Bird in Hand - Christina Baker Kline [23]
But Claire lost the baby. And things got complicated.
He looked up at her now as she came into the bedroom, cradling the cordless phone against her cheek as Charlie told them more details about the accident. Ben caught her eye and she shook her head slowly.
“So terrible,” she said. “I just can’t believe it.”
Chapter Three
December 2008
Working on a freelance feature story the week after the dinner party in Rockwell, Claire conducted interviews and did research and had lunch with her editor, and the whole time she was thinking of the skin on Charlie’s arm, how it felt like the skin of an apricot, and how he smelled like the floor of a forest, pine needles and moss. She thought of his back, like a mountain lion’s, lean and sinuous, with a layer of muscle just under the skin. She was aware of her legs as they crossed under the table, the curve of her own neck, as if those body parts were new to her, not merely newly observed. Men on the street looked at her differently. Sitting on a bench in a small triangle of park on an unseasonably warm day she ate an orange, tearing at the fleshy pulp. The juice ran down her chin and she wiped her hand across her lips, covering a smile. She could feel the power of her desire, an almost palpable strength—the will to seduce and entice and invite.
She thought about Charlie all the time, couldn’t stop thinking about him. Conversation with others was a time killer, a way to while away the hours until the two of them might, at last, be together. When her cell phone rang, her nerve endings jerked, as if connected to it by a thread. Her heart beat hard in her chest. She checked her e-mail and text messages constantly; sometimes he had just written, and when she responded he wrote back seconds later. The idea of him sitting in his office writing her was more intoxicating than alcohol.
I have to see you, he wrote.
When.
Friday—didn’t B say he’d be away?
Yes—a client in Boston.
A’s taking the kids overnight to see a friend upstate. Can you meet?
Yes.
Where.
I’ll find a place.
Okay.
I’ve never done this. Have you?
No.
Never felt like this before. Sorry—cliché.
All the clichés are true. Nothing new to say.
So say it anyway. It doesn’t have to be new.
What did Pascal say? “There are reasons of the heart about which reason knows nothing. … ”
In the dim lobby of the discreet Midtown hotel, the crowd around them blurred; only Charlie was in focus. “I got a room,” Claire said. He took a swallow of his Scotch and set it down. Claire tipped up her gin and tonic and finished it, the ice avalanching toward her mouth.
He ran his finger along the hem of her short black skirt, brushing her thigh.
The elevator was tiny, and it took forever, stopping at each floor, the doors sliding open silently, no one there. When it got to eleven they stepped out and made their way to the room. Charlie fumbled with the card and the door handle, but neither of them made a joke of it, as they might have done. Claire felt oddly detached, as if she were in a trance. In some clear corner of her brain she acknowledged that this might just be her conscience mounting an insanity defense, but she didn’t want to think, so she willed herself to stop.
The hotel room was small and dark and stylish, a jewel box. Its one window had a postcard view of Broadway, miniature yellow cabs and neon lights and pedestrians. Claire sat on the chocolate brown velvet bedcover and smoothed it with her hand. Cold light on pale skin; no candles, no music. They were awkward with each other, not knowing how to begin. She looked at Charlie and started unbuttoning her blouse, and he came over to the bed and knelt beside her. He slipped his hand between her legs and pushed up her skirt. She leaned back with her eyes open, feeling his slippery fingers inside her, his breath hot on her thigh.
Afterward, they took the elevator to the ground floor in silence. The hotel was busier than it had been earlier in the evening; the elevator stopped three times before they