Curled in the Bed of Love (19 page)

Billy winks at Maeve. “Your mom's not going to make it through your next lesson.”

“Why don't you all get off my back?” Katie says.

She thinks, no one here knows me. Her real self moves shiftily behind the screen of
mommy-honey.
She's snuck off to see Malcolm. She's clung to him as talisman, proof that she can slip free of this life: delicious fear, thrilling vice of the wicked, and no timid little weakness.

XII
. Evan lies on the couch with another headache, and Katie tries to talk him through an amateurish, patched-together version of hypnosis, about the only benefit they've gained from all the trips to all the different kinds of doctors.
She asks Evan to breathe slowly and deeply, imagine that rhythm as the rhythm of his pulse.

He opens one eye. “That's just not—it's not anatomically correct.”

“Sh,” she says. He always begins these sessions with a token avowal of his skepticism. He takes his cue from Billy, who implies in a hundred ways that these sessions are Katie's way of making herself feel better. Evan couldn't learn biofeedback because he couldn't learn to recognize subtle signals from his body, couldn't pay the right kind of attention. It will take her ten minutes of quiet talk to get him to relax the tense muscles of his body, relinquish control.

She tells him to imagine the beat of his pulse sending blood lapping out from his heart, one wave after another in steady rhythm. If a thought comes to him, it's only tossed by those waves. She describes the tide slowly rising, flowing to the tips of his fingers, his toes, its warmth molding his body as if it were soft wax.

When she has tried this on Maeve, Maeve actually gets sleepy. Evan will usually deny it's had much effect, though often by the end of a session the migraine tightness has left the skin around his eyes.

She finishes the way she always does. “You have to remember what this feels like after you open your eyes. The steadiness at the core of you. When you start to feel a headache coming on, this is where you have to come. Just listen to the waves.”

She watches Evan breathe evenly and deeply. Maybe the curl of his fingers is a degree or two less tight. Once when he was about seven, she and Billy sat down with him to try to explain about his father. They'd rehearsed exactly how to present the story, how to lie. After their nonjudgmental declaration of facts, Evan said, “So my other dad—he was like the bad guy, right?” They had to explain everything all over again. As if that raw feeling could be amended instead of chased into hiding. But honesty runs counter
to love. Katie doesn't want her son to learn he has lost a father. She doesn't believe in any steadiness at the core.

XIII
. Katie agrees to see Malcolm again, and again she does not tell Billy. They meet in the same restaurant, both of them so taken up with the task of seeing one another that they can't spare the energy to care much about the details. She means to tie things up neatly this time if she can.

They try to make small talk and fail. Malcolm can't think of any questions to ask her beyond simple ones. His knee keeps knocking the table; he keeps clenching his fingers around his coffee cup, making the spoon tremble against the saucer.

He works his jaw back and forth as if he is rolling a marble around in his mouth. “Does he ever ask about me?”

She wishes Malcolm would refer to Evan by name. “No.”

“Of course the kid doesn't have any use for me—I guess, you know, I'm still a long way from thinking straight. I live in a studio, I go down to the clinic every day, just how I used to when I was a client, junkies, ex-junkies, it's the same old, same old, and I'm just trying to think of how to do this at all, how you pick up your life again, what that is, you know, like what do people do on Saturdays, and how do you ask a woman out, and what is it you're supposed to do when it's your mother's birthday.”

She's ashamed of her own scruples, her mistrust of the plentiful confusion of memory, so clouded by wishes, when Malcolm is forced to improvise from scratch.

He's drained his cup nearly to the bottom. He starts tearing open sugar packets and slowly pouring them into the cup. One, two, three, four packets slowly silt into the cup, and then he stirs the sugar and coffee into a grainy sludge.

She would like to offer him something to take hold of. “You used to steal sugar packets from restaurants,” she says.

“Did I?” he says.

“You'd leave them in your pockets, and I'd throw your pants in the wash, and when it was done, there'd be streaks of sugar paste on the clothes, tiny bits of paper sticking to everything.”

She watches his face for some sign of interest in himself, some willingness to believe with her that she loved him crazily. “We had glorious fights, remember?”

He smiles at her with such humility. “I wasn't so good with the baby, was I?”

She feels trapped by knowing too little and too much to make sense of anything: She remembers sleeping beside Malcolm, who'd fallen into bed fully clothed, stupefied, and then waking in the darkness to the sound of the baby crying, Malcolm no longer beside her. The baby's crying stopped, abruptly smothered. She jumped from bed, raced to find them. In the kitchen Malcolm was standing by the sink, the baby in his arms. He'd turned on the tap, and the baby was holding perfectly still, eyes wide, mesmerized into silence by the tinkling of the running water. She would never have thought to try that.

Malcolm says, “I'm always seeing the kids in the park, fooling with their skateboards, and I wonder if he's one of them, and I don't even know it.”

What yearning there might be in his words is faint, pitifully impoverished.

“He doesn't skateboard,” she says.

“Do you think he would see me?”

She can't bear to refuse him outright. “I don't know.”

She reaches under the table for her purse. She always keeps pictures in there, loose, and she plucks them out for him.

Malcolm looks at a picture of Katie holding both the kids in her arms, all of them laughing, no one looking at the camera, and then studies a more recent photo of Billy with an arm thrown over Evan's shoulder.

“He's that big?” Malcolm says in surprise.

“Evan takes after my father's side of the family,” Katie says.

With every word she does a poorer job of describing Evan to Malcolm. She thinks at first it's because the pictures are so very middle-class—taken at beach resorts, their cozy home, parks, school festivals. Then she's scared that she might be inventing Evan as uncertainly as she has reimagined Malcolm, her own past. In her mouth her son thins—a baseball fan, always in sweatpants, never ready for school on time—till he could be any of those boys with skateboards. She lacks some gift. She feels she is taking a guess at her son the way Malcolm must guess what he can't remember about the habits of daily life. How can a habit as persistent as love leave no clear notation, no record of itself other than this wavering approximation?

“I sure would like to know my son,” Malcolm says.

Poor Malcolm can't imagine what a daunting proposition that is. When will there be some right time for Evan to feel the hurt his father has caused him, to face this ruined man, to reconstitute himself according to loss? What words, what story could prepare him or make him understand the life Katie was willing to wish on him when he was born? She is visited by the same sudden and absurd relief she felt after Maeve was thrown by the horse. If only for a moment, she feels not braced against herself. She pulls out her wallet to show Malcolm the only other photo she has, of Evan at four, standing before an easel, his hands dipped to the wrists in red paint.

What's ahead will be hard in ways Katie has trained herself to anticipate, but maybe there'll be gaps like this one when it's also something else, when she can hear another music murmuring.

“O brother, dear brother, why are

they absolving me instead

of my brother?”

The Epic of Gilgamesh,
Tablet VII

In the letter he wrote to each of them, he mentioned his brother's death. He worked hard on the sentences that described his feelings, constructed them, even though the feelings were true. Sam's car accident had cleaved Marshall's life as abruptly as it had cleaved his brother's; afterward he felt old, too old for the life he was leading. He applied to graduate school and gave notice to the park service, and now he has a few months free before he starts at the University of California in Santa Cruz. He has planned his trip according to who did and did not reply to his letters, his route a track retracing the old byways of his heart, circumventing lacunae where contact had been broken or former heat had dissipated to nothing.

Some of these women he hasn't seen since college, others were buddies in the park service, temporarily stationed out on the Olympic Peninsula with him, and some were briefly lovers. The
line between lover and friend has always confused him; he has a string of women friends whose feelings for him have long been tinged with the erratic bitterness of unrequited love and another string of former lovers whom he has ardently pummeled into remaining friends. He has written to a few male friends too, but his route is dictated by women, with whom intimacy has always been so easy.

Isabelle in Ashland is his first stop. He drives into the theater district, where the summer Shakespeare festival's buildings have been set down like giant blocks in what would otherwise be a peaceful, rural Oregon town. He wanders among the tourists and stops at an ice cream parlor to get directions to the tree-shaded street where Isabelle lives. When he arrives at her little house, she isn't back from rehearsals yet, and he waits for her on the front porch, finishing his ice cream. He looks in the window at a worn sofa with a pine chest before it, old standing lamps with fringed shades, candles clustered on the windowsill, their melted wax frozen in the flow of a spill. He is glad she's not home yet, so he can indulge in anticipation, in imagining this life he is about to waltz into on his way to somewhere else.

When Isabelle arrives, she jumps from her beat-up bike and rushes at him, her long, straight black hair floating behind her. She throws herself into his arms and kisses him on the mouth, and he remembers that what most drew him to her was her theatricality, the glorious excess of emotion that always left him wondering what was and wasn't real in her. He smells some botanical concoction in her hair, imbibes the warmth of her through the shiny fabric of her multicolored shirt, and when she leans back from him, bracing herself with her arms around his waist, he can feel an erection stirring.

His brother's death has lifted him into an intensity of emotion that brings unearned gifts: each moment seems crystalline, slowed
so that he can take in everything, from the sweet fog of scents rising from Isabelle's skin to the snub-nosed pressure of her hipbone against his. Even when he feels blindsided by grief, the world seems newly lit.

Isabelle punches his arm. “It's been four years, and you don't look a day older.”

Inside the house he admires the African masks hung on the wall. Isabelle waves her hand dismissively. “They're not mine,” she says, disappointing him. “This place gets passed around among the people who come out for the summer theater. Sort of slowly silts up with a little bit of everyone who's passed through.”

They cook dinner together, grilling a thick salmon steak, washing dirt off lettuce from the garden that is haphazardly maintained by the successive tenants of the house. Isabelle, with her heavy eye makeup and shiny shirt, seems out of place in the homely kitchen, searching the drawers for a good knife as if she doesn't live here. She complains about having to scrounge for work when she goes home to New York City. But she prefers the democratic struggle of the stage to commercial work.

“That's what's great about these summer companies,” she says, her hands flaring as she talks. “I've only got a small part in
The Winter's Tale,
but in rehearsals all of us argue about lines, interpretation—it's invigorating.”

Marshall asks for an example, hungry for real information. And soon Isabelle is arguing her opinion to him. The basic secret of the play is that it's a tearjerker, that at the end, when what the king believes to be a statue of his dead wife turns out to be the living woman, capable of forgiving him, the actors ought to be able to look past the lights and see tears shining on the faces of the people in the audience.

“That's what theater is essentially about,” Isabelle says. “Giving that audience a free ride on the emotion you're digging up.”

When they finish the second bottle of red wine, Isabelle yawns and says she's tired. She offers to fold out the sofa bed for Marshall, but he says it isn't necessary. “I don't sleep well these days.”

Isabelle takes his hand. “I didn't want to bring it up,” she says. “You know. You feel you're causing pain if you say anything.”

“It's hard for me to talk about Sam,” Marshall says. “I think about him a lot.”

He lies awake at night, not remembering his brother but rehearsing him, replaying a gesture in his mind to get it right, growing less and less sure with each effort. The joke's on him, the philosophy major who gleefully used the tools of his training in logic to demonstrate that no one could prove anything. He no longer has time for the self-defeating history of philosophy, the laborious parsing of the world into fewer and fewer certainties. Now when morning finds him still lying awake, he studies how dawn's light etches the fan of tendons on the back of his outstretched hand, and he marvels at his power to command his fingers to wriggle. He's eager to begin his graduate work in biology, where every fact or nuance uncovered connects to another, snaps into place in an intricate gridwork of profusion.

Instead of going to bed, Isabelle opens another bottle of red wine. She describes the tiny apartment she shares in Manhattan with her boyfriend Ross, the tub that sits in the kitchen. Marshall deflects Isabelle's curiosity about his job in the park service. When he left college, he'd felt noble for not marching off to law school or med school or business school like so many of his classmates. He wanted to head to the woods like Thoreau. But he doesn't like to talk about those six years he spent in the park service, giving people directions when they couldn't read the trail maps, preparing little talks on wildlife that he delivered in a corny outdoor theater, living in the housing complex that was just like a college dorm, participating in pranks with his coworkers, who left the park only to make the trek into Seattle for a weekend. He's willing to talk
about now, his hope that he can become a field biologist. He still believes in the woods.