Bird in Hand - Christina Baker Kline [60]
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.
Chapter Six
May 1998
In modern society, Charlie wrote, the psychoanalyst Erich Fromm contended, instinct, which guides us and keeps us safe, has been replaced by reason and imagination. At the same time that we have become more self-reliant, independent, and critical, we are also increasingly fearful, isolated, and alone. We have two alternatives, Fromm believed. We can use escape mechanisms such as authoritarianism and self-aggrandizement to try to reestablish the primary bonds, though these mechanisms will erase our individuality and integrity. Or we can try to relate to the world spontaneously and creatively.
The phone rang in the hall Charlie shared with seven other expatriate grad students, a shrill, insistent British telecom tone that startled him out of his chair. He put down his pen and hurried out of his room onto the landing. “Hello?” he said into the heavy black receiver. He had to stand close to the phone box; the receiver was tethered to it by a short metal rope.
“It’s Claire. What are you doing?”
Charlie was startled. He still wasn’t used to her habit of forgoing pleasantries. “Uh—working on a paper. Erich Fromm.”
“Wasn’t he completely nuts?”
“Not completely,” Charlie said. “Well, no more than the rest of them.”
“I guess you have to be nuts to state the obvious as if it were the answer to the universe,” Claire said.
“Or a genius,” Charlie said. He tried to lean against the wall but was yanked back by the cord. The landing was drafty, and he looked longingly at his open door and electric heater, its red coils visible from the hallway. “So what’s up?”
“Are you free Friday evening?” she asked. “We want you to come to dinner.”
Charlie had gotten used to the “we,” though he was always disappointed when she used it. He suspected it was a way of keeping him at a safe distance. Even worse was when she would say Ben thinks or Ben believes, or when she expressed a tender feeling for him in the course of their conversation: Ben is working so hard right now. I have to get back or Ben will worry.
A few days earlier, standing in the mist on Grange Road, saying good-bye at a traffic light, Claire had suddenly reached out and held Charlie’s arm. “I’m so glad you and Ben are friends,” she said. “I like you both so much.” It was at once a casual understatement of her feelings for Ben and, Charlie thought, a flattering revelation of her feelings for him. Both so much. That one phrase made him and Ben the same.
“I think I’m available,” Charlie said now. He’d been going to their house for dinner once or twice a week—whenever they invited him—since they’d met. It was better than sitting in a long, formal row and eating boiled peas in the Downing College Hall, and it definitely beat what he could come up with in the cramped kitchen he shared with the other grad students. “What can I bring?”
“Just some grog,” she said.
“How many people?”
“Four. You, me, Ben, and a friend of mine. Alison.”
“Really?” He was surprised. Their dinner parties were usually large and riotous, peopled with all manner of boisterous Americans and tolerant Europeans.
“Alison is my best friend from home. From North Carolina. She’s flying in on Thursday for a little visit. I don’t want to overwhelm her.”
“How did I make the short list?” Charlie asked, not so subtly seeking a compliment.
“Male, single, straight,” she said without