Charisse

Charisse is a close friend of Clare and Henry and the partner of Gomez, whose affection for Clare becomes a source of difficult honesty between the friends. She moves through the story as part of the couple’s everyday circle: sharing games and outings, helping during Clare’s labor, and remaining alongside Clare and Alba after Henry’s death. Her presence combines humor with practical care, while her willingness to speak plainly makes her an important witness to the tensions beneath that circle’s warmth.

Identity and Place in the Family Circle

Charisse appears among Clare’s friends before the story follows her into years of adult friendship with Clare and Henry. At Clare’s wedding, she is one of the bridesmaids, wearing a matching sage-green velvet outfit alongside Alicia, Helen, and Ruth. The friends compare the dye jobs on their shoes and discuss who should catch the bouquet. Helen points out that Charisse is already engaged; Charisse answers that with Gomez, one never knows. The exchange gives her a teasing, unsentimental manner and establishes Gomez as her intended partner, while the wedding places her firmly within Clare’s close circle.

Her friendship continues in the couple’s home and in shared gatherings. On a Friday in February 1995, Charisse, Gomez, Clare, and Henry play a game Gomez and Charisse have invented using a Monopoly set. Called Modern Capitalist Mind-Fuck, it turns questions, points, money, and exploitation into a social game. The episode presents Charisse not just as a guest in Clare and Henry’s life, but as a co-creator of its convivial routines, with the group’s humor shaped by the game’s deliberately sharp premise.

Friendship with Clare and Henry

Charisse’s friendship with Henry is evident in their ease with one another and in the trust involved in their shared activities. When Henry and Clare leave a meeting with Kendrick, Henry is pleased by Kendrick’s response and tells Clare that Kendrick is completely hooked. The scene is brief, but it places Charisse’s friends within the couple’s ongoing efforts to persuade the doctor to investigate Henry’s condition, a serious undertaking framed through the couple’s familiar banter.

Charisse is also part of the practical support surrounding Clare’s pregnancy and delivery. When Clare goes into labor, Henry calls Gomez and Charisse late at night, as Gomez had told them to do regardless of the hour. Gomez answers after the phone rings sixteen times. Fifteen minutes later, he and Charisse help get Clare into Gomez’s Volvo and prepare the car for the trip to the hospital: Charisse runs back inside for garbage bags to cover the seats. The quick response turns their friendship into tangible assistance at a moment when Clare needs to reach medical care.

At the hospital, Henry remains beside Clare as the medical staff attend to her and the fetal monitor indicates that the baby’s heartbeat is very fast. Charisse’s role in the larger birth sequence is part of the circle of people helping Clare through the emergency; the evidence does not place her in the delivery room itself. Her established presence as a dependable friend, however, is echoed later in the hospital, where she sits with Clare while Henry is being treated.

Candor about Gomez and Clare

Charisse becomes the person who tells Henry something he has not understood about Gomez. During a conversation over coffee, she hesitates before explaining that Gomez is in love with Clare. She adds that Clare has told Gomez to give up, while Gomez believes that if he persists long enough, something may happen between them. Charisse’s account makes explicit the contrast between Clare’s rejection and Gomez’s hope, and exposes a tension that politeness might otherwise leave unspoken.

The disclosure is not delivered as gossip for its own sake. Charisse brings it to Henry because she thinks he should know; Henry realizes as the conversation begins that she has been waiting to discuss the situation. Her careful pauses and attention to her coffee cup mark the awkwardness of the subject, while the content itself is direct. In this exchange, her loyalty to the friendship includes a willingness to raise a fact that could unsettle it.

A Continuing Presence After Henry’s Death

Charisse remains close to Clare and Alba in the years after Henry’s death. In 2003, Clare describes spending time with Charisse and Gomez without making Henry the subject of conversation, one of several ways she sometimes enjoys life while he is absent and still welcomes his return. Their friendship therefore offers Clare company that is not defined solely by her marriage or by waiting for Henry.

On New Year’s Eve, Charisse and Gomez arrive at Clare and Henry’s home as preparations are under way. Gomez brings CDs and goes outside to shovel the walks; Charisse takes a large bottle of vodka into the kitchen and explains that they have left their children with their grandmother so the adults can enjoy the evening and their future hangovers in private. She also brings Alba a small manicure set as a Christmas present. The scene places Charisse within the family’s celebrations, attentive both to Clare and to Alba, while retaining the playful, matter-of-fact humor evident in her earlier exchanges.

Years later, Charisse takes Alba and several children roller skating at the Rainbo. Clare arrives early to pick Alba up and waits at Charisse’s house, where Gomez answers the door. On the drive afterward, Charisse asks whether Alba understands that Henry is dead. Clare says that Alba loves her visits with him; when Charisse asks how the arrangement feels for Clare herself, Clare admits that she never sees him and that the visits stir both her sense of unfairness and her longing to hear every detail. Charisse’s question gives Clare room to acknowledge that complicated grief: she listens not only to Alba’s affection for Henry, but also to the pain those encounters leave with Clare. Across the novel, Charisse’s importance lies in that steady friendship—playful in ordinary company, useful in crisis, and perceptive enough to ask what others may leave unsaid.