Amy Bloom: Where the God of Love Hangs Out

“Adam? That boy could beat Adam at one-on-one now. I love you.”

So it is not a discussion of the limited options for nonwhite children, and it is not a discussion of the hideous fate of young black men, and there’s no reason to talk about Adam right now. Clare cannot stop staring at her watch. The second hand is hammering around the dial.

“Oh, I know,” she says. “How about a little Percocet? Just a quarter, take the edge off.”

“Is that a good idea?” William says. If she had offered him a bottle of almost anything, William would have taken it, but prescription drugs that make you feel better scare the shit out of him.

Clare takes a white pill out of her pocket and bites it in half. She spits half of it back into her hand and swallows.

“Here. Half. You don’t have to take it.”

William takes it. It seems like an extremely reckless and adolescent thing to do, but he isn’t operating any heavy machinery, he isn’t driving or running for office, he is just sitting on the couch with his old friend, waiting for his wife to come back.

It dissolves in Clare’s throat, leaving a sandy, salty trail. She pulls herself up to William and hugs him.

“You were very good with Nelson. After a while.”

“He’s a good kid. He was lucky.”

“You can’t beat lucky,” she says.

“We’ve been lucky. So far,” William says.

“We really have.” Clare lies down again, her head in William’s lap, her feet up on the sofa’s arm. William looks down into her eyes, unsmiling, and she looks away.

Maybe, Clare thinks, when Isabel and David return, William will have migrated back to the armchair, reading something high-toned, and I will be resting, attractively, or reading, attractively. And when Charles comes back, he’ll find the four of us talking over drinks and eating the goat cheese and crackers that Isabel brought. He’ll join us. He’ll put his hand on my horrible hair, as if it is nice hair, and he’ll sit where William is sitting now.

It is such a golden picture, the five of them. The six of them — Clare pictures Nelson, too, sitting on the other side of her, in a clean shirt, holding a couple of the cookies she’d forgotten to put out for him before. The light shines on Charles’s lovely Nordic hair, a mix of blond and gray, as if the boy and the man will coexist forever, and Isabel is bringing out the best in everyone in her kindest, most encouraging way, as if all she has ever wanted is to help Clare make a nice party, and David tells his stories of Second Avenue, and there is nothing in them, not Great-Aunt Frieda, not the death of little cousin Renee, to make Clare cry, and William tells her that he will love her forever, that nothing has been lost, after all, and he mouths the words so that no one can hear him, but her, of course, and it is so beautiful, so drenched in the lush, streaming light of what is not, she closes her eyes to see it better and falls asleep.

William relaxes. There really is nothing more to do. He can just close his eyes, too. Clare’s hair fans out across his lap. Her hands press his to her chest. The objects in the room darken, until it is a black reef from couch to table to chair, and no one turns on the light. William and Clare sleep, as if it is a quiet night in their own home, as if they are lying naked and familiar in their own bed.

No power.

The roads were thick with pine branches and whole birch trees, the heavy boughs breaking off and landing on top of houses and cars and in front of driveways. The low, looping power lines coiled onto the road, and even from their bedroom window, Clare could see silver branches dangling in the icy wires. Highways were closed. Classes were canceled. The phone didn’t work. The front steps were slippery as hell.

William kept a fire going in the living room and Clare toasted rye bread on the end of fondue forks for breakfast, and in the early afternoon, they wrapped cheese sandwiches in tin foil and threw them into the embers for fifteen minutes. William was in charge of dinner and making hot water for Thai ginger soup-in-a-bowl. They used the snow bank at the kitchen door to chill the Chardonnay.

They read and played Scrabble and at four o’clock, when daylight dropped to a deep indigo, Clare lit two dozen candles and they got into their pile of quilts and pillows.

“All right,” William said. “Let’s have it. You’re shipwrecked on a desert island. Who do you want to be with — me or Nelson Slater?”

“Oh my God,” Clare says. “Nelson. Of course.”

“Good choice. He did a great job with the firewood.”

William kept the fire going all night. Every hour, he had to roll sideways and crouch and then steady himself and then pull himself up with his cane and then balance himself, and because Clare was watching and worried, he had to do it all with the appearance of ease. Clare lay in the dark and tried to move the blankets far to one side so they wouldn’t tangle William’s feet.

“You’re not actually helping,” he said. “I know where the blankets are, so I can easily step over them. And then, of course, you move them.”

“I feel bad,” Clare said.

“I’m going to break something if you keep this up.”

“Let me help,” Clare said.

When the cold woke them, Clare handed William the logs. They talked about whether or not it was worth it to use the turkey carcass for soup and if they could really make a decent soup in the fireplace. William said that people had cooked primarily in hearths until the late eighteenth century. William told Clare about his visit to his cardiologist and the possible levels of fitness William could achieve. (“A lot of men your age walk five miles a day,” the doctor said. “My father-in-law got himself a personal trainer, and he’s eighty.”) Clare said maybe they could walk to the diner on weekends. They talked about Clare’s sons, Adam and Danny, and their wives and the two grandchildren and they talked about William’s daughter, Emily, and her pregnancy and the awful man she’d married (“I’d rather she’d taken the veil,” William said. “Little Sisters of Gehenna”). When the subject came up, William and Clare said nice things about the people they used to be married to.

* * *

It had taken William and Clare five years to end their marriages. William’s divorce lawyer was the sister of one of William’s old friends. She was William’s age, in a sharp black suit and improbably black hair and bloodred nails. Her only concession to age was black patent flats, and William was sure that most of her life, this woman had been stalking and killing wild game in stiletto heels.

“So,” she said. “You’ve been married thirty-five years. Well, look, Dr. Langford—”

“‘Mister’ is fine,” William said. “‘William’ is fine.”

“‘Bill’?” the woman said and William shook his head no and she smiled and made a note.

“Just kidding. It’s like this. Unless your wife is doing crack cocaine or having sex with young girls and barnyard animals, what little you have will be split fifty-fifty.”

“That’s fine, Mrs. Merrill,” William said.

“Not really,” the woman said. “Call me Louise. Your wife obviously got a lawyer long before you did. I got a fax today, a list of personal property your wife believes she’s entitled to. Oil paintings, a little jewelry, silverware.”

“That’s fine. Whatever it is.”

“It’s not fine. But let’s say you have no personal attachment to any of these items. And let’s say it’s all worth about twenty thousand dollars. Let’s have her give you twenty thousand dollars, and you give her the stuff. There’s no reason for us to just roll over and put our paws up in the air.”