Bird in Hand (24 page)

When Ben left home on a boarding-school scholarship, he had felt paradoxically freer to be himself and determined to invent a self he liked more. He worked hard to shed any vestiges of his past. He conveniently lost his JCPenney fifty-fifty dress shirts in a “laundry mishap,” as he told his skeptical mother, and ordered 100 percent cotton replacements from J. Crew. He lost his unsophisticated upstate accent, coating it with various varnishes to see if the finish would take: wry aesthete, cynical rogue, witty everyman. He’d copy a phrase or gesture from someone more self-possessed than he was, and change it just enough to avoid detection.

Over the course of three years of high school and four years of college, he learned how to ingratiate himself with professors (a finely calibrated performance involving earnest inquisitiveness and superficial knowledge of their published work), negotiate sharing a room the size of a jail cell with a mentally unbalanced roommate (tact and avoidance), sign up for the right mix of classes so he wouldn’t have a nervous breakdown during exams. Most important, he’d learned that confidence can be faked, and if you fake it long enough you can actually acquire it.

Which is why Charlie’s ingenuous provincialism had grated on him at first—it was a reminder of a world he’d left behind. Charlie looked to Ben like a guy who should be catching baseballs in outfields and dating cheerleaders and inheriting the family business (which, in fact, he was—though by the time the business was ready to be inherited, his father had declared bankruptcy). He looked like a guy who’d marry a local beauty contestant, build a cookie-cutter house with cathedral ceilings on a bald tract of land, and raise a passel of towheaded kids. He’d ride a tractor mower around his property every weekend, cutting a wide swath around the spindly saplings he’d planted at even intervals. He looked like the type who’d either pack on fifteen pounds in the decade after college, or become a fitness freak, running on the broad, quiet streets of his development every morning before work, lifting weights at night in the home gym he’d built in his basement.

But every time Ben thought he had Charlie pegged, he’d do something that surprised him. For one thing, he was smart. Here he was at Cambridge, studying Aquinas and Jung. Here he was taking the train into London to buy cheap tickets to a Beckett play in the West End. Here he was, blond and easygoing, with a shrewd glint in his eye and a dry sense of humor. Ben would never have predicted that they’d become friends, but here they were, sharing beer and conversation in a smoky pub on a foggy night in a foreign country.

Chapter Five

Claire had been
away for thirteen days, but it felt to Ben as if she’d been gone for months. And maybe in a sense she had. He’d been surprised to find, on the third night, that he was relieved to come home to an empty apartment, that an unhappiness of which he was barely aware had pervaded their shared space, as invisible and enervating as carbon monoxide.

Ben had never been especially good at picking up people’s cues—particularly the unhappiness or dissatisfaction of those closest to him. An old girlfriend once speculated that it probably had to do with his mother’s melancholy, his father’s barely contained rage; at the first sign of trouble, Ben was likely to retreat into computer chess or a crossword puzzle—activities that occupied his mind to the extent that he could be physically present and yet emotionally disengaged. For the first week Claire was gone, it had been a relief for Ben to turn his attention to the Boston commission, which would consume as much time and energy as he allowed.

But the Boston project was now well under way; other people were involved, and Ben no longer felt solely responsible. The plans had been approved and finalized, and ground had been broken. His role had become secondary. And just as he’d done when final exams were over, he took a week to simply breathe—to clear the low-priority papers off his desk, return e-mail and phone calls, sleep late, buy himself some new shoes, get a good haircut (not just a quickie from the barber in the basement of his office building). He called his mother, checked in on his brother, took his two prize hires out for a fancy lunch on Drone Coward’s dime, an occasion they used to announce that they were both taking jobs with rival firms. At night he ordered takeout and sat on the couch like any ordinary New Yorker, letting the laugh track from syndicated sitcoms wash over him like warm, sudsy bathwater. He watched
SportsCenter
. He read the Dining In section of the
Times
.

One evening, as he was clicking through channels, a wagging finger caught his eye. “Listen to what people tell you about themselves,” a self-help guru was saying. “If they tell you not to trust them,
don’t
. If they tell you they’re bad news, believe them. It’s human nature to want to think the best of others, but if you listen carefully, people will always tell you who they are.”

Ben turned off the TV and sat there, staring at his shadow reflected in the black screen. On some subterranean level below consciousness, his brain, ostensibly resting, began to generate data, sifting through unconnected moments—conversations, observations, gestures, and expressions he didn’t even know he’d been aware of—to build a hypothesis.

I was just out with a girlfriend. … There were no messages—nothing important—I erased all the calls. … She likes the country-bumpkin type … I’ll just be out for a few hours. … Honey, I picked up your dry cleaning … 210 It’s going to be so tedious. One obscure radio station after another. …

Do you think God is punishing us because we weren’t sure?

And other things: the phone calls with no one there. The silk-corded bag from a pricey lingerie shop Ben had glimpsed in the garbage, with a fleeting thought. Lingerie? When’s the last time she wore fancy lingerie?—he promptly dismissed it, his brain swimming with too many other details.

Seemingly out of nowhere, a memory floated up: the first time Claire had met his father. It had been a bitterly cold January weekend in upstate New York. Ben’s father, along with his current girlfriend, Paula, met Ben and Claire for lunch at a chain restaurant in the parking lot of a strip mall. After an hour and a half of mediocre food and strained conversation, the two men went to get the cars. “You’re in over your head, son,” his father said as he and Ben tramped through the snow. “If I were you I’d get out while you can.”

Though Ben was accustomed to these kinds of pronouncements from his father, this one caught him off guard. He’d thought they were all getting along pretty well, despite his father’s loutish insinuations about Claire’s previous boyfriends and the way he mocked her southern accent. “Why do you say that?” Ben said, trying to keep his voice as neutral as possible.

“I just know. She’s a type. Can’t trust her.”

Ben laughed dryly. “That’s rich, coming from you.”

“I guess I deserve that,” his father said. “But maybe that’s part of it. Takes one to know one.”

They trudged along in silence.

“Hope I’m wrong,” his father said when they reached the cars. “For your sake.”

“She’s nothing like you, you arrogant prick,” Ben had said.

It was the last time he spoke to his father for years. But as he let the pieces, fine as silt, sift through his brain now, a picture began to emerge, the way in a trick painting the background details settle into focus, becoming clearer than those in the foreground, forming an unexpected image—a picture composed of shadows, a wraith, perhaps, or a skull. And suddenly Ben’s confused, unanticipated emotions the night of the party—the rush of feeling for Alison, the swell of identification with her, and his own recoiling—began to make a horrible kind of sense.

That boy has a crush on you
.

All your strays
.

Claire and Charlie.

The night she spilled her wine in his lap and they disappeared into the kitchen, leaving Ben and Alison to make awkward small talk. What were they doing in the kitchen all that time?

The rift with Alison.

Was Ben losing his mind?

Was he making this up out of some kind of deep-rooted insecurity?

Ben wasn’t a particularly jealous person. He didn’t see the point. As a kid he’d witnessed his father’s rabid, hypocritical jealous rages at his mother, and they sickened him. Anyway, he was used to people being infatuated with Claire. She was eminently, as a boorish drunk at a party had told him one night, “fuckable.” He knew, also, that part of her craved the attention, but this had seemed innocuous to him, a quirk of her psychology that played itself out in harmless flirtations. To be desired was enough, Ben had thought; it fulfilled her need.

It never occurred to him that she might act on it.

All at once, jealousy took root in Ben’s stomach like a hardy, noxious flower.

Claire’s distractedness, her distance, even her compassion. She’d been unnaturally nice to him lately, both in and out of bed. There was a distance and a cover in that. Sex had never been the primary bond between them; though at first, like most couples, they couldn’t keep their hands off each other, over the years their cohabitation had become so siblinglike that when they turned toward each other in the night it sometimes seemed almost inappropriate. Ben had always thought that their connection was based on a deeply felt, shared sense of irony, which tended to quash lust, a decidedly unironic feeling. To make mad love was to take it seriously, to admit to an earnest, naked need that the two of them didn’t often confess to. It helped when they were drunk, when self-consciousness was obliterated; after parties, late at night, they could be ravenous for each other.

But lately Claire had been approaching him with a disorienting sincerity—acting out, Ben thought now, a pantomime of desire. Was it pity sex? For the two of them to be ironic together meant that they shared a worldview; they were in sync. Her kindness to him now, on reflection, struck Ben as patronizing. Something was definitely going on. With a heavy heart, he realized he would have to find out what it was.

Or would he? He’d never been good at confronting people; it was so much easier to let things unfold, give emotions time to dissipate. And wasn’t it more natural that way? When he’d asked too many questions as a child it usually ended with his mother in tears and his father storming off. Ben had constructed his entire adult life on the premise that people should behave courteously toward each other; in his view, the rules of decorum and the right to privacy were inviolable. He didn’t want people poking and prying in the stew of
his
mixed feelings. Who knew what might rise to the surface? Putting Claire on the spot might provoke the issue unnecessarily.

He took so much for granted with her. They got along beautifully day to day; they rarely fought, and when they did, it didn’t last long. Claire wasn’t necessarily easy to live with—she felt things deeply, acted impulsively; she could be arrogant in her opinions—but these things had never really bothered him. He admired the operatic scale of her emotions. If it was true that, over the years, the passion between them had tapered off, wasn’t that normal? Their relationship had grown into a different kind of love, stronger and more mature, a slow simmer rather than a consuming burn.

Maybe she was simply going through a phase, pulling back to focus on her book and other priorities. She was allowed to do that. They weren’t joined at the proverbial (or was that literal?) hip. Plenty of unconventional marriages survived, even flourished. Look at Bloomsbury —Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant. And hadn’t he read somewhere that Margaret Drabble and Michael Holroyd lived in the same English cul-de-sac, married to each other but inhabiting separate houses, meeting in the afternoon for tea? He and Claire didn’t have to live a conventional life, damn it; he loved her enough to respect her wishes for autonomy and freedom, even if—God forbid—it were sexual.

And if it wasn’t a phase, if she was genuinely pulling away? Well, he would find out soon enough.

THE FLOWER SHOP on Eighty-second and Columbus, a narrow space with painted brick walls, was one of Ben’s favorite places on the Upper West Side. It was hard to define what set it above ordinary florists—was it the Zen-like simplicity, rare outside SoHo, that showcased the beauty of individual blooms, or the bold colors and combinations, bunched beautifully in old-fashioned tin buckets along one wall, or the floor-to-ceiling display on the opposite wall of bright earthenware pots and exotic glass vases? Whatever the reason, Ben loved it. The florist was part of a neighborhood he’d carefully carved for himself out of the overwhelming variety available within the ten-block radius of his and Claire’s apartment. Ben’s world was composed of several good restaurants, a dependable dry cleaner and Vietnamese takeout, a twenty-four-hour pharmacy, two coffee shops, a tiny, ancient, used-book shop and a giant Barnes & Noble, and two gourmet grocery stores. If he didn’t have to go to work, Ben could imagine living out his life quite contentedly on this mile-long stretch.

Today he wanted something lush and elegant, a bouquet that would convey both congratulations and sincere, old-fashioned love. Claire was coming home. Wouldn’t it be wonderful, he thought, if they could both see this as a new beginning? Standing in the flower shop, looking around at the variety—you couldn’t go wrong, really, and anyway he’d ask Zoë, the owner, with whom he was on a first-name basis, for her opinion—he basked in the glow of possibility. He felt an odd, unfamiliar excitement, like the buzz of a new relationship. It was as if he and Claire had recently met and then she’d gone away on a long trip, and tonight she was coming back. Would he cook something, or should they go out? Maybe somewhere new, to surprise her—or perhaps it’d be best to stick with an old standard. He’d make several reservations, just to be sure.