Curled in the Bed of Love (16 page)

She crawls into bed with him. “I did three houses today, way too many. It's so hard to turn down work right now. Everybody's holding their breath, waiting for the market to slack off. Be glad you don't have the stress I do at work.”

No. Now that he's back at school, the only pressure he gets is from students who want to know when he'll hand back the last papers they turned in. Sixteen hundred pages per class per semester. Yesterday, for maybe the thirtieth time in his life, Bill talked to his students about the river and the shore in
Huck Finn.
He was saying something about the river, the fluid freedom of natural man, the search for meaning, when he felt a sharp pain in his back, pain like a directional arrow instead of the usual seeping ache. It made him think that there was something he could do—something he had to do—to relieve it. Like hunger, it condensed his attention to meeting a single demand. He was in the middle of a sentence. Something about Huck's journey to find meaning. “Find meaning,” he said. But he was listening to that other demand. “Find meaning . . . in the meaningful.” And all the rest of the day, he felt a craving he could compare only to hunger. A craving he could plan for without being sure that this was what he was doing. When he slipped the key into his pocket, he didn't know that he would use it; he didn't know if it was of any use in staving off this sensation.

Pam kneads Bill's trapezius muscles. “I've been wondering if I should try something else,” Bill says.

“What do you mean? Go into administration?”

Pam's touch confuses him. Too light. He's gotten used to the chiropractor, who seems bent on remolding his flesh with her hands. She was interested in the types of his pain. She had him fill in a diagram of his torso, locating every emanating source of hurt in red ink. Then she sank her fingers right into the core of every glowing ember, an artist.

Bill traces figure eights on Pam's arm until she shivers. He says, “Really something else. Something entirely different.”

Pam kisses him, tugs his chest hair in smooth circling motions. They're married people all right. They don't bother to demarcate sex from the chitchat that ends their day. She says, “A year ago I'd have told you, get a real estate license. We'll go into business together and make a killing.”

“I wouldn't like all those forms you have to deal with when you sell a house,” Bill says. “But I don't know what I could try. You're good at figuring out what people want. What do you think I should do?”

Pam moves her hand down to his belly. “I never know too specifically. That's the whole point. If people are still living in the house, we make them take down the family pictures, anything that makes the house seem as if it belongs to someone else. The trickis to give the buyers room to imagine themselves in the house. You set out place mats and pretty dishes and wine glasses and the buyer is like, yeah, if I lived here, I'd have wine with lunch every day. They can see
their
life, only nicer.”

It doesn't make any sense to Bill that he wanted to go inside that empty house, that he wants to again. Really he wants to go into all the other houses he walks past. In neighborhoods like theirs, people always draw the curtains so you can't look in, as if to shield the inner sanctum of all that visible cherishing and flaunting. He had to get in somewhere.

It was just an empty house. Pam had not yet transformed it with
her props. Sometimes she borrows things from their own house, filches a Moroccan pitcher or a framed watercolor that proves essential to achieving the desired effect.

Pam fishes in Bill's crotch. “Do you enjoy your work?” he says.

Pam giggles. “Which work? What I'm doing now?” Her efforts are producing instant results. “Yeah, I enjoy my work. I'm good at it. That's always gratifying.”

Bill's hands scout the solid surface of her. “Is this gratifying?”

He smells her perfume. He wonders how many dabs are in a bottle, how many days of smelling like jasmine. Sometimes when he wakes at night he feels as if the air in the room has thickened with this scent while they sleep. An odor so strong it drowns the smells of the body.

When he enters her, he feels pain spread like warmth across his lower back, like a large hand pressing on his hips from behind. That pain plants itself behind every thrust of his body, and Pam braces him with her hips from beneath. Slap, slap, slap, his hips against hers. A metronome beats out the time, the steady pace of his strokes. Every human on earth must do this to the same rhythm.

“Pammy?” he calls.

Slap, slap, slap, steady and unending as the sound of the ocean.

Bill retrieves his kids from school in a rental car. The kids climb in, banging backpacks and slapping their rumps on the seat and slamming their elbows in that way that kids need to smack you with their physical existence.

“How come you're driving?” Liam says.

Bill shrugs. “I usually do,” he says.

It's time. Pam is right about this. If he can do nothing more about his back, he just has to pick up where he left off. It takes only forty minutes, total, to make the circuit from his school to the kids' and then home.

Arianne fidgets, her legs making slick sounds on the vinyl of the car seat. “You forgot to sign my permission slip,” she says.

“What permission slip?”

“I gave it to you yesterday,” Arianne says. “You lost it.”

Even when he can't remember how he must have sinned against his daughter, she always makes him feel he deserves to be accused. “If you gave it to me,” he says, “then it's somewhere in the house.”

“I was supposed to turn it in today,” Arianne says.

Bill is distracted by a light change. He has time to brake for the yellow light, but only if the driver behind him doesn't expect him to squeak through on the yellow. Reacting to a light change is no longer reflex but a futile attempt to read someone else's mind. He brakes, and the car rocks, and he can't help looking in the rearview mirror.

“Whoa, Dad!” Liam says. “You're scary.”

Arianne's rump swooshes across the seat; her elbows go smackety-smack on vinyl. “My teacher says if I don't bring it in tomorrow, I can't go on the field trip.”

“We'll find it,” Bill says, trying to sound soothing. He has students like Arianne, kids who always rush into class late or are dismayed to discover that a paper is due or redden with humiliation when Bill gently corrects something they've said in class. These kids remind him of cartoon characters; every emotion registers on their faces as an abrupt infusion of shock, shame, or despair, and no mishap ever registers as less than catastrophe. It helps to divert them to task—have them scrawl the due date on a binder or open their books to the third chapter or answer the next question he's posed for discussion.

“We'll look for it as soon as we get home, and we'll put it in your backpack,” Bill says.

“You don't remember what you did with it,” Arianne says.

Bill's hands on the steering wheel seem to bear the weight of
the wheel and the column that holds it in place. “Sure I do,” Bill says.

Arianne kicks the back of the seat. The impact shudders up his spine.

As they approach the next intersection, the light turns yellow. The Jeep behind him is awfully close. But Bill brakes for the yellow light. In the rearview mirror he sees the Jeep grow rapidly larger till it blots out its own reflection. As the truck did when it hit him. Anticipation keens in Bill like hunger. The Jeep's tires squeal on the asphalt, and then the driver gives Bill the finger. When the light turns green, the driver of the Jeep leans on the horn.

Be reasonable, Bill tells himself.

Arianne wails. “You don't care about me! You don't care about anything! And now I won't get to go!”

Bill accelerates jerkily and careens into the left lane to get away from the Jeep, but the Jeep swerves with him. Bill slams the brake, though the light at the next intersection is still green. The Jeep's tires make a whining sound as it skids. Arianne emits a tiny squeak.

Bill doesn't mind that it hurts to twist around in his seat to look at Arianne. It should hurt. “Not another sound out of you,” he says, “or you walk home.”

She stares back at him in silence. But her body seems to vibrate and shimmer, to be blurred by the incessant needs that swarm about her. Bill has to remind himself, this is my daughter. My little girl.

He drives on, gripping the steering wheel, hunching over it in a way that he knows is not good for his back. When the Jeep swerves around him, he slows to let it pass. Be reasonable, be reasonable, he tells himself, until they arrive home. Pam pulls into the driveway right behind them, home early. She gets out of the car to wait for them, strands of fine hair drifting free of her ponytail, just like usual, her body quietly countering her strictness with it. Liam jumps from the car—the bang of the door, the slam of
his backpack against it, so much announcement—to run to his mother. “Dad's a lousy driver,” he hollers. Pam laughs and lifts him off his feet, and then she snags Arianne. She leans close so Arianne can snuggle against her and murmur and sniffle against her chest, and then she booms her answer, as loud as Liam's judgment of Bill's driving.

“No!” Pam says to Arianne. “She didn't say that, did she? That teacher is really an idiot! I'm going to have a talk with her.”

Pam sends Arianne into the house to take her pick of the Godiva chocolates some realtor sent today (diverted to task, Bill thinks approvingly). How firmly in place Pam is, how simply her feelings are translated into deeds.

When Bill approaches her, Pam gives him a peck on the cheek.

“She whined the whole way home,” Bill says. “She worries me.” What he means is, she bothers me.

“You have to learn to ignore her. She's a twitchy kid, just like my brother was. She'll outgrow it someday.” Pam laughs. “And she left her math book at school. She said you rushed her. I told her you'd go back for it.”

Forty minutes, round-trip. Bill doesn't think he can do it. Anything could happen on the road at rush hour. He feels the way he felt behind the wheel of the car, as if things in his field of vision are arbitrarily swelling, bursting the constraints of perspective, and then shrinking back into place.

“With my back like this,” he begins.

“I've got about eighty calls to make before I'm through for the day.” Pam swats him lightly. “Just take a Vicodin when you get home.”

Bill wakes in the night, his heart thudding. Why? He managed to retrieve the math book, Pam finished her calls in time to join them for dinner, and they watched
TV
afterward, relaxed. He lies still, soaking up the pain he feels whenever he wakes, the pain that
seems to locate for him the parts of himself. He listens for some noise in the house, some clue to what woke him.

He decides to get up and check on things. He pulls on sweatpants and a T-shirt and moves quietly through the house. He listens at the door of each kid's room. He looks in on Liam, curled in a ball at the foot of his bed, but when he tries Arianne's door, it opens only a few inches before he meets resistance. She has rigged up some kind of spiderweb of twine between the door and the doorjamb, with tape clumped here and there. He reaches in and feels for the doorknob, clotted with tape and twine. Don't ask, he tells himself. You don't want to know.

He goes to the front of the house and looks out the window at a silent street. He thinks about waking Pam.
Just take a Vicodin.
His back hurts enough that he'd have trouble going back to sleep anyway. Walking relieves his back pain. He could take a walk. He grabs Pam's clump of keys from the bowl by the door, and again something not exactly like intention directs him down the hill toward the empty house with these keys in his hand.

It's peaceful to be alone on the street with all these darkened houses around him. He could walk right up to anyone's windows and peer in. When he gets to the empty house, he has trouble locating the correct key on the key ring in the dark, and then he has a hard time fitting it into the lock.

He steps into the house and calls “hello?” into the echoing emptiness. And then he booms into the empty space, “Hello!” He flicks on the light switch in the living room. It's as naked as it was the first time he came. Pam hasn't gotten to work with her usual efficiency. His nostrils itch. Something about a house that's not lived in makes dust collect everywhere, silt the air. He has the urge to turn on every light as he moves through the house, to enter every room so that he can silt the air with himself. He flips one switch after another as he goes, on and off, opens closets and yanks on pull chains to light the naked bulbs inside, looks
in the empty medicine cabinet in the bathroom, slides on the slick wooden floor of the hall as he heads toward the bedrooms. He finds a receipt wedged beneath a baseboard. He remembers packing up their old house. You always leave something behind, cannot completely erase the traces of your life within four walls.

He ends up in the kitchen, where all the cupboards are disappointingly empty. He turns on the tap and water pulses noisily from the faucet, forcing before it an explosive rush of air. When the water flows in a steady stream, he cups his hands to drink it. He lies down on the linoleum floor. The cold hard surface eases the ache in his back. He watches a branch scratch against the window above the sink. There's something drowsy-making about the fluid motion of the branch.

He wakes for the second time that night with a thudding heart. Only now he is blinded by light. That light seems so omnipotent and obliterating that the terse voice he hears seems to emanate from it, and he can't identify what is being said any more than he can identify any human source for it. A rough hand grips his shoulder and forces him over onto his stomach, yanking his hands behind his back.