Avery followed Charlie’s eyes to the now empty tree. The leaves glowed electric green in the evening light.
“I wish I had your mother’s God too.”
Charlie nodded thoughtfully.
“If I did, I definitely would have spent a lot less money on cocaine,” he said.
Avery barked with laughter.
“True. And I probably wouldn’t have shot heroin into my groin,” she said.
Charlie glanced at her in surprise.
“Really? I can’t picture that. Or were you one of those heroin chic chicks?”
Avery colored ever so slightly. As far as she knew, no one had ever thought of her as chic at doing anything, heroin or otherwise.
“I lived in a commune for a while with a group of libertarian Marxists and anarchists and then in a parking lot in the Tenderloin. I guess it was meant to be some kind of twenty-four-hour protest against the system, but we mostly just shot up and gave each other head lice.”
Charlie laughed and the sound was like a smooth banister she could slide down to another floor, another life.
“And did it work?” he asked. “Did you feel free of the chains of capitalism?”
“Mostly, I just felt itchy,” she said.
“How long did that last?”
“The itching?”
“That life.”
“Until I was twenty-three and got clean.”
“So you have…”
He was fishing for her age, but she let him have it.
“Ten years next month,” she said.
Twenty-three plus ten. She was thirty-three years old, had been sober now for longer than she ever drank or used drugs. But she didn’t feel sober at all. She felt lost.
“Wow, that is…sensational,” Charlie said, and the word in his mouth sounded like something smooth and delicious, like a fruit from a foreign country she had yet to try.
“I don’t know what it is yet,” said Avery. “But it’s definitely something.”
At the tube station they exchanged numbers and an awkward, lingering hug. When she got home, she went straight to her study to search his name. She was surprised to find there were dozens of articles about his work and videos of his readings; she had taken him for an amateur, but he was just that rarest of things: humble. Checking over her shoulder to make sure Chiti wasn’t nearby, she pressed play on the first video that came up. It felt illicit, as though she was watching porn, not a poetry reading.
He was standing in front of a packed crowd at one of the East London bars Avery never went to, the audience’s faces upturned to him. They were all slim and young and able to sit cross-legged on the floor without issue. She could see one woman wearing a vintage military beret. Charlie looked relaxed in a red hoodie and jeans standing above the others, everyone’s eyes on him. Then he began to speak, without ceremony, without self-consciousness, reciting from memory with a half smile on his face that seemed to suggest that yes, he was there, earnestly taking part in this ancient social tradition of oral poetry, but he was also lightly laughing at himself for being there, laughing at all of them, at the whole enterprise. As he spoke he flitted seamlessly between gravity and levity, the cosmic and the comic, never landing in one place too long.
By the time the poem ended, Avery didn’t feel that she wanted him, exactly; she wanted to be him. She wanted to make a bed in the chamber of his chest and live there. She wanted to speak and have his words come out of her mouth. She wanted to be a man onstage with a woman in a beret staring at her like she had just invented language. She wanted to see the world as he did and make it into an offering.
The next day, Charlie texted her that he was going to a meeting at six that evening, and Avery answered immediately that she would meet him there. It was the earliest she had left work in months; she often stayed in the office until after eight p.m., then took more work home with her to look at after dinner. Chiti had long ago accepted this and sometimes even scheduled clients that late herself, ostensibly ones who, like Avery, struggled with work boundaries.
But they spent enough time together, Avery told herself. They took weekend walking tours in the Lake District and went to dinner regularly at the Italian place at the top of the high street where the pasta came baked in tinfoil and the host always brought them a complimentary slab of tiramisu. But Avery had not left work early to spend time with Chiti in a long time, and it was this, more than anything else, that nagged her as she walked to the church. Then she entered the meeting and saw Charlie sitting coolly in the last row, one arm slung over the back of a chair he was saving for her, and she stopped thinking about anything at all.
“Hey, American,” he said.
“Hey, poet.”
He offered her the copy of the Twelve and Twelve the group was reading from that week. They shared the book, heads bowed close together, following along as one by one each person read a passage. AA had often left Avery feeling like she was in school again, the reading aloud, the Big Book studies, the step work with a sponsor that felt so similar to homework. She loved the way meetings always started and ended on time, each beginning with the familiar preamble and ending with the same prayer recited as a group. After years of chaos and turbulence, it felt safe, structured—which was, she supposed, the point.
But now, sitting next to Charlie, she really did feel like a schoolgirl again, the hot flush of a crush creeping into her cheeks as she inhaled the scent of smoke and a musk that was simply male wafting off his skin. At closing, when they formed a circle, and she slipped her hand into his cool, dry palm, Avery felt something she had not felt in a long time: a frisson of desire.
Later that week, she met Charlie at another meeting. Lucky was arriving from Paris that evening, and she knew she should go straight home after work to meet her, but it felt so good, for once, to not do what she was supposed to do. And, if she was honest, she wanted an excuse to be out of the house. Chiti had promptly started looking at sperm donor websites online after their conversation on Nicky’s anniversary, happily peppering Avery with life-altering questions with the blithe breeziness of someone asking what she wanted for dinner—Did she have a preference on the donor’s race? Height? Did she want to know where they went to college?—while Avery felt like the air was slowly being siphoned out of the room.
She met him in the basement of a church in Belsize Park at a meditation meeting where they discussed the eleventh step. Avery opened her eyes during the meditation to find him watching her with his calm, still gaze. At first, she’d attempted to make light of it and pulled a silly face to make him laugh, but he had continued regarding her with serene composure. Eventually, she stilled, too, and they sat like that, each looking into the other’s eyes in a silence that seemed to reach for eternity. Only when the timer went off and the room sprang back to life with the usual sighs and shuffles did their eyes break away from each other. As the secretary read from the script, Avery glanced down into her lap, overcome suddenly by the desire to shake herself out like a wet dog or hoot with laughter or stretch her mouth into a scream, something to release the intensity of the past handful of minutes. Her entire body was buzzing with a new electricity. Chemistry, she thought with wonder. Impossible to force or fake. Inexplicable and undeniable. Who knew why she had it with Charlie? She only knew that she did.
He was walking her back toward Hampstead after the meeting when she turned to him.
“I watched some of your readings online,” she said.
Charlie raised his eyebrows in surprise.
“You looked me up?”
“Just doing my due diligence. I am a lawyer, after all.”
“What did you think?”
