There were some seats separate from the café and Charlie joined me from the booking desk carrying—not wheeling—his two suitcases. I had coffees waiting.
“So,” he said. “What do you have to tell me that justifies me keeping a dozen senior executives cooling their heels in Milan?” He sipped his coffee and winced. “If you think you need some sort of dispensation from me, you’ve got it. So has Angelina. I’ve already told her I won’t come between you.”
“I’m not here to see Angelina. She wants to be with you. I think you know that. You’re the problem.”
He didn’t argue. He was a smart guy, the sort of guy who spends the fifteen minutes after losing his cool thinking about why it happened. But now it was up to me. Between Paris and Mâcon, I had managed to think of only one way of persuading him.
I told him a story. About the lotto debacle. With a little artistic license, because the original facts were not going to equate to Charlie’s cheating on a relationship that had been built on his adoration. So it was not a lotto syndicate but futures trading. I had quit my job and spent my days writing thirty thousand lines of code, an infallible system. I’d had some bad luck but never lost my faith. Good money went after bad; I took the imaginary savings my mother had from my dad’s nonexistent life insurance; I lost Claire’s mother’s house, the one she currently lived in. Everything short of mugging a nun and stealing the collection.
At that point in the tale I was beginning to feel relatively virtuous by comparison with my fictitious alter ego. Or Charlie, for that matter.
I told him about my confession and my shame, and about Claire organizing the trip to Paris. Here there was no need to embellish.
“A pretty special person,” he said when I finished.
“Luckily,” I said. “Because I didn’t have the guts to deal with my problem myself.”
Charlie went to speak, then stopped himself.
I remembered something Claire had told me from her sales training. Don’t buy it back. Once you’ve made your sale, stop selling, or you’ll risk the buyer getting pissed off and changing his or her mind. Don’t buy it back, she would say after I had persuaded her to go to the pub instead of the Masala Garden, and was then tempted to enumerate all the advantages of her wise decision.
Still, I was not sure I had made the sale. I wanted to say something more anyway. For Angelina.
“All the things you did, she saw through. She played her part in whatever game you set up because she wanted you to get through it. Including everything she did with me.”
I knew the last bit was only partly true. Her I love you might not have happened without the marital crisis, but it had nothing to do with any games with Charlie. I could only assume Charlie didn’t know about that. He was nodding slowly.
I had one more thing to say, a final bit of advice for the great negotiator. “There’s a saying we often quote in IT that insanity is doing the same thing over and over, and expecting a different result.”
“Einstein.”
“Attributed to. So maybe, if you want to keep your marriage, you’ll have to do something different instead of more of the same.”
It struck me that Charlie had just kept amping up the rabbits-out-of-a-hat game when he needed a paradigm shift. It also struck me that I was at risk of buying it back.
“I’m going to get a couple of beers,” I said.
From the bar, I saw Charlie stand up and use his phone. He was on it, pacing around, for nearly half an hour, time that I used to drink both beers and confirm I had missed the last connection to London.
When he had finished the call, I brought two more beers over. He was still standing.
“I’ve spoken to Angelina,” he said. “She’s—”
“—a special person, too,” I said. If my mother had been listening, she would have told us both to get a grip.
“You need to get to London?” said Charlie.
“I’ll have to wait till tomorrow,” I said. “And thank you, but no, I don’t think it’d be a good idea to spend the night at your place.”
“Can you call a taxi? Your French is better than mine.”
He gave me his phone and followed me to the sign with taxi details.
“Home?” I said.
“No, Angelina’s going to catch me in a couple of days. We can share one to Lyon airport. My shout.”
* * *
It was a ninety-minute ride to Lyon. The last flight to Milan had gone, and Charlie booked two seats to London: “Best place to get a connection tomorrow.”
In the departure lounge, Charlie fetched glasses of champagne for both of us, but we kept our toasts to ourselves.
“So,” he said as they announced a delay to our flight, “are you going to take your own advice?”
“About?”
“Claire.”
“Different story.”
“You sure? You just spent a week with another woman. You’d have to be a psychopath to be able to go back to your partner without feeling bad about yourself. But if you tell me you’re not going back because you’re still in love with Angelina, I’m going to puke.”
Enough already. I had bailed this guy out, sacrificed the chance to be with the love of my life, and now he was calling it all into question.
“You don’t think I love Angelina?” I said.
“You didn’t love her enough to take her twenty years ago. I saw the letter you sent. ‘I’m not coming back. I’m with someone else. Love, Adam and Claire.’ You chose Claire. Angelina was there if you wanted her. I was her second choice. Claire was your first choice.”
Jesus Christ. Maybe that was the letter I should have read over and over. I had loved Claire. But she had to compete with a memory of a person—and a love—that was forever young. I had still felt guilty at not being there for Angelina. Perhaps it had been that guilt, rather than happy memories, that lay dormant before turning into nostalgia.
Charlie laughed. “Made me try harder.”
“She doesn’t see you as second best now.”
“That’s what time and hard work does. Love is a verb. Your turn now. I mean, what are you going to do? Find someone else like Claire and not make any mistakes? No shared memories? Find out she doesn’t like your English breakfast? Or Bob Dylan? You’ve fixed half of it. Don’t you have the guts to deal with your own problem yourself?”
* * *
Charlie was on the phone again, and I pulled out my laptop to pass the time. For no conscious reason, I found myself Googling Bob from Idaho. I had heard nothing from him since Singapore, 1990. To my surprise, I found him, easily. He had a Web site devoted mainly to technology topics, but there was a personal section.
He was gray, but instantly recognizable. He had recently posted pictures of his fortieth wedding anniversary gathering, with children and grandchildren. His wife, the heart-stoppingly beautiful Polish lady, was an elegant contrast to the slightly shambolic American who looked as though he still couldn’t believe his luck.
I had always thought of Bob as the man who seized the day, a role model for what I had failed to do. But after forty years, he was something more: the man who, with his wife, had turned that opportunity into a life. Time and hard work.
* * *
Charlie and I had seats together in business class.
“All right,” he said. “Are we good on sorting it out with Claire, or do I have to waste time that I could use to help with her buyout?”
It’s always easier to solve other people’s problems. I ignored the first part of his question.
“Monday’s D-Day and she’s meeting with the other directors tomorrow to make a decision. If she sells, she’ll probably need to move to the States. In which case, the part about us…”
As I was about to state a position I had held for most of my life, I felt diminished in the presence of this guy who had abandoned his profession to support his wife’s Hollywood ambitions.
“Forget that,” I said.
“She’s having her strategy meeting tomorrow?” he said. “Where?”
“London, I suppose.”
“Can they use some help?”