Curled in the Bed of Love (9 page)

Matt stops hammering, turns off his radio. A moment later he
pokes his head in the door. “I think I'm going to head out,” he says. “There's some nasty dry rot under the steps. I can't fix it until I buy more lumber.”

“Liar.” He likes to leave early to go the beach, carries a surfboard and wet suit in his truck even in winter. He's young.

He smiles, unashamed. “Mind if I wash up?” he says.

She follows him into the kitchen, offers him a drink. Today she should have gone to the studio at Hunters Point. She is lucky that Edward lets her share his space for a pittance. Usually she shows up religiously on her days off from the frame shop, Thursdays and Fridays, exercising a discipline and self-sacrifice she expends on nothing else, summoning the will to persist in failure, which has required so much more loyalty than success would have.

Matt turns the water on full blast and lathers his arms up to the elbows till they look as if they've been dipped in cream. Carrie has found herself skipping the studio with the excuse that she'll draw at home just so she can lookout the window to spy on him, bicker with him about his noise and his hours. How weak she is, to crave beautiful men so, to give in to this secret indulgence, luscious and painful. And this pleasure is laced with a kind of panic that she will fail to feel every delightful increment of sensation, the same panic that makes her knot her body, kernel hard, and force herself to think of Daniel, remember touching him, recall the way he slumped over his coffee in the morning, painstakingly reconstruct the contour of his cheek, the faceted knobs of his knuckles, the ways of his body and no one else's.

Drying his hands on a towel, Matt glances surreptitiously at her face and then looks away. He's too young not to be embarrassed, priggish about the possibility that she could be sending him sexual signals.

Warmth blooms in her body at this tempting resistance. She reaches up to tuck a bra strap under her tank top, to draw his eyes to her shapely shoulder.

“Can I borrow a putty knife from you?” she says. “And Spackle, if you have it?”

He blushes, rich reward for her first, virtuous small step.

Foster saved Carrie's life. When they were first married, they traveled together a lot, a frivolity Foster can still afford regularly and Carrie cannot. When he finished his residency, they drove down to Baja, Mexico, to celebrate. They camped on the beach, rose with the sun every morning to make cowboy coffee in a pot precariously perched over their small fire, throwing the grounds into the boiling water, straining the coffee through a cloth, and then thickening the weak brew with sweetened condensed milk. They were hiking, miles from the nearest village, when she got stung by a bee and went into anaphylactic shock. Foster made an incision in her throat with a Swiss Army knife, an emergency tracheotomy, had the courage and the steadiness to do what was necessary. He carried her over a mile back to their car, drove her, with her head resting in his lap, into the village to a dilapidated hospital. For years they showed slides of their trip to friends, the show always culminating with slides of the Baja beach, the story of how Foster saved Carrie's life on that day.

When Foster shows up at her Open Studio at Hunters Point, Carrie can't help feeling that he has turned up to rescue her again, and that it's her own fault. She'd told him she would agree to the carpenter only if she could pay Foster back after her upcoming Open Studio, intimated that she could count on selling canvases and making some real money. And now she'll never again be able to allude vaguely to her studio space, her work, without Foster knowing exactly what that means: a poor-cousin corner of Edward's space, a grand total of six canvases to show. She may well be fired for the sake of those six canvases. When she asked for the day off today, her boss told her not to bother coming in next week.

Foster bumps against her easel and rights it. Then he announces that it's about time he owned an original Carrie Decker.

“Spare me the paternalism,” Carrie says. “Nobody's even come in to look.”

“Maybe you scared them off,” Foster says. “Look at you! Your hair's a mess, and did you know that your shoes don't match?”

Carrie looks at her feet. One boot is brown, one black. Well, she was tired this morning. She couldn't sleep last night, called Daniel at 3
A.M.
New York time, listened in panic to the phone ring and ring—maybe she'd memorized a wrong number, maybe he was sleeping somewhere else—until she heard him say “hello?” into the phone, into her silence, his voice blessedly familiar, his sleepy bewilderment so intimate.

“Are you all right?” Foster says.

“I'm an artist,” Carrie says. “I get to be this way.”

He brushes a strand of hair from her face and then draws back from her.

She can feel it, like some chemical reaction, the tense stillness of his response to her physical proximity. It's no different from the wariness that makes Matt, the carpenter, rock on his heels when Carrie steps too close to him, envelops him in the tantalizing aura of her grief, her preoccupation with someone who isn't him.

“Lisa's here somewhere,” Foster says, as if he has to remind them both of his wife. “She'll turn up eventually. So tell me which picture we should buy.”

Carrie follows him as he moves along the wall, squinting at the stickers that list the title and price of each canvas. He stops before the largest canvas, her most recent one. “‘Dream House.' You've done a series of houses, haven't you?”

“It's inspired by my recent travails,” Carrie says. “My next series is going to be called ‘Black Holes.' ”

“Oh, stop being so maudlin.” Foster takes her elbow lightly, calling up for her so suddenly and fully her favorite thing about him,
the professional, precise lightness of his touch. He can feel bruised skin for a broken bone without giving pain. His gentleness makes her want to burst into tears.

“Tell me about this picture,” he says.

She explains how she painted washes of color, one translucent layer over another, to build up a thick but seamless layer of paint that suggests a doll's house, rooms stacked above each other. She glued on tiny squares of paper, cut from gift wrap, from a letter Daniel wrote her (robbed of any power once she put it to use), from the green foil cups in a box of chocolates. Then she built up more thin washes of paint to shellac the squares, embed them in the surface of the canvas.

She sticks to giving Foster a technical description. She's been painting houses because she has a recurring dream about a house, one that predates even her current disastrous circumstances. Always she is walking through beautiful, empty rooms, an endless profusion of them, imagining how she will fill them when she and Anya move in. It ought to be a happy dream, but she never wakes up from it happy.

“I think I'd like to take this one,” Foster says.

She suspects the offer is made out of charity, not desire. “It's not finished.”

“Sure it is,” Foster says. “You hung it and priced it.”

A few days ago, when this canvas was still on her easel, she couldn't decide whether to scrape into those layers of paint with a palette knife or to build them up further, stroke on opaque paint that would retain the imprint of the brush hairs. All the determination, the boldness, that made her so damn cheery when she was in the early stages abruptly deserted her at the end.

Working on a canvas, Carrie always arrives at this moment of regret, of complete doubt in her ability to recognize the mistakes she has made. Her hand will wander to the vertical scar of the tracheotomy like a tongue to an aching tooth.

When Lisa arrives, Foster steps away from Carrie so that she can
stand between them. “Isn't this great?” He sweeps an arm as if all the canvases on the wall are his.

“It's really neat,” Lisa says. “We've never come to an Open Studio before. All these artists in one place!”

Carrie has no right to her inward sneer. Those are her feelings exactly—excitement and awe at the idea of being an artist, being among artists. She was disappointed to find herself alone so often on her days here. The beautiful light that's to be had in these converted warehouses, so close to the bay, comes at a compounded price: most of the tenants have to work day jobs to pay the rent, and the land is steeped in poison from the years when this was a Navy shipyard.

Foster and Lisa glance at Carrie for signs of disapproval every time they dare to comment on a picture. Carrie wraps her hands more tightly around herself and gives them only a vindictive stare that their polite effort does not deserve. When she left Foster, she accused him of not supporting her as an artist, and he said, “I always encouraged you,” using the word that made her feel like a doctor's wife with a hobby. Lisa, so anonymously attractive, so varnished, makes a much better wife for him.

Foster pulls his checkbook from his pocket. “Do I add tax to the total?”

The music has been turned up so loud that Carrie can feel the bass beat through her bare feet, a pump driving the bodies crowded into her living room. In the ocher light cast by the one lamp left in the room, the dancers' undulating shadows lick at the walls like tongues of dark flame. Someone climbs back in through the open living-room window—people have been climbing in and out all night, since the stairs are still under construction—bringing in a whiff of sweet smoke. Carrie makes her friends smoke pot outside, out of sight of Anya, as a concession to maternal duty. She doesn't smoke pot herself because it induces lethargy, though you'd never know it from the way her friends behave.

She is drunk enough to feel transcendent, as benevolent as if she has personally orchestrated the chaos around her: the blender whirring in the kitchen where people are making daiquiris, two people sketching in pencil on the scarred walls, someone sleeping on the sofa, still draped with the drop cloth, someone else twirling the standing lamp so the light swims across the wall and ceilings, and yet another someone lighting sparklers that hiss and spit, parting the closely packed dancers. Carrie barely knows half the people here, just collected whoever was available at the end of the Open Studio, waving Foster's check to prove she could provide plenty of free liquor.

She lets Edward drape his arms around her for a slow dance, contemplates the possibility of taking him into her bed later tonight. They occasionally sleep together, a just-friends kind of thing in which they both acknowledge each other as temporary stopgaps, and she is feeling so lonely, roused to such craving by the daily, muscular presence of the carpenter. But Anya will scold her. Anya has already come over to her once to wean her away from Edward and hiss in her ear, “Mom, how can you be so promiscuous in the age of
AIDS
?”

Carrie looks for Anya and is relieved to find her sitting cross-legged in the corner talking to Marty, who has the studio next to Edward's at Hunters Point. Carrie trusts Marty not to prey on Anya. She trusts herself, the self she imagines tugging the invisible strings that coordinate every body in this room, suspending everyone in the dreamy blissfulness of loud music and dimness and movement.

When Anya collars her to tell her there's a neighbor at the window, complaining about the noise, Carrie shrugs. She doesn't want to be bothered. She refuses to go to the window to speak to the neighbor.

“Do you want him to call the cops?” Anya demands.

“Oh, he won't.” Carrie loops an arm around Anya's waist, tries to draw her into a circle with Edward. “Isn't my baby beautiful?”

Anya pushes at Carrie's arm. “Mom, can you get serious?”

“You're the one who told me I should lighten up,” Carrie says.

Anya goes back to the neighbor at the window. “It's my mother's party,” Anya says loudly. “I can't do anything about it. I'm just a kid.”

There is such amusement in Anya's voice that Carrie doesn't suspect anything when she sees Anya dig the phone out from under the drop cloth and sit on the windowsill with the receiver to her ear. Later, when a loud banging on the window scatters the crowd in her living room, funneling people into the kitchen to head out the back door, Carrie thinks that the neighbor did call the police. She is stunned when Foster compresses his tall body to squeeze in through the window.

Anya is waiting with her backpack in hand, a preparation Carrie should have noticed. Someone calls from the kitchen to ask if it's the cops, and Carrie turns off the
CD
player and answers, “No. It's just the lifestyle police.”

Foster puts his hands up defensively. “Anya asked me to come get her.”

The flannel collar of a pajama top sticks up from beneath his windbreaker. Carrie laughs. “Jesus, Foster, you wear pajamas now?”

“Don't be mad at me, Mom,” Anya says. “I just wanted some sleep. I have to study for a test on Monday.”

“Of course I'm not mad, honey,” Carrie says. “You do what you want.” She turns back to Foster. “You're welcome to stay for a drink.”

“Look at this mess,” Foster says. “You have to get hold of yourself. We're going to have to talk.”

“I hate your talks,” Carrie says. He always arranges to meet on what he has decided is neutral territory, some coffee shop where he will be so fucking civilized, polite and hands-off and judgmental.

“Fine,” Foster says. “That's just fine.”

He backs out the window, and Anya goes after him, stuffing her backpack through ahead of her. Carrie leans out the window to watch them go to the car. Anya looks back once, ducking her head as if she expects a blow, some curse to land on her. And Carrie hopes the party will last all night, because she realizes only as Anya gets into the car that she was looking forward, after everyone left, to having Anya lead her to bed, pull off her shoes, maybe even sit quietly in her room and talk.

Foster keeps catching her. Before Carrie even catches herself doing what she's doing. She and Matt are in bed when she hears a noise at the front of the house. Though the steps are repaired, the front door is off its hinges so Matt can shave the warped wood at the bottom. She remembers too late that Foster had mentioned coming over to talk. She'd been so annoyed by the implicit criticism of his urgency, his violation of his own rule of neutrality, that she hadn't paid attention to when.