Where the G.o.d of Love Hangs Out.
Amy Bloom.
YOUR BORDERS, YOUR RIVERS, YOUR TINY VILLAGES.
At two o"clock in the morning, no one is to blame.
We"d been watching CNN, one scene of disaster leading to the next, the reporter in front of what might have been a new anthrax outbreak giving way to the military a.n.a.lyst in the studio with new developments in Kabul, when William put his hand on my breast. My husband was asleep upstairs, dreaming of making the deal that would put us on high ground when the entire economy collapsed, and William"s wife was asleep in the guest room, getting her restorative eight hours. I think of Isabel as forcefully regular and elegant in all of her habits, and I"m sure she thinks of me as a little askew in all of mine.
William"s hand trembled slightly. Our two plain gold wedding bands twinkled in the light of the TV screen. He touched my breast through my bathrobe and my pajamas-I had dressed for watching TV with William as if for bundling-for a very long time. His touch, left forefinger on left nipple, through wool and flannel, should have been numbing in its dreamy repet.i.tion, but it was not; it captured my whole body"s attention. We kept our eyes on the TV. Finally, he fumbled under my robe and opened two b.u.t.tons of my pajama top. His hand moved across my breast, and I sighed. I heard him breathing, hard and damp, and I put my hand on his big belly. It does not seem possible that we are people with three children, two marriages, and a hundred and ten years between us.
The first time I made out in a car, it was with Roger Saleta from Far Rockaway. We were trying to end the war in Vietnam by flooding the local draft board with mail and marching in front of it whenever our cla.s.s schedules allowed. I had spoken at a big rally, wearing an electric-blue nylon halter top and my tight bell-bottoms with a crucified Jesus painted on the right leg. (I pretended not to know, and it may have been that I actually did not know then, why some people found this offensive. "I"m not mocking Jesus," I told my mother. "I"m just representing him, on my jeans.") Roger circled around the parking lot after the rally and offered me a ride in his gold Camaro. We drove to Jones Beach, miles from the protest, miles from social studies and home ec, and we stayed in the car while the waves crashed and we worked at each other. Hands and mouths. Necks and elbows. He licked me through my jeans until they were wet and dark blue from inseam to belt buckle. I wanted to bang my head against the back of the seat from pleasure, and dug my hands into his black curls instead. This boy, not my idea of a lover, not even my idea of a date, had my body humming, dancing its tiny, fierce dance in the backseat. His hands under me and his mouth shamelessly pressed against me, as if the rest of the world could sink into the ocean out there and we would not even blink, or maybe, yes, blink dully, just once, before we returned to the real world of my p.u.s.s.y and his mouth. Later, we went to his prom, and I saw that he couldn"t dance, which I hadn"t known, and that his eyes were much too close together, which I had known and ignored, and I was a big disappointment to him that night.
William whispered something to me, but they were showing night bombing in the north and I couldn"t hear him over the shouting correspondent. "May I?" he said again, and put his mouth over my nipple. William is English, and he has beautiful manners. He has never failed to open the door, to pull out the chair, to slip off the coat, to bring flowers and send thank-you notes. It is not an affectation. Charles, my husband, is the same way, and it"s not an affectation in him, either. They are both sons of determined English mothers and quiet American fathers who let their wives have their way. Charles and William are friends, Isabel and I are friends. It is all just as bad as it sounds. The close friendship has always been between me and William, from the moment we stood snickering together at that first faculty meeting until now. Everybody knows that William and I are, inexplicably but truly, best friends. I think his size and my shyness, and, of course, Isabel"s beauty and Charles"s good looks, gave us permission to love each other and hold hands in public, looking, I"m sure, like a woolly mammoth and a stiff-tailed duck, just that odd and just that ridiculous.
Even when they moved back to Boston after their one year in New Haven, back to his university and her real estate, we stayed friends. Isabel and I have had pedicures together, we"ve dissected our husbands and considered the possibility that a little collagen around the mouth might not be a bad idea. All four of us have sat at our kitchen tables, talking through their daughter"s suicidally bad time in Prague and our son Danny"s near-engagement to an awful girl from Bryn Mawr. I like that William is such a good storyteller; she likes that Charles is so clever with his hands. When we visit, she gives him a "Honey Do" list and he pops around their house with his toolbox all afternoon and Isabel follows behind, handing him nails and a caulk gun, while William and I play Scrabble. She used to asked me for advice on getting William to watch his weight, which I gave, which was useless, and I felt terrible for her. After his first heart attack, she called me in tears, and I thought, Well, of course he has got to exercise and drink less and stop smoking and cut out the bacon and if I were his wife I would have him on egg whites and a thimbleful of sherry, but I"m not. William called me from the hospital and said, "Please eat some b.u.t.ter for me." We continued to meet at every intriguing restaurant he"d hear about, Abbott"s Lobster in the Rough, Ma Glockner"s for the chicken dinner, and we spent half a day finding a little place in Kent that had outstanding macaroni and cheese.
We"ve come to our quartet already grown up, with our longstanding convictions and habits and odd ways in place, and none of us has changed very much since we met. Isabel is much fitter and William is a little fatter and Charles dropped tennis for golf, coming home flushed and handsome, cursing cheerfully about his handicap and his stroke. Charles and William and Isabel e-mail one another news every day, and when we"re together, Charles and William watch CNN for hours, drinking their Guinness. They talk like they"ve just come from a meeting with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Isabel joins in, perching on the end of the sofa near William, clucking her tongue when the scroll at the bottom of the screen says: AIR STRIKEs. .h.i.t ALL AL QAEDA TRAINING CAMPS IN AFGHANISTAN ... DURING THE RAID ON BEIT JALA, ISRAELI FORCES ARRESTED 10 PALESTINIANS AND KILLED 6. I don"t know if she is clucking because six isn"t enough or because it is way too much. Isabel reads The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times every day and I don"t. It"s not as if I waltz around the homestead with a big bow in my blond curls, picking daisies and waiting for the grown-ups to sit down to the nice dinner I"ve made. I teach, I go to the movies, I talk to my grown sons frequently (Adam is a news-watcher, Danny is a news-avoider, and all that matters to me is that they both live in small, safe towns in the Midwest and neither has children). I don"t watch the news with my friends" avidity; I have not constructed a mental map of Afghanistan so that I can track troops, bombs, and food drops, and I will not even discuss whether or not we should call Bobby Bernstein, Charles"s new golfing partner, and ask him for doxycycline.
William and I had a date to watch Mrs. Dalloway. Charles and Isabel had kissed good night, the way we often kiss one another, some thing more than lips on cheek, nicely suggestive of restrained pa.s.sion, as if, under the right circ.u.mstances, Charles and Isabel and William and I would just fall upon each other.
"Let"s watch a bit of the news first," William said. I made popcorn for later. We would sit with my feet in his lap, and he would ask for another beer and more salt, and I would get it. Then William would sigh with pleasure at having everything he wanted, and so would I.
The Appalachian Trail through New Jersey is like the road to h.e.l.l. My boyfriend Danny and I slogged through swamp and low water, past dozens of orange blazes, which indicated not trail but possible paths through purgatory, until in the dark we found a flat, meadowy place. As soon as we stopped moving, mosquitoes descended upon us, attacking every moist, warm spot. They flew into our eyes, our mouths, our ears, burrowing through our wet, salty hair to our scalps. Trying to be quick in their buzzing black fog, we threw down our tarps and our sleeping bags and dove into them, clothes and boots still on. It was eighty degrees outside and per haps ninety-five in our sleeping bags, but the choice was to be bit ten all night or lie in pools of sweat until dawn. Danny zipped our bags together, and we rolled back to back, rank and itching and, as I recall, furious with each other-me because he had picked the trail into Rattlesnake Swamp, him because I laughed unkindly every time he unfolded our Sierra Club map that afternoon and said, "This looks right." Just before dawn, the bugs disappeared to digest and rest up to prepare for the second wave. Danny, the gentlest of boys, willowy and devoted, slid on top of me, rolled my underpants down to my ankles with one hand, pushed my legs apart, and came into me like a stranger. We lay there, stuck together from hip to collarbone, faces turned away, until it was light enough to leave.
William said, "Come here, on top of me. Come sit on my lap, darling." In six years, he has never called me anything but my name. Just one time, when we were chatting on the phone and his other line rang, he said, "Hold on a tick, dear." I climbed up on him, just as he asked, and draped myself over his stomach, resting my face against his shoulder, kissing it through his shirt. I unb.u.t.toned his collar and ran my fingers around his thick neck, into his hair and down through the gray hairs beneath his undershirt.
"Oh, yes," he said. I turned around and lay back against him, and he cupped my b.r.e.a.s.t.s under my pajama top, and we watched Jeff Greenfield and then the young woman who dyed her hair brown to go to Afghanistan. "At least it"s not Fox," William said. "Fox News, b.l.o.o.d.y Bill O"Reilly. Pandering little hairball." He put his hands around my waist and pressed me close to him, and I could feel his stomach, his shirt b.u.t.tons, his belt buckle against my spine, and his very hard erection underneath me.
I said I could feel him, and I put my head back so he would kiss my neck. He slid his lips up and down, and then his teeth and then his tongue. He pressed me closer. "You should have known me twenty years ago," he said. "Thirty years ago. Back in my flowering youth." I said that I was just as glad not to have known him in his flowering youth and that it had never occurred to me that I would know him this way, even in his autumnal splendor.
"What now?" he said, and we both looked to the right and the left, to Isabel on one side and Charles on the other and the television in front of us. I shrugged and I felt William shrug, too. "Face me," he said. "I miss seeing you, otherwise."
I swung around and unb.u.t.toned another b.u.t.ton. "This is so terrible," I said, and I think he wasn"t sure if I meant what we were watching or what we were doing.
"We are not terrible people," he said.
He was so big, there was so much to him; it was a great comfort, to find warm flesh everywhere I turned, his big thighs beneath me, like ground. At the beach last summer, he"d kept to his linen pants and guayabera ("Fat men may not appear in bathing suits," he said), but he showed his broad white feet, in the sand. I thought every part of him must be a pink-tinged white, wide and thick and immaculately kept. His heart was beating like a drum.
"This could be it," he said. "The big bang. That would take some explaining."
"It won"t be your problem," I said, and he laughed, bouncing me in his lap a little.
"Touch me," he said.
I unzipped his pants and reached into his big blue-striped shorts and held his p.e.n.i.s in my hand. I touched him as best I could, moving my fingers in the small s.p.a.ce beneath his belly, in the little cave of his pants and boxers. He put his head back and closed his eyes, and he looked just the way he did at our lunches, greedy and delighted and deeply attentive. His whole body shuddered when he came, and even before his eyes were open, he"d pulled out a beautiful white handkerchief and cleaned up.
"Messy," he said. "Marvelous." He cleared his throat and put the handkerchief away. "Darling. Something for you?" He picked me up and laid me back on the couch. I shook my head. I still had my socks and slippers and every thing else on. William took my slippers off.
"What a little chatterbox you are," he said, and while I was laughing, he knelt down on the floor in front of me, muttering about his knees and the state of our carpeting, and pulled my pajama bottoms down and put his face between my legs. I put his gla.s.ses next to mine on the coffee table. When he got back up on the couch, breathing like a freight train and smoothing out my pajamas, Greta Van Susteren was still answering questions on her show, which William said was an excellent forum for the slightly informed. He handed me the remote.
"Turn it off, please," he said. "Put your head here."
I laid my head on his shoulder again and put my slippers back on.
"It"s almost three," I said.
"I know," he said. "Not yet."
We held hands, and then he hoisted himself up, bringing me with him.
"People," he said. I nodded.
"No harm done, I hope? You"re not going to look at me tomorrow with barely disguised horror?"
"No," I said. "Nothing like that."
I put away the popcorn and rinsed the bowl while William finished his beer.
"How about a cigar?" he said.
William has moved to cigars from cigarettes, not exactly the dramatic change his doctors hoped for, and moved from cream in his coffee to fat-free half-and-half, which he now talks about the way other men talk about working out. When he smokes, I take a few puffs, to be companionable.
We sat on the back porch, the wood cold under my a.s.s. "Do you need a coat?" he asked.
"I"m fine. How about you? You don"t have a jacket on."
"I keep me warm," he said. "My thermostat is set rather high." The moon shone through the clouds.
"The leaves are going," he said.
I puffed on his cigar.
"William," I said.
He stood up slowly, using the banister for leverage.
"It"s still a beautiful night," he said. He lay down on the ground. "Climb on," he said. "Let"s go for a ride."
The moon lit up the whole yard and William, white beneath me. I folded my robe and tucked it under his head. Tiny leaves shook loose, bronze snow floating down upon us, sticking gently in my hair and his, until we were almost covered.
I LOVE TO SEE YOU COMING, I HATE TO SEE YOU GO.
William has gout.
It is the worst and most embarra.s.sing pain of his life. His true nature, his desires and hidden history are revealed. By his foot.
Before he can get to the phone, the machine picks up.
"It"s me. I heard the gout"s back. Call me."
Clare"s messages are always like this, concerned and crabby, as if having to make the call will cause her-probably has caused her; the plane is pulling away even as she speaks-to miss her flight.
"I"m here," William says.
"Okay, do you want to just get Thai in Springfield?"
Springfield is almost halfway between Clare"s house and his. William doesn"t have the energy even for Thai in Springfield.
"Christ. Why don"t you just drive up here and bring lunch?" He would like to patch things up with Clare, but just putting down the phone drives two long, thick needles of uric acid deep into his ankle. He should have flowers in the house. He should shave. It won"t be romantic.
Clare gets her car washed and drives up. She has to make sure that her visit takes place when her husband won"t want to come, and there are things she cannot cancel and things she doesn"t want to cancel, and in the end she sticks a note on her door, changing her office hours, and loads up the car. Usually she brings William corned beef on rye, or pate and pumpernickel, and a big can of Guinness, and once, when they were right in the thick of things, she brought a box of Krispy Kremes and a bottle of Sancerre, but none of that is right for someone with gout. She packs two cooked, skinless chicken b.r.e.a.s.t.s, blanched broccoli, a basket of Maine blueberries (she read up after the first attack, and every Web site said blueberries), a box of chocolate soy shake, and a little tub of tofu. It"s not romantic.
Clare knocks twice and comes in. If Isabel were there, they"d hug and kiss before she was ushered into the Presence. And if Isabel were upstairs and not too close by, William would kiss Clare hard on the lips and then he"d ask her to do things that he wouldn"t ask of Isabel. If Isabel were there, she"d make Clare stay over when it got late, and lend her her own ivory linen pajamas. Clare would lie awake listening for William and imagining him listening for her, under the faded pink comforter, in his daughter"s old room. Neither one of them would slip down the hall at two A.M., they wouldn"t expect it of each other, but at breakfast, while Isabel showered, Clare would look at William with a sort of friendly disdain, and he would look at her as if she were selling drugs to schoolchildren.
William calls her name from the living room. He would get up, but it hurts too much. He usually shaves twice a day. He usually wears custom-made shirts and mossy, old-fashioned cologne, and he would prefer not to have Clare see him in backless bedroom slippers and green baggy pants, dragging his foot from room to room like road kill, but when he says so, she laughs.
"I"ve seen you worse," she says, and there is no arguing with that. It seems to William that Clare last saw him looking good, well dressed and in control of himself a year and a half ago, before they were lovers. Now she"s seen him riddled with tubes, hung left and right with plastic pouches, sweating like a pig through a thin hospital gown that covered about a third of him.
Clare puts her groceries away in Isabel"s kitchen. Isabel has been telling William to change his ways for twenty years, and now he has to. Clare puts the chicken b.r.e.a.s.t.s in the refrigerator and thinks that that must be nice for Isabel.
William sits back in his armchair, moving his right foot out of harm"s way. If Clare gently presses his foot or lets the cuff of her pants just brush against his ankle, it will hurt worse than either of his heart attacks. He sees Clare angling toward him and moves his leg back a little more.
"Don"t b.u.mp me," he says.
"I wasn"t going to b.u.mp you."
Clare sits on the arm of the chair and glances at his foot. It"s her job not to take any notice of it. She can notice the slippers and green gardening pants, and she can say something clever about it all, if she can think of something clever, which she can"t. Isabel says clever, kind things to William when he"s under the weather. Clare"s seen it. Isabel arranges him beautifully, she flatters him into good behavior, she buys chairs that fit him and finds huge, handsome abstracts to balance the chairs; she drapes herself around him like wisteria and she carries his hypertension pills, his indomethacin, his cholesterol pills, and his prednisone in an engraved silver case, as if it"s a pleasure. The last time William and Clare had s.e.x, William rested above Clare, just for a minute, catching his breath. He slipped off his elbows, and his full weight fell onto her. "Jesus Christ," she"d said. "You could kill someone." William did laugh but it"s not something she likes to remember.
"G.o.d, it"s like a giant turnip," Clare says, putting her hand over her mouth.
It is exactly like a giant turnip and William is happy to hear her say so. His heart rises on a small, breaking wave of love just because Clare, who says the precisely wrong and tactless thing as naturally as breathing, is with him, and will be right here for almost twenty-four hours.
"Really, cooked turnip."
"Well, the skin begins peeling in a couple of days, the doctor says, so it"ll be even more disgusting. Hot, peeling, naked turnip." He leans forward and kisses the shoulder closer to him.
"Did Isabel leave food for you?"
"Hardly any. The three things I can eat. When she comes back the two of you can have a big party, tossing back shots of vodka, licking caviar out of the jar."
"Isabel wouldn"t do that to you."
"You would."
"Probably," Clare says, and bends to kiss him. Everything she thought about while driving up, how much trouble he is and how selfish and where all that shameless piggery has gotten him (gout and her), is nothing when he kisses her, although even when their lips touch, even as the soft, salty tip of his tongue connects to hers, they are not the best kisses she"s ever had.
When they stop kissing, William says, "Take off that ugly brown coat and stay a while, won"t you?"
A month before the gout attack, Clare made William come with her to visit her uncle David. William clutched the staircase with both hands and made her carry his hat, his jacket, and the bottle of wine.
"You didn"t say it was a walk-up."
"It"s two flights, William, that"s all. Just rest for a minute."
It was a bad idea. William said it, panting up the stairs, and he said it again when Uncle David went into his kitchen to get William a gla.s.s of water. Uncle David said it when William went to use the bathroom.
William washed his face with cold water and took his hypertension pills. He looked at the v.i.a.g.r.a pills he"d been carrying around, in a tiny square of plastic wrap twisted like the wax-paper salt shakers his mother made for picnics. He"d been hoping for several weeks that he and Clare would go for a very elegant autumnal picnic in the Berkshires and that afterward they would stop into one of the seedy motels on Route 183. (When they did finally have the picnic and they did find the Glen Aire motel, the v.i.a.g.r.a mixed badly with William"s hypertension pills, and right after getting the kind of erection the online pharmacy had promised, he pa.s.sed out. Clare drove them home in her aggressive, absent-minded way, blasting the horn and sprinkling the remaining six blue pills out the window, as William rested, his face against the gla.s.s.) "What do I want to meet him for?" Uncle David said. "He seems like a nice man but I like Charles."
"He"s my best friend. That"s all. I wanted my best friend to meet my favorite relative."
"Only relative." David shrugged.
It was so clearly a bad idea, and so clearly understood by all parties to be a bad idea, that Clare thought she should just take William back downstairs and send her uncle a box of chocolates and a note of apology.
William came out of the bathroom, mopping his face, and shook Clare"s uncle"s hand again.
"Nice place. I"m sorry Clare made me come."
"Me, too. She"s hard to argue with."
The two men smiled, and William picked up his coat.
"Those stairs"ll kill you," David said. "Why don"t you have a beer, and then go."
They had their beers as if Clare wasn"t there. They talked about baseball, as the season was under way, and they talked about electric cars, which was even more boring than baseball. Clare sat on the windowsill and swung her feet.
William used the bathroom again before they left. David and Clare looked at each other.
David said, "You can"t hide someone that big. Where would you put him, sweetheart? He"d stick out of the closet and you can"t put a man like that under the bed."
Clare knew Charles was never going to walk in on her and William. It was probably not a great idea to sleep with William; she knew it wasn"t a great idea almost immediately after it happened. She had managed to upend something that had sat neatly and foursquare beneath them, and even if William shouldered the blame, even if Charles was good enough to blame William, Clare never thought you could fault a man for taking s.e.x when it was offered, any more than you"d blame the dog for flinging himself on a sc.r.a.p that missed the plate. She knew she"d done more than just tilt the friendship between the four of them, but she was not ruining their lives with brilliantined paramours, sidecars, and cuckolds, the way her uncle made it sound. She was not ruining their lives at all, and you might think that the man known in her family as the Lord Byron of Greater Nyack would understand that.