Where the God of Love Hangs Out - Amy Bloom [8]
“I don’t want to get a guilty conscience. Let’s just say that.”
William pushes the socks off the nightstand. There is nothing to be gained by arguing. What they have is nothing to their marriages. Clare to Isabel, he to Charles: two cups of water to the ocean. There’s no reason to say: Remember the time you wore my shirt around the motel room like a trench coat and belted it with my tie to go get ice? How about when you sat on top of me in East Rock Park and you pulled off your T-shirt and the summer light fell through the leaves onto your white shoulders and you bent down close to me, your hair brushing my face, and said, “Those Sherpas ain’t got nothin’ on me, boy.” I have never known another woman who can bear, let alone sing, all of The Pirates of Penzance, and who else will ever love me in this deep, narrow, greedy way?
“We’ll do whatever you want,” he says.
Now Clare laughs. “I don’t think so. I think what I want, in this regard, is not possible.”
“Probably not.”
Oh, put up a fuss, Clare thinks. Throw something. Rise up. Tell me that whatever this costs, however pointless this is, the pleasure of it is so great, your need for me is so tremendous that however this will end—and we are too old not to know that it’ll end either this way, with common sense and muted loss and a sad cup of coffee or with something worse in a parking lot somewhere a few months from now, and it’s not likely to cover either one of us with glory—it is somehow worth it.
William closes his eyes. I would like it if seeing you would always make me happy, Clare thinks. I would like to have lost nothing along the way.
“What do you think?” she says.
William doesn’t open his eyes and Clare thinks, Now I have lost him, as if she has not been trying to lose him without hurting him, for the last hour. She crosses her arms on her chest, in the classic position of going to bed angry (which William may not even recognize—for all Clare knows, he and Isabel talk it out every time, no matter how late), and she thinks, Maybe I just want to hurt him a little, just to watch him take the hit and move on, because he is the kind of man who does. Except in matters of illness, when he sounds like every Jewish man Clare knows, William’s Presbyterian stoicism makes for a beautiful, distinctly masculine suffering that Charles can’t be bothered with. She uncrosses her arms and puts a hand on William’s wide, smooth chest. He looks at her hand and breathes deeply, careful not to shift the comforter toward his foot.
“I don’t know,” he says. “Farewell, happy fields?”
“You’re not helping.”
“I’m not trying to help.”
“Oh,” Clare says.
“It’s late,” William says.
“I know.” Clare rolls toward him.
“Watch out for the turnip.”
“I am.”
Her head is on his chest, her chin above his heart. His hand is deep in her hair. They sleep like this, a tiny tribe, a sliver of marriage, and in their dreams, Clare is married to Charles and they are at Coney Island before it burned down, riding double on number seven in the steeplechase, and they are winning and they keep riding and the stars are as thick as snow. And in their dreams, William is married to Isabel and she brings their daughter home from the hospital, and when William sets her down in the crib, which is much larger and prettier than the one they really had on Elm Street, he sees their baby has small sky-blue wings and little clawed feet.
William kisses the baby’s pearly forehead and says, to his wife in the dream and to Clare beside him, It’s not the end of the world, darling.
THE OLD IMPOSSIBLE
Clare can’t walk.
She has sprained her ankle so badly, it’s no better than broken. Marble step, wet leaf, a moment of distraction, and she was pulled up, several feet above the landing and dropped like a bag of laundry, her fingers sliding down the wet iron banister, her feet bending and flopping like fish. Three of her anterior ligaments snapped off as she landed, two small pieces