Curled in the Bed of Love (10 page)

She jumps from the bed, throws on clothes, and finds Foster in the living room.

“I'm sorry I didn't knock,” Foster says. He laughs. “But there isn't any door.”

She tries to think. How did this happen? This morning she taped the baseboards and the trim on the windows in preparation for painting. She borrowed a ladder from Matt and returned the Spackle she'd used to repair the damaged walls. She put music on her
CD
player, poured paint into a tray, dipped a roller into its creaminess, stroked the paint onto the walls. The roller made a rhythmic, squishy sound, and those neat rectangular strips of clean new white transformed the discolored walls into blank pages. Some dread took hold of her.
I'm not going to be able to do this.

She turned up the volume on her
CD
player to drown out Matt's
radio on the front steps, to cover the sound of her crying. She brushed at her tears, smearing her cheeks with paint. Matt came in and took the roller from her. He ignored her tear-stained face. He let her run her hands over his, up over the sharp outcrop of his wrists and along the curves of his muscled arms.

In her bedroom, he shucked his clothes with the graceless, greedy haste of the young, gave no thought to being seen. She slipped from her clothes more surreptitiously, glad she hadn't ripped out the curtains in here. She could not help imagining what he might see: the creases and folds and puckering of flesh that had survived hard use for four decades, borne a child.

Matt comes out of the bedroom, dressed, but barefoot as Carrie is.

She should have warned him to stay in the room.

“Hey,” Matt says to Foster, but he can't meet the eyes of the man who hired him. He turns to Carrie. “I'm going to head out, I think. I'll see you tomorrow.”

He leaves quickly, silently, lightly, his shoes in his hand. What was it she thought she was doing in bed with Matt? After they made love, she lay in his arms, drawing a deep breath, letting loneliness back in, trying to see if she could fill her lungs with it, not have her breath catch on that thickness.

Foster clears his throat. “I see you've gotten over your heartbreak.”

She's not still married to him, yet she can't look at him. Her hand floats up to cover the scar at her throat.

“I need to talk to you about Anya,” Foster says. “I think she should stay with us for a couple of weeks while you get the house back in shape.”

“Why? What for?”

“For God's sake, you don't even have a door.”

Matt was supposed to put the door back on its hinges before he left. He must have forgotten—his mind on the beach, the next pleasure of the day—as soon as he crawled from her bed.

“That's temporary,” Carrie says. “Look, Foster, I'm sorry about this—”

“It's none of my business,” Foster says firmly.

Carrie can count on one hand the times she has found herself on Foster's doorstep. He always ferries Anya back and forth because Carrie doesn't have a car and his ritzy neighborhood near Sea Cliff is hard to reach by bus. She feels nervous when she rings the bell. She has never been desperate enough to cross Foster's threshold, and now Foster is the one who has all the leverage.

As soon as Foster lets her inside, he offers her a tour of the house. She is overwhelmed by the size of the foyer—big enough to hold three huge Japanese chests and still feel empty—and smacked anew by the fact that Foster is a wealthy man.

She holds out her hands before her, wrists together. “Just arrest me, officer, and let's get this over with.”

He shakes his head. “I'm not having that kind of conversation with you.”

“Where's Lisa? Doesn't she want to be here to lecture me too?”

“She's at work. Her job at the ad agency is very demanding. But I've got all the time in the world. Let me show you the house. At least have a look at where we hung your painting.”

He leads her into the living room, sheer drapes drawn against the sun, two huge sofas facing each other before the stone fireplace, chests and shelves and tables laden with bric-a-brac, glass figurines, Chinese vases and bowls, and on the walls, dark oil paintings of prissy British countryside, even a fox hunt, in massive gilt frames. So much plunder. She's filled with a visceral contempt for desire dulled and drowned by its own profusion, the habit of accumulation. She shouldn't have come here. She shouldn't have let him blackmail her with Anya, shouldn't have furiously painted the walls, shoved the furniture back in place, talked her way back into her job. See, Foster? I'll be good.

“I want Anya to come home,” Carrie says. “The house is fixed up now.”

“I think she should live here. She's more comfortable here.”

“She belongs with me.”

Foster takes her elbow. “Foster, please,” she says, moving into that gentle touch, so light yet so firm, so reliable.

“You don't even see how guilty she feels leaving you. You probably want her that way. Whatever will keep her comforting you and looking after you and making sure you get out of bed in the morning. You are so selfish.”

She must be. Anyone who confuses her own need with necessity as often as she does must be selfish. Only selfishness could have led her to mistake Foster's concern for her as some vestigial grace left from the time when they did, must have, loved one another.

With gouging, goading politeness, Foster says, “Come on, there's more to see.”

His hand, as mechanically accurate as a pincer, propels her into the dining room, dominated by a huge darktable so shiny it makes her think of a polished casket, then through the kitchen, so perfectly appointed, and into the family room. This room offers the first lovely thing she's seen here, if she excepts the Oriental rug in the dining room, a purchase she made long ago and left with Foster as ransom. A huge picture window opens onto a lush garden and an expansive, unobstructed view of the bay. The floweriness of this room—the pink-and-yellow chintz sofas, the lettuce green carpeting, the doll collection in a display case—pales before the magnificent window. Foster doesn't bother to point out her painting, which he somehow cheated her out of only so Lisa could hang it in a corner, in the least obtrusive spot she could find.

“I know this place is probably a bit precious for your taste,” Foster says. “I keep telling Lisa to go easy on the pastels. But will you look at the view I've got?”

Carrie could have been living here in this house with him. Sometimes she boasted to her friends that she used to be married to a surgeon: I gave it all up. As if she'd done something noble.

She can't yank her arm free of his. “Foster, let go! You just want to punish me.”

“You can handle that all by yourself,” Foster says. “You're an expert at it.”

He drags her up the stairs in that mysteriously unbreakable grip, and when she stumbles, he keeps pulling her. He shoves open the door of a bedroom. The twin bed, neatly made, covered by a handmade quilt, must be Anya's. Anya never makes her bed at home, and Carrie and Anya have argued for years about her sloppiness. More sheer curtains, delicate jewelry boxes, a Matisse poster on the wall, a cluster of framed photographs on the bureau. This is the room of another girl, someone Carrie doesn't know. The photos prove it: pictures of the three of them, Foster, Lisa, and Anya, the reconstituted family in frames that Carrie knows Lisa picked out, Lisa filled. Proof. Those slide shows, the grand finale against which Carrie's own desires were nothing.

Foster has tempted her, finally, to feel longing, even if it is not the kind he wishes her to feel.

“I've put up with your irresponsibility for long enough,” Foster says. “The way you rub my nose in it.”

To remember the sweetness of that morning in Mexico, sharing the syrupy coffee from one tin cup, pains her as much as it does to owe him her life. There's no proof.

Her body moves to comfort him, reflexively, but he shifts his grip to keep her at arm's length.

“I want Anya to stay here,” Foster says. “Any court would back me up.”

“Don't do this,” Carrie whispers. She tries again to touch him.

He pushes her against the wall with a fury she knows is her fault. “It's too late to be sorry now. But are you? Are you sorry?”

His face is so close to hers, their mouths only a few inches from a kiss. He trembles, pressed against her. She has used her body so carelessly and so often in the service of frantic, deluded hope, why shouldn't she barter it now for her daughter, her only child, her one true need?

“No,” she says.

Their friends are not dropping like flies anymore. Now twenty-five pills a day will keep death from the door indefinitely. And all the medieval horrors—the purplish lesions of
KS
mottling the beautiful curve of a young man's calf, thrush growing thick as a furry pelt in a mouth that should have been kissed, a dark neck wound opening like an obscene portal—are no longer a daily fact of their lives.

Sometimes Jim imagines that his and Jordan's love has grown like the lush grass on all the graves they have each visited in the last decade. They met at an open grave. By that time the funerals had become as fantastic as the disease—a ceremony in a nightclub rented for the evening, a service conducted jointly by a rabbi and a Buddhist monk, a party where everyone said their good-byes to the host, whose flesh was evaporating from his bones by slow degrees.

At Michael's funeral, the mourners were asked to place in the grave some precious gift for him to take into the sweet afterlife. In single file, men lined up to drop onto the coffin a silk scarf, pages torn from a book of poetry, a pinecone, a Game Boy. Jordan was in line ahead of Jim. Jordan dropped into the grave a pair of eyeglasses, explained his awkward gift when Jim stepped up to deposit one perfect peach.

“He was so vain he wouldn't use his reading glasses,” Jordan said. “When we went out to eat, somebody always had to read the menu to him.”

Jordan's shoulders began to shake, and Jim put an arm around him and led him away. Back then, you took anyone in your arms at these things, for whoever grieved more intensely was only temporarily taking your place in the endlessly reshuffled hierarchy of mourners.

Jordan put his hands up to ward off Jim. “Don't,” he said. “I'm not crying for him.” He didn't have to confess he was seropositive.

After the service everyone met for lunch at a barbecue restaurant. Jim sat with Jordan, and they discovered they had nothing in common. Jordan was a partner in a small art gallery downtown, and Jim was a physical therapist. Their only mutual interest was their volunteer work in the
AIDS
ward at San Francisco General. But everyone did that in those days. The ward swarmed with boisterous volunteers who delivered flowers and library books, plumped pillows, told jokes, gave manicures, served the fancy Sunday brunches donated by restaurants and caterers.

Jim struggled to hold Jordan's attention. He met all kinds of people in his work, he said. “And you're touching their bodies, working them through pain. They tell you everything. The writers tell me their ideas for stories, the bankers give me tips on investing. I know more about them than their hairdressers do.”

Jordan smiled politely, and Jim was thinking of excusing himself to sit with friends when Michael's cousin turned his video camera on them. Michael's cousin had been going from table to table, and now he wanted Jim to tell one story about Michael. Jim couldn't think of a story. All he could remember was that Michael was forever stepping in dog shit. He stared openmouthed at the camera. Instead of turning the punishing lens away, Jordan turned Jim's face to his, kept his hand cupped protectively along the line of Jim's jaw.

That gesture was all it took for Jim to fall for Jordan. Then, intimacy came quickly and fiercely. Jim, still healthy, never had to ask himself whether he really loved Jordan. What he fought down the first night they spent together, when he studied Jordan's unmarked body in the soft glow of a bedside lamp, imagined the raging disease already scarring organs and unseen tissue, was absolute proof in and of itself.

Now that time has unfurled before them again, a red carpet unrolled, they can handle a rough spot or two. Jordan has only just started back to work full-time after two years of devoting himself to his health. Jordan was lucky that he could afford the time off—thanks to his parents' determination to avoid inheritance taxes, he had enough capital sunk into the business that his partner had to accommodate him. How they celebrated his first day back—Jim sent Jordan flowers at the gallery with a card signed “J.J.,” their nickname for each other, the twinned link of their initials, and served up a candlelight dinner when Jordan got home. But Jordan's been much more tired since he started back at the gallery. Jim worried at first, insisted Jordan go for a battery of blood tests. His T4 cell count is
OK
. He's just tired. Too tired to want more than a cuddle when they curl up in bed. For two years they've fallen asleep every night in the embrace of new love, spooned together with their arms entwined, but now, after a quick hug, Jordan rolls away from Jim into a sleep he needs so desperately that it must be solitary.

Usually Jordan invites artists he's interested in to dinner parties with seven or eight other people, so they'll be just one of the crowd. But Jordan invited Lawrence to dinner by himself, which means he wants the gallery to show Lawrence's work more than Lawrence does. Jim has been reduced to the role of quiet housewife, serving up chicken simmered with chickpeas and star anise, clearing dishes, bringing dessert on a tray to the living room, and
then kneeling by the coffee table until the other two are willing to interrupt their study of Lawrence's portfolio of slides.

Lawrence and Jordan are talking about Paris, where to stay and where to eat cheaply, and sometimes they lapse into French, as if they've forgotten that Jim doesn't understand them. Even French words sound crude, scatological, coming out of Lawrence's mouth. He has an air of coarseness about him that inflects his speech, tangles the wild mass of his hair, shimmers in his sloppy gestures.