He still dreamed of her often, which felt unhealthy and vaguely shameful.
There was something about her, an indomitability of spirit mixed with the vulnerability of a child, that Stone had recognized when he had first met her, during senior year in college. She had been sitting at one of the long dark wooden tables in the dining hall, her elbows resting on the overwaxed, uneven surface, holding a book. Everyone around her was talking and laughing, and she was sitting alone, reading, but not with the pensiveness or detachment you often saw in someone sitting apart from a crowd. She seemed to be enjoying her solitude, lost in it.
She was beautiful. Her blond hair was wavy and unruly; crinkly golden waves sprouted from the part at the middle of her head and just touched her shoulders. Her eyes, which were a spectacular hazel-blue, were spaced a little too far apart, beneath a prominent arched brow. Her jaw was strong and jutted a little, especially when she looked at you skeptically, which was often. When she smiled, which was just as often, long deep dimples emerged in brackets around her mouth. When she sat in the sun, her strong nose freckled.
She was in the dining hall, reading a book on Winthrop Lehman. Charlie could not resist interrupting her – with all the subtlety he could summon – “I wouldn’t put much stock in that biography. I know the guy, and he’s far nicer than that writer makes him out to be.” A cheap line, a cheap tactic, and it didn’t work. She looked at him blandly and replied, “That’s interesting,” and went back to reading.
“No, really,” Stone persisted. “He’s my godfather.”
“Hmm,” she said, politely disbelieving, not bothering to look up this time.
“Are you writing something on him?”
She looked up again and smiled. “A political-science paper. I’d rather not hear anything personal about him. I’m writing a critique.”
“What’s your angle?”
“I think his reputation is overblown. I don’t think he’s a great man at all. I think he was a perfectly ordinary diplomat and wheeler-dealer who happened to have a lot of family money and be in the right place at the right time.” She flashed a smile; there was a space between her front teeth. With impeccable timing, she added, “So you say he’s your godfather?”
A few days later, he managed to talk her into going out for pizza. She arrived in her Yale sweats, thereby wordlessly declaring that it was not really a date, just a study break. They bantered, argued. Each of Stone’s confident proclamations she met with an equal and opposite response, as if deliberately trying to provoke – and then she’d soften it all with a wonderful, heart-melting, endearing demi-smile.
Stone, nervous, found his heart racing. He chipped away at the foil label on the cold wet beer bottle with his thumbnail. He was fixating on, of all things, her complexion, which was milky-white with permanently blushing cheeks, the healthy flush most people get walking outside on a frozen winter day, only she had it all the time.
He walked her to the Gothic archway outside her dorm room, and they stood for a long moment, awkwardly. “Well,” he said, “good night.”
Suddenly she seemed as awkward as he, one long leg turned in front of the other in an unconscious ballerina’s stance. Once again the vulnerable little girl. “Good night,” she said, not moving.
“Thanks,” Stone said.
“Yeah, thanks.”
His heart now hammering, Stone asked, “Can I see your room?” and immediately felt foolish.
“My room?” Her eyes wide.
Stone gave an exaggerated shrug, a goofy smile. He couldn’t stand to leave her.
She took a deep breath, and Stone was startled to see her smile shyly and say in a small, hopeful, knowing voice: “Really?”
And then Stone was in over his head. In a haze of anticipation and amorousness, he leaned forward and kissed her. It took a few seconds, but she kissed back, with a passion that surprised and delighted him.
Every other college student listened to Jefferson Airplane or Strawberry Alarm Clock, but Charlotte put on a scratchy old Bessie Smith record, and they danced in the darkness of her cramped bedroom to the insinuating lyrics of “I Need a Little Sugar.”
They made love several times that night. She craned her soft white neck, twisting her head from side to side, eyes closed, back arched. Her lovely florid cheeks glistened with tears and triumph and sweat, and when she began to come she looked right at him, the first time during their lovemaking that she had had the courage to open her eyes, and right then, at the most intimate moment.
Afterward, in the first months, they made love constantly, it seemed, obsessively. They were inseparable; they lost touch with their friends. In the mornings, they would wake up late, too late for breakfast in the dining hall, and they’d lie nude on her narrow bed and drink instant coffee made in an aluminum hot-pot, scrape butter on English muffins unevenly toasted in the toaster oven she kept under her bed, and make love again.
They spent almost all their time in her dorm room, always in sweatpants, which could drop to the floor with a simple tug of the waist cord. Underneath, Charlotte’s blond triangle was always moist, excited by just his glance.
Stone studied her, majored in Charlotte Harper, intent on learning everything about her. He discovered that she was from a small town in Pennsylvania near Iron City, and both her parents worked in a plastics factory. They were second-generation Poles; “Harper” had been changed from something much longer and unpronounceable.
They weren’t poor, but they were always struggling, and they didn’t understand their daughter Charlotte, who insisted on going to college, when her older sister, Martha, was perfectly content to go right to work after high school in the Department of Motor Vehicles, where she met her husband and immediately produced three children. Charlotte had gone to the University of Pittsburgh but then decided in her sophomore year that she wanted to study history. All the professors she hoped to work with were at Yale, and so she transferred.
He couldn’t stand the idea of being away from her. Even the similarity of their names seemed a happy coincidence, a good omen – although she demanded he never call her Charlie.
She was one of the kindest, yet most fiercely independent people Stone had ever met. When he nervously took her to New York to have lunch with Winthrop Lehman at the Century Club – in effect, introducing to his godfather his girlfriend and the woman he planned to marry – she got into an argument with the living legend about American foreign policy – and then later told Charlie that she actually liked the old fart. Lehman, it was clear, was charmed by this lovely, feisty woman. As they left the club, Lehman took her hand and planted a dry, mandarin kiss upon her cheek, something Stone had never seen him do to anyone else.
At graduation, her parents met Charlie’s father. There were long silences at lunch. Her parents, simple people, were intimidated by this Harvard professor. But Charlotte had a way of drawing people into exuberant conversation, making them connect. She took to Alfred Stone instantly, and after maybe half an hour they were laughing and telling jokes, and Charlie sat there watching, amazed. Sometimes Stone felt that Charlotte’s magnetism was like the pull of a planet whose gravity is a hundred times ours.
Leaving the restaurant, Alfred Stone put his arm around his son’s shoulder and muttered, “You’d better marry this girl before someone else does.”
The next night. Stone asked her to marry him. She looked at him with that same you-can’t-possibly-mean-me, little-girl look Stone had first seen under that Gothic archway near her room, and said, “Really?”