Where the God of Love Hangs Out - Amy Bloom [7]
“We could go to bed,” William says.
Clare goes into the kitchen, gathers up everything that wasn’t eaten at lunch and every promising plastic container, including a little olive tapenade and a lot of pineapple cottage cheese, and lays it all on the coffee table in front of William with a couple of forks and two napkins.
“You do go all out,” he says.
“I don’t know how Isabel caters to you the way she does. If Charles were as much of a baby as you, I’d get a nurse and check into a hotel.”
“I’m sure you would.”
He doesn’t say again that they could go to bed; she heard him the first time. That lousy picnic might have been the last time. This might not be the farewell dinner (and you could hardly call it dinner—it’s not even a snack, it’s what a desperately hungry person with no taste buds might grab while running through a burning house), but it has that feeling. She’s brought him sensible food, and no wine; she hasn’t made fun of his slippers or the gardening pants; she’s worn her ugly brown coat and not the pretty blue one they bought together in Boston. An intelligent, disinterested observer would have to say it doesn’t look good for the fat man.
“Let’s go to bed,” Clare says. Husbands and wives can skip sex, without fuss, without it even being a cause for fuss, but Clare can’t imagine how you say to the person whom you have come to see for the express purpose of having sex, Let’s just read the paper.
“You look like a Balthus,” William says later. “Nude with Blue Socks.”
“Really? I must be thirty years too old. Anyway, Balthus. Ugh.” She pulls the socks off and throws them on William’s nightstand. They’re his socks. He must have a dozen pair of navy cashmere socks and he’s never asked to have these back. And Charles has never said, Whose are these? They cover Clare almost to the knee, the empty heel swelling gently above her ankle. She wears them all the time.
William lies under the sheets and the comforter, leaving his foot uncovered and resting, like the royal turnip, on a round velvet pillow taken from Isabel’s side of the bed.
“Is it better?” Clare asks.
“It is better. I hate for you to have to see it.”
Clare shrugs, and William doesn’t know if that means that seeing his foot grotesquely swollen and purple cannot diminish her ardor or that her ardor, such as it is, could hardly be diminished.
“I don’t mind,” she says. She doesn’t mind. She didn’t mind when her kids were little and projectile vomiting followed weeping chicken pox, which followed thrush and diarrhea; she didn’t mind the sharp, dark, powdery smell of her mother’s dying or the endless rounds of bedpan and sponge bath. She would have been a great nurse, Clare thought, if the patients never spoke.
“You looked very cute in those socks, I have to tell you.” William puts a hand on Clare’s stomach.
“I don’t know,” Clare says. “I think … maybe we have to stop this. I think …”
William laughs before he sees her face. This is exactly what he has hoped not to hear, and he thought that if she was naked beside him, bare even of his socks and her reading glasses, they would get through the night without having this conversation.
Clare turns on her side to look at him. “You don’t think I might have a guilty conscience?”
William sits up and puts on his glasses. He doesn’t think Clare has a guilty conscience; he doesn’t think she has any kind of conscience at all. She loves Charles, she loves her sons, and she’s very fond of William. She’d found herself having sex with William when they were bombing Afghanistan and it seemed the world would end and now they are bombing Iraq and the evening news is horrifying, rather than completely terrifying, and whatever was between them is old hat; it’s an anthrax scare, it’s Homeland Security; it’s something that mattered a great deal for a little while and then not much.
“You might have a guilty conscience. Sometimes people confuse that with a fear of getting caught.”
Clare does not say that she would cut William’s throat and toss his body