Amy Bloom - Where the God of Love Hangs Out

Margaret waited. As much as she wanted to help, it wasn’t her house or her husband and Clare had been in charge of their relationship for the last twenty years; this was not the moment to take the lead. Clare walked up the stairs and right into their bedroom, as if William had phoned ahead and told her what to expect. He was lying on the bed, shoes off and fully dressed, his hand on Jane Eyre , his eyes closed, and his reading glasses on his chest. (“‘He is not to them what he is to me,’” Jane thought. “‘While I breathe and think I must love him.’”) Clare lay down next to him, murmuring, until Margaret put her hand on Clare’s shoulder and asked if she should call the hospital or someone.

“I have no idea,” Clare said, lying on the bed beside William, staring at the ceiling. These things get done, Clare thought, whether you know what you’re doing or not. The hospital is called, the funeral home is contacted, the body is removed, with some difficulty, because he was a big man and the stairs are old and narrow. Your sons and daughters-in-law call everyone who needs to be called, including the terrible sister in England who sent them a note and a chipped vase, explaining that she could not bring herself to attend a wedding that so clearly should not be taking place.

Margaret comes back the next day and makes up one of the boys’ bedrooms for you, just in case, but when your best friend flies in from Cleveland, you are lying in your own room, wrapped in William’s bathrobe, and you wear his robe and his undershirt while she sits across from you, her sensible shoes right beside William’s wing tips, and she helps you decide chapel or funeral home, lunch or brunch, booze or wine, and who will speak. Your sons and their wives and the babies come and it’s no more or less terrible to have them in the house. You move slowly and carefully, swimming through a deep but traversable river of shit. You must not inhale, you must not stop, you must not stop for anything at all. Destroyed, untouchable, you can lie down on the other side when they’ve all gone home.

Clare was careful during the funeral. She didn’t listen to anything that was said. She saw Isabel sitting with Emily and Kurt, a little cluster of Langfords; Isabel wore a gray suit and held Emily’s hand and she left as soon as the service ended. At the house, Clare imagined Isabel beside her; she imagined herself encased in Isabel. Even in pajamas, suffering a bad cold, Isabel moved like a woman in beautiful silk. Clare made an effort to move that way. She thanked people in Isabel’s pleasant, governessy voice. Clare straightened Danny’s tie with Isabel’s hand and then wiped chocolate fingerprints off the back of a chair. Clare used Isabel to answer every question and to make plans to get together with people she had no intention of seeing. She hugged Emily the way Isabel would have, with a perfect degree of appreciation for Emily’s pregnant and furious state. Clare went upstairs and lay down on the big bed and cried into the big, tailored pillows William used for reading in bed. Clare held his reading glasses like a rosary. Clare walked over to the dresser and took out one of William’s big Irish linen handkerchiefs and blotted her face with it. (Clare and Isabel did their dressers the same way, William said: odds and ends in the top drawer, then underwear, then sweaters, then jeans and T-shirts and white socks. Clare put William’s almost empty bottle of Tabac in her underwear drawer.) She rearranged their two unlikely stuffed animals.

“Oh, rhino and pecker bird,” William had said. That’s how he saw them, and two years ago Clare had found herself in front of a fancy toy store in Guilford on a spring afternoon and found herself buying a very expensive plush gray rhino and a velvety little brown-and-white bird and putting the pair on their bed that night.

“You’re not so tough,” William had said.

“I was,” Clare said. “You’ve ruined me.”

Clare wanted to talk with Isabel about Emily; they used to talk about her all the time. Once, after William’s second heart attack, when William was still Isabel’s husband, Isabel and Clare were playing cards in William’s hospital room and Emily and Kurt had just gone off to get sandwiches and Clare had stumbled over something nice to say about Kurt, and Isabel slapped down her cards and said, “Say what you want. He’s dumb in that awful preppy way and a Republican and if he says, ‘No disrespect intended,’ one more time, I’m going to set him on fire.” William said, “De gustibus non est disputandum,” which he said about many things, and Isabel said, “That doesn’t help, darling.”

Clare looked at William’s lapis cuff links and at the watch she’d given him when they were in the third act of their affair. “You can’t give me a watch,” he’d said. “I already have a perfectly good one.” Clare took his watch off his wrist, laid it on the asphalt, and drove over it, twice. “There,” she’d said. “Terrible accident, you were so careless. You had to replace it.” William took that beautiful watch she’d bought him out of the box and kissed her in the parking lot of a Marriott halfway between his home and hers. He’d worn it every day until last Thursday. Clare walked downstairs holding William’s jewelry, and when she passed her sons pouring wine for people, she dropped the watch into Danny’s pocket. Adam turned to her and said, “Mom, do you want a few minutes alone?” and Clare realized the time upstairs had done her no good at all. She laid the lapis cuff links in Adam’s free hand. “William particularly wanted you to have these,” she said, and Adam looked surprised — as well he might, Clare thought.

Clare took the semester off. She spent weeks in the public library, crying and wandering up and down the mystery section, looking for something she hadn’t read. A woman she didn’t know popped out from behind the stacks and handed her a little ivory pamphlet, the pages held together with a dark-blue silk ribbon. On the front it said, GOD NEVER GIVES US MORE THAN WE CAN BEAR. The woman ran off and Clare caught the eye of the librarian, who mouthed the words “ovarian cancer.” Clare carried it with her to the parking lot and looked over her shoulder to make sure the woman was gone and then she tossed it in the trash.

After the library, Clare went to the coffeehouse or to the Turkish restaurant, where they knew how to treat widows. Every evening at six, men would spill out of the church across the street from the coffeehouse. A few would smoke in the vestibule and a few more would come in and order coffee and a couple of cookies and sit down to play chess. They were not like the chess players Clare had known.

One evening, one of the older men, with a tidy silver crew cut and pants yanked up a little too high, approached Clare. (William had dressed beautifully. Clare and Isabel used to talk about how beautifully he dressed; Clare said he dressed the way the Duke of Windsor would have if he’d been a hundred pounds heavier and not such a weenie and Isabel said, “That’s wonderful. May I tell him?”)

The man said gently, “Are you waiting for the meeting?”

Clare said, in her Isabel voice, that it was very kind of him to ask, but there was no meeting she was waiting for.

He said, “Well, I see you here a lot. I thought maybe you were trying to decide whether or not to go to the next meeting.”

Clare said that she hadn’t made up her mind, which could have been true. She could just as soon have gone to an AA meeting as to a No Rest for the Weary meeting or a People Sick of Life meeting. And Clare did know something about drinking, she thought. Sometime after she and William had decided, for the thousandth time, that their affair was a terrible thing, that their love for their spouses was much greater than their love for each other, that William and Isabel were suited , just like Charles and Clare were suited, and that the William and Clare thing was nothing more than some odd summer lightning that would pass as soon as the season changed, Clare found herself having three glasses of wine every night. Her goal, every night, was to climb into bed early, exhausted and tipsy, and fall deeply asleep before she could say anything to Charles about William. It was her version of One Day at a Time, and it worked for two years, until she woke up one night, crying and saying William’s name into her pillow over and over again. Clare didn’t think that that was the kind of reckless behavior that interested the people across the street.