Amy Bloom - Where the God of Love Hangs Out

And Buster wraps his arm around his wife’s soft waist, beneath her nightgown, and she pulls it up and places his hand on her breast. Their dance is Buster’s palm settling over her nipple, his fingertips sliding up the side of her breast, Jewelle rolling over to put her face next to Buster’s, Jewelle licking at the creases in Buster’s neck. Jewelle runs her hand along the smooth underside of his belly and he sighs.

“Oh, you feel so good,” she says. “You always do.”

“My Jewelle,” he says.

“Oh, yes,” she says. “No one else’s.”

They love this old dance.

“I think we should do it right away. We’re all here.” Jewelle has waited for Lionel to speak but he’s been lying on the couch for ten minutes, not saying a word.

“What is the ‘it’?” Patsine asks.

Jewelle looks at Patsine. Patsine has something pointed and sensible to say about everything, all the time.

“I think the ‘it’ is a memorial service.”

Lionel lifts his head a bit, so he can see everyone.

“I hope that little sonofabitch dies,” he says, and he sits up, changing his tone. “You know, her wishes were very clear. Cremation and lunch. No clergy, no house of worship, and no big deal. Obit in the Cranberry Bog Times or whatever and that’s it.”

“Cremation?” Patsine asks, and shrugs when everyone looks at her. Julia was not her mother and it’s not her business but she liked Julia very much and she would not slide a beloved into the mouth of a furnace by way of farewell.

“Why not? It’s not like she was Jewish,” Corinne says. It really isn’t Patsine’s place to ask all of these questions when she’s been married to Uncle Lionel for about five minutes.

“Her father was Jewish,” Lionel says, and everyone looks at him.

“Her father was Jewish? Julia was half Jewish?” Jewelle says.

“Well, not the side that counts,” Lionel says.

“I’m part Jewish?” Corinne says.

“Yes,” Lionel says. “You are not only a quadroon, you are also, fractionally, a Jewess. You can be blackballed by everyone.”

Buster puts his hand on Corinne’s shoulder and shakes his head at his brother.

“Nice.”

Lionel lies back down. He recites.

“Ma’s mother was Italian. Her father was Jewish. We never met either of them. The old man ran off and left them when Ma was a girl and her mother raised her nothing, which is why we are the faithless heathen we are. Long after the divorce, the old man dies in a car accident — I think.” He looks at Buster, in case he’s gotten it wrong — it’s thirty-five years since he heard the story — but Buster shrugs. He was even younger when Julia told them the story and it doesn’t seem to him that he ever heard it again. Buster shrugs again, to show that he’s already forgiven his brother for teasing Corinne. She needs it; his daughter has become like fucking Goebbels on the subject of race and he can’t stand it. “He never remarried and he left all his money to Ma’s mother. She went on a round-the-world cruise after Ma graduated college and then … she dies. That’s all, folks.” Lionel spreads his arms wide, like Al Jolson.

Patsine says flatly, “Jewish men do not abandon their wives.”

Is that so, Jewelle thinks. She guesses some French Jewish married man sometime must have not left his wife for Miss Patsine Belfond, and Jewelle arches an eyebrow at Corinne. Lionel kisses Patsine’s puffy ankle. He loves her politically incorrect and sensible assertions. Fat people do eat too much. Some people should be sterilized. The darker people’s skins, the noisier they are, until you get to certain kinds of Africans who are as silent as sand.

“Well, apparently one did,” Lionel says cheerfully. “Although Grandpa Whoever, Morris, Murray, Yitzhak, made up for it by leaving Grandma Whoever a lot of money, which was great until she died of food poisoning in Shanghai or—”

“Bangkok.” Buster says. “Bhutan?”

“Burma?”

“She died of food poisoning?” Corinne says.

“Bad shrimp,” Lionel says, closing his eyes.

He hears his brother say, “Or crab,” and he smiles.

“People don’t die from food poisoning,” Corinne says.

Jewelle has had enough. “Your aunt Helen almost died from food poisoning when we were girls. We were at the state fair and she got so sick from the fried clams she was hospitalized for it. She vomited for three days and she was skinny as a stick anyway. She really almost died.” Corinne and Jordan stare at their mother. Their aunt Helen is big and imperturbable, a tax lawyer who brings her own fancy wine and her own pillow when she visits, and it’s impossible to imagine her young and skinny, barfing day and night until she almost died.

Lionel presses his feet against his wife’s strong thigh and keeps his eyes shut. If he keeps them closed long enough, everyone but Patsine and Buster will disappear, his mother will reappear, and the worst headache he has ever had will go away.

“I guess there are always things people don’t know about each other. I didn’t know that about Helen and the clams.” Buster takes out a pencil. “I think we should do a little planning, for the service, the lunch, for Ma.”

“Fuck you,” Lionel says.

“I know.”

Robert has been standing in the doorway for about half a minute, listening to his friend’s children. He wants to write it all down and tell Julia after. You wouldn’t believe it, he’d say. They are all just like you said. Lionel is completely the master of the universe — you must have loved him a lot, darling, to give him that self-confidence — and Buster is Ted E. Bear on the outside but very strong on the inside; you’d sleep with Lionel but you’d marry Buster, is what I’m saying. Well, not you, of course, but me — back in the day. And poor Jewelle, doomed to be runner-up, isn’t she, even with those absolutely fantastic tits and still workin’ it, but my God, Patsine, what a piece of work. Don’t ask her if that dress makes you look fat because she will tell you. But I can see why you were thrilled she married Lionel. She has bent that man to her will and he is so glad, I can tell you that. Jordan’s a love; he’s like Buster, although maybe without the brains. Julia would pretend to smack him and he would apologize and she would say, Go on, go on eviscerating my loved ones, you terrible man. And he’d say, Corinne, my God, that child is why convents were invented . And Ari is very sexy in that broody, miserable way but it’s hard to see what exactly one would do with him. And Julia would look at him and he would say, I’m just sharing my observations, and she would say, You should be locked up, and he would say, And then you’d miss me, and she would say, Yes, I would, and I’d visit you in jail once a month and bring you porn.

Corinne sees Robert first and she pokes her uncle Lionel. They all look over at Robert and they all say hello, more or less.

“Would you like a cup of coffee?” Jewelle says.

“No, thank you. I’m sorry to disturb you. I just thought I would … come by.”

“We’re planning a service, just a lunch,” Lionel says, and Robert can see how hard the man is trying to be civil. “Maybe you want to say a few words.”

“Yes,” Robert says to the roomful of people who don’t want him there. He is an impediment; he is an awful, faggy roadblock to their mother’s memory, and the sooner he picks up his odds and ends and goes back to Old Fagland, the better. Robert is not a brave man; he has stood up for himself a couple of times, in a polite way, over the course of seventy years, but he isn’t the kind of person who stays where he isn’t wanted. Julia was. Julia was just that kind of person, going where she wasn’t wanted, telling people to go fuck themselves, and Julia had loved him. He had braided her long gray hair and they had discussed whether or not she should cut it after all this time, and he had rubbed moisturizer into the dry skin between her shoulder blades and trailed his fingers down her spine and toward the small folds of skin above her waist. Julia said, No playing with my love handles. Robert had leaned forward to kiss them and said, Lovely, lovely handles. Robert pulls up a chair and he pats Jewelle on the knee.