Losing Charlotte by Heather Clay Page A

remembered the building door a couple of beats before it closed and locked behind him, and whirled around to hold it open with the palm of his hand. He kicked off one of his shoes, used it to prop the door, and hopped on one foot down the cold brownstone steps to Charlotte. He opened his arms to her.
    “Welcome to your house,” he said.
    She leaned into him. “Thank you,” she mumbled into his shirt.
    Bruce wanted to hold her here forever, his nose in her hair.
    “I almost had a nervous breakdown this morning,” she said, still mumbling.
    “Oh,” Bruce said. He blinked. He didn’t exactly want to hear about it, not now. “Let’s sit here on the steps,” he said. “You really drove?”
    Charlotte wiped at her nose with the sleeve of her T-shirt. She looked at him, then moved to sit down beside him. “Just for a few blocks,” she said. She began to smile again. “It was great. I sat between them at first, they were letting me downshift, and I screwed it up, you could hear my stuff sliding around in the back and the thing almost stalled, but then I begged them to just let me try driving, so they did. The steering wheel on those trucks is gigantic. It’s up to my chin.”
    Bruce laughed. He knew that this would become one of Charlotte’s stories, the one she might tell next, when they found themselves among new friends around someone’s kitchen island, or drinking on a roof. The Israelis might become skinny Russians; a hand might be placed on her bare knee; the wheel might become so big that all three of them had to turn it together; the truck might jump onto a curb. He had learned early not to question the evolving details of Charlotte’s tales in front of others, though exactitudewas somewhere in his nature, and it took willpower not to mind a little.
    “I didn’t get to bed until four,” Charlotte said. She reached for the cuff of his shirt, began to tug the small button at his wrist.
    “You were packing until that late?” Bruce asked. He touched her back. He felt a tiny thrill; perhaps she’d brought everything, perhaps she possessed more than he’d realized. He wanted all of her objects in his house, even the useless ones.
    “Well, I really finished up this morning. But I was on the phone for hours last night,” she said. She withdrew her hand from his cuff and placed it over her face. “I am so tired, love.”
    “Why?” Bruce said. What he’d really meant to ask was: Who? Who were you talking to?
    He didn’t have to ask. “I feel like I called everyone I know. I called my sister, but she didn’t answer the phone. I’m sure she knew it was me. Then I called Stephen. Remind me never to call him again in the middle of the night. Not that I plan to.”
    Charlotte scratched at the gritty swath of step between them with her fingernails. Bruce resisted an impulse to cover her hand with his, to still it. Stephen was one of the old boyfriends. An actor whom Bruce had met. He had met so many people already. The caterer Charlotte staffed for, Helen from Trinidad, her temporary coworkers, the waves of friends that seemed to shift by the week, according to both Charlotte’s ideas about them and certain of their given characteristics: stamina, thick skin, ego, drama. From what Bruce had observed, it was important either to possess an exaggerated surplus of these qualities or not to have them at all if you expected Charlotte to keep choosing you, talk about you at parties, cook you supper, call you in the middle of the night. He wasn’t sure yet whether he was blessed or doomed because of where he fell.
    “You know that I used to go out with him, right? God, I hate that phrase: go out.”
    “Of course. You told me all about that.”
    Bruce reached down and began to rub his exposed foot. It was cold out here. He needed patience when Charlotte forgot things,forgot bits of conversation they’d had, things they had confided in each other.
    “I did tell you. I remember. Well, it doesn’t matter,”