Losing Charlotte

by Heather Clay

  “People are saying she does drugs. They made her crazy.”

  “Like, cocaine?”

  “I guess,” Bruce said. “She needed money to buy more of it, whatever it was.”

  “Is she still going to teach lab?” Toby was warming up to this, Bruce could tell.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know any more than what I just told you.”

  “Bruce—,” his mother said. Bruce tried to ignore her. He was dancing now.

  “But I do know,” Bruce said, “that that’s the biggest thing that’s happened since you left. Soolster arrested, dude. Going to the pokey.”

  “Jail,” Toby whispered. “Geez. Are you kidding?”

  “She cried when the police came,” Bruce said. “Seriously.”

  Bruce’s mother lunged across him and grabbed the phone.

  “Toby,” she said. “This is Brenda, Bruce’s mom.” She glanced sideways at Bruce. “How are you doing, honey?” She kept her eyes on Bruce as she listened, said “Mm-mm” in a softer voice.

  “Ask him if he’ll be back on Monday,” Bruce said. His throat felt dry.

  “We’re thinking of you, Tob,” his mother said. She pressed two fingers into the place between her eyebrows and put her other hand up between her and Bruce, as if to block him from view. “You call us if you need us. Okay. Bye.”

  She hung up the phone. They sat together on Bruce’s bed. Traffic noise drifted up from the street below.

  “Quite the performance,” his mother said, finally.

  Bruce shrugged his shoulders.

  “Don’t do that.”

  “What.”

  “Shrug at me. You know what I’m talking about.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  Bruce couldn’t help himself. When his mother was unhappy with him, he got trapped in the body of a hater, was left pounding on soundproof glass while that guy, embarrassed, venomous, spoke words for him, gestured for him.

  “Do you honestly think that you’re helping him by doing that? By making up something ridiculous?”

  “What.”

  His mother made a face, imitating him. “Whuhht,” she drawled in a deep, dopey monotone. Then, remembering herself, she said, “I think you’re a smart guy, bud, and a nice guy—too nice and smart to take up and slander Mrs. Subbylane or whatever her name is with some horse-ass story just to make Toby feel better—I mean pokey, what is that?—when he won’t feel better by being told a lie, because his world …” and here she blew air through her lips and rubbed her eyes, and because she was upset and the venomous version of himself had bodysnatched him and addled him and sealed him into the glass interior pod, Bruce made fun of her.

  He snickered: “Sulemain. Not Subbylane,” like Subbylane was the funniest thing he had ever heard in his entire life. Then he said, pumping his voice full of scorn, “How do you even know that’s not the truth? And I just forgot to tell you?”

  His mother didn’t look at him. Eight stories down, a horn sounded, and the gears of an accelerating truck ground together and sighed, ground together and sighed.

  “I guess it’s lucky that you don’t totally get this,” she said. She picked something, some hair or fleck, off the back of his shirt—delicately, as if he might scald—before lifting herself off his bed and letting herself out of his room. Blinking, Bruce listened to her pad down the hallway. I do too get it, he said to her in his mind. I do.

  SIX YEARS AGO, at the Colony Club, Bruce saw Jebbie Jackman at a wedding—the same wedding at which he and his wife met, though she remembered Jebbie only vaguely when they talked about that night. “The white-dinner-jacket guy? Really drunk?” she would ask, and Bruce would have to answer yes, though it pained him, somehow, to answer at all. Jeb, who had also gone to Bancroft and had left at some point (Bruce thought seventh grade) before clubs and girls and nights logged in diners, sucking back eggs and butter-soaked toast and glass after glass of water in an attempt to blunt the throat burning that afternoons full of bong hits in someone’s parent-free apartment had given rise to—Jeb had been part of a group, when they were still young enough to sport bowl cuts and hairless bodies without shame, that had included Bruce, and Toby, and Charlie Potts. The four of them had built a makeshift half-pipe together in the backyard of Jebbie’s country house, skated it until Toby had legendarily sailed over its side doing a twisty move and sprained both of his wrists. They had competed for top Atari scores and traded in cards and candy and comics and tapes and the occasional Playboy—trafficked in all the usual areas of boy commerce, worn Stan Smiths with their uniforms to school. Jeb had been there, that fifth-grade year, was the eleven-year-old equivalent of a friend to Toby, just as Bruce had been—and he had been there at the Colony Club, thus weaving himself and Toby and Charlotte together in Bruce’s mind whenever he thought of that night.

  He’d felt old, and changed, and uncomfortably reminded, when he’d recognized Jeb right away. They had exchanged hellos, reaching around the backs of their dinner partners to slap hands and shake; after dinner was finished and most of the guests were on the dance floor pretending to boogie to the stale band, they were able to draw their chairs together. They rested their elbows among flung napkins, plates of partly eaten cake, flickering votives, loose petals turning to parchment. Jeb was drinking Scotch out of a champagne flute. The bar had run out of highballs.

  “What’s keeping you busy these days, Bruce Tavert? Keeping you going?” Jeb’s eyes, shadowed within the fleshy contours of his face, scanned the ballroom. Bruce noticed sweat along his hairline.

  “Um,” Bruce said, trying not to laugh at the way the question was phrased, the bleary-retiree formulation of it. “Man, I wouldn’t want to bore you.” But, to avoid ending the conversation before it had started, he had gone ahead and bored, with a description of his job, the fact that his offices were moving downtown, hoping to shore up more interesting business, start managing funds for design companies, artists, SoHo types.

  “Rich ones,” Jeb said. His expression didn’t change.

  “Mm,” Bruce said. He had pushed for the office move, partly because he hated describing himself as a money manager. It sounded narrow and … expected, somehow, though he couldn’t think who would be expecting it. Still, the idea of working in loft space, which he pictured as perpetually washed in ethereal white-blue light, and of afternoon meetings over cappuccinos and protein smoothies, with people other than representatives from state teachers’ associations and suits from utility companies (an area he specialized in particularly) felt like hope, like absolution. He was restless, to tell the truth. On good days, he managed to be glad of this restlessness. At least it meant that he was alive. On bad days, he wondered how, at thirty-one, life had come to feel so circumscribed so quickly, consisting as it largely did of bed, shower, subway, office, conferences at the Midtown Hilton, trips to the second-floor vending machine. He didn’t say this, though he considered trying to.

  “Check out that waitress,” Jeb said. “I’d fuck her.”

  Bruce brushed at a flake of pastry that was clinging to his tux pants. From the onion tart, he thought. He said: “Oh.”

  Jeb drained the rest of the Scotch from his glass. He looked at Bruce. “Sorry,” he said. “I’m pretty pissed. Did I offend you?”

  “No. That’s okay. You didn’t.”

  “I’m an asshole. I can tell I offended you.”

  “She is pretty,” Bruce offered stupidly, though he hadn’t really looked. “So how are you, Jeb? What’s going on with you?”

  Jeb grinned into his empty glass. “Shit, Tavert, how long has it been since we’ve seen each other?”

  “Well, not since around the time you guys moved away. Maybe sixteen years, something like that. We were kids.”

  “Yeah. Well I guarantee you I’ve been a loaf since then. I guarantee you that.”

  “Well—” Bruce realized he had no response. What would do, a reflexive I’ll bet you haven’t? I’ll bet you’re just being hard on yourself?
Anything that came to mind sounded trivial and false. And yet, he wanted to say something bright, something useless.

  “Shitty band,” Bruce said.

  Jeb looked at him. “Hey,” he said, “I heard your mother died.”

  Bruce inhaled audibly. It had been years and he still did that.

  “Yeah. She did,” he said.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I really, really liked your mom.”

  “Thanks, Jeb.”

  Jeb picked up a fawn-colored petal from the table and rubbed it between his fingers. Bruce watched as it was crushed into a tiny ball that darkened with its own moisture and the condensation from Jeb’s glass. Jeb rolled it onto the white cloth with the tip of his index finger; it left a threading, sluglike trail. He brought his fingertips up to his face and smelled them, then offered his hand to Bruce.

  “Rose,” he said. “Smells like perfume.”

  Bruce smiled.

  “Your dad doing okay?” Jeb asked.

  “Yep,” Bruce said, relieved that Jeb hadn’t found it necessary or been bombed enough to get into the long-ago whats and hows of his mother’s cancer (pancreatic) and length of treatment (nine and a half months). The details sounded too banal, too common, and he hated being asked about them. Unlike his father, who could still assume a grim expression, his eyes trained on the middle distance, and recite the events and progression of his wife’s illness as if they formed a litany, an epic poem, whose final lines he would only remember if he could speak it whole, start at the beginning and let rhythm and chronology guide him toward the elusive end. In the Vale of Tawasentha, / In the green and silent valley… He had moved out to the Springs, where he lived in a rented bungalow on a friend’s property and spent his days in a yurt he had erected himself, overlooking the rocky bay. Inside the yurt he typed at a manuscript that Bruce had never seen any part of and knew nothing about; he worked on his “art projects,” which were mostly red circles painted on board, painted as large as the turning circumference of his father’s body allowed. “It’s just what I feel like doing,” he told Bruce. “Making these circles. The world is too big to learn anything new. So I stand inside and draw a line around myself, over and over.”

  “Wasn’t he a teacher,” Jeb asked.

  “Adjunct mathematics professor. Up at Columbia. But he retired.”

  “Ah.”

  They drifted into silence. Bruce wanted a drink, thought of asking Jeb to go to the bar with him. But he feared that they would get separated if they moved from where they sat. It seemed the two of them should remain together until he found something real to love about his old classmate. That was it. It felt important, right now, to love something about Jeb Jackman. He signaled the waitress, who was stacking dessert plates at a nearby table. She frowned at him, then mouthed over the medium din of the electric bass, the wailing backup singers, “I’ll be right there.”

  “Shit, brother, you’ve got the right idea,” Jeb said. “That girl is not to be believed.”

  “Yeah, well. I’m just thirsty.”

  “Sure,” said Jeb. He laughed once, an aggressive “pah” that laced the inside corners of his lips with spittle, though the expression in his eyes remained grave. The girl made her way over to them.

  “You wanted something,” she said to Bruce. It was a statement, not a question, and from the slight nasal inflection in her voice, the bemusement that played across her mouth, the way she stood over him, taller than he had realized, her shoulders set in a languid slope that seemed to curve down through her hips, he knew to regret calling her over. She didn’t match her surroundings, or the task of fetching drinks. She looked, truly, like she belonged in a bed, or stretched out by someone’s fire, blinking sleepily. Her hair was pulled back into two messy pigtails, and a silver and turquoise bracelet circled her arm just above the elbow. Bruce willed away the desire that began to snake through his body—desire that felt tainted and foolish because Jeb had claimed it first, because he couldn’t imagine it ever being returned, because he sat in a tuxedo, implicated in the mindless party that jumped all around them.

  “That’s okay,” Bruce said, sounding more forceful than he’d meant to. “I changed my mind.”

  “He wants a Dewar’s and water for himself and one for me,” Jeb said. “Christ, you’re a work of art.”

  The girl ignored him.

  “I just work for the caterer,” she said to Bruce. “So you’ll have to go to the bar yourself. Sorry.” She shifted her posture; Bruce perceived a mild bovine cast, a heaviness, in her lower body that only seemed to underscore her … grace. Grace was what it was.

  “No problem,” Bruce said. “I’m sorry we bothered you.”

  “We’ll pay you,” Jeb said. “I’ll pay you whatever you want.”

  “You didn’t really bother me,” she said. “We’re about to set up coffee over there, if you’re interested in that. Maybe your friend could use some.”

  “Okay.”

  “Hello. Over here. What color underwear are you wearing?” Jeb said.

  The girl kept her eyes trained on Bruce, and smiled. She took her time with the smile, letting it spread over her face in degrees. Bruce felt himself smiling back. She knows, he thought. She knows what kind of effect she has. She likes it. Well, good for her.

  “Bye,” she said, and walked away. Her walk was heavy but sure. Bruce noticed that her long feet, in their flat, lace-up shoes, toed in a bit.

  “That’s all right, baby,” Jeb said. “Your ass is a little too full figure for my taste anyway, now that I’ve seen it up close.”

  Bruce sighed. “She can’t hear you.”

  Jeb said nothing. He picked up a cloth napkin and wiped at his forehead with it, letting his eyes close.

  They watched the dancers for a few minutes. Bruce drummed his fingers on the tablecloth through the whole of “Proud Mary.” As he watched the waitress setting out mugs next to a huge silver urn at the other end of the ballroom, he realized that a small happiness was taking hold somewhere within his chest, maybe his rib cage. It was opening, like a tiny flower.

  “I’m sorry,” Jeb said during a pause between songs. “I drink too much.”

  Bruce looked at him. It seemed unbelievable that he had forgotten Jeb’s presence for even a second.

  “Champagne and Scotch—plus a couple beers before the ceremony. Bad combination. The champagne at these things always gets me.”

  “Yes,” Bruce said.

  Jeb watched him. His lashes, almost transparently blond, seemed to reflect light. The sheen of sweat on his face tinted his skin a pale, lambent green, and Bruce could see the pocks in his complexion up close, as if they’d been magnified. He fought to hold Jeb’s gaze.

  “Do you ever talk to Toby Van Wyck?” Bruce asked suddenly.

  “Naw,” Jeb said. “I lost touch with him.”

  Bruce nodded.

  “I do think about him, though,” Jeb said.

  “Me too.”

  “He still in Florida?”

  “No idea.”

  “I remember all that happening,” Jeb said. He leaned forward. “I remember the memorial service. We had those rubber bands that we were playing with and nobody minded.”

  “Yeah.”

  “They found her, you probably heard that. I’m sure you heard that.”

  “I did.”

  “Incredible,” Jeb said.

  Stories, shared, could inspire love, Bruce thought after. Jeb Jackman, prematurely middle-aged, doughy, pickled, he was all right.

  (When Bruce first told Charlotte Toby’s story, the parts he knew, he kept details to a minimum, and refused to fuel her pity with too many observations of his own, because by that time he knew that her pity, while extravagant at times, could be fleeting, that she could be distracted from it. The facts he included were as stark as he could make them: Toby’s mom had gone missing, there had been publicity, his father had remarried quickly, Toby had moved to Naples with his fathe
r and stepmother, though they occasionally returned to the Westchester house in the summers, and in Bruce’s junior year of high school Mrs. Van Wyck’s remains had been found. She had been buried at the edge of an abandoned car lot on Long Island, unearthed when the lot was cleared to make way for a senior-living condominium development. The forensics people who identified her had confirmed that she had died from blows to the head and chest, and the police had charged Viri Minetti after all, based on some evidence linked to the body that Bruce couldn’t quite remember. Confirmed, forensics, unearthed, blows. Newspeak was the language he had learned it in, and he doubted there was any other language to use that was any more comprehensible, so he stuck with it. Holy, Charlotte would say, her eyes filling so automatically with tears that Bruce thought her acting for a moment, then despised himself for the thought just as quickly as he’d had it, nodded, and looked back at her, half proud that something he described could move her so. Holy.)

  Bruce reached—awkwardly, his elbow bent to avoid dipping his cuff into the flame of one of the candles—for Jeb’s hand, shook it again. He didn’t feel surprised when Jeb tightened his fingers around his—a firm handshake would be rote to him and didn’t necessarily signal particular regard. Then the moment was over, and they both let go and faced forward again. Bruce rested his chin on his palm. He had never said anything to Toby about Mrs. Van Wyck, the disappearing into nothing. This was a pain that surfaced, from time to time. But what he would have said if he had known how—this he was never sure of.

  Bruce’s fingertips curled around the lower part of his face and brushed against his top lip. He thought that they smelled strangely sweet.

  “Good to see you,” he said to Jeb. “Really good.”

  “Right back at you,” Jeb said.

  They watched the girl together, until one or the other of them excused himself to make a trip to the bar.

  AT THE END of that night, Bruce approached the waitress. He told himself that he meant to apologize to her, in case she’d felt harassed. He came upon her standing at the bottom of a back staircase, outside the kitchen. She was talking to a man and a woman, who were leaning into each other, passing a cigarette back and forth. The waitress had one elbow hooked around the newel post of the banister and held a mug of something steaming in her other hand. She stood with her back to him. She laughed at whatever the man had said—a low, gravelly laugh that she was too ready with. He felt he knew that this wasn’t her real laugh, though he had no idea what her real laugh would sound like.