Amy Bloom: Where the God of Love Hangs Out

Uncle David reaches for his tea, which will not be the way he likes it, but he has made up his mind not to complain. The man went to the trouble of making tea. David didn’t quite catch what Clare said about Charley. He hopes she isn’t complaining. She’s no day at the beach, his niece; the sprained ankle has not made her a happier, nicer person. If he were Charley, he would make up pressing business in Baltimore, never mind a few errands down town.

“This is okay,” Uncle David says. “This is fine. He makes a better cup of tea than you do.”

“Well, good. Half English. The Magna Carta. Men’s shoes. Tea.”

“And roast beef,” David says, and he is about to add “and sodomy” just to keep the conversational ball rolling, when Isabel he can’t remember her last name walks into the room, with bags of things. No one bothered to tell him she was coming. He would have put on a fresh shirt. He might have shaved. She’s a good-looking woman, and well read for a real estate agent, and she has that quality, that way of making it clear that she wants him to get what he wants, that makes even plain women — and Isabel is not plain — very attractive. Clare is the more interesting person; as a human being, he’d pick Clare over Isabel, but he can’t see how you’d be married to Isabel and chase Clare. It would make no sense, except David does remember chasing, and catching, a big, bushy-haired girl with thighs like Smithfield hams, and after her, chasing an Egyptian ballerina whose kohl ran onto his linen sports coat, so he had to just leave it, streaked and stuffed into a wastebasket, in Grand Central Terminal — all while married to the most beautiful woman in the world, a woman who turned heads until the day she died. He can see his wife and those girls, and a few other women, all rotating delicately in the same shadowy, treacherous light.

“We brought nice things,” Isabel says, and kisses them both.

“You smell good,” Clare says. Clare doesn’t smell good. She smells like rancid butter and wet wool. She smells just like a yak, and her one skimpy shower didn’t change that or keep her hair from hanging in limp coils, so that she now has yak ears as well. Uncle David, for whom the word natty was invented, who loved to tell people that his late wife always got ready for bed behind a closed door and that as far as he knew, she woke up every morning with brushed hair and a hint of lipstick, should not have to see his niece like this. She’s not fit for company, even if it is only Isabel and William, and it never is only Isabel and William. What comes through the door is William as only Clare knows him, naked on a motel bed, sweating like a man with a fever, or cupping her chin in a restaurant and leaning forward with great, premeditated grace to kiss her. And right behind those stolen pictures come Clare’s old friends Isabel and William, the four of them playing Monopoly at Cape Cod, and right behind them, her husband, Charles, slicing limes, and behind Charles, their sons, not as they are now, but pink and adorable in their footy pajamas, Danny holding his father’s hand, Adam carrying his briefcase. Some of you will simply have to go, Clare wants to say. She smoothes out her ice pack, watches her uncle leer at Isabel, and longs for the thick, amiable hours of Percocet.

William comes in, leaning heavily on a cane, and Clare can’t even say hello; the sight of the cane just snaps her mouth shut.

David stands up to shake William’s hand and tries to take the bag of nectarines from him. He stands to demonstrate to Isabel — and it’s all right for William and Clare to see this, too; he has no objection to either of them noticing — that David and Isabel are the only two people in the room able to get up and down from the furniture whenever they please. William hugs the nectarines.

“What happened to you?” David says.

William is sorry to see David, as he always is. David is the living embodiment of William’s bad conscience about sleeping with Clare, and he is not a rueful, forgiving conscience. He is Con science as a caustic, sensual, dyspeptic old man.

“Nothing much,” William says. “How’s the heart?”

Isabel says, “Where’s Charles?”

“He’s running errands,” Clare says, and Isabel picks up the tea tray. Privately, Charles and Clare call Isabel The Governess. Isabel purses her lips just a tiny bit as she gathers the cups, and Clare can see her thinking that Charles is out gallivanting — and that would be Isabel’s word for it, gallivanting —when he should be home supervising Clare, who might try to get herself a glass of water, or worse. It’s very pleasant, it is just very warming, to have poor, good Charles on the receiving end of Isabel’s disapproval for a change, and Clare throws her shoulders back and down to lengthen her neck and smiles up at William, who smiles back with relief, thinking, She’s all right, she’s just sick of being Charles’s little cripple, as who wouldn’t be.

William stands in front of Clare.

“Sit,” Clare says, and he sits in the armchair across from David, miles away from Clare, close enough to David to pat him on the knee or, alternatively, smash him in the throat and kill him.

“Sitting,” William says. “Shall I roll over, too?”

“What’s with the cane?”

“It helps me walk more comfortably.” The thought of discussing his rheumatoid arthritis with Clare is disheartening. It is unbearable.

“Oh,” Clare says. She looks down at the bag of books Isabel has brought and pulls one out. “God bless Isabel. I like this series.”

William smiles politely.

“I never read them,” he says. “You know, Isabel goes through hundreds.”

“Are you in pain?” Clare says accusingly.

“Yes,” he says, and Clare thinks, Oh, God, he’s dying.

“I’m just in pain,” he says. “I’m not dying.”

He shouldn’t have come. He should have let Isabel come down by herself, and the women could have had some girl talk and clucked their tongues over the stupidity or cupidity of men, about which he would never argue, and have a few measured glasses of white wine (which is completely untrue to his memory of Clare, who pulled a bottle of Balvenie out of her suitcase when they were still twenty miles from their motel). He’s not going to tell Clare, least of all when she’s lying there like the little match girl, and certainly least of all while her uncle David sits before them like a cross between Cerberus and Mel Brooks, that he feels like he’s been dying for some time. He has not been happy to see daylight any morning that he can remember, and he falls into sleep as if he’s been wrapped in chains and tossed overboard.

“I’m not dying,” he says again.

“I hope not,” Clare says, and shifts her weight to look at him more closely.

“For the love of Jesus,” David says. “He’s limping, he’s not dying. Who are you, Dr. Kevorkian?”

Clare looks at William and smiles. David sees. He could sit here all night, is how David feels, keeping an eye on this big fat smoothie who’s just as crazy about Clare as he ever was. Clare’s feelings he can’t read. She looks old and tired, and in David’s experience old and tired is not a breeding ground for illicit love. Not in women. In men, sometimes it makes them try a little harder, to get the woman to chase the old and tired away.

“So, what a pair,” David says. “Pair of lame ducks.” They shrug, like a pair.

“Since my ankle,” Clare says, “I’m only reading about the ambulatory. Cowgirls, lady mountain climbers. Strong-minded women paddling down the Amazon, with their bare hands. Shrunken heads in their lace reticules. Banana leaves on their feet.”

“Really,” William says.

“Your mother was a great walker,” David says. Evoking Clare’s mother seems like a good idea. His sister was hell on hanky-panky, and everybody knew it. She threw David out of her house on four different occasions because of hanky-panky. He was sitting on the curb after one Thanksgiving, up to his ass in dead leaves, in front of that house they had in, where, Lake Success, and it was little Clare who came out with his coat, his hat on her head, carrying a beer and a handful of pigs-in-blankets. Life is short, David thinks, and walks out.