Bird in Hand - Christina Baker Kline [30]
“I think she might’ve had more than two,” Claire said. She was sitting on the couch, distractedly leafing through the New York Times Book Review. She put it down. “Anyway, our going out there today is not going to help. I’m sure there are plenty of people looking after the kids and bringing casseroles and all that. We’d be in the way. And besides, Ben, I’m leaving for two weeks tomorrow. I’ve got a lot to do.”
Ben stopped pacing and looked at her. “You’re still holding a grudge, aren’t you?”
It took her a moment to realize what he was talking about. “What? No. I just think we should give them space. She needs some time alone, and they need time as a family.”
The thought of seeing Alison and Charlie together like this filled her with dread.
“It’s just—appalling. Unbelievable,” Ben fretted. “There has to be something we can do.”
“You did find them a lawyer,” Claire said.
He shook his head. That wasn’t enough.
“We could send flowers,” Claire said. She wanted to be alone, away from Ben’s needy articulation of disbelief. She was desperate to talk to Charlie, to find out what he was thinking and feeling, but she didn’t know how or when she might get a chance. What was going to happen now? Alison must be shattered. Charlie would, of course, have to attend to her. And what then? Matters that had seemed relatively simple yesterday—the deception, the affair, feelings that had been reawakened after so many years—now felt immensely complex.
“Flowers … I don’t know,” Ben said. “Aren’t they a bit—funereal? Or falsely cheerful? It seems like the wrong message, somehow.”
“Of course, you’re right,” she murmured, and Ben went off to call Zabar’s, to see if they would send a gift basket to the hinterland, and then trekked over to the store to handpick the items. A task, an errand, was exactly what Ben needed. Faced with being able to do nothing, he needed something to do.
He’d always been that way. The evening of their first real date—they’d made a plan to go out for Thai in the Village a few days after the party where they’d met—Claire had sat on a bench in Washington Square Park and watched him walk toward her, alone with his backpack and a paper cone of flowers: a tall, gangly, dark-haired Harvard student with a soft smile and little gold glasses that were too round for his face. She could tell that he felt a bit exposed coming toward her like that. Even then, before she knew him, she saw through his thin veneer of self-assurance to the insecurity lurking beneath, instantly identifying in him what she recognized in herself.
“Hello, Claire Ellis,” he’d said when he reached her. His voice was deep, croaky. He handed her the flowers—black-eyed Susans (what guy brought black-eyed Susans?), eased the backpack off his shoulder, and pulled out a bottle of wine, a hunk of cheese, a floury baguette, two small juice glasses. “I didn’t know what to bring, so I brought all this. Hope you’re up for a picnic.”
For a long time Claire thought that maybe she could live inside Ben’s love, that it would keep her sane. She often wondered, in fact, if Ben, with his erudite good sense, was all that stood between her and a life of manic unpredictability. Sometimes she suspected that Ben was living through her—he didn’t have to be impulsive because she was; she enabled him to be the nurturing presence in the background. It was a safe role for him, a comfortable one. But was it good for her? Was he helping her by keeping her from her demons, her own unmanageable feelings? At times she felt like an exotic plant, a bonsai tree, perhaps; he was the custodian who kept her healthy but also tightly pruned.
“I CAN’T DO it. I can’t go out there.”
“Why not?” Claire’s therapist, Dina Bronstein, peered at her over her reading glasses.
Claire pushed her forefinger into the leather seat cushion