Where the God of Love Hangs Out

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 of bone clinging to their ends, and the white rubbery fibers and the tiny triangles of bone continue to float where they should not be, above her ankle’s hinge.

Her husband props the crutches up against the coffee table, tilting the handles in Clare’s direction, and after he’s laid a pillow under her mottled pink-and-blue ankle and a towel over the pillow and a bag of ice over everything, he brings in tea for Clare and her uncle David. He leaves to run errands. Neither of them asks Charles what kind of errands or when he’ll be back; he carried and fetched and did for them all morning, and if he had said that he was going off to bet on greyhounds, or try a little Ecstasy, or worse, Clare and David would understand. Clare and David share a strong dislike of being, and caring for, the disabled. David is in Clare and Charles’s house to recover from triple-bypass surgery and to entertain his niece during her period of limited mobility. Mostly, they read together in the living room.

“He is sweet,” Clare says aloud. It’s not what she usually says about her husband. She thinks good things; she thinks interesting, she thinks handsome (the first thousand times he stepped out of the shower, water still flowing down the runnel of his spine, she thought, Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, how can anyone be so beautiful), she thinks he is much nicer than William ever was. William would have shaken his head over her ugly ankle, made his own coffee, and waddled upstairs, leaving her lying on the couch like in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? Clare doesn’t think about William every day anymore; she thinks about him mostly when she is falling asleep or when she’s about to see him, which will be in the next few minutes. William and Isabel are pulling up to Clare and Charles’s front door right now. William struggles with his cane and himself and a bag of nectarines. Isabel gathers up the groceries and a canvas tote of mysteries. She looks away as William rocks himself up and out of the passenger seat.

Uncle David reaches for his tea, which will not be the way he likes it, but he has made up his mind not to complain. The man went to the trouble of making tea. David didn’t quite catch what Clare said about Charley. He hopes she isn’t complaining. She’s no day at the beach, his niece; the sprained ankle has not made her a happier, nicer person. If he were Charley, he would make up pressing business in Baltimore, never mind a few errands down town.

“This is okay,” Uncle David says. “This is fine. He makes a better cup of tea than you do.”

“Well, good. Half English. The Magna Carta. Men’s shoes. Tea.”

“And roast beef,” David says, and he is about to add “and sodomy” just to keep the conversational ball rolling, when Isabel he can’t remember her last name walks into the room, with bags of things. No one bothered to tell him she was coming. He would have put on a fresh shirt. He might have shaved. She’s a good-looking woman, and well read for a real estate agent, and she has that quality, that way of making it clear that she wants him to get what he wants, that makes even plain women — and Isabel is not plain — very attractive. Clare is the more interesting person; as a human being, he’d pick Clare over Isabel, but he can’t see how you’d be married to Isabel and chase Clare. It would make no sense, except David does remember chasing, and catching, a big, bushy-haired girl with thighs like Smithfield hams, and after her, chasing an Egyptian ballerina whose kohl ran onto his linen sports coat, so he had to just leave it, streaked and stuffed into a wastebasket, in Grand Central Terminal — all while married to the most beautiful woman in the world, a woman who turned heads until the day she died. He can see his wife and those girls, and a few other women, all rotating delicately in the same shadowy, treacherous light.

“We brought nice things,” Isabel says, and kisses them both.

“You smell good,” Clare says. Clare doesn’t smell good. She smells like rancid butter and wet wool. She smells just like a yak, and her one skimpy shower didn’t change that or keep her hair from hanging in limp coils, so that she now has yak ears as well. Uncle David, for whom the word natty was invented, who loved to tell people that his late wife always got ready for bed behind a closed door and that as far as he knew, she woke up every morning with brushed hair and a hint of lipstick, should not have to see his niece like this. She’s not fit for company, even if it is only Isabel and William, and it never is only Isabel and William. What comes through the door is William as only Clare knows him, naked on a motel bed, sweating like a man with a fever, or cupping her chin in a restaurant and leaning forward with great, premeditated grace to kiss her. And right behind those stolen pictures come Clare’s old friends Isabel and William, the four of them playing Monopoly at Cape Cod, and right behind them, her husband, Charles, slicing limes, and behind Charles, their sons, not as they are now, but pink and adorable in their footy pajamas, Danny holding his father’s hand, Adam carrying his briefcase. Some of you will simply have to go, Clare wants to say. She smoothes out her ice pack, watches her uncle leer at Isabel, and longs for the thick, amiable hours of Percocet.

William comes in, leaning heavily on a cane, and Clare can’t even say hello; the sight of the cane just snaps her mouth shut.

David stands up to shake William’s hand and tries to take the bag of nectarines from him. He stands to demonstrate to Isabel — and it’s all right for William and Clare to see this, too; he has no objection to either of them noticing — that David and Isabel are the only two people in the room able to get up and down from the furniture whenever they please. William hugs the nectarines.

“What happened to you?” David says.

William is sorry to see David, as he always is. David is the living embodiment of William’s bad conscience about sleeping with Clare, and he is not a rueful, forgiving conscience. He is Con science as a caustic, sensual, dyspeptic old man.

“Nothing much,” William says. “How’s the heart?”

Isabel says, “Where’s Charles?”

“He’s running errands,” Clare says, and Isabel picks up the tea tray. Privately, Charles and Clare call Isabel The Governess. Isabel purses her lips just a tiny bit as she gathers the cups, and Clare can see her thinking that Charles is out gallivanting — and that would be Isabel’s word for it, gallivanting—when he should be home supervising Clare, who might try to get herself a glass of water, or worse. It’s very pleasant, it is just very warming, to have poor, good Charles on the receiving end of Isabel’s disapproval for a change, and Clare throws her shoulders back and down to lengthen her neck and smiles up at William, who smiles back with relief, thinking, She’s all right, she’s just sick of being Charles’s little cripple, as who wouldn’t be.

William stands in front of Clare.

“Sit,” Clare says, and he sits in the armchair across from David, miles away from Clare, close enough to David to pat him on the knee or, alternatively, smash him in the throat and kill him.

“Sitting,” William says. “Shall I roll over, too?”

“What’s with the cane?”

“It helps me walk more comfortably.” The thought of discussing his rheumatoid arthritis with Clare is disheartening. It is unbearable.

“Oh,” Clare says. She looks down at the bag of books Isabel has brought and pulls one out. “God bless Isabel. I like this series.”

William smiles politely.

“I never read them,” he says. “You know, Isabel goes through hundreds.”

“Are you in pain?” Clare says accusingly.

“Yes,” he says, and Clare thinks, Oh, God, he’s dying.

“I’m just in pain,” he says. “I’m not dying.”

He shouldn’t have come. He should have let Isabel come down by herself, and the women could have had some girl talk and clucked their tongues over the stupidity or cupidity of men, about which he would never argue, and have a few measured glasses of white wine (which is completely untrue to his memory of Clare, who pulled a bottle of Balvenie out of her suitcase when they were still twenty miles from their motel). He’s not going to tell Clare, least of all when she’s lying there like the little match girl, and certainly least of all while her uncle David sits before them like a cross between Cerberus and Mel Brooks, that he feels like he’s been dying for some time. He has not been happy to see daylight any morning that he can remember, and he falls into sleep as if he’s been wrapped in chains and tossed overboard.

“I’m not dying,” he says again.

“I hope not,” Clare says, and shifts her weight to look at him more closely.

“For the love of Jesus,” David says. “He’s limping, he’s not dying. Who are you, Dr. Kevorkian?”

Clare looks at William and smiles. David sees. He could sit here all night, is how David feels, keeping an eye on this big fat smoothie who’s just as crazy about Clare as he ever was. Clare’s feelings he can’t read. She looks old and tired, and in David’s experience old and tired is not a breeding ground for illicit love. Not in women. In men, sometimes it makes them try a little harder, to get the woman to chase the old and tired away.

“So, what a pair,” David says. “Pair of lame ducks.” They shrug, like a pair.

“Since my ankle,” Clare says, “I’m only reading about the ambulatory. Cowgirls, lady mountain climbers. Strong-minded women paddling down the Amazon, with their bare hands. Shrunken heads in their lace reticules. Banana leaves on their feet.”

“Really,” William says.

“Your mother was a great walker,” David says. Evoking Clare’s mother seems like a good idea. His sister was hell on hanky-panky, and everybody knew it. She threw David out of her house on four different occasions because of hanky-panky. He was sitting on the curb after one Thanksgiving, up to his ass in dead leaves, in front of that house they had in, where, Lake Success, and it was little Clare who came out with his coat, his hat on her head, carrying a beer and a handful of pigs-in-blankets. Life is short, David thinks, and walks out.

“Why don’t you just sit by me?” Clare says. “You can provide the elevation.” She would ask for more ice, she could actually use some more ice, but if William goes to get it, Isabel will intercept him and want it done properly and bring it herself, knowing that William will bring back three ice cubes in a dripping dish towel. If ice were what Clare wanted most, she would ask Isabel.

William hoists himself up, which he would rather Clare didn’t see, and limps over to the couch. She’s already seen him limping so there’s no help for that, and he holds her feet up and puts himself under them and sinks back onto the sofa, pain gnawing at his hip.

“A lot of activity here,” Clare says.

“Oh, yes, quite a ruckus,” William says. “I am not going back to that chair anytime soon. David can come back in with Hera and her peacocks, I’m staying on this couch, under these bumpy black-and-blue little feet.”

“And the peacocks are for?”

“Peacocks pulled her royal wagon. I have no idea why. She drove everybody crazy. A vigilante about adultery. Most of the myths are about her driving someone insane with her suspicions.”

“Gosh, I wonder who wrote those stories. She wasn’t wrong, right? Zeus fucked everything. Ship to shore. Ox to goose. Whatever.”

“Oh, yes.”

Isabel comes into the room and looks at them. There are things she could say, there are plenty of things she could say about her husband, who doesn’t like her coat to brush against him when he’s driving, who so prefers some space between him and everyone else that he makes reservations for four even when it’s the two of them, and who is now making himself into a footrest for their friend Clare. But Clare looks terrible, crumpled and waxy, and her hair, and the two of them are not likely to run off for some brisk lovemaking — how could they and what has it ever been between them but the rubbing up of two broken wings? And Isabel believes that life is what you make it. She adjusts Clare’s pillow.

“Do you need anything? David wants to take a little walk, and it’s just so gorgeous today—”

Clare and William look out the living room’s bay window at the beautiful autumn day, and sigh, as if they have given up all hope of ever walking unaided on beautiful days.

“It’s really beautiful,” Clare says. I am the worst person in the world, she thinks.

“It is,” William says. Go, in Christ’s name, he thinks, and take that awful little man with you.

* * *

“We’ve got an hour to ourselves,” William says. “Where should we start?”

“How’s Emily?”

“Oh. Fine. She’s liking law school — what can I say? You want to talk about our kids?”

“No. What’s the matter with your leg?”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake. I’d rather talk about the kids. I have bad arthritis, that’s all. It acts up. I’m doing what I’m supposed to. Glucosamine chondroitin. Physical therapy. Whole grains. What do you want from me?”

“That’s good,” Clare says. “I’m glad.” She doesn’t look glad. She looks chastened and sulky, and she pulls at the corner of her quilt until a wisp of cotton batting appears.

“What’s wrong? Comparing yourself to Isabel? Thinking how I’d be curled into a fetal position by now if I were in your hands?”

It is a terrible thing to think and a terrible thing to be seen thinking — Isabel is a better wife than I am — and still Clare’s glad that William knows her.

“Jesus, be nice. Nicer.”

“I don’t have to be nice. Leave the quilt alone. I miss you every day, and we’re not even friends anymore.”

“We are.”

“We are not, and do not dishonor the memory of that beautiful thing by saying otherwise. You know we’re not.”

Clare wipes her eyes with a corner of the quilt. “Fine. Jesus.”

“Less than an hour. If your uncle doesn’t come scuttling back to check on us.” William picks up Clare’s hand and kisses it. He takes a nectarine out of the bag and wraps her hands around it.

“Look at the size of this,” Clare says.

Clare twists the nectarine sharply, and it falls into halves, each one a brilliant, glazed yellow with a prickled hot-pink center. The pit falls onto her lap. They eat their halves and watch each other eat, and they drip, just a little, on the quilt. Clare wipes her chin with her wet hands, and then she wipes her face again, on the quilt.

“Napkins would have been good,” Clare says.

William shrugs. “I like this,” he says. He lifts up the quilt and wipes his hands on Clare’s jeans.

“Oh, what is this,” she says. If they’re going to start acting like the senior-citizen version of Tom Jones, smearing their faces with nectarine juice and carrying on, the next thing you know, they’ll be hobbling off to motels and looking up positions for the disabled in the sex books. William does not look at all embarrassed; he looks as he always looks: imperturbable, and mildly intrigued, inclined to be benevolent, if no discomfort is involved. Privately, Isabel and Clare call William The Last Emperor and there have been times when Isabel has called Clare to say, “L.E. is driving me mad. Why don’t you and Charles come up before I put glass in his cereal?”

“I love a nice nectarine,” William says. “My mother made a nectarine tart, I remember. Sliced nectarines and a little brown sugar on top of a brick, just a giant slab of really good pie crust.”

William kisses Clare’s right hand, then her left, lightly, absent-mindedly, as if in passing.

“What’s this?”

“Nothing,” William says. “Tell me something else. Tell me a secret.”

“Oh, a secret. What a baby. You mean something Charles doesn’t know?”

William bites his tongue. He doesn’t think Charles knows much, but he could be wrong. He thinks that Charles has been so lucky and so handsome for so long that he’s come to think that the world is actually filled with honest men making fair deals and bad people being thwarted by good ones. This is what William prefers to think. Before he slept with her, William thought that Clare had gotten the better half of the bargain. He even said so to Isabel, a few times. Clare is good, spiky company, and she is the very best companion to have in a bad situation. Trouble brings out the cheer beneath her darkness, unlike everyday life, which tends to have the opposite effect, and she holds her liquor like an old Swede, but Charles has to put up with that squinty, unyielding nature, and he does it with real grace, William thinks. In private conversation, the men call Clare The Cactus.

A small boy sticks his head around the doorway and stares at William, rather coolly, from under his long lashes. It is the same look David gives him, now pasted onto a round brown face. William knows he knows the boy, who he is and his place in the world (third grade, grandson of the cleaning lady; Clare likes him; Charles wouldn’t know him if he fell over him), but nothing else, like his name or why he is wandering around Clare’s house, comes to mind.

“You have company,” he says. Small boys are not his department. Small girls are delightful; he would entertain a roomful of little girls, if it were necessary.

“Hey, Nelson.” Clare waves to the boy. The boy doesn’t say anything.

“Nelson Slater, come on. You’ve met Mr. Langford before. Last summer.”

Nelson nods. Clare sighs. It’s not the short, vicious hiss that signals her annoyance. It’s not the mild, watery sound she makes when her children call while she’s working. It’s the sigh of some one settling in for a short, satisfying tussle. If she were upright, Clare would roll up her sleeves.

The boy sits down across from them on the floor. Clare and William smile helplessly. He slides to the floor so easily, he glides right down, and later, he will spring right up. It is a lovely thing to watch, the way gravity barely holds him.

Nelson has come to play checkers. Clare taught him when he was a little kid, and since the accident, Nelson makes a point of coming by every few days, eating the cookies that are always on the coffee table, and fitting in a quick game. His grandmother is collecting old clothes for church, from the garage, and he has fifteen minutes, she says. He might be able to beat Clare in fifteen minutes. It would be better if the fat man went outside, but it’s okay — Nelson can just keep his eyes on the board and on Clare’s skinny hands, looking closely at the tree of veins on the back of each one, blue branches pointing toward the fingers.

“All right,” Clare says, like she’s giving in, like she isn’t completely ready to kick his ass. “Set it up.”

Nelson plays as he always does, death in a bow tie, moving his front line cautiously but already dreaming of the queens slaughtered in their castles, gazing down at his men in terror and admiration, flames leaping orange and blue across their wooden walls.

“Game of Pharaohs,” William says. The kid must study Egypt. Mummies and Cleopatra’s negritude and the pyramids are what pass for history now. Half an hour left, and they’re going to spend it with Clare’s little friend.

Nelson pauses in front of one of Clare’s pieces. It’s not an advantageous jump.

“If you can jump, you must,” William says.

“Shut up. He knows.”

Clare rolls her eyes so Nelson can see: Ignore him. Nelson nods. He has met some very nice white people, but none of them have been men. He jumps Clare’s piece, and she jumps his.

“Watch yourself, young man,” Clare says.

“You watch yourself,” Nelson says, and laughs.

“Tough guy,” William says, and Nelson smiles tightly and looks away.

William sees Nelson’s opportunity, an unguarded square that will open up the board for him. You have it, William thinks, you may as well take it. He looks closely at Nelson, as he used to look at his daughter when they played Scrabble. See it, he thinks, see it. Do it. Nelson looks at William as if he’s spoken and scans the board. Nelson thinks hard. The man’s face is all lit up with wanting Nelson to win. Nelson and the fat man are going to beat Clare, is what Nelson sees. Nelson jumps like crazy, bouncing his man two, then three times and pounding his fists on the floor.

Clare claps.

“Good God. Well. Let’s see what I can do with this … ruination.” It is short work after that. Nelson’s men saunter around the board picking off Clare’s pieces and when she has trouble reaching to discard them, he scoops them up for her, tossing them in his palm once or twice and laying them on the side of the board in a neat line. They look good, one big red dot after another.

Mrs. Slater honks the horn, which is not what she usually does, but she still has to set up the Jumble Sale and the Baked Goods Table today, and this stop for winter clothes is out of her way. There’s no help for it, poor Clare, and it’s worth it for the six coats and the many pairs of shoes and the men’s suits that will go fast, but this is not something she has time for today.

Sorry to leave the scene of his triumph, Nelson leaps up, to show off for them one more time, graceful and determined as a knight on horseback, and he trips over his untied laces. He puts his hands out toward the floor, but the edge of the coffee table, a sheet of granite, catches him fiercely on the face, and he is down on the rug, screaming in pain and fear and because blood is flowing right into his eye. William very gently puts Clare’s feet aside, picks up the boy, and carries him into the kitchen.

“It’s okay,” he says. “It’s okay. It’s just blood, it’s okay.” It may not be okay, but William can see both eyes whole and no bone showing, and if the boy’s not blind or crippled, it should be more or less okay.

Clare comes in on her crutches, white around the mouth. She runs cold water and hands an icy dish towel to Charles, who lays it on the small curvy wound, a little red mouth exhaling blood. Nelson stops screaming. Blood soaks the dish towel.

Charles says, “A couple of Band-Aids, Clare?” and he pulls the edges of the gash together tightly, so tightly Nelson squirms under him, but Charles pins him gently and puts the bandages on, butterfly-style.

“Clare, you want to tell his mother, his grandmother, so the poor woman doesn’t have a stroke when she sees him?”

Clare wants to stay, but Nelson is nestled on the kitchen counter, resting so comfortably against William, she has to go tell his grandmother the bad news and let William be the hero. (Isabel told her that when baby Emily cried in her crib, Isabel and William would stand, locked hip to hip, in the doorway, each trying to get to her first, each trying to persuade the other that it didn’t matter, that they just didn’t want to trouble the other. Clare could not imagine Charles fighting her for the privilege of changing Danny’s diaper.) She turns around for a last look, and Nelson is laughing into William’s chest; Zeus holding Ganymede beneath his dark wing.

Nelson’s grandmother raised three boys and one girl, and an accident that does not involve a broken limb or serious impairment is, as far as she’s concerned, the best one can hope for in this treacherous world.

“He’s fine,” Clare says. “He cut his forehead on that granite coffee table. You know.” They have both banged their knees, badly, on that coffee table, and they both watch Nelson walk out the door, followed by William, and they both think that if Clare and Nelson had not been playing checkers, if Nelson had been helping his grandmother in the garage, like the good boy he is, he would not be marching toward them, a wounded boy soldier, with two pale-pink Band-Aids, already darkly bloodstained in their centers, laid above his beautiful eyes. His shirt is ruined.

“I have some plain white T-shirts,” Clare says. “I know you’re pressed for time.” She holds the door for Nelson, and he slides into the backseat to stretch out. His head hurts and there were no cookies and it seems like years ago that he was jumping Clare’s pieces and killing her queens where they stood. He puts his head on the pile of coats.

“Don’t bleed on those coats, little man. Are you okay? Do you want me to drop you at Auntie’s?”

“No.” His friends will be at the church. It will look like he has been in a big fight, which he sort of has, and that will be pretty cool. Clare turns the topcoat inside out so the silky lining is against his cheek. No one but Clare would do that for him. “I’m okay. We can go.”

“I’ll go back and get a T-shirt,” Clare says.

Nelson looks at his grandmother in the rearview mirror. He is not going to, and he doesn’t think his grandmother will expect him to, or let him, wear one of Clare’s own white T-shirts to the church Fall Festival, and a T-shirt that belonged to her husband would fit him like a dress. His grandmother smiles at him in the mirror and shakes her head at Clare.

“Don’t you worry — probably some fine shirts in the backseat. Nelson can have his pick. Bye, now.” She steps on the gas, like that, and they are off, down the driveway.

Nelson sits up to see Clare waving to him and the fat man giving him a salute. He lies back down on the black silk and replays the last few minutes of the game until they get to church.

“My ankle is killing me,” Clare says. “How’s your hip?”

“He’s a big boy.”

“Yes, he is.”

“He’ll play basketball, I guess.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake. Is that what you’d have said about Adam?”

Her son Adam is six-three, and although William is fond of him, the kid is such a sport of nature, he always hoped his Emily, tall and broad-shouldered, would never take a shine to him because their children would have been freaks, some kind of advanced-race humans, who would have lost all control of their huge, flailing limbs.

“Adam? That boy could beat Adam at one-on-one now. I love you.”

So it is not a discussion of the limited options for nonwhite children, and it is not a discussion of the hideous fate of young black men, and there’s no reason to talk about Adam right now. Clare cannot stop staring at her watch. The second hand is hammering around the dial.

“Oh, I know,” she says. “How about a little Percocet? Just a quarter, take the edge off.”

“Is that a good idea?” William says. If she had offered him a bottle of almost anything, William would have taken it, but prescription drugs that make you feel better scare the shit out of him.

Clare takes a white pill out of her pocket and bites it in half. She spits half of it back into her hand and swallows.

“Here. Half. You don’t have to take it.”

William takes it. It seems like an extremely reckless and adolescent thing to do, but he isn’t operating any heavy machinery, he isn’t driving or running for office, he is just sitting on the couch with his old friend, waiting for his wife to come back.

It dissolves in Clare’s throat, leaving a sandy, salty trail. She pulls herself up to William and hugs him.

“You were very good with Nelson. After a while.”

“He’s a good kid. He was lucky.”

“You can’t beat lucky,” she says.

“We’ve been lucky. So far,” William says.

“We really have.” Clare lies down again, her head in William’s lap, her feet up on the sofa’s arm. William looks down into her eyes, unsmiling, and she looks away.

Maybe, Clare thinks, when Isabel and David return, William will have migrated back to the armchair, reading something high-toned, and I will be resting, attractively, or reading, attractively. And when Charles comes back, he’ll find the four of us talking over drinks and eating the goat cheese and crackers that Isabel brought. He’ll join us. He’ll put his hand on my horrible hair, as if it is nice hair, and he’ll sit where William is sitting now.

It is such a golden picture, the five of them. The six of them — Clare pictures Nelson, too, sitting on the other side of her, in a clean shirt, holding a couple of the cookies she’d forgotten to put out for him before. The light shines on Charles’s lovely Nordic hair, a mix of blond and gray, as if the boy and the man will coexist forever, and Isabel is bringing out the best in everyone in her kindest, most encouraging way, as if all she has ever wanted is to help Clare make a nice party, and David tells his stories of Second Avenue, and there is nothing in them, not Great-Aunt Frieda, not the death of little cousin Renee, to make Clare cry, and William tells her that he will love her forever, that nothing has been lost, after all, and he mouths the words so that no one can hear him, but her, of course, and it is so beautiful, so drenched in the lush, streaming light of what is not, she closes her eyes to see it better and falls asleep.

William relaxes. There really is nothing more to do. He can just close his eyes, too. Clare’s hair fans out across his lap. Her hands press his to her chest. The objects in the room darken, until it is a black reef from couch to table to chair, and no one turns on the light. William and Clare sleep, as if it is a quiet night in their own home, as if they are lying naked and familiar in their own bed.