Amy Bloom: Where the God of Love Hangs Out

“I don’t mind,” she says. She doesn’t mind. She didn’t mind when her kids were little and projectile vomiting followed weeping chicken pox, which followed thrush and diarrhea; she didn’t mind the sharp, dark, powdery smell of her mother’s dying or the endless rounds of bedpan and sponge bath. She would have been a great nurse, Clare thought, if the patients never spoke.

“You looked very cute in those socks, I have to tell you.” William puts a hand on Clare’s stomach.

“I don’t know,” Clare says. “I think … maybe we have to stop this. I think …”

William laughs before he sees her face. This is exactly what he has hoped not to hear, and he thought that if she was naked beside him, bare even of his socks and her reading glasses, they would get through the night without having this conversation.

Clare turns on her side to look at him. “You don’t think I might have a guilty conscience?”

William sits up and puts on his glasses. He doesn’t think Clare has a guilty conscience; he doesn’t think she has any kind of conscience at all. She loves Charles, she loves her sons, and she’s very fond of William. She’d found herself having sex with William when they were bombing Afghanistan and it seemed the world would end and now they are bombing Iraq and the evening news is horrifying, rather than completely terrifying, and whatever was between them is old hat; it’s an anthrax scare, it’s Homeland Security; it’s something that mattered a great deal for a little while and then not much.

“You might have a guilty conscience. Sometimes people confuse that with a fear of getting caught.”

Clare does not say that she would cut William’s throat and toss his body in the dump before she would let Charles find them and that there is clearly something wrong with William that he would even mention it.

“I don’t want to get a guilty conscience. Let’s just say that.”

William pushes the socks off the nightstand. There is nothing to be gained by arguing. What they have is nothing to their marriages. Clare to Isabel, he to Charles: two cups of water to the ocean. There’s no reason to say: Remember the time you wore my shirt around the motel room like a trench coat and belted it with my tie to go get ice? How about when you sat on top of me in East Rock Park and you pulled off your T-shirt and the summer light fell through the leaves onto your white shoulders and you bent down close to me, your hair brushing my face, and said, “Those Sherpas ain’t got nothin’ on me, boy.” I have never known another woman who can bear, let alone sing, all of The Pirates of Penzance , and who else will ever love me in this deep, narrow, greedy way?

“We’ll do whatever you want,” he says.

Now Clare laughs. “I don’t think so. I think what I want, in this regard, is not possible.”

“Probably not.”

Oh, put up a fuss, Clare thinks. Throw something. Rise up. Tell me that whatever this costs, however pointless this is, the pleasure of it is so great, your need for me is so tremendous that however this will end — and we are too old not to know that it’ll end either this way, with common sense and muted loss and a sad cup of coffee or with something worse in a parking lot somewhere a few months from now, and it’s not likely to cover either one of us with glory — it is somehow worth it.

William closes his eyes. I would like it if seeing you would always make me happy, Clare thinks. I would like to have lost nothing along the way.

“What do you think?” she says.

William doesn’t open his eyes and Clare thinks, Now I have lost him, as if she has not been trying to lose him without hurting him, for the last hour. She crosses her arms on her chest, in the classic position of going to bed angry (which William may not even recognize — for all Clare knows, he and Isabel talk it out every time, no matter how late), and she thinks, Maybe I just want to hurt him a little, just to watch him take the hit and move on, because he is the kind of man who does. Except in matters of illness, when he sounds like every Jewish man Clare knows, William’s Presbyterian stoicism makes for a beautiful, distinctly masculine suffering that Charles can’t be bothered with. She uncrosses her arms and puts a hand on William’s wide, smooth chest. He looks at her hand and breathes deeply, careful not to shift the comforter toward his foot.

“I don’t know,” he says. “Farewell, happy fields?”

“You’re not helping.”

“I’m not trying to help.”

“Oh,” Clare says.

“It’s late,” William says.

“I know.” Clare rolls toward him.

“Watch out for the turnip.”

“I am .”

Her head is on his chest, her chin above his heart. His hand is deep in her hair. They sleep like this, a tiny tribe, a sliver of marriage, and in their dreams, Clare is married to Charles and they are at Coney Island before it burned down, riding double on number seven in the steeplechase, and they are winning and they keep riding and the stars are as thick as snow. And in their dreams, William is married to Isabel and she brings their daughter home from the hospital, and when William sets her down in the crib, which is much larger and prettier than the one they really had on Elm Street, he sees their baby has small sky-blue wings and little clawed feet.

William kisses the baby’s pearly forehead and says, to his wife in the dream and to Clare beside him, It’s not the end of the world, darling.

Clare can’t walk.

She has sprained her ankle so badly, it’s no better than broken. Marble step, wet leaf, a moment of distraction, and she was pulled up, several feet above the landing and dropped like a bag of laundry, her fingers sliding down the wet iron banister, her feet bending and flopping like fish. Three of her anterior ligaments snapped off as she landed, two small pieces of bone clinging to their ends, and the white rubbery fibers and the tiny triangles of bone continue to float where they should not be, above her ankle’s hinge.

Her husband props the crutches up against the coffee table, tilting the handles in Clare’s direction, and after he’s laid a pillow under her mottled pink-and-blue ankle and a towel over the pillow and a bag of ice over everything, he brings in tea for Clare and her uncle David. He leaves to run errands. Neither of them asks Charles what kind of errands or when he’ll be back; he carried and fetched and did for them all morning, and if he had said that he was going off to bet on greyhounds, or try a little Ecstasy, or worse, Clare and David would understand. Clare and David share a strong dislike of being, and caring for, the disabled. David is in Clare and Charles’s house to recover from triple-bypass surgery and to entertain his niece during her period of limited mobility. Mostly, they read together in the living room.

“He is sweet,” Clare says aloud. It’s not what she usually says about her husband. She thinks good things; she thinks interesting, she thinks handsome (the first thousand times he stepped out of the shower, water still flowing down the runnel of his spine, she thought, Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, how can anyone be so beautiful), she thinks he is much nicer than William ever was. William would have shaken his head over her ugly ankle, made his own coffee, and waddled upstairs, leaving her lying on the couch like in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? Clare doesn’t think about William every day anymore; she thinks about him mostly when she is falling asleep or when she’s about to see him, which will be in the next few minutes. William and Isabel are pulling up to Clare and Charles’s front door right now. William struggles with his cane and himself and a bag of nectarines. Isabel gathers up the groceries and a canvas tote of mysteries. She looks away as William rocks himself up and out of the passenger seat.