Curled in the Bed of Love (14 page)

Elena and her mother were already planning her wedding when she left to join Jeremy. From what Elena tells me, she and her mother are close, and maybe this tenderness made it impossible for Elena to go home after she'd been betrayed. If Jeremy had had the good manners to write to her from Spain when he discovered his new true love, she might be in graduate school now, disappointed but resilient, spending her days in the company of young men who'd watch for her shy smile, coax her out of herself again. If Vince had been traveling when Elena first came here, she might never have met him before she moved on. Her father and Vince must be roughly the same age. I can't imagine Vince invited home to dinner with the family, enjoying a drink with the insurance-executive papa in his polo shirt. Elena's mother wouldn't have any illusions about selecting flower arrangements, not when Vince showed up in his paint-spattered shoes and his jeans worn to gray at the knees. How worried Elena's parents would be about her reaction to her heartbreak, how uncertain that the scales would
right themselves again in time to save her from her defiant, clumsy efforts to defy nature.

Vince was supposed to come over last night to help Nuala build a model of a log cabin for a school project, but he forgot. Tonight, belatedly, he has remembered, and he shows up at our door, his arms laden with tools and supplies. But Nuala's not ready to forgive him. She'll never get it done now; he never does things when he says he'll do them.

“I'm doing something else instead,” Nuala says.

I love Nuala's absolute little heart, but it causes all kinds of difficulties for her. She's bereft whenever Vince forgets a promise or shows up late, cannot forgive his casual notions of responsibility, not even when he compensates generously.

“You've got time to get started now,” I tell Nuala.

“He didn't even apologize!” Nuala says.

“Your dad didn't mean to hurt your feelings,” I say.

“We don't need a translator,” Vince says. “Come on, Nuala, I'm tired.”

“Why don't you just go home?” Nuala says. “Go home to your girlfriend!”

“
OK
.” Vince gets up from the table. “I'll come back when you're ready.”

Nuala screams when he goes to the door, and Vince flinches in mock horror, then steps out and shuts the door quietly behind him.

Nuala starts to cry. “He doesn't care. He doesn't care!”

I go out after Vince, and he turns to face me.

“Can't you work this out with her?” I say. “I'll never get her to bed tonight.”

“Let me have my own relationship with her, will you?”

“Sure. When I'm not the one who gets stuck holding the bag.”

“Is there something weird going on with the moon?” Vince says.
“Every female on planet Earth wants a piece of me these days. What the hell did I do?”

“You're just an innocent bystander. Jesus, you don't even see what you're doing to Elena.”

“You don't know the first thing,” Vince says.

It takes me hours to get Nuala to bed after her father leaves, and then I find that Vince has left his car keys on the table. I don't want him waking us both up at six in the morning when he comes looking for them. I grab a jacket and a flashlight and head down the road to his house.

I almost don't need the flashlight—I have memorized the zigzag route from my house to his, know my progress by the thicket of blackberries that scratches me as I take a corner, the eerie jutting of a crooked fence into the brief illumination of the flashlight, the dog that bays at a house halfway between his and mine.

Music pours from his house. Miles Davis,
Sketches of Spain.
The big uncurtained windows along the front of the house spill light like drifting smoke into the night. Elena, dressed in a T-shirt of Vince's and underpants, moves before a window, and then Vince comes into view. He's naked, but the sight is so familiar to me—the way his dark chest hair is patterned in rippling Vs like a brace of arrows aimed at the frothy hair of his crotch—that I don't feel startled. He lunges for Elena, who lifts her shirt to expose her breasts before darting into darkness, disappearing, and then reappearing at another window. It's as if I've entered a movie theater halfway through a film in a foreign language: I'm caught, held by the flickering images that I cannot understand, straining to intuit some narrative from the dialogue of their bodies, the chain reaction of their gestures, the unconscious tension of muscles fluidly shaping and reshaping their mouths and eyebrows.

They disappear and reappear again in my field of vision. Elena carries a towel, a steaming bowl of water, a razor. Vince sits on the
sofa, and she sits in his lap, facing him, her legs wrapped around his hips. She lathers shaving gel in her hands and slowly smooths it onto his face, caressing the skin, working the flesh to reshape his features. She dips the razor in the bowl of hot water and carefully tracks it across his cheek. Her hand moves slowly, cuts a clean swath through the foam. He kisses her, smearing her face with the white cream. I see her laugh rather than hear it, the sharp, scythed tracks of the muscles around her mouth. I know they can't see me. Even if they were to look in my direction, they'd see only their own reflection against the silvery mirror that night makes of the window.

Elena works beside me at the repotting table, a row of uprooted vandas laid out before her on sheets of newsprint, their fat white roots clawing the air like gnarled, arthritic fingers. Her hands encased in vinyl gloves at my insistence, she trims brown leaves and dead roots before popping a plant into a new pot and shoveling in bark chips.

She starts to clip the next plant, and I remind her sharply to use the propane torch on the shears. She forgets how easy it is to transmit a virus from one plant to another. We have to use the gloves, lay down fresh sheets of newsprint between batches of plants, soak our pots in disinfectant before reusing them.

Vince comes in as she is sterilizing the shears, and she turns to face him with the torch held like a weapon in her hands. “Forget you, mister!”

“Can't you see that I'm trying to think of you?” Vince says. “Can't you give me any credit at all?”

“Will you both
please
do this somewhere else?” I say.

“You don't have to torture me,” Vince says. “When you didn't come home last night, I was imagining all kinds of things—”

“You deserve to suffer,” Elena says.

She reaches into a bin of bark chips and hurls a handful at him. Vince ducks, then rushes forward to plunge his own hands into the
bin. They fling bark chips at each other, making a mess of the floor and the repotting table. I'm tired of them both—their sacrilegious shrieks in the hum of the greenhouse, their utter disregard for my privacy or their own, their recklessness in this place that's a chapel of order and slow, slow time. I don't bother to protest but strip off my gloves and leave them.

Vince finds me in my kitchen having my late night cup of tea. I offer him a cup, but he shakes his head and stands on the threshold as if he's afraid to come in.

“Is Elena here?” he asks.

“Look, you've got to stop conducting your love life on my premises.”

“She stormed out on me last night. She takes things wrong. I want her to go to graduate school. I'm trying not to be selfish—I don't want to hold her back. I'm tied down here because of Nuala.”

“I'm thrilled you remember her.”

“Well, I am a minor shareholder,” Vince says. “Shit. I was a prick to start this up with Elena in the first place. I'm too fucking old and set in my ways.”

Where I used to dread their painful ending—for Elena's sake—now I just wish they would stop rehearsing it. “You've turned her into my most useless employee, and that's saying a lot. She didn't even show up for work today.”

He says, “Please. Help me look for her. The last time she walked out she told me she spent the night in one of your greenhouses. She has nowhere else to go.”

We find her in the cool greenhouse where I keep the cymbidiums. As if insulated by the scented hush, she doesn't realize we've come in. She sits on the floor, her back against a bench, knees bent. She's leaning over her left arm, a razor in her right hand, her lower lip caught between her teeth, absorbed in what she's
doing: flaying the sleekness of her arm with calm precision, forcing herself past the instinct to hesitate. A neat seam of blood wells in the track of the razor.

Vince freezes, but some maternal instinct, some compound of fury and fear, propels me to Elena, and I slap the razor from her hand.

Vince chokes out, “You need a doctor.”

He's standing far enough back that Elena has to search for him when she lifts her head. But her gaze is steady when she finds him. “A head doctor, you mean.”

She seems, oh, not vulnerable at all, but hard and stubborn and determined. Still, I cup her hand gently when I bend to inspect the shallow cuts on her arm.

“It doesn't hurt that much,” she says.

Her meek voice is such unarguable proof that she belongs to another realm, where her scratches and bruises are ordinary accident, as inconsequential as the clumsiness I've pitied in her and the apologies that trail after it. Some mistake has landed her here with the two of us.

Vince steps closer to Elena and crouches, keeping himself an arm's length from her. The way he shakes his head reminds me of how he shakes his head over a bad piece of carpentry, woeful and condemning all at once. “Jesus Christ, what a mess.”

I think we need to bandage her arm before we take her to the hospital, but I have to explain this simple decision twice to Vince before he'll let me go to the office for the first-aid kit. I find it on the shelf, just where it should be. I've never used the first-aid kit, but I feel stupidly confident once I have the little metal box in my hand.

When I come back into the greenhouse, Vince has adopted a pose of solicitude, looped an arm around Elena's shoulder. She jerks against his arm, some muscle spasm, and then he kisses her forehead, her temple, her cheek, tracing a faint tenderness onto her skin.

“I don't want you to be hurt, that's why,” Vince murmurs to Elena. “I only want what's best for you.”

“I know, I know.” Elena is crying again.

The metal box slips from my hand, crashes to the floor, and pops open, spilling its contents. When I kneel to replace the packets of gauze and tubes of ointment in the box, Vince tells me just to grab a few things and bring them, for God's sake.

He has never spoken so urgently to me.

“Shut up,” I say. I'm pleased to deny him. I want to see him damaged, burdened. He deserves it.

But in the end I obey him, will my hands to behave. He holds out Elena's arm so that I can squeeze antibiotic ointment onto her wounds. His hands shake so much that I lay down squiggly transparent worms of the gel. I'm afraid to touch her raw skin, too much in the habit of rough competence with the orchids, whose beauty does not require reverence or delicacy.

I wrap Elena's arm like a mummy's, tear the tail end of the gauze into two strips so I can tie it to itself, making a lumpy, loosely spooling package of her arm.

Vince laughs. “Is that really the best you can do?”

Misery makes his voice harsh. And again I'm pleased. I can't tell if this pleasure is vindictive or born of some sympathy I can't help, not after all these years we've known each other.

Elena reaches for me so I can help her to her feet. Her hands transmit to me the raking consciousness of what it means to feel ravaged, broken by one's own will, and in this trembling contact telegraph the slashing force of need.

Wonder is not what Bill should feel after a truck smashes into his car at forty miles an hour, but he does. He is amazed that he could step unscathed from his crumpled Toyota, amazed by the way his body absorbed the impact. The stack of bones in his spine jumped, scattered, and then resettled, as if his bones had been momentarily freed from their tethers of muscle and tendon and ligament.

Everyone, even the paramedics who came to the scene of the accident and assured Bill he would be in pain tomorrow, seemed as amazed as Bill. You escaped with your life, said the cop who made the report, both of the paramedics, the shaken driver of the truck.

Even Bill's wife, Pam, says so when he comes home to tell her what happened. He finds her in the backyard, barbecuing even though the fog is rolling in, visible as exhaled breath in the cold air. Their old house didn't have a yard, only a rectangle of concrete patio, but here they have a lawn, flagstones, a flower bed. The grass is already jeweled with beads of condensed water. Bill has an impulse he's never had before. He takes off his shoes and socks to cross the lawn to Pam. His feet sink in the
damp grass, so cold. With his two hands he mimes for Pam the collapse of his car and watches her face shift, like another kind of mime, from nonchalance to concern to fear. She puts both her hands on his cheeks. They've come through a bad patch recently, and it's good to see that inside his wife, this is what was waiting for him.

She wants him to go to the emergency room right away, and when he refuses, she wants him to lie down. But he feels good. Woozy and only slightly achy in his joints and completely let off the hook, the way he feels when he is coming down with the flu. Bill walks away from Pam and drifts across the wet grass. He imagines his feet leaving a slicksnail's trail on the wet lawn. Delicious cold pricks at his toes. He watches the pine tree at the back of the yard shiver a little in the wind and he waits. He has a beatific moment coming to him.

The closest he ever comes to that clarity is when he takes the Vicodin his doctor prescribed for back pain. Throw in the daily dose of muscle relaxants, and Bill can feel mighty fine indeed. Maybe the recognition of having been spared comes grain by grain, like some sort of time-release medication. Maybe he is just distracted by all the trivial ways in which, it turns out, he hasn't been spared. The morning after the accident, Bill decided to call the doctor and discovered he couldn't lift the phone book. His doctor said he had whiplash and he could only expect his pain to grow worse. When Bill called the truck driver's insurance company to file a medical claim, an agent informed him that the truck driver—that man who'd had tears in his eyes when he saw Bill climb out of his car—was claiming the accident had been Bill's fault. Every day, Bill, lying on the sofa with ice packs strapped to his lower back and neck, has to field calls from the bullying substitute who has been taking his high school English classes until he gets back on his feet.