Where the God of Love Hangs Out - Amy Bloom [12]
“It’s really beautiful,” Clare says. I am the worst person in the world, she thinks.
“It is,” William says. Go, in Christ’s name, he thinks, and take that awful little man with you.
* * *
“We’ve got an hour to ourselves,” William says. “Where should we start?”
“How’s Emily?”
“Oh. Fine. She’s liking law school—what can I say? You want to talk about our kids?”
“No. What’s the matter with your leg?”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake. I’d rather talk about the kids. I have bad arthritis, that’s all. It acts up. I’m doing what I’m supposed to. Glucosamine chondroitin. Physical therapy. Whole grains. What do you want from me?”
“That’s good,” Clare says. “I’m glad.” She doesn’t look glad. She looks chastened and sulky, and she pulls at the corner of her quilt until a wisp of cotton batting appears.
“What’s wrong? Comparing yourself to Isabel? Thinking how I’d be curled into a fetal position by now if I were in your hands?”
It is a terrible thing to think and a terrible thing to be seen thinking—Isabel is a better wife than I am—and still Clare’s glad that William knows her.
“Jesus, be nice. Nicer.”
“I don’t have to be nice. Leave the quilt alone. I miss you every day, and we’re not even friends anymore.”
“We are.”
“We are not, and do not dishonor the memory of that beautiful thing by saying otherwise. You know we’re not.”
Clare wipes her eyes with a corner of the quilt. “Fine. Jesus.”
“Less than an hour. If your uncle doesn’t come scuttling back to check on us.” William picks up Clare’s hand and kisses it. He takes a nectarine out of the bag and wraps her hands around it.
“Look at the size of this,” Clare says.
Clare twists the nectarine sharply, and it falls into halves, each one a brilliant, glazed yellow with a prickled hot-pink center. The pit falls onto her lap. They eat their halves and watch each other eat, and they drip, just a little, on the quilt. Clare wipes her chin with her wet hands, and then she wipes her face again, on the quilt.
“Napkins would have been good,” Clare says.
William shrugs. “I like this,” he says. He lifts up the quilt and wipes his hands on Clare’s jeans.
“Oh, what is this,” she says. If they’re going to start acting like the senior-citizen version of Tom Jones, smearing their faces with nectarine juice and carrying on, the next thing you know, they’ll be hobbling off to motels and looking up positions for the disabled in the sex books. William does not look at all embarrassed; he looks as he always looks: imperturbable, and mildly intrigued, inclined to be benevolent, if no discomfort is involved. Privately, Isabel and Clare call William The Last Emperor and there have been times when Isabel has called Clare to say, “L.E. is driving me mad. Why don’t you and Charles come up before I put glass in his cereal?”
“I love a nice nectarine,” William says. “My mother made a nectarine tart, I remember. Sliced nectarines and a little brown sugar on top of a brick, just a giant slab of really good pie crust.”
William kisses Clare’s right hand, then her left, lightly, absent-mindedly, as if in passing.
“What’s this?”
“Nothing,” William says. “Tell me something else. Tell me a secret.”
“Oh, a secret. What a baby. You mean something Charles doesn’t know?”
William bites his tongue. He doesn’t think Charles knows much, but he could be wrong. He thinks that Charles has been so lucky and so handsome for so long that he’s come to think that the world is actually filled with honest men making fair deals and bad people being thwarted by good ones. This is what William prefers to think. Before he slept with her, William thought that Clare had gotten the better half of the bargain. He even said so to Isabel, a few times. Clare is good, spiky company, and she is the very best companion to have in a bad situation. Trouble brings out the cheer beneath her darkness, unlike everyday life, which tends to have the opposite effect, and she holds her liquor like an old Swede, but Charles has to put up with that squinty, unyielding nature, and he does it with