Bird in Hand - Christina Baker Kline [84]
“Don’t do this, Claire.”
“I’m sorry, Ben,” she said, “I don’t think this is the time to. … ”
“To what?”
“Look,” she said, as if she were about to level with him.
He waited.
She bit her bottom lip.
“Look at what,” he said finally.
To his surprise, she started to cry. He watched dispassionately as tears welled in her eyes and ran down her cheeks. Her mouth quavered; she let her wavy auburn hair fall across her face. She covered her eyes with her hands and stood there in front of him, her shoulders heaving and legs shaking, muffled cries rising out of her until she was flat out sobbing in a way he’d never seen before.
So this was it, the moment he’d been dreading. Yes. Claire was sleeping with Charlie. It would stand to reason that she was in love with Charlie. She would probably leave him for Charlie. Ben felt as if he were experiencing all this from a great distance, from the ceiling, perhaps, or maybe even farther away. He felt as if it wasn’t actually his life that was disintegrating but someone else’s, someone he didn’t know. He felt sorry for the guy, in a general kind of way—the way you feel sorry for people in earthquakes or other disasters, fire and flood and warfare and car accidents. It would suck to be him, to be that guy whose wife was having an affair with her best friend’s husband. But he didn’t actually feel sorry for himself. Not yet, anyway. What he felt instead, he realized with dawning comprehension, was relief. Relief that it was out in the open, that he wasn’t going crazy, that his instincts had been right. And something else. He didn’t know how to define it, exactly; he wasn’t sure what it was. But it felt like a larger kind of liberation, an unburdening. He felt free, for the first time since he could remember. He might never have chosen this freedom, but here it was, for the taking.
Watching Claire as she stood in front of him, crying still, Ben felt a rush of tenderness for her, and he went over and took her in his arms. He hated that she felt terrible. He wished there were something he could do. Of course she was in love with Charlie; he understood completely. Hadn’t both of them been in love with Charlie, on some level, for all these years?
Later he would feel other things—bitterness, rage, loneliness, loss. He would make mad promises that he would change, that things would be different, that somehow he would become the person Claire had decided she loved more than him. He would become Charlie. But he didn’t know the first thing about becoming Charlie. He couldn’t have done it if he’d wanted to.
Chapter Six
November 1997
“Ah, hello,” said the tall, thin, dark-haired man who answered the door. “Careful, we’re missing a step. The stone dislodged itself last week and I don’t know how the devil to replace it.”
How the devil. Another American trying to sound English. “I’m Charlie. Granville.” Charlie stuck out his hand.
“Ah, yes, Charles Granville. Benjamin Sayers. Ben.” He squeezed Charlie’s hand and smiled. “Claire said she’d invited you. Said she found you aimlessly wandering the streets.”
“Something like that.” He could see Claire inside the house. She was biting the lip of a plastic cup, laughing at something somebody was saying.
“Come in, come in,” Ben said, waving him up. “Claire likes to think of us as the Cambridge University Immigration Service for New Americans. Been here long?”
“Two weeks.”
“Bit of a culture shock, isn’t it? Flats and lifts and all that.”
“There’s a lot of rain,” Charlie said. By now they were standing at a drinks table in the middle of a small living room crowded with people, most of them sitting. Without asking, Ben poured a tiny glass of pale sherry and handed it to him.
“You’ll get used to it,” he said. “Have you got a bike?”
Charlie took a sip of the sherry and winced at the flame in his throat. He’d only tasted sweet sherry before. “I need to get one.”
Ben looked him up and down. “What are you, five nine?”
“Five ten,” he said, color rising to his cheeks.
Ben smiled. He’d obviously caught Charlie