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,