Bird in Hand - Christina Baker Kline [78]
“You’re a smug prick, you know that?” Charlie took a sip of his beer and laughed. Then he shook his head and laughed some more. “So tell me about—what bumfuck town are you from? Tell me about that cultural Mecca.”
“All right,” Ben said. “You have a point.”
Ben didn’t tell many people about his background, but Charlie had been persistent. In a weak moment Ben had divulged that he’d been raised by a single mother in a little town in upstate New York, the kind of place that Manhattanites escape to for the weekend, and escape from on Sunday nights. It had bed-and-breakfasts, but no library. The schools were small and poorly staffed, textbooks out-of-date. The older siblings of Ben’s elementary school friends worked at the local drugstore and Burger King, or waited tables at one of the two fancy restaurants in town, places nobody Ben knew ever went to. On weekends the entire town, en masse, attended high school baseball, basketball, or football games, depending on the season.
When Ben left home on a boarding-school scholarship, he had felt paradoxically freer to be himself and determined to invent a self he liked more. He worked hard to shed any vestiges of his past. He conveniently lost his JCPenney fifty-fifty dress shirts in a “laundry mishap,” as he told his skeptical mother, and ordered 100 percent cotton replacements from J. Crew. He lost his unsophisticated upstate accent, coating it with various varnishes to see if the finish would take: wry aesthete, cynical rogue, witty everyman. He’d copy a phrase or gesture from someone more self-possessed than he was, and change it just enough to avoid detection.
Over the course of three years of high school and four years of college, he learned how to ingratiate himself with professors (a finely calibrated performance involving earnest inquisitiveness and superficial knowledge of their published work), negotiate sharing a room the size of a jail cell with a mentally unbalanced roommate (tact and avoidance), sign up for the right mix of classes so he wouldn’t have a nervous breakdown during exams. Most important, he’d learned that confidence can be faked, and if you fake it long enough you can actually acquire it.
Which is why Charlie’s ingenuous provincialism had grated on him at first—it was a reminder of a world he’d left behind. Charlie looked to Ben like a guy who should be catching baseballs in outfields and dating cheerleaders and inheriting the family business (which, in fact, he was—though by the time the business was ready to be inherited, his father had declared bankruptcy). He looked like a guy who’d marry a local beauty contestant, build a cookie-cutter house with cathedral ceilings on a bald tract of land, and raise a passel of towheaded kids. He’d ride a tractor mower around his property every weekend, cutting a wide swath around the spindly saplings he’d planted at even intervals. He looked like the type who’d either pack on fifteen pounds in the decade after college, or become a fitness freak, running on the broad, quiet streets of his development every morning before work, lifting weights at night in the home gym he’d built in his basement.
But every time Ben thought he had Charlie pegged, he’d do something that surprised him. For one thing, he was smart. Here he was at Cambridge, studying Aquinas and Jung. Here he was taking the train into London to buy cheap tickets to a Beckett play in the West End. Here he was, blond and easygoing, with a shrewd glint in his eye and a dry sense of humor. Ben would never have predicted that they’d become friends, but here they were, sharing beer and conversation in a smoky pub on a foggy night in a foreign country.
Chapter Five
Claire had been away for thirteen days, but it felt to Ben as if she’d been gone for months. And maybe in a sense she had. He’d been surprised to find, on the third night, that he was relieved to come home to an empty apartment,