Amy Bloom: Where the God of Love Hangs Out

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 sex when it was offered, any more than you’d blame the dog for flinging himself on a scrap 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.

“What can I say?”

“He makes you feel so young?” David sang. “He makes you feel like spring has sprung, songs must be sung? Like that?”

“No. You don’t have to be ugly about it. I think … I make him feel alive.”

David shook his head. “I’m sure you do. That’s what these things are for.”

Clare looked out the living room window and counted three women pushing strollers, four boys smoking cigarettes, seven bags of garbage.

“Don’t bring him again.”

“I get it,” Clare said. “I’m sorry.”

“You’re not listening to me. Don’t do this.”

“All right.”

William walked in to see Uncle David whispering in Clare’s ear and Clare pulling on her coat. William would rather have danced naked in a Greyhound bus station, he would rather have danced naked wearing a big pink party hat and matching pink boots, than stay another minute in Clare’s uncle’s apartment.

The men shook hands again and Clare kissed her uncle on the cheek, and he patted her face. They didn’t like to fight.

In the car William said, “What was that for?”

“I thought you’d like each other.”

“You embarrassed him,” William said, and he thought it was just like her to make that perfectly decent old man meet her lover and force him — not that she ever thought she forced anything upon anyone — to betray Charles by saying nothing or to betray Clare, which of course he would never do. It was just exactly like Clare to act as if it’d been a pleasant visit under normal circumstances.

William dropped Clare off at the university parking lot and drove back to Boston. She watched him pull away, the gray roof silver from the halogen street lamps, the inside brightened for just a second by the green face of his phone and the deep yellow flare of his lighter.

At four o’clock, William takes the round of pills Isabel left in a shot glass by the kitchen sink. At five, he falls asleep, and Clare reads their newspaper and then William’s old Economists . At six, while William snores in his recliner, she calls Charles to say that William is under the weather, Isabel is still on duty with her mother, and she, Clare, will stay overnight with William. As she talks, Clare gets her sweater out of the dining room and kicks her shoes into the rattan basket in the front hall.

“Don’t kill him,” Charles says. Clare is not famous for her bedside manner.

“He’s a pain in the ass,” Clare says, and it’s not just her faint reflexive wish to throw Charles, and everyone, off the track. Isabel and Charles and all of their combined children could walk through the house right now, looking for trouble, and there’d be no sign, no scent, no stray, mysterious thread, of anything except an old, buckling friendship.

William snorts and wakes up, his hair wild and waving like silver palm fronds. He looks like he might have had a bad dream, and Clare smiles to comfort him. He looks at her as if he’s never seen her, or never seen her like this, which isn’t so; he’s seen her a hundred times just like this, seated across from him deep in thought, flinging her legs over the arm of the chair to get comfortable.

“Oh, here you are,” he says.

Clare drops the magazine on the floor. William looks encouragingly at the handsome bamboo magazine rack on the other side of the chair, and Clare stands up.

“Do you want some dinner?”

“How can you?” William asks. “What kind of dinner?”

“Aren’t you the most pathetic thing.” Clare walks over to smooth his dream-blown hair. They stay like this so long, her hands on his head, his head against her chest, that neither one of them can think of what the next natural thing to do is.

“We could go to bed,” William says.

Clare goes into the kitchen, gathers up everything that wasn’t eaten at lunch and every promising plastic container, including a little olive tapenade and a lot of pineapple cottage cheese, and lays it all on the coffee table in front of William with a couple of forks and two napkins.

“You do go all out,” he says.

“I don’t know how Isabel caters to you the way she does. If Charles were as much of a baby as you, I’d get a nurse and check into a hotel.”

“I’m sure you would.”

He doesn’t say again that they could go to bed; she heard him the first time. That lousy picnic might have been the last time. This might not be the farewell dinner (and you could hardly call it dinner — it’s not even a snack, it’s what a desperately hungry person with no taste buds might grab while running through a burning house), but it has that feeling. She’s brought him sensible food, and no wine; she hasn’t made fun of his slippers or the gardening pants; she’s worn her ugly brown coat and not the pretty blue one they bought together in Boston. An intelligent, disinterested observer would have to say it doesn’t look good for the fat man.

“Let’s go to bed,” Clare says. Husbands and wives can skip sex, without fuss, without it even being a cause for fuss, but Clare can’t imagine how you say to the person whom you have come to see for the express purpose of having sex, Let’s just read the paper.

“You look like a Balthus,” William says later. “Nude with Blue Socks.”

“Really? I must be thirty years too old. Anyway, Balthus. Ugh.” She pulls the socks off and throws them on William’s nightstand. They’re his socks. He must have a dozen pair of navy cashmere socks and he’s never asked to have these back. And Charles has never said, Whose are these? They cover Clare almost to the knee, the empty heel swelling gently above her ankle. She wears them all the time.

William lies under the sheets and the comforter, leaving his foot uncovered and resting, like the royal turnip, on a round velvet pillow taken from Isabel’s side of the bed.

“Is it better?” Clare asks.

“It is better. I hate for you to have to see it.”

Clare shrugs, and William doesn’t know if that means that seeing his foot grotesquely swollen and purple cannot diminish her ardor or that her ardor, such as it is, could hardly be diminished.