September 1998
It was Freud who first proposed convincingly that motives can be hidden from consciousness. Writing this line four months after Alison had gone back to the States and they’d begun a long-distance telephone relationship, Charlie had a revelation. He understood that he’d been prepared to fall in love with Alison not only because he couldn’t have Claire, but also because he’d fallen in love with Claire and Ben—the whole idea of them, the way they lived and the way they saw themselves. He liked the person he imagined he was when he was with them; they made him more interesting to himself. Even before he met Alison, he had envisioned a perfect life for the four of them, traveling around Europe by train, staying up late in smoky bars, sharing dog-eared paperbacks, drinking espresso at midmorning in Parisian cafés—every cliché a midwesterner might have about the sophisticated life, joie de vivre and all that.
Claire and Ben would traipse off to Europe for a week on a whim. Days would go by without a word, and then they’d pop up at a master’s tea with sunburned noses and announce that they’d been in a seaside town in Andalusia. “The weather was so dismal here,” Claire would say, by way of explanation. “We had to do something.”
When they finally did invite Charlie along he wasn’t given much notice. He was standing outside the university library, thumbing through notes from a lecture, when he felt someone pinch his waist. “We’re going to Paris,” Claire whispered in his ear. “Wanna come?”
“Hello, Claire,” he said. Over the past year Charlie had become accustomed to her abrupt greetings.
“Hello.”
“When?”
“Umm … ” She looked at her watch. “Five hours from now. We’re taking the four-twenty train to the ferry.”
“I have a tutorial tomorrow,” Charlie said.
She tilted her head sympathetically. “I’m so sorry to hear you’re not well. There is something going around. I’m sure your tutor will understand. Mine did.”
Of course he agreed; how could he not?
They stayed in a sliver of a pension, the three of them in one big room with an in-room sink. They shared a toilet with eight other guests in a closet at one end of the long hallway, and a bathtub at the other end of the hallway that heated water only after you dropped coins in a box. They went out late for Italian in the Marais—the cheapest food in town—and drank Chianti from bulbous straw-covered bottles and ate spaghetti with red sauce. They made their way to the late-night clubs, drifting in and out of the ones without a cover charge, scraping together enough change to get into the Pink Pussycat. Of the three of them, only Ben spoke passable French, so he did the negotiating while Claire and Charlie stood back and let the sounds and smells drift over them, content just to be there, in that moment, where they were.
Strolling back to their pension through deserted cobblestone streets, sleepy and light-headed from the smoke and the noise, they were quiet. Then Claire said, “Remember in middle school, learning about metamorphosis—that stage between cocoon and butterfly? What’s it called again?”
Ben glanced at Charlie and smiled, acknowledging their shared tolerance for Claire’s non sequiturs. “Instar,” he said.
“Yes, that’s it!” She clapped her hands together. “That’s where we are, the three of us, isn’t it? Between one phase and another. Instar.”
“ ‘Isn’t it lovely to think so,’ ” said Ben.
“Quoting Hemingway is not allowed,” she said. “Not in Paris, anyway.”
Later that evening, as Charlie sat in the badly lit common room of their pension, polishing off a jug of wine and trying to make small talk in his broken Spanish with an Argentinean backpacker, he could hear Claire and Ben in the creaky double bed in their room directly above, thudding arythmically against the floor. Charlie wasn’t sure why it made him so uncomfortable—they were often physically affectionate in his presence. Ben would kiss Claire on the forehead when he came back from the library, or Claire might run her hand along Ben’s back and squeeze his shoulders, or twine her fingers through his. Of course Charlie knew they had sex. But knowing and hearing were different things.
It dawned on him then that perhaps there was something odd about the fact that he was along on this excursion with them—that they seemed so content to have him around, and that he was so pleased to be included. Sometimes, even in England, he felt as if he were their child, on a family vacation. Sometimes he knew he was there to amuse them. Sometimes it was as if he and Ben were the practical menfolk and Claire was the zany, impulsive female, and at other times Claire and Charlie were the adventurers and Ben was the fey intellectual whom they had to force outdoors for a little fresh air. Charlie couldn’t predict what the dynamic would be on any given day—and that, for him, was part of the charm. When he was with them he didn’t want to be anywhere else, with anyone else. They insulated one another from the gray weather, the wary English, but most of all from taking their own futures too seriously. While they all complained about the fog and the rain, the heavy food, the incomprehensible rules and the seemingly endless reading and writing, they also knew that a time like this in their lives would probably never come again. Charlie didn’t want it to end. And as he sat in that dank common room, chatting with the Argentinean, feeling the vibration against the ceiling, he understood that the only way they might continue like this, together, was to make their group of three a four.