Where the God of Love Hangs Out - Amy Bloom [0]
Away
Normal
A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You
Love Invents Us Come to Me
For Brian
CONTENTS
William and Clare
YOUR BORDERS, YOUR RIVERS, YOUR TINY VILLAGES
I LOVE TO SEE YOU COMING, I HATE TO SEE YOU GO
THE OLD IMPOSSIBLE
COMPASSION AND MERCY
BETWEEN HERE AND HERE
PERMAFROST
Lionel and Julia
SLEEPWALKING
NIGHT VISION
LIGHT INTO DARK
FORT USELESS AND FORT RIDICULOUS
BY-AND-BY
WHERE THE GOD OF LOVE HANGS OUT
Reader’s Guide
YOUR BORDERS, YOUR RIVERS, YOUR TINY VILLAGES
At two o’clock in the morning, no one is to blame.
We’d been watching CNN, one scene of disaster leading to the next, the reporter in front of what might have been a new anthrax outbreak giving way to the military analyst in the studio with new developments in Kabul, when William put his hand on my breast. My husband was asleep upstairs, dreaming of making the deal that would put us on high ground when the entire economy collapsed, and William’s wife was asleep in the guest room, getting her restorative eight hours. I think of Isabel as forcefully regular and elegant in all of her habits, and I’m sure she thinks of me as a little askew in all of mine.
William’s hand trembled slightly. Our two plain gold wedding bands twinkled in the light of the TV screen. He touched my breast through my bathrobe and my pajamas—I had dressed for watching TV with William as if for bundling—for a very long time. His touch, left forefinger on left nipple, through wool and flannel, should have been numbing in its dreamy repetition, but it was not; it captured my whole body’s attention. We kept our eyes on the TV. Finally, he fumbled under my robe and opened two buttons of my pajama top. His hand moved across my breast, and I sighed. I heard him breathing, hard and damp, and I put my hand on his big belly. It does not seem possible that we are people with three children, two marriages, and a hundred and ten years between us.
The first time I made out in a car, it was with Roger Saleta from Far Rockaway. We were trying to end the war in Vietnam by flooding the local draft board with mail and marching in front of it whenever our class schedules allowed. I had spoken at a big rally, wearing an electric-blue nylon halter top and my tight bell-bottoms with a crucified Jesus painted on the right leg. (I pretended not to know, and it may have been that I actually did not know then, why some people found this offensive. “I’m not mocking Jesus,” I told my mother. “I’m just representing him, on my jeans.”) Roger circled around the parking lot after the rally and offered me a ride in his gold Camaro. We drove to Jones Beach, miles from the protest, miles from social studies and home ec, and we stayed in the car while the waves crashed and we worked at each other. Hands and mouths. Necks and elbows. He licked me through my jeans until they were wet and dark blue from inseam to belt buckle. I wanted to bang my head against the back of the seat from pleasure, and dug my hands into his black curls instead. This boy, not my idea of a lover, not even my idea of a date, had my body humming, dancing its tiny, fierce dance in the backseat. His hands under me and his mouth shamelessly pressed against me, as if the rest of the world could sink into the ocean out there and we would not even blink, or maybe, yes, blink dully, just once, before we returned to the real world of my pussy and his mouth. Later, we went to his prom, and I saw that he couldn’t dance, which I hadn’t known, and that his eyes were much too close together, which I had known and ignored, and I was a big disappointment to him that night.
* * *
William whispered something to me, but they were showing night bombing in the north and I couldn’t hear him over the shouting correspondent. “May I?” he said again, and put his mouth over my nipple. William is English, and he has beautiful manners. He has never failed to open the door, to pull out the chair, to slip off the coat, to bring flowers and send thank-you notes. It is not an affectation. Charles, my husband,