Amy Bloom: Where the God of Love Hangs Out

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 pâté 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 breasts, 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 breasts 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 bump me,” he says.

“I wasn’t going to bump 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 sex, 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.

“God, 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 glass 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 Viagra 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 Viagra mixed badly with William’s hypertension pills, and right after getting the kind of erection the online pharmacy had promised, he passed 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 glass.)

“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.