Where the God of Love Hangs Out - Amy Bloom [6]
“What can I say?”
“He makes you feel so young?” David sang. “He makes you feel like spring has sprung, songs must be sung? Like that?”
“No. You don’t have to be ugly about it. I think … I make him feel alive.”
David shook his head. “I’m sure you do. That’s what these things are for.”
Clare looked out the living room window and counted three women pushing strollers, four boys smoking cigarettes, seven bags of garbage.
“Don’t bring him again.”
“I get it,” Clare said. “I’m sorry.”
“You’re not listening to me. Don’t do this.”
“All right.”
William walked in to see Uncle David whispering in Clare’s ear and Clare pulling on her coat. William would rather have danced naked in a Greyhound bus station, he would rather have danced naked wearing a big pink party hat and matching pink boots, than stay another minute in Clare’s uncle’s apartment.
The men shook hands again and Clare kissed her uncle on the cheek, and he patted her face. They didn’t like to fight.
In the car William said, “What was that for?”
“I thought you’d like each other.”
“You embarrassed him,” William said, and he thought it was just like her to make that perfectly decent old man meet her lover and force him—not that she ever thought she forced anything upon anyone—to betray Charles by saying nothing or to betray Clare, which of course he would never do. It was just exactly like Clare to act as if it’d been a pleasant visit under normal circumstances.
William dropped Clare off at the university parking lot and drove back to Boston. She watched him pull away, the gray roof silver from the halogen street lamps, the inside brightened for just a second by the green face of his phone and the deep yellow flare of his lighter.
At four o’clock, William takes the round of pills Isabel left in a shot glass by the kitchen sink. At five, he falls asleep, and Clare reads their newspaper and then William’s old Economists. At six, while William snores in his recliner, she calls Charles to say that William is under the weather, Isabel is still on duty with her mother, and she, Clare, will stay overnight with William. As she talks, Clare gets her sweater out of the dining room and kicks her shoes into the rattan basket in the front hall.
“Don’t kill him,” Charles says. Clare is not famous for her bedside manner.
“He’s a pain in the ass,” Clare says, and it’s not just her faint reflexive wish to throw Charles, and everyone, off the track. Isabel and Charles and all of their combined children could walk through the house right now, looking for trouble, and there’d be no sign, no scent, no stray, mysterious thread, of anything except an old, buckling friendship.
William snorts and wakes up, his hair wild and waving like silver palm fronds. He looks like he might have had a bad dream, and Clare smiles to comfort him. He looks at her as if he’s never seen her, or never seen her like this, which isn’t so; he’s seen her a hundred times just like this, seated across from him deep in thought, flinging her legs over the arm of the chair to get comfortable.
“Oh, here you are,” he says.
Clare drops the magazine on the floor. William looks encouragingly at the handsome bamboo magazine rack on the other side of the chair, and Clare stands up.
“Do you want some dinner?”
“How can you?” William asks. “What kind of dinner?”
“Aren’t you the most pathetic thing.” Clare walks over to smooth his dream-blown hair. They stay like this so long, her hands on his head, his head against her chest,