Bird in Hand - Christina Baker Kline [99]
Claire was large, greedy. He was always trying to please her, to make her happy. He appreciates that Sarah is so self-contained; he doesn’t have to be the sane, logical one. He can be spontaneous and even offbeat. He can be greedy himself.
After work, now, Ben goes home to a rented loft space on the top floor of an old brick factory building with a half-moon living room window leading to a balcony overlooking a cobblestone street. On clear nights he goes out on the balcony and gazes up at the stars, chips of light, halogen-bright, against the velvety expanse. He plays his childhood game of searching for ancient constellations, Leo the Lion and Orion the Hunter. He notes the moon’s progress from crescent to full, and watches meteors streak across the sky. Standing there, surrounded by stars, he thinks about how easy it would be to believe, as people did for thousands of years, that all the stars and planets move around the earth.
One of the first major purchases Ben makes in his new apartment is a telescope. Setting up the tripod in front of the half-moon window, he thinks of Galileo, who in the early seventeenth century trained his rudimentary telescope (less powerful than modern-day binoculars) on the moons revolving around Jupiter, and made the stunning discovery that the earth is not the center of the universe. Over the next hundred years, astronomers came to believe that all the planets orbited around the sun. Now, of course, they know that the sun is just one of many stars, spinning far from the center of the Milky Way galaxy, which is itself only one of billions of galaxies.
Through his telescope Ben follows the moons of Jupiter and identifies the hazy Orion Nebula. He sees the stars of the Milky Way, Saturn’s rings, the spiral arms of the Andromeda galaxy. Sometimes he imagines that he can see his life with Claire like this, from a great distance, the way satellites orbiting above the planet’s atmosphere can identify objects on earth as small as cars. Claire was the sun in his solar system; he hadn’t questioned whether to revolve around her. But there are other solar systems in the galaxy, other galaxies in the universe. How far does he want to travel? He doesn’t know yet, and maybe he doesn’t need to know. Maybe it is enough for now to know that other worlds exist.
“It’s so—small,” Claire says.
“We prefer to say ‘charming,’” the Realtor says, holding open the front door. After a moment she peers around the corner into the hallway. “Now where did your husband go?”
“What? Oh. He’s not my husband.”
“Sorry,” the Realtor says, “I just assumed.”
Claire nods. Then she says, “Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why did you assume?”
The Realtor gives her a look, as if she’s trying to gauge what Claire wants to hear. “You seem—connected,” she says. “And of course,” she says, tapping her ring finger with her thumb, “the wedding bands.”
Claire looks down at the gold ring on her left hand. Four months have passed since she and Ben parted, so why is she still wearing it? For that matter, why is Charlie wearing his? She thinks it has something to do with the fact that everything happened so quickly—the revelation of the affair, the dissolution of their marriages. Maybe the rings are a talismanic symbol of normalcy that neither of them is ready to give up.
For the past few months, ever since Alison asked Charlie to move out and Ben left for Boston, Claire and Charlie have been living in the apartment of a former professor of Claire’s, Eva Stokes, who’s been on sabbatical in Europe. In her first year at NYU, Claire had taken Professor Stokes’s “Intro to Women’s Studies,” and, predictably, it had changed her