Bird in Hand - Christina Baker Kline [98]
Sometimes Ben worries that he will end up as one of those persnickety single men in small spectacles and bow ties who make a fetish of neatness and erudition. The other morning, as he ground his coffee and steamed milk and read the Boston Globe at the round oak table in his breakfast nook with a piece of buttered whole grain toast, he felt a brief, sudden panic: might his world have permanently narrowed to this?
He has told the other partners at Sloane Howard that he’s only in Cambridge to see the project through, but Ben suspects he will stay. A few days ago he called a friend from graduate school, a partner in a small local architecture firm, who set up an exploratory lunch. Besides, he has no home to go back to. He and Claire put the New York apartment on the market, and it sold surprisingly quickly. They divided their lives fairly amicably: Ben took the books, Claire kept most of the wedding presents. Claire and Charlie are already living together, from what he understands, in a friend’s apartment downtown.
It seems to Ben that the breakup of his marriage was like a carefully choreographed dance, except he hadn’t been taught the steps. All he could do was follow, and try to pick it up as he went along. He’d always thought that when you’ve been with someone for a long time your feelings are like an iceberg, only a small part of which is visible above the surface. Now he can see that what he thought was the tip of Claire’s deeper feeling was in fact all that was left—a shard of intimacy, a nub of desire, the only remaining fragment of a dissolving relationship. She was lost to him before he realized he was losing her.
Ben has come through this experience changed, but he can’t say, as he has always said before about times of stress and uncertainty, that it is for the better. He is stronger now. More wary. Less inclined to expect the best, as if it were his due. He has avoided bitterness, and maybe that is the most he can hope for.
As a child, Ben would not do things that hurt too much—look directly into the sun, push his body past endurance, run the water too hot. His goal was to avoid pain. And yet here it is, unavoidable.
ONE DAY, WHEN his life is still in boxes and his head in disarray, Ben answers his cell phone to hear the voice of the girl he hired last fall, Sarah, the one who deserted Drone Coward for a more prestigious job.
“I’m bored at this place,” she tells him with characteristic bluntness—a bluntness he finds both alarming and intriguing. “I want to come back, if you’ll have me.”
“The Boston project is an exception,” Ben says. “You really want to design pools and guesthouses?”
“No. But I want to work with you.”
“Why?”
“Because you care about your work. I’m finding that’s rare.”
“Oh, you are, are you,” Ben remarks absently, recalling details about the girl—her corn silk hair and thin wrists and unsettling intelligence. Her steady gaze and stone gray eyes. “Where’s the boy?” he asks.
“Who? I have no idea. I never liked him much.”
When she comes up to Boston on the train he takes her to dinner, and by dessert he has hired her as his associate on the Boyd project. It will be nice, he thinks, to have someone to talk to about work. Not that he hadn’t talked to Claire—he just wasn’t ever sure she wanted to listen.
“So what do you want to do with your life?” Ben asks Sarah one day, and she answers, “I want to design interesting buildings and I want to have a baby, not necessarily in that order.”
I want to have a baby. In his marriage to Claire Ben had begun to give up on the idea, to reconcile himself to the life it appeared they would lead, but now that he has been set free perhaps he can finally admit how important it is to him, how he yearns for a child.
How strange,