Bird in Hand - Christina Baker Kline [61]
“Flattered.”
“It’s our good fortune that you also happen to be charming, intelligent, and handsome.”
“Now you’re just making nice.”
“Whatever it takes,” she said. “So you’ll come?”
The truth was, he would have done anything for her. He would’ve hitchhiked to Siberia if she’d asked him to. To Charlie, reading Rossetti and Swinburne and Robert Browning for the first time, Claire seemed to have stepped out of the nineteenth century, with her translucent skin and full lips, the shapely curve of tummy and breasts under those tiny cashmere cardigans in olive greens and deep reds, her searching gaze and unpredictable smile and wild hair. The expression in her eyes was a peculiar mix of innocence and knowingness; her curves were babylike, and sometimes she seemed so guileless that he wanted instinctively to protect her. She was often late, and sometimes she didn’t show up at all; if she did, she would be apologetic, usually bringing a peace offering of some kind—a coffee or Cadbury bar, with a long, involved story about where she’d been and why she was unable to tear herself away. It was frustrating to wait for her—all the more because he wanted desperately to be with her—but he never got the feeling that her lapses of civility were malicious, and he rarely got angry. He made allowances for Claire that he wouldn’t have made for anyone else.
Claire was constantly introducing him to someone new by saying, “Charlie, have you met my good friend so-and-so?” It was rare that he went somewhere she hadn’t already been, or learned something about Cambridge that she hadn’t already discovered. She knew the shortcuts, the back alleys, the restaurant that had half-price dinner specials on Tuesdays and the bakery where you could get free day-old muffins. They’d stroll through the outdoor mall downtown and she’d greet cross-dressers and vagrants, whom she knew from volunteering at the soup kitchen on weekends, like old friends. No matter how much she told him about herself, he never felt as if he had the whole story.
This is what it was: she surprised him. Whatever she did was different from what he would have done, or what he might have predicted. She could be formal one moment and irreverent, even crude, the next. She pulled a sweater over her head like a five-year-old, arms akimbo, hair snarling across her face. She laughed loudly and unabashedly at movies. One evening they got caught in a rainstorm coming back from a farmers’ market and ran to wait it out under the sloping roof of a locked boathouse beside the Cam. Standing there, soaking wet, Claire looked him in the eye and slipped her seaweed-slick stockings off under her skirt. At the time Charlie couldn’t tell whether it was flirtatious or ingenuous. It seemed simply impulsive, though her movements were graceful and adult.
“So. Alison and Charlie,” Claire said a few days later, squeezing Ben’s toe. It was late afternoon, and the three of them were in Claire and Ben’s living room, ostensibly studying. Charlie was taking notes at the too-small desk in the corner, and Ben and Claire were reading on the couch. “What do you think? She likes the country-bumpkin type.”
“That’s because she’s a country bumpkin,” Ben said, not looking up from his book.
“She is not!” Claire said, sitting up. “She’s not,” she assured Charlie.
“Oh, it’s fine to call me a bumpkin, but not her?” Charlie said.
“I’m not sure girls can be bumpkins,” she mused. “Is there a female ending?”
“Bumpkiss,” Ben said from behind his paperback. “Bumpkina.”
“Anyway, she isn’t one. She’s quite cosmopolitan and lovely. Don’t you think, Ben?”
“What?”
“That Alison is perfect for Charlie.”
Ben looked over at Charlie, as if to assess his qualities, and then began reading aloud. “ ‘The man who desires something desires what is not available to him, and what he doesn’t already have in his possession. And what he neither has nor himself is—that which he lacks—that is what he wants and desires.’”
“Oh, for God’s sake. What is that?” Claire asked.
“Socrates. You know, Charlie, this philosophy is good stuff. It