baby stroller. From this distance she looks like Alison, and Claire feels a twist in her gut. Alison’s hair, as shiny as a blackbird, her eyes watchful like a bird’s, hopping down a branch, head cocked to one side. Her maddening deliberation, her hesitation and careful weighing. Her kindness and constancy. Alison was always there, taking what Claire had to offer and giving back more than she probably deserved.
How profound this betrayal is—to hurt the person she once loved best.
Everything is muddy. Claire can’t make the fine distinctions; they seem to have escaped her. Alison, the accident, Ben—dear Ben—creating a new life in Boston. She shakes her head. She doesn’t want to think about all the repercussions, to contain these other lives in her experience. It’s hard enough to know what
she feels for herself.
Twelve years is a long time to love someone without acting on it. In a way, Claire thinks, she has been more faithful to Charlie all these years than she was to Ben. Had she been inclined to unfaithfulness, she might have moved from Charlie to other obsessions. Her love for Ben was reinforced by their vows; her love for Charlie was spun out of air, suspended in time. Doesn’t she deserve to be happy now? Doesn’t she deserve to spend the rest of her life with the one man in the world she has ever truly desired?
“Ah, there he is!” the Realtor exclaims, and Claire turns to see Charlie amble into the room.
“The toilet’s broken,” he says, coming over to join Claire at the window. “This building is monstrous.”
“Yes. It’s a big, healthy co-op with a solid financial history,” the Realtor says, her voice resolutely chipper, as if she’s trying to fix up an unattractive friend on a blind date.
Charlie wraps his arms around Claire’s shoulders. “You hate it,” he whispers.
She shrugs, determined not to be ill-tempered. “What do you think?”
“I’m with you.”
“I know that, but what do you think?”
He squeezes, pulling her close.
For a moment she shuts her eyes. These enveloping arms, his grip on her so different from Ben’s tentative grasp. Ben never just held her like this, fully in the moment, without worrying about whether he was crushing her or if she wanted to pull away. If she wants to pull away, she’ll pull away. Charlie knows this. He has a doglike faith in her ability to push him off her lap.
The apartment isn’t really so bad, Charlie thinks, but he knows Claire doesn’t like it, and it’s pointless to try to talk her into it. He’s happy enough to be borne along on the tide of her quest. If anyone can find the perfect apartment in their price range, it will be Claire.
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