Where the God of Love Hangs Out - Amy Bloom [61]
“I do not sleep.”
“That’s understandable. Je comprends.” Julia pats the empty side of the bed, and Ari sits down. His doleful, cross face is handsome in profile, the bedside light limning his Roman nose and straight black brows.
“Jordan hate me. You all hate me.”
“We don’t hate you, honey. Non, ce n’est pas vrai. Nous t’aimons.” Julia hopes that she is saying what she means. “It’s just hard. We all have to get used to each other. Il faut que nous …” If she ever had the French vocabulary to discuss the vicissitudes of divorce and future happiness and loving new people, she doesn’t anymore. She puts her hand on Ari’s flat curls. “Il faut que nous fassions ta connaissance.”
She hears him laugh for the first time. “That is ‘how do you do.’ Not what we say en famille.”
Laughing is an improvement, and Julia keeps on with her French—perhaps feeling superior will do him more good than obvious kindness—and tries to tell Ari about the day she has planned for them tomorrow, with a trip to the playground and a trip to the hardware store so Lionel can fix the kitchen steps.
Ari laughs again and yawns. “I am tired,” he says, and lies down, putting his head on one of Julia’s lace pillows. “Dors bien,” the little boy says.
“All right. You, too. You dors bien.”
Julia pulls the blankets up over Ari.
“At night my mother sing,” he says.
The only French song Julia knows is “La Marseillaise.” She sings the folk songs and hymns she sang to the boys, and by the time she has failed to hit that impossible note in “Amazing Grace,” Ari’s breathing is already moist and deep. Julia gets under the covers as Ari rolls over, his damp forehead and elbows and knees pressing into her side. She counts the books on her shelves, then sheep, then turns out the bedside lamp and counts every lover she ever had and everything she can remember about them, from the raven-shaped birthmark on the Harvard boy’s shoulder to the unexpected dark brown of Peter’s eyes, leaving out Peaches and Lionel senior, who are on their own, quite different list. She remembers the birthday parties she gave for Lionel and Buster, including the famous Cookie Monster cake that turned her hands blue for three days, and the eighth-grade soccer party that ended with Lionel and another boy needing stitches. Already six feet tall, he sat in her lap, arms and legs flowing over her, while his father held his head for the doctor.
Ari sighs and shifts, holding tight to Julia’s pajama top, her lapel twisted in his hands like rope. She feels the wide shape of his five knuckles on her chest, bone pressing flesh against bone, and she is not sorry at all to be old and awake so late at night.
FORT USELESS AND FORT RIDICULOUS
Lionel Sampson reads to his brother from the flight magazine. “‘The Seeing Eye dog was invented by a blind American.’”
Buster laughs. “Really. Invented. Man must have gone through a hell of a lot of dogs.”
Julia’s sons, Buster and Lionel, are flying from Paris to Boston, to be picked up and driven to their mother’s house for Thanksgiving. Their driver will be an old Russian guy they’ve had before, big belly, a few missing teeth, with cold bottled water and The New York Times in the backseat. The two men are as happy as clams not to be driving in Buster’s wife’s minivan with all the kids and their laptops and iPods and duffel bags and Jewelle’s gallon containers of creamed spinach and mashed sweet potatoes, which Jewelle now brings rather than making them at her mother-in-law’s, because now that Julia’s getting on, although the house is clean and Jewelle is not saying it’s not clean, you do have to tidy up a little before you get to work in Julia’s kitchen, and Jewelle would just rather not.
Lionel closes the magazine and the homely flight attendant brings them water. (Remember when they were pretty? Lionel says. Remember when Pop took