Where the God of Love Hangs Out - Amy Bloom [15]
“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 now. 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