look past her family for the kind of affirmation she needed, had always needed, in order to breathe. The money the farm started to bring in thrust her parents further into a world Charlotte viewed as phony and meaningless; though Knox and Robbie were still young enough never to have known anything different, Charlotte recognized the speed with which things were changing. Finally, she’d wanted out, and on some level, it seemed, they’d let her out, which Charlotte felt was right and unforgivable at once. This was the Cliffs Notes account as Bruce understood it, the synopsis Charlotte had arrived at after years spent in therapy and engaged in the burial of her former self under a series of East Village walk-ups, temporary jobs, and pointless left turns. Then came Bruce. He was part of the story, too. He was supposed to be the happy ending.
Of course, this was a story with the blood drained out of it. But Bruce was glad to possess something boiled down that he could invoke at the sight of all that insane beauty on his visits to the farm, and the warm enthusiasm, the trust, really, with which Mina and Ben had taken him in. Otherwise, he would have little idea why Charlotte scheduled so few visits home or could be drawn so quickly into an argument behind the closed doors of her childhood room during their rare visits—her room with its lone Gauguin poster still pinned to the corkboard wall, its desk drawers filled with school ephemera and murky, undated Polaroids of Charlotte in Day-Glo makeup, everything preserved so carefully that entering it, for Bruce, was akin to stumbling into a Pharaoh’s tomb.
He had no idea what Knox knew, or thought, about his marriage to her sister. He suspected not very much, on both counts. She’d always struck him as someone who remained resolutely single—like certain bachelors did, refusing to wade all the way into the pond of human incident, full of mess and danger and caterwaul as it was. This refusal made sense to him, though he was incapable of it himself. He respected it, even gracefully accepted the judgment inherent in it. Of course, Knox did have that boyfriend. A nice guy; Bruce had met him a couple of times. At the moment, he was having trouble remembering his name.
He reached the vending machine. He stood in front of it, suddenly baffled as to what he’d thought he wanted. There was a machine for drinks of all colors and caffeination levels and degrees of sugar content—flavored waters, sports drinks, sodas—and another for food: cellophane-wrapped cakes, bags of chips, candy, jerky, small boxes of cereal. He slid his hand into the pocket of his jeans and jangled the change there. He didn’t even know if he had enough. The sodas here cost two dollars apiece. He’d left his wallet in the backpack beside the chair, the backpack that he’d balled a receiving blanket into, that held a portable bottle of hand sanitizer, his phone, a work file that he couldn’t fathom ever cracking again but nonetheless hadn’t removed. (He needed to call Susan, his boss, to find out how many weeks it was acceptable for him to take. Two, three more? However many he needed? Though the firm was small, devoid of the cold, swinging-dick culture that characterized larger shops, it was a business, and he followed a lot of companies. They wouldn’t keep paying him forever.) He swallowed against a faint taste of bile at the back of his throat. He wouldn’t think about anything now.
THE TURKEY BASTING hadn’t happened in the hospital but in the OB’s office, all of two blocks away from here. Charlotte had been given a week’s cycle of Clomid and had the moment of her ovulation zeroed in on definitively the day before. When they saw each other in the waiting room at the appointed time, they laughed! They were still young! They were fine! They’d fallen into the hands of professionals in the nick of time! Somehow, they both recognized hilarity in the moment, and in each other’s relief. The source of their inability to conceive still hadn’t been diagnosed; still, Bruce privately suspected himself as the reason for their problem. He wondered if Charlotte suspected him, too, though she’d assured him she didn’t, that it was surely her fault if it was anyone’s, she was probably defective, marked, the star of their infertility show.