The Hazards of Sleeping Alone (14 page)

R
arely in the fifteen years since Joe left her has Charlotte felt compelled to consult him in matters of parenting. She's never wanted his input on raising Emily; in fact, she preferred to avoid it. Joe's loose approach to raising children, to being a father—to life in general—unsettled her.

“You can't plan anything,” Joe used to say. “Not a goddamn thing.”

Charlotte would nod, at least in the beginning, because this sounded carefree and laid-back and all the things she wished she could be. But inside, she disagreed. You
could
plan things. And, through planning, safeguard against unwanted consequences. Sun damage, flu, dry rot, ring-around-the-tub. You could anticipate these things and avoid them.

But Joe was different. Joe lived in the moment. Even his marriage proposal, delivered in a moment of impulse—a diner, two half—drunk vanilla milkshakes, a dab of ice cream on Charlotte's upper lip, a sweet-tongued kiss across the table, Formica digging into their ribs, and a charming, makeshift ring made out of a piece of knotted plastic straw—had a haphazard quality that was,
by all objective standards, romantic. No matter they'd known each other less than a year. The women Charlotte worked with in the LaSalle admissions office melted when they heard the story, the corners of their eyes and mouths drooping downward. “It's so
spontaneous,
“ they said, longingly, so Charlotte reasoned spontaneity was a good thing. She liked it, in theory. But in practice, it alarmed her. She imagined it made her feel the way her father felt but wouldn't say: his face tightening, eyes narrowing, glancing at the plastic ring and then quickly away, as if the gesture were so inadequate he felt ashamed to even be looking.

When they began planning the wedding, Charlotte made lists. She spent many hours calculating and recalculating prices. She arranged various combinations of guests at various combinations of tables. She labeled these configurations Plan A and B and C, and kept them in a red spiral notebook in a locked drawer in her bedroom. She was still living at home, naturally, and it was rare that Joe was ever even upstairs; still, she didn't want to risk him accidentally finding the notebook and seeing her neuroses laid out in such painstaking detail. She planned on keeping those lesser qualities to herself.

Because Charlotte had realized, early on, Joe liked her for the things she kept hidden. She was shy. Contained. The reserved, bookish only child of two reserved, bookish parents. Her father was a philosophy professor, her mother a homemaker. They'd had Charlotte later in life; her father was nearly sixty when she graduated high school. Nights in their house growing up had been virtually silent: the only sounds the click of knitting needles, slip of a book's pages, shudder of the minute hand as it slid past the seven on the grandfather clock. Falling asleep, Charlotte had grown used to the sound of her own voice.
Good night, ankle. Good night, heel. Good night, toes.

Charlotte met Joe when she was twenty-two, at a New Year's party she was dragged to by a classmate at LaSalle. She was taking night classes (she got free tuition as a “faculty daughter”) and working part-time in the admissions office. She had little experience with men, except for awkward high school dances and a smattering of setups. She'd never thought of herself as especially pretty, though the women in the admissions office disagreed:
You have perfect eyebrows, Charlotte. Look at her bone structure! You're probably one of those people who can eat anything and not gain an ounce.
But these were women—didn't they always compliment each other like that?

The night of the party, Charlotte wore a red dress she'd bought for Christmas. It was unlike her to wear such a bold color, but in the store it had looked festive. Holiday red, she'd thought, in the dressing room. But that night, the dress turned a different shade. Suddenly it was fiery red. Attention-getting red. At the party, when Joe approached her, Charlotte was nowhere near so bold as her dress. She was so nervous she couldn't speak. She could barely even smile. But to her shock, Joe Warren seemed smitten. All night he gazed at her from across the room, eyes wide as saucers. He appeared at her side with glasses of wine and watched a blush swim into her cheeks. When the clock struck midnight and the crowd toasted the arrival of 1977, he kissed her dry knuckles, one by one. And when they said goodbye, Charlotte agreeing to let him call her, Joe gazed at her wonderingly, shook his head, and called her “hard to read.” It was that night Charlotte concluded that, in the adult world, if you were thin and looked aloof, you were no longer considered shy; you were mysterious.

For a while, Charlotte was able to sustain her aura of mystery. While inside she felt constantly nervous-in peril! in love! in
fear! in danger!—her nerves were so intense as to be paralyzing. They had the ironic, opposite effect of making her appear calm. Joe, with his long, loose limbs and garrulous nature, saw Charlotte's unrevealing exterior as a challenge. He was fascinated by this little person, determined to unlock her. Squeezing her shoulder, pinching her hip, resting his hand on her knee—he was always trying to get as close to her, as close to inside her, as he could.

Joe was equally fascinated by Charlotte's father, a professor of philosophy for the past nearly-thirty-five years. For Joe, finishing his master's in sociology and preparing to teach at Temple in the fall, George Rainer was a windfall. Joe would coax him onto the Rainers' front porch, where they would drink brandy and talk Hegel and Freud and chaos theory while the sun sank below the trees. Charlotte would sit in the living room, trying anxiously to listen, her own homework abandoned on her lap. When they returned, Joe would slap her father on the back or squeeze his sloped shoulder, as if emerging from some good-natured game of cards. Joe's face would be bright, energized, while her father's seemed a careful map of tweaks and tucks—upturned corner of the mouth here, skeptical squint of the eye there. Charlotte had the feeling that if one feature loosened, the entire face would fall apart.

In this, his near-reverence for her father, Joe was much like his daughter would one day be: easily seduced by ideas. Overwhelmed by passions that were flighty, fleeting. Charlotte often wondered if her entire marriage—Joe's nine-year stint as a suburban husband—was a symptom of this innate curiosity, this desire to experiment with life.

Once Charlotte and Joe were married (a simple summer ceremony that, in retrospect, captured them perfectly: his insistence
on a nondenominational justice of the peace, her conservative dresses and discount tulips), Charlotte began to realize it was impossible to keep select parts of herself to herself. Maybe in a different marriage, this would have been possible. Maybe in a marriage like her parents', so private it occupied different rooms at different times of day, so deeply routine that perhaps it was inevitable her mother would die not two years after her father. But not in Charlotte's. Not with a husband who strolled into the bathroom when she was clipping her toenails. A husband who stepped into the shower with her in the morning and massaged her back. A husband who, lying in bed, whispered, “What's going on in there?” and tapped her on the temples. A man who wanted to share everything.

Within a year of being Mrs. Joe Warren, Charlotte's nerves began bubbling to the surface. First in small ways: a spotless kitchen, a double-locked front door. “Fluttery,” Joe called her, holding her hands so she wouldn't nibble them when they watched TV. He would smile and kiss her knuckles, one by one. Then, gradually, she noticed him pausing over her hands. She noticed him notice her jagged cuticles, the flecks of loose skin. While before they were married he'd looked at her with eyes that were wide—so wide, she worried, he might be seeing more of her than was really there—his eyes had been gradually shrinking, narrowing to a squint, like a physical manifestation of his dimmed expectations.

She knew what was happening: her husband was becoming unfascinated. He'd been deadset on “unlocking” her, and—like any mystery, she supposed—had convinced himself that once he did, what he discovered would be worth it. But the truth, once the mystery of Charlotte was revealed, was this: there was no mystery. Charlotte was not intriguing; she was ordinary. She felt
guilty for having let Joe believe she was anything other than this, a woman capable of being called “Char”—so breezy and blasé, it begged to be yelled after a speeding taxi or into a whipping wind. She even slunk away from academia, reducing her course-load to just one class each term. Her father would have argued harder had he not been diagnosed with cancer soon after their wedding. Suddenly he was no longer a wellspring of abstract thought, but a man rooted firmly in the world of the flesh: chemotherapy treatments and hair loss and bedpans.

Something had begun shifting between Joe and Charlotte, something they both recognized but wouldn't admit. The more Charlotte felt herself exposed, the more nervous she became. The more control of herself she felt slipping, the more she needed to reclaim. Her fearfulness translated into terse formality. There was no fighting about it, no articulating of it, just a mutual accommodation. Joe no longer tried to probe her mind, to know her thoughts. He stopped coming into the shower to soap her shoulders. Instead of kissing her ragged fingernails, he began buying her manicures. He joined a gym, burning off his aggression by swimming laps and lifting weights. For their first anniversary, he gave her a certificate for a massage. “So you can relax,” he quipped, and smiled, but his smile held something else inside it. “You deserve it.” Charlotte thanked him, but never went. The mere thought of undressing for a stranger made her anxious.

Now, as she stares at the cold fireplace, Charlotte sees only more evidence of her neuroses. The brass grate is polished to glinting, the insides of the hearth swept clean. Like a womb that's been vacuumed out, scoured spotless. She squeezes her eyes shut. Everything has an extra weightiness about it; it's a fitting payback for making fun of Rita Curran's symbolism. Charlotte's
own world is now composed of nothing but symbols: babies and wombs, life and death.

She forces her eyes open. Funny how plans to build a fire had seemed so daunting just twenty-four hours ago. Now she would light the flames without a flinch. She would stir the embers, fling in old newspapers and
TV Guides.
She could become one of those people who run their fingers through candles, snuff them out with a pinch of their finger and thumb. Emily used to torture her with stunts like these: lighting a tapered candle at the dinner table on Dunleavy Street and running a finger lazily through the flame.

She wonders where Emily is now. After Walter finally knocked on the door, just after 4:30
P.M.,
the two of them had driven off in Emily's car. When they returned, at 6:15, they weren't flirting. They weren't fighting. They just seemed tired.

“Where did you go?” Charlotte asked.

“For a drive,” Emily answered.

Charlotte looked at Walter, thinking he might be more forthcoming, but he only fingered his eyebrow ring and looked at the ground.

“Anyplace in particular?”

“No.”

“Not even to eat?”

“Mom,” Emily snapped, “I didn't get an abortion, if that's what you're getting at.”

“We just drove,” Walter added, then looked back at the floor. There was a current of guilt between them now, that of two co-conspirators who had been caught in an act.

Emily and Walter had retreated to the couch, Emily curled on one side and Walter upright on the other. They turned on the TV, a rerun of
Seinfeld,
and watched in silence. There were so
many things Charlotte wanted to ask, but neither seemed like they were in the mood to talk. She got up, once, to ask if they were hungry. Emily said no, they weren't. So Charlotte returned to the kitchen table, listening to the sounds of canned laughter, staring at the six uneaten Needhams until, finally, getting up to stretch a film of plastic wrap over the plate.

“We're going out,” Emily announced, when the show was over.

“Where?” Charlotte hurried into the foyer, where Walter was pulling their coats from the closet.

“Out,” Emily repeated.

“Out to eat? But I could just put something on here—”

“That's okay.”

“I have Boca Burgers, I have pasta, I have plenty of—”

“We're not hungry,” Emily said, shrugging into her coat. It was a heavy olive thing, capelike, and looked like it weighed more than she did. Walter was easing into a black leather jacket Charlotte had never seen him wear, much less hang in her closet.

“Where are you going then?”

“We'll probably just look for a bar or something,” Emily said. “God knows what we'll find.”

Charlotte pressed her lips together, telling herself to stay out of it, but she couldn't. “Just don't drink,” she blurted, as Emily unhooked the chain.

Emily paused.

“Because of the baby,” Charlotte said, keeping her voice down. She felt irrationally afraid that the baby might hear her and start to worry.

“Perfect.” Emily let the chain tumble against the wall. She shot Walter an accusing look, then swung the door open and strode off, boots crunching heavily on the lawn.

Charlotte looked at Walter, and a flicker of guilt crossed his face. “See you later, Charlotte,” he said.

Charlotte watched from the doorway as the car pulled away. She noticed the slight movement of a curtain in the front window of Ruth O'Keefe's and shut the door. She didn't regret what she'd said. And she didn't feel hurt by Emily's reaction. She couldn't afford to. Even if it meant making Emily angry, ensuring that she wasn't drinking, finding out where she was going, she would do it. For the baby's sake.

Now, three hours later, staring at the fireplace, Charlotte thinks of calling someone. But who? There's no one she can bring herself to admit this to. Especially if, God forbid, Emily doesn't keep it. The closest thing she has to friends is the book group, where telling one of them is as good as telling all. She couldn't bear their reaction anyway: the intake of breath, the thick concern, and yet, the unmistakable twinge of excitement. It was how she herself had felt telling Emily about Rachel Hill hiding rocks in her pockets. Remembering that now, Charlotte feels awful, so awful that she can't call Linda, the one person in whom she might have been able to confide.