Where the God of Love Hangs Out - Amy Bloom [11]
“I’m not dying,” he says again.
“I hope not,” Clare says, and shifts her weight to look at him more closely.
“For the love of Jesus,” David says. “He’s limping, he’s not dying. Who are you, Dr. Kevorkian?”
Clare looks at William and smiles. David sees. He could sit here all night, is how David feels, keeping an eye on this big fat smoothie who’s just as crazy about Clare as he ever was. Clare’s feelings he can’t read. She looks old and tired, and in David’s experience old and tired is not a breeding ground for illicit love. Not in women. In men, sometimes it makes them try a little harder, to get the woman to chase the old and tired away.
“So, what a pair,” David says. “Pair of lame ducks.” They shrug, like a pair.
“Since my ankle,” Clare says, “I’m only reading about the ambulatory. Cowgirls, lady mountain climbers. Strong-minded women paddling down the Amazon, with their bare hands. Shrunken heads in their lace reticules. Banana leaves on their feet.”
“Really,” William says.
“Your mother was a great walker,” David says. Evoking Clare’s mother seems like a good idea. His sister was hell on hanky-panky, and everybody knew it. She threw David out of her house on four different occasions because of hanky-panky. He was sitting on the curb after one Thanksgiving, up to his ass in dead leaves, in front of that house they had in, where, Lake Success, and it was little Clare who came out with his coat, his hat on her head, carrying a beer and a handful of pigs-in-blankets. Life is short, David thinks, and walks out.
“Why don’t you just sit by me?” Clare says. “You can provide the elevation.” She would ask for more ice, she could actually use some more ice, but if William goes to get it, Isabel will intercept him and want it done properly and bring it herself, knowing that William will bring back three ice cubes in a dripping dish towel. If ice were what Clare wanted most, she would ask Isabel.
William hoists himself up, which he would rather Clare didn’t see, and limps over to the couch. She’s already seen him limping so there’s no help for that, and he holds her feet up and puts himself under them and sinks back onto the sofa, pain gnawing at his hip.
“A lot of activity here,” Clare says.
“Oh, yes, quite a ruckus,” William says. “I am not going back to that chair anytime soon. David can come back in with Hera and her peacocks, I’m staying on this couch, under these bumpy black-and-blue little feet.”
“And the peacocks are for?”
“Peacocks pulled her royal wagon. I have no idea why. She drove everybody crazy. A vigilante about adultery. Most of the myths are about her driving someone insane with her suspicions.”
“Gosh, I wonder who wrote those stories. She wasn’t wrong, right? Zeus fucked everything. Ship to shore. Ox to goose. Whatever.”
“Oh, yes.”
Isabel comes into the room and looks at them. There are things she could say, there are plenty of things she could say about her husband, who doesn’t like her coat to brush against him when he’s driving, who so prefers some space between him and everyone else that he makes reservations for four even when it’s the two of them, and who is now making himself into a footrest for their friend Clare. But Clare looks terrible, crumpled and waxy, and her hair, and the two of them are not likely to run off for some brisk lovemaking—how could they and what has it ever been between them but the rubbing up of two broken wings? And Isabel believes that life is what you make it. She adjusts Clare’s pillow.
“Do you need anything? David wants to take a little walk, and it’s just so gorgeous today—”
Clare and William look out the living room’s bay window at the beautiful autumn day, and sigh, as if they have given