forgiven me, too. And yet if I could call him, if I could make things all right, the relief would be so great that perhaps it was a risk worth taking. In the bathroom, I washed my face and brushed my teeth, and then I tweezed my eyebrows a bit, just to occupy myself. I went back into the bedroom and changed into my sleeveless cotton nightgown. It was ten-twenty, I saw, and I decided that I wouldn’t call him before eleven o’clock. I wouldn’t even make a definite plan to call him until then; I would leave open the possibility, and if I could restrain myself, I would, but if I couldn’t, at eleven I’d think through what I wanted to say.
I lay on my side, with the light on and the window open, and a warm breeze blew in. I tried not to cry. Who cared if I had to sit through speeches about taxes for the next fifty years? Perhaps I could learn to hold a novel in my purse at such an angle that no one would observe me reading it. No, it wouldn’t be a narrowing, a stricture, to become Charlie’s wife; whenever I was with him, my life felt dense with possibilities, fuller and noisier and far more fun. I had never been a person who believed life was an adventure. To me, it was more a series of obligations, some of which could be quite rewarding and some of which you just gritted your teeth for. But now I saw the case for larks and mischief. Here I was being offered my own personal tour guide in the country of good fortune, and I was stalling as I had once stalled with Andrew Imhof. What was wrong with me?
I nearly leaped from the bed, I hurried into the kitchen, I’d lifted the receiver and begun dialing and then my buzzer rang, and when I flew downstairs and opened the front door, we made eye contact, and without either of us saying anything, we were hugging tightly, and he said, “If you don’t want me to run again after this, I won’t. Hell, I don’t even need to run now,” and I said, “Of course you should.”
“I promise I won’t try to brainwash you,” he said. “You can vote for Fidel Castro and I won’t bat an eye.”
Although I hadn’t been crying, when I laughed, it was the kind of deep, gaspy laughter that follows tears.
“Can we decide there won’t be ugliness between us?” He was looking down at me, and he set his palms on my cheeks. “Because I can’t stand it, I really can’t.”
I still was giggly with nervous relief. “Charlie, I’m so sorry.”
“Obviously, we’re still getting to know each other,” he said. “No doubt some folks will say we rushed this. But I’ve never felt more sure of anything. Getting to know you better, the idea of spending all the coming weeks and years together—there’s nothing I look forward to more.”
“Charlie, I do know you’ve been raised for this life, and I think it’s honorable. You believe in making the world better, and I admire that.” As I said it, it became true. There was a skepticism that I surrendered in this moment, and the surrender was long-lasting; it was practically permanent. There is such a thing as lively debate, and Charlie and I weren’t cut out for it—so limited was our appetite for rancor that any taste of it was acrid. We could agree, or we could avoid discussion, and I was good at both; by generation, gender, and geography, and above all, by temperament, I was good at agreement and good at avoidance.
If I were to tell the story of my life (I have repeatedly declined the opportunity), and if I were being honest (I would not be, of course—one never is), I would probably feel tempted to say that standing that night just inside my apartment, me in my nightgown and Charlie in jeans and a red shirt, I made a choice: I chose our relationship over my political convictions, love over ideology. But again, this would be false honesty; it would once more contribute to a narrative arc that is satisfying rather than accurate. My convictions were internal—I’d rarely seen the point in expressing them aloud, and if I had, my entire political outlook could have been summarized by the statement that I felt bad for poor people and was glad abortion had become legal. And so I didn’t
Charlie was grinning.
“What?” I said.
“I just realized.” His nostrils flared a little. “We get to have our first makeup sex.”
I HAD BOUGHT a basil plant in a small terra-cotta pot to give as a hostess present to Charlie’s mother, but we were less than halfway to Halcyon when I began to question my selection. This second-guessing occurred right around the time I came to understand that Halcyon, Wisconsin, was not, as I had previously assumed based on Charlie’s passing references, a town. Rather, Halcyon was a row of houses along a seven-hundred-acre eastern stretch of the peninsula that was Door County, and in order to own one of the houses, you had to belong to the Halcyon Club. Apparently, you became a member by being born into one of five families: the Niedleffs, the Higginsons, the deWolfes, the Thayers, and the Blackwells. Charlie’s first kiss, he explained cheerfully, had been with Christy Niedleff, when he was twelve and she was fourteen; Sarah Thayer, the matriarch of the Thayer family, was the sister of Hugh deWolfe, the patriarch of the deWolfes; Hugh deWolfe and Harold Blackwell, Charlie’s father, had been roommates at Princeton; Emily Higginson was the godmother of Charlie’s brother Ed; and those were about all the intramural details I managed to retain, though there were many, many more, and Charlie shared them with increasing zest the closer we got to our destination. The families had purchased the land together in 1943, he said; they each had their own house, their own dock, and everyone took their meals at a jointly owned and maintained club. Oh, and that weekend was the Halcyon Open, the long-standing tennis competition for which a silver trophy vase sat on the mantel in the clubhouse and on whose surface the men’s singles and doubles champions’ names were engraved each year. Charlie had won singles in 1965, 1966, and 1974, and he and his brother Arthur had won doubles in 1969.
“You eat
“The peanut-butter no-bake bars are out of this world,” Charlie said. “And the apple pie, it makes you proud to be an American.”
“But who cooks? Do you take turns?”
“No, no, there’s a staff.” His voice was casual—naturally, there was a staff—and I tried to absorb this information quickly and invisibly. Just as I did not think I ought to apologize for having been raised middle-class, I did not think Charlie ought to apologize for or feel self-conscious about his privilege. “Mainly, it’s Ernesto and his wife, Mary,” he was saying. “Just terrific people, one of those couples that fight like cats and dogs but you know they’re crazy for each other. And they always hire a couple of kids from town. One niece of theirs, damned if I can remember her name, but she was—I guess
She’s bending over to set down the French toast every morning, and my eyeballs are popping out of my head. My brothers and I were in pig heaven, let me tell you, until Maj caught wind of what was going on and told Mary she had to buy the niece a better-fitting uniform.” Charlie tapped his fingers against the steering wheel; he was in an exceptionally good mood. “What there used to be on Labor Day weekend,” he said, “and I guess no one wants to put in the time anymore, but there were annual musicals. Walt Thayer would play the piano, Maj and Mrs. deWolfe would write the lyrics, and I swear I believed I’d have a career on Broadway, which practically gave Maj a coronary, as you can imagine.”
