Where the God of Love Hangs Out: Fiction (6 page)

*  *  *

It had taken William and Clare five years to end their marriages. William’s divorce lawyer was the sister of one of William’s old friends. She was William’s age, in a sharp black suit and improbably black hair and bloodred nails. Her only concession to age was black patent flats, and William was sure that most of her life, this woman had been stalking and killing wild game in stiletto heels.

“So,” she said. “You’ve been married thirty-five years. Well, look, Dr. Langford—”

“‘Mister’ is fine,” William said. “‘William’ is fine.”

“‘Bill’?” the woman said and William shook his head no and she smiled and made a note.

“Just kidding. It’s like this. Unless your wife is doing crack cocaine or having sex with young girls and barnyard animals, what little you have will be split fifty-fifty.”

“That’s fine, Mrs. Merrill,” William said.

“Not really,” the woman said. “Call me Louise. Your wife obviously got a lawyer long before you did. I got a fax today, a list of personal property your wife believes she’s entitled to. Oil paintings, a little jewelry, silverware.”

“That’s fine. Whatever it is.”

“It’s not fine. But let’s say you have no personal attachment to any of these items. And let’s say it’s all worth about twenty thousand dollars. Let’s have her give you twenty thousand dollars, and you give her the stuff. There’s no reason for us to just roll over and put our paws up in the air.”

“Whatever she wants,” William said. “You should know, I’m not having sex with a graduate student. Or with porn stars.”

“I believe you,” Mrs. Merrill said. “You may as well tell me—it’ll all come out in the wash. Who are you having sex with?”

“Her name is Clare Wexler. She teaches. She’s a very fine teacher. She makes me laugh. She can be a difficult person,” he said, beaming, as if he were detailing her beauty. “You’d like her.” William wiped his eyes.

“All right,” said Louise Merrill. “Let’s get you hitched before we’re all too old to enjoy it.”

When they could finally marry, Clare called her sons.

Danny said, “You might want a prenup. I’m just saying.”

Adam said, “Jeez, I thought Isabel was your friend.”

William called Emily and she said, “How can you do this to me? I’m trying to get pregnant,” and her husband, Kurt, had to take the phone because she was crying so hard. He said, “We’re trying not to take sides, you know.”

Three days after the storm had passed, classes resumed, grimy cars filled slushy roads, and Clare called both of her sons to say they were essentially unharmed.

“What do you mean, ‘essentially’?” Danny said, and Clare said, “I mean my hair’s a mess and I lost at Scrabble seventeen times and William’s back hurts from sleeping near the fireplace. I mean, I’m absolutely and completely fine. I shouldn’t have said ‘essentially.’

William laughed and shook his head when she hung up.

“They must know me by now,” Clare said.

“I’m sure they do,” William said, “but knowing and understanding are two different things.
Vershtehen und eiklaren
.”

“Fancy talk,” Clare said, and she kissed his neck and the bald top of his head and the little red dents behind his ears, which came from sixty-five years of wearing glasses. “I have to go to Baltimore tomorrow. Remember?”

“Of course,” William said.

Clare knew he’d call her the next day to ask about dinner, about Thai food or Cuban or would she prefer scrambled eggs and salami and then when she said she was on her way to Baltimore, William would be, for just a quick minute, crushed and then crisp and English.

They spoke while Clare was on the train. William had unpacked his low-salt, low-fat lunch. (“Disgusting,” he’d said. “Punitive.”) Clare had gone over her notes for her talk on
Jane Eyre
(“In which I will reveal my awful, retrograde underpinnings”) and they made their nighttime phone date for ten
P.M.,
when William would be still at his desk at home and Clare would be in her bed at the University Club.

Clare called William every half hour from ten until midnight and then she told herself that he must have fallen asleep early. She called him at his university office, on his cell phone, and at home. She called him every fifteen minutes from seven
A.M.
until her talk and she began calling him again, at eleven, as soon as her talk was over. She begged off the faculty lunch and said that her husband wasn’t well and that she was needed at home; her voice shook and no one doubted her.

On the train, Clare wondered who to call. She couldn’t ask Emily, even though she lived six blocks away; she couldn’t ask a pregnant woman to go see if her father was all right. By the time she’d gotten Emily to understand what was required, and where the house key was hidden, and that there was no real cause for alarm, Emily would be sobbing and Clare would be trying not to scream at Emily to calm the fuck down. Isabel was the person to call, and Clare couldn’t call her. She could imagine Isabel saying, “Of course, Clare, leave it to me,” and driving down from Boston to sort things out; she’d make the beds, she’d straighten the pictures, she’d gather all the overdue library books into a pile and stack them near the front door. She’d scold William for making them all worry and then she would call Clare back, to say that all broken things had been put right.

Clare couldn’t picture what might have happened to William. His face floated before her, his large, lovely face, his face when he was reading the paper, his face when he’d said to her, “I
am
sorry,” and she’d thought, Oh, Christ, we’re breaking up again; I thought we’d go until April at least, and he’d said, “You are everything to me—I’m afraid we have to marry,” and they cried so hard, they had to sit down on the bench outside the diner and wipe each other’s faces with napkins.

Clare saw that the man in the seat across from her was smiling uncertainly; she’d been saying William’s name. Clare walked to the little juncture between cars and called Margaret Slater, her former cleaning lady. There was no answer. Margaret’s grandson Nelson didn’t get home until three so Margaret might be running errands for another two hours. They pulled into Penn Station. If Margaret had a cell phone, Clare didn’t know the number. Clare called every half hour, home and then Margaret’s number, leaving messages and timing herself, reading a few pages of the paper between calls. Goddammit, Margaret, she thought. You’re retired. Pick up the fucking phone.

Clare pulled into their driveway just as the sun was setting and Margaret pulled in right after her. Water still dripped from the gutters and the corners of the house and it would all freeze again at night.

“Oh, Clare,” Margaret said, “I just got your messages. I was out of the house all day. I’m so sorry.”

“It’s all right,” Clare said, and they both looked up at the light in William’s window. “He probably unplugged the phone.”

“They live to drive us crazy,” Margaret said.

Clare scrabbled in the bottom of her bag for the house key, furiously tossing tissues and pens and Chap Sticks and quarters onto the walk, and thinking with every toss, What’s your hurry? This is your last moment of not knowing, stupid, slow down. But her hands moved fast, tearing the silk lining of the bag until she saw, out of the corner of her eye, a brass house key sitting in Margaret’s flat, lined palm. Clare wanted to sit down on the porch and wait for someone else to come. She opened the door and she wanted to turn around and close it behind her.

They should call his name, she thought. It’s what you do when you come into your house and you haven’t been able to reach your husband, you go,
William, William, darling, I’m home
, and then he pulls himself out of his green leather desk chair and comes to the top of the stairs, his hair standing straight up and his glasses on the end of his nose. He says, relief and annoyance clearly mixed together,
Oh, darling, you didn’t call, I waited for your call
. And then you say,
I
did
call, I called all night, but the phone was off the hook, you had the phone off
, and he says that he certainly did not and Margaret watches, bemused. She disapproved of the divorce (she all but said, I always thought Charles would leave you, not the other way around) but gave herself over on the wedding day, when she brought platters of deviled eggs and put Nelson in a navy-blue suit, and cried, shyly.

“Fulgent,” William said after the ceremony, and he said it several times, a little drunk on Champagne. “Absolutely
fulgent.”
It wouldn’t have mattered if no one had been there, but everyone except William’s sister had been, and they got in one elegant fox-trot before William’s ankle acted up. William will call down, “I’m so sorry we inconvenienced you, Mrs. Slater,” and Margaret will shake her head fondly and go, and you drop your coat and bag in the hall and he comes down the stairs, slowly, careful with his ankle, and he makes tea to apologize for having scared the shit out of you.

Margaret waited. As much as she wanted to help, it wasn’t her house or her husband and Clare had been in charge of their relationship for the last twenty years; this was not the moment to take the lead. Clare walked up the stairs and right into their bedroom, as if William had phoned ahead and told her what to expect. He was lying on the bed, shoes off and fully dressed, his hand on
Jane Eyre
, his eyes closed, and his reading glasses on his chest. (“‘He is not to them what he is to me,’” Jane thought. “‘While I breathe and think I must love him.’”) Clare lay down next to him, murmuring, until Margaret put her hand on Clare’s shoulder and asked if she should call the hospital or someone.

“I have no idea,” Clare said, lying on the bed beside William, staring at the ceiling. These things get done, Clare thought, whether you know what you’re doing or not. The hospital is called, the funeral home is contacted, the body is removed, with some difficulty, because he was a big man and the stairs are old and narrow. Your sons and daughters-in-law call everyone who needs to be called, including the terrible sister in England who sent them a note and a chipped vase, explaining that she could not bring herself to attend a wedding that so clearly should not be taking place.

Margaret comes back the next day and makes up one of the boys’ bedrooms for you, just in case, but when your best friend flies in from Cleveland, you are lying in your own room, wrapped in William’s bathrobe, and you wear his robe and his undershirt while she sits across from you, her sensible shoes right beside William’s wing tips, and she helps you decide chapel or funeral home, lunch or brunch, booze or wine, and who will speak. Your sons and their wives and the babies come and it’s no more or less terrible to have them in the house. You move slowly and carefully, swimming through a deep but traversable river of shit. You must not inhale, you must not stop, you must not stop for anything at all. Destroyed, untouchable, you can lie down on the other side when they’ve all gone home.

Clare was careful during the funeral. She didn’t listen to anything that was said. She saw Isabel sitting with Emily and Kurt, a little cluster of Langfords; Isabel wore a gray suit and held Emily’s hand and she left as soon as the service ended. At the house, Clare imagined Isabel beside her; she imagined herself encased in Isabel. Even in pajamas, suffering a bad cold, Isabel moved like a woman in beautiful silk. Clare made an effort to move that way. She thanked people in Isabel’s pleasant, governessy voice. Clare straightened Danny’s tie with Isabel’s hand and then wiped chocolate fingerprints off the back of a chair. Clare used Isabel to answer every question and to make plans to get together with people she had no intention of seeing. She hugged Emily the way Isabel would have, with a perfect degree of appreciation for Emily’s pregnant and furious state. Clare went upstairs and lay down on the big bed and cried into the big, tailored pillows William used for reading in bed. Clare held his reading glasses like a rosary. Clare walked over to the dresser and took out one of William’s big Irish linen handkerchiefs and blotted her face with it. (Clare and Isabel did their dressers the same way, William said: odds and ends in the top drawer, then underwear, then sweaters, then jeans and T-shirts and white socks. Clare put William’s almost empty bottle of Tabac in her underwear drawer.) She rearranged their two unlikely stuffed animals.

“Oh, rhino and pecker bird,” William had said. That’s how he saw them, and two years ago Clare had found herself in front of a fancy toy store in Guilford on a spring afternoon and found herself buying a very expensive plush gray rhino and a velvety little brown-and-white bird and putting the pair on their bed that night.

“You’re not so tough,” William had said.

“I was,” Clare said. “You’ve ruined me.”

Clare wanted to talk with Isabel about Emily; they used to talk about her all the time. Once, after William’s second heart attack, when William was still Isabel’s husband, Isabel and Clare were playing cards in William’s hospital room and Emily and Kurt had just gone off to get sandwiches and Clare had stumbled over something nice to say about Kurt, and Isabel slapped down her cards and said, “Say what you want. He’s dumb in that awful preppy way and a Republican and if he says, ‘No disrespect intended,’ one more time, I’m going to set him on fire.” William said,
“De gustibus non est disputandum,”
which he said about many things, and Isabel said, “That doesn’t help, darling.”

Clare looked at William’s lapis cuff links and at the watch she’d given him when they were in the third act of their affair. “You can’t give me a watch,” he’d said. “I already have a perfectly good one.” Clare took his watch off his wrist, laid it on the asphalt, and drove over it, twice. “There,” she’d said. “Terrible accident, you were so careless. You had to replace it.” William took that beautiful watch she’d bought him out of the box and kissed her in the parking lot of a Marriott halfway between his home and hers. He’d worn it every day until last Thursday. Clare walked downstairs holding William’s jewelry, and when she passed her sons pouring wine for people, she dropped the watch into Danny’s pocket. Adam turned to her and said, “Mom, do you want a few minutes alone?” and Clare realized the time upstairs had done her no good at all. She laid the lapis cuff links in Adam’s free hand. “William particularly wanted you to have these,” she said, and Adam looked surprised—as well he might, Clare thought.