Curled in the Bed of Love (25 page)

What I feel can't be so far from what she feels. She's excited too.

Anna Marie sorts a stack of curled photos from her old wallet. “I don't think this new wallet will hold all my pictures of Eli,” she
says. “You can help me pick out the best ones. Have you seen this one? We just had it done at the studio in the mall.”

She'd be hurt if I didn't study the picture of her two-year-old grinning ferociously. “He looks like he's thinking about what he can do next to get in trouble.”

“He doesn't have to think,” Anna Marie says. “Trouble comes naturally to Eli. I had him in church with me last week, and I went up to Communion with him in my arms. When the priest gave me the host, my little guy pipes up, loud as you please, ‘
I
want a cracker!' I mean, isn't that just the cutest thing?”

When Anna Marie talks to me about Eli, she is always asking me to answer the same questions,
isn't he cute, isn't he adorable,
with the utterly absorbed monotony of love. I'm only the honorary auntie. He
is
the cutest thing, with a head of curls and the deep, husky voice of a cartoon character. Once when I baby-sat for him, I had to distract him so Anna Marie could get ready to go out with Roger, and he wanted his mother. I tried to make a game out of blocking him from going to her in the bedroom, pretend we were playing tag, but he wouldn't be fooled. He struggled in my arms when I caught him. He bit me when I wouldn't let him go.

“Can't you tell me now what this show is all about?” Anna Marie says.

The show's producer sent us each a letter, strictly instructing us not to discuss our appearance with each other. “You know I'm not supposed to.”

“Is it something to do with your mother?” Anna Marie says. “I thought maybe it was, because she's just passed on. But she didn't have any deep, dark secrets.”

“Don't put me on the spot,” I say.

“So then I'm thinking, what secret could there be that has to do with me?” Anna Marie taps a photo against her chin. “The only thing I can think of—this is silly—was maybe this is about Peter. It took me so long to figure out that he was a creep.”

Shame floods my face at the sound of his name in her mouth. I'm bursting with the desire to tell her, but when we're alone, when there's nowhere else to look but at her, I can't open my mouth.

“You knew something about Peter, didn't you?” she says.

We ate in bed, afterward. I got up and fetched loaves of bread, fruit, blocks of cheese, the jam jar. We broke the food into crumbly bits. And Peter would scoop two fingers in the jam jar and smear jam on a chunk of bread and smash it into my mouth—
there, choke on it.
I never changed the sheets until the next time he came. Though I tried to brush them from the bed, the bread crumbs we left multiplied to infinity when I slept alone, sharp and hard as tiny crystals.

What do I know about Peter? He didn't even call me after he and Anna Marie broke up.

“Debbie, you didn't have to protect me,” Anna Marie says. “I knew he was sleeping around. How can you not know with some part of yourself?”

She's the one who told me to go with him. They'd run out of ice at their party, and they'd been fighting that night, and if I didn't go with him to the liquor store, he'd ask another girl, the prettiest one he could find, just to rub salt in the wound. When we came back to the car with the ice, the bag split open all over the seat, and he and I were collecting the cold cubes in our hands, trying to stuff them back in the bag, and he started putting ice down my back, and I yanked him and pressed a handful under his collar to get back at him, and then we were kissing. I was so drunk. Sitting in his car in the dark parking lot, spitting on a Kleenex and trying to wipe smears of my lipstick from his face, I knew we'd find a time and a place to meet, as if it were an already accomplished fact. The way I've been knowing for years that Anna Marie has to find out.

“Don't worry,” Anna Marie says. “I can laugh about it now. I've got Eli and Roger.”

Whenever Anna Marie asks me to baby-sit for Eli, she acts as if she's bestowing a great favor, and she is. She tries to fix me up with guys too, inviting me over to watch football on Sundays with Roger and a bunch of his friends from work, coaching me on how to flirt. Who could bear this, forever and forever?

Our plane is met by a uniformed driver holding up a placard with our names on it, and Anna Marie and I are whisked off to the studio in a limousine. Anna Marie helps herself from the juice bar, slips off her shoes and sinks her feet in the thick carpet, devouring her taste of the star treatment. When we arrive at the studio, we are ushered to Makeup by a young woman named Candy who wears a headset. The smocked cosmetician works on Anna Marie first, and Anna Marie chatters giddily in the chair, says she feels like she's at a health spa. When it's my turn, I watch the glass as the cosmetician draws on me a face I would never wear out on the street. I'm pleased to be the person in the chair, relieved of all the anxiety about detail. When I'm snipping the fine ends of a client's hair, I know how hopeless it is to try and make such flimsy stuff truly even, would never finish if I did not look at the mirror instead of the few inches of hair pinched between my fingers.

Candy comes again to lead us each to separate rooms. Anna Marie asks her why we can't wait together, but Candy only smiles for answer. When I am alone in the waiting room—Candy calls it the green room—the awful sense of what I did visits like physical pain. This isn't the same thing as remembering. Only scattered pieces of what I did and felt come back, catching me unaware, with the force of a kick: the bitter smell of sex on my sheets after I'd been with Peter, a way he had of cupping my chin in his hand to turn my face to meet his, the word he used for what we did,
shtupping.
It happens so fast, hurts so swiftly, that there's no hope for using Molly's mental stop sign. One pain pulls another in its wake, and I find myself repeating the words of the confiteor:
Oh my God I am heartily sorry for having offended Thee.

But these words are just reflex. I have in me only fragments of the grand slow music of my religion:
where fore should I fear in the days of evil; behold the handmaid of the Lord; for the Lord spoke thus to me with a strong hand.
My mother knew her litanies by heart and made novenas for me. Even when she was dying, struggling with her illness and my father's fits of temper, she would tell me she was offering it up to God. “You go to God with your troubles, that's the answer.” I'd want to ask her where it had gotten her—spending her life wishing and hoping and waiting on my father's whims, collecting her good china set at the supermarket, place setting by place setting. I'd want to tell her there was no one there waiting for the handoff.

I was able to fool myself only when I was alone with Peter. Then I could stand to think of Anna Marie, lash myself with the picture of him returning to her, jealousy drowning in the thrill and terror of betrayal, the sacrifice I'd made for him, and isn't that what saints do, torment themselves? It had to be love that made me kneel before him and press my mouth to the veins at his wrist, to the cushioned, unfeeling pad of his palm. And I wanted him to look down at me, worshiping him.

When I am called from the green room, I step onto the stage during a commercial break, sit down on a sofa on the dais. Vivian Woods stands before me, her back to the audience. Cameras are wheeled across the stage to set up for that moment when we'll be back on the air. The faces of the people in the audience remind me to cross my legs, sit like a lady. I feel giddy, powerful, imagining what will flicker on their faces when I tell my story.

Cued, Vivian announces me as her next guest in her authoritative, rat-a-tat voice. She reminds me of Oprah Winfrey, stocky, her hair tormented out of its natural kinks into a smooth shell, her eyes sharply outlined in pencil.

“You have a secret you want to share with us,” Vivian says. “In
a moment we're going to let your cousin listen in, but first I'd like you to tell us your story.”

“Well, this happened about four years ago,” I say. “I got involved with my cousin's boyfriend.”

“You
slept
with your cousin's
boyfriend
?” Vivian is leading me, insinuating the shape and heft of my sin. “Wasn't he actually her fiancé at the time?”

“Yes.”

“And what was the deal—was this some kind of one-night stand or some hot-and-heavy love affair?”

I don't know what to say, how to make anyone believe me.

“Now don't just sit there and shrug,” Vivian says. “What was it—did you sleep with him once or a dozen times?”

“More than once.”

“Five? Ten? Fifteen?”

“Maybe five or six times.” Vivian looks disappointed. Smaller and smaller it shrinks, what I thought I had inside me raging to get out, to dimensions as exact as the set number of Hail Marys and Our Fathers the priest doles out in penance.

“Let's go back to the beginning,” Vivian says. “How did this happen?”

“We went out to get ice for a party at his house, and we just started kissing in his car. They—he and my cousin were having trouble then. The relationship was kind of on the rocks.”

“And you decided you'd give it a helpful push.”

The audience laughs. I didn't really expect the Princess Di treatment. Peter pours cement for a living, and I give people bargain-basement haircuts. I feel the wrong kind of shame.

“So what happened then?” Vivian says. “Did you do it in the car while your cousin was waiting for you to come back with the ice?”

In the car when I wiped his face, Peter squeezed his eyes shut.
I bought a red kimono for those few nights he came to me. That flagrant, fearless color, just for him, just for that dark room.

“No,” I say. “We went back to the party. Maybe a couple days later, he met me at my place. We met a couple times after that, and then we stopped.”

“You and your cousin were close, right?”

“Yes.”

“So what possessed you? What makes a woman betray her own family?”

Vivian's voice drops an octave on the word
betray,
that big word, but she's flogging it, trying to workup some interest.

“I thought I loved him,” I say.

“And you never told your cousin?”

“No.”

“Why tell her now, in front of a live television audience?”

“I guess I want to get it off my chest. Ask her to forgive me.”

“You're saying you feel guilty, but you've got a smile on your face. Did you know you were smiling?”

I tuck my lower lip under my teeth. “I feel like I'm still lying to her every time I see her. Still doing it to her.”

Vivian's face shifts readily to an expression of tenderness, so quickly and easily. “Well, we don't always get forgiveness. Sometimes we have to learn to forgive ourselves. We're going to see your cousin on the video screen now, and all I can promise you is the chance to ask.”

I have to turn sideways on the couch to see Anna Marie's face on the big screen behind me, just a head and shoulders, eerily disembodied and enlarged.

“Anna Marie, this is about Peter,” I say.

She nods as if she wants to help me.

I take a deep breath. “Remember back when you were breaking up with him?”

She nods again.

“Well, I was in love with him a little. You know, a crush. And then one thing led to another. You know. And I could never bring myself to tell you what happened.”

I'm watching her face as avidly as the audience is: that worried, helping look gives way to shock, then to pain. I'm greedy for it, and God, yes, it's pleasure, watching like everyone else to see the damage, the visible proof that I've done something terrible.

Then she remembers she's on
TV
and looks down at her hands, fiercely reining in what shone so radiantly, so purely, from her face a moment ago. And I wanted to see it, what I had really done.

In her booth, Anna Marie can't see me, doesn't even know that I am looking at her. “I am so sorry,” I say.

“Sure you are,” Anna Marie says. “I know that.”

To watch her blink so furiously brings tears to my eyes. This breach, this porousness, is forgiveness, isn't it?

“I just hated lying to you,” I say. “It felt like—”

Vivian Woods interrupts me. “And can you find it in your heart to forgive her?” she asks Anna Marie. “Knowing what she's done and the burden of guilt she's been carrying?”

Watching Anna Marie's face on the video screen, I could be watching a movie. Her mouth puckers, and then she gives a quiet answer. Her words are as lost to me as the words I was going to say, words draped in velvet and shot through with gold threads.
Oh my God I am heartily sorry.

Vivian Woods is already done with us, talking to the camera. “Don't go away, folks. After our next commercial break, Dr. Jean Dolan will talk about her new low-carbohydrate diet and show you how easy it can be to lose those extra pounds.”

I wait for Anna Marie in the green room. Candy shows her in and asks when we'd like the limo to take us to the airport. Our flight's not scheduled for three more hours. “We could go now and probably get on an earlier flight,” I say.

Anna Marie doesn't look at me.

“Would that be
OK
with you?” I ask her.

She shrugs. “Whatever you want.”

Candy tells us she'll come back to fetch us when the limo arrives, and while we wait, we should help ourselves to coffee. “And don't hesitate to ask me for anything you need,” she says, but her eyes are already glazed, her attention on whatever instructions are being sent over the headset she wears.

When Candy leaves, Anna Marie crosses the room and goes to the counter where the coffee service is arranged—a thermos, paper cups, packets of sugar, a half-and-half carton in a bucket of ice. She busies herself fixing a cup of coffee. I don't want a cup of coffee, but I go over there by her anyway. I pour a cup, fuss with the cream, a stirring stick. She doesn't move away.