Curled in the Bed of Love (17 page)

The light no longer shines in his eyes. He can see the figure of a man—someone other than the man who has a knee on his back—in the kitchen doorway, the dark clothing, the peaked cap, the bulky outline of the belt that must hold a gun, another long-handled flashlight. He shouldn't have left lights on all over the house. He should say something to these men. Appease them.

He hears the clink of handcuffs being locked over his wrists. The sound of Pam's heavy watch ringing on her dresser, the sound of her clump of keys pinging when she drops them in the bowl. He wonders where he left the keys. He wonders what she'll do when his call wakes her. He blinks when the flashlight beam sweeps over him again, spiderwebbing his vision.

Why didn't he hear them trying the door, issuing an order into
the silent house? And what intruder was his daughter expecting, preparing for, with the twine and tape Pam kept for packaging her gifts to the realtors?

The cop above him says something and tugs on Bill's shoulder. To comply, to get up from the floor, Bill has to fold his body to leverage his weight onto his knees. Pain balls up in Bill's lower back, a fist ready to strike, a separate existence within his existence.

Bill has that dizzy sensation he had when his back was x-rayed, a fearful and thrilling anticipation. He twists to get to his feet, deliberate now, anxious to force the torque in his spine, to flush from cover what's inside him.

I.
When her son's life begins in her, Katie is stunned, not sure she can have this child, not with Malcolm, not when her life is still so tentative. Malcolm does not share her astonishment. He does what he always does before a gig, shares a joint in their living room with the guys in his band. Even stoned, Malcolm has a sharp-edged way of moving, a way of tumbling words as rapidly and effortlessly as he strikes keys on the piano. Katie hungers after that quality, feels pinched in comparison. When she does her work, it is work: whatever art is involved in her page layouts for the magazine must always be sacrificed to function.

When Malcolm lights another joint, the smell of the marijuana smoke makes her sick to her stomach. She makes out shapes in the haze, sees a predator stalking her, tendrils of smoke curved like claws. Until this moment she has thought of her wariness about drugs as a kind of cowardice, an inhibition. She has to leave the room. In the kitchen she kneels by the open window, gulping fresh air, engulfed by need narrowed to the contours of her own body.

II.
Katie kisses Malcolm's beautiful shimmedand-sheared hands, runs her tongue over the calluses on his fingers, playing them, their specific shapes and hardnesses, the way he plays piano. Pulling her against him on the sofa, Malcolm says he knew he would never have the technique for classical music. The kind of perfection required has to do with fitting yourself to the elegant, specific arrangement of the notes, not making mistakes. But jazz calls for exploring the gap between notes as written and what your fingers might accomplish in translating them into sound.

Trying to explain to her ignorant mind, her ignorant ears, he says, “Jazz comes from how you move in that space, back and forth. You don't disappear to make the music, you
are
the music. That's why you can take any piece of shit—like ‘Someday My Prince Will Come'—and make it jazz.
If
you can.”

Katie wants to be an artist because she wants to be good enough for Malcolm, something like him. Compared to her, he is an aristocrat. His parents were both college professors, and he grew up familiar with art history and classical music, took music lessons and trips to Europe as a matter of course. His carelessness about drugs is for her yet another example of privilege, another proof that he grew up in a world where there was room to take risk.

Katie thinks she hears the baby cry, and though Malcolm tries to hold onto her, she gets up to check. When she comes back with the baby, Malcolm is setting out the paraphernalia he needs to get high—the syringe, the spoon, the stub of a candle to heat the heroin to liquid state—with the elaborate care of the newly initiated. He's still flirting with the novelty of this, still free to be fascinated by how it's done.

She has tried not to worry about money or marrying now that they have the baby. Even their fights about drugs are careless blowups that seem to leave no residue except a faint afterglow of passion. She can't summon the energy to nag him again, anew,
as if he's never promised to quit and never broken that promise before. In her arms her son is as heavy as the future, but she can still imagine that time's predictable rhythm can be thwarted by Malcolm's sheer inventiveness.

III.
When Katie leaves Malcolm, it seems that every step she takes is a tiny one. She does layout for a newspaper four nights a week so that she can be with the baby for most of his waking hours. His days are orderly now, mealtimes and nap times scheduled by the clock. They spend mornings in the park, where Katie's vision contracts to the field of her child, the safety she must work to prove to him every day. She has mistaken so badly the margin for error.

When she starts seeing Billy, she tells him she does not want to get serious. She can carve out only a little time for Billy now that she is taking a class every week, working toward a teaching credential. But Billy brings Evan small presents that have to be dug from his pockets, wants to take them on picnics on Sunday afternoons, never arrives late and never leaves early. She feels for Billy nothing powerful enough to pull her to her knees, compel her against her will. When she thinks of being with him her thoughts run in a small circle. It's
nice
—he likes to hold hands; his bigness comforts her; he is honest in a way that thrills her, applying his conscience to everything from his work to the patient explanations he provides for her two-year-old's constant questions about why. He gives her similarly copious reasons when he asks her to marry him. There are two kinds of perfection.

IV.
All through the night, Katie has been waking Evan, wiping his body with a damp washcloth, trying to bring the fever down. Evan, at six, has never had a high temperature before. She's often thought of his perfect health, like his perfect good temper, as something she earned through vigilance. When
Billy gets up and offers to trade places with her, give her a few hours of sleep, she refuses. Katie thought she'd feel less territorial after Maeve was born two years ago, but she doesn't. She still has that mother's superstition that she is irreplaceable.

Alone with Evan, she holds him in her arms in the battered rocking chair in his room, singing, listening to his whispery rasp, a metronome dictating the beating of her own heart, which ratchets with every catch in his breath. He's a heavy child, big-boned, much more like Billy than like his biological father. There's nothing in Evan of the wiriness, the abrupt, jerky energy of Malcolm.

Evan's eyes flutter open, and he sighs
mommy
as if she's a place he's momentarily waking to recognize. He murmurs something else, tenderly.
Popsicle.
He doesn't want one actually but is just, deliriously, anticipating pleasure. The children's sick days are sweet rituals—they get Popsicles, they get to watch the
TV
that is otherwise kept in the closet like a shameful secret, they get to drink weak tea from tiny teacups, laden with milk and sugar, they are allowed to nap on the sofa surrounded by toys. All the routines of their household are adapted to the small orbit of a child's delights, from the fussy way they make toast and jam into treats that Evan calls “riders” to their gleeful bedtime dances with stuffed animals. Every day amazes Katie, such richness in place of the hard life, the work and struggle and penance, she expected.

The raging heat of Evan's body burns her own skin as she holds him. She's afraid he'll have convulsions. She's afraid she has hesitated too long already, that she and Billy should have taken him to the hospital hours ago. The same animal instinct that gives her such certainty when it comes to what her children need—that stretches like a taut cord between her and them, a physical tug she can feel in her spine, her ribs—betrays her, pulls her into humiliating helplessness.

By the time she wakes Billy, she's sobbing that he has to get dressed and drive them to the hospital. In her arms, Evan stirs
from lethargy to cry with her. Billy gets out of bed and takes Evan from her. “Sh,” he says, “you're scaring him.” He carries Evan to the bathroom to turn on the shower. “It's only croup,” he tells her. He holds Evan carefully, comfortably, as the steam from the hot shower clouds the bathroom, and when their child begins to breathe more easily, Billy carries him back to bed and tucks him in. “I'll stay with him for a while,” Billy says. He's sending her away because there's something dangerous in her. She sees that Billy doesn't love as she does, that it isn't necessary for love to be shadowed by treacherous dread.

V
. In one way Malcolm has disappeared from her life; in another way, he is always there. Over the years she's heard about him from people who were once his friends. “He went down,” one of them told her. Everyone wanted to banish him for having slipped from improvisational daring into the imprisoning need of the addict. No one ever seemed to know how it had happened.

Once in a while Malcolm calls her. She can't imagine how he finds her phone number, as indifferent as he is to the world beyond the compacted core of his need. But he calls. She has learned not to panic when she picks up the phone and hears him say her name, learned that she doesn't really exist for him, not in a way that he can sustain past the impulse to dial her number.
How you doing, how's my son, that's good, real good, see you around.

Malcolm is gone. Gone in the same way that the youthful mistakes of her friends are gone—the love affairs that retrospective has turned into comedy or a bitter lesson, the foolish and romantic political commitments, the experiments with sex or cocaine somehow equivalent now that they can be looked on with a degree of wry amusement, coated over with irony. The past is gone, even for Billy, who had his heady days as a young socialist but only gently revised this former self. He went to law school, but he works
for a union, the same union where his father was once a steward, and he puts in long hours for little money. He is not ironic about Katie's big mistake, but he is gentle and lenient in a way that excuses her and makes her feel ashamed of the impulse to reclaim Malcolm from the shabby and venial seediness Billy assumes.

Malcolm is not gone. Even though he's seen Evan only once since Katie left him. When they received the final papers for Billy to adopt Evan, Malcolm refused to sign unless Katie brought Evan to see him. She was eight months pregnant with Maeve, and she and Billy had just bought a house, and she felt that Malcolm had called her to him to dispense one final curse that could pull her life down around her like a house of cards.

Four-year-old Evan was afraid even of Malcolm's apartment building, the halls that stank of urine and canned beans heated on a hot plate and a nameless sourness. Malcolm answered his door and ushered them in with such liquid grace that Katie knew he was high, and Evan refused to go to him when Malcolm sat on the edge of the bed and beckoned him with his long musician's fingers.

For a moment, Katie expected those fingers to conjure music out of thin air. When they lived together, Katie and Malcolm squeezed a grand piano into their small apartment, and sometimes while Malcolm played, Katie would lie beneath the piano, in the belly of the music, where the vibration of the wires was stronger than the notes themselves, their hum a wave of jarred molecules that she could feel striking her skin.

Malcolm had a present for Evan, an old-fashioned mechanical toy of stamped metal, a brightly colored bird whose stiff forked legs stamped on Malcolm's palm when he wound it up. When he leaned forward to hand the bird to Evan, Evan shrank back against Katie and began to cry. “I don't want it to bite me,” he said.

Katie will see, forever, that bird, so intricately painted, cupped in the palm of Malcolm's hand, the gift he offered: the grace of
her life measured intently against his ruin. She took the bird when Evan would not.

VI
. Maeve comes to Katie in tears, so overwhelmed by her anger that she can't talk. Finally Maeve finds words for her heartbreak. Evan said she wasn't his real sister.

Katie cuddles Maeve, reassures her that her brother didn't mean to insult her. Mommy and Daddy have explained this before, remember? It's just a technicality—which is a
what?
Maeve wants to know—and it only means that Evan had a different father than Maeve, though Billy is their real father now. Then Katie calls Evan into the bedroom so she can ask him in private to account for himself.

Evan shrugs. “It's true. She's only my half sister. She doesn't even look like me.”

“Does that bother you sometimes?”

He gives her an eleven-year-old's best attempt at a withering look. “It's just a fact.”

His dogged rationality about everything can be so paper-thin—the government should force people to conserve energy by taxing them for driving cars; it makes no sense for his mother to fuss about how messy his room is when it's neater than the rooms of any of his friends; his father is a neutral bit of biological data.

Billy stops in the doorway. “What's going on?” he says. “Maeve's all bent out of shape. You didn't hit her, did you, Evan?”

“Evan said she was only his half sister,” Katie says. “He hurt her feelings.”

“Maybe it was the way you said it,” Billy says. “Your sister worships you. You might consider lowering the daily quota of insults, intended or not.”

Billy doesn't imagine there's more to this than the usual bickering, and for a moment Katie is embarrassed by her impulse to ferret out some unspoken worry, to badger Evan in pursuit of her
craving to speak of Malcolm, to tell herself that story with tenderness and regret. But being Evan's mother has schooled her in self-restraint.