Union Atlantic Page 0,46

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