Where the God of Love Hangs Out - Amy Bloom [52]
My naked mother ran into the room. I was curled up in a ball, her feet beside my ass. She knelt down, pushing back my hair to get a better look at me. Her breasts swung down, half in, half out of the hallway’s dusty light.
“You do not have a scratch on you,” she said, and patted my cheek. “Walk over toward the door—there’s nothing that way. I’ll get a broom.”
I could see her, both more and less clearly than I would have liked. She pushed herself up, and the view of her folded belly and still-dark pubic hair was replaced by the sharp swing of her hips, wider now, tenderly pulled down at the soft bottom edges, but still that same purposeful, kick-down-the-door walk.
She came back in her robe and slippers, with a broom and dustpan, and I wrapped a towel around my waist. I stood up straight so that even if she needed glasses as much as I did what she saw of me would look good.
“Quite the event. Is there something, some small thing in this room, you didn’t run into?”
“No,” I said. “I think I’ve made contact with almost everything. The armchair stayed out of my way, but otherwise, for a low-key kind of guy, I’d have to say I got the job done.”
My mother dumped the pieces of glass and the lightbulb and the lamp remains into the wastebasket.
“You smell like the whole Napa Valley,” she said, “so I won’t offer you a brandy.”
“I don’t usually drink this way, Ma. I’m sorry for the mess.”
She put down the broom and the dustpan and came over to me and smiled at my towel. She put her lips to the middle of my chest, over my beating heart.
“I love you past speech.”
We stood there, my long neck bent down to her shoulder, her hands kneading my back. We breathed in and out together.
“I’ll say good night, honey. Quite a day.”
She waved one hand over her shoulder and walked away.
LIGHT INTO DARK
“It’s six-fifteen,” Lionel says to his stepmother. “Decent people have started drinking.”
“Maybe I should put out some food,” Julia says.
Lionel nods, looking around for the little cluster of liquor bottles Julia had thrown out when his father was alive and trying to stay sober, and which she replaced on the sideboard as soon as the man passed away. Lionel’s not sorry he’s dragged himself and his stepson from Paris to Massachusetts for their first trip together, but it seems possible, even probable, that this Thanksgiving weekend will be the longest four days of his life.
“It’s all over with Paula?” Julia doesn’t sound sorry or not sorry; she sounds as if she’s simply counting places at the table.
“Yeah. Things happen.”
“Do you want to tell me more about it?”
“Nothing to tell.”
After his first wife, the terrible Claudine, Lionel had thought he would never even sleep with another woman, but Paula had been the anti-Claudine: not French, not thin, not mean. She was plump and pretty, a good-natured woman with an English-language bookstore and a three-year-old son. It did not seem possible, when they married in the garden of the Hôtel des Saints-Pères, with Paula in a short white dress and her little boy holding the rings, that after five years she would be thin and irritable and given to the same shrugs and expensive cigarettes as the terrible Claudine. After he moved out, Lionel insisted on weekly dinners and movie nights with his stepson. He wants to do right by the one child to whom he is “Papa,” although he has begun to think, as Ari turns eight, that there is no reason not to have the boy call him by his