At Cambridge Charlie had studied the early church philosopher Augustine, who believed that although true happiness is possible, most people will never experience it. You cannot be happy if you don’t possess what you love—or, possessing it, you realize that it is bad or harmful—or if you don’t love what you have, no matter how objectively good it is. True happiness exists only when you have what you love, and when what you love is good for you.
Charlie believed he was in love with Alison when he married her—even if it was clear to him later that what he thought was love was nothing like true happiness, not the barest shadow of it. He saw Claire’s delight in Alison’s smile, the sparkle in their eyes when they told a story together, their habit of finishing each other’s sentences like sisters. The truth was, he had such strong feelings for Claire that he didn’t know what to do with them. Sharing some of them with Alison seemed as reasonable a strategy as any. For a time this transfer of emotion was effective enough to fool both of them into thinking that it might be theirs alone.
But in the past few months, since reconnecting with Claire, Charlie had begun to recapture the way he felt at Cambridge. He didn’t know what it was, exactly, only that it was transformative. The boredom, his sense of going through the motions—all of that had dissipated.
WHEN CHARLIE GOT home from work that evening, June was in the kitchen, chopping organic vegetables for a stir-fry he knew the kids wouldn’t eat.
“You’re home early,” she said with surprise when he opened the back door.
Having booked an e-ticket to Atlanta for Monday afternoon, Charlie had taken Bill Trieste up on his offer and shunted his biggest account, with its irksome client, off on a colleague. Then he took an earlier train home than he’d said he would. Now that he had a plan, he felt a surge of warm feelings toward Alison and her parents that was directly proportional to the guilt he felt for leaving, the anxiety he felt about lying to them, and the fear that his plan might somehow be foiled. “I wanted to get home as soon as I could. How is she?” He gestured vaguely upward.
June, chopping bok choy, lifted her shoulders slightly. “She’s not in bed, at least. She’s in the playroom with Ed and Annie.”
“How are her spirits?”
“Hard to tell.” She stopped chopping and held the knife aloft in apparent contemplation. “I don’t think this is the kind of thing you can get over easily. Not if you’re Alison, at least. She’s going to need a lot of support—a lot—in the next few months. Years, maybe.”
Charlie nodded, shrugging off his coat. He felt as if she’d gently slipped the knife under his skin. His conversations with June had always seemed this way to him, with the subtext italicized and partially exposed. You don’t fool me. We both know that you are absent here, disengaged. You need to change your attitude.
“We’re looking for a good therapist,” he said, which wasn’t exactly true. Dr. Waldron had given Alison some names, but the blue prescription slip with the contact information was somewhere in a pile of receipts and business cards on Charlie’s dresser.
“That’s a start, but I’m really talking about what Alison needs from you,” June said, spelling it out in case he hadn’t gotten it.
Charlie turned and hung his jacket on a hook in the hall, then came back into the kitchen. “I know. It’s going to be a long road,” he said, striving for a bland metaphor to close the conversation and realizing too late that it was exactly wrong.
“Well,” June said briskly, “that’s not how I would have put it, but yes.” Gesturing toward the pile of vegetables under her knife, she said, “I thought it might be time to introduce the children to something a little more interesting than baby carrots and frozen corn.”
“Good luck,” Charlie said. “What’s the backup plan?”
He found Alison sprawled on the floor of the playroom with Ed and Annie, watching them build a castle out of blocks. “Hi,” she said, looking up with a wan smile. “I heard you come in.”
“I was talking to your mother,” Charlie said, kissing Annie on the top of the head and squeezing Alison’s shoulder, then sinking down beside her. “Why haven’t the kids eaten yet?”
“We had a late lunch. Mom wants us all to eat together tonight.”
He raised his eyebrows at her. “It looks like nuggets are off the menu. You sure this is going to fly?”
“They can have toast, if it comes to that,” Alison said. “Bless her for trying, right?”
Charlie knew Alison was peacemaking; she was probably as skeptical as he was. The seething indignation he’d felt at June’s bullying insistence on what their kids should eat melted away. Alison was right—her mother meant well. Peace, love. Warm feelings, remember?
“How go the crusades? Doth the enemy lie vanquished?” Ed asked Charlie. He sat up, crowning a pile of blocks with a conical turret. Having worked in education all his life, Ed made no secret of his disdain for and utter ignorance of corporate America. It wasn’t personal, and Charlie didn’t take offense. Ed tended to equate working for a corporation—any corporation—with going to war, and Charlie had to admit that he wasn’t half wrong.
“The enemy lies, yet is not vanquished,” Charlie said, playing along. “But it appears that I have been summoned to the king’s court.”
Alison pulled herself up to a sitting position. “What do you mean?”
Charlie winced exaggeratedly, trying to convey his own displeasure at this news and his awareness of hers to come. “I need to meet with the client next week,” he said. “They’re feeling undervalued.”
“When?”
“Tuesday morning. Which means I have to fly out on Monday, I’m afraid.”
“I thought they were in Philadelphia. Can’t you just take an early morning train?”
Clearly, he’d told Alison more about PMRG than he’d remembered. “Ahh—their creative offices are in Chicago.” Creative offices? Chicago? It made no sense, even to him. And now he’d have to be sure to keep his flight itinerary from her—and hell, what if she wanted the hotel number? “But, actually, they’re on a company retreat in Atlanta, and they want me to go there.” He shifted uncomfortably. His ears felt hot.
Ed rolled his eyes and shook his head—further confirmation, in his mind, of corporate waste and stupidity—but Alison just said, “Oh. When do you get back?”
“I’ll get a flight that afternoon. I’ll be home Tuesday evening. As soon as I can, honey.” Three months ago it would have been unfathomable to Charlie that he could lie to his wife like this, with her father and their daughter listening in. The shocking thing was how easy it was, how readily their lifestyle accommodated his deception.
That night, after a predictably disastrous dinner, with Annie moaning about the unfamiliar vegetables and rudely shoving her plate to the middle of the table and Noah chewing bok choy and spitting it out in viscous lumps on his Blues Clues place mat, and then toast and bath time and five renditions of The Very Hungry Caterpillar, with Noah successively supplying more and more of the words, Charlie stood at the foot of the bed he shared with Alison, listening in the stillness to the sound of her crying through the bathroom door. The water was running and it was hard to hear, but occasional whimpers and the faint sounds of her sniffling confirmed his suspicions.
“Al,” he said, leaning his forehead against the doorframe.
After a moment she said, “I’ll be right out.”
“Are you all right?”
He heard the faucet shut off. The door opened, and she said, “Yeah.” She was wearing a lilac tank top and floral pajama bottoms, and her face was damp and pink. She sniffed and rubbed her nose with the back of her hand, like a child. Her ability to rally like this, to act resolute and self-possessed when she clearly wanted to fall apart, was a trait he’d always admired. One of the things that had attracted him to her at the start.
“Your parents are being helpful.” He phrased this as a statement, not a question, to show Alison that he was giving them the benefit of the doubt.
“Mostly.” She turned to pluck a sweater from the clothes piled on her dresser, shaking it out and folding it against her chest.
This was what passed for small talk between them these days— Charlie encouraging and slightly disingenuous, Alison only partly willing to play along.
“That stir-fry was actually pretty good. And it probably is reasonable every now and then to force the kids to deal with grown-up food, don’t you think?”
She held another sweater against the length of her body, draping the sleeve along her own arm and then folding it across the sweater, as if she were teaching it to dance. After a moment Charlie realized she wasn’t going to answer. He unbuttoned his shirt and took off his pants. He went to the closet and folded the pants on a hanger, then stuffed the shirt in a dry-cleaning bag that hung on a hook on the back of the door. In his white T-shirt and gray jersey shorts, he went into the bathroom to brush his teeth, leaving the door ajar.
“What time is your flight on Monday?” she asked.
He answered with a mouth full of toothpaste, and she went to the door. “What? I couldn’t understand you.”
“Midday,” he said, spitting into the sink with a studied casualness. “I’ll leave from work.”
She nodded, went back to folding. When she was done she shut all the drawers of her dresser and the closet door. Then she sat on the bed, squirted Kiehl’s lotion into her hand, and rubbed it into her hands, elbows, shins.
“I love that smell,” he said, trying to fill the silence.
“It’s unscented.”
“That’s just marketing. Everything has a scent.” He sprawled on the bed behind her.
“Oh, you’re an expert?”
“As a matter of fact.”
She turned toward him, nudged him with her shoulder.
This was what passed for flirting between them these days.
He put his hand up the back of her T-shirt, and she leaned against him. It was the first time since the accident that she’d shown any interest in him at all.
She sank back farther, the full weight of her body on his, and he felt himself beginning to stir. He moved his hand around to her warm stomach and then higher, the stretchy fabric of her shirt tight against his knuckles as he spanned his fingers between her small breasts, then cupped each one. She arched her back, her neck against his cheek, and he kissed her jawbone, her chin, the corner of her mouth before she turned her head to his and kissed him full on the lips, her tongue already in his mouth.
The lights were on, two bedside lamps and one overhead, and the bed was still made. It was only nine o’clock. It had probably been years, Charlie thought, since they’d had sex like this, at this hour, with the lights on. The door wasn’t even fully shut. Alison’s parents were downstairs puttering around; Alison hadn’t folded out the couch in the TV room for them yet, as she normally did each night. Annie was in bed, but probably not asleep.
These were the thoughts running through Charlie’s mind as Alison slid her finger under the waistband of his shorts, slipped them down, pushed him back against the pillows. Straddling him, she took his nipple between her teeth, running her tongue back and forth over it as it stiffened, and he shut his eyes and tried not to think of anything at all.
Concentrate. Pure physical sensation.
Slowly she moved down his body, her breath hot on his stomach, and then, finally, took him in her mouth. He was hard now, and she ran her tongue up and down his length, brushed her lips across the head, put her whole mouth around him. Light-headed, he opened his eyes, winced at the brightness, saw his wife’s silky dark hair spread out across his abdomen—her own eyes shut, her tongue curling around him—and closed them again. Now it was Claire’s tongue encircling him, her hand moving up his flank, her wavy hair against his skin. …
Charlie reached down and held Alison under the arm, urging her up. “Let’s fuck,” he whispered.
“No,” she said.
“I want to. I want to be inside you.”
“No.” She wouldn’t look up.
“Alison—”
“I want you to come in my mouth.”
Charlie was startled—though of course she’d gone down on him plenty of times over the years, as far as he could remember she’d never said those words before. It was vaguely unsettling: Was this some kind of self-flagellating impulse? Did she want to feel degraded? Did she feel him pulling away; was this a calculated gesture, a competitive move? Was she trying to control him? It might have been any of these things, or it might have been none. At that point, lying on the down comforter in a T-shirt and nothing else, Charlie decided he didn’t much care.
He closed his eyes and consciously tried to relax, pushing away the images in his mind, concentrating only on the opaque orange light through his eyelids, a thick, glowing sea of light, warm as summer. As she sucked steadily he felt a gathering wave of pleasure, and then the stronger pull of an undertow, blood orange, bleeding into the orange of the wave. His body shuddered and stiffened; he stifled a groan, and then felt a sudden, dissipating release.
After a moment he looked down. Alison was wiping her mouth on a corner of her T-shirt. She laid her head against his thigh. Then she moved back up the bed toward him.
“That was amazing,” he said, turning onto his side to make room.
“Umhh,” she said.
He got up and shut the bedroom door, turned off the lights, then went to the bathroom. When he came back to bed she was curved away from him, her hair half covering her face, with her eyes closed.
He wanted to tell her that he loved her—it seemed like the right thing to say. I love you isn’t much, he thought; it’s just what a husband says to his wife in bed in the dark, an automatic reflex, an acknowledgment of the bond between them. It isn’t like saying it for the first time to a girlfriend. It’s a touchstone, tacitly understood and only spoken aloud out of a desire to connect.
A few weeks ago, putting Annie to bed, Charlie had said, “Do you know how much I love you?” and she looked him straight in the eye and said, “Yes, because you tell me all the time.” Her lack of sentimentality had surprised him, and he wondered if she sensed that he’d said it automatically, almost glibly. Was the power of the phrase diminished through repetition?
Now, with Alison, he stayed quiet. In three days he was getting on a plane to Atlanta; by Monday night he’d be with Claire. He didn’t want to make any promises that he couldn’t keep.