Amy Bloom: Where the God of Love Hangs Out

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 passion, as if, under the right circumstances, 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 hell. 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 unbuttoned 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 breasts 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, bloody 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 buttons, 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 unbuttoned another button. “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 penis in my hand. I touched him as best I could, moving my fingers in the small space 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 glasses 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 ass. “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.

William has gout.

It is the worst and most embarrassing pain of his life. His true nature, his desires and hidden history are revealed. By his foot.