Where the God of Love Hangs Out

by Amy Bloom

  “What is the ‘it’?” Patsine asks.

  Jewelle looks at Patsine. Patsine has something pointed and sensible to say about everything, all the time.

  “I think the ‘it’ is a memorial service.”

  Lionel lifts his head a bit, so he can see everyone.

  “I hope that little sonofabitch dies,” he says, and he sits up, changing his tone. “You know, her wishes were very clear. Cremation and lunch. No clergy, no house of worship, and no big deal. Obit in the Cranberry Bog Times or whatever and that’s it.”

  “Cremation?” Patsine asks, and shrugs when everyone looks at her. Julia was not her mother and it’s not her business but she liked Julia very much and she would not slide a beloved into the mouth of a furnace by way of farewell.

  “Why not? It’s not like she was Jewish,” Corinne says. It really isn’t Patsine’s place to ask all of these questions when she’s been married to Uncle Lionel for about five minutes.

  “Her father was Jewish,” Lionel says, and everyone looks at him.

  “Her father was Jewish? Julia was half Jewish?” Jewelle says.

  “Well, not the side that counts,” Lionel says.

  “I’m part Jewish?” Corinne says.

  “Yes,” Lionel says. “You are not only a quadroon, you are also, fractionally, a Jewess. You can be blackballed by everyone.”

  Buster puts his hand on Corinne’s shoulder and shakes his head at his brother.

  “Nice.”

  Lionel lies back down. He recites.

  “Ma’s mother was Italian. Her father was Jewish. We never met either of them. The old man ran off and left them when Ma was a girl and her mother raised her nothing, which is why we are the faithless heathen we are. Long after the divorce, the old man dies in a car accident—I think.” He looks at Buster, in case he’s gotten it wrong—it’s thirty-five years since he heard the story—but Buster shrugs. He was even younger when Julia told them the story and it doesn’t seem to him that he ever heard it again. Buster shrugs again, to show that he’s already forgiven his brother for teasing Corinne. She needs it; his daughter has become like fucking Goebbels on the subject of race and he can’t stand it. “He never remarried and he left all his money to Ma’s mother. She went on a round-the-world cruise after Ma graduated college and then … she dies. That’s all, folks.” Lionel spreads his arms wide, like Al Jolson.

  Patsine says flatly, “Jewish men do not abandon their wives.”

  Is that so, Jewelle thinks. She guesses some French Jewish married man sometime must have not left his wife for Miss Patsine Belfond, and Jewelle arches an eyebrow at Corinne. Lionel kisses Patsine’s puffy ankle. He loves her politically incorrect and sensible assertions. Fat people do eat too much. Some people should be sterilized. The darker people’s skins, the noisier they are, until you get to certain kinds of Africans who are as silent as sand.

  “Well, apparently one did,” Lionel says cheerfully. “Although Grandpa Whoever, Morris, Murray, Yitzhak, made up for it by leaving Grandma Whoever a lot of money, which was great until she died of food poisoning in Shanghai or—”

  “Bangkok.” Buster says. “Bhutan?”

  “Burma?”

  “She died of food poisoning?” Corinne says.

  “Bad shrimp,” Lionel says, closing his eyes.

  He hears his brother say, “Or crab,” and he smiles.

  “People don’t die from food poisoning,” Corinne says.

  Jewelle has had enough. “Your aunt Helen almost died from food poisoning when we were girls. We were at the state fair and she got so sick from the fried clams she was hospitalized for it. She vomited for three days and she was skinny as a stick anyway. She really almost died.” Corinne and Jordan stare at their mother. Their aunt Helen is big and imperturbable, a tax lawyer who brings her own fancy wine and her own pillow when she visits, and it’s impossible to imagine her young and skinny, barfing day and night until she almost died.

  Lionel presses his feet against his wife’s strong thigh and keeps his eyes shut. If he keeps them closed long enough, everyone but Patsine and Buster will disappear, his mother will reappear, and the worst headache he has ever had will go away.

  “I guess there are always things people don’t know about each other. I didn’t know that about Helen and the clams.” Buster takes out a pencil. “I think we should do a little planning, for the service, the lunch, for Ma.”

  “Fuck you,” Lionel says.

  “I know.”

  Robert has been standing in the doorway for about half a minute, listening to his friend’s children. He wants to write it all down and tell Julia after. You wouldn’t believe it, he’d say. They are all just like you said. Lionel is completely the master of the universe—you must have loved him a lot, darling, to give him that self-confidence—and Buster is Ted E. Bear on the outside but very strong on the inside; you’d sleep with Lionel but you’d marry Buster, is what I’m saying. Well, not you, of course, but me—back in the day. And poor Jewelle, doomed to be runner-up, isn’t she, even with those absolutely fantastic tits and still workin’ it, but my God, Patsine, what a piece of work. Don’t ask her if that dress makes you look fat because she will tell you. But I can see why you were thrilled she married Lionel. She has bent that man to her will and he is so glad, I can tell you that. Jordan’s a love; he’s like Buster, although maybe without the brains. Julia would pretend to smack him and he would apologize and she would say, Go on, go on eviscerating my loved ones, you terrible man. And he’d say, Corinne, my God, that child is why convents were invented. And Ari is very sexy in that broody, miserable way but it’s hard to see what exactly one would do with him. And Julia would look at him and he would say, I’m just sharing my observations, and she would say, You should be locked up, and he would say, And then you’d miss me, and she would say, Yes, I would, and I’d visit you in jail once a month and bring you porn.

  Corinne sees Robert first and she pokes her uncle Lionel. They all look over at Robert and they all say hello, more or less.

  “Would you like a cup of coffee?” Jewelle says.

  “No, thank you. I’m sorry to disturb you. I just thought I would … come by.”

  “We’re planning a service, just a lunch,” Lionel says, and Robert can see how hard the man is trying to be civil. “Maybe you want to say a few words.”

  “Yes,” Robert says to the roomful of people who don’t want him there. He is an impediment; he is an awful, faggy roadblock to their mother’s memory, and the sooner he picks up his odds and ends and goes back to Old Fagland, the better. Robert is not a brave man; he has stood up for himself a couple of times, in a polite way, over the course of seventy years, but he isn’t the kind of person who stays where he isn’t wanted. Julia was. Julia was just that kind of person, going where she wasn’t wanted, telling people to go fuck themselves, and Julia had loved him. He had braided her long gray hair and they had discussed whether or not she should cut it after all this time, and he had rubbed moisturizer into the dry skin between her shoulder blades and trailed his fingers down her spine and toward the small folds of skin above her waist. Julia said, No playing with my love handles. Robert had leaned forward to kiss them and said, Lovely, lovely handles. Robert pulls up a chair and he pats Jewelle on the knee.

  “If I may change my mind, coffee would be lovely.”

  Lionel says, “Maybe some Marion Williams in the background?”

  Robert says, “Absolutely. Julia was playing ‘Remember Me’ just the other day.”

  The day after the luncheon, they are still cleaning up. Buster washes and Lionel dries and Jewelle, who knows where everything goes, directs the putting away. Patsine sits at the kitchen table, with her feet up on a chair. Buster sings, “Some of these days, you’re gonna miss me, honey,” and Lionel growls, “Some of these days, you’re gonna miss me, babe,” and Patsine and Jewelle look at each other, eyes welling up, for their grieving husbands.

  “Be useful,” Jewelle says to the boys,
and she gives them both platters to put into the sideboard. There’s no point in giving them the wineglasses. Corinne pokes her head into the kitchen and disappears.

  “Corinne,” her mother says. “I could use a hand here.”

  Corinne walks into the middle of the kitchen in her grandmother’s black T-shirt, her own yoga pants, her mother’s black patent-leather pumps, and a green-and-black silk scarf tied around her neck, Apache-style. (“A-patch,” her grandmother said. “It’s a dance, not a rodeo.”) Her eyes are bright red.

  “Nana loved this song,” Corinne says. “So, okay.”

  Buster dries his hands and Lionel and his brother stand with their arms around each other.

  “Pretty legs, great big knockers, that’s what sells them tickets at the door. Honey, these are real show stoppers, it’s what keeps ’em comin’ back for more.”

  Corinne sang this song with her grandmother when no one was home. They shimmied and shook their behinds and one time they both slid down the banister onto pillows. They did the Electric Slide and Nana taught her The Stroll, too, and they danced around the living room like crazy women until they fell onto the couch, laughing and breathless.

  “Pretty legs, great big knockers, that’s what put the two in two by four. Oooh, baby”—Corinne pauses for her big finish. She struts across the floor like a showgirl and flings open her arms—“Oooh, it ain’t the ballads, it ain’t the rockers, it’s pretty legs and … these great … big knockers!”

  Her father and her uncle whistle and stamp their feet. Ari stares at her, and it’s not that sly, slitty look that makes her feel like hiding in the bathroom; his eyes are wide open. Her mother sits down next to Patsine and Patsine is holding Jewelle’s hand tightly but they are definitely smiling and Jordan shakes his head in admiration because there is no one like his baby sister. Corinne runs to her mother’s lap and buries her head in Jewelle’s shoulder. Jewelle puts her arms around her girl and showers her with kisses. Corinne can feel the bump of Patsine’s belly pressing behind her and Patsine’s hand on her hair.

  Robert is standing on the other side of the kitchen, clapping. “Oh, my dear, what a gift,” he says. “What a send-off.”

  Lionel looks at the empty kitchen table and he looks at the clock.

  “It’s dinner time.” He hands food to each person and soon the table is covered with three cartons of Chinese food, from Julia’s favorite restaurant, and a deep dish of oyster stuffing and a Tupperware of sweet potatoes with maple syrup and two kinds of chocolate-pecan pie, one for the people who like bourbon and one for people who like it and have to avoid it, and a casserole of creamed spinach with half a nutmeg taped to the top, for the last minute. Jewelle sticks one of the good silver spoons into the bowl of cranberry sauce she brought from home and Buster sets bottles of pear and apple cider and red wine on the table and hands out the crystal wineglasses to everyone. Patsine rests her hands on the baby.

  Lionel stands up and lifts his glass and looks at his brother. “Remember this one? A Jewish grandmother and her grandson are playing on the beach, building sandcastles. A wave comes along and drags the poor kid out to sea. The grandmother falls to her knees, screaming and crying. ‘Oh, God, oh, God, please save my only grandson. Please, he is the light of my life. Please, God, just save him, that’s all I ask of you.’”

  “Oh, yeah,” Buster says and he stands up. “And another wave comes and drops the little boy back on the beach, good as new. The grandmother hugs and kisses him. Then she looks up at the heavens and says, ‘Excuse me? He had a hat.’”

  BY-AND-BY

  Every death is violent.

  The iris, the rainbow of the eye, closes down. The pupil spreads out like black water. It seems natural, if you are there, to push the lid down, to ease the pleated shade over the ball, down to the lower lashes. The light is out, close the door.

  Mrs. Warburg called me at midnight. I heard the click of her lighter and the tiny crackle of burning tobacco. Her ring bumped against the receiver.

  “Are you comfortable, darling?”

  I was pretty comfortable. I was lying on her daughter’s bed, with my feet on Anne’s yellow quilt, wearing Anne’s bathrobe.

  “Do you feel like talking tonight?”

  Mrs. Warburg was the only person I felt like talking to. My boyfriend was away. My mother was away. My father was dead. I worked in a felafel joint on Charles Street where only my boss spoke English.

  I heard Mrs. Warburg swallow. “You have a drink, too. This’ll be our little party.”

  Mrs. Warburg and I had an interstate, telephonic rum-and-Coke party twice a week the summer Anne was missing. Mrs. Warburg told me about their problems with the house; they had some roof mold and a crack in the foundation, and Mr. Warburg was not handy.

  “Roof mold,” she said. “When you get married, you move into a nice prewar six in the city and you let some other girl worry about roof mold. You go out dancing.”

  I know people say, and you see it in movies, cascades of hair tumble out of the coffin, long, curved nails growing over the clasped hands. It’s not true. When you’re dead, you’re dead, and although some cells take longer to die than others, after a few hours everything is gone. The brain cells die fast, and blood pools in the soft, pressed places: the scapula, the lower back, the calves. If the body is not covered up, it produces a smell called cadaverine, and flies pick up the scent from a mile away. First, just one fly, then the rest. They lay fly eggs, and ants come, drawn to the eggs, and sometimes wasps, and always maggots. Beetles and moths, the household kind that eat your sweaters, finish the body; they undress the flesh from the bone. They are the cleanup crew.

  Mrs. Warburg and I only talked about Anne in passing and only about Anne in the past. Anne’s tenth birthday had had a Hawaiian theme. They made a hot-dog luau in the backyard and served raspberry punch; they played pin-the-lei-on-the-donkey and had grass skirts for all the girls. “Anne might have been a little old for that, even then. She was a sophisticate from birth,” Mrs. Warburg said. I was not a sophisticate from birth. I was an idiot from birth, and that is why when the police first came to look for Anne, I said a lot of things that sounded like lies.

  Mrs. Warburg loved to entertain; she said Anne was her mother’s daughter. We did like to have parties, and Mrs. Warburg made me tell her what kind of hors d’oeuvres we served. She said she was glad we had pigs-in-blankets because that’s what she’d served when she was just starting out, although she’d actually made hers. And did one of us actually make the marinara sauce, at least, and was Anne actually eating pork sausage, and she knew it must be me who made pineapple upside-down cake because that was not in her daughter’s repertoire, and she hoped we used wineglasses but she had the strong suspicion we poured wine out of the box into paper cups, which was true. I told her Anne had spray-painted some of our thirdhand furniture bright gold and when we lit the candles and turned out the lights, our apartment looked extremely glamorous.

  “Oh, we love glamorous,” Mrs. Warburg said.

  In the Adirondacks, the Glens Falls trail and the old mining roads sometimes overlap. Miles of trail around Speculator and Johnsburg are as smooth and neatly edged as garden paths. These are the old Fish Hill Mining Company roads, and they will take you firmly and smoothly from the center of Hamilton County to the center of the woods and up the mountainside. Eugene Trask took Anne and her boyfriend, Teddy Ross, when they were loading up Teddy’s van in the Glens Falls parking lot. He stabbed Teddy twice in the chest with his hunting knife, and tied him to a tree and stabbed him again, and left him and his backpack right there, next to the wooden sign about NO DRINKING, NO HUNTING. He took Anne with him, in Teddy’s car. They found Teddy’s body three days later and his parents buried him two days after that, back in Virginia.

  Eugene Trask killed another boy just a few days before he killed Teddy. Some kids from Schenectady were celebrating their high school graduation with an overnight camping trip, and when Eugene Trask came upon them, he tied them
all to different trees, far enough apart so they couldn’t see one another, and then he killed the boy who’d made him mad. While he was stabbing him, the same way he stabbed Teddy, two sharp holes in his heart and then a slash across his chest, for emphasis, for something, the other kids slipped out of their ropes and ran. By the time they came back with people from town, Eugene Trask had circled around the woods and was running through streams, where the dogs could not catch his scent.

  The heart is really two hearts and four parts: the right and the left, and the up and the down. The right heart pumps blood through the lungs, the left through the body. Even when there is nothing more for it to do, even when you have already lost ten ounces of blood, which is all an average-size person needs to lose to bring on heart failure, the left heart keeps pumping, bringing old news to nowhere. The right heart sits still as a cave, a thin scrim of blood barely covering its floor. The less air you have, the faster the whole heart beats. Still less and the bronchioles, hollow, spongy flutes of the lungs, whistle and squeeze dry until they lie flat and hard like plates on the table, and when there is no more air and no more blood to bring help from the farthest reaches of the body, the lungs crack and chip like old china.

  Mrs. Warburg and I both went to psychics.

  She said, “A psychic in East Cleveland. What’s that tell you?” which is why I kept talking to her even after Mr. Warburg said he didn’t think it was helping. Mrs. Warburg’s psychic lived in a rundown split-level ranch house with lime-green shag carpeting. Her psychic wore a white smock and white shoes like a nurse, and she got Mrs. Warburg confused with her three o’clock, who was coming for a reading on her pancreatic cancer. Mrs. Warburg’s psychic didn’t know where Anne was.

  My psychic was on West Cedar Street, in a tiny apartment two blocks away from us on Beacon Hill. My boss’s wife had lost a diamond earring and this psychic found it, my boss said. He looked like a graduate student. He was barefoot. He saw me looking down, and flexed his feet.