Lost and Wanted(87)

“Mine, too, for more banal reasons, I think. They’re just set in their ways.”

“But there’s not a lot of romance,” Neel suggested, turning to look at me directly. His mouth was beautiful, too, the generous lower lip. Between the sex and the talking, we stayed awake most of the night. We agreed that we should have as much sex as possible now, since that wasn’t the kind of thing that was going to improve by the time we were ready for our second marriages.





16.


When we went downstairs late the next morning, Charlie was already up. She had made coffee, and there was even a Globe and a bag of fresh doughnuts on the counter.

“Gloucester has the best powdered-sugar doughnuts on the planet,” she said. “Little-known fact.”

She didn’t tease us or make a big deal out of what had clearly happened, for which I was grateful. Because of her long relationship with Kwesi, there had been a lot of mornings when I was the third wheel; being a part of every aspect of each other’s lives felt natural to us then.

Sun streamed into the kitchen, but frigid air seeped in around the kitchen door. A thermometer mounted on the window frame outside read seventeen degrees. We sat at Aunt Penny’s kitchen table, where a wooden boat held a stack of paper napkins folded to form a sail.

“Penny loves all this kitschy stuff,” Charlie said, moving the boat to the counter to make room for our mugs of coffee and the paper.

“I used to be so embarrassed about my mom’s things,” Neel said. “She loved stuff like that boat, but she also had a lot of religious knickknacks. She used to have a shrine in the corner of their bedroom, when I was little: just a framed poster with a brass bell and a couple of candles. Sometimes she would put flowers in front of it, or a rice ball or some ghee. I always used to close the door before my brother and I had playdates—I was worried our friends would see it.”

“Does she still have it?”

“No,” Neel said. “And I kind of miss it. I get the feeling the temple is more of a social thing for them now.”

“It’s the same with my parents,” Charlie said.

“They had a shrine to the goddess Lakshmi in the bedroom?”

Charlie giggled. “I mean with church. Except my dad was the one who started out more religious.”

I liked the way they were joking together. In my mind I’d already moved ahead to the stage in which Neel spent enough time in our apartment that Charlie would feel comfortable wearing her pajamas in front of him. That morning she was fully dressed in a sweater and jeans, and even wearing a little makeup. It was her public self she was presenting; at first I thought that was only because she and Neel didn’t yet know each other well.

    Charlie cupped her hands around her mug, warming them, and leaned forward in a conspiratorial way.

“I have an announcement to make.”

“Uh oh,” I said. I thought she was still joking.

“I’m giving up my thesis.”

“Charlie!”

“No, listen. I thought about it a ton last night. I’m totally decided.”

“What were you writing about?” Neel asked.

“Choderlos de Laclos.”

“He wrote Dangerous Liaisons,” I told him, but Neel wasn’t familiar even with the movie.

“See?” Charlie said. “Laclos is totally irrelevant.”

“I wouldn’t go by me,” Neel said, and for a moment I was distracted by the way he looked that morning, his hair still wild from the salt water and the night we’d just spent, the line of his jaw, his pale fingernails—all these parts of him were suddenly known to me in a way they hadn’t been before.

“I’ll tell you one thing,” Charlie said. “Ask anyone in L.A. how a twenty-one-year-old Harvard student should spend her last year of absolute freedom—finishing an undergraduate-level paper about an eighteenth-century French novelist, or writing a spec script for Law & Order—and I know what they’d tell you.”

“Do you want to act, or write?” Neel asked.

“Both, I hope.” Charlie pulled her bare feet up to the seat of Aunt Penny’s Shaker chair, and looked suddenly younger than usual. “I don’t really know. But you’re supposed to go out there with something finished.”

“Maybe you should go ‘out there’ for a little longer than a spring break, before you up and move,” I said.

“I loved L.A. even before I visited you there,” Charlie said. “Maybe because it seems like the total opposite of Boston. In any case, it has to be better than clawing my way up in academia, toward the aspirational goal of a living wage.”

    “Best case,” Neel agreed. “Not that you’d be doing it for the money.”

I felt suddenly annoyed. “Her tutor thinks her thesis is the best one he’s advised in years,” I told him.

Charlie gave me a look. “For what that’s worth.”

“You’ll graduate without honors if you don’t turn in the thesis.”

Charlie put on an expression of mock horror. “I didn’t think of that—how am I going to survive out there in the real world without two or three Latin words on my diploma?” She turned to Neel, as if she expected him to be more sensible. “I even talked to Penny about it last night. My parents are going to flip, but she’ll support me. And I know it’s the right decision.”