by Amy Bloom
The boy sits down across from them on the floor. Clare and William smile helplessly. He slides to the floor so easily, he glides right down, and later, he will spring right up. It is a lovely thing to watch, the way gravity barely holds him.
Nelson has come to play checkers. Clare taught him when he was a little kid, and since the accident, Nelson makes a point of coming by every few days, eating the cookies that are always on the coffee table, and fitting in a quick game. His grandmother is collecting old clothes for church, from the garage, and he has fifteen minutes, she says. He might be able to beat Clare in fifteen minutes. It would be better if the fat man went outside, but it’s okay—Nelson can just keep his eyes on the board and on Clare’s skinny hands, looking closely at the tree of veins on the back of each one, blue branches pointing toward the fingers.
“All right,” Clare says, like she’s giving in, like she isn’t completely ready to kick his ass. “Set it up.”
Nelson plays as he always does, death in a bow tie, moving his front line cautiously but already dreaming of the queens slaughtered in their castles, gazing down at his men in terror and admiration, flames leaping orange and blue across their wooden walls.
“Game of Pharaohs,” William says. The kid must study Egypt. Mummies and Cleopatra’s negritude and the pyramids are what pass for history now. Half an hour left, and they’re going to spend it with Clare’s little friend.
Nelson pauses in front of one of Clare’s pieces. It’s not an advantageous jump.
“If you can jump, you must,” William says.
“Shut up. He knows.”
Clare rolls her eyes so Nelson can see: Ignore him. Nelson nods. He has met some very nice white people, but none of them have been men. He jumps Clare’s piece, and she jumps his.
“Watch yourself, young man,” Clare says.
“You watch yourself,” Nelson says, and laughs.
“Tough guy,” William says, and Nelson smiles tightly and looks away.
William sees Nelson’s opportunity, an unguarded square that will open up the board for him. You have it, William thinks, you may as well take it. He looks closely at Nelson, as he used to look at his daughter when they played Scrabble. See it, he thinks, see it. Do it. Nelson looks at William as if he’s spoken and scans the board. Nelson thinks hard. The man’s face is all lit up with wanting Nelson to win. Nelson and the fat man are going to beat Clare, is what Nelson sees. Nelson jumps like crazy, bouncing his man two, then three times and pounding his fists on the floor.
Clare claps.
“Good God. Well. Let’s see what I can do with this … ruination.” It is short work after that. Nelson’s men saunter around the board picking off Clare’s pieces and when she has trouble reaching to discard them, he scoops them up for her, tossing them in his palm once or twice and laying them on the side of the board in a neat line. They look good, one big red dot after another.
Mrs. Slater honks the horn, which is not what she usually does, but she still has to set up the Jumble Sale and the Baked Goods Table today, and this stop for winter clothes is out of her way. There’s no help for it, poor Clare, and it’s worth it for the six coats and the many pairs of shoes and the men’s suits that will go fast, but this is not something she has time for today.
Sorry to leave the scene of his triumph, Nelson leaps up, to show off for them one more time, graceful and determined as a knight on horseback, and he trips over his untied laces. He puts his hands out toward the floor, but the edge of the coffee table, a sheet of granite, catches him fiercely on the face, and he is down on the rug, screaming in pain and fear and because blood is flowing right into his eye. William very gently puts Clare’s feet aside, picks up the boy, and carries him into the kitchen.
“It’s okay,” he says. “It’s okay. It’s just blood, it’s okay.” It may not be okay, but William can see both eyes whole and no bone showing, and if the boy’s not blind or crippled, it should be more or less okay.
Clare comes in on her crutches, white around the mouth. She runs cold water and hands an icy dish towel to Charles, who lays it on the small curvy wound, a little red mouth exhaling blood. Nelson stops screaming. Blood soaks the dish towel.
Charles says, “A couple of Band-Aids, Clare?” and he pulls the edges of the gash together tightly, so tightly Nelson squirms under him, but Charles pins him gently and puts the bandages on, butterfly-style.
“Clare, you want to tell his mother, his grandmother, so the poor woman doesn’t have a stroke when she sees him?”
Clare wants to stay, but Nelson is nestled on the kitchen counter, resting so comfortably against William, she has to go tell his grandmother the bad news and let William be the hero. (Isabel told her that when baby Emily cried in her crib, Isabel and William would stand, locked hip to hip, in the doorway, each trying to get to her first, each trying to persuade the other that it didn’t matter, that they just didn’t want to trouble the other. Clare could not imagine Charles fighting her for the privilege of changing Danny’s diaper.) She turns around for a last look, and Nelson is laughing into William’s chest; Zeus holding Ganymede beneath his dark wing.
Nelson’s grandmother raised three boys and one girl, and an accident that does not involve a broken limb or serious impairment is, as far as she’s concerned, the best one can hope for in this treacherous world.
“He’s fine,” Clare says. “He cut his forehead on that granite coffee table. You know.” They have both banged their knees, badly, on that coffee table, and they both watch Nelson walk out the door, followed by William, and they both think that if Clare and Nelson had not been playing checkers, if Nelson had been helping his grandmother in the garage, like the good boy he is, he would not be marching toward them, a wounded boy soldier, with two pale-pink Band-Aids, already darkly bloodstained in their centers, laid above his beautiful eyes. His shirt is ruined.
“I have some plain white T-shirts,” Clare says. “I know you’re pressed for time.” She holds the door for Nelson, and he slides into the backseat to stretch out. His head hurts and there were no cookies and it seems like years ago that he was jumping Clare’s pieces and killing her queens where they stood. He puts his head on the pile of coats.
“Don’t bleed on those coats, little man. Are you okay? Do you want me to drop you at Auntie’s?”
“No.” His friends will be at the church. It will look like he has been in a big fight, which he sort of has, and that will be pretty cool. Clare turns the topcoat inside out so the silky lining is against his cheek. No one but Clare would do that for him. “I’m okay. We can go.”
“I’ll go back and get a T-shirt,” Clare says.
Nelson looks at his grandmother in the rearview mirror. He is not going to, and he doesn’t think his grandmother will expect him to, or let him, wear one of Clare’s own white T-shirts to the church Fall Festival, and a T-shirt that belonged to her husband would fit him like a dress. His grandmother smiles at him in the mirror and shakes her head at Clare.
“Don’t you worry—probably some fine shirts in the backseat. Nelson can have his pick. Bye, now.” She steps on the gas, like that, and they are off, down the driveway.
Nelson sits up to see Clare waving to him and the fat man giving him a salute. He lies back down on the black silk and replays the last few minutes of the game until they get to church.
“My ankle is killing me,” Clare says. “How’s your hip?”
“He’s a big boy.”
“Yes, he is.”
“He’ll play basketball, I guess.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake. Is that what you’d have said about Adam?”
Her son Adam is six-three, and although William is fond of him, the kid is such a sport of nature, he always hoped his Emily, tall and broad-shouldered, would never take a shine to him because their children would have been freaks, some kind of advanced-race humans, who would have lost all control of their huge, flailing limbs.
“Adam? That boy could beat Adam at one-on-one no
w. 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.
COMPASSION AND MERCY
For JOB
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.”
“Whatever she wants,” William said. “You should know, I’m not having sex with a graduate student. Or with porn stars.”
“I believe you,” Mrs. Merrill said. “You may as well tell me—it’ll all come out in the wash. Who are you having sex with?”
“Her name is Clare Wexler. She teaches. She’s a very fine teacher. She makes me laugh. She can be a difficult person,” he said, beaming, as if he were detailing her beauty. “You’d like her.”
William wiped his eyes.
“All right,” said Louise Merrill. “Let’s get you hitched before we’re all too old to enjoy it.”
When they could finally marry, Clare called her sons.
Danny said, “You might want a prenup. I’m just saying.”
Adam said, “Jeez, I thought Isabel was your friend.”
William called Emily and she said, “How can you do this to me? I’m trying to get pregnant,” and her husband, Kurt, had to take the phone because she was crying so hard. He said, “We’re trying not to take sides, you know.”
Three days after the storm had passed, classes resumed, grimy cars filled slushy roads, and Clare called both of her sons to say they were essentially unharmed.
“What do you mean, ‘essentially’?” Danny said, and Clare said, “I mean my hair’s a mess and I lost at Scrabble seventeen times and William’s back hurts from sleeping near the fireplace. I mean, I’m absolutely and completely fine. I shouldn’t have said ‘essentially.’
William laughed and shook his head when she hung up.
“They must know me by now,” Clare said.
“I’m sure they do,” William said, “but knowing and understanding are two different things. Vershtehen und eiklaren.”
“Fancy talk,” Clare said, and she kissed his neck and the bald top of his head and the little red dents behind his ears, which came from sixty-five years of wearing glasses. “I have to go to Baltimore tomorrow. Remember?”
“Of course,” William said.
Clare knew he’d call her the next day to ask about dinner, about Thai food or Cuban or would she prefer scrambled eggs and salami and then when she said she was on her way to Baltimore, William would be, for just a quick minute, crushed and then crisp and English.
They spoke while Clare was on the train. William had unpacked his low-salt, low-fat lunch. (“Disgusting,” he’d said. “Punitive.”) Clare had gone over her notes for her talk on Jane Eyre (“In which I will reveal my awful, retrograde underpinnings”) and they made their nighttime phone date for ten P.M., when William would be still at his desk at home and Clare would be in her bed at the University Club.
