Lying in Bed (8 page)

Her breathing quickened at my words. One of her fingers pressed into my skin as if I were a violin myself. “You have no idea.”

“I was quoting Nietzsche,” I confessed. “One of the attributes of free spirits is what he called uninhibited fingers for the unfathomable.”

“I'm a free spirit,” she said.

I could imagine she was. “He was talking about people who sacrifice everything in their search for the truth. He
called them the new philosophers.”

“I didn't think he was referring to girls who went around swinging their underpants over their heads.”

She was the first person I had ever wanted to hold in my arms. I wished I knew how. It is such a long and dangerous journey out of emptiness.

“Stop laughing,” she said, “and take me home.”

I press the pillow once more to my face, smelling her though being careful not to speak to her, before I throw it back against the headboard and reach in the darkness for the console on Clara's side of the bed. There I find the rheostats that control the entire rectangular track of lighting along all four walls of the loft.

I push one slowly up. The far wall emerges in the light breathing with color.

I am enveloped by quilts. Clara has hung them all with great care, stretching each one over a wooden frame so its weight will be distributed evenly. The quilts in her shop, on the other hand, are hung by Velcro or are folded in piles, though once a month, wearing latex gloves, Clara refolds each one.

She has taught me to love quilts and their creation as I have taught her to love music and its creation, beyond her own fancying of Led Zeppelin and Steppenwolf and Madonna. And as I feel my human connection most to
those who have died and left their music behind, so Clara feels joined to those women who pieced or appliquéd scraps of fabric into entire designs of great beauty and durable life. She has read to me of, and imagined aloud for me, the great quilting bees of the two centuries before ours, and we have imagined together the life of a young woman beginning the traditional thirteen quilts in the days of her maidenhood—twelve for quotidian use and the thirteenth her bridal quilt—and then the bee itself, which could not be held until she had betrothed herself to her beloved, when she would be joined by her friends and they would back and interline and finish her bridal quilt, and through their very gathering announce to the world that she is to be married.

I have joined the life of my country through these quilts around me and ended what I realized was a lifelong exile in the culture of Europe. As I lie here on the Double Wedding Ring that covers our bed and was Clara's wedding gift to me, I am the true, evolved American man, beyond action, beyond provincialism, beyond greed, ambition, destructiveness, and the illusion of omnipotence.

Surrounding me are a Stair-Steps Illusion quilt from Kentucky, a Friendship quilt from Ohio, a Mennonite Light and Dark from Pennsylvania, a Sunshine and Shadow also from Pennsylvania, a Beloved Flag from Hawaii, over near the kitchen a Broken Dishes quilt from Indiana (which Clara gave to me on our first wedding anniversary and to honor the fact that we had broken no dishes, had no fights, as if it were conceivable to me even to raise my voice at her), a Stairway to Heaven (one of Clara's favorite songs) quilt from Ohio, and next to that Jacob's Ladder, also from Ohio, a Maze or Labyrinth from Kentucky that puts me in mind of Pope's “Love in
these labyrinths his slaves detains” (far better a line than those he wrote so poor Pergolesi's
Stabat Mater
could be sung in English), and above, toward our immensely high ceiling, Birds in the Sky from Massachusetts, a Log Cabin Streak of Lightning from New York, and another anniversary present, a Star of Bethlehem from Maine on whose points I sometimes picture Clara's hands as I lie on my back on this bed with my penis in her mouth and the straight furrow of her ass at the tips of my fingers.

Clara has always placed her quilts strategically (and separate from the Madonnas I have given her as gifts) and with the sense of humor that I had never imagined could accompany sexual mystery. She keeps threatening to find a quilt called Trip Around the World to hang like a flag from the ceiling above our bed, and already, on the wall behind the bed, there is an Amish Puss in the Corner, and there, directly across from our bed, is a Swastika from Missouri, perfect evidence of the corruption of beauty in the
mêlée
of history.

She has also joked to me that someday she is going to buy me a Contained Crazy if I don't get out more.

But I don't want to get out more. I prefer my life here in the loft, which has become my version of Wittgenstein's eternal hut, though he, lover of men, chose always to live in the utter solitude I had believed to be my own destiny B.C., as I might denote my life Before Clara. I remain, however, some kind of underground man, even if in my case I am buried in the sky. (Though I must confess that when I still dared read fiction I was infinitely more impressed with that other madman's voice that could say, “It was I killed the old pawnbroker woman and her sister Lizaveta with an axe and robbed them.”) And with these quilts all around me, and the little antique rugs and samplers Clara has put here
and there, I feel I am in the very midst of America, right in its fist, as it were, as I so often find myself in Clara's fist and I see myself as she sees me and learn to love myself as she loves me in that great generous blessing of self-acceptance that marriage, finally, sweetly, kindly brings.

As I have said, this loft is one great room. We designed it ourselves and deliberately created no place for either of us to hide. The only private spaces are the two bathrooms, hers of Italian tile and with a bidet, mine of stone and with a sauna, and the two giant closets.

Those closets are nearly as large as other people's studio apartments, and while neither of us has had occasion to hide in our closet, we do keep all our things in them, for when you live in one big room and are as menseful as we two and want that room to be as orderly as we want ours, you must have a place to put all the incredible number of things one accumulates on this earth, from clothes and papers to weapons and toys.

I have never been in Clara's closet, and she has never been in mine. (Only Elspeth, our maid, who comes but once a week, like all good maids on Thursday, 10:00
A.M
., has been in both.) We agreed, when we created this large public space of ours, that each of our closets would be off limits to the other. In the beginning of our marriage, we locked our closets. But I have not locked mine in months (years, now that I think of it), and to judge from the way she will open her closet door after a long day at work and throw in her clothes before coming to me with a smile and a greeting to get her hug and glass of wine, I don't believe she locks hers either.

My clothes are in my closet. (I haven't many, and they are as conservative as I, Clara's attempt to Armani-ize and brief me notwithstanding; I have always been the first to
admit that it is my mind that is dandified, not my corporeality.)

So are my books.

And whatever we have in the way of security for life in a city as renowned for its violence as its vertu. This is the place, after all—this pinnacle of civilization, this hub of finance and the arts, this seat of learning and lotophagy—where women are thrown off roofs in some sort of post–forced-coital
tristesse
, where tourists invite the knife by their very blondness, where the automobile siren is the Queen of the Night's nightly aria, where beggars are our village idiots, and where democracy will, probably in the nick of time, yield to what Arnold called “the refinement of an aristocracy, precious and educative to a raw nation,” or else to the “thou shalt” of the herd. In the meantime, and for all the good they may do us should the hordes of victims of the failure of family planning reach our loft, I have a sword Clara bought me at a flea market, a bayonet from an army-surplus store, a baseball bat my father once gave me in the mistaken belief that the wand makes the magician, and something called a 2-Pound Camp Wonder that combines a hatchet blade, hammer, nail-puller, and pry bar, which Clara and I ordered from
The Sportsman's Guide
early in our marriage when, like many couples, bestirred by a bucolic urge and goaded by the apparently inescapable urban image of making love in a sleeping bag, we said we should try camping, though we came to our senses before we'd bought a tent, a tarpaulin, or even the sleeping bag itself. All this is laughable, of course, both in its fire power and its necessity. Or thus I feel it, so ubietously content am I, contained securely in my marriage and my home, which I leave so rarely, my little piece of safe and colorfully quilted (I am tempted to say, as I lie in
bed, buntinged) America. We are immune here to the ravages of the dissolution of law in this city, this country, and to the violence of domestic breakdown when love has died and in its place comes, like some aberrant antonym, rage.

Because I have accumulated fewer things than has Clara, I have volunteered my closet for our financial records, including canceled checks and tax returns. It also holds: a copy of my thesis (I never was able to confront the oral part of the exam); my bust of Nietzsche, which I thought rather audacious, even modish, for my undergraduate lodgings first in Vanderbilt and then in Jonathan Edwards, though now I realize that it probably would have kept the girls away if I hadn't succeeded in doing that without its help; “The Final Resource of French Atheists” as well as the other erotica with which Clara has tried to enlighten me; and my old violin, which I have kept despite its painful associations and the large sum of money for which I could undoubtedly sell it because it reminds me of that first day in Clara's shop when she said, “I'd like to see it,” and I said, “The violin?” and she responded, “Your apartment,” and that is what led me to have the courage to invite her home with me that evening and to be with her every evening, every night, since then, which is why it is so comforting to have this night to myself, as I listen to the music that played at our wedding and find myself beginning to grow hungry and wondering if Clara is growing hungry or whether she has eaten by now and where she might be eating and with whom.

I was very careful not to ask her anything about her evening when she told me this morning she had a dinner date for tonight. I simply said, “That's nice,” and told her I would miss her.

In anticipation of her absence, I found as the day went
on that I desired her less, as if my body had been in preparation for this evening and my mind had known enough to start early on its journey toward the kind of self-discovery that can be made only in separation from thoughts of, and desire for, the beloved. I am willing myself to learn the truth about myself. I want to make “all being thinkable,” as Nietzsche said. He called that the will to truth and said it fills one with lust.

I am still waiting for the lust. But I'm in no hurry.

So that when Clara came home from work, I found I could not wait until she'd leave again for dinner, so interested had I become in what I would discover in her absence tonight.

Without emotion, I watched her dress. She replaced one set of layers with another. I have never met anyone who dresses like Clara, with such cepaceous perfection. It is as if she is making a quilt of herself, fabrics and colors overlapping one another, textures and revelations. She usually wears tights, whether with or without a skirt, and I find her shapely legs, with their thin ankles, muscular calves, and girlish thighs, even more sensual wrapped in bright, opaque colors than naked. If the tights are worn simply as leggings, she will often offset the startling sight of her high, arcuated behind with a clashing pair of drooping socks, though sometimes she'll also wear socks over the bottom of her tights when she wears a long shirt atop them, sometimes one of my shirts, which I gather has always been a woman's stratagem to make a man desire her (though I can't imagine that its opposite—a man wearing a piece of his woman's clothing—would have the same effect on her).

Tonight, just those few hours ago, she put on no tights
whatsoever, which surprised me, and a dress, black, a color she rarely wears. It didn't occur to me then that she might be dressing this way to try to assure me that wherever she was going and whatever she would be doing, she was invading her evening in her most demure apparel. And it probably didn't occur to her that she was all the more desirable for the somberness of her outfit, like a beautiful woman at a funeral.

“You look beautiful.”

“Thank you,” she said distractedly, for she was bent over her handbag and pawing through it.

“You're not planning to take that out, I hope.”

“Of course not.”

She emerged from her handbag with what looked like house keys, some cash, a blank check, and a credit card, which she put into the pockets of her dress. Clara seems to be the rare woman who can be separated from her makeup and comb for long periods of time and not feel as if calamity might strike. She does little enough to her face to change it: some eyeliner to amplify the warmth of her gaze and occasionally a dusting of some sort of fleshly powder when the effects of our lovemaking are still visible on her artless skin. Her hair scarcely needs its comb. She keeps it short (I doubt very much she is out getting a haircut tonight), it always seems to fall with its own perfect taste over enough of her ears to allow her earrings their mysterious dangle, and I never love it more than when we sit at an outdoor cafe for dinner early on a summer evening and I watch as her hair takes more light from the carmine spill of the sun than does the glass of chilly Chénas in her hand, unless it's when I see it swept between my fingers when her head is in my hands and her eyes are in my eyes.

“Are you going to cook?” she asked.

“You know I can't eat my own cooking when you're not here to tell me that Jacques Pépin won't be sending out a death squad.”