Curled in the Bed of Love (8 page)

Now I'm filled with craving. Not for a drink. For something that there's always going to be more of. It cycles inside me like a piston, this want that has no object.

Walter calls me at school, claiming it's an emergency so the receptionist will fetch me from the classroom to take the phone. I don't even register what it is he wants, only know the compulsion to stave off the next demand by answering yes to this one. I make an excuse to the receptionist about a sick child and drive over to his apartment.

When Walter opens the door, dressed only in sweatpants, I see that he's cleaned up for me. The pile of crumpled chip bags is gone, there are no clothes on the floor, the narrow coffee table bears the streaks of a hasty swipe with a dust rag. Straightened up, this place is even uglier, more frightening to me. Through the partly closed curtains, light slants into the room like a blade.

“You can't call me in the middle of the day,” I say.

“I need to sleep,” he says. “I haven't slept for two days.”

I follow him into the alcove, where he pulls back the untouched covers, climbs into bed, and pats the mattress next to him. I lie down beside him, and he pulls the sheets up over both of us, curls his body against mine.

He strokes my hair, and I can feel the warmth of him along my body, the oppressive clamminess of his sweat, his hot breath. A shock, like the nick of a static shock, runs through me each time he lifts my hair and lets it cascade over his hands. I can't believe the impossible fact of a man other than Jay caressing me. I shut my eyes, block out the light the way Jay's earplugs block the sound of me slipping into the bedroom after he's gone to sleep.

Walter's hand moves down over my shoulders, along my hip, where even through my clothes, it kindles an unpleasant warmth. The blunt ridge of his erection presses against my thigh, and then he shifts his hand to his own crotch, rubs himself in rhythmic circles that make his breath catch. I keep my body rigid, as if there's some rule that I must remain untouched, unmoved, while he does what he needs to do to arrive at release, to sprawl against me with a new, helpless softness. Soon I will have worked the magic that will enable him to sleep till morning comes, enable me to get up and fetch my children, move through the clean corridors of my own life, blunt the pleading of his fingers on my skin, renounce the complicity of our bodies rocking on the mattress.

After a while, when his breathing becomes even, I slip slowly and carefully from beneath the covers. I need to leave him sleeping, need to lean over him to tuck the sheets around him in just the way I would tuck them around my children. Only when he's asleep do I want or dare to touch him, brush damp hair back from his forehead.

His hand comes up like a vise to grip mine in the act of tenderness.
Panic bolts through me when he pulls me down toward the bed.

“Please,” he says, “just one little good-night kiss.”

He shifts his hand to the back of my neck, brings my face to his. The pressure of Walter's mouth on mine unlocks an answer, and I open my mouth to let his tongue fill the little cave of my hunger.

He laughs when I jerk back from the bed. “Sweet dreams,” he says, as if I am the one he has released to oblivion.

I race down the stairs as if he will come after me. When I get into my car, I lock the doors, but I can't turn the key in the ignition, not with these hands. I look in the rearview mirror, see that my lipstickis smeared around my mouth. I spit into a Kleenex and slowly rub the rosy aura from my skin. I run my fingers through the disarray of my hair, hiding the evidence once again.

But it's there in the gaze the mirror reflects. I'm not the only one in the world with the eyes of a liar. No, there's a herd of us, the comrades of lonely craving, slapping down folding chairs in a thousand musty meeting rooms. I close my eyes the way I closed them when Walter kissed me, and again I can feel the rushing warmth of desire, of hungered-after contact. Such allegiance it claims, this second self, this scavenger who returns to demand its sweet share, whom I must let come and go, come and go, move through me like fog.

Three days after Daniel left Carrie, a tree came down against her house in a terrible rainstorm, crushing the front stairs and puncturing the roof. Carrie and her daughter, Anya, got up from bed and set out buckets, every last pot and pan in the kitchen, even piles of rags, to catch the water sluicing down the walls, dripping from cracks in the ceiling. Yanking the sofa and armchair away from the seeping walls, Carrie thought that it was just as well that Daniel had taken a lot of the furniture. In the morning she ripped the heavy water-soaked curtains from the living-room windows, sending the curtain hooks pinging across the bare wood floor, and bundled the curtains into the trash. She was glad to strip the house, toss ruined rugs, empty the mantel of her collection of Talavera pottery, survey the water stains on the walls as if they were destruction's bold scrawl, writ large.

For two weeks she and Anya have been stepping over the bowls and pots and pans on the floor, curling together in Carrie's bed, the only place in the house that stays dry when it rains. The landlord has cleared away the fallen tree but made excuses about repairing the roof and the front steps, claiming that every roofing contractor he calls is busy because of all the rain this winter. He
has left the house in disrepair for years, hoping to force Carrie out so he can jack up the rent.

When Foster brings Anya home on Sunday night, he climbs in the window after her—they can't use the front steps. Carrie has spent the day in her robe, left her hair in a tangled spill down her back. She wasn't expecting him to come in with Anya.

Foster lifts a corner of the drop cloth she's thrown over the furniture huddled in the middle of the room. “You've got to snap out of this,” he says.

He is perfectly confident, as Carrie is, that the damage is her doing. Anya must report to her father and stepmother when she spends the weekend with them: Mom's not cooking, she's living on candy bars, she's not sleeping. Carrie can live with Foster thinking she is crazy. But her eyes cross at the thought of another lecture from him on the needs of a teenager.

Carrie shrugs. “I can't help this mess.”

“You're wallowing in it,” Foster says. “There'll be someone else soon enough.”

“Dad,” Anya scolds automatically.

Should Carrie be flattered or dismayed at Foster's expectation? She's been thinking that there won't be another someone for a while. When she split up with Foster twelve years ago, she was so certain of what she was leaving him for. Yes, she was going to fall in love, desperately, pursue her dream of working as an artist, live in a neighborhood that offered noise and struggle, not hushed, propertied order. She's had one adventure after another since she left Foster, scrabbling together waitressing jobs until she found the job at the frame shop, falling in and out of love so many times, fighting the landlord because if she had to pay higher rent, she couldn't afford to sublet studio space two days a week.

“You should move out,” Foster says.

“The roofer is supposed to come next week,” Carrie says.

“That's what you said last weekend.”

She gives him a look. But Foster persists. “I know a good handyman. I could get him in here to fix those front steps for you—”

“We like going in and out the window,” Carrie says. “Anya just calls for me when she gets home from school. ‘Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair.'”

“Look, my daughter has to live here,” Foster says.

“Don't put me in the middle,” Anya says. But her voice has an impish lilt; she likes to best them at the game of being a grown-up.

“Oh, Foster,” Carrie says. “Will you just relax? After the roofer gets here, I'll paint the walls. We'll just be so shipshape and middle class you won't know us.”

Anya comes into the bedroom and tugs open the curtains. The sudden light makes Carrie feel as if her pupils are made of chips of glass, refracting and distorting what she sees: the mildewed square on the wall where Daniel's bureau used to stand, the paper bags of clothes that have taken the place of the bureau drawers, the dusty mess of the vanity table with its filmy mirror.

Anya yanks the blankets off Carrie's body. “You have to go to work.”

“We stayed up too late,” Carrie moans.

“You drank too much,” Anya says.

Carrie tries to remember. They sat on the sofa together, their legs in each other's laps, eating popcorn and watching a video,
Some Like It Hot,
with Marilyn Monroe managing to be so calculating and so innocent all at the same time that of course you wanted her to get the rich man she was angling for. Carrie leaned down now and then to refill her glass from the bottle of wine on the floor. Now and then.

“I'm entitled to suffer,” Carrie says.

Anya swats her. “Get over yourself, Mom. He's been gone for a month.”

“Is that any way to speak to your mother?” Carrie says. But she swings her legs over the side of the bed. “Make coffee. Please?”

Carrie gets dressed in clothes that will make her feel better, a long, diaphanous skirt, a see-through blouse with a tank top underneath, chunky heels. Hardly clothes she ought to wear to the frame shop. Her boss has been riding her about her erratic hours, which has only made her more persistently tardy. Her work is good—the shop does frames for galleries, for half the artists out at Hunters Point where Carrie has her studio, and a lot of the customers request her when they come in because she's decisive, has a trustworthy instinct for simplicity, is efficient with materials.

She sits at the vanity table and fishes among tiny compacts filled with delicious creamy colors that she can't resist. She may have the largest collection of makeup in the city of San Francisco, a collection to rival a drag queen's. Her hangover gives her some technical problems. Her hand shakes when she applies blush, and it takes two attempts to apply eyeliner. When she reapplies it, one finger stretching the eyelid, she can't help noticing that wrinkles make the job harder too. She's exactly of an age, forty-three, to feel shocked that her body is no longer young, no longer a match for the firmness of her desire.

And maybe this is why she counted on Daniel, crossed her fingers during their four years together—her longest time with any man since Foster—and didn't see how little that meant to Daniel, who did not have behind him the string of failed relationships that she did. Six years younger, his life still as flexible as his skin, he never questioned the opportunity that beckoned in New York. And she'd had to choose: accuse and make their last months miserable or corroborate in the lie that fate was separating them, severing their great passion. She'd gone with the lie.

The tattoo on her shoulder, a heart with an arrow through it,
shows through her translucent blouse. Daniel's name is inscribed on the shaft of the arrow, crude and shameless epithet. She and Daniel argued unscrupulously and savagely, made up with sex predictably but gorgeously stoked by their anger, stuffed each other's pockets with vulgar love notes folded into stiff origami shapes. They fought to keep alive their infatuation, clung to its absolute diction despite his irresponsibility and hers. Her marriage to Foster had taught her the price of accommodation.

Anya comes back and kisses Carrie's cheek when she leans down to place a steaming mug on the vanity table. Carrie hands Anya her hairbrush, and Anya pulls up a stool behind Carrie's chair.

Carrie used to brush Anya's hair for hours every day, and now that Anya has cropped her hair close around her face, the better to show off the three holes pierced in each ear, they have reversed places. But Anya hesitates at her task. She says, “You
will
make it to work today, won't you, Mom?”

The night of the big storm, when they were running around setting out pots and pans to catch the dripping water, barefoot, in their nightgowns, Carrie and Anya finally gave up their hopeless effort. Carrie salvaged a pot to make hot chocolate, and when water dripped from the ceiling into the boiling milk, Carrie started to cry and then to laugh, and she and Anya laughed so hard they had to hold on to each other.

“Of course,” Carrie says. “The world of art would grind to a halt without me.”

She'll call in sick. She just can't explain to Anya, still a child, or to herself this helplessness, this inexplicable, self-dramatizing need to stay put, to be bereft.

Slowly the progress of the brush turns smooth as a caress. Both of them luxuriate in the wordless intimacy of this ritual, this lover like intentness. Though she stayed with Foster for three more
years, Carrie knew when Anya was born that she didn't really love him, knew because her feelings for Foster were nothing like the aching physical need she felt for her daughter. Carrie had been terrible to Foster, bluntly instructing him not to bore her with his work stories, vengefully spending the money he made as an orthopedic surgeon on expensive clothes and Oriental rugs and paintings he didn't like, and toward the end taking lovers. Still, he didn't believe her when she said she wanted to separate, forced her through three months of marriage counseling before he let her go.

Foster wanted Carrie to stay in their house with Anya, keep it as her share of community property. She told him to sell it. Carrie could not take Foster's money anymore, could not help a sense of honor at the last, even if it was akin to the honor among thieves.

Carrie can hear the carpenter hammering on the front steps. It's really Foster hammering at her, Foster who hired the guy and told him to show up—surprise!—on Carrie's doorstep. Her first impulse was to send the carpenter away, call Foster's office, and light into him for trying to run her life. But the carpenter, Matt, turned out to be cute, and the window they'd been using as an entryway was beginning to stick from all the water damage. Maybe the carpenter will loan her his tools; the roofer who showed up put more cracks in the ceiling and walls with his heavy equipment. Maybe Carrie is worse off than she thinks she is if Foster is willing to risk interfering. They've always operated under a laissez-faire policy—she keeps her mouth shut when Foster sends Anya to his horrible parents for holiday visits, and Foster forebears comment on Carrie's lax rules, Anya's stories of meeting strange men in the bathroom in the morning. Carrie will paint the living room as soon as she can repair the cracks in the walls.