by Amy Bloom
William calls her name from the living room. He would get up, but it hurts too much. He usually shaves twice a day. He usually wears custom-made shirts and mossy, old-fashioned cologne, and he would prefer not to have Clare see him in backless bedroom slippers and green baggy pants, dragging his foot from room to room like road kill, but when he says so, she laughs.
“I’ve seen you worse,” she says, and there is no arguing with that. It seems to William that Clare last saw him looking good, well dressed and in control of himself a year and a half ago, before they were lovers. Now she’s seen him riddled with tubes, hung left and right with plastic pouches, sweating like a pig through a thin hospital gown that covered about a third of him.
Clare puts her groceries away in Isabel’s kitchen. Isabel has been telling William to change his ways for twenty years, and now he has to. Clare puts the chicken breasts in the refrigerator and thinks that that must be nice for Isabel.
William sits back in his armchair, moving his right foot out of harm’s way. If Clare gently presses his foot or lets the cuff of her pants just brush against his ankle, it will hurt worse than either of his heart attacks. He sees Clare angling toward him and moves his leg back a little more.
“Don’t bump me,” he says.
“I wasn’t going to bump you.”
Clare sits on the arm of the chair and glances at his foot. It’s her job not to take any notice of it. She can notice the slippers and green gardening pants, and she can say something clever about it all, if she can think of something clever, which she can’t. Isabel says clever, kind things to William when he’s under the weather. Clare’s seen it. Isabel arranges him beautifully, she flatters him into good behavior, she buys chairs that fit him and finds huge, handsome abstracts to balance the chairs; she drapes herself around him like wisteria and she carries his hypertension pills, his indomethacin, his cholesterol pills, and his prednisone in an engraved silver case, as if it’s a pleasure. The last time William and Clare had sex, William rested above Clare, just for a minute, catching his breath. He slipped off his elbows, and his full weight fell onto her. “Jesus Christ,” she’d said. “You could kill someone.” William did laugh but it’s not something she likes to remember.
“God, it’s like a giant turnip,” Clare says, putting her hand over her mouth.
It is exactly like a giant turnip and William is happy to hear her say so. His heart rises on a small, breaking wave of love just because Clare, who says the precisely wrong and tactless thing as naturally as breathing, is with him, and will be right here for almost twenty-four hours.
“Really, cooked turnip.”
“Well, the skin begins peeling in a couple of days, the doctor says, so it’ll be even more disgusting. Hot, peeling, naked turnip.” He leans forward and kisses the shoulder closer to him.
“Did Isabel leave food for you?”
“Hardly any. The three things I can eat. When she comes back the two of you can have a big party, tossing back shots of vodka, licking caviar out of the jar.”
“Isabel wouldn’t do that to you.”
“You would.”
“Probably,” Clare says, and bends to kiss him. Everything she thought about while driving up, how much trouble he is and how selfish and where all that shameless piggery has gotten him (gout and her), is nothing when he kisses her, although even when their lips touch, even as the soft, salty tip of his tongue connects to hers, they are not the best kisses she’s ever had.
When they stop kissing, William says, “Take off that ugly brown coat and stay a while, won’t you?”
A month before the gout attack, Clare made William come with her to visit her uncle David. William clutched the staircase with both hands and made her carry his hat, his jacket, and the bottle of wine.
“You didn’t say it was a walk-up.”
“It’s two flights, William, that’s all. Just rest for a minute.”
It was a bad idea. William said it, panting up the stairs, and he said it again when Uncle David went into his kitchen to get William a glass of water. Uncle David said it when William went to use the bathroom.
William washed his face with cold water and took his hypertension pills. He looked at the Viagra pills he’d been carrying around, in a tiny square of plastic wrap twisted like the wax-paper salt shakers his mother made for picnics. He’d been hoping for several weeks that he and Clare would go for a very elegant autumnal picnic in the Berkshires and that afterward they would stop into one of the seedy motels on Route 183. (When they did finally have the picnic and they did find the Glen Aire motel, the Viagra mixed badly with William’s hypertension pills, and right after getting the kind of erection the online pharmacy had promised, he passed out. Clare drove them home in her aggressive, absent-minded way, blasting the horn and sprinkling the remaining six blue pills out the window, as William rested, his face against the glass.)
“What do I want to meet him for?” Uncle David said. “He seems like a nice man but I like Charles.”
“He’s my best friend. That’s all. I wanted my best friend to meet my favorite relative.”
“Only relative.” David shrugged.
It was so clearly a bad idea, and so clearly understood by all parties to be a bad idea, that Clare thought she should just take William back downstairs and send her uncle a box of chocolates and a note of apology.
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 unc
le’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.
“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.
