Where the God of Love Hangs Out - Amy Bloom [5]
“Really, cooked turnip.”
“Well, the skin begins peeling in a couple of days, the doctor says, so it’ll be even more disgusting. Hot, peeling, naked turnip.” He leans forward and kisses the shoulder closer to him.
“Did Isabel leave food for you?”
“Hardly any. The three things I can eat. When she comes back the two of you can have a big party, tossing back shots of vodka, licking caviar out of the jar.”
“Isabel wouldn’t do that to you.”
“You would.”
“Probably,” Clare says, and bends to kiss him. Everything she thought about while driving up, how much trouble he is and how selfish and where all that shameless piggery has gotten him (gout and her), is nothing when he kisses her, although even when their lips touch, even as the soft, salty tip of his tongue connects to hers, they are not the best kisses she’s ever had.
When they stop kissing, William says, “Take off that ugly brown coat and stay a while, won’t you?”
A month before the gout attack, Clare made William come with her to visit her uncle David. William clutched the staircase with both hands and made her carry his hat, his jacket, and the bottle of wine.
“You didn’t say it was a walk-up.”
“It’s two flights, William, that’s all. Just rest for a minute.”
It was a bad idea. William said it, panting up the stairs, and he said it again when Uncle David went into his kitchen to get William a glass of water. Uncle David said it when William went to use the bathroom.
William washed his face with cold water and took his hypertension pills. He looked at the Viagra pills he’d been carrying around, in a tiny square of plastic wrap twisted like the wax-paper salt shakers his mother made for picnics. He’d been hoping for several weeks that he and Clare would go for a very elegant autumnal picnic in the Berkshires and that afterward they would stop into one of the seedy motels on Route 183. (When they did finally have the picnic and they did find the Glen Aire motel, the Viagra mixed badly with William’s hypertension pills, and right after getting the kind of erection the online pharmacy had promised, he passed out. Clare drove them home in her aggressive, absent-minded way, blasting the horn and sprinkling the remaining six blue pills out the window, as William rested, his face against the glass.)
“What do I want to meet him for?” Uncle David said. “He seems like a nice man but I like Charles.”
“He’s my best friend. That’s all. I wanted my best friend to meet my favorite relative.”
“Only relative.” David shrugged.
It was so clearly a bad idea, and so clearly understood by all parties to be a bad idea, that Clare thought she should just take William back downstairs and send her uncle a box of chocolates and a note of apology.
William came out of the bathroom, mopping his face, and shook Clare’s uncle’s hand again.
“Nice place. I’m sorry Clare made me come.”
“Me, too. She’s hard to argue with.”
The two men smiled, and William picked up his coat.
“Those stairs’ll kill you,” David said. “Why don’t you have a beer, and then go.”
They had their beers as if Clare wasn’t there. They talked about baseball, as the season was under way, and they talked about electric cars, which was even more boring than baseball. Clare sat on the windowsill and swung her feet.
William used the bathroom again before they left. David and Clare looked at each other.
David said, “You can’t hide someone that big. Where would you put him, sweetheart? He’d stick out of the closet and you can’t put a man like that under the bed.”
Clare knew Charles was never going to walk in on her and William. It was probably not a great idea to sleep with William; she knew it wasn’t a great idea almost immediately after it happened. She had managed to upend something that had sat neatly and foursquare beneath them, and even if