All This Heavenly Glory (10 page)

Within the mutual admiring, Jeff and Charlotte spent more time together and she began to take his continuing flattery to be
sincere based on his apparent inability to censor himself as indicated by his strong opinions on a variety of matters ranging
from how the Simpson trial went hopelessly wrong to board games as life allegory to mediocrity on any front, and especially
in any form of art. Certainly Charlotte had some concerns that his sincere-seeming high opinion might be colored by his thinking
she was awfully cute. At that point, even though Charlotte had begun to build a certain amount of self-confidence (
begun
being the high-point-value word in this clause), somehow she got into a thing with Jeff where she felt a little too worried
about what he thought about almost everything, which was probably a pattern she had in relationships even though she was aware
that she wasn’t even in one in this case, and also that more and more it became kind of a thing where she was aware that she
was asking him a lot of questions, not advice so much as what were his experiences with different things that came up, like
jealousy, or self-confidence issues, which mutated into a how-do-you-live kind of thing, and Charlotte wasn’t exactly looking
for a guru or anything, nor did he seem to want that job, but she was interested in his outlook and was also sort of indirectly
trying to find out whether his interest in her was strictly platonic or if maybe it wasn’t.

In spite of the fully formed mutual-admiration society, nothing happened, because Charlotte, who would go out with some manner
of asshole, would not do anything with someone else’s boyfriend under any circumstances, and it’s not like she hadn’t tried
to come up with some circumstance under which it would be morally acceptable to her to become involved with Jeff. Charlotte
is the sort of person who’s inclined to feel guilty imagining so much as a kiss between her and someone who’s already involved,
the sort of person who can’t really even manage a fantasy about a movie star who might be married, much as she finds, let’s
say, Andy Garcia to be worth imagining, Charlotte is the sort of person who will have to get Andy Garcia divorced, within
the fantasy but having nothing to do with having met her, he has to be divorced prior to having met her in order for her to
think about kissing him, and so Charlotte tends to find it easier to just fantasize about celebrities she knows are single
than to go to all that trouble. It has nothing to do with anything that Charlotte was not at that time in the orbit of any
famous people, because for whatever reason it was actually much easier for her to imagine that she would be in their orbit
than it was for her to imagine them divorced. Plus, Charlotte knew absolutely that Jeff was still madly in love with Nicole,
remember who wouldn’t be, and at that point Charlotte believed that Jeff, regardless of any Scrabble-oriented eccentricities,
was of impenetrable moral fiber and would never ever stray from his woman, even in the face of some other more true and passionate
love, in which case he would surely say only,
No, Helen Mirren, even though I could love you as no man has ever loved a woman before, I cannot leave my woman for you because
that is not the right thing to do.
So Charlotte, who wasn’t doing very well at all in her efforts to put it out of her mind, tried instead to dismiss the flirtation
as not being in any way harmful to anyone and especially since Jeff was obviously madly in love with his girlfriend and also
why would he leave Nicole for someone who wasn’t even Helen Mirren.

Nicole came back to town for the holidays and confided in Charlotte that she’d had a fling with this guy Charlotte thought
of as being something worse than a sycophant and who was also in no danger of getting advanced degrees of any kind. Charlotte
was sworn to secrecy before she had a chance to say maybe she’d like not to have known anything about it in the first place,
seeing as how this wasn’t even the first such troublesome confidence Nicole had placed in Charlotte, and Nicole seemed to
feel unburdened somehow for having talked about it, even though the full weight of the burden was felt by Charlotte, who felt
somewhat complicitous just for having the knowledge, which she didn’t feel quite so guilty about having before Jeff was determined
to be a real person. And then Jeff and Nicole started hanging out more, since they were still a couple, and Jeff and Charlotte
started hanging out less, and eventually Nicole left town again but by that time none of them were hanging out so much anymore,
again, and Charlotte was kind of glad not to have to be acting like she didn’t have the awful secret or the crush, which was
easier for her to forget when she wasn’t having to see so much of Jeff.

Months later, by chance Charlotte ran into Jeff at the Sock Drawer, one of those specialty stores that sells only socks or
sock-related items, where needless to say she’d hardly have expected to run into him (seeing as how Jeff had previously seemed
to be in no rush to replenish his sock wardrobe and/or organize his tattered socks) and because of that didn’t recognize him,
even though he will later claim he was shouting her name at the time. Not insignificantly, however, she did notice him, because
she did at least see that he was looking at her like, I wonder when you’re going to get around to noticing that I’m shouting
your name. Furthermore, and more importantly, the other reason she noticed him was because she thought he was really cute,
still completely not knowing that she actually knew him pretty well, and for at least as long as it took her to think this
thought, which was totally based on what he looked like for this brief moment (which had not been her initial thought about
him when she
really
didn’t know him), he carried on looking at her until the recognition was made. So they started hanging out again, and it’s
not irrelevant that Nicole was out of town again, not irrelevant to Charlotte, and as it will turn out, not to Jeff either,
but not for the same reason. Charlotte and Jeff picked up where they’d left off with the mutual admiring, but it still seemed
fairly harmless because of the circumstances, because of all the already enumerated moral concerns and also equally because
she wasn’t really interested in getting hurt herself any more than she was in hurting anyone else, and the likelihood in a
preexisting-relationship situation in which a breakup takes place, it seemed to Charlotte that more or less everyone gets
hurt in one way or another. For her part, Charlotte felt that the total hurt amassed in her series of one-on-one relationships
might be equal to any hurt that would come up in a single triangle, and also she had been making efforts to make better choices,
romantically, and you know, there wasn’t much doubt that someone else’s boyfriend wasn’t a good bet, even if she could possibly
construct some justification on account of betrayal.

One night Jeff invited Charlotte over and Chloë’s name came up, and at first Charlotte didn’t really notice that it came up
in a way that was maybe meant to be casual but was somewhat noticeable because it came up relatively out of the blue, even
though Charlotte did at some early point forget who brought Chloë’s name up, although she was pretty sure she’d have had no
reason to. Which out-of-the-blue conversation seemed to call for some discussion of whether or not Chloë, a painter, was talented,
which Charlotte believed strongly that she was not.
Really why do you say that,
Jeff asked, in what Charlotte did not recognize as a concerted effort to sound casual. To which Charlotte rolled her eyes
and said,
Uch, I know I don’t know all that much about art but that whole thing with the gum wrappers
(referring to Chloë’s implementation of gum wrappers and candy products in most of her work, which was drawing some bit of
notice in the art world), and then never really finished the sentence except to shake her head ruefully, as if to indicate,
If that’s art, there’s maybe a slow period in the art world right now or something.
(Charlotte is the sort of person who does go to a museum or a gallery from time to time, and has her own taste, for sure,
but not an art-educated one or anything, and even in the face of gum wrapper—oriented art, when she hears people saving things
like
The novel is dead, painting is dead,
she just wonders who’s deciding all of this, and what isn’t dead, although she has a feeling that maybe a blob of jujubes
isn’t helping to bring it back to life.) And Jeff said, again in a sort of overly casual tone, but also seeming to indicate
that he knew more or less that Charlotte was right,
So you don’t think she’s very good,
and Charlotte shook her head and Jeff quickly mentioned some other artist to make it seem like they were really just talking
about art in a general way, and muttered some theories about the art being tied up with the person.
Meaning what, exactly,
Charlotte asked, knowing pretty well that Jeff’s idea was that if a person was bad at their art that their depth as a person
was probably limited. Which he did say, in his own construction of words, to which Charlotte said,
And what about their
goodness
as a person,
because you can be sure by then that Charlotte was feeling that they were talking about more than just art, that the Scrabble
mind-set figured in there somehow with regard to her, that they were not talking about Chloë at all, that Jeff probably thought
it was Charlotte who was not very deep, and could care less about her goodness as a person. And so when he said,
Charlotte,
with his most sober face (which tended to precede his turning around to his most sincere and charming face as a manner of
teasing),
I think you’re the cutest thing ever,
Charlotte decided she really didn’t know what to think about any of it.

It’s possible that a big long talk with Jenna confused the issue some. For obvious reasons, Charlotte tried to relay her quandary
in the abstract. Jenna, who does have a clear sense of right and wrong when she actually knows what someone is talking about
and who had no idea that the core of the issue was about whether or not Charlotte should go ahead and move in on Jeff (which
Charlotte of course knew she should not but was looking for some, any small justification), interpreted the entire story as
being hypothetical and launched into a long discourse about the need to live honestly, how important it was that people express
their feelings and how sad it was that fear so often kept us from living our dreams and especially how it kept us from really
connecting with people. Charlotte’s deep-rooted concern about not living as honestly and fearlessly as she could long predated
her association with Jeff, and of course at that time, she was indeed not living honestly—if she were, she wouldn’t have been
sitting around having a deep conversation about it with Jenna. There would have been some honest and fearless activity occurring
in place of the deep conversation about honest and fearless living preempting the need for naming it as such, ideally, with
Jeff.

The next day, Charlotte decided she would tell Jeff the truth, more or less, and she actually did call him up to say,
If the circumstances were different I’d be all over you in a heartbeat,
and possibly because of it being a phone call it was somewhat less courageous than if she’d marched over to his house and
pushed him down on the couch or something, but still she was trying to be honest and fearless but retain some kind of propriety
(even though she didn’t really know what she’d do if he suggested they did get involved, which she was nearly certain by then
that he wouldn’t, which possibly made the whole situation safer than any kind of results of honest and fearless living she
had been hoping for would have been, except for the honesty part), and he reciprocated the sentiment even though she didn’t
totally hear him to remember his exact words because she was kind of too nervous to hear.

The day after that, undoubtedly under the duress of some of their recent conversations, Jeff revealed, under an oath of secrecy
(having given her word, Charlotte will keep all these oaths even if it means she might go a little silently mental), that
he had indeed already strayed, and to make matters worse, with Chloë, about whom Charlotte has had not entirely unwarranted
ill feelings, not at all because of her questionable talent but because Chloë once went to a party at Charlotte’s house and
then the next day or maybe a week later acted as though they’d never met, and it wasn’t like it was some big party where maybe
you might not have ever had a chance to meet the host, this was a party of maybe eight. Not to mention in Charlotte’s modest
apartment it would have been pretty hard not to notice exactly who was there. Meanwhile, Chloë, Charlotte knew, was unavailable
to Jeff in a thousand ways, even though that didn’t stop him from thinking he was in love with her, and that somehow he would
overcome the obstacles of his having a girlfriend and all of the reasons why Chloë was unavailable as well as her being a
bad artist, which was the most difficult of all things he needed to reconcile for himself, which Charlotte naturally thought
was a little bit misguided. Worst of all to Charlotte was that there turned out to be some element of retribution in Jeff’s
having gotten involved with Chloë, not lessening the actuality of his or her feelings necessarily, but being a considered
factor on the part of Jeff, who insisted that his lust for retribution was entirely new to him, which Charlotte decided to
believe, because she still dug him, even after all this information came out. Jeff explained at length to Charlotte the whole
thing he had worked out in his head about
do unto others,
which he interpreted vehemently as some kind of nearly literal eye-for-an-eye deal, some kind of situation where, Charlotte
guessed, if someone kicks your dog, you kick their dog, putting aside the poor innocent dog, and how therefore his involvement
with Chloë was totally justified, seeing as how Nicole had slept with the guy Jeff knew about the whole time. Charlotte, who
recognized in Jeff her own need for an editor in any number of areas in her life (ranging from things people usually use editors
for to needing someone to come over and say,
You could maybe stand to throw out, let’s say, your checks from ten years ago,
or in Jeff’s case, his allegories and his sock wardrobe), cut him off and tried to point out that maybe the meaning had gotten
lost a little, that as she understood it it’s not about keeping score but that it’s essentially about karma, and that the
end of the quote was not
what they actually do to you,
which seemed to be the idea Jeff had worked out in his head, but something Charlotte knew was more like
as you would have them do unto you.
If he was going to live by the philosophy he’d worked out, she explained,
If it’s about math,
then he was, as it happened, not even, because there had been three dalliances on the part of his girlfriend that they both
knew about, two existing prior to the sycophantic guy, not one, and it certainly would have served Charlotte if Jeff chose
to recognize and act upon this. She suspected he wouldn’t, of course, because then he’d absolutely have to admit how very
off this sort of idea was to begin with, and also, she’d have to live with it too, which she wouldn’t care to, seeing as how
it would go from being some attempt at honest and passionate living to some kind of scorekeeping situation, and of course
Jeff would still have to go sleep with someone else besides Charlotte in the interest of catching up. In which case Charlotte
would have moved from the already difficult original (albeit only imaginary) romantic triangle consisting of points J, N,
and C into intersections of geometric shapes she had no interest in knowing about.