Curled in the Bed of Love (2 page)

“I don't feel like sleeping, do you?” Sam says. “Let's go kill another bottle of wine and play some poker. Strip poker would be my preference, but I'll understand if you only want to play for pennies.”

Claire hasn't wanted sex since the last miscarriage. Maybe her bottled-up instinct exudes a scent that provokes Sam, arouses his marauding desire. She has to push him to get him to step back from her.

Sam wants to hike around this end of Tomales Bay, and he doesn't want to get in the truck and drive to the trailhead in the state park.
Not when they can walkthrough the gate below the writing shed and take a path along the bluff. Claire explains to him again that they can't trespass on the dairy farmer's land.

“You never used to be so finicky.” He tugs the rusted gate open and walks off.

Claire follows him. They are cheating anyway. They hardly ever shirk the discipline of their work days. Claire often feels she owes it to Russell, who is right now dutifully putting in a ten-hour day, to work strictly in his absence, to earn their three-day weekends in the garden or hiking in the abundant wilderness here.

She and Sam don't walk in silence for long. Sam is full of questions, sucking down whatever information Claire can provide about their surroundings. She explains that the summer gold of these California hills is not natural, but the consequence of overgrazing by cattle in the early days of European colonization. In its natural state this place would have remained green all year round. Claire regrets the loss of green as keenly as if she once knew it.

Claire doesn't mind Sam's questions, since she too is a devourer. She keeps notebooks full of notations on the color of ripening peaches, the drift of chameleon fog over the hills of the Inverness Ridge, the number and shape of the petals on a lily. She must take in a disproportionate excess of detail to feed the slender body of the poem that will eventually emerge, a compound of greedy pleasure and disappointment that the senses can't dam and hold the world in words.

They follow a track of trampled grass along the sloping hillside. Sam tells Claire of walking through golden fields of grass in a game preserve in Botswana, coming suddenly upon lions who held their ground because they must have had a fresh kill nearby, and pissing his pants with fear. Claire smiles. Sam must have his nature red in tooth and claw.

Barn swallows dart past them, tilting like paper airplanes on the breeze, flashing their russet bellies. The trail leads into a tightly
packed thicket of bushes and trees, and Sam pushes branches aside and crouches to move in the compacted space. Following him, Claire ends up crawling on her hands and knees. When they come out, they are trapped by a creek, its muddy bank scalloped by the hooves of cows. Sam wants to wade through it, water up to his ankles, but Claire refuses. When they were lovers, Sam favored walks that required fording rivers, climbing steep, rocky slopes, leaving the trail and getting lost in the woods at dusk.

They return the way they've come, still at a military pace, with Sam eager to try every fork in the path. Claire often walks here with Russell, and they meander, not even aware of which path they choose. They talk very little about what they see—they need only touch one another or point—but a lot about Russell's work. Russell, who shrugs out of his suit jacket and into jeans as soon as he arrives home, is buried by the copious paperwork the
INS
requires, must share his clients' anxiety over their poor odds for victory, and he sheds the pressures of his work by spilling them here.

When Claire and Sam are again halted, this time by the farmer's fence, he holds barbed wire apart for her so she can follow him through. As they walk down toward the fingerlets of water where the bay and the streams that feed it first intermingle, they surprise a flock of seven white pelicans. The big birds lift into the air, unwieldy as laden bombers, their fight with gravity making Claire hold her breath.

The pelicans settle again in the water with timid fuss, like ungainly, plain girls invited to the ball after all—there's something so pleased and modest about their tucked heads. Claire asks Sam to stop and sit down to watch them. Overhead, a turkey vulture circles as it searches for carrion, its silhouette a gently sloping V, the feathers at its wing tips articulate as fingers.

“I never pictured you ending up in a place like this,” Sam says. “You were such a city girl.”

“Me? When we met, we were living in the country, remember?”

“A little college town in New England hardly qualifies as raw country.”

Claire met Sam on a sidewalk, introduced by a woman in the graduate program Claire had just begun and Sam was just finishing. He was moving into a house down the street from Claire's, carrying a mountain bike over his shoulder and two disk-shaped weights in his fist. For Claire, it was disdain at first sight. A few days later, when she was passing his house on the way to campus, Sam startled her by coming around from the back and dragging her into his yard to watch a snake eating a frog. No words sealed this mutual seduction, only that fierce death they witnessed, the frog squirming and kicking as the snake's muscles forced it down the long tunnel of its digestive tract, the snake enduring that terror and panic in order to swallow it whole. Sam had given Claire a poem to write.

Claire looks up at the vulture still wheeling above them. “Where did you imagine me ending up?”

“I thought you'd stay in New York. In some little apartment crammed with African fetishes and Mexican pottery. I thought you'd run through men the way that I run through women.”

“Been there, done that.”

“You're like another person.”

Russell introduced Claire to mornings in bed with the Sunday paper and coffee, to games played with flashlights under the covers when the power went out, to the names of flowers and their preferences for direct light or shade. He taught her that the world was a shell whose hinged mouth could be pried open to reveal a secret, smaller morsel of joy.

“I guess I am another person,” Claire says. “I can't remember now why I liked the parties so much, and the men, from bad to worse, and swapping drugs with my friends. In case you didn't know, you should never mix downers and Prozac.”

“Sounds like a Joni Mitchell song.”

“Now you know why I don't talk about it.”

The vulture keeps looping above them. There must be a dead mouse or a vole hidden in the grass, too close for the vulture to dare descending.

“Can I rent a kayak around here?” Sam says. “To go out on the ocean?”

“There's a place in town where you can rent one.”

“I'd like to explore the coastline. You want to come?”

The coast is rocky, the surf perilous. Automatically, Claire rejects even the slightest physical risk, before she remembers that she's not pregnant anymore. A sonogram enabled her doctor to explain the mistake of nature that made her miscarry this time: the
corpus luteum,
an enlarged ovarian follicle that normally functions to produce the hormones needed to thicken the lining of the uterus and anchor the fetus, in Claire's body swelled like a cyst, filled with mysterious internal debris. No planning, no propitiation of the gods, could have prevented the random error.

“I might,” Claire says. “It depends on whether you'd be willing to follow a few simple rules. Like staying out of the breakers. Like no tipping the kayak on purpose.”

Sam squints at the vulture circling above them as if held in orbit by their presence. “I hate to have to tell you this, but one of us must be dead.”

Claire flops back onto the stiff, brittle grasses, arms outstretched, and the vulture veers away at this sudden movement. Sam lazes beside her for a moment and then stands and peels off his shirt.

Claire sits up. “What are you doing?”

He shucks his pants. “I'm going swimming. I'm going to go say hello to those big white oafs out there in the water.”

“Some militant environmentalist you are. Leave those birds alone.”

“I've swum in a flock of brown pelicans before. They were feeding all around me. They're not fragile.”

Cheeky thing. Those birds have survived on earth, nearly unchanged, for millions of years, and in comparison Sam and Claire are only dust motes in time's eye. But she knows better than to urge any modesty on Sam. Last weekend, when Sam, Russell, and Claire were driving out to the Point Reyes headlands, Claire steered around a dead skunk and then pulled over and walked back to drag it from the road with a stick so the vultures could feed in safety. Sam protested. “Don't interfere. We are not nature's housekeepers.”

The birds scatter and regroup when Sam approaches the water. He wades in slowly, and Claire can imagine his feet sinking into the velvety silt. When he reaches deeper water, he dog-paddles silently, without a splash, and the pelicans slowly drift in his direction, close enough that he could reach out and stroke one of these abashed beauties. Slowly, he lifts one hand from the water and beckons Claire to join him.

She strips to her bra and underpants. Mud sucks at her toes until she too reaches deeper water. The birds have scattered again at her approach, and she and Sam have to wait for them to return. Claire has a moment when she fears the pelicans won't come back, fears her wishes are too extravagant to be granted. But soon the pelicans bob close enough that she can hear the clicking of their elongated beaks, see their yellow eyes, pools as mysterious and cool as amber.

Sam has a slaphappy grin on his face. He looks drunk. Claire should be grinning like that. But she's not. She has frayed the wiring of her nervous system so badly that the only electrical charge it can deliver is weak, erratic.

Though she doesn't trust Sam's reassurances, Claire goes along on the kayak trip anyway. They rent a kayak in town, load it into
Claire's truck, and drive along the shore of Tomales Bay. They put in at Heart's Desire Beach, argue briefly over who gets to sit in back and steer. Claire gives in and climbs into the front seat. They paddle clear of the shore, where at low tide the mudflats can strand a craft in a sticky goo that holds it in place but won't support your weight if you step out to reach shore.

Sam's questions peter out more quickly than usual, maybe because they are caught up in the rhythm of their work, maybe because the rhythm binds them to the intent purposefulness of this wild place. Turkey vultures cast off and circle on the air currents that curve around the flanks of Inverness Ridge, shorebirds poke methodically in the bay's muck, a kingfisher or two flits from its perch toward the water and back again to watch patiently. Claire and Sam are reduced to the simplest talk:
There! That flash of red in the trees—did you see that egret strike?
When Claire sits before her window at home, pad of paper in hand, she feels the same peace. All that is required of her is receptivity, the same kind of patience the kingfishers employ.

When they reach the rougher waters at the mouth of the bay, Claire and Sam pull out their oars and eat the lunch she has packed. Claire would turn back now, but Sam wants to leave the shelter of the bay and poke along the coast of the headlands.

“The surf is dangerous there,” Claire reminds him.

“I know what I'm doing.”

Again she gives in to him, reluctant to mar the accord of their bodies as they power the kayak through the water.

As soon as they round Tomales Bluff, the waves become choppy, and the wind pelts them with gusts of fog. It's harder now to work in rhythm with each other, the hollow kayak bucking on the waves. Claire shivers. They should have checked the weather prediction this morning. Russell consults the tide table when he and Claire are only walking out to the rocky coves where a fluke tide might trap trespassers. Sam says he'd like to go as far as Bird
Rock, which they can see in the distance, speckled with the dark bodies of cormorants. She turns to look at him. The waves punching at the boat, spraying his face and body, do not disturb him at all.

She doesn't want to count the number of times she and Sam drove back roads to find filthy, tiny bars where he would play pool and win no matter how he drank, teasing out the hostility of the locals in the same way he would flirt at parties until Claire betrayed annoyance, and then smile at her and deny intention. She doesn't want to remember enjoying that curiosity of his even when, their night finally at an end, they were followed out to Sam's car by the men who had been paying for his games all night.

Closer to Bird Rock, the surf is devious, the waves slapping at the kayak from a dozen directions, making it impossible for Sam to steer an even course. A wave smacks the bow directly, washing over Claire, so heavy and quick that she inhales salt water.

“I want to go back,” she says.

“I think we can't.” Sam shouts to be heard over the noise of the waves. “If we flip, lean in the direction of the roll, and we'll come back up.”

She feels fear again, this companion of her wisdom, her painfully acquired care for her own survival.

Sam says, “We'll have to let the current take us past the rock. Once we get by, the water should be more predictable. We can head further out and circle back.”

Now in the choppy rise and fall of the waves, the kayak clunks on its way down, smacks an air pocket before reentering the sea. Claire can no longer keep her paddle in the water; the torqued pounding of the waves would take it from her.

A wave smacks them broadside, and the kayak flips. Plunged into the cold, roiling water, Claire wants to fight free of the boat, free of the churning fists around her. But she leans, as Sam instructed, holding her breath until the kayak bobbles upright again to be slammed by another wave.

Sam praises Claire for hanging on to the paddle she didn't remember she had in her hands, urges her to stroke right, right, now left. She's so cold, her wet clothes so heavy and grasping against her skin. But Sam gets the kayak out past the breakers into deeper water, where they finally steer themselves toward safety.