Bird in Hand Read online

  Nag. It was such a retro, politically incorrect word that it made Alison seethe. She could not believe he had said it. She felt unfairly typecast as a character in a fifties sitcom: the hausfrau with the commuting husband she scolds and cajoles and manipulates, their gender roles as clearly drawn as the edging cut into the grass along their front walk. (For that matter, how had it come to pass that fixing windows and sinks were his domain; cleaning them was hers?)

  “So I’m a nag and you’re the henpecked husband, huh?” she said. “Is that how it’s going to be?”

  “Oh, stop it,” he snapped. She knew Charlie couldn’t really refute her objection; in her position—and they’d always resolved disputes that way, by trying to see each other’s point of view—he’d probably feel the same way. So instead he said, “This is why I didn’t want to move out of the city. I feel trapped out here. I can’t do a fucking thing on my own without a permission slip.”

  “What does moving out of the city have to do with it?”

  So many of their arguments were about pushing the other person to articulate the things they’d been threatening to say that were just under the surface, wounds that had scabbed over but refused to heal.

  Not talking about things that matter was one of those surprises of married life that Alison wished someone had told her about in advance. She and Charlie could go for days, weeks even, without discussing anything more important than the phone bill. It wasn’t that they didn’t have time to talk; it was that the time was never right. Alison’s lurking fear was that Charlie’s silence masked a fundamental disappointment—that she wasn’t interesting or exciting enough for him; that he thought he had “settled.” That he felt trapped in a maze of bourgeois concerns and aspirations, that he resented having to work so hard to maintain their way of life.

  There was plenty that Alison kept quiet about, too. She didn’t feel she had any right to articulate how powerless she sometimes felt as an unsalaried stay-at-home mother, how raising children essentially alone often felt like drudgery, how distant the mundane realities of marriage were from her idealistic girlish notions. She had chosen it, all of it. But with those choices came great anxiety. Together they had constructed a life that was, if not a lie, then some milder form of delusion. Charlie made $130,000 a year, and they could barely make ends meet. They lived on the knife edge of their means; each month they slid further into debt, until February, bonus time, when they could pay off their credit cards. They chose to live in a town with astronomical taxes so that their children would go to reasonable public schools; they chose to buy a “preowned,” still-above-their-means Volvo because they wanted a safe car; Alison chose to stay at home. But their fear lurked just under the surface.

  Sometimes late at night Alison would whisper, “Maybe we should just leave all this, go somewhere—Kansas, maybe, or North Carolina—”

  “But you’re the one who wanted this life,” he’d say.

  “We had to go somewhere. We couldn’t afford to stay in the city.”

  “Not with children, it’s true.”

  “What are you saying? You wanted children. Are you saying you didn’t?”

  “I’m not saying anything,” he’d say. Then it would become about that—about who wanted what kind of life. That was the problem with talking about anything. One of you might say too much, reveal too much, and there would be no going back.

  For months Alison had chalked it up to their busy life, the hectic grind of parenthood. It had been ages since Charlie had looked at her—really looked, the way he used to—but she had barely noticed. She wasn’t looking at him, either. She was bandaging Annie’s feelings and Noah’s scraped knees, asking Charlie to hand her the antiseptic cream, it’s on the dresser, honey, in the orange bowl, thanks, without looking up. After the kids were in bed, Charlie would collect the recycling or the trash, depending on the day, and pour himself a Scotch, and sit down to pay some bills. If Alison made dinner they might eat it standing up at the counter, and ask each other perfunctory questions about their day. With friends, some evenings, over wine and candles, they might laugh about married life—the sex they weren’t having, the romance they’d sacrificed to a constant round of dirty diapers and ear infections, the endless repetitive motion of raising kids.

  But thinking back now, Alison could see where the cracks had started to form. She hadn’t been looking closely enough. She extrapolated from parts to the whole. She built a bridge in her head over the spaces between them. A morning kiss, a bouquet of flowers, a Mother’s Day card—it had been enough for her, enough to ignore the gaps in their conversation, the white gully of sheet in the middle of the bed.

  WHEN CHARLIE’s CAB pulled into the driveway at dusk, Noah was standing sentinel at the living room window. “Daddy’s home!” he shrieked, flushing Annie out of the TV room, where she was watching SpongeBob SquarePants. “Mom, Dad’s here,” Annie called on her way to the front door, sounding remarkably to Alison’s ears like a teenager.

  Alison was in the kitchen, washing lettuce for a salad. She had roasted a chicken and boiled new potatoes and set the table for four. Maybe a normal family dinner—as abnormal as that was—would cure what ailed them: Chicken Soup for the Dysfunctional Marriage. She turned off the faucet and dried her hands on a dish towel.

  “Hey, little guy!” she heard Charlie say as he came in the front door.

  “I’m not little. I’m big,” Noah shouted.

  “Yes, you are! Hi, Princess,” he said to Annie.

  “Hi, Dad. Did you bring me anything?”

  Alison winced. She went out into the hall. “Annie, that’s not very polite. Give your dad some time to get settled.”

  Charlie looked relieved. He might have anticipated Annie’s question, rude as it was, since he usually came home with trinkets or candy from an airport vendor (a model plane with the Continental logo for Noah, a bracelet or Beanie Baby for Annie). But clearly this time he had forgotten.

  “Hey, honey,” he said, leaning over and kissing Alison. Not on the lips, exactly, but somewhere close.

  “Hey,” she said. Her hands were shaking. She clasped them behind her back. “How did the hand-holding go?”

  He looked at her quizzically.

  “The client.”

  “Oh, right, right.” He emitted an odd little grunt. “It went fine, I think,” he said, nodding his head.

  “Did you get everything worked out?”

  “Yep,” he said. “I think so.” He was jumpy, as if he’d had too much caffeine.

  “Well, that’s good.”

  There might have been an awkward silence then, but Annie was holding up a drawing of a unicorn she’d done in school for Charlie to see, and Noah was tugging on his hand, pulling him toward the playroom and his Thomas the Tank Engine railroad track, saying, “You be Percy and I’ll be James.” Charlie shrugged and held his free hand up to Alison, as if to say, What can I do?

  “I made dinner,” she called after him. “A family dinner, for a change.”

  “Gosh, I wish you’d told me,” Charlie said with an exaggerated grimace as he headed toward the playroom. “I had a late lunch—and I’m wiped. When I’m done here I thought I might go lie down for a few minutes. If that’s okay with you.” He disappeared around the corner.

  Alison felt as if she’d been slapped. Charlie didn’t want to have dinner with his family. He didn’t even feel compelled to play along. She took a deep breath and followed him into the playroom. “Actually, it’s not okay. I made dinner for the family. The least you can do is sit with us.”

  Charlie looked aggrieved, as if she had misinterpreted his motives. “Sure,” he said. “Whatever you want.”

  “Meaning … ”

  “Be Percy, Daddy!” Noah demanded, placing the little green engine in Charlie’s hand.

  “Meaning ‘whatever you want.’ ” Charlie opened his eyes wide in benign agreeableness.

  “Meaning it’s not what you want.”

  “Daddy, come on,” Noah
said.

  “Just a second,” Charlie said. “Alison, for Christ’s sake.”

  “Fuck you,” Alison said. She turned on her heels and went to the kitchen. She’d folded yellow-checked napkins on four woven yellow place mats set for dinner. Three floating candles in the center of the table, an impulse purchase from Crate and Barrel, bobbed, lit and glowing, in their glass holders. Alison leaned against the counter and closed her eyes. Two, three, four. She opened her eyes. Charlie hadn’t followed her. She went over to the table and blew out the candles, then covered the top of the salad bowl with plastic wrap and put it in the fridge—she was really the only one who ate salad, anyway—along with the open bottle of sauvignon blanc. She left the roast chicken and potatoes where they were, on trivets on the counter.

  Standing in the doorway to the playroom, she announced, “Dinner for the kids is in the kitchen. I’m going upstairs.”

  “Wait a minute,” Charlie said.

  She waited.

  “Why are you doing this?”

  “I’m not hungry now.”

  “Come on, Alison. This is childish.”

  “Child—issssh!” Noah said, rocking on his heels. “You’re funny, Daddy.”

  “Mom, I’m hungry,” Annie said, pushing past her into the playroom.

  “Dinner is ready,” Alison said. “Daddy’s going to get it for you.”

  “I thought you said it’s a family dinner,” Annie said.

  “I thought it was, but I guess I was wrong.”

  “Christ,” Charlie said, climbing to his feet. “If I’d known it was so important to you I wouldn’t have said anything.”

  “That really would’ve made a difference?”

  “Of course.”

  “Jesus, Charlie,” she said. “The point is, it’s not important to you. Is it?”

  Charlie stood in front of her with his arms crossed. “What are you trying to get me to say, Alison?”

  “I don’t know. You tell me.”

  He glanced down at Noah, who was sprawled on the floor now, busily running a blue engine around the train track, up a hill and across a bridge and through a green plastic tunnel, murmuring encouragement along the way: “Up the hill, Gordon! Now down the hill and over the bridge, that’s right!” Charlie glanced at Annie, who was looking apprehensively from one parent to the other. “We’re all a little cranky and hungry, aren’t we, Annie?” he said. “I think we’ll feel better after dinner, don’t you?”

  “Maybe,” Annie said warily.

  “Don’t go upstairs,” he said to Alison. “Let’s be a family tonight. Okay?”

  She wanted nothing more than to believe him—that if she didn’t go upstairs they would be a family, that everything would be back to normal. But the word tonight sounded jarringly provisional to her, as if “family” might be a temporary condition.

  Was she losing her mind? Could that be true?

  “Come on,” Charlie said gently, taking her arm, and she went with him into the kitchen and took the salad out of the fridge and tossed it and set it in the middle of the table. Charlie carved the chicken, taking care to remove the skin and cut the white meat into chunks for the kids, and Alison lit the floating candles again and dimmed the overhead halogens.

  Charlie sat at one end of the table and she sat at the other, father and mother with their children between them, sharing an ordinary dinner on an ordinary day, chatting about whether Annie should start ballet and what Noah was learning in his sing-along music class and whether it was time to plant grass seed on the front lawn. It was real life, the way things should be, and even as it was happening it felt to Alison like a distant memory, the moment already slipping into the past.

  Chapter Four

  November 1997

  “That guy has a crush on you,” Ben told Claire when the party was over. They were lying in bed in the dark, going over the evening together.

  “What guy?”

  “That American from Kansas. Charlie.”

  “Nah,” she said. “He probably has a crush on you.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  She poked him in the side, teasing him. “Poor guy doesn’t know anyone yet. We should have him to dinner.”

  “Sure,” he said. “All your strays.”

  “You like it. If it weren’t for me, you’d always have your nose stuck in a book.”

  “That’s an original phrase.”

  “Shut up and kiss me,” she said, turning toward him and twining her leg around his.

  Ben hadn’t particularly liked Charlie at first sight. When he’d opened the door to find him standing awkwardly on their stoop, in his clothes from the Gap, Ben’s first impression was that Charlie looked like every other bland midwesterner he’d met, which admittedly weren’t many. Ben’s only prejudice, he liked to say, was against Middle America. As prejudices went, it was fairly safe: few people at Cambridge were going to disagree.

  “You’ve never even been to the Midwest,” Charlie said over pints one night when they’d gotten to know each other better. “I’ll bet you don’t even know where it is on a map.”

  “Hmm, let me think. This is a tough one. In the middle of the West, maybe?”

  “Is Indiana part of it? Ohio? Arizona?”

  “I know one thing,” Ben said. “Kansas is smack dab in the middle.”

  “In the middle of what, exactly?”

  “Look, you can pretend you don’t have any idea what I’m talking about, but we both know I’m right. The American Midwest is a bastion of mediocrity, a sinkhole of consumerism and fast food. I don’t think I’m overstating it when I say the Midwest exemplifies American quote-unquote culture at its worst.”

  “You’re a smug prick, you know that?” Charlie took a sip of his beer and laughed. Then he shook his head and laughed some more. “So tell me about—what bumfuck town are you from? Tell me about that cultural Mecca.”

  “All right,” Ben said. “You have a point.”

  Ben didn’t tell many people about his background, but Charlie had been persistent. In a weak moment Ben had divulged that he’d been raised by a single mother in a little town in upstate New York, the kind of place that Manhattanites escape to for the weekend, and escape from on Sunday nights. It had bed-and-breakfasts, but no library. The schools were small and poorly staffed, textbooks out-of-date. The older siblings of Ben’s elementary school friends worked at the local drugstore and Burger King, or waited tables at one of the two fancy restaurants in town, places nobody Ben knew ever went to. On weekends the entire town, en masse, attended high school baseball, basketball, or football games, depending on the season.

  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 (w
hich, 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.