Where the God of Love Hangs Out: Fiction by Amy Bloom Read Free Book Online Page B

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