Curled in the Bed of Love

curled in the bed of love

WINNER OF THE FLANNERY O'CONNOR AWARD FOR SHORT FICTION

stories by catherine brady

Published by the University of Georgia Press

    Athens, Georgia 30602

© 2003 by Catherine Brady

All rights reserved

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Brady, Catherine, 1955–

Curled in the bed of love: stories / by Catherine Brady.

p. cm. — (Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction)

ISBN
0-8203-2545-7 (hardcover: alk. paper)

1. Love stories, American.   2. San Francisco Bay Area

(Calif.)—Fiction. I. Title.     II. Series.

PS3552.R2375 C87   2003

813′.54–dc21                              2003006539

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

ISBN for this digital edition: 978-0-8203-4369-3

FOR ILSE KAHN

I dreamed that I died: that I felt the cold close to me;
and all that was left of my life was contained in your presence:
your mouth was the daylight and darkof my world,
your skin, the republic I shaped for myself with my kisses.

PABLO NERUDA, “NIGHT,” XC

Acknowledgments

The Loss of Green

Comfort

Nothing to Hide

Honor among Thieves

Curled in the Bed of Love

Light, Air, Water

Side by Side

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird

Roam the Wilderness

Written in Stone

Behold the Handmaid of the Lord

The stories in this collection owe more than I can say to the editorial acumen and persistent faith of Steven Kahn, my first reader, my dearest friend. For their comments on individual stories, I am grateful to Linda Brady, Aaron Shurin, and Maureen Brady. Margaret Hansen, Patricia Hein, Mary Nisbet, and Tim Sheils made helpful suggestions along the way. Aaron Shurin, Deborah Lichtman, and Lewis Buzbee, my colleagues in the
MFA
in Writing Program at the University of San Francisco, have been extraordinarily generous in their support for my work. Last but not least, I want to thank David and Sarah Kahn, just because.

The following stories have appeared in the following magazines:

“Behold the Handmaid of the Lord,” in
The Cimarron Review
(spring 2002)

“Comfort,” in
Nua: Studies in Contemporary Irish Writing
(fall 2001)

“The Loss of Green,” winner of the 2000 Brenda Ueland Prose Prize, in
Water-Stone
(fall 2000)

“Nothing to Hide,” in
Other Voices
(fall 2000)

“Light, Air, Water,” in
Natural Bridge
(fall 2000)

“Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” in
The GSU Review
(spring 2000)

“Curled in the Bed of Love,” winner of the 2001
Zoetrope: All Story
Short Fiction Prize, in
The Cimarron Review
(spring 2003)

curled in the bed of love

Every night, Sam makes Claire and Russell dance. He pushes the sofa and chairs against the wall, rolls up the rug, and puts one of the
CDS
he brought with him on the
CD
player. In the three weeks he has been staying with Claire and Russell, he has abolished the neatness by which they live their daily lives just as he's thrashed their habit of early evening hours. He filches more books from their shelves than he could possibly read at once, scatters books, maps, and unpartnered socks throughout the house, and marks his trail with plates and knives rimed by butter, bread crumbs, rinds of fruit. Claire is grateful that he works like a demon during the day, writing in the shed that Russell built for her on the bluff below the house, and just as grateful that at sunset he comes back up to the house to batter them with his careless, teeming presence.

Given Sam's hearty appetite for novelty, Claire is not surprised by his enthusiasm for ballroom dancing. And what Sam loves, he generously forces on others, so that Claire isn't certain whether she and Russell have been coaxed or bullied into learning to tango.

Sam makes Russell lean Claire backward, razzing Russell about looking into her eyes. “Never break eye contact, never. Come on, Russell. You are seducing her. Hold her like you mean it.”

Russell laughs. Russell likes everything Sam dreams up for the evening, like a growing boy who enjoys whatever is put on his plate. When Russell pretends to lose hold of Claire, Claire clutches at his arms, and Sam shakes his head in disapproval.

Claire ends the lesson, as she does every night. She's still physically weak from her miscarriage three months ago, still finds herself suddenly exhausted by the effort to accommodate Sam's desire for fun.

Claire flops onto the cast-aside sofa and grabs the wine bottle that Sam has hogged while he ordered them around the room. He will be here for another month, finishing his book of nature essays. He wants to call it
Wild to the Bone.
He's managed to stay wild enough, never settling, never stooping to more than temporary work when he can't sell any freelance pieces, wangling his way onto naturalist junkets around the world, daisy-chaining together a string of women, none of whom has ever given him pause.

Claire and Russell sit together on the sofa, and Sam perches on its arm, jealously regarding the generous portions of wine they pour themselves.

“Claire, I wish you would wear a dress to dance class,” Sam says. “Something sheer. Orange.”

“And I wish you would wear fuzzy bunny slippers,” she says.

Sam reaches over and draws his fingers through the thickblack tuft of Claire's hair, shaped to frame her face and fan bluntly at the nape of her neck. “You could wear a flower behind your ear if you still had long hair.”

Russell never seems to mind Sam's intimacies. Sam is the only one of Claire's former lovers who has remained a friend. That life, that wild life of Claire's before she met Russell, is over now,
and Russell is the rock on which she hauled herself out, out of the chaotic sea of hard-drinking, hard-partying, heart-smashing, promiscuous years when she still believed that suffering was a kind of vocation.

Russell puts on a
CD
of Jacqueline du Pré playing Boccherini's cello concerto and turns out the lights so they can see the stars beyond the windows. Situated on a bluff at the tip of tongue-shaped Tomales Bay, the house faces the water, walled by windows that let in the night sky as gloriously as they let in the daylight view.

Sam grumbles. “Why do we have to have a show? Why can't we go outside and stumble around if we want stars?”

“Shut up and just take it in,” Russell says good-naturedly. “You're the self-proclaimed Man of Nature.”

“There is no nature with a capital
N,
” Sam says. “That's a whitewash, that religious crap.”

Claire's study, like the living room, faces the marshy flats where the land and the bay contend for dominance, fields of rich alluvial soil where dairy cows move slowly as silt, with Inverness Ridge to the west and the bay itself a crescent of blue foil at the horizon. She can't imagine feeling anything less than holy reverence for this place, the gift she mines in her thin books of poetry, and even the obscure destiny of her books seems of a piece with the humility awe engenders.

“Excuse me,” Claire says, “but it sounds like you're the one preaching.”

“It's always two against one around here,” Sam says.

Russell yawns. “I need to get some sleep.”

Sleep is hard to come by with Sam around. Tomorrow morning at six, Russell will roll out of bed and climb into the car, a cup of coffee in his hand, to drive two hours from Point Reyes Station into San Francisco, where he practices immigration law. He's negotiated a four-day workweek, but it's still a lot of driving. Claire, who commutes only two evenings a week to the poetry workshops
she teaches, takes on all the peripheral commutes for necessities that can't be found in their rural town.

When Claire inherited the house from her uncle, she and Russell never considered selling it, even though the house was built on the San Andreas Fault, the rift zone that records the efforts of the Pacific plate to move northwest and tug free of the North American plate, working for millions of years to take the coast of California, including the headlands to the west of them, with it. Geology is more metaphor than fact to Claire, and the secret strain in the earth beneath them makes her delight all the more in her solid house and lush garden. For Claire, moving here marked the completion of her reform. She thinks that for Russell, who was less sure, their move offered insurance against the risks she might incur in the city.

“Why don't you go on upstairs to bed?” Claire says to Russell. “I'll do the dishes.” She looks pointedly at Sam. “Maybe I can get someone to help me.”

“Leave them 'til morning,” Sam says. “Give entropy a chance.”

Claire gets up. If Sam is going to stay here for another month or so while he finishes his book, he'll have to earn his keep. “Let's go.”

“Just when I was going to ask you to adopt me,” Sam says.

Claire's eyes meet Russell's. It's so like Sam to trip carelessly on the wide and shallow root network of their recent loss. He sleeps in the guest room that would have been the nursery, and he has happily taken over the writing shed Russell built for Claire so she would have a separate space to work once the baby came. Claire has never used the shed. Someday, Russell promises. She has miscarried three times. A bout of endometriosis in her twenties, belatedly treated, has made it hard for her to get pregnant at all. At thirty-eight, she isn't sure she wants to keep trying.

In the kitchen, Sam hinders rather than helps. He blocks Claire's path from the sink to the butcher-block island so he can tell her about a camping trip in Yellowstone with his old girlfriend Andrea, boasting of their rowdy and constant sex in the tent.

“One day we came back from a hike, and the tent was torn up. It had to be the smell of sex that attracted the bear—we'd cached the food far away, like responsible ecotourists. I just wished we'd gotten back in time to see the grizzly at it. I've never laid eyes on one.”

A little sparrow inside Claire pounces on this tempting morsel, a grizzly demolishing the flimsy temple of love, and gulps it down, guiltlessly driven by metabolic need. She's less quick to swallow Sam's declaration that Andrea broke his heart. More likely, Sam left Andrea, not brutally—he's a cowboy, not a conquistador—but in such a way that he could allow himself to feel wounded, regretful. That's how he left Claire, and quite a few women since. Claire couldn't let Sam go easily: she hunted him down at bars, to weep in his arms as he tried to lead her somewhere private; she spent sleepless nights smoking and drinking and scrawling bitter poems; she tore the poems into tiny pieces and mailed them to him.

“You have to cut your losses in bear territory,” Sam says. “And I don't see why they shoot the bears when there's an attack. It's usually human carelessness, or stupidity, that provokes the attack. They ought to shoot the humans.”

Sam is like a grizzly himself, looming and large and territorially rapacious. He doesn't even realize that he's backed her against the counter.