Adam Haslett - Union Atlantic

She wouldn’t be chastised like this. Not in her own house. Not by Sam. Lying there with his fine pale coat and superior manner. It was no great mystery who he had come to fancy himself as. All that pure breeding and King James diction. As though each day she walked Cotton Mather over the golf course on a leash. Did he really expect her to believe that was the case?

Across the room, the television stood mute, its glass a dull, greeny gray. The reception had grown steadily worse over the years, though she’d changed nothing, until finally the static had grown so thick it was hardly worth it, Jim Lehrer’s voice muffled beneath the hiss. She’d preferred MacNeil, in any case.

In the kitchen, the refrigerator shuddered off and the quiet of the house was once again absolute.

Eric’s place had been much like hers, a studio apartment over by the water on Bethune Street. A mess of books and papers, barely any shelves to put them on, a small wooden table, one chair. The previous fall, he’d enrolled to study philosophy at the New School and had been overwhelmed by the amount of work. He was late wherever they went, unkempt, often tired-looking. Charlotte loved him for it and even more for their hours of conversation and for his letting her kiss him whenever she felt the urge, Eric being happy to let her lead the way, telling him when they would study and when they would stop, when they would sleep and eat. Those first few months he’d get up early and go to his apartment a few hours each morning to get ready for his seminars, he said, and she’d usually find him back at her place napping when she returned in the late afternoon. She’d sometimes sit watching him as he slept, his legs curled up toward his chest, his mouth slightly open against the pillow. Her first guess at his age had been right. He was only twenty-four. The youngest of seven. His mother’s choice for the priesthood. Yet the only one of his siblings who hadn’t ended up living within a quick drive of the house back in the working-class section of Philadelphia where he’d grown up. Charlotte had been surrounded most of her life by people who’d sauntered to their place in the world, coming to it as if by right. This hadn’t been the case for her because she hadn’t chosen the course offered. Watching Eric sleep like that, an entire evening in the apartment together still ahead of them, she felt delivered not just from the usual loneliness — so well hidden by the manner she kept up with family and colleagues — but from the years of it she’d already been through, the tiring work of living on one’s own, of being such an odd bird, a single woman of her age back then, 1962, getting a PhD, no marriage in the offing. An awkward fit in the world. It was as if Eric gave her those years back by accompanying her now.

He made her young. He let her be silly. She’d never been able to afford silliness. Like fooling around in Henry’s apartment, where she’d taken Eric for dinner, fooling around in the bathroom after dessert, their drinks perched on the sink. Stuffy Henry and stuffy Betsy in their appropriate little apartment on the Upper East Side, the settee from the back hall in Rye primped up in the living room, carpets their mother had unearthed from the attic covering the floor, the wedding silver polished to the nines, and the two of them already on the lookout for a house, the closer to Mommy and Daddy the better. Charlotte could barely keep herself from laughing when they sat down again, so punch-drunk and pleased she was.

When Eric’s stipend ran down he asked if he could move in. She’d been taken aback at first, that it should happen so quickly, so informally, but then it seemed of a piece with how it had all begun. He’d practically been living with her in any case. They slept together most nights and his clothing had started to accumulate in her drawers. It might have bothered other women, women like Betsy who would have wanted to clarify the issue of his intentions. But Charlotte had given up so much of that racket — the hunt for the possession of the man— and instead marveled at how effortlessly Eric had slipped into her heart, as if he hadn’t even noticed the rigidity she feared had been the cost of exempting herself from all that.

She’d never been able to explain that to anyone afterward. How thankful she’d been to him for loving her just as he found her. There were too many steps to it, too much to account for. And by then they’d assembled their views, Henry and her mother: that she’d been taken in by a bad character. If there had been feeling there, well my goodness it had been misplaced. For heaven’s sake. Would you have us think otherwise? That you could still love and admire such a person? None of which, of course, ever had to be stated aloud, their taut lips and averted eyes all too eloquent.

“But I lived with him,” she wanted to say. “Shouldn’t you ask first what it was like? He loved me. I felt that to be so. He hated having to put me through it.”

In these basic facts, she had never lost her faith. Because while it was true, looking back, that he may have been under the influence around the time they met — those first few months when he’d go back to his apartment during the day — and so perhaps true also that his lack of money stemmed from that, once he moved in, he stopped. He had to have stopped, because it was summer, neither of them were in classes and they spent all their waking hours together. She would have known. And those were the best months they had together. The happiest of her life. Waking midmorning, the drowsy, shut-eyed kissing and fondling, his head in her hands between her legs. Morning after wonderful morning like that. Caught up in him. And then wandering out to a coffee shop where they’d eat and read and talk. And then films, what seemed like every night, though it couldn’t have been, and cooking soup or scrambled eggs and bacon on the electric stove and eating wherever they could clear a seat amidst the cram of his papers and hers.

He’d taken a seminar in the spring with a student of Karl Jaspers and that summer was working his way through Heidegger. “How’s your serious young man?” Henry would ask when they spoke, and of course there was some of that to Eric, the long discussions about authenticity and being, a cascade of words propelled by the need to believe there existed some world, however abstruse, other than mere things and our accommodation to them. But was that so laughable? Not to Charlotte. She and Henry had grown up in the most unexacting faith imaginable, a drawling, self-satisfied Episcopalianism marked by the minister’s wife in her mink coat and pleasant enough hymns at Christmas. They would no more have discussed their religion at the dinner table than fry filet mignon. Eric had been raised strict Catholic. When he left the Church, his mother called him apostate and refused to speak to him for a year. There may have been a pose now and again as he tried on the philosophy he was studying, a slight callowness to the high-handed way he dismissed books or people who hadn’t grasped the urgency of existential thought, but at the base of it lay an honest hunger. And a sadness.

Oh, come on sister , Wilkie said. Paint your picture if you want to, but a dope fiend is a dope fiend, and I should know. Your white boy might have been able to keep it under wraps longer than your uptown Negro because he didn’t have to score on the street. But the disease is the disease. There comes a day you’re going to get desperate, and it’s going to get ugly. A woman, if you’ve still got one by then, she’s just another route to a score .

It had taken awhile, but recently Charlotte had come to recognize Wilkie’s pretension as well. That oracular tone of his, the voice of Malcolm X streaming from his black head.