Bird in Hand - Christina Baker Kline [56]
At one point, when Ben was gesturing animatedly, Charlie leaned back in his chair, laughing, and caught Alison’s eye. She knew he’d seen her studying him.
“What?” he said, an expectant half smile on his face. It was an expression she would come to know well—seemingly guileless, more guarded than it appeared.
“Nothing,” she said.
“Tell me.”
He seemed familiar to her, like a fond memory or a recurring dream. “I feel like I’ve met you somewhere before.”
“Ever been to Kansas?” he asked jokingly.
“He’s like that, Alison,” Ben said. “Not just with you. He has this protean face, or something—I don’t know. It’s misleading. You think you know him and then you make assumptions about his likes and dislikes, and more times than not you’re wrong; you’ve misjudged him. It’s bloody annoying.”
“I don’t know what he’s talking about,” Charlie said.
Falling in love with Charlie was like traveling to a foreign country and feeling unexpectedly at home. It surprised Alison to discover that he didn’t wear deodorant; he showered every day and that was enough, he said, and it was. He had a clean midwestern smell, as sweet as hay. He didn’t like pills or lotions or creams; he washed his face once a day, in the shower, with shampoo. He toweled off quickly, like a dog shaking off after running through a sprinkler. Like a dog, too, he was refreshingly unneurotic—he ate what he liked until he was full, and then he stopped; he worked on a paper until he decided he was done, and then he put it aside. He didn’t second-guess everything. He once told Alison that he couldn’t remember being picked on as a kid. She imagined that he had been raised like an ear of corn in a big field out there in Kansas, ripening on the stalk until he was ready to leave.
From the first time Alison touched him, Charlie’s skin was a welcoming place—a warm place, a refuge. It smelled familiar, like her own skin or the skin of a child she might someday give birth to. Falling in love with Charlie was as easy as breathing. Years later, when he started to pull away and Alison finally, stupidly, belatedly, realized that something was wrong, it was still incomprehensible to her that they might ever be separate, that a time would come when his sandpapery face and sinewy arms would be off-limits.
Chapter Five
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