The time traveler's wife (53 page)

"Alba."

"Alba is perfect. And you are perfect. I
mean, as much as I love you, back there, it's the shared life, the knowing each
other
           
"

"Through thick and thin
           
"

"The fact that there are bad times makes
it more real. It's the reality that I want." Tell him, tell him.

"Even reality can be pretty
unreal..." If I'm ever going to say it, now's the time. He waits. I just.
Can't. "Clare?" I regard him miserably, like a child caught in a complicated
fib, and then I say it, almost inaudibly. "I slept with someone."
Henry's face is frozen, disbelieving. "Who?" he asks, without looking
at me, "Gomez."

"Why?" Henry is still, waiting for
the blow.

"I was drunk. We were at a party, and
Charisse was in Boston—"

"Wait a minute. When was this?"

"1990."

He starts to laugh. "Oh, God. Clare, don't
do that to me, shit. 1990. Jesus, I thought you were telling me something that
happened, like, last week." I smile, weakly. He says, "I mean, it's
not like I'm overjoyed about it, but since I just got through telling you to go
out and experiment I can't really... I dunno." He's getting restless. He
gets up and starts pacing around the studio. I am incredulous. For fifteen
years I've been paralyzed with fear, fear that Gomez would say something, do
something in his big lumbering Gomez callousness, and Henry doesn't mind. Or
does he?

"How was it?" he asks, quite
casually, with his back to me as he messes with the coffeemaker. I pick my
words with care. "Different. I mean, without getting real critical of
Gomez—"

"Oh, go ahead."

"It was sort of like being a china shop,
and trying to get off with a bull." "He's bigger than me." Henry
states this as fact.

"I wouldn't know about now, but back then
he had no finesse at all. He actually smoked a cigarette while he was fucking
me." Henry winces. I get up, walk over to him. "I'm sorry. It was a
mistake." He pulls me to him, and I say, softly, into his collar, "I
was waiting very patiently... " but then I can't go on. Henry is stroking
my hair. "It's okay, Clare," he says. "It's not so bad." I
wonder if he is comparing the Clare he has just seen, in 1989, with the
duplicitous me in his arms, and, as if reading my mind he says, "Any other
surprises?"

"That was it."

"God, you can really keep a secret."
I look at Henry, and he stares back at me, and I can tell that I have altered
for him somehow.

"It made me understand, better...it made
me appreciate..." "You're trying to tell me that I did not suffer by
comparison?"

"Yes." I kiss him, tentatively, and
after a moment of hesitation Henry begins to kiss me back, and before too long
we are on our way to being all right again. Better than all right. I told him,
and it was okay, and he still loves me. My whole body feels lighter, and I sigh
with the goodness of confessing, finally, and not even having a penance, not
one Hail Mary or Our Father. I feel like I've walked away scot free from a
totaled car. Out there, somewhere, Henry and I are making love on a green
blanket in a meadow, and Gomez is looking at me sleepily and reaching for me
with his enormous hands, and everything, everything is happening now, but it's
too late, as usual, to change any of it, and Henry and I unwrap each other on
the studio couch like brand new never before boxes of chocolate and it's not
too late, not yet, anyway.

Saturday, April 14, 1990 (Clare is 18) (6:43
a.m.)

Clare: I open my eyes and I don't know where I
am. Cigarette smell. Venetian blind shadow across cracked yellow wall. I turn
my head and beside me, sleeping, in his bed, is Gomez. Suddenly I remember, and
I panic. Henry. Henry will kill me. Charisse will hate me. I sit up. Gomez's
bedroom is a wreck of overfilled ashtrays, clothes, law textbooks, newspapers,
dirty dishes. My clothes lie in a small, accusing pile on the floor beside me.
Gomez sleeps beautifully. He looks serene, not like a guy who's just cheated on
his girlfriend with his girlfriend's best friend. His blond hair is wild, not
in its usual perfect controlled state. He looks like an overgrown boy,
exhausted from too many boyish games. My head is pounding. My insides feel like
they've been beaten. I get up, shakily, and walk down the hall to the bathroom,
which is dank and mold-infested and filled with shaving paraphernalia and damp
towels. Once I'm in the bathroom I'm not sure what I wanted; I pee and I wash
my face with the hard soap sliver, and I look at myself in the mirror to see if
I look any different, to see if Henry will be able to tell just by looking at
me.. .I look kind of nauseous, but otherwise I just look the way I look at
seven in the morning. The house is quiet. There's a clock ticking somewhere
nearby. Gomez shares this house with two other guys, friends who are also at
Northwestern's Law School. I don't want to run into anyone. I go back to
Gomez's room and sit on the bed.

"Good morning." Gomez smiles at me,
reaches out to me. I recoil, and burst into tears. "Whoa. Kitten! Clare,
baby, hey, hey..." He scrambles up and soon I am weeping in his arms. I
think of all the times I have cried on Henry's shoulder. Where are you? I
wonder desperately. I need you, here and now. Gomez is saying rny name, over
and over. What am I doing here, without any clothes on, crying in the embrace
of an equally naked Gomez? He reaches over and hands me a box of tissue, and I
blow my nose, and wipe my eyes, and then I look at him with a look of unconditional
despair, and he looks back at me in confusion.

"Okay now?"

No. How can I be okay? "Yeah."
"What's wrong?"

I shrug. Gomez shifts into cross-examining
fragile witness mode.

"Clare, have you ever had sex
before?" I nod. "Is it Charisse? You feel bad about it 'cause of
Charisse?" I nod. "Did I do something wrong?" I shake my head.
"Clare, who is Henry?" I gape at him incredulously.

"How do you know?..." Now I've done
it. Shit. Son of a bitch. Gomez leans over and grabs his cigarettes from the
bedside table, and lights one. He waves out the match and takes a deep drag.
With a cigarette in his hand, Gomez seems more...dressed, somehow, even though
he's not. He silently offers me one, and I take it, even though I don't smoke.
It just seems like the thing to do, and it buys me time to think about what to
say. He lights it for me, gets up, rummages around in his closet, finds a blue
bathrobe that doesn't look all that clean, and hands it to me. I put it on;
it's huge. I sit on the bed, smoking and watching Gomez put on a pair of jeans.
Even in my wretchedness I observe that Gomez is beautiful, tall and broad
and...large, an entirely different sort of beauty from Henry's lithe panther
wildness. I immediately feel horrible for comparing. Gomez sets an ashtray next
to me, and sits down on the bed, and looks at me.

"You were talking in your sleep to someone
named Henry." Damn. Damn. "What did I say?"

"Mostly just 'Henry' over and over, like
you were calling someone to come to you. And 'I'm sorry.' And once you said
'Well, you weren't here,' like you were really angry. Who is Henry?"

"Henry is my lover."

"Clare, you don't have a lover. Charisse
and I have seen you almost every day for six months, and you never date anyone,
and no one ever calls you."

"Henry is my lover. He's been gone for a
while, and he'll be back in the fall of 1991."

"Where is he?" Somewhere nearby.

"I don't know." Gomez thinks I am
making this up. For no reason I am determined to make him believe me. I grab my
purse, open my wallet, and show Gomez the photo of Henry. He studies it
carefully.

"I've seen this guy. Well, no: someone a
lot like him. This guy is too old to be the same person. But that guy's name
was Henry."

My heart is beating like a mad thing. I try to
be casual as I ask, "Where did you see him?"

"At clubs. Mostly Exit, and Smart Bar. But
I can't imagine that he's your guy; he's a maniac. Chaos attends his every
move. He's an alcoholic, and he's just... I don't know, he's really rough on
women. Or so I hear."

"Violent?" I can't imagine Henry hitting
a woman.

"No. I don't know."

"What's his last name?"

"I don't know. Listen, kitten, this guy
would chew you up and spit you out.. .he's not at all what you need."

I smile. He's exactly what I need, but I know
that it is futile to go chasing through clubland trying to find him. "What
do I need?"

"Me. Except you don't seem to think
so."

"You have Charisse. What do you want me
for?"

"I just want you. I don't know why."

"You a Mormon or something?"

Gomez says very seriously, "Clare, I..
.look, Clare—"

"Don't say it."

"Really, I—"

"No. I don't want to know." I get up,
stub out my cigarette, and start to put my clothes on. Gomez sits very still
and watches me dress. I feel stale and dirty and creepy putting on last night's
party dress in front of Gomez, but I try not to let it show. I can't do the
long zipper in the back of the dress and Gomez gravely helps me with it.

"Clare, don't be mad."

"I'm not mad at you. I'm mad at
myself."

"This guy must be really something if he
can walk away from a girl like you and expect you to be around two years
later."

I smile at Gomez. "He is amazing." I
can see that I have hurt Gomez's feelings. "Gomez, I'm sorry. If I was
free, and you were free..." Gomez shakes his head, and before I know it,
he's kissing me. I kiss back, and there's just a moment when I wonder....
"I've got to go now, Gomez."

He nods. I leave.

Friday, April 27, 1990 (Henry is 26)

Henry: Ingrid and I are at the Riviera Theater,
dancing our tiny brains out to the dulcet tones of Iggy Pop. Ingrid and I are
always happiest together when we are dancing or fucking or anything else that
involves physical activity and no talking. Right now we are in heaven. We're
way up front and Mr. Pop is whipping us all into a compact ball of manic
energy. I told Ing once that she dances like a German and she didn't like it,
but it's true: she dances seriously, like lives are hanging in the balance,
like precision dancing can save the starving children in India. It's great. The
Iggster is crooning " Calling Sister Midnight: well, I'm an idiot for
you... " and I know exactly how he feels. It's moments like this that I
see the point of me and Ingrid. We slash and burn our way through Lust for
Life, China Doll, Funtime. Ingrid and I have taken enough speed to launch a mission
to Pluto, and I have that weird high-pitched feeling and a deep conviction that
I could do this, be here, for the rest of my life and be perfectly content.
Ingrid is sweating. Her white T-shirt has glued itself to her body in an
interesting and aesthetically pleasing way and I consider peeling it off of her
but refrain, because she's not wearing a bra and I'll never hear the end of it.
We dance, Iggy Pop sings, and sadly, inevitably, after three encores, the
concert finally ends. I feel great. As we file out with our fellow elated and
pumped-up concertgoers, I wonder what we should do next, Ingrid takes off to go
and stand in the long line for the ladies' room, and I wait for her out on
Broadway. I'm watching a yuppie in a BMW argue with a valet-parking kid over an
illegal space when this huge blond guy walks up to me.

"Henry?" he asks. I wonder if I'm
about to be served with a court summons or something.

"Yeah?"

"Clare says hello." Who the hell is
Clare?

"Sorry, wrong number." Ingrid walks
up, looking once again like her usual Bond Girl self. She sizes up this guy,
who's a pretty fine specimen of guyhood. I put my arm around her. The guy
smiles. "Sorry. You must have a double out there." My heart
contracts; something's going on that I don't get, a little of my future seeping
into now, but now is not the moment to investigate. He seems pleased about
something, and excuses himself, and walks away.

"What was that all about?" says
Ingrid.

"I think he thought I was someone
else." I shrug. Ingrid looks worried. Just about everything about me seems
to worry Ingrid, so I ignore it. "Hey, Ing, what shall we do next?" I
feel like leaping tall buildings in a single bound.

"My place?"

"Brilliant." We stop at Margie's
Candies for ice cream, and soon we're in the car chanting "I scream, you
scream, we all scream for ice cream" and laughing like deranged children.
Later, in bed with Ingrid, I wonder who Clare is, but then I figure there's
probably no answer to that, so I forget about it.

Friday, February 18, 2005 (Henry is 41, Clare
is 33)

Henry: I'm taking Charisse to the opera. It's
Tristan und Isolde. The reason I am here with Charisse and not Clare has to do
with Clare's extreme aversion to Wagner. I'm not a huge Wagnerite either, but
we have season tickets and I'd just as soon go as not. We were discussing this
one evening at Charisse and Gomez's place, and Charisse wistfully said that
she'd never been to the opera. The upshot of it all is that Charisse and I are
getting out of a taxi in front of the Lyric Opera House and Clare is at home
minding Alba and playing Scrabble with Alicia, who's visiting us this week. I'm
not really in the mood for this. When I stopped at their house to collect
Charisse, Gomez winked at me and said "Don't keep her out too late,
son!" in his best clueless-parent voice. I can't remember the last time
Charisse and I did anything by ourselves. I like Charisse, very much, but I
don't have much of anything to say to her. I shepherd Charisse through the
crowd. She moves slowly, taking in the splendid lobby, marble and sweeping high
galleries full of elegantly understated rich people and students with faux fur
and pierced noses. Charisse smiles at the libretto vendors, two tuxedoed gents
who stand at the entrance to the lobby singing "Libretto! Libretto! Buy
yourself a libretto!" in two-part harmony. No one I know is here.
Wagnerites are the Green Berets of opera fans; they're made of sterner stuff,
and they all know each other. There's a lot of air kissing going on as Charisse
and I walk upstairs to the mezzanine. Clare and I have a private box; it's one
of our indulgences. I pull back the curtain and Charisse steps in and says,
"Oh!" I take her coat and drape it over a chair, and do the same with
mine. We settle ourselves. Charisse crosses her ankles and folds her small
hands in her lap. Her black hair gleams in the low soft light, and with her
dark lipstick and dramatic eyes Charisse is like an exquisite, wicked child,
all dressed up, allowed to stay up late with the grown-ups. She sits and drinks
in the beauty of the Lyric, the ornate gold and green screen that shields the
stage, the ripples of cascading plaster that rim every arch and dome, the
excited murmur of the crowd. The lights go down and Charisse flashes me a grin.
The screen rises, and we are on a boat, and Isolde is singing. I lean back in
my chair and lose myself in the current of her voice. Four hours, one love
potion, and a standing ovation later, I turn to Charisse. "Well, how did
you like it?" She smiles. "It was silly, wasn't it? But the singing
made it not silly."