Bird in Hand - Christina Baker Kline [97]
This is a little how Ben feels at the moment—lost, without direction, unable to find his way because he doesn’t know what he’s looking for.
Are you my wife?
It doesn’t do any good to recount the details, but Ben can’t help it; he keeps running over things in his mind. For all the time he has spent replaying it, he honestly can’t make any more sense of what happened than he could in those first slow-motion minutes when he saw the shape of his future, and Claire’s, and realized that they were not the same.
He feels as though he’s living someone else’s life. It’s as if he’d been watching a show on TV and then, with the click of a remote, changed the channel. There’s no continuity and no flow; it’s just a whole different story.
A week or so after Claire left, Ben had called Alison.
“Did you have any idea?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” she said. “But I didn’t want to know.”
They were quiet for a moment. Then she said, “They could’ve saved us both a lot of time.”
“And themselves,” he said.
There was not much more to say. Each was embarrassed for the other. To be linked in this way was terrible.
It would be easier if Ben could separate the strands of the story, but they remain tangled in his mind in an impossible snarl. There is his marriage to Claire, his relationship with his mother and father, his rural childhood and urban adulthood, his friendship with Charlie and Alison. As he thinks about the past it is as if he is looking too closely at the dots in a pointillist painting but can’t step back to see the larger image.
It makes no logical sense to him that Claire would leave him for Charlie. Charlie is a good guy (or at least Ben used to think so), but he possesses little ambition or fire. He is stuck in a job he doesn’t like, and seems in no particular hurry to figure out what he wants.
Except, that is, for Claire.
How foolish. How wasteful. Claire hurt two of the few people in the world who truly cared about her, who always wished the best for her, who loved her. And Charlie—Charlie has two children who need him, a house, a yard, a whole conventional adult life that Claire has always seemed happy enough to avoid. When Ben really thinks about it, he gets angry. So he tries not to think about it much.
Since moving to Boston to oversee the construction of the Boyd Arts Center six weeks ago, Ben has been constantly on-site. How he ever tried to oversee this job from New York is hard for him to imagine now. Weekly visits did not permit this kind of access and accountability. When Philippa Boyd decided on a whim that the façade demanded sandstone, not limestone, Ben was able to convince her that limestone was more in keeping with the design, the location, the symbolic import of the whole project. On-site, he could intercede when the chief engineer decided to shift the building 20 percent to the left for vague structural reasons, thereby altering the entire focal point, the meeting of earth and water.
On weekends Ben strolls through Cambridge, revisiting old haunts. Restaurants he frequented as a student, record stores, The Coop—he can lose himself for hours. He has signed on to teach a continuing education class one evening a week in the fall at Harvard—a place he had mixed feelings about as a student but that now feels as comfortably familiar as an ancestral home. Observing the undergraduates—remarkably more diverse, even, than when he was a student—he feels a mixture of nostalgia and envy. Their adult lives are embryonic; they have no idea what’s in store.
Boston feels safe, familiar, clean-rinsed by frequent rain. Ben appreciates the New Englandness of it all—the neat, conservative clothing people wear, the discrete provincial villages, even the twee romanticizing