In Love Again (10 page)

Claire tried to put together the fragments of her memories, how her mother had called so early that last day and said she was in Nice and it was imperative for Claire to come meet her. According to her mother, there had been some unexpected royal to-do in Monaco and Claire needed to accompany her.

Claire had gone to look for Ben down the hall, in the small hotel in Antibes where they were all staying. His roommate was curled up with his girlfriend, still mostly asleep. Ben and Claire had never slept in the same room, but she’d kissed him good-night just before dawn and promised to say good-bye before she left.

“Where’s Ben?” Claire asked quietly.

“He went for a run,” Steve croaked. “Before he left, he said to tell you, ‘Have a nice life.’”

Claire paled. “Oh. Okay. Well, I’m off then. Great meeting you and all that. Tell Ben I came to say good-bye, would you?”

“Sure, Princess. I’ll tell him.”

Claire narrowed her eyes at Steve, wondering for the hundredth time that summer why he had taken such a dislike to her. “Okay. Bye, Steve.”

“Bye, Claire.”

She pulled the door shut gently and went back to her room. Her friend Sally, with whom she’d supposedly been traveling, was packing up her bag, but paused to look at Claire.

“Was Ben there, sweetie?”

“No. Just that jerk Steve. I suppose it’s my own fault.”

“You should have told Ben you were already engaged, you mean? Bull. You had every right to have a little summer fling. And it’s not like you slept with him or anything. You shouldn’t even have told him you were engaged.”

Claire sat down on her unmade bed with a heavy thump. “He was so angry last night, Sal. I couldn’t quite account for it.”

“You couldn’t account for the fact that he’d fallen madly in love with you?” Sally was folding a T-shirt and putting it into her bag.

“That’s preposterous. We only knew each other for a few months.”

“You sound like your mother. It only takes a second or two to know you like someone. And only a few days—or even a few seconds more—to know you might love them. It’s a spark and all that. Haven’t you ever read anything about love at first sight? You and Ben were gaga over each other. Everyone saw it except you, Claire.”

Claire wasn’t going to cry. She stood and began packing methodically, ignoring the weight against her chest and the pressure behind her eyes that made her feel old and tired. Her life was supposed to be just beginning, so full of promise, and instead it felt…over.

Sarah’s voice across the telephone line snapped Claire back to the present. “You never told him you were engaged to Freddy? That whole summer? Until the last night?”

“It was a summer fling. I wanted to be free of…all that Freddy business. My own version of
An Affair to Remember
, I guess. I didn’t want to be promised to anyone or spoken for or what have you. I just wanted to be Claire Heyworth. Was that so wrong?”

Sarah sighed, mumbled something impatient to Devon, then started to speak again. “It kind of was wrong, but not in the way you mean. It was wrong of you to get engaged when you were seventeen and married when you were eighteen. What were you thinking? What was your
mother
thinking?”

“Oh, Sarah. I am simply not going to have this discussion. I was a good daughter. Obedient. You know me well enough by now. I thought if I did what was expected of me…well, I just thought I was part of a system, part of something larger than my silly likes and dislikes.”

“Well,” Sarah said. “Now I’m the one who wants to cry.”

“Don’t. I mean, if Freddy hadn’t been…a jerk, it would have all been quite lovely. Isn’t there some statistic about how we all have about a fifty-fifty chance at marital happiness, whether in an arranged marriage in rural India or speed dating on the Upper East Side?”

“Oh, Claire!” Sarah was trying to laugh, but Claire could hear the tenderness in her voice. “That’s probably technically true. But what about your own
feelings
?”

The silence fell between them again. “I didn’t know my own feelings,” Claire confessed. “I didn’t know I had a right to them, I guess.”

“Oh, dear. I know what you mean. But, still. Oh, dear.” Sarah mumbled something to Devon again, then finished speaking to Claire. “Your puppy of a brother is desperate for my attention. You will figure this all out, Claire. You obviously liked this Ben character right off the bat when you met him in the south of France all those years ago. Why not just try to be friends with him? Just call him—it will be much easier over the phone—you won’t have to contend with all those muscles and smoky glances.”

Claire actually giggled.

Sarah continued. “Good. You sound much better. A good cry and maybe even a laugh. Have a great day, sweetie. And don’t make me wait another week for a phone call.”

“Okay, Sarah. Say hi to Devon for me. Bye, honey.” She hung up the phone and stared at it in her hand. Could she possibly muster the courage to call Ben? Of course she could. As Sarah had pointed out, it would be much easier to talk to him on the phone. It was all that physical immediacy that had made her so awkward yesterday, or that’s what Claire tried to tell herself.

She got up and made a pot of coffee in Bron’s tiny kitchen. While the water burbled and began to brew, Claire opened the folder for the Litchfield house project.
The Pinckney project
, she thought with mild irritation. She flipped to the inside flap where she’d put the address and telephone of the property and took a deep breath. She checked the time and saw that it was after nine and probably not too early to call. Ben seemed like the type who was up early anyway.

Claire pressed the numbers carefully and took another deep breath. The phone rang several times then the answering machine picked up. Simultaneous relief and disappointment came over Claire in a quick wave. She tried to stay calm and began speaking after the long beep.

“Hello, Ben. I just wanted to call and, oh I don’t know, apologize, I guess. This is Claire, by the way. I was so taken aback to see you after all these years, I think I may have come off—”

The phone screeched loudly and Claire pulled it away from her ear.

“Claire? Is that you?”

He sounded sort of breathless, and his voice right in her ear felt far more intimate than Claire had anticipated. Her breathing quickened.

“Yes. Ben, listen, it was so awkward yesterday—”

“Claire, I feel terrible. I just, I don’t know what came over me to be so rude. I don’t even have any excuse. I was just…I don’t know what to say.”

Claire breathed and made a mental note to thank Sarah James Heyworth for the rest of her life, every single day. “Oh, Ben. I’m so relieved. I was feeling so awful the whole drive home. I am just a mess, if you must know.”

“A mess?” He sounded like he was settling in. “Can you talk for a few minutes? Is this a good time?”

Claire’s stomach flipped. A few minutes? She could talk to him forever. His voice was so deep and optimistic. Tentative, but hopeful. “Of course. I called you, remember?”

“Ouch,” Ben said quietly. “I swear I was waiting until I thought you’d be awake and then I was going to call and apologize—”

Claire laughed. “No! I didn’t mean it like,
I called you, damn it!
I just meant, I have plenty of time to talk, because I called…I mean, oh, I don’t know what I mean. I was just so happy to see you yesterday and then I got all nervous and I tend to act a bit…cool…apparently.”

It was Ben’s turn to laugh. “Oh, Claire. Listen to you.” He sounded so happy to listen to Claire, and her hand shook a little as she poured the freshly brewed coffee into the white mug.

“I know. I’m a shambles.”

“You must be joking. If you’re a shambles, the rest of us are catastrophic.”

She laughed, a wonderful release of a laugh, deep and satisfying. “God, I’ve missed you,” she let slip through her laughter. Then they both fell silent. Oh, dear. Why had she said that? What a horribly inappropriate, overly intimate—

“Oh, Claire, you have no idea,” he blurted. “I never knew what happened to you. I came back to the hotel in Antibes, and Steve told me you’d popped your head into our room to let us know you were leaving. I couldn’t believe it.”

“You were so angry the night before. I didn’t think you’d want to see me. Ever again, really.”

She could hear the hiss of Ben’s exhale. “I think letting you go without a fight might be the greatest regret of my life.”

Claire almost dropped the coffee mug on the white tile floor. “Ben. What a sweet thing to say.” She had to get this new upbeat…friendship…on the right track. She wanted to be around Ben, just to be near him, to sit at the folding table and laugh and be his friend. Was it even possible? “Do you think we might be friends? Now that we’re so much older and wiser.”

Ben hesitated, and Claire worried she’d pushed too hard. Then she tried to remember Sarah’s advice, that Claire’s idea of pushy was the rest of the world’s idea of humble solicitude.

Holding the chipped blue-and-white mug in his left hand and the cordless phone in his right, Ben weighed the pros and cons of being friends with Claire Heyworth. Was it even possible? When the mere thought of her got him hard. Like right now. The sound of her voice worked on him like an erotic caress. He’d practically torn the pantry door off to get to the phone in time to interrupt her voice message. “Friends. What a concept. I think we might.”

She sounded relieved as she exhaled into the phone. He wanted so much more, but if that’s all she had to offer, he’d take it. She was probably madly in love with the marquess, after twenty years of marital bliss.

“So. What do friends do?” she asked, with that optimistic innocence that threw him right back to their time together in France. Her eyes had been so bright. She had been so easily amazed. At first, he’d thought she was putting him on. His backpacking buddy Steve had thought she was a frigid tease. Ben had thought she was an angel. He still did, come to think of it.

“Oh, I don’t know. How long are you in New York? We could go to dinner or a movie.”

“How long? What do you mean? I live here.”

“Oh. I thought you lived in a castle…I mean…I thought—”

“Ben. My marriage is over. My husband absconded with my entire fortune. If such a thing still existed, he’d be going to debtor’s prison. Unless he can find more of my money to pay for his sins.”

“Wow. I had no idea. I’m so sorry, Claire.”

“I…I don’t even know if I’m sorry or not. I mean…it was pretty awful…”

Then why do you only want to be friends?
Ben wanted to yell. Instead, he asked her to come hear him play in the East Village that night. “It’s just a small jazz band in a dirty old bar. But it might be fun. Friendly-like.”

She smiled through the words. “I’d love that. What time?”

They finished making plans, and Ben said they could grab a bite to eat after his set, which usually ended around nine. He hung up the phone and thought maybe life wasn’t as dismal as it had seemed the night before. A chance to remedy all those years of what-ifs and what-went-wrongs. He could be a friend. In fact, Ben would be the best friend Claire ever had.

He spent the rest of the day going through all the items that he’d pretended he didn’t have time to think about when he’d been so rude to Claire the day before. He looked at baseboard samples, paint samples, doorknobs, and hinges. He made tons of notes that he would send to Claire’s office Monday morning, so she could move forward on the project. He was grateful they had something physical to work on together. Like friends. Maybe eventually it wouldn’t feel like an approximation. Or maybe Nora Ephron was right, and all men not-so-secretly wanted to sleep with all their female friends. Maybe it was just pheromones. Ben could deal with that. He wasn’t a teenager after all.

The thought of being a teenager made him think of Claire, which made him hard as a lead pipe, which led him back up to his bedroom to rub one out, then back to his to-do list before driving back to the city that afternoon. He put his car in his Upper East Side garage and went to his apartment to drop off his weekend bag. He took a quick look around his place before he picked up his guitar, wondering what Claire would think of his bachelor pad. He shook his head at all of his dreaming about the future and was on the number six subway heading downtown with plenty of time to be at the club by seven.