Curled in the Bed of Love (21 page)

In the quickly descending cold of a coastal night, Marshall shivers in his thin borrowed shirt. “Whose clothes are these?”

She shrugs again. “They've been in my closet for years.”

He sleeps that night in her guest room, as well-appointed as a room in a hotel. Swathed in comfort, he sleeps, but he wakes repeatedly to listen to the ticking of a clock, to brush from his cheek a tiny goose down feather that's escaped the pillow, to kick off the bulk of the covers, to list in chronological order the camping trips he took with his brother.

Unlike Isabelle, Debi likes to be in the woods. Every afternoon after she's finished with her patients, they hike together, then return to her house for dinner. When they stop in town for groceries, she doesn't even introduce him to the people who greet her. In the woods, she keeps up with him no matter how rough the terrain, though she pauses for hourly cigarette breaks, sitting on a tree stump, putting out her butts in the dust, and then carefully shredding them into a baggie that she pockets before she gets up to continue their walk. When he camped with his brother, they packed out every last bit of trash they brought in; his brother insisted that they bag even their used toilet paper. Marshall cannot recall anything they talked about on those trips, only feel such longing watching Debi bag her butts that he has to dig his nails into his palms.

He tries to talk to her about Sam. She's a doctor, so she'll understand why he wants to know. He describes his brother's injuries, asks her if Sam could have been saved if the paramedics had gotten him to the hospital sooner. She doesn't think so. With a torn aorta, he would have had massive, rapid blood loss. She can't tell him whether his brother had time to be conscious of pain before he died.

She's as vague when he asks her about some small thing he remembers from their shared past. She merely raises an eyebrow and keeps walking. One afternoon when she puts him off again with, “I didn't know you that well,” he takes her by the shoulders, halting her march. He shouts, “Yes you did! Yes you did!”

She pushes him away from her and doesn't speak to him for the rest of the walk. When they get back to her house, she goes to her room and shuts the door. But after he's eaten a solitary dinner, she comes to the kitchen, wearing a bulky terry cloth robe, clutching the collar to her throat.

“Maybe you should go,” she says.

When he approaches her, she doesn't flinch. He puts his arms around her. Her body feels so small when it isn't caught and shaped by bra, blouse, nylons. She puts her mouth up to his to kiss him.

So he gets to discover, after all, the different woman she is in bed—his bed, not hers. She nibbles—on his lips when she kisses him, on his skin when she searches hesitantly for the stony outcrop of his nipples on his hairless chest—and her hands too are hesitant, almost reluctant. He is almost rough with her, gripping her hard, plowing through her to get to her, confident that his body will not fail him. Her sighs, when she reaches orgasm, are fluttery and tentative, like her mouth and hands, a fragile answer to the grunts of his pleasure. Afterward they lie in each other's arms to talk. In the darkness, he confesses how hard it is when he visits Kay now, cocooned in her suburban house with two kids, a husband, a dog, content in a way that might have been his to share.

“It's eerie, like looking at my own life through a window,” he says. “What could have been.”

“No,” Debi says. “No. You had no idea how you tormented Kay, did you? All your female best buddies.”

“Kay always knew I'd be faithful,” Marshall says. “We were always open. It wasn't like that.”

“Dream on, Mountain Man,” Debi says.

She rolls over, and Marshall doesn't persist. He's sure they'll argue about this again. Now that they are intimate. And all the questions he has about her—whose clothes did she lend him? what secret dissatisfaction with the offerings of the world makes her need to smoke?—still roil inside him, but he can sleep because he knows now the very first secret, the delicacy that skulks inside this small, practical person who covers her refrigerator with neat lists, each anchored by its own tiny magnet. The first secret promises all the rest.

He stays another week, breaking his own schedule for his trip. Each day her reticence fires frustration and ambition in him. He discovers that she talks in her sleep, that she doesn't like to be spoken to until she's had her morning coffee, that she likes to have her curls tugged. Yet he's the one who must nibble at the edges of her, conquer with difficulty the secret of her long-term lover's name—Bob—and feel tantalized by all that she won't confess, by her refusal to take him into her own bed. When it's time for him to leave—she's got to get back to her life, she tells him—they talk about him coming back, trips up and down the coast once he's settled in school.

When he drives over the Golden Gate Bridge, the city of San Francisco is laid out like a vision before him, the hills and houses gilded by late afternoon light, the bay a silvery mirror. Though he's been here before, that first view always seems new to him, gloriously promising. Still, cities make him feel hemmed in. He had to
stop over in Point Reyes with his friend Gerard for a few days, gird up for this entrance. He smiles, remembering; Gerard's sister had been visiting at the same time. She and Marshall had gone kayaking while Gerard was at work; they'd weeded the garden together one afternoon, sneaking up to soak each other with the hose and finally tumbling into Gerard's bed. He's begun to expect that no matter where he goes now, some woman will be waiting for him with open arms. It's become so easy that he feels guilty, as if his mysterious power is a form of deceit.

To get to Lee Ann's place, he has to drive through the Haight-Ashbury district, cross Haight Street where the store display windows are still emblazoned with tie-dyed banners, and the kids on the street wear the bell-bottoms and beads of another generation. When he climbs the stairs to her attic apartment in a narrow Victorian, she rushes out to meet him on the landing and embraces him as if he's a prodigal returning home.

They open a celebratory bottle of wine and sit in the two armchairs in her sparsely furnished living room. She apologizes for not having a sofa; her ex-husband took it. There are books stacked on the floor, tenants of a bookcase her husband must also have taken, a few ghostly rectangles on the wall, and only a framed photo of her husband playing the sax on the otherwise naked mantelpiece. Vaguely, Marshall remembers it's been several months since Jeff left her, and he wonders why Lee Ann hasn't replaced the missing pictures or rearranged the remaining furniture.

“You'll have plenty of room to roll out your sleeping bag,” Lee Ann says.

When he asks her if she's doing any better, she shrugs and says she'll get over it. She asks about his brother, and he finds it easy to tell her things he's told no one else. He even tells her about hearing Sam's voice in the redwood grove near Crescent City, about stopping in Muir Woods on his way into San Francisco.

“I was going to scatter his ashes there,” he says. “We were there
together once. But then, so many people go through there every day. It's not the kind of thing you want someone to catch you at.”

“I know,” Lee Ann says eagerly. “There's this shamefulness to grieving, isn't there?” She stops herself. “You still have his ashes?”

“I was thinking I might find a place near Santa Cruz, in the mountains. Someplace he's never been. I think he'd like that—to go to one more wild place.”

For once the tables are turned, and Marshall is the one answering questions, not asking them. He watches Lee Ann, out of a kind of tact, fight the impulse to chime in again with “I know,” to make some reference to her husband. He knows all about that anyway, even though he's never met Jeff. Marshall's friendship with Lee Ann is based on a single summer they spent working together, when Lee Ann was temporary staff at the park. But they talked so much that summer. For years they have been writing each other letters that are as open as those conversations, each confiding everything with the haste and fury of someone writing in a diary.

Lee Ann, determined to show him a city good time, takes him out that first night to a jazz bar in North Beach, Pearl's. Absorbed in the music, Lee Ann bites her nails, hunched over, jaw clenched. When they'd worked together, he'd been impressed by her, a working-class girl getting a Ph.D. at Berkeley, all expenses paid. But in spite of her intellectual fierceness, she had annoying habits that marred her attractiveness—nail biting, the frantic flurry of her hands when she talked, her stoop-shouldered modesty. She has changed—this is the first time he's seen her bite her nails on this visit—but still she doesn't seem to know she's nice to look at. This secret she's kept from herself charms him now.

Between sets she talks to Marshall about her teaching. Occasionally she interrupts herself to glance at the door as more people arrive to take in the second set, and he has to call her back to attention. She's passionate about her mission to stir disinterested college freshmen to respond to
The Odyssey, The Aeneid,
The Epic of Gilgamesh,
all the ancient, immortal epics. She tells her students that these are riches and that the world is conspiring to keep these riches from them, sandblasting them with titillating consumer longing and the wish fulfillment of movies. Marshall finds this archaic but beautiful, like the old, elegant philosophical proofs of the immateriality of the soul, so inadvertently and easily shattered by the progress of science, the reduction of thought to a finite chemical reaction.

They stay till the second set is finished, and then at 2:00
A.M.
they head across the street to the Vesuvio Cafe, with its colored mosaic glass windows, where again Lee Ann scans the room as if she's looking for someone. They take a table by the window and sit over bowl-sized cups of coffee, and Marshall wonders at her—doesn't she have to get up in the morning to teach?—but Lee Ann says she got used to staying out late and getting up early when she was with Jeff, who kept a musician's hours.

When they get back to her apartment, Lee Ann says she has only three hours before she has to go to class anyway, so she makes more coffee and they sit on the floor together—it is impossible to feel close sitting in those two winged armchairs—and talk about how neither of them can sleep. It confuses him to talk about this with Lee Ann when he's so clear—has been lifted into such an architecturally open sense of time—and she's so muddy. She thinks she ought to burn the few things Jeff left behind; she can't sleep unless she's clutching an old shirt, unwashed, that he left in the hamper.

It's so easy to hold her in his arms. Lee Ann leans against him and cries, and he makes a soothing sound and runs his hand over her hair, again and again. Her dark hair is the color of Isabelle's, he thinks, but Lee Ann cries and cries, and then he's uncertain about the similarity. His mouth glances against Lee Ann's cheek.

She pushes him away, wrapping her arms around herself, making herself ugly. “God, I can't stand it.”

“He's not dead,” Marshall says.

Lee Ann apologizes immediately, accepts so humbly this cruelty that leaves Marshall shocked at himself. What's the matter with him? He reaches for her. But she scrambles to her feet, escapes him. She goes to take a long shower, and when she comes back, she says resolutely, “Let's have fun while you're here.”

During the day while she's teaching, Marshall goes to the art museums or walks at Land's End, following the path from the cypress-studded cliffs west of the Golden Gate Bridge to the city's west coast until, past the Cliff House, he hikes down to Ocean Beach and walks for miles. Once Lee Ann takes him to class with her, and he watches her charm her students with her peculiar combination of conviction and self-doubt. She rips into a recent translation of Homer for its dull language, then looks up to plead with her students: “Do you see what I mean?”

Nearly every night they go out to hear jazz, at Pearl's or another club where local bands play. After four ragged, joyful nights, Lee Ann offers Marshall one of her sleeping pills. Before she takes one for herself, she counts the precious remaining few. When she lets him into her bed, she curls her body into a tight fist, but he is determined to get over that barrier. He kneads the bunched muscles of her shoulders, confident that she will become pliant under his touch, his gift for abundance. She pushes him away. He cannot understand her stubborn refusal to be absolved.

They're at Pearl's again when Lee Ann, habitually glancing up to see who's in the room, halts in midsentence and gets up from the table. She steps up behind a man who's still busy paying his cover charge to the woman at the door and waits for him to notice her. Marshall feels a twinge of jealousy. The man has to be her husband. For him, Lee Ann's face collapses slowly, like a clay hillside giving way in a hard rain. Marshall doesn't want to look at that either, so why does he feel such a surge of anger when the man finally notices Lee Ann and flinches?

Marshall is on his feet and beside the guy in an instant. He
shoves Jeff on the shoulder, forcing him to take a step back to keep from being knocked off his feet.

“Leave her alone!” Marshall shouts. “Leave her alone!”

Lee Ann stares as if she doesn't know him or see him. Marshall tugs her, feels her jacket bunch reassuringly in his hand, yanks until her feet move, and drags her out of the bar. She's like a flimsy packet of matches beneath the bunched cloth that fills his fist, so light, so easy to keep pushing ahead of him.

Out on the street, the sickly smell of car exhaust, stale urine, and greasy food assaults him. He's stayed here too long, exceeded his tolerance for the claustrophobic compactness of city sounds and smells. He wishes he'd stayed with Debi in her glass house above the ocean, with the horizon that stretched endlessly beyond the window.