Where the God of Love Hangs Out: Fiction (3 page)

“What can I say?”

“He makes you feel so young?” David sang. “He makes you feel like spring has sprung, songs must be sung? Like that?”

“No. You don’t have to be ugly about it. I think … I make him feel alive.”

David shook his head. “I’m sure you do. That’s what these things are for.”

Clare looked out the living room window and counted three women pushing strollers, four boys smoking cigarettes, seven bags of garbage.

“Don’t bring him again.”

“I get it,” Clare said. “I’m sorry.”

“You’re not listening to me. Don’t do this.”

“All
right.”

William walked in to see Uncle David whispering in Clare’s ear and Clare pulling on her coat. William would rather have danced naked in a Greyhound bus station, he would rather have danced naked wearing a big pink party hat and matching pink boots, than stay another minute in Clare’s uncle’s apartment.

The men shook hands again and Clare kissed her uncle on the cheek, and he patted her face. They didn’t like to fight.

In the car William said, “What was that for?”

“I thought you’d like each other.”

“You embarrassed him,” William said, and he thought it was just like her to make that perfectly decent old man meet her lover and force him—not that she ever thought she forced anything upon anyone—to betray Charles by saying nothing or to betray Clare, which of course he would never do. It was just exactly like Clare to act as if it’d been a pleasant visit under normal circumstances.

William dropped Clare off at the university parking lot and drove back to Boston. She watched him pull away, the gray roof silver from the halogen street lamps, the inside brightened for just a second by the green face of his phone and the deep yellow flare of his lighter.

At four o’clock, William takes the round of pills Isabel left in a shot glass by the kitchen sink. At five, he falls asleep, and Clare reads their newspaper and then William’s old
Economists
. At six, while William snores in his recliner, she calls Charles to say that William is under the weather, Isabel is still on duty with her mother, and she, Clare, will stay overnight with William. As she talks, Clare gets her sweater out of the dining room and kicks her shoes into the rattan basket in the front hall.

“Don’t kill him,” Charles says. Clare is not famous for her bedside manner.

“He’s a pain in the ass,” Clare says, and it’s not just her faint reflexive wish to throw Charles, and everyone, off the track. Isabel and Charles and all of their combined children could walk through the house right now, looking for trouble, and there’d be no sign, no scent, no stray, mysterious thread, of anything except an old, buckling friendship.

William snorts and wakes up, his hair wild and waving like silver palm fronds. He looks like he might have had a bad dream, and Clare smiles to comfort him. He looks at her as if he’s never seen her, or never seen her like this, which isn’t so; he’s seen her a hundred times just like this, seated across from him deep in thought, flinging her legs over the arm of the chair to get comfortable.

“Oh, here you are,” he says.

Clare drops the magazine on the floor. William looks encouragingly at the handsome bamboo magazine rack on the other side of the chair, and Clare stands up.

“Do you want some dinner?”

“How can you?” William asks. “What kind of dinner?”

“Aren’t you the most pathetic thing.” Clare walks over to smooth his dream-blown hair. They stay like this so long, her hands on his head, his head against her chest, that neither one of them can think of what the next natural thing to do is.

“We could go to bed,” William says.

Clare goes into the kitchen, gathers up everything that wasn’t eaten at lunch and every promising plastic container, including a little olive tapenade and a lot of pineapple cottage cheese, and lays it all on the coffee table in front of William with a couple of forks and two napkins.

“You do go all out,” he says.

“I don’t know how Isabel caters to you the way she does. If Charles were as much of a baby as you, I’d get a nurse and check into a hotel.”

“I’m sure you would.”

He doesn’t say again that they could go to bed; she heard him the first time. That lousy picnic might have been the last time. This might not be the farewell dinner (and you could hardly call it dinner—it’s not even a snack, it’s what a desperately hungry person with no taste buds might grab while running through a burning house), but it has that feeling. She’s brought him sensible food, and no wine; she hasn’t made fun of his slippers or the gardening pants; she’s worn her ugly brown coat and not the pretty blue one they bought together in Boston. An intelligent, disinterested observer would have to say it doesn’t look good for the fat man.

“Let’s go to bed,” Clare says. Husbands and wives can skip sex, without fuss, without it even being a cause for fuss, but Clare can’t imagine how you say to the person whom you have come to see for the express purpose of having sex, Let’s just read the paper.

“You look like a Balthus,” William says later.
“Nude with Blue Socks.”

“Really? I must be thirty years too old. Anyway, Balthus. Ugh.” She pulls the socks off and throws them on William’s nightstand. They’re his socks. He must have a dozen pair of navy cashmere socks and he’s never asked to have these back. And Charles has never said, Whose are these? They cover Clare almost to the knee, the empty heel swelling gently above her ankle. She wears them all the time.

William lies under the sheets and the comforter, leaving his foot uncovered and resting, like the royal turnip, on a round velvet pillow taken from Isabel’s side of the bed.

“Is it better?” Clare asks.

“It is better. I hate for you to have to see it.”

Clare shrugs, and William doesn’t know if that means that seeing his foot grotesquely swollen and purple cannot diminish her ardor or that her ardor, such as it is, could hardly be diminished.

“I don’t mind,” she says. She doesn’t mind. She didn’t mind when her kids were little and projectile vomiting followed weeping chicken pox, which followed thrush and diarrhea; she didn’t mind the sharp, dark, powdery smell of her mother’s dying or the endless rounds of bedpan and sponge bath. She would have been a great nurse, Clare thought, if the patients never spoke.

“You looked very cute in those socks, I have to tell you.” William puts a hand on Clare’s stomach.

“I don’t know,” Clare says. “I think … maybe we have to stop this. I think …”

William laughs before he sees her face. This is exactly what he has hoped not to hear, and he thought that if she was naked beside him, bare even of his socks and her reading glasses, they would get through the night without having this conversation.

Clare turns on her side to look at him. “You don’t think I might have a guilty conscience?”

William sits up and puts on his glasses. He doesn’t think Clare has a guilty conscience; he doesn’t think she has any kind of conscience at all. She loves Charles, she loves her sons, and she’s very fond of William. She’d found herself having sex with William when they were bombing Afghanistan and it seemed the world would end and now they are bombing Iraq and the evening news is horrifying, rather than completely terrifying, and whatever was between them is old hat; it’s an anthrax scare, it’s Homeland Security; it’s something that mattered a great deal for a little while and then not much.

“You might have a guilty conscience. Sometimes people confuse that with a fear of getting caught.”

Clare does not say that she would cut William’s throat and toss his body in the dump before she would let Charles find them and that there is clearly something wrong with William that he would even mention it.

“I don’t want to get a guilty conscience. Let’s just say that.”

William pushes the socks off the nightstand. There is nothing to be gained by arguing. What they have is nothing to their marriages. Clare to Isabel, he to Charles: two cups of water to the ocean. There’s no reason to say: Remember the time you wore my shirt around the motel room like a trench coat and belted it with my tie to go get ice? How about when you sat on top of me in East Rock Park and you pulled off your T-shirt and the summer light fell through the leaves onto your white shoulders and you bent down close to me, your hair brushing my face, and said, “Those Sherpas ain’t got nothin’ on me, boy.” I have never known another woman who can bear, let alone sing, all of
The Pirates of Penzance
, and who else will ever love me in this deep, narrow, greedy way?

“We’ll do whatever you want,” he says.

Now Clare laughs. “I don’t think so. I think what I want, in this regard, is not possible.”

“Probably not.”

Oh, put up a fuss, Clare thinks. Throw something. Rise up. Tell me that whatever this costs, however pointless this is, the pleasure of it is so great, your need for me is so tremendous that however this will end—and we are too old not to know that it’ll end either this way, with common sense and muted loss and a sad cup of coffee or with something worse in a parking lot somewhere a few months from now, and it’s not likely to cover either one of us with glory—it is somehow worth it.

William closes his eyes. I would like it if seeing you would always make me happy, Clare thinks. I would like to have lost nothing along the way.

“What do you think?” she says.

William doesn’t open his eyes and Clare thinks, Now I have lost him, as if she has not been trying to lose him without hurting him, for the last hour. She crosses her arms on her chest, in the classic position of going to bed angry (which William may not even recognize—for all Clare knows, he and Isabel talk it out every time, no matter how late), and she thinks, Maybe I just want to hurt him a little, just to watch him take the hit and move on, because he is the kind of man who does. Except in matters of illness, when he sounds like every Jewish man Clare knows, William’s Presbyterian stoicism makes for a beautiful, distinctly masculine suffering that Charles can’t be bothered with. She uncrosses her arms and puts a hand on William’s wide, smooth chest. He looks at her hand and breathes deeply, careful not to shift the comforter toward his foot.

“I don’t know,” he says. “Farewell, happy fields?”

“You’re not helping.”

“I’m not trying to help.”

“Oh,” Clare says.

“It’s late,” William says.

“I know.” Clare rolls toward him.

“Watch out for the turnip.”

“I
am
.”

Her head is on his chest, her chin above his heart. His hand is deep in her hair. They sleep like this, a tiny tribe, a sliver of marriage, and in their dreams, Clare is married to Charles and they are at Coney Island before it burned down, riding double on number seven in the steeplechase, and they are winning and they keep riding and the stars are as thick as snow. And in their dreams, William is married to Isabel and she brings their daughter home from the hospital, and when William sets her down in the crib, which is much larger and prettier than the one they really had on Elm Street, he sees their baby has small sky-blue wings and little clawed feet.

William kisses the baby’s pearly forehead and says, to his wife in the dream and to Clare beside him, It’s not the end of the world, darling.

THE OLD IMPOSSIBLE

Clare can’t walk.

She has sprained her ankle so badly, it’s no better than broken. Marble step, wet leaf, a moment of distraction, and she was pulled up, several feet above the landing and dropped like a bag of laundry, her fingers sliding down the wet iron banister, her feet bending and flopping like fish. Three of her anterior ligaments snapped off as she landed, two small pieces of bone clinging to their ends, and the white rubbery fibers and the tiny triangles of bone continue to float where they should not be, above her ankle’s hinge.

Her husband props the crutches up against the coffee table, tilting the handles in Clare’s direction, and after he’s laid a pillow under her mottled pink-and-blue ankle and a towel over the pillow and a bag of ice over everything, he brings in tea for Clare and her uncle David. He leaves to run errands. Neither of them asks Charles what kind of errands or when he’ll be back; he carried and fetched and did for them all morning, and if he had said that he was going off to bet on greyhounds, or try a little Ecstasy, or worse, Clare and David would understand. Clare and David share a strong dislike of being, and caring for, the disabled. David is in Clare and Charles’s house to recover from triple-bypass surgery and to entertain his niece during her period of limited mobility. Mostly, they read together in the living room.

“He
is
sweet,” Clare says aloud. It’s not what she usually says about her husband. She thinks good things; she thinks interesting, she thinks handsome (the first thousand times he stepped out of the shower, water still flowing down the runnel of his spine, she thought, Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, how can anyone be so beautiful), she thinks he is much nicer than William ever was. William would have shaken his head over her ugly ankle, made his own coffee, and waddled upstairs, leaving her lying on the couch like in
What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?
Clare doesn’t think about William every day anymore; she thinks about him mostly when she is falling asleep or when she’s about to see him, which will be in the next few minutes. William and Isabel are pulling up to Clare and Charles’s front door right now. William struggles with his cane and himself and a bag of nectarines. Isabel gathers up the groceries and a canvas tote of mysteries. She looks away as William rocks himself up and out of the passenger seat.

Uncle David reaches for his tea, which will not be the way he likes it, but he has made up his mind not to complain. The man went to the trouble of making tea. David didn’t quite catch what Clare said about Charley. He hopes she isn’t complaining. She’s no day at the beach, his niece; the sprained ankle has not made her a happier, nicer person. If he were Charley, he would make up pressing business in Baltimore, never mind a few errands down town.